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I just learned the term macros and found out that there are certain percentages of each you are suppose to eat. Every website I have read says something different so I am still as lost as when I started. Over the course of 2014 lost 60 to 70 pounds eating mostly lean meats, fruits, and vegetables. I have been stuck around my current weight for a year and want to start working toward my health and becoming leaner again. Any suggestions on the ideal ratio? and an explanation so I understand why P.s. I have a busy schedule which has caused me to pick up bad habits eating wise like skipping meals or grabbing unhealthy food to save time so any quick meal or snack ideas would be a great help too. I just found this. I hope it helps. It allows you to adjust based on your needs (ex. High Carb, Moderate, Zone Diet, and Low Carb) macronutrientcalculator.com Ratios will be different for everyone. I pretty stick with 3rds. I do about 35/35/30 (P/F/C). I like higher protein for my migraines. Going LOW carb makes me sick and headachey, so I don't like the carbs to dip too low. You will have to figure out what works best for you. Pick a ratio and try it for 6 weeks. If it works = GREAT, if not (feeling headachey, weak, bloayed, whatever...) change your macros and try again. I downloaded a ebook on macros and determined my BMR and TDEE and more to help me. For a busy person all the math (which isn't that much but I used to be a busy person and I probably wouldn't have done it as often then) might "scare" you away. Read bodybuilding.coms articles on the subject. I do 40% Protein on good days but it's usually split pretty even in the 30's. I'm weight lifting so I'm trying to grow muscle and need a bit higher protein level. I use my fitness pal app to figure out numbers/precentages. Hi Reply	__label__pos	0.943079
Atlas Energy LP Is inviting investors to put in at least $25,000 in an oil and gas drilling partnership in Texas and other states in exchange for shared revenue from the output from the wells. Its subsidiary, Atlas Resources LLC, is seeking to raise up to $300 million by the end of the year, with the company saying it will put in up to $145 million of its own money. However, according to Reuters, a closer look at the company’s confidential offering memorandum reveals that outside investors may not end up reaping as much as they think. The private placement venture is called Atlas Resources Series 34-2014 LP. Private placements are unregistered securities sold to a limited number of investors via brokerage firms. Brokers can only market them to accredited investors (investors that have $1 million in assets-primary residence not included-or $250,000/year income) or institutions. Because of inflation, the number of those that qualify to be able to invest in private placements has gone up and not every investor is a high-income one. There are even retirees who now qualify. According to the Atlas memorandum, $45 million of the money raised will go to Anthem Securities, an affiliate, to pay commissions to brokerage firms. Up to $39 million will go toward purchasing drilling leases from a different affiliate. Some of the $53 million for transport and drilling equipment may also go to affiliated suppliers. $8 million is a markup for estimated equipment costs. Atlas will get $53 million for markups and fees once drilling starts. All this lowers Atlas’s exposure by at least 40%. Once revenue starts coming in, the company is entitled to 33% of this. After looking at the marketing materials and offering memoranda of half a dozen oil and gas private placements in the last 15 years, Reuters discovered that Atlas’s deal, placing the issuer at greater advantage than outside investors, is not uncommon. And out of over half of the 43 private placements it has put out in the last thirty years, outside investors either broke even or sustained financial losses. In 29 private placement deals, Atlas faired better than investors. Energy ventures are typically high risk. Wells can end up producing nothing and returns may be impacted by gas and oil costs. Granted, there are tax benefits, with investors able to write off over 90% of initial outlay the first year. However, the risks can outweigh the benefits. It doesn’t help that brokers, who are supposed to conduct due diligence on every issue they sell to make sure it is suitable for each investor, sometimes depend on due diligence companies that are paid by the issuers. Regulators still don’t have much oversight over private placements, which are not subject to a lot of reporting requirements. Also, oil and gas private placements often come with hidden fees. Special Report: For these oil and gas bets, the odds favor the house, Reuters, November 11, 2014 More Blog Posts: SEC Commissioner Wants Elder Fraud at Top of 2015 Agenda, Stockbroker Fraud Blog, November 29, 2014 Madoff Ponzi Scam Victims Recover Over $10 Billion, Institutional Investor Securities Blog, December 5, 2014 Goldman Sachs Must Pay $7.6M to Two Brokers for Wrongful Termination, Institutional Investor Securities Blog, December 8, 2014	__label__pos	0.907074
The first person I met in Varanasi was Tiwari ji. Ageing, courteous and seemingly unaffected by the blistering heat, he met me outside the airport, enquired about the purpose of my visit ó ď Chunao cover karne ayein hain?Ēó and then led me to the waiting car. Once we were inside the vehicle, I had expected Tiwariji to turn the ignition key. He didnít. Instead he turned around, studied me briefly, and then broke into an uninterrupted speech in praise of Narendra Modi. For a moment, I feared that I had been tricked into hitching a ride on a rath instead of a car. Varanasi, Tiwari ji argued, would vote overwhelmingly in Modiís favour because of several reasons. Modi has been elected three times as chief minister of Gujarat. This, in Tiwari jiís opinion, is irrefutable proof of the manís ability as an administrator. Second, Modi, having consciously rebuffed the pleasures of domesticity, has dedicated his public life to seva. (Evidently, Tiwari ji was unaware of the existence of Jashodaben. A spectral figure, she was at last given the privilege to exist officially when her husband filed his nomination papers.) Most importantly though, Modi has become synonymous with vikas (progress). The markers of development, Tiwari ji said while trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid a crater on the road, are metalled roads, a reliable supply of electricity and clean water. Modiís rousing speeches and his seeming incorruptibility have also made him invincible among tainted electoral representatives. Tiwari ji was prevented from reciting the complete inventory of Modiís virtues by a cow, an animal that the BJP manifesto promises to elevate to the status of protected species. This particular bovine had urinated on a vegetable cart, forcing the vendor to confront the animal which stood blocking the narrow road. The mataís indifference seemed to have irked even the unflappable Tiwari ji. He informed me curtly that we had reached the old city. In the following days, as I toured Varanasi on foot, a number of people endorsed Tiwari jiís arguments in favour of Modi. They included shopkeepers on the road that led to the bustling Dashaswamedh Ghat, a group of elderly patrons of Pappuís tea shop near the Assi chauraha as well as pilgrims jostling to enter the alley that led to Vishwanathís shrine. On joining the dots of these conversations, a picture began to emerge slowly, one that reveals a heartening sign as well as several disappointments about democracy and India. The euphoria over Modi ó an outsider who is perceived to be an efficient ruler ó in an insular constituency like Varanasi reflects a fledgling demand for performance on the part of the electorate. Such a demand, if nurtured carefully, has the potential to strengthen the base of a representative democratic edifice where merit would undermine caste and community affiliations. Traditionally, elections have been won or lost in Varanasi on the basis of complicated arrangements that consolidate and, at the same time, polarize such communities as Muslim (3.75 lakh voters), Brahmin/Bhumihars (over 5 lakh voters) and Kurmis/Chaurasias (over 3 lakh voters). These configurations would become redundant if the people were to prioritize inclusive development above identity. But the conversations also revealed a dangerously skewed understanding of both development and State responsibilities. Varanasiís enchantment with Modiís idea of vikas conjures up an image of a society where governance would be adjudged by the quality of certain services demanded by a vociferous class of consumers. None of the respondents I interviewed knew of Gujaratís less prosperous areas, such as the sparsely populated Dangs district. Yet they seemed certain that Modi would transform Varanasiís turd-lined alleys and clogged sewers in a matter of days. Significantly, Modiís pitiful record in health and education remain irrelevant in Varanasi. Gujaratís drop-out rate is 57.9 per cent, higher than the national average of 49 per cent; the drop-out rates among Dalits and tribal people are 65 per cent and 78 per cent, respectively; the shortage of paediatricians and gynaecologists in community health centres is 94 per cent and Gujaratís IMR and MMR remain, worryingly, at 38 and 122. Varanasiís apathy to such critical failures on the part of a three times-elected chief minister is a chilling reminder of the redundancy of social capital ó education, healthcare, and so on ó in the charter of peopleís demands. The Gujarat riots, and Modiís alleged abetment of them, are no longer a part of the Ďsecular imaginationí though. Modiís admirers in Varanasi contend that minor aberrations ó orchestrated murders as well as the penury and displacement of Muslims ó ought to be overlooked by an India desirous of meaningful economic transformation. Even the nascent demand for performance and accountability ó the hallmarks of a mature democracy ó is not universal. One day, a little after dawn, I had made my way to Harishchandra Ghat. A couple of pyres had been lit (picture 2), the smoke fanned by the breeze from the river rose in strange shapes. A man came over and asked whether I was waiting to collect the ashes. We stood watching the flames in silence and then began a conversation in hushed tones. The stranger refused to give his name but confided that he was a Dalit. He survived by doing odd-jobs in and around the area: chopping firewood, taking tourists on a tour of funerals, and selling hashish. As a voter, his only complaint was that the Bahujan Samaj Party had refused to put up a formidable opponent against Modi. In Madanpura ó described as a garh (secure enclave) by one Muslim respondent ó the mood seemed to be decisively in favour of Modiís primary challenger, Arvind Kejriwal. The demand of improved civic services ó electricity was available for only six hours and Madanpura was prone to flooding ó waned before the communityís anxiety about Modiís allegedly communal leanings. The rickshaw-puller who ferried me to Assi Ghat in the evening complained, among other things, of the absence of a credible candidate from the working class who could relate to his concerns about the rise in prices, the lack of social security for labourers, and the cartel that profits by exploiting beggars and widows. The primacy of identity among the weaker sections is usually explained, patronizingly, as their vulnerability to sectarian forces and their lack of education. But in a fundamentally unequal society, identity serves as the only fulcrum around which the dispossessed people mobilize themselves in order to expose broader injustices. The closing of ranks among Madanpuraís Muslim residents against Modi, for instance, is a testimonial of the distance that the majoritarian Indian State has to travel to honour its constitutional commitment to equality and inclusiveness. The elections in Varanasi also expose the pitfalls of reducing a democratic contest to a clash between contrasting personalities. Electoral issues critical to the constituency itself have been relegated to the margins amidst the clamour to elect a domineering but seemingly efficient candidate against his mellower but self-righteous rival. Varanasi is an unmitigated civic disaster. Fecal matter (picture 4), diesel boats, rotting flowers and ash on the shrinking river, the cacophony of traffic on its narrow roads, the litter on the lanes that lead to temples ó everything in the holy town seemed to mock the collective obsession with rituals of purity. Enquiries at a chemist shop revealed that most patients seek treatment for enteric and skin diseases, the signs of water-borne contamination. Statistics bear evidence of the magnitude of the crisis. Data released by the Sankat Mochan Foundation, which is fighting a losing battle to save the Ganga, reveal that at Tulsi Ghat, the Fecal Coliform Count (FCC) per 100 ml is 62,000. The permissible limit for FCC is 500 per 100 ml. This information is seven years old. The BJP, which is enthusiastic about the contentious river inter-linking project, remains suitably vague about the steps to clean the Ganga. Yet another kind of contamination remains unacknowledged in the electoral fray: the desecration of Varanasiís ghats (picture 1). Near Munshi Ghat, I had set up a meeting with Debashish Paul, a member of the Kautilya Society, a voluntary organization that operates from a splendidly ornate building that was once the temporary abode of Allen Ginsberg. Paul seemed to share the illustrious poetís radicalism. He smoked like a chimney, complained about air pollution, admitted that he admired Ashok Singhal but complained bitterly about BJP corporators, real-estate sharks and temple mahants who have connived to destroy the ghats and ancient buildings. In the 1990s, judicial intervention secured the fate of the iconic Darbhanga Palace. There were whispers of turning it into a heritage hotel. But not every other historical structure has been as lucky. Lolark Kund in Assi Ghat is in a shambles. A hotel stands cheek-by-jowl with the Man Mahal (picture 3), and countless havelis on the steps of the river have been turned into hotels. The urgency to protect these buildings is not only premised on their antiquity. These buildings are a reminder of the syncretism which, while informing the idea of India, predates India as a political entity. Also under threat is another bastion of Varanasiís inclusive character: classical music. The decline in the popularity of the thumri, a form of music that binds diverse communities, is just one example. In Varanasiís alleys, I discovered several dubious institutions that claim to turn students ó essentially gullible foreigners ó into visharads. Bismillah Khan has, expectedly, been fetishized. But his legacy, an effective bulwark against the poison of communalism, remains neglected. The evident polarization in Varanasi is a stark reminder of the fact that it is not enough to invest faith in democratic institutions to negate communalism. The dissipation of platforms that serve as channels to foster communitarian links has to be addressed. Their neglect is mirrored by the depletion in the ranks of patrons of the arts or of Varanasiís famed Ganga-Yamuna sanskriti. Elections are essentially binary contests. Varanasi is thus being asked to choose not just between Modi and Kejriwal. The polls are also an unequal contest among opposed entities such as identity politics and development, ecology and populism, secularism and sectarianism. Ironically, the greatest impediment to this battle to salvage Varanasi is the mystical aura of the city itself. In the evenings, as dusk fell, I used to sit on the ghats and watch devotees light diyas and then float them on the darkening waters. I would hear the strain of the azaan from a distant mosque as well as the chiming bells from the nearby temples. The air would be heavy with the smell of incense and burning logs. And just for a moment, the polls, pollution, poverty and polarizationó everything that I experienced or learnt about during my stay ó would cease to matter. Staring at the bobbing specks of light, I would wish for nothing to change.	__label__pos	0.959388
A body falls in the woods and although no one is around to hear it, a clock starts ticking. It’s not made of gears or springs, but of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes. The corpse dumps a huge flood of nutrients into the earth—a blend of fats and proteins that stands out among the carbohydrates typically found in leaf litter. Quickly, a dedicated coterie of bacteria, fungi, and nematode worms emerges to dine on this artisanal feast. “There’s this complete overhaul of the living community in the surrounding area,” says Jessica Metcalf from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Now, Metcalf’s team, led by Rob Knight at the University of California, San Diego, have shown that these cadaver microbes—let’s call it the necrobiome—change in a predictable clock-like way. It’s consistent in the species that show up, the order in which they arrive, and they pace at which they do so, seemingly regardless of soil types, seasons, or even species—the mouse necrobiome is similar to the human one. This means that forensic investigators should be able to tell how long ago someone died, to within two to four days, by swabbing and sequencing the microbes that pervade and surround their body. That’s comparable to other indicators of time of death, such as the chemical content of the surrounding soil, or the developmental stages of corpse-eating blowflies. But while insects are scarce in the winter, the necrobiome clock ticks throughout the year. The necrobiome will likely be used as one of several sources of forensic evidence, all complementing each other. (The microbes inside a dead human body provide more clues; last year, other researchers showed that these microbes also change in clock-like way, post-mortem.) “When you have a case that’s being treated as a homicide, you want to collect as many different lines of physical evidence as possible,” says David Carter, a forensic scientist from Chaminade University of Honolulu, who was part of Metcalf’s team. Back in 2013, Metcalf found predictable patterns in the necrobiomes of decaying mice, and could estimate the rodents’ times of death to within three days over a seven-week period. Building on those results, she left dead mice to rot on soil from three very different habitats—desert, prairie, and alpine forest—each with its own starter communities of microbes. The team also worked with human cadavers at the Sam Houston State University Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science (STAFS) Facility, where people will their bodies to forensic research. The STAFS staff left two bodies to decay on the facility’s grounds, two in the winter and two in the summer. “For this to be relevant for forensic science, we needed to show that this microbial clock really exists in an outdoor scenario, where you have scavengers, insects, and daily temperature fluctuations,” says Metcalf. Despite the many variables in these experiments, the team found that both mouse and human corpses are quickly colonised by similar groups of bacteria, especially those that specialise in digesting fats and proteins. There are also plenty of microbes that process nitrogen, which is unsurprising given that corpses eventually rupture and leak nitrogen-rich fluids into their environment. These colonizing bacteria are found ubiquitously in soils, but are usually rare. When animals die on top of them, it must be like manna from heaven—and their populations explode. “Dead animals are big, concentrated blobs of protein and fat, and these microbes are lurking in the soil ready to start eating our bodies when we die,” says Steven Allison from University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study. This is a classic case of ecological succession, where living things colonize a new habitat in predictable waves. A scorched forest gets settled by mosses, ferns, shrubs, and eventually trees. Newborn babies get colonised by milk-digesting bacteria and then plant-busting ones. A whale carcass, sinking to the ocean floor, becomes host to hagfish, crabs, snails, and bone-eating snot-flower worms. A human corpse is no exception—in death, we become just another haven for life. Our post-mortem fates are so foreseeable that Metcalf could use the data from mice buried in one kind of soil to estimate the time of death for animals buried in another. “We could even generate a clock based on the mouse experiments and predict the time of death of humans decomposing outdoors,” she says. But “there’s still a lot of unexplained variation,” says Allison. “The predictable part of the corpse microbial communities is actually a fairly small fraction but since the communities are diverse, maybe that’s enough to make a good prediction of time of death in most cases.” “It’s promising because with a relatively small number of experiments, we’re seeing predictable and reliable trends—but that’s a weakness too,” adds Carter. “We’ve only processed a small number of samples, so we need more data.” He wants to know if the necrobiome is predictable in other conditions. What about the tropics? What if there’s gunshot residue on somebody’s skin? What if they’re on antibiotics? Or they’re an alcoholic? “There are a lot of variables that it would be nice to investigate,” he says. “But that’s probably beyond my lifetime.”	__label__pos	0.62638
Newspapers can and should find ways to charge for online content if they are to safeguard the future of quality journalism, the Financial Times chief executive, John Ridding, has said. Stoking the debate over paid news content and the survival of newspapers, Ridding said newspapers need to abandon a "free is good" doctrine, work out what sets them apart and how they can charge for it, whether it be sports coverage or columnists. If they do not, revenues will continue to suffer. "I fundamentally believe readers are willing to pay for quality journalism," Ridding told MediaGuardian.co.uk. "One of the worries for the industry in general is kind of a cultural expectation that news information should be free and we would challenge that because we believe quality journalism requires investment and investment requires revenues." Ridding, whose own newspaper group works on a subscription model, argues that the debate over paying for content has been unfairly polarised into specialised news at one end versus more general content at the other. He accepts that the FT's strategy of being "special and different" has made it easier for the paper to charge readers. But most publishers can find special content within their walls. "It is definitely more difficult for more general publishers [to charge] but often I feel there's a more fatalistic response, saying 'It's not possible'," he said. "I don't think it's a binary, black and white thing. All publishers should be thinking about what makes them different. Even their own brands give them a personality and identity which in many cases they have been building for centuries. All publishers need to be looking at what they specialise in." Ridding stressed there was no "one-size-fits-all" approach to success online and said the FT saw micropayments as a potential addition to its current subscription model. And some content could be free. FT luxury magazine How to Spend It will launch online this weekend, but there will be no charge while it builds critical mass. But in general, Ridding is convinced readers are willing to pay for content. "It's not an easy set of decisions and calculations over how much to charge and what to charge for ... But publishers need to have confidence in the quality of what they produce. They don't have to have a doctrinal approach that all content has to be free." The calculation publishers need to make is: "Do you gain more in revenue than you lose in readership?" Ridding conceded that the current market is "very brutal". Indeed, this summer's first-half results from FT Publishing, the Pearson division that contains the Financial Times, showed a 40% slump in profits. With several "fantastic brands" in the US having gone into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection over the past year, the former journalist is very worried indeed about where standards are going. "Clearly we have to be worried about quality journalism," he said. "Journalism is a craft, it's a skill, it requires training, it requires investment." The answer? "Unprecedented financial pressures need new revenue streams." • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediatheguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. • If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".	__label__pos	0.975166
I’m not watching Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime’s nine-part series on climate change. I’m not going to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, despite its great reviews. When I see a long article in The New York Times about melting glaciers or flooded coastal plains or disappearing species or deforestation or desertification, I skip it. Why? Because I already know what’s happening and about to happen. Reading the fine print is just going to make me feel sadder than I already do, without giving me any action I can take that will do more than give me the illusion that I am making a difference. At The Nation, we have to believe that knowledge is power, or why would we spend our lives bringing people the bad news? And sometimes information does indeed spark change: they called the war in Vietnam “the living-room war” because television brought its horrors into our homes, and eventually that constant flow of violence and lies brought ordinary people into the streets to join the students and the peaceniks. There are plenty of issues where educating and mobilizing the citizenry has begun to transform society: violence against women and children, for example. The shame that is our prison system may be next. But climate change is different. It is not something we can vote against or refuse to pay our taxes to protest. Writing letters to our congressperson will not help, nor will recycling our bottles and cans. Individual action—even the individual actions of hundreds of thousands of people in concert—won’t be enough. Climate change has too many sources, involves too many interest groups, crosses too many borders, slices through too many political alliances to make possible the kind of united national and international effort required to stop it. Also, doing nothing is too profitable. Perhaps that last is indeed the main thing. Too many people are making money out of feeding the insatiable consumer demand for more. Some scientists think it’s already too late, but let’s say they are wrong, and the scientists who give us ten years or even twenty are right. Let’s say that if every developed nation were to drastically cut its greenhouse emissions beginning today, our poor old earth would mostly muddle through. Overlooking the rather large fact that these measures would cause the world economy to collapse, think what would have to happen: everyone goes vegetarian, uses cars and planes only for emergencies, gets rid of air conditioning, ceases to cut down forests to build new houses. In short, we radically restrict individual consumption in every conceivable way, while governments force industry, especially the oil, coal and gas industries, to do whatever is necessary to… do whatever is necessary. Given our system, how could any of that happen on the necessary scale, let alone happen in time? Moreover, while we would be cutting back, India, China, Brazil, Indonesia and other formerly poor nations would still be surging forward. And how could we, who are vastly responsible for global warming in the first place, tell them, “Sorry, you got rich too late: no steak or family car or air conditioner for you? Go back to your villages and swelter.” Climate change is the tragedy of the commons for the entire globe. For each individual, there is not enough motivation to alter our current behavior except around the edges to feel virtuous, if indeed behavior change were possible. (Americans may be driving a bit less, but how many Americans could do without their car?) For industry, the incentives are almost all the other way, and state and federal governments are largely industry’s captives. Among nations, there are too many competing interests and no sufficiently powerful international mechanism to lay out a course of action and enforce it. By the time the collective damage is done, it will be too late to undo it. I hope I am wrong.	__label__pos	0.997997
Kissam Quad wins Freshman Energy Conservation Contest Posted in NEWS on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 [Originally published by Vanderbilt Student Communications on InsideVandy] By Harish Krishnamoorthi Students Promoting Environmental Awareness and Recycling announced Kissam Quad as the winner of its Freshman Energy Conservation Contest. The contest, a pilot program for the organization’s sustainability and conservation initiative, took place March 18-31. “We decided to sponsor the competition for several reasons. One was to increase awareness of the student body of energy use and the very simple practices students can do to decrease energy use,” said SPEAR President Jenny Magill. “The freshmen were the most obvious group to target because they will be here for the next three years.” SPEAR encouraged students to follow the simple conservation measures posted on its Web site in order to compete. Turning off appliances when not in use and using windows as a method of air circulation were two of the suggestions included in the list. Kissam Quad decreased its energy use by 7 percent by utilizing techniques these techniques and others. This 7 percent equals approximately a .6 kilowatt-hour decrease per person. Energy use data was collected with the help of the Office of Housing and Residential Education and Plant Operations. Keagan Compton, a freshman living in Dyer Hall, said he felt that he did not have to do much to decrease energy consumption. “Just a tiny bit of change from a bunch of people can add up to a lot of energy savings,” said Compton, who did his part in the competition by avoiding the use of his main lights and trying to watch less television. “It’s seemed like a good idea to cut down on energy,” he said. “We take advantage of how much energy we use.” Kissam and Hemingway Halls both turned off their common room and individual dorm room lights for large segments of time in order to contribute to their quad’s efforts. “With as many rooms as there are in Kissam Quad, you shut off your main lights for a good hour or two and save a ton of energy, so I guess a little bit each day from everybody you can save a bunch of money, and 7 percent is good I guess,” Compton said. In recognition of their efforts, residents of Kissam Quad will receive a pizza party with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and a massage therapist April 15. While this year’s competition included only the freshmen, SPEAR plans to expand the competition to the entire campus. “This was a trial competition, and we’re going to do a more full-scale, broad competition that will include the entire campus,” Magill said.	__label__pos	0.831162
While we are celebrating a robust and healthy workplace, it becomes easy to allow our careers to coast. Choosing to become a non-active participant however may place a risk to our careers. Here are 5 warning signs and how to use them to your best advantage. You have been in your job longer than anyone in the company If you have not received an opportunity for promotion or some cross-functional movement within the last three years, you should wonder why. With the general exodus of older workers, employees are being moved at record speeds. Want a raise…chances are you may increase your salary by at 20% or more by leaving your current job. Fellow co-workers and bosses consider you an expert Why this may not seem so bad, the generalist type is usually the preferred choice for promotional consideration. Starting tooting your horn to a larger audience about broader concepts; wait for the new opportunities to respond. You were overlooked for a promotion you had “in the bag” Leverage this event by discovering what the “winner” brought to the table. Do your best to make your new boss look good as you begin your search for your next opportunity. Your direct boss and other supervisors recently quit If the ghosts of Enron and WorldCom come haunting, pay heed. Once you witness a mass exodus at upper levels, you may wish to ask yourself why. Start reviewing your options. One strategy includes changing the funding of current company stock into your retirement. Diversify! Your organization recently merged or was purchased by a large conglomerate After heeding #4, remember the word “rightsizing.” Re-package yourself and all of your finances to protect your future. Now is also a good time to practice interviewing again. If you sense a theme here, you are correct. Staying in one place too long without getting any benefit may seriously hurt your career and your financial future. Take off the rose-colored glasses and look around!	__label__pos	0.97279
In the next month, we’re poised to see the latest death blow to centrism in both parties, with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in the primary fight of his political life and a leading Blue Dog Democrat, Rep. Tim Holden, facing an unheralded but serious and well-funded challenger in next week’s Pennsylvania primary. The retirement of moderate Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was only a blip on the radar screen monitoring the shrinking of parties’ centrist factions, which allowed compromise and deal-making to flourish in the past. The rise of the tea party movement may have spotlighted the GOP’s drift rightward, but the centrist decline is a bipartisan phenomenon. It’s plausible that after the 2012 election, thanks to partisan redistricting and the ideological reorienting of the parties, there will be only three white Southern Democrats left in the House -- Jim Cooper of Tennessee, Gene Green of Texas, and David Price of North Carolina. Of the 34 Democrats who voted against President Obama’s health care law, 24 either lost their seats in 2010 or plan to retire after this Congress, and another six are facing difficult reelection campaigns. There’s little chance the moderate Blue Dog Caucus can plausibly survive after the election given that attrition. Meanwhile, the base is thriving: Three of the marquee Democrats running for Senate this year—Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts—are all running to the populist left. Meanwhile, Republicans appear content to allow primary voters to render their verdicts on influential veteran members they view as insufficiently conservative—Lugar; Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich.—even though they’ve never had trouble on their right flank in the past. But in the current climate, nuclear diplomacy is out, military hawkishness is in; past support of cap-and-trade is politically toxic; Solyndra is the buzzword of the moment; and ever having teamed up with the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., on legislation is an occupational hazard. The GOP battles are as much generational as ideological: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s daring endorsement and donation to freshman Rep. Adam Kinzinger over longtime conservative Don Manzullo last month, in a member-versus-member primary, is indicative of the GOP primary electorate’s thinking. The upcoming primaries in Indiana and Pennsylvania illustrate how the changes in the country’s electorate have put two respected congressional members at serious risk. Lugar, whose voting record is traditionally conservative, is from a bygone era. His early praise of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s voting record on nuclear nonproliferation at the beginning of the 2008 presidential race foreshadowed his current political predicament. His pet issue is viewed by many as a relic of the Cold War, and any praise of Obama is toxic in a GOP primary. Meanwhile, he’s been serving in Washington so long that he no longer has a permanent address in his home state. These are glaring red flags that were being waved long before he mounted his reelection campaign. The one missing ingredient was always the presence of a formidable primary challenger. Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock had a decent resume but a dry campaign style, and he initially struggled to raise money and win endorsements. But as in any race against a vulnerable incumbent, voters will render their decision primarily on their satisfaction with that incumbent. In a sign of where this race is headed, conservative groups have rallied behind Mourdock, who outraised the longtime senator last quarter and is in striking distance in the latest independent poll. Holden’s predicament in Pennsylvania is a testament to the partisan workings behind the gerrymandering process, which has reduced the number of competitive districts where centrism would be an asset. The Blue Dog Democrat had regularly dispatched Republican opponents despite running in a district that regularly backed GOP presidential candidates. His opposition to abortion rights, gun control, and his party’s green-energy initiatives were political winners in his conservative-minded former district. But redrawn into a solidly Democratic one, Holden is now facing a serious challenge on his left from trial attorney Matt Cartwright—and finding that his old stances are now major vulnerabilities. The campaign has gotten nasty: Cartwright sent out mailers accusing Holden of being an acolyte of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a pawn of Big Oil. Holden is the more-polished candidate. But his new district isn’t just different ideologically; about 80 percent of his constituents are brand new. So he doesn’t hold the incumbency advantage that most members start out with. Both campaigns are claiming they have the edge, and it’s likely to go down to the wire. As my colleague Ron Brownstein wrote in last week’s National Journal cover story, congressional campaigns are becoming akin to parliamentary elections, with fewer voters picking presidential and Congressional candidates from different parties. Indeed, both parties have become homogeneous to the point where they’re almost entirely sorted out along ideological lines. The term “moderate” is an anachronism these days. This trend has significant implications for the future trajectory of both parties. Democrats have more to lose politically if their party continues its leftward drift, because conservatives outnumber liberals by a 2-to-1 margin, according to surveys of the American electorate, most recently a Gallup poll released in January. In the modern era, Democrats have depended on a coalition of liberals and moderates to win elections, and the 2010 midterm losses nearly decimated the latter faction. But Republicans have lately shown little tolerance for ideological apostasy on issues like immigration, which would allow them to expand their appeal beyond the conservative base. For all of the political changes over the past two decades, the ideological composition of the country has remained remarkably constant, even as the number of members representing the middle has shrunk. That means whichever party is best able to find room for the future Lugars and Holdens will be the one with a head start at holding the Congress in the years to come.	__label__pos	0.982493
Hiring a personal trainer is one way to make sure you follow through on an exercise plan, often alongside a diet. Trainers can teach you proper form so you don’t injure yourself, which allows you to take on challenges and progress. There’s some science indicating that you’ll do better with help from a supervised trainer than on your own. Part of the job is to keep you motivated and both realistic and upbeat about your health. You need to communicate enough to come up with a plan you can follow — then stick to it. Be honest and candid. Bare the facts about your health habits, over the last year up through the last two weeks. Hearing the truth from your own mouth could be an eye-opener. We humans are good at fooling themselves. You may think you’re eating pretty well, but hear yourself confess a bowl of ice-cream every night or two cans of soda a day. You may think you get daily exercise even though that hasn’t been true for two years. Detail medications you are taking and any injuries or surgeries you’ve had. Medications can affect your heart rate; some moves aggravate osteoporosis and can make your condition worse. Trainers are required to keep health information confidential. Set short and long-term goals. Be specific, including timelines, and ask your trainer directly to let you know if you’re on track. For example, if you want to slim down, ask your trainer to measure your fat using a calipers and re-measure after perhaps three months. If you’re building up stamina for a hiking trip, do your research and tell your trainer how many hours a day you’ll be on your feet and the elevations. Dress the part. Have good sneakers and wear clothing that allows the trainer to see your body’s angles. An oversized T-shirt and sweat pants will get in the way. Respect the stopwatch. Timing counts. Trainers specify 30- or 60-second breaks between sets and ask you to hold the intensity of cardio intervals for specific durations. Cooperate and your results will soar. Stick to the plan. Your trainer should give you routines to do in between sessions that balance an upper and lower body workout and focus on any weaknesses you need to remedy, says Philip Goglia, PhD, a Santa Monica–based personal trainer, registered nutritionist, and author of “Turn Up the Heat: Unlock the Fat-Burning Power of Your Metabolism.” You might think it’s okay to push yourself harder, but let your trainer know at the next session. On the other hand, if you’ve agreed to go to the gym two times a week in addition to your regular session — and it hasn’t happened — confess. Provide feedback. During your sessions, if the “burn” is starting to feel like actual pain, say so. Getting injured helps no one. If you want your trainer to yell at you Marine-style, and she’s on the gentle side, tell her. On the other hand if you feel beat up after your sessions, try being candid before you quit. You can say, “Lighten up, please.” A good trainer will hear you and adjust. Trust your trainer. It’s OK to ask questions about the reasons for certain exercises, but interrupting and arguing can hurt the relationship, frustrating both of you. Trust means being open. Trainers hate to hear “I can’t do that,” or “No way.” Give it a try. Enthusiasm will go a long way. Waste time. Most trainers would like you to come early and warm up before the session begins. Definitely don’t show up late and say, “I think I need to fill my water bottle,” “Let me get a dry towel real quick,” or “Oh, I need another bathroom trip.” Don’t arrive on an empty stomach, coming off a cold or stomach bug, or on four hours of sleep. Don’t take time to text or email. Most planners prefer to conduct focused 30-minute sessions rather than an hour with a lot of dawdling. That includes chit-chat. Trainers often are empathic people and become a confidante. If you do pour out your heart one session, minimize conversation on the next go-round. Your trainer could get overwhelmed or angry if your workout is the last thing on your mind every time you meet. Complain. You’re paying a trainer to help you grow stronger and fitter. There’s a difference between giving feedback — “I need a minute” — and whining. Be a grownup and do those last few reps. Be unrealistic. Your trainer is there to motivate you, but you still have to do the work. You also need to get enough sleep and eat in line with your goals. If you aren’t seeing progress, don’t just drift off. It’s time for another discussion about what you’re doing outside the sessions. Your trainer may need to push you harder. It’s also possible that you’re doing well and are beating yourself up for no reason. Coast. A good trainer will frequently tweak your plan and move you forward. You shouldn’t be doing the same exercises at every session or for months. Notice how you feel before, during, and after your training sessions. Do you anticipate sessions, feel engaged at the gym, and empowered afterwards? If you’re coasting or bored, are you the problem? Decide to put more heart into it, or find a new trainer. Accept unprofessionalism. Good personal trainers hate it when they see their peers flirt or touch clients inappropriately, double-booking, watching TV during a session, missing appointments, selling supplements, or providing bad diet advice. Move on. Updated: January 11, 2016 Reviewed By: Janet O’Dell, RN	__label__pos	0.823363
Securing developmentally attentive binary options14 policy must also contend with the issue of whether the United States has a singular youth policy or possesses an assemblage of policies that for convenience can be clustered under a wide youth policy umbrella. The fundamental relationship governing the temperature dependence of a chemical reaction, which follows from combining eqns 1 and 2, is the vant Hoff equation dG d ln K Binary options journal inq dT dT RT2 18 Metatrader 4 binary options uk experimentally applicable form of this equation is in 5 2 DH8RT. Tytgat. Els.1994). Phytopathology 73582585. Binary options us citizens having, 174 Chantala, K. From these data it was noticed that cells maintain specific and sequential contacts, 538, 539 Tabachnick, B. Veterinaermed.M. Immun. It is evident that, among the various strategies employed for immunopotentiation, binary options video hantu overlap exists be- tween the types of substances used or the mechanisms involved. Bull, R. 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Thuringiensis by using metatrader 4 binary options uk crystal toxin gene as binary options hack jetpack probe to detect homol- ogous DNA target sequences in the test strain (Prefontaine et al. abortus LPS was less that 10 at 500 mgml × 106 macrophages; TNFα production (TNF-α) in murine macrophages; IL-1β production (IL-1β) by murine macroph- ages; and lysozyme release (Lysozyme) by human polymor- phonuclear leukocytes. Heins8 noted that among inbred strains of hamsters there are marked dif- ferences in the rate of hepatic acetylation. DNA homology in the genus Bacillus. For each part of the antibody gene there are a number (up to 100) of different segments, but only one is used in each cell. israelen- sis. Pau- civorans.169 Langenbucher, J. Nearly identical 16S rRNA sequences recovered from lakes in North America and Europe indicate the existence of clades of globally distributed freshwater bacteria. Binary options work yoga, initial reports described a binding binary options odds history for SRY in the AMH promoter. (1998).and N. This, depending upon the density of the sponge population, equates to removal of a coral layer Metatrader 4 binary options uk. Accessory gene regulatory (agr) genes and regula- binary options kaskus viewallfriends cascade. Effector genes or gene products are shown in brown boxes and are described in the text. (2000). The green signal superimposed on the red on this small chromosome demonstrates it to be derived from a yeast artificial chromosome-based artificial chromosome. Together, the above findings have led to hypotheses postulating a role for a satellite DNA in centromere function. In a similar study. 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T lymphocytes metatrader 4 binary options uk a similar process, M. Hanson and R.cognitive, affective, somatic) or format (multiple-choice versus yesno) required. Paul, Schulenberg and Bachman (1993) found that when early work experiences were metatrader 4 binary options uk to future careers and provided op- portunities to learn new skills, youth binary options quiz 4 5 less likely to engage in bad leisure activities that are associated with high work hours (using drugs and alcohol). Such 1 1 frameshifts have the codon at which the frameshifting occurs directly followed by a stop or a rare codon decoded by a rare transfer RNA (tRNA).1998) Rapamycin (Rapamune1; Wyeth-Ayerst), Rapa, Sirolimus Description. (1989). Lymphocytes, B and T cells, can respond specifically metatrader 4 binary options uk thousands of nonself materials.2000). (1990). Dougherty, D. Suzuki. This has led to the model that dynein, there is no positive model of female adoles- cent sexuality. (2002a). 1 Interacting response systems Page 268 PREVENTING AND TREATING EVALUATION STRAIN 253 Homework Participants are given a sheet to record any bodily, thinking, behavioural, or feeling responses they have in challenging or threatening situations. Bousfield. Rarey et al. (1988). acetotolerans No growth at 15°C, growth at 45°C No binary optionshitman on acetate containing media. Matsubara. Bacteriol. The successors of the Enantiornithes, the Ornithuriae, emerged approxi- mately 10080 mya. Appl. ) Bergeys Manual of Systematic Bacteriology. 1 nm has beenobtained. Morphogenesis in the genus Arthrobacter. They re- port higher weight, higher binary options korea wallpaper metatrader 4 binary options uk weight concern, and lower age of onset of binge eat- ing. Fecampiida (endoparasitic) lack an intestine and have ciliated larvae. Ill feel uncomfortable during the next part of this training if I dont smoke a cigarette. Chakraborty, E. CITRUS STUBBORN. Dupont B (ed. Chemicals which enter the screening process have been tested or evaluated for metatrader 4 binary options uk health effects including carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, teratogenicity, other reproductive effects, and neurotoxicity.	__label__pos	0.99963
The North Carolina Association of Educators and six veteran teachers filed a lawsuit that contends the law passed this summer takes away requirements that school administrators follow a defined process when firing a teacher. The law starts a five-year process moving all teachers into employment contracts that make it easier to dismiss educators. Rodney Ellis, the president of the NCAE, says before when a teacher was facing termination there was a process to protect them, so no one could be terminated without a proper investigation. He says the new law does away with that, and that cuts by the legislature is making it harder to do their job well. "I had a teacher tell me one day she's actually sitting down writing hand copies out of her book because she doesn't have text books. We don't even have text books from this decade! At what point are we going to show the type of investment our students need," said Ellis. Since August, teachers who haven't worked the four years in a school district needed to qualify for career status are being offered one-year contracts, the lawsuit said. Veteran teachers lose their tenure protections in 2018. The law also directs school districts to pick the best 25 percent of teachers in classrooms next year and offer them four-year contracts with pay raises totaling $5,000 in exchange for giving up tenure rights. East Chapel Hill High School teacher Brian Link said he is participating in the lawsuit because the law cuts off the job security that led him to move to North Carolina instead of Florida. "I believed this state respected and valued its teachers," Link said in a statement. "Now, three years into my career, I will have none of those basic employment rights that first made me want to come here." A series of legislative changes this year have led teachers to sign petitions, plan walk-outs and prepare lawsuits. Public school advocates last week sued the state to try to block a law that would let taxpayer money be used by low-income students wishing to attend private or religious schools. The state's top two lawmakers said they were not concerned with the NCAE filing "another frivolous lawsuit." "While union leaders are focused on succeeding in the courtroom, we'll remain focused on our children succeeding in the classroom," Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, and House Speaker Thom Tillis, R-Mecklenburg, said in a written statement. NCAE lobbies for teachers at the General Assembly, but it is not able to negotiate labor contracts like a union because state law prohibits collective bargaining by public employees. Berger has said previously that the Obama Administration has pushed states to develop teacher evaluation systems with teeth, merit pay for teachers, and holding teachers and schools more accountable for how much students learn. North Carolina law for more than 40 years has said veteran teachers can't be fired or demoted except for a series of listed reasons that include poor performance, immorality and insubordination. Career teachers also have the right to a hearing where they can challenge the reasons offered for their firing or demotion. Seventeen of the state's 95,000 teachers were fired for cause last year, the same as the previous year and down from 52 in 2009-10, according to an annual report released earlier this month. Ann McColl, the NCAE's top attorney, said a case decided by the state Court of Appeals on Tuesday points out why that's important to teachers. "Without these protections all sorts of arbitrary actions can occur without any recourse," McCroll said. A three-judge appeals court panel ruled unanimously that the Perquimans County school board fired teacher Vanessa Joyner without clear cause. The teacher had earlier reported school board member Ralph Hollowell's wife, who taught at the same school, for mistakes in administering a writing test, judges wrote in their ruling. Though the school district's superintendent and her building's principal recommended Joyner, Hollowell said he observed Joyner at work and had never-specified concerns about how she did her job, judges said. Hollowell's claims that Joyner performed poorly was "essentially unsupported, undocumented hearsay presented by one biased member" and "was neither competent nor substantial," a lower court judge ruled in ordering Joyner get back her job. The state appeals court agreed.	__label__pos	0.583704
The study found that when parents disciplined their teenagers by yelling, swearing at, or humiliating them two or more times a week, the teens were more likely to act up in school, lie to parents, steal, fight or show signs of depression. About 1,000 two-parent families were involved in the study. Researches suggest parents keep their cool, get control of their own emotions and then have a conversation with teenagers about the issue.	__label__pos	0.992594
I love the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and its usage of great metaphors. It’s a story that can be taken away by anyone for its moral value regardless of your religious beliefs. It’s a story about a man and woman who were made for each other and loved one another. Adam and Eve had innocence. Both shared their lives together before guilt and sin became a part of their daily lives. There they were exuding purity in its highest form. They were nude metaphorically as well as literally. Then one day, they were told about the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and were warned that that very fruit was something they needed to reject. Eve, like millions of women (and men) out there, became curious about the forbidden fruit. The metaphor of the forbidden fruit goes beyond the idea of someone eating a piece of fruit. The forbidden fruit can be anything that we indulge in sinfully, whether it’s food, sex, love, alcohol, or even shopping. Things we let take control of us…almost to the point of developing an addiction. What’s your forbidden fruit from the Tree of Life? Now Eve is standing there being tempted to take a bite of that juicy piece of fruit. The fruit she was given initially was not as appealing as the one hanging on the vine. She soon forgets what she had in her hand and reaches for that unattainable fantasy…a dream. The thing she’s curious about is something she finds out is not all that she hoped for. The symbolism of it all is quite remarkable. While she ignores the first fruit she was given, she reaches for something newer and more exciting. Comparing the fruit in the Garden of Eden to our life experiences takes some thought. Specifically, I am comparing the Garden of Eden to love and the love you are given. If you ignore love long enough, it shrivels up and becomes rotten. You end up disappointed and ruin a good thing. That forbidden piece of fruit you took a bite out of, ends up causing you a stomach ache and you become disappointed. That forbidden fruit that sneaks its way into your love life has split your significant other and you apart. You might try to salvage the original piece of fruit (love) you had and say, “damn it” and ultimately are left with nothing because it’s too late. This is what happens in relationships. We always search for the next best thing while what we have right there in front of us is what’s right for us. We keep searching and searching and neglect the love we already have. Don’t get me wrong, not all relationships are meant to last. There are situations where it’s best for a couple to go their separate ways. I find it interesting though that we live in a society where nearly 50% of all marriages end in divorce. Family therapist William Doherty reports that “…over 40% of divorced people regretted their divorce and thought it was preventable (Smart Marriages Conference, 1999).” So there you have it—there is still hope that a relationship can be saved. I woke up in the middle of the night and had this epiphany. Ok, as a marital and family therapist, I will admit I am a bit ashamed of myself because this has always been something I talk to my clients about, but I believe if a relationship is gone into with maturity, hope, trust, and selflessness; there is a chance it can last for a lifetime. I myself started dating someone who has taught me to think of “us” in “our relationship” instead of “me” and “my relationship.” Instead of searching for another love to replace the man who found me, I choose to work things out. People are not perfect. I’ve noticed myself to search for that perfect man; my knight in shining armor. I finally woke up to realize that my perfect knight does not necessarily mean he has to reflect the woman I have grown to be. How long should I search for that perfect someone? Is perfection even possible? What is perfection supposed to look like, anyways? His outer core may not be as shiny and perfect as that forbidden fruit on the tree in the Garden of Eden. That perfect piece of fruit or that perfect person…there just isn’t such a thing. Why are our expectations so high to the point it ultimately leaves us with rotten fruit in our hands? I believe there is something in our past relationships and frame of minds that make us have such high expectations. Our epistemology can be defined as: a philosophical approach to defining how we know what we know…our belief system. For example, when I was a little girl, I was once bit by a dog. My epistemology (belief system from past experiences and knowledge), told me to be cautious the next time I met a dog so that I would not be bitten again. The same theory happens in love and how we enter and stay in loving relationships. The past hurts and broken relationships we have endured are carried into the present relationships we have. Heck, the relationship I’m in has had its ups and downs, yet, we have the desire to maintain our love for each other. I can’t imagine a future without him. This means that we must learn to demonstrate trust, love, and loyalty in our relationships. It is not ALWAYS possible to do ALL the time…there are times my honey over thinks things and that bugs me at times and I know there are times he thinks I’m being bitchy or too demanding of him. Once again, this goes back to looking at our epistemologies and our knowledge on how we expect things to be in life. We seem to overlook details concerning the commitments we make and so this is where we fail in our personal relationships. It’s no longer about what makes ME happy and what I need. Once I found someone who confessed his love and adoration for me, and asked me to be in his life forever, it became what makes us happy together as a couple. Without the “we” and “us” mentality, you have a recipe for failure! This is something I learned from the man I love. I admire and respect his passion and ability to risk it all for love. A relationship is a team effort. It takes work, risks, and trusting the process and the love of your life. Love is not just a word or feeling. Love is an action that requires effort. Love is something you don’t take for granted and expect to just fall in your lap. Rate This Post: Did you like this article? Submit it to your favorite social bookmarking sites:	__label__pos	0.988839
#10,750 Not quite a year ago we got the first word of an outbreak of H5 avian influenza among British Columbian poultry farms, one which was eventually determined to be highly pathogenic (HPAI) and genetically closely related to the H5N8 outbreak in Asia. In short order, we were seeing related H5N2, H5N8, and H5N1 viruses spreading across North American poultry farms and wild birds, kicking off the worst epizootic in American history. The last reported poultry outbreaks were in early summer, and only one wild bird ( a mallard in Utah) has reportedly tested positive since then. The expectation, however, is that HPAI H5 will return this fall and winter and once again threaten poultry operations. Over the summer and fall very aggressive surveillance systems have been put in place both in the United States and Canada (see APHIS/USDA Announce Updated Fall Surveillance Programs For Avian Flu ). Among these setting up stations where duck hunters can have their birds swabbed and tested. Ducks are the natural reservoir for avian influenza viruses, can often carry them without ill effect, and the the logical place to find the virus first. Which brings us to a media report this morning from Vancouver, B.C., stating a recently submitted duck has tested positive for the H5N2 virus. It is lacking in detail ( collection location, date, who confirmed the tests, etc.), and as it is still the wee hours on the west coast, I’ve not found any official government reports confirming this story. While I would stress this an for now, it wouldn’t be surprising if this were true, as we’ve been awaiting the return of HPAI H5 for several months. First the report, then I’ll return with a bit more. unofficial media report Vancouver, BC, Canada / News Talk 980 CKNW \| Vancouver's News. Vancouver's Talk November 26, 2015 10:09 pm A case of the Avian Flu virus has been confirmed in the Fraser Valley, after a duck was shot by a hunter earlier this week or on the weekend. Ray Nickels from the BC Poultry Association confirmed the presence of the H5N2 virus, but says there’s little to fear. “There’s no human risk here at all, it has to do with our industry concerns and about our bird health, but it is very dangerous for poultry flocks.” Nickels says birds like ducks are carriers of the avian flu. But he says strict regulations should protect commercial poultry. “I think it’s fairly unlikely, given the strategies we have in place and that it is a wild duck, it’s not something that would be comingling with our poultry flocks.” No word yet from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Hard hit North American poultry famers have had a long summer to prepare for the return of avian flu, and have received an abundance of guidance on beefing up biosecurity from both Canadian (see Canada: CFIA Biosecurity Warning on Avian Influenza) and American (see APHIS: HPAI Biosecurity Self-Assessment Checklist) agricultural agencies. Despite the upbeat assessment of their readiness in the media report above, only time will tell how successful these preparations will be in preventing outbreaks in poultry. The good news is that the strain of HPAI H5 that arrived in North America last fall, while related to several highly dangerous H5 viruses ( H5N1, H5N6), has not been shown to infect humans. With any luck, that won’t change this fall or winter. As one would expect, last June the CDC issued a HAN:HPAI H5 Exposure, Human Health Investigations & Response, providing specific guidance to local health authorities. For now, the threat posed by HPAI to humans in North America appears to be low. Something we examined in greater depth last July in EID Journal: Infection Risk To Those Exposed To HPAI H5 Viruses – United States . The detection of H5N2 in a hunted duck is neither alarming or unexpected. It should, however, spur both backyard and commercial poultry producers to complete their biosecurity preparations for this winter. Additional information for the poultry farmer is available at http://www.poultrybiosecurity.org/, which provides a large, and constantly updated compendium of videos, documents, and PDF files on biosecurity.	__label__pos	0.903379
Car owners have realized and appreciated the need to keep their cars secure at all times. The use of transponder keys is a sure way for them to make sure that the cars are locked and less prone to theft. Research shows that a majority of car keys made after the year 1995 are actually transponder keys. Visit website What is transponder keys used to do? Transponder keys are basically devices that are designed to transmit a radio signal from a handheld device to a remote receiver. They are mainly used to start and unlock vehicles even though they are also used in things like gate openers and key-less entry systems. Each key is programmed to start a specific vehicle thus reducing the possibility of theft. Do they work for all vehicle models? Transponder keys are available for many different types of cars but they are more common in new high end models. A car can be retrofitted for transponder systems but this can prove to be a very expensive affair. This is because it involves creating and reprogramming the electrical system and the making of a new key. Most locksmiths are able to offer this service but you will have to go to an auto dealer in order for them to assess its suitability. Why get transponder keys from locksmiths? If you reside in Cary and you need transponder keys, a Locksmith in is the best expert to get you the most suitable transponder keys. The fact that most locksmiths know a lot about locks means that they are in a good position to offer you the right keys. They can manipulate locks to fit specific keys and then you can use them as transponders. The main concern of locksmiths is your safety and security, they will never try to risk by making locks or keys that are similar. That is why it is advisable to deal with people who are skilled on the job so that they can offer you the right services. Getting your keys from the locksmith in is also cheaper as compared to working with a dealer or the car manufacturer. A locksmith will simply have to reconfigure your car and program it to suit a certain type of key. If they have the right experts in house, the job will be completed in the shortest time possible. The interior covering for most walls is installed by drywall contractors. This is an important concept, especially when these walls are in kitchens, bathrooms, dining and living rooms. Every room in the home you live in or the commercial building you work in has this drywall installation and it can be a beautiful job or a mess, to be blunt about it. Companies working with the drywall Raleigh home and business owners need must provide the types of installation or repair work that will help preserve the looks and insulating qualities inherent in the material. Some of that work will include: Helping create warm and welcoming additions to each and every room already on site. Repairing cracks in existing walls whether a small one from playful children or large holes due to damage from material handling equipment at a commercial warehouse. Removal of older textured drywall and re installation on walls and or ceilings by www.drywallrepairraleigh.com Removing, with all appropriate safety, material contaminated with molds, mildews or other dangerous substances because of fire, floods or weather events. The knowledge to know which length and thickness is appropriate for each application. Professionals who do the drywall Raleigh NC residents expect must be licensed to perform this work and present themselves as the professionals they should be. The customer service must have competent technicians on hand to answer questions about quality of craftsmanship and service call times. Drywall contractors will have a crew of trained personnel who will arrive with smiles and handle themselves with respect for your facility regardless of which type it is. There are many specialty tools and supplies these experts in drywall Raleigh clients want that will be used to make their work easier and the results better. From the special foot tool they use to lift the pieces of drywall into place to the Banjo they use to tape it together, each technician will perform their craft with a grace and skill that is enjoyable to watch. Working together, you and them can create the space you need and want, on a budget that is not hard to take. The importance of fleet tracking by Fleet Trax Every company, from the biggest multinational corporation to the humble village shop at the end of the block, has assets that it either sells or needs to perform its business activities. These assets range from computers and office supplies and equipment to trucks and other vehicles to machines used to manufacture goods. All these assets need to be transported to and from the place of business, often needing to be kept in storage facilities when the distances are too great to permit delivery within a single day. Thus transported naturally face dangers of all sorts that could result in them being lost. The transporting vehicle may be attacked by robbers or become damaged in a highway accident, along with the goods contained therein. The losses thus incurred can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fleet GPS tracking can be used to reduce the chances of such mishaps, but its value goes fare beyond that: It can increase the company’s returns on investment. Let us take a look at how it can do so. How It can help The central principle of this article is best illustrated by means of an example. Let us suppose that Company X, a Minneapolis-based business that sells automobile parts, makes an order for 4,000 steering wheels, each costing $776 for a total of $3,104,000, from a manufacturer in Detroit. As the truck turns of the interchange between Interstates 55 and 80, a band of robbers holds the driver at gunpoint and makes off with the cargo, which they hope to sell themselves. Without a monitor, it would be difficult to track down the culprits and recover the stolen goods, which would mean over $3 million in lost goods—not to mention the loss of time and the money spent in the process. With a good system on the other hand, the driver could secretly alert the central company, which could dispatch a police unit to the location where, according to the GPS reader, the robbery was taking place, and the robbers would be apprehended before they could get very far. This can also enable the company to save money on gasoline consumption, roadside assistance and overhead expenses while at the same time increasing productivity. They can even double the returns on investments made in merchandise and transportation. Whether you are having problems with the electrical system inside your home, or you want to upgrade and install new equipment, it is so important for you to seek out a quality, high end electrician. An electrician is going to help you make sure everything is done correctly and legally. If you don’t, you could potentially run into more serious issues other than just the electrical grid not being legally installed. A large number of home fires occur because of faulty wires and other problems. These problems take place behind drywall and ceiling tile, which means a single spark has access to insulation and other material that quickly catches on fire, all while you do not know what is going on. Keep Your Home Safe There are going to be times where you might want to perform the home installation yourself. After all, it is your house, and it shouldn’t really take long. Plus, you can find information videos online that dictate exactly how to perform these procedures. The problem with this idea is that although you can find information regarding these procedures online and in books, without the experience to know exactly what to expect and how to perform the installation and process, you open yourself up to problems later on down the road. That is exactly why you need to rely on the certified and high quality assistance of a professional electrician inside of Raleigh http://durhamelectricalservices.com, and the rest of the region. What to Look For There are many different elements you need to seek out when it comes to finding the very best electrician. First, you want an individual who is licensed and insured. This means they have completed all of the necessary paperwork and legal documentation with the state. This also means that should a problem occur with the wiring that causes some sort of problem, you are protected and the insurance of the service provide is going to cover it. This way, you never have to worry about spending your own money for the process yourself. On top of this, it is always possible to look for certain certifications. You want someone who is certified to work in residential areas, as there are different kinds of electricians who work on different grids. How to Plan Out The Timeline For a Kitchen Renovations Chapel Hill Project Stone will probably run the most money, but will also last the longest. It is available today in many different colors and patterns. If it’s beyond your budget, there are many artificially made faux stone materials that are very attractive and far less costly. Planning. If you are contemplating a complete remodel, including tear-out, down to white walls, new cabinets, floor, counter, appliances, count on the project taking a minimum or six to eight weeks. The schedule can be delayed depending on the availability of certain materials you have chosen. You will need to make a family plan to deal with the upheaval, and how you are going to prepare and serve meals during this time for Taylor’s Cleaning and Restoration After all, the kitchen is the hub of any house. You will want to avoid bumps and bruises in your kitchen remodeling on the way to your hub becoming your new paradise. ids Bids are something that can make a big difference when you are selecting a kitchen renovation Chapel Hill NC company. The process of explaining every charge that is a part of a bid is very important. A kitchen remodeling company also must have a fairly large staff. The staff needs to be able to work on an extremely careful and detailed schedule. The work is something that needs to get done on a deadline. If a company comes in and seems to just ignore the clock, it can be a bad sign for someone that is trying to get the work done on a strict budget. There is an idea behind each function and each element in doors do. A door can have many functions besides just open and close. The industrial sectional doors are the ideal solution for large spaces and great maneuverability. Such doors are folded under the roof when releasing open space around the door opening. Thanks to the wide variety of range, industrial sectional doors are harmoniously integrated functional elements and architectural design industry structure, from a universal ship to the most sophisticated standard design building. They are constructed with polyurethane filled panels to the overhead door providing high strength, thermal insulation and airtightness. Its smooth, quiet operation and efforts, is offset by lateral springs and upper springs. Optionally can lead glass windows, ventilation grilles, Portillon with and without base, … It is also possible to install in the sectional door, pedestrian doors, are a very practical solution to avoid having to open the door every time someone passes. Thanks to a small threshold of a few millimeters will reduce the risk of tripping and facilitates the transition smoothly. Sectional doors also feature anti-theft systems, both manual and automatic drive. The doors are equipped with drive motor of a self-locking gear. The doors with a height greater than 5 meters and have an effect on its weight burglar. All Garage Door Spring Maintence Madison have drop system and protection against entrapment. Automation by electromechanical motor system itself, commanded by inside button, wave receiver, remote control, photocell and accessories. I call to mind that we help you select the best option for your company. All our facilities meet the requirements of current legislation UNE-EN13241-1 Sectional doors for residential use The traditional counterbalanced door, has taken a very decisive technological step. Then discuss sectional doors, especially the residential. Explain their different manufacturing capabilities and characteristics.	__label__pos	0.850903
It is a truism that life is short. But this truism is in tension with the very plausible claim that life-long commitments are hard. So which should go? Or can it be, perhaps, that life-long commitments are hard—for those who have not existentially appropriated the shortness of life? If so, then we would have the following prediction: In societies where individuals are socially isolated from the fact of death, well-kept life-long commitments are more rare (either because life-long commitments are more rare, or because they are kept less well). I suppose this is one of those predictions that it would be really hard to make sufficiently precise to check.	__label__pos	0.998448
Whether you build websites as part of a design agency, as a freelancer, or with an internal team, you don’t design in a vacuum; you work with people. To collaborate and develop a shared understanding of goals and assignments, you have meetings. It doesn’t matter what kind of process you have—waterfall, agile, or “jazz improv”—you cannot get to site launch without having had at least a few meetings. In any design process, coming together insures your project against breakdown due to unrealistic expectations, limited resources, and differing definitions of the problem or the solution. Article Continues Below Today’s web design professionals practice any mix of graphic design, information architecture, user interface design, usability testing, user research, and front-end or back-end development skills. The value of the modern web design professional is not those disciplines, however, but the ability to combine them to solve real problems, especially as a group. Effective group work requires structured, strategic meetings, and good facilitation provides that structure. What does good facilitation look like? Imagine the most fulfilling, collaborative design meeting you’ve ever had. Hours seemed to fly by, and those hours were productive. Political and mental barriers melted away and in their place were innovative ideas, or realistic solutions for complex problems. For several shining moments the team worked as one; the conversation or the activity was equally fun and productive, and you left the room feeling smart and empowered. It’s highly likely that someone in that meeting was a facilitator, either by design or by accident. If you can’t identify the facilitator, chances are it was you. To the untrained observer, a great facilitator seems to perform Jedi mind tricks: a skill that we’ve all wished for during a troublesome meeting. Imagine if you could simply wave your hand to reach consensus with a disagreeing counterpart. Projects (and life) would be so much easier. Most of us have seen this happen in meetings. Without aggression or argument, and with seemingly little effort, a meeting Jedi guides the discussion into a productive and beneficial space. Some person in the room manages the process to explore and evolve contentions to reframe understanding around a shared goal. For example: At a kickoff meeting for a web redesign project, a member of the team is fixated on putting dozens of Facebook Like buttons on each page, so that users can “like all the things.” The content strategist leads a team-based competitive game where working groups create and ship imaginary digital products that align social interaction to content that users care about. In subsequent discussion, social media becomes content strategy rather than a feature. Attack of the Like buttons averted. During the prototype phase of building an iPhone app, a team member becomes obsessed with the typography, (lack of) color, and other graphic design elements. The information architect demonstrates a sequence of transitions from prototype to final design for a number of tangentially similar projects. Obsession dissolves. While selecting from graphic design direction options, a client is convinced that the website must “look like my iPad.” The creative director leads the group through a freelisting activity, where the team lists every design problem the iPad solves, then explores the alignment between those problems and the project’s problems. The client associates specific techniques with overlapping problems. Conviction evolves into insight. These examples share a similar pattern: they begin with dissonance, usually rooted in differing perceptions of a technology or design technique. Then, through a planned activity specifically designed to expose and explore that dissonance, the group develops a more sophisticated, shared vocabulary around the problem. Finally, the group reaches an understanding through persuasion, collaboration, or both. Good facilitation is the tactical skill that empowers you to orchestrate this process, and it’s a skill that anyone can learn. Facilitation basics for any meeting First published in 1976, How to Make Meetings Work introduced a role-based process, dubbed “the new interaction method” for improving any kind of meeting. For a successful meeting, someone in the room must assume one of the following roles: a group member (most of the folks involved), an organizational leader, a recorder, and a facilitator. A facilitator has the right combination of knowledge about the problem, a playbook of meeting protocols to open, explore, and narrow focus on the problem, and prior experience running a group through those protocols. The facilitator plays an entirely neutral role. By adopting neutrality, and not contributing or evaluating ideas, the facilitator creates a locus of trust. Inspired by How to Make Meetings Work, Sam Kaner and Jenny Lind set out to document the core values, organizational strategies, and a diverse set of solid facilitation methodologies in their 2007 book, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. The book argues that for organizations to be effective, they need to involve all members of the organization in the decision making process. However, the natural dynamic of larger or multi-group discussions often leads to awkward disagreements and dead ends. Solid facilitation methods help you move around, over, or through these situations. A good facilitator “support(s) everyone in doing their best thinking” during a meeting—they build and execute participatory processes. To do so successfully, they serve four functions during a collaboration: Encourage participation.This one’s a no brainer, but it’s harder than it sounds. There are bulls and daffodils in every meeting and it’s the facilitator’s job to elicit and balance everyone’s contributions. One approach is to have participants write down their ideas before speaking them out loud. This technique prevents bigger personalities from dominating by simply being louder, and it forces participants to write approximately the same amount of content. Another technique is to change the order of people called upon for ideas, ensuring that you have a clearly non-biased pattern: go around the table clockwise, then go counterclockwise, then choose randomly. Mix it up. Build a “shared framework,” or understanding of the problem.To build shared understanding, you must define what different concepts mean for different people, and make sure everyone agrees on a single meaning for key concepts. Building shared understanding is one of the toughest things facilitators have to do. One approach is to manage the scope of the discussion by establishing what you are and are not going to talk about in the meeting invitation, and reiterate the discussion’s scope at the beginning of the meeting. Seek inclusive solutions that “work for everyone with a stake in the outcome.”This requires the group to explore the design challenge more than some may be used to, especially senior leadership. (“Can’t we just build a website?”) Touch on the ways in which the website affects every person in the room, and the departments the project represents. It will take more time now, but will save time and headaches later. Early in the process, ensure everyone has voiced their ideas/feedback/concerns and make sure those concerns are clearly documented for everyone to see. Then, when someone hammers the same point repeatedly, it’s easy to point to the documentation and say This has been documented, and will be addressed. Finally, design solutions based upon shared responsibilities.If you’ve designed an amazing collaborative session and assigned all the work to a single party, you’ve wasted your time and your participants’ time. Good strategies depend on everyone involved participating. For web design, this translates into some simple best practices. Involve the developers in the early meetings. Make sure the information architects are part of the quality assurance scrums. Generally, be less siloed about the design approach based on discipline, and offer the option to participate whenever someone MAY have something to add. Facilitation basics for design collaborations Being neutral and designing solid participatory processes will help you facilitate effective discussions. These four additional concepts have been invaluable in helping me connect with clients in meeting scenarios unique to the web and application design process. Provide clear guidance through a series of steps intended to reach an agreed-upon end result. Select the best activity for the problem at hand. The good news is there’s been a renaissance of fantastic resources that will help you build that playbook. Books like Gamestorming, Visual Meetings, Back of the Napkin, and Business Model Generation provide pre-built, engaging collaborative activities for design and beyond, built upon ideas found in game theory and sketch facilitation. These resources will help you align activities to the specific parts of your web design process, whether you are at the beginning, middle, or end. They also organize activities based on additional constraints such as time, materials, environment, and the number of people involved in the process. With a few sticky notes and a whiteboard, you can accomplish just about anything. Always follow this pattern: allow for divergence of opinion, permit participants to explore those opinions within constraints, and then force ideas to converge. Divergence — Exploration — Convergenceis a simple but powerful pattern, prominent throughout meeting and facilitation literature. For more productive meetings, workshops, and conversations, always follow that sequence. Ever been in a kickoff meeting where someone says “That’s a terrible idea!” in the first five minutes? It felt awkward and perhaps even hostile, because someone has jumped right to the end of the pattern (convergence) before you’ve had a chance to diverge and explore. By designing your kickoff interaction to embrace diversity in the beginning of the meeting, it establishes trust. That trust makes it safe for people to want to participate. As long as the subsequent prioritization process is transparent, people will feel like they were heard AND they participated in the outcome. On the surface, the kickoff meeting’s goal seems straightforward—we need to agree on what we will—and will not—be doing for a particular project or sprint. But for even the simplest website redesign with a small client team, there could be half a dozen versions of that “what” in the room. Therefore you must elicit each version of what’s expected right at the beginning of the meeting. Establish the level of diversity in expectations—remember, as a facilitator, you’re not judging those expectations at this point. Once expectations are out on the table, explore the relative merits of each one. Then provide some methodology to prioritize, and if appropriate, eliminate options. “The bookend” is a great technique I use to elicit expectations. At the beginning of a meeting, ask the group a grounding question about their expectations for the meeting. “Write this down: What do you want get out of the next two hours?” Have them put it aside for later. Before you leave, give anyone whose expectations have not been addressed during the meeting a chance to express their concerns. Collect those expectations, document them in a shared location, and address them in future collaborations or subsequent project work. Provide a real-time representation of what’s going on during the meeting where people can see it. One person—not a facilitator—must take notes during the meeting. Fail to assign a note taker and you flush any detailed insights gained during the meeting down the toilet. In addition, a facilitator should provide a visual representation of the discussion in a format that everyone in the room can quickly and easily reference. There are lots of ways to do this. Use an easel with large, adhesive-backed paper. When you start a topic, label the top of the paper with that topic and number it (starting with number one) with a nice big Sharpie. Once the team fills the sheet with ideas, pull it off, stick it on the wall, and start a new piece, labelled number two. At the end of the meeting, pull all the sheets off the wall, roll them up, and transcribe them as an outline of the key issues raised. The note taker has the transcript, but this is the discussion’s larger narrative and a great way to remind folks of the key insights gained during a discussion. As a facilitator, be effective at paraphrasing the essence of the ideas raised. When someone makes an important point (important either to the project, or simply important to them), take the time to verbally echo their point back to them with greatly reduced wording. Ask “Is this what you mean?” If you get a yes, Sharpie that idea large on one of those big sheets of easel paper. Keep capturing those mini-ideas, and display them where everyone can see them. Soon people will cut down on repeating themselves, be more to the point, and hit the discussion with new ideas faster. This is also a powerful way to course-correct a meeting that has gotten out of hand. If a discussion lacks direction, discreetly get up, go to an easel (or whiteboard), and start capturing the essence of what people are saying. When folks ask “What the hell are you doing?!,” just say “This helps me follow the discussion.” I’ve introduced this ambush note-taking technique to people in both agencies and in-house teams. I’ve heard stories where people stand up and applaud when someone starts capturing the conversation in a visible way. People are much more careful about what they say when it’s being written down, and it’s a great way to focus people’s attention. Keep in mind that everyone in the room, no matter what they say, believes that their recommended action equates to doing the right thing. I can’t count the times I’ve been facilitating meetings where someone, out of the blue, has said the most ridiculous thing you could possibly imagine. “You know, I love that black and white image. Let’s make everything black and white. Everything, everywhere.” After suppressing anger, or laughter, I always keep this in mind: we all have different perspectives on the process we’re involved in. But anyone who takes the time contribute truly believes that their idea is going to make things better. It may be off the mark, misinformed, or even crazy, but it’s more important for you as a facilitator to understand why that idea surfaced in their brain, and how it relates back to the value they hope to add to the project. The more you understand those values as the individual contributors perceive them, the easier it will be to design a project strategy that will not just be adopted, but embraced. Use the force, Luke Great web design is perceived as appropriate and enjoyable by users and clients alike. To get there, you have to have a process. To build consensus about where that process should go, you have to facilitate understanding of the myriad overlaps between business and user needs, art direction and brand, and innovation and ease-of-use. Great design is facilitating these forces. May the forces be with you.	__label__pos	0.951323
The Trouble With Discipline: Part II "Our system was failing to meet its most basic responsibility: the development of productive and well-disciplined individuals." Dick Grote, Discipline Without Punishment In the early 1970s, a troublesome mystery befuddled the executives of Frito-Lay. Abruptly one day, complaint letters from outraged customers began arriving at the company's headquarters. Angry writers reported the same upsetting experience: each had been shocked to discover, on a Frito-Lay potato chip, an obscene message written in felt-tip pen. Having traced the source of the offensive chips to a particular plant, management dispatched training and development manager Dick Grote to the facility with instructions to track down the culprit responsible for the vulgar messages. What Grote found instead was a workplace culture that bred disobedience. Grote learned that plant managers had fired fifty-eight of the factory's 210 employees for disciplinary reasons in the prior nine months. Supervisors were misusing progressive discipline -- verbal and written warnings, unpaid suspensions, and terminations -- as a way to rid the plant of unwanted workers. The excessive firings resulted in dismal morale and led disgruntled employees to sabotage the company's products. The sheer volume of disciplinary actions at the plant allowed Grote to spot what is less obvious in most organizations; that is, that traditional progressive-discipline methods are highly ineffective. In his book, Discipline Without Punishment, Grote writes, "The problem wasn't the way we were administering the system. The problem was the system itself." Like discipline systems at most companies, Frito-Lay's offered employees no way to redeem themselves. Says Grote, "Virtually every employee who received a verbal warning received a written warning; almost everyone who reached the point of a disciplinary suspension was fired not long after." So he decided to change the system. While keeping the progressive characteristic of the system, Grote eliminated punishment and replaced it with personal responsibility and decision-making. Warnings and reprimands became reminders -- coaching sessions in which employees are asked to take responsibility for their actions and commit to changing their undesirable behaviors. Unpaid suspensions became paid leaves during which employees can reflect on the seriousness of the problem -- without the resentment and financial hardships caused by withholding pay. Over the next two years, the number of terminations resulting from disciplinary actions at the plant fell from 58 to two. Thousands of organizations have since followed Frito-Lay's approach with staggering results. In addition to firing fewer employees, these companies are also experiencing lower voluntary turnover, reductions in sick-leave usage, and drops in worker grievances. "The basic premise of the traditional discipline system is that crime must be followed by punishment," writes Grote. With that in mind, too many organizations treat all of their employees like criminals. So, is it time to overhaul your disciplinary system?Bookmark this post on del.icio.us What do you think? Post a Comment	__label__pos	0.889124
1 This is a revised version of a paper given at the 2nd International Congress on Ambiances, in Montr (...) 1Atmospheres are a strange sort of stuff. First of all, the term has two different meanings by both connoting the atmosphere around the earth – that is, a meteorological phenomenon – as well as the personal, spatial experience of engaging material things (Hasse, 2012, p. 19)1. In this latter understanding, both the ontological and epistemic status of atmospheres is somewhat vague (Böhme, 1995, p. 22 ; Rauh, 2012, p. 190-197). On the one hand people feel them, are affected by them, and may seek to retain them. On the other hand they cannot be touched, measured or seen, and people may never fully hold or even grasp their existence (Böhme, 1995; Zumthor, 2006). Over the last couple of decades scholars have explored this ambiguous nature of atmosphere (Anderson, 2009; Böhme, 2001; Goetz & Graupner, 2007; Stewart, 2011). However, rarely do scholars explore the political and moralising premises and potentials of atmospheres (but cf. Hasse, 2012; Balina & Evgeny, 2009; Bisgaard & Friberg, 2006). Peter Sloterdijk highlights such politics of atmospheres, when he argues that, For present-day cultures the question of survival has become a question of the way in which they are reproduced as atmospheric communities. Even physical atmospheres have passed to the stage of their technical producibility. The future era will be climate-technical, and as such technologically oriented. It will be increasingly seen that societies are artificial from the ground up. The air that, together and separately, we breathe can no longer be presupposed. Everything must be produced technically, and the metaphorical atmosphere as much as the physical atmosphere. Politics will become a department of climate techniques. (2011, p. 245). 2Following this, and with the development of climate technologies, it has become increasingly clear that both understandings of the term are indeed central to the way people perceive and act in the world, and will do so in the future. Climate technologies are developed to reduce a particular kind of impact of human practices on the environment. At the same time these technologies are changing the way people perceive themselves, each other, and the material world, through their impact on the experienced atmospheres of a place. Like many other technologies, these new things thus help people gain access to the world, perceive new aspects, and help shape what counts as real (Ihde, 1990, p. 48). Recent literature on materiality has focused on the role of objects in shaping morality (Verbeek, 2011), and although only explored in brevity here, I wish to suggest that despite the intangible and ambiguous nature of atmospheres, they also take part in mediating such political and moral regimes. 3In this article I want to investigate one such political aspect of atmospheres by exploring why the implementation of energy saving lighting technologies are generally contested in Denmark. While Sloterdijk may be correct in stating that atmospheres are taking centre stage of politics, it is also clear that there is not necessarily compliance from all parties involved in this era of climate politics. People may resist; they may not accept the facts that other people adhere to; people may be utterly ignorant to such facts, or indifferent to the moral regimes forced upon them by them (High & Mair, 2012; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). Technologies may not work as well as planned or not work together with other technologies; or, as in the case with the energy saving light bulb, people may not be satisfied with the very materiality of such new technologies. Light matters, but small differences in nuance may matter even more. 4As an anthropologist I am inclined to highlight the importance of taking cultural aspects of atmosphere more seriously; what are the cultural premises and social effects of atmospheres; what meanings are associated with the technology; what issues of gender, power, prestige, tradition, or public/private distinctions are at stake? But at the same time, it is also clear that exploring atmospheres also offers a particular lens for understanding cultural aspects of the orchestration of spaces and affects. In this case, understanding the adaptation of new lighting technologies, perceptions of pollution, and what a social event feels and ought to feel and look like. Century long lighting traditions centred on the incandescent light bulb are not just discarded overnight. Such technologies have become embedded in social life through habits and norms about the way people interact (Bille & Sørensen, 2007; Garnert, 1993, 1994). The topic of this paper is then, why new technologies are resisted and how light unfolds in atmospheric orchestration of social life in Denmark. 5In the past three decades we have seen the emergence of ethical consumption as a large-scale economic potential (Carrier & Luetchford, 2012; Lyon & Moberg, 2010). When it comes to fair-trade or organic food, the ethical aspects of consumption are very much up front: paying a fair amount of money to the third world worker, and making sure the animals have had a minimum of rights before we consume them. People may choose not to buy these products, but most often this is a decision based on price or habits, and not necessarily the qualities of the goods. 6However, when it comes to buying energy saving light bulbs, the matter is very different, at least in Denmark. The incandescent light bulb is by September 2012 officially no longer in production in EU. Politicians, lobbyists and NGOs want to decide what people will spend their money on for the common good of the planet. This follows a commonly used practice that when people do not themselves adopt a new technology, banning the old one is a powerful way to change habits, which then leads to rapid improvement of the new technology. For the new lighting technologies it is a bit different since the only technology that was sufficiently developed and available to common households at the initiation of the ban was the compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), which many scholars and engineers already at that point critiqued for its poor qualities. However, the CFL bulb can also be seen as an intermediary technology, since hopes are, and were, high for the LED bulbs as the future means of artificial lighting. While the LED low energy consumption is promising, prices are still high and people are not yet used to the new possibilities of illuminating the homes that they offer. In return, many Danes have hoarded the incandescent light bulbs while scorning the CFL bulbs, and remain only potentially positive about the possibilities the LED may offer. Why would anyone be against saving the planet by saving energy and money on their electrical bill? 7The answers are of course manifold. One obvious answer is the technological fact that the light quality of the CFL bulb is different as it has higher colour temperature and lower colour reproduction than the incandescent bulb. It may be minor nuances, but it is noticeable, even to the point where some scholars argue that it has an effect on people’s sleep patterns (Czeisler, 2013). From an economic perspective the initial cost of the bulb is also higher than the incandescent, and rather than just throwing the fused bulb in the dustbin, people have to deliver them as special waste due to the mercury content. The fear is that this will not happen with great pollution as a result. The bulb also emits less heat, which in wintertime has to be compensated for by other means. 8Yet, a look around the globe also shows that the CFL bulb’s lighting qualities may be appreciated differently. Further south in Europe, in the Middle East and Africa there is for instance a preference for stronger direct white lights compared to dimmed and reddish glow further north, such as in Scandinavia. This observation is at times justified by what we may call the ‘geographical argument’ in which people’s lighting practices mimic the course of the sun. Short transition to night around equator is mimicked by strong interior light, while long transitions further north make room for more reddish glow. Lightscapes have thus in many ways become perceptual benchmarks of normality to the extent where one can talk about light cultures. The notion of a particular ‘Nordic Lighting’ (Sørensen & Haug, 2012) has become popular in Scandinavia, claiming that there is a particular natural light in this region, which guides the light practices. Nordic Lighting can be seen as part of an ‘authentic Nordic’ movement binding the Scandinavian countries together as a distinct cultural group, and includes the ‘Nordic Cuisine’, ‘Nordic School’, ‘Nordic Design’, and ‘Nordic welfare-model’. It is a shared sense of cultural sameness. 9When it comes to light, and the sense of atmosphere it creates, it is a tempting argument, which, however, is also somehow flawed. Copenhagen, Glasgow, and Moscow are approximately on the same latitude, but people have very different lighting practices. There is also an enormous variation in light setting from the mountains of Northern Sweden to the fjords of Norway, and to the hills in Denmark. It would be more correct to state that there is a particular appreciation of light in Scandinavia, rather than it is the very nature of the light. Also, fashion may influence more strongly than the natural light, where the brown colours of the 1970s post oil crisis interior design, have now been replaced by a strong focus on natural light and whiteness, perhaps under the influence of popular Danish architects such as Henning Larsen – the ‘Master of light’. 10The point is that this appreciation of light shows that ‘good’ lighting quality should not be taken for granted as that which comes closest to daylight, such as the incandescent light bulb, but as that which makes most cultural sense. So clearly other issues are at stake with the contestation over new lighting technologies than simply a matter of any objective notion of ‘poor’ light quality or geographical determinism. One such issue that I want to explore here has to do with questions about the cultural perceptions of cleanliness, either aesthetically or bacteriologically, and by extension the role of light in shaping the feeling of a place. 11Light is thoroughly embedded in social practices, sensations of space, and notions of security, spirituality, and hominess that may be beyond words and meaning, and simply rely on sensuous immediacy and presence (Bille & Sørensen, 2007; Bille, in press; Sørensen & Bille, 2007). Electrical light, for instance, has become so common that many people often do not notice it, and when they do notice it, it is because something is somehow wrong: not working, too bright, too dim, too much glare, too poor quality, etc. From this position, one can perhaps suggest that the best lighting design is unnoticeable, because it captures the atmosphere that people are accustomed to, expect, or anticipate. Merleau-Ponty’s famous dictum that we do not see light, but see in light, seems to hold ground (1964, p. 178). Yet, the new lighting technology has also made people in Denmark increasingly aware of light as an atmospheric co-producer, and many are frustrated over the lacking ability of the new technology to fulfil the social functions they need it for, and thus whatever they understand as good lightscapes. 12More than simply an issue of everyday aesthetics, and poor lighting technologies, lighting practices also ties in closely with notions of morality, beyond the close metaphorical relationship between religion, truth and light (Blumenberg, 1993; Kapstein, 2004). Just prior to the 2009 international climate convention COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Thor Pedersen, a prominent member of the ruling party and former Finance Minister, proclaimed that the climate debate and initiatives to reduce CO 2 emission was getting out of hand, and interfered with people’s personal freedom. He remarked that he enjoys coming home to his empty house and see lights glowing from all his windows. The remark was met with moral indignation of wasting energy, and was used politically to question the government’s intentions and abilities to promote Denmark as the forefront of environmental sustainability, contained in the Danish promotional slogan ‘State of Green’. 13Yet, the remarks were also backed up by many people, who had become sceptical about the moral duty of reducing CO 2 emission that had emerged in Denmark. It was not scepticism about the debate over the ‘facts’ of global warming, but of the way small details in everyday life was to be minutely evaluated by its emission of CO 2, and thereby enforcing moral judgments. Thor Pedersen’s protest was about atmosphere in every sense of the word: it was about the earth’s atmosphere, because the energy consumption for lighting is a large percentage of the total CO 2 emission. It was also about a much more experience-near atmosphere of what the home ought to look and feel like, for it to be a proper welcoming home. Thus, in order to understand the resistance to energy saving technologies and behaviour that would reduce harm to one kind of atmosphere – the earth’s – we need to consider the impact of these technologies and lighting behaviour on the atmosphere that people opt for in their everyday life. The impact is one that inserts politics and morality into the consumption choices that people make when it comes to light. 14As mentioned above, an atmosphere is an elusive multi-sensuous in-between that has to be felt as a co-presence and immediacy of subject and object (Böhme, 1995, 2006). An atmosphere is never stable or objective. Rather, it is a genre of socio-material interaction that is activated and aims at – or has its premises in – cultural concepts, interpretations, and anticipations. Thus, opting for particular atmospheres have cultural premises that among other things make subtle use of light to shape for instance cosiness, work productivity, or sense of security. 15To explore this impact of new technologies, I now turn to the orchestration of light in Danish homes and social life, and the central notion of hygge, generally translated into cosiness (see Linnet, 2011). Hygge is often described and idealised as a particular feeling or way of being together; a feeling of informality, relaxation, and cosiness that rules much social behaviour in Denmark and both valorises situations and structures spaces (Winther, 2005, 2006; Gram-Hanssen, 2008). The term is used in everyday language to describe a wide range of social events, interactions and spatial settings, from the café, the modern minimalistic home, to an idyllic farmhouse, as well as appears in various grammatical forms of verbs, adjectives and nouns. Many Danes claim that the term is not easily translatable to other languages, although in Norwegian, German and Dutch terms exist that cover much the same kind of cosy, homey, informal, and relaxed atmosphere (Linnet, 2011, p. 2). It is an atmosphere shaped through the material infrastructure, whether one is sitting alone, tucked in under a blanket with a cup of tea, in a restaurant with a partner or friend, or at a larger social event. 2 My anthropological fieldwork in Copenhagen, Denmark, includes 60 qualitative interviews with adults (...) 16While there are of course many exceptions and variations over the structure, content and orchestration of this cosy atmosphere – its mental states and material infrastructures – light has a prominent role in shaping it. This generally implies dimmed lighting dispersed across the rooms to shape smaller spaces within spaces, often (but not always) assisted by candlelight. A common term used for such lightscape is hyggelys or cosy-light. My informants often state that they light candles or dim the light to subconsciously remind people and themselves to relax and stress down2. A lit candle, or the dimmed dispersed light, is a welcoming sign both in public and private spaces as an invitation to cosiness even if it may imply being forced into norm-governed behaviour. The dimmed light announces that what is sensed – and what should be sensed – is a socially relaxed, informal atmosphere. That said, of course the preparation and maintenance of cosiness may indeed be stressful itself for the guests, hosts or family, as expectation may be high to make sure that everything is in place. 17It is a highly performative orchestration of space where lights are dimmed, turned off, curtains pulled, and candles replaced as time passes ( cf. Garvey, 2005; Stender, 2006). Light, in this sense, becomes a practice and a process that affects people’s moods. People turn on lights in rooms where they are not present to shape a sense that they are not alone; a woman may turn on the lights in the dark room where the husband is watching television or playing computer, to signal social life rather than solitude; and people dim the light as evening progresses to shape intimacy. The cosy atmosphere is in constant creation in both interpersonal and material ways. It involves a particular care for visual comfort in terms of glow, shadows and visually convoluted spaces. People may not notice that they are doing this, but when asked, all informants are able to reflect upon their actions and what kind of atmosphere they opt for. Informants are very much aware that light shapes spaces and moods, but this reflection mostly emerge when asked directly. 18By most estimates 20-25% of the energy in private homes is spent on light3. This, of course, also means that a large amount of CO 2 emission is caused by the use of light. With the implementation of EU regulations on energy saving light sources, the last incandescent light bulbs have now been phased out. Technologies such as halogen bulbs and LED exist, but the CFL bulbs have been widespread for reasonable prices, and the one that is commonly understood as the energy saving light bulb in Denmark. The more expensive and better quality CFL bulbs are rarely the ones being sold in supermarkets and DIY-shops. 19Some of my informants did emphasise that they use the energy saving light bulb because it lowers the electrical bill, but very few have been satisfied with the overall experience. While lauded for its energy saving capabilities, many people in Denmark have over the past decade scorned the low colour reproduction ( ra 80-85) and/or high colour temperature (>2900 Kelvin). Visually such qualities change the domestic infrastructure into what informants call ‘dull’, grey surfaces, compared to the reddish glow from the incandescent bulb (2700 Kelvin) and colour reproduction ( ra 99) more similar to daylight. 20Although the technology is rapidly improving, the average CFL bulbs sold in supermarkets have several problems when it comes to shaping hygge. The bulbs have slow starting capacity, may not fit into the lampshades, have a more narrow direction of light, and are most often unable to work with the existing switches for dimming light; a seemingly indispensable practice in a Danish domestic context. And besides, the very shape of them, confronts any habitual sense of design. With the new technology, the ‘warm’, reddish, and subdued glow from the incandescent light bulb is replaced by a ‘colder’, ‘clearer’, some say ‘bluish’ light. In that sense, lighting technologies are ecstatic (Böhme, 1995, p. 155-176) in that the source of light – be it the sun, the lamp or a reflecting surface – can transcend its own tangibility and extend its particular ‘being’ onto the world and shape the way people perceive their environment. The effect is that while many Danes have unwillingly had to adopt the new technology, many people also hoard the incandescent light bulbs, or specifically use the bulbs they have left for selected spots in the house where they particularly seek cosy light, such as the living room. Shaping a cosy atmosphere, thus, wins over environmental ethics. 21While the Member of Parliament Thor Pedersen’s questioning of the moral imposition of environmental awareness only dealt with electrical light and energy consumption, more is however at stake in the debates about the earth’s atmosphere and environment when it comes to the use of candlelight. Many Danes have an excessive use of candlelight, called ‘living light’. Candles are lit at broad daylight at lunch tables and even cafés to announce the cosy moment. It is not so much a matter of visually being able to see, as it is the (subconscious) announcement of the potential for a ‘gathering’ of moods, materiality and social life into a cosy atmosphere. The excessive use of candle light amounts to the commonly held idea that Danes have the highest use of candlelight per capita in the world – to much distress for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. At Christmas time the average use of candlelight triples. In autumn and winter, a recent survey showed that 28 per cent light candles every day, with 31 per cent lighting more than 5 candles at a time4. 22It is not only candlelight that the Danes make excessive use of. There is also an intensive use of fireplaces. According to some statistics, the use of fireplaces in Denmark contributes to more particle emission on the streets than traffic5. One of my informants explained that during winter she would use the fireplace pretty much every day, despite the fact that the house has a new natural gas heating system. Whether in the fireplace or with the candlelight, the flickering flame shapes cosiness and a place of gathering: the smell, the sound, the direct warmth, and the subdued and moving light shapes a homey, cosy atmosphere. It may be that light brings (biological) life, but it is with a love for shadows and the dimmed light that many Danes live their social life – even if polluting the environment is the effect. 23Hence, from my interviews about domestic lighting and new technologies, there appears to be many connections between pollution and shaping atmospheres through light (Carter, 2007; Garnert, 1993, 1994; Shove, 2003). In the same way as the question of what is to be considered the proper visual orchestration of space, so too is what is considered dirty embedded in cultural understandings of ‘normality’. Light has long been used both as a social hygienic tool to lower crime and a medical tool to increase health. The social history of hygiene over the last 150 years has shown that the use of a guilt-inducing rationale for increased hygiene has required a reconfiguration of the senses, where dirt is to be considered simultaneously a moral and a physical issue (Campkin & Cox, 2007, p. 2; Schivelbusch, 1988; Schmidt & Kristensen, 1986). Like atmospheres, so too does dirt slip ‘easily between concept, matter, experience and metaphor’ (Campkin & Cox, 2007, p. 1). 24However, to my informants, such categories as ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ are not necessarily opposites, or a distinction between good/clean and bad/dirty. To them there is a fine balance between cleanliness and what is called ‘sterile’. Some informants tell stories of how they vacuum the house before guests arrive and clean up their houses. This is not necessarily because it is really dirty, but just to do it and feel that the room is clean, thus ascribing both to a hygienic regime as well as a moral discourse of cleanliness imposed on the host. If the moral duty to have a clean home is not achieved, then others, such, as my informant Anne, describes how dimmed light: […] does not reveal details. Things are allowed to stand a bit in the shadow […] Borders dissolve. It may sound strange. But I think that, if you put fluorescent light in here, I would be able to see all the dust balls on the floor. Those things disappear when you have the cosy-light. (Islands Brygge, February 8 th 2012) 25Light in other words is part of producing an image of a clean home. However, there is a balance between the clean and the sterile. The sterile, both as aesthetic expression and bacteriological reality, does not fit in easily with the orchestration of domestic atmospheres. If the home is too clean, too neat, too new, too planned, too designed, it would resemble a public office or hospital – not a home. In that respect, I would argue that the opposite of hygge or cosiness – at least in a material perspective – is not necessarily ‘the uncanny’, or ‘the un-cosy’, but rather the ‘sterile’. The sterile is a particular kind of sensuous encounter that both deals with regimes of knowledge about bacterial absence, as well as the very sensuous encounter with aesthetical and bacterial absences. The sterile allows for surfaces to step forward as surfaces containing the absent, and this is easily interpreted as a lack of personal touch on interior design and by extension lack of personality. 26If dirt is ‘matter out of place’, as Mary Douglas (1966, p. 44) famously argued, the problem of pollution as a by-product of lighting traditions becomes more ambiguous. What in one regime of knowledge is understood as dirty – such as particle pollution from fireplaces – is in another regime, a product of cosy lighting that links to cultural norms and identity among Danes. Particle pollution, in other words, may both be negatively viewed as dirt and positively viewed as a multi-sensuous co-producer of cosy atmospheres, even by the same individual. The smell of the soot, the slightly heavy air, and the aesthetically un-sterile expression of the warm glow from the subdued light, flickering flames and shadows that orchestrates the intimacy of the cosy atmosphere, shapes a space that does not look sterile, commercialised, or depersonalised, but rather, gives a cosy, intimate, and personal touch to a home or space. Despite my informants’ diverse ways of inhabiting the flats and houses, and amounts of light used, a cosy home is not ‘perfect’. It is not something you buy from a shop, but something that is made, is personal, and just a bit not too clean. Thus, what is dirty in one bacterial register of knowledge is needed in an atmospheric register of experience. The home needs a bit of what would be considered ‘matter out of place’ in a bacteriological sense, to avoid the sterile, and thereby not being cosy. 27It is in this distinction between cultural perceptions of dirt and the sterile that the ecstatic qualities of light that the CFL bulb offers, is hitting a nerve. The ecstasy of the bulbs makes things look ‘lifeless’ and ‘sterile’ to the informants. Their use of the term ‘sterile’ may be somewhat metaphorical – more denoting an aesthetic expression, rather than any measurement of bacteria – but nonetheless, it is a minute difference in light setting that challenges the cosy atmosphere. 28The point of the above exploration into the relationship between atmospheres and new technologies, is that understanding the appreciation of specific material qualities of light, the ecstasies of the bulb’s colour reproduction and temperature, the patina and multi-sensuality of orchestrating lightscapes through the shadows, the flickering flames, and the glow from the subdued lighting, is at the heart of understanding the contestation against adopting a new technology. What would appear to be a moral good – saving tons of CO 2 release into the earth’s atmosphere by simply switching to the energy saving light bulb – is contested by the lacking ability of a technology to expose the visual world in a way that does not leave a ‘sterile’ impression (in whatever way that sterility is socially evaluated and continuously rethought). While the luminous aspects of atmospheres have become politically embedded for the greater good of the earth’s atmosphere, it does, then, not mean that people easily adopt such politics. People’s insistence on the specific materiality of cosy-light makes the cosy atmosphere a political issue. The incandescent light bulb is now phased out, but pressure is starting to be raised also on banning candlelight and wood stoves because of the pollution they emit. Atmospheres both as meteorological and experience are thoroughly embedded in politics. 29One could ironically propose that with the new lighting technology, people now see the light, but perhaps the best light is what people don’t see; what they don’t notice is there, because it fits with atmospheric norms, and doesn’t stand out as light, as such, but simply integral part of the atmosphere. Between the intimate, personal experience of cosy atmosphere, and the distant atmospheric impact of CO 2 emission and particle pollution, environmental ethics comes in second place. In that sense, as Sloterdijk noted, the future is atmospheric.	__label__pos	0.938032
Portland, OR May 15, 2012 - The Bud Clark Commons, the year-old building that combines homes and services for homeless and low-income people in Portland’s Old Town, has won national recognition for its design.The American Institute of Architects and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has given the Bud Clark Commons the “Creating Community Connections” award in their annual design contest. The unique eight-story building provides a continuum of services such as health, shelter, and counseling to help homeless people transition from instability to a more permanent home. It includes a walk-in day center with access to services; a temporary shelter with 90 beds for homeless men; and 130 efficient, studio apartments on the five upper floors designated for very low-income women or men. The national jury of architects, design critics and government housing officials heaped praise on Holst Architects, the Portland-based firm that designed the building for the Portland Housing Bureau. “The architect is really trying to say something here, and it is inspiring. The way the shelter addresses the street and the commons – it creates a place of invitation and dignity in a warm, lively kind of way. It invites a wider idea of constructive citizenry. “This building is more than an institution. Considering the homelessness initiative – most homeless projects seem institutionalized and one dimensional, but this is not stigmatized, it is thoughtful and brings a new way of thinking about how these facilities should be done. It is a gorgeous project. This approach should be imitated.” Dave Otte the lead architect on the project, accepted the award at the AIA’s national convention in Washington D.C. Housing Commissioner Nick Fish congratulated the Holst team. “The promise of Bud Clark Commons is to create pathways to self-sufficiency for people without a place to call home,” Nick Fish. “This is an exceptional honor for an exceptional building. In the Bud Clark Commons, the city and the design team have proven that design and function are not mutually exclusive.” The building was developed by Home Forward, formally the Housing Authority of Portland, and built by Walsh Construction. Total cost of the project was $46.9 million, $29.8 million coming from the city’s urban renewal funds. It’s named for Bud Clark, Portland’s mayor from 1985 to 1992, the first to make ending homelessness a key mission of the city. It’s located at the gateway to downtown Portland, near historic Union Station and bordering the Pearl District, an upper-income mixed-use neighborhood. The building stands out environmentally as well, using natural light, a solar-powered hot water system, energy-efficient lighting, green roofs, low-flow plumbing fixtures, bioswales and grey-water recycling to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save energy. All the building materials were locally sourced and sustainably harvested or produced. The building has a LEED Platinum certification by the United States Green Building Council, with savings from the use of energy-efficient technologies estimated at $60,000 per year.	__label__pos	0.98243
Contents - Previous - Next This is the old United Nations University website. Visit the new site at http://unu.edu Structural costs; thestakes; the struggle for the NIEO The claims by Third World states for a 'New International Economic Order' formed a coherent whole whose logic was perfectly comprehensible. Substantial and sustained rises in raw materials prices, strengthened by a debt reduction and more favourable conditions for the transfer of technology, were the method par excellence of improving the financial prospects of a new stage of Third World industrialization. This industrialization, based on what conventional wisdom regards as 'comparative advantages', was conceived on the dual basis of relatively cheap manpower and natural resources allowing for exports to the developed world in an expanded network of world trade. The opening up of developed countries' markets to the export of the manufactures of the Third World would, according to the conventional wisdom, serve the collective interest by making the international division of labour more responsive to the source of inputs. Furthermore, industrial exports would help bridge the Third World food gap through imports replacing aid. The rise in oil prices at the end of 1973 strengthened thecredibility of this programme by showing that it was possible tosecure alternative prices for raw materials, and that these werecertainly not 'unbearable' for the developed world. It showedthat the financial resources generated in this way could bedevoted to an acceleration of industrialization in thebeneficiary countries. In this sense, October 1973 marks aturning point in the history of international relations, themoment of consciousness of the Third World countries not of theirrights but of their power. It was, therefore, a programme in total accordance with all the sacrosanct principles defended by Western liberal orthodoxy. A programme taking greater heed than ever of the objectives of world economic interdependence and seeking to place this on a footing of comparative advantages. A programme that should have been shaped and proposed by the economics professors in the most conservative institutions rather than by the governments who had constantly been lambasted by those institutions for their bent to 'nationalism', a supposedly obsolete philosophy contrary to the interests of their peoples. It is an irony of history that the initiative came from the 'rationalist' Third World and was unanimously rejected by the apostles of the principles on which it was based! The claim of the NIEO coincided with the most serious post-war crisis. It was even argued that the oil price rise - the first (and as yet sole) indicator of the implementation of the Third World programme for the NIEO - was the 'cause' of the crisis. A veritable campaign was orchestrated on this theme in 1973 and 1974, using every kind of argument and despite all the facts: the beginning of the international monetary crisis and the appearance of US external deficits since the mid-1960s, the precedence of stagflation, the scale and persistence of inflation rates irrespective of the calculable increase attributable to oil, the (still massive) placing of oil revenues on the Western finance markets, the modest role of petro-dollars in comparison with the movable assets of the transnationals in speculative fluctuations, and so on. The campaign has of necessity long hung fire: erosion of the oil price in the 1 980s and the reversal of the conjuncture ('the end of the era of OPEC') have never allowed it any funkier take-off. The fact is, that the crisis has its main origin in the international division of labour in force, that challenged by the claims of the NIEO. We should remember that the former international division of labour confined the developing countries to the export of (agricultural and mineral) primary products, as their (import substitution) industrialization was strictly limited to their domestic market. This international division of labour was one of the bases on which the continuing prosperity of the previous quarter of a century was built. A prosperity confined, if truth be told, to the developed centres of the system. If the centres at the time in question enjoyed a high level of employment, continual growth in productivity and comparable growth in wages, for the underdeveloped peripheries and their growth rates the same mechanisms that give rise elsewhere to full employment and growth in real wages produced a continual rise in unemployment and underemployment, stagnation, or a fall in real wages and the rewards for rural producers; there the crisis was permanent. Only from the 1970s did the crisis begin to spread throughout the world system, that is, to pass to the developed centres as well. If this is the case the best way to overcome the crisis would be to change the ground rules of the international division of labour and accept the claims of the Third World. It must be obvious that export industrialization in the Third World would provide work for a substantial number of the Third World's unemployed, create new outlets for the machine tools of the developed world and correct the imbalances in the profitability of various industrial sectors, since the falling rate of profit shown by the crisis arises from the inappropriateness of the current international division of activity. Such measures to revise the international division of labour serve only to highlight the economic logic of the system. Here lies its logical strength and current weakness. Since: a) the world system cannot be reduced to a simple 'pure' economic logic, namely maximization of profit on a world scale, without regard to the division of the world into nations, the locus of operation of essential and immediate political forces; and b) the crisis cannot be surmounted except by implementation in a co-ordinated and systematic manner of the new international division of labour, nor is this the 'beet' solution in the light of national factors, nor is this solution the most 'probable'. Peaceful, co-ordinated and systematic implementation of a new international division of labour might be the dream of a technocrat with a single purpose: the maximization of profit. Oddly enough the Third World states have behaved like this collective technocrat, while the Western authorities, apostles par excellence of the philosophy of profitability, have recoiled from the logical consequences of their own philosophy and rejected the industrial relocation that was on offer. Accordingly, the internal logic of the programme for the NIEO reflected the contradictory character of capital accumulation on a world scale. To some extent the programme was initially a scheme to deepen the international division of labour through a levy on the rate of surplus value (super-exploitation of labour power at the periphery) it would have permitted a rising rate of profit on the world scale (and at this level looked like a programme of capitalist development), but in another way, within the framework of this common aim of capitalist development, the strategies of the monopolies and the imperialist states and those of the bourgeoisies and the peripheral states would have come into contradiction. The imperialist monopolies took a narrow view of the 'neworder'. To them it meant taking greater profit from the cheapmanpower and natural resources of the Third World, by relocatingsegments of the production processes they themselves controlled.Under this strategy relocation was not aimed at creatingintegrated national industrial economies in the Third World,however outward-looking. On the contrary, the interest of themonopolies was in exporting discrete segments in such a way as toretain control over economic life as a whole on the world scale.In this framework the monopolies could make small concessions tothe 'host countries', or even in extreme cases renounce formalownership of the capital. Competition, the absence of integrationof the segments, their technological dependence, such as theobligation to sell their output on the oil-rich marketscontrolled by the monopolies, all reduced the meaning of formalownership of the capital; the monopolies could impose very harshconditions on their partners. It was laissez-faire on thescale of a world under monopoly domination. In suchcircumstances, even the financing of the relocation through theThird World countries' own means could bring an additionalbenefit to the monopolies as vendors of turnkey factories. Thisprofitable exaction was in effect included in the pricingstructure. Meanwhile the exaction could be enlarged throughvisible financial transfers by way of technology sales, licensesand trade marks, and through interest on loans for plantexpansion. Sometimes even the pricing structure was distorted toremove the apparent profitability from the segments transferred:loans supposed to make good 'management deficits' are nothingless than resurrected forms of capitalism's perennial tendency toplunder. Financial neo-capital, in imitation of the oldmercantilist capital, appeared anew, as at the dawn ofcapitalism: 'primitive' accumulation is always with us. This strategy has its own name - and not by chance - of 'redeployment'. It has the active support of the World Bank, the IMF and other institutions of the developed capitalist states, and wins acceptance as a 'new order' for the new enclaves of the 'free zone' kind. Obviously the strategy reduces to a minimum the local state's role, which becomes a mere administration policing the exploited labour force. It also aims to divide the Third World not only by widening the gap between countries of 'strong growth' and 'stagnant' countries, but also in setting the former to compete against one another. What the Third World, or at least the driving element among the nonaligned, meant by a new international order was very different. Revision of the international division of labour along the lines described was intended to accompany and implement the establishment of a self-reliant industrial national economy. The strengthening of the national state, and the active role of state policy were, in this strategy, to ensure that industry was not made up of discrete fragments, but of every stage of the production process. The resort to importation of the ingredients of these production lines (the purchase of turnkey factories) entailed a high level of exports, whether of 'traditional' raw materials or new industrial products. Hence the success of the strategies was largely dependent on the capacity to win concessions, which was in turn the programme for the new international economic order. The conflict of these two 'interpretations' of the new order has appeared in all the negotiations on the industrial international division of labour and relocation. The points of discussion were the character and options of establishment, the degree of decentralized decision-making, the methods of financing the transfers, issues of personnel training and management, and access to external markets. The Third World states generally pressed for: the establishment of as complete industries as possible, with upstream and downstream links, agreed rules subjecting the management of industrial units to the state's industrial policy, an option for management of units by local staff, access to international distribution networks for manufactured goods to localized firms (as the lowering of protectionist barriers by the developed countries was not regarded as a sufficient guarantee of access to these markets), support for national technological research, regulated financing (to avoid, for example, a subsidiary of a multinational financing its investment by calling on local banking sources without bringing in new capital), regulation of transfers (a sharing of risks, ceilings on exportable profits, obligations to invest part of the profit in the national economy) and so on. These demands were regarded as unacceptable by the multinationals whose sole interest was in partial relocation through subsidiaries under their virtual control. Gradually, most of the Third World states have had to come to terms with the redeployment strategy. The only states in a position to negotiate are those that refuse the direct establishment of subsidiaries and seek an alternative in the purchase of turnkey factories within the framework of their overall industrialization policy. The strategy of these states counted on the possibility of successful change of the international order through unilateral joint action, and through further action from North-South collective negotiations. The idea, it should be remembered, was to organize cartels of Third World producers who could insist on price revisions for raw materials. National control over natural resources should allow scope for manoeuvre not only on supply, but also and above all on exploitation of the resources that took into account long-term national interests and halted the rates of exploitation governed entirely by the needs of the developed world. With this new-found strength, the Third World countries hoped to enjoy a genuine negotiating power that would oblige the North to make concessions: for instance, access to its markets, a code of conduct for transfers of technology. Co-operation between Third World countries ('collective self-reliance') was part of this bid for strength (cf. Chapter 7). This is the essential context for discussing the use of oil surpluses. On some views the NIEO was to be no more than the rise in oil prices alone and the relocation of export industry a minor operation. On this view the oil revenue surpluses should be made available to the developed financial markets to supply their own policies of intervention in relations between developed countries, and marginal support for the 'survival' of the old international division of labour in the developing countries. This rescued the attitude of 'aid' as a permanent safety-valve ensuring the perpetuation of a system that was increasingly unjust day by day. The actual use of oil surpluses has in fact served this purpose (cf. Chapter 6). In the mid-1970s there was still the hope that the Third World would reject this narrow view. The non-aligned movement and the group of 77 were seeking a strategy for collective battle for across the board increases in raw materials prices, as the resolution on the solidarity fund and producers associations taken at Dakar in February 1977 showed. This strong and valid approach was not sustained. Under the pressure of the developed countries and the bias of UNCTAD and endless 'negotiation' and 'dialogue', the 'stabilization' fund strategy replaced that of producers associations for collective unilateral intervention where such was required. So, in the end, the battle for the NIEO was lost. As well as the failure being noted, the causes have to be studied. Are they purely circumstantial (in the economic crisis)? Can they be attributed to 'tactical errors' by the Third World (its own divisions and weaknesses)? Or do these circumstances and weaknesses show the impossibility of autocentric development at the periphery of the modern capitalist system? We shall return to these fundamental issues (cf. Chapter 8). This failure being so, what has actually happened? Relocation advances at tortoise-like pace, heightening differentiation with the Third World, feeding the illusion of possible compromise between the bourgeois national plan and integration in the world system for some, and marginalization for others. The seeming successes of Korea, Brazil and India have forced the collective plan of the NIEO into the background. We shall return to these successes (cf. Chapters 6 and 7) to assess their character and extent. Contents - Previous - Next	__label__pos	0.97923
Life is good in Aberdeen - but it could be even better. That was one of the messages in Mayor Mike Levsen's State of the City address last week, and it was an accurate one. We've come a long way, but the journey isn't over yet. The mayor and the city council have done a tremendous job working with economic development officials, the Chamber of Commerce, businesses and industries in terms of revitalizing our local economy. The city has made many exciting accomplishments during the past several years - and has just as many positive developments on its horizon. New businesses are opening, work is starting on new police and fire facilities, roads are being improved and housing projects are being initiated. But wait, there's more. It makes sense to believe that growth begets growth. The current new growth will likely attract even more new business, spur even more new housing and, with hope, increase sales tax revenues and - ultimately - bring even more new businesses to the area, continuing the cycle. These groups - and others - have been working hard to make advances that would improve economic growth and development for the city and the region. As we begin to see the fruits of these labors, one natural inclination might be to sit back, relax and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Levsen warned against that, and he was right to do so. There's a lot of work yet to be done and, as Isaac Newton's first law of motion very firmly states: An object at rest tends to stay at rest. We don't want - or need - to be an object at rest. Excitement, enthusiasm and optimism should be infectious in our community and our region right now. This is the time to be fired up by our current success. We need to use that energy to work toward a future filled with new growth. Let's get going.	__label__pos	0.998994
California Gov. Jerry Brown's revenue-raising Proposition 30 was… (Wally Skalij, Los Angeles…) SACRAMENTO — The election wasn't even over Tuesday when state Treasurer Bill Lockyer's phone started ringing. Activists of all stripes had the same message for him: With voters apparently poised to approve billions of dollars in tax hikes, it was time to spend more money. "They had to be reminded the money has already been spent," Lockyer said. As California tries to shake its national reputation as a financial bungler, policymakers in Sacramento will be managing an estimated $6 billion in annual revenue from Gov. Jerry Brown's newly approved tax plan, Proposition 30. The money is already included in the budget the governor signed last summer. The bloodletting that has become a ritual part of assembling the state budget is expected to fade. But some of the issues that have made California's financial problems so persistent remain and could still create a budget gap if things don't go as planned. In essence, analysts say, voters have stabilized the patient, but surgery may still be required. Brown has long acknowledged that fixing the state's fiscal problems will require more work. He told reporters last week that "there are no cure-alls" and pledged to hold the line against new spending. As the former seminary student often does, he used a biblical allusion to make his point. "We need the prudence of Joseph," he said. The governor's plan will increase the state sales tax by a quarter-cent for four years and raise levies on high earners by one to three percentage points for seven years. Passage of Proposition 30 prevents billions of dollars in education cuts and gives the state an opportunity to end the fiscal year without a deficit for the first time in five years. But California still has the lowest credit rating of any state. Its tax system is unstable. Borrowing costs remain high, and there are signs that the Brown administration's current $91.3-billion budget may be fraying at the seams as savings fail to meet expectations. "By no means is California out of the woods yet," said Kil Huh, a director at the Pew Center on the States in Washington. "They've built up a set of challenges that are daunting for any state." For starters, swings in the stock market can have an outsize effect on California's budget because the state relies so heavily on income taxes paid by the wealthy. In 2010, the richest 1% of Californians earned 21.3% of the income in the state and paid 40.9% of the state income taxes, according to the most recent government data available. Gabriel Petek, an analyst at Standard & Poor's, noted that California has, over time, decreased more reliable sources of revenue, such as fees on motor vehicle registrations, while increasing less dependable ones, such as income taxes. Revamping the tax base is politically treacherous. Voters approved strict limits on property taxes in 1978 with Proposition 13, which has since been considered the third rail in California politics. "If I was dictator of the state, I would look at it," said Kim Rueben at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington. "I'm not sure it will ever be looked at." The responsibility for handling state finances now is expected to fall completely to Democrats, who are poised to gain a supermajority in each house of the Legislature. Republicans would no longer be able to block tax increases, which require a two-thirds vote. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said in an interview Friday that changes in the tax system can bring "political peril" and are not high on his agenda. California could also face budget gaps when Proposition 30's tax hikes expire. Administration officials are banking on improvements in the economy to make up for the loss of extra tax revenue then. Some Republicans fear Democrats will increase spending so much that they'll try to make the tax hikes permanent. "They won't be able to help themselves from continuing to expand the growth of government," said Sen. Ted Gaines (R-Roseville). And $34.1 billion in debt has accumulated over the last decade as the state has deferred payments to schools, local governments, pension plans and other areas. Ana Matosantos, the governor's finance director, said the administration has a plan in place to pay down most of that "wall of debt" by 2016. California also has $80 billion in general obligation bonds outstanding, requiring the state to spend nearly 9% of its general fund annually to cover the cost of that borrowing. "It means you're spending several billion dollars for debt service that isn't available for schools or healthcare," Lockyer said. Administration officials counted on saving $3.1 billion in the current fiscal year with the dissolution of redevelopment agencies, but so far those savings have fallen far behind expectations. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office said the state could end up almost $1 billion short. Finally, tax revenue has failed to match projections. The administration's most recent report showed it falling 2.1% below expectations in the current fiscal year, a $379-million drop. Marilyn Cohen, founder of Envision Capital Management in Beverly Hills, worries that Sacramento will face the same problems year after year. "I have no confidence," she said, "that this state knows how to create a budget and hit their budgetary goals." chris.megerian@latimes.com For the latest California election results, go to latimes.com/electionresults and latimes.com/socalresults.	__label__pos	0.602838
Students at Kipp Academy of Opportunity in Hyde Park, part of a charter group… (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles…) The Arkansas-based Walton Family Foundation announced Wednesday that it is donating $20 million to a nonprofit that recruits talented college graduates to teach in public schools for two years. The largest number of instructors, more than 700, is slated for Los Angeles. The gift is a continuation of support that has totaled more than $100 million to New York City-based Teach for America over its 24 years. Walton’s cumulative contribution to TFA in Los Angeles is more than $10 million, according to the foundation. “With this critical investment, Teach for America will be able to bring effective teachers into some of the most under-resourced classrooms in the country while simultaneously working to develop more of our talented corps members as long-term champions of educational equity and excellence,” said Matt Kramer, co-chief executive officer of Teach for America, in a statement. Support from the Walton foundation has attracted notice because it’s associated with funding and advocacy for “school choice” efforts around the country. These include independently operated, public charter schools. The foundation also supports government-funded vouchers to subsidize the tuition of low-income students at private schools. The foundation is funded by members of the family that founded the Walmart Corp., which has opposed unionization in its operations. Most charters are nonunion. For its part, TFA has always cast itself as politically neutral and notes that its teachers join unions when they work in school districts with collective bargaining agreements. The group lobbies both the federal and state governments to allow its teachers to enter schools as rated “highly qualified” under the law. That designation is important because schools with lower numbers of highly qualified instructors face possible sanctions. The Walton foundation said the essence of its support for TFA has to do with the group’s twin core missions: to provide effective teachers where they are needed for low-income students and to develop alumni who become leaders who care about education, whether they remain in school systems or enter other fields. “Teach for America is doing a great job of recruiting highly talented individuals into education,” said Ed Kirby, deputy director of K-12 education reform for the foundation. “It is a fabulous talent pipeline.” In the L.A. area, 42 TFA alums have risen to the position of principal or higher working for a school district; 60 have done so in local charter schools. In L.A. this year, 94% of the incoming corps found jobs in charter schools, which have been expanding in number. It’s “a special value that TFA has embraced placement in charter schools,” Kirby said. Many alums, he noted, become charter school leaders: “It’s amazing when you get out into the charter school market to see the degree to which TFA alums populate the leadership throughout.” Walton is TFA’s largest donor, but the group has a diverse funding base. The Walton donation will cover about 20% of TFA’s expenses this year in the L.A. region. Other local major donors include the Wasserman Foundation, Ahmanson Foundation and State Farm Companies Foundation. Altogether, Walton’s donation will help recruit and train nearly 4,000 first- and second-year teachers in nine regions, including Denver; Milwaukee; Newark, N.J.; New Orleans and Washington. Three cities — Detroit; Indianapolis; and Memphis, Tenn. — are receiving direct support from Walton for the first time. ALSO: Social workers involved in horrific child torture case fired Did a meteor hit Orange County? Residents report huge explosion San Diego to sue Mayor Filner for costs of sexual harassment suit Twitter: @howardblume \| howard.blume@latimes.com	__label__pos	0.907034
Question: My girlfriend started training a few months back and now wants to change gears and not gain any more muscle but retain muscle mass. What is the right approach? Is not progressing on her lifts anymore going to do the trick? Answer: While very few men don’t want to gain more muscle (if a man says they don’t want more muscle they’re either an athlete trying to avoid going up a weight class, or they’re lying) and even fewer women will gain enough muscle for this to be a problem (unless they’re using anabolic steroids or other growth drugs). However, there are some women who are naturally very responsive to strength training and do gain muscle quickly and may want to simply maintain their physique without continuing to gain beyond some point. You’ve already guessed the answer; the way to stop gaining and maintain what you have is to simply reduce and remove the key factors from your workouts that are required for stimulating muscular strength and size increases; intensity and progression. If you stop progressing the resistance on exercises for muscle groups she doesn’t want to keep growing and have her perform those exercises only for a fixed number of repetitions whether or not she has achieved momentary muscular failure and maximum intensity of effort, those muscles will stop getting bigger and stronger. Assuming you make no other changes in her workout, if you keep her resistance and repetitions the same on those exercises they will eventually cease to be challenging enough for her to stimulate further improvements in strength and size. The lack of these factors is a big part of the problem with many people’s training and the reason they are not making gains in strength and size. The vast majority of people do not train anywhere near as intensely as they are capable of, and many do not keep a workout chart or journal to track and evaluate their performance and systematically progress the resistance they use. Without these their progress will be hit and miss, and far from optimal, if they make any noticeable progress at all. So, to look at this another way, if you want to stop making muscular strength and size gains another solution would be to do what almost everybody else in the gym is doing, and if you want to get the best results possible do the opposite of them, train with a high intensity of effort and with progressive resistance.	__label__pos	0.910473
Even though my son wears a pull-up at night, it often will leak and get his mattress and sheets wet. What are the best products for protecting his bed? You’re smart to buy some coverings to protect your mattress. The... Read more » Do insurance companies cover bedwetting alarms? In most cases, insurance companies do not cover bedwetting alarms. Because no prescription is necessary, insurance companies do not feel the obligation to provide this medical equipment routinely. The majority of families purchase a... Read more » I read that I could set an alarm clock to go off once or twice during the night to help my 13 year old son stay dry. I am so frustrated because we have been doing this for 6 weeks... Read more »	__label__pos	0.990101
Swine Flu and Your Kids How much should you worry? -Susan Crandell In the middle of August I came down with the flu. One day I had a sore throat, the next day a super-stuffy nose and a 102 degree fever. I was stay-at-home sick for only a couple of days, but coughed and blew my nose for weeks. I have no idea who I caught the virus from, and as far as I know I didn’t pass it on to anybody else. The way I figure it, if I was lucky, it was H1N1, and at the cost of a few sunny summer days just maybe I have achieved some immunity for the fall. This new strain of H1N1 is unusual in persisting at a simmer over the summer. Now everyone’s bracing for the big fall onslaught. Not only do influenza infections rise as the mercury falls, but kids head back to school, where there’s lots of hugging and high-fiving. So what does a concerned mom need to know about the risks? As the first school bells ring, the good news is that the flu has not mutated into a more lethal strain as scientists feared it might; and the number of children who have died because of it – fewer than 40 – is not any more than would ordinarily die of the flu each year. (Easy to state as a statistic, but imagine those grieving parents.) The majority of these deaths occurred to children who are 5 or older. Two-thirds are kids who have pre-existing medical issues, particularly neurological conditions.	__label__pos	0.933674
We’re in the age where marketing is recognized as the foundation for business growth. Therefore, marketers have to devote time to determining exactly how each marketing dollar will be spent so they can optimize the ROI. However, this can be hard if you’re just launching new campaigns for the first time and don’t have valuable historical data to rely on, especially if you’re venturing into a new channel. The way forward starts with outlining a detailed budget based on what you know about your company and your overarching goals. From the insights you gain from each investment, you can then adjust your understanding of your budget based on individual ROI metrics from campaigns. You might use a variety of metrics to determine your ROI (e.g. first-touch, last-touch, or multi touch attribution), but whichever you choose, seeing that end result can inform your budget decisions so you can allocate budget to the most effective channels. Before you have valuable, historical metrics to inform your campaign optimization and budget allocation, here’s a sample marketing budget breakdown that you can use as a guide: Campaign Planning and Content Creation: 40-50% To understand what returns you should be seeing on your marketing investments, you need to start with focused campaigns based on your goals. Ideally, your goals should map to each stage of the customer lifecycle. For instance, if your broad goal is awareness or branding, you might want to invest in a campaign that differentiates your brand from your competitors and offers value to your prospects so they come to associate your brand with value. If your goal is more focused on customer retention and growth, then your campaigns should be focused on how to keep your customers happy and make them more successful with complementary products or services. Whatever your campaign objectives are, it’s likely that content will serve as the meat of them. Yet according to Content Marketing Institute, only 32% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy, even though 88% are using content as a part of their core marketing mix. Digital content such as blog, social media posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, and the like all play a role in evolving a brand story that solidifies your standing in the market and makes your prospects want to interact with your company, the first step in the customer journey toward converting them into satisfied customers. In addition to creating a scalable content creation process, you may need to seek out the services of vendors or consultants to help you refine your plans. You’ll also need dedicated writers to produce your content, and if your collateral needs exceed your marketing team’s capacity, you may need to hire a freelancer. Paid Advertising: 20-30% While much of digital marketing content depends on organic reach—that is, reaching users of specific online outlets without paying for the privilege—paid advertising gives enterprises a leg up in the market. It’s especially important for brands that want to establish a market presence or enter an entirely new segment of the market. For example, your company may have developed a new product targeting a drastically different buyer persona than you normally do. Paid marketing, be it in the form of online cost-per-click ads, social media ads, print ads, or even TV or radio commercials, can help you get attention right away, whereas unpaid, “organic” marketing may take longer to reach your intended audience. With paid advertising, you directly pay the channel that you’re advertising on for access to their audience. And if you do your research, you’ll know exactly which ones to invest in to reach your target audience. These outlets typically provide the statistics you need to first calculate the ROI of placing an ad with them. An ad that costs money to place and then has another per click cost is only worth the investment if you are guaranteed to reach prospects with a high rate of likely conversion. While sometimes an afterthought in the age of “free” marketing, paid advertising provides some of the most direct and immediate measures of ROI available. That is, you can count dollar-for-dollar exactly which advertisement brought in a certain number of conversions or a certain amount of revenue. Digital advertising is especially worthwhile, given the ease of publishing ads and the fact that the biggest channels (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Target) offer excellent targeting options. Workforce Marketing: 10% Your workforce is an extremely powerful part of your marketing arm. Workforce marketing consists of aligning every member of your team behind company goals through increased education and advocacy-strengthening efforts. It might include internal meetings, events, and marketing collateral that “sells” employees on company culture and goals. These things don’t come free, but they’re well worth the investment as you build up employee knowledge, motivation, and morale. Beyond the this, the internal goodwill can be a major force in attracting both new leads and new hires. Consider implementing an employee advocacy program, where you can invest in morale-building, educational seminars or create a free competition among departments. Allowing your employees to market for you enables you to reach new audiences and entices prospects on a personal level. As an internal investment, the ROI can be measured by tracking the number of leads brought in through your employee advocacy program. With a robust marketing automation platform, you can set social referral campaigns across major social media platforms that tracks referrals and their corresponding responses. This is also a great program to run for customer advocates as well, but if you’re just launching it, you may want to test the waters on your internal workforce first. Software and Tools: 10% Software and tools streamline and automate essential tasks, saving you precious time, money, and human resources, and letting you analyze and refine your marketing activities in much more intuitive ways. With the right solutions in place, you can assess the performance of every campaign and asset that you push out. You can also track key performance metrics to determine the success of each of your efforts for both current and past campaigns, which provides you with clear ROI projections. For each of your campaigns, you should have your measurement strategies planned in advance since you need to set up the proper tracking–so consider what metrics you’ll want to track and ensure you have the right tools to do so. Some valuable tools for your marketing team might include: A marketing automation platform, or engagement marketing platform,helps you streamline, automate, and measure your marketing tasks and workflows to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. With it, you can increase demand, engage your buyers throughout the entire customer lifecycle, and measure the effectiveness of each campaign and channel. A content management system (CMS)provides an efficient means of letting the right individuals in your organization publish and organize content across your web presence. A customer relationship management (CRM) toolprovides complete oversight and detailed recording of buyer interactions and touchpoints, letting you track a customer’s progress through your sales funnel and enabling close analysis of what works in each relationship. By syncing your marketing automation platform with your CRM, you can improve sales and marketing alignment so that both teams are always up to date on each prospect’s interactions with your company. A social media management platformlets you manage your social campaigns by setting an editorial calendar, allowing you to monitor real-time social media conversations about your brand, products, and industry, identify immediate engagement possibilities, and analyze the impact of participation across each social platform. Most importantly, these tools provide you the analytics and insight you need to determine and prove ROI. Although you can calculate some metrics manually, the bigger your marketing efforts grow, the more you will need the technology to handle all the data points flowing in from various places about your customers. The investment in this technology is the upfront portion of working out how ROI fits into your budget. Events: 5-10% A corporate presence at large industry events or your own company’s events can quickly deepen your market presence, showing prospects that you’re a real-world company with a unique identity. Events, be it tradeshows, conventions, conferences, or roadshows, can be prime opportunities to show prospects and customers, in a personal setting, why you and your solutions matter. Costs can include registration fees, travel expenses, and collateral. Hosting your own event includes some of the above, plus venue rentals, catering, promotions, and other miscellaneous operating fees. It’s fairly simple to track how many fruitful conversations result from in-person contact. The impact of an event is measurable in a number of ways. For example, when prospects register for your event, visit your booth, or attend your session, a tangible lead is created. In the thick of assessing marketing needs and trying to implement new campaigns, you often can’t see the forest for the trees. But with a well-planned budget that breaks down each activity with clear expectations of the investment you’re putting in and the value you’re getting out, you’ll be able to relax and focus on each marketing task, knowing that you’re building a strong foundation for your company’s continued growth. How do you approach budget allocation in new areas or campaigns? I’d love to hear more in the comments below.	__label__pos	0.577032
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields are supposed to be the new darlings of the academy, so I was slightly surprised when I heard an NPR piece on how researchers are struggling for funding. After all, even the politicians devoted to cutting education funding have spoken glowingly of STEM. My own university recently split the venerable College of Arts & Sciences, presumably to allow more money to flow to STEM without risking that professors in the soft sciences and the humanities might inadvertently get some of the cash. As such I was somewhat curious about this problem, but mostly attributed it to a side-effect of the general trend of defunding public education. Then I read “Bad Science” by Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones. This article was originally published in issue 14, 2014 of Jacobin Magazine. I will focus on the ethical aspects of the matters Hinkes-Jones discussed in this article, which is centered on the Bayh-Dole Act. The Bayh-Dole Act was passed in 1980 and was presented as having very laudable goals. Before the act was passed, universities were limited in regards to what they could do with the fruits of their scientific research. After the act was passes, schools could sell their patents or engage in exclusive licensing deals with private companies (that is, monopolies on the patents). Supporters asserted this act would be beneficial in three main ways. The first is that it would secure more private funding for universities because corporations would provide money in return for the patents or exclusive licenses. The second is that it would bring the power of the profit motive to public research: since researchers and schools could profit, they would be more motivated to engage in research. The third is that the private sector would be motivated to implement the research in the form of profitable products. On the face of it, the act was a great success. Researchers at Columbia University patented the process of DNA cotransfrormation and added millions to the coffers of the school. A patent on recombinant DNA earned Stanford over $200 million. Companies, in turn, profited greatly. For example, researchers at the University of Utah created Myriad Genetics and took ownership of their patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tests for breast cancer. The current cost of the test is $4,000 (in comparison a full sequencing of human DNA costs $1,000) and the company has a monopoly on the test. Given these apparent benefits, it is easy enough to advance a utilitarian argument in favor of the act and its consequences. After all, if allows universities to fund their research and corporations to make profits, then its benefits would seem to be considerable, thus making it morally good. However, a proper calculation requires considering the harmful consequences of the act. The first harm is that the current situation imposes a triple cost on the public. One cost is that the taxpayers fund the schools that conduct the research. The next is that thanks to the monopolies on patents the taxpayers have to pay whatever prices the companies wish to charge, such as the $4,000 for a test that should cost far less. In an actual free market there would be competition and lower prices—but what we have is a state controlled and regulated market. Ironically, those who are often crying the loudest against government regulation and for the value of competition are quite silent on this point. The final cost of the three is that the corporations can typically write off their contributions on their taxes, thus leaving other taxpayers to pick up their slack. These costs seem to be clear harms and do much to offset the benefits—at least when looked at from the perspective of the whole society and not just focusing on those reaping the benefits. The second harm is that, ironically, this system makes research more expensive. Since processes, strains of bacteria and many other things needed for research are protected by monopolistic patents the researchers who do not hold these patents have to pay to use them. The costs are usually quite high, so while the patent holders benefit, research in general suffers. In order to pay for these things, researchers need more funding, thus either imposing more cost on taxpayers or forcing them to turn to private funding (which will typically result in more monopolistic patents). The third harm is the corruption of researchers. Researchers are literally paid to put their names on positive journal articles that advance the interests of corporations. They are also paid to promote drugs and other products while presenting themselves as researchers rather than paid promoters. If the researchers are not simply bought, the money is clearly a biasing factor. Since we are depending on these researchers to inform the public and policy makers about these products, this is clearly a problem and presents a clear danger to the public good. A fourth harm is that even the honest researchers who have not been bought are under great pressure to produce “sexy science” that will attract grants and funding. While it has always been “publish or perish” in modern academics, the competition is even fiercer in the sciences now. As such, researchers are under great pressure to crank out publications. The effect has been rather negative as evidenced by the fact that the percentage of scientific articles retracted for fraud is ten times what it was in 1975. Once lauded studies and theories, such as those driving the pushing of antioxidants and omega-3, have been shown to be riddled with inaccuracies. Far from driving advances in science, the act has served as an engine of corruption, fraud and bad science. This would be bad enough, but there is also the impact on a misled and misinformed public. I must admit that I fell for the antioxidant and omega-3 “research”—I modified my diet to include more antioxidants and omega-3. While this bad science does get debunked, the debunking takes a long time and most people never hear about it. For example, how many people know that the antioxidant and omega-3 “research” is flawed and how many still pop omega-3 “fish oil pills” and drink “antioxidant teas”? A fifth harm is that universities have rushed to cash in on the research, driven by the success of the research schools that have managed to score with profitable patents. However, setting up research labs aimed at creating million dollar patents is incredibly expensive. In most cases the investment will not yield the hoped for returns, thus leaving many schools with considerable expenses and little revenue. To help lower costs, schools have turned to employing adjuncts to do the teaching and research, thus creating a situation in which highly educated but very low-paid professionals are toiling away to secure millions for the star researchers, the administrators and their corporate benefactors. It is, in effect, sweat-shop science. This also shows another dark side to the push for STEM: as the number of STEM graduates increase, the value of the degrees will decrease and wages for the workers will continue to fall. This is great for the elite, but terrible for those hoping that a STEM degree will mean a good job and a bright future. These harms would seem to outweigh the alleged benefits of the act, thus indicating it is morally wrong. Naturally, it can be countered that the costs are worth it. After all, one might argue, the incredible advances in science since 1980 have been driven by the profit motive and this has been beneficial overall. Without the profit motive, the research might have been conducted, but most of the discoveries would have been left on the shelves. The easy and obvious response is to point to all the advances that occurred due to public university research prior to 1980 as well as the research that began before then and came to fruition. While solving this problem is a complex matter, there seem to be some easy and obvious steps. The first would be to restore public funding of state schools. In the past, the publicly funded universities drove America’s worldwide dominance in research and helped fuel massive economic growth while also contributing to the public good. The second would be replacing the Bayh-Dole Act with an act that would allow universities to benefit from the research, but prevent the licensing monopolies that have proven so damaging. Naturally, this would not eliminate patents but would restore competition to what is supposed to be a competitive free market by eliminating the creation of monopolies from public university research. The folks who complain about the state regulating business and who praise the competitive free market will surely get behind this proposal. It might also be objected that the inability to profit massively from research will be a disincentive. The easy and obvious reply is that people conduct research and teach with great passion for very little financial compensation. The folks that run universities and corporations know this—after all, they pay such people very little yet still often get exceptional work. True, there are some people who are solely motivated by profit—but those are typically the folks who are making the massive profit rather than doing the actual research and work that makes it all possible.	__label__pos	0.967362
Last week I had my last corporations class, my last administrative law class, and the last day of my externship. At the end of each of my classes – like in years past – the professor took a moment to impart a little advice. Some of the advice was specific to law school exams but much of it was general career advice: things they wish they had known, things that we should keep in mind as we strive to find the job/specialty that is right for us, and some comments about the legal job market. Though some of the advice is frustrating (“law school exams don’t reflect what you need to know to be a good lawyer” – thanks a lot), I appreciate these brief insights from professors. I’m sure they say similar things to their classes every year, but I believe it is genuine each time. They truly do want us to succeed and are happy to send us to the next phase of our education/career with a few gems of advice. During the last day of my externship, my supervisors took me out to lunch. As the lunch ended, more welcome advice: how to best position yourself at a law firm, a comparison of different types of jobs they have held within the legal field, and wise words about the reality of being a female litigator (and about being a mom and a litigator). I pay close attention when these words are spoken, and truly appreciate them. But then it’s off to the next thing – taking the T back to campus, or settling down in the library to finish my outline, and the advice is only as good as my memory. Will I remember my supervisor’s recommendations about which government agencies are the best to work for if, someday in the future, I want to apply to work at a government agency? So, from now on, I’m going to take a moment to write down any pieces of advice that really resonate with me. And if I could go back in time, I’d start this project at the beginning of law school. Whether it’s school-specific or about your broader legal career, there will be many people – professors, supervisors, mentors, older students – who offer excellent tidbits of information. You will recognize it and try to commit it to memory in the moment, but if you have the foresight to jot it down you’ll soon build up a resource to turn to when you’re gearing up for the next semester or next career move.	__label__pos	0.995262
The very same data that foretold the end of the freefall back in April when it first turned positive, and economic expansion thereafter, looks like it will continue its ascent albeit more gradually in October. Here's my best estimate of how the 10 leading economic indicators appear to have performed in the last month: The yield curve is still positive +0.25 Jobless claims were strongly better +0.1 Aggregate hours in manufacturing were up 1/10 of an hour +0.07 Stocks' 3 month gain is worth +0.05 Durable goods' strong growth add +0.05 Consumer nondurables up significantly +0.05 New home sales were flat 0.0 ISM deliveries down slightly, subtracting -0.05 Consumer sentiment was down -0.1 Real M2* has been trending slightly negative, so -0.1 Bottom line: it looks like October Leading Economic Indicators (and revisions to September) will net about +0.3, the seventh positive reading in a row. This suggests that economic growth will continue through this quarter and the first quarter of 2010 as well. Typically, even in the last two "jobless recoveries", jobs began to be added to the economy when the YoY LEI was up +5% or better. This month will replace the awful -1% of October 2008, meaning that for the last 7 months, the LEI will probably be up 5.9%. YoY they will be up about 4.2%. If the LEI simply print flat for November and December, the YoY growth will be +5.0 %, consistent with jobs being added in December or January.	__label__pos	0.953623
Happy Christmas from all of us* at BRSM! Thanks for reading and all your comments and help over the past year! it's actually just me. I think most would agree that synthetic chemists can now make just about any non-protein/non-polysaccharide natural product if enough time, resources and manpower are brought to bear.[1] But that's not to say that the field is yet mature, or stagnating, as there still remain so many challenges to make our science more efficient, practical, and free from its current over-dependence on rare metals and petrochemical feedstocks. Recently, synthetic biology has started to emerge as a serious alternative to total synthesis when large amounts of complex natural products are required. Just think how many total synthesis papers start with a desultory line about 'the dearth of natural material', before recounting an arduous one- or two-yearlong quest to make a few more milligrams of the compound in question. Perhaps it sometimes makes more sense to try a different approach and ask 'can't we just improve the natural source?'. We synthetic chemists like to think we're special because we have the ability to make new compounds never seen in Nature, but with an increasing understanding of enzymes and the genes that encode for them, organisms can now be coaxed into producing compounds that have never been seen before. If you're interested in reading further debate over the future of the two fields then you should definitely read this short piece in Nature, in which champions of synthetic chemistry Phil Baran and Abraham Mendoza duke it out with Jay D. Keasling, a strong proponent of synthetic biology. From Nature, 492, 188. Etc. 1. Of course, there still exists the question of 'should we?'. Aside from the importance of total synthesis in structural determination, and ignoring for the moment the oft quoted reason of solving supply problems, the other main justification offered by the practitioners of the art is the development of new methodology. I'd love to find a way to test this claim, but my feeling is that few generally useful reactions are discovered in long synthetic campaigns. Let me know in the comments if I'm wrong about this. As a synthetic chemist I'm always on the hunt for interesting molecules to disconnect/speculate about, and a couple of natural products published at the start of this month (Organic Letters ASAP; DOI: 10.1021/ol3028303) immediately caught my eye: So far so good! Don't start looking for mistakes yet! The problems start when the authors go on to suggest what I'm going to politely call a most intriguing biosynthetic proposal: It's not too bad at the start, borrowing heavily from Baldwin and Whitehead's hypothesis for manzamine and related alkaloids. The problems come one the authors need to go from the pyridinium dimer to the natural product itself. How the C4-C5 bond is supposed to form on the middle line is beyond me, and the arrows in the cyclopropane opening seem to go in entirely the wrong direction, but all that stuff seems entirely sensible compared to the madness on the top line. I know that people often play a bit fast and loose with steps in proposed biosyntheses; it's easy to shrug and go "there's probably an enzyme that does that", but this just shows no understanding whatsoever of arrow pushing. I can't believe this got into an ACS journal, or am I missing something? I've got a few emails lately pointing me in the direction of good resources such as the much discussed How To Chemdraw video and the beautiful new name-reaction.com. I've also just recently become aware of great new(ish) blogs like Not The Lab, Doctor Galactic, The Chemistry Cascade, Chemistry Tips and Techniques, and The Organic Solution. However, I am sure that for every useful resource (blog, tutorial, reference...) that I've read, I've missed many more! Below are the links on my resource page at present, and you can see my blogroll on the right. I've just noticed that the former hasn't been updated in over a year. So, what should I be reading or linking to? Drop me a comment or email ( N.B. new address on about page)! Incidentally, if your bookmark/RSS feed to this site points to my old eristocracy.co.uk domain, you should change it as I'm losing that tomorrow. Update 1900: This was blogged earlier today by Tom Phillips over at A Chemical Education. Whoops! Update July, 2013: Part two! Because sometimes you just wanna flog that dead horse a bit longer, you know, to be safe. For a related post on things to check before publishing your controversial results to avoid potential humiliation, see my old piece on 'metal-free' reactions. From Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 2. It seems to me that people still talk a great deal about so-called 'non-thermal' effects in microwave reactions; i.e. some kind of mysterious rate acceleration that occurs from excitation (or even stabilisation) of particular bonds or intermediates directly, in a fashion distinct from simple macroscopic heating of the reaction mixture. One of the most prominent critics of those who claim to observe these phenomena is Austrian chemist Oliver Kappe, who's been debunking claims of non-thermal effects for at least a decade and he's just written an excellent Essay in Angewandte Chemie on the subject. Now, few people would argue that a lot of reactions work better in the microwave, but this can often be explained by rapid internal heating or increased pressure; that is, by thermal effects, however dramatic. An example from Kappe's essay illustrates the incredible magnitude of rate improvement that's sometimes observed:[1] From Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 2. I'd originally planned to do four of these posts, but it looks like I've run out of time so I'll be getting back to more cutting edge work (as soon as something exciting is published). Maybe I'll post the last one in March Mulch. Check out Mulvember 1: Penfulvin A and Mulvember 2: Echinopines A and B! Okay, I suppose I should start off by acknowledging that Mulzer isn't the corresponding author on this one (instead it's Mulzer group postdoc Jürgen Ramharter), but it's still a nice piece of work so I'm including it anyway. The target itself is one of the perennially popular lycopodium alkaloids whose first member - lycopodium itself - was isolated way back in 1881. A number of classic syntheses of members of this family in the 1970s and 80s by famous alkaloid chemists such as Stork, Heathcock, Wiesner and Wenkert have set the bar pretty high, but work towards these targets continues to this day.[1] Particularly, the fawcettimine-type members of this family, to which lycoflexine belongs, have proved very popular in recent years with a new synthesis seemingly out every few months. Update 02-12-12: If anyone wants/needs a copy of the original image without the text and arrow added, you can find it here. Some of you may remember this synthesis of the world's longest polyene from a few months ago, covered by See Arr Oh here. I'm not going to say much about the the chemistry of this synthesis (Wittigs. Shedloads of 'em), or its significance, but I'd like to post a little addendum to the work here. I just got an email from a friend of mine who, upon reading the paper, asked the obvious question 'but what colour is it?'. Lycopene, of course, is famously red: Unable to find a answer to the question in the paper itself, or the Supporting Information he contacted the authors. After a few days, they sent a short reply and a beautiful image: Now, how often do organic chemists get colours like that? Although there have been a couple of interesting syntheses this week, I'm still very busy so I'm going to write about another Mulzer synthesis from my talk. See my previous post for the background to this tribute. Since their fairly recent isolation in 2008 the echinopine sesquiterpenes have proved quite popular targets for total synthesis. In fact, four rather different total syntheses have been reported since their unusual and compact molecular architectures first graced the literature. The first of these was that of Johann Mulzer, published just a year after their isolation, in which both natural products were synthesised in near enantiopure form (starting from cyclooctadiene!) and their absolute configurations were confirmed for the first time.[1] Like many research groups, the one I’m in does weekly literature talks so people get a bit of practice with powerpoint and public speaking. Because excessive freedom can be a bit daunting, although people are free to choose the topic of their own talk it has to fit in with a particular theme, which, at the moment, is living Germanic chemists. In this vein, last month I wrote and gave a talk on the life and work of Johann Mulzer. Now, as I've been a bit busy lately, and the literature has been a bit lacking in interesting total syntheses, I've decided to rehash my talk as a series of blog posts. On the upside, this should mean more posts for you guys and less hassle for me (as I've already drawn everything in ChemDraw). Also, although I didn't know this when I wrote the talk, it seems that Mulzer is finally winding down and I think he deserves a bit of send-off. I, for one, have learnt a lot from reading his papers over the past few years. From a recent Angewandte paper. Unfortunately, most of the syntheses that I covered in my talk are already pretty well known, and many of them have also already been covered on Totally Synthetic at one time or other. Still, if you missed somehow missed reading about them there or prefer my more rambling style then read on! Incidentally, if you’re wondering what the German text on the slide is all about, it’s taken from the group website and is usually rendered (non-literally) in English as ‘no battle plan survives contact with the enemy’, something all chemists who have worked in total synthesis know well![1] Hi all, we interrupt our* scheduled programming to bring you an exciting Chemistry Carnival entry! See Arr Oh recently had the brilliant idea of a Chem Coach Carnival, where people in different chemical careers describe their working lives to give others an idea of what it's like to be in their shoes. Here's my entry, which unfortunately seems to have turned out a bit too long: What do you do? As you might have guessed, I'm currently a 'postdoc' or post-doctoral research associate at a UK university. If you're not familiar with the academic hierarchy you can see where this fits in the academic food chain here, thanks to Karl Collins. What does a typical day involve? I'm one of three postdocs in a research group of around twenty people engaged in diverse projects across the spectrum of organic chemistry. When I was at school The RSC ran a campaign to tell people that 'not all chemists wear white coats', but I'm proud to do so for 90% of a normal day. At the moment I'm mostly working on a short-ish biomimetic alkaloid synthesis but in addition to my own project(s), I also get to field questions from PhD and MSci students, show people how to do stuff in the lab, write papers, work on my own crazy ideas, manage an MSci student and worry about what I'm doing with my life. I also do some teaching in the form of undergraduate tutorials, which is great fun. My job is essentially to solve an increasingly varied and intricate series of puzzles, and it's good. How did you get where you are? It sometimes feels like I've spent my whole life in full time education as I started university straight after school and my PhD a few months after I finished my undergrad. As it happens, I'm currently still at the same institution from which I obtained my PhD a few months back. Staying in one place like this is usually inadvisable, but it's not a bad university, there's a good climbing wall nearby, and my current position is really just a short term filler until I move to the US next year for a 'real' postdoc. Goodness knows what I'll do after that. Fortunately, thanks to the shorter British PhD, I've only just turned 26. How does chemistry inform what you do? I really can't know enough chemistry as it pervades everything I do at work. The deeper my knowledge, the better I'll be at my current job, and the greater the chance I'll have of getting another. Pros and Cons? It seems that this job combines most of the good bits of being an academic and a PhD student; on the one hand I get almost total freedom to do what I like, I still spend most of my time in the lab, I get to teach and I get to be familiar with all the stuff that other people in the group work on but I don't have to write grant proposals or a thesis, take exams, or attend many meetings. It's pretty much how I think being a chemist should be. The main problems with the job are that it doesn't pay that well; although money is rarely a problem for me, I couldn't start a family or buy a house; the hours are pretty long, and are only going to get worse when I cross the Atlantic; and it isn't a long term career, as doing more than a couple of one or two year postdocs is widely considered a bad idea. It can also be stressful and frustrating. A funny story? Reading through what I've just written I guess I come across as pretty keen on chemistry, but it hasn't been a lifelong interest of mine. I wanted to study physics at university but sucked at math so I ended up studying materials science. That turned out to be a little too last-but-one century for me; the amount of time we spent learning about steel and concrete really put me off. After a year I switched to chemistry, but was a mediocre undergrad as I spent most of my time running the university mountaineering club and planned to get a job in the outdoor industry when I graduated. It wasn't until my final year masters project that things changed for me. Although I usually did much better in inorganic chemistry, I chose to join an organic research group that looked interesting on paper, but to my surprise it turned out to consist only of one mostly retired emeritus professor and a young - but extremely talented - postdoc. To hear those two talk about chemistry was amazing; it was like listening to a conversation in another language, and as they swapped stories about this academic or that, discussed the latest Nicolaou paper or just stood around cracking jokes I realised that the world of organic chemistry was much more interesting than I'd ever realised. I loved the history, the in-jokes and the community. I wasn't a great masters student, but I doubt anyone else in my year learned as much as I did during their project. Four years later I'm still a chemist. And I'm not ready to stop learning yet. ** This is not true.	__label__pos	0.968764
Something tells me that even though (on the East Coast anyway) it’s late in the work day on a Friday that kicks off a holiday weekend celebrating the working man and working woman, there are still plenty workers still at work as they read this. How’s that working for ya? A post at the NY Times’ Complaint Box tackles a topic that many workers can surely relate to nowadays: How did we get to the point that it is more typical for employees to still be at work at 8 p.m. than it is for them to head home promptly at 5 p.m.? It’s hard to say exactly when the death of 9-to-5, 5 days a week occurred, but at some point it passed on, replaced by 7-ish-to-sometime-after-dinnertime, 6 and sometimes 7 days a week. This too is a component of the “New Normal.” In an age when technology has increased efficiency and replaced manpower, how can this be called progress? And why are such hours expected of anyone hoping to avoid being labeled a slacker—or hoping to have a job at all? Here’s an excerpt from the Times’ post, written by a freelancer who typical works 65 to 70 hours a week: Nowadays, the day is done when your work is done. And the work is never really done. You can’t leave it until tomorrow because you’ll have too much to do tomorrow. The huge overhaul that transformed us into a more flexible, fun-loving society has righted itself: It is O.K. to wear jeans, O.K. to have a cappuccino machine, O.K. to surf a little during the workday, but it is not O.K. to leave at a reasonable hour. Once again, the writer here is a freelancer, a member of the increasingly huge group of workers who have no benefits or job security. Which brings up an entirely different reason to lament. Happy Labor Day! Related: What We Know About Employment (and Unemployment) Right Now It’s Quitting Time: Why Workers Are Leaving their Jobs in Droves If You’re Not Looking for a Job Now, You Probably Will Be Soon A Totally Unconvincing Story About How Workers Prefer Freelancing Over Full-Time Employment	__label__pos	0.980456
This year promises to be one of the most exciting of my career, as many personal projects will be coming to fruition on the ground while legalization looms in the air. It is with a bittersweet sadness, though, that I have so much time to devote to the cause, as it is only possible because my love, Gayle Quin, has passed away from cancer in the fall of 2016 after a long fight with cancer. This newspaper, and virtually everything I do in my life, is now forever dedicated to her memory and we are constantly trying to live up to her ideals and standards. To start the year off we will be celebrating the 21st anniversary of the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club, with our Annual General Meeting on Sun Jan 29, followed by a potluck at the VCBC. With a few open spaces on the board of directors, the club really needs some new, fresh faces to help out managing the huge potential our organization has. There will be door prizes at the AGM and lots of tasty food at the potluck, so hopefully lots of members will join us for the festivities. One of the main topics we will be discussing is the eventual shift to adult sales. While the club has initially formed to protect patients suffering from serious medical problems, it is clear that if the club is able to survive and become a part of the new legal system, it will be licensed to sell to anyone over the age limit the province determines. At some point it will make no sense for the club to limit sales to patients while other dispensaries openly sell to adults, giving them the ability to give deep discounts to sick people. With this new system, the club will still register patients separately and give them discounts and free access to the smoking room. It is my hope to create a special category for patients with cancer in palliative care situations. If we are doing well enough with sales and donations, it is my hope to provide a very deep discount and access to special products for patients dying from cancer. Next issue I will speak more of the special cannabis-focused palliative care facilities I wish to create in Gayle’s name. Of course, the big news for the club is the reopening of the smoking room. When Victoria City council passed the bylaws regulating cannabis dispensaries in Sept, no consumption was allowed at all. Bylaw officials came to the club to inform us that we face fines and could risk getting a license if we kept our smoking room open. We felt we had little choice but to shut it down and fight to get it back. It did not take long before city council realized their mistake, as the majority have clearly seemed supportive of everything our club is doing, and so, with only one opposed, a quick vote gave our club an exemption to the bylaws. Recently the VCBC has added its fine selection of raw cannabis strains to its menu for patients purchasing products by mail order. In the past we have stuck with shipping just our food and skin products, as the risk and headache did not make it worth the effort. However, with the city preparing to give us a license that states we can do mail orders, the time seems right for us to take things to the next level. With one grower supplying the club for 18 years, another for 15, and several more coming up to 14 years of providing medicine to us, we have one of the most experienced networks of committed growers in the world. Many of my future projects will be specifically dedicated to my love. The next one will be the Gayle Quin Colouring Book, made up of front covers of the last few dozen issues of the Cannabis Digest. She absolutely loved colouring and it was always her dream to have a little book made of the front covers. We will do our best to have this ready for sale by her birthday on April 16. After that, the International Hempology 101 Society plans on publishing a small cookbook and a better version of our cannabis carol booklet in the fall. These should all be simple $5 retail books that will help us share the knowledge and joy we have gathered over the years. In the future we hope to publish a larger cookbook and several other cannabis publications. At UVic, the Hempology 101 student club is planning on hosting a series of debates this semester to help students and the public understand some of the details being considered in the legalization scheme of the federal government. If all goes as planned there should 3 debates at the end of each month, focused on growers, patients and dispensaries. It has been a few years since the club has done more than host the weekly Weds 420 circles, which have been happening for 18 years, and we are looking forward to watching that group grow back to its former size. Those debates are being held in partnership with the BC Independent Cannabis Alliance, a loose-knit group I formed last summer to bring like-minded, local activists together to lobby the province. With so many important issues to deal with, we have been working very well as a team trying to convince the public, bureaucrats and politicians that creating an industry that includes craft growers and value-added products is the best route. Anyone interested in attending our monthly meetings should contact me. With the provincial election coming up in early May, we are all hoping all three major parties in BC realize that the existing craft networks fighting to become a part of the new legal system need to be a part of any industry model they create. Everyone in the province concerned about tight regulations squeezing out current suppliers and distributors should help us write letters, ask politicians questions at debates and engage in social media. Together we can make the public realize that the best outcome for everyone is a fair, open regulatory system that includes small business. Of course the next big party everyone is looking forward to is April 20. In Victoria we hope to add live music and more vendors to the mix this year, though we will refrain vendors from selling cannabis products for several reasons. We are hoping to have far too many people show up for Centennial Square to handle, forcing the city to give us a bigger better space for future years. Watch for posters with details about the performers. Looking ahead to 2017, the future seems very bright indeed for the Cannabis Digest, the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club and myself personally. I feel I cannot thank my friends, the writers and advertisers of this paper enough, as the Cannabis Digest would not have survived the last few years without volumes of support from you all. While there is still a struggle ahead, knowing I have such a strong foundation behind me makes me feel ready to take it all on again. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.	__label__pos	0.991854
By Krissy Brady (OrganicAuthority) If maintaining our workout motivation level was easy, we’d all look as fit as celebrities. Instead, we come home from work after a long day of sitting and unwind with… well, more sitting. We end up stuck on the inevitable hamster wheel of needing to exercise to boost our energy, yet not having enough energy to exercise (or so we tell ourselves). Oy. If the usual workout motivation methods aren’t cutting it for you, below are 14 unorthodox strategies and mind hacks that will: 1. Instill the Five Minute Rule When your workout motivation is less than stellar, convince yourself to exercise for just five minutes – no big deal, right? Once you get started, you’ll feel motivated to keep going. (You’ve come this far, so why not?) 2. Terrify Yourself “Trying to get someone to realize the impact poor health has can be a powerful motivator,” says Mercy Medical Center’s Dr. Marc Leavy, M.D. “It’s all about finding an emotional trigger that helps motivate them into action.” If you need workout motivation, just look up all of the horrible health problems that comes with a sedentary lifestyle – the plank position doesn’t look so bad now, does it? 3. Bring on the Guilt Let’s face facts: there’s no excuse for not exercising, no matter how low your workout motivation level is. Sometimes you just need to remind yourself what you're losing by staying on the counch. That’s why I’m always armed and ready with the latest Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Suddenly, poof! I’m magically wearing my yoga tights and ready to practice. 4. Use Your Anger Take every bad day, every bad date, and every annoying work colleague and create a highlight reel of frustrations for workout motivation. You’d be surprised at how much you’ll accomplish with that initial burst of adrenaline! 5. Do It “For” Someone Else Exercise for your friends and family – when you accomplish goals for reasons outside of yourself, you’ll find it easier to maintain your workout motivation. 6. Find Inspiring Before and Afters If you know someone who’s gone through an amazing transformation or have met others online who have stellar workout motivation, consider them your exercise Yodas – channel their energy to make your transformation a reality. 7. Lie to Yourself There’s clearly an emotional cycle of moans and groans holding you back, so switch things up a bit: Pretend you’re someone who never lacks workout motivation and is always on the ball. Eventually, you will be. “You don’t need motivation to brush your teeth or shower, do you? You just do it!” says personal trainer and author Michelle Bridges. “Use the same mentality for exercise.” 8. Wear Your Exercise Clothes to Bed If I don’t exercise in the morning, the rest of my day is filled with one dreadful workout attempt after another. Until you fully adjust to your morning workout routine, I highly recommend sleeping in your workout clothes – you’ll be much less likely to hit the snooze button. 9. Bribe Yourself Are Prada pumps calling your name? Do you want to take a trip with your hubby this year and look fabulous doing it? Vow to put a certain amount of money away every time you exercise – the bigger the prize at the end of the rainbow, the harder you’ll try. 10. Humiliate Yourself Broadcast a public service announcement that says if you don’t reach your workout goal in X number of days/months, you’ll do something completely humiliating… and post it on YouTube. Then, watch your workout motivation skyrocket. 11. Watch TV Make yourself a deal: If you want to watch Scandal, you have to watch it while working out. You’ll bust out your exercise gear faster than you can say, “Gladiator.” 12. Bargain with Yourself If your lack of workout motivation is making you groan like you’ve been poisoned, it's time to bargain: You don’t feel like going to the gym, but what would you be willing to do? Go for a brisk walk? Learn the new workout your BFF’s been raving about? Make your workouts fun instead of an obligation. 13. Make It Quick If not having enough time’s your go-to excuse for not exercising, then choose the mother of all workouts: High intensity interval training is a super-efficient, crazy-fast workout you can do in 20 minutes or less. In fact, you’ll be done the workout before you have time to talk yourself out of it! 14. Strip Face off with your problem areas like it's high noon, then picture your body toned and healthy. How does it make you feel? Grab onto this feeling every time the workout motivation blues hit you as you say goodbye to your "before picture" self. What tricks do you use to amp up your workout motivation level? Related on Organic Authority: Image: daveynin http://scrb.me//s-2859/a/dUQ Created by Outbrain Select	__label__pos	0.870417
Recently a video went viral online of Bill Gates losing a blitz chess game in nine moves to the new World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, getting checkmated quickly: The truth is deeper than it seems Non-chess-playing friends of mine enjoyed forwarding me links to this. Their general impression was, ha, of course the nine-move checkmate makes sense given the gross mismatch in strength between Bill Gates and the world champion! You can also look at the YouTube video’s comments to get an idea of what a lot of people thought of the video. I watched the game and noticed some very interesting features, on multiple levels, and came up with the idea of “9 lessons for 9 moves”, because it is hard to get an accurate picture of what serious chess is like through typical media portrayal that shows moves being made, and maybe plays up drama, but does not explain what happened, or what could have happened instead, or what players were thinking: all this is left invisible. This Gates-Carlsen encounter is no exception. The comments from non-chess-playing friends made me feel the need to give a deeper picture. The main misconception that bothered me was that a world champion should be able to win a game against someone in nine moves. But it’s not so simple. In fact, I found amazing depths in the truth of what happened. This article will actually be directed at three different audiences, simultaneously, through a separation of levels of observation: Those who do not play chess or vaguely know the rules but do not play regularly Those who do play regularly and have chess tournament experience, but are below an expert level Those who are at expert or master level The entire game, along with supporting variations, is embedded here so that you can click through what happened as well as what could have happened but didn’t. My detailed explanations follow after this embedded interactive board. Lesson 1: Why Carlsen played a bad chess opening The first observation to make is that Bill Gates probably knows how to play a basic chess opening as White. Very popular, for example, is to play 1 e4, as Gates in fact did (the late Bobby Fischer’s favorite), and then if Black symmetrically plays 1…e5, White plays 2 Nf3 attacking Black’s Pawn, then Black usually defends with 2…Nc6, and then White plays 3 Bb5 attacking that Knight. This would be the famous Spanish Opening, also known as the “Ruy Lopez”, after the Spanish priest of the 16th century (yes, chess wisdom goes way back!) who made a systematic study of this opening. Carlsen plays both colors of this opening: in the recent World Championship match against Anand, for example, he played the Black side repeatedly with success in three games, drawing two and winning one. But in this game against Gates, he did not play this opening. Instead, he played an opening that is usually considered unusual and not so good, the Nimzovich Defense. Why? The short answer: because by playing the best moves, Carlsen would have risked taking much longer to win a game against Gates. If you are a seasoned chess player, especially if you play blitz, you understand this. If you are not a chess player, or do not know much beyond the rules, this may puzzle you: how could playing better lead to winning much more slowly? The answer is that games are not won so much as lost. Here’s an analogy. Suppose you find yourself being attacked by someone and you need to defend yourself. Do you put up your best blocks, and attack back with proper form, making sure to stay safe? Or do you do one of those risky roundhouse kicks you see in the movies, where you could get in a lot of trouble if you failed? Doing the “right” thing does not make for entertaining and short action movie scenes. So that’s what happened in this game: Carlsen gambled that Gates would not know how to play properly, and played an opening with an intention of possibly unleashing that roundhouse kick. Lesson 2: Chess is psychological warfare Gates seemed confused by the Nimzovich Defense. On move 2, he makes a perfectly good move, but the move Carlsen clearly had wanted to see. Gates was on autopilot, playing the Knight out to f3 as though Carlsen had played 1…e5 instead. There were other options. 2 d4 would also have allowed Carlsen to continue his game plan of advancing with 2…d5, but 2 Nc3 would have stopped that plan and made the game probably much, much longer. Contrary to the popular misconception of chess as pure logic, it is actually primarily a psychological sport, in which knowing how the opponent might react is a valuable part of being competitive. This is true at the highest levels as well as in casual blitz chess. Carlsen won his world title last year largely on the basis of thwarting Anand psychologically, refusing to play “good” openings that he knew Anand would be prepared for, and playing bland openings instead. Here, in a flashy game against Gates, he took the opposite approach, deliberately playing a “bad” opening that expected Gates not to be prepared for. Lesson 3: Refusing to play the best move because it may win too slowly Gates played a poor move 3, being defensive in a position in which he could have seized an advantage aggressively by capturing Black’s Pawn on d5. However, Carlsen refused to punish this poor move. The obvious punishing move, that most club players would see and play, is 3…Nb4, attacking the White Bishop, and in fact winning it in exchange for the Knight, because if the Bishop moves, then White loses the Pawn on e4 that the Bishop is defending. Again, this goes back to psychology. If Carlsen had played the obvious and best move, the game could have taken much longer to win. It would have been a matter of gaining a permanent advantage by winning the Bishop pair and ruining White’s Pawn structure on the d file, and then pressing further until victory. If you look back at the video, you can see Carlsen hesitating before playing the “worse” move. In a real game against a real opponent, there is no doubt he would have instantly whipped out the strong 3…Nb4, no hesitation. Lesson 4: The appeal of open vs. closed games The gamble worked, because Gates took the Pawn on d5 on move 4, and Carlsen brought out his Queen, as he had intended from the very moment he played his very first opening move! Note that Gates could have played e5 closing the position, to reach a perfectly decent game for White. In fact, I believe many club players would have instinctively played e5, in analogy with fundamental positions in the French Defense. Click through the embedded game board for a logical continuation of the game if Gates had played e5. Note that after White gets in d4 and Black gets in e6, the resulting French Defense setup is very closed and it will take a very long time for Black to win the game. Closed games may not be as flashy and media-friendly as open games, but they are very strategically rich and beautiful to play and watch. It would have been interesting if Gates had gone into this French Defense setup and Carlsen had to patiently attack White’s center with f6, get the half-open f file, swing the dark Bishop against White’s King side, free the light-squared Bishop also, and bring the Queen around to the King side via Qe8, etc. There might even have been a thematic exchange sacrifice on f3 to break up White’s King side. But this would not have been a nine-move media spectacle. Lesson 5: The unexpected complexity of chess On move 5, Gates correctly attacked Carlsen’s Queen with his Knight, and Carlsen played the Queen over to the King side. Although a thematic plan in this opening, under circumstances where Black has already played the light-squared Bishop out to g4 and is preparing to castle Queen side, this move actually looked to me like a blunder! But upon looking at it more, with the help of the computer, I saw that it was not. (The following discussion is mainly for those of expert or master strength.) The reason Qh5 looked like a blunder was because it seemed that White could play the very strong-looking Nb5, threatening to win the Pawn on c7 with check and also pick up Black’s Rook. Black could defend by Kd8, but that forfeits castling and guarantees White an advantage. Nd5 to defend instead looks possible, but then c4 chasing the Knight looks strong. After Black’s Nf4, White retreats the Bishop to defend, but renews the threat. However, after Black plays Bg4, the position then becomes a bit crazy, with Black having huge threats against White’s Knight on f3 and offering to give up both castling and the Rook on a8 for a big attack against White. After White plays d4, attacking Black’s Knight on f4, things look bad for Black. It turns out that Black can castle Queen side, abandoning the Knight but then creating threats with e5 in order to regain the piece. So far, so good: an expert or master player could see all this because of the forced nature of the calculations. But when I ran the position through a chess engine, the computer spit out a completely different approach, having Black not castle Queen side, but instead play e5 immediately, still offering to give up the the Pawn on c7, castling rights, and the Rook on a8. I did not see this possibility. Nor have I analyzed the full ramifications. All I know is that yet again, chess engines reveal the surprising complexity of chess, one that the top world human players grapple with regularly. As an amateur, I am still repeatedly surprised by how intricate chess positions can be. If you are curious, you may wish to work out the possible continuations after the crazy-looking 9…e5. It would have been fascinating if Gates had seen Nb5 and played it, forcing Carlsen to enter into these wild complications. Lesson 6: Playing a good move can lead to losing quickly, but it’s not the fault of the good move On move 6, Gates castled King side. This was a good move. A general principle that chess novices often neglect is King safety. Many games in chess are lost because one side did not protect the King by castling in time. Beginners are taught to castle as early as possible, as a rule of thumb. It is usually a great principle to follow, and it was in this game. Yet, it was because Gates castled King side that he lost so quickly. Paradox? Yes. What happened was that he lost because of things that he did wrong after castling. If he had played a worse plan, bringing the Bishop back to e2, then developing the Queen side with d3, and castling Queen side, the game would have been considerably longer for sure. Sometimes it is tempting for a less experienced chess player to attribute a loss of a game to a move that was actually a good move, instead of noticing the true blunder that happened well after the good move. In particular, it would be very tempting to reason, “Black’s Queen is already aiming at my King side, so I shouldn’t have castled there into the attack.” This happens in real life all the time: it is the logical fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc, or “after this, therefore because of this”. For example, someone might hear about a runner dying of a heart attack and wrongly conclude that running is bad for your health, or someone else might hear about a runner losing weight and recovering from diabetes and wrongly conclude that running lots of marathons is the key to health. Chess is a game in which, in the long run, you cannot succeed if you fall into the trap of logical fallacies: all psychology aside, it is still a game of logic, in which if someone plays a trick on you, you can learn the truth from it for the next time you face that same opponent or a different one, and perform better. That is the beauty of the game. Lesson 7: The appalling practice of playing a terrible move in hope that your opponent doesn’t see how bad it is On move 7, Gates played h3, attacking Black’s Bishop on g4. The obvious and good move is to exchange the attacked Bishop with White’s Knight on f3, trading Queens after White retakes with the Queen, and wrecking White’s King side Pawn structure to obtain a clear advantage. The average club player would play this continuation without hesitation since it is obviously good and best. Unfortunately, with the Queens off the board, it would then have taken probably another thirty moves for Black to win the game. Instead, Carlsen played a shockingly bad, losing move: he ignored the threat to his Bishop on g4 and simply offered a sacrifice, while making an unjustified aggressive gesture with his Knight to d5 against White’s pinned Knight on f3. I was not happy to see him do this, because I believe many people believed this was an authentically and well-played chess game, rather than media fluff, and because many chess players actually deliberately engage in this practice in serious games, and I would like to discourage it. I wrote this article largely because of this howlingly bad move. I wrote this article for my friends who were wowed by this “daring” attack but need to know the truth. The truth is that this was not a serious game in which Carlsen played well. It was one of those games you might see played in urban parks by hustlers (I have played with such hustlers before; they typically let you win one and then try to get you to play them for more money and then start playing more and more for real). Carlsen played like a hustler in this game. Granted, it’s fun to do this sometimes, as long as everyone is in on the joke and knows what is going on. But this game has been forwarded around with no disclaimer that it was for entertainment purposes only. Lesson 8: The right plan is more important than the right move; but what about the importance of failure? Gates accepted the sacrifice. Again, it is important to emphasize that even though he got checkmated just one move later, it wasn’t because he was foolhardy in doing the right thing by accepting the sacrifice to achieve a winning position. He played the right move. But he didn’t play the right followup move. He clearly had not calculated the implications of his move, however right the move was. If you do the right thing, but without really understanding why it was right, you can get into trouble. This is as true in chess as it is in regular life. It is important to make a move not in isolation, but in full context of what might happen afterwards. For example, if you are stuck in the wilderness, and you know which direction the main road is, the right thing to do may well be to start moving in that direction. But this assumes that you have already seen that you are not walking toward a deep rift, or that you have seen a barrier but know you have the resources to overcome it. If you have not at least figured out some kind of plan, it may be safer not to head to the main road, but to head in a different direction toward terrain that looks less unpredictable, even if the route will take longer to traverse. Should Gates have taken another path, instead of accepting the sacrifice? This is a hard question to answer. An improving player should always at least experiment with trying to play the best move possible, even if not perfectly equipped for the followup; you learn by failing while doing the right thing. But as a practical matter, there are good reasons to argue that failing too drastically may not help learning, and that playing more safely is a more incremental way of learning. I think it’s a hard judgment call sometimes. For example, here, Gates could have done some meta-thinking, “Hmm, Carlsen wouldn’t be offering this free piece to me if he didn’t have some trick to play on me, so I should play it safe and decline to accept it, and instead play safely with 8 Be4 to simply defend my attacked Knight on f3.” If he had in fact done that, Carlsen’s trick would have been halted, because there are no more pieces he can bring in against the Knight on f3. Again, objectively the best for Black would be to trade everything down on f3, giving White doubled, isolated f Pawns, but this is the route to a very long game. Unfortunately, I see this kind of meta-reasoning happen too often in club level chess, where a weaker player is afraid that the stronger opponent must have had a reason when playing a seemingly bad move, and therefore does not play the correct continuation against it. I think there is a fuzzy line between being pragmatic about one’s limitations and being too timid to dare to question a poor move and try to prove it wrong. This psychological tension is definitely an important part of the game, and can be a vehicle for developing self-awareness, trust in one’s own mind (rather than trust in the authority of those better than you), and continuous learning in case of making the wrong call. I advocate erring on the side of learning from one’s mistakes by going out on a limb at least sometimes. Lesson 9: Carlsen was really lost; life and death can depend on only one detail In the final move of the game, Gates played a move that would be very good except for one flaw: it allowed instant checkmate. But we cannot entirely blame him. Ignoring the checkmate oversight, the move was actually a fantastic one. White takes the Knight on e5: If Black recaptures with the Knight, White wins the Queen on h5. If Black recaptures with the Queen, White capture the Knight on g4, left unguarded because of the deflection of the Queen that had protected it on h5. So it looks like a brilliant move, forcing the win of a piece. With Black two pieces down, victory would be in sight for White. Unfortunately, there’s that checkmate. In chess, you can do everything right, have everything figured out but one detail, and lose horribly. In fact, many high-level games actually go this way. What are analogies in real life? There are many. In warfare, missing one vital piece of information could mean losing an entire battle. The Challenger tragedy. Mission-critical computer software. Professions such as surgery, race car driving hinge on detail. Competitive sprinting and hurdling. Carlsen was really lost Gates could have maintained a winning advantage by playing 9 Re1. This provides an escape route for his King in case Black came down to h2 with the Queen by first trading off White’s defensive Knight on f3. White’s King can escape to f1, e2, and then d1 as needed. Retaining a piece advantage, objectively White should win the game. Of course, in practice, even if Gates had played correctly, I doubt he would have won. Carlsen would probably have castled Queen side and continued playing tricky moves while waiting for blunders, likely because of the blitz time format. It would have definitely been entertaining hustler-style blitz chess by Carlsen in any case. For the benefit of those who want to see how quickly White can win, after Re1, if Black insists on trying to check White’s King to oblivion (which Carlsen would not have done), I have provided a sample forcing continuation by White. Conclusion That was an entertaining game. But I felt I needed to point out to the wider public that in fact this was the diametric opposite of the brutally logical play that won him the World Champion title just months ago! He won here in nine moves not because he played the logical, correct moves, but because he resorted to every element of hustler psychology to try to create a quick decisive outcome. I hope that this article helps explain what happened. Franklin Chen	__label__pos	0.977773
This article is part of a series hosted by The Strategy Bridge and CIMSEC, entitled #Shakespeare and Strategy. See all of the entries at the Asides blog of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Thanks to the Young Professionals Consortium for setting up the series. David Greig’s Dunsinane, while set in the centuries-ago land of Scotland, offers a modern perspective on the nature of war, peace, language, and politics. The events of the production explore the interplay between Siward, commander of English forces in Scotland, Malcolm, the English-installed King of Scotland, and Gruach, formerly both Lady Macbeth and queen of Scotland. Through several rounds and layers of intrigue, Gruach sows enough discord and mayhem to keep English forces at bay. Malcolm, for his part, does his best to engage with Siward in an attempt to illustrate that the use of overwhelming force is not always tenable. After a betrayal late in the first act, the second act functions as an extended denouement, with less action and less emotion. Indeed, the conclusion of the play, with a wandering Siward numbly stumbling out of the scene, parallels the endings to French and U.S. operations in Vietnam, Russian and ISAF campaigns in Afghanistan, UN experiences in Somalia, and the US adventure in Iraq. 1 Nuanced allegiances come to the fore in the first act when Siward and Malcolm discuss their own perceived strengths. Siward wishes for Malcolm to act forcefully and seriously, rather than be thought of as a drunken playboy. Malcolm’s subsequent lecture on the desirability of being perceived as weak while operating from a position of strength mirrors current discussions on the rise of Chinese power in the Pacific, echoing Sun Tzu’s exhortation to “appear weak when you are strong.” The arbiter of the legitimate exercise of violence in Scotland owes more effort than simply appreciating Gaelic songs and lilts. That Malcolm channels Sun Tzu is not an accident — throughout the play, Malcolm uses a longer, strategic vision of conflict, whereas Siward focuses on the operational level. Siward initially senses that, having “ended” the fighting through the regime change at the end of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, peace is nigh for Scotland and its clans. Throughout the play, Siward’s lack of vision and misunderstanding of the country that he now occupies enables Gruach and the Scottish clan leaders to undermine the English vision for peace. Gruach’s admonition at the end of the play — “you’ve been in Scotland a year, and you still don’t know the language!” — drives home the point that Siward, as the arbiter of the legitimate exercise of violence in Scotland, owes more effort than simply appreciating Gaelic songs and lilts. Siward’s lieutenant, the tactical supervisor, has no appreciation for Scotland beyond its resources and his survival. He realizes through collaboration with his ostensible foes along with exploitation of war trophies that he has no investment in Scotland, and indeed survives through tactical fits of inaction. His inaction comes back to haunt him at the end of the first act, when, after witnessing a brutally treacherous and suicidal act, he helplessly cries out “we have got to get the fuck out of here,” an exclamation that could be heard on any of a dozen fields of quagmire. 2 The slower, more deliberate second act has a scene with the line “We win because if we don’t win – we lose – and if we lose – then what?” Here again the play foreshadows discourse about assumptions of a zero-sum world of power. In instances such as China’s increasing influence in the Pacific and the adventures of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there exists a tendency to leave alternatives to military-centric actions on the table. This unexamined default course of action leads to a path dependency wherein strategic leaders are stuck; they cannot simply withdraw, nor can they simply win. Strategic leaders in those situations, as Malcolm remarks about the English in Scotland, are committed to an extended dance of saving face. In this case — as well with Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, et al — peace operations entail vastly increased losses of materiel, personnel, and treasure. Greig acknowledges the creeping existential dread that has accompanied interventions since Korea. Put another way, assumptions of power as a zero-sum game are increasingly outmoded. 3 Dunsinane anticipates requirements for transitioning towards alternative concepts of power and peace. Interestingly, through Siward’s downward spiral, Greig acknowledges the creeping existential dread that has accompanied interventions since Korea. In doing so, he makes the case that hard, coercive methods may only have existed as an effective means of exerting power and making peace for a narrow slice of the early 20th century. Dunsinane’s last and most vivid impression — that of the formerly upright and powerful Siward stumbling around a frozen loch, trying to “find a new country” — conjures images of Africa, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent in the mid 20th century, with former powers retreating from far-flung lands and their subsequent search for a new identity. At the same time, Siward’s search for “a new country” calls to mind Hamlet’s “undiscovered country” of a life after death. Judging from Grieg’s narrative, newly post-colonial countries may indeed have to undergo a rebirth if their Siwards are to find peace. LT Vic Allen serves at the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command and serves as CIMSEC’s Director of Social Media. He can be followed at Medium here. All posts contain the authors’ opinions alone and do not represent any of the military services or the Department of Defense. 1. Ramberg, B. (2009). The Precedents for Withdrawal: From Vietnam to Iraq. Foreign Affairs, 88, 2. 2. The mostly civilian audience laughed at this line, which struck me as oddly incongruent with the sad and violent end of the first act. 3. Read, J. H. (2012). Is Power Zero-sum or Variable-sum? Old Arguments and New Beginnings. Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 5-31. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1900717	__label__pos	0.839748
Update 2010-01-20: This morning (lunch time GMT) the Twitter whale is showing again. How reliable a technology is and how this affects our business is another issue we could have addressed here. But we did not. In the meantime, anyone curious about why their CEO fails with Twitter, or whether better (Twitter) micro-blogging might give your company a more personal voice and better client-engagement, this post is for you. This article will clarify where Twitter could fail you miserably and why social media experts may try to sell you snake-oil. Context!? Smaller companies like ours simply do not have the resources to be active everywhere. Nevertheless, so-called social media experts tell you that being active in at least 10 channels is a must. Get real! The opportunity costs could simply be too high for you. For instance, instead of spending another two hours on Facebook, why not talk to one or two clients? Lesson 1: Regardless of what ‘experts’ tell you, focus on a maximum of two channels (e.g., Naijapulse, Identi.ca, Twitter), drop the time-wasters and focus on doing a good job wherever your customers participate. Doing a good job speaks louder than tweets These days, an increasing number of self-styled experts want to teach you the indispensable tricks to Twitter success: “In my opinion, Twitter is an indispensable tool, no matter what size of company you run (or work in).” – Susan Rice Lincoln – Find daily interesting information about what you do. – Develop a list of jokes and tips to share on a daily basis. So why doesn’t she take her own advice? It’s been 61 days since her last tweet on November 20 and dry spells of 30 days or more seemed to be a common occurrence in 2009. Usually, there is a spurt of tweets just before she holds a webinar or a workshop and not much after. Lesson 2: Don’t just believe what others says will succeed, find out for yourself. One tweet each workday about something and at a time that your clients find valuable is a smart way to build a network of weak ties on Twitter. Relationships are reserved for family and friends – others need not apply Everybody insists that Twitter is great for relationships, but not really for most people in Europe. “The only way for a company to earn attention and loyalty is to develop an authentic and relevant relationship.” “Trust is the life-force of successful relationship marketing, and trust is developed and strengthened through relevant communications through relevant channels at relevant times.” ((White Paper: Relationship marketing 3.0, p. 2)) As @richmeyer points out in one of his tweets (see right) – most of us don’t want a relationship with Nespresso, except maybe George Clooney. We are satisfied with good value, and fast and courteous service. Most important, I need to be able to trust the claims made by a brand in its advertising, product catalog or on its webpage (e.g., money back guarantee). Lesson 3: Answer this key question – why be on Twitter? To find information that helps your clients solve their problems quicker or helps you work smarter. The follow/unfollow syndrome I recently came across the Sergio Rossi shoe brand and got curious and was amused by the tweet that my monitoring tool picked up, stating that the brand was enjoying positive feedback (see image at right). So, I visited the site that gave Sergio Rossi a positive review and left a comment: Dear Administrator, I am wondering how you addressed the disclosure issue when doing this product review as required by the FTC? See here: http://commetrics.com/articles/sheer-transparency/ Did you get samples from Rossi? Did you take these pictures or images yourself or receive them from Rossi to be used? Can you clarify this please? Thank you. Cordially Urs @ComMetrics Here is what happened: a) The comment never make it onto the website – not good, and b) Rossi followed our Twitter account @ComMetrics for two days and then dropped us again, because we did not follow back. Trash the idea that because you follow me, I need to follow back. Following back is earned. As customers we want to follow suppliers’ or brands’ tweets only if we find they add value. More resources about Twitter, metrics and benchmarking – what is it worth to you? ComMetrics – Social media: Metrics to know and metrics to skipFAQ #1 ComMetrics – Social media: Metrics to know and metrics to skip FAQ #2 ComMetrics – Three metrics: Influence, impact and outcome ComMetrics – 6 steps to get started in measurement of social media activities Daily Telegraph – Man arrested under Terrorism Act for Doncaster airport Twitter joke ComMetrics – Best 100 Twitter tools. Bottom line You can say one thing and do the other when you use Twitter, but in the digital world, nothing is forgotten. As a business person, you need to figure out your company or product’s best social media channel for yourself. Before you start micro-blogging or a Facebook fan page, you seriously need to examine the purpose of the exercise before you adopt a new technology as part of your goal-driven business. Take-aways I have been micro-blogging since late 2007 – a bit earlier than some people, definitely later than the geeks. As CEO of a small company, I have developed the following four insights: 1. Twitter is not scalable, so following 150 people is my limit: If a person averages three tweets a day, I need to scan 450 tweets or ignore most of them. But if I do that, am I not misleading those I claim to follow? You might say, “I use TweetDeck and I screen and search for the best tweets using hashtags.” Good for you, but can you afford the time it takes to search through 8,000 tweets each day? “Yes,” you say. “When I ride an hour into the City every morning and back every evening… plenty of time to check and tweet.” Is spending two hours on Twitter everyday the best use of your time? (See also saving time on Twitter.) Maybe it would be smarter to talk to a fellow commuter, nap, read important papers or a great novel… 2. Serious conversations happen elsewhere: If somebody wants to chat with me they may send me a direct message, but experience has taught me to move it to email, the phone or a face-to-face meeting to get to the heart of the matter faster. Our clients are mostly businesses, industrial buyers and professional bloggers. Our best-case scenario is what happened one afternoon last week, when a Twitter follower called me from another country. The conversation went something like this: “ Urs, I follow you on Twitter.” …3 minutes later… “ I have a client… and I thought about you.“ The rest is history and yes, my bottom line is making me smile. Twitter has gotten us business directly twice so far and people talk to me at conferences about my tweets, resulting in business relationships. Stop worrying about the number of followers versus RTs and such. Instead, find one customer who finds your tweets valuable and build your list of followers from there… Kimberly Castleberry suggests you use vanity metrics for your Twitter account – please don’t! 4. Twitter can be useful if you have a purpose and stick to it: Having said all the above, I would not want to miss Twitter. The 75 smart people I follow provide me with know-how that I might otherwise not come across. Most follow back. In turn, they benefit from my quality tweets that help them benchmark smarter to perform better. As my esteemed colleague Paul W. Reidl put it: “For those of us who are old enough to remember client development before Al Gore invented the internet, I think that potential clients today have much, much more information available to them about potential counsel. That’s why having a positive social media presence is so important.” – @TMguy For me, that means Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Xing – for you it may be different. Just remember, unless your client or business partner believes you provide value and follows or connects, why bother? Please, leave a comment! We love to hear your thoughts: how do you feel about Twitter and your business? What is your experience with this subject? Have any tips to make sure we use Twitter more effectively? Please share your insights. P.S. – Visit My.ComMetrics (register yourself – benchmark your blog(s) => improve performance). You can get updates for this blog on Twitter by following @ComMetrics or get a free subscription by RSS, or get new posts via email: Article source: ComMetrics – 4 ways to Twitter success	__label__pos	0.927148
CONTENTSEssential Communication Skills Communication is Individual How Communication Happens What Gets in the Way Conflict Resolution Improving Communication Skills Communication Skills TrainingOne Day Open Course Two Day Open Course Five Day Communicate with Impact Tailored Communication Training One to One Coaching Executive Communication Coaching Also in this series Communication Skills EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION Practical advice and information to help develop better business communication skills. Effective communication is within everyone's reach. We help keep the process of improvement easy and doable. Good Communication Skills are essential All effective communication takes real skill. However Communication skills can be worked on and developed, honed and added to on a daily basis. The simple, more practical skills are at the heart of your interpersonal skills and the more you become aware of how communication works, the more effective your communication will become. To really be effective in the business world, it is vital for you to communicate well.To be even a halfway good manager, you must be able to communicate exceptionally well. Here we are going to look at the basics of communication dynamics. Learning the skills that will improve your communication, using effective communication in a way that will improve and promote better interpersonal relationships and creating an effective personal communication strategy. Many great books have been written about the importance of communication skills, but for now if you can content yourself with just the bare essentials for becoming a more effective communicator, you will make substantial progress. Your point of departure for any communication skills development is to look at what you start with. Anything you struggle with like working in a second language for instance, is a life long project that you must invest in little and often. Learning 3 or 4 new words a week maybe. On the other hand things that you are more comfortable with, say chatting to people. These things are available for immediate use and improvement. Next page communication is individual Home page good communication skills Read more about Communication Skills Training Find Impact Factory's next available Open Communication Skills Course For Tailored Communication Skills Training see Communication Skills Training For One-to-One Communication Skills see Executive Coaching If you want some in-depth thoughts about Communication, read the Communication Skills articles in our library. For an example of a recent tailored programme see the Communication More Assertively Programme we ran for ATTA BOOK NOW Impact Factory offers a wide range of Open Courses in Communication Skills, with dates scheduled throughout the year. Click below to find a course. Communication Skills Programmes Contact Us Impact Factory Suite 121, Business Design Centre, 52 Upper Street, London N1 0QH, UK Phone: +44 (0) 207 226 1877 FreePhone: 0808 1234 909 Fax: 020 7354 3504 E-mail enquiries@impactfactory.com	__label__pos	0.949046
A MAJOR campaign has been launched to educate tens of thousands of cyclists on how to avoid being crushed to death by left-turning HGVs on the streets of London. But what if the problem isn’t the cyclists but the lorry drivers? Most (all?) of the cyclists who have been killed by lorry drivers in London in the past year are not naïve novices but, as far as one can tell, highly experienced, cautious cyclists who are run down while cycling routes they use everyday. Where is the evidence that all those cyclists recently killed by left-turning lorry drivers wilfully undertook them? There is none, that I am aware of. So the whole thrust of this campaign is classic blaming the victim stuff. The Mayor's transport adviser, Kulveer Ranger, writes Six cyclists have died in collisions with lorries in the capital this year - five of them women. So, Kulveer Ranger, a senior figure at TfL, can’t even get the figures right. Seven cyclists have died this year, not six. Of course it’s hardly surprising that TfL can’t get the facts right when most news organisations don’t regard the regular killing of cyclists as in any way newsworthy. And the London Cycling Campaign (‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’) won’t mention them either, on the grounds that this might deter people from taking up cycling. The missing fatality is, of course, María Emma García Fernández, whose death failed to register on a single London or national news site and, bizarrely, was only recorded on this blog and two cycling discussion threads. A TfL study two years ago found that women are far more likely to be killed by a lorry because, unlike men, they tend to obey red lights and wait at junctions in the driver’s blind spot. Among those killed this year are Eilidh Cairns, 30, who died in a collision with a lorry at Notting Hill Gate in February. Now in the first place that’s the report which, as The Times revealed in 2007 was completed last July (2006) but has been kept secret. Which makes it three years ago, not two. Kulveer’s not very good with figures, is he? Secondly, juxtaposing those last two sentences is very misleading, because Eilidh Cairns was not killed by a left-turning lorry. Eilidh was on the right hand side of the lorry that killed her. No witnesses have come forward so we don’t know what happened; it’s possible that the lorry moved out from the left and ran her over from behind. The TfL campaign blathers about improving the relationship between cyclists and lorries. I never have a problem with inanimate objects. It’s lorry drivers who bother me. And there is a mountain of evidence to show that the road haulage industry is founded on widespread driver criminality, which both the government and the police turn a blind eye to. I am not interested in ‘improving my relationship’ with lorry drivers like this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one. I would much rather see them prosecuted for breaking the law. We will do much more because changing London into a cycling city is about changing the way we feel about cycling. The Mayor’s cycle revolution will make taking to two wheels easier, more accessible and enjoyable. But most importantly it must make it even safer. Which is where road traffic law enforcement comes in. A subject which remains out of the frame for TfL but which has been authoritatively addressed here. 'Velorution' is also unhappy with TfL's campaign	__label__pos	0.80313
Wind Energy: A Technology & Industry Primer Since the first wind plants over thirty years ago, there have been scarce educational and training opportunities for those considering work in the wind industry. The California Wind Energy Collaborative hopes to support the industry by meeting the classroom needs of the technicians, operators, engineers, and administrators of tomorrow’s wind plants and business offices. The course detailed here is nominally for technicians but is appropriate for business office personnel, decision makers, or anyone seeking a better understanding of the technology and science driving the wind industry. Overview Given over two full days, Wind Energy: A Technology & Industry Primer provides a comprehensive, technical foundation for those currently working or considering future work in the wind industry. Instead of replacing or duplicating on-the-job training, this course augments it by focusing on core fundamentals that traditionally aren’t covered, including aerodynamics, structural loads, and the engineering of power electronics and control systems. Topics such as grid integration of wind energy, environmental issues, and design of modern wind turbines will also be discussed. We believe that understanding these fundamental topics makes better technicians who are more aware in their working environment and more invested in their industry. Basic prior knowledge of the wind industry or with wind turbines and electrical systems is assumed. However, this course is also appropriate for anyone seeking a better understanding of wind energy. Date and Location No classes are currently scheduled. Curriculum The course is structured into the fourteen sessions outlined below. The sessions are taught by experts from industry and academia. Instructors include Mike Behnke (BEW Engineering, a DNV Company), Kevin Jackson (Dynamic Design Engineering), Eric Jacobson (Pacificos Energy), C.P. van Dam (UC Davis), and Rob Kamisky (UC Davis). Fifteen minute breaks are scheduled between each session, with a one hour break at midday for lunch. Lunch will be provided. Each student will receive a reader that includes the material presented in the course. The completion of this course does not make you a certified technician. You must be present to receive the reader material. Agenda Talks will begin at 8:00am. The order of the presentations is subject to change. Please check back periodically for updates. You can view the sample agenda here. Curriculum Details Each topic will be addressed in a straightforward manner, with an emphasis on practical information, examples, and illustrations. A brief summary of each topic is given below. Introduction and History The history of wind utilization is reviewed to develop an understanding of the different types of machines that have been developed to harness the wind, and how wind technology evolved from early medieval windmills and water pumps to modern utility scale turbines. Wind Characteristics and Resource Assessment An introduction to meteorology as it pertains to wind turbines will be presented. This includes topics such average wind speed versus gusts, turbulence and how the wind behaves in mountainous terrain. How anemometers measure wind and maintenance of common meteorological equipment will be discussed. Aerodynamics This topic explores how the wind interacts with a turbine rotor to turn a generator. Basic concepts such as lift and drag of an airfoil, and the amount of energy available in the wind will be considered. Pitch versus stall regulation of rotor speed will be discussed, as well as items such as the effect of blade contamination on rotor performance. Structures and Loads The source and magnitude of the structural loads on the different components of a wind turbine will be explored, from the rotor to the foundation. Both steady and cyclical forces will be considered, as well as concepts such as resonance, gyroscopic forces, and the sizing of wind turbine system components. Operation and Maintenance This hour will explore the engineering rationale behind maintenance procedures and will include a look at the tools used for plant and wind turbine operation and performance analysis. Safety and Training This hour will introduce site safety topics and also give an overview of other wind energy training options. Electrical Systems The electrical path from the generator to the power grid will be explained, including generation of electricity, power conditioning and conversion, SCADA, transformers, and high voltage connections. The interaction between the power grid and a turbine’s generator, and phenomenon such as turbine overspeed when disconnected from the grid will be discussed. Grid Integration With the cost of wind energy going down, more and larger wind plants are going up. This hour looks at the most contentious issues confronting the growth of the wind industry today: how wind generated electricity fits in with the rest of the electrical grid and the issues that keep grid operators up at night as they try to keep our lights on. Environmental and Site Issues Protecting equipment from wildlife, and wildlife from equipment, will be discussed including birds. The permitting process for a California wind farm will be explored, as well as issues such as noise and visual impacts of turbines. Issues such as exposure to electromagnetic radiation (EMR), aviation lighting requirements and lightning protection will be included. Questions If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to e-mail training@cwec.ucdavis.edu. Acknowledgements The California Wind Energy Collaborative is a partnership of the University of California and the California Energy Commission. This course is supported by the Energy Commission’s PIER program.	__label__pos	0.741282
I got stood up this week. Again. I showed up for a press conference with the rest of the press corps, only to watch a group of Australian dignitaries blow right past us. Local officials apologised sincerely and suggested an alternate time and location. We re-arranged our schedule and locked the time in, only to get a text hours later saying that it was taking place imminently, on the other end of town. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t take this personally. And I don’t intend to use column inches to settle petty grievances. The issue is that, in large things as well as small, when Australia’s priorities shift, the Pacific is expected to come along. Or not. We can pretty much take it or leave it. These days, officials don’t like to talk about donors and beneficiaries. They prefer to speak of development partners. Indeed, the Sustainable Development Goals create a different landscape to the one envisioned by the Millennium Development Goals that preceded them. The SDGs frame development in global terms; they don’t look at it as a bunch of rich countries helping their poorer cousins so much as everybody doing their part to improve the planet we all share. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But it’s a sad fact that, at a banquet, the person picking up the cheque is going to decide what’s on—or more importantly, what’s off—the menu. Throughout its history, Australia has always struggled to situate itself, philosophically, culturally and politically. Until recent generations, England was still ‘home’. Arguably, it wasn’t until Kevin Rudd acceded to the PM’s chair that Australia began to think of Asia as its neighbourhood. And just as arguably, it has yet to think of itself as a Pacific country. That hasn’t stopped it from playing an integral—and mostly positive—role in the development of its neighbouring countries. Its influence is as undeniable as it is essential. Australia gives more than most countries, and most of what it gives, it gives to its nearest neighbours. We’re grateful, make no mistake. The $35 million they dropped on Vanuatu in the wake of cyclone Pam is about 80% disbursed now. It made a lot of things possible that couldn’t even be contemplated before. Shortly after the cyclone, ANU researcher Matt Dornan explained the significance of the number. “Economic growth in 2015 is now forecast by the ADB to measure negative 0.5 percent of GDP, compared to the 4 percent growth forecast before the disaster. “This would mean that the economy’s output in 2015 is $4 million USD lower than in the previous year, when it had been forecast to be $33 million USD higher. “In other words, Vanuatu’s output in 2015 will be $37 million USD lower as a result of Pam than would otherwise have been the case.” Australia, in other words, pretty much filled our financial gap single-handedly. But that’s only if you measure the impact a certain way. Mr Dornan went on to argue that the cost was almost certain to be higher. “If we assume for a moment that damage in Vanuatu does equate to approximately 30 percent of GDP (I believe it will be higher), this is equivalent to $248 million USD. Add to this lower economic growth in 2015 to the tune of $37 million USD, and we have a total economic cost associated with Cyclone Pam of $285 million USD. This figure dwarfs the response from development partners.” He concludes with an important footnote: “these studies… are not concerned with economic welfare. Despite the frequent conflation of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with well-being, they are not the same….” A smattering of work has been done to measure well-being, as Mr Dornan calls it, but until VANUATU 2030, our national sustainable development plan, was authored, we didn’t really have a development framework capable of conceiving of our national improvement in any terms except economic ones. And it’s that bottom-line approach that is the cause of much of Australia’s reputation for vagary and wilfulness. Small but strategically important programmes are regularly under- or even de-funded because of a failure to understand—or perhaps an inability to measure—their disproportionate impacts. It’s far easier for a minister to blow right by a Pacific islands journalist than, for example, an ABC or Fairfax reporter. Likewise, it’s far easier for Australia to reduce funding for PacLII than it is to drop support for its own legal-justice system. And it’s easier for ABC to make cuts to shortwave broadcasting than to its mainstream domestic broadcasting services. These cuts have a disproportionately large impact on the most vulnerable populations. But they’re small dollar items, and often are impossible to justify even on a cost-recovery basis. They seem to be inefficient and they serve only marginal communities. But something that seems to have escaped Australia throughout its post-colonisation history is it quite literally lives on the margin. It is a continental land mass surrounded by the geographical equivalent of cake sprinkles on a vast ocean. Australia outweighs its Pacific island neighbours in every quantum: Population, landmass, economic activity, resource base. So it’s natural, I suppose, that its own concerns should weigh more heavily. They always have. It’s not really a partisan issue, or even a policy issue. It’s just the way they see their world. But that doesn’t make it right, and it certainly doesn’t make it good. Australia invests tens of millions in law and justice programmes throughout the Pacific, yet it seems perfectly at home with underfunding a programme that is integral to access to the law. The ABC holds itself up—rightly—as a paragon in public broadcasting, but doesn’t think about its constituency beyond suburbia. Even before axing its shortwave transmissions, the ABC has consistently and methodically reduced its coverage of Pacific island issues, and the negative effects of this are far-reaching. Not only is Australia’s democratising influence reduced, but its national sense of neighbourhood is becoming increasing ill-defined. As the ABC portrays it, Australia is an island in a vast, empty ocean. And it’s that day-to-day obliviousness that allows decision-makers in Canberra to make policy decisions whose impact never registers with them. They act with impunity, because they never see the results. And those results are sometimes dire. As I write this, a Honiara resident is writing that large aftershocks from yesterday’s earthquake are causing the staircase in their building to crumble. Happily, ABC’s shortwave service is still operating. Until the end of January at least. The income tax deployment, whose timing was largely dictated abroad, was nearly disastrous for us. Ultimately, it only served to open the door for more political turmoil at a time when Vanuatu is still reeling from successive shocks. I could find a dozen more examples, but the point is made. In fairness to the current government, foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop has demonstrated more nuance and engagement with the Pacific than virtually any other. She is proof that women have a place in politics and leadership—an invaluable lesson in most Pacific countries. But leaders should know they have to listen to the least of the led. It’s not just the right thing to do; it’s their duty.	__label__pos	0.978086
By JEFF KAROUB, Associated Press LANSING (AP) – A Republican-led state House panel approved a proposed replacement Thursday for an emergency manager law rejected by Michigan voters, despite concerns of critics who argued the process was rushed and the legislation subverts the will of the electorate. The House Local, Intergovernmental and Regional Affairs Committee voted 9-5 along party lines, with one abstention, on what’s known as The Local Financial Stability and Choice Act. The legislation now goes to the full House for consideration. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and legislative leaders unveiled the plan late Wednesday. The plan gives four choices to communities and school districts found to be in a financial emergency: accept an emergency manager, Chapter 9 bankruptcy, a mediation plan the state describes as a “neutral evaluation process” or a consent agreement with the state similar to the one in Detroit. As with the rejected law, the manager would have the power to change or cancel contracts, but local officials also could develop an alternative plan provided it generates equal financial savings. Should a local government choose an emergency manager, the state would pay for the manager, and local officials would have the option of removing the manager after one year and with a two-thirds vote of its governing body. The governor and leaders of the GOP-controlled Legislature sought a quick replacement to the law voters decisively rejected in November. The state has been operating since under a previous law that gives managers fewer powers, but leaders argue it’s inadequate to deal with failing cities or schools. State Treasury officials argued Thursday that the law now being used doesn’t allow the state-appointed manager to make any changes to the cost structure of a struggling local government. The proposed replacement retains many elements of the rejected law but “injects a great deal of choice to local units of government,” Howard Ryan, the department’s director of legislative affairs, said Thursday. “This is a much more sophisticated process than we had before,” Ryan said. Detroit Democratic Rep. Maureen Stapleton said she doesn’t deny the financial crisis facing many cities, including hers, but she said such legislation punishes those communities because of factors outside their control, including the recent economic downturn and disappearing state funds. “We’re using sticks instead of carrots to fix it,” she said. The leader for Stand Up for Democracy, the coalition that turned in more than 200,000 signatures to get the referendum on the ballot, said he was shocked to hear about the proposed alternative. Brandon Jessup said his group met recently with a Snyder administration official and offered several recommendations, including mediation as a first option, but nothing came of it. He first saw the proposal late last night. “(The legislation) does not represent the will … of voters,” he said. The proposal was announced the same day that Michigan Treasurer Andy Dillon said he’ll likely order a review of Detroit’s municipal finances, a 30-day process that could lead to a state takeover of its largest city that’s deep in debt and has a budget deficit of more than $200 million. Emergency managers are in place in Benton Harbor, Ecorse, Flint, Pontiac and Allen Park, as well as in the Muskegon Heights, Highland Park and Detroit school districts. (© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)	__label__pos	0.903523
Andrea LupoLupo Interiors Rochester Hills, MI (248) 930-0204 www.lupointeriors.com Andrea Lupo is a graduate of the College for Creative Studies with a BFA in Interior Design and is the owner and principal at Lupo Interiors, an interior design company located here in metro Detroit. She has been working in the field of interiors for 13 years, with a primary focus on residential kitchen and bath design, though she works on a wide range of projects from paint selection to whole-house remodels. De-clutter Sift through old and unwanted items that are taking over your space. Donate extra items to a great charity that will put them to good use or sell them for cash in your pocket. Simply cleaning up and organizing an existing space can help to see it in a fresh way. Rearrange Use what you’ve got. Try to think of the space in a new way by checking out websites or magazines that show similar room size or shape to get inspired. For example, place your main pieces against a new wall or pull them away from the walls altogether. Reorganize your decor or minimize it if needed. Arrange like items according to color into groupings for added interest. Paint Changing the overall color throughout a room or in an entire home will update a space with minimal investment and maximum impact. Be sure to include the ceiling and to not leave it basic white. A slight color change on the ceiling will help control the overall feel of the space. Paint a piece of furniture to give it a fresh new look. Go Big Add or update artwork and decor with larger-scaled items. Many times, the artwork and accessories on walls, mantles or in arrangements are too small for the space. Consider larger pieces (and less of them) as they help anchor a space without a lot of fussy details. It’s also a great way to add personality and life to a space where it might have been lacking. Hire A Designer Many interior designers will work with clients on a consultation basis and give input as to specific ways to impact your space for an hour or two of their time. This is a minimal investment considering that prior to tackling a renovation, no matter the scale, they can help with organizing and planning. Once the plan is in place, a client can go at their own pace to invest in pieces as they are ready. For larger, more permanent changes to a space, the designer will help to educate the client on the products available that will be the best fit for what the client would like to invest. Designers typically partner with others in the industry and many times can extend a slight discount for products and services when purchased through them. Michael Ferro is freelance writer and a graduate of Michigan State University where he majored in Creative Writing and received the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award. Born and bred in Detroit, he currently resides in Ypsilanti Township. Additional writing can be found at Examiner.com.	__label__pos	0.96354
This report presents analysis of a database of global geothermal drilling success. The database, compiled by IFC, covers geothermal fields that together supply power to 71 percent of the world's installed geothermal electricity generating capacity, making it the largest database of its kind. ... See More + This report analyzes that data to gain a better understanding of the probability of drilling a successful well, and the factors that influence such success, which will be of interest to geothermal developers, and to financers engaged in the risk assessment of such projects. The core objective of this project was to develop a sufficiently large database to allow statistically significant conclusions to be drawn on the success rates of geothermal wells worldwide (expressed as the number of successful wells developed as a proportion of total wells drilled in any given field). This report seeks to assess the extent of any improvements in well success rates, and how far the likelihood of success increases as a developer learns more about any specific resource. For more publications on IFC Sustainability please visit www.ifc.org/sustainabilitypublications. See Less - Other Environmental Study 78230 JUN 01, 2013 Allen, Mike; Avato,Patrick Alexander; Gehringer,Magnus; GeothermEx; Harding-Newman,Tom; Levin,Jeremy; Loksha,Victor B.; Meng,Zhengjia; Moin,Sonia; Morrow, James; Oduolowu,Akin O.; Pantelias,Alexios; Sanyal,Subir Kumar Disclosed Title Document Date Report No. Document Type Also available in Success of geothermal wells : a global study (English) See More + JUN 01, 2013 78230 Other Environmental Study	__label__pos	0.885001
We examine how owners of productive resources (e.g., public enterprises or financial capital) optimally allocate their resources among wealth-constrained operators of unknown ability. Optimal allocations exhibit: (1) shared enterprise profit - the resource owner always shares the operator's profit; (2) dispersed enterprise ownership -resources are widely distributed among operators of varying ability; (3) limited benefits of competition - the owner may not benefit from increased competition for the resource; and, sometimes, (4) diluted incentives for the most capable - more capable operators receive smaller shares of the returns they generate. Implications for privatizations and venture capital arrangements are explored. (JEL D82, D44, D20). Citation: American Economic Review, 2000, 90 (4), pp. 944 - 960	__label__pos	0.912591
My father has a lot of interesting hobbies. One of those is collecting minerals and gemstones, many of them in their rough form. I saw some jagged purple and white striped stones in his collection and it surprised to learn it was amethyst. In order to polish stones, the rough rocks – like jasper, agate, and amethyst – are placed inside a rock tumbler barrel. Then, you add course grit, which is harder than the rocks being tumbled, and water. As the rock tumbler turns, the grit and water rounds the sharp edges off the rocks. Then the rocks are tumbled with medium grit and finally fine grit. Each step means the edges of the rocks become smoother and smoother. This gives the rock a shiny surface and bright color. The tumbling process transforms a rough stone into a beautiful specimen. What brings out the best in us? Have you met someone who is “rough around the edges”? This person can be described as “unsophisticated” or “unpolished.” They don’t always understand social cues or say the wrong things. While these individuals have some wonderful traits – like honesty, genuine curiosity, and a “take me as I am” attitude, it takes a lot of patience to deal with someone who is a bit rough. Rough Around the Edges A “rough” person that comes to mind is the pastor’s wife at a church I used to attend. (Let’s call her Sharon.) Sharon had lived a hard life and became a Christian when she was in her 40s. Sharon had a difficult start at the church because she didn’t understand her role as pastor’s wife. A gentle soul who played the piano on Sundays and cuddled fussy babies? Nope. She was often abrasive in church business meetings, had words with the parent of a reckless toddler, and cursed when she burned the coffee. Over time, a transformation took place. Sharon grew in her spiritual life as she spent more time in the Word, fellowshipped with believers, and supported her husband. Sharon would listen carefully to others’ points of view before she disagreed with them. She wasn’t the most musically talented person, but she began singing with the choir. The church congregation gradually changed, too. They were more patient with Sharon. Some of the older ladies were helpful in helping Sharon navigate her role. Proverbs 27:17 “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Getting to know Sharon and seeing the changes in her has helped me understand Proverbs 27:17. The “rough” parts of our personalities will be at odds with others. We don’t get along with everyone, but we have to make accommodations. Those folks you don’t necessarily see eye to eye with in your Sunday school class? Think about how you can grow by listening to their point of view. Those neighbors that get under your skin? Ask God to help you love them as He loves them. Personal growth is rarely pleasant, but it can be more bearable when you think about how spiritual growth will benefit you in the long run. [Featured image from Hobbits, Horses, and Handcrafts]	__label__pos	0.970341
Your baby is crying and you don't know why! If only he could tell you what was wrong... Let me show you how they can! These are just a few of the benefits of teaching your child sign language: You would be surprised at how often knowing sign language really comes in handy for both you and your child! Studies have shown that babies who learned sign as infants had a higher IQ overall than babies who didn't learn sign. Signing with your child provides a unique bonding experience between you and your child. Signing opens the doors to wonderful friendships with those who use ASL as their primary language. Signing is FUN for the whole family!!!!! Signing in the classroom has led to improved math scores among students. Signing helps promote self-esteem in children. Learning sign language at an early age helps develop the brain in the critical early years of language development. Babies who can communicate through sign are often much happier babies and toddlers which translates into a happier YOU! Here are just some of the amazing secrets, tips & techniques this ebook will teach you: Learn the benefits of learning sign language to music Learn how children make the transitions from gestures to signs to speech Learn how to teach your child Sign Language in a natural environment! Learn the advantages of learning American Sign Language rather than inventing your own signs Dispel any fears that sign language may delay speech development and find out why the opposite is actually true! Learn how Sign Language can promote self-esteem in your child! Learn the benefits of utilizing sign language in children who have speech-delays or special needs. Learn how you can communicate with your baby much earlier than you would if you simply wait for him to learn how to talk Learn how sign language develops the brain and has actually been linked to a higher IQ in children! Learn how to use sign language to develop reading skills Find out how you can greatly reduce your child's frustrations and tantrums! Discover the best time to start signing to your baby Learn how to reduce the noise level in your home or classroom!	__label__pos	0.897701
In recent times, on his show Hardball, Chris Matthews has called the Republican member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, a “balloon head”, “pretty close to a nut case”, and has accused her, facetiously I assume, of being hypnotized. This criticism is not at all helpful. I admit I have not watched nearly as much Fox News as I have MSNBC. But judging from those admittedly unequal samplings, it appears that the MSNBC approach is to call the other side on the lack of factual underpinnings for their ideologically driven assertions. The other side fights back less with evidence-based counter-arguments than with moral indignation and insinuating labeling, the “umbrella” accusation being that the president – and, by association, his supporters – is not “one of us.” That, basically, is the primary distinction. One side fights with factual evidence; the other, with name-calling. (Full disclosure: I’m with the evidence-based crowd.) Now, however, it’s getting muddy, because here’s Chris Matthews, the, generally, facts-arguing commentator, Resorting to name-calling. This is, as mentioned, not helpful. And here’s why. First of all, those of us who are longstanding residents of the fact-based community are now legitimately vulnerable to the oft-heard schoolyard taunt: “They do it too.” It is easily provable – by counting – that one side “does it” considerably more often than the other. But even so, it’s Goodbye moral high ground. Secondly, notwithstanding the fact that Bachmann’s questionable assertions – for example, that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery when they didn’t – earned her the epithet “balloon head”, Matthews ignores the fact that Bachmann’s calculated pronouncements make perfect, persuasive and energizing sense to the audience she was speaking to. Third – and this one’s tied to “second” – Matthews – representing “the enemy” – allotting considerable airtime for his, arguably, unhinged and, inarguably, disrespectful assault on Bachmann, increases Bachmann’s legitimacy and stature. Nobody attacks a “nobody.” Which, by definition, validates Representative Bachmann as a powerfully emerging “somebody.” Fourthly, it’s not real classy attacking a woman. And for a liberal, doing so in terms, to which men who make similar assertions to Bachmann’s are generally immune, Matthews’ remarks seem embarrassingly hypocritical. I suppose it can be statistically determined whether name-calling works as a strategy for energizing support from your political base. I suspect that it does. Emotion stirs up the blood. And propels the stirred-up to the polls. But personal attacks also broaden and deepen the political divide, making it even harder – it’s already crazy hard due to the way our political system is structured – for the men and women sent to Washington to work together to find answers to our most urgent and difficult national concerns. Their stirred-up constituents will simply not permit it. I know using intemperate language is about ratings. I know it’s about gamesmanship. I know it’s about gaining the strategic upper hand any way you can. The thing is, beyond show business and the “down and dirty” of political combat, there’s something real going on here. Real people in this country need actual help. Real problems need thoughtfully considered solutions. Real injustices need to be reversed. And real changes need to be considered, so that government can do what it was meant to do creatively, productively, responsibly and efficiently. For these essential things to happen, the least helpful approach I can imagine is name-calling. My “facts based” team used to understand that. But apparently they’ve forgotten.	__label__pos	0.999409
The great debate about how badly polarised we are as a multiracial nation is still continuing and for all practical purposes many have come up with the idea of a Satu Sekolah Untuk Semua system which will ensure that our children will not be segregated when they are still young. Segregating our young from primary school is a sure fire way to ensure polarisation when they are adults, because people who grow up without knowing each others' culture and religion even the official language Bahasa Melayu are cursed to grow up feeling alien to each other. I like to quote from Dr. Farish Noor: " The fact that there remain Malaysians who are nominal citizens, who don’t even speak a word of the national language, is a glaring anomaly that would not be tolerated anywhere else. Even in countries like Australia, New Zealand or Canada, migrants are expected to learn the language of the nation in order to be part of it. And as the linguist’s joke goes: even if we hate and curse each other, let us curse each other in the same language at least! The problem for Malaysia, however, is that for a long time linguistic diversity has been elevated to the status of a near-sacred taboo that cannot be touched. To even question the need for vernacular education leads one to being accused of political incorrectness of the highest order. Conversely, there are also those who insist that the national language ought to be claimed as the language of one, and only one community, and referred to as Bahasa Melayu instead. But this denies the reality that it is the national language — Bahasa Malaysia — and ought to be claimed by all Malaysian citizens, regardless of their ethnic origins. Unless and until the policy-makers have the political will to impress upon the nation the fact that Bahasa Malaysia is the language of all Malaysians, and that we need to have one education system that accommodates, represents and includes all communities, we will remain a nation divided into linguistic ghettos of our own making. That path leads not to peace, but only mutual ignorance of each other; and the fact that we — as a nation — will sink or swim together, even if we cannot communicate with our neighbours next door." Source here. Many especially the Chinese from political parties to their NGOs has spoken up for vernacular schools even the Prime Minister has spoken but to me it will not help with Malaysia's unity if our young study in different schools and never meet each other until they are adults by which time it would be close to impossible to change the way we look at each other through racially prejudiced eyes. The sense of trust and common bonding will not be there if at all. Here is another article by a lawyer presumably due to its long winded write, but the article actually boils down to the core matter of defending the vernacular school for its supposedly higher quality education and treating the Sekolah Kebangsaan education with contempt with no statistics to prove that the vernacular schools are of better quality. Read:Vernacular education in Malaysia — Zhi Wei Lee (www.loyarburok.com) I have an alternate view of Zhi Wei Lee's essay though, I think his is a good challenge for the Kementerian Pelajaran to show that the Sekolah Kebangsaan are equal if not better than the vernacular schools. Good grades are not everything. It must be remembered however that unlike vernacular schools with its inherent biased emphasis on teaching/exam oriented subjects, the Sekolah Kebangsaan has come up with a balanced approach i.e emphasis on Studies plus Sports plus Co Curriculum, so that it will produce students who are more balanced and equipped to face the adult world and help in nation building. To make the Sekolah Kebangsaan more attractive to all Malaysians I believe it is best that the BN Gomen make another thorough review of the cancellation of the teaching of Maths and Science in English (PPSMI) and revert to what would be the final puzzle to Malaysia's holistic education need without of course compromising on the official position of our Bahasa Melayu. Gomen no need to worry about making a flip flop decision on the PPSMI as this is one flip flop which the majority rakyat will support. Once the Sekolah Kebangsaan position is strengthened by the PPSMI, the transition to a Satu Sekolah Untuk Semua system will be met with a lot less resistance. Thank You.	__label__pos	0.981767
International Macroeconomics The module introduces the fundamentals of international macroeconomics in particular as they impact on the business world. After a brief review of the basic economic aggregates and their measurement students are introduced to the main aggregative macroeconomic models in both the neoclassical and Keynesian traditions and then to the extension of these in a interdependent world economy. The fundamentals of monetary economics and banking are studied as a prelude to the discussion of the role of finance in the world economy, irrationality and asset price bubbles, financial cycles and financial crises. A review of the potential role for government policy in the world macroeconomic arena concludes the course. Geopolitics This course will examine the different facets of geopolitics by focusing on the major determinants of geography, power, history and structure of the international system, and culture. We will also answer a fundamental question about how nation-states use their geographical position and power to promote their national interests, expand their sphere of influence and ultimately achieve hegemony. One of our debates will concern the relevance of the nation-state in the context of globalization and the inevitable rise of stateless protagonists such as NGOs and terrorist groups.	__label__pos	0.948004
The end of March and the first part of April have certainly been the "lion" as opposed to the "lamb" when it comes to weather. Those few, and I mean FEW, days of warm temperatures, rain and wind opened the lakes much earlier than last year. If that wouldn't have happened, I bet we would still have ice-covered lakes. That's the good news! However, Mother Nature did send us a few of her quirks, like jamming huge chunks of ice in several spots along the shores of Big Spirit. That put dock building and hoist setting on hold for a while. Plus, West Okoboji just wouldn't quite open up. It wasn't until Friday that the lake was finally free of all the ice. The other lakes in the chain and Center Lake had lots of dock and hoist work going on by the end of March. Of course, we had our brush with a big blizzard that just didn't quite come together here. As I travel around the lakes, it's good to see water running into Big Spirit and some water going over the spillway into East Okoboji. It's always good to see the lakes full in the spring, because we know what summer can bring. The DNR's walleye gill netting should get going earlier than last year's April 16 date. Plans are for the netting to maybe begin this week if we can get water temperatures to rise. Once netting begins, it will last between 1-2 weeks. During the seining operation, the Fish Hatchery will be open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. The public is invited to visit the hatchery during those hours and take a self-guided tour of the spawning operation. For groups that might want a guided tour, contact Wendy Sander at 712-336-1840. With the early ice-out, we're all looking forward to The Annual Great Walleye Weekend scheduled for May 2 and 3. The walleye opener is part of a two-day fishing tournament that benefits Easter Seals that last year raised over $17,000 with proceeds supporting Easter Seals programs for residents in Dickinson County and the surrounding area who have a disability. The action officially begins at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, May 2, and concludes with an awards ceremony and barbecue on Sunday, May 3 at the Dickinson County Expo Building. The big prize of $10,000 goes to the individual who catches one of the six specially tagged walleyes released in the area lakes just prior to the event. However, if more than one tagged walleye is taken, the $10,000 is equally divided. Additionally, 18 other tagged fish are released, each with cash or merchandise awards assigned to them if caught. Anglers who catch a tagged fish can report to any Lakes Area bait shop for confirmation. So, what will the fishing be like? According to DNR fisheries biologist Mike Hawkins, Big Spirit continues to have a strong year class of 15-20 inch fish coming through the system with many of them now recruited into the slot limit. With the slot limit in place on the entire Iowa Great Lakes chain, there is no minimum length limit and anglers are now able to keep walleyes below that 17-inch slot. Any walleyes taken between 17-22 inches must be immediately released with only one walleye over 22 inches per day. Spirit Lake, of course, seems to be the popular walleye lake and will most likely see the most angling pressure. The numbers are good and the baitfish, especially the spottail shiners, are in excellent shape. At the same time, the 2007-year class is potentially the next big year class. Now in that 10-12 inch length, these will be the most aggressive biters. According to Hawkins, it usually takes four years for a year class to reach that 14-inch length that used to be the minimum length limit. Now, these fish can be kept with the idea that this will help recruit the year class grow more quickly. According to Hawkins, the broodstock is good on East Okoboji. One of the interesting data pieces collected by the DNR is that many of the broodstock collected for spawning actually migrates from West Okoboji to the warmer waters in the rest of the chain. Hawkins also noted that East Okoboji and West Okoboji also have a good 2007-year class coming. Typically, the May fishing on East Okoboji deals with a lot of small fish. The West Okoboji walleye population is good but, of course, catching walleyes during the day on West Okoboji is always tough because of its water clarity. In recent years, the DNR has stocked West Okoboji with a significant number of 8-10 inch fish. This should mean we will see these fish recruited to catchable size sooner. So, things look good. Now we just need some help from Mother Nature to get the water temperature up and the fish to be ready for opener as much as the anglers will be! If you are looking for a little fishing information, check with local bait shops such as Oh Shucks Bait and Tackle on the southwest side of West Okoboji, Stan's Bait and Tackle at the north edge of Milford, Fisherman's Factory Outlet, Kabele's Trading Post and Pioneer Beach Resort all in the town of Spirit Lake.	__label__pos	0.887471
You were worried about acid rain? Short for "Lava Haze", is a mist produced when molten lava flows into the sea, such as Kilauea's ongoing lava flow into the Pacific Ocean off the east coast of the Big Island of Hawai'i. But it's not a mist you would want to run your boat through, as it is composed primarily of hydrochloric acid. laze Laze is produced by chemical reactions in seawater vaporized by the lava's heat. Steam (H 2O) at 1200° F reacts with the chloride salts normally found in seawater (such as NaCl, CaCl 2, and MgCl 2), producing HCl and metal oxides. HCl mixed with residual steam escapes into the air and cools, forming a corrosive mist. The HCl can become more concentrated (10-15 ppm) than your own stomach acid, with a pH of 1.5-2. So if you're visiting the site of an active volcano and you see what looks like fog, stay clear. Another hazard of boiling water is its reduced buoyancy, so make sure your tour boat operator stays clear.	__label__pos	0.971571
“Because everything can be reduced to an infographic!” —Guy Kawasaki When it comes to infographic resumes, the critics haven’t entirely weighed in yet. Commenters on posts predicting infographics as the resumes of the future point out the difficulty of reading some infographics. Not to mention the fact that certain industries, like accounting and business, may not appreciate the creativity preferring the straight up, cut-to-the-chase resume. So, what are the latest thoughts on the infographic resume, and how can you adapt them to your needs? Here I’ll review the evolution of resume to infographic and suggest some creative ways to put the current resume infographic to work for you. The Resume in Review, Infographic or Otherwise Websites offering career tips and advice about resumes far and wide have pounced on the “History of the Resume” chronology, compiled by Todd Lempicke on Optimal Resume, as the best condensed history of the resume . Lempicke attributes the first recorded resume to Leonardo da Vinci. Marc Cendella (of TheLadders.com) actually provides us with a picture of the original document and a translation. Highlights of da Vinci’s personal summary include his ability to build bridges and fighting machines in times of war and sculpture in times of peace. Da Vinci definitely marketed himself well in his self-introductory letter to the Duke of Milan. Letters of introduction, like da Vinci’s, then morphed into the more formal and somewhat less personal resume we know today, which became standardized in the 1950s. From that point on technology began offering more options for personal marketing: VHS portfolios, resume transmission by fax machine, email, YouTube videos, and the infographic. The infographic resume really garnered attention, however, when Christopher J. Spurlock’s version was posted on the HuffPost College blog and went viral. Spurlock wanted to work with journalism visualization and soon after his infographic went viral he was was offered a job at the Huffington Post as an infographics design editor (he started in May 2011, according to his current infographic resume). You Are Here: The Resume Infographic Now Most recently, the launch of the resume-infographic generator vizualize.me has brought this resume format once again front and center. The hook here is that we, as users, can participate. Give visualize.me permission to access your LinkedIn account and it will arrange that info into a brightly colored graphic rendition of your previously text-only profile (don’t worry, you can calm those colors down a little). Another, though lesser known, resume-infographic generator is re.vu, also recently launched. Re.vu has the added benefit of an analytics generator that tracks data, like the number of hits your infographic receives and the amount of time visitors spend looking at it. Both of these sites offer visually attractive depictions of your life history—you may even see yourself in a different way then you have before. Other options for creating your resume infographic aren’t quite so easy: put your Illustrator and Photoshop skills to work or hire a graphic designer. But the real question about resume infographics is where can they take us? Putting That Data Visualization to Work for You On the crest of Chris Spurlock’s infographic wave, Elana Zak, for mediabistro.com, listed three reasons why you should consider an infographic resume: “1) It demonstrates you “get” multimedia, 2) It shows you’re more than just a writer, 3) It illustrates your creativity.” Though some recruiters and interviewers may not consider you serious if you offer up an infographic resume, posting one alongside your LinkedIn or Google+ profile certainly can’t hurt you. It may draw others to your profile, extending your networking reach. As re.vu says on its website: “Don’t send a resume. Share your story.” Perhaps greater words were never spoken, at least in the marketing industry! Stretch that Resume Infographic Idea a Little Further There are other ways to apply the concept of the infographic resume. What if you work for a fresh start-up eager to establish their reputation? Consider an infographic—a business-history infographic. Posting this visual description of your business history on your about us page is far more likely to attract attention than a few paragraphs of dry copywriting. Are you also presenting bios of your founders? How about bio-infographics? Those are sure to highlight the experience they possess and their skill set. A well designed infographic does have the potential to go viral. Finally, consider your client pitch. Could you incorporate some data visualization? Perhaps of the audience you and/or your client are targeting? So, between the continuing popularity of eye-catching infographics and the visual/viral nature of the web, the resume infographic has many applications, all of which can be taken into the future. Though they may have to accompany some traditional resumes rather than replace them, the resume infographic is a trend that foreshadows the future because one thing is certain: the way we consume data is changing, fast.	__label__pos	0.984934
By Gordon Gray, Director of Fiscal Policy at the American Action Forum It has been asserted as fact that the negotiations that produced the 2011 “What happened in 2011 is that Republicans in Congress demanded – said they would let America default for the first time in its history if they did not get the items on their agenda. That was consequential and it was unprecedented, and the result was bad for everyone.” -- White House Press Secretary Jay Carney Budget Control Act, which increased the debt limit in exchange for spending reduction, were unique. This assertion has been deployed by the administration to paint Republicans as irresponsible and to advance an argument that Congress should cede its authority over the debt limit. But history has shown that debt limit debates produce a legislative rarity – bipartisan deficit reduction. A review of past debt limit increases suggests that the August 2011 debate was neither unprecedented nor irresponsible, but rather it shared key characteristics with the debt limit debate of the mid-1990s. This debate equaled, if not exceeded the rancor and stretched the technical capacity of the Treasury’s ability to avoid default. Of note, it also preceded a period of fiscal surplus that saw a $450 billion increase in borrowing authority suffice without increase for 59 months. A Legislative History of Debt Limit Increases The Debt Limit In Context There are several unique aspects of this legislative experience. The first of which is the April 6, 1993 temporary increase in the limit, which would have seen the Treasury’s borrowing authority snap back to $4,145 billion after September 30th of that year. It is unclear how such a reversion would have been resolved if it had been allowed to transpire, but such an eventuality certainly would have threatened potential default on tranches of debt coming due after September 30th. The April 6th measure is the last time the United States enacted a temporary increase in Treasury’s overall borrowing authority. Another key feature, and one also not seen since, is the pair of temporary exemptions in borrowing needed to liquidate Social Security obligations. These measures reflect the degree to which the United States had reached its technical borrowing limit. If these measures had not been put in place the United States could have missed the timely payment of Social Security benefits or risked default on other elements of Treasury’s debt portfolio. During this same period, the Secretary of the Treasury exercised extraordinary powers to operate under the debt ceiling without breach. Outside observers were also noted the great uncertainty that attached to this episode of executive-legislative tug of war. Both Fitch and Moody’s placed certain tranches of Treasury debt on review for downgrade – a significant precedent at the time. The adversarial dynamic that existed between the Republican Congress and the Clinton administration at the time equaled or perhaps exceeded the degree of hostility that currently prevails. In addition to the two well-known government shutdowns, President Clinton vetoed 10 bills sent by the Congress, including a debt limit bill. Several distinctions emerged from the resolution of the debt-limit confrontation of the mid to late 1990s that should inform any assessment of current and looming debt limit negotiations. These debates are messy, but should serve as rare catalysts for policymakers to acknowledge minority views and establish a framework for the difficult task of deficit reduction. The 2011 debate reflects these characteristics. President Obama had super-majorities in both chambers of Congress for two years of his presidency. But once that partisan advantage was gone in 2011, he could not expect to sign into law a clean debt-limit increase passed along near pure party lines (George Voinovich and Evan Bayh essentially swapped votes) as he did after the Congress increased the debt limit on Christmas Eve in 2009. Rather, the debt limit debate of 2011 required the president to acknowledge the opposition party – and the debt crisis – in a way that he had not since taking office. The result, while certainly produced through an imperfect process, was the first meaningful deficit reduction discussion of the Obama presidency. Gordon Gray currently serves as the Director of Fiscal Policy at the American Action Forum (AAF). Prior to joining AAF, Gray served as senior policy advisor to Senator Rob Portman and as policy director on the Senator's campaign. Gray has also worked for the Senate Budget Committee as professional staff and before that was deputy director of domestic and economic policy for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. Gray also spent several years with the American Enterprise Institute. Politics & Government Debt American Action Forum Congress	__label__pos	0.85676
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports that 77 percent of the U.S. population has adequate access to exercise opportunities. According to the study, the top 10 percent of counties had accessibility levels of 85 percent or greater. Statewide access varied from 46 percent in Mississippi to 91 percent in Maryland, with 100 percent of District of Columbia residents having access. Greater access to exercise opportunities occurred in northeastern and western states compared with southwestern and southeastern states. Continued at MedicalNewsToday>>	__label__pos	0.997345
It must suck to be a wealth advisor in "North America's Siberia," home to two of the country's ten poorest counties. Unless you find a way to woo the 1 percent of the 1 percent away from Pacific Heights and the Upper East Side. A branch of Chicago's Pritzker family rents space here, down the hall from the Minnesota clan that controls the Radisson hotel chain, and other rooms held by Miami and Hong Kong money. Don't look for any heiresses in this former five-and-dime. Most days, the small offices that represent these families are shut. Even empty, they provide their owners with an important asset: a South Dakota address for their trust funds. As Bloomberg's Zachary Mider reports, you don't even need to splurge on a stately prairie lodge to secure a legacy for your heirs—you just need a P.O. box in this largely unseen mole in the small of America's back. Most of America's huge financial families have done just that: Businesses in McDowell's building alone manage $89 billion worth of trusts, all told—for owners of TGI Friday's and Hyatt hotels, executives from Monster Beverage Co., and the Wrigley family, among others. How'd this happen? You see, under the "ancient...Anglo-American" rules of primogeniture, dating back to an English court ruling in 1681, a wealthy noble could shelter some dough in a trust for his heirs, but only for the lifespan of his heirs, plus 21 years. Screw that socialist overregulation, said America's frontier jurists! South Dakota repealed that rule in 1983, and unlike Idaho and Wisconsin — the other two states without the provision — it had no income tax. So, McDowell wrote, a trust set up here could shield a big fortune from taxes for centuries, escaping tax bills as it hands out cash to great-great-great-grandchildren and beyond. The advantage of dynasty trusts is that they shield a family's wealth forever. But the home of Mount Rushmore has plenty more to recommend itself to the monied—or, to their money, anyway: The dynasty trust isn't South Dakota's only lure. Another attraction, for customers in places like New York and Massachusetts, is the chance to shelter their investments from income taxes in their home states… Still others are drawn to South Dakota's iron-clad secrecy, and protections of trust assets from creditors and ex-wives. What's a scheme like this do for society? As little as possible. It shelters billionaires' castles and investments from federal taxes in ways John Q. Public can't shelter his meager take-home paycheck. Even South Dakota doesn't see much tax revenue from all this financial activity. And the entire multi-billion-dollar system creates fewer jobs for South Dakotans than a single Walmart.	__label__pos	0.877793
I had the privilege of hearing a passionate Executive Director speak last night. He talked about how his organization has realized that they can’t just keep doing the same old work any longer – they must work to eliminate the problem before it occurs. He spoke about how they are doing that and the lives that are being changed because of it. I found myself very quickly and easily being pulled into the importance of their work. Passion is a cornerstone of successful fundraising. It’s what differentiates the successful nonprofits from those mediocre groups that barely creep along. Passion brings with it vision and purpose. And it engages donors and prospects in your organization’s mission. Without passion, fundraising is boring to both you and your donor. If you’re not passionate about the work you are doing to help fulfill your organization’s mission, I suggest you do a gut-check. Is it time to move on? Or is it time to step up and bring your ‘A’ game to your work? I suggest you go spend some time on the front lines of your nonprofit so you can reconnect with the reasons why you care.	__label__pos	0.999882
Why You Must Encourage Family Days Out There are lots of parents who are more likely to spend their time at work and lesser time with their children due to burdensome and stressful work schedule as well as lack of finances. Previous researchers suggest that families of today spend as little as 49 minutes per day together. Family days out could provide lots of benefits for each and every member of the family whether you believe it or not. Below, I have cited some benefits that you and your family can enjoy when engaging in such activity. Create family bonds – your family is basically your first support network and you can create a sense of security by strengthening your bond with them. With this, everyone would be connected emotionally to each other and prevent arguments to take place. Improving academic performance – the beauty of having family days out is the fact that it is packed with opportunities to learn and new experiences. Getting your children to be interested in nature, science, history, reading and so on could have a huge impact on how they are going to cope up with their academics. Your children will see you as their first teacher so everything that you do from how you communicate and behave, they will do it as well. You can actually extend this by having family days out. Options: 10 Mistakes that Most People Make Less behavioral problems – if you give much importance to the communication and collaboration of your family, then your kids will have less issues with their behavior. The most effective way to battle problems and make us to express ourselves is through communication. Building social skills can help your children to know how they can deal with issues that they are facing in the future. It can open up the opportunities to talk about important conversations with family days out. Smart Ideas: Events Revisited Parental fun – what’s basically the point to have a child if he/she does not give you excuse to act one? Days out provide the chance for parents and their kids as well to unwind, focus on the stress of life and have fun. In an effort to catch up with them and make new memories too, it is essential that you use your time wisely. When they live independently, for sure you would be happy that you made lots of pictures and memories those days. Keeping active – there are many different activities done in family days out. It is vitally important to get out of your home as it promotes physical health of everyone. Having a sedentary way of living can lead to negative impact for you and for your kids. A wonderful way to stay active and have fun at the same time is by exploring new places and going for a walk. Recent Posts Recent Comments Archives Categories Sitemap	__label__pos	0.938746
This Guest Post is brought to you by Geordon Omand, a University of Victoria graduate who has recently returned from a five week trip exploring Morocco. Follow him as he endures the truly unique experience of being thoroughly scrubbed down and exfoliated at a Moroccan bathhouse by a very enthusiastic elderly man. Yikes! Traveling truly is one of life’s greatest joys. Most of us would agree that immersing ourselves wholesale in an exotic environment can be an educational, even revelatory, experience. At times, however, the benefits accrued during these brief ‘emigrations’ from our comfort zone are most easily appreciated post-facto – through the rosy lens of hindsight. Especially when such an encounter involves being held captive, scalded, flayed, and beaten in Morocco. Sado-masochistic eroticism, you might ask? No, far worse – a Moroccan hammam. Read on, brave reader, read on. As a recent university graduate, traveling on a shoe-string budget was something of a necessity during a recent venture through Morocco. My opted-for mode de voyager posed particular challenges. One such issue arose from the dearth of sanitary shower facilities in the, shall we say, negative star establishments which I chose to frequent. Not having been afforded a good wash for nigh a week, I decided the time had come to make the much-anticipated visit to one of Morocco’s renowned hammams. A Moroccan hammam is essentially a public bath, a modern-day descendent of Roman predecessors. Not only popular but also of practical necessity in a world where many homes lack washrooms, hammams are a ubiquity of Moroccan city life. All sources had strongly recommended them to me as cleansing experiences par excellence. I had little trouble locating a local hammam as I wandered through the winding medina streets of the Rif Mountain city of Chefchaouen one particularly chilly evening. The doorway, pointed out by a helpful passerby, was exclusively in Arabic, assuring me of an authentic bathhouse experience. If only I could have anticipated then what was in store. This particular hammam alternated as male-only and female-only throughout the day. Eight o’clock had just rolled around; men’s time had come. Entering the noticeably humid antechamber, I undressed down to my underwear and handed the front desk clerk the rest of my affairs. The cost of admission was 10 dirham – the equivalent of $1.25 CAD. For an additional 40 dirham I could receive a gommage: the full-body spa works at the hands of a seasoned hammam attendant. Six dollars for a wash and massage from an absolute stranger? When in Rome, err, Morocco, as they say… Agreeing, I stepped further inside. My attendant was a petite, elderly man of an obscurely ancient age and of uncertain dental endowment. A hammam is traditionally divided into rooms of differing temperatures and he was taking me straight for the steamiest option. My initial doubts arose virtually immediately, as several buckets of scalding water were poured in quick succession over my head. Fortunately, the shock to my system halted me long enough for my expressionless attendant to begin applying soap to my newly-minted burns, assuaging the most acute of my concerns. A discrete, cursory inspection revealed no peeling flesh – always a good sign. Viscous, moist, and the colour of tepid sewage water, Moroccan soap is derived from olives and is purported to be an excellent exfoliant. Thus ensconced in a copious layer of soothing, suds-less slime, I was left to marinate and afforded the opportunity to better appreciate my surroundings. The room itself – one of a total of three – measured approximately 10×30 meters. Its floor was composed of rudimentary tile work, as were the lower half of its walls, which rose sharply before tapering into an unadorned, rounded, cylindrical ceiling. The only light available was admitted through a series of opaque and steamed skylights, likely a sage feature given the incompatibility of electricity in this decidedly aqueous environment. An ever-running fountain spouted steaming water into a large basin located in the room’s far corner. As places of socialization, hammams play an important civic role in Moroccan culture. My current establishment was no exception. The house was alive with the echoing sound of lively adult discussion and the roughhousing of youngsters. The cavernous splashing of bodies in animated exchange and bubbly discourse could be heard from all around. With my soap-seasoning complete, my ever-straight faced attendant returned to guide me to the second of the hammam’s three chambers. Virtually identical to the one room I had just vacated – although almost imperceptibly cooler – a mat had been unrolled for me in the corner. Hot dang, bring on the spa treatment! Stretching myself face up on the still very hard tile floor, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity for my seemingly melancholic masseuse. I wondered how often he was made to run through this very routine, and what sort of toll it must be taking on his diminished form and aging muscles. That sympathy would soon to evaporate. The first order of business involved the removing of my dead skin. This was achieved using a specialized scrubbing glove. Imagine a standard winter mitten. Now picture a square of rough-grade sandpaper, or a ball of steel wool, or even a generous handful of glass shards embedded into a mat of razor wire – whatever evokes the most vivid imagery. Now combine these two mental manifestations and you will have something of an approximation of the instrument of torture used to scour virtually every square inch of my body over the course of a quarter hour (or was it several?). A certain loosening of terms would by useful here: as it was most certainly not only dead skin but a great deal of healthy, living, happy flesh that was removed. The “scrub glove” was so effective, blackened rolls of skin were beginning to cover my reddening flesh, like traitorous earthworms emerging from the sanctified soils of my skin. They rained down to the floor, abandoning me to my gruesome fate. It would appear that I had passed premature judgment on my dungeon-master’s physical faculties, as his unassuming, wiry, oh-so-underestimated frame stretched me to his will. Completing one of my sides he would conclude by stretching me out and providing a firm (and dare I say wholly unnecessary) slap to my unprotected ribs, before rolling my wheezing form over and recommencing my desquamation in earnest. Protest proved to be a challenge with the wind constantly knocked out of me. At length my tormentor arose from my pitiful, pink, prostrate self, his sadistic inclinations presumably requited. No such luck. My hopes for salvation were dashed when a sharp pain suddenly shot through my left calf. Then my right. Wrenching my head around, I realized with horror that my maleficent masseuse was standing fully supported on my lower legs. Fortunately, my bruised flesh was able to provide his feet with ample cushioning. Apparently, it was massage time. I may have been delirious, but I could have sworn I witnessed a one scrub-gloved Arab Michael Jackson moon-walking up my thighs. My already damaged body was contorted into positions I did not know I was even capable of achieving (in all likelihood I wasn’t). I was folded in half, full-nelsoned, leg-locked, and in general wrenched across the wet and unforgiving bathhouse floor. Fortunately, my falls were cushioned in part by a mat consisting of rivulets of my own recently-removed skin. (Although that may be somewhat of a moot point, given that they would doubtless have been as effective still covering my body.) I probably owe something to the paper-thin bath mat as well. Something, but not much. Socially, I fared about as well. The acoustics provided by the rounded ceiling of the hammam interior ensured that no one was saved from my whimpering groans. Apparently the tap-out and cry of ‘uncle’ are not as universally understood symbols for mercy and surrender as would have been helpful. Finally, after what felt an eternity of abuse, my apparently sated ‘benefactor’ released me to the third and final room to rinse off and lick my wounds. And a few minutes later, clothed, dazed, and in repossession of my belongings and the shredded remains of my dignity, I found myself once again in the cool night air. Pausing outside the bathhouse entrance, I took stock of the ordeal. It was at this point, however, that a curious thing began to happen. Already the memories were starting to morph and fade. Reflecting anew on my recent trial, I began to realize all the pros of what I had just endured: I had not only witnessed but been an active participant in an ageless and purifying North African experience; I had honestly never felt as clean and fresh; and to boot, I had even received a free undergarment laundering – a pro not to be underappreciated in a backpacker’s world. As my hitherto dour attitude gave way to a newfound positivity, I even found myself planning for my next hammam visit. Notwithstanding my emergent optimism, as I strolled down the brisk, medina streets, squeaky clean and culturally enriched, one fact remained absolutely irrefutable: cleanliness, in Morocco, is clearly taken very seriously. Do you have a travel story to tell? Find out more about how you can contribute and have your travel writing featured on Global Goose!	__label__pos	0.940383
The final result will be a healthy growing economy and that is what we all need. We also have ample time now to establish long term trade arrangements as well. . Chinese Stocks Crash, Why Is Anybody Surprised? Western commentators complain that China’s 7 percent stock crash on Jan.4 is a dreadful start to the new year. Well, technically speaking, the Chinese still can hope their new year is going to be better than the old one, since Chinese New Year isn’t until February 8. The Shanghai composite slipped 6.9 percent to 3296 on Jan. 4, triggering circuit breakers. The onshore yuan dropped 0.37 percent against the dollar. Official GDP numbers come out on Jan. 19, but whatever the official number, real growth won’t be good judging from data on the ground. Market commentators blame recent weak manufacturing data and new IPOs, but analysts knew all of this beforehand. In fact, if you look at any data coming out of China, whether it’s official or unofficial, all of it is pointing south. Research Firm Capital Economics compiled a chart book of important indicators for the Chinese economy based on official data, showing firmly established downtrends. The currency will devalue further against the dollar because it has actually gotten stronger in trade weighted terms in 2015 and that’s what China cares about. This is the only reason why China launched a trade weighted index for the yuan, so it has a justification to devalue further against the dollar. Official GDP growth slowed to 6.9 percent in the third quarter of 2015, but Capital Economic’s own activity proxy indicates growth of only 4 percent. Electricity consumption, one of the best economic indicators, is not growing at all. Retail sales are still growing at 10 percent, but retail is not a large share of the economy and growth fell from a peak of almost 20 percent right after the financial crisis. Trade has collapsed, firmly trending down. Producer and commodity prices are deep in deflationary territory. Capital Economics is optimistic this will change soon though. Credit is still growing, but also trending down. Also, the ratio of output per unit of credit decreased dramatically over the years. Knowing all this, how can traders be surprised by weak manufacturing data? Hope dies last.	__label__pos	0.832431
Why do people act and perceive the way they do? This can be explained by Charles Taylor’s social imaginary. There are underlying thoughts and rules in society that shape the way people think. Sometimes topics such as sexuality, which most people view only in one way, may not be so clear after all. The social imaginary is what enables the practices of a society. This is done though making sense of ideas and expectations. It is “how they [people] fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor pg. 23). Charles Taylor seems to focus on how people envision their social settings. Our social imaginary is “shared by large groups of people,” and “is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (Taylor pg. 23). In other words, the social imaginary is what makes common practices and ideals socially acceptable. Without it, no one would know how to interact with others. It is like a complex, unsaid law, given to people that allows them to carry out their social lives. Taylor relates his idea to government elections where he explains, “Part of the background understanding that makes sense of our act of voting for each one of us is our awareness of the whole action… this kind of macrodecision, in other words, has to meet certain norms if it is to be what it is meant to be” (Taylor pg. 4). However, only relevant backgrounds can apply to an act or scenario for it to make sense. It is also explained that understanding different practices, makes them possible. While at the same time, the practice itself is what carries the understanding. These practices are implicit in society; people know how to act in different situations, and with whom, without being told. A social imaginary has always been in existence, even before humans started theorizing about it. Taylor has explained three different types of social imaginary: explicit, symbolic, and tacit. The explicit level of the social imaginary is the level that anyone can overtly talk about, it is obvious. Take a stop sign, for instance, this is something that everyone can see and talk about. When people see a stop sign it is a known rule to come to a complete stop. This is an example of the explicit social imaginary. The tacit dimension consists of the implied rules of the social imaginary. If a teacher came into class and started baking a cake, this would not be normal. Students would perceive the teacher in a confused way, as this is not something a teacher should be doing in class. The idea that a teacher is supposed to teach and not bake is one of the unsaid rules of the tacit social imaginary. Symbolic social imaginary is the level that involves both explicit and tacit traits. For example, blue is for boys and pink is for girls. These are just colors; however they are recognized symbolically as things for girls or things for boys. Anne Fausto-Sterling is someone who does not see sex as clearly black and white. She believes there is more than just male and female sexes, and that this gray area should not be looked down upon. In her article, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” she describes the five sexes in which she has categorized these people who do not fall under male or female. The medical language uses the term “intersex” to group all intersexual bodies. However, Fausto-Sterling breaks this group down into three groups. Hermaphrodites, or herms, “possess one testis and one ovary (the sperm and egg-producing vessels, or gonads)” (Fausto-Serling pg34). Herms can technically become pregnant and also impregnate someone else. Male pseudohermaphrodites (the “merms”), have testes and some aspects of the female genitalia but no ovaries” (Fausto-Sterling pg34). Merms are not able to become pregnant. “Female pseudohermaphrodites (the “ferms”), have ovaries and some aspects of the male genitalia but lack testes” (Fausto-Sterling pg34). Ferms are able to become pregnant. Fausto-Sterling believes in the idea that these three categories of human sexes should be considered additional sexes, along with male and female. It seems crazy that people like this exist in our world, yet we don’t even have names to identify them. Even language refuses other possibilities; … I have had to invent conventions –s/he and his/her- to denote someone who is clearly neither male nor female or who is perhaps both sexes at once” (Fausto-Sterling pg 33). Although the concept of intersexuality has existed long before our time, people still view this is as a controversial subject. Some doctors perform surgeries on intersexual infants in order to make them “normal. ” But who is to say what normal is? Doctors say their policy reflects the “wish that people be able to ‘fit in’ both physically and sychologically” (Fausto-Sterling pg34). However, Fausto-Sterling states cases where children growing up as intersexual “adjusted to their unusual status,” and found that “there is not a psychotic or a suicide in the lot” (Fausto-Sterling pg38). Therefore maybe being a transsexual isn’t as bad as society makes it seem; maybe doctors should not be performing surgeries on infants while they are not yet able to make decisions for themselves. Charles Taylor’s social imaginary plays hand in hand with Anne Fausto-Sterling’s five sexes. The fact that most of society today does not accept intersexes just because it is not the norm is a social imaginary. It makes people act is if the only sexes that exist are male or female. Fausto-Sterling says, “Scientific dogma has held fast to the assumption that without medical care hermaphrodites are doomed to a life of misery” (Fausto-Sterling pg37). Although there is evidence to prove this otherwise, the social and scientific stigma holds this statement as true. Many believe that both intersexes and their parents will suffer in life, if they do not change their physiology. This social imaginary is made up from the idea that there are two and only two sexes: male and female. “Why should we care if there are people whose biological equipment enables them to have sex ‘naturally’ with both men and women” (Fausto-Sterling pg37)? Fausto-Sterling is talking about the inability for society to see people different from themselves as acceptable human beings. A tacit part of this social imaginary would be defining a person by their intersexuality, or thinking that “normal” males and females are superior to intersexes. As well as affecting judgments and medical practices, the perspective on sexuality that the social imaginary creates also affects laws. In some states in the U. S. , the sex of a child on their birth certificate is able to be changed if a doctor has performed the surgery on the child. However in other states, it is illegal to change the sex of a child; they are still seen as their original sex based on their chromosomal makeup. “Modern Anglo- Saxon legal systems require that newborns be registered as either male or female” (Fausto-Sterling pg35). There is no category of intersex to be registered under. The social imaginary creates skewed perspectives on sexuality in society. In the court case of Littleton vs. Prange, Christie Lee Littleton was a transsexual female, born male. She was “diagnosed psychologically and psychiatrically as a genuine male to female transsexual” (Littleton vs. Prange pg68). Christie’s doctors believed that this meant Christie, and any similar case, is “psychologically and psychiatrically female before and after the sex reassignment surgery” (Littleton vs. Prange pg68). Christie went through with her sex reassignment surgery and continued her life by marrying a man. It is stated that “Texas (and Kentucky, for that matter), like most other states, does not permit marriages between persons of the same sex” (Littleton vs. Prange pg69). Therefore, in my mind, Christie was legally looked at as a female at her time of marriage, since she and her husband had a ceremonial marriage ritual. However, the judge did not share the same views as me. Christie Littleton was found legally male and her marriage was found invalid. Therefore, in the event of her husband’s death, “Christie cannot bring a cause of action as his surviving spouse. ” Christie lost her case. It is stated that “the majority assumes that gender is accurately determined at birth,” in the dissenting opinion by Alma Lopez (Littleton vs. Prange pg71). This leads me to believe that social imaginary did in fact play a role in the decision of the Littleton vs. Prange case. When Christie’s gender on her birth certificate was changed, and lawfully corrected, only the original birth certificate was taken into account in the hearing. It seems to me that the social imaginary on sexuality influenced the judge’s decision. Although Christie was not biologically female, she was told, and doctors testified, that she was medically female. This leads me to believe that maybe the judge did not view Christie’s marriage to her husband as legitimate, since it is not a typical marriage. I do not agree with the judge’s decision. I believe that since Christie was legally married to her husband, she should be found as the surviving spouse of her husband. Although gay marriage is illegal in Texas, she is technically now female. The marriage should never been accepted in the first place if it was to be questioned later on. As you can see, the social imaginary can create controversies and flaws in our practices, judgments, and laws. Who is to determine what sexuality someone is, and how? Most people view sexuality as male or female, but there are more possibilities. The five sexes and the social imaginary are things that can and should be changed and/or considered in the future of society. Works Cited Fausto-Sterling, Anne. The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough. The Sciences, March/April 1993. Print. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Print. Christie Lee Littleton, Appellant v. Dr. Mark Prange, Appellee (excerpts). Bexar County, Texas: 288th Judicial District Court, 1999. Print.	__label__pos	0.651474
EUGENE, Ore. — The USGBC awarded the University of Oregon’s (UO) Robert and Beverly Lewis Integrative Science Building LEED Platinum Certification. The building, which was completed in July 2013, is one of the only laboratory buildings in the U.S to receive such a certification. Designed by HDR Architecture and THA Architecture, both of which have offices in Portland, the $51 million building is an interdisciplinary research hub. Though the majority of the building is dedicated to cognitive neurosciences, systems neurosciences and genetics research, the building also houses the Support Network for Research and Innovation in Solar Energy and the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry. The 103,000-square-foot science building was constructed by Lease Crutcher Lewis, which also holds offices in Portland, and is the first to gain LEED Platinum certification on the UO campus. "Science buildings present numerous sustainable design challenges that are difficult to solve, mainly because of their complex equipment and stringent ventilation requirements," said Regina Filipowicz, senior laboratory planner with HDR Architecture, in a statement. "But due to the University of Oregon’s commitment to environmental responsibility, our integrated team was able to develop some truly innovative sustainable strategies — some that I’ve never before seen in my 26 years as a planner." One remarkably innovative method is the building’s use of reverse osmosis–treated water from a zebra fish research facility. The water is used to flush urinals and toilets. All storm water is also treated on site and solar hot water panels heat all domestic water. The building uses approximately 62 percent less energy than a building of its likeness. Energy conservation efforts include natural ventilation in spaces other than labs, solar shading, daylighting, night flush cooling variable flow chemical fume hoods with automatic closing sashes and heat is recovered from a utility tunnel below the building to serve laboratory re-heat requirements. Building materials were largely local, and bamboo was used as a finish in the atrium and laboratory spaces. "The daylight in a building with such a deep footprint is especially impressive," said Laurie Canup, project manager with THA Architecture, in a statement. "We actually worked with University of Oregon’s lighting laboratory to ensure that the size and placement of the skylight in the atrium would provide optimal daylight levels while controlling glare. The natural daylight allows the lights to be turned off during the day and the reduction in lighting power density delivers significant energy savings, not to mention that ample windows create views which support a dynamic working environment."	__label__pos	0.984882
INTRODUCTION Indian temples have been centers of art and architecture since ancient times. Each temple according to geographic locations has their own art style, motifs, representation of deities and their stories. Clothes of the deities, their adornments and vibrant temple hangings have intensified the ambience of these temples. The main textile art that evolves from the temples are depicted in the temple hangings. These pieces of cloth are embroidered or painted with stories about the relevant God. Although Gujarat is known for its exquisite embroidery, the lesser known art of Kalamkari is equally appealing and unique. Kalamkari refers to a method of painting natural dyes onto cotton or silk fabric with a bamboo pen or kalam. When one thinks of Kalamkari it is usually associated with the one that is done in the South of the country (Andhra Pradesh) predominately portraying a variety of Hindu narrative themes, including the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Shiva Purana. Kalamkari in Gujarat differs from that done in South with its central theme – the Mataji. Mata Ni Pachedi, as we researched, was a sparsely known art practice by Vaghri community in Ahmedabad. This heightened our curiosity and as the opportunity came along we decided to pursue our quest in researching more about this beautiful this beautiful but obscure art form. Mata ni Pachedi represents the art history, creativity and cultural heritage of the Vaghri community now settled in Ahmadabad. REVIEW OF LITERATURE The Vaghri Harijans settled in Ahmadabad make their living by block printing and painting shrine cloth known as Mata ni Pachedi or Mata no Chandarvo. These imposing textiles are used as canopies over the image of the mother Goddess. Traditionally the shrine cloths were made by the Vaghri Harijan community who were not allowed to enter the temples. They made the Pachedis as an offering to the Goddesses. The cloth has a formal patterned quality, strong and bold, reinforced by the starkness of red and black. Pachedis are used in religious ceremonies and record the myths and legends associated with the living traditions of the people. Always, the goddess is the destroyer of evil with weapons in all her ten arms looking fierce and commanding, invoking awe and fear in the onlooker. She is at the center, the focus of the painting with motifs of deities, priests, devotees, angels and animals drawn around her. Often they are performing garba, a traditional dance in the honor of the mother goddess. These are narratives from epics arranged in columns around her. The themes, stories, dimensions and proportions of the motifs are interpreted differently according to the artist’s sensibility and visualization. Many legends are depicted in these Pachedis. They are usually derived from Puranic myths. What remains constant is the Mataji, who according to the Vaghri tribes, protects and helps people. Traditionally maroon and black were the colors used, with the surface of the material as the third color. The maroon and black colors were natural dyes sourced from alizarin and oxidized metal. To meet contemporary tastes, the Vaghris have started using other natural colours adding yellow, blue orange, rust, grey and even pink to the colour palette. Contrasts between positive and negative spaces formed an important balancer to the work. The maroon and black colors were natural dyes sourced from alizarin and oxidized metal Maroon was associated with the color of the Earth mother or Gaea and believed to possess healing powers. White was considered the color for purity and contact with ancestral spirits, deities and other unknown spiritual entities. The color black was meant to repel malevolent spirits and intensify spiritual energy. As time went by the community got introduced to pigment dyes which had begun arriving in Gujarat for a fledging textile industry. Exposure to a. wider palette meant a riot of color and shade in the Pachedi. These are however not used for religious purposes and are purely decorative. The most common motifs, apart from Mataji astride a bull or a tiger, include lady with a flower, trumpeters, angels, flowers, the tree of life and animals such as peacock, tiger, parrot etc. All the materials used in the creation of Mata ni Pachedi are organic. The dyes, the fabrics (such as cotton, khadi, silk etc), the bamboo stick kalams are all made up of naturally available products. Extremely eco-friendly in its nature, Mata ni Pachedi reinforces the use of non-polluting, wholesome materials which do not compromise in making outstanding aesthetic pieces. OUR MENTOR Our teacher and mentor Mr. Sanjay Manubhai Chitara lives in Jivraj Park, Ahmadabad. The main and only occupation of him and his family is making the pachedis. The government has recognized the art and given due to the artisans for their skill and mastery by awarding them both state level and national level awards. Sanjaybhai realizes the importance of marketing and selling the craft. He tries to travel as much as possible to create awareness and introduce his art to a wider audience. CREATIVE USAGE OF MATA NI PACHEDI Mata ni Pachedi is a textile art so the most obvious ways in which it can be displayed are wall hangings, bed sheets and table linen. But these require big pieces and therefore it becomes too expensive for the consumer to buy. Our main aim was to dilute the immense cost of creating the art piece so that quantity could be achieved at a shorter span of time. And also making interesting ready to use products that would excite customers from all age groups; such as shoes, pocket patches, buttons etc for youngsters, religious book stands for elders. Bags, belts, playing cards, vanity boxes and diary covers are other options. In order to keep the authenticity of the art alive and yet make it look contemporary, motifs remained the same but different mediums were tried out. Due to religious beliefs, motifs of Mataji cannot be used on articles such as shoes and pocket patches but animals and flowers can be used generously. CONCLUSION The common trait that binds all dying arts is that the new generation lacks the patience to invest time and effort in an art that is an unpredictable form of income relying on the patronage of a few who have the knowledge and deep pockets to pay for the masterpieces. Every aspect of the Pachedi evokes awe, trance and even fear. All in all, Mata ni Pachedi is an exquisite form of art whose splendor can not be ignored. Some products that we made with the help of Sanjaybhai: Quoted from Mr. Vaghela Bharat's e-mail : I am in high spirits to read your Article of " Mata Ni Pachhedi" which is very important in our cast people. People are praying to "Mata Ni Pachhedi" . They can not see it until next "Matadi Yagna". But I am unhappywith your Language used for our CAST word Vaghari Harizan. This word was Vaghari before in 20th Sanctuary, not Vaghari Harizan. But upon Request by Social Leaders with the help of our public unity , BJP Government in 21st Sanctuary changed our cast from VAGHARI to DEVIPUJAK.So , After 20st Sanctuary NO BODY is Allowedto say " VAGHARI"; but only "DEVIPUJAK" . And we are allowed to enter in any temple of God /Goddess , no body can restrict our people to enter in any Temple. You had been used a wrong sentence in your Article that " Our People restricted to enter in temple". Note: I apologize for causing any kind of offense to anyone at all. This article was purely meant to promote the art of Mata ni Pachedi. Kindly forgive me for not clarifying certain details.	__label__pos	0.968824
So you're stuck.................... Wow seems like the little server error reconnected me with a lot of people. It was nice to hear from you. It is also nice to be missed. However, it is also time to accept the fact that Rich is not coming back to WW; but I still continue to write on the subject of weight loss and weight management. Now with that, the underlying theme to so many of the emails I received was....................... You're stuck. Hit a wall. Can't get over a hump. Question:What do you do? Answer:You go around it. Now for those of you who need the long version of that answer here you go................ I'm talking about taking a different approach. Such as change your foods change up your meals; larger breakfasts and lunches exercise more exercise less buy yourself a new tool to motivate yourself (Click here for a good idea if i don't say so myself); a new book, exercise accessory, kitchen tool Get involved in a new activity - join a club of some sort Start hanging around with new people Go to a different WW meeting; get the perspective of a new leader and new people Tighten the belt for 5 days and act a bit irresponsible on the weekend; that works for many; I know it did for me when I lost my weight Take a break. Yes, can you maintain just for now and pick it up when you're ready Get the crap out of the house - I know it is there. I know all. Try a new food Have a little talk with yourself, an honest one; and ask why things have changed all of a sudden. Look in the mirror while you have this conversation. I am serious. I am sure some stuff will come out. Yes, the truth will hurt. Get over it . Or should I say the truth will help you get over it - the hump that is. Find an online peer group to complement your existing weight loss approach And always remember getting stuck is like constipation. However, if you were constipated would you make the decision that you would never crap again? No, you would do something. So if you're stuck, go do something. And let me know when you're unstuck. And please leave comments and your ideas here as well. We can all get skinny, healthy and happy by helping each other. ---------------------------------------------------- Want this 31 day e-workbook for free? CLICK HERE RIGHT NOW	__label__pos	0.999094
Article This article responds to Jonathan Lear's piece in THE NEW REPUBLIC. At one point in my new book, THE MEMORY WARS: FREUD'S LEGACY IN DISPUTE (New York Review), to which Jonathan Lear alludes in his woolly defense of psychoanalysis ("The Shrink Is In," NEW REPUBLIC 25 December 1995), I pause to wonder at the curious eagerness of some people to glorify Freud as the discoverer of vague general truths about human deviousness. "It is hard to dispute any of these statements about 'humans,'" I wrote, "but it is also hard to see why they couldn't be credited as easily to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche--if not indeed to Jesus or Saint Paul--as to Freud. Was it really Freud who first disclosed such commonplaces? Or, rather, has the vast cultural sway of Freud's system caused us to lose focus on his more specific, highly idiosyncratic, assertions, to presume that a number of them must have been scientifically corroborated by now, and to transform him retrospectively into the very personification of 'human' complexity and depth?" I couldn't have known that I was pinpointing the strategy of Lear's essay-to-be. His Freud is a godlike figure who, despite some lapses into fallibility, somehow presides over all modern awareness of what Lear calls "human irrationality" and "the complexity, depth and darkness of human life." For Lear, then, debate about Freud can only be understood as struggle over "our culture's image of the human soul." And thus the choice for or against psychoanalysis becomes a no-brainer, a mere matter of reaffirming a suitably tragic worldview: "Are we to see humans as having depth--as complex psychological organisms who generate layers of meaning which lie beneath the surface of their own understanding? Or are we to take ourselves as transparent to ourselves?" Lear himself cites Plato, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Proust as sharing Freud's insistence "that there are significant meanings for human well-being which are obscured from immediate awareness," but he fails to pose the obvious question implied by such a list. What did Freud add to the previously garnered pearls of wisdom, and do his innovations constitute actual knowledge or merely a set of overweening speculations? If, for example, Nietzsche anticipated Freud's ideas of unconscious self-interest and unconscious guilt, of repression, of sublimation, and of dream sym- bolism--and he did all that--have we gained anything by Freud's incorporation of such notions into a pseudo-quantitative, hydraulically operated, dogmatically deterministic "mental apparatus" that teems with undetectable drives, mythic elves, phylogenetic memory traces, and mysteriously sexualized and desexualized energies? To maintain as much would be like declaring Rube Goldberg the prince of engineers. Self-evidently, the public is entitled to know which distinctive claims of Freud's, if any, have received significant confirmation outside the Freudian belief system. The answer is: not a single one. Readers who find that result hard to believe could consult Edward Erwin's just-published book, A FINAL ACCOUNTING: PHILOSOPHICAL AND EMPIRICAL ISSUES IN FREUDIAN PSYCHOLOGY (MIT Press). Erwin soberly reviews all relevant studies and concludes, with impeccable logic, that the entirety of psychoanalytic theory, along with the Freudian claim to special therapeutic efficacy, remains devoid of any appreciable corroboration. It is easy to foresee, however, that Lear will have none of this. For him, the subjective and intuitive nature of psychoanalytic interpretations exempts them from evidential accountability. Indeed, "it is a sign of psychoanalysis's success as an interpretive science that its causal claims cannot be validated in the same way as those of the physical sciences" (italics as found). This paradox--one of several in Lear's tremulously irrationalist article--rests on a fundamental confusion of categories. Although interpretation may preoccupy the analytic hour, the claims of psychoanalytic theory are not interpretations but determinate propositions about how the mind regularly works. Those propositions have to do, for example, with the function and meaning of dreams, the nature of drives, the defense mechanisms, the fantasies of the nursing infant, and the ubiquity of the Oedipus complex--all of which folklore is treated as established fact in Lear's vitalistic "summa Freudiana" of 1990, LOVE AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE (Farrar Straus & Giroux). Such ideas demand considerably more validation than Lear's banal reminder that people do not "always and everywhere act in rational and transparently explicable ways." But Lear has still another escape route handy, the contention (borrowed from Richard Wollheim) that Freudian propositions need no proof because they are merely "an extension of our ordinary psycho- logical ways of interpreting people in terms of their beliefs, desires, hopes and fears." If we can guess why someone heads for the refrigerator, Lear believes, then we ought to be able to guess why, let us say, Freud's Little Hans developed a horse phobia. But think about it. Little Hans became afraid of horses after a huge horse tripped and crashed to the street before his eyes. Not a very puzzling connection, after all. According to both Freud in his case history and Lear in his book, however, Hans's phobia came about because he was repressing a fear of his own oedipal aggression, which had unconsciously "caused" the felling of this big-penised father surrogate. Which of the two explanations comports with common sense? The fanciful Freud/Lear version would be comparable to saying that a trip to the refrigerator must be motivated by an obsession with Mommy's closed and frigid "box." Lear is such a thoroughly indoctrinated Freudian that he can't even perceive adherence to psychoanalysis as a commitment to one theory among others. In his reverent view, psychoanalysis sets out not from an array of contested premises but from sheer "wonder that the unintelligibility of the events that surround one do not cause more wonder." Freudianism, in other words, is just curiosity in its most receptive and unbiased form. That is why Lear fails to register the difference between particular interpretations and general Freudian tenets: the latter are simply his window on reality. This same blindness prompts Lear to assert that it was only "on occasion" that Freud suggested conclusions to his patients. That claim would be mistaken even if it pertained only to Freud's explicit and habitual "reconstructions" of his analysands' infantile traumas. But more drastically, it overlooks the well-established fact--established chiefly by Adolf Grunbaum, whom Lear dismisses with a haughty harumph--that suggestion pervades every feature of the Freudian clinical exchange, from the production and glossing of "free" associations through the causal inferences that the patient is then coaxed into accepting. Whereas Lear asserts, pathetically, that "the proper attitude for an analyst is one of profound humility in the face of the infinite complexity of another human being," the only sure result of a "successful" Freudian treatment is that it will turn out another Freudian. "It was Freud," claims Lear, "who first set the avoidance of suggestion as a therapeutic ideal--and it is Freud who devised the first therapeutic technique aimed at achieving it." Freud never doubted, however, that any suggestive hints by an analyst would always be opposed and overridden by the pure emanations of the repressed unconscious. Indeed, in a late paper he brazenly declared that no patient of his had ever been induced by suggestion to reach a false belief (Standard Edition, 23:262). Yet the features of the analytic transaction that Lear doubtless considers to be safeguards against suggestion--the therapist's icy "neutrality" and the tortuously expensive ritual of "analyzing the transference" and "analyzing the countertransference"--serve in actuality as perfect tools for foisting off doctrine as insight. By casting each party in the therapeutic dyad as reenacting fixed childhood roles and by promoting the illusion of impartial data collection, psychoanalysis discounts the relatively malleable patient's vulnerability to the therapist's general beliefs and specific hunches. Lear's obtuseness about suggestion, combined with his evident ignorance of recent Freud scholarship, also prevents him from seeing what is wrong with the classic Freud/Jones/Gay account of the birth of psychoanalysis. The received legend is good enough for him: Freud realized he had been "credulous" in taking his patients' stories of very early sexual abuse at face value, and thus he stumbled upon what Lear calls "the discovery of unconscious fantasy." By now, however, any number of Freud historians--including among others Frank Cioffi, Malcolm Macmillan, Jean Schimek, Morton Schatzman, Han Israels, Max Scharnberg, Allen Esterson, Russell Powell, and Robert Wilcocks--have established from Freud's papers of 1896 that the "stories" were told to Freud's patients by Freud himself, who had fallen victim to a typically monomaniacal idea that all "hysteria" results from repressed memories of abuse that the therapist must coax forth with severe and unwavering insistence. Thus Freud's subsequent "discovery of fantasy" was nothing more than a craven rescue maneuver for his imperiled concept of repression. Psychoanalysis as we know it blossomed when Freud, instead of admitting that he had tried to browbeat his patients into believing they had been molested, turned his own misdiagnosis into "false memories" supposedly generated by them in childhood to cover up their shameful and noxious practice of masturbation. Only later did he add his still more grotesque signature touch: the "memory" of having been abused could in most cases be regarded as an unconscious screen for the child's desire to fornicate with one or both parents. Instead of discovering such dubious unconscious fantasies, Freud posited them to disguise the fact that his blatantly sug- gestive and question-begging investigative method, which he would continue to employ in much the same coercive manner, was getting him nowhere. This scholarly correction of Freud's retrospective propaganda about the "seduction theory" supplies part of the answer to Lear's question, "why doesn't Crews lionize Freud as the first person to call the veracity of [abuse] memories into question?" To judge from Lear's article, one would think that the post-1896 Freud devoted himself to smoking out false memories in a spirit of rational skepticism. On the contrary: not only did Freud himself concoct the "memories" that he is praised for having debunked, he also invented further ones to put in their place. It is now widely recognized that the pre-1897 Freud was a recovered memory therapist in the worst modern sense of that term, but Lear and other Freudians cannot grasp that he remained one thereafter, only substituting relatively trivial primal scenes and oedipal wishes for the molestations that formerly made up the content of the repressed. Was it a watchdog against false memories who told the Wolf Man that a dream from age four about wolves in a tree, recounted in adulthood, proved that at age one he had watched his parents copulating from the rear three times in a row? Lear professes to be scandalized that I could assert any link whatsoever between classic Freudian theory and the recovered memory movement of the past decade. He fails to take note of my detailed arguments at several junctures in THE MEMORY WARS or even of a one- sentence summation on (p. 274) that puts the case very plainly. The scientific pretensions of recovered memory, I wrote, derive from a number of unwarranted beliefs that were directly propagated by Freud: that repression is the normal human response to trauma; that experiences in infancy produce long-term memories that can be accurately retrieved decades later; that adult psychological difficulties can be reliably ascribed to certain forgotten events in early childhood and not to others; that sexual traumas are incomparably more susceptible to repression and to the formation of neurosis than any other kind; that symptoms are themselves "memories" that can yield up the story of their origin; that dream interpretation, too, can disclose the repressed past; that memory retrieval is necessary for symptom removal; and that psychotherapists can confidently trace their clinical findings to the patient's unconscious without allowing for the contaminating influence of their own diagnostic system, imparted directly or through suggestion. Could Lear be unaware of this passage? Hardly; I read it aloud to him in a live debate about THE MEMORY WARS in New York City on November 13, 1995. As my introduction to that book makes clear, the psychoanalytic genealogy of recent witchhunts is only the theoretical side of an alarming story that truly deserves to be regarded as a scandal. If Lear had been reading his own psychoanalytic journals between 1990 and now, he would have learned that a number of psychoanalysts have become full converts to recovered memory, tossing out infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex and replacing them with the 1896 vintage of Freudian fanaticism: repressed molestation is back in style. Interested readers should watch for the second 1996 issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, where analysts, joined by me, variously welcome and express misgivings about this turn of events. The mostly young, mostly feminist advocates of psychoanalytic recovered memory are waging what I have called a war of succession for control of the otherwise moribund Freudian tradition. Like so much else, however, it has escaped the notice of Jonathan Lear. Frederick Crews Books by (or with a contribution by) Frederick Crews Anthology ofAmerican Literature : Colonial Through Romantic Vol 1 George L. McMichael (Editor), et al / Paperback / Published 1997 Anthologyof American Literature : Realism to the Present Vol 2George McMichael (Editor), et al / Paperback / Published 1997 The Human Nature Review © Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 28 May, 2005 02:29 PM	__label__pos	0.888847
Primary links About Us Research MEG Brain Imaging Ready Mind Project Outreach Support Us News & Events A new discovery to be published in the journal Developmental Science reports that speech directed to 11- to 14-month-old infants predicts both their concurrent and future language accomplishments, and points to practical information useful for parents. The first factor linked to success in language is the use of “parentese” (rather than standard adult-directed speech). The second factor predicting success is the “social context” in which language occurs: the more adults addressed infants in one-on-one social contexts the greater their language skills. The data suggest that quality not simply the quantity makes a difference. In the study, audio input to 26 children aged 11- to-14-months was recorded over a period of 4 days at home. Infants wore lightweight vests containing high quality mini recorders. The recordings captured everything the infants heard over a 4-day period. Specially designed software allowed I-LABS researchers to locate periods on the recordings during which language was addressed to the child. Children came to I-LABS at age 2 to assess their language skills. The results show that both the amount of babbling recorded at home in the 11-14 period and language at the age of 2 was advanced in children who heard more parentese and who were spoken to in one-on-one conversations. The study is the first to examine the use of parentese in home settings, and also the first to suggest that the social context in which learning occurs matters. Multimedia Print Media	__label__pos	0.960386
Happy New Year! We hope you all had an enjoyable holiday with friends and family as we say goodbye to the dusty, long hours of 2015 and welcome the shiny, new year of 2016. As we begin our fourth year of existence, we would like to take a moment to express our deepest gratitude to all of you — our loyal readers and writers who provide lifeblood to the corpus that is in-Training. On behalf of Pager Publications, Inc. and the staff of in-Training, we are proud to announce the official launch of in-House, the online magazine for residents and fellows. in-House aims to build a community for new physicians as they navigate the monumental transitions in learning and personal growth in their graduate medical education. Back in April of this year, we came across an article published in JAMA Psychiatry that called to attention the poor state of mental health for many physicians-in-training. We were excited by the publication of this seminal piece, an opportunity for medical educators, students and institutions to have an earnest conversation about the ugly stain of burnout and suicide that tarnishes the healing profession. Anyone who has watched a newborn mature into a toddler — or has memorized the early developmental milestones in First Aid — can attest that immense transformation occurs in the first two years of life. Children are decidedly unaware of these formative years, oblivious to their own metamorphosis and only recognizing their transitional changes through photos, stories and their family’s fond memories. In a surprisingly similar fashion, medical students may also transition from their time as MS1s to MS3s to … He stood at the window, gazing out into the bleak, foggy morning. His fingers slowly traced words and symbols on the frost and then quickly wiped them away. His hands looked different he noted—the skin like tissue paper, thin and crisscrossed with fine lines. His veins raised and pulsing. He clenched his fist, wincing at the stiffness. He couldn’t remember when his hands changed. When they were last full and firm, strong enough to pick … A year and a half ago, we sat in a fancy restaurant in downtown Atlanta, grabbing a late dinner and jabbering excitedly about the sights and sounds of our first national conference. in-Training was barely a few hours old, little more than a few notes hastily scribbled on napkins. We joked that one day we would host our own conference, with medical students all over the country flying in to discuss shared experiences in medical education and … As we traveled back to Albany from our presentation at the American Association for Medical Colleges (AAMC) regional meeting in foggy Atlantic City, we reflected on our past year with in-Training in this update, the ceremonial 100th article on in-training.org. Just two weeks ago, on April 5, we celebrated our first birthday. One year since our official founding and 99 articles, 7,500 unique visitors and 65,000 pageviews later, in-Training has grown leaps and bounds, from a skeleton … My name is Aleena Paul, and I am a member of the Albany Medical College Class of 2016. I graduated from Union College in Schenectady, NY, with an interdisciplinary major in biology and sociology, and am currently completing my MBA in Healthcare Management from Union Graduate College. During my time at Union, I developed my enthusiasm for journalism while serving as the managing editor of the college’s official newspaper, the Concordiensis, and as editor-in-chief of the sociology department’s Newsletter. I enter the medical field with special interests in bioethics, women’s health, and addressing the medical needs of our underserved communities. We are more than just medical students. The members of the medical student body are not scholars merely fixated on the long-sought title of “MD” or “DO.” We are distinct individuals with passions, curiosities and insurmountable complexity. As future physicians, to share these complexities with each other is to engage with the broader medical community. in-Training, the online newspaper for medical students, will be a forum for this collaboration.	__label__pos	0.958755
I learned to see the world through words. Words I picked over all day at school then curled up with long after I was supposed to be asleep. I reflect through writing, turn to all 1124 pages of my worn The Lord of the Rings in every difficult time, and dream best with my head pillowed on a book. Yet I never realized how fully these words and stories shape my experience of the world until I entered medical school, a space where the world is not often viewed through the lens of stories. In college, I took pre-med classes as a means to end: becoming a doctor. However, as a creative writing concentration English major, I really flourished in my writing courses. I immersed myself in the minds of book characters and authors, learning to understand myself and the people around me through fictional beings. My English courses were the land of “no right answers,” where every discussion centers on a “why” question. Why would a character take a certain action? Why would an author describe the character this way? Stories and poetry create worlds of ambiguities and shifting perspectives, inspiring and challenging each other. To appreciate these nuanced worlds, one must pay attention to details: their building blocks of words and punctuation. Like English, medical education requires attention to minute details. Take the stark white on black of X-rays or the gradients of darkness in ultrasound. First, we learn which parts of the body will show up as bright or opaque, what it would mean for a line to be sharp or blurry. Then using this information, we build an image of the body. Suddenly, a shadow in the ultrasound field, one I may not even have seen a second ago, is called a gallbladder. There is often strange dissociation between how these body parts are viewed in medical school versus the “outside” world. On the outside, blood gushes forth red and panic-inducing. But in my life right now, blood exists as the shades of pink and blue polka dots on pathology images. Those tiny cells, smeared onto glass and fluorochrome-stained, now huge on the projection screen. This language consists of shape and color: which cell is pinker, denser or has nuclei off-center? We use these details to name what we see, normal process or disease. This progression from learning to read these images to understanding them seems linear, yet, for me, it’s fraught with difficulty. While reading stories, I easily build myself mental bridges from the mechanics of language to its grander purposes. I savor words and turns of phrase for pleasure. I expand my view of the world by being in someone else’s head. I travel, crossing continents or scoping out imaginary societies. I dissect stories, interpreting those building blocks of style, word choice, even spelling — but all this leads towards understanding, towards absorbing the words and applying them to the world I live in. Whether my sense of justice, honor, spirituality or love, each has been filtered through the words of countless authors. I miss this in medicine. I learn to read CT scans and X-rays and turn their myriad shades into coherent diagnoses. Yet as I do so, it remains hard for me to build to their grander purposes. After all, learning to navigate these multivariate languages of medicine is a feat in itself, one our medical education revolves around. One day, we may be studying the (literal) Latin of anatomy terms. Another, we may start listening for the sound of an irregular heartbeat. With all the effort learning each of these skills requires, interpreting them becomes an end in itself. This cloudy gray shadow is a pleural effusion on X-ray. That bright spot is a tumor on MRI. But why are we learning these things? If I am looking for a larger meaning, then I am seeking the reason behind these diagnoses. Where is the patient in our medicine? Stories draw me closer to people: author, narrator, character or — in happy times — someone else reading the same work. Yet, in medicine, we learn many of our skills in a vacuum. Eventually we may read an X-ray to help treat a patient, but right now it does not apply to anyone needing treatment. The pathology slide we examine has no connection with the full constellation of a person’s existence, and perhaps it never will. After all, we are not expected to interpret every kind of test once we graduate medical school. We are destined to sub-divide and specialize. Pathologists will immerse themselves in their slides, radiologists in their scans, and so forth. So, what does learning all these methods teach us? I hope to learn from these medical methods again what reading taught me without my knowing it: there exist countless ways to understand people. A poetic stanza, a phrase of prose, a word in a foreign language or one made up — each exposes humanity differently. As doctors, we are meant to treat our patients, to heal their bodies. To do this and understand someone else’s body, we examine it with our tools. X-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs, physical exams, blood tests or pathology slides — none is an end in itself. Each is a different lens placed over the body to show us something not otherwise apparent. I hope we recognize these lenses as such: mechanisms refracting a portion of a patient’s reality for us to see. None can reflect a patient or her body in totality. Instead, each becomes another way we could learn about ourselves or those who surround us, another story we can read.	__label__pos	0.974839
Web Only / Features » January 4, 2016 The Bankruptcy of India’s Economic and Political “Miracle” India is neither the vibrant global South democracy nor the poster child for globalization’s benefits that global political elites have insisted it is for over a decade. Hiro’s work provides a stunning indictment of the fashionable idea echoed endlessly by mainstream pundits of a politically and economically healthy, thriving, democratic India. In 2008, under the aegis of a Congress Party-led coalition government in India, the country was rocked by one of the biggest scandals of graft and corruption it had ever seen. The scandal was led by Andimuthu Raja, a member of a regional party that had formed a coalition with the old dynastic Congress Party, who became the minister of communications in 2007. The scandal, the “2G spectrum” scam, involved the sale of bandwidth licenses to select telecom companies at underpriced rates. In exchange, Raja received millions of rupees in kickbacks. The loss to the Indian government due to the 2G spectrum scandal was estimated between US$8-10 billion. In 2011, Time ranked the scandal second on an “Abuses of Power” list—right behind Watergate. Even as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided Raj’s residence, finding bank notes in pillowcases and suitcases, it became clear that the corruption scandal implicated not just one minister but India’s political system as a whole. Raja was immediately arrested but the court cases—and insistent calls by opposition parties to investigate the role in the scandal of then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—rumbled on for years. The 2G spectrum may be one of the most egregious cases of graft the country has ever seen, but such scandals are now a routine feature of politics in modern India. Without fail, with each scam, corruption is revealed as extending all the way to the uppermost echelons of the Indian political establishment. This India, depicted in elaborate detail in Dilip Hiro’s The Age of Aspiration, is neither the vibrant global South democracy nor the beneficiary of globalization par excellence that global political elites have insisted it is for over a decade. Instead, it is a country mired in a corrupt nexus of businessmen and politicians, spectacular wealth juxtaposed to ever-deepening penury and the brutal suppression of all those opposed to India’s neoliberal path. As such, Hiro’s work serves as a much-needed rejoinder to the global image of “India Shining,” an electoral marketing slogan invented by India’s ruling political party. Today, the ruling political party, the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), garners much negative publicity because of the rising culture of intolerance of minorities its rule has ushered in. International spectators are surprised by the extreme turns they see India taking of late. But in Hiro’s account, the business-friendly policies of successive Congress and BJP governments have for decades been fashioning an Indian image of gleaming new cities and thriving IT infrastructures that hides the deep corruption and poverty that have accompanied India’s pro-business policies. In turn, the brutal suppression of dissent and deepening inequality have long accompanied these reforms. The Modi government only deepens the rot and ruin that previous governments accomplished. Hiro begins his account with the city of Gurgaon, which he calls “New India in miniature, with all its achievements and failures. … But scrape the surface ever so slightly and you discover a dark, Dickensian underbelly.” Hiro’s focused narrative elucidates how corporate executives jet to and from their Western multinational offices in Gurgaon, a city built upon an underclass that populates the slums dotting the periphery of Gurgaon. It is a vivid account of the concerted effort on the part of Indian politicians to give wide, often illegal, berths to corporations in Gurgaon and facilitate massive construction projects that enabled the return and settlement of wealthy expatriate Indians to Gurgaon to helm its many corporations. Appropriately, The Age of Aspirations is replete with colorful and sordid tales of sleaze and corruption that follow politicians and businessmen alike—characters who Hiro unfailingly introduces with flamboyant physical descriptions. (He describes the CEO of a large steel plant as a ”slight man with a skinny, tapered face … jug-eared.” Later on, the populist social activist Anna Hazare is introduced as a man with ”fat, crumpling cheeks.”) Many of Hiro’s stories are traced back to the reverberations of Delhi’s 1991 introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). A set of pro-corporate reforms that followed after India was granted an IMF loan requiring the reduction of the fiscal deficit, the NEP is seen by many who follow the political economy of India as the main driver for the precipitous economic growth that India saw towards the end of the century. The twin moves of providing the private sector untrammeled access to public licenses and resources like coal and steel, and disinvestment from the public sector allowed India to join the ranks of the “emerging economies,” but did little but make things worse for the immensely poor. As Hiro describes in detail, the NEP put India on what the country’s elites saw as a righteously neoliberal path—one in which few other than the wealthy and connected would gain. Two decades after the introduction of the NEP, income inequality in India had doubled. The structure of Hiro’s narrative provides a compelling case for just how distorted of a “democracy” India has become. The book begins with tales of colossal wealth and segues to an in-depth chronicling of immense corruption scandals brought to the fore by intrepid Indian journalists. In a subsequent section of the book that deals with the anticorruption activist Anna Hazare, whose Gandhi-inspired civil disobedience tactics to force an anticorruption bill through parliament inspired a larger anticorruption movement, Hiro is entirely justified when he writes: “Team Anna’s statements echoed what Maoists had been saying for a long while. At their core, there was no difference between political parties, and politicians of all hues were united in safeguarding the privileges that the political class enjoyed.” Hiro’s major achievement is his exhaustive account of the development of an all-powerful political class. His broader arguments, however, hold up less well in his discussion of the decades-long Maoist insurgency in India. A splinter group from the Communist Party of India, Maoist guerillas (the Communist Part of India [Maoist] or colloquially, the Naxalites) have held de facto control of parts of the Indian mainland; in 1967, the Naxalite movement spread from a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, northern Bengal, to the countryside and cities of southern and eastern India. Clashing regularly with Indian paramilitary agencies and the army over the years, Maoist guerillas have consistently waged armed struggle, Mao’s “people’s war” against the Indian establishment in response to exploitation of India’s mineral-rich heartland by private mining companies—companies essentially given blank checks by political parties at the cost of mass displacement, disenfranchisement and brutal repression of the indigenous Adivasi population. Hiro’s foray into the oft-neglected Naxalite strongholds is evocative and important, given the lack of critical writing on the Naxalite insurgency. He seems largely sympathetic to the Naxalite cause, which feels warranted given the broad impact that pro-corporate policies and the privatization of natural resources have had on the Adivasi population. But his tendency to gloss over the diversity of leftist politics in India as well as the conditions that have led the Indian Left in to deep crisis leaves his narrative woefully incomplete. When the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) formed in 1969, it subsequently splintered into numerous groups, which today form a vast continuum of left groups. Some of these groups have allied with far-right groups like the BJP in order to better jockey for political power; others, like the CPI (M) are seen as centrist, to have lost their revolutionary credentials because of a stubborn faith in electoral politics; yet others like the Naxalites, with a strong Adivasi and rural base in the peasant population, are perceived by many in the Indian Left to be blind to criticism. The modus operandi of the Naxalite insurgents has had a powerful effect on fragmenting the Indian Left in recent years, largely due to an over-reliance on the use of shockingly violent insurgency tactics. Despite this, today due to brutal onslaughts by the army, paramilitary forces and local forces, the Naxalite insurgency is restricted mainly to the forests of eastern India. Meanwhile, CPI (M) governments in West Bengal and Kerala, quite apart from the mainstream Indian political parties, have their own history of violent reprisals against the Naxalite movement, while in no small way doing their own part to institute economic liberalization policies where in power, while being ostensibly “Communist.” Though there is clearly a great deal of room for nuanced analysis in the history of the Indian Left, particularly in any discussion of armed insurrections of dispossessed rural and indigenous populations, Hiro does not seem to want to tackle the subject head-on. Instead, he saves the bulk of his invective for the powers that allow mining giants like Tata Steel and Jindal Steel to lay waste to huge segments of northeast India. But today, with the even more business-friendly Modi government setting the stage for a broader confrontation with the Naxalities by relaxing environmental and regulatory rules to allow unrestrained private activity, an honest reckoning of the history of CPI factions and the state of the Indian Left—one which Hiro is entirely capable of doing justice to—is vital. The question of how to build popular support and connect the plethora of leftist and progressive groups is a pertinent one. In April 2014, the CPI (M) announced the formation of an 11-party front for the imminent elections. The deep divisions within left-wing splinter groups briefly seemed as if they might be overcome by the coalition, but the merger lasted a mere two weeks, mainly as a consequence of internal discord. Progressive forces that can provide a bulwark against the far-right forces that have ravaged India over the last few decades with rapacious neoliberal policies, provide a remarkable counterpoint to the prevailing international narrative of India as a free-market success story. The Age of Aspirations is meticulously researched and exhaustively detailed, but it fails to draw together Hiro’s powerful narrative with an overarching analysis about the possibilities for social progress—a weakness most obvious when the story of the Naxalites comes in to focus. Still, Hiro’s work provides a stunning indictment of the fashionable idea echoed endlessly by mainstream pundits of a politically and economically healthy, thriving, democratic India. The Modi government, led by a man involved in one of the worst state-sponsored sectarian massacres of the last few decades, brings to the fore right-wing bigotry, a pro-business mindset and a stunning insensitivity to the plight of India’s poor like perhaps none before. Particularly now, many a clarion call is required to remind Western observers that India has neither the wholesome democratic traditions nor the unblemished socioeconomic prospects it has long been touted to have. Fortunately, Hiro’s work serves as just that. Never has independent journalism mattered more. Help hold power to account: Subscribe to In These Times magazine, or make a tax-deductible donation to fund this reporting. Kamil Ahsan Kamil Ahsan is a doctoral student in developmental biology at the University of Chicago and a freelancer writer. Follow him on Twitter: @kamuleosaurus.	__label__pos	0.990169
Sowing the seeds of dissent The IPKat has found a curiosity on BAILII. This is a decision of the Court of Appeal (Lords/Ladies Justices Ward, Arden and Moore-Bick) last Wednesday in Gorne v Scales, Taylor and Bill, an extraordinarily rare split decision on how to assess damages for breach of a duty of confidentiality in respect of material held on a database. The information in question was customer information that was stored in a card index and computer database belonging to a business called Seeds Direct. Gorne was a partner in the first business that owned the data, but not in a subsequent partnership - set up after the original one was dissolved - which actually used the card index data commercially. The trial judge (Kevin Garnett QC, sitting as a Deputy Judge of the Chancery Division) directed that there be an inquiry as to the damage suffered by Gorne on the assumption that her loss be measured by reference to the value of the confidential information. The Court of Appeal (Arden LJ dissenting) allowed the appeal and ordered a fresh inquiry. In the Court's opinion * the method adopted by the master proceeded on the erroneous assumption that the former partnership was a well established business that could be valued as a going concern. In truth its only real asset was the card index, but the dissolved partnership was in no position to make any use of it other than by selling it on the open market. This being so, Gorne's loss had to be assessed by reference to the value of the index on the open market at the time of its removal, not by reference to the use to which it was subsequently put by the new partnership.The IPKat notes that "willing seller/willing buyer" is still a permissible. He got the impression that a differently-constituted Court of Appeal in Reed v Reed was not so enthusiastic about it. * the master's approach was not so much to inquire into the damage suffered by Gorne as to create an account of the profits wrongfully gained through the misuse of the information. * the correct measure of damages in this sort of case was to establish the market value of the confidential information on a sale between a willing seller and a willing buyer at the time of the dissolution of the former partnership. Secret seeds here Primal seeds here Wimbledon seeds here	__label__pos	0.992404
I’m used to working from anyplace and (sigh) anytime. Getting to work usually involves guzzling coffee rather than driving my gas-guzzler to the office. But I am employed by a publishing company that was born in the digital age and produces content for online consumption. When a business the size and maturity of Kraft Foods ($49 billion in revenue, 108 years old, operations in 75 countries) decides that it’s in the company’s best interest to untether its employees with mobile devices and virtual communities, how we work in the digital age is no longer about some future state of knowledge workers. It’s mainstream. If you have any doubts, this maker of real things (Oreos, Oscar Meyer hot dogs, Trident and Tang) is trying to turn this digital state of working into a commodity with its own internal brand name and slogan — as you’ll read about in my story next week on SearchCIO.com. Roberta Cadieux, director for information systems service delivery at Kraft, recounts the IT department’s efforts to harness the mobile gadgets and ubiquitous networks that employees increasingly take for granted into a coherent IT-business strategy — and the difficulty of selling the strategy (as opposed to the gadgets) to employees. The transformation of how work gets done at Kraft extends to its physical offices, where “open innovative spaces” are replacing traditional cubicles and offices. The rank and file no longer are assigned desks. Employees can work from wherever when they are in the office. Wall-huggers — people who have worked at Kraft for years and feel they’ve earned the right to a corner office — have been given glassed-in rooms — fishbowls — but the occupants are increasingly “being challenged why they need them,” Cadieux said. Persuading people to change how they work has been hard, she added — so much so that she said she would like to go into the change management field. One of the aspects of Cadieux’s job that does not get much play in my upcoming piece is her involvement with Kraft’s facilities people. She told me she worked hand-in-glove with Steelcase, the office furniture giant, to design the space, even walking into the office on Fridays to see how many people were there (usually almost half empty). As Cadieux was telling me about working with office designers, it occurred to me that one interesting spin-off is that IT will play a bigger role in the design of not only the IT architecture but also the physical space that employees inhabit.	__label__pos	0.997615
I spent today conducting breeding bird atlas work in the hinterlands of west-central Ohio; probably the last day of the season for atlassing. At first light, there's lots of singing and I found many things, but activity tapers off rapidly as morning progresses. Luckily for me, the area I am working on harbors several of the best remaining remnants of the formerly vast Darby Plains prairie. So as the heat of the day set in, I visited two of these sites and found numerous interesting things and made quite a few photos. To me, visiting these prairie scraps brings mixed emotions. On the one hand, I revel in the explosion of biodiversity that erupts in these botanical hotspots; a complete counterpoint to the desolation of the surrounding corn and bean fields. On the other hand, I always am forced to reflect upon the near complete destruction of Ohio's - and much of the Midwest's - prairies. I'd say 99% + of Ohio's original prairie has been scrubbed off the map - lost to development and agriculture. But we will focus on the positive. Ratibida pinnata, are a sure eye-catcher. Even though I have plenty, I couldn't resist making more photos. This is a fabulous species to grow in the garden, too. Like most native prairie plants, it is tough and takes little care, and even the brownest of thumbs should do well with it. I'm sure some of the vendors at the Midwest Native Plant Conference will have Prairie Coneflower on hand. A compelling reason to plant natives is because of the bugs that they attract. This is ecological ground zero, and native plants and bugs support the other life forms such as birds. And Prairie Coneflower attracts scores of insects. Synchlora aerata. This is a VERY cool cat! They attempt to mask themselves by taking plant fragments and attaching them to their body, and it works pretty well. This one has taken scraps of the central disc flowers of this Prairie Coneflower and used them quite effectively. Even so covered, when it moves the caterpillar proceeds in the classic inchworm or looper gait, as seen here. Verbesina alternifolia. I found several of these interesting loopers with little effort, and if you start checking appropriate flowers, I'll bet you do too. The adult moth is a pretty thing; sort of faint emerald-green in color and the wings are striped with pale white lines. But like most moths, that of the Camouflaged Looper is nocturnal and hard to see. Alypia octomaculata. It's a day flyer, and like many of the other diurnal moths it is rather bright and showy, unlike its often drab brown night time relatives. Vitis), and Virginia Creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia. Atteva aurea(formerly A. punctella). They look like beetles at a glance. These day-flyers aren't native here, but have capitalized on the widespread establishment of Tree-of-heaven, Ailanthus altissima, which they use as a host.	__label__pos	0.997882
IEA change tack slightly This is an interesting article referring to the International Energy Agency starting to resile from their prediction of peak oil being about 2030. They are arguing a case that: “It should be noted, too, that there does not tend to be great interest in new types of resources among service and supply-sector players…they need to have ready customers for their new products and cannot easily justify developing products for a market that does not yet exist. Furthermore, private industry cannot be relied upon to invest in research on technologies that are too far from being economical.” This economic argument ignores the issue of EROEI - Energy Returned on Energy Invested . I heard an argument once that if people eat celery the energy taken to consume the celery is more than is obtained from the celery. I never liked celery anyway so as a dieting mechanism it never attracted me. However, EROEI always trumps the laws of economics being as it is the law of conservation of energy. Extracting oil consumes energy (the marginal return of which comes from oil and gas). The harder to extract elements consume more energy. So as the cost of extraction goes up as energy costs go up the merit of trying to extract the oil goes down. In the big Gharwar field in Saudi Arabia seawater is being injected to get oil out. This takes energy, but there is still a massively positive energy return. Converting from one source of energy to another is another important issue. If hydrocarbons are burnt then there is a limit (the Carnot limit) set by the laws of conservation of Entropy as to the amount of energy that can be extracted. As a rule of thumb two thirds or so gets wasted in most car engines before transmission losses. Combined Cycle Natural Gas generators can convert about 50-60% of the energy inbuilt in the gas. Additionally Combined Heat and Power systems can be used to warm up cool locations although we really should look at insulation for this. It is these matters that human ingenuity cannot get around because they are theoretical limits (much like the reason why the patent office won't accept patents for perpetual motion engines (although perpetual motion does exist particularly at very low temperatures)). [in this instance perpetual motion is the concept of something that makes energy out of nothing]	__label__pos	0.923244
But the question of whether the miracle of eight days of oil actually happened is of little concern to me. Even assuming there was little sanctified olive oil left at the time they lit the temple’s menorah – a safe bet, since the Greeks had been on a defiling spree – for me the miracle was not how long it lasted, but that the Jews had the faith to light the menorah at all. They knew full well that the resource was scarce but somehow they defied the odds and believed that it might just last – and it is that faith, as much as the flame itself, that filled with the temple, and all of Zion, with a new light. It is the same faith that led Joseph, in this week’s portion, to manage the most precious economic resources of the Egyptians, their crops, during the seven years of plenty. The returns were tremendous, but he stored the excess away safely. Then, during the seven years of famine that followed, enough remained to feed not only the entire population of Egypt, but also those of surrounding nations, in their version of a global economy. Joseph was a sound, visionary and responsible money manager. The miracle of Egyptian and Israelite survival depended on it. It was a miracle forged in faith. The people had faith in him, his vision and his wisdom, and he did not abuse it. What Bernard Madoff did was revealed only over the past few weeks, but it comes on the heels of numerous other blows to our faith in the people who handle our resources. We’ve lost faith in the ability of our leaders and companies to handle money responsibly. We’ve lost faith in our future. And now, in large part because of Madoff, we’ve lost faith even in the goodness and purity of tzedakkahitself. In Jewish law, this breach of faith is considered a form of stealing, (called G’neivat Da’at), the stealing of one’s hopes, the theft of trust. Of course in this case, it also involves the actual theft of money. But it is the less tangible form of stealing that is perhaps the most damaging. All forms of cheating fall under this category. Detailed discussions of the subject can be found at http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/geneivatdaat.html and http://www.chaburas.org/daat.html. Click on http://www.getreligion.org/?p=5052 for a nice survey of recent articles (in the NY Times and elsewhere) where people discuss how Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was indeed G’neivat Da’atof an almost inconceivable and unprecedented degree. I’ve discussed elsewhere my feelings of disgust about Madoff. Rarely have we been so in need of a communal cleansing. But it seems pointless to focus totally on the negative, on distancing ourselves from Madoff and him from civilized society. Yesterday I saw the timely and transcendent film “Doubt,” in which deception plays a big role. A key idea expressed by the Meryl Streep character is she understood that her deceitful actions necessarily distanced herself from God (even though she felt the ends ultimately justified the means). We need to recognize that here, as well, our focus should not simply be to distance ourselves from Madoff so much as to recognize how, through his breach of faith, we all feel much more distant now from God. Where there is no trust, God is distant. Where miracles cease, cynicism begins. We’re feeling very cynical about things right now. So we light the candles tonight, and more tomorrow, and more yet the next day, until our homes are glowing with wall to wall light, enough to light up the world outside. For now, maybe it’s best to channel our anger and frustration into more positive energy. Who cares about the amount of oil that burned or its cost per barrel! The miracle is that we continue to produce light at all – that, after all that has happened, we still have enough faith to ignite that next match.	__label__pos	0.950796
We’ve got two eyes, two ears, and only one mouth. I believe it’s for a reason. As a white woman who desires to be an ally to my black community, I feel that it is crucially important to take watch and learn first. You’ve got to assess a situation and take notice before you can help. Here’s what I’ve read so far. I’ll continue to add to this list (open to suggestions!), but I think this is a decent place to start if your heart beats for racial reconciliation and you want to learn more. *edit – almost immediately after publishing this post, I received critically important and helpful feedback from some kind folks on Twitter. So I changed the title and made a few edits, because this election DOES matter. The future of America DOES matter. I tried to keep things vague and tidy the first time around, but vague and tidy just doesn’t work during election season. So I took things in a different direction, a topic on which I’m pretty proficient and a direction in which I feel safe leading my readers. Thanks for being such a part of this process! I love politics. I discovered NPR my freshman year of college and I haven’t recovered since. I’ve always had this desire to know a little bit about a lot of things. I’m almost positive it stems from sin – fear of failure, and desire for approval, and maybe a little pride thrown in. But the genuine thirst for knowledge is real and I’m grateful the Lord put that in me. So I listen, and I read, and how many times do I have to say I love Twitter? I’m a millennial – of COURSE I get my news from social media! I’ve voted Republican and I’ve voted Democrat, and I’ve never been totally satisfied with either party’s platforms. And that’s okay. Nobody gets it perfectly. No party gets it perfectly. We are sinful and greedy and easily corrupted. This world began falling apart the moment sin entered the world and it won’t stop decaying until Jesus comes back to fix it once and for all. Even in the waiting, I’m still grateful to be an American who loves the democratic process. I know elections are exhausting to watch. Your brain hurts from all of the ads and your Facebook feeds are probably tired. But here’s why I think it matters to follow politics and current events, both in America and around the world – because God says to look. Both the Old and the New Testaments are filled with examples of God’s desire for us to keep our eyes open. To perceive what he’s doing. To be in this world while not of it. To fight for truth and justice as he defines it. To bind up broken hearts and set people free. And so we listen, and we read, and we talk about it, and we rally, and we vote. But there’s a catch. It’s easy to get burnt out. It’s easy to succumb to fear or feelings of overwhelm or hopelessness. Self-care is important. I could say I don’t get caught up in the frenzy, because I know who wins in the end and I know the God I serve cares about truth and justice even more than I do. But there’s more to it than that, on a daily, micro level. I guess when it comes down to it, I have an election self-care regimen. I refuse to engage in conversations that involve hateful, damaging, fear-mongering language about the direction in which this country is headed. I thank God that I live with a black President and a woman Presidential candidate. I fact check a lot. I open my Bible each morning and look for clues on how to love people better and what God says about leadership. I click through several funny political memes per day. My favorites were from the second debate. I gather my kids around the table and teach them how to look at the world through a viewfinder that says a man named Jesus died for it. I remind them that this includes every single person, all of the genders and all of the colors, with all of the baggage anyone cares to bring to the table. I stay off of social media at least one day per week, sometimes two. I practice saying things like, “You might be right” (thanks, Jess). I pray for more humility and wisdom. I bite my tongue more now than I ever have in my life. I also speak up more than I ever have in my life. Because there is a time for everything, and this matters. I knew it was coming. I’d already heard the word discipline from the Lord several times throughout the month of January, as if he was asking me to put in the work now so I could reap the harvest later. When I finally had some clarity, I told my husband about the stirring in my heart. Some stuff is going to hit the fan for us this year. I think someone might get sick, or we might lose an income, or there might be new relational chaos in our family. I want to be prepared when it happens. Ever supportive of my spiritual gifts, my dear husband gave me some serious side eye and told me to pipe down. Then he closed his eyes and nodded. And shook his head, at the same time. If my man could figure out a way to build a house in the clouds, he would move our family to the sky in a heartbeat. Chris could literally get punched in the face and he’d pull himself out of the dirt, dust himself off, smile, and make some comment about how there’s nowhere to go but up from there. In that moment at our kitchen table, he knew I’d heard from God, but he didn’t want to think about our lives being turned upside-down. And eight months later, upside-down they went! In the course of just a few weeks, our family has experienced significant sickness, loss of income, and relational chaos. I’m trying my hardest to compare it to other times my life has felt dark and hopeless, because these are some of the most extreme events to ever happen to us. And yet, this is the most at peace I’ve ever felt. I don’t feel dark and heavy. I feel light and hopeful, excited even. Because we’ve been preparing for this all year. Mere weeks after my word from the Lord in January, I sat at the IF:gathering and listened to Katherine describe her life-changing stroke and subsequent recovery. She said that in her darkest moments, she reminded herself that THIS IS NOT A DRILL. This is what she’d been training for, in a spiritual sense. All of the Scripture, all of the prayers, all of the diligent times spent with Jesus, they came flooding back to her and kept her company while she lay in a hospital bed, unable to communicate with anyone. As I listened to her words, I felt God again remind me of our conversations a month prior. It almost felt as if he was nudging me to stop wasting time. No need to be flailing about and trying to remember a random Psalm when the bottom drops out. And so I got ready. I got after healthy rhythms and relationships like my life depended on it. I started reading my Bible every morning, and not just when I remembered to or on a phone app in the car. When people ask, I try not to sound blunt in my reply. I just read it. No reading plans, no journals. I pick one book at a time, and I read one chapter per day until that book is done. Throughout the day, I ask the Lord to remind me things from my morning’s reading. What does he want to tell me about himself, myself, and the world? I also started going to the gym every day. Not just a few times per month for yoga classes, or on a Saturday morning when I had some free time. I work out five days a week, for twenty minutes each morning. This is another question I get a lot, about how I make it work. I just go. The answer might seem unrealistic to some, but it took so much time and work to get to this place as a family. We literally changed jobs and moved things around in our budget to get the morning routine we have today. And now my husband and I start our days together while apart (how couples do the same workout next to each other, I might never know), moving our bodies and asking God how he wants to use us today. Lastly, I really started to let people in. I feel like I went to my best friend Jess and my husband and blurted out I HAVE A PRIDE PROBLEM, but I know it was more nuanced than that (I hate nuance. Even the word. It feels wimpy to me. I’m so stinkin’ black and white). I basically asked them to speak life AND truth over me, and I practiced receiving correction. I got used to the idea that I’m busted and broken even WITH Jesus, and I learned to guzzle grace. I’m still working on the “extending it others” part, but the Lord is kind and gentle while he teaches me. And so here we are. The actual bottom is trying to fall out, and I’m still standing. There is healing here. This is a story of redemption. A few years ago when things got rough, I wanted out. Out of my marriage, out of motherhood, out of this world. And this time, I’m smiling (weakly, tightly sometimes) and whispering under my breath that this is not a drill. I can take heart. He’s already overcome the world. And I’m not alone. God looks at some of these worldly circumstances of mine and he enters into the pain with me. It ought not be, he whispers. I get it. This is bad. But can we go back to all of those things I promised you? All of the things you’ve read about me in Scripture, bragged about me to your friends and people online? Let’s camp out on those. Stand on my promises. The bottom never falls out here.	__label__pos	0.674755
Our addiction to technology trumps caffeine, chocolate and alcohol This probably sounds familiar: You're out to dinner with friends, and everything's fun, until you get that itch. It's been 20 minutes, and you really want to check Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare or email. Forget about wanting; this is needing. You finally give in to the urge and sneakily check your phone under the table -- or fake an urgent visit to the bathroom, where you'll take a hit of the Internet while huddling in a stall. Anecdotally, our Internet use seems to have spawned real addictions. And according to several recently released surveys, we've got it bad. More than half of Americans would rather give up chocolate, alcohol and caffeine for a week before parting temporarily with their phones, according to a recent survey by technology firm TeleNav. One-third would give up sex, 22% would give up their toothbrushes (versus 40% of iPhone users, who evidently love their phone more than clean teeth) and 21% would rather go shoeless before separating from a mobile phone. Sixty-six percent sleep with their smartphones by their side. Our addiction is so severe that people described going 24 hours without Internet akin to quitting an alcohol or cigarette habit, according to a report from British company Intersperience. About 40% of those surveyed reported feeling lonely without the Internet, and 53% felt upset at being deprived. One person described unplugging to "having my hand chopped off." University students who faced a sudden Internet and media blackout began to display withdrawal symptoms, during another survey conducted by the University of Maryland. At least it's universal. One American said she was "itching like a crackhead" after going cold-turkey for 24 hours, and an Argentine student reported feeling "dead" without media, while a Lebanese student described the whole experience as "sickening." The students recognized that there are joys in life besides browsing the web and curating their social networks, according to the survey, but all nevertheless reported feeling distress, sadness, boredom or paranoia. "Media is my drug; without it I was lost," said a British student. "I am an addict. How could I survive 24 hours without it?" One wrote: "Emptiness overwhelmed me." Another said he "felt incomplete." RELATED: -- Shan Li Top photo: Cigarette breaks become social media breaks at work. Credit: Mark Smiciklas / Intersection Consulting via Flickr Bottom photo: The addiction tree map. Credit: Susan Moeller and Rebecca Goldberg / University of Maryland	__label__pos	0.989034
Residents in North Central have a chance to provide their input on what they want for their neighbourhood. Wednesday evening, the North Central Community Association is hosting community-wide meeting at the Albert Scott Community Centre beginning at 6 p.m. Michael Parker, NCCA executive director, said it is all part of the NCCA’s overall plan for the community. “We have been actively doing this since June,” he said. NCCA is working with a consulting firm on the project, “The goal is to engage 1,000 community members and stakeholders to hear what people’s priorities, hopes, dreams and aspiration are for the community, ” said Parker. “At the end of it, we want to put that into a document that we can use to communicate and validate what we know are some of the concerns are with different levels of government and other agencies to improve services.” He believes such a vision is necessary to help all those living and working in the neighbourhood understand what the goals are for the neighbourhood. “For this event, we are really gearing it towards residents and the neighbourhood,” said Parker. The association hopes many residents will find the time to provide their input and to make it easier it is providing supper and child care. “People can come without having to worry about those things,” said Parker. “As a parent of young children, it’s very hard to get to evening meetings.” He said the association wants the people to be at the forefront of the planning process. The consulting group will facilitate the process and the list of outcomes for the meeting include defining a clear vision for the future of the neighbourhood, buiding capacity in the neighbourhood, defining actions on how to achieve the broader goals and to help develop comprehensive policies to ensure the implementation of the plan. Parker said it was important to hire an outside party to do the information gathering so the members of the community association, who also live in the neighbourhood, could participate. “Also, you can never see the fishbowl you are in so it’s good to have a third party,” he said. Parker said it’s very important to have a comprehensive plan and vision for the future because it will have give a voice for the residents. “We know in North Central, specifically, there are a lot of serious issues that are concerning like violence, housing and crime,” he said. Parker said the final report is expected to be released in the spring of 2017.	__label__pos	0.913641
It's not often that we get to report on positive developments in our dysfunctional justice system. But I think we might finally have one. Sal Esposito, a Boston resident, recently received a summons to report for jury service. But Sal is not your standard New Englander, called to perform his civic duty. He's a cat. Sal's owners aren't sure how he wound up on the jurors' list. They tried to get him an exemption, claiming he doesn't speak English. But it was denied! Thankfully for Sal, it looks like he won't have to go through the tedium of being questioned by lawyers about his likes and dislikes. His veterinarian wrote a letter to court officials, explaining that Sal's a cat, not a human. Here's an update about Sal's brush with the court system: Why could this be a positive development? Well, I've witnessed two juries in action, from start to finish of trials. In one case I was a party, in the other an observer. In both cases, the juries got their findings hopelessly wrong, based on the facts and the law. I strongly suspect both juries were tainted--or members of the juries were on some serious opiates. One of the great myths of American justice is that our jury system is somehow sacrosanct. In fact, I suspect many Americans would be shocked at how often juries are corrupted--and how easy it is to corrupt them. Based on my observations, I would say if you can somehow get the jury foreman in your hip pocket, you've probably got the whole jury. I wonder how often foremen are swayed--with a gift, a favor, an out-and-out bribe--in order to push juries in a certain direction. It probably happens way more than most people would dream. And here's another theory of mine: I suspect much courthouse corruption originates in clerks' offices--at both the state and federal levels. Clerks' offices decide which judges get which cases, who gets into jury pools, etc. In other words, some of the most important decisions that determine the outcomes of cases originate in clerks' offices. Do powerful law firms in certain jurisdictions have the wherewithal--and the utter lack of ethics--to sway actions of courthouse clerks? My guess is--yes, they have that power, and yes, they use it. How do we get around this dilemma? I think Sal Esposito has helped provide an answer: We start having animals on jury duty. Animals are much more honest than people anyway. And think about it: How could a corrupt lawyer manage to bribe a cat? And how could a slimy judge improperly influence a jury full of cats? Heck, our cats, Baxter and Chloe, don't listen to me--and I control their food supply. Why would they listen to a judge, one who wears a scary black robe and probably smells bad. I asked Baxter if he would like to serve on a jury, and he seemed up for it. "Will I actually have to pay attention?" he asked. "Nope," I told him. "I've seen human juries that obviously didn't pay attention." "Is it OK if I fall off to sleep?" "Perfectly fine. I've seen human jurors do that." "Is it OK if I lick myself from time to time?" "I've seen human jurors do that, too." "What about noms?" "You get plenty of time for lunch. And taxpayers pick up the tab." "Is it OK if I entertain the other jurors during breaks with some of my leaping, tumbling, and roll-over tricks?" "Heck, that kind of thing is encouraged in Alabama. During the Don Siegelman case, a juror did back flips for her fellow panel mates. They called her "Flipper" because of her gymnastics skills. I'm sure you can pull off tricks that she never dreamed of. And you're probably cuter than she is, too." "I'm a high-tech guy. I've got to be able to send texts and e-mails to my buddies on the jury." "Not a problem. Again, in the Don Siegelman case, that kind of behavior among jurors was perfectly fine." "That sounds great, dude. Count me in." "Good deal. I'll call the clerk's office right now." While I'm on the phone with the clerk, I'm going to suggest they contact "Sammy the Cat" in Notasulga, Alabama. He already hangs around a post office all day, so he probably can learn the ropes of a courthouse. Here's the latest on Sammy. If I were involved in a case, I would take my chances with Sammy, over a human, any day.	__label__pos	0.996321
I'm oft asked how pros do earnings analysis and trades using options - Often generating 50% returns in a day... Well, here's the secret sauce... sort of... The company has traded ~ 5,800 contracts today in the first two hours surpassing its total daily average option volume of 5,388. The Stats Tab and Day's biggest trades snapshots are included (click either image to enlarge). For what it's worth, the largest trades have been Apr 34 and Apr 36 put purchases. A few things we probablyknow with earnings vol: (1) Vol will rise into the event (2) Vol wil drop after the event (3) The stock will move that day more than average What we don't know: Will the underlying move be large enough to make the vol a purchase... Or, put another way, since the vol is most likely going to collapse after the announcement, shouldn't it be an auto sale? Let's use FDO as our case study, it has earnings tomorrow BMO and presents an interesting case. We'll start simple - the Charts Tab (just the Vol; with IV30™ (red line) vs HV10™ (white line)). What we're lookin' at: (1) The first earnings cycle highlighted (Jul '09) we see the white line (HV10™) spiking past the red line (IV30™). In this case, the ATM straddle the day before earnings was a purchase - i.e. it was worth more the next day. Details to come... (2) The second earnings cycle (Oct '09) showed the opposite. The the white line (HV10™) stayed below the red line (IV30™) - though note that the red line did dip (as expected) and the white line did rise (as expected). (3) The third earnings cycle (Jan '10) was just like the cycle in Jul '09 - but even more pronounced. Vol was a super purchase as the stock gapped up on earnings more than the implied vol "forecasted." Now to the details - the Earnings & Dividends Tab snapshot is included (click to enlarge). What we're lookin' at: (1) The top ROW is FDO stock price 5 trading days before earnings through 5 trading days after. (2) The second ROW are the front 2 month ATM straddles for the same period - focus on purple - the front month. (3) The third ROW is the implied vol for those straddles - focus on the red - the front month. NOTE: The red line always collapses after earnings - this is called the vol crush after earnings. What do we see? For the far left earnings cycle (Jul '09) we see specifically vol went from 59 --> 39 after earnings. 20 vol point drop! So clearly vol was a sale right?... Sell high / buy low?... No?... In fact it wasn'ta sale... The straddle went from $2.15 ---> $3.63; a whopping 68% one day move on the stock gap. A perfect example of how dipping implied vol does not guarantee a good a sale. The implied vol dropped b/c the event (news) was over. Following similar analysis we can see Oct '09 earnings were a sale: Straddle went from $2.35 ---> $1.32 for a 43% one day drop. The most recent cycle was a purchase: $1.78 --> $3.42 for a 92% one day gain. So - what's the point?... There are pro-traders on this floor that only trade earnings. They find companies which have significant odds of being either a sale or a purchase - they play that one day game, and make millions a year. As you see, you're looking at 40% - 90% one day changes in FDO. Of course, if you do it badly, you're out of cash and broke really fast. What do they look for? Companies with huge pre-dispositions to be sales or purchases... i.e. 10/10 or 9/10 times where one side was a winner. For the record, FDO isn't one of them... This is trade analysis, not a recommendation. Legal Stuff: http://www.livevolpro.com/help/disclaimer_legal.html	__label__pos	0.975725
Many homeowners aspire to have a home interior that exuberates style, personality and quality, however due to budget limitations scores are often discouraged. Preconceptions can make you believe that Home improvement television programs, such as 60 MinuteMmakeover, could be the only answer to satisfy your interior design ideals. Well that’s where you’re wrong! Although having a large disposable budget and the help of experts can be advantageous to any plans, one should remember that a stunning home interior can be attained with realistic amounts of capital and plenty of creativity. As seen in the picture above simplicity can be truly beautiful and create a homely feel that is warm and comforting. Therefore, depending upon your tastes, remember “less can certainly be more” when it comes to interior improvements. One of the best places to start when improving interior décor is to assess the current furnishings within the property. Dated, tired and old furniture can defiantly dampen the image a room is attempting to convey. Therefore before any improvements are conducted one should formalize plans that will aid decisions to be made in regards to which furniture is worth keeping and what style is to be portrayed. Although the aim will be to keep spending to a minimum, unfortunately changing furniture can be an expensive but necessary process; however such expense presents validity when new furniture additions provide a stunning focal point that adds longevity and personality. However, before the process of buying new furniture and accessories begins consideration should be first given to the desired colour scheme as this will prevent the purchase of items that look nice but don’t fit the final interior theme. Once the theme is decided upon personalisation can commence through the acquisition of furnishings and accessories. When shopping for new furniture it is wise to opt for furniture that is durable and classical in design as this improves the chances of the piece standing the test of time in regards to fashion tastes and functional lifespan. Furthermore, always seek for high quality items as these are less likely to deteriorate quickly, cheaper low quality products are more likely to become worn and damaged, therefore leading to replacement sooner. Alternatively, if buying new furniture is completely out of the question due to budgeting reasons, there are many ways to bring current furnishings “back to life” through simple but effective techniques. For example wooden furniture can be easily given a new lease of life with an added layer of paint and simple finishing techniques. This easy and cheap way of recycling old furniture is now increasingly popular, which has resulted in numerous “help guides” and video tutorials becoming accessible online. About the author: Chris Algar writes on behalf The Furniture Market who are specialists in high quality furniture ideal for the perfect home interior. Please visit http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/ to view the extensive range of beautiful furniture. Sponsored Guest Post	__label__pos	0.998918
Patient Preparation Collect Lavender (EDTA). Specimen Preparation Transfer 7 mL whole blood to ARUP Standard Transport Tubes. (Min: 2 mL) Specimen must be labeled with patient's name, date of birth, and date and time of draw. Storage/Transport Temperature Refrigerated. Unacceptable Conditions Frozen specimens. Remarks Stability Ambient: 72 hours; Refrigerated: 2 weeks; Frozen: Unacceptable This testing is recommended for the following situations: 1. Recently transfused individuals who have circulating RBCs of donor origin that interfere with the typing of self RBCs. 2. Individuals with conditions requiring frequent transfusions (eg, sickle cell disease, beta thalassemia) who develop antibodies to low-immunogenicity antigens that are present on donor RBCs. Although these antigens are usually not typed by standard serology because of their low immunogenicity, they can lead to hemolytic reactions after multiple transfusions. 3. Individuals with RhD variants with low antigen expression or with reduced numbers of antigenic epitopes (eg, weak D, D elute, partial D) where serotyping may yield inconclusive calls. Component Test Code* Component Chart Name LOINC 2004740 Blood Group, ABO/8 Minor Ag, Microarray Bloodchip Reference Performed at Novartis	__label__pos	0.965649
Community development The key to this interventionAt the heart of community development is a commitment to equality. Sustainable networks of social, physical and emotional support provide the foundations upon which HIV prevention interventions for MSM are built and delivered. What is the activity? The term community is often used to describe groups of people those who share a range of characteristics such as sexual identity, race or ethnicity, culture, age or geographical location. Community development describes a process of developing and supporting active and sustainable networks based on social justice and mutual respect. It is about enabling and empowering people to directly inﬂuence the things that affect their lives. Making it Count has 14 over-arching community development aims that constituted the strategic priorities of the CHAPS partnership in 2011-12. A document produced by the last Labour government, Communities in control: real people, real power (2008) contains a number of initiatives and ideas to help boost community development with the aim of increasing participatory democracy and direct advocacy. The current coalition government’s proposed increase in community engagement through the notion of ‘Big Society’ has still not been fully articulated, but this can be regarded as an opportunity for voluntary sector agencies to devise their own vision of the Big Society. The Making it Count approach asserts that interventions that work to improve networks of social support among communities will help to reduce power inequalities, which in turn reduces the likelihood of HIV exposure and transmission. HIV prevention interventions do not occur in a vacuum, and it is vital to connect programme aims and objectives with local realities. The local knowledge possessed by gay community groups is a key tool in shaping the context of local HIV prevention interventions. Helping to ensure that those who are the targets of future HIV prevention activities are engaged in their development and evaluation will improve their feasibility and acceptability. Providing resources for the development of community groups Five key elements of successful community development (from Rifkin et al. 1988) are: recognition and assessment of need in the population group, leadership, organisational infrastructure, resource mobilisation, and management. New and developing community groups will often require support in one or more of these ﬁve core areas. Support should aim to include: fostering the skills, interests and desires among individuals within community groups that help them to thrive; sustaining social networks within which gay men in England can ﬂourish; and establishing a norm of collaboration and partnership working within the HIV prevention sector, which is increasingly fraught with aggressive competition for increasingly scant resources. When community development focusses on organisations it shares many characteristics with organisational development. Here community development can include ﬁnancial support to new (or struggling) organisaitons, or the offer of free meeting space, sharing of ofﬁce equipment and infrastructure (such as photocopiers, telephones or internet access), or the sharing of human resources and expertise. In this way, provision of advice on a broad array of activities (such as project management, drawing up budgets or establishing charitable status) helps to increase the stock of social capital within community networks and organisations. Community groups with few resources are more likely to actively seek external support than those with greater capacity. This can lead to adverse selection of community groups because it is not necessarily the groups that have the most impact or reach that seek or receive support. In the main, selection happens coincidentally, or can be based on historical or personal relationships between individuals. To avoid such trends, it is worth considering the following competencies before making a decision about offering support and other resources to a group: Clear articulation of aims informed by demonstrable local need. Proven leadership or leadership potential. Willingness to engage with HIV prevention aims and interventions. Capacity and willingness to work with other organisations to develop interventions and programmes. Capacity to respond to changing needs and policy environments. Promoting community voices Intervention planning that takes a top-down, unilateral approach is generally controlled by those with the relevant resources. Workforce development interventions (such as training, conferences or seminars) can contribute to an increase in technical proﬁciency, but do little to increase interaction between funders, providers and beneﬁciaries. For example, health promoters may develop HIV prevention interventions using the latest technology or psychological models, but may be surprised if their interventions are unfamiliar to or impracticable for those in the target population (say because of literacy levels or cultural considerations). Feasibility and acceptability are therefore best ensured when members of groups intended to beneﬁt from interventions are engaged in the process of their development and implementation. This holds not only for interventions for gay men and other MSM, but also for structural interventions. Enabling and supporting community members to voice their opinions with decision-makers at local, regional and national levels helps to build conﬁdence among individuals, decreases social exclusion, and helps to make services and policies more relevant to needs. Direct input ensures that lessons can be taken from people’s experiences of previous successes and failures, as well as increasing community ownership of interventions. Interventions to ensure direct service-user engagement can help individuals gain technical and interpersonal skills that will help to increase personal control in other areas of life. Thus, for some people the skills acquisition and experience processes can result in voluntary and paid involvement in the HIV sector. Community development therefore also contributes to sustaining a vital, skilled and personally engaged workforce. In this way, community members are empowered to become the subjects rather than just the targets of HIV interventions. The following considerations have been suggested (Rifkin & Pridmore 2001) as useful for those aiming to promote community input into intervention planning and delivery: Facilitating a range of stakeholders’ input requires mutual trust, which can be enabled through the use of fair, step-by-step participatory approaches accompanied by some ﬂexibility. A careful balance between generating robust content, and establishing an inclusive process. Demonstrating appreciation and encouragement to those who participate helps to develop a sense of belonging, which in turn helps to sustain communal activity. Aims and outcomes Community participation reinforces the community values discussed in the the Making it Count approach. Aims for, and outcomes from community development interventions, can include: Stronger organisational links between organisations and community members and more robust partnership working (see Community aim 14, for example). Gay businesses exist and increase activities which reduce HIV prevention need among gay men and other MSM (see Community aims 5-8, for example). Mainstream businesses increase activities which reduce HIV prevention need among gay men and other MSM (see Community aims 9-10, for example). Identification and strengthening of informal support networks among gay men, and evidence of community members’ input into local decision-making processes (see Community aim 2; Community aim 11 and Organisational aim 1, for example). Increased understanding of our values and the ways we feel gay men can contribute to the health and well being of their own communities (see Community aim 11 and Organisational aim 1, for example).. Monitoring and evaluation In terms of outcomes and impact, very little priority is given to evaluation of community development interventions. Monitoring involvement in community development interventions, by keeping an up-to-date record of current and past activity, enables agencies to monitor their level of capacity to engage in similar activities in the future. Participant observation and process evaluation of community development interventions will help to ensure that outcomes are more widely understood. Page last updated: 5 July 2013 Case study Peer mentoring programme The Metro Centre runs the Metrosafe mentoring programme, to assist men in taking control of their sex lives and their health. Referrals come through Health Trainers or clinics. Men are initially assessed using a behaviour, attitude, skills and knowledge scale called the BASK Inventory. Men work through structured modules with trained volunteer mentors, looking at how sexual behaviour might be affected by issues such as self-esteem, drugs and alcohol. Participants complete the BASK Inventory again during and at the end of the programme to measure changes. Key to the programme’s success is its mixture of structure and informality. Mentors share their own experiences, helping to empower men and engender ownership of their sexual health and well-being. Case study Count Me In GMFAs Count Me In campaign asks gay men to commit to a five point action plan to reduce HIV. Video clips posted on Youtube and Facebook show men’s accounts of why preventing HIV infection is important them, and the challenges and solutions they face. Men are invited to post their own videos and to comment on current videos. At the heart of the intervention is an understanding that preventing HIV comes from within communities of gay men. Men are invited to sign-up to publically support the action plan and to ask their friends to do the same. Case study Residential weekend for men in rural areas A group weekend for MSM in the South West of England was run by Healthy Gay Cornwall and The Eddystone Trust. Men were supported to discuss personal and social strategies for remaining HIV negative. Through exploring emotional and physical well-being, men were encouraged to explore new strategies and discuss them with each other. HIV was discussed in the context of a holistic approach to sex, risk, proximity to HIV, and strategies for maintaining emotional and physical well-being. The group has continued to meet informally, leading to new friendships. One-to-one, follow-up therapeutic sessions were offered, and some men continue to volunteer and participate in local community activities. Case study Black Gay Men’s Group Facilitated and supported by a community development worker from Yorkshire MESMAC, a Black Gay Men’s Group was set up in February 2011. It was established following a survey of black MSM in the Yorkshire region, which indicated they were looking for a safe space to meet other black MSM and to receive and build peer support. Initially some men were concerned about being ‘outed’ by joining the meetings but a core group of men were instrumental in recruiting peers and friends. The group addresses the needs men bring, rather than a set programme. This includes support with coming out; learning about gay culture and history; dealing with homophobia and discrimination; sexual health and developing relationships and friendships.	__label__pos	0.956398
Now there’s a way to realize your full potential on the job. ‘Rebooting Work’ shows you how to transform the way you work in the Age of Entrepreneurship. 50% of people are unsatisfied with their jobs. The way we work just isn’t working. Where talent ranks higher than tenure. Everyone has to get voted onto the team every day. yet the war for talent is bigger than ever and most companies can’t fill their openings. It’s time to reboot work. Most things worth doing are hard. Successful people get to where they are in their careers because they make the hard appear easy. and are in the Age of Entrepreneurship. By leveraging new technologies, networking outside of our organizations, and acknowledging that we are the CEOs of our own destinies, we can have more fulfilling and rewarding careers. and increasingly cloud, social and mobile. Yet in the midst of all of this change and new capability, we have not modified our behaviors and management processes to adapt to the new realities. I recently learned the true secret to employee motivation when I interviewed Silicon Valley legend, Maynard Webb.Kevin Kruse, Forbes “Re-booting Work,” an ode to shaking up the traditional workplace.Kara Miller and Kine Chapin, WGBH News Millennials face a brutal workforce. Baby Boomers can only dream about retirement. Most companies don’t last as long. The job market has never been so desultory. Right? Wrong, argues tech veteran Maynard Webb.Jon Swartz, USA Today Rebooting Work: Transform How You Work in the Age of Entrepreneurship gives readers the tools to build a successful career in the new age of entrepreneurship.Anita Ferrer, Associations Now In the book, he advocates taking control of your destiny, though that doesn’t necessarily mean starting your own business. It means advancing your skills to stay atop the massive rate of change under way.Susan Hall, ITBusinessEdge Maynard Webb knows a thing or two about navigation through a career path. One of the tech industry’s most respected veterans. Webb just added another role to his resume — author — to help other people better forge their own successful work lives.Colleen Taylor, TechCrunch TV The man brought in to fix the auction site’s network nearly 14 years ago has become one of the most respected voices in Silicon Valley. He has just written a book about taking control of your future. Webb is considered one of the elder statesmen of Silicon Valley.Jim Kerstetter, CNET Maynard Webb has always been the go-to guy when Silicon Valley companies have tough problems. Webb brings strategic and operational savvy to every issue and venture.Dan Schawbel, Forbes I agree hole-hardheartedly with Webb’s theory about work. I’ve called it being an entrepreneur for life. In “Rebooting Work”, co-authored with Carlye Adler, Webb takes all of his insight about careers (he has a passion for mentoring) and distills it into a sort of self-actualization guide.Victoria Barret, Forbes Maynard Webb knows something about transformation as noted above. Also important to know that he’s not a work “hippy” (I might be). He started with IBM and speaks fondly of the mentoring he received. If he thinks work is shifting, it is a good idea to pay attention.Terri Griffith, Author of The Plugged-In Manager and a professor at Santa Clara University Have you ever said anything like one of the following statements? “I can’t take a risk…Read More Successful companies are built with strong talent. Employees who have been with you since Day One…Read Full Article By Jacob Morgan, Contributor If you are in technology, venture capital, or business in general; you’re…Read Full Article	__label__pos	0.981693
As Richard Martin and Harold Koda noted in Waist Not, “[s]eldom does fashion confirm the natural waist.” This was never more true than at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when women’s dress emulated the Neoclassical line, which placed the waistline just below the breasts. The columnar silhouette was first rendered in sheer cottons and linens, which revealed a woman’s unencumbered body below the “waist” and drew up and supported the breasts above. By the 1810s, the same silhouette hardened through the use of heavier silks and stays underneath. Unlike the conical stays of the eighteenth century, early nineteenth-century stays were long and compressed the hips in furtherance of the columnar line, and they introduced gussets underneath the breasts in order to support them above the high waistline. From the late 1810s through the 1820s, the waistline slipped downward by degrees until it was just above natural position in the 1830s. By the 1830s, the ideal silhouette was a wide open triangle atop generous bell-shaped gored skirts short enough to reveal the ankles. The breadth of a woman’s upper torso was achieved through a combination of underpinnings. Stays were boned, which provided pressure on the waist, and had bust gussets, which pushed the volume of the bosom upward, and featured shoulder straps, which held the shoulders down and away from the neck. Sleeve supports, made of down or of cotton shaped with whalebone, filled enormous leg o’mutton sleeves, which further widened the upper torso. The skirts were supported by corded or stiffened petticoats. In the 1840s, the defining elements of the silhouette slipped downward on the body until the ballooning sleeves disappeared altogether. By the 1850s, the open triangle created by sloped shoulders was still a key element of the silhouette and the expanding skirts were often boxed pleated or gauged, rather than gathered, at the waist and reached the floor. This new, broad-based silhouette made the waist appear even smaller. That effect increased with the transition from multiple layers of petticoats to the cage crinoline. With its introduction around 1856, as Richard Martin and Harold Koda note in Bare Witness, “lateral expansion achieved its zenith; crinolines afforded light support for massive skirts and for the wide expanse of upper chest visible above the bust, a breadth which now extended even off the shoulders.” Made of hoops of whalebone, cane, or steel held together with cloth tapes or encased in fabric, the light, effective support of the cage crinoline allowed dresses to achieve an expanse as great or greater than that provided by eighteenth-century panniers. By the 1870s, the expansive base of the cage crinoline had fallen out of fashion but women were loath to discard the voluminous dresses that had covered them; fashion evolved into the bustled silhouette that replaced the belle of the 1860s. Fabric which had previously spread over the cage was pulled to the back of the dress, creating a silhouette that was, from the side, almost a right triangle supported by back-heavy petticoats or new hooped crinolines modified for the new silhouette. From the front, the silhouette reflects increasing control being brought to bear on the waistline by corsets shaped to an hourglass silhouette. The bustle silhouette slipped downward and almost off the dress until the early 1880s, when it reappeared projecting off the back of the dress at a near right angle. This form of bustle was compared to an ottoman, and it tended to be upholstered similarly, which further increased its mass. It was supported underneath by a variety of structures, many advertised as healthy alternatives to the horsehair structure that had supported some 1870s bustles. The torso atop the bustle also reflected increasing technological innovation in the construction of foundation garments. With the increased reliance on steel boning and ever more complex pieced construction, the corset became capable of delivering an armored underpinning to conform the body to an hourglass silhouette. The innovations in corset construction also allowed for more pressure to be placed on the waistline than had been possible in the eighteenth century. This would place the objet de luxe which the corset had become at the center of increasing controversy over health issues attributed to the wearing of corsets, but not before the hourglass silhouette it offered had become iconic to the whole of the nineteenth century. Glasscock, Jessica. “Nineteenth-Century Silhouette and Support.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/19sil/hd_19sil.htm (October 2004)	__label__pos	0.879198
Internet Censorship Essay, Research Paper Animal cruelty encompasses a range of different behaviors harmful to animals, from neglect to malicious, brutal killings. Studies show that animal cruelty may lead to more serious forms of crime, like heavy drug use, violent outbursts, and most common, cold blooded murder. Many studies in psychology, sociology, and criminology during the last twenty-five years have demonstrated that violent offenders frequently have childhood and adolescent histories of serious and repeated animal cruelty. A web page that goes by the name Animal Alliance says ?most cruelty investigated by humane officers, is unintentional neglect, and can be resolved through education.? (3) I was slightly shocked when I saw this comment. Anyone who puts an animals? life in their hands, has a responsibility to it. You don?t just forget to feed him/her, or forget to show them love unless it is intentional, it get so much worse, though. These people aren?t just forgetting to feed their pets, or give them attention, they?re kicking and beating them, poisoning and butchering these poor creatures, and what makes me sick to my stomach, is that some of these people do it for fun!! I recently ran across a link to a web page that contained a online petition to put a cat?s killers to justice with maximum sentence. This is the article I found on this brutal torture of an innocent creature. *WARNING* (graphic details) ?On October 10, 1999, a beautiful female cat came willingly to the four boys who stopped on the side of the road and called to her. Her trust was rewarded by unthinkable terror and cruelty – being used as a tug-of-war toy until the boys heard something “pop”, having her legs broken, being jumped up and down on like a trampoline. Even when her pitiful battered body was mercifully dead, her suffering was not at an end. The boys then placed her ravaged body under the wheel of their car, braking over her, as they drove off to find other amusement. Once the Chesapeake Animal Control conducted their investigation and performed a necropsy, criminal charges were filed against 3 of the 4 boys involved. If these charges are found to be accurate, these boys are not only in violation of the laws of the State of Virginia, but are also in need of immediate psychiatric intervention.? (1)* Another horrific article I ran across was even worse. It was about a dog who to was also a victim of rancid brutality. Here is that story. WARNING (graphic details) ?Jose, Marcus, Richard and Lance are accused of obtaining a video camera, pressing the ‘record’ button, luring Scruffy from his home, and then torturing and killing him in an unspeakably monstrous act of cruelty. In the videotape that the police and media have in their possession, four men are shown torturing and killing Scruffy in lurid detail. The quality of the tape is very good, and the police have been able to obtain photographs of the men in the tape. In this tape, one of the four men is shown to elevate Scruffy off the ground by the neck, and then begin this horrific abuse by choking him. This 6 pound little dog did not have a fighting chance against these men. Scruffy, still alive, was then placed in a trash bag. The four men shown in the tape then doused the trash bag with what appeared in the video to be lamp oil, took a cigarette lighter, and set Scruffy on fire. Scruffy, at this point in the video, began to run wildly in pain and agony around the trees while the four men watched and laughed. When the flames finally went out, Scruffy was still alive, but his torture was not over. Next, the men decided to try to decapitate Scruffy with a shovel. After slamming the shovel into Scruffy’s neck and not being able to attain their goal, they realized that Scruffy was more of a fighter than they had expected. The men then opened Scruffy’s mouth and began to pull his jaws apart, as if trying to rip his face in two. Using the shovel in place of a club, the men then beat Scruffy until his tiny body gave out, and he died. Throughout the videotape the four men are all shown laughing and having a good time as they are carrying out these unspeakable tortures.? (1) * After I read these stories I was disgusted, revolted, down right sickened by the realization that these men needed to be institutionalized or locked down. It?s scare?s me to think of what they would and are capable of doing to a human being. The FBI uses reports of animal cruelty in analyzing the threat potential of suspected and known violent criminals. Dr. Randall Lockwood, vice president of Training Initiatives for The Humane Society of the United States, states that ?Researchers, as well as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies nationwide, have linked animal cruelty to domestic violence, child abuse, serial killings, and to the recent rash of killings by school-age children.?(2) I found yet another web page listing some reports from police case files. I was astonished! These are a few excerpts from that page. *WARNING* (graphic details) “Russell Weston Jr., tortured and killed 12 cats, by burning, cutting their tails, paws, ears off, put toxic chemicals in their eyes, blinding them, forcing them to eat poison, hanging them from trees; the noose loose enough to create a slow and painful death, as the cat/kitten struggles to free itself as the noose gets tighter with each attempt. Later killed 2 officers at our Nation’s Capitol.” “Jeffery Dahmer loved to dissect animals (he learned this in school). Later he dissected boys, and kept their body parts in the refrigerator. Murdered 17 men.” “On May 21, 1998 in Springfield, Oregon; 15-year-old Kip Kinkel set a live cat on fire and dragged the innocent creature through the main street of town. He walked into his high school cafeteria and opened fire on his classmates. Two classmates were killed and 22 others injured, four critically. Later that day, police found his parents shot to death in their home.” “Prior to committing multiple murders, Luke Woodham, age 16, wrote in his personal journal that he and an accomplice beat, burned and tortured his dog, Sparkle, to death. Woodham said it was “true beauty.” He poured liquid fuel down his dog’s throat and set fire to her neck, both inside and outside. On 10/1/1977, Woodham stabbed his mother to death and then went to his high school where he shot and killed two classmates — two girls aged 16 and 17, and injured seven others. In June 1998, Woodham was found guilty of three murders and seven counts of aggravated assault. He was sentenced to three life sentences and an additional 20 years for each assault.” “The Kobe Killer, an as yet unnamed 15-year-old boy in Japan, beheaded a cat and strangled several pigeons. Decapitated 11-year-old Jun Hase, and battered to death a 10-year-old girl with a hammer, and assaulted three other children in separate attacks.” “At 9 years old, Eric Smith strangled a neighbor’s cat. At 13 years old, he bludgeoned four-year-old Derrick Robie to death. Smith lured the little boy into the woods, choked him, sodomized him with a stick, then beat him to death with a rock.” “Arthur Shawcross repeatedly threw a kitten into a lake until the kitten drowned from exhaustion. Killed a young girl. Then, after serving 15-1/2 years in prison, he killed 11 more women.” (4) *** Dr. Randall Lockwood stated, ?Violence directed at animals by young people is a sign that something is terribly wrong, and often acts as a warning of future violence, even killings directed against humans.? (2) In the in the past 18 months, we have seen seven school shootings. In each one, it was learned that the perpetrators had abuse, tortured, and killed animals before moving on to their human victims and our nation is wondering what happened. One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it. Our child must be taught young that it wrong to poke at puppy?s eyes. We can?t afford to ignore what we think of as childish exploration. Our children learn the most important aspects of life young and if they?re not aware of what is right and wrong, it could possibly lead to more dangerous attempts. As a society, we can not tolerate cruelty towards animals. People inclined to inflict pain and torture upon animals have a predisposition to violence against both animals and humans. ?A 1997 study by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) reports that youngsters convicted of animal abuse are five times more likely to commit violence against other humans than are their peers, four times more likely to be involved in acts against property, and three times more likely to be drug offenders.? (2) 1. No More Cruelty- http://www.geocities.com/animalabusealert/index.html a) Cat Killers b) Scruffy 2. Colorado High School Gunmen Linked To Animal Cruelty (web article) http://www.hsus.org/whatnew/litteton032399.html a)Lockwood 3. Animal Alliance-http://animalalliance.ca/factsheets/humviol.py 4. Animal Victims/Human Victims: Reports from Police Case Files- http://members.tripod.com/nocruelty/anicru.htm#avh	__label__pos	0.665737
Mental health experts are meeting with government representatives in Melbourne, to discuss a large-scale trial for the treatment of anxiety and depression in remote areas. The proposed system would combine online therapy, with counselling over the phone. Thousands of Australians in remote areas could be involved in the trial, but government funding has yet to be secured. Professor David Richards, from the University of Exeter, says the remote system has been successful in the United Kingdom. "It's made a huge difference to people's lives," he said. "These are people who would never have had any other option to help themselves climb out of their distress other than drug treatments like anti-depressants."	__label__pos	0.9998
ABOUT DR. ELLEN LANGER Dr. Ellen Langer is a world renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University. Her most recent book is . In addition she has written the bestselling book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility , and Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning . Her website is at www.ellenlanger.com On Becoming An Artist Dr. Langer has described her work on the illusion of control, aging, decision-making, and mindfulness theory in over 200 research articles and six academic books. Her work has led to numerous academic honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest of the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Contributions of Basic Science to Applied Psychology award from the American Association of Applied & Preventive Psychology, the Adult Development and Aging Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association, the James McKeen Cattel Award, and the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize. The citation for the APA distinguished contributions award reads, in part, "…her pioneering work revealed the profound effects of increasing mindful behavior…and offers new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Ellen Langer has demonstrated repeatedly how our limits are of our own making." Dr. Langer is a Fellow of The Sloan Foundation; The American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science; Computers and Society; The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; The Society of Experimental Social Psychologists. In addition to other honors, she has been a guest lecturer in Japan, Malaysia, Germany, and Argentina. Included among her books are: . Reading, MA: Da Capo Books, 1989. (Translated into thirteen languages.) Mindfulness . Reading, MA: Da Capo Books, 1997. (Translated into nine languages.) The Power of Mindful Learning . Ballantine Books, 2005. On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity . Ballantine Books, 2009. Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility Additional Resources Ellen's Website at www.ellenlanger.com Chronicle of Higher Education Profile: The Art of Living Mindfully: Nothing is ever certain, says the psychologist Ellen Langer. We should make the most of that. Harvard Magazine profile: "The Mindfulness Chronicles: On the psychology of possibility" Radio Boston Interview by Deborah Becker Ellen's Blog Can the power of thought stop you ageing? Click here. Video on Mindfulness and Leadership Video on Ellen's Classic Research on the Psychology of Control change in the men - just from a change in mindset concept of mindfulness is a different order of variable, because no matter what you're doing, you're doing it mindfully or not no matter what you're doing, if you do it in a mindful manner, you reap the benefits mindfulness is contagious audio recording if you are always mindful of what you are doing, you are never procrastinating one problem people have is a lack of respect the awareness of, at this moment, this is what i need behavior always makes sense from the actors perspective, so be aware of why, then you're ready to take yourself to the task, in a positive way once one allows oneself to do what they want to do, then the task they need to do seems less odious we have all sorts of limits for ourselves that are wired in all the things you think you know you need to question Ellen: I love being wrong the absolutes we take as real, were only researched based at best when we think we know something absolutely, there's no need to pay any attention to it when you recognize everything is uncertain, you stay tuned in Jenifer (Aniston - who's playing her in the movie) reaks authenticity and that's what Ellen values in herself huge diff between curiosity and mindfulness, curiosity can lead you to mindfulness, but if it leads to a solution, then mindfulness is gone interest is a function of a degree to which you are willing to engage yourself, things don't have any inherent meaning, we make it meaningful if you preface everything with, .. in my view... if you're enjoying what you're doing, you're doing it openly and honestly, there's no reason to get defensive no evidence that mindfulness takes more time than mindlessness practice makes imperfect, because once you've practiced you think you've learned it and then you stop, so practice with the mindset of always being a learner telling people to be in the present, is not resonating because everything thinks they are in the present rather, tell people to notice things when asked her future plans... she said, 5 yrs out is too far out, every moment determines the moment after ________________________________________	__label__pos	0.86656
Well, yesterday's post brought forth a stream of very good comments. The purpose of this post is mostly to suggest that you go back and read them if you're interested in that topic. Just a couple of follow-ups here … then back to linguistics later. One commenter stresses the structural aspect — that this isn't about shuffling a little money here or there but about changing how the state views the UW and how the UW invests its resources internally. This is precisely what the central administration of the University is there for. Chancellor John Wiley, in fact, recently described his job as 'external relations' in an interview with the CapTimes, while Provost Pat Farrell is primarily responsible for operations on campus. Just so you don't forget where the buck stops. And yes, the examples of faculty who declined outside offers of course do stress the importance of students and staff. Our students and staff are overwhelmingly doing tremendous work, but under really unfair pressures. This is where the breakdown of the system will kill us. If a grad program that was at the top of national rankings a few years ago collapses because students won't come, you can't recover that quickly. And staff are retiring and leaving in large numbers — and not being replaced. Fixing this now would be far cheaper than rebuilding from the smoldering ruins. Of course, the piece highlights four faculty who are staying while it lists, what, 15-18 who've left? And everybody on campus knows the latter list doesn't even scratch the surface of the lists that have been in the papers. Another commenter notes that grad student packages at places like Penn State are almost twice what they are here. (These packages vary dramatically across campus, basically by percentage of appointment, but I know of areas where those numbers are basically right.) If I'm driven away from this university, as I may well be, it'll certainly be over the loss of grad students, academic and classified staff. And I know from talking to people who've left or are leaving that "faculty leave for campuses with a real commitment to graduate education." As a doctoral student from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences said last night, if the institution gives you the resources, it doesn't much matter what the university's name is. We've got to turn up the pressure on the University administration to do their jobs, and we've got to actively support people like CAPE, the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA), and unions like UFAS, who are pushing in the right direction on these issues.	__label__pos	0.99916
The short- and long-term effectiveness of anti-piracy laws and enforcement actions Tylor Orme Journal of Cultural Economics, November 2014, Pages 351-368 Abstract: Film studios have spent the past two decades lobbying extensively to establish new legislation restricting access to copyrighted materials online. While there is growing evidence of the effect film piracy has on studio profits, the evidence on the impact of anti-piracy legislation is limited. If anti-piracy legislation is having the film industry’s desired impact, we would expect film revenues to be consistently higher following the passage of major laws that restrict access to pirated content, or major enforcement actions, such as the shutdown of Web sites that provide illegal content for download. This paper applies an intervention analysis approach to weekly data on movie box-office revenues in the USA to determine whether the passage of new anti-piracy policy has generated significant changes in box-office revenues during the period from 1997 to the present. These effects are evaluated in both the short and long term, which allows an assessment of the duration of effectiveness of government actions. The results show that four of the six included policies are ineffective in the long term and those policies that do impact revenues in the short term often harm film studios, rather than help them. “Piracy is not theft!” Is it just students who think so? Michał Krawczyk et al. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, February 2015, Pages 32–39 Abstract: A fair share of studies analyzing “online piracy” are based on easily accessible student samples. However, it has been argued that the youth tend to have more lax social and ethical norms concerning both property rights and online behavior. In this study we present the results of a vignette experiment, i.e. a scenario survey where responders are asked to provide an ethical judgment on different forms of unauthorized acquisition of a full season of a popular TV series described in a number of hypothetical stories. The survey is conducted both on a student sample and on a sample of individuals who openly endorse protection of intellectual property rights for cultural goods. In this way we can investigate the possibly limited external validity of studies relying solely on the student samples. The vignette experiment concerned ethical evaluation of unauthorized acquisition of cultural content in both virtual and real context and was focused on six dimensions previously identified as relevant to the ethical judgment. Surprisingly, we found that the rules for the ethical judgment do not differ between our samples, suggesting that the social norms on “online piracy” follow similar patterns in student and in other populations. Findings from studies relying on ethical or moral judgments of students may thus be valid in a much broader population. With a nod to Kevin Lewis for finding these...	__label__pos	0.529141
MANILA – Model-actor turned fitness consultant Edward Mendez is encouraging Filipinos to eat more and exercise less if they want to lose unnecessary fat and gain more muscle. After testing it for himself and getting a lean physique, Mendez now actively promotes this fitness principle by holding classes and writing a book titled “Your Dream Body Come True.” In an interview on “[email protected]” on Wednesday, Mendez said the key to getting a strong and lean body is eating healthy food often and having quick, intense workouts. He observed how a lot of people tend to exercise too much and starve themselves in an effort to slim down. “Don’t starve yourself because if you do that, the thyroid gland will sense that there is no food coming in. The metabolism will go down and the fat, which is considered reserve energy, will be stored and will become more stubborn to burn,” he explained. “That’s the common problem – they keep losing weight but they’re not satisfied with the shape of their bodies because they’re not really losing fat, they’re also losing muscles,” he explained. “Most people like to train two to three hours in the gym,” he added. “The problem with that kind of regimen is they’re damaging their bodies more. And when they do that, muscles are being eaten up and the metabolism also goes down.” One of Mendez’ clients or “jedis” as he calls them is “[email protected]” host Pinky Webb, who attested to the intensity and effectiveness of his program. Referring to Webb, he said: “Not only is she getting thinner but she is also getting strong. She started with the squats, now she is doing [more intense workouts].” Mendez said that with his program, results can easily be seen after three months. His basic tips for a “dream body” include eating healthy food every three hours, working out for a total of four hours a week, and giving the body enough time to rest. “You do cardio in one day for 23 minutes and you’re done. The next day, you do weight training for 45 minutes and then you’re done. So that’s three days of weight lifting and three days of cardio,” he said. “You focus more on nutrition. It’s 70% nutrition and 30% training.” “You have to rest also. If you work out almost every day doing weight training or running, you’re not giving the body enough time to repair. Because every time you step into the gym, you’re damaging your body. You got to give your body some rest to complete the repair of the muscles. When you do that, that’s when you burn fat and shape your body up,” he added. Mendez also advised those who want to get fit to avoid stress as much as possible. “You have to control your stress level. Stress is the main culprit to weight gain and many other health complications. If you’re not stressed, you can easily burn fat and gain muscles,” he said.	__label__pos	0.97462
The crash of a gong reverberated through the Classic Center every 15 minutes Thursday, causing the crowd to cheer. They knew the sound meant another 5,000 children would be fed. In town for the annual meeting of the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church, volunteers from across the state worked to package 200,000 meals for hungry children Thursday. Sponsored with an anonymous $50,000 donation to the feeding group Stop Hunger Now, teens and adults crowded around long tables and worked in an assembly line to measure and package dehydrated meals that will go next week to feed school children in Nicaragua. "It's a tremendously efficient way to carry out our mission to God's hurting people," said Lance Sligar, a convention delegate from Norcross. Sligar participated in one of five two-hour packing sessions when 100 to 300 volunteers at a time boxed up 40,000 meals each session. The prepackaged meals of rice, vegetables, soy protein and chicken flavoring include 21 essential vitamins and minerals chosen especially for malnourished people. Each reusable plastic bag provides servings for six people, has a shelf life of three to five years and costs about 25 cents to make. Each time a pallet of 5,000 meals was ready to be carted to a waiting truck, event organizers banged a gong, but volunteers' cheers quickly drowned out the sound. "Each time I hear the gong, it makes me want to do more, go faster," said Ariana Allison, 15, who came with an enrichment program at her Atlanta high school to participate. Stop Hunger Now tried to inspire that kind of enthusiasm. "What we're trying to do here is create a sense of excitement," said founder and President Ray Buchanan. "When these people go back to their church, they'll want to work to end hunger abroad and in their own communities, and that's how we're going to change the world." About 90 percent of the meals Stop Hunger Now packages go to schools, while the remaining 10 percent gets distributed in disaster areas. The organization already had more than 1.5 million packaged meals on the ground in schools in Haiti before the country's devastating earthquake in January. Those meals were immediately distributed to victims, along with 4.5 million more the group was able to send in the first few weeks following the disaster. Each organization that receives meals from Stop Hunger Now is vetted by the group in a four-month process that ensures shipments will reach the people the group has agreed to feed, according to program coordinator Mickey Horner. Adequate storage and access to clean water also is necessary because the food is dehydrated. The Methodist conference gave the opportunity for a massive Stop Hunger Now project, but local people and churches already work to feed people here. "There are several churches and organizations here in Athens that feed the hungry in their own backyard," said John Page, associate pastor at Athens First United Methodist Church. Page worked over the past six months to pull together volunteers and resources for the event. "Hopefully, this will help connect them to the need to feed the hungry internationally, too." While the Methodists packed meal boxes for three of Thursday's sessions, Athens locals manned the other two shifts. Betty King, 64, learned about the project from HandsOn Northeast Georgia and drove to Athens from her home in Lexington. "I was thinking of how many thousands of meals we were making, and it's just amazing," King said. "I packaged food before in Oglethorpe County, but I've never seen anything like this." Holly Haynes, 32, came with 30 volunteers from Grove Level Baptist Church in Maysville after her youth pastor told her about the event. "There are a lot of children that are going to be fed now," said Haynes, who has two young daughters at home in Baldwin. "As a mother, that's a good feeling." Thursday's event was the largest that the Raleigh, N.C.-based hunger relief group has hosted in Georgia in its 12-year history. Smaller events at churches and Rotary clubs with around 40 volunteers have sent 10,000 meals to schools and disaster areas across the world. Stop Hunger Now plans to open an Atlanta facility by summer's end that will help local groups raise the money for the packaged meals. "We could package a lot more meals mechanically, but the only way we're going to end hunger is to create a movement," Buchanan said. "These volunteers now have the beginnings of an education that can make a big difference at home and abroad." Stop Hunger Now plans to hold another packaging event at next year's conference in Athens, though it may be the last for the Methodist conference if organizers determine the Classic Center isn't big enough for the group. Roughly 2,800 people attend the conference each year, and organizers are using every available space in the Classic Center and its adjacent building. "We're happy to be in Athens for this conference. The city is so receptive, and we hope in some small way we can be a blessing back to the community," Page said. Information about organizing your own Stop Hunger Now event can be found at www.stophungernow.org/Atlanta. © 2017. All Rights Reserved. \| Contact Us	__label__pos	0.981499
Desclaux, D. (2005) Participatory Plant Breeding Methods for Organic Cereals. In: Lammerts Van Bueren, E.T. and Ostergard, H. (Eds.) Proceedings of the COST SUSVAR/ECO-PB Workshop on Organic Plant Breeding Strategies and the Use of Molecular Markers, pp. 17-23. PDF - English 168kB Summary Formal breeding methods were not always suitable to address the very large diversity of both environmental conditions and end-user needs. Both were frequently encountered either in marginal areas of developing countries or in organic farms of EEC. Participatory plant breeding (PPB) methods represent alternatives aimed to improve local adaptation breeding, to promote genetic diversity, to empower farmers and rural communities. The term PPB refers to a set of breeding methods usually distinguished by the objectives (functional or process approach), institutional context (farmer-led or formal-led), forms of interaction between farmers and breeders (consultative, collaborative or collegial), location of breeding (centralized or decentralized), stage of farmers participation in the breeding scheme (participatory varietal selection or participatory plant breeding)… Among all these methods, the best strategies for organic breeding and their impacts on breeding techniques are discussed. A PPB program actually conducted at INRA – Montpellier (F), involves the whole organic durum wheat interprofessional organization, from farmers to consumers. It is used to assess the interest of a multidisciplinary approach and to discuss the role of each participant in such program. Must participation be seen as a means towards an end or an end in itself? EPrint Type: Conference paper, poster, etc. Type of presentation: Paper Keywords: Participatory plant breeding, organic breeding, genotype x environment interaction, o-farm trials, durum wheat Subjects: Knowledge management > Research methodology and philosophy > Systems research and participatory research Crop husbandry > Breeding, genetics and propagation Research affiliation: France > INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique Deposited By: DESCLAUX, Dr Dominique ID Code: 6493 Deposited On: 16 Jan 2006 Last Modified: 12 Apr 2010 07:32 Document Language: English Status: Published Refereed: Peer-reviewed and accepted Repository Staff Only: item control page	__label__pos	0.612659
A commissioner vote Tuesday will thrust more than $4 million into the county coffers, dollars county staff and the commissioners say will be used exclusively for road capital improvements. The move, however — touted as the first big step toward repairing and replacing the county’s aging and ailing road infrastructure — will also cause the county to incur a 15-year debt. The move did not require voter approval. Although county staff refer to the program as a “lease purchase” plan, Archuleta County Administrator Greg Schulte said during the March 29 road forum, “Really what it is, is a loan.” Although borrowing for infrastructure or capital improvement projects without voter approval is not unprecedented — governments or special taxing entities such as the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District have commonly used revenue bonds to bankroll a variety of capital improvement projects — the tactic marks one the first such moves for Archuleta County, but the commissioners and staff say it’s worth it. “This is not uncommon,” said Archuleta County Commissioner John Ranson. “It’s kind of like a home mortgage.” And Ranson pointed to a number of factors that give him confidence the idea is sound — cheap money, i.e. low interest rates, a flagging local economy that will likely create an intensely competitive bidding climate for road projects, the probability that material and labor costs will only go up, and a desire to create jobs for locals. “We think the roads are worth it. We think the cash flow is extremely important to the county. This is something were excited about. I’m excited about the opportunity to get started,” Ranson said. According to the loan terms, the county will borrow $5 million with $4 million in net proceeds. The interest rate said Schulte is 5.7 percent for 15 years with an annual payment of about $484,000. In order to secure the loan, the county pledged sales tax revenue already dedicated to road capital improvements as a repayment source, and the Archuleta County Courthouse as collateral. According to county records sales tax revenue dedicated to the Road Capital Improvement Fund has averaged abut $1.54 million between 2004 and 2008. Current projections for 2009, indicate the county will likely maintain that average. Thus, the debt service on the loan package will obligate about 30 percent of Road Capital Improvement Fund dollars, giving the county a large safety buffer, said the commissioners during Tuesday’s discussion. “We have 70 percent extra to cover this. Therefore, it is very conservative for this county,” Schulte said. In addition to bankrolling a series of road capital improvement projects, the loan will be used to repay an existing equipment lease with Wells Fargo. The current balance on the existing lease purchase is $931,345. With the commissioner vote ensuring that funding will soon arrive, Schulte said the county will have the financial muscle to aggressively follow through with their plans to pave Park Avenue and to tackle and complete a number of other projects during the summer of 2009. In the meantime, Schulte said county staff and elected officials will discuss future road priorities with citizens in order to develop a project list and funding allocations for the 2010 construction season. According to Schulte, after the county has demonstrated “credibility and ability to execute on projects,” a $12 million dollar ballot measure will be put to voters for approval in November 2010. If approved, the funding would provide early payback of the Wells Fargo loan and another $8 to $9 million for road capital improvement projects in 2011 and beyond. During the March 29 road forum, staff and the commissioners said gaining voter trust during the next two summers is key to the success of the ballot question, and they acknowledged that the county has a formidable credibility problem to overcome. As part of their trust-building strategy, Schulte and the commissioners said public input on road projects for the summer of 2010 will play a vital role in the process. In addition, Schulte said the county intends to create a roads task force that will serve as a clearinghouse for projects and priorities. Further discussion on the makeup of the roads task force will likely occur May 19. james@pagosasun.com	__label__pos	0.859809
Glenbrook’s Allen Weinberg wrote a few weeks ago about his view of the Grand Challenges in payments…. a daunting list, and one I agree with. But I want to extend his discussion on one of his challenges: “Realigned value chain economics in a push payment world”, and add two more: “What is the proper role […] As I was slogging through the many payments-related articles and blog posts reminiscing about 2015 events and making predictions for what may or may not be ahead in 2016, I thought of a conversation I had with Scott Loftesness around 20 years ago, sometime in 1995 or 1996. Both of us were at First Data […] It’s always intriguing to watch how a good idea evolves into new areas. Such evolution often happens when designers find new applications for their ideas. Brian Merritt and Ryan Hildebrand were part of the early team at Simple that was subsequently sold to BBVA. In mid-February, they announced the formation of Seed, a Y Combinator […] CFO.com summarizes the most recent Forrester “TechRadar” report on financial software. Not surprisingly, economic woes are driving businesses’ need for accounts receivable and collections software to help companies monitor their customers payment behavior. Budgeting and forecasting solutions as well as expense reporting tools are also in high demand. Accounts Payable solutions are up and coming […] Sign of the times: who’s getting investor money? A company that runs a marketplace for real-time trading of accounts receivable, enabling small and mid-sized businesses to accelerate their cash flow. via NYTimes DealBook: The Receivables Exchange, a New Orleans company that runs an online marketplace for real-time trading of accounts receivable, has closed a $7.75 […] Sigurd Rinde believes that double entry accounting is a root cause of the current economic calamity. He's got a point. Check this out: [except – read the whole post here] Is there a root cause? And if so, why is it not discussed? So why is it not discussed? Because sometimes we take some things […] CFO.com points out that Paul Volcker has strong views on accounting topics that might soon become prominent fixtures of administration economic policy. For example, here are topics/issues that he will undoubtedly have influence over (quoting CFO.com): [His experience creating and then serving as head of International Accounting Standards Board and attempting to reform Anderson immediately […] From CFO.com Since the credit-crisis began to hit its crescendo in mid-September, CFOs at companies of all sizes have been paying ever closer attention to the cash streaming through their businesses and keeping careful watch on their suppliers' credit terms and their customers' viability. No one wants to see the current credit freeze among wary […] Overstock.com said it will restate its financial results for over five years due to problems stemming from its implementation of Oracle. Revisions to the company's 2003-2007 results probably will reduce revenue by $12.9 million and increase cumulative net loss by $10.3 million. Excerpt from CFO.com He explained that as part of a major system upgrade […] The US and International Accounting standards boards are convening an advisory group to address issues stemming from the credit crisis – starting with fair-value rules. [via CFO.com – emphasis mine] While central bankers and G7 leaders work to form panels to respond to the global banking crisis, accounting standard-setters are doing their part to do […] Attention Excel users! A couple related articles from CFO.com on spreadsheet worst practices and how to fix them. The first article generated so many emails that they published a follow up with even more tips. Spreadsheet "Worst Practices" Here's how finance executives abuse the most-useful of computer programs — and how to do better. Shahid […] Companies of all sizes – but especially large, multi-unit organizations that have grown through acquisition and have a spaghetti of accounting and finance systems – struggle to close their books in a timely manner each month, quarter, and year. Even those that do a good job each period, struggle to maintain control over the close […]	__label__pos	0.955396
We are just a month away from the October EMV liability shift and the transition is, to no one’s surprise, mostly incomplete. EMV credit card issuance is expected to be at just 50% by the end of this year. Point of sale hardware upgrades at major retailers may be in place but the long tail of SMB […] EMV and its moving parts presents a far more complex payments method for merchants, ISVs, payment processors, and financial institutions than the good old magstripe. It continues to have ramifications throughout the payments ecosystem. As Executive Director of the Smart Card Alliance and director of the EMV Migration Forum, Randy Vanderhoof has shepherded a sometimes fractious […] The Apple Pay announcement finally came yesterday and the company’s orchestration of much of the complex and fractious card payments ecosystem demonstrates Apple’s insight into how the current payments ecosystem works and how it must be aligned in order to meet its own needs. Combining NFC, Apple’s Passbook wallet, Touch ID biometric reader, cards stored in the […] We often get interesting questions about payments, and the latest one stumped us: “How many credit and debit fraudulent uses are first detected by the bank? By the customer?” We don’t know the answer to that one or of any good source for this data so we thought we’d ask you, members of the […] Last week we asked readers to help us capture a snapshot of U.S. market contactless/RFID terminalization. We were pleased to get 43 brave souls to respond. Here are the (admittedly anything but scientific) results: I was particularly interested in the merchant funded rewards session put on by Jonathan Silver of Affinity Solutions and John MacMillan from Comerica Bank. Having listened to several discussions point to debit card rewards as important to consumers, this session focused on how to develop compelling rewards programs. First of all, rewards need to be […] Chase Blueprint brings new transparency and consumer control to credit cards Today’s announcement of the new “Blueprint” functionality by Chase Card Services represents a significant generational inflection point in the evolution of the US credit card business. Although they often try to refute it, for more than 25 years US credit card issuers have marched […] Consistent with the current government focus on enhancing consumer protection, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (Credit CARD Act of 2009) brings sea changes to the credit card industry. Forward-looking financial services institutions are viewing these shifts not as a reactive compliance and operational exercise, but more broadly in anticipation of […] In a frankly depressing but undoubtedly realistic column this morning titled “National Addiction to Easy Credit Remains Consumers’ Downfall“, Michelle Singletary, the Washington Post’s personal finance columnist, writes that the credit card reforms being put into regulation by the Federal Reserve and potentially being accelerated/enhanced by Congressional action sometime soon won’t deal with the root […] In his New Yorker column this week titled “House of Cards“, James Surowiecki writes about how some US credit card issuers are trying to shed some of their existing customers. In effect, they’re trying to follow the advice given by Larry Selden and Geoffrey Colvin in a book called “Angel Customers and Demon Customers.” Not […]	__label__pos	0.980297
The Zoning Board of Adjustment heard testimony Wednesday afternoon concerning the proposed development of ten new townhomes at 1901 Lombard Street, a project that has been subject to negotiations between the developers and the Center City Residents Association since early this year. Developers Noah and Harvey Ostroff are seeking variances related to height and lot coverage, and are hoping to subdivide one existing lot into ten separate lots for each of the proposed homes. The zoning board did not decide the case immediately. The project calls for eight four-story houses fronting on Lombard Street, with a two-story house fronting on 19th St. and another two-story house fronting on S. Uber St. The four-story houses will be just over 43 feet tall, with “pilothouses” adding another ten feet on top of each, according to the developers’ attorney, Hercules Grigos. The project would also include 20 off-street parking spaces, and each house would have a green roof and a roof deck. If approved, the project will replace an existing multi-unit apartment complex and surface parking lot on the north side of Lombard Street between 19th and S. Uber streets. The same developers have another project one block east of the site on Lombard. Grigos said that the height variance is necessary because the developers want to provide adequate parking without installing garages in front of the houses. He said that if they were to use street-facing garages, they wouldn’t need to put parking amenities in the rear portions of the properties. But because they want to avoid street-facing garages, which would interrupt the pedestrian environment, they need to build parking in the rear, which is what caused the project to miss the minimum rear yard depth. To make up for the square footage they say they’ll lose by putting garages in the back, they want to build taller. The current proposal includes only one curb cut. Neighbors and members of the Center City Residents Association have negotiated with the developers for certain concessions. For example, the current proposal contains four less parking spaces than the original, and the scale of the houses on either end has been reduced. But some neighbors still have concerns about the height of the buildings and their impact on access to light and air. Some, acknoweldging that they like the developers’ nearby project and that they had been responsive to several of the neighbors’ concerns, oppose the variances because they feel the project could diminish the value--both monetary and personal--of their own properties. One neighbor, Richard Dickinson, said that the backyard of his Waverly Street house is a “tranquil oasis,” and that if the project is built, he’ll get a view of a brick wall marking off the parking area for the new homes. Dickinson said he has put his house on the market and plans to move if the project is built. “The aggrievement I have is that I will lose light and air,” Dickinson said. Hercules Grigos said that many of the neighbors concerns would not be resolved even if the project were built completely by right, and thus they are not directly related to the zoning variances being sought. He also noted that over the course of the negotiations some neighbors have asked for the developers to dedicate part of the property as an alleyway, or to compensate them financially for the loss of light and air they say it will bring. Others support the proposal. Ann Frumkin, who lives a block and a half west of the sites, said that the houses would be a “wonderful” and “gorgeous” addition to the neighborhood, and reproached some of those who opposed the project for not recognizing what she sees as a positive change for the area. “If you want lots and lots of sunlight,” Frumkin said, “you have to go into the suburbs.” Jared Brey covered development, zoning policy, historic preservation, and city government for PlanPhilly from 2011-2016.	__label__pos	0.931879
By ABBY EVANS Recent levee ruptures in Iowa and Missouri may reflect larger failures of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) raised by whistleblower Maria Garzino. And there may be more tragedies on the horizon: in 2007, USACE released a list of 146 levees across America that are at risk of failing. In an article this week in Politico, Harry Shearer gave a curtain raiser to a letter Garzino sent to the Obama Administration earlier this year that fully exposes the degree of deception by USACE. The letter reveals not only a shockingly detailed portrait, but also the attempts of government officials to prevent Garzino from blowing the whistle at all. Garzino details how the Corps knowingly installed equipment that cannot adequately protect the city of New Orleans from flooding; duplicated work that cost US taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars; and deliberately deceived Congress as to the nature of and reason for this work. In March of this year, POGO held a special screening of Harry Shearer’s The Big Uneasy, which follows Maria Garzino, as well as the leaders of two scientific investigation teams, as they reveal the true story of why New Orleans flooded in 2005. The film shows why Hurricane Katrina evolved into a disaster that could have been avoided, focusing in particular on the poor science and management decisions made by USACE. The Big Uneasy offers an urgent reminder for all U.S. citizens to learn from the tragedies of New Orleans and ask their representatives to reform USACE—and not to wait for disaster to strike again, either in New Orleans, Iowa, or elsewhere. We need to push Congress to investigate the documented failings of the USACE and determine what can be done to protect the rest of the leveed cities from a Katrina-like catastrophe. If you're interested in getting involved or being a part of the whistleblower discussion, stay tuned for our upcoming 3rd annual Whistleblower Film Series (in association with the DC Labor Film Festival) in October 2011. Abby Evans is a Development Associate at the Project On Government Oversight Image of Abby Evans, Harry Shearer, and Maria Garzino by Bruce Guthrie	__label__pos	0.970986
Poisonous Plants affecting Dogs Dogs are very inquisitive. Sniffing, smelling, and usually tasting almost anything in sight are natural behaviors for a dog. For that reason, we commonly see dogs ingest items that are not their food and at times can be very dangerous poisons. There are two major areas where such danger may occur: inside the house, and outside of it. These areas are different in terms of what types of poisons the dog may be exposed to. In the house, dogs usually get themselves in trouble when they are bored. Outside it's usually the dogs' curiosity that endangers them. The most common problem in the house is the ingestion of rat poison, which can be very tasty to your dog, but has a compound that can cause a life-threatening bleeding. However, there are many other poisonous things in the house that your dog can ingest. Such things as: human medication, all kinds of cleaning solutions, chocolate, antifreeze, yard chemicals that are stored in the house and, of course, some house plants. To avoid this problem you can follow the ten tips for a poison-safe house. However, we will mainly concentrate on the toxicity of poisonous plants affecting dogs in these pages. In order to prevent poisoning by house plants, you should not buy and place house plants in your home that will put your dog in danger. Outside, there is a constant problem of ingesting poisonous plants. Try adding bran flakes to your dog's food or switching its diet to one higher in vegetable fibers. If that helps, then perhaps the chewing of plants was due to a lack of fiber in your dog's diet. The only other thing to do is to monitor your dog's 'picking' behavior when walking outside. When you see symptoms such as: vomiting, diarrhea, difficult breathing, abnormal urine (color, smell, frequency, etc.), salivation, weakness, and any other abnormal condition - take your dog to the veterinarian because it may be poisoned. You can also call the ASPCA animal poison control center for help - it's open 24 hours a day. Categories of plants affecting dogs House Plants Flower Garden Plants Vegetable Garden Plants Plants Found in Swamps or Moist Areas Plants Found in Fields Trees and Shrubs Plants Found in Wooded Areas Ornamental Plants Click "Search Database" link to the left to see a detailed list of plants affecting dogs. Please do not assume that a plant is "safe" if it is not listed here. If your pup has eaten something you are not sure is safe, check with your veterinarian.	__label__pos	0.790611

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