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Secretary of the Air Force Office Public Affairs / Published January 28, 2015
WASHINGTON (AFNS) -- Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James in coordination with Frank Kendall, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, determined that the Boeing 747-8 will serve as the next presidential aircraft, commonly known as Air Force One.
“The presidential aircraft is one of the most visible symbols of the United States of America and the office of the president of the United States;” James said. “The Boeing 747-8 is the only aircraft manufactured in the United States when fully missionized meets the necessary capabilities established to execute the presidential support mission, while reflecting the office of the president of the United States of America consistent with the national public interest.”
Analyses of the capability requirements conclude a four-engine, wide body aircraft is required to meet the needs of the Air Force One mission. Market research determined there are two four-engine platforms that could meet the requirements; the 747-8 manufactured by Boeing in the state of Washington, and the A380 manufactured by Airbus in Toulouse, France.
The decision, made official through a Determinations and Findings document, authorizes the commercial aircraft purchase by other than full and open competition. This decision, in conjunction with the notification of the Air Force’s intent to award a sole source contract to Boeing for the modification of the 747-8, allows discussions with Boeing that will likely lead to a contract for the aircraft platform as well as the modifications necessary to missionize the aircraft.
“We are also committed to incorporating competition for subsystems of the missionized aircraft,” James said.
“This decision is not a contract award to procure 747-8 aircraft,” said Col. Amy McCain, the Presidential Aircraft Recapitalization (PAR) program manager. “We still need to finalize the overall acquisition strategy and conduct risk reduction activities with Boeing to inform the engineering and manufacturing development contract negotiations that will define the capabilities and cost.”
The contract will be awarded only if negotiations result in a fair and reasonable price, McCain said.
The secretary is clear affordability will be a key element of the PAR program.
“The program will use multiple strategies, such as the use of proven technologies and commercially certified equipment, to ensure the program is as affordable as possible while still meeting mission requirements.” James said. “We will insist upon program affordability through cost conscious procurement practices.”
The Air Force wants to own enough of the technical baseline to permit competition for sustainment throughout the aircraft’s planned 30-year life cycle. Competition can keep costs down, spur innovation and provide options.
“The current fleet of VC-25 presidential aircraft has performed exceptionally well, a testament to the Airmen who support, maintain and fly the aircraft,” James said. “Yet, it is time to upgrade. Parts obsolescence, diminishing manufacturing sources and increased down times for maintenance are existing challenges that will increase until a new aircraft is fielded.”
“The Air Force provides the president with safe and reliable air transportation with high levels of security and communication capability as the alternate airborne White House. This platform will meet the requirements necessary to provide that level of service for future presidents,” James said.
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The Paris Agreement writes history. The Agreement strenghtens the temperature goal from "below 2°C" to "well below 2°C" and to pursue best efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. Less in the headlines, but of equal importance is the translation to emission goals.
Article 4 is the crucial one in regard to emissions. It says that "In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty."
In our assessment, the Paris Agreement rises to the challenge of limiting dramatic climate change. It sets the framework for a chance to limit multi-metre sea-level rise in the long-term. Individual post-2020 country targets put on the table before Paris are insufficient to the task of limiting warming to 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. The so-called INDCs have not been enhanced here in Paris (they were never meant to be enhanced here because the main focus was on the global agreement). Thus, there exists a big gap between INDCs and the global ambition needed. This will need to be bridged by upgraded mitigation contributions from countries in the years to come. In this article, we keep in mind those insufficient country INDCs but look at the Paris Agreement itself.
What are the main targets in terms of global mitigation?
The ultimate objective of the Agreement is to limit global warming to well below 2°C, and "to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels".
There is also a long-term greenhouse gas emission goal. It is to peak global emissions as soon as possible, then reduce rapidly, and achieve net zero emissions "in the second half of the century". These "net zero" emissions are expressed as the "balance between anthropogenic emission by sources and removals by sinks". This basically means that any greenhouse gas emissions remaining in the second half of the century need to be outweighed/compensated/balanced/offset (take your pick) by anthropogenic actions to enhance the uptake of CO 2 through afforestation, biomass, carbon capture and storage, and other negative emissions techniques.
Does the Paris Agreement refer to "natural" sinks?
No, clearly not. First of all, as in "international aviation and maritime transport", "international" refers to both "aviation" and "maritime transport". Thus, the adjective "anthropogenic" refers to both "emissions" and "sinks". Furthermore, Article 4 of the UNFCCC convention uses the standard term "anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks" clearly as referring to anthropogenically induced sinks - otherwise the UNFCCC Parties would have reported incorrect data for the last 23 years. In the hypothetical case that you might interpret it differently, Art. 4 would imply a stabilisation of concentrations, which would NOT be in line with the "best available science" given that we need reducing concentrations to stabilise temperatures over the couse of this century.
Summary in graphs:
In a summary graph, the Paris Agreement contains two temperature goals and two long-term emission goals.
(download as slides here, or high-res PDF here). A simpler graph of what the Paris Agreement concluded:
(Feel free to use these graphs; just cite as: M. Meinshausen, Australian-German Climate & Energy College, The University of Melbourne, climatecollege.unimelb.edu.au, download as slides here, or high resolution PDF )
How does that language of "balance between emissions and sinks" differ from "net zero"?
Well... substantially, it does not.
A balance between a positive and a negative thing means that both parts are of equal magnitude and hence the sum is zero. However, in terms of communication and framing, they may be very different.
The "balance" language places an emphasis on the "sinks". We would argue that this emphasis is not ideal, as the enhancement of sinks via large-scale afforestation and biomass production can come with substantial risks in terms of food security and biodiversity. The "net zero" language puts an emphasis instead on the "zero". This stresses that the most important and first task is to reduce emissions to zero.
Nevertheless, whatever the expression, the substance of reducing all greenhouse gas emissions to zero is ambitious, clear and appropriate in light of collective temperature target.
How does the Paris Agreement compare to the G7 agreement in Elmau?
Arguably, the Paris Agreement target is much stronger than the G7 agreement. The G7 agreement aimed at a "decarbonisation over the course of the century". That can actually mean lots of different things.
Optimistically seen, it means that net CO 2 emissions in the energy and industrial sector are phased out by 2100 with a transition to that point. The Paris Agreement has both a potentially closer timeframe ("in the second half of the century") and a broader scope (all greenhouse gases, rather than only CO 2 ). For all greenhouse gas emissions to go to net zero, CO 2 emissions have to becomes negative. Negative CO 2 emissions are the uptake of CO 2 from the atmosphere in growing trees and biomass. However, "negative" methane or nitrous oxide emissions are hard to imagine. Thus, the only way to have net zero greenhouse gas emissions is to have negative CO 2 emissions. In order to get from today's high CO 2 emission levels to negative emission levels, we first have to go through zero. The Paris Agreement therefore implicitly includes a stronger decarbonisation target than did the G7 agreement.
A look at Figure SPM.7 in IPCC Working Group 3 from the Fifth Assessment Report clarifies some things.
The bunch of scenarios analysed in this Figure aim at 450ppm CO 2 equivalence concentrations. One can see that a full decarbonisation of the electricity sector occurs by 2050. Those 450ppm scenarios are roughly speaking the "below 2°C" scenarios.
This makes it clear that full decarbonisation is part of the story no matter what, but even more so if we wish to stay "well below 2°C" and at "1.5°C".
Malte Meinshausen & College
Last updated: 15 Dec 2015
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01 - Globular - Playing For Rain (101 BPM)
02 - TRD - Derive And Detach (85 BPM)
03 - Radioactive Sandwich - Everything Is Awesome (65 BPM)
04 - Jeremy's Aura - Drinking Cornish Clouds (105 BPM)
05 - Easily Embarrassed - The Capital (96 BPM)
06 - Shantam - Fiddle Sticks (100 BPM)
07 - Spacey Koala - My Cat Is A Dragon (108/128 BPM)
08 - Tron Sepia - Salamander (137.77 BPM)
09 - Supersillyus - Enigmagician (99 BPM)
10 - Ekoplex - Nama (128 BPM)
11 - Zoungla - Flower Sun (75 BPM)
Welcome to the Smörgåsbord, an eclectic selection of delectable audio treats and sonic snacks for your ears. Compiled by Jeremy’s Aura and jointly released by Omnitropic and Maia Brasil Records, this release brings together an extraordinarily talented group of playful, fun-loving musicians. Each and every artist on board has a distinct sound with no compromise to artistic individuality and integrity. This compilation is presented with the simple intention of sharing the one thing we all have in common—the love of music!
Analogue summing and mastering by Sammy Wags with original hand-drawn artwork and design by Jeremy Costa. [OMNI 015]
MP3 Download | FLAC Download | WAV Download · Download count: 20,702.
Released under a Creative Commons license for noncommercial usage.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Be sure to activate Flash in your browser; it is usually disabled by default in Chrome and other modern browsers.
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College of Prayer members in Uganda's parliament have spearheaded the push for the new anti-gay bill and, as a story posted on the main College of Prayer website quotes College of Prayer Canada head Rev. David Chotka,
"I have three-twelve members of the Canadian Parliament who have heard about what God is doing in Uganda and would like to attend the Parliamentary COP in Uganda next year. They are interested in bringing the College of Prayer to the Canadian Parliament."
The article concludes, "It seems that God continues to expand our spheres of influence. The extraordinary favor of God is resting upon us. All glory to His name!
As the Talk To Action report, Rick Warren's Dissertation Advisor Leads Network Promoting Uganda Anti-Gay Bill details, the president of Uganda's College of Prayer, Julius Oyet, has extensive ties to networks associated with C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. Peter Wagner is perhaps the world's leading expert on church growth, and he is an unabashed Christian supremacist. Wagner was also advisor for Rick Warren's 1993 dissertation... on church growth. The report traces ties and parallels between Rick Warren's and Peter Wagner's ideologies and global networks.
Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation is coalescing out of a global religious tendency known as the Third Wave which was estimated in 2000 to encompass 295 million Christians worldwide. For over a decade Wagner and his close working associate Ted Haggard, former National Association of Evangelicals, exported distinctive Third Wave and New Apostolic ideas, concerning expelling demon spirits, hunting witches and raising the dead, from Haggard's Colorado Springs church to Africa and the developing world.
Through association with Thomas Muthee and Alaska evangelist Mary Glazier both Sarah Palin and her most significant Alaska church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, are closely tied totop leaders in Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation and its distinctive prayer warfare networks.
On August 16, 2005, Sarah Palin was blessed and anointed by a man Peter Wagner has described as a close personal friend, Kenyan evangelist Thomas Muthee. While Palin was still officially a member of the Wasilla Assembly of God, her church raised tens of thousands of dollars to finance Thomas Muthee's Kenya ministry. Before anointing Palin during the August 16, 2005 event Thomas Muthee detailed, in a short speech, the Seven Mountains mandate, an organizing and inspirational concept for Peter Wagner's movement which encourages believers to win positions of power and influence in key societal sectors such as government, business, education, and media. The 7-M Mandate is also promoted by College of Prayer Uganda President Juliius Oyet. As Os Hillman, one of the members of Peter Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles (ICA) and a friend of Julius Oyet's has described, in 2006 Oyet traveled to Dallas, Texas, to meet with ICA leadership. The Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill has also been linked to the Washington D.C.-based evangelical group known as The Family. The globally influential group is the subject of a 2008 book by journalist Jeff Sharlet, The Family: Power, Politics and Fundamentalism's Secret Elite.
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NBC placed the second season of Constantine into limbo; leaving it to the fans to attempt to #SaveConstantine. This tactic was tried before by followers of the series ‘Jericho‘ on CBS to great success, they sent truckloads of nuts to their corporate headquarters. Sadly the Hellblazer of DC Comics didn’t fare as well. While enthusiasts have swarmed behind the hashtag across all forms of social media and re-watched multiple episodes to raise viewer counts; today execs announced via twitter that they’ve declined to renew the series.
NBC a “no” for Season 2. Warner Bros working hard to find #Constantine new home. Stay active. Stream. Tweet. #SaveConstantine #Hellblazers — Daniel Cerone (@DanielVCerone) May 8, 2015
Originally set up to complement Grimm, the show never garnered enough of an audience to be attractive to advertisers. It’s premier claims the highest viewer-ship at 4.8 million with subsequent episodes failing to break the 4 million mark. Its late Friday night time slot, where most shows go to die and recently claimed Dracula, may have had something to do with its early demise.
Warner Brothers isn’t giving up though, as they’re looking for a new home for Constantine and the fans are all behind them.
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David West Defined The “Blue Collar, Gold Swagger” Era of the Indiana Pacers by Ben Gibson
Indiana Pacers 84 Memphis Grizzlies 96
The Indiana Pacers looked terrible on the tail end of a back to back, getting mauled by the Memphis Grizzlies.
The Good: It was eaten by a bear. Slowly. Painfully.
The Bad: Another slow start. A hallmark of this month so far. They’ve bounced back from a few, but it isn’t always going to happen. A 37.5% FG in the first half shades the fact that it hovered closer to 30% for most of that time. I don’t know what to say about fixing it as often there are just several bad plays that end up setting them back and then they have to fight back for most of the first half as they did. It was only a nine-point on Saturday and they cut it to one at the intermission, but they need to stop spotting their opponents leads.
Then the same demeanour carried into the second half. Sigh. Nothing good here.
MVP: Paul George, but he wins it more by default than by performance. To his credit he scored 29 points, but in a game like this it is hard to feel good about anything.
LVP: The Indiana Pacers effort, as it looked like they were resigned to taking a loss on the tail end of a back to back on the road.
This tweet from April still works.
Let's check in on the Pacers and Grizzlies… pic.twitter.com/ZodrRpZCDn — Ben Gibson (@CowboyOnPatrol) April 16, 2015
X-Factor: Jordan Hill gets another double-double. One of the few guys who shot well. Pacers fans should be happy he’s become an impact player off the bench.
PAUL GEORGE Power Forward, Indiana Pacers B 29 points? Good. Shooting 8 of 22 from the field, 4 of 12 from 3-point range? Not so good.
MONTA ELLIS Shooting Guard, Indiana Pacers B
Made half his shots, scored 13, but in the most unremarkable fashion.
[/grade]
GEORGE HILL Point Guard, Indiana Pacers F George Hill has been in a funk since late November, and a 3 0f 7 shooting night (0 of 3 from deep) has extended it for at least another game. Only 8 points and that’s below his averafe of 9.2 in the last 5 games.
C.J. MILES Shooting Guard, Indiana Pacers F Not his night as he went 0 of 9 from the field.
IAN MAHINMI Center, Indiana Pacers D Foul trouble limited him to 7 points and 6 rebounds.
RODNEY STUCKEY Point Guard, Indiana Pacers C 11 points, but like Monta is barely felt like he was part of the game.
JORDAN HILL Center, Indiana Pacers B Jordan Hill’s double-double (10 points, 13 rebounds) was one of the few bright spots.
LAVOY ALLEN Power Forward, Indiana Pacers C- He appeared in the game. I think.
CHASE BUDINGER Small Forward, Indiana Pacers C Only played 8 minutes, so didn’t have much time to make an impact.
JOE YOUNG Point Guard, Indiana Pacers INC Garbage time.
GLENN ROBINSON Small Forward, Indiana Pacers INC Garbage time.
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click to enlarge City of Burlington
A rendering of the Champlain Parkway depicted in the draft Plan BTV South End
A Vermont Supreme Court ruling has cleared the way for Burlington to pursue a contentious and repeatedly delayed plan to build the Champlain Parkway, a two-lane road that would run from Interstate 189 through the South End.Designed to alleviate traffic by providing another route into the city, the project was green-lighted in an Act 250 permit from the state in 2012. That spawned four lawsuits from individuals and companies over traffic concerns and property disputes, three of which the city settled.On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled on the only remaining case — an appeal brought by Charles Bayer, owner of the Innovation Center on Lakeside Avenue. Bayer, who could not be reached for comment, is concerned that the Parkway, which would pass by the Innovation Center, will generate excessive traffic near his property. He appealed to the state's highest court after the Environmental Court upheld the permit decision in a July 2014 ruling, while adding conditions that require the city to monitor traffic and work with Bayer to address potential problems.In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court justices agreed with the lower court. The decision emphasized that the Environmental Court "did not find that the project 'will' but rather 'may' cause unreasonable traffic congestion orunsafe conditions" and noted that the traffic forecasts were based on "inflated numbers." "From how I understand the project today, this was the last remaining piece of major uncertainty about whether or not the project could be be built," an energized Mayor Miro Weinberger told several reporters at his office Friday afternoon.Plenty of design and planning work remains — under the current schedule, construction wouldn't start until the summer of 2018, Weinberger said. The parkway was originally estimated to cost $30 million, but Weinberger said he "would not be surprised" if that number gets revised upward. But the project will largely be funded by federal money secured years ago; the city is obligated to pay just 2 percent of the costs, according to Weinberger.Even with major legal hurdles out of the way and a permit in hand, the Weinberger administration will still need to work to convince the public that the parkway is both possible and desirable.First conceived of during the 1960s, the project has undergone many iterations and has stopped and started so many times that the words "Champlain Parkway" frequently prompt skeptical head-shaking and chuckling among residents.Weinberger acknowledged that "people have been saying the Champlain Parkway is two or three years out for a long time." What's different this time, he continued, is that the city has the necessary permits. He didn't rule out unforeseen challenges, however. He said, "This is a project that has had unusual twists and turns going back a long time, so maybe there's something we haven't anticipated, but I do think this was the last major piece of uncertainty."
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SEOUL (Yonhap) — North Korea has displayed a model of a submarine-launched ballistic missile at a flower exhibition to celebrate its key anniversary, Pyongyang’s state broadcast showed Tuesday.
Unlike earlier expectations, the North did not showcase the SLBM, which it claimed it successfully fired off in May at its military parade Saturday to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.
But Pyongyang made the SLBM model public at the exhibition displaying flowers named after the North’s founder Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, the late father of the North’s leader Kim Jong-un, according to footage shown by the state-run Korean Central Television.
If confirmed, the North’s success of the missile launch could serve as a fresh threat to security on the Korean Peninsula as it is difficult to detect sources of ballistic missiles launched underwater.
North Korea forwent provocative acts, such as a long-range rocket launch, before the anniversary, which the North had threatened to do in recent weeks.
But analysts said that the North may go ahead with a rocket launch within this year as Pyongyang has claimed it has the right to fire off “a series of satellites” for peaceful space development, which experts view as a cover for ballistic missile tests.
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A raging wildfire that broke out on October 21st in North Korea’s Samjiyon County, Yangkang Province is said to have
burned down former leader Kim Jong Il’s home on Mount Baekdu near Milyong, the
alleged birthplace of the late leader, the Daily NK has learned.
“The fire in Samjiyon County has spread to
Baekam County putting the country in a state of emergency,” a source in Yangkang
Province told the Daily NK on Tuesday. “The Baekdu Milyong home and most of the
historic revolutionary landmarks have gone up in flames.”
“The 10th Corps [a military body charged
with maintain order and security] in Yangkang Province, the State Security
Department, and provincial units of the People’s Safety Ministry are all on
high alert,” the source elaborated. “To determine the cause of the fire, cadres
from the Central Party have also been dispatched.”
The Mt. Baekdu revolutionary remains
include the ‘Mangyongdae home,’ known as Kim Il Sung’s birthplace, as well as
other landmarks used as part of the North’s idolization of the Kim bloodline. Kim
Jong Il was actually born in Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in Russia, on February
16th, 1941, but the North has maintained it was in a log cabin in Milyong on
Mt. Baekdu. With this, the area was developed as a revolutionary landmark from
the 1970s.
When Kim Jong Eun came to power, the site
has been promoted as the origin of the “Baekdu bloodline.” One of the key
examples is back in February 2012, when officials from the Party, various administrative offices, and the military, held a rally at Baekdu Milyong to commemorate the 70th birthday of the late Kim
Jong Il and vowed their loyalty to the younger Kim.
North Korea claims the area of Mt. Baekdu
carries an abundance of traces from Kim Il Sung’s era of independence fighting
against Japanese colonialists in the 1930s. This is why it is proclaimed the “grand
revolutionary outdoors museum” and visited each year by Party cadres, military
officials, and residents, who go on state tours of the area.
“In Samjiyon County, there are camps for
visitors to stay at such as those for workers, children, and college students,
but if the fire reached this area, it’s likely they all burned down,” the
source explained. “It’s a state of emergency in Hyesan, Samjiyon,
Daehongdan, and others in Yangkang Province, so agencies and businesses have
been assigned to work areas to put out the fire.”
North Korea appears to be trying to wipe
out the fire by mobilizing residents in the area. “They started broadcasts from
the 20th in downtown Hyesan, and even on the Third Broadcast [fixed cable
system to which only North Korean residents are exposed], they’ve been saying that everyone actively must lend a hand to get the
fire under control,” the source said. It is not only in Hyesan City, but residents
in Bochon, Unheung, Baekam, and Shinpa Counties that have also been mobilized
to combat the wildfire.
“The autumn air is dry and so are the
leaves. On top of that the winds are strong, so they haven’t been able to
effectively fight the fire,” she went on. “Despite days having
passed since the fire broke out, they haven’t been able to tame the flames.”
“Already people are saying, whether the
fire was deliberate or an accident, anyone tied to it will probably be
executed,” she said, speculating, “If it’s arson, it will be a huge problem,
since it will be seen as treason. Even if that’s not the case, they will be
held accountable for not managing a key historic site of the country.”
“Some security officials have said that
this incident will not end with simply one or two people being held
responsible,” the source alleged. “Even provincial Party members have been staying
onsite, eating and sleeping there, to try to put out the fire.”
North Korean state media outlets have yet
to report on the fire, but attention is on how or if it will provide coverage
of the incident.
If the state does disclose the fire, it
will come with the political price tag of having to admit to a flaw in its
state security system. However, trying to cover it up will not be any easier. This
is because people will question why state tours to the “Mt. Baekdu
revolutionary site” that have continued since the 1970s have abruptly come to a
halt.
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Abstract
Trivers' parental investment model states that individuals facing higher levels of parental investment will become increasingly choosy in their choice of mates. For humans, this leads to two predictions. First, both males and females will be choosier in relationships more likely to lead to the production of children. Second, females will be choosier than are males, because their minimum risk of parental investment is higher. Previous studies of human mate choice found support for these predictions, with one curious exception: male choosiness was lower for short-term sexual relationships involving no relationship commitment (one-night stands) than for short-term relationships involving no sexual activity (single dates). Because the risk of parental investment would be higher in a one-night stand, this suggests that true risk of parental investment was not the underlying factor governing choosiness levels, either because study subjects assigned different levels of sexual activity to the relationships than were intended by the investigators of the study or because perceived risk is more important in human mate choice than real risk. To confirm that male/female differences in choosiness criteria exist in humans, and to evaluate the effect that different expected levels of real or perceived parental investment may have on choosiness, we studied mate choosiness in the context of five types of relationships that reflected explicitly defined, increasing levels of risk of parental investment for both males and females. The subjects were 468 undergraduate students, mostly between the ages of 18–24. By using questionnaires, male and female participants rated their minimum requirements in a potential mate for 29 personal characteristics with respect to level of relationship. Our results confirm the major predictions of the parental investment model for humans but suggest that sex differences in choosiness are better explained by perceived rather than real risk of parental investment.
A general principle underlying studies of mate choice is that the greater the level of parental investment required, the more stringent the criteria that should be required of potential mates (Trivers, 1972). Parental investment is the total energy and resources that parents must expend to produce a particular offspring, and that increase the survival of the offspring but also decrease the ability of the parent to invest in other offspring (Trivers, 1972). In mammals, males and females differ considerably in the levels of parental investment to which they are committed by the act of copulation. In humans, for males the minimum parental investment risked by copulation is the cost of sperm, whereas for females the cost is 9 months of pregnancy and the risks inherent in childbirth. As a result of this skewed minimal risk of parental investment, on average, human females should be much more stringent in their mate choice criteria than are males (Trivers, 1972).
The expected degree of mate choosiness is not simply a function of the minimum level of parental investment required of males and females. Other factors, such as the mating system and the degree of parental care offered by both parents after the birth of their offspring, are also important. Unlike most mammals, human males often invest in their offspring beyond the initial investment of gametes (Clutton-Brock, 1989; Geary, 2000), suggesting that under some circumstances, male and female investment might actually be similar. This in turn would suggest that males and females would exhibit similar minimum criteria for prospective long-term mates. However, the amount of parental investment provided by human males is highly variable (Heath and Hadley, 1998). Although some males provide a great deal of parental investment, others provide very little or none at all beyond the initial investment of gametes. For example, some research has found that fathers in many cultures almost never care for infants or young children, whereas other studies in the United States found that males did spend time caring for their children, but to a much lesser degree than did their mothers (Geary, 2000). These findings translate into a general pattern in which average female parental investment is greater than that of males, both initially and after birth.
Recent studies confirm what many of us know intuitively, that humans exhibit a variety of mating strategies, adjusting mating behavior to current environmental, social and life-historical circumstances (Gangestad and Simpson, 2000). Adjustments in mating strategies are likely related to patterns of parental investment, both within and between the sexes (Bleske and Buss, 2000; Hill, 2000). Although in many mating contexts, the amount of parental investment risked by females is greater than that for males, there are also circumstances in which expected parental investment over the long-term may be more or less equal for males and females, or even greater for males. For humans, Trivers' parental investment model leads to two predictions. First, both males and females will exhibit more stringent mate choice in mating situations entailing a higher level or risk of parental investment. Second, there will be a discrepancy in the stringency of male and female choosiness that is more or less proportional to their differential risk of parental investment. This means that overall, females should be choosier than are males, but the difference between them should decrease as the difference in expected parental investment decreases.
Much research effort has been devoted to examining the criteria that human males and females use to choose mates, including physical traits such as attractiveness (Berry and Miller, 2001), facial symmetry (Thornhill and Gangestad, 1999), body odor (Herz and Inzlicht, 2002; Jacob et al., 2002; Wedekind and Furi, 1997), and age (de Sousa Campos et al., 2002); genetic traits such as major histocompatibility complex genotype (Ober et al., 1997); as well as traits like economic status (Borgerhoff Mulder, 1990) and personality (Landolt et al., 1995; Sadalla et al., 1987). Fewer studies have been designed as explicit tests of Trivers' parental investment model as it relates variable risk of parental investment to mate choice. The major exception is a series of studies by Kenrick et al. (1990, 1993) that investigated the effect of level of parental investment on the stringency of mate choice in mate choice relationships entailing different real risks of pregnancy. As predicted by the parental investment model, these studies had two important results. First, females were on average choosier than were males, although for some specific criteria, males were choosier than were females. Second, in both males and females, choosiness increases as risk of parental investment increases. There was one curious exception to this pattern: although females were choosier for relationships consisting of one-night stands (a single sexual encounter and nonzero risk of pregnancy) than for single dates (no sexual encounter and zero risk of pregnancy), males exhibited significantly lower choosiness for one-night stands. This result has been cited as evidence for the low standards in mate choice exhibited by human males, at least for sexual encounters that carry no commitment (Alcock, 1998: 622).
We were curious about why human males should exhibit this exception to the expected positive relationship between risk of parental investment (PI) and mate choosiness, an exception not predicted by Trivers' (1972) model, and one for which creative adaptive scenarios can easily be proposed (cf. commentaries in Gangestad and Simpson, 2000). We wondered if Kenrick et al.'s influential studies might actually have examined mate choice as it relates to perceived risk of parental investment rather than real risk. If males and females differently perceived risk of parental investment resulting from dates or one-night stands, this might be enough to explain the anomalous results for males. Therefore, we carried out a new version of Kenrick's studies, with certain adjustments, including explicitly defined levels of sexual activity in five types of relationship associated with increasing risk of parental investment. This also allowed us to distinguish post hoc between real and perceived risk of parental investment.
METHODS
Subjects
The participants were 468 undergraduate students from Brock University, 334 females and 134 males. This research was approved for use with human subjects by the Brock University Research Ethics Board (file number 00-072). Participants did not receive compensation for participating in the research. The questionnaire and raw data are available on request (from M.H.R.).
Procedures
The participants in the present study were requested to complete a questionnaire in which they indicated the minimum and maximum acceptable scores for particular traits in a potential partner, given a particular level of relationship. The possible scores ranged from one to 10 and were considered to be a measure of choosiness. The personal traits assessed were chosen to replicate as closely as possible those used in the early studies by Kenrick et al. (1990, 1993), with a few changes to remove gender-biased terms such as “good housekeeper”; these changes were made in response to suggestions received during preliminary tests of the questionnaire. The characteristics used were kind, understanding, religious, exciting personality, creative, artistic, intelligent, good earning potential, hospitable, wants children, easy-going, free of genetic disease, ethnicity, university graduate, physically attractive, healthy, aggressive, ambitious, emotionally stable, friendly, popular, powerful, sexy, wealthy, good sense of humor, high social status, likes to be in charge, grooming, and hygiene. The participants were also asked to rate themselves on the same criteria. An overall choosiness score was constructed by averaging all of the criteria for a given level of relationship.
The levels of relationship examined were single date, one-night stand, casual dating, steady dating, and marriage. The levels of involvement were derived from Kenrick et al. (1993) but were slightly modified in name. The following definitions were included in the questionnaire: single date, a single date that would not include any sexual activity; one-night stand, this type of situation involves sexual intercourse with a person you did not know and would not see again; casual dating, which refers to partners involved in a relationship including sexual intercourse but not necessarily exclusively with one partner; steady dating, which refers to partners involved in a committed relationship, and would include sexual intercourse; and marriage, which refers to formal marriage.
The instructions on the questionnaire emphasized that all relationships were to be treated hypothetically and that by answering the questions, no subjects implied that they had ever engaged in any of these relationships. We did not ask questions about subjects' sexual orientation, attitudes to sex before marriage, or use of birth control. Two orders of presentation of the levels of relationship (ascending or descending) within the questionnaire were used in order to control for any order effects. To minimize the biasing effect of self-rating on mate score (Kenrick et al., 1993), self scores were assessed at the end of the questionnaire, after the assessments of hypothetical mates.
Statistical methods
Principal components analysis using choosiness scores for the 29 characteristics as variables was undertaken to assess the feasibility of aggregating the characteristics into a smaller number of composite trait groups to simplify the analyses. Kenrick et al. (1990, 1993) aggregated their set of characteristics into eight composites such as dominance and family orientation. In this study, we found that the total variance explained by the first four principal components was only 57%, and that only four of 29 traits (ambitious, good earning potential, friendly, and intelligent) had even moderate factor loadings (more than 0.70), indicating no overall and easily interpretable pattern of trait preferences. Thus, for our data set, principal components analysis was not revealing, and we elected to analyze the data using general linear models (as Kenrick et al. also did).
\[\mathrm{choosiness}{=}\mathrm{intercept}{+}\mathrm{gender}{+}\mathrm{level}{+}\mathrm{gender}{\times}\mathrm{level}{+}\mathrm{self-rating}\] For choosiness scores, we used ANCOVA to determine the influences of gender (a nominal variable), level of relationship (a ranked, interval variable), and self-rating on choosiness (minimum score for a partner), according to the model We analyzed both overall choosiness scores, and the individual choosiness scores for each of the 29 individual characteristics. One-way ANOVA was used to compare gender differences in choosiness or self-scores within particular levels of relationship. All analyses were performed by using SPSS.
RESULTS
For all types of relationships, the overall mean choosiness scores of females were higher than those of males (Figure 1 and Table 1). In both males and females, choosiness tended to increase as risk of parental investment increased, with a decrease in choosiness at the level of one-night stand. The difference between males and females was especially marked at the level of one-night stand (ANOVA: F 1,490 = 16.707, p < .05), which probably accounts for a significant interaction between gender and level of relationship (Table 1).
Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Overall choosiness scores of male and female subjects ordered by real risk of parental investment as defined in the questionnaire.
Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Overall choosiness scores of male and female subjects ordered by real risk of parental investment as defined in the questionnaire.
Table 1 Source df Type III SS MS F Sex 1 29.534 29.534 21.224* Level of relationship 4 822.359 205.59 147.742* Sex × level 4 18.348 4.587 3.296† Self-rating 1 766.945 766.945 551.145* Error 2329 3240.912 1.392 Source df Type III SS MS F Sex 1 29.534 29.534 21.224* Level of relationship 4 822.359 205.59 147.742* Sex × level 4 18.348 4.587 3.296† Self-rating 1 766.945 766.945 551.145* Error 2329 3240.912 1.392 View Large
Table 1 Source df Type III SS MS F Sex 1 29.534 29.534 21.224* Level of relationship 4 822.359 205.59 147.742* Sex × level 4 18.348 4.587 3.296† Self-rating 1 766.945 766.945 551.145* Error 2329 3240.912 1.392 Source df Type III SS MS F Sex 1 29.534 29.534 21.224* Level of relationship 4 822.359 205.59 147.742* Sex × level 4 18.348 4.587 3.296† Self-rating 1 766.945 766.945 551.145* Error 2329 3240.912 1.392 View Large
Separate analyses of choosiness scores for each characteristic revealed that for some characteristics (Table 2), females were choosier than were males, whereas for others males were choosier than were females, or there was no difference between the sexes. Because self-rating and choosiness scores tend to be correlated (Table 3), we looked for evidence that either gender is choosier for those traits in which that gender has higher self-ratings. As is evident from Table 2, neither males nor females tend to be choosier for traits on which they are more highly self-rated.
Table 2 Females more choosy than males Males more choosy than females No difference ambitious aggressive (M) artistic easy going (M) free of genetic disease creative exciting personality grooming (F) emotionally stable (M) friendly hygiene (F) ethnicity good earning potential healthy (M) good sense of humour (M) hospitable (F) high social status likes to be in charge (M) intelligence religious kindness (F) sexy (M) popular wants children (F) powerful (M) understanding (F) university graduate wealthy (M) Females more choosy than males Males more choosy than females No difference ambitious aggressive (M) artistic easy going (M) free of genetic disease creative exciting personality grooming (F) emotionally stable (M) friendly hygiene (F) ethnicity good earning potential healthy (M) good sense of humour (M) hospitable (F) high social status likes to be in charge (M) intelligence religious kindness (F) sexy (M) popular wants children (F) powerful (M) understanding (F) university graduate wealthy (M) View Large
Table 2 Females more choosy than males Males more choosy than females No difference ambitious aggressive (M) artistic easy going (M) free of genetic disease creative exciting personality grooming (F) emotionally stable (M) friendly hygiene (F) ethnicity good earning potential healthy (M) good sense of humour (M) hospitable (F) high social status likes to be in charge (M) intelligence religious kindness (F) sexy (M) popular wants children (F) powerful (M) understanding (F) university graduate wealthy (M) Females more choosy than males Males more choosy than females No difference ambitious aggressive (M) artistic easy going (M) free of genetic disease creative exciting personality grooming (F) emotionally stable (M) friendly hygiene (F) ethnicity good earning potential healthy (M) good sense of humour (M) hospitable (F) high social status likes to be in charge (M) intelligence religious kindness (F) sexy (M) popular wants children (F) powerful (M) understanding (F) university graduate wealthy (M) View Large
Table 3 Single date One-night stand Casual dating Steady dating Marriage Male 0.355* 0.158 0.428* 0.507* 0.497* Female 0.401* 0.355* 0.510* 0.522* 0.562* Z <1 −2.056* −1.022 <1 <1 Single date One-night stand Casual dating Steady dating Marriage Male 0.355* 0.158 0.428* 0.507* 0.497* Female 0.401* 0.355* 0.510* 0.522* 0.562* Z <1 −2.056* −1.022 <1 <1 View Large
Table 3 Single date One-night stand Casual dating Steady dating Marriage Male 0.355* 0.158 0.428* 0.507* 0.497* Female 0.401* 0.355* 0.510* 0.522* 0.562* Z <1 −2.056* −1.022 <1 <1 Single date One-night stand Casual dating Steady dating Marriage Male 0.355* 0.158 0.428* 0.507* 0.497* Female 0.401* 0.355* 0.510* 0.522* 0.562* Z <1 −2.056* −1.022 <1 <1 View Large
DISCUSSION
The reliability of self-report data on questionnaires for assessing human behavioral ecology is somewhat controversial (Daly and Wilson, 1999), because self-assessment may be biased, subjects may lie, or they may not have perfect memory of events. We believe that to assess mate choosiness levels as they are associated with expected parental investment is only possible by using this method. First, lying and mischief-making would simply have increased the variance in responses, making it less likely that we would detect differences between males and females or a correlation between choosiness and parental investment risk. Second, subjects were stating their responses to hypothetical situations and did not need to rely on memory. Third, an observational study would require that individuals be observed in a variety of mate choice situations, and it is difficult to see how this could be achieved without resorting to memory-based accounts of past romantic adventures. Fourth, observational studies of mate choice have one serious drawback, which is that subjects (human or animal) must choose from the available pool of mates (Pawlowski and Dunbar, 1999), rather than from the completely free choice offered by a hypothetical situation. Thus, it is unlikely that in observing actual human mate choices, we would be able to reliably associate them with risk of parental investment. In short, Kenrick's studies and ours actually are at an advantage to be studying “the garrulous animal” (Daly and Wilson, 1999).
The present study and those of Kenrick et al. (1990, 1993) support the general prediction, based on parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972), that mate choice criteria become more stringent as risk of parental investment increases. Moreover, the prediction that females should be choosier than are males was also generally supported, although it was not true for all criteria nor was the difference between males and females statistically significant within every level of relationship (Table 1). In fact, the choosiness scores of males and females become more and more similar as the risk of parental investment increases, so that at the level of marriage, they were almost identical. This suggests that in long-term reproductive relationships, both males and females expect to invest heavily, and perhaps equivalently, in their offspring.
An important difference between the present study and the earlier work of Kenrick et al. (1990, 1993) is that we explicitly defined levels of sexual activity in the relationships. In the present study, this meant that the study subjects did not need to interpret the level of sexual activity involved in the hypothesized relationship, and allowed us to distinguish post hoc between real and perceived risk of parental investment as it relates to choosiness. Moreover, Kenrick et al. (1990, 1993) found that male choosiness declined at the level of one-night stand, whereas we found that the decline actually occurs in both sexes (Figure 1). This is evidence that study subjects do not judge risk of parental investment based solely on the level of sexual activity. This is not surprising given that widespread use of contraceptives may mean that the perceived risk of pregnancy in a one-night stand is zero, even though the risk is actually greater than zero. However, we suspect that contraceptive use is not the only explanation for the decline. As we were informed by the undergraduate testers of our questionnaire, a date requires planning and financial investment, and may be regarded as a potential prelude to a longer-term relationship that will eventually include sex—whereas a one-night stand often requires neither planning nor financial investment. As a result, the perceived risk of parental investment in a date is greater than zero, even though the actual risk is zero, whereas the perceived risk for a one-night stand is zero, even though the real risk is greater than zero. If we re-ordered the relationship levels so that one-night stand preceded single date, we would have perfect support for Trivers' (1972) hypothesis (Figure 1).
We found that male subjects seemed to be choosier for characteristics (e.g., attractive, grooming, and hygiene) related to physical appearance or health, whereas female subjects tended to be choosier for characteristics related to the resources of prospective mates (e.g., earning potential, high social status, university graduate, and wealthy) (Table 2). Although we did not directly address the issue of age in the present study, it appears to have been an indirect criterion, because physical attractiveness in females and resource acquisition in males are both associated with age (Bereczkei et al., 1997; Buss et al., 2000; Buunk et al., 2001; Kenrick and Keefe, 1992; Townsend and Wasserman, 1997). These patterns have been interpreted as evidence that human males choose mates primarily based on female health and child-bearing ability, whereas females choose mates based on male resource acquisition and holding ability (Pawlowski and Dunbar, 1999). Such interpretations must be made cautiously, especially when based on forced choices such as in our questionnaire, as missing sex-specific criteria might be as important or more important than those actually assessed (Herz and Inzlicht, 2002).
Alternative models of human mate choice are the social exchange and biological markets models, in which prospective partners attempt to exchange their assets for those of a partner, in a manner analogous to an economic exchange system. Social exchange theory predicts that individuals will assess their own qualities, and attempt to find partners of the same quality for relationships (Kenrick et al., 1993), and so predicts a correlation between self-scores and minimum mate choice criteria (Table 1). Mate similarity in quality is also predicted by biological markets models in which two classes of traders (males and females) exchange commodities (sex; Noe and Hammerstein, 1995; Pawlowski and Dunbar, 1999). In fact, the parental investment model also predicts mate similarity in quality, especially at higher levels of investment and in monogamous mating systems (as implied by marriage in the present study). So all three models make the same prediction. However, social exchange models do not predict the existence of gender differences in choosiness, except insofar as would be predicted by gender differences in the self scores (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959). In other words, females could be choosier than are males, but this would be because they rate themselves more highly. However, we found that females were choosier, despite having lower self-scores on average than do males. Furthermore, the characteristics for which each gender's self-scores were higher were not necessarily those for which they were choosier. Thus, the social exchange models are contradicted by the patterns revealed in the present study, as well as Kenrick's. Ultimately, our data fit the parental investment model but not the socioeconomic alternatives.
This research was approved for use with human subjects by the Brock University Research Ethics Board, file number 00–072, in compliance with Canadian laws and regulations. We thank the members of our laboratory group for their help in testing early versions of the questionnaire and Kevin Brown for his comments on the manuscript. This paper is based on K.W.'s fourth-year undergraduate research project.
References
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Behavioral Ecology vol. 16 no. 1 © International Society for Behavioral Ecology 2005; all rights reserved.
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What the heck is Cedarcide, and is it right for my cat or dog flea problem???
Unlike most products whose names end in “-cide,” Cedarcide is a non-poisonous alternative to external parasite control, like fleas and tics. It is advertised as safe for humans, including babies, as well as puppies, kittens, cats, and dogs. None of us in the Smith household have suffered any ill effects after several years of usage.I really hate to drown our cats and dogs in chemicals, and there is an ongoing debate as to the cumulative harmful side-effects of applying products such as Frontline and Advantage, to name only two. Occasionally, because we live in Florida, which evidently is “flea heaven,” I break down and use a chemical treatment. Chemicals do work. However, I really wanted to find an effective, safe alternative.
You can check the website for compete information, but I’ll just give you a brief summary of the product.
Cedarcide uses natural cedar scent in either a silicone or water-based formula, depending on your intended usage. There are products for yard pest control, animal bathing, kennel cleaning, etc. I first tried their “Best Yet” all-purpose spray repellant in the sample size, and then ordered two gallons. This was about three years ago, and I have just now poured my last bit into the large spray bottle. Small and large spray bottles are included free with your purchase.
I use Cedarcide a LOT, and have even given some to friends, and it has still taken a long time for me to finally run out! So, Cedarcide is a HUGE money saver, if you compare it to the cost of multiple Frontline applications, which essentially cost as much as a car payment every month, if you have several animals! Yes, I will re-order! I plan to try the water-soluble bathing products as well.
Cedarcide’s “Best Yet” kills fleas (and most other insects) on contact, and the effects will last several days. (We do not have a tick problem, so check the Cedarcide literature on this point of effectiveness.)
I just spritz it on the problem areas—neck, base of tail, belly—and rub it in a bit. I supplement spraying with using a flea comb on those areas as well, before and after spraying. I do find that it works best on my short-coated animals. With long-haired coats, you must take the time to lift the hair and spray under, then be sure to really work it in. This is time-consuming, if you have several dogs to deal with.
I have tried a variety of other non-toxic flea control alternatives on both the dogs and the cats: Rosemary and other essential oils (from the health foods store) sprayed on or massaged in; boiling lemons in water, letting them steep, and then rubbing the strained water into their coats; herbal flea collars; adding garlic to our pets’ foods. I really haven’t been happy with the results. The dogs smelled great, and their coats looked very nice, but the flea control wasn’t happening.
It’s not too expensive to try their small sample size, so that’s a good place to start, if you want to be cautious about investing your flea-control dollars.
I hope this might work for you! Fleas are THE WORST!!!!!
By the way, as an alternative to using a flea bomb, you can sprinkle plain old salt on your carpets, leave it for a few days, then vacuum it up. For our wood floors, I use a wash of water with a little salt, if needed, to do a quick mop treatment.
We have also used the “diatomaceous earth” powder, both on the dogs and on the floors. I found it not so effective on the dogs, but great for sprinkling on new fire-ant mounds on the yard—it’s also non-toxic to animals, but coats the carapaces of insects and sort of dehydrates them. One last note…we DO use Heartguard, purchased form our vet, once a month, religiously, for all the dogs. They are only outdoors briefly several times a day, but Florida is also mosquito and heartworm heaven, and we are taking NO chances of having to do a heartworm intervention for any of out little guys! If anybody has encountered an effective, non-chemical heartworm treatment, I would be very interested to hear about it.
Wags to all the dogs out there, from our pack!
As always, please be consider supporting this blog by checking out my cat and dog art at www.TheArtOfLovingcatsAndDogs.com.
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LAS VEGAS -- The National Hockey League announced today the order of the presentation for tonight's 2015 NHL Awards. Hosted by actor and comedian Rob Riggle and featuring a performance from rock band Daughtry, the 2015 NHL Awards will broadcast live from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas at 7:00 p.m. ET on NBCSN in the U.S. and on Sportsnet in Canada.
The scheduled order of award presentations is as follows (subject to change):
Ted Lindsay Award (most outstanding player as voted by the players)
Presenters: Colin Hanks and Ted Lindsay
Selke Trophy (forward who best excels in the defensive aspects of the game)
Presenters: Kathryn Tappen and Pat LaFontaine
Norris Trophy (top defenseman)
Presenters: Kathryn Tappen and Pat LaFontaine
Jack Adams Award (top head coach)
Presenter: Kix Brooks
General Manager of the Year
Presenters: NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and Jordyn Leopold
Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy (goal-scoring leader)
Presenter: Anson Carter
Introduction of Hart Nominee #1
Presenter: Anson Carter
King Clancy Memorial Trophy (for leadership on and off the ice and noteworthy humanitarian contribution to community)
Presenter: Matthew Modine
Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award presented by Bridgestone
Presenters: Matthew Modine and Mark Messier
NHL Foundation Player Award (community service)
Presenters: Matthew Modine and Trevor Linden
Art Ross Trophy (scoring champion)
Presenter: Rob Riggle
Introduction of Hart Nominee #2
Presenter: Samantha Hoopes
Calder Trophy (top rookie)
Presenters: George Stroumboulopoulos and Daniel Alfredsson
Vezina Trophy (top goaltender)
Presenters: George Stroumboulopoulos and Daniel Alfredsson
William M. Jennings Trophy (goaltender who plays at least 25 games for the club allowing the fewest goals)
Presenter: Rob Riggle
Lady Byng Trophy (player best combining sportsmanship and ability)
Presenters: Russell Peters and Bill Guerin
Masterton Trophy (perseverance and dedication to hockey)
Presenters: Retta and Cam Neely
Introduction of Hart Nominee #3
Presenter: Nick Kypreos
EA NHL® 16 Cover Athlete
Presenter: Rob Riggle
Hart Trophy (most valuable player to his team)
Presenter: Rob Riggle
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Samrang Pring/ Reuters Cambodian environmentalist Chut Wutty at Botum Sakor National Park, in Cambodia, in 2012
On April 26, 2012, Cambodian environmentalist Chut Wutty was killed during an investigation into illegal logging in the country’s arcane Cardamom Mountains. A year on, his family is no closer to learning the truth of what happened that fateful day and why. And now, sadly, Chut Wutty’s cause — the protection of Cambodia’s pristine woodland — is under greater threat than ever. New concessions for plantations and development projects are devastating the nation’s protected forests. On Monday, Global Witness, an advocacy group for which Chut Wutty worked for many years, accused Vietnamese rubber firms allegedly backed by the World Bank and Germany’s Deutsche Bank of driving a land-grabbing crisis.
Chut Wutty, 48 when he died, had been on a collision course with Cambodia’s murky business elite for some time. He was shot during a confrontation with security personnel at a land concession for a 338-megawatt hydropower dam to be built by China Huadian Corp. (CHC), one of China’s largest energy companies. Chut Wutty suspected that the area was being used to launder precious rosewood — loggers would bring felled trees from nearby protected forests, which would then be fraudulently registered as originating from within the concession’s land. An argument broke out and shots were fired. The activist died at the scene after being hit in the stomach and leg. A military policeman was also killed. Security officials were apparently responding to a complaint from CHC that Chut Wutty was taking photographs on private land without permission.
(MORE: Battle of the Jungle: In Cambodia, Monks Take On the Carbon Market)
Investigating officers decided that the second slain man, military policeman In Rattana, 32, shot Chut Wutty before being killed himself. A third man, Ran Boroth, was convicted of killing In Rattana while attempting to disarm him. Ran Boroth was a 27-year-old security guard for Timbergreen, a Cambodia-registered, Chinese-backed firm responsible for clearing the dam site. Ran Boroth was released without explanation after serving six months of his two-year prison sentence for unintentional homicide. Timbergreen acknowledged to the Phnom Penh Post that it holds the contract to clear the land but will not comment further.
Olesia Plokhii was one of two journalists accompanying Chut Wutty at the time of his death while on an assignment for the Cambodia Daily, but did not witness the manner of his shooting firsthand. A Canadian national, she describes the case as “heartbreaking” but maintains that such travesties are unsurprising considering the rampant corruption that blights Cambodia. Chut Wutty “would be the first person to envisage that there would be no justice for him,” she told TIME. “He was very cognizant of the dangers riding against him. He saw that he might have to go soon.” The stakes in this conflict are high. Richly hued, brownish red Siamese rosewood fetches around $5,000 per cu m in Phnom Penh and up to $50,000 in China, making the potential profits tantalizing for poverty-stricken Khmers.
Chut Wutty was a particularly effective activist owing to his military background — he was formerly a soldier — and extensive network of contacts. He encouraged rural communities to search out illegal timber stores near their homes and burn them — hitting the pockets of the criminal loggers. “Burning [timber] remains the most effective tool available to local people,” says Chut Wutty’s nephew, Chuon Phirom, himself an environmental activist for U.K.-based Flora & Fauna International.
Cambodia’s deforestation is the world’s third highest, after Nigeria and Vietnam, according to the latest figures from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. China is the biggest importer of timber, and the destination for much of Cambodia’s beleaguered woodland. Total Chinese log imports surged from 13.6 million cu m valued at $1.6 billion in 2000 to 42 million cu m worth $8.2 billion by 2011. China imported about 30% of all logs traded worldwide in 2011, with around half of that illegally sourced, according to a report published in November by the London-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency.
There was once significant progress to thwart Cambodia’s illegal logging trade. The international community put pressure on the Cambodian government amid a crisis situation 10 years ago: nearly 3 million hectares — an area the size of Maryland— was lost between 1990 and 2010, according to the U.N. The IMF and World Bank placed conditions on financial assistance, and logging returned to “oxcart levels,” according to Marcus Hardtke, a German environmentalist who worked alongside Chut Wutty for many years. “No other country in the region [except Cambodia] managed to enforce a complete [illegal-]logging ban,” says Hardtke.
(MORE: Is Cambodia Dredging Its Rivers to Death?)
Since 2010 the situation has deteriorated drastically. While strong regulations remain for selective logging in protected forests, concessions for rubber plantations and development projects allow for the clear-cutting of large swaths. In March, Thailand finally listed Siamese rosewood under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)’s Appendix II, which will monitor and control the export of the valuable lumber to other countries. Yet with so much illegal trade passing through Vietnam to China — and the vast majority of Cambodia’s top-grade rosewood already stripped out — critics argue that this is too little, too late.
As such, loggers have turned to new high-value targets like the resin trees that are part of the sustainable livelihoods for the indigenous Kuy tribe inhabiting Prey Lang forest, around 200 km north of Phnom Penh. Seng Sokheng, spokesperson for the Prey Lang Community Network, says that the logging leads to soil erosion and the loss of natural fertilizer that has traditionally aided the subsistence farming of vegetables, mushrooms and honey. “The Kuy people’s culture and tradition are being eroded day by day,” says Seng Sokheng.
Prey Lang is the last remaining evergreen lowland forest in the whole of Indochina. Once around 70% of the continent was so covered, yet now only this patch, the size of Rhode Island, remains. Environmentalists estimate that about 40% of Prey Lang has been eroded since 2000, with the entire forest likely to disappear in five or six years if current trends continue. Andrew McDonald, a botanist with the University of Texas–Pan American, says Prey Lang is a unique mosaic comprising half a dozen woodland varieties. But now the area is under threat from concessions for economic migrants to grow cassava to the north, while rubber plantations creep in from the south. “When I go back now, we are surrounded by smoking stumps,” says McDonald. “It is alarming that we are losing ground as we are trying to save it.”
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen declared a moratorium on new land concessions last May, yet at least four new concessions have since been announced in protected areas. A government spokesman told local media that these were issued prior to the moratorium, but did not answer media enquires regarding how many more of these agreements were still pending. “Our patrols are constantly finding red signs on trees marking out where new concessions will be deep in [Prey Lang] forest,” says Seng Sokheng. Hun Sen said in March that 1.5 million hectares of land concessions — 80% for rubber plantations — had been granted to private companies, according to the Cambodia Herald.
Global Witness this week accused two of Vietnam’s biggest companies — Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) and the Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG) — of being responsible for major land grabs in Cambodia. Both companies are apparently financed by Deutsche Bank while the International Finance Corporation (IFC) — the private lending arm of the World Bank — reportedly invests in HAGL through intermediaries. Both VRG and HAGL have released statements denying any illegal activity. Similarly, Deutsche Bank and the IFC have both contested their level of involvement.
Tragically, fates similar to Chut Wutty’s are not uncommon in Cambodia. Just weeks after his murder, a 14-year-old girl was shot and killed by military police during a forced eviction. Four months later, Hang Serei Oudom, a journalist who exposed illegal logging and forest crimes, was found dead in the trunk of his car. An investigating judge said that the 44-year-old’s head had been caved in with a sharp tool, perhaps an ax or a machete. Activists gathered for the anniversary of Chut Wutty’s murder say that Cambodia’s dependence on foreign aid means that a moratorium on land concessions is possible if the international community again exerts pressure. That may be the only way left to protect Cambodia’s forests — and save lives too.
MORE: Rio Climate Summit: Top 10 Priorities for a Planet in Peril
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Just a day after releasing a new poll showing President Barack Obama’s approval rating in a freefall, CNN icame out with new numbers today finding that Americans increasingly believe that the White House is behind the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups (emphasis mine):
A growing number of Americans believe that senior White House officials ordered the Internal Revenue Service to target conservative political groups, according to a new national poll. And a CNN/ORC International survey released Tuesday morning also indicates that a majority of the public says the controversy, which involves increased IRS scrutiny of tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, is very important to the nation.
[…]
Last month only 37% of the public thought that the IRS controversy led to the White House, with 55% saying that agency officials acted on their own without direct orders from Washington. Now the number who say the White House directed that IRS program has increased 10 points, to 47%, virtually the same as the 49% who believe the IRS agents acted on their own.
The number reiterate the lack of trust the public has in this administration. The CNN poll released yesterday found that 50% of Americans reject the notion that President Obama is “honest and trustworthy,” A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released last week had similar findings.
It’s not a crazy notion that the White House was behind the IRS’s targeting of these conservative groups. The agency has been used as a tool by past administrations to target political opponents. But despite a recent Quinnipiac poll showing that 76% Americans want a special prosecutor to look into the matter, President Obama has been steadfast in opposing an outside, independent investigation. He apparently believes that an internal investigation will be enough.
That, however, isn’t enough to allay Americans’ growing concerns about their scandal-plauged government. C’mon, President Obama, if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide.
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The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that over 43.8 million adults experience a mental illness each year. Studies also show that over 70% of those with a mental illness conceal it from others because they fear discrimination when looking for or keeping a job. For many employees, the balance of work and life is a priority, and they are looking for employers who will support their well-being at work. While this may be a priority for the employee, many companies are left wondering what to do about the employee population with mental health issues.
The World Federation for Mental Health reports that 10% of the employed population has missed work due to depression, and on average 36 workdays are lost per depression episode. Mental health disorders, combined with substance use disorders cost employers over $80 billion in direct costs. Indirect costs, such as productivity and the rise of disability claims adds to that number. The costs and productivity loss alone should be an incentive to discuss mental illness, but employers are also under a legal obligation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to refrain from discriminating against, and to make reasonable accommodations for, those who have a mental illness.
As mental illnesses become more prevalent in America, some companies are setting a precedence on taking mental health seriously. Unilever, the maker of many household name-brands such as Lipton, Knorr, Dove, Axe, and Hellmann’s, has a global health initiative for all employees that includes a compressive program tailored to mental health. Offerings such as mental health training for managers and senior leaders, and regular workshops on sleep, mindfulness, and exercise helps to end the stigma that surrounds mental health and encourage employees to seek help if they need it. Not only focusing on the mental health of their employees, but Unilever is also using the Dove brand to help young people build positive body confidence and self-esteem through educational programs.
Another well-known brand, American Express, is providing the “next generation of healthcare for its employees” through a focus on physical, mental, and behavioral health. The company has added free onsite professionals, face-to-face counseling sessions in regional wellness centers, and rebranded their Employee Assistance Program as part of the “Healthy Living” program. Under this program, the company has also introduced enhanced communication, education, and behavior change programs to help destigmatize mental health conditions.
The nation’s largest insurer, Aetna, has recently founded the Campaign to Change Direction aimed at changing the culture of mental health and wellness in America. The campaign is partnering with over 50 businesses, government agencies, nonprofit partners, and communities to encourage others to reach out to those with signs of emotional suffering to help them get the care they need and to form healthier communities. For their employees, Aetna includes meditation and yoga classes as part of its wellness program. In 2012, they reported an average 13,000 employees took part in at least one class and saw a 28% reduction in stress levels. Over 20% of the participants noted an improvement in sleep quality and the company reported a gain of 62 minutes of productivity per week per person.
One of the most efficient ways to support employees suffering from mental health issues is through an Employee Assistance Program. The EAP gives employees access to counselors and clinicians, and services to help with workplace and personal issues. In addition to the core program, companies can also add educational workshops to learn more about mental and emotional health and training for employees and management. To combat the stigma associated with mental health, employers should create a culture that encourages talking about mental health. Companies that promote positive mental health and wellness can transform their culture, and have a healthier, more productive workforce.
If you or a loved one have questions regarding a mental illness, seek guidance from a mental health provider that is right for you. You do not have to face this challenge alone, Pasadena Villa can help. Call us at 877-845-5235 or complete our contact form to help with the next steps of treatment. Pasadena Villa Network of Psychiatric Services currently offers treatment at two residential locations in both Orlando, Florida and Knoxville, Tennessee, and outpatient services in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Not me in either vehicle, but both are in my dreams.
May 22, 2013
Ever since about my 5th year of life on this Earth, I've had a drive to become a pilot. Much of this love of flight can be attributed to the fact that my family moved from New York to the Netherlands right around this time. We lived overseas for 5 years, with the annual vacation destination being family back in the U.S.A.
I longed for the thrill which initiated these 8 hour flights that provided the portal between the two cultures I grew to love. The most astounding rollercoasters had nothing on the feelings that were experienced during the takeoff roll. Meeting the pilots in the cockpit afterwards was like coming face to face with the very image of that which we hold most sacred.
Very soon after my first flight, I began responding to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with the definitive reply "a pilot!" The positive feedback I received only solidified my perception of myself as a future pilot.
The dream slowly continued to accumulate in ferocity and passion as the years went by. High School came and went, with the summer following my senior year leading me onto the road to Purdue University. I was one of the lucky applicants selected to be a student of the esteemed Purdue Aviation program. It was time for the fledgling to learn to soar.
Freshman semester began, and I was experiencing 5 hours of cherished flight hours per week on average. If there was a way to share the elation involved in slowly advancing the throttles (gas) on the runway after being cleared for takeoff, it would involve the descriptions: free spirit, understanding of beauty, wonder, pureness, connection with the world, and sense of self-discovery. The relationship between man and machine can be truly awe-inspiring at times.
Through times of difficulty and occasional self-doubt, I continued to grow in my ability to "become one" with the airplane. My instructor guided me along the path towards success. I was soon ready to take the check-ride--pilot speech for test--which would prove my worth of being considered amongst the lucky few.
The day of the check-ride came, and I could sense the approach of a longtime dream. The flight was an infusion of nervous tension with trust in my abilities. Although there were minor details that the check-ride instructor brought to my attention, I performed to the high testing standards.
Following the flight, I felt like a changed man as I stepped from the wing of the plane (I remember very clearly that the plane I was flying was N557PU--or "Purdue 7" as we called it). I was "pretty sure" that I had passed, but I couldn't celebrate internally until the instructor officially carved his signature into my very eagerly awaiting logbook. Watching the deliberate scribble slowly take shape after the line "Endorse here: _____" was like watching the formulation of years of hopes, dreams, and yearnings become tangible. I became pilot.
In the time since, I have attained my Commercial Certificate, and become Instrument Rated (I can fly in clouds, baby). It's astoundingly humbling to control an aircraft thousands of feet about all that has been familiar, with those in your accompaniment harboring complete trust towards you. Flying family and friends--and having all of the fun that planes are able to provide--is intoxicating.
To any of you remotely interested in learning the art of flight, I would suggest that you do not allow all of the roadblocks that naturally occur mentally when considering something of this magnitude. It is entirely realistic to achieve your Private Certificate in just a few months, even with a tight schedule. In my opinion, it's impossible to ever regret the freedom that comes from such a pure form of wonder.
Dare yourself to do something you've always wanted to achieve. Nothing feels better than following through on something you've always wanted to accomplish.
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Actually, this is one of a number of chicken hypnotism techniques used to calm a chicken prior to killing it--this causes the chicken to calm down, which both prevents the release of stress hormones that can cause the meat to have a bad texture or taste, and makes it easier to have a quick, clean kill without undue pain to the bird in question.
Here's a link, all you've ever wanted to know about calming, killing, and butchering a chicken: http://www.rogueturtle.com/articles/chicken.php
sdhardie, believe me when I say I looked into this before I released it into the wilds of the internet. If I thought I was putting out something that would cause a lot of pain and suffering, I never would have posted it.
Also, Hangfire, just because someone objects to what they perceive as cruelty to animals, it doesn't mean they're a vegetarian. I eat plenty of meat but I don't like the idea of causing another living being to suffer more then required to get it onto my plate. It's one of those stereotypes that holds true just often enough to keep it alive, and makes it difficult for those of us who hold a middle ground position to engage in polite discourse on the subject.
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Paul Ryan supports Donald Trump for president — but does Trump support the Republican House Speaker against his primary challenger?
It was assumed by many politicos that Trump was supporting Ryan in his primary fight against Wisconsin businessman Paul Nehlen, but the Republican presidential nominee put that assumption into question with a Monday tweet.
Thanks to @pnehlen for your kind words, very much appreciated. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2016
Trump was presumably thanking Nehlen for a Monday press release standing behind Trump and bashing Ryan over the Khizr Khan imbroglio. Ryan issued a press release Sunday distancing himself from Trump’s handling of the situation by criticizing the idea of a ban on immigrants based on religion and praising the sacrifice of Khan’s son, a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq in 2004.
In response, Nehlen issued his own statement Monday arguing Ryan had misrepresented Trump’s position on a ban on Muslims entering the United States. (Since coming out in favor of a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States in December, Trump seems to have modified his proposal to make it less based on on religion.)
“The problem with Paul Ryan is his constant knee-jerk reactions to anything controversial Donald Trump might say without completely understanding the issue,” Nehlen’s statement read, in part. “He’s LOOKING for a way to contradict and criticize Mr. Trump because he knows the liberal press will eat it up.”
“And every time he jumps in front of reporters and takes an uninformed shot at Mr. Trump, he’s helping to elect Hillary Clinton,” the release continued. “The best way to stop Paul Ryan from continuing to provide this aid-and-comfort to the Clinton camp is to defeat him in the August 9 GOP primary in Wisconsin’s 1st District. Dump Ryan. Vote Nehlen.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for clarification whether Trump supports Ryan in his primary challenge against Nehlen.
Nehlen is viewed as a long shot to upset the House speaker in the primary, but he has earned the support of several prominent immigration hawks, including Ann Coulter, who will campaign with Nehlen this Saturday.
Follow Jamie on Twitter
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After getting scolded by the Department of Energy for paying employees (with taxpayer dollars) to play cards and volunteer at local charities, the manufacturer of the Lithium-ion batteries for Chevy Volts finally got their assembly lines moving. . . Only to shut them down again because of “environmental concerns.” It’s kinda cute to watch liberals stumble through their own web of regulatory obstacles.
The LG Chem battery plant in Holland, Michigan was finally scheduled to manufacture a battery or two after years of endless delays. After receiving over $150 million in federal funds, and roughly $175 million in green-energy tax credits, the company decided that it should actually produce a product.
According to the original press reports, the company was supposed to hire over 400 workers, and start producing Lithium-ion batteries for the combustible Chevy Volt as early as 2012 – two years after they scrapped together some environmental fools willing to invest taxpayer dollars in their project. Serving as living proof that Liberals misunderstand the concept of business, the company then paid their workers. . . .well, to do nothing.
Earlier this year, the Department of Energy released an audit in which it reported that the company had only filled about half of its promised positions. Furthermore, the company had run into delays in actually conducting business. But, in an effort to avert giving any hard earned taxpayer dollars back to the Treasury, the company paid its workforce of 200 people to play cards, volunteer in their community, and generally slack off. Of course, this explains our current jobless recovery: Liberals clearly misunderstand the fundamental purpose of a job.
After the DOE audit, the company decided it should get around to doing what they received government funds, and crony capitalist tax credits, to do: Build highly toxic batteries for use in GM’s low quality inefficient hybrid, the Chevy Volt. But, c’mon. . . Let’s not rush into anything.
After being open for business (really this time) for barely a month, the company declared they would have to halt production because of a chemical that has yet to be approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. After reading about EPA agents storming a small community in Alaska with fully automatic weapons and Swat gear, one would have to think the company got off easy with a simple delay in manufacturing abilities.
The LG spokesman, Jeremy Hagemeyer, said “we are currently reviewing the registration status [for the chemical] and will work with the EPA to resolve the issue quickly. In the meanwhile, we are delaying production activities for approximately 6 weeks until we have confirmed the registration status or otherwise obtain approval from EPA.”
It is unlikely that employees will be paid for playing cards this time. According to Hagemeyer, the employees will be involved in continuous factory improvement projects, training, and in “maintaining readiness”. One can only assume this means employees will be prepping the factory for that fateful day that the government’s $300 million investment gets put to use. Apparently “shovel ready” doesn’t mean what most of us were lead to believe.
The unfolding of events for LG Chem epitomizes everything that has been wrong with the spontaneously combustible Chevy Volt experiment. The factory’s initial wasteful nature and disregard for the capital raised by the American taxpayer is indicative of the abuse that comes with government’s meddling in free markets. Would this factory have spent two years paying workers to play cards if the proprietors had fronted their own money? It is nearly a guarantee that private capital would never tolerate such inefficiencies. . . But, then again, that’s why private capital has been largely absent in the green energy sector – unless accompanied by government loans, tax credits, or guarantees.
The most recent delay in manufacturing is also irony-flavored icing on the cake. The environmentalists who hungrily gobbled up money from Big Government to fund their altruistic quest for efficient battery power, are now being stopped by environmentalist-driven Big Government regulations.
It is almost poetic justice. Except poetry shouldn’t cost taxpayers $300 million.
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Paul Morphy
The Morphy number is a measure of how closely a chess player is connected to Paul Morphy (1837–1884) by way of playing chess games.[1] People who played a chess game with Morphy have a Morphy number of 1. Players who did not play Morphy but played someone with a Morphy number of 1 have a Morphy number of 2. People who played someone with a Morphy number of 2 have a Morphy number of 3, et cetera.
The idea is similar to the Erdős number for mathematicians and the Bacon number for actors. For example, Viswanathan Anand, along with many current top players, has a Morphy number of 5: Anand played Efim Geller (Morphy number 4), who played Salo Flohr (Morphy number 3), who played Géza Maróczy (Morphy number 2), who played John Owen (Morphy number 1), who played Morphy.[1] Taylor Kingston states that the idea of the Morphy number may have originated in a June 2000 note by Tim Krabbé, who has Morphy number 4.[2][3]
As of April 2016, Leonard Barden, Pal Benko, Arthur Bisguier, Melvin Chernev, Dennis Horne, Borislav Ivkov, Erik Karklins, Franciscus Kuijpers, Aleksandar Matanović, Friðrik Ólafsson, Jonathan Penrose, Oliver Penrose, and Peter Swinnerton-Dyer were the only known living players with Morphy number 3.[4][5][6]
Many ordinary players have a Morphy number of 6 or more.[2]
Morphy number of famous players [ edit ]
These are players who are important in making links for Morphy numbers.
Morphy number 1 [ edit ]
Morphy is known to have played about 100 people, but all of the known links for players with Morphy number 2 go through the following five players.[1][4] Some Irish players could go through the Rev. Dr George Salmon, who played in one of Morphy's blindfold chess simultaneous exhibitions.[1]
Morphy number 2 [ edit ]
Everyone in this group played someone in the group above. Some of the most important members of this group follow.[1] Tartakower lost to Mortimer early in his chess career, which spanned beyond WW2, so allowed many younger players to gain a 3.
Morphy number 3 [ edit ]
Most of the masters in this group played several members of the previous group. This group includes some of the most important players for making connections to later generations. Botvinnik and Reshevsky played older masters such as Lasker and Janowski, had long careers, and played many younger players.[1] Najdorf was Tartakower's pupil and they played a number of published games together, and Najdorf played blitz right into his 80s, allowing many younger players to achieve 4. C.J.S. Purdy played Tartakower (2), enabling many Australian players to achieve 4. As of March 2015, fewer than 15 of them are still alive.
Morphy number 4 [ edit ]
As of 2013 many of these players are still alive; a few (such as Short) are still active.[1]
Morphy number 5 [ edit ]
As of 2013 many of the top grandmasters are in this group (along with a large number of lower-rated players).[1]
See also [ edit ]
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A startling surge of support for Barack Obama has catapulted the Illinois senator into a virtual tie with Hillary Rodham Clinton in California's Democratic presidential primary, a Field Poll released Saturday shows. Arizona Sen. John McCain lengthened his lead in the state Republican primary, grabbing a 32 to 24 percent edge among likely voters over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was at 13 percent and Texas Rep. Ron Paul at 10 percent. But the Democratic numbers are the shocker. Clinton, a longtime California favorite, saw her once-commanding lead slip to two percentage points, 36 to 34 percent, in the new survey. That's down from the New York senator's 12 percentage point lead in mid-January and a 25 percentage point margin over Obama in October. But with 18 percent of Democratic voters still undecided just days before Tuesday's primary, the election is still up for grabs, said Mark DiCamillo, the poll's director. "It's an unusually volatile election, with a very high number of undecided voters and so many moving parts," he said. "It could be a very, very close election." The head-to-head matchups between the Republican and Democratic candidates highlight both Clinton's loosening hold on California voters and McCain's growing strength in the state. Clinton now clings to a bare 45 to 43 percent lead over McCain in a projected California presidential vote, down dramatically from her 17 percentage point margin just two weeks ago. Obama now holds a stronger 47 to 40 percent margin over the Arizona senator, but that's only half the 14 percentage point advantage he had in mid-January. Both Democrats still run well ahead of Romney, collecting more than 50 percent of the vote in those matchups. Obama's California campaign team said the latest polls reflect a hard-charging effort to track down potential voters in every precinct - undeterred by polls that showed the Illinois senator behind by double digits here for most of the race. "If we hadn't laid the groundwork for the last year, we couldn't be delivering now," Debbie Mesloh, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, said Saturday. Averell "Ace" Smith, Clinton's California campaign manager, said the last-minute dead heat is to be expected in the nation's most populous state, which is "critical" to Clinton's effort to win the nomination. "We always knew it would tighten," he said. "But we're incredibly confident in the organization we have to get out the vote." The new poll shows why Obama's campaign has been targeting decline-to-state voters, who can cast ballots in the Democratic primary. While Clinton has a 37 to 31 percent lead over Obama among Democrats, Obama leads by an overwhelming 54 to 32 percent among nonpartisans, who will make up an estimated 13 percent of the primary voters. The poll also highlights the dramatic split the Clinton-Obama battle has caused in the state's Democratic Party. Rich versus poor, young versus old, liberal versus conservative, men versus women: Each of those groups has lined up on different sides of the primary divide. While people aged 18 to 29 back Obama by a margin of 11 percentage points, voters 65 and older support Clinton, 40 to 18 percent. Voters with household incomes of $40,000 or less back Clinton by an advantage of 11 percentage points, while those making $80,000 or more are strong Obama supporters. Obama attracts voters who call themselves liberal, who have gone to graduate school and who are from the Bay Area, which backs him 41 to 31 percent. Clinton's strength is among conservatives and moderates, those with a high school education and residents of sprawling Los Angeles County, where she holds a 42 to 34 percent lead. There's also a broad ethnic and gender gap between the campaigns. While white voters are split evenly between Clinton and Obama, the Illinois senator, whose late father was a black African, has a 55 to 19 percent lead among black voters, while Latinos back Clinton 52 to 19 percent. Among men, Obama holds a 13 percentage point lead, the same advantage Clinton holds among women. But for Clinton, even her good numbers show some ominous changes. In mid-January, the Field Poll showed her with a 19 percentage point lead among women and a huge 59 to 19 percent advantage with Latino voters. In two weeks, much of that backing has melted away. While part of the reason for the huge number of undecided voters is last week's departure of John Edwards from the race, most of it seems to be honest angst among Democrats pressed to make a choice between two favored candidates, DiCamillo said. "This is the Democratic rank and file having a hard time making a choice, because they like them both," he said. On the Republican side, McCain continues to make an astounding comeback in a state where he was virtually given up for dead just months ago. He's moved from 12 percent in December to 22 percent in mid-January to 32 percent and the lead in the most recent poll. "McCain's had a very good month," DiCamillo said. "He also benefits from Huckabee, who peels off some votes from Romney." McCain's lead comes courtesy of a strong showing among moderate and moderately conservative Republicans, where he holds a 39 to 16 percent advantage over Romney. Steve Schmidt, a senior strategist for McCain, said the new poll numbers reflect a national surge for the Arizona senator. "From California to Massachusetts, Sen. McCain is on the move and getting ready for a big night on Tuesday," said Schmidt. But Romney spokeswoman Sarah Pompeii said the latest figures will not stop them from pushing hard in California. So much of the election still depends on who turns out to vote on Tuesday, which DiCamillo admitted is the hardest thing to project. "There are cautionary notes," he said. "With those big differences among (Democratic) subgroups, an unexpectedly large turnout by any one of them can shift the final result. We don't know if Obama's surge will continue or if something will arrest it in the days before the election." Both Democratic campaigns were working hard in the Bay Area on Saturday. Chelsea Clinton, the 27-year-old daughter of Sen. Clinton, spoke Saturday to hundreds of students at Oakland's Mills College, while Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was in San Francisco to boost Obama's campaign. Kerry was pleased Obama was closing the gap in California, but warned that "we've got to try even harder over the next few days because there are all of these absentee ballots out there - people who voted a few weeks ago when they thought the race was a foregone conclusion (for Clinton). It's proven not to be." The poll was based on a telephone survey of 511 likely voters in the Democratic primary and 481 likely voters in the Republican primary and was conducted between Jan. 25 and Feb. 1. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points among Democrats, plus or minus 4.6 percentage points among Republicans and plus or minus 4.2 percentage points among general election voters.
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Pinocchio is Incompatible with Free-will
Pinocchio’s Paradox (original)
The story of Pinocchio is an exercise of assuming the following mechanics.
Pinocchio’s nose grows if and only if he tells lies
You’ve heard of the liar paradox, right? Or, as I like the call it, the Pinocchio paradox, which is a fun little thought-experiment: what happens when Pinocchio says “My nose will grow now”?
You guessed it, there’s no way to classify that sentence as true or false. If he is telling a lie, his nose will not grow. But, his nose grows if and only if he tells lies. “A contradiction!” shouts Kurt Gödel.
Pinocchio’s Paradox (extended)
I’m not the first to extrapolate the paradox to the future-tense. The modified Pinocchio paradox rephrases the statement and introduces the concept of time.
At time t=0, Pinocchio makes this strange claim.
NoseGrows and TellsLie are now a time-varying function (otherwise known as a fluents). Formally, Pinocchio has made the following claim at t=0.
Equivalently, Pinocchio is admitting that he will tell a lie in the future.
Here’s some interesting observations to conclude:
If his nose grows in the future, he told the truth at t=0.
If his nose does not grow in the future, he told a lie at t=0.
Free-will
If a person has free-will, they have the choice to either tell the truth or tell a lie at any given time in the future. A little more formally, free will means no simulation of a person can predict their behavior.
How does this relate to Pinocchio? First, let’s consider the two possible cases:
Case 1: For t>0, Pinocchio chooses to never lie again. Therefore his statement at t=0, “I will lie in the future” is false! Consequently, his nose will grow at t=0.
Case 2: For t>0, Pinocchio chooses to lie. His statement at t=0, “I will lie in the future” was true! Therefore his nose will remain normal and not grow at t=0.
Here’s the exciting part: Regardless of whether Pinocchio’s nose grows or doesn’t, there is no such thing as free will!
What? Yes, you heard right!
Assume free-will exists. Therefore, the future must be unpredictable. But, knowing the state of Pinocchio’s nose at t=0 reveals with certainty whether he will lie in the future. A contradiction! Therefore, free-will does not exist.
Even stranger argument:
Assume free-will exists. If Pinocchio chooses never to lie, then his past-self’s nose at t=0 will grow. Thus his current nose at t>0 will also grow, even if he was not lying. A contradiction! Therefore, free-will does not exist.
Poor Pinocchio.
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Researchers at Seoul National University have developed prosthetic skin that could someday allow patients to regain their sense of touch. The skin is made of clear graphene with temperature, pressure, humidity, strain, and nerve stimulation sensors. The study was published in the Nature Communications journal.
During the experiments, researchers laminated the skin on a prosthetic hand. According to Live Science, the results showed that the prosthetic skin can survive complicated hand operations such as holding cold or hot drinks, shaking hands, grasping balls, typing on a keyboard, and touching other people. The scientists also added heating devices on the prosthetic skin that can change its temperature to mimic the regular body temperature of a person.
There have been substantial developments regarding bionic arms and legs the past years. Scientists have also been looking for ways on how to connect the limbs to nervous systems that will help patients have their sense of touch back.
Dae-Hyeong Kim, co-author of the study, said that the prosthetic skin can stretch more on some parts of the body than on others.
“Some parts of the hand stretch only several percent, while other parts more than 20 percent.”
Researchers took a look at the properties of the skin and matched the properties of the sensors depending on which body part it should cover. They made the prosthetic skin more sensitive for the hand where the skin does not stretch as much as other areas.
NY Daily News reports that the researchers say that the sensors are meant to help patients’ daily interactions, such as the pressure of shaking hands too hard or telling if someone has a fever.
“As a result, sensing and actuation capabilities are enabled over a wide range of sensory inputs, in the presence of skin deformations, thus providing enhanced function and high performance in the emerging field of smart prosthetics.”
The scientists are also looking into the possibility of using the prosthetic skin with electrodes in order to relay the data from sensors to the brain. However, there are still some safety issues that need to be resolved when using the electrodes.
[Image via Live Science]
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by Keelan Balderson, Contributor
In an extremely deceptive piece in the Independent and several of the UK papers today, The British Lung Foundation have been allowed to peddle a long-debunked myth that smoking cannabis poses a lung cancer risk, going as far as claiming it poses a higher risk than smoking the Government’s cash cow tobacco. This is in stark contrast to easily obtainable scientific evidence that cannabis actually inhibits many cancers, including lung tumors.
Without citing any evidence whatsoever, Dame Helena Shovelton, BLF chief executive is quoted as saying:
Young people in particular are smoking cannabis unaware that each cannabis cigarette they smoke increases their chances of developing lung cancer by as much as an entire packet of 20 tobacco cigarettes.
This is an increase on their previous baseless claim that 3 joints are equal to 20 cigarettes.
Nonetheless, even on the face of it these statements are ridiculous. Unless they’ve been treated with obscene amounts of pesticides, Marijuana buds that are hand rolled by weed smokers are a far-cry from the mass-produced chemical, poison, preservative filled and radioactive packs of cigarettes bought from the shops.
Cannabis simply does not contain the arm-long list of dangerous cancer causing additives that cigarettes do. Dr. Melamede from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA, writes that although cannabis smoke and tobacco smoke are chemically very similar, evidence suggests that their effects are very different and that cannabis smoke is less carcinogenic than tobacco smoke [1].
The obvious question to ask is if the BLF’s claims are true where are all the deaths? A widely cited report by the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit states that there are at least 3 million cannabis smokers in the UK [2], and the general consensus is that there are about 9 million tobacco smokers [3].
National mortality statistics note that around 100,000 people die each year from illnesses directly linked to smoking cigarettes [4]. 42,800 are from smoking-related cancers, 30,600 from cardiovascular disease and 29,100 die slowly from emphysema and other chronic lung diseases [5].
So what amount of deaths are linked to smoking cannabis? None!
There are zero reported deaths linked to smoking cannabis each year. While it’s possible there are some here and there, they don’t make any recognized list and are clearly not on the scale of tobacco-related deaths. If there were lots of deaths linked to cannabis, don’t you think the likes of the Independent would have reported such facts in their article? Instead they focus on fear-mongering statements that have no basis in reality.
At one time the Daily Mail ran with the headline Cannabis ‘kills 30,000 a year’, but rather than sourcing the deaths directly, it was simply a math sum of how many pot smokers should be dying each year if cannabis is as bad or worse than tobacco, not that 30,000 were actually proven to be dying each year.
Origins of the Myth
Upon analyzing the BLF’s statement, it turns out that they’re not citing any new scientific studies or any independent research that they’ve conducted themselves. In fact the only new thing the organization did was conduct an opinion poll. As the Independent notes at the beginning of the article:
The UK’s most popular illicit recreational drug is used by more than a third of people under 24, but 88 per cent believe it is less dangerous than tobacco. One in three said it did not harm health …The British Lung Foundation, which commissioned the survey, said the findings were ‘alarming’.
Well just because they found it alarming, doesn’t mean that it is. Despite what lobbyists and Government bureaucrats might claim, the current scientific evidence shows cannabis to be relatively harmless if used recreationally by adults without underlying mental health issues, and a very positive form of pain relief and medicine for many illnesses. Using basic death/hospital statistics, alcohol and tobacco are far more dangerous that pot.
David Nutt, former head drugs adviser, was sacked for making this obvious statement. Professor John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientist backed Nutt, saying the evidence to support the claim was “absolutely clear cut” [6]. Despite these two leading experts stating the self-evident facts, politicians unsurprisingly have taken the hypocritical political route, rather than the scientific one.
So where does the myth come from?
In 2002 the British Lung Foundation released a report entitled A Smoking Gun, that compares the health risks of smoking tobacco to cannabis. Rather than new scientific data, the authors simply interpreted studies already conducted over the years.
The original claim was that 3 cannabis joints equates to 20 cigarettes. Somehow this has now become 1 joint equates to 20 cigarettes, but, regardless, the claim is a crude deception that the BLF themselves are misquoting from their own report.
The data for the erroneous claim is taken from two papers published in 1987 [7], but these papers themselves did not make the claim either. Rather the BLF decided to play scientist and present their own more severe conclusion to the press. As this was reported and exaggerated by the media, and other papers cited the BLF, the myth has spread without anyone bothering to trace back the source material.
The two 1987 studies on which the claim is based examine only a limited range of respiratory illness symptoms, and did not estimate the risks of lung cancer and emphysema.
To reiterate the original study cited by the BLF to back up their claims that cannabis puts you at a higher risk of developing lung cancer, didn’t actually make a conclusion on the link between cannabis and lung cancer!
In its report the BLF use political semantics to brush this glaring flaw under the rug, claiming that there are“conflicting findings” on the link between lung cancer and cannabis, and more research should be undertaken“to establish what link” there is. Given that the data used doesn’t actually cover the main risks, and the link between these major risks is acknowledged to be uncertain by the BLF, it is a miscarriage of science to allow the claim about cannabis and lung cancer to hit the mainstream media. Yet today, almost 10 years later the Independent and BLF spokespeople are still making it.
What Science Says
Believe it or not the studies that have in fact looked at links between cannabis and lung cancer have concluded that there is no link!
Hashibe et al. carried out an epidemiological analysis of marijuana smoking and cancer. A connection was not observed [8]. These conclusions are reinforced by Tashkin et al. who were also unable to demonstrate a cannabis smoke and lung cancer link [9].
Tashkin, a UCLA researcher whose work is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, did a case-control study comparing 1,200 patients with lung, head and neck cancers to a matched group with no cancer. Even the heaviest marijuana smokers had no increased risk of cancer, and strangely actually had less of a risk of cancer than non-smokers.
This is backed up by an earlier 1997 study (obviously ignored by the BLF) by researchers at the Kaiser-Permanente HMO [10]. They followed 65,000 patients for nearly a decade, comparing cancer rates among non-smokers, tobacco smokers, and marijuana smokers. Tobacco smokers had massively higher rates of lung cancer and other cancers. Marijuana smokers who didn’t also use tobacco had no increase in cancer risk, and in fact their rates of lung and most other cancers were slightly lower than non-smokers.
This suggests that far from being more prone than cigarettes to cause lung cancer, cannabis may in fact lower the risk of lung cancer.
Why aren’t these peer-reviewed scientific studies with actual source data cited by the mainstream media?
THC and Cancer
Not only does smoking cannabis possibly protect you from cancer, but Marijuana’s active compound THC and other chemicals within the plant, administered in a variety of other ways has been found to actually kill numerous cancer types directly.
Researchers at Harvard University tested the compound with both lab analysis and studies where mice were injected. They found THC cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread [11].
A 2007 study showed THC’s ability to inhibit aggressive breast cancer cells [12].
In 2009 it was revealed that Cannabis cannabinoids have been found to stop prostate cancer cells from growing in the laboratory [13].
Research led by Dr Wai Man Liu, at Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, showed that THC has the potential to be used effectively to destroy leukemia cells [14].
Similar results have been found with Giloma (brain/spine tumors) [15], and skin cancers using topical application of THC oil [16].
Conclusion
It’s difficult to determine why the UK mainstream media and the British Lung Foundation are so poor at presenting facts regarding cannabis and cancer. An evening on Google with basic discernment about sources will easily turn up a wealth of studies that show the health benefits of Cannabis and the complete lack of a link between smoking the plant and getting lung cancer. Considering the BLF claim to be “working for positive change for the future diagnosis and treatment of lung disease,” you’d think they’d be all over findings that THC cuts lung cancer growth in half.
It could be just a case of mediocrity through bureaucracy. Dame Helena Shovelton who is quoted by the Independent is not a scientist or an expert, she’s a lifelong bureaucrat. Before joining the BLF she was Chair of the UK National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux and former Chair of the UK National Lottery Commission. What they have to do with understanding cannabis is anyone’s guess.
This article first appeared at Wide Shut.
If you found this information valuable, please help promote it on Reddit by clicking the “like arrow” HERE
Keelan Balderson is an independent journalist, documentary filmmaker and Internet radio host from the UK. You can listen to his WideShut Webcast every Monday at 8pm GMT onResistance Radio. Please support his work by visiting his website: WideShut.co.uk. You can stay up to date with WideShut using our RSS Feed, Twitter, Facebook & YouTube
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A popular ingredient in many cuisines, tomatoes have made quite an impact on the world ever since they spread beyond their homelands of Mexico and Central America. In terms of symbolism, the tomato shares qualities with many similar foodstuffs, but possesses a few features that are all its own.
The basic meaning of the tomato is not difficult to understand; with its red color, juicy texture and many seeds, the tomato is clearly a sensual plant and can be viewed as an aphrodisiac. When it arrived in Europe in the 16th century, the Christian church deemed it lewd and disapproved of tomato consumption. While not entirely for this reason, it was several centuries before Europeans began to eat tomatoes in any quantity. Since it was later discovered that tomatoes are in the same botanical family as deadly nightshade- a highly dangerous poison- perhaps they were right to be cautious?
Among the Bambara people of present-day Mali, the story was different. Introduced to West Africa by subsequent traders and slavers, tomatoes have had an extensive impact on the region. The Bambara view tomatoes as symbols of blood, life and fertility. On a culinary level, tomatoes have become one of the “holy trinity” of West African cooking, along with onions and chili peppers.
Linguistically, the tomato possesses some interesting features. During their early days in Europe, tomatoes were known as “love apples”, and this moniker developed from a few different influences. Since early specimens of the plant were yellow (presumably the red varieties were not developed until later), there were known in Italian as “pomo d’or” or apple of gold. Another name for them was “pomo d’Moro” or apple of the Moors (this referred to the Spanish explorers who brought tomatoes back from the New World, as Spain had been occupied by the Muslim Moors until just a few generations prior). From such roots, the French “pomme d’amour” or love apple developed.
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The talk from Wolf Blitzer on CNN is all “Florida, Florida,” but for Hillary Clinton the first win of the night Tuesday was the much-expected Vermont and its three electoral votes. The home state of the Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, was called right after 7 PM ET on CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC as polls closed in the Green Mountain State.
With Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia going in Donald Trump’s column, the GOP candidate holds an early Electoral College lead of 19-3. The night has already seen some “computer glitches” in North Carolina, where polls in Durham County will now stay open an extra 90 minutes, state officials have decided. In the closely contested state, that county is seen as heavily Democratic with its large African-American communities.
Along with Vermont, polls closed at 7 ET in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, New Hampshire and pivotal Florida. West Virginia and Ohio are expected to close at 7:30 PM ET, as is the rest of North Carolina. A win in Florida by Clinton would make it very hard for Trump to find a route to the White House unless he took all the other battleground states in play and more.
Of course, as small percentages trickle in among those states, cable news networks are starting to froth at the calling-it mouth. At least John King had the reserve to say “we’ve got a long way to go in Florida” when looking at the first batch of numbers from the Sunshine State. Then again, “senior advisors” from both the Clinton and Trump camp are being cited left, right and center too — is the night we’re facing.
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I hate using modal dialog when the new content could be easily nested in the same page. I just don’t like the user experience of a popup. Why limit yourself to a small box when you can show it in the full-blown layout?
However, sometimes clients insist on a modal in their design and we have to deal with it. In this blog post I will show you how to make the modal dialog a little bit better – give it its own URL.
Lack of own URL is the pain point of many modal dialog implementations. Imagine that you have a list of articles and when a user clicks “edit” the form is rendered in the modal dialog, covering the list. One day the form stops working and the user submits a bug report with the URL of the page. What is the URL in the bug report? Of course, it’s the URL of the list, because showing the modal does not change the current URL. Happy debugging!
In fact, the situation doesn’t have to be related to bugs at all. It’s also true for any other case when user would like to share a link to a specific page. Take the next example: reloading the page. User reloads the page and the modal dialog is gone.
When I learned that routable modal dialog can be easily implemented in Ember.js I was very happy, because the above issues are important for me. I’ve never implemented similar solution while working with modal dialogs in AngularJS, but in fact I never really searched for it. If you have an example please share it in the comments!
The workhorse of this example is going to be Ember Modal Dialog. This is a wonderful addon which in fact does the job for us. In this example I’m going to use Ember CLI 1.13.8, Ember 2.1.0 and Ember Modal Dialog 0.8.1.
Let’s start with creating the new application:
1 ember new modal-dialog-demo
and change version of Ember to 2.1.0. We can also remove Ember Data, because we will mock data with static objects and ember-data-fixture-adapter is no longer maintained.
As the next step, install ember-lodash . Then add code which renders a simple list of posts, with nested show route:
app/router.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 import Ember from 'ember' ; import config from './config/environment' ; var Router = Ember . Router . extend ({ location : config . locationType }); Router . map ( function () { this . route ( 'posts' , { path : '/' }, function () { this . route ( 'show' , { path : '/posts/:post_id' }); }); }); export default Router ;
app/routes/posts.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 import Ember from 'ember' ; export default Ember . Route . extend ({ postRepository : Ember . inject . service (), model : function () { return this . get ( 'postRepository' ). findAll (); } });
app/routes/posts/show.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 import Ember from 'ember' ; export default Ember . Route . extend ({ postRepository : Ember . inject . service (), model : function ( params ) { return this . get ( 'postRepository' ). findById ( params . post_id ); } });
app/templates/posts.hbs 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 <ul> {{#each model as |post|}} <li> {{post.title}} {{#link-to 'posts.show' post}} show {{/link-to}} </li> {{/each}} </ul> {{outlet}}
app/templates/posts/show.hbs 1 {{model.title}}
We also have to implement this PostRepository service. Here it is:
app/services/post-repository.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 import Ember from 'ember' ; import _ from 'lodash/lodash' ; export default Ember . Service . extend ({ FIXTURES : [ { id : 1 , title : "Some random title" }, { id : 2 , title : "Another silly blog post" }, { id : 3 , title : "Why should I care?" }, { id : 4 , title : "And yet another one to fill the space" } ], findAll : function () { return this . get ( 'FIXTURES' ); }, findById : function ( id ) { return _ . findWhere ( this . get ( 'FIXTURES' ), { id : parseInt ( id ) }); } });
Now it’s time to replace the nested post view with a modal dialog.
Start by installing ember-modal-dialog and ember-cli-sass as described in the README:
app/services/post-repository.js 1 2 ember install ember - modal - dialog ember install ember - cli - sass
and replace empty app/styles/app.css with following app/styles/app.scss :
1 2 @import "ember-modal-dialog/ember-modal-structure" ; @import "ember-modal-dialog/ember-modal-appearance" ;
Next, we have to modify app/templates/posts/show.hbs to wrap its content with modal-dialog :
1 2 3 {{#modal-dialog close="goBackToList"}} {{model.title}} {{/modal-dialog}}
And as a final step let’s define goBackToList action which handles clicks outside of the modal dialog:
app/routes/posts/show.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 import Ember from 'ember' ; export default Ember . Route . extend ({ // [...] actions : { goBackToList : function () { this . transitionTo ( 'posts' ); } } });
And that’s all! Wasn’t it easy? We have our routable modal dialog with just a have lines of code. You can check out this example on Github. Also, big shout-out to Ember Modal Dialog maintainers!
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Frazier Park, by where Frazier Mountain is. (Photo by Damian Gadal via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
During the autumn season of last year, we were gripped by a fear of earthquakes after a cluster of temblors hit the Salton Sea. Was the big one on the verge? Seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones did her best to quell our anxiety.
Then, the Presidential election happened, and a lot of other (man-made) tragedies cropped up. Also, we had the rain to contend with. With all this swirling around, we put our quake-obsession on the backburner.
Those fears may be creeping back, however, on the heels of a new study published earlier this week by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The study focused on Frazier Mountain in the Grapevine area, about 50 miles south of Bakersfield. The area, which sits by the San Andreas Fault, had never been studied in great detail before, reports the L.A. Times. What the researchers found was sobering. For one thing, a 7.9 magnitude quake had hit the area in 1857. It ruptured 185 miles of the San Andreas Fault. It was so powerful that it caused soil to liquify; all the way out in Stockton, nearly 300 miles away, trees sank into the ground.
How does this apply to us? Researchers said that a major quake happens in the area once every 100 years on average; it's been 160 years since the 1857 quake. Also, the more the quake is delayed, the more energy is wound up from years and years of friction; meaning we may see an especially big quake when it does happen.
So now we're tossed back into the "We're overdue" story. But there are, indeed, some news to quell your concerns. For one thing, researchers found that the quakes don't happen with strict regularity out there. While the average interval is about 100 years between quakes, they've also found that, in history, there have been major quakes that happened within 186 years of each other, while others had happened 22 apart, according to Tremblor. Which is to say that we may have decades before it actually hits (or, like, it can happen once you've finished reading this write-up). The USGS forecasts a 16% chance that another major quake will happen in the area within 30 years.
Another tidbit to mitigate your anxiety: the 7.9 quake in 1857 was abnormally big—with such a big reservoir of energy released, this may mean a (relatively) smaller quake when the next one strikes.
Certainly, the Grapevine is not as highly populated as other parts in the lower half of California. But there are people out there, and the area is a vital artery. As noted by the Times, a major quake could damage nearby aqueducts, bring down transmission lines, and devastate a big stretch of Interstate 5.
And in case the Big One really does hit at the end of this article, check out this video of Dr. Jones explaining the proper protocol in surviving an earthquake:
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IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Photo: Flickr, CC
Image: Green500
The geeks reading this will know about Top500.org , a reference website that ranks the world's fastest supercomputers by raw speed. It's all about teraFLOPS (10^12 operations per seconds), and until a few years ago, that's pretty much all that most people cared about. But these days, energy efficiency is becoming the dominant metric. Operations per watt is now key, and that's what the Green500 list uses to rank supercomputers. Read on for more details on how it works.
The June 2009 version of the list can be found here. The first thing to notice is that IBM is kicking ass when it comes to making its supercomputers energy-efficient. 18 out of the top 20 are supercomputers made by Big Blue (though it also makes more supercomputers than anyone else overall, so that helps). Another interesting fact: The #1 supercomputer when it comes to raw speed is #4 when it comes to energy efficiency.
The supercomputer that wrings out the most operations out of each watt of energy is located at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling of the University of Warsaw, and it achieves an impressive 536.24 million floating point operations per second (FLOPS) for each watt of electricity that it consumes. Most of the other computers in the Green top 20 are IBM Blue Gene/P models, and their energy efficiency is 371 million FLOPS for each watt of electricity.
This might not mean much to you, but the important thing is the trend: "Average efficiency increased by 10% (98 MFlops/Watt --> 108 MFlops/Watt), which is of significant note given that the aggregate power of the list increased by 15% (200 MW --> 230 MW) over the previous release. In short, while the supercomputers on the Green500 are collectively consuming more power, they are using the power more efficiently than before."
"Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance. To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient," said David Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. Exactly.
Via Green500, CNET, iTWire
More Green Computing
Saving Energy in Data Centers with Smart Sensors and Algorithms
Yahoo! Says Yes to Greener Data Center, Yes to Renewable Energy, No to Carbon Offsets
IBM Building Data Center That Will Use 50% Less Energy
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Iskander missiles have a range of up to 400km (248 miles) Russia is to deploy new missiles in a Baltic enclave near Nato member Poland, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says. Short-range Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad region would "neutralise" the planned US anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, he said. The US says its shield is a defence against missiles from "rogue" nations, but Moscow sees it as a direct threat. Mr Medvedev also said he wanted to extend Russia's presidential term to six years from the current four. He did not explain if he wanted to extend his own term, or change the rules for his successor. There has long been speculation that Mr Medvedev is a stop-gap so that Prime Minister Putin - who served the maximum two consecutive terms - can return to the top job, correspondents say. 'Conceited' US policy In his first state-of-the nation address, Mr Medvedev said Moscow would deploy the Iskander missile system in the Kaliningrad region - between Nato members Lithuania and Poland - to "neutralise - if necessary - the [US] anti-missile system". "Naturally, we also consider using for the same purpose the resources of Russia's navy," he said. Mr Medvedev also said Russia would jam the US anti-missile system electronically. Mr Medvedev's announcement is extremely provocative, but the Kremlin's clear message is that America is to blame, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Moscow says. Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus later said that Russia's decision to deploy missiles was "beyond comprehension". In his speech to lawmakers, the Russian leader also said the August war in Georgia had resulted from a "conceited" US foreign policy. He said "the conflict in the Caucasus was used as a pretext for sending Nato warships to the Black Sea and also for the foisting on Europe of America's anti-missile systems". Mr Medvedev, who succeeded Vladimir Putin in May, vowed that Russia "won't retreat in the Caucasus". Mr Medvedev also blamed Washington for the global financial crisis, but said Russia would "overcome" the challenge.
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People outside academia often struggle to comprehend tenure. We live in a society where job security is in decades-long decline. Contingent and precarious employment is increasingly the norm. Why should professors who receive tenure get a special kind of lifetime job security?
If you look only at the remarks of people like Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker, who has been dismantling tenure as it has existed for generations within his state’s world-class university system, you would be led to believe tenure merely protects the useless and the lazy. But tenure, in fact, does something very important: it frees up researchers and adult educators to try out new, unprofitable and challenging ideas.
Tenure warms the universities that are the incubators of American democracy.
Of course, tenure is neither a prerequisite nor a guarantee of bold and good research and teaching. Some of my own most daring teaching and research has been done while I’ve worked in universities outside of the safety of tenure. But having lived through the decline of tenure, I can see clearly that universities in which the majority of the faculty feel unsafe in terms of job security become places where no one feels safe to do anything that might risk upsetting someone.
And that’s a recipe for generally useless research as well as impoverished teaching.
When researchers get the message that they better not produce data that might offend the powerful, they end up telling us not what is true, but what we want to hear. Policy separates from reality, and we end up with waste and poor outcomes in education, healthcare, economics, and the justice system. Good policy cannot be built on comfortable fantasies.
When teachers get the message they can’t push or challenge students, we end up with fellow citizens, neighbors, and co-workers who are inflexible, threatened by difference, and lacking in critical-thinking skills. Parents may think they want comfortable intellectual spaces for their dear college-age children, but if they really want their children to grow into strong, capable thinkers, they want professors who feel safe to host unsettling conversations, to provide unexpected lessons, and to go where students need, rather than want, to go in order to develop.
There are plenty of important cases where tenure has protected individuals. But having now spent years studying (and defending) individual academics who have been attacked for doing work that is politically challenging, I am convinced that the real value of tenure is at a global level. When the tenure system is functioning well, it creates intellectually healthy environments that allow professors to challenge automotive and pharmaceutical industry claims, to hold our government and our military accountable, and to be at the vanguard for positive social change.
Yet, today, a triumvirate of forces is pushing against bold research and teaching, and often purposely challenging tenure in the process.
Fed up with the left-leaning nature of universities, political right wingers, including the Koch brothers, have made reshaping academia a priority. In Wisconsin, Walker has made it easier for programs and departments to lose funding at the whim of those in political power. Likewise, the Republican-controlled Board of Governors at the University of North Carolina recently closed the law school’s highly-regarded Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.
Meanwhile, on the left, identity-politics activists are using devices like ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’ to shut down speech they believe to be offensive and dangerous. In my campus visits around the US – aimed at emboldening the students, faculty, and administrators to push for academic freedom – I’ve been told time and time again about staff being reported by left-leaning students for teaching ‘uncomfortable’ ideas that have been taught for generations.
For example, one faculty member at a prestigious liberal arts college told me about a colleague who was reported for teaching the ancient Greek tale Leda and the Swan. The alleged discriminatory offense? Not first warning students that the story includes a symbolic rape. Others at public universities described being reported for stumbling over students’ preferred pronouns. Some historic women’s colleges have given up trying to produce The Vagina Monologues because of complaints that the 1996 play doesn’t reflect the breadth of transgender experiences. (It doesn’t; it wasn’t written for that purpose any more than The Federalist Papers were.)
The third part of the triumvirate? The corporatization of universities. I experienced this personally when Northwestern University’s medical school dean censored an article I had edited and published because he was afraid it might violate a ‘branding agreement’ with the corporation who oversaw the running of the university hospital. (The article recounted an academic anthropologist’s story of consensual oral sex with a nurse after he was paralyzed in 1978.) Our dean even set up a new ‘editorial committee’ comprised of overseers from his office and the PR department to ensure we didn’t publish anything else off-brand.
Corporatization, social media, political warring – if ever we needed tenure to resist them, it is now. Yet tenured positions are increasingly being replaced with short-term contract jobs. The people in these insecure jobs are not slackers or dummies; they are the people who used to get tenure.
When my husband, an academic internist at Michigan State University, was asked last year to become interim dean of his medical school, his university’s administration hit a snag; he wasn’t on a tenure line. The rules (reasonably) said deans have to be tenured. He took the opportunity to point out to his bosses that the vast majority of his faculty are working without any hope of tenure. Most are physicians, so most would survive economically if fired, but that isn’t true of most academics, the vast majority of whom cannot easily obtain another job in their professional fields.
My husband’s faculty voted to make an exception in his case. He is, we think, the only untenured dean in his university (and perhaps America). Does his lack of job security weigh on his mind? When one of your faculty is the lead whistleblower in the Flint water crisis, and you work at a university funded by the administration of a governor deeply implicated in the same water crisis, you probably have to think about it. (My husband’s wife definitely thinks about it, especially since she quit her Northwestern job over censorship.)
But why would university administrations want tenured faculty? A workforce without job security is obedient and cheaper. If tenure is to be saved in American universities, academics can’t do it themselves. It will likely happen only if non-academics come to understand the tremendous cost to our society of turning our universities into places of fear, of turning their children’s professors into a herd of terrified sheep.
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.
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Dem turnout stretches ballot supply in NH
New Hampshire voters were shattering turnout records Tuesday especially in the Democratic presidential primary, sending elections officials scrambling to find enough ballots to meet the demand.
"We're going to have historic turnout, there's no doubt about that," Pia Carusone, communications director for the New Hampshire Democratic Party, told RAW STORY .
Carusone said she was unaware of details regarding reports that polling locations were running out of Democratic ballots.
ABC News' Political Radar blog reported that officials were concerned about running out of ballots in at least four cities and towns.
Party officials were "just learning as you are about the ballots," Carusone said by phone Tuesday afternoon. "I'm just hearing about it as you are."
Phones at the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office were busy Tuesday afternoon.
CNN reported that extra ballots were being sent to several polling locations.
"The towns that are calling now are experiencing heavy turnout, and see their piles of ballots starting to drop at a rate faster than they're comfortable with," Deputy Secretary of State Dave Scanlan told MSNBC. "They're also stating to us that it's the Democratic ballots that have them more concerned than the Republican ballots."
New Hampshire's secretary of state predicted a half-million voters would turn out Tuesday, breaking previous turnout records. It was unclear whether even that prediction would be too modest.
"We're certainly encouraged," Scanlan told MSNBC's First Read, "and if it goes beyond what the secretary predicted, that's great."
This video is from MSNBC's MSNBC News Live, broadcast January 8, 2008.
This video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast January 8, 2008.
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Enhancements for game development: To improve overall responsiveness, we’ve added a new concurrent garbage collector and optimized the platform’s overall event handling. We’ve also given developers native access to more parts of the system by exposing a broad set of native APIs. From native code, applications can now access input and sensor events, EGL/OpenGL ES, OpenSL ES, and assets, as well a new framework for managing lifecycle and windows. For precise motion processing, developers can use several new sensor types, including gyroscope.
Rich multimedia: To provide a great multimedia environment for games and other applications, we’ve added support for the new video formats VP8 and WebM, as well as support for AAC and AMR-wideband encoding. The platform also provides new audio effects such as reverb, equalization, headphone virtualization, and bass boost.
New forms of communication: The platform now includes support for front-facing camera, SIP/VOIP, and Near Field Communications (NFC), to let developers include new capabilities in their applications.
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Noise is a series of random numbers, typically arranged in a line or a grid.
In old TV sets, if you tuned to a channel that didn’t have a station, you’d see random black and white dots on the screen. That’s noise (from outer space!). On radios, if you tune to a channel that doesn’t have a station, you hear noise (I’m not sure if this comes from space or elsewhere).
In signal processing, noise is typically the unwanted aspect. In a noisy room it’s harder to hear someone than in a quiet room. Audio noise is random numbers arranged in a line (1D). In a noisy image it’s harder to see a pattern than in a clean image. Image noise is random numbers arranged in a grid (2D). You can also have noise in 3D, 4D, etc.
Although in most applications you’re trying to subtract the noise, a lot of natural systems look noisy, so if you’re trying to procedurally generate something that looks natural, you typically want to add noise. Although real systems look noisy there’s usually an underlying structure; the noise we add won’t have that same structure, but it’s much simpler than programming the simulation, so we use it and hope the end user doesn’t notice. This is a tradeoff that I’ll talk about later.
Let’s look at a simple example of where noise is useful. Let’s say we have a 1D map as before, but instead of a single treasure chest, we want to create a landscape of valleys, hills, and mountains. Let’s start by using a uniform random selection at each location. If random(1,3) is 1 we’ll set it to a valley, if 2 set it to hills, and if 3 set it to mountains. I’m using random numbers to create a height map: at each location in the array, I store the height of the landscape. Here’s Python code to create the landscape:
for i in range ( 5 ) : random.seed ( i ) print_chart ( i, [ random.randint ( 1 , 3 ) for i in range ( mapsize )])
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Hm, these maps look “too random” for our needs. Maybe we’d like larger areas of valleys or hills, and we’d also like mountains to be less common than valleys. Earlier we saw that uniform selection of random numbers may not be what we want; there are times we want non-uniform selection. Can that help here? We could use some random selection where valleys are more likely than mountains:
for i in range ( 5 ) : random.seed ( i ) print_chart ( i, [ random.randint ( 1 , random.randint ( 1 , 3 )) for i in range ( mapsize )])
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That decreases the number of mountains but doesn’t really show any interesting patterns. The problem is that non-uniform random selections change what happens in each location in isolation but instead we want something where the random selection in one location is related to to the random selections in nearby locations. This is called “coherence”.
That’s where noise functions come in. They give us a set of random numbers instead of one at a time. Here we want a 1D noise function to give us a sequence. Let’s try a noise function that modifies a sequence of uniformly selected random numbers. There are lots of ways to do this but let’s take the minimum of two adjacent numbers. If the original noise was 1, 5, 2, then the minimum of (1, 5) is 1, and the minimum of (5, 2) is 2. So the resulting noise will be 1, 2. Note that it removed the high point (5). Also note that the resulting noise has one fewer value than the original. That means when we generate 60 random numbers below we will only get 59 out. Let’s apply this function to the first set of maps:
def adjacent_min ( noise ) : output = [] for i in range ( len ( noise ) - 1 ) : output.append ( min ( noise [ i ] , noise [ i+ 1 ])) return output for i in range ( 5 ) : random.seed ( i ) noise = [ random.randint ( 1 , 3 ) for i in range ( mapsize )] print_chart ( i, adjacent_min ( noise ))
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Compared to the previous maps we made, these have larger areas of valleys, hills, or mountains. Mountains are often near hills. And because of the way we modified the noise (by taking the min), valleys are more common than mountains. If we had taken the max, mountains would be more common than valleys. If we had wanted neither valleys nor mountains more common, we could’ve taken the average instead of min or max.
We now have a noise modification routine that can take some noise and make some new, smoother noise.
Hey, let’s run it again!
def adjacent_min ( noise ) : output = [] for i in range ( len ( noise ) - 1 ) : output.append ( min ( noise [ i ] , noise [ i+ 1 ])) return output for i in range ( 5 ) : random.seed ( i ) noise = [ random.randint ( 1 , 3 ) for i in range ( mapsize )] print_chart ( i, adjacent_min ( adjacent_min ( noise )))
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Now our maps are even smoother and there are even fewer mountains. I think we’ve smoothed too much, since we’re not seeing mountains near hills very often. So maybe it’s better go back to one level of smoothing in this example.
This is a common process with procedural generation: you try something and see whether it looks right, and if not, you change it back or try something else.
Side note: smoothing is called a low-pass filter[3] in signal processing. It’s sometimes used to remove unwanted noise.
To review:
Noise is a set of random numbers, usually arranged in a line or grid.
In procedural generation we often want to add noise to produce variation.
Simply picking random numbers (whether uniformly or non-uniformly) leads to noise that has each number unrelated to its surroundings.
We often want noise with some characteristics, like having mountains be near hills.
There are lots of ways to make noise.
Some noise functions produce noise directly; others take existing noise and modify it.
Picking a noise function sometimes takes guesswork. Understanding how noise works and how you can modify it means you can make more educated guesses.
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The Port Adelaide Football Club is thrilled to launch its bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup* following recent reports the event is probably going to be up for grabs given all the issues at FIFA...
As a proud, long-established football club, we have the means and ability to bring about a truly spectacular display of the rest of the world’s game right in the heart of South Australia – Port Adelaide.
That’s right, Port Adelaide is the undisputed hub of activity in the only part of Australia not to be settled by British convicts.
In doing so, we’ll bring the heart of Port Adelaide - primarily consisting of a lighthouse, several open and long-defunct hotels, a blood bank, council chambers, two shopping centres and heritage-listed woolstores - to life.
We’re a friendly city with friendly people. Our local footy club in Port Adelaide is pretty popular and the ideal place to host such an event.
Read greater detail of our Port Adelaide 2022 bid below:
Stadium
Alberton Oval is the largest venue in Port Adelaide and well-equipped to host all games with its picturesque heritage grandstands and copious bar facilities around the ground - it’s got something for all 14,000 fans it is able to hold.
At 180m long and 130m wide, Alberton is actually an oval, but we think it would be a welcome change for international soccer to play with a little bit more space to run around.
We also envisage the goals will look something like this:
We anticipate using Alberton Oval for all 64 matches, including finals.
Training Facilities
The park adjacent to Alberton Oval covers an area of 1.56 acres and is perfect for hosting warm-ups and walkthrough training of all the competing nations.
We also have a quarter-hectare block available for use at the nearby Alberton Croquet Club.
Climate
A balmy 21 degrees is the average October temperature for Adelaide, making it perfect for any competing nation wanting to enjoy Australia in the tiny window of bliss between our dry and excruciatingly hot summers and wet and miserable winters.
Media Facilities
The Alberton Oval press box was constructed in November 1973 and seats eight journalists.
Up to two broadcast commentators can be housed in our TV media centre, which is located on the first floor of our western kiosk facility and from which a camera can be mounted on eight-year-old scaffolding.
Costs, Travel and Accommodation
We encourage use of the Outer Harbour line train to the facility from either the CBD or Port Adelaide and Outer Harbour themselves. As a low-trafficked Port in contemporary times, the World Cup will greatly aid in revitalising our hydro-transit avenues and anticipate a high volume of sea craft to use the facility.
While it cost around $3.68 billion to build stadia for Brazil 2014, we don’t need worry about doing that because we think Alberton is quite sufficient.
However anyone wishing to contribute towards the costs of housing all teams in the upstairs function centre of the Robert B. Quinn stand will be gladly welcomed.
We also envisage any overflow of athletes and support staff being billeted into the homes of local residents, an arrangement we’ve had decades of experience doing when blokes come down from the west coast to play for Ports in the footy.
Food and Drink
The Port Club is open from 8am most mornings until midnight on some nights. It comes equipped with a full restaurant and salad and veg bar and recently upgraded sports bar facilities.
We also have two kiosks and occasional sausage sizzles at games.
There’s also a great pizza shop up the road and a few really delicious Vietnamese roll joints around the place.
Marketing
All marketing will occur on social media. You can visit our bid page and add your support on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/portadelaidefc.
What about Port’s players?
Because the World Cup will be held in the break following Port Adelaide’s 2022 premiership triumph, we’ll get our players and officials to work as linesmen, food vendors and ticket sellers around the Oval throughout the course of the event.
Our coaches are also willing to help coordinate substitutions on the bench for all competing nations.
What will this do for the town of Port Adelaide?
Germany and France hosted World Cups, and look how popular they are...
We're also supporting Macclesfield...
...For their 2026 bid
It's time @FIFAcom gave the World Cup to a sensible bidder. Here is the Macclesfield bid for the 2026 World Cup. http://t.co/AT3tgBu9w3 — Macclesfield Town (@thesilkmen) June 2, 2015
*assuming that Qatar loses the event thanks to Sepp and his mates.
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The Superman curse refers to a series of supposedly related misfortunes that have plagued creative people involved in adaptations of Superman in various media, particularly actors who have played the role of Superman on film and television.[1] The "curse" is frequently associated with George Reeves, who starred in Adventures of Superman on television from 1952 to 1958, and died of a gunshot wound at age 45 under disputed circumstances (officially ruled a suicide[2]); and Christopher Reeve, who played the superhero in four theatrical films from 1978 to 1987, was paralyzed in a 1995 horseback riding accident, and died nine years later at age 52 from heart failure.[3][4]
The curse is often invoked whenever misfortune is experienced by actors and other personnel who work on Superman adaptations, so much so that some talent agents cite the curse as the reason for the difficulty in casting actors in the role in live-action feature films.[5][6]
A more prosaic explanation for the alleged 'curse' is that given the high number of people involved in the many adaptations and treatments of the Superman story over the years, a number of significant misfortunes would inevitably occur, as they would do in any substantial sampling of random individuals.[7]
Deceased Superman actors who allegedly became victims of the curse [ edit ]
The following actors who played Superman have sometimes been cited as victims of the "Superman curse".
Kirk Alyn [ edit ]
Kirk Alyn played Superman in two low-budget 1940s serials but failed to find work afterwards because he was too closely identified with the role, and was relegated to voiceovers, commercials and uncredited screen roles. He later appeared as Lois Lane's father in the 1978 Superman film.[8] Alyn had Alzheimer's disease later in his life and died in 1999 at the age of 88.[5][9]
Bud Collyer [ edit ]
Bud Collyer voiced the first Superman cartoon from 1941-43. He went on to enjoy a career in TV, hosting the game show To Tell the Truth. He returned to Superman by voicing The New Adventures of Superman for CBS in 1966. Three years later, he was dead of a circulatory ailment at the age of 61.[5][10]
Lee Quigley [ edit ]
Lee Quigley, who played Superman as a baby in the 1978 film, died in 1991 at age 14 of solvent abuse.[11][12][13][14]
George Reeves [ edit ]
George Reeves played Superman in the 1951 film Superman and the Mole Men and the ensuing television series Adventures of Superman. Like Alyn and Reeve, he was too closely associated with the role to find further work. On June 16, 1959, days before he was to be married, Reeves was found dead of a gunshot wound at his home with his Luger near him. The death was ruled a suicide, but controversy surrounds the death, as Reeves's fingerprints were never found on the gun, and he had been having an affair with the wife of MGM exec Eddie Mannix.[8][10] It was Reeves's death that inspired the conspiracy theories and the urban legend of a curse associated with the character.[15]
Christopher Reeve [ edit ]
Christopher Reeve played Superman/Clark Kent in the Superman film series, Superman: The Movie (1978), Superman II (1980), Superman III (1983), and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Like Kirk Alyn, Reeve was so closely identified with the character that it was difficult for him to acquire lead parts in other films. He was largely relegated to Superman sequels and supporting roles.[8] Reeve was paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from his horse in a cross-country equestrian riding event on May 27, 1995.[10] Reeve died on October 10, 2004, of heart failure stemming from his medical condition.[16]
Other alleged victims [ edit ]
Marlon Brando [ edit ]
Marlon Brando, who played Jor-El in the 1978 film, is cited for the misfortune he suffered in his private life, such as his son Christian's shooting of his half-sister Cheyenne's boyfriend in 1990 and subsequent decade-long imprisonment, Brando's own admission in court he had failed his son and daughter, his daughter's 1995 suicide and his later reclusiveness. He died in July 2004, three months before his Superman co-star Christopher Reeve.[11] Footage of him would later be posthumously used in 2006's Superman Returns.
Margot Kidder [ edit ]
Margot Kidder, who played Superman's love interest Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve, had bipolar disorder. In April 1996, she went missing for several days and was found by police in a paranoid, delusional state.[10][17][18] Kidder dismissed the notion of a curse, remarking in a 2002 interview, "That is all newspaper-created rubbish. The idea cracks me up. What about the luck of Superman? When my car crashed this August, if I hadn't hit a telegraph pole after rolling three times, I would have dropped down a 50ft to 60ft ravine. Why don't people focus on that?"[19] Kidder died on May 13, 2018 in Livingston, Montana after a drug and alcohol overdose. Her death was ruled a suicide.[20]
Richard Pryor [ edit ]
Comedian Richard Pryor, who had previously had a drug addiction that led to a near-fatal suicide attempt, starred as villain Gus Gorman in 1983’s Superman III, but later took Superman's side near the end of the movie and became a hero. Three years later, he announced that he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.[10][19] He died of a heart attack on December 10, 2005 at the age of 65.[21]
Dana Reeve [ edit ]
The curse has been mentioned regarding the death of actress Dana Reeve (the widow of actor Christopher Reeve), who, despite being a non-smoker, died of lung cancer in 2006 at the age of 44.[1][22]
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster [ edit ]
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the writer and artist who co-created Superman, sold the rights to their creation to DC Comics for a relatively small amount of money, in contrast to the amount of money the character has generated over the decades. Despite the repeated efforts over the course of the rest of their lives to recover legal ownership of Superman, and a share in the immense profits that the character brought for DC Comics, DC's copyright on the character was renewed.[11] By the 1950s, Shuster's worsening eyesight prevented him from drawing, and he worked as a deliveryman in order to earn a living.[23][24] Jerry Robinson claimed Shuster had delivered a package to the DC building, embarrassing the employees. He was summoned to the CEO, given one hundred dollars, and told to buy a new coat and find another job.[25] By 1976, Shuster was almost blind and living in a California nursing home.[26] In 1975, Siegel launched a publicity campaign, in which Shuster participated, protesting DC Comics's treatment of him and Shuster. In the face of a great deal of negative publicity over their handling of the affair (and with the Superman movie coming soon), DC's parent company Warner Communications reinstated the byline dropped more than thirty years earlier and granted the pair a lifetime pension of $20,000 a year plus health benefits.[27][28][29] The first issue with the restored credit was Superman #302 (August 1976).[30] Siegel died in 1996 and Shuster in 1992.[11]
Max and Dave Fleischer [ edit ]
Brothers Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios, who produced the Paramount Superman cartoons began to quarrel with one another and their studio suffered financial disaster. After selling off Paramount Studios, the new owners fired the two brothers. One of them died in poverty.[31]
Kate Bosworth [ edit ]
Kate Bosworth played Lois Lane in Superman Returns. Although she did not suffer any physical attacks, accidents or illnesses, her romantic relationship with Orlando Bloom ended in 2006, which she blamed on the Superman Curse.[32]
DVD Crew of Superman Returns [ edit ]
The curse was invoked after three people involved in the creation of the Superman Returns DVD were injured. One of them fell down a flight of stairs, another was mugged and physically assaulted, and a third smashed into a glass window. Director Bryan Singer remarked, "My DVD crew absorbed the curse for us."[15][22]
Allison Mack [ edit ]
Allison Mack, who played Chloe Sullivan on the TV series Smallville, was accused of sex trafficking and forced human labor and was arrested on April 2018 on those charges. An article on Fox News speculated whether this was related to the curse.[33]
Superman actors not generally believed to have become victims of the curse [ edit ]
The following actors have portrayed Superman, but are not typically associated with the curse.
Dean Cain [ edit ]
Dean Cain became a household name in the early to mid-1990s for his portrayal of Superman/Clark Kent in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. He went on to have various roles in shows such as Frasier and Law & Order, as well as made-for-TV movies. He has also made guest appearances in two other Superman-related series: in an episode of Smallville as the villainous Dr. Curtis Knox, and a recurring role in Supergirl as the title character's foster father, Jeremiah Danvers. ABC News correspondent Buck Wolf once commented, "(Cain) has yet to find the right role."[8]
Brandon Routh [ edit ]
Actor Brandon Routh, who played Superman in the 2006 film Superman Returns, dismisses the notion of the curse. He stated that what occurs to one person or set of people will not necessarily occur to everyone, and that he does not live his life in fear.[15][34] Routh eventually played Ray Palmer (The Atom) on other DC Comics-related projects, is a recurring character in Arrow and The Flash while he is a regular in the spin-off series Legends of Tomorrow (occasionally, his role as Superman is referenced in the Arrowverse[35]).
Bob Holiday [ edit ]
Bob Holiday played Superman on Broadway in the 1960s musical It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman!. He called the idea of a Superman curse "silly." He states that "nothing but good" has come from his playing Superman.[36]
Henry Cavill [ edit ]
Henry Cavill, who plays Superman in the 2013 film Man of Steel, the 2016 sequel Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and 2017 sequel Justice League, has said that he does not believe there is a Superman curse, and that incidents thought to be evidence of it are explained by bad luck.[37]
Tom Welling [ edit ]
Tom Welling who played Clark Kent in the Superman prequel series Smallville (2001).
See also [ edit ]
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The good news just keeps rolling in for Un-carrier customers, and that’s bad news for Verizon. For the second time in as many weeks, another network performance study is demonstrating T-Mobile’s LTE network speed and strength— that means the end of Verizon’s vaunted network edge.
The latest results released earlier this morning from OpenSignal, the most extensive test of LTE network speed and customer experience based on 4.6 BILLION actual user experiences, rank wireless providers based on LTE speed and availability across five regions. And again, no surprise, T-Mobile ranks first or second for LTE speed and availability in every single region.
All of which is bad news for Verizon, who have always relied on essentially two strategies—tout the best network, and charge the most money. Well, that first strategy is gone. Their perceived network advantage is history, and Verizon knows it. Look no further than their abrupt about face on unlimited data for proof.
For years, Verizon’s tried to force customers off unlimited data or convince them they don’t need it. One of the suits at Verizon actually said this: “people don’t need unlimited plans.” They’ve even run commercials explaining why limits are better than unlimited. So, what changed? Why did Verizon launch an unlimited plan? I’ll tell you what changed – the Un-carrier. Verizon knows their network advantage is gone, and they’re forced to finally – after SIX YEARS – cave-in on unlimited data.
Now, faced with the loss of their network advantage, Verizon has only one strategy left – charge the most money. Yea, that sounds exactly like Verizon.
Get this. For LTE speed, T-Mobile’s network ranked No.1 outright in two regions and tied for No.1 in a third, in a dead heat with Verizon overall. And T-Mobile’s network ranked second -- within a stone’s throw of Verizon’s -- on LTE availability in all regions. T-Mobile customers get an LTE signal roughly as often as Verizon customers. That, to me, underscores the expansive breadth of T-Mobile’s LTE coverage, which now reaches 314 million people and covers 99% of the people Verizon covers.
Of course, the best way to understand all this is to experience it yourself. There’s just no other way to fully appreciate the full power of T-Mobile’s network—with more advanced LTE technologies than any other US network. Like VoLTE, EVS, 256QAM and 4x4MIMO. All of which translates to speeds up to a blistering 400 Mbps—and an amazing network experience.
Here’s how OpenSignal described their findings on LTE network speeds …
“Just as we saw in our national rankings, we had a real contest in 4G speed across the five regions. T-Mobile and Verizon split the awards down the middle. T-Mobile topped our LTE speed meter in the Northeast and Southeast, while Verizon won the Midwest and West. The final region, the Southwest, was an extremely close race, resulting in a statistical tie between the two operators.”
I love me some good competition. It’s good for everybody. Most importantly, it’s good for customers. In fact, with the huge advancements we’re driving in network performance, it’s a GREAT time to be a wireless customer. Now, we’ve put an end to Verizon’s network edge. T-Mobile’s network can go toe-to-toe with anyone virtually anywhere.
A growing number of independent third-party studies, including Speedtest.net, Twin Prime, the FCC and OpenSignal tell the story of T-Mobile’s network strength. In fact, every test of real people using their real devices where they really live, work and play shows the T-Mobile network is neck and neck with Verizon—if not ahead.
Still, it’s no surprise that tests by consultants using test devices on a pre-determined route – and who Verizon pays millions every year – show something different. But T-Mobile’s going to put its trust in real people every time. After all, from the beginning, this whole Un-carrier revolution’s been for the people. Through our industry-rattling Un-carrier moves and from our industry-leading network innovations, we’re changing wireless for good. And, have I mentioned, we won’t stop?
Based on T-Mobile analysis of OpenSignal reporting United States 2017. Results © 2017 OpenSignal. All intellectual property rights, data, content, graphs & analysis in report is owned by OpenSignal.
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The amount of digital data being created and stored is growing rapidly, by some estimates by over 40% annually. This rapid growth in stored digital content is leading to large data repositories. These repositories need a lot of storage in a limited space. They must also store this content cost effectively while still providing the performance that those who want to access this data need.
While solid-state storage such as SSDs are increasingly being used for high performance applications, they are more expensive on a $/TB basis compared to hard disk drives and magnetic tape. Magnetic tape is used in libraries that require a robot to get tape cartridges and bring them to drives where they can be written or read. This takes time, so only infrequently used data is generally stored on tape.
HDD drives have faster performance than magnetic tape, although quite a bit less than solid-state storage. Hard disk drives are often used for more active access of data. They are often an important part of an active archive where data is access fairly frequently from the stored content.
Denser hard disk drives allow cost effective storage of more data in a smaller total volume. This is why one of the fastest growing category of HDDs are high capacity enterprise HDDs often using the SATA interface. Coughlin Associates estimates that unit shipments of these products will grow by 20% in 2015. With this background the announcement by HGST of a He-filled HDD with 10 TB of storage using conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) will allow even higher density storage systems.
The helium in the drive reduces the resistance to the disk rotation, allowing thinner and more disks in a HDD and also helps reduce the heat generated by the HDD during operation. This allows higher density storage devices with more disks and heads and also reduces the heat generation and the power consumption. Handling the heat generated by storage and processors in modern data centers is a large part of the overall operating cost, so less heat means lower cost storage.
While HGST introduced a 10 TB He-filled HDD in March of this year using a technology called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) the current product (the Ultrastar He10 HDD) does not shingle the written tracks. By using conventional PMR without SMR these new 10TB drives don’t have the overhead that SMR drives have when writing. Also some other issues with building arrays of SMR drives are avoided.
As reported in a past blog the HDD companies have announced products in Q3 2015 that have up to 60% higher areal density (AD, the amount of data that can be stored in a fixed area of a HDD disk) compared to the same quarter in 2014. This is a significant increase compared to the much slower AD growth in the last 4 years. Most of that advance in AD was using conventional PMR technology, which can now provide more than 1 Tb per square inch recording density.
The demand for large storage capacity in storage devices will continue to grow with the growth of content libraries. Handling this growth with denser storage products while controlling heat generation and power consumption will be important considerations to control the operating costs. He-filled HDDs will have an important role in data centers as long as the density of these products continues to grow.
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The last killer whale born in captivity under SeaWorld’s former orca-breeding program died Monday at the company’s San Antonio park. Veterinarians were treating the calf for an infection, possibly pneumonia, but her health continued to decline. The park discontinued its breeding program in March 2016.
SeaWorld is seeking a restraining order against three animal rights activists who disrupted a killer whale show at its San Diego park last month in a protest led by actor James Cromwell.
The company wants to bar Lyanne Fernandez, Ricky Chavez Rodriguez and Lisa Lange from the San Diego park and SeaWorld's nearby waterslide park, Aquatica, according to court documents filed Thursday in San Diego County Superior Court.
Company officials told The Associated Press that the three were particularly aggressive but the order would not bar them from its other parks in San Antonio and Orlando, Florida. The court plans to hold a hearing before deciding, the documents say.
Lange said SeaWorld's action is retaliation for the complaint the trio filed to press charges against the company's head of security in San Diego. They said some of the protesters were thrown to the ground.
S. Carolina Pediatrician Stops Taking Unvaccinated Patients
A South Carolina pediatrics office is turning away unvaccinated patients, citing the health and safety of other immunocompromised children who are in danger of catching contagious diseases in the waiting room. Parents say their choices for their unvaccinated children are shrinking. (Published Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019)
"I think it's an odd reaction for SeaWorld. Instead of saying to their security guy, 'Hey, you're not allowed to beat people up,' they seek a restraining order against us," said Lange, who works for PETA in Los Angeles. "He really roughed us up."
Lange said it won't stop her from protesting against SeaWorld. The two other activists could not be immediately reached for comment.
Wearing a "SeaWorld Sucks" T-shirt, Cromwell and six activists with the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals barged in to the "Orca Encounter" show July 24 and spoke through a megaphone demanding SeaWorld release its orcas living in tanks and move them to massive pens in the ocean.
Cromwell, who starred in the movie "Babe," told park visitors that SeaWorld was condemning the orcas to premature deaths unless they are moved immediately to ocean sanctuaries.
When park security asked them to leave, the protesters locked arms, went limp and refused. After they were removed by force, SeaWorld alleges one protester later lashed out at a security guard.
PETA has denied the allegations and said the security guard manhandled the three protesters, wrestled phones away and threw two of them to the ground, sat on them and put a knee on a woman's chest until she yelled that she could not breathe.
R. Kelly Facing 10 Counts of Criminal Sexual Abuse
R. Kelly has been charged with 10 counts of criminal sexual abuse in Cook County, Illinois. (Published Friday, Feb. 22, 2019)
PETA said in a statement after the arrests that it was a "non-confrontational protest against cruelty to marine life" and that the protesters obeyed the uniformed officers.
Cromwell, who was handcuffed and escorted out of the park, was separated from the other demonstrators when they were taken away.
Fernandez, Rodriguez and Lange were charged with criminal trespassing last month, and one of them also was charged with assault and battery, according to SeaWorld.
If the order is issued and the trio tries to enter the San Diego parks, the company will call police, said Marilyn Hannes, president of SeaWorld's San Diego park.
"We certainly respect free speech. When they demonstrate on SeaWorld Drive, we are respectful and understand that. But this is not about that at all," Hannes said. "This is really about safety."
PETA has long been known for its stunts to draw attention to its protests. But Hannes said it has been escalating in recent months.
Avenatti: Today Is a ‘Watershed Moment’ in Case Against R. Kelly
Attorney Michael Avenatti, who said he is representing several women and families in a sexual misconduct case against recording artist R. Kelly, said he recovered a videotape from the 1990s that appears to show Kelly engaged in various acts with underaged women and teens. (edited) (Published Friday, Feb. 22, 2019)
"Now that it's gotten to the point of becoming violent, that is beyond acceptable," she said. "We're very proud of the conduct of our security team under difficult circumstances."
Hannes said the request for a restraining order is the first such action taken by SeaWorld that she knows of in her 20 years working at the San Diego marine park.
The educational attraction called "Orca Encounter" debuted this summer at the San Diego park as part of the Orlando-based entertainment company's move to end its world-famous killer whale shows amid public pressure that has intensified after the 2013 release of "Blackfish," a documentary critical of SeaWorld's orca care.
SeaWorld has said the new "natural orca encounters" will replace the theatrical shows.
Copyright Associated Press
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NEW DELHI: Search giant Google will come up with new devices under its Android One program in India even as gives more freedom to local handset makers to come up with their own specifications and pricing. Mike Hayes , Director, Business Development, Android & Chrome Partnerships at Google told ET’s Gulveen Aulakh and Danish Khan, that a broader view of the Android One programme was being taken even as the program has been getting interest from a number of handset vendors globally. Edited excerpts:Andorid One has become a part of the broader hardware strategy. Google is taking a broader view of its hardware business. So you should expect to see a position around what we are doing on low-end devices all the way through.We still continue to support a number of OEMs (original equipment makers) that partnered with us on the programme. However, speeds at which the devices are coming to the market are completely dependent upon the OEMs.We still have interest from a number of OEMs wanting to work with us on programmes like the Android One. The program is about mass market low-end devices, more affordability and to drive services into the market, and the premium things that we are working on with a number of OEMs.No, by any means. We meet regularly and we have discussed Android One as one of many topics on an ongoing basis.For the initial devices that we had launched, we had put certain yardsticks in order to stand up the software, which is why you saw commonality between the specifications. But, since that time, we have had devices with different display sizes, and different chip-sets. There is freedom to choose components is now around for OEMs. The decision to procure the components to build the device is still very much taken by the OEM, as they decide everything in terms of specification, pricing, and when to launch. We work around the software elements such as bringing services and Android as a platform OS on to those devices.It's safe to say, yes!When we are coming to a market, we want to work possibly with as many as we can, because it benefits the overall ecosystem of developers and consumers. A part of conversation with is about eliciting local information be it legal, regulatory, financial or tax related. There are complexities involved. We work with a lot of partners to do the due diligence around tax and legal environment, besides looking at the developer environment, and to see on what makes sense for the developer and the consumer in terms of the affordability. In countries, some carriers are more progressive, while others are still discussing various elements. So that's why it takes a little bit time when we go into a market.In India, we earlier changed our sub-dollar pricing, which is down to as low as Rs 10. Now, the developer can set the prices as low as Rs 10. Also, we introduced Gift Cards. Now, in Idea, we have found such as strong partner in India. The feedback from the developers is overwhelmingly positive, as is the interest from the carriers.We are actively engaging with other major carriers. I can't give a specific date but we expect that in the short term, there will be several announcements that we would announcing with them. We have learnt a lot and are able to talk intelligibly what those opportunities are with the carriers.What we found in other markets that it make simpler for other carriers to feel confident to come onboard and wanting to participate, once a telco has taken the lead. Further, other telcos who are not participating see this as another tool to offer consumer digital content that they can’t offer to, by themselves.We have said publicly that we have given 70% revenues to developers. Google Play is a marketplace, when a developer lists an app they make money. With Google Play gaining traction traction globally, it has actually become a defacto standard that other platform operators are also offering 70% to the developers.We are quite excited about the results we have seen in the other markets. For instance, In Indonesia we have seen 4x growth in the number of buyers in 18 months. So carrier billing has played a critical role in getting more buyers on to the platform. We are seeing similar encouraging results in markets like Saudi Arabia, UAE. We expect same results in India.
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UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations, backed by the United States, Britain and other powers, urged the Syrian government on Friday (June 3) to end all sieges and allow UN airdrops of aid to hundreds of thousands of people trapped across conflict-torn Syria.
Nearly 600,000 people are besieged in 19 different areas in Syria, according to the UN, with two-thirds trapped by government forces and the rest by armed opposition groups and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militants.
UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien told the Security Council the world body would on Sunday ask Syria to approve airdrops or airlifts of aid into besieged areas where only partial or no land access had previously been granted, said French UN Ambassador Francois Delattre, president of the council for June.
"I told the council that the operating space for humanitarian actors is shrinking as violence and attacks across Syria increase," O'Brien said in an statement.
"We need the consent of the Syrian government and all necessary security guarantees, in order to conduct airdrops."
Last month members of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), which includes Russia and the United States, agreed that the UN World Food Programme should airdrop aid to Syria's besieged communities from June 1 if land access was denied.
O'Brien said the UN only reached two of the besieged areas by land last month, representing some 20,000 people, or 3.4 per cent of Syria's total besieged population.
"The Security Council and the rest of the UN, the ISSG, and international community must be prepared for air drops if the regime continues its obstruction," US Ambassador Samantha Power said in a statement.
Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari declined to respond when asked if his government would permit airdrops. He said it was "terrorists," not Damascus, preventing aid deliveries.
"If the Syrian government did not cooperate with the UN with regard to humanitarian aid, millions of Syrians would have died," Ja'afari told reporters.
If Syrian President Bashar Assad's government blocks the airdrops, British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said his and other governments "will consider further action to ensure that humanitarian aid is delivered." He declined to provide details.
It was not clear why Assad's government would consider agreeing to airlifts for areas where it has blocked land access.
Syria gave the UN and the Red Cross approval on Thursday to send humanitarian aid convoys into at least 11 of the 19 besieged areas during June after the United States and Britain called for airdrops.
Several Western diplomats said the Syrian announcement may be a ploy to deflect discussions on airdrops, noting that Assad's government has a track record of reneging on promises to permit full access to needy people.
Syria's opposition has warned the government may open the door just enough to defuse international pressure before restricting access again.
At least 250,000 people have died in Syria's five-year civil war in Syria, while more than 6.6 million have been internally displaced and another 4.8 million people have fled the country.
Vitaly Churkin, the UN ambassador of Assad's close military ally Russia, suggested Russia was not necessarily opposed to airdrops. "We're open to everything, if it's effective, if it can be done properly and safely," he said.
Russia, like Assad's other ally Iran, is widely seen as having significant influence over the Damascus government.
"Are we always completely successful? No we are not,"Churkin said.
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You might earn more in places like San Francisco and New York – but it'll take you years to save for a down payment in those markets.
How long do you have to work in order to afford a home? Ahead of the upcoming Labor Day weekend, we calculated how many years it takes to save enough for a down payment in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, factoring in both local average wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and local housing prices based on the median asking price per square foot of homes listed on Trulia. We assumed that people saving for a down payment set aside 10 percent of their pre-tax earnings – even though of course that depends on your earnings and how much you want to put away – and will earn an annual return of 1.5 percent on those savings. We also assumed a 20 percent down payment, the traditional norm, though many mortgages (including FHA-insured mortgages) require less than a 20 percent down payment (see note at end). Powered by Tableau Affordability varies hugely across metro areas. Even though people can earn more money in most metros with higher housing costs – like San Francisco and New York – those high wages usually aren’t high enough to offset the even higher housing costs. We found that while wages are much higher in some metros than others, the range of home prices across metros is bigger. Among large metros, average weekly wages range from $655 in El Paso to $1809 in San Jose – almost three times as much. But median price per square foot runs from just $46 in Detroit to $459 in San Francisco – nearly ten times as high. As the table below shows, in San Francisco you’ll need to work 20.6 years at the local average wage of $1,478 per week in order to save enough for a 20 percent down payment on a typical 2,000 square-foot home. That’s more than anywhere else in the country except Honolulu, where housing prices are high but wages are much lower.
New York is also among the 10 least affordable metros when comparing home prices to local wages. Note that six of the ten least affordable metros are located in California. With housing markets getting even tighter in California, those metros won’t get more affordable any time soon. Metros with the Least Affordable Housing U.S. Metro Median price per square foot Average weekly wage Years of savings to make a 20 percent down payment* Honolulu, HI $393 $851 28.7 San Francisco, CA $459 $1478 20.6 Orange County, CA $261 $1038 17.1 Ventura County, CA $229 $949 16.5 Los Angeles, CA $236 $1046 15.5 Long Island, NY $216 $1023 14.6 San Diego, CA $212 $1009 14.6 Peabody, MA $189 $978 13.5 New York, NY-NJ $275 $1435 13.4 Oakland, CA $220 $1177 13.1 At the other extreme, you'll need to work just 3.4 years at the local average weekly wage of $1015 to buy a 2,000 square-foot home in Detroit. That’s because Detroit homes are inexpensive, not because Detroit wages are low. In fact, the average wage in Detroit is about the same as in San Diego. Texas ranks high for affordability, too: Houston and Dallas wages are above those in Los Angeles even though housing in those Texas metros is much cheaper than in southern California. Metros with the Most Affordable Housing U.S. Metro Median price per square foot Average weekly wage Years of savings to make a 20 percent down payment* Detroit, MI $46 $1015 3.4 Atlanta, GA $67 $978 5.1 Houston, TX $84 $1130 5.5 Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, MI $77 $974 5.9 Dallas, TX $87 $1057 6.1 Indianapolis, IN $73 $871 6.2 Memphis, TN-MS-AR $74 $878 6.2 Las Vegas, NV $70 $818 6.3 Fort Worth, TX $77 $896 6.3 Cleveland, OH $78 $887 6.5
If you want more affordable housing, you might guess that moving to the suburbs is the answer. Not always! You’ll actually need to work longer – earning the local average wage – to buy a home in Long Island (14.6 years) than in New York (13.4 years); more years in Ventura County (16.5 years) than in Los Angeles (15.5 years); and more years in Peabody, Massachusetts (13.5 years), than in Boston (12.1 years). Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... New York, Los Angeles, and Boston all have more expensive housing than Long Island, Ventura County and Peabody, respectively, but higher wages in those urban metros relative to their suburbs more than offset higher housing prices. Homes cost 27 percent more per square foot in New York than in Long Island, for example, but average wages are 40 percent higher in New York than in Long Island. Moving to the suburbs or a smaller city can be the key to affordability, though, if you keep your job in the big city. A down payment on a Long Island house requires only 10.7 years of earning the average wage in New York - which gets you to homeownership faster than if you paid higher New York housing prices or earned lower Long Island wages. Or, for a West Coast example, a Tacoma house takes only 6.7 years of Seattle wages. That gets you to homeownership a lot faster than living and working in Tacoma (9.3 years) or living and working in Seattle (also, coincidentally, 9.3 years). But commuting from Long Island to New York City or from Tacoma to Seattle is no fun. If you could teleport yourself from home to work instantaneously, you might choose that commute. But why stop there? If you teleported, you could work in San Jose and live in Detroit, which would let you afford a home in just under 2 years. But be sure to program your Transporter correctly: if you accidentally ended up working in low-wage El Paso and living in high-cost San Francisco, your home would require almost 40 years of work. That’s a lot of laboring for a house. * These estimates of years needed to save for a down payment are based on a 20 percent down payment. The years needed to save for a 10 percent down payment are slightly more than half of the years needed to save for a 20 percent down payment. It isn’t exactly half because we’re assuming that savings earn interest, which causes the total amount saved to grow exponentially, not linearly. Photo credit: suphakit73 /Shutterstock
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Canadian taxpayers will fall about $3.5-billion short of breaking even on the money the federal and Ontario governments invested in the bailouts of Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors Co. in 2009.
The federal government's sale of the remaining 73.389 million common shares it held in GM will close the book on the investment and the auto maker's period of being derided as "Government Motors."
Ottawa will raise about $3.2-billion from the sale, based on a report from Bloomberg Tuesday that the stake it sold to Goldman Sachs & Co. was priced at $35.90 (U.S.) a share.
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A report on the auto rescue done by the Auditor-General last year said the two governments had received $5.4-billion (Canadian) of the $13.7-billion they contributed to the bailouts of the two auto giants.
Since then, GM bought back about $400-million (U.S.) in preferred shares and the Ontario government sold its remaining shares for $1.1-billion (Canadian), before the final sale by the federal government this week. That brings the total proceeds to the governments to around $10.2-billion.
The share sale by Ottawa will help federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver balance the federal budget.
But Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, which represents workers at GM plants in Oshawa, Ont., St. Catharines, Ont., and Ingersoll, Ont., said the government should have kept its shares and used the ownership as leverage to force GM to re-invest in Oshawa and St. Catharines.
"It is remarkably short-sighted of the federal government to sell off its shares in GM at a time when there has been widespread agreement that securing GM's future in Canada is critical," Mr. Dias said in a statement.
Unifor has been meeting with GM officials both in Detroit and the Canadian head office in Oshawa to lobby for new investment in St. Catharines and Oshawa. General Motors of Canada Ltd. announced earlier this year that the auto maker and suppliers will invest about $540-million at the plant in Ingersoll to make the next generation of the Chevrolet Equinox crossover utility vehicle.
"The federal government is selling off its shares for short-term political gain, as it prepares its last budget before the next federal election. We need leaders with more vision, strategy and savvy than this," Mr. Dias said. "At some point very soon, the federal and provincial governments are going to have to take decisive action to secure the future of GM."
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Federal and provincial cabinet ministers have also met with senior GM officials to urge the company to find new vehicles for two Oshawa assembly plants and invest in St. Catharines, where the auto maker operates an engine and transmission plant.
One of the two Oshawa factories is scheduled to close next year, while the plant known as the flex plant has no new products allocated to it. Production of the Chevrolet Camaro will be shifted out of the flex plant to a factory in Lansing, Mich., later this year.
GM Canada president Stephen Carlisle has said that no decisions on new vehicles for the Oshawa plants will be made before 2016 and negotiations with Unifor on a new contract.
Unifor issued an economic impact study on the Oshawa plants last week that showed the two governments stand to lose $1-billion in tax revenue if they are permanently closed.
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My job description at Klonk Games has been Lead Artist for quite some time now. I am stoked with what we were able to achieve with our game visuals, especially with all the new assets and the style. Even more so, because I did not really have to push anyone in any direction. Things just happened as everyone contributed their ideas and imaginative input. The Art team is nice bunch of people that grows with their tasks and more than ever I can rely on them when it comes to making the right decisions. This enabled me to do a lot of other important things.
How is this working you ask? Well I will tell you that story!
Artists on the loose!
I think most of the people can relate to the most common problem with delegating things: You have to make sure it gets done, review it, maybe request a change, review again… In the end, the process itself took longer than to just do it yourself. At least, that’s what it feels like.
But now, for the first time ever, I do not have to worry about this. The Art Team is pretty self sustaining. We have occasional feedback-sessions and review things together on demand. People are communicating among each other, important decisions are made in groups of relevant klonkers. This kind of freedom, paired with feedback and quick communication, is an ideal form of creating the art and assets like the team does at the moment. I love them.
Although I try to coordinate tasks and work with Oliver on the management part, I do not supervise any of the actions directly. People are responsible for themselves and at the moment, this pays off big time.
Seriously, the best feeling ever is to come back to the office after an event and see so many good artworks, assets and concepts came to life during my absence. Although I still really love making 3D-artwork, drawings and being part of the creative process, this is awesome.
Business Jazz
Recently I’ve been involved with a lot of the regular business development. Writing a business plan, providing and assembling various documents and so on… While I really did not like the thought of ending up as a PR front-door business-relations battle guy, the job is fun. Although I never wanted to be the guy who is responsible for acquisition and sales, I enjoy being responsible for this team and bring home some good offers.
This work is far more enjoyable than I first thought. It involves bringing your team to the customer, selling our expertise to the right people and finding projects that are worthwile and fun. It is not about chasing people to give your money, it is about finding somebody in need of your skills and then developing a solution for their problem together with your team and the customer. Being a problemfinder and solver is something I really enjoy to be.
Business Relations have to be done. Somehow. Personally I was afraid of going out, talking to people and actually sign contracts over projects. But from what I have experienced in the last two years I can just tell you: See the fun side of it and give it a go. Most of the people are actually very interested in what you’re doing. And don’t forget: You should be at least as interested in what they’re doing, too. Business communication is very much the understanding what others are doing, what they need and how you can solve their problems.
Something I did not realize in the beginning: The biggest part of that is just listening. Listening to anybody and show some real interest in their problems. You should be genuinely interested in the problem or their work, otherwise your solution will probably be of no use or interest.
tl;dr:
Get a good team. Give them freedom and help if needed. Find problem. Solve problem. Enjoy doing the process. Profit.
Now my job description is more of a Creative Navigator and Business Nerd at Klonk Games. I think that’ll go on my business card.
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Two pieces of green-energy legislation have been derailed by the California legislature, much to Governor Jerry Brown’s consternation.
Senate Bill 350, which would have given one of the most draconian state agencies in the nation epic powers to cut fuel consumption, and a gas tax supposedly for road repair, have gone down to defeat…at least temporarily.
In a major setback for Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate agenda, the governor and legislative leaders on Wednesday abandoned an effort to require a 50 percent reduction in petroleum use in motor vehicles by 2030. The announcement followed weeks of lobbying by oil companies and resistance not only from Republicans, but moderate Democrats in the Assembly. For Brown, the failure represented a rare legislative defeat, and on Wednesday there were two: In addition to dropping the petroleum reduction mandate from Senate Bill 350, Brown’s proposal to raise billions of dollars for road repairs appeared to stall.
However, Brown plans to push forward with the implementation of his climate change measures despite the legislatures vote.
“This is one skirmish, but I’ll tell you, it’s increasing the intensity of my commitment to do everything I can to make sure we reduce oil consumption in California,” he said. “My zeal has been intensified to a maximum degree, and nothing, nothing is going to stop this state from pushing forward on our low-carbon fuel standard and our cap-and-trade and our ZEV [zero-emission vehicle] mandate.” “The only thing we don’t have is a formal statement in law of the 50 percent, but the ARB is committed to that 50 percent goal, and I am committed to backing them up and doing whatever I can,” Brown said. “We might get another bill next year, we might just keep doing it by regulation. California is not going to miss a beat.”
Because if you can’t get people to vote for insanity, you can regulate it in!
One of the few recourses Californians have for over-zealous governors, legislators, and bureaucrats is our proposition system. And voters may get a second vote on Brown’s other big, green dream project — the fiscal fiasco that is the high speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The initial cost estimate in 2008 for the rail was $33 billion, and has since gone up to $68 billion with some projections up to $100 billion. Recent studies even show the entire project could cost as much as $200 billion dollars. The bill’s author, Senator Andy Vidak, a Republican from the Central Valley, says this effort has bipartisan support. Assembly member Rudy Salas, a Democrat from Bakersfield, is a co-author of the bill. They say voters deserve to be able to vote the project down, because now more of the cost will be shouldered by taxpayers.
Interestingly, the pricey high speed rail system has been the biggest beneficiary of the $2.2 billion in Cap-And-Trade funds now being spent on eco-activism. In fact, the monies essentially form one big, green slush fund that is supporting several other of Brown’s environmental agenda items, including drought reduction efforts.
Brown has about 3 more years in office. I sure hope we can survive these years of intensified, regulatory zeal.
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George T. Conway III is Of Counsel in the Litigation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He joined the firm in September 1988. His litigation experience has included a variety of high-profile matters spanning many areas of law in federal and state courts throughout the country. He has extensive experience in securities litigation, mergers and acquisitions litigation, contract litigation, antitrust litigation, and other litigation, both at the trial and appellate levels.
In the area of securities litigation, he briefed and argued the case for respondents in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 does not apply extraterritorially to claims of so-called "foreign-cubed" plaintiffs -- foreign investors who purchased securities of foreign issuers on foreign exchanges. He also recently argued and won a precedent-setting motion to dismiss so-called "foreign-squared" claims against EADS brought by American plaintiffs who purchased that foreign company's shares on foreign exchanges.
Mr. Conway also recently argued and won an important appeal under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 on behalf of the Swiss installation artist Christoph Büchel in the artist’s highly publicized dispute with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. He also successfully represented the Chief Judge of the State of New York and the New York Unified Court System in historic constitutional litigation over the State of New York’s extended failure to adjust judicial salaries. Mr. Conway also played a substantial role in the successful defense of Kenneth Langone’s Invemed Associates in a disciplinary proceeding before the NASD (now FINRA) that resulted in what the New York Times called a "withering," "high-profile defeat" for the regulators.
Mr. Conway’s work in mergers and acquisitions litigation includes the representation of Rohm and Haas Co. and ADVO, Inc., in, respectively, Rohm and Haas v. Dow Chemical Co., and Valassis Communications v. ADVO, two Delaware Chancery Court cases involving claims to enforce merger agreements, as well as two historic cases in the development of Delaware corporate law governing mergers and acquisitions, QVC v. Paramount Communications and Paramount Communications v. Time Inc. and Warner Communications, in addition to many other cases involving contests for corporate control in the Delaware courts and elsewhere over the past two decades.
In addition, Mr. Conway played a substantial role in prosecuting one of the most prominent defamation cases in recent memory (Philip Morris v. American Broadcasting Cos.). He has extensive experience in merger-related private antitrust litigation and government antitrust investigations, including the defense of Cardinal Health in the preliminary injunction proceedings before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in FTC v. Cardinal Health. He also represented the National Football League in trademark and antitrust litigation against the Dallas Cowboys in NFL Properties v. Dallas Cowboys Football Club. His pro bono work includes his successful representation in the Second Circuit of crime victims and public-interest groups as amici curiae in opposing claims that federal law requires the State of New York to allow felons to vote while still incarcerated.
Mr. Conway is a graduate of Harvard College, where in 1984 he received an A.B. magna cum laude in Biochemical Sciences. He received his J.D. in 1987 from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. In 1987 and 1988, he served as a law clerk to Circuit Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
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Graphic courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture
There are more than 16,000 tobacco farms in the United States, about half of them in Kentucky. So perhaps it’s little wonder that Kentucky residents are more likely to smoke than residents of any other state.
Slightly over 30 percent of Kentucky residents smoke, according to a new Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index poll, while 29.9 percent of West Virginians reported smoking. More than a quarter of residents in Mississippi, Oklahoma and Ohio said they smoke, too.
Utah is still the home to the smallest percentage of smokers, due in large part to the state’s large Mormon population. Gallup reported that just 5 percent of Utah’s Mormon population smokes, far below the national average; about 60 percent of Utah residents identify themselves as Mormon. Statewide, 12.2 percent of Utah residents said they smoked.
Fewer than 17 percent of residents in California, Minnesota, Massachusetts and New Jersey smoke, while 17 percent of those in Maryland and Washington said they smoke.
States with strict smoking bans have seen the percentage of cigarette users drop precipitously in recent years. All 10 of the states with the lowest percentage of smokers ban smoking in the workplace, restaurants and bars. On the other hand, the three states with the highest percentage of smokers — Kentucky, West Virginia and Mississippi — have no statewide smoking bans at all.
Nationally, the smoking rate has fallen by more than half in the last six decades, to 19.7 percent last year. Alaska, Rhode Island and North Dakota saw the steepest drop-offs between 2008 and 2013; more than 5 percent of each state’s population gave up cigarettes during that time.
Though Kentucky has the highest number of tobacco farms, it doesn’t produce the most tobacco. That distinction falls to North Carolina, where the U.S. Census Bureau said more than 170,000 total acres of tobacco were produced in 2007, the last year for which data is available. Kentucky produced 87,000 acres of tobacco that year. North Carolina’s 2,600 tobacco farms are far more likely to be big producers, rather than small farms.
The number of tobacco producers, and acres farmed, has also dropped precipitously. In 1997, the Census Bureau reported 93,530 tobacco farms in the United States. By 2007, that number had dropped 82 percent. The number of acres of tobacco harvested dropped 57 percent over the same decade, according to statistics compiled by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. In the decade between 2002 and 2012, total sales of cigarette packs in the United States declined by almost 31 percent.
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Four south Texas police officers, including the son of a top cop advising the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on border issues, were charged Thursday with accepting thousands of dollars in bribes to guard cartel cocaine shipments.
One of the officers arrested, 29-year-old Alexis Rigoberto Espinoza, is the son of Hidalgo Chief of Police Rodolfo Espinoza, according to south Texas newspaper The Monitor.
Another one of the officers, 29-year-old Jonathan Treviño, is the son of Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño. The elder Treviño also serves on the Southwest Border Task Force, a group established by DHS chief Janet Natpolitano in 2009 to advise her on border issues.
Two other officers, 28-year-old Fabian Rodriguez and 30-year-old Gerardo Duran, were reportedly members of the sheriff’s narcotics task force, nicknamed the “Panama Unit,” according to Government Security News. All four men were arrested on Wednesday.
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Ladies' "Geek Chic" Line Launches Today!
Posted By Mandy on April 26, 2010
ESB shirt that you've had your eye on for so long, and then not be able to find it. Ashley Eckstein, voice of Ahsoka Tano, has partnered with Lucas Licensing and The Araca Group to design and produce a line of fashionable female-focused Star Wars products, to be made available at conventions throughout the country and via the Her Universe website. The Her Universe line is an answer to all of my problems (of the what to wear type), and I, for one, cannot wait to start accessorizing.
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The voices of female Star Wars? and science-fiction fans have been heard! Recognizing a need and a desire for merchandise created especially for the female fan, actress Ashley Eckstein - the voice of Ahsoka Tano in the hit animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars? - has created Her Universe,? a new clothing line featuring fashionable, feminine products for fangirls. Partnering with The Araca Group - a leading production and merchandise company ? Eckstein will enter into a multi-year agreement with Lucas Licensing to develop and produce a line of female-focused Star Wars products, to be made available at conventions throughout the country and via the Her Universe website.
?We?re thrilled to be working with Lucas Licensing to address this dramatically expanding market of Star Wars female fans,? says Eckstein. ?After four years of working on The Clone Wars, I have become a huge Star Wars fan and have noticed the rapidly increasing number of women who share my love for George Lucas? amazing universe. Wanting to give these fans a voice and affirm that they play an important role in the world of Star Wars and science-fiction, we created the Her Universe brand especially for them. As a consumer, I believe that quality and creativity are of the utmost importance and those standards were paramount in my joining forces with The Araca Group.?
?We are thrilled to start Her Universe with Ashley and we look forward to helping bring her vision to life,? said Matthew Rego, principal of The Araca Group. ?Moreover, the opportunity to work with Lucas Licensing utilizing the Star Wars catalog of images is thrilling. Our goal is to bring fashion-forward, authentic, quality products to the legion of devoted female Star Wars fans.?
?Ashley is such an enthusiastic emissary of the Star Wars brand, and we are so excited that she?s taken the lead on this exciting new initiative,? said Paul Southern, Lucas Licensing?s Sr. Director of Domestic Licensing and Marketing. ?She has her finger on the pulse of what our female fans want to wear.?
The Araca Group is known as one of the most innovative theatrical production and merchandise companies in the world. As producers, Araca?s credits include Wicked, The Laramie Project, Urinetown The Musical, Debbie Does Dallas, The Vagina Monologues, Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, A View From the Bridge and the current Broadway production Lend Me a Tenor. As merchandisers, Araca has launched worldwide operations for entertainment properties including Wicked, The Wedding Singer, Jersey Boys, and Rock of Ages.
Described playfully as ?geek chic,? the new Star Wars line from Her Universe will premiere at San Diego Comic-Con?s Star Wars Pavilion in July, and will also be available at Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando, Florida in August. Fans can also learn more about Her Universe and get updates by going to www.heruniverse.com/ and by following Ashley on Twitter at https://twitter.com/HerUniverse and visiting the Her Universe Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/HerUniverse.
If you would like more information on Her Universe or to schedule an interview with Ashley Eckstein, please contact Dan Madsen at HerUniversePR@Araca.com
Lucasfilm, STAR WARS? and related properties are trademarks and/or copyrights, in the United States and other countries, of Lucasfilm Ltd. and/or its affiliates. TM & ? Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. All other trademarks and trade names are properties of their respective owners.
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Stay tuned for more news about this exciting line! Ashley will be talking with us tonight, so keep your eyes peeled for a special interview tomorrow! Also, make sure to tune into the As a lady (oh, alright... woman), I've always faced certain challenges when wanting to display geekitude for all to see. I, among others, have become reconciled to the difficult task of remaining fashionable while also proudly proclaiming for all to see that yes, I am nerd, hear me roar. Dearest female brethren (sisteren?), I'm pleased to announce that no longer will we have to wear another pink, Princess Leia shirt or sift through the dregs of a men's Old Navy sale to snag that one, grayshirt that you've had your eye on for so long, and then not be able to find it. Ashley Eckstein, voice of Ahsoka Tano, has partnered with Lucas Licensing and The Araca Group to design and produce a line of fashionableTheline is an answer to all of my problems (of the what to wear type), and I, for one, cannot wait to start accessorizing.##########Stay tuned for more news about this exciting line! Ashley will be talking with us tonight, so keep your eyes peeled for a special interview tomorrow! Also, make sure to tune into the Forcecast tomorrow night at 8pm EST for a special treat as Ashley takes live listener calls!
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Characters: Male My Unit/Robin, Shulk, Dunban, Magnus, Dark Pit, Lucina, Master Hand, Alph, Olimar, Undyne, Alphys, Papyrus, Sans, Mettaton, Toriel, Asgore, Muffet, Annoying Dog, Frisk, Monster Kid, Marth, Pit, Ness, Lucas, Rosalina, Alvis, Palutena, implied Hades, Ganondorf, Boy Inkling, Napstablook, Temmie, hOIVS Temmie, Bob, Henry, Female My Unit/Robin, and Reyn
Beginning Notes: Tra la la. Who the hell came up with that title? I don't know. Tra la la.
Also, Frisk will be referred to by 'they' and 'them' pronoun wise. Meanwhile the Monster Child will be referred to as 'Chil', which is really just a lazy shortening of 'child', but also it works for their use of casual language.
It was a calm spring afternoon and the Smashers were all gathered around in t
he Ballroom to listen to an announcement from Master Hand himself. It was always important business if Desmond made a personal appearance outside his domain for one-on-one conferences or Master Orders. Everyone was conversing amongst themselves on what the news could be and why it's so important.
"Gentlefolk of the various dimensions." Desmond begins as he raises his single gloved hand. "I gathered you all here to discuss that we're having a surprise visit by a small group from the Monster Realm known as 'The Underground'. This group has a single human ambassador with them. I expect you all to be on your best behavior today as to not scare the monsters back to where they came from."
Dante calmly adds in his own bit of information. "The monsters have been sealed underground for at least a couple centuries and this is their first interaction with the outside world since then. We should be honored that they even bothered coming to this dimension to establish relations with other realms."
"Just as my brother said, this is a way for these folk to get acquainted with cultures not their own and form positive relationships amongst these cultures. Out of all of you, Lady Palutena, Lord Hades, Master Pit, I expect you all to not cause any… repeat incidents."
After their proclamation the Hands dismiss themselves and everyone else to get prepared for their guests arriving within the next hour. Thankfully with Mama around, she and Peach can easily make a lot of food in a short span of time for dinner. Meanwhile those with Smash matches until midnight are going to busy with those. Everyone decided to at least get cleaned up if they haven't showered yet today, or need to take a second one due an earlier match.
Within fifteen minutes of the announcement a small child along with a fairly decent size group of monsters behind them, arrived at the door. Amongst the group was two goat-like creatures, a pair of skeletons, a yellow lizard in a lab coat, a fish-creature, an armless lizard in a sweater, a spider, a ghost with a pair of headphones, and a robot. As the group reached the doors the child turned around and asked for the taller skeleton to put them on their shoulders.
"Ok guys. This is Smash Mansion." They say. "Inside there will be a lot of different species including humans like me. Keep in mind that just because they're not human does not mean they're a monster. So please try not to get into any fights."
The female goat nods her head before glaring and turning her nose up at the other goat. "I'm sure we'll be fine my child. At least Sans and I will be."
The child nods as they are put down again. Turning around once again the child calmly knocks on the door and does not seem surprised as they swing open on their own to reveal Master Hand standing in the entryway ready to greet his guests.
"I am Master Desmond Hand." He greets as he bows. "It is my pleasure to welcome you to my realm young Master Frisk. I extend this welcome to your companions as well."
Frisk nods their head in response. "Do you want me to introduce everyone? Or should that be saved for another time?"
"I know who most of your friends are regardless. Do not feel the need to introduce yourselves to me though, my Smashers of are greater importance. Feel free to wander the grounds of the manor and meet some new friends. My domain is on the second floor if you require my assistance for anything.
As the master of the house departs, Frisk turns around and says that his friends are allowed to go off and make friends as fighting outside of the Smash battles is usually prohibited anyway. The taller skeleton, the armless lizard, and the ghost offer to stay with the child while the others decide to go do their own thing.
The fish creature has wandered off to the area where Smash fights can be viewed.
"U-Undyne, are you sure you want to watch these matches?" The lizard asks as she sits down to watch through the 'Fourth Wall'.
Undyne joins her girlfriend and wraps an arm around her. "Of course Alphys! I'm a born fighter and what's better than watching a fight live than doing it yourself!? I admire the fact these guys can take such a pounding and not explode into dust."
In the actual match it was Roy Koopa, Ryu, the other Roy, and R.O.B. duking it out in a 2v2 team match. Alphys found it very interesting that the robot of the group is even able to be damaged at all. This world truly is different if that is the case. There is also the fact that these are physical blows that are being dealt. No bullets to be dodged, no Souls being used. What was more amusing to Undyne was that all of the fighters currently participating had their names start with the letter 'R'.
They were on the Miiverse stage or as the Smashers like to joke the Memeverse seeing as how all of their loyal fans were posting comments about them that showed up on the back of the stage. The 4th wall and other Smashers could read the "marvelous" things posted today. Hopefully Master filtered it today for the guests that were coming to watch the matches, but chances are something bad was going to happen.
The irony is how the worse part of the messages was just a cat fight between Roy and Roy and no one knew who got more messages. Chances are it was Roy from Fire Emblem because he was the one that got all the girls and Roy Koopa was only a substitute for Roy in terms of jokes until then.
Fortunately for the Roys, FE Roy was with Ryu while Roy Koopa was with R.O.B. in the double team. The Koopaling wanted to beat Roy to a pulp and he was going to do so, if Ryu didn't tell his partner when the battle started, 'Don't separate.'
Not separating proved to be an effective strategy due to how both Ryu and Roy had poor recovery. When they were close, they watched each other's back and hit hard while making sure not to hit each other. Roy wanted to be flashy, but this was a team battle, so he had to listen to Ryu to a certain extent. That meant, he couldn't charge his neutral b without being ridiculed.
Roy Koopa in contrast was being too independent going in with his clown cart while holding a Mecha-Koopa in his hand hoping to casually drop it and then follow up with another aerial combo. R.O.B. had been charging his gyro, but his partner constantly being in the way gave the robot a hard time to set up properly.
The teams were simply unbalanced this time around, but that had to do with random matchup. Roy killed ridiculously early and wouldn't let R.O.B. start walling him or Ryu out. A down throw to some side tilts to another re-grab and a charged forward smash took out even the heaviest of characters. Roy smirked hearing the fangirls cheer for him.
"Please watch your back." Ryu told him as he kicked Roy Koopa away. "We only have one minute on the clock. You are allowed to style."
"Really?!" Roy asked sounding rather happy.
"Just a reminder though that I will out style you if you attempt to do so."
"Oh...that's a challenge. I see how it is."
They changed their targets to suit their fighting style. Roy should have known that the Koopaling wasn't going to go down that easily against Ryu, so he was in rage mode now. Many combos did not work for the shade wearing Koopaling, but being drilled wasn't a good feeling. Roy yelped at his shield almost breaking, so he dropped his shield and let himself get hurt. He was thrown to the top platform and nearly got up air comboed with the stupid mallet. Meanwhile, Ryu was getting hit by every attack by R.O.B. who attempted to annoy him. The martial artist remained calm and allowed R.O.B. to mess up. He did this by simply fading back to the middle of the stage so he wouldn't get provoked to going near the right ledge of the stage. The Roys were getting ferocious with each other that Roy Koopa would end up hitting his partner a few times. Ryu only needed a certain percentage before he was ready to mess the robot up. R.O.B. knew what the martial artist wanted and attempted to hover around the air. Roy had forgot that R.O.B. was Ryu's target and would jump up and hit R.O.B. out of his double jump forcing the robot to use his gas to get back on stage.
"Caught you."
Ryu only needed one grab before going all Street Fighter on the robot. He had a really lame jab in comparison to other characters in terms of power, but he didn't want to hurt any of the Smashers due to how many he could throw out. He caused a jab reset by hitting R.O.B. four to five times before suddenly doing a Shoryuken that caught everyone's attention due to how clean the combo was. It didn't matter if the robot was heavy, the poor thing was sent flying and crashed into the screen with X eyes on the monitor.
Roy Koopa was easily distracted by how cool Ryu was being that Roy had took this opportunity to charge up his attack. By the time the Koopaling had noticed, Roy successfully managed to style on the Koopaling with a one-hit kill that sent him flying to the left side of the screen. At this point, the game went to time.
"3...2...1...TIME!"
It wouldn't be long until they announced that the winner was Red Team with a score of 3.
Undyne could be heard cheering very loudly as the battle came to a close. Perhaps she can convince Master Hand to throw her into one of these battles and show the humans and non-humans exactly what a monster is capable of. Besides, without her armor she doesn't have to worry about drying out as much. Though, Alphys was trying to calm her down and not get too reckless.
Elsewhere in the Mansion, Frisk and the others are outside in the back courtyard. The child is contenting themselves to playing catch with Ness and Lucas. Unfortunately the ball gets slightly over tossed and it ends up flying straight through the ghost.
"oh…. i'm sorry… i should have tried to catch it…" The ghost says as it starts crying.
Frisk tries to comfort the ghost. "It's ok Napstablook. We can have Chil get it."
"Yo!" The lizard says as they jump in the air. "I'll go get it dude!"
While Chil runs off with Ness to find the baseball, Pit, Kuro, and Lucina all end up joining the group outside. The skeleton ends up gasping at the sight of the angels.
"Oh my god! Frisk! Are those humans!?" He says as he points to the angel twins.
Frisk shakes their head. "No Papyrus, those are not humans."
"Oh. Well are they monsters?!"
"Excuse you!" Pit shouts. "I'm not a monster! I'm Pit, loyal servant to the Goddess Palutena!"
"I'm Kuro. Servant to none but myself." Dark Pit responds coolly.
"These are angels Papyrus. Basically a subspecies of humans. Usually corporeal spirits of humans that died and reborn with those wings." Frisk responds, seemingly glancing over the fact Kuro is a dark angel with those black wings.
"Oh ho! So these 'angels' are both humans and non-humans! This is the best moment of my life!" Papyrus shouts and he runs over and picks up the angel twins in an awkward hug as he cries his eye sockets out.
Lucina awkwardly stands there as both angels flail around trying to wiggle from the skeleton's grip. "If you would be so kind, can you please put those two down?"
Papyrus promptly drops the angels before clearing his 'throat'. "I, the Great Papyrus, semi-not quite-official mascot of all monsters, have a request of you humans and non-humans."
As Frisk, the Pit twins and Lucina begin looking at the skeleton warrior Ness, Lucas, and Chil are finally returning with the ball, in the latter's mouth of course. Everyone besides the child had this look of 'oh no' on their faces as the skeleton struck a marvelous pose, not unlike Waluigi was known to do.
"My request is that one of you stand up to my challenge. A challenge to become… MY FRIEND! Nyeh heh heh heh heh."
Pit grinned like an idiot and cracked his knuckles, he was always up for a challenge. Frisk meanwhile pinched their nose in frustration as Robbi, her husband Henry, and a blue Inkling decided to show up. This was becoming quite the party.
"I've always wanted to be friends with a skeleton." Pit remarks as he equips his Insight Staff. "Let me see what you're capable of."
"Wait!" Frisk shouts as they jump in front of the skeleton. "If you do fight Papyrus, just don't hurt him too much."
"Wh-why?"
"Well, besides the fact he will turn to dust, you don't want to see an angry Sans."
Just as that moment said skeleton brother shows up from behind the angel, as if he was capable of teleportation. "before you ask, i'm sans. sans the skeleton. and if you kill my brother, you're going to be in for a very bad time."
Pit nods in acknowledgement shakily to the threat as he flips the staff in his hand to use it as a melee weapon. He smirked at first knowing he was a shoe-in to win, he was the captain of Palutena's Angel Army after all. What he wasn't expecting out of this was suddenly the world around him to dim like it was suddenly midnight and for him to feel his heart suddenly pounding before a light blue heart manifested itself in front of him.
"Nyeh heh heh. Surprised? That is your SOUL. Where we come from, we fight with those!" Papyrus declared.
The angel eyed the heart in front of him and tried moving it. He managed to get it to move to the left and right but no other direction. He stopped it and managed to get it to move up and down as well. His Soul seems to only move one direction at a time, similar to many old 8-bit style games. In addition there is a UI in front of him that shows all of his available commands. After Papyrus finished talking, his Soul relocated to a box that says 'Fight'. In addition there's other boxes that say 'Act', 'Item', and 'Mercy', and the text box itself just says 'Papyrus appears!' and not much else. The reader quickly picks up that Pit shouldn't be able to read any of this, yet he finds a way regardless.
Unsure of what to do Pit moved his soul to the Act menu and, after selecting Papyrus, hits check.
*ATK 8 DEF 2
*HE LIKES TO SAY "NYEH HEH HEH!"
"Nyeh heh heh!" The skeleton says as if he could read the text box as it shifts back to the battle box with Pit's Soul in the center.
A few bones begin to slide by in the box, just below the Soul. There was no way they'd naturally hit the angel unless he moved his soul deliberately just to run into the bones. So the angel just moved the heart aimlessly in the upper regions of the box. Pit looks pretty annoyed as his turn comes up again and he decides to check the options and sees that, other than checking, he has the option of flirting and insulting Papyrus.
Selecting the 'Insult' option, Pit speaks. "I think you're a bonehead!"
"Nyargh, why must you be like my brother and speak in puns!? But I appreciate your honesty." Papyrus replies as he repeats the same attack as last turn.
Seeing as just screwing around is going to get him nowhere, the angel just elects to spare the skeleton, not wanting to enact the wrath of Sans if he were to accidentally hurt his brother too much. Calmly he moves his soul to the 'Mercy' panel and hits 'Spare'.
"So you won't fight? Very well, prepare for my Fabled 'Blue Attack'!" Papyrus declares as the battle box comes up again.
Pit decided not to move at all as more bones than before start entering the area his Soul was in. He figured that since both his Soul and the attacks were the same color that nothing would happen. That really wasn't the case, but regardless he wasn't at all harmed until suddenly the heart changed to a darker blue and fell to the bottom of the box and one last bone hit it.
"Ow!" Pit declares as he felt something in his chest, as if his heart was just punched.
Papyrus laughs. "You're blue now!"
As if to rub it in, the text box repeated that same sentence again to the angel. In addition, the reader can hear the blue inkling off to the side begin singing to the tune of "I'm Blue". Angrily Pit moves the heart over to the Mercy again and tries to spare his opponent once more. Unfortunately that didn't help at all as Papyrus merely attacked once more, much to the dismay of the angel as he didn't know how to avoid the bones. He could feel his chest hurting as if something was continuously hitting him there.
"You can… y'know, jump over my attacks." Papyrus says, feeling bad that he's hurting Pit. "You managed to get your soul to move before, so prepare yourself. In a couple turns I will use my 'special attack'!"
"If I can't get him to spare me, and I can't spare him, there must be something I can do to get him to stop." Pit thinks to himself as he looks at his options and sees that in the Act menu a new option has shown itself labeled 'Pun'. Without a doubt the angel chose it. "Hey, Papyrus, I have a joke for you. I bet you'll find it, humerous!"
"Oh my god, you sound like my brother!"
After the very horrible skeleton pun, Papyrus attacks once more. It seems that Palutena's captain seems to have figured out how to move his Soul again and avoid the attacks. Thankfully he also figured out that standing still for the blue bones made him basically immune to them. He smiled realizing he might actually have a chance. With a jovial smile crossing his lips he selects the pun option once again.
"What's a skeleton's favorite instrument?" He waited a second. "A trombone!"
In addition to Pit and his horrible joke, Sans interrupts the fight for a brief moment to play his trombone.
"SANS! What have I told you about plaguing my life with incidental music!? You're ruining this fight!" Papyrus complains. "I swear you're better suited to be my brother's friend than mine."
Regardless the skeleton still attacks like normal, not that the angel is getting any better at dodging without getting hit a couple times. Regardless of these japes Papyrus once again warns Pit about the upcoming 'special attack' saying he finally mastered pulling it off. It didn't matter to the brunette, as he only selected the pun option one last time.
"Ok, last one I promise. I guess after this fight you're going to have a bone to pick with me!" Pit couldn't even keep it together he was laughing at his own joke so much, to the dismay of his opponent.
Papyrus groans. "Un. Believable. Either way non-human! Prepare yourself for my 'Special Attack'!"
The angel suddenly became worried as the battle box expanded to the right to reveal… a dog. A small, white, fluffy dog munching on a bone.
"Again!? Grab that meddlesome canine! It has my special attack!"
Pit quickly reaches into the battle box and grabs the dog and hurls it away through the already shattered fourth wall, hitting the reader square in the face. They were unable to react quickly enough to 'doge' the incoming projectile. Sorry reader.
"I'm not exactly sorry whoever's reading this!" Pit shouts as he turns back around to see Papyrus facepalming.
In the meanwhile of these shenanigans Kuro is finding so much amusement in this that he is literally on the ground laughing so hard that he thinks the pain he's feeling from Pit is actually from his laughing fit instead. Ness, Lucas, and Chil are finding this just as funny as Dark Pit and are accompanying him on the ground in a fit of giggles. Lucina doesn't get what's so funny and is just standing there awkwardly.
Inside the Mansion, Robin seems to have gotten himself into quite the sticky situation. He's hanging in a spider's web in a compromising position and some of the fibers are wrapping around some very... risqué places as the spider girl slowly sips a cup of cider. Shulk is sitting on his friend Reyn's shoulders holding his hands over his mouth to prevent his friend from screaming.
Robin is trying to wiggle free from his bindings but finds that difficult as the more he moves the tighter the web gets in his sensitive areas. "Put me down wench!"
"You know this could have been prevented dearie~." The spider girl says. "All I asked was that you buy a donut."
Shulk awkwardly laughs at his boyfriend's predicament. "I could have foot the bill you know. Ninetynine G is the discount of a lifetime in Colony 9."
"Yeah, well maybe I don't want to eat spiders!" Robin retorts as he felt another squeeze between his legs as the girl tugged her web with one of her free hands.
At that same time Undyne, Alphys, and Dunban were coming down the hall to see the awkward scenario. The older Homs tries to hold back laughter seeing Reyn about to cry in fear. The lizard scientist lets out a sigh.
"Muffet, please let him go." Alphys says with a slight bit of sternness. "Tying up the customer has never worked for you."
Muffet giggles playfully. "Well, little Frisk doesn't ever visit my new parlor to allow me to tie them up, so I'm enjoying myself with someone who didn't have a choice~."
Undyne snickers. "How'd you convince that punk there to let you do that anyway?"
"Oh, he decided to pick a fight with me, but it seems he was unaccustomed to the ways of fighting with a Soul. He did not stand a chance."
"Well, I'd say the same for this guy here." Undyne proclaims as she points to Dunban with her thumb. "But I've never seen a newbie to Soul fights guard against ALL of my attacks so expertly. Even the punk kid couldn't do that!"
Dunban gracefully bows. "Well, I am most acclimated to avoiding and guarding attacks than actually taking hits. Though, you are quite the worthy foe yourself Lady Undyne. I would not mind sparing with you again in the future."
Robin rolls his eyes as Alphys makes her way to Shulk to inspect his sword, the Monado. She has a very delicate gleam in her reptilian eyes as she asks to hold it. While the Monado Boy did have to keep a hand on Reyn to keep him from getting loud, he sees Muffet eyeing him with a hungry look, he enjoyed the fact Alphys was willing to geek out with him. Clearly Robin wasn't going to be let down as he felt another tug of the webbing.
In the kitchen Mama, Peach, and the female goat are all helping each other make three different pies. Sans is also here, for somehow, and is enjoying a nice, refreshing bottle of ketchup in the meanwhile. The male goat had gone off to have a friendly chat with Bowser after the ladies kicked him from the kitchen due to him being a little clumsy.
"Toriel?" Peach asks as she mixes the batter of her cobbler. "Would you mind handing me the cinnamon when you're done with it?"
Toriel nods as she hands off the container to add the butterscotch-cinnamon filling to the crust. "I'm glad that there are other people here so interested in baking. Having only myself and snails for pie makes things a little boring."
"Well, it's a pleasure to share recipes with you as well! Might I ask though why you kept glaring at Asgore?"
"That miserable hairball of a Monster King is my ex-husband. We separated a few decades ago and I've since become more friendly with Sans here."
"'sup." The skeleton replies as he finishes his ketchup.
The three women giggle in response to Sans as Napstablook floats in with Chil, Ness, and Lucas behind them. The children look like they all just ran through a spider's nest, there was silk everywhere on them.
"Oh, such poor, innocent youth." Toriel says as she sets down her ingredients to go clean the webs away. "Who would ever do such a thing as cover you in webs?"
Lucas smiled gently. "It was our own fault miss. We followed Napstablook through Miss Muffet's webs and some of it got stuck to us."
Speaking of Muffet, some time has passed and Robin has since been dropped to the floor and is awkwardly rubbing his inner legs to alleviate the pressure from the spider's webs. He also looks particularly annoyed because Shulk and Alphys are still on the floor geeking out, with Alph now being part of this group, while the blond is snacking on the donut Muffet sold him. They seem to be enjoying themselves, in particular Alphys.
Undyne grins as she leans on the wall. "Looks like Alphy found someone she'd like to come and see sometime."
"Shulk does like it when he can just sit down and ramble about the machines he's worked on." Dunban comments. "It makes him feel like he belongs. Your girlfriend and him will probably make great things together."
"Wait, you're saying that we're allowed back?"
A light chuckle. "If Master Hand says so. In fact, I heard that he's setting up places for you lot to stay in Fivemonte, the Smash city. Shulk travels there often to get some scrap materials to tinker with."
"Huh." Undyne says as she turns to see Shulk bouncing in glee on the floor as he and Alphys exchange ideas on robots. "Well, he seems passionate about what he does. And I love it when people are passionate."
Robin finally joins the conversation as he walks over to the duo to speak with the Royal Guardswoman. "Seems the two of us share similar tastes in romantic partners."
"There's perks for having a relationship with a nerd. And it's AWESOME."
Robin turns back to look at the trio on the floor and smiles seeing Shulk and Alph seeing that even monsters can share their interests. He's still a tad annoyed his boyfriend left him tied up for so long, but he let's it slide seeing him happy and making a friend. They can have a talk later about the tactician feeling of being violated by a spider.
This entire time Marth has been socializing with the robot in the sunroom with Link. The robot seems to have quite the thing for the Hero King, if the fact he's all over him wasn't a big enough indicator. They've been exchanging beauty and battle tips as well.
"Mettaton," Marth begins. "I don't know how you got your hair to look that amazing, but I envy you for it. At least my bloodline carries my marvelous color."
Mettaton laughs as he strikes a pose. "I use my own patented MTT brand of metal hair gel darling~. Though I'm sure now that I'm going to host my own show out in the city I'll start making some for humans as well."
Link lets out a yawn before hearing something thump against the window. The three look at the glass and see a white creature with both dog and cat ears in a blue shirt slowly sliding down as more fall from the sky. It seems the other Smashers outside have started questioning the odd rain as well.
"Mettaton, what is that creature?" Marth asks as he stands up to watch it fall to the ground.
The robot stretches and extends a leg. "That, your majesty, is a Temmie. They're adorable, but not the brightest monsters in the Underground. Only two have any actual intelligence."
In the actual courtyard Pit and the others are very confused by the Temmies. Papyrus in particular is trying to comprehend how they even managed to get into the sky anyway to rain down. One in particular struts up after landing feet first, in contrast to the others acting like ragdolls, and sits down in front of the angel twins.
"Hello there." They say. "My name is Bob, pleasure to meet you."
Robbi smiles brightly and picks up Bob. "Now, aren't you an adorable little thing? My brother will simply adore you!"
The next Temmie of note to fall was one wearing a blue and yellow stripped shirt and a graduation cap. Instead of black hair like the rest of her kind, she has slightly longer grey hair in a different style. Kuro picks up this one and watches as her paw stretches and moves around until it boops him on the nose and retracts. The dark angel snuggles the Temmie into his chest and gives Pit that pleading look he does when he wants something.
"Pittoo…" The light angel sighs, "That's a monster too, not a pet. You can't just keep her because she's adorable and fluffy. It's bad enough Henry's here!"
Henry grins wildly and waves.
Kuro starts pouting and looks at the Temmie. "But she's cute! And she booped my nose."
"tem suprise human not allergic!" The Temmie says as she snuggles in. "no allergic? tem sTay! yaYA!"
"See Pitstain?! She wants to stay with me!"
Pit sighs once more as his twin snuggles with the monster. Robbi is just casually holding Bob under her arm to take to Robin later. The last notable Temmie to fall from the sky at first seems like the rest of them but it starts twitching a little in the presence of the others. Everyone watches as suddenly her face is overtaken by hives.
"hOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII…" The Temmie begins, and doesn't seem to be stopping soon.
Kuro looks down at his new pet. "What's going on?"
"humans. Allergic to tem. tem, also allergic to tem."
Papyrus can be seen rubbing his temples off to the side as the Temmie continues screaming about her hives without actually stopping. The 'rain' has ceased at least so the condition won't get any worse hopefully.
At least five minutes pass as some of the Smashers, as well as the rest of Frisk's group, and the Hands come outside to see Henry being held back by Robbi. The Temmie with hives is still screaming without any sign of stopping.
"I swear by my wife I will hex this thing to the farthest reaches of hell!" The dark mage shouts as he attempts to wiggle out of the tactician's grasp.
Shulk and Robin look at each other in worry. It's rare for Robbi's husband to get angry at anything, much less a tiny screaming monster. Even the other Temmies seem to be getting a little annoyed by their screaming friend.
Pit covers his ears as he tries to think of a way to get these creatures out of here. "L-Lady Palutena? Viridi? Someone?"
"What's the little buzzard asking for now?" Viridi asks sarcastically. "Your goddess is currently dealing with Hades' head since he found a way out of the jar. So I'm filling in."
"Well, I bet you can see what's going on. Everyone's about to lose their minds over this, and I'm being serious when I say this includes Henry."
"Yeah, yeah, I can see the fuzzy Temmies. I'll just have to send them to my domain. They're not good at fighting, so they'll make good pets at the least."
Pit nods as the Temmies are one by one sucked up by the divine light. "Just leave the one named Bob, and the one Pittoo has."
A few more minutes pass before the last of the Temmies are sent to Viridi's domain and Henry has calmed down. Master Hand clears his throat and explains that it is time for Frisk and the others to leave to get acquainted to their new temporary home in Fivemonte. Everyone enjoyed their stay today, and they may come back sometime soon. To say the least, the day was enjoyable to most except Robin…
"Shulk you shouldn't have just stood there! You left me there for hours!" Robin yelled as he continued to pull webs from his hair.
Shulk continues chuckling at his boyfriend's predicament. "It wasn't hours Ro, maybe twenty minutes. Besides I had to keep Reyn from screaming."
The tactician just groans loudly. "You owe me big time!"
End Notes:
1. Before you go lashing out at me I will explain. As far as I can tell 'Master' does not denote gender in any way, shape, or form. Master Hand uses this to address Frisk as there is no true 'gender neutral' variant.
2. Originally the Smash fight was Lemmy, Yoshi, Roy, and R.O.B., but it was changed to make things stupider.
Ginta: I wanted Roy versus Roy and Roy being able to style on Roy for stealing Roy's glory before Roy got confirmed in Smash. Also Ryu gets to show off those tournament combos. He e-sports in the For Fun world.
3. The Papyrus fight is basically a condensed version of the one in Undertale itself with some added twists. Also, I made up the function of Pit's Soul on the spot as the light blue and orange Souls are never used for the player.
4. The Annoying Dog showing up and 'eating' Papyrus' special attack is a nod to the actual fight. Pit throwing said dog out through the fourth wall is another nod to the fact that the dog represents Toby Fox (The creator of Undertale for the uninformed) and thus has the ability to break the fourth wall.
5. Due to the fact Shulk makes weapons, and Alph is the engineer of the SS Drake I figured the two of them would
LOVE to associate with Alphys because she built Mettaton's robotic body. That, and it adds a female to the group, who is also NOT an alien. (Alph being Koppaite and Shulk being Homs)
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PHOENIX -- Video released Tuesday shows officers responding to a report of someone pointing a gun from the window of an Arizona hotel, but a judge barred the release of additional footage showing an officer later shooting and killing an unarmed man at the scene.
The shaky body-camera footage was taken during a Jan. 18 call that ended with Officer Philip Brailsford fatally shooting Daniel Shaver of Granbury, Texas, in Mesa.
Brailsford has pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder in Shaver's death.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers ordered portions of the video released after Shaver's widow and news organizations called for it to be unsealed as a way to hold police accountable and serve the public interest.
However, the order bars the public release of the face-to-face encounter between officers and Shaver until Brailsford's case is resolved.
Investigators said in police records and in court that the video shows Shaver on the ground outside his room as he is ordered to crawl toward officers and tearfully pleads with them not to kill him. Officers at the scene say they believed Shaver was reaching for a gun.
No weapons were recovered from Shaver's body. Investigators found two pellet rifles in the hotel room that were later determined to be part of his pest-control job.
Brailsford was later fired for violations of departmental policies.
The video shows Brailsford and other officers getting into a hotel elevator, listening to a sergeant voice a plan for getting Shaver and a woman out of the room, and waiting for several minutes as their calls for the pair to come out went unanswered.
"Listen to my instructions or it's going to become very uncomfortable for you," one of the officers shouted.
Officers took cover in doorways as they waited for a response. Brailsford and another rifle-carrying officer at one point crouched down on their knees as they pointed their guns down the hallway.
The edited version of Brailsford's video ends when someone walks out of the room.
Video taken by another officer ends with an upset woman being taken from the hotel to wait on a bench.
Brailsford, prosecutors and Shaver's parents have argued that the video shouldn't be released to protect Brailsford's right to a fair trial.
Police shooting videos have become the focal point of protests around the country. Chicago officials fought for more than a year to withhold a video showing a teenager getting shot by a police officer, and the court-ordered release of the footage prompted heated protests against Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
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As HTC nears a major announcement about its future on Thursday, Bloomberg today published a report claiming that Google is closing in on a deal to acquire “assets” from the company. HTC is reportedly planning to hold a town hall meeting at its headquarters on Thursday, according to VentureBeat’s Evan Blass. If that’s true, this deal could very well already be done, leaving Google and HTC to finalize everything before making their agreement public tomorrow.
Bloomberg’s report doesn’t get us any closer to knowing exactly what parts of HTC’s business that Google will be buying, nor how much money it’s spending to make this happen. A source told Blass that Google is focused on the company’s hardware engineering assets, which would potentially allow the HTC brand to carry on as part of the Vive/virtual reality business. But it also remains very possible that Google will absorb the entire brand and a good number of HTC employees in a more thorough buyout rather than being selective.
[2] According to this person, the companies have finalized a deal wherein GOOG will acquire certain HW eng assets, but HTC retains its brand — Evan Blass (@evleaks) September 20, 2017
Neither company has denied that a potential acquisition is in the works in the weeks since this rumor surfaced. Each has only given the standard corporate response of refusing to comment on rumors or speculation.
In a continuation of a partnership that began with last year’s Pixel smartphones, HTC and Google are currently working towards the launch of the Pixel 2, expected to debut on October 4th. But this time, a different company — LG — is manufacturing the larger-sized phone.
HTC announced that it will temporarily halt trading of its shares on the Taiwan stock exchange tomorrow pending the release of “material information,” which means significant news is coming.
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Labour supporter Terence Smith has been voted in as mayor of Goole, in east Yorkshire, on a 12-month term
At the age of 19, Terence Smith has become the UK’s youngest mayor. He was elected last year as a councillor for Goole’s north-east ward for a four-year term and was appointed by councillors as the deputy mayor.
Britain's youngest deputy mayor: 'All I can do is my best' Read more
But on Thursday night, at the authority’s annual meeting, councillors went one step further and voted Smith, a Labour supporter, as Goole’s mayor for a 12-month term. Goole council, created in 1982, covers about 2,200 acres, with a population of some 18,500 people. It is part of the larger East Riding of Yorkshire council.
As well as attending events in Goole and surrounding areas on behalf of the council, the A-level student at York college plans to become a young people’s champion to get them more involved in the community and the council’s activities. Smith told the Guardian last year that he was considering a career in politics, at either a local or national level.
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Summer nights: The Watsons Bay Boutique Hotel is one of many options for summer outings. Photo: Supplied
Staying in town over the Christmas break? Here's a list of some of the restaurants, cafes and bars that will stay open between December 24 and 30.
Metro
Ananas Bar and Brasserie 18 Argyle Street, The Rocks, 9259 5668. Closed Christmas Day.
The Apollo 44 Macleay Street, 8354 0888, Sydney. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Yabby and crab linguine from Watsons Bay Boutique Hotel. Photo: Jennifer Soo
Burger Project Shop 11.06 World Square, 644 George Street, Sydney. Closed Christmas Day.
Cafe Nice 2 Phillip Street, Circular Quay, 8248 9600. Closed Christmas Day, Boxing Day and December 28.
Cafe Sydney 5th Floor, Customs House, Alfred Street, Circular Quay, 9251 8683. Closed Boxing Day lunch, but open for dinner.
China Doll 6 Cowper Wharf Road, Woolloomooloo, 9380 6744. Closed Christmas Day.
The Cut Bar and Grill 16 Argyle Street, The Rocks, 9259 5695. Closed Christmas Day.
Gowings Bar and Grill QT Hotel, 49 Market Street, Sydney, 8262 0062.
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Kazbah The Promenade Harbourside, Darling Harbour, 9555 7067. Closed Christmas Day dinner and Boxing Day dinner.
Mejico 105 Pitt Street, Sydney, 9230 0119. Closed December 24 to December 28.
Rockpool 11 Bridge Street, Sydney, 9252 1888. Closed Christmas Day, Boxing Day and December 28.
Sake Bar and Restaurant 12 Argyle Street, The Rocks, 9259 5656. Closed Christmas Day.
Watsons Bay Boutique Hotel 1 Military Road (corner of Marine Parade), Watsons Bay, 9337 5444.
Bars
The Brewery Bar 160 Bourke Road, Alexandria, 9669 3600. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Frankie's Pizza 50 Hunter Street, Sydney. Closed Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Icebergs 1 Notts Avenue, Bondi Beach, 9365 9000. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
The Owl House 97 Crown Street, Darlinghurst, 9357 5060. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
North
Mamak Shop P9 1-5 Railway Street, Chatswood, 9411 4411; also at 15 Goulburn Street, Haymarket, 9211 1668.
Ormeggio at the Spit D'Albora Marinas, The Spit, Mosman, 9969 4088. Closed Boxing Day and December 29.
Sakana-Ya 336 Pacific Highway, Crows Nest, 9438 1468. Closed Christmas Day until December 28.
Via Alta 197 High Street, Willoughby, 9958 1110. Closed Boxing Day.
Waqu 308 Pacific Highway, Crows Nest, 9906 7736. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
East
10 William St 10 William Street, Paddington, 9360 3310. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Catalina Lyne Park, New South Head Road, Rose Bay, 9371 0555.
Chiswick 65 Ocean Street, Woollahra, 8388 8688. Closed Christmas Day.
Cho Cho San 73 Macleay Street, Potts Point, 9331 6601. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Coogee Pavilion 169 Dolphin Street, Coogee, 9240 3000. Closed Christmas Day.
Fratelli Paradiso 14-16 Challis Avenue, Potts Point, 9357 1744. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Ms G's 155 Victoria Street, Potts Point, 9240 3000. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Inner west
4Fourteen 414 Bourke Street, Surry Hills, 9331 5399. Closed December 22 to December 26.
Abhi's Indian 163 Concord Road, North Strathfield, 9743 3061. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Adriano Zumbo Patissier 114 Terry Street, Rozelle. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
The Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay 123 Ferry Road, Glebe, 9518 9011. Closed Boxing Day and December 29.
Brewtown Newtown 6-8 O'Connell Street, Newtown, 9519 2920. Closed Christmas Day, Boxing Day and December 27.
Efendy 79 Elliott Street, Balmain, 9810 5466.
Fratelli Fresh 52 Mitchell Road, Alexandria, 8399 4777. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Spice I Am 90 Wentworth Avenue, Surry Hills, 9280 0928. Closed Christmas Day.
Phoenix Level 5, Rhodes Shopping Center 1 Rider Boulevarde, Rhodes, 9739 6628. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Outer west
Green Peppercorn 1 Hamilton Road, Fairfield, 9724 7842. Closed Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Restaurant 317 317 Church Street, Parramatta, 1300 317 317. Closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
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This is Leap Day, Feb. 29, and the first Gratitude Monday and time to ask, when is the last time you actually showed appreciation to your clients — and meant it? As legendary coach John Wooden once said, “Although thanks is a rather simple one-syllable word that too often is used without true feeling, when used with sincerity no collection of words can be more meaningful or expressive.”
With marketing expenses rising these days, businesses are under a great deal of pressure to get their marketing right, the first time. Gratitude Marketing is your long-term solution. It helps you engage and connect with your clients.
This will enable your business to grow in a deliberate and measurable way and allow you to better target and select clients with whom you want to work. It will position you to attract clients, not pursue them. This is not any single event but rather a consistent, sound way of doing business to increase client retention, increase referrals and increase revenues.
Here are four reasons why it’s so important to express gratitude in business:
When clients experience kindness and generosity from your business, it makes them want to support you by way of cultivating referrals. What your clients say about you, your company, and the services you offer is ultimately more credible than anything you could say yourself.
The cost of acquiring a new client is high. It’s a lot cheaper to retain than to acquire clients. Gratitude Marketing is simply a way to utilize strategies to extend existing relationships. By digging deeper and nurturing your relationships with your clients, you’re much more likely to retain them.
The No. 1 asset your business has is your client relationships. When you combine relationship-building ideas with consistent nurturing, you create clients for life.
Giving to others is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Studies reveal that when we help others, we release additional endorphins into our system that build our immune system and give us what researchers call a “helpers high.” If you’ve ever served a meal at a homeless shelter or visited the elderly at a retirement community, you know what a wonderful feeling that is.
Clients want to be regularly reminded that they are important to you. It’s not up to your clients to remember you. It’s your job to constantly and consistently remind them of who you are and reinforce why they have a relationship with you.
Experiences are what clients remember. So, perfect your client experience. You have no idea how this will improve your business. There’s an old saying, “If you want the heart to prompt the mind to do what logic points to, a warm, caring attitude is vital.”
For example, Disney has perfected the consistent client experience. Disney knows that if you enhance the customer experience and do that in a fun sociable way, you create clients for life. They understand this so well that they connect on such a deep level with their customers that they build bridges to the next generation, their customers’ children. Disney realizes that it is far less expensive to retain loyal happy customers than it is to acquire new ones.
The success of your business relies on these happy and loyal clients. They may not always remember what you say, but they will remember how your business makes them feel.
If you want your business to grow and thrive, thank your clients. The appetite for a sincere thank you is unlimited!
Michael Sciortino is a keynote speaker, trainer and founder and CEO of Gratitude Marketing. He is the author of Gratitude Marketing: How You Can Create Clients For Life. For information, go to GratitudeMarketingBook.com.
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In the 2016 draft, the critics say the Leafs fell back into their old ways, and went after Bottom 6’ers.
Apparently, they just picked older kids. Over-agers. Ones the Leafs thought could slot in as Bottom 6’ers in the NHL or in the AHL right away. Big bodies, most of them, and maybe a bit slow. But we’d save a few bucks, and protect all those skilled kids we got last year.
At least, that’s the word I hear from the analysts in the know.
To listen to them, this Leaf draft was pretty disappointing.
I mean, just as one example, take that Russian kid. It was probably worth getting him, but using up a 2nd round pick on him?
Whoa.
Worse yet, the kid was over-age. Way over-age, as in draft + 2. He turns 20 in July.
Not. Good.
Okay, fair enough, he made the Russian men’s league, and put up 12 points in 30 or 40 games or so, which is okay, but he’s no Pavel Bure.
And sure, the kid is big. He’s probably going to end up around 220 pounds. Big kids take more time. We know that.
Also on the plus side, he kicked the tar out of the World Juniors, scored some nice goals, and put on a show with his line-mates.
Fact is though, even if we add all that up, he’s still almost 20 years old. That’s bottom six material. So of course we’re going to be disappointed in that pick.
Even if he did turn out to be Nik Kulemin.
Say what?
Kulemin. Nik Kulemin. That is who we’re talking about, right?
Because the 20 year old Russian kid picked a decade ago was… Nik Kulemin. And just like Yegor Korshkov this year, he was picked by the Leafs in the second round.
And just like Korshkov, Kulemin was a draft+2 over-ager. In fact, they almost have the same birthday… and both got drafted as young wingers playing in the Russian bigs.
Over-Age? Not Over There.
Maybe let’s take a second look at this “over-age” thing.
In North America, we all focus on the CHL and its particular timeline for development. And we all know how Canadian kids are directed, from damn near since birth, to hit certain time slots so they can show their stuff by their age-18 year.
The thing is, the human body and psyche aren’t locked into this pattern. And you know what?
Kids in other countries aren’t locked into this timeline. Sure, some are aiming at the NHL draft window. But for an awful lot of European and Russian kids, their families and their coaches and development processes aren’t.
That is why an awful lot of European and Russian kids only really show up when they’re past their 18th birthday.
I know, I know. I must be wrong because I’ve heard so often that picking over-agers is just targeting bottom six filler — a waste of a pick — and that these “late developers” are rare as unicorns. “Just look at the evidence,” they say. Which all points to how we should pick younger kids.
Like with the Leafs.
Oh, wait:
Nik Kulemin was draft + 2
Leo Komarov was draft + 1
Anton Stralman was draft + 2
Carl Gunnarsson was draft + 2
Viktor Stalberg was draft + 2
Oh, and then there’s Rinat Valiev, draft + 1, as well as Viktor Loov.
Oh, Nikita Soshnikov and Nikita Zaitsev. They weren’t drafted by the NHL at all, ever.
That’s just Leaf players from the last decade. Before that, there was Danny Markov, Modin, Berezin, Borschevsky and Mironov.
Look, the official wisdom about picking older players has a hole in it. A hole roughly the size of Europe.
And one that Thommie Bergman has apparently been long aware of.
Sometimes, even if we’re smart and study the numbers, the things we think turn out to be wrong.
Target The Undervalued… And The Underperforming
Truth is though, we’ve learned some things about draft picks in these recent years. For instance, we’ve learned that a lot of NHL teams under-value smaller players. And that this may, in fact, be really dumb.
Johnny Hockey says hello.
That was a good new idea to learn, because it went against the trend of decades worth of hockey thinking. For example, the Leafs idiotic preference for big, slow guys. So it was nice to see the Leafs draft Mitch Marner last year, and Timashov, and Bracco.
But we’ve learned other things about drafting as well:
Other things being equal, it’s better to draft a young guy than an older one. Even within a draft year, if the stats are equal, you take the younger one.
Also, we now know we should draft more for home runs — pick kids with a high upside — rather than just go for fodder for the Bottom 6 because you can always pick up Bottom 6 players as free agents or as throw-ins in trades. Use your picks to aim high.
We learned that you should draft guys who can skate. The NHL is getting faster and faster, and a defence corps made up of Brute Squad members isn’t such a grand idea. O’Byrne, Oreskovic, Exelby and Aulie say hello.
We’ve also learned that we should probably draft for the Best Player Available (BPA) instead of picking 18 year olds to fill a hole on an NHL roster. No more 18-year-old defencemen shoved into the NHL too soon, okay?
And, on average, I’d agree with each one of these things. Teams should target smaller players when they’re undervalued… and younger ones, all else being equal… and ones with the higher upside… and good skaters… and aim to pick the BPA.
On average, you should do that. On average.
All these things are good pieces of advice.
On average.
But here’s the sting: In an NHL draft, a real smart team may well be looking to go off average. To move off the consensus draft rankings.
Sure, when you pick in the top 5, you probably follow the consensus because the very best of the best players have been analyzed — by 1,000 eyes — in every single way imaginable. There’s going to be pretty strong information there.
But with every pick you move down the draft board, the information gets patchier, the unknowns grow, and the possibilities — the potential for a kid to soar or to crash — widen.
What you really want to find is not some consensus pick — some fairly talented kid who performed fairly well — but a kid who actually has first round talent, but who underperformed somehow, or fell off the scouting radar, or who got undervalued for some reason.
It’s those kids — the undervalued & underperforming, i.e. hockey’s crap-heap — who are precisely the ones you and your scouts most need to dig out.
By now, we’ve all seen how a player can be ranked too low because of the prejudices and blind spots of teams and scouts. Like with smaller players, or — as we explored last Summer — how the Leafs had been [stupidly] opposed to picking European kids [Russians in particular].
But beyond the blind-spots and irrationalities of scouts and managers, there are a whole lot of other reasons why a hockey player can underperform his peers. If a team’s scouts can see those reasons, and believe those kids’ potentials can still be tapped, they’re going to be able to mine veins of talent other teams won’t even see.
For instance, maybe they know that a kid got sick and was underperforming or behind on his development because of that. Take Leaf pick Andreas Johnson, for instance, who was held back by undiagnosed asthma. After that was better managed, his totals soared.
Or the kid whose team is so bad he barely gets to see the other team’s end of the ice. [Not only will this often drag their stats down, they often have to deal with coaches doing dumb things.] [Hi Randy.]
Or the players who simply get buried because a team is deep in talent, or their coach hates them, and so they get barely a sniff of ice time.
Then there are the European and Russian kids having to adjust to North American ice and life. Rinat Valiev effectively lost a year of junior play to chaos as he came over.
And then there are the kids who are physically big, and just not as comfortable and coordinated in their movements as kids who have finished their growth. They’re often facing huge growth spurts in a year when they’re supposed to be looking smooth and finished on ice.
What you want is for your scouts to find these kids — kids who have “underperformed” somehow. The more the better, actually.
Sure, it’s great on draft day when a kid ranked #49 “falls” to you at #57. That’s what most of us watching the draft on TV look for.
The chances of that difference turning into a big NHL advantage are almost nil. But when you find a kid whose potential is actually that of a #12 pick — who could become a real top six player — and you pick them up at #87 or #122?
That’s gold, Jerry.
Gold.
***
In reality, there are lots of kids with more potential than they’ve shown, of at least, who have more talent than is captured in the consensus draft ranking. The difficulty is that most of them are lost, and will remain lost.
What a good scout or management team has to do is find the subset of those kids where:
You know what went wrong with their game or their year — why they underperformed, or weren’t well identified by the scouts. Then, if something is wrong, you have to know you can fix it. And ideally, you’d prefer that other teams haven’t spotted this potential. If everyone sees it, their ranking gets pushed up, right?
These are the kids who you stand to gain the most from — the outliers, the gems. These are the ones who form the potential home runs.
But here’s the cold part of that — the slap of a wet fish to the face. If our team is doing a great job of drafting, they will often land players where even we don’t see the value.
Because we’re not privy to what they’re seeing, right? So if they play their cards right, it’ll look to us like the team just made a bad pick.
That’s right: A really good draft pick may look, to those of us not on the inside, like an idiotic decision.
For example, everybody in the NHL now knows to look for smaller players, and not to under-value them too much. So, the list of small players that went in round #1 or #2 this year was enormous. Just take the kids under six feet tall: There was Keller and Jost, Kunin and Steel, Mascherin and Debrincat, Asplund and Dahlen, Girard and Dube, with Fox, Bitten and Abramov coming at the start of the third round. A batch of these kids weighed down around 160 pounds. Not big.
Which means that, suddenly, smaller players aren’t being undervalued nearly as much. The room for a big competitive advantage on this point has been eaten up.
Similarly, much of the advantage of drafting from Europe is now gone. After my complaint last year that the Leafs needed to pay more attention to Finland, this year turned into the Year of the Finn. Much of that advantage was eaten up as well.
But for the Leafs scouting team, the answer to those advantages disappearing is not to simply fall back on the standard draft ranking, and pick the next highest consensus pick, or the kid with the higher PPG.
It’s to take a risk.
Go further out into the water. Go fishing for talent on the basis of new and surprising ways of identifying undervalued kids.
Which is just what the Leafs did.
They took over-agers, because they spied an opening there. The 3 Russians, as we discussed, but also two WHL kids.
And they took Russians also because the NHL still doesn’t weigh the risks and rewards there very well.
They took kids off really bad teams [Like Chebykin, whose 35 points this season came on a team where nobody else had over 23].
They took a kid who got sick, but who also changed position late in his development [Jack Walker].
They took a kid who got buried on a good team [Mattinen, on London].
They took a Russian kid who had a lost year coming to North America [Bobylev, who went from 9 to 67 points this year].
They picked three really big defencemen [and maybe one will learn to skate well enough to turn into a… monster].
The Leafs went fishing.
Thing is, we just didn’t expect them to reel in the ones they did.
Hey Critics: Smarten Up and Just WATCH This Yegor Korshkov Kid, Willya?
Now, rather than go into all the picks, let’s spend a minute just on Korshkov, and see if we can see what the Leafs saw.
First off, Korshkov is best known for leading his Russian WJC teammates to a silver medal, missing gold by an inch to Finland. And he led the Russians in scoring with 8 points in 7 games.
To compare him with a Russian pick of the same age, last year Detroit picked Evgeni Svechnikov at #19. Svechnikov is also a big winger at 6’2” and 200 pounds. Now, the WJC is only one tournament, but in it Svechnikov had 0 points, while Korshkov had 8.
Just sayin’.
Another big Russian winger that Korshkov outshone was Alexander Dergachev, who went to the LA Kings last draft. Dergachev only had 2 points.
When Korshkov went back to Russia, he also led his Junior team to the championship, and led the playoffs in scoring with 19 points in 15 games.
So, the Leaf pick people are crapping on just led all Russian Juniors in scoring at the WJC, and then led them again in scoring during their Memorial Cup equivalent.
Meanwhile, in the same season [and he played 86 games in total last year; a lot of hockey], he also played as a 19-year-old in the KHL. Which means, in Russia, that he got to prop up the bench and watch the veterans [which Soshnikov and most other Russian youngsters go through].
So, in his first 21 KHL games this year, Korshkov only put up three points. But then the coach began shoving a bit more ice time at him [roughly 10-12:00 per game], and Korshkov’s scoring rose accordingly, adding 9 points in his last 20 games.
In fact, while that looks low, it was actually second best for all Russians under-20 in the KHL, and well ahead of highly-touted picks like Dennis Guryanov [the Dallas #12 pick who got 5 points in 47 games], or Alexander Dergachev [2 points in 33 games.]
***
Now for some wider things the Leafs almost assuredly knew about Korshkov.
First off, his size. He’s officially almost 20 years old now, and stands 6’ 4”. But while he’s been shooting up, he doesn’t yet have the weight as he carries just 179 pounds. He needs to add muscle. Once he does, if he can carry it, skate with it and use it, he’ll be much more of a player than he is now.
Which is why you need to hear about his dad [Like Timashov’s dad last year, the wrestler].
Korshkov’s dad is named Alexei, and Alexei Korshkov played defence for Russian teams for 18 years.
Anyway, the old man stood 6’ 5” and weighed 247 pounds. He’s a monster.
Watch him in this fight. The guy he’s beating on is 205 pounds:
That’s the old man.
And what I’m saying is, that if young Yegor adds even half that weight as he fills out, he’s going to be a 6’4” and 220 pound power winger.
And wait ’til you see the soft hands on this kid.
First though, the not-so-soft hands of Korshkov Jr. Here he is at age 19 against Sami Lepisto:
Second, beyond size, there are other reasons to believe that Korshkov’s development was delayed. That thing about where you grew up, and then have to move to play better hockey? Well, Korshkov’s dad ended his career playing in Kazakhstan, so young Yegor grew up learning hockey and playing there from age 8 to 16.
Which was fine, but it’s tough to get into certain competitions from there, and your learning curve isn’t ideal. For instance, at age 15, young Korshkov had to play against grown men, and on a really bad team — one that got outscored 297 to 98 over the season. He was third highest scorer on the team, but ran a -44. Maybe not the best learning environment for Korshkov compared to other kids in bigger cities.
Anyway, Korshkov moved the next year to play for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl’s system, and he tore it up. Thing is though, the year after was his draft year already, and he just plain wasn’t ready.
Growing up big in Kazakhstan, you maybe end up a “late bloomer.”
Third, in terms of how Korshkov plays today, those who have seen him mention how he’s strong on his skates, how he’s training to improve his explosiveness, is a good stick-handler, can win board battles and cycle, plays smart, and has a good hockey IQ. On the downside, they all mention that 179 pounds is too lean, and he needs to add weight.
But, just like with Soshnikov, you really do need to see him in action. When they say he handles the puck, they mean it. This kid is a power winger at age 19.
But just WATCH this winning goal he scored at the World Juniors against the US. From 1:15 on:
Now, tell me how a 6’ 4” winger who can do that isn’t worth at least thinking about?
Those are JVR’esque moves.
So sure, he’s older than most draft picks, and he’s bigger.
But I’m not convinced Korshkov is some hulking, slow-moving, slow-thinking Bottom 6’er we drafted as cheap filler.
***
P.S. Remember That Russian 5 Thing?
Remember last year, when Soshnikov played for a team where Kozlov, Namestnikov and Kudashov all had ties to Shanahan and Hunter?
This year, Korshkov’s head coach and assistant coach were, once again… Kudashov and Namestnikov.
And how are we scoring on our Russian 5 project? Well, the Leafs just added three more Russians — Korshkov, Bobylov, Chebykin — to Zaitsev and Soshnikov, who came to Toronto as free agents. Added to last year’s picks, Dzierkals and Timashov [both ex-Soviet Union] and Korostelev, and Valiev from the year before. Of course, we already had Komarov [ex-Soviet Union] to show them the ropes.
The Leaf Russian 5.
Now with 100% more Korshkov.
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Two months ago, I started reading The Sound & The Fury by William Faulkner. And when I say reading, I mean hacking through its dense prose, line by disjointed line, progressing about two pages per day. I'm now about 150 pages in.
But Faulkner's classic tale of a Southern family is a difficult book to end all difficult books. I didn't realize this when I started all those weeks ago. All I knew was that it had somehow wriggled free from my English Lit syllabus, and never came into my orbit since then.
My progress has, however, been massively helped by a new edition from the Folio Society, which sees the first part of the book laid out in 14 different colors that represent different time zones in the narrative.
I have a love-hate relationship with difficult books. Infinite Jest I love, despite – or perhaps because of – David Foster Wallace's end notes upon end notes, his meandering digressions, his interminable descriptions of tennis games.
Ulysses, on the other hand, not so much. I think I made it through about 50 pages through James Joyce's masterpiece before chucking it across the room.
Sometimes love turns into hate. Reading the first volume of In Search Of Lost Time, I remember giving Marcel Proust a spontaneous standing ovation for the way he captured aspects of the human experience. Then I stalled halfway through the third volume. I’ve still got about 700,000 words to read at some point.
The main problem with difficult books is this: They just don’t lend themselves to the 21st century way of life. Proust’s 1.2 million words could be devoured by contemporary fans from the comfort of their art deco armchairs.
Today’s reader has to bat away the awareness of cool new Netflix shows and the insistence of Slack pings or WhatsApp chats. There's always the promise of something new on Facebook. My wife and I recently added a baby to the distracting mix.
Put all that together at the end of a work day and a hectic commute, and the opening 70 pages of The Sound and the Fury don’t stand a chance. A stream-of-consciousness account from Benjy, the first of several narrators and the mentally-challenged son of the Compson family, whose fortunes the book chronicles, it dives back and forth between at least fourteen time zones.
It's a dissonant parade of memories and events, all designed to echo his confusion.
Faulkner himself called The Sound and the Fury 'a real son-of-a-bitch'. Image: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Shifting from the present day, 1928, back to 1898 and on to many other years in between, the book drags the reader this way and that as it pieces together bits of Benjy’s life and the fall in the family’s fortunes — with just a shift from roman type to italics and back again to mark the jumps.
They were designed, Faulkner said, as the "unbroken-surfaced confusion of an idiot which is outwardly a dynamic and logical coherence."
In the second section of the book, narrated by Benjy’s brother Quentin, the action again shifts back and forth between pasts and present. This time Quentin’s more intact mind shifts back to events from his youth in a more controlled fashion. Except when it doesn’t, and he’s compulsively propelled back into recollections from the past.
Faulkner marks these passages with much freer punctuation. The whole thing is dazzling, with seemingly fragmentary sections tied together by recurring themes. It's also the definition of difficult.
Every page demands you stay on your toes. Faulkner himself knew how complex his novel was – he described it to his friend and agent Ben Wasson as “a real son-of-a-bitch” and to his aunt as “the damndest book I ever read” — and he repeatedly expressed the hope it would one day be published in ink of different colors to mark the time periods.
The first section of the book has 14 different time zones identified. Image: folio society
That dream is finally a reality, thanks to a lavish edition from The Folio Society, which sees Benjy’s section reproduced in reds and greens and blues to make some sense of the whole thing.
A bookmark with line numbers and a description of exactly which memory / time period we’re in also helps, as do extensive notes from two Faulkner scholars (some 200 pages worth for around 300 pages of text).
It’s not cheap. The slipcase hardback, bound in blocked cloth can be yours for almost the cost of a Kindle: $87. It’s hefty too, at 10 inches by 6 ¼ inches — not something you’d want to lug around on your commute. But it’s a perfect bedrock for your bookshelf.
Is an annotated version the best way to read The Sound and the Fury for the first time? Not necessarily. It takes away some of the challenge – and reward – of wrestling with the text alone, and it also inadvertently provides spoilers. I found out a major plot line involving Quentin long before I would have worked it out on my own.
Colored text itself, on the other hand, feels like a breakthrough for publishing. It's a playful approach perfectly attuned to our era. Learning in general has already moved away from dusty tomes of monochrome text to brighter, shinier and more interactive methods.
The scholars involved in the Folio edition admit in the introduction that its literary merits and successes are up for discussion, but the new edition undoubtedly offers a more accessible way in to a rewarding read.
In a time of short attention spans and digital distractions, could multi-colored publishing work for other difficult books? Would ' Gravity's Rainbow' be more popular with a rainbow-colored makeover?
Would Proust's interminable sentences be easier to navigate if they switched back and forth from one color to another, allowing the reader a sense of a light at the end of each tunnel?
It's not just tough reads that could benefit from a new look. Maybe George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series could be recast in different hues, with Melisandre's tale a fiery red and Daenerys' a dragon green.
I certainly can't see myself having the time to really do The Sound & the Fury justice without this help any time soon. Working through Faulkner’s layered and allusive prose, line by line at a snail’s pace in a few snatched moments at the end of the day, is a meditative, joyous and colorful experience.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
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A Muslim convert from London, who wrote in his diary how he planned to buy a nine-year-old virgin slave girl after he joined Islamic State, faces jail for terrorism offences.
Patrick Kabele from Willesden, Northwest London, was stopped at Gatwick Airport on his way to Sabiha Gokcen Airport in Istanbul on 20 August 2016, Metropolitan Police revealed in a statement.
The 32-year-old, who wrote in his diary he had a “death wish”, was found guilty of preparation of terrorist acts by a jury sitting at Woolwich Crown Court Tuesday. He was remanded in custody.
Giving evidence during the trial, Mr. Kabele insisted slaves are allowed in Islam.
“In our religion, Islam, it’s OK to have slaves. The prophet had slaves, so I’m talking if I ever possess slaves,” he said. “I’m saying slaves is connected to the religion. It’s an integral part of our religion.”
The former scaffolder, who practised martial arts, also wrote about “seeding some women over here, UK white” and said “I dont kiss anymore” in the diary he stored on his phone.
The Daily Mail reports that the extremist also wrote: “My plan remains the same. It’s only my [attitude] towards women and children, i.e. not giving a f*ck.
“I am talking seeding women. Chinese, Indian, whatever. In Uganda, multiple wives and sh*t on the side.”
He added in one entry: “‘If i ever marry again its gotta be a virgin 9yrs old as what i would want. The younger & experienced [sic] the better.
“I wouldnt rule out a matron to protect my self from the sun till i have the funds for a young virgin. I dont kiss anymore.”
In another entry, he wrote: “If i ever possess slaves i wont free them except maybe on my death bed fisabillah. With priority given to those who become muslim first.”
Then, on 5 August, Mr. Kabele wrote: “I want to fight on the frontline where there’s the heaviest gunfire/thickest action, I got a death wish but not by my own hand.”
Commander Dean Haydon, MPS Counter Terrorism Command, said in a statement: “Kabele’s intention to join Isis is made very clear in his own notes.
“Due to the good work of officers at the airport, who spotted Kabele and questioned him, as well as the investigation team who pieced the case together, we have prevented someone from travelling to fight for a terrorist group.”
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DATA MINING
“But we do not plant more than 9-10 species.” The forest department is planting fast-growing species to meet demand for fuel-wood and its afforestation targets. “We cannot plant trees like Sal. They grow very slowly and are vulnerable to grazing,” says the senior ministry official quoted earlier. “In contrast, a tree like Acacia grows in two to three years, and fills out the canopy.It can be used for pulpwood and poles. It fixes nitrogen.” In the process, a forest changes: the tree species originally found in it move towards extinction, as do birds and animals dependent on them. Raman Kumar, a project coordinator studying migratory birds with Bangalorebased National Centre for Biological Studies , documented one such example in a paper titled ‘how good are managed forests at conserving native woodpecker communities'.Kumar compared woodpecker species and numbers in four landscapes: natural Sal trees, old and managed Sal, young and managed Sal, and Teak plantations. He chose woodpeckers as they are “reliable indicators of forest health and avian biodiversity”. Natural sal had the highest woodpecker density, teak plantation the lowest. Yet, since 1992, the push is on plantations.This is partly due to programmes like the National Afforestation Programme , and partly due to private-sector plantations and funding from international donors like the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). In their paper, Davidar and others estimate that India is adding 15,400 sq km of plantations every year—about 15 times the overall increase in forest cover in the latest survey.These are fastgrowing, short-rotation species like Eucalyptus, Acacia and Rubber. “If you travel through Punjab, you will see large tree plantations to meet demand for plywood, etc,” says a former FSI researcher, not wanting to be named. “Most are from the private sector. There are similar plantations around Ooty and Nagpur.”India's forest cover is changing. One, forests are becoming utilitarian. Two, the area under plantations is increasing. Three, natural, non-forest ecosystems, like the Banni grasslands of Kutch and the Shola forests of the Western Ghats, are changing into wooded forests due to the afforestation drive. Four, protected areas are degrading.“Dense forests have become moderately dense, which have, in turn, become open forests,” says the ex-FSI researcher. In another paper, Davidar and others say, Tamil Nadu lost about 500 sq km of dense forest between 2001 and 2003, and gained about 1,600 sq km of open forest. However, few of these changes show up in FSI reports, which only report aggregates.They don't measure the respective area under plantations and native forests. Nor do they measure how much afforestation comprises native species and how much non-native species. “We also don't know if forests are fragmenting,” says Bhargav. “How many are over, say, 5,000 sq km, 3,000-5,000 sq km, and so on?” This is important because a forest of 5,000 sq km is not the same as 10 forests of 500 sq km each. As a forest shrinks, it houses fewer large animals and gives rise to fewer and smaller rivers.
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A man that fancies women with blond hair may announce such almost anywhere. Established scientists frequently work thinly veiled references to the proverbial sexiness of blondes into their talks, to loosen them up, to render the seminar or lecture personal and memorable. On the other hand, I have never seen anybody but Quentin Tarantino put their foot fetish into their work; certainly I do not know of any politician or scientist “putting their or others’ feet in their mouth” this way.
Being into blondes is accepted – it makes you “one of the blokes”, a good pal. If you are into high heels however, things become immediately more icky, kinky, even pervert to some. This is strange when considering the demographics, since foot fetishism is spread widely and advertisers seem to know this well. How can we understand all this? I will try to clarify the issues via obviating the naturalness of such sexual orientations from an evolutionary perspective, but most of you will not like it, especially not if you are into blondes. Since I like to provoke in order to open eyes, lets play the Gaga of science (if that is what this means).
Hair colored blond, her feet jammed into sado-maso heels: optimizing attractiveness from head to toes – yes I put this here to get the most clicks ever – that’s what the whole title is about - mhuahahahaha!
Let me give you a straight forward “derivation” of foot fetishism in sex, sorry, six easy steps, some following from each other, but mostly working in parallel (after that I will relate it to blond issues):
1) When a woman reaches sexual maturity during puberty, her legs grow quite fast. Thus, long legs are one of the many aspects that almost universally attract men. Long legs signal the onset of childbearing age.
2) Short skirts, black pantyhose, and especially high heels are all there to optically lengthen the legs. Stiletto heels, long legs, femininity, sex, these are strongly associated for all of us who have been brought up with television and suchlike media.
3) Now add a little more male/female biology, one being able to perform reproductively several times a day, the other having to at least spend nine months and partially her own health. Obviously, male primates can spread their sperm more effectively by inseminating many easy targets instead of chasing around hard to get alpha females just to be rejected. Especially for males, sex is aggression. Testosterone makes us aggressive. Rape fantasies are very common among men, even if they do not admit it. High heels make you walk in a way – well – how can I say this – they say it stresses or “pronounces” your hips and what not, but recent results indicate that this is not quite effective as long as the males do not directly see the shoes, so lets be serious here: High heels impair and it simply looks easier to chase down – the male brain understands this regardless of whether you know or agree. The shoes render the female more vulnerable, an easy and safe target to mate.
4) I make this another separate item, as it is still more human biology rather than cultural: Sex always naturally (to humans) implies hierarchy, domination and submission – the old hair pulling always works (soft, dude, softly I say!). One party forces the other, and I do not care about how much you are in denial about any of this, or how much you have it personally hidden under a pile of make believe like the masochist who obeys his dominatrix.
4.5 or 3 again? Must be six in total or it needs changing the lame joke above) Again, these numbered items overlap a lot: she is already half conquered, slowed down by her gait in those shoes and all tied down by her “”. We males naturally understand strappy heels, shackles, chokers; ankle chains are widely regarded as sexy. Straps and tying down and all this is one associative bundle.
Quentin Tarantino having dessert.
5) Now add more human culture: Sex associates with dirty, embarrassing, and forbidden, and as we just saw, aggression and establishing hierarchical positions. This is where the focus on long legs and high heel shoes can quickly turn into one of the many forms of pure foot fetish, nylon socks fetish, and so on. Feet and shoes are down there; they are usually dirty, embarrassing
and forbidden. In Thailand, you go to jail for depicting the King with a foot near him. Having somebody’s boot above your head is universally understood as your submission. Now you could object that it would be natural only if the male had the upper hand. But here comes the weirdness of human culture into play: Submission is especially embarrassing to us males. Having a shoe in your face is as embarrassing as being caught having any sort of sex, be it masturbating. It is a forbidden, dirty little fruit. Dirty feeling, embarrassment, dominance/submission, sex; these are strongly associated. A foot or shoe fetish is basically the ideal mix.
6) Feet are known to smell, not just because they are dirty, although this is of course all mixed up in our irrational human minds, so the smell and the “dirty deed” still work in synergy. Feet have the same apocrine sweat glands that genitalia have. For some reason, the feet’s sweat glands produce sexually attractive smells (pheromones). Perhaps this evolved in order to track females when humans were rare – a wild guess this, I admit, I have also no idea about whether all primates show this feature. Anyway, a male smelling a female’s shoes and getting excited is a perfectly understandable, natural thing.
BTW, FYI: Embarrassment drives a fetish into specialization; this holds the same also for females (starting with spreading “embarrassingly” wide during foreplay for example). What one gets used to over time is replaced by yet still more embarrassing related objects (ankles, soles, toes, socks, shoes) and practices (caressing, sniffing, licking, being pressed down by, being penetrated by, being forced to talk about it, …) in all sorts of combinations. So the fetish usually explores and very strange fetishes develop; with regards to foot fetishism there are for instance dangling, pedal pumping, and crushing (look them up on the net but better not while at work).
So let us summarize: However the details maybe, fancying smelly high heel shoes naturally derives from the fact that sexually mature (!) females correlate with long legs and all that. So, whatever you may blame them kinky footsy lovers for, pedophilia it is certainly not.
And this brings us to blondes. Fancying blonde hair - does that have an equally natural derivation? Well, it has, but sadly it is involving only the most negative aspect of all of the above, and that is the fact that males are aggressive and can spread their sperm more easily with easy targets. Blond hair associates with babies; nobody is more vulnerable than defenseless babies. This has been put in politically more correct formulations, like that babies correlate with cuteness and cuteness correlates with easy target, but babies are of course not just cute for no reason. Our perceiving cuteness, it being a quale at all, has evolved to protect our offspring. However they spin it, one thing is obvious: It correlates directly with sexually immature humans!
The blond or the smelly end? Quentin in “Inglorious Basterds” can’t be bothered to attend to the immature blond end of the deal and goes straight for the side with matured Camembert flavor.
I know you will mostly object to this, but I, a sober mind drunk on science, will nevertheless put it in these sharp and provoking terms, because science can emancipate, and today I would like to let it help emancipating the usually still as pervert child molesters stigmatized foot/shoe/leg/pantyhose/toes whatever fetishists: If anybody here relates to pedophilia, it is not them, as their preference is for mature females, even emancipated ones “wearing the boots”. It is those who like blonde hair that desire immature aspects, and who are, if we want to sink to this level of discourse at all, to be thrown together into one pot with pedophilia first.
(Disclaimer: This article is designed to provoke thinking and discussing about a taboo topic, which is generally greatly facilitated by a sober, scientific perspective. In the absence of hard evidence, “Just-so stories” inspired by our incomplete knowledge of evolution, which at times has gone rampant in the context of evolutionary psychology, should never be taken as more than inspired hypotheses. I nowhere claim that my thoughts, which admittedly are here about an issue that involves fields outside of my expertise if the latter is narrowly defined, can substitute for proper research, which might or might not, for instance, result in that from a culturally accepted sexual norm more deviant persons may in general statistically correlate with any particular form of norm violation, the latter being for example pedophilia. Any form of rape is a grave topic, so I like this disclaimer to be taken seriously.)
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The teams have been working on their new cars for months and they will start to appear at the end of January. The testing starts in the first week of February and the first race is on 17 March.
The season has a lot to live up to after the thrills and spills of 2012, in which seven different drivers won the first seven races for the first time and the title went down to the final grand prix, decided by just three points between two of the finest drivers in history, with German Sebastian Vettel emerging champion and Spain's Fernando Alonso second.
With the rules virtually unchanged, making it harder than ever to find an advantage, 2013 could be just as close. Let's take a look at what's in store for the year ahead.
Red Bull
Three-time world champion Sebastian Vettel appears to have an unquenchable desire for success
After three consecutive drivers' and constructors' championships with Vettel, and an unchanged driver line-up completed by Mark Webber, Red Bull remain the team to beat.
Vettel was able to overturn what had been a 40-odd point advantage held by Ferrari's Fernando Alonso at mid-season because of a major step forward on the car from the Singapore Grand Prix.
And while Red Bull's design chief Adrian Newey has admitted that the lack of rule changes makes it "increasingly difficult" to find an advantage, if anyone can, it will be him.
Red Bull's titles have been achieved thanks to an incredible level of competitive intensity, but can they keep that up for a fourth consecutive season?
The same goes for Vettel himself. He seems to have an unquenchable desire for success and his love of statistics means he almost certainly has his heart set on becoming only the second man to take five titles in a row after compatriot Michael Schumacher - which would require him to win in 2013 and 2014.
But the very fact that only Schumacher has done that before proves how hard it is, not just to keep up the technical excellence but to maintain the required motivation, too.
Ferrari
Championship runner-up Fernando Alonso is committed to Ferrari for four more years
For Ferrari, the big questions heading into 2013 all surround the team. Can they finally make a car good enough to challenge for wins on pure performance, rather than relying on circumstances and the relentless talent of Alonso?
Last year's F2012 car was not as bad as some made out - or at least it wasn't once it had had its update for the start of the European season - but it was never close to the McLaren or the Red Bull on outright pace.
As a result, towards the end of the season, there were perhaps the first very small hints of a slight frustration creeping into Alonso's relationship with the team.
The Spaniard has come very close to winning two of the last three titles, despite having an inferior car, and he has on paper committed to Ferrari until the end of 2016.
But if 2013 turns into another year struggling against the odds, how much will that affect the bond between him and Ferrari?
Another key feature of 2013 will be Felipe Massa's form. Will he continue at the high level he reached in the final third of last year or slump back to where he was at the start of 2012?
McLaren
McLaren will be able to concentrate on satisfying one driving style rather than two
How McLaren cope without Lewis Hamilton will be one of the major themes of 2013.
On the face of it, it should not be too big a loss - statistically, Jenson Button actually outscored Hamilton in their three years as team-mates and won only two fewer races.
But this is yet another example of statistics being unreliable gauges of F1 reality.
On pure pace, there is no doubt who was the faster driver and Hamilton's stats are skewed by his difficult 2011 season, when he came close to personal meltdown, and the team's poor reliability and operational record in 2012, which cost him at least three victories. Bad luck - in terms of collisions with other drivers for which he was blameless - deprived him of another.
In that context, it was not hard to find someone in F1 towards the end of the year predicting a difficult year for McLaren in 2013.
The theory went as follows: Take out Hamilton's fantastic qualifying pace, knock a place or two off Button's average grid position because Hamilton will not be there to keep him on his toes, and stick new driver Sergio Perez four or five places behind Button, and you go from the two McLarens qualifying on the front row and in the top six, to the top eight and somewhere around 13th. And that's assuming the same quality of car.
It could, though, go completely the other way. Button's main flaw is that while he is close to unbeatable in a car with which he is happy, he often struggles when the car is not to his liking.
He and Hamilton have completely different driving styles and, rather than satisfy both, McLaren can now pursue one development direction that favours Button. If that works, Button could be a contender all season.
The big unknown is Perez. Not everyone in F1 is convinced that he was the best possible choice in terms of performance, that finance had nothing to do with McLaren choosing him or that he is ultimately good enough.
The pressure is truly on the Mexican to prove them wrong.
Mercedes
Mercedes will be worth watching in 2013 after Lewis Hamilton's arrival
Lewis Hamilton's arrival presages a fascinating period at Mercedes, who need to dramatically improve the performance of their car.
Publicly, Hamilton has done his best to play down expectations and explain that he realises there is a lot of work to do. But privately, while he does not expect to challenge for the championship, he does think he will be able to win races in 2013.
How will he cope if that is not the case? Will a £19m ($31m) salary be enough to enable him to accept this as a work in progress - or will he do what he did at McLaren when the car was not competitive, and become moody and withdrawn?
The team realise that the time has come to up their game, but can they realistically close a second-a-lap gap to the likes of Red Bull over the winter or have Mercedes effectively written off 2013 and taken aim at the regulation changes of 2014?
The internal battle between the drivers will provide a further fascinating plotline.
Most expect Hamilton to comfortably have the beating of Nico Rosberg, but the German will realise his career standing is on the line. He is an intelligent man and will be doing everything in his power to turn the team towards him. How will Hamilton respond?
They might not be title contenders, but Mercedes will be well worth watching in 2013.
Lotus
The signs are looking good for Lotus as they aim to build on a successful 2012
Lotus's 2012 cannot be considered anything other than a success: the car was quick after a couple of shaky seasons and the gamble on Kimi Raikkonen's return paid off.
But it could have been even better.
There are those in the team who feel they should have won more races and even challenged for the title - would have done, in fact, if they had had their former driver Alonso in the car.
Raikkonen showed remarkable consistency throughout the year, but his qualifying left a lot to be desired in the first half of the season.
And while Romain Grosjean showed great pace, he was wild and horrendously error-prone.
The foundations, though, are there for a strong 2013. If the team can develop the 2012 car effectively, Raikkonen can qualify more consistently and Grosjean can cut out the errors, the team could challenge at the front all year.
The rest
Valtteri Bottas has taken Bruno Senna's seat at Williams for next season
There are some interesting sub-plots further down the grid.
There was the sense in 2012 that Sauber had produced a fantastic car out of which the team and their drivers rarely extracted the best.
If the team can develop it effectively and keep it at more or less the same comparative level, will the arrival of the highly promising Nico Hulkenberg mean a step forward in terms of pace and consistency? Between the lines, it seems the team believe so.
Hulkenberg finished 2012 very strongly indeed with Force India, firmly putting in the shade Scot Paul di Resta, who had edged their battle in the first half of the season. Can Di Resta recover from the disappointment of not being picked up by a top team and get himself back on track?
Williams did not score anywhere near as many points as they should have done given the performance of their car. They won a race for the first time in eight years but finished only eighth in the constructors' championship, behind two teams who did not.
Pastor Maldonado was quick but error-prone and Bruno Senna's qualifying performances were lacklustre.
With another season under his belt, and a winter to reflect on becoming a grand prix winner, can Maldonado deliver his occasionally electrifying pace more consistently without the red-mist moments that wrecked his 2012?
And will Finn Valtteri Bottas, who has replaced Bruno Senna at Williams, deliver on a potential that seems so rich?
At Toro Rosso, will either Daniel Ricciardo or Jean-Eric Vergne do enough to earn a call-up to the senior Red Bull team or be jettisoned in favour of the next generation?
And, now heading into their fourth year in the sport, can either Caterham or Marussia bridge the still-significant gap between them and the back of the midfield group?
It promises to be another fascinating year.
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A cannabis plant in every yard?
That could be the slogan for Dana Larsen’s Overgrow Canada pot-seed campaign.
The marijuana advocate led a project this year to give away 5 million cannabis seeds this year; last year he and his colleagues gave away 2.5 million.
“We’re encouraging people to plant them openly,” he said Sunday. “The goal is to normalize cannabis growing.”
It’s a continuation of a civil disobedience campaign, following on from the growth of bong shops and dispensaries in many communities across Canada.
One of his contacts spotted a pair of cannabis plants growing in the flower beds around Vancouver city hall. That was a great thing to see, he said.
“I want to be in a country where growing a plant in your front is a common thing,” he said.
Cannabis plants growing wild aren’t any more dangerous than other plants he pointed out.
“I look at my yard, there’s morning glory taking over — it’s actually hallucinogenic,” he said. “So don’t feel there’s any concern about that. There’s no harm being near a cannabis plant.”
“Munching on a cannabis bud, nothing’s going to happen at all. It’s not actually nice to chew on, it’s not like a bright red berry that grows everywhere and is toxic to kids.”
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ABUJA, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Nigeria has a third confirmed case of Ebola disease in the oil hub of Port Harcourt, bringing the country’s total confirmed infections to 16, with around 200 people under surveillance, the health minister said on Monday.
A doctor in Port Harcourt died last week after treating a contact of the Liberian-American man who was the first recorded case of the virus in Africa’s most populous country. That raised alarm that Ebola, which looked on the verge of being contained in the commercial capital, Lagos, may flare up again elsewhere.
Patrick Sawyer, the first case, came in from Liberia, then collapsed at Lagos airport on July 20.
The shift to Port Harcourt shows how easily containment efforts can be undermined. Nigeria’s government acted quickly at the end of July, setting up an isolation ward and monitoring contacts closely. But one of Sawyer’s contacts in Lagos avoided quarantine and travelled east to Port Harcourt.
He has since recovered from the disease, but he infected the doctor who treated him, who then himself died of Ebola. A third case in the oil city was a female patient in the same hospital as the doctor and caught the disease from him.
Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said in a press conference that 72 people in Lagos, a city of 21 million people, were still under surveillance.
“Two other contacts of the late Port Harcourt doctor, one of the doctors who managed him and a pharmacy technician working in the doctor’s hospital, are symptomatic and have been admitted to the isolation ward in Rivers,” Chukwu said, although he added that preliminary tests had been negative for Ebola.
The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is the world’s worst ever. It has killed at least 1,550 people, and the World Health Organisation says it could infect 20,000 more. (Reporting by Camillus Eboh; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Larry King)
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Back in the public fray at a rally in Virginia, the former president delivered his views on the current political climate in his strongest terms yet
It was the night his supporters waited nine long months for. Barack Obama returned to the fray on Thursday with a fervent denunciation of Donald Trump in all but name, condemning the politics of division and rekindling the politics of hope.
The former US president earned deafening cheers at a rally ostensibly for the Democratic candidate in a gubernatorial election in Virginia. In championing Ralph Northam’s cause, Obama expressed his views on the state of the nation in the strongest terms since the inauguration of his successor and antithesis.
“You’ll notice I haven’t been commenting a lot on politics lately,” Obama told thousands of supporters in Richmond. “But here’s one thing I know: if you have to win a campaign by dividing people, you’re not going to be able to govern them. You won’t be able to unite them later if that’s how you start.”
Campaigning for fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton last year, Obama hammered Trump regularly during the presidential election but became more circumspect after the Republican’s shock win. He initially expressed a wish to follow the example of George W Bush, who refrained from commentary once he left the White House. He has also trodden carefully to avoid outshining the next generation of would-be Democratic stars.
George W Bush condemns bigotry and lies in coded attack on Trump Read more
Nevertheless, he has taken Trump to task in written statements for efforts to gut his signature healthcare law and reverse his immigration and environmental policies. He has also offered spare, pointed criticisms during public appearances. But on Thursday he returned to full campaign mode in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which elect governors on 7 November.
While not mentioning Trump by name, Obama delivered a withering critique of the president’s time in office. His polished style and elegant, erudite sentences contrasted with the bellicose, scattergun approach of his successor, as did the racial diversity of the crowd who queued for hours to see him.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Obama addressed a crowd at an earlier rally in Newark, New Jersey, on Thursday. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
“Instead of our politics reflecting our values, we’ve got politics infecting our communities,” said Obama, looking relaxed in a tieless blue shirt and suit. “Instead of looking for ways to work together to get things done in a practical way, we’ve got folks who are deliberately trying to make folks angry, to demonise people who have different ideas, to get the base all riled up because it provides a short-term tactical advantage.”
He continued: “The question now, at a time when our politics seem so divided and so angry and so nasty, is whether we can recapture that spirit, whether we support and embrace somebody who wants to bring people together,” Obama said. “Yes, we can.”
The crowd erupted in chants of the winning 2008 slogan, “Yes, we can!”
Virginia became a battleground this summer when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville and a civil rights activist was killed. Trump notoriously said there was blame “on both sides” and deflected attention to whether Confederate statues should be torn down, and whether that would lead to slave owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being toppled too.
The first black president said: “If we’re going to talk about our history then we should do it in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds, not in a way that divides. We shouldn’t use the most painful parts of our history just to score political points. We saw what happened in Charlottesville but we also saw what happened after Charlottesville when the biggest gatherings of all rejected fear and rejected hate and the decency and goodwill of the American people came out.
“That’s how we rise. We don’t rise up by repeating the past. We rise up by learning from the past and listening to each other.”
We should have seen Trump coming | Ta-Nehisi Coates Read more
His voice growing with emotion matched by the crowd, Obama continued: “We can acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson, one of Virginia’s most famous sons, owned and sold slaves – that’s not disputable. And we can also acknowledge that he also wrote those words: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
“And we can recognize that even if our past is not perfect we can honor the constitutional ideals that have allowed us to come this far and to keep moving toward a more perfect union. That’s what America is. That’s who we are.”
For those gathered in the Greater Richmond Convention Center there was excitement and some wistfulness. Amber Wihshi, a 21-year-old African American woman, said: “I’m a little nostalgic. I remember being in eighth grade when Obama was inaugurated. But seeing so many people here shows there are still people fighting for change who don’t want to see America go backwards.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama and Ralph Northam in Richmond, Virginia. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in August, 51% of Americans said they have a favourable opinion of Obama, while 35% had a negative opinion. The same survey found that 36% said they had a positive opinion of Trump and 52% had a negative opinion. The pair are not thought to have spoken to each other since Trump’s inauguration.
Wihshi added: “He’s still our president. You can’t compare the two. The way they handle everything is so different. Barack Obama is the people’s president; Donald Trump encourages hate and tried to divide groups.”
Trump: 'Ask General Kelly' if Obama called after son died in Afghanistan Read more
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, sat at the table next to Trump’s at the 2011 White House correspondents dinner, where Obama gave the billionaire businessman a roasting. “I remember him not enjoying one bit of it,” he said by phone on Thursday. “There is no doubt in my mind that the president has had a fixation on President Obama since then.”
Indeed, Trump, who was a longtime proponent of a false conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the US, appears to be obsessed with assailing the legacy of his predecessor. He pulled the US out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, announced his intention to quit the Paris climate agreement and has threatened to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal – all products of the Obama administration. He has also tried to torpedo the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, turning to executive orders after deadlock in the Republican-controlled Congress.
And this week Trump made one of his most personal attacks yet, claiming that his predecessor did not regularly call families of military service personnel killed in combat – a charge that provoked a furious backlash from former administration officials.
Asked to compare the 44th and 45th presidents, Steele said: “Obama is more cerebral; Trump is more visceral and emotional. If Obama was upset by things he generally kept it to himself; with Trump, every little slight is played over and over on a 100ft screen. They are very different men in how they interact with people and how they deal with problems; Trump creates more problems than most presidents do.”
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Image caption Microsoft says a new world of possibilities for computing may open up
Microsoft is to open up its Xbox Kinect technology to allow amateur software developers to experiment with it.
The company is to release a software development kit in the spring, which will give developers access to the secrets behind the technology.
For now it will only be for personal use, but Microsoft says it will release a commercial version in due course.
Kinect, which turns the player's body into a game controller, has been a big hit since it launched last November.
It has already captured the imagination of the hacker community, which has been demonstrating various uses for the technology, including 3D photography.
Microsoft is hoping that an army of smarter developers will now find more ways to take Kinect to the next level.
"As breakthrough technologies like these reach scale, the resulting creativity and invention will open up a whole new world of possibilities for computing," said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer.
The announcement was made during an open day at Microsoft's research centre near Seattle.
The company is hoping that the success of Kinect, developed by its own scientists, can give it a greater presence in the home entertainment field.
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A few weeks ago, I asked to Reddit for things to do in Turkey.
Reddit, as it so often does, gloriously rose to the occasion. Over forty people joined the discussion, and their advice has greatly shaped the direction of our trip.
I’ve collated their responses, as a gift of thanks to /r/travel, in hopes that it will be useful to the next Redditor making a voyage to Turkey.
The hot air balloons of Cappadocia, by MaxBrand
Dress
pack warm clothing. Something about the cold in Istanbul…it gets in your bones
the temperature lies in Istanbul. Maybe it’s because you are surrounded by water, but the cold is hard to shake here. I have found myself shivering on 70 degree evenings. Bring lots of layering clothes and a rain jacket.
Istanbul
get late-night hookah
take a ferry to the Asian side
Blue Mosque
Hagia Sophia - Check out the wishing column in the near left corner on the first floor and make a wish.
Grand Bazaar
Suleymaniye mosque (arguably more beautiful than Hagia Sofia)
Underground Basilica Cistern - walk all the way to the end to see the giant medusa heads holding up the columns
Tour of Dolambahce Palace
Topkapi Palace has some great views.
plan a day just to ride the ferries up the bosphorus to explore the less traveled areas.
Take the day tours on the islands out to the Black Sea.
If you’re soccer fans, catch a Fenerbahce game.
Taksim is nice for partying and Western shopping
My favorite part of Istanbul is Kadikoy, you might consider staying there for a few days. It’s about a 25 minute ferry from either Eminonu or Karakoy, both close to all the sites.
Food
Definitely try out the baklava, they have so many varieties it blows the mind.
Eat a lot of donner kabop.
eat at Kosebasi
eat baluk ekmek off one of the boats in the Bosphorus - they hang around near the bridges
It’s very easy to pay far, far too much for very mediocre food here.
Take the train to the Eminonu stop in Sultanahmet (area of Istanbul where you’ll find the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia). Cross the bridge and down to your left there is a fish market. Get a grilled fish sandwich; they are amazing.
Drink Raki, if you can stomach it.
Cappadocia (Goreme)
world famous for hot air balloons
The surreal scenery and empty roads make driving around a very pleasant experience and there’s no lack of really fascinating things to go see.
definitely worth spending some time in (maybe 5 days?)
rent a scooter while you’re there to get around
The surreal scenery and empty roads make driving around a very pleasant experience
no lack of really fascinating things to go see
See the underground cities
Considered one of the best places in the world to take a hot air balloon
Arif pansion - a bit of a walk up the hill but if you get a scooter for the time you’re there it’s got some great rooms of varying prices and the best views.
Outside of Istanbul
From Goreme ideally go to Pamukkale, on your way to Ephesus. If you can’t handle the buses any more it’s near Izmir and you can probably fly between the two rather cheaply.
take the sleeper car to Denizli, see Pamukkale, rent a car, and go east
drove the black sea coast to NE Turkey, went into Georgia
Get a bus to Cappadocia, stay in a cave
Go west then to Ephesus - just walking down the stone road to the library is an experience of a lifetime.
Also see Pammukale near Ephesus
The town of selcuk next to ephesus. It’s a beautiful area and is not overly touristy. Worth spending a day or two relaxing. Also a really nice museum you could spend a lot of time in.
Check out Turkey travel planner website but their bus system is world class and so cheap.
travel to Mount Nemrut and Sanliurfa. Bring really warm clothes and climb it for sunrise wow.
If you’re at all into hiking, do the first three day stretch of the Lycian way
splurge a bit for a night or two this place - the closest approximation to paradise I have ever seen.
Mardin, a beautiful town to wander around,
Hasenkeyf, a sparsely populated ancient city overlooking the Tigris. definitely not to be missed if you’re in the area.
There really isn’t anything to see at Troy.
Eastern Turkey: check out Dogubeyazit and Mardin, Mt. Ararat
Take a night bus to Goreme from Istanbul. Spend a couple days sightseeing there. Some absolutely amazing stuff there.
Here is the approximate route I followed : about 3.5K kilometers, and saw some incredible places. I would particularily recommend (following the order in which I saw them): Aspendos - Perga - Phaselis - Pamukkale - Pergamum
Not to Do
I found Mount Nemrut impressive, but the tourist ripoff vultures that populate the area really soured the experience: all in all it wasn’t worth the trip out.
the larger cities in eastern Turkey weren’t very interesting - they’re mostly ugly and unless you have special interest in the history of the region there’s not much to see.
Thank you to bryanplayspiano, brasscaribou, skz, MaxBrand, Pantadarell, whywontyoowork, innocuous_nub, seambyseam and many others.
If you enjoyed this post you may want to follow me on Twitter.
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Not long before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, I tried to enter my university's cafeteria for lunch. A bunch of lefty students—all dressed in black—had sprawled across the floor. They were holding a "die-in" to protest the preemptive strike.
I didn't support the war, but this was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. Did these kids really think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would notice their brave efforts to keep me away from my cheeseburger? Their theatrics seemed more about ego and attention than practical, pragmatic politics. How many of them had written to their local representatives? How many had bothered to vote?
In February of 2003, millions of people worldwide made a much bigger statement by marching against the war, and the media took notice, but—like my cafeteria comrades—they failed to sway Bush's mind. As an impressionable 20-year-old, I learned a bitter lesson: Making your voice heard doesn't often make a difference to those in power.
Getty Images
Over the next five years as a reporter in D.C., I covered too many protests and counter-protests to keep track of. I hated every one, due to all of the sanctimonious diehards yelling at one another while accomplishing zilch for their respective causes. Marching seemed more like a cultish ritual—primal screams, mindless incantations—than a means by which to change the world on a policy-by-policy basis. Chanting, I concluded, was a substitute for the ability to think; you repeat words along with a crowd only if you lack an individual mind to come up with your own words. All of the lemmings just push each other further and further towards their respective extremes. Why couldn't these knee-jerk wingnuts all shut up, go have a beer, and enjoy their brief time on Earth?
"It's like your whole philosophy is 'don't bother saying anything,'" a friend scolded me, accurately.
Why couldn't these knee-jerk wingnuts all shut up, go have a beer, and enjoy their brief time on Earth?
Then came Donald Trump's America. Like most Jews, I've been terrified to witness the rising tide of bigotry, xenophobia, and power worship in the United States. The White House told us that baldfaced lies are "alternative facts," a broadside against the concept of objective reality that Ayn Rand spent 977,000 pages defending.
Initially, I responded to all of this by tweeting approximately 70 times per minute until my wife begged me to log off. And yet, it felt hollow, this tweeting. No matter how much I #resisted on social media, it wouldn't necessarily be heard by anyone in power, just like the die-in at my college cafeteria.
Getty Images
So, on January 21, 2017, I marched.
The vibe at the Women's March—the largest worldwide protest in history—was positive and cathartic. After a year-and-a-half straight of acidic division in this country, it felt like a needed moment of hope. The Women's March drove Trump (even more) insane with rage by dwarfing his Inauguration crowd size. A week later, he couldn't stop whining about it.
The next weekend I joined thousands at the local airport for another protest, just as Americans did all over the country. Standing up for what's right—as opposed to sitting down on the couch—felt fantastic. Chanting in unison ("hands too small, can't build a wall," "hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go") felt lemming-like at first, but after awhile it was calming, like a Buddhist mantra.
Apathy is no longer an option.
By the end of the weekend, the administration was walking back its stance on green card holders as they relate to the travel ban. While there's still a court battle to be waged over the executive order, here was proof that peaceful protest works, just as our Founders promised it would. Democratic politicians are hearing the outcry and (finally) promising to stand up to Trump, and even some Republicans are acknowledging the unrest.
"Women are in my grill no matter where I go," Republican Virginia Rep. Dave Brat told a conservative meeting earlier this week, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Over the past couple of weeks my office has been inundated with phone calls and emails and comments on social media requesting a town hall meeting, and believe me, I fully intend to have plenty of town halls that are open and transparent."
(However, Brat claimed that protesters are "paid activists on the far left." Where do I send the invoice?)
Most of the people at these events weren't angsty teens in Che shirts, just adult professionals doing a civic duty on their weekends, choosing involvement over apathy. That's making America great again.
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Databases are designed in different ways. Most of the time we can use “school examples”: normalize the database and everything will work just fine. But there are situations that will require another approach. We can remove references to gain more flexibility. But what if we have to improve performance when everything was done by the book? In that case, denormalization is a technique that we should consider. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits and disadvantages of denormalization and what situations may warrant it.
What Is Denormalization?
Denormalization is a strategy used on a previously-normalized database to increase performance. The idea behind it is to add redundant data where we think it will help us the most. We can use extra attributes in an existing table, add new tables, or even create instances of existing tables. The usual goal is to decrease the running time of select queries by making data more accessible to the queries or by generating summarized reports in separate tables. This process can bring some new problems, and we’ll discuss them later.
A normalized database is the starting point for the denormalization process. It’s important to differentiate from the database that has not been normalized and the database that was normalized first and then denormalized later. The second one is okay; the first is often the result of bad database design or a lack of knowledge.
Example: A Normalized Model for a Very Simple CRM
The model below will serve as our example:
Let’s take a quick look at the tables:
The user_account table stores data about users who login into our application (simplifying the model, roles, and user rights are excluded from it).
table stores data about users who login into our application (simplifying the model, roles, and user rights are excluded from it). The client table contains some basic data about our clients.
table contains some basic data about our clients. The product table lists products offered to our clients.
table lists products offered to our clients. The task table contains all the tasks we have created. You can think of each task as a set of related actions towards clients. Each task has its related calls, meetings, and lists of offered and sold products.
table contains all the tasks we have created. You can think of each task as a set of related actions towards clients. Each task has its related calls, meetings, and lists of offered and sold products. The call and meeting tables store data about all calls and meetings and relates them with tasks and users.
and tables store data about all calls and meetings and relates them with tasks and users. The dictionaries task_outcome , meeting_outcome and call_outcome contain all possible options for the final state of a task, meeting or call.
, and contain all possible options for the final state of a task, meeting or call. The product_offered stores a list of all products that were offered to clients on certain tasks while product_sold contains a list of all the products that client actually bought.
stores a list of all products that were offered to clients on certain tasks while contains a list of all the products that client actually bought. The supply_order table stores data about all orders we’ve placed and the products_on_order table lists products and their quantity for specific orders.
table stores data about all orders we’ve placed and the table lists products and their quantity for specific orders. The writeoff table is a list of products that were written off due to accidents or similar (e.g. broken mirrors).
The database is simplified but it’s perfectly normalized. You won’t find any redundancies and it should do the job. We shouldn’t experience any performance problems in any case, so long as we work with a relatively small amount of data.
When and Why to Use Denormalization
As with almost anything, you must be sure why you want to apply denormalization. You need to also be sure that the profit from using it outweighs any harm. There are a few situations when you definitely should think of denormalization:
Maintaining history: Data can change during time, and we need to store values that were valid when a record was created. What kind of changes do we mean? Well, a person’s first and last name can change; a client also can change their business name or any other data. Task details should contain values that were actual at the moment a task was generated. We wouldn’t be able to recreate past data correctly if this didn’t happen. We could solve this problem by adding a table containing the history of these changes. In that case, a select query returning the task and a valid client name would become more complicated. Maybe an extra table isn’t the best solution. Improving query performance: Some of the queries may use multiple tables to access data that we frequently need. Think of a situation where we’d need to join 10 tables to return the client’s name and the products that were sold to them. Some tables along the path could also contain large amounts of data. In that case, maybe it would be wise to add a client_id attribute directly to the products_sold table. Speeding up reporting: We need certain statistics very frequently. Creating them from live data is quite time-consuming and can affect overall system performance. Let’s say that we want to track client sales over certain years for some or all clients. Generating such reports out of live data would “dig” almost throughout the whole database and slow it down a lot. And what happens if we use that statistic often? Computing commonly-needed values up front: We want to have some values ready-computed so we don’t have to generate them in real time.
It’s important to point out that you don’t need to use denormalization if there are no performance issues in the application. But if you notice the system is slowing down – or if you’re aware that this could happen – then you should think about applying this technique. Before going with it, though, consider other options, like query optimization and proper indexing. You can also use denormalization if you’re already in production but it is better to solve issues in the development phase.
What Are the Disadvantages of Denormalization?
Obviously, the biggest advantage of the denormalization process is increased performance. But we have to pay a price for it, and that price can consist of:
Disk space: This is expected, as we’ll have duplicate data. Data anomalies: We have to be very aware of the fact that data now can be changed in more than one place. We must adjust every piece of duplicate data accordingly. That also applies to computed values and reports. We can achieve this by using triggers, transactions and/or procedures for all operations that must be completed together. Documentation: We must properly document every denormalization rule that we have applied. If we modify database design later, we’ll have to look at all our exceptions and take them into consideration once again. Maybe we don’t need them anymore because we’ve solved the issue. Or maybe we need to add to existing denormalization rules. (For example: We added a new attribute to the client table and we want to store its history value together with everything we already store. We’ll have to change existing denormalization rules to achieve that). Slowing other operations: We can expect that we’ll slow down data insert, modification, and deletion operations. If these operations happen relatively rarely, this could be a benefit. Basically, we would divide one slow select into a larger number of slower insert/update/delete queries. While a very complex select query technically could noticeably slow down the entire system, slowing down multiple “smaller” operations should not damage the usability of our application. More coding: Rules 2 and 3 will require additional coding, but at the same time they will simplify some select queries a lot. If we’re denormalizing an existing database we’ll have to modify these select queries to get the benefits of our work. We’ll also have to update values in newly-added attributes for existing records. This too will require a bit more coding.
The Example Model, Denormalized
In the model below, I applied some of the aforementioned denormalization rules. The pink tables have been modified, while the light-blue table is completely new.
What changes are applied and why?
The only change in the product table is the addition of the units_in_stock attribute. In a normalized model we could compute this data as units ordered – units sold – (units offered) – units written off. We would repeat the calculation each time a client asks for that product, which would be extremely time consuming. Instead, we’ll compute the value up front; when a customer asks us, we’ll have it ready. Of course, this simplifies the select query a lot. On the other hand, the units_in_stock attribute must be adjusted after every insert, update, or delete in the products_on_order , writeoff , product_offered and product_sold tables.
In the modified task table, we find two new attributes: client_name and user_first_last_name . Both of them store values when the task was created. The reason is that both of these values can change during time. We’ll also keep a foreign key that relates them to the original client and user ID. There are more values that we would like to store, like client address, VAT ID, etc.
The denormalized product_offered table has two new attributes, price_per_unit and price . The price_per_unit attribute is stored because we need to store the actual price when the product was offered. The normalized model would only show its current state, so when the product price changes our ‘history’ prices would also change. Our change doesn’t just make the database run faster: it also makes it work better. The price attribute is the computed value units_sold * price_per_unit . I added it here to avoid making that calculation each time we want to take a look at a list of offered products. It’s a small cost, but it improves performance.
The changes made on the product_sold table are very similar. The table structure is the same, but it stores a list of sold items.
The statistics_per_year table is completely new to our model. We should look at it as a denormalized table because all its data can be computed from the other tables. The idea behind this table is to store the number of tasks, successful tasks, meetings and calls related to any given client. It also handles the sum total charged per each year. After inserting, updating, or deleting anything in the task , meeting , call and product_sold tables, we should recalculate this table’s data for that client and corresponding year. We can expect that we’ll mostly have changes only for the current year. Reports for previous years shouldn’t need to change.
Values in this table are computed up front, so we’ll spend less time and resources at the moment we need the calculation result. Think about the values you’ll need often. Maybe you won’t regularly need them all and can risk computing some of them live.
Denormalization is a very interesting and powerful concept. Though it’s not the first you should have in mind to improve performance, in some situations it can be the best or even the only solution.
Before you choose to use denormalization, be sure you want it. Do some analysis and track performance. You’ll probably decide to go with denormalization after you’ve already gone live. Don’t be afraid to use it, but track changes and you shouldn’t experience any problems (i.e., the dreaded data anomalies).
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"E (number)" redirects here. For the codes representing food additives, see E number
y = 1 / x . {\displaystyle y=1/x.} e is the unique number larger than 1 that makes the shaded area equal to 1. Graph of the equationHere,is the unique number larger than 1 that makes the shaded area equal to 1.
The number e is a mathematical constant that is the base of the natural logarithm: the unique number whose natural logarithm is equal to one. It is approximately equal to 2.71828,[1] and is the limit of (1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity, an expression that arises in the study of compound interest. It can also be calculated as the sum of the infinite series[2]
e = ∑ n = 0 ∞ 1 n ! = 1 1 + 1 1 + 1 1 ⋅ 2 + 1 1 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 + ⋯ {\displaystyle e=\displaystyle \sum \limits _{n=0}^{\infty }{\dfrac {1}{n!}}={\frac {1}{1}}+{\frac {1}{1}}+{\frac {1}{1\cdot 2}}+{\frac {1}{1\cdot 2\cdot 3}}+\cdots }
The constant can be characterized in many different ways. For example, e can be defined as the unique positive number a such that the graph of the function y = ax has unit slope at x = 0.[3] The function f(x) = ex is called the (natural) exponential function, and is the unique exponential function equal to its own derivative. The natural logarithm, or logarithm to base e, is the inverse function to the natural exponential function. The natural logarithm of a number k > 1 can be defined directly as the area under the curve y = 1/x between x = 1 and x = k, in which case e is the value of k for which this area equals one (see image). There are alternative characterizations.
Sometimes called Euler's number after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, e is not to be confused with γ, the Euler–Mascheroni constant, sometimes called simply Euler's constant. The number e is also known as Napier's constant, but Euler's choice of the symbol e is said to have been retained in his honor.[4] The constant was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest.[5]
The number e is of eminent importance in mathematics,[6] alongside 0, 1, π and i. All five of these numbers play important and recurring roles across mathematics, and are the five constants appearing in one formulation of Euler's identity. Like the constant π, e is irrational: it is not a ratio of integers. Also like π, e is transcendental: it is not a root of any non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients. The numerical value of e truncated to 50 decimal places is
2.71828 18284 59045 23536 02874 71352 66249 77572 47093 69995... (sequence A001113 (sequencein the OEIS ).
History [ edit ]
The first references to the constant were published in 1618 in the table of an appendix of a work on logarithms by John Napier.[5] However, this did not contain the constant itself, but simply a list of logarithms calculated from the constant. It is assumed that the table was written by William Oughtred. The discovery of the constant itself is credited to Jacob Bernoulli in 1683,[7][8] who attempted to find the value of the following expression (which is in fact e):
lim n → ∞ ( 1 + 1 n ) n . {\displaystyle \lim _{n\to \infty }\left(1+{\frac {1}{n}}\right)^{n}.}
The first known use of the constant, represented by the letter b, was in correspondence from Gottfried Leibniz to Christiaan Huygens in 1690 and 1691. Leonhard Euler introduced the letter e as the base for natural logarithms, writing in a letter to Christian Goldbach on 25 November 1731.[9][10] Euler started to use the letter e for the constant in 1727 or 1728, in an unpublished paper on explosive forces in cannons,[11] and the first appearance of e in a publication was in Euler's Mechanica (1736).[12] While in the subsequent years some researchers used the letter c, the letter e was more common and eventually became standard.[citation needed]
The constant has been historically typeset as "e", in italics, although the ISO 80000-2:2009 standard recommends typesetting constants in an upright style.
Applications [ edit ]
Compound interest [ edit ]
The effect of earning 20% annual interest on an initial $1,000 investment at various compounding frequencies
Jacob Bernoulli discovered this constant in 1683 by studying a question about compound interest:[5]
An account starts with $1.00 and pays 100 percent interest per year. If the interest is credited once, at the end of the year, the value of the account at year-end will be $2.00. What happens if the interest is computed and credited more frequently during the year?
If the interest is credited twice in the year, the interest rate for each 6 months will be 50%, so the initial $1 is multiplied by 1.5 twice, yielding $1.00 × 1.52 = $2.25 at the end of the year. Compounding quarterly yields $1.00 × 1.254 = $2.4414..., and compounding monthly yields $1.00 × (1 + 1/12)12 = $2.613035... If there are n compounding intervals, the interest for each interval will be 100%/n and the value at the end of the year will be $1.00×(1 + 1/n)n.
Bernoulli noticed that this sequence approaches a limit (the force of interest) with larger n and, thus, smaller compounding intervals. Compounding weekly (n = 52) yields $2.692597..., while compounding daily (n = 365) yields $2.714567..., just two cents more. The limit as n grows large is the number that came to be known as e; with continuous compounding, the account value will reach $2.7182818...
More generally, an account that starts at $1 and offers an annual interest rate of R will, after t years, yield eRt dollars with continuous compounding. (Here R is the decimal equivalent of the rate of interest expressed as a percentage, so for 5% interest, R = 5/100 = 0.05.)
Bernoulli trials [ edit ]
P of not observing independent events each of probability 1/n after n Bernoulli trials, and 1 - P vs n ; it can be observed that as n increases, the probability of a 1/n-chance event never appearing after n tries rapidly converges to 1/e. Graphs of probabilityofobserving independent events each of probability 1/afterBernoulli trials, and 1 -vs; it can be observed that asincreases, the probability of a 1/-chance event never appearing aftertries rapidly converges to 1/
The number e itself also has applications to probability theory, where it arises in a way not obviously related to exponential growth. Suppose that a gambler plays a slot machine that pays out with a probability of one in n and plays it n times. Then, for large n (such as a million) the probability that the gambler will lose every bet is approximately 1/e. For n = 20 it is already approximately 1/2.79.
This is an example of a Bernoulli trial process. Each time the gambler plays the slots, there is a one in one million chance of winning. Playing one million times is modelled by the binomial distribution, which is closely related to the binomial theorem. The probability of winning k times out of a million trials is:
( 10 6 k ) ( 10 − 6 ) k ( 1 − 10 − 6 ) 10 6 − k . {\displaystyle {\binom {10^{6}}{k}}\left(10^{-6}\right)^{k}\left(1-10^{-6}\right)^{10^{6}-k}.}
In particular, the probability of winning zero times (k = 0) is
( 1 − 1 10 6 ) 10 6 . {\displaystyle \left(1-{\frac {1}{10^{6}}}\right)^{10^{6}}.}
This is very close to the limit
lim n → ∞ ( 1 − 1 n ) n = 1 e . {\displaystyle \lim _{n\to \infty }\left(1-{\frac {1}{n}}\right)^{n}={\frac {1}{e}}.}
Derangements [ edit ]
Another application of e, also discovered in part by Jacob Bernoulli along with Pierre Raymond de Montmort, is in the problem of derangements, also known as the hat check problem:[13] n guests are invited to a party, and at the door each guest checks his hat with the butler who then places them into n boxes, each labelled with the name of one guest. But the butler does not know the identities of the guests, and so he puts the hats into boxes selected at random. The problem of de Montmort is to find the probability that none of the hats gets put into the right box. The answer is:
p n = 1 − 1 1 ! + 1 2 ! − 1 3 ! + ⋯ + ( − 1 ) n n ! = ∑ k = 0 n ( − 1 ) k k ! . {\displaystyle p_{n}=1-{\frac {1}{1!}}+{\frac {1}{2!}}-{\frac {1}{3!}}+\cdots +{\frac {(-1)^{n}}{n!}}=\sum _{k=0}^{n}{\frac {(-1)^{k}}{k!}}.}
As the number n of guests tends to infinity, p n approaches 1/e. Furthermore, the number of ways the hats can be placed into the boxes so that none of the hats are in the right box is n!/e rounded to the nearest integer, for every positive n.[14]
Optimal planning problems [ edit ]
A stick of length L is broken into n equal parts. The value of n that maximizes the product of the lengths is then either[15]
n = ⌊ L / e ⌋ , or ⌊ L / e ⌋ + 1. {\displaystyle n=\lfloor L/e\rfloor ,\,\,{\text{or }}\,\,\lfloor L/e\rfloor +1.}
The stated result follows because the maximum value of x − 1 ln x {\displaystyle x^{-1}\ln x} occurs at x = e {\displaystyle x=e} (Steiner's problem, discussed below). The quantity x − 1 ln x {\displaystyle x^{-1}\ln x} is a measure of information gleaned from an event occurring with probability 1 / x {\displaystyle 1/x} , so that essentially the same optimal division appears in optimal planning problems like the secretary problem.
Asymptotics [ edit ]
The number e occurs naturally in connection with many problems involving asymptotics. An example is Stirling's formula for the asymptotics of the factorial function, in which both the numbers e and π enter:
n ! ∼ 2 π n ( n e ) n . {\displaystyle n!\sim {\sqrt {2\pi n}}\,\left({\frac {n}{e}}\right)^{n}.}
As a consequence,
e = lim n → ∞ n n ! n . {\displaystyle e=\lim _{n\to \infty }{\frac {n}{\sqrt[{n}]{n!}}}.}
Standard normal distribution [ edit ]
The normal distribution with zero mean and unit standard deviation is known as the standard normal distribution, given by the probability density function
ϕ ( x ) = 1 2 π e − 1 2 x 2 . {\displaystyle \phi (x)={\frac {1}{\sqrt {2\pi }}}\,e^{-{\frac {\scriptscriptstyle 1}{\scriptscriptstyle 2}}x^{2}}.}
The constraint of unit variance (and thus also unit standard deviation) results in the 1/2 in the exponent, and the constraint of unit total area under the curve ϕ(x) results in the factor 1 / 2 π {\displaystyle \textstyle 1/{\sqrt {2\pi }}} .[proof] This function is symmetric around x = 0, where it attains its maximum value 1 / 2 π {\displaystyle \textstyle 1/{\sqrt {2\pi }}} , and has inflection points at x = ±1.
In calculus [ edit ]
x ↦ ax are shown for a = 2 (dotted), a = e (blue), and a = 4 (dashed). They all pass through the point (0,1) , but the red line (which has slope 1 ) is tangent to only ex there. The graphs of the functionsare shown for(dotted),(blue), and(dashed). They all pass through the point, but the red line (which has slope) is tangent to onlythere.
e , i.e. ln(e) , equals 1. The value of the natural log function for argument, i.e., equals
The principal motivation for introducing the number e, particularly in calculus, is to perform differential and integral calculus with exponential functions and logarithms.[16] A general exponential function y = ax has a derivative, given by a limit:
d d x a x = lim h → 0 a x + h − a x h = lim h → 0 a x a h − a x h = a x ⋅ ( lim h → 0 a h − 1 h ) . {\textstyle {\begin{aligned}{\frac {d}{dx}}a^{x}&=\lim _{h\to 0}{\frac {a^{x+h}-a^{x}}{h}}=\lim _{h\to 0}{\frac {a^{x}a^{h}-a^{x}}{h}}\\&=a^{x}\cdot \left(\lim _{h\to 0}{\frac {a^{h}-1}{h}}\right).\end{aligned}}}
The parenthesized limit on the right is independent of the variable x: it depends only on the base a. When the base is set to e, this limit is equal to 1, and so e is symbolically defined by the equation:
d d x e x = e x . {\displaystyle {\frac {d}{dx}}e^{x}=e^{x}.}
Consequently, the exponential function with base e is particularly suited to doing calculus. Choosing e, as opposed to some other number, as the base of the exponential function makes calculations involving the derivative much simpler.
Another motivation comes from considering the derivative of the base-a logarithm,[17] i.e., of log a x for x > 0:
d d x log a x = lim h → 0 log a ( x + h ) − log a ( x ) h = lim h → 0 log a ( 1 + h / x ) x ⋅ h / x = 1 x log a ( lim u → 0 ( 1 + u ) 1 / u ) = 1 x log a e , {\textstyle {\begin{aligned}{\frac {d}{dx}}\log _{a}x&=\lim _{h\to 0}{\frac {\log _{a}(x+h)-\log _{a}(x)}{h}}\\&=\lim _{h\to 0}{\frac {\log _{a}(1+h/x)}{x\cdot h/x}}\\&={\frac {1}{x}}\log _{a}\left(\lim _{u\to 0}(1+u)^{1/u}\right)\\&={\frac {1}{x}}\log _{a}e,\end{aligned}}}
where the substitution u = h/x was made. The a-logarithm of e is 1, if a equals e. So symbolically,
d d x log e x = 1 x . {\displaystyle {\frac {d}{dx}}\log _{e}x={\frac {1}{x}}.}
The logarithm with this special base is called the natural logarithm and is denoted as ln; it behaves well under differentiation since there is no undetermined limit to carry through the calculations.
There are thus two ways in which to select such special numbers a. One way is to set the derivative of the exponential function ax equal to ax, and solve for a. The other way is to set the derivative of the base a logarithm to 1/x and solve for a. In each case, one arrives at a convenient choice of base for doing calculus. It turns out that these two solutions for a are actually the same, the number e.
Alternative characterizations [ edit ]
x y = 1 {\displaystyle xy=1} The five shaded regions are of equal area, and define units of hyperbolic angle along the hyperbola
Other characterizations of e are also possible: one is as the limit of a sequence, another is as the sum of an infinite series, and still others rely on integral calculus. So far, the following two (equivalent) properties have been introduced:
The number e is the unique positive real number such that d d t e t = e t {\displaystyle {\frac {d}{dt}}e^{t}=e^{t}} The number e is the unique positive real number such that d d t log e t = 1 t {\displaystyle {\frac {d}{dt}}\log _{e}t={\frac {1}{t}}}
The following four characterizations can be proven equivalent:
The number e is the limit e = lim n → ∞ ( 1 + 1 n ) n {\displaystyle e=\lim _{n\to \infty }\left(1+{\frac {1}{n}}\right)^{n}} Similarly: e = lim t → 0 ( 1 + t ) 1 t {\displaystyle e=\lim _{t\to 0}\left(1+t\right)^{\frac {1}{t}}} The number e is the sum of the infinite series e = ∑ n = 0 ∞ 1 n ! = 1 0 ! + 1 1 ! + 1 2 ! + 1 3 ! + 1 4 ! + ⋯ , {\displaystyle e=\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }{\frac {1}{n!}}={\frac {1}{0!}}+{\frac {1}{1!}}+{\frac {1}{2!}}+{\frac {1}{3!}}+{\frac {1}{4!}}+\cdots \,,} where n! is the factorial of n . The number e is the unique positive real number such that ∫ 1 e 1 t d t = 1. {\displaystyle \int _{1}^{e}{\frac {1}{t}}\,dt=1.} If f(t) is an exponential function, then the quantity τ = f ( t ) / f ′ ( t ) {\displaystyle \tau =f(t)/f'(t)} time constant (it is the reciprocal of the exponential growth constant or decay constant). The time constant is the time it takes for the exponential function to increase by a factor of e : f ( t + τ ) = e f ( t ) {\displaystyle f(t+\tau )=ef(t)}
Properties [ edit ]
Calculus [ edit ]
As in the motivation, the exponential function ex is important in part because it is the unique nontrivial function (up to multiplication by a constant) which is its own derivative
d d x e x = e x {\displaystyle {\frac {d}{dx}}e^{x}=e^{x}}
and therefore its own antiderivative as well:
∫ e x d x = e x + C . {\displaystyle \int e^{x}\,dx=e^{x}+C.}
Inequalities [ edit ]
y = 2 x {\displaystyle y=2^{x}} y = 4 x {\displaystyle y=4^{x}} y = x + 1 {\displaystyle y=x+1} x = 1 {\displaystyle x=1} x = − 1 / 2 {\displaystyle x=-1/2} e {\displaystyle e} y = e x {\displaystyle y=e^{x}} x = 0 {\displaystyle x=0} e {\displaystyle e} Exponential functionsandintersect the graph of, respectively, atand. The numberis the unique base such thatintersects only at. We may infer thatlies between 2 and 4.
The number e is the unique real number such that
( 1 + 1 x ) x < e < ( 1 + 1 x ) x + 1 {\displaystyle \left(1+{\frac {1}{x}}\right)^{x}<e<\left(1+{\frac {1}{x}}\right)^{x+1}}
for all positive x.[18]
Also, we have the inequality
e x ≥ x + 1 {\displaystyle e^{x}\geq x+1}
for all real x, with equality if and only if x = 0. Furthermore, e is the unique base of the exponential for which the inequality ax ≥ x + 1 holds for all x.[19] This is a limiting case of Bernoulli's inequality.
Exponential-like functions [ edit ]
x x {\displaystyle {\sqrt[{x}]{x}}} x = e . The global maximum ofoccurs at
Steiner's problem asks to find the global maximum for the function
f ( x ) = x 1 / x . {\displaystyle f(x)=x^{1/x}.}
This maximum occurs precisely at x = e. For proof, the inequality e y ≥ y + 1 {\displaystyle e^{y}\geq y+1} , from above, evaluated at y = ( x − e ) / e {\displaystyle y=(x-e)/e} and simplifying gives e x / e ≥ x {\displaystyle e^{x/e}\geq x} . So e 1 / e ≥ x 1 / x {\displaystyle e^{1/e}\geq x^{1/x}} for all positive x.[20]
Similarly, x = 1/e is where the global minimum occurs for the function
f ( x ) = x x {\displaystyle f(x)=x^{x}}
defined for positive x. More generally, for the function
f ( x ) = x x n {\displaystyle f(x)=x^{x^{n}}}
the global maximum for positive x occurs at x = 1/e for any n < 0; and the global minimum occurs at x = e−1/n for any n > 0.
The infinite tetration
x x x ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ {\displaystyle x^{x^{x^{\cdot ^{\cdot ^{\cdot }}}}}} ∞ x {\displaystyle {^{\infty }}x}
converges if and only if e−e ≤ x ≤ e1/e (or approximately between 0.0660 and 1.4447), due to a theorem of Leonhard Euler.[21]
Number theory [ edit ]
The real number e is irrational. Euler proved this by showing that its simple continued fraction expansion is infinite.[22] (See also Fourier's proof that e is irrational.)
Furthermore, by the Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem, e is transcendental, meaning that it is not a solution of any non-constant polynomial equation with rational coefficients. It was the first number to be proved transcendental without having been specifically constructed for this purpose (compare with Liouville number); the proof was given by Charles Hermite in 1873.
It is conjectured that e is normal, meaning that when e is expressed in any base the possible digits in that base are uniformly distributed (occur with equal probability in any sequence of given length).
Complex numbers [ edit ]
The exponential function ex may be written as a Taylor series
e x = 1 + x 1 ! + x 2 2 ! + x 3 3 ! + ⋯ = ∑ n = 0 ∞ x n n ! {\displaystyle e^{x}=1+{x \over 1!}+{x^{2} \over 2!}+{x^{3} \over 3!}+\cdots =\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }{\frac {x^{n}}{n!}}}
Because this series keeps many important properties for ex even when x is complex, it is commonly used to extend the definition of ex to the complex numbers. This, with the Taylor series for sin and cos x, allows one to derive Euler's formula:
e i x = cos x + i sin x , {\displaystyle e^{ix}=\cos x+i\sin x,}
which holds for all x. The special case with x = π is Euler's identity:
e i π + 1 = 0 , {\displaystyle e^{i\pi }+1=0,}
from which it follows that, in the principal branch of the logarithm,
ln ( − 1 ) = i π . {\displaystyle \ln(-1)=i\pi .}
Furthermore, using the laws for exponentiation,
( cos x + i sin x ) n = ( e i x ) n = e i n x = cos ( n x ) + i sin ( n x ) , {\displaystyle (\cos x+i\sin x)^{n}=\left(e^{ix}\right)^{n}=e^{inx}=\cos(nx)+i\sin(nx),}
which is de Moivre's formula.
The expression
cos x + i sin x {\displaystyle \cos x+i\sin x}
is sometimes referred to as cis(x).
The expressions of sin x {\displaystyle \sin x} and cos x {\displaystyle \cos x} in terms of the exponential function can be deduced:
sin x = e i x − e − i x 2 i , cos x = e i x + e − i x 2 . {\displaystyle \sin x={\frac {e^{ix}-e^{-ix}}{2i}}\,,\qquad \cos x={\frac {e^{ix}+e^{-ix}}{2}}\,.}
Differential equations [ edit ]
The general function
y ( x ) = C e x {\displaystyle y(x)=Ce^{x}}
is the solution to the differential equation:
y ′ = y . {\displaystyle y'=y.}
Representations [ edit ]
The number e can be represented as a real number in a variety of ways: as an infinite series, an infinite product, a continued fraction, or a limit of a sequence. The chief among these representations, particularly in introductory calculus courses is the limit
lim n → ∞ ( 1 + 1 n ) n , {\displaystyle \lim _{n\to \infty }\left(1+{\frac {1}{n}}\right)^{n},}
given above, as well as the series
e = ∑ n = 0 ∞ 1 n ! {\displaystyle e=\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }{\frac {1}{n!}}}
given by evaluating the above power series for ex at x = 1.
Less common is the continued fraction (sequence A003417 in the OEIS).
e = [ 2 ; 1 , 2 , 1 , 1 , 4 , 1 , 1 , 6 , 1 , . . . , 1 , 2 n , 1 , . . . ] , {\displaystyle e=[2;1,2,1,1,4,1,1,6,1,...,1,2n,1,...],} [23]
which written out looks like
e = 2 + 1 1 + 1 2 + 1 1 + 1 1 + 1 4 + 1 1 + 1 1 + ⋱ . {\displaystyle e=2+{\cfrac {1}{1+{\cfrac {1}{2+{\cfrac {1}{1+{\cfrac {1}{1+{\cfrac {1}{4+{\cfrac {1}{1+{\cfrac {1}{1+\ddots }}}}}}}}}}}}}}.}
This continued fraction for e converges three times as quickly:[citation needed]
e = 1 + 2 1 + 1 6 + 1 10 + 1 14 + 1 18 + 1 22 + 1 26 + ⋱ . {\displaystyle e=1+{\cfrac {2}{1+{\cfrac {1}{6+{\cfrac {1}{10+{\cfrac {1}{14+{\cfrac {1}{18+{\cfrac {1}{22+{\cfrac {1}{26+\ddots \,}}}}}}}}}}}}}}.}
Many other series, sequence, continued fraction, and infinite product representations of e have been developed.
Stochastic representations [ edit ]
In addition to exact analytical expressions for representation of e, there are stochastic techniques for estimating e. One such approach begins with an infinite sequence of independent random variables X 1 , X 2 ..., drawn from the uniform distribution on [0, 1]. Let V be the least number n such that the sum of the first n observations exceeds 1:
V = min { n ∣ X 1 + X 2 + ⋯ + X n > 1 } . {\displaystyle V=\min {\left\{n\mid X_{1}+X_{2}+\cdots +X_{n}>1\right\}}.}
Then the expected value of V is e: E(V) = e.[24][25]
Known digits [ edit ]
The number of known digits of e has increased substantially during the last decades. This is due both to the increased performance of computers and to algorithmic improvements.[26][27]
Since that time, the proliferation of modern high-speed desktop computers has made it possible for amateurs, with the right hardware, to compute trillions of digits of e.[35]
In computer culture [ edit ]
In contemporary internet culture, individuals and organizations frequently pay homage to the number e.
For instance, in the IPO filing for Google in 2004, rather than a typical round-number amount of money, the company announced its intention to raise $2,718,281,828, which is e billion dollars rounded to the nearest dollar. Google was also responsible for a billboard[36] that appeared in the heart of Silicon Valley, and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Seattle, Washington; and Austin, Texas. It read "{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com". Solving this problem and visiting the advertised (now defunct) web site led to an even more difficult problem to solve, which in turn led to Google Labs where the visitor was invited to submit a résumé.[37] The first 10-digit prime in e is 7427466391, which starts at the 99th digit.[38]
In another instance, the computer scientist Donald Knuth let the version numbers of his program Metafont approach e. The versions are 2, 2.7, 2.71, 2.718, and so forth.[39]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
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Image copyright PA Image caption The Queen has taken up summer residence at Balmoral
The Queen has said she hopes "people will think very carefully about the future" ahead of the Scottish independence referendum.
The comment was made to a well-wisher outside church near her Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire.
It follows reports claiming the Queen was growing increasingly concerned about the 18 September vote.
Royal officials have insisted her comment did not breach the monarch's constitutional impartiality.
The Queen's comment came as she spoke to a member of the public outside the church at Crathie.
When the well-wisher joked that they were not going to mention the referendum, the Queen remarked: "Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future."
'Serious reflection'
Following previous reports that Her Majesty was growing increasingly concerned about Scottish independence, Buckingham Palace issued a statement which read: "The sovereign's constitutional impartiality is an established principle of our democracy and one which the Queen has demonstrated throughout her reign.
"As such, the monarch is above politics and those in political office have a duty to ensure this remains the case.
"Any suggestion that the Queen would wish to influence the outcome of the current referendum campaign is categorically wrong. Her Majesty is simply of the view this is a matter for the people of Scotland."
The BBC's royal correspondent Peter Hunt said: "This wasn't a slip of the tongue by the head of state of the United Kingdom - rather a reflection of how seriously, she like many others, views the significance of Thursday's vote."
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The Apple Watch is either a hit or a failure, depending on who you ask, but one thing’s for certain: June was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month for the US traditional watch industry.
As reported by Bloomberg, data from market research firm NPD Group shows that traditional watch sales in the United States dropped by 14 percent in the month of June, as compared to June 2014. According to Bloomberg, that represents the biggest year-over-year drop in watch sales since 2008.
Watches in the $100-$149.99 price range took the biggest hit, NPD’s data shows: Sales of timepieces in that range fell by 24 percent. In general, the sub-$1000 watch market declined in June, Bloomberg notes.
Why this matters: Such a dropoff in traditional watch sales may suggest that the Apple Watch is starting to affect the traditional watch market. In Apple’s last quarterly earnings call, CEO Tim Cook stated that Apple Watch sales increased in June, contrary to media reports: Such an increase in sales may have contributed to sluggish sales of traditional watches.
Other factors in play?
Just the same, plenty of other factors may be coming into play here. As Bloomberg notes, NPD cites market saturation of “lower-priced fashion brands” as another factor contributing to the sales decline.
On the other hand, comments from Apple’s suppliers suggest that Apple Watch sales may not be as great as hoped. Also, Apple refuses to provide sales numbers for the Apple Watch, which means that sales estimates are, at best, educated guesses.
Either way, it’s too hard to draw conclusions based on one month’s worth of sales data. If sales bounce back, June’s dropoff was probably a blip on the radar. But if the declines continue, well, maybe there’s something to this Apple Watch thing.
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In the French courts during the 17th Century, ballet first begins to flourish with the help of several important men: King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Pierre Beauchamps, and Molière. The combination of different talents and passions of these four men shaped ballet to what it is today.
Early history [ edit ]
Louis XIV [ edit ]
Louis XIV, the King of France from 1643 to 1715, was a ballet enthusiast from a young age. In fact his birth was celebrated with the Ballet de la Felicite in 1639. As a young boy, he was strongly supported and encouraged by the court, particularly by Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, to take part in the ballets. He made his debut at age 13 in the "Ballet de Cassandre" in 1651. Two years later in 1653, the teenage king starred as Apollo, the sun god, in The Ballet of the Night or in French, Le Ballet de la Nuit. His influence on the art form and its influence on him became apparent. His fancy golden costume was not soon forgotten, and his famous performance led to his nickname, the Sun King. In the ballet, he banishes the night terrors as he rise as sun at dawn. His courtiers were forced to worship him like a god through choreography. They were made clear of the glory of King Louis XIV and that he had absolute authority both on and off the dance floor.[1] The ballets that young King Louis performed in were very different from ballets performed today.[2] The form of entertainment was actually called ballets d’entrées. This refers to the small divisions, or “entries,” that the ballets were broken up into. For example, Le Ballet de la Nuit, comprised over forty of such entries,[2] which were divided into four vigils or parts. The whole spectacle lasted 12 hours.
Throughout his reign, Louis XIV worked with many influential people in his court dances. He worked alongside poet Isaac de Benserade, as well as designers Torelli, Vigarani and Henry de Gissey, which made fashion and dance closely interlinked. Possibly his greatest contribution to the French court was bringing composer/dancer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Louis supported and encouraged performances in his court as well as the development of ballet throughout France. Louis XIV was trained by Pierre Beauchamp. The King demonstrated his belief in strong technique when he founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 and made Beauchamp leading ballet master. King Louis XIV’s and France’s attempt to keep French ballet standards high was only encouraged further when in 1672 a dance school was attached to the Académie Royale de Musique.[3] Led by Jean-Baptiste Lully, this ballet company is known today as The Paris Opera Ballet.
The king was very exacting in his behavior towards his dancing. In fact, he made it a daily practice to have a ballet lesson every day after his morning riding lesson.[4] As the French people watched and took note of what their leader was doing, dancing became an essential accomplishment for every gentleman.[4] Clearly ballet became a way of life for those who were around King Louis XIV. If one looked at the culture of seventeenth-century France, one saw a reflection of an organized ballet that was choreographed beautifully, costumed appropriately, and performed with perfect precision.[according to whom?] Louis XIV retired from ballet in 1670.
Jean-Baptiste Lully [ edit ]
Perhaps one of the most influential men on ballet during the seventeenth century was Jean Baptiste Lully. Lully was born in Italy, but moved to France where he quickly became a favorite of Louis XIV and performed alongside the king in many ballets until the king’s retirement from dance in 1670.[3] He moved from dancer for the court ballets to a composer of such music used in the courts. By the time he was thirty, Lully was completely in charge of all the musical activities in the French courts.[4] Lully was responsible for enlivening the rather slow stately dances of the court ballets.[3] He decided to put female dancers on stage and was also director of the Académie Royale de Musique.[3] This company's dance school still exists today as part of the Paris Opera Ballet. Since dancers appeared in the very first performances the Opera put on, the Paris Opera Ballet is considered the world’s oldest ballet company.[1] When Lully died in 1687 from a gangrenous abscess on the foot which developed after he stuck himself with the long staff he used for conducting, France lost one of the most influential conductors and composers of the seventeenth century.[3] However, Lully did not work alone. In fact, he often worked in collaboration with two other men that were equally influential to ballet and the French culture: Pierre Beauchamps and Molière.
Pierre Beauchamps [ edit ]
Beauchamps was a ballet-master who was deeply involved with the creation of courtly ballets in the 1650s and 1660s.[4] However, Beauchamps began his career as the personal teacher to Louis XIV. Beauchamps is also credited with coming up with the five fundamental foot positions from which all balletic movements move through.[1] Beauchamps techniques were taught throughout France in secondary schools as well as by private teachers.[5] Contemporary dancers would astonish Beauchamps at their ability to have 180-degree turnout. Beauchamps dancers wore high-heeled shoes and bulky costumes which made turnout difficult and slight.[1] One of the first things that Lully and Beauchamps worked together on was Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, which they called opéra-ballet.[5] The opéra-ballet is a form of lyric theatre in which singing and dancing were presented as equal partners in lavish and spectacular stagings.[3] The Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, one of their first and most famous collaborations, consisted of excerpts from court ballets linked by new entrées stages by Beauchamps.[5] Customarily, King Louis and courtiers danced in the court ballets; however, in this new form of entertainment, the opéra-ballet, all of the dancers were professionals.[5] Beauchamps not only collaborated with Lully, but he also had the great privilege to partner with Molière during his lifetime.
Beauchamps also originated the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, which provided detailed indications of the tract of a dance and the related footwork. Starting in 1700, hundreds of social and theatrical dances were recorded and widely published in this form. Although this has been superseded in modern times by even more expressive notations, the notation is sufficiently detailed that, along with contemporary dancing manuals, these dances can be reconstructed today.
Molière [ edit ]
Molière was a well-known comedic playwright during that time period. He and Beauchamps collaborated for the first time in 1661, which resulted in the invention of comédie-ballet.[6] His invention of comedies-ballets was said to be an accident. He was invited to set both a play and court ballet in honor of Louis XIV, but was short of dancers and decided to combined the two productions together. This resulted in Les Facheux in 1661. This and the following comédie-ballets were considered the most important advance in baroque dance since the development of Renaissance geometric figures.[6] One of the most famous of these types of performances was Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which is still performed today and continues to entertain audiences.[1] The idea behind a comédie-ballet was a combination of spoken scenes separated by balletic interludes; it is the roots for today’s musical theatre.[1] Many of Molière's ballets were performed by Louis XIV. According to Susan Au, the king's farewell performance was Molière's Les Amants magnifiques in 1670. Not only were these types of performances popular in the courts, but they helped transition from courtiers being the dancers to using actors and professional dancers, soon to be known as ballerinas.[1] The comédie-ballets helped to bring understanding between the court and the commoners as the transition from court ballets to a more common place ballet occurred.
With Molière writing the dialogue and directing, Beauchamps choreographing the ballet interludes, and Lully composing the music and overseeing the coming together of all the dancers and actors, these three giants of men worked together to create many beautiful pieces of art for King Louis XIV.
References [ edit ]
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About two weeks ago, I met Mike McNeill at an event. We started chatting about JavaScript frameworks and his own brainchild, SailsJS. "Wouldn't it be cool if you could just run a simple command and the app would be automatically deployed to the Internets?" Yes, that would be cool. So we got together, ordered some Pizza and built exactly that: Pull Request #2663 enables sails deploy , which automatically creates a new Azure Website with the locally developed sails app running.
Talking to Azure
Sails makes heavy use of Node Machines, an open standard for JavaScript functions. They are essentially meta data wrappers for APIs, allowing other applications to consume the packages in a standardized way. We started by building a Machine Pack for Azure, which is capable of setting up the local Azure account, creating and updating websites and uploading files (amongst other website-related thing). It is also able to upload scripts (Bash, Node, Python, Powershell), which are exposed via REST API. This is important: We're able to locally create a script, upload it to the website, and execute it on the website's machine by calling a protected REST API. It's the same concept I previously used to update Ghost instances running on Azure Websites. Let's check out the flow:
Do we need to create a website?
The command sails deploy accepts a website name and deployment username/password, in which case we can skip thinking about whether or not the user has rights to create an Azure Website. If we're just going with sails deploy and need to create a new website, we start by checking the local environment for an Azure account. Users that have the Node-powered Azure-CLI installed won't have to do anything, while users without it are asked to authenticate the local environment (they won't have to install the CLI though).
Once we're authenticated, we move forward to check if the website already exists in the current account. If so, we could just deploy to it - if not, we're creating one.
Package it up!
We're ready to ship things up, so we're zipping the local folder, excluding unnecessary things. We could have used Git to deploy, but Mike felt strongly that SailsJS shouldn't have a Git requirement. Once Node is done creating a ZIP package, we'll go ahead and upload it to a temporary folder on the website's virtual machine.
Remote Scripting
The next step is the cool one: We're uploading a local script containing commands to clean the site, unzip the package and run npm install to Azure, where it is automatically assigned a REST api - allowing us to call the script, fetch its status and output. Once the script is uploaded, we simply call its API, pipe through the output to the local machine and watch as Azure is setting up the SailsJS website.
Moving forward
Since we can execute Bash and PowerShell scripts on the machine that is supposed to run the sails app, we can pretty much do whatever we want - and enable scenarios that are more powerful than what we have built so far. We could also easily enable the same scenario for Ember, Angular or various other environments. If you want to see some code, here are the respective repositories:
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Citizens United, whose court challenge to rules barring political spending by corporations has led to far-reaching changes in the campaign finance landscape, has formed its own Super PAC, allowing it to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.
Paperwork for the new committee -- Citizens United Super PAC LLC -- was received by the Federal Election Commission on Saturday Friday and posted on its website this morning.
In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in January 2010 that prohibitions on independent expenditures by corporations and unions are unconstitutional. The case grew out of Citizens United's plans to release a documentary about Hillary Clinton on a video-on-demand service, which would have been prohibited under federal election laws. In the court's opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that under the ban, "speech would be suppressed in the realm where its necessity is most evident: in the public dialogue preceding a real election."
A subsequent opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, in SpeechNow.org v. FEC, allowed for the creation of independent-expenditure-only committees, which have come to be known as Super PACs. This is the type of committee Citizens United has now formed.
In the SpeechNow decision, the court wrote, "Given this analysis from Citizens United, we must conclude that the government has no anti-corruption interest in limiting contributions to an independent expenditure group such as SpeechNow."
Since last July, when an Advisory Opinion by the FEC set out the guidelines for forming independent-expenditure-only committees, 94 such groups have been formed, and 46 have reported spending money -- about $60 million in the 2010 election cycle.
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The terrorist who carried out a car-ramming attack in Jerusalem on Monday was a member of Hamas, the Palestinian terror group announced a day later in a flier, as it emerged that Abed el-Muhsen Hassuna had been residing in Hebron.
Police said on Tuesday that Hassuna, 21, had in the past lived in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina but moved to the West Bank city two years ago with his family.
Hassuna, who held resident status in Israel and an Israeli identity card that granted him access to the entire country, drove from Hebron to the capital to carry out the attack. Fourteen people were injured in the attack, including 18-month-old Yotam Sitbon, who was seriously wounded.
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Many East Jerusalem Arabs have resident rather than citizen status in Israel. They are permitted to travel freely between the West Bank and areas within the Green Line.
Hassuna drove his white Mazda sedan onto the sidewalk on Monday afternoon, smashing into pedestrians at a bus stop across the street from the Chords Bridge and near the capital’s central bus station. A member of the security forces, a security guard and an armed civilian who saw the attack taking place shot him before he was able to get out of his car and approach the civilians. An ax was later found in his car, which police say is an indication he intended to wield it as a weapon after getting out of the vehicle.
Jerusalem has been one of the two focal points of terror attacks since the latest wave of violence began in October, with Hebron being the other. More than 20 Israelis have been killed since the start of the violence, and hundreds more have been wounded.
Seven of the those injured in the attack Monday, including Sitbon and his mother, were being treated in Haddassah Hospital Ein Kerem. Sitbon was operated on twice on Monday as doctors fought to save his foot, which was badly crushed in the attack.
Five more of the injured were treated in Shaare Zedek Medical Center. One, whose condition was described as “moderate,” required surgery and was being kept on a respirator in the intensive care unit. Another victim of the attack was in a moderate condition in the orthopedic ward, and another was being treated in the ear, nose and throat department.
Meanwhile, IDF troops and Border Police officers arrested 15 wanted suspects during operations in the West Bank overnight Monday, the army said in a statement.
Eight were sought on suspicion of involvement in “popular terror activities” and violent disturbances against Israeli civilians and security forces, the army said. Many of those arrested were alleged Hamas activists.
In addition to the arrests, security forces, including army engineers, together with the IDF Civil Administration, conducted operations to survey the homes of terrorists in preparation for their demolition.
Engineering forces entered the village of Tsuref near Hebron and surveyed the home of 16-year-old Musab Muhammad Ghneimat, who stabbed and moderately injured an IDF soldier near the West Bank security fence on October 23. Ghneimat was shot in the leg and arrested at the scene.
In Hebron, forces assessed the home of 16-year-old Lama al-Bakhri, who attempted to stab an Israeli civilian near the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba on December 13.
Also in Hebron, soldiers found an improvised gun together with magazines and bullets in a mattress factory, the army said.
The practice of demolishing the family homes of terrorists has been criticized by nongovernmental groups, but government officials have defended its use as a deterrent against future attacks.
Critics claim that in addition to being a form of collective punishment, house demolitions could motivate family members of terrorists to launch attacks themselves.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
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CNN’s Don Lemon was unable to contain his laughter on Wednesday while reporting on a new poll which found 55 percent of whites in America believe whites face discrimination.
“A new poll shows that the majority of white Americans believe there’s discrimination against their race,” Lemon said while introducing a new segment with Marc Lamont Hill and Ben Ferguson.
Hill responded by shaking his head and smiling, at which point Lemon burst out laughing.
“Mark, don’t start,” Lemon said. “I’ve gotta go on, let me tell people about the poll first!”
“White people are amazing,” Hill responded.
Hill said white people are not being systemically discriminated against, rather they’ve just begun getting a taste of “equality.”
“When white people don’t have complete power and control over a situation, they read their situation as somehow an oppressive situation,” Hill said. “I don’t doubt that 55 percent of white people feel discriminated against, I’m saying there’s something wildly irrational about 55 percent of white people in America thinking that they are being discriminated against because they are white, that is simply untrue and there’s no data for it.”
Ferguson responded: “Is it wildly irrational that 94 percent of African Americans think they’re discriminated against when in reality it’s not even close to that in America?”
Hill and Lemon started stammering in response and were unable to form a coherent answer.
Contrary to brilliant legal scholar Marc Lamont Hill’s proclamations, white people are systemically discriminated against through affirmative action programs at colleges and in the workplace, as well as through loans and government contracts given only to minority-owned businesses.
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What is it about Java EE and container-based technologies like Docker and Kubernetes that lends itself so well to enterprise development? Be it a basic web application that delivers HTML to the browser, or a microservice running on a server in the backend, the big trend in the industry is to containerize these applications and services, with Docker and Kubernetes always being the technology of preference.
So why is Docker, Kubernetes and enterprise Java such a natural fit? "The main reason is there is a hard separation between the infrastructure and the business logic, and you only get it with Java EE," said Java Champion Adam Bien. And what's the big benefit to using Docker and Kubernetes? The most obvious benefit to using container technology with Java EE applications, and perhaps the feature most beneficial to software developers, is the incredibly fast build times.
Bien emphasized this by pointing out that in an hour-long conference session, he built and re-built his microservices application over 50 times, and the builds were so fast that they didn't detract from the talk itself. "You can only achieve this performance with very thin WARs, and infrastructure that doesn't have to be rebuilt each time. This is the whole trick with Docker and Java EE."
Docker and Java EE without Kubernetes
You can only achieve this performance with very thin WARs, and infrastructure that doesn't have to be rebuilt each time. This is the whole trick with Docker and Java EE. Java Champion Adam Bien
Of course, all of this can be done with just Java EE and the Docker container. Kubernetes only needs to be introduced into the mix when orchestration capabilities become a requirement, which is pivotal for production systems hosting applications that are deployed into containers that need to be clustered and managed. In the development environment, there are big wins to be had by keeping things simple by leaving Kubernetes out of the mix and working with Java EE and Docker alone.
To learn more about how Docker and Kubernetes are changing the way enterprise software is developed, watch Cameron McKenzie's full interview with Adam Bien.
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(Reuters) - Oklahoma’s highest court on Tuesday struck down a law imposing restrictions on abortion providers, including a requirement that they take samples of fetal tissue from patients younger than 14 and preserve them for state investigators.
The law also set new criminal penalties for providers who violate abortion-related statutes as well as individuals who help a minor evade the requirement to obtain parental consent. In addition, the bill created a new, stricter inspection system for abortion clinics.
Legislators had said the fetal tissue section was aimed at capturing child rapists and that the law would protect women’s health. But the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, which challenged the law in court, said it unfairly targeted facilities that perform abortions.
In a unanimous opinion, the nine-member Oklahoma Supreme Court found the law violated the state constitution’s requirement that each legislative bill must address only “one subject.”
The rule, the court said, is designed to prevent legislators from including provisions that would not normally pass in otherwise popular bills. The state unsuccessfully asserted that each part of the law addressed a single subject: women’s reproductive health.
“We reject defendants’ arguments and find this legislation violates the single subject rule as each of these sections is so unrelated and misleading that a legislator voting on this matter could have been left with an unpalatable all-or-nothing choice,” Justice Joseph Watt wrote for the court.
In a concurring opinion, four judges said they also would have struck down the law as an unconstitutional burden on a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Lincoln Ferguson, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, called the decision “disappointing.”
“This law would have given law enforcement the ability to more easily prosecute sexual assaults of children that are discovered when a child under 14 has an abortion,” he said.
“The Attorney General’s Office remains committed to defending laws aimed at protecting the safety and well-being of Oklahoma women.”
In a statement, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northup said the law was “nothing but a cynical attack on women’s health and rights by unjustly targeting their trusted health care providers.”
Oklahoma’s Republican-dominated government has joined several socially conservative states in enacting abortion restrictions in recent years, drawing court challenges.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law imposing strict regulations on facilities that perform abortions. A similar law is on hold in Oklahoma while the state Supreme Court considers its legality.
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When looking at the array of 400-plus TV shows to watch, your eyes transforming into stressed-out spinning pinwheels at the options, you might wonder—as you organize your DVR and sift through your various streaming service bills—how we got here.
Most probably assume House of Cards was patient zero , the big Netflix original content experiment that had rival streaming services churning out their own TV shows quicker than a spreading virus—and cable networks soon catching the original content bug, too.
But probably the better sign that the new age of the streaming service, cable TV boom, and more TV than you could watch in a lifetime had arrived was Orange Is the New Black . Four seasons in—the fourth batch of episodes arrive ready to binge Friday—it may still be the best example of this Wild West of content opportunity’s great potential.
As much of House of Cards’ arrival was momentous, it may not have been as risky as we treated it. A proven story shepherded by David Fincher with Kevin Spacey as the lead, rabidly chewing the Capitol Hill scenery in a familiar—though exquisitely produced—Washington soap opera. The “binge” model was adventurous. Its status as “first” left it vulnerable. But there was no way this wasn’t going to be a hit. It was always going to be sampled, and likely devoured, because of the pedigree and because of the comfort of the content.
Then came Orange Is the New Black, and with it the purer mission—supposedly—of all these new non-traditional outlets.
It’s a show that played with tone, that didn’t look or feel like anything you would see on traditional networks. A show with largely unknown and diverse stars, because they’re the ones that made the most sense for the parts. A show that had to be sought out and discovered, because there was nothing to sell it, sight unseen, to the masses. A show that in its very existence became activism.
These new platforms were supposed to be a haven for the unique, out-of-the-box creations that didn’t fit in the literal cable box—the bundled networks we already subscribed to. The Cinderella Story success of Orange Is the New Black in its first season meant that audiences had been waiting for that haven. Now that it arrived, they were prepared to bask in it. They still are.
The influence of Orange Is the New Black is all over the television industry now, where you see not-quite-famous showrunners making TV starring not-quite-famous actors (though that’s largely changing) and saying powerful, challenging, confronting things about society and culture. You see it in Amazon’s Transparent and Hulu’s Casual , and now filtering into traditional cable television, too, with series like USA’s Mr. Robot and Lifetime’s UnREAL .
But the biggest benefactor of Orange Is the New Black’s breakout popularity and critical respect is Orange Is the New Black itself, which has grown richer, more surprising, and ambitious in its fourth season. That doesn’t always mean it’s better than ever—often it isn’t—but is just as admirable as ever. And after three seasons of getting to know the Litchfield inmates and the alternately wacky and terrifying universe they populate, the show has unlocked a perk of its now veteran status: there’s an ease to its level of entertainment.
That’s not to say that season four is comfortable. Like the three seasons before it, it relishes in being creatively undefinable.
It’s competed at the Emmy Awards in both comedy and drama categories. Its protagonist has gone from a fish-out-of-water female lead to an entrenched member of the ensemble. It continues to “say something”—about the justice system, institutionalized racism, queerness, femininity, privilege, and more—at an unignorable volume, but crafts it with unusual subtlety. And perhaps no show kindles comedy with tragedy together quite so explosively.
Season four picks up exactly where season three finishes.
In the an aligning of perfect circumstances, a hole in the fence surrounding the prison is discovered just as the security guards are staging a walkout over unfair labor practices. The prisoners are bathing in the lake in a rare moment of unbridled glee, contrasting with the two catalysts for season four's dramatic arcs that are unfolding simultaneously: a hitman is attempting to murder Alex (Laura Prepon) and school buses full of new inmates are being unloaded and admitted to the prison.
After their fleeting dip in freedom lake, the inmates return to the cells and a harsh new reality: double the prison population, half the resources. Seeds of turf wars are planted between the veteran inmates and the newbies. Beyond crowding, the pitfalls of an overextended institution begin to reveal themselves in unexpected and, commenting on our incarceration system, infuriating ways.
There are only enough work assignments for the original prisoners, who already held the jobs to make money. That becomes especially aggravating when the prison runs out of maxipads—the budget for "nonessentials" (let that classification settle for a moment) is the same, even though the prisoner count has increased. Inmates can buy tampons at commissary for $10, but that's only if you have a job—and if you've managed to save enough of your 10-cents-per-hour salary to purchase them.
Racial demographics band closer than before. Our well-intentioned hero Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) even ends up accidentally starting a white supremacist group—"White Lives Matter!" they chant—when attempting to retaliate against a threat to her illicit prison panties business . (Who knew that storyline would end up being so fruitful?)
Fights start happening. There's a looming sense of dread as tensions slowly rise, like you're winding a jack in the box and cringing while you wait for it to explode.
The season seems to be making, more than ever before, a statement on the human indignities that follow the push to privatize prisons and turn the inmates into inventory. A trip to what is known as CorrectiCon, a Disneyland for wardens looking to make budget cuts, is particularly sickening, especially as the keynote speaker outlines his mission statement: "Stop fixating on the days and start thinking about the years." The day-to-day life of these prisoners? Doesn't matter.
Give Alex's hitman storyline time. It starts to pay off in spades as more and more inmates get clued-in on what happened, and what measures were taken to cover up the deed (which we won't spoil here). It ends up being a particularly strong showcase for Lori Petty's NSA-paranoid Lolly, especially, whose spiraling psychotic breaks has her comic relief living painfully close to tragic.
The "backstory" episodes are still a thing, which puts a bright spotlight on the creative advantages and disadvantages of the show's extraordinarily large cast—which with the inmate influx is now, almost nonsensically, more unwieldy than ever.
Some backstories are a treat, like one featuring fan favorite Diane Guerrero as ditz with a heart of gold Maritza. Others you could aggressively do without. A backstory for Officer Healy? Really?
The sheer number of characters to juggle—there are new security officers added to the mix, too—means less screen time for the show's best characters and most talented actors.
Uzo Aduba's Crazy Eyes swaps last season's ridiculous tentacle porn arc for a hunt for a shower pooper. On the flip side, Laverne Cox's Sophia Bursett is absent for the first three episodes, which actually makes the character's presence more powerful when she finally does arrive—with heartbreaking vengeance—in episode four.
Daya (Dascha Polanco) and her mom, Aleida (Elizabeth Rodriguez) share some of the early season’s most emotional scenes when Aleida finds out that she's going to be released early—and is terrified. How will she find her kids, or afford an apartment, or find a job as an ex-convict? It revisits the Taystee ( Danielle Brooks ) storyline from season one, where life after release proved so unmanageable for the former prisoner that she purposely got herself sent back in. Four seasons in, it's a necessary reminder of the real world that gives context to this unique one inside the Litchfield walls.
As for Taystee, she's a ray of sunshine as always, this season working as Caputo's assistant, both shining in her new responsibilities and also abusing them--she uses her phone privileges to find out if Beyonce and Jay Z are getting divorced. As for the new characters, the standout is Judy King (Blair Brown), the celebrity chef who comes in with loads of southern charm and a heaping spoonful of race and class privilege.
The season is as funny as ever. Piper has morphed from scared Bambi to the Hunter, and is hilarious while doing it. Adrienne C. Moore's Black Cindy is a treasure trove of witticisms. Our favorite? After being told not to "go there" by her new cell mate: "Oh I went there, bought a house, and moved in, bitch. And now I'm remodeling the kitchen."
But for all the laughs, there's no denying the show's power as a drama. A terrifying one. An unabashedly female one, but oh-so-importantly a universal one. The season drags at times, and not every new character is as captivating as the ones you remember falling in love from season one. (In fact, none of them are.)
Yet four seasons in there's something about Orange Is the New Black, at a time when most shows start to feel stale or repetitive, that still feels—and I can't think of a better word for it—special.
When there's 400-plus shows to choose from, that's no small feat.
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What is it and why I built it?
Paul Graham (PG) is very influential in the startup world and his essays are considered classics. Unfortunately they are available only on his website and it isn't possible to read them on ebook device. That's why I created pg2epub.
pg2epub is a simple web scraper (running each morning) that generates ePub & PDF versions of Paul Graham’s essays.
Is it legal?
Not sure. I have tried several times to reach out to PG and ask for permission but never got a reply. So I decided that I don’t have anything to lose and built it without official permission. In the worst case scenario this site will be shut down and I would finally have gotten in touch with him.
This ebook is for personal use only and you are not allowed to distribute it or use it for commercial purposes. All essays are originally published in Paul Graham’s official website. All rights reserved to Paul Graham.
This is a side-project of Dimitar Raykov.
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President-elect Trump is set to meet with retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis Saturday amid speculation that Trump could tap him to serve as secretary of defense.
According to a pool report from the Trump transition team, Mattis is among eight people slated to meet with Trump on Saturday, including 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, who is being discussed as a potential nominee for secretary of state.
Bloomberg reported Friday that Mattis and retired Gen. Jack Keane are in the running for secretary of defense.
Mattis, a retired Marine general who served as head of U.S. Central Command, is widely revered throughout the Marine Corps and is known for his colorful statements over the years.
He commanded the 1st Marine Division in Iraq, followed by tours at Marine Corps Combat Development Command, commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force and chief of Joint Forces Command.
Mattis retired in 2013, so he would need a waiver from Congress to be confirmed as defense secretary since he would not have reached the "cooling-off period" required by law.
Members of the #NeverTrump movement attempted to draft Mattis to run for president as an independent to challenge Trump and Hillary Clinton, but he declined in late April.
"The thoughtfulness and patriotism — and for that matter, the modesty — Jim showed as he reflected on this decision make me more convinced than ever that he would have made a truly admirable president, and also a good candidate," wrote Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. The Weekly Standard and Washington Examiner are owned by the same parent company. "But it's not to be. So we won't have a President Mattis."
The retired general serves as fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.
News of Mattis' meeting with Trump also comes soon after the president-elect tapped another general, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, to serve as his national security adviser.
Mattis' selection for a national security position would be surprising, since NBC News reported Thursday that Mattis was among a list of retired senior military officers who Flynn had taken out of contention. Others crossed off the list were retired Marine Gen. Peter Pace and retired Adm. William McRaven.
Trump is also meeting this weekend with Mitt Romney, Michelle Rhee, Betsy DeVos, Todd Ricketts, Bob Woodson, Andy Puzder and Lew Eisenberg.
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When news broke last Monday that national security adviser Michael Flynn had resigned over his communications with Russia, it was a sure thing that John Oliver would lead this fat, juicy story to the slaughter—and he did not disappoint. On Sunday night, Oliver positively eviscerated the administration’s complicated relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Oliver opens by taking allegations of Russian influence over Trump associates like Paul Manafort and stunning them with a captive bolt pistol of truth. Next, the waggish host skewers the trotters of a montage of Trump saying nice things about Putin with a piercing gambrel of logic, suspending it upside-down and using his razor-sharp wit to sever its carotid artery and jugular vein. Before the troubled administration’s murky web of foreign business and personal relationships is even fully exsanguinated, he submerges it in a scalder, loosening the hairs of hypocrisy with the boiling water of reason.
Oliver, who honed his keen observational skills on the sharpening stone of The Daily Show, painstakingly scrapes footage of Putin “discovering” ancient vases on an obviously staged diving expedition until it’s clean. Incisively cutting through the bullshit surrounding Putin’s finances from sternum to groin, Oliver pries apart the thick, leathery skin of obfuscation, exposing secrets the Russian autocrat never thought would see the light of day.
From here on, gravity does most of the work—pull on a single coil of Putin’s slimy history of blackmail and murder, and it all begins unspooling. Oliver simply has to keep his bucket of justice underneath Putin’s ominous past as the bloody details come out. It’s a messy business, but the brilliant host doesn’t miss a single detail.
Leaving the story’s carcass for the traditional media to pick over, Oliver carefully puts Russia’s history of anti-gay sentiment in a stockpot of boiling facts for five minutes, killing the bacteria of homophobia and painstakingly removing the fecal matter of Russian televangelism.
After rinsing off Russia’s terrible human rights record with the shocking cold water of a sly reference to Saudi Arabia, Oliver cuts shots of Trump saying “Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia?” into three-inch slices.
Next, the host reveals a stockpot filled with a bouillon of alarming facts about Putin. The base, simmered all week by Last Week Tonight’s crack research staff, consists of a mirepoix of infantile foreign policy statements from Trump seasoned with a bouquet garni of photoshopped stock images and boiled with the bones of Putin’s Charlie Rose appearance. Submerging Russia’s delight in U.S. hypocrisy for a full five minutes, Oliver then drains it in a colander of indignation until all that’s left is a pile of false equivalencies offered by Putin’s defenders.
Finally, Oliver ignites the grapevines of wrath with the searing fire of investigative journalism. When the coals subside, he grills Trump’s statements about American innocence until they are brown and crispy, finally removing them from the heat of his penetrating gaze. Lightly seasoning with a coarsely ground montage of Oliver saying terrible things about Trump—demonstrating our freedom of the press and unlocking the rich flavors of Putin’s hypocrisy—Oliver plates the completed Last Week Tonight segment with a garnish of earnest belief in America, serving it with a 2003 Château Lafite Rothschild made from first-growth Russian pop music. Bon appétit!
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*Update 04/20/2015- Today is my 2 year no-shower anniversary! Enjoy the story I wrote a year ago today:
As of today it has been one year since my last shower. Yes, I know that sounds crazy and a year ago I would have agreed with you. I was a regular showering guy for the first 26 years of my life. Well, maybe not every single day, but just about.
So how does a regular showering guy end up going 365 days and counting without taking a shower? It started with a long bike ride across the United States to promote sustainability and eco-friendly living. I set a bunch of rules for myself to follow to lead by example. The rule for water was that I could only harvest it from natural sources such as lakes, rivers, and rain or from wasted sources such as leaky faucets. And I kept track of exactly how much I used too, with an aim of showing just how little we need to get by.
I made it through the 100-day bike ride without taking a shower and for me that was quite the task in itself. But everything had gone so well that I decided to continue my shower-less streak. I set a goal for 6 months and when that day passed, I figured I might as well go a full year without a shower.
So here I am now, one year later, to tell you story of my year without a shower.
I might as well bring this up right away. You think I’m really stinky right? You think I smell like some sort of Swamp Monster like this:
Actually, nope. When I say that I haven’t showered that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t bathing. I swam almost daily in places like this:
And this:
And in waterfalls like this:
And I used eco-friendly, biodegradable soap when I needed to.
But I learned that by living naturally I didn’t need cosmetic products anymore. I just used some soap, toothpaste, and essential oils and found that to work real well. This compared to previously using colognes, deodorant, shampoo, lotions, and all sorts of other products full of chemicals. And guess what? I had no lack of friends!
In fact, some even bathed with me.
And I even had some romances in that year.
Nobody thought that I smelled at all. And I surprised myself at how clean I was, just like everyone else.
I realized that water doesn’t have to come from a shower head to get me clean. You can wash yourself in lakes.
Rivers.
Or just by sitting in the rain.
But when natural water wasn’t available I found other places to clean myself without having an impact. Like this leaky fire hydrant in Brooklyn:
Or this blasting fire hydrant in the Bronx:
I learned that I can air dry rather than using a towel. And this meant less laundry, which saved even more water.
And I also turned my bathing time into a time to connect with nature. It became my favorite time of the day, when I would disconnect from the stresses of life and be present with my surroundings.
I learned that the average American uses about 100 gallons of water per day. But I was able to use less than 2 gallons per day on my bike trip. That’s just 8 Nalgene water bottles. (This was not including the natural water and leaky sources that I bathed in.)
Most importantly I learned to really appreciate every last drop.
Because water gives life to all of us and the animals too.
When I got home from my bike trip I resumed life at home but managed to use just 10-20 gallons per day. That is 5-10 times less than the average American uses. I went another 8 months without showering and conserved over 5,000 gallons of water and had plenty of fun with friends at the same time!
And when I didn’t feel like swimming, but I needed to get clean, I just rubbed myself down with a cloth and a gallon of water. But most importantly, I learned that you don’t have to stop showering to be a part of the solution. There are many easy ways to conserve water and most are really easy for any of us to do.
You can…
-Eat less (or no) meat and dairy*
-Flush the toilet less often.
-Take shorter showers or turn off the water while you’re soaping up and scrubbing down.
-Wash clothes less and in full loads
-Turn off the faucet
-Wash the dishes efficiently.
-Install water efficient shower heads and toilets.
-Get your leaks fixed.
-Grow food not lawns.
-Harvest rain.
How will you choose to conserve water? Start today by picking just one way to conserve and with time do more and more. You’ll likely find it to be quite easy this way.
And if you do all of that, you might start feeling like this!
Please share this story to inspire others to conserve water!
Photography by Brent Martin
*This tip was added due to an extremely large number of people bringing it up. According to the EPA “One hamburger requires 660 gallons of water to produce. This is equal to about two months worth of showers (daily five minute showers).” So rather than giving up showering for a year you could just pass on six hamburgers. That seems a lot easier to me. I had already given up on meat long before this adventure though. If I could do only one thing to live in a manner that is good for the earth, my community, and myself it would be eating a primarily plant-based diet.
Note added 09/06/2014: Since writing this article I have learned that you should not use any soap in natural bodies of water, even biodegradable soap. Soap does not readily biodegrade in water as it does in soil. If you want to bath with soap you should instead take a bucket of water 200 feet from the water source so that the soap runs off of you into the soil where microbes can break down the nutrients in the soap. Today I use soap on my hands but rarely anywhere else. It has been 1 year and almost 4 months since my last conventional shower and my hygiene is better than ever even having embraced a nearly soap free life. Learn more at LeaveNoTrace.com
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Lots of media (e.g. CNET) bring us the gospel about a survey organized by the Associated Press and GfK among 1,000+ Americans. They were asked about their beliefs in various claims made by the scientists.
Only 4% doubted that smoking causes cancer; over 80% actively claimed it does. Only 8% doubted that cells contain a consequential genetic code; almost 70% actively argued that they did. The reality of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago was the least believed proposition, getting about 20%. That's vastly lower than the number of Americans who believed in various religious insights such as the resurrection of Jesus Christ or the claim that the weather patterns get less favorable in the wake of the human sins (the so-called "climate change" religion is bought by nearly 1/3 of Americans).
Natural selection and evolution was actively backed by 31% of the Americans.
It's not pretty but the Big Bang's results were much worse than that. It seems that the percentage for the Big Bang is as low as the percentage of the TV viewers who are watching The Big Bang Theory on CBS. Maybe all believers in the Big Bang Theory are watching the sitcom of the same name! ;-)
Dear 80% Americans, why don't you try to look at the color of some galaxies and see that it's redshifted? This shift towards the lower (redder) frequencies is due to the outward motion, the Doppler effect, that you should have known from Sheldon. Four your convenience, the definition of the Doppler effect is repeated 3+1 times in the video below:
It was enough for Penny!
The reddening shows that the outward velocity of a galaxy at distance \(D\) is equal to \(V = DH\) where \(H\) is an observed constant, Hubble's constant. Just assume that the velocity was always of the same order. How much time did it take for the galaxies to get this far? It's \(T = D / V = 1/H\), the inverse Hubble's constant. It's just of order 10 billion years, stupid. So 10+ billion years ago, the galaxies were very close, unless someone already made them diverge that quickly a long time ago. A good enough explosive to do so only works if the galaxies' matter were extremely compressed. So 10+ billion years ago, the galaxies were just superclose to each other.
Some extra maths you don't want to follow helps you to calculate it a bit more accurately – including the variable speed of the galaxies and the curvature of space and time – and the best measured age of the Universe is 13.8 billion years according to the data from numerous experiments. You know that you need an ancient universe, anyway. 27% of Americans answered that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The Big Bang Theory has made other predictions – about the relative abundance of light elements in the cosmos; and the cosmic microwave background, among others – and they were confirmed. They would surely contradict other random ways to get the galaxies in outward motion.
OK, I don't want to try to convince the 80% Americans about the reality of the Big Bang in any deatail because it is a waste of time and most Americans who are visiting this blog are confident that the Big Bang has occurred, anyway. But let me just say that if Christianity is the reason, it is actually bizarre for the Christians not to embrace the sharp beginning – the Big Bang – enthusiastically. The hippie on the picture above is the Christ, Jesus Christ, and he has just said "BANG". Such a "BANG" when the time started needed a creator – it's probably the only activity where the modern science may actively consider a creator helpful.
I have actually listened to parts of various debates and talks by William Lane Craig, a Christian apologist (e.g. one debate with Lawrence Krauss and another one with Sean Carroll). He is not your kind of a dumb obsessed Young Earth Creationist. He is an intelligent man who decided to rationalize Christianity. I don't believe that he enjoys the social and ethical freedom to abandon Christianity and its basic dogmas altogether but given the straitjacket into which he has squeezed his soul, he is doing a good job in defending some traces of God within physics.
Needless to say, I would disagree with most of the other "religiously tainted" insights (including his views on resurrection, a topic that I mentioned because we just celebrated the Easter) – as well as his unjustifiably skeptical attitude towards string theory and other key parts of modern physics – but he's been on the winning side in the question "whether the Universe had a beginning". For some reason, Krauss – and other atheists – would prefer a cosmology without any beginning, the kind of the past-eternal "static Universe" that physicists would believe in the 19th century. Why would atheists favor such a thing? Well, because there would be no room for Jesus to say "BANG". ;-)
The Big Bang Theory has actually been assaulted by the Marxist ideologues for quite some time; that much for the "scientific character" of Marxism. They don't like the idea that the mass/energy conservation law has to be revised in the context of cosmology (modern cosmology is an application of the general theory of relativity) – and essentially becomes invalid or vacuous, depending on your viewpoint.
Even though tons of professional atheists are either overt or covert Marxism sympathizers, they gradually got used to the Big Bang. But most of them would still prefer some past-eternal picture on top of the Big Bang. I would bet that even efforts such as the cyclic/ekpyrotic (or Penrose's cyclic conformal) cosmological models are partly motivated by the authors' fear of the true beginning. Eternal inflation allows new universes to grow all the time – and it produces a future-eternal universe.
But all cosmological models actually prohibit a past-eternal cosmology; they always imply that the world had a beginning. This has been most clearly proven by Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alex Vilenkin ("BGV") in 2003:
Hi Lawrence [Krauss],
Any theorem is only as good as its assumptions. The BGV theorem says that if the universe is on average expanding along a given worldline, this worldline cannot be infinite to the past.
A possible loophole is that there might be an epoch of contraction prior to the expansion. Models of this sort have been discussed by Aguirre & Gratton and by Carroll & Chen. They had to assume though that the minimum of entropy was reached at the bounce and offered no mechanism to enforce this condition. It seems to me that it is essentially equivalent to a beginning.
On the other hand, Jaume Garriga and I are now exploring a picture of the multiverse where the BGV theorem may not apply. In bubbles of negative vacuum energy, expansion is followed by contraction, and it is usually assumed that this ends in a big crunch singularity. However, it is conceivable (and many people think likely) that singularities will be resolved in the theory of quantum gravity, so the internal collapse of the bubbles will be followed by an expansion. In this scenario, a typical worldline will go through a succession of expanding and contracting regions, and it is not at all clear that the BGV assumption (expansion on average) will be satisfied.
I suspect that the theorem can be extended to this case, maybe with some additional assumptions. But of course there is no such thing as absolute certainty in science, especially in matters like the creation of the universe. Note for example that the BGV theorem uses a classical picture of spacetime. In the regime where gravity becomes essentially quantum, we may not even know the right questions to ask.
Alex [Vilenkin]
They showed that the integral of the Hubble parameter is smaller than a finite bound in a cosmology that is mostly expanding – and they didn't even need any energy condition for that (a condition saying that the density of energy or some related quantity can't go negative).William Lane Craig is on a mission – and the beginning of the Universe seems very Christian to him. So the BGV theorem has actually become his pet result and he has understood it rather well. So well, in fact, that – painfully and ironically enough – he's been more correct or more honest about its interpretation than cosmologist Lawrence Krauss with whom Craig has debated.In September 2013, a month after the Craig-Krauss debate, the Christian apologists got very excited about the fact that Krauss has partially censored and misinterpreted an e-mail he got from Vilenkin . Krauss has pretty much cropped some sentences in a way that dramatically changes the overall implications of Vilenkin's e-mail. On the other hand, Vilenkin sent another e-mail to Craig where he acknowledged that Craig has interpreted the BGV theorem "very accurately".(Even if all the people were acting dishonestly and purely in their personal interest, it wouldn't be shocking that Vilenkin has supported Craig and not Krauss: after all, Craig thinks that the work by Vilenkin et al. is important and robust while Krauss treats it as an inconvenient piece of dust that may be blown away.)Craig has later published the full e-mail from Vilenkin to Krauss and you may compare it with Krauss' truncated version , too. Krauss' censorship is pretty scary and his claims that he omitted the "too technical parts" of the e-mail are clearly indefensible. The parts censored by Krauss are written in bold:You see that in the censored parts, Vilenkin essentially says that all the conceivable and proposed loopholes are unlikely or probably wrong and that the BGV theorem may be extended to one that bans these would-be loopholes, anyway. Even if the theorem were formally wrong in some interpretation, it is still morally right, Vilenkin argues.Note that one proposed would-be loophole was due to Carroll and Chen . That paper reflects Carroll's omnipresent misunderstanding of the origin of the second law of thermodynamics. He says that the Universe could have been past-eternal before a certain point but the entropy was decreasing for \(t\lt 0\) which he finds – and, probably, they find – OK. At \(t=0\), the arrow of time was reverted and the entropy had a global minimum. It is not really possible to revert the arrow of time – the thermodynamic arrow of time is a derived one (via the H-theorem) from a more fundamental and unavoidable one, the logical arrow of time – and even if you found a framework in which such a reversal would be formally allowed, the \(t=0\) moment would be so special and catastrophic that it should still be called "the beginning", anyway (both Vilenkin and your humble correspondent say).Because the entropy was decreasing for \(t\lt 0\), it is better to use the entropy itself – and not the coordinate \(t\) – to be a faithful quantification of time since the beginning. And because the entropy was high both for \(t\gt 0\) and \(t\lt 0\), it would be more correct to say that the Carroll-Chen universe had a beginning at \(t=0\) and from that beginning, it was evolving into two futures, one for positive \(t\) and one for negative \(t\). You shouldn't imagine the time as a straight line but rather as a V-shaped manifold that is increasing in the left as well as in the right; it's two (equivalent or inequivalent?) futures evolving from the beginning.Another "not really real" loophole that Vilenkin discusses is the same one that I discussed in March when I disagreed with Matt Strassler's claim that there was probably no Big Bang singularity . (Now I realize, maybe Matt Strassler has voted along with the 80% majority of the Americans – claiming that there has been no Big Bang LOL.) If one adds some quantum-gravity regime that regulates various quantities and protects their finiteness, the "period of time" in which the quantum gravity is existentially needed should have been very short (Planckian short) and it is conceptually right to view it as a part of the object called "singularity" (our right description of the concept of the Big Bang singularity is improved and regulated when we switch from classical GR to quantum gravity but as long as the following – nearly classical – expansion of the Universe is still there, we have no right to say that the singularity as a locus has entirely disappeared).Incidentally, when Craig caught Krauss' censorship of important segments of Vilenkin's e-mail, I was also disappointed by Krauss' foggy suggestion that science hasn't proven that there had to be a beginning, and so on, which – Krauss indicated – meant that Craig was building on sand. However, science never proves things with a strict 100% certainty. But this limitation doesn't prevent science from getting really close to 100% and the "nearly proven" propositions are treated as rather important ones by scientists. That's exactly what Craig was doing – he used the evidence to argue that it was far more likely for the Universe to have a beginning – so it was painful for Krauss to try to weaken Craig's propositions by saying that there exists no 100% rigorous proof. There never exists a 100% rigorous proof of propositions that directly apply to Nature!So I do think that the BGV theorem kills the models that want to extend the cosmological history of the visible Universe in a way that makes it eternal. The real motivation is clearly to make it past-eternal – because the (finite or infinite) future couldn't have affected the present, by causality, so the future's being finite or infinite is inconsequential for us today – but cosmologies can't really be past-eternal. So it is silly to "prefer the past-eternal cosmologies for aesthetic reasons" because the very basic feature of these models makes them impossible, BGV showed.I don't have any doubts that William Lane Craig is also spinning insights and results in ways that depend on the outcomes he wants to defend. But it's disappointing to see that people like Krauss and Carroll are doing the same thing. If both sides of a controversy are doing such a thing, it may happen that each of them is more right. And indeed, it has just happened that the Christian apologist ended up as the man who has more accurately interpreted a theorem, the BGV theorem.(Just to be sure, the proof of the beginning – even if we view the existing evidence as a proof, and we're arguably not far from that – doesn't imply that some God or supernatural forces at the beginning have been established. The initial conditions of the Universe may follow perfectly rational, natural, and scientifically accessible laws.)I should also try to "weaken" my claims that the evolution of the Universe had to have a beginning by saying that I can imagine some room for the pre-Big-Bang cosmological evolution. Perhaps, our visible patch of the Universe had a father, perhaps a grandfather, possibly a few great grandfathers, and a forefather – and the evolution was looking for the right compactification that is so hospitable for us. But it's important to realize that according to the available evidence and calculations, the number of these generations probably had to be finite.
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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Two powerful earthquakes, measuring 4.8 and a 5.5 magnitudes did not hit San Simeon and Brooktrails early Saturday morning. The widespread reports of the quakes are the result of a glitch in the systems used to quickly spread the word about damaging tremors.
Automated earthquake sensors, and the text messaging, email alerts, and automated Twitter alerts associated with it again appeared to malfunction for the United States Geological Survey and the media outlets that have built automated systems to report them to readers.
A real quake did hit, a massive magnitude 7.8 struck the open ocean hundreds of miles south of Tokyo at 4:23 a.m. Pacific time, over 400 miles beneath the earth’s crust, sending shockwaves of seismic energy around the globe.
About fifteen minutes later, the USGS sent out two alerts, one about a quake later revised to a 5.5 near Brooktrails, California and another about a San Simeon earthquake.
The alerts also triggered the LA Times “Quakebot” algorithm to write two stories, which were then read by a human editor and published.
The problem is these reported events never happened, and the alert for the actual quake off Japan occurred about five minutes after first two false alerts.
A USGS geophysicist explained that the Japan quake was so deep and strong that it sends ripples of energy around the globe, and the Northern California Seismic Network picked up those spikes from the initial waves and falsely reported them as additional quakes. The problem is likely to recur whenever a strong and deep quake happens.
For a 5.5 magnitude quake, significant localized damage would have been expected, but instead the rural area north of Healdsburg slept calmly on through the automated earthquake reports.
Both @USGSted tweets about the non-quakes indicated that there were zero tweets per minute using the hashtag #quake. With quakes of that size near populated areas, this “#quakes” count is one way to tell if the automated USGS Tweet is accurate.
To make automated services like the LA Times’ “Quakebot” accurate, taking into account how many real people tweeted with the #Quake hashtag before the alert could help reduce erroneous reports.
The actual quake off Japan had 56 “#quake” hashtag usages per minute by the time the alert went out.
With a major quake, Tweets will often beat all the automated services in reporting a quake quickly, and sometimes more accurately.
When the 6.0 Napa earthquake hit on August 24th last year, the first online report of the quake came not from a government sensor or a media outlet with software to re-tweet or re-post information, but from a guy who grabbed his smartphone and quickly tapped out six characters at 3:21 a.m., while the earthquake was still rolling. This beat the USGS automated alerts by minutes.
Quake! — Chris Taylor (@FutureBoy) August 24, 2014
The two Saturday quakes were removed from the large interactive quake map on the front page of USGS.gov that morning, however event pages for the quakes still existed well into the day and it took another several hours for a “deletion notice” to be sent out. The stories about the two non-quakes continued to exist on the LA Times website and on several media sites that pull data or RSS feeds from the USGS or the LA Times stories well into Saturday.
The official automated USGS tweets and the tweets from @latimes and other media outlets and re-tweet services continue to ricochet in social media, being retweeted dozens of times as there is no way to edit or modify a sent tweet. The only option would be to delete it. Headlines associated with a tweet do automatically update, however, as seen in the LA Times tweets.
ACTIVE TWEET FROM @USGSted:
@LATimes TWEETS
Earthquake: 5.5 quake strikes near Brooktrails, Calif., in Mendocino County http://t.co/rc9bv5FLTd — Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 30, 2015
Earthquake: 4.8 quake strikes near San Simeon http://t.co/iZNQvUQ9IU — Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 30, 2015
The same chain of events occurred Friday, when the USGS, the Associated Press and the LA Times reported an earthquake with magnitude of 5.1 hit the Redding area after a real and very powerful earthquake struck the coast of Alaska.
The Associated Press confirmed Friday morning that this was a “…erroneous alert based off an earthquake that struck in Alaska” and killed the story from its wire service.
As with Saturday’s false reports, the event record of the earlier California quake vanished from the USGS seismic activity map, but remained on Twitter, and the LA Times story remained for hours before being updated.
“Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor,” Slate reported in a 2014 article about the newspaper’s use of the computerized journalism technology.
The Los Angeles Times confirmed to CBS SF that a human editor continues to review all Quakebot stories. In Friday’s case, a “deletion notice” was not sent out through the automated government systems.
A Times spokesperson tells CBS SF that the newspaper’s editors are working with the USGS on coordinating the two automated systems to ensure the data is accurate, but while those conversations may have begun Friday, the Japan quake tested them again and the USGS false report issue struck a second and third time the next day.
The article with headline and excerpt describing the Friday non-quake near Redding continue to exist on the LATimes.com website, but a paragraph was added reading: “10:57 a.m.: This post is incorrect, with the USGS reporting that sensors in California misidentified seismic activity from a magnitude 6.7 quake that struck earlier in Alaska. The USGS reported there was no earthquake in the area at the time reported.” Later Friday, the headline was later updated as well.
The false reports of the San Simeon and Brooktrails quakes remain reported as actual quakes on LATimes.com as of 7:00 a.m. Saturday.
Journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke designed “Quakebot,” but left the Times in 2014. The system is described in depth here in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Automated data feeds are increasingly common, and news outlets including the Associated Press are using them to automatically write and share everything from stock updates to NCAA sports stories.
The challenge for journalists is knowing when to immediately post a story based on automated data, and when to wait, and correlate it with actual reports. With earthquakes, Twitter is often the best judge of a quake.
COMPLETE QUAKE COVERAGE: CBS Earthquake Resource Center
LIVE QUAKE MAP: Track Real-Time Hot Spots
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The upcoming NLDS between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Atlanta Braves will be one of the most exciting playoff matchups of the MLB Playoffs as the stars of L.A. take on the young guns of Atlanta. While pitching is at the forefront of the series with Clayton Kershaw and Kris Medlen likely opening Game 1, the people behind the pitchers will be even more important.
According to studies completed by Baseball Prospectus, the three most important variables relative to playoff success are measures of defense. Specifically, the three metrics in question are closer WXRL, pitcher strikeout rate and FRAA (fielding runs above average). Each team is amongst the top in all three categories, but there are glaring differences between both contenders in all of them.
As far as strikeout rate goes, the Dodgers take the cake on this one. With Kershaw and Zach Greinke as their one-two punch, striking batters out is something L.A. knows how to do as they own an 8.09 K/9 rate. The Braves aren’t bad themselves though as they posted a 7.65 K/9 rate.
While each team’s strikeout rate is good, Atlanta’s batters are specifically known for their high strikeout rate, so I think the ability for Kershaw to strikeout batters will come into play even more in this series.
Despite the strikeout advantage that the Dodgers claim, the Braves best them in both remaining categories. As far as closers go, Craig Kimbrel is the undisputed leader in the world. With 50 saves this season and numbers that continue to baffle stat-heads, he’s nearly unhittable. Kenley Jansen has been outstanding for the Dodgers as well, but there’s no doubt that Don Mattingly would take Kimbrel over him any day of the week.
Defense goes to the Braves as well. With Matt Kemp officially done for the season and Andre Ethier likely missing at least the NLDS, the Dodgers’ defense is vulnerable. That isn’t to say Atlanta isn’t without their faults. Since B.J. Upton has struggled so mightily this season and with the emergence of Evan Gattis‘ explosive offensive potential, Fredi Gonzalez finds himself forced to play Gattis in left field.
Despite that, the Braves still have Jason Heyward in the outfield and most importantly Andrelton Simmons at shortstop, two of the best defenders in the game.
Each team has slumped through September, but both have also demonstrated their ability to go on long stretches where they are nearly unbeatable. While there is no doubt that Atlanta has the upper hand defensively in this series, there is even less doubt that it will be one of the most compelling of the postseason.
Adam Krentz is an Atlanta Braves writer for RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter or add him to your network on Google.
Related:
Atlanta Braves’ Closer Craig Kimbrel Will Have His Chance to Shine on the Big Stage
Dodgers vs. Braves NLDS 2013: J.P. Howell is the Difference-Maker
2013 NLDS: 5 Bold Predictions for Los Angeles Dodgers-Atlanta Braves Series
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Despite my break from climate, I can’t help sometimes reading things. Today, Twitter led me to Lewandowsky’s whose title is, “Why climate ‘uncertainty’ is no excuse for doing nothing “; that article was written with a coauthor named Pancost. Naturally, I was interested to see if– like Wadhams– Lewandowsky was simply going to rehash his usual talking point with the added “Lew” twist of not engaging what those he criticize actually said or claimed.
This paper had a surprising new twist. Rather than merely not engaging a person they criticize, they appear to totally misconstrue her argument!
So what’s Lew’s beef this time? This time, Lewandowsky (along with Pancost) are ostensibly criticizing people for suggesting that “uncertainty” (in scare quotes) about climate change is a reason to delay climate change. But here’s the kicker: They claim Judy Curry is an example of someone who claims “uncertainty” is a reason to delay action. Or at least that’s what I infer from these words:
Paterson is far from alone: climate change debate has been suffused with appeals to “uncertainty” to delay policy action. Who hasn’t heard politicians or media personalities use uncertainty associated with some aspects of climate change to claim that the science is “not settled”? Over in the US, this sort of thinking pops up quite often in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Its most recent article, by Professor Judith Curry, concludes that the ostensibly slowed rate of recent warming gives us “more time to find ways to decarbonise the economy affordably.”
So there we have it: Judy Curry is the American example of a person who uses claims of “uncertainty” or “not settled” as reasons to delay policy action. But did she suggest policy action should be delayed for these reasons? Curry did write the more recent estimates of climate sensitivity suggest we have more time to find ways to decarbonise affordably. The contributors to the “The Conversation” got that right.
But their reading comprehension must be abject if they think her reason for suggesting lower urgency is greater uncertainty or that science is “unsettled”. In fact: her argument that action is less urgent is based on the premise that the range of transient sensitivity is less uncertain than claimed in the recent IPCC report.
It’s fairer to say her article is consistent with the argument that science is progressing (as it always does). The additional evidence collected in recent years permits us to obtain more precise estimates climate sensitivity and we are discovering the transient climate sensitivity is likely lower than previously thought. That is to say: science is becoming “more settled”, we now have less uncertainty in transient climate sensitivity.
Let’s turn to numbers. According to Lewis and Curry:
The uncertainty in transient climate sensitivity is now less that previously though. The estimate for the spread between upper and lower values dropped from 1.5C to 0.75C. So, the uncertainty range has been cut in half. The lower range climate sensitivity is higher than previously thought. This estimate rose from 1 degrees C to 1.05 degrees Celsius. The upper range of climate sensitivity is lower than previously thought. This estimate dropped from 2.5 degrees C to 1.80 degrees Celsius. The best estimate of climate sensitivity is lower than previously thought. This estimate dropped from 1.8 degrees C to 1.33 degrees Celsius.
To put these numbers in context, the first bullet implies that by incorporating data not previously available, Lewis and Curry’s analysis indicates less uncertainty than the IPCC range. Yes: “Less” as in “the opposite of more”.
The second bullet point can be interpreted as suggesting we are more certain climate change is true. Why? 1.05C is further from ‘0C’ than 1.0C was. This implies the claim ‘climate change is false’ is even less likely to be true under her analysis than the previous IPCC analysis. Once again: Lewis and Curry’s data suggest less uncertainty that climate change is real and will occur.
If the magnitude of uncertainty was the only thing that mattered to urgency, and if we accepted Lewandowsky and co-authors claim (or possibly only seeming claim) that higher uncertainty automatically means greater urgency for action, we should now stop right here and say “Oh! Lew says greater uncertainty should motivate more action. But uncertainty is less than before. Clearly, action must be less urgent!” But I don’t think anyone around here ever accepted the claim Lewandowsky seems to make. Nearly everyone accepts that uncertainty range matters. The difficulty is that range has always been accounted for in best estimates of damage because economists know how to weight probability of damage with cost of damage and integrate to get the best estimate of for the cost of damage accounting for the uncertainty. Clearly, the extra cost arising from uncertianty shouldn’t be counted both in the economists estimates and then added in again by those interpreting the likely damages based on published cost estimate. The uncertainty should be counted once: either in the analysis (as it is) or afterwards, but not both.
The issue for most lukewarmers has been the range of estimates of sensitivity provided by the IPCC gave short shrift to observational evidence. Moreover, the basis for including the upper range in the IPCC estimate of ‘uncertainty’ is tenuous, and appeared to contrary to some observational evidence. The discrepancy widened as the hiatus continued.
Returning to bullet points , the final two bullets address that issue of estimate of the upper bound and midpoint of the range. The final two bullets show the best and upper estimates of climate sensitivity are lower than previously suggested by the IPCC. This means that using Lewis and Curry’s current best and upper bound estimates of climate sensitivity, we would predict less economic and environmental damage than using than the most recent IPCC estimated range.
But finally: Lewandowsky and coauthors misreading exhibits another element. The main reason Curry is saying that acting is less not merely because the transient sensitivity is smaller than previously. It also turns out, the best estimate for the sensitivity is lower that previously thought. Had the reduced uncertainty resolved into the upper range of the previously larger uncertainty window, Curry would likely be saying the new results suggest greater urgency. Such a claim would have been justified if we became more confident transient response was high. But, Lewis and Curry’s analysis suggests transient climate sensitivity with the most likely value in the lower range of that published in the most recent IPCC report.
Now, it may be that Curry and Lewis are incorrect. If so, one might discount Curry’s conclusion about lowered urgency. But that’s hardly the same as suggesting she claims the reason for reduced urgency is “uncertainty”. She most certainly does no such thing: Her uncertainty range is half that of the IPCC’s most recent range in uncertainty for transient climate response.
I know people are going to ask me whether I think Lewis and Curry’s estimate is right or wrong. My answer is I don’t know! My main reason for commenting is I find it interesting that Lewandowsky and co-author criticize Curry for saying something that is nearly the opposite of what her article appears to communicate. If you have thoughts, share!
Written by lucia
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Researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft are developing one of the first complete storage systems to house digital data in DNA. The news comes as the digital universe is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020.
“Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works. It’s very, very compact and very durable,” said co-author Luis Ceze, UW associate professor of computer science and engineering, in a press release.
“We’re essentially repurposing it to store digital data, pictures, videos, documents, in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years.”
Digital data storage using DNA by Luis Henrique Ceze of University of Washington and… https://t.co/KUlHHMUzXspic.twitter.com/ahanCZGJqu — Naesstrom (@Naesstrom) December 4, 2015
The team of bioengineers and computer science and electronic engineers were able to encode data from four image files into the nucleotide sequences of synthetic DNA snippets. This was achieved by converting the long strings of 1’s and 0’s in digital data into the four building blocks of the DNA sequence – adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. The synthesized DNA molecules were then dehydrated for long-term storage.
Miraculously, researchers then reversed the process by retrieving the correct sequence from a large pool of DNA and reconstructing the images without losing a single byte of information, according to the University of Washington.
The University of Washington and Microsoft researchers chopped up digital data and encoded it into nucleotide ... https://t.co/ZdjfTAnJrS — Badru WISE de BîðøÑ™ (@BadruWISE) April 8, 2016
To make it easier to find the images they had encoded, researchers put the equivalent of zip codes and street addresses into the DNA sequence to facilitate easier retrieval. Researchers also used Huffman coding for lossless data compression, according to Techworm.
“How you go from ones and zeroes to As, Gs, Cs and Ts really matters because if you use a smart approach, you can make it very dense and you don’t get a lot of errors,” said co-author Georg Seelig, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said in the press release.
“If you do it wrong, you get a lot of mistakes.”
Researchers were up against a punishing deadline. The world is producing data faster than it can create new storage. The digital universe – all the data contained in computer files, historic archives, movies, photo collections, plus the exploding volume collected by businesses and devices worldwide – is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020, according to the UW. That’s a tenfold increase compared to 2013.
CIA teaming up with skincare line that collects DNA in unconventional wayhttps://t.co/i0I5GJqovkpic.twitter.com/tbQC9lazMZ — RT America (@RT_America) April 8, 2016
Ceze and his team think they can go much further, moving on to store video and large digital files. They claim it could be possible to “shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.”
Researchers said DNA molecules can store information many millions of times more densely than existing technology for digital storage, such as flash drives and hard drives, as well as magnetic and optical media. Those systems also degrade after a few years, while DNA can preserve information for centuries.
Scientists sue NY state police for forcing them to ‘customize’ DNA test resultshttps://t.co/fxuNpPBJV7pic.twitter.com/gpiylCGgBV — RT America (@RT_America) February 22, 2016
The study, A DNA-based Archival Storage System, was presented at this year’s ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.
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Icons are everywhere. These “little miracle workers” (as John Hicks described them) help us reinforce meaning in the interfaces we design and build. Their popularity in web design has never been greater; the conciseness and versatility of pictograms in particular make them a lovely fit for displays large and small.
But icons on the web have had their fair share of challenges. They were time-consuming to prepare for every intended display size and color. When high-resolution displays hit the market, icons looked particularly low-res and blocky compared to the text they often accompanied.
So it’s really no wonder that icon fonts became such a hit. Icons displayed via @font-face were resolution-independent and customizable in all the ways we expected text to be. Sure, delivering icons as a typeface was definitely a hack, but it was also useful, versatile, and maybe even a little fun.
But now we need to stop. It’s time to let icon fonts pass on to Hack Heaven, where they can frolic with table-based layouts, Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners and Scalable Inman Flash Replacements. Here’s why…
Screen Readers Actually Read That Stuff
Most assistive devices will read aloud text inserted via CSS, and many of the Unicode characters icon fonts depend on are no exception. Best-case scenario, your “favorite” icon gets read aloud as “black favorite star.” Worse-case scenario, it’s read as “unpronounceable” or skipped entirely.
They’re a Nightmare if You’re Dyslexic
Many dyslexic people find it helpful to swap out a website’s typeface for something like OpenDyslexic. But icon fonts get replaced as well, which makes for a frustratingly broken experience.
They Encroach on Emoji Turf
Most of the time, we rely on automated tools to choose which Unicode characters are assigned to which icon. But Unicode’s also where our beloved emoji live. If you aren’t careful, they can overlap in confusing (albeit hilarious) ways. My favorite example: Etsy’s “four stars and a horse” bug. More recently, our own Jason Grigsby encountered random fist-bumps on ESPN’s site.
They Fail Poorly and Often
When your icon font fails, the browser treats it like any other font and replaces it with a fallback. Best-case scenario, you’ve chosen your fallback characters carefully and something weird-looking but communicative still loads. Worse-case scenario (and far more often), the user sees something completely incongruous, usually the dreaded “missing character” glyph.
Custom fonts shouldn’t be mission-critical assets. They fail all the time. One look at Bootstrap’s icon-related issues and it’s no wonder why they’re removing them entirely from the next version.
Worse still, many users will never see those fonts. Opera Mini, which frequently rivals iOS Safari in global usage statistics with hundreds of millions of users worldwide, does not support @font-face in most cases. Opera recommends avoiding icon fonts if you want to support Opera Mini.
They Never Looked Right
The way browsers hint fonts to optimize legibility was never a good fit for our custom iconography, and support for tweaking that behavior is all over the place.
Multicolor icons are even worse. The technique of overlaying multiple glyphs to achieve the effect is impressively resourceful, but the results often look like their printing registration is misaligned.
You’re Probably Doing It Wrong
“But Tyler,” I hear you say. “You’ve completely ignored Filament Group’s Bulletproof Icon Fonts, complete with feature tests and sensible, content-driven fallback solutions.”
And you’re right. Those techniques are great! If you’re using an icon font, you should definitely follow their recommendations to the letter.
But you probably won’t.
What you’ll probably do is adopt whatever your framework of choice has bundled, or drop in some massive free icon font you can use right away. You won’t modify how they work out of the box because that’s really hard to prioritize, especially when they look great on your monitor with virtually no effort at all.
Or maybe you will do the work, designing and curating a custom icon font, choosing your Unicode characters carefully, documenting and evangelizing the importance of implementing your icons in an accessible way with appropriate fallbacks. Then one day, Dave forgets to add a fallback image to that iconographic button he added (which looks great, by the way), which Roberta reuses for her related Pull Request, and before you know it, your app has devolved into a fragile, hack-littered wasteland once more.
These examples are not hypothetical (though names have been changed to protect the innocent). I’ve seen them happen to multiple organizations, all of them starting with the best possible intentions.
There’s Already a Better Way
SVG is awesome for icons! It’s a vector image format with optional support for CSS, JavaScript, reusability, accessibility and a bunch more. It was made for this sort of thing.
But I hear a lot of excuses for why teams avoid using it, even for brand-new projects. Here are a few…
“SVGs can’t be combined into sprites.”
They totally can. There are even really great tools like svg-sprite and IcoMoon that can help automate that process.
“SVGs are larger in file size.”
Usually when I hear this, the team’s comparing a single binary icon font to multiple, uncompressed SVG files. The gap narrows dramatically when you optimize your SVGs, combine reusable ones into sprites, and deliver those with active Gzip compression or embedded in-page.
Occasionally I’ve heard the gap is still too wide when hundreds of icons are included. This begs the question: Why are you including hundreds of icons on every page?
“The icon markup is too verbose by comparison.”
Let’s compare:
<!-- Typical @font-face icon: --> <span class="icon icon-search" aria-hidden="true"></span> <!-- Typical SVG icon: --> <svg class="icon"> <use xlink:href="path/to/icons.svg#search"/> </svg>
The SVG markup is barely more verbose, and way more descriptive and semantic than some empty, ARIA-hidden <span> element.
“Browser support for SVG is worse.”
As of this writing, global support for SVG is up to 96%… 4% higher than the same stat for @font-face . Plus, SVGs are way more accessible and their fallbacks are much more straightforward.
“The framework we chose already has an icon font.”
If your framework told you to jump off a bridge, would you?
Don’t Be “Table Guy”
I was in school when the Web Standards movement hit critical mass. While the majority of my instructors saw the merits of semantic markup and embraced it wholeheartedly, one passionately held out. “Table Guy” argued that no layout tool could usurp <table> , that it was inherently better-suited for crafting grid-based designs. He boasted of how quickly and easily he could achieve the “Holy Grail” layout with his trusty table cells. He cited the wealth of cross-browser inconsistencies that continued to plague CSS.
Table Guy and I kept in touch. Today, he freely admits he was wrong about CSS. He feels embarrassed to have been so married to a technique that was so clearly misappropriated in hindsight.
If you won’t stop using icon fonts for people with screen readers, people with dyslexia, people with browsers that don’t support @font-face , people who randomly didn’t load the icon font once for some reason, or designers who just want their icons to look right on-screen…
Then do it for yourself. Don’t be Table Guy.
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Even halfway decent - and honest - military historians will tell you that the 1965 war was the last one that Pakistan had a chance of winning against India. It had better equipment, more advanced technologies, better and more focused NATO-standard training, a clearer doctrine and strategic objectives. It seems difficult to believe now, but even internally and politically, Pakistan then looked more cohesive than did India, which faced Naga insurgency, Dravida separatism and an unstable Kashmir.Most importantly, the initiative was fully with Pakistan. It had chosen its timing, place and method of launching that war. Its purpose was to wrest the Kashmir Valley. Its leadership had concluded, quite correctly, that India's military modernisation was very well under way after the 1962 debacle against China. Another couple of years of expansion, re-equipment and consolidation would have made it decisively stronger militarily.They were not wrong. Consider these technological and hardware advantages Pakistan had in 1965, giving it a clear military edge on the ground, in the air and over the seas:Pakistan's American-made Patton was by far the best in the subcontinent. You could argue that India's British-made Centurion was its equal, but there were two problems. One, India had too few of these heavy tanks (about a half of Pakistan's Pattons). As a result, the Indian army had to allocate these very carefully. The rest of India's tanks were Second World War Shermans, and light French AMXs. In fact, India's defensive brigade which fought the main Pakistani thrust in Chhamb had only two squadrons of AMXs. Two, no Indian tank was night-capable whereas the Patton was. The only Indian superiority was in having a larger number of infantry divisions. But, as Lt General Harbaksh Singh notes in his "War Despatches", many of these were fresh, post-1962 raisings and not yet settled or fully battle-ready.Pakistan had decidedly superior artillery and a much larger number of higher caliber US-made guns. These often tilted the balance when used in a massed profile, particularly in the open tank-infantry battles in the Sialkot sector, a fact documented well by Lt General Harbakhsh. In fact, he says that both Pakistani equipment and doctrine of artillery use were superior. More than 75 per cent of Indian casualties were caused by artillery. Pakistan also had a headstart in special/commando forces, as the Special Services Group (SSG) was already formed.In the air, sidewinder missiles on F-86 Sabre as well as F-104 Starfighter gave Pakistan's Air Force a clear edge. IAF was still in the gun age. The first MiG-21 squadron was still coming up, and had only nine planes with pilots under conversion training. Further, F-104 was fully night-capable, as were some F-86s. India had no night-capable fighter/interceptors. This gave Pakistani bombers safer passage to Indian bases at night whereas Indian night bombers were unescorted and vulnerable to PAF defenders. With C-130 Hercules, Pakistan had a way superior transport fleet, also more capable of paratroop operations, which it tried.On the naval front, India had a larger fleet. But Pakistan was already in the submarine age with the US-gifted Ghazi. So Pakistan was a clear dimension ahead. The Indian navy had inadequacies in sonar and submarine detection, so it wasn't entirely capable of fighting in that dimension. India's lone carrier INS Vikrant was then in dry dock, but even if it had been active, it would have had limited impact.It was with all these factors in mind that Ayub and Bhutto finally embarked on this war. Their presumptions of decisive superiority were confirmed in their minds by the poor performance of the Indian defensive brigade in the Kutch sector earlier that year. Even the IAF had avoided combat there, and Pakistanis misread that as a disinclination to fight. Coming as it did soon after 1962, Pakistan decided - rightly on paper - that this was their moment.Why did it not work out that way? There are some reasons on which reputed and fair chroniclers of both sides now agree. These include:Arrogance on the part of Pakistani commanders. Lack of respect for the opposition and a foolhardy tendency to declare victory too soon. A prime example is how its brilliant armour thrust in Khem Karan, which had once seemed so threatening that General J.N Chaudhuri wanted to withdraw to a new defensive line behind Beas river, thus conceding most of Punjab (to be firmly dissuaded, fortunately, by Harbaksh), became, instead, in its biggest disaster. Destruction of its 1 Armoured Division here pretty much ended Pakistan's offensive capability in the plains in that war.India's better doctrine and leadership of armour at fighting unit level. Better Indian performance in the mountains, particularly in battles at night. India gained territory across the hilly terrain in Kashmir, while losing a chunk in the plains in Chhamb.Brilliant tactical dash on the part of Pakistan ruined by incompetent execution. Pakistan, for example, stunned India on September 6 with dusk raids on its forward airbases, particularly Pathankot, where 10 frontline aircraft were destroyed on the ground, but didn't know what to do thereafter. A few losses over Halwara and Adampur, and though it had an upper hand through that war, the PAF desisted from any further daytime raids over IAF bases.No navy had the size to be able to weigh in on that war. But with the Indian navy definitely not battle-ready, the Pakistani navy wasted the opportunity with a symbolic though humiliating bombardment of Dwarka. It achieved no military purpose though.Overall, Indian forces were very resolute and efficient in defensive battles as Khem Karan showed. This was totally contrary to Pakistani mythology that "Hindu" armies wouldn't be able to resist it, particularly after India's dismal record in 1962. Strategically, Pakistan miscalculated big-time, and stupidly, by believing any provocations in Kashmir would be met with a response confined there. And once India opened the Punjab front, it had to hurriedly fall back on defence.All wars begin with miscalculation. The 1965 war was purely Pakistan's. It was their decision and initiative. It was based on a sound appreciation of relative military strengths that put the aggressor at advantage. Even politically and economically, India was going through multiple crises. But it failed for all the reasons discussed earlier. Only Pakistan had strategic objectives in this war and it failed to achieve any. That, to some extent, answers the question: who won this war and who lost? Since Pakistan failed to achieve any objectives, it definitely lost that war. But while it had the better of the land engagements, India did not win the war militarily. It was a strategic defeat for Pakistan but a military stalemate. Shekhar Gupta hosts 'Walk the Talk' and 'Chalte Chalte' on NDTV. His weekly column, 'National Interest', currently published in India Today, is in its 20th year.)
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Washington, DC, 4 March 2014 – The Obama Administration has requested a record US$ 200 million in its fiscal year 2015 budget to support the GAVI Alliance in its mission to save children’s lives and protect people’s health in the world’s poorest countries by increasing access to vaccines. This is the largest amount the United States has ever requested for the Alliance.
The request demonstrates leadership by the United States, a founding donor of the GAVI Alliance, in ending vaccine-preventable deaths in developing countries in spite of a difficult budgetary environment. It comes as the GAVI Alliance prepares to outline how donor investments will enable Alliance partners to reach millions more children with protection against deadly diseases between 2016 and 2020.
“This strong support from the Obama Administration for our mission to protect the lives of children is greatly appreciated,” said Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance. “It is a tragedy that every 20 seconds a child dies from a disease that could have been prevented by a vaccine. The GAVI Alliance, with the support of our donors, is working hard to accelerate efforts to reach children with vital vaccines no matter where they live.”
This strong support from the Obama Administration for our mission to protect the lives of children is greatly appreciated Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance
Since 2000, with support from donors, including the United States, and implementing countries, the GAVI Alliance has helped save approximately six million lives by immunising an additional 440 million children. In 2011, donors committed US$ 7.4 billion to the Alliance’s work for the period 2011-2015, enabling an unprecedented acceleration of vaccine introductions. More than 60 introductions are anticipated in 2014 alone, compared to just over 150 in total between 2000 and 2012.
Since GAVI was founded in 2000, the United States through USAID has contributed more than US$ 1.2 billion dollars to immunisation through GAVI, as well as provided technical support to its implementing country partners.
Vaccines save millions of lives every year and are among the most cost-effective health interventions ever developed. They also bring wider economic benefits for communities and countries as healthy children are more likely to attend school and thereby become productive adults.
“Bold new donor commitments will enable the GAVI Alliance to accelerate progress towards reaching the 22 million children who do not complete a course of even the most basic vaccines each year.” Dr Berkley added: “We look forward to working with Congress to ensure this level of funding for the Alliance, as well as strong funding for all maternal and child health programmes.”
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Spain are aiming for a third successive Euro triumph after wins in 2008 and 2012
BBC and ITV have agreed a deal to show the next two European Championships.
All 51 matches from Euro 2016 and Euro 2020 will be broadcast live across BBC and ITV, with coverage on respective online, digital and mobile services.
Next summer's tournament will take place in France, while the 2020 event will be hosted in 13 cities across the continent - with the final in London.
The deal includes highlights, catch-up TV and full radio coverage rights for broadcast in the UK.
France 2016 will be the first European Championship to feature 24 nations, with England, Northern Ireland and Wales having all already qualified.
London will also stage the semi-finals in 2020, with Glasgow, Dublin, Amsterdam, Munich, Bilbao, Bucharest, Budapest, Copenhagen, Brussels, St Petersburg, Rome and Baku making up the other host cities.
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Donald Trump may have benefited from his decision to cancel his rally in Chicago due to protests and threatened violence, a new poll reports.
According to a Monmouth poll released Monday, 22 percent of Florida voters said the incidents in Chicago on Friday night make them more likely to vote for Trump, with only 11 percent saying they would be less likely. A vast majority, 66 percent, said that the heated protests from late last week make no difference.
The event Friday was cancelled by the Trump campaign after a string of protests, which led to violence and clashes between protesters and Trump supporters.
Less than 24 hours after the rally, an attendee at Trump's event in Dayton tried to rush the stage, leading Secret Service agents to surround a spooked Trump as other agents took down the individual.
In addition, Sen. Marco Rubio admitted Saturday morning that while he still plans to support the Republican nominee, "it's getting harder every day" to do so. Ohio Gov. John Kasich echoed those remarks, blaming Trump for the "toxic" environment he's created with his campaign.
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TORONTO - An Ontario company convicted in a deadly explosion of a propane plant in Toronto will be back in court Dec. 9 for sentencing.
Sunrise Propane and directors Shay Ben-Moshe and Valery Belahov were found guilty last month of nine provincial-offences charges in relation to the 2008 blast that killed one man and forced thousands of people from their homes.
Twenty-five-year-old employee Parminder Saini died in the blast and a 55-year-old firefighter, who responded to the emergency call on his day off, also died of a heart attack.
The court ruled Sunrise failed to provide safety training and a safe working environment, discharged a contaminant and contravened a number of provincial orders related to the cleanup after the blast.
The court also found Ben-Moshe and Belahov failed to take all reasonable care to prevent the company from flouting those orders.
Following the blast, the government shut down all three Sunrise Propane's facilities.
Also on HuffPost
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There are those times, in my journey to learn about baseball, that I’ve legitimately had my mind blown. Most of them occurred early on, when I learned that saves were made up by some guy in the late 60’s, RBI’s were mostly a function of guys getting on base in front of a hitter, and pitchers don’t have all that much control over what happens to a baseball once it’s put in play. But one happened just a few years back when the idea of pitch tunneling made it’s way in front of my eyes as part of a larger discussion on velocity. Here was an incredible question: how much do two distinct pitches from a pitcher look like one another to the batter? We can talk about the shape, break or velocity of individual pitches all we want, but what’s most important is how the pitches are perceived by the hitter.
Baseball Prospectus has been seeking to measure this, and a few weeks back rolled out their methodology as part of a week-long saga that served as the backdrop for this new frontier. Not long after, numbers from the 2016 season were added to their leaderboards and voila! we have data. Hats off to the Jeff Long, Jonathan Judge and Harry Pavlidis for bringing this to the forefront as it can have big consequences (just like we’ve seen with their work around pitch framing). If we were to know which pitches sequence together well and which don’t, that could help shape our understanding of which pitch combinations should be prioritized for each pitcher. And, it could enlighten us to which pairs of pitches should be avoided. This seems potentially helpful. Really helpful.
But before we get into that, we need to lay out some groundwork. As the BP crew shared, a hitter’s decision to swing at a pitch is both simple and complicated: it comes down to a decision. That jives with our intuition, but there’s something about that decision that makes it unique — it has to happen in a tremendously short amount of time. The hard-to-read chart below maps out this decision (click to enlarge) based upon a 90mph fastball. Only 400 milliseconds elapses from the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and reaches the plate. The first 175 milliseconds allows the hitter to decide if the pitch is worth swinging at. The 175 milliseconds before the ball reaches the plate gives the hitter time to decide where to swing (i.e. inside, outside, up, down). The middle 50 milliseconds is where the interesting stuff happens. This is the “decision point” as this is when the hitter has to make the choice to swing or not to swing.
Before the decision point, the hitter may be able to discern some things about the pitch, mostly about where it was released and if there’s any sign of the pitch’s type. After the decision point, the hitter, or his brain rather, is trying to project where the pitch is going to end up and how he can hit it. That 50 milliseconds in the middle is the point of no return, essentially. The hitter will do his best to pick up the pitch before the decision point and there may be some clues. The ball will keep breaking after the decision point and the hitter will do his best to track it to make contact (or take the pitch). With the neurology of hitting a baseball broken down like this, here are some things we can glean:
Making unique pitch types look very similar before the decision point is good
Making unique pitch types look significantly different before the decision point is bad
Making unique pitches break significantly differently after the decision point is good
Making unique pitches break similarly after the decision point is bad
In the “good” category, we have unique pitches that look very similarly out of the pitcher’s hand and/or break very differently after the hitter has had to make up his mind to swing or not swing. In the “bad” category, we have pitches that look differently out of the pitcher’s hand and/or don’t offer much break differential after the hitter has made up his mind to swing or not swing. These are hard things to read and write, but it aligns with our understanding. Put yourself in the hitter’s shoes — you’d much rather be able to tell early what the pitch is than have basically no idea and try to hit the ball.
So which pitch pairs are looking similar from Diamondbacks pitchers out of the hand? Which pairs are breaking far differently after the decision point? And which pairs just aren’t working? This is why we’re here, after all. We’ll rely on three of BP’s new metrics to determine which pitch pairs are good and which should be avoided.
Release Differential: how well the pitcher mimics the same release point when throwing these two pitches Tunnel Differential: how similar the flight of the two unique pitches are after release, but before the decision point (i.e. how well the two pitches “tunnel”) Post-Tunnel Break: how much the two unique pitches “separate” or break away from one another after the decision point
With all of that out of the way, let’s look at some pitch pairs, shall we?
The Good
Zack Greinke ‘s four-seamer and changeup
‘s four-seamer and changeup Zack Greinke’s four-seamer and slider
Zack Greinke’s sinker and changeup
Patrick Corbin‘s sinker and slider
The Pretty Good
The Bad
Robbie Ray ‘s four-seamer and changeup
‘s four-seamer and changeup Braden Shipley ‘s four-seamer and changeup
‘s four-seamer and changeup Enrique Burgos ‘ four-seamer and slider
‘ four-seamer and slider Robbie Ray’s four-seamer and slider
Robbie Ray’s four-seamer and curveball
Taijuan Walker’s four-seamer and splitter
Robbie Ray’s sinker and curveball
We’ll take a closer look at these pitch pairs in a later post, but for now, let’s make some observations. Zack Greinke isn’t a velocity monster, but succeeds because hitters just can’t pick his pitches apart before the decision point and face too much break after the decision point to have wide-ranging success. Patrick Corbin does a good job of making that nasty slider look like his fastballs out of his hand, so good luck with that Dude At The Plate. Jake Barrett might really have something with that splitter… Those fastballs up in the zone for Taijuan Walker and Archie Bradley make some sense when you see how well they pair with their respective curveballs. On the flip-side, Robbie Ray’s secondaries look so much differently than his fastballs that it’s no wonder batters aren’t biting. Enrique Burgos’ slider is nasty, but hitters can see it coming. We’ve seen Taijuan Walker start going away from his splitter for his slider and this supports that approach.
Again, we’ll take a closer look at some examples here shortly.
Notes: all data from 2016, minimum 20 pairs required for each pitch pairing, statistics courtesy of Baseball Prospectus
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DC11 is Finally Here and will be Launched at Midnight! (EST)
Changes from the First DC11 Announcement
- Chest Shops has been brought back due to popular demand
- Towny will be used to claim land and create cities
- PvP is enabled in the wild, but can be disabled in towny cities
- /pvp command to toggle your participation in pvp
- When disabled, you can not be damaged by players or damage other players
- There is a 10 minute cooldown when toggling pvp
Here's what you can expect in the new map:
Map Goals
- Taking the good parts about the previous maps, and improve upon them with the help of both staff involvement and its players.
- Special care is to be given to the economy. We need to prevent a situation where one player can corner the market, effectively choking the lifeblood out of the rest of the server.
Spawn Island
- Spawn to receive its own island in an inland sea
- Spawn island to transition smoothly between spawn and sea level
Other Terrain Screenshots
Cities - See cities post -> HERE
Economic Changes
Jobs has been removed
Money can be earned through land ownership with towny, by selling to admin shops or with chest shops
More admin shops
Admin shops are located in the spawn courtyard
Admin shop prices change based on the demand of that item (see below)
Gameplay Changes
- Dynamic Admin Shops The admin shops at spawn have dynamic buy and sell prices
The price changes depending on how much people buy and sell the item
The price of an item goes up if a lot of people buy the item, and goes down if a lot of people sell the item
Prices go down over time if player's don't buy a lot of the item
- Pay REM to Teleport:
Teleporting costs 15 rem per-block
/mta [check] <player>
- This is the command used for asking players if you may teleport to them. The [check] argument in this command will give you the amount of money it will cost to make this teleport.
- This is the command used for asking players if you may teleport to them. The [check] argument in this command will give you the amount of money it will cost to make this teleport. /mwarp [mwarp name]
- This is the command used for teleporting to an MWarp and also listing out an interactive list of a player's MWarps. On the MWarp list the player can click on any one of the items on the list to teleport to it.
- This is the command used for teleporting to an MWarp and also listing out an interactive list of a player's MWarps. On the MWarp list the player can click on any one of the items on the list to teleport to it. /setmwarp <mwarp name>
- Setting a warp costs 500 rem
- This is the command used for creating new MWarps.
- - This is the command used for creating new MWarps. /delmwarp [mwarp name]
- This is the command used for deleting an MWarp and also listing out an interactive list of a player's MWarps each one being easily deleted from there.
- Vote to Change the Weather:
/wv
- This command opens the Voting-Inventory.
- This command opens the Voting-Inventory. /wv sun
- This command allows you to start a sun-voting.
- This command allows you to start a sun-voting. /wv rain
- This command allows you to start a rain-voting.
- This command allows you to start a rain-voting. /wv [yes/no]
- This command allows you to vote for yes or no.
Future Plans: Updating and installing the winery plugin: Create a vineyard to grow, and sell wine!
Create a party with friends for group benefit
A command to report grief to staff
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Anytime engineers try to design a new kind of heat-based engine or improve on an existing design, they bump up against a fundamental efficiency limit: the Carnot Limit.
The Carnot Limit “sets an absolute limit on the efficiency with which heat energy can be turned into useful work,” says MIT’s Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics Robert Jaffe, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. If engineers are faced with redesigning an engine that is 35 percent efficient, it makes a big difference whether the maximum possible efficiency of such an engine is 50 percent — in which case it may not be feasible to try to push it further — or 80 percent, in which case there is a significant margin for improvement.
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, who was born in France in 1796 and lived for only 36 years, deduced this limit. His insights into the nature of heat, and the limitations on machines that use heat, had an impact that lasts to this day. What makes his accomplishments all the more remarkable is the fact that the nature of heat itself was not understood until long after Carnot’s death. At the time of his research, scientists still subscribed to the later-discredited “caloric” theory of heat, which held that an invisible fluid of that name carried heat from one object to another.
Carnot’s 1824 book “Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire” laid out a set of principles that, in some cases, are still widely used. One of those is the Carnot Limit (also known as Carnot efficiency), which is given by a simple equation: the difference in temperature between the hot working fluid — such as the steam in a power plant — and its cooled-off temperature as it leaves the engine, divided by the temperature in degrees Kelvin (that is, degrees above absolute zero) of the hot fluid. This theoretical efficiency is expressed as a percentage, which can be approached but never actually reached.
At the time of Carnot’s work, the best steam engines in the world had an overall efficiency of only about 3 percent. Today, conventional steam engines can reach efficiencies of 25 percent, and gas-fired turbine steam generators in power plants can reach 40 percent or more — compared to a Carnot Limit, depending on the exact heat differences in such plants, of about 51 percent. Today’s car engines have efficiencies of 20 percent or less, compared to their Carnot Limit of 37 percent.
Since the limit on efficiency is based on the temperature difference between the heat source and whatever is used to cool the system — usually outside air or a supply of water — it is clear that the hotter the heat source, the higher the possible efficiency. So, for example, Jaffe explains, “a fourth-generation nuclear reactor that heats steam to 1200 degrees Celsius uses a given amount of energy far more efficiently than a geothermal energy source that employs steam at 120 degrees Celsius.”
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Nothing livens up a slow day of fishing like a tsunami warning.
On April 1, 2014, the Ocearch, a 126-foot vessel rigged to capture large sharks alive, was anchored near Alejandro Selkirk Island, a small piece of land about 500 miles off the Chilean coast. Twenty-five people were on board, among them biologists, filmmakers, social-media experts, a former war photographer who was once held hostage in Iraq, a retired federal agent, and a long-haired Chilean fisherman with a Viking tattooed on his shoulder. Everyone was looking for dorsal fins, but no one had seen so much as a long shadow for days. The yellowtail heads strung off the back of the boat broke down slowly, dissolving into the South Pacific Ocean and attracting nothing.
The ship’s owner, a 46-year-old former reality-TV host named Chris Fischer, stood on deck wearing a serious expression and his customary outfit: Caterpillar shirt and cap, Costa shades, jeans. He was abnormally quiet. His nonprofit research organization—also called Ocearch—had been at sea on Expedition Chile for more than a week, and its team of fishermen, led by a burly captain named Brett McBride, whom Fischer calls “the real-life Aquaman,” had hooked and lost just one mako. Fischer believed that shark finners had emptied the area out, and he was despondent. “I’ve never, ever seen anything like this,” he’d said the previous day. “This is what we’ve been talking about all these years. A sharkless ocean.”
Fischer frequently uses this sort of language—absolutes and gravitas—which he honed in his previous career. From 2008 to 2012, his boat was a traveling TV set, with Fischer and McBride capturing white sharks for the National Geographic and History Channels. Since his shows ended, he has engineered a unique and controversial model for marine research in which the Ocearch acts as a roving field station for shark scientists, with the vast majority of the funding for the operation provided by corporate sponsors. Ocearch’s crew catch the sharks and allow scientists the rare opportunity to collect blood samples and affix GPS-enabled tracking tags. Sponsors, meanwhile, receive high-impact exposure by associating themselves with a terrifying and charismatic predator. Coverage is crucial, so Fischer crams as many journalists aboard as possible during the expeditions. Last year the group was mentioned some 3,000 times in media outlets worldwide. Images accompanying most of those stories showed Fischer and his team standing over prone great whites while clad in gear made by Caterpillar, the $56 billion construction-equipment giant and Ocearch’s primary backer.
The sun slipped behind the cliffs off the starboard side, and Fischer went to pour a drink. On deck, people sipped vodka and Sprite, soaking up the last of the day’s warmth and the country music cranking over the sound system. Up in the galley, Luis, a Panamanian chef and weight-lifting enthusiast, was roasting a turkey. It was cocktail hour at the edge of the world.
Selkirk, or Isla Mas Afuera (“farther out”) as it’s known, is the westernmost point in the Juan Fernández archipelago. A seven-mile-long, egg-shaped former penal colony with sheer volcanic walls, it’s populated by an endemic species of fur seal, hundreds of invasive goats, a number of rare birds, and about 40 seasonal lobster-fishing families. Selkirk is technically a national park, but access to the outside world is limited to a seawater-hardened rope tow extending into the ocean from a rocky beach at the foot of a canyon. The nearest airstrip, pier, and phone are 100 miles to the east, on Robinson Crusoe Island, a relative hub with about 880 residents.
A motor hummed in: the Contender, a smaller fishing vessel Fischer’s team uses to hook sharks before leading them to the mother ship. The fishermen on the Contender jumped aboard the Ocearch and hauled up two massive yellowtail. Todd Goggins, the first mate, a laconic 29-year-old former high school baseball star from Florida, lay down next to one of the fish. It was nearly as tall as him. Everyone laughed. Rudy Ortiz Aravena, a 37-year-old fisherman and lodge owner from Crusoe Island who was Ocearch’s unofficial ambassador, started to dance.
A crew member came on deck, poured a drink, and cracked a joke. Then he approached Fischer: “Fisch, we’ve got an earthquake off the coast, an 8.2. There’s a tsunami warning. It’s time for us to go.”
Chile’s government had ordered evacuations of around a million people in coastal areas, including the port city of Valparaiso, Easter Island, and the entire Juan Fernández archipelago, which in 2010 had been ravaged by a tsunami that killed 16.
Fischer and McBride huddled to make a quick plan, then began shouting instructions at the crew. Some people assembled life jackets and water bottles. Forty minutes later, everyone was gathered in the galley as the ship rumbled out to sea, trying to reach deep water before the wave arrived. The engineer, Vince Cislo, assigned everyone a number in the event of a worst-case scenario. One by one we called them out. Voices were strained, faces pale. “If we do this again,” he said, “we’re going by number, not name. If it’s abandon ship, Chris makes the call. Good luck.”
Ocearch had come to Chile primarily to catch and study sharks, but that was just the beginning. The group would create GPS tracks of the tagged fish for its website and produce short films to broadcast a swashbuckling brand of research, brought to you by Caterpillar, Costa, and Yeti, the cooler maker. To board Fischer’s vessel is to enter a world of branded exploration and multiplatform content distribution that, depending on your point of view, represents either the future of conservation or the next vanity project for a lapsed reality-TV host.
Fischer’s admirers, who include top scientists from the U.S. and South Africa, see him as a hard-working and compelling advocate able to deliver the save-the-oceans message to a mainstream audience while funding research expeditions that would otherwise be inaccessible to grant-starved marine biologists. His fans throw around terms like “visionary,” “tireless,” and “passionate.”
Scientists who work with Ocearch say that the unparalleled access to great whites, as well as the media attention, is transforming the field of shark ecology. “These guys are making us throw out everything we learned about these animals,” says Bob Hueter, director of shark research at Florida’s Mote Marine Laboratory, whom Fischer considers a mentor. “They’ve created a generation of people who have fallen in love with this kind of work.”
Fischer’s detractors, on the other hand, deride him as an “actor” and “big-game fisherman.” A vitriolic contingent of online haters allege that Ocearch’s method for affixing data transmitters to sharks—which involves raising the fish out of the water on a wooden platform with its forklift—harms the animals. James Moskito, a cage-dive operator on Mexico’s Guadalupe Island, a white shark destination where Fischer worked from 2007 to 2009, calls him “by far the worst” person in the white shark world, because, he told me, “Ocearch is killing sharks.” Other critics suggest that Fischer’s conservation-by-Caterpillar approach leads him to prioritize hype over science. “It’s sensationalist television wearing a facade of science,” says a prominent ocean cinematographer who has declined to work with Ocearch. “It’s catch-and-release fishing by people who want to catch big sharks that are now protected.”
Fischer is unapologetic. He maintains that Ocearch, with its $3 million annual budget, is the last best hope for large-shark research, which is incredibly expensive to conduct. “I didn’t realize how disruptive we’d be, but the fact of the matter is the system is broken,” he says. “The institutional approach is not getting it done.” Fischer opens his ship to a wide range of scientists, frequently pays for their food and shark tags, and offers live tracking of every tagged shark on the Ocearch website. “It’s open, inclusive, data driven, and ocean first,” Fischer says.
The number of people who are on board the Ocearch—journalists, photographers, filmmakers, Caterpillar executives—is constantly vacillating. “Mi Barco es tu barco,” Fischer tells his guests. “If you see something you want, take it.” People sleep where they can: on deck, on floors. McBride, who is a big man, often crashes on a couch. “Chris thinks everyone should be welcome,” one staff member told me, wearily.
Fischer sees the rotating milieu as a blessing. “We can force collaboration,” he says, “because this is the only place people are able to get their hands on a live [white shark]. There’s no ask other than to collaborate.” Fischer likes to point out the surprising dearth of knowledge about sharks—scientists don’t know with any certainty how many are alive or where they breed, for example—and how endangered they are. He frequently spits out alarming facts: A quarter-million sharks died today. A hundred million were killed last year. As he explains it, Ocearch’s model is “entirely selfless.”
Still, he doesn’t lack personal ambition. The first time I met Fischer, he told me that he had “set out on a course to become the Cousteau of our time.” Scientists don’t usually gravitate toward that kind of bombast. But biologists fighting for grant money aren’t often offered free boat rides to the world’s top shark-gathering spots, either. No one has attempted corporate-backed field research on this scale with an animal as alluring as a great white.
“I don’t see many other Chris Fischers out there,” says Nick Whitney, a colleague of Hueter’s who has worked with Ocearch. “Forget marine science. I mean in life. His vision, his energy. I mean, to look at a ship like the Ocearch and say, ‘I think we could use this to tag large sharks’—it’s insane!”
Fischer's first gig was a far cry from Jacques Cousteau: he sold soda. Fischer grew up in a prominent Louisville, Kentucky, family, and when he was just 12, he helped his three older brothers and their dad start a beverage distribution business called Servend. (One brother, Greg, is now Louisville’s mayor.) Fischer got a B.S. in business from Indiana University, and after graduating he ran Servend’s Asia operations from California. In 1999, when he was 29, his family sold Servend for $73 million. Fischer did what any single, ocean-loving, newly minted millionaire would do. He went fishing, buying a 72-foot vessel he named the Go Fisch.
In 2000, he created a production company and bought airtime on ESPN2 for a reality show he called Offshore Adventures. The formula was straightforward: McBride drives the boat, Fischer catches fish, a chef cooks it. They pumped out 188 episodes, with some incorporating Fischer’s wife, Melissa, and their two young daughters. Red Lobster sponsored the show, and President George W. Bush hopped on board for an episode in Chesapeake Bay to promote a striped bass protection order he’d recently signed. In the spring of 2007, Fischer was in Costa Rica when he spotted a docked Bering Sea crabber with a custom forklift. He arranged to meet the owner, made a handshake agreement, and bought the vessel. He’d upgraded to the proverbial bigger boat.
That fall, Fischer met with a biologist named Michael Domeier, who was researching white sharks at Guadalupe Island, an aggregation site off Mexico’s Pacific coast. Domeier wanted to use a GPS device to track their behavior, but doing so would require lifting the fish out of the water, since it had to be bolted to the dorsal fin. Most shark tags are affixed by harpoon and work in one of two ways, either by transmitting an underwater acoustic signal to submerged receivers, or by collecting data while hanging off the fish by a metal wire, which gradually corrodes and pops off. Acoustic tags tell you when a shark is near a buoy, while recovered pop-offs allow scientists to examine a fish’s migratory history, like old E-ZPass records. Instead, Domeier wanted to use SPOT tags (for smart position and temperature), which send out coordinates every time they break the surface of the ocean, allowing for real-time location tracking. Could Fischer raise the animals in his forklift? asked Domeier. Absolutely, Fischer said. There was just one condition: cameras would be rolling.
Soon they were rumbling out to Guadalupe Island in the crabber. There was no proven system for catching a great white, so they improvised. For fishing line they used thick rope, to which they attached a series of buoys, so it wouldn’t sink. At the end of the rope was a braided wire, then a steel chain connected to a large hook baited with tuna. Once they hooked up, they’d battle the shark at the surface with the aid of the buoys until it could be led onto the crabber’s wooden platform like a leashed dog.
The first attempt went poorly: a giant shark pulled the rope and three buoys beneath the boat and, as Fischer put it, “destroyed the biggest tackle on earth.” What they needed was a way to quickly add more buoys once the animal was at the surface, positioned close enough to keep the shark from diving but far enough away to prevent the buoys from being chomped. McBride jury-rigged a fix with a butter knife, which he attached to the chain just above the hook. That way, once they had a shark on the line, he could bring a boat alongside the fish and clip on more buoys with carabiners, which would slide down and catch on the knife. It worked perfectly. Domeier tagged 12 sharks in two trips.
In 2009, Fischer sold Shark Men to the National Geographic Channel. Early episodes overplay small disputes and veer toward shark porn, which Fischer blames on the producers. “I fixated on National Geographic because I thought that they were more on-mission with what we were doing as far as science,” he says. “That turned out to be incorrect. When you’re in the business of making TV, you’re in the business of making TV.”
The adrenalized elements, including high fives when a fish came on deck, angered animal lovers. Things got worse when the group foul-hooked a great white in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, off the coast of San Francisco, where Domeier had secured a permit to study sharks. On the team’s first day of fishing, a male shark named Junior swallowed a hook baited with salvaged whale meat. It lodged in the back of his mouth, and McBride had to reach through the shark’s gills with bolt cutters to get it out. The government temporarily suspended Domeier’s permit. They were eventually allowed to tag one more shark, after which Fischer yelled, on camera, “Fucking A, man! That is what we do! We needed that one like we never needed a shark in our life, and we went out and did it together!”
Junior lived, his signal pinging in for three years after the Farallones expedition, but animosity over Fischer and his crew’s techniques began to simmer. “They left a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths out here,” says David McGuire, a Bay Area biologist and founder of the conservation group Shark Stewards.
Domeier and Fischer’s partnership ended shortly thereafter, when Fischer asked the scientist to sign over partial ownership of his tagging data so that he could post it online. “I wanted to give the data away, and he wanted to hold onto it,” Fischer says. Domeier maintains that the request was outlandish. “Fischer has repeatedly denounced me in public for ‘hoarding data,’ ” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have to call bullshit on that.… Scientists work in a world where we are measured by the value of our intellectual property. The best ideas are the ones that attract funding and lead to groundbreaking, publishable results. Fischer latched onto one of my ideas, and it has done well for him.”
In 2011, National Geographic didn’t renew Shark Men for a fourth season, but the next year Fischer sold it to the History Channel, which renamed it Shark Wranglers. He headed to South Africa, teaming up with local biologists to tag 43 sharks. About a week into the expedition, Fischer and McBride suffered an ignominious first: they killed a shark, a 15-foot female named Maya that left the platform lethargically and sank to the bottom. Shortly thereafter, their tagging permit was again suspended when a local activist group charged that a fatal shark attack some 60 miles from where Fischer and McBride had been working was due to the team’s chumming. Despite the drama—Maya’s demise and the loss of the permit were both featured prominently on Shark Wranglers—the show’s ratings faltered.
“I realized that I had to figure out a way to transcend TV,” Fischer says, “before TV canceled us.”
The sun was blazing, the beer was flowing as liberally as the chum, and white sharks were hungry. It was August 2013 and a clear day off Cape Cod’s Monomoy Island, an uninhabited patch of sand that’s become a major gray seal breeding ground—and, consequently, a white shark magnet. I was on board the Ocearch, along with a camera crew from NBC, a reporter from The New Yorker, and a host of local media, plus roughly a dozen scientists representing seven institutions.
Ocearch’s publicity director gathered the press and said, “We have literally tens of thousands of news outlets all over the world that are standing by for us to get them this footage, so they don’t like to get scooped.” Everyone signed forms saying we wouldn’t take photos. Fischer stood up and explained the Ocearch approach. “I can do what I think is best for the ocean all the time,” he declared, his voice rising to reality-TV volume. “I don’t have to fight with Captain Brett for ratings like some derelict in a TV show!”
Fischer was feeling triumphant. It was in this same location, almost a year earlier, that he had transcended TV. When the History Channel canceled Shark Wranglers, in August 2012, he reached out to a leading Massachusetts shark scientist named Greg Skomal and sunk his last $500,000 into an expedition to study the resurgent great white population off Cape Cod.“I thought, Fuck it,” he recalls. “Let’s go solve the mystery of Jaws.”
Fischer thought it was Ocearch’s last trip. He and his crew wore the gear of the companies he relied on, including Caterpillar. (He uses the company’s engines in the boat.) On September 17, 2012, McBride caught a 3,500-pound female great white, which Fischer dubbed Mary Lee, after his mother. During the next three months, images of the shark, along with Caterpillar’s logo, popped up in The New York Times and on CBS, Fox, and NBC. Fischer had a lightbulb moment and pitched Caterpillar’s marketing team on a sponsorship. The company bit, agreeing to a three-year, multimillion-dollar contract.
Now, almost a year later, Fischer was hoping for an encore. Around 2 p.m., he got it. The radio crackled: “Hooked up! Hooked up!” came Fischer’s voice from the Contender. People jockeyed for space near the platform as the other boat came into view. Behind it were a cluster of buoys and a slate gray dorsal fin knifing through the water. “No cameras! No cameras!” howled members of Ocearch’s press team.
As the Contender led the shark toward us, the fish rolled, evading the platform. A thin stream of blood ran from its mouth, mixing with sea foam. The Contender made another lap. This time, McBride got the shark on the lift. “No cameras!” yelled the press staff. McBride hopped alongside the shark, water up to his shoulders, ran a hose pumping sea-water through the fish’s gills, and draped a black cloth over its eyes. The platform rose out of the water, and about ten scientists descended to take blood samples and affix tags. The shark, a juvenile female, was just shy of 13 feet long and 1,400 pounds. She thrashed once, nearly knocking a scientist over, then calmed, as if napping. Fifteen minutes after arriving in the lift, she was loaded with electronic jewelry.
Fischer stood in the lift, jeans soaked, and said, “The first diesel engine made by Caterpillar was named Betsy. So this shark will be named Betsy!” The platform lowered as McBride grabbed Betsy by the tail and gave her a shove. She shook her tail, slid slowly forward, and then, once she was five feet underwater, disappeared.
The next day, Cape Cod icon (and current Connecticut state senator) Ted Kennedy Jr. came on board. Fischer told a few members of Kennedy’s party, “My biggest problem is people think I just catch sharks. This is only the beginning. I want to crowdfund Fortune 500 companies to get plastic off the planet. We should be able to do that.”
I spoke with Fischer a little while later on a couch on deck while his daughters took turns jumping on his lap. “This is social entrepreneurism at its finest,” he said. “It’s the Google model: create content, give it away, and create scale, then monetize the scale. We leverage the news media as our content distributor.”
He looked at me and laughed: “I’m leveraging you right now, bro!”
Sharks sell, and the people who study them can’t stand all the commerce: Shark Week, Shark Tank, Sharknado. Indeed, scientists’ inherent distaste for salesmanship is at the root of their concerns about Ocearch. Fischer’s expeditions offer tantalizing research opportunities, but you have to embrace the hype.
“I think Chris Fischer is a remarkably media-savvy individual,” says Rick MacPherson, a marine ecologist and conservationist. “He’s aware of the power of video. And I worry when conservation gets couched as conservation-brought-to-you-by-Chris-Fischer.” MacPherson is one of a number of respected scientists who wonder whether the additional data brought by SPOT tags is really worth the risk of lifting sharks out of the sea. “It seems to me that is wholly playing to the camera,” he says of Ocearch’s methods. “If more viewership means more support, great. But if you’re doing it for sexy visuals, cop to it, man.”
“Fischer is turning something that’s not kitchen-table conversation into something that people pay attention to,” says Jeffrey Parrish, senior director for conservation resources at the World Wildlife Fund. “That is awesome, and he should be commended. But you have got to be careful that you’re not equating stories with science.”
Parrish notes something that many Ocearch observers bring up: the lack of peer-reviewed papers that have come out of the group’s expeditions. Only eight have been published, six of them by Domeier.
According to numerous scientists who have worked with Ocearch, more studies are in the works. Nick Whitney, of the Mote Marine Laboratory, is studying the speed at which white sharks rise and descend through the water column, something he was able to do only by teaming up with Ocearch to attach accelerometers to their dorsal fins. Alex Hearn, a biologist who worked with Ocearch in the Galápagos, told me, “I’ve been tagging sharks for ten years now, and I’m learning from those guys.” Even those who’ve had a beef with Fischer say the science is useful. Peter Klimley, a leader in the field who teaches at the University of California at Davis and is the author of The Biology of Sharks, recently resolved a financial dispute with Ocearch over what he says are unpaid dues from the final season of Shark Men. Still, he says he’s close to publishing a major paper on sharks’ use of volcanic seamounts for navigation, based in part on data he collected with Ocearch in the Eastern Pacific.
As for lifting the animals out of the water to study them, researchers who’ve worked with Ocearch believe the risk is worth it. Hueter, Mote’s director, points to Ocearch’s track record: one dead shark and 102 SPOT trackers still providing data. “I’m sorry, but in science you can’t do anything and have that kind of success now,” he says.
Still, Fischer tends to oversell his impact. To hear him tell it, everything Ocearch does is “groundbreaking” and—a favorite word—“disruptive.” The consensus among the scientists I spoke with is that Fischer and his team have fueled a growing body of solid studies that are helping advance our understanding of sharks. While he never misses an opportunity to plug his sponsors—and Ocearch allows Caterpillar to review social-media videos before they’re posted—researchers insist that none of this compromises the quality of the data. Ocearch wouldn’t show me the agreement researchers sign, but several I spoke to told me that Ocearch is allowed to post any of their tracking data on its website, while the scientists receive a password giving them access to every tag the group has ever put out. They also agree to credit Ocearch in any published studies.
Meanwhile, Fischer has proved to be a master at soliciting positive media coverage. Early last year, I set up a Google news alert for “great white shark.” For months afterward, I was inundated with stories about Ocearch’s sharks. Mary Lee was south of Key West! Betsy was near Texas! Katharine got so popular she crashed Ocearch’s site!
That ability to engage the public makes Fischer more like Cousteau than his detractors want to admit. The Frenchman was famously brash, deploying showmanship to advance a conservation message. He was not a trained scientist and considered data useful but secondary to emotional communication. He also funded his work through films and had to overcome early mistakes—in a climactic scene in The Silent World, Cousteau’s first mainstream hit, his crew angrily gaffes a bunch of sharks, hauls them on board, and hacks them to death with an ax. Later projects, like the aquatic-living experiment World Without Sun, resembled underwater reality TV. As Fischer told me, “Cousteau did not have a Caterpillar deal.”
Tsunamis are surges of seawater that manifest themselves in shallow water. A boat at sea is a good place to be during such an event—in deep water, you sometimes don’t even feel the wave. But a boat immediately offshore is not a good place to be. The Ocearch was anchored near Selkirk in just 110 feet of depth when the quake hit, at 8:46 P.M. Fischer heard the news about a half an hour later. He huddled with McBride to make a hasty plan, in which the speedy Contender would lead us out to a safe depth while the Ocearch, which can only move nine knots per hour, chugged behind.
McBride and the first mate, Goggins, prepared the Contender for its run, while the rest of the crew organized supplies. The filmmakers, cameramen, scientists, and I were told to huddle in the galley. Imagining what might happen if the ship overturned, I took off my boots. As the last bit of sunlight faded, we stared out the window at the blueing horizon while a Chilean biologist translated the Navy’s radio transmissions: “Eight-point-two! A thousand feet deep! We will feel the wave at 11:06! This is my first tsunami!”
Rudy Ortiz Aravena, the lodge owner from Crusoe with the Viking tattoo, stood outside the galley with his head in his hands. When the 2010 tsunami had struck, it arrived in the middle of the night without warning. His son woke him up after seeing a glass of water quaking, like in the movies. Aravena jumped into his jeep and rushed around, gathering friends and family before driving to high ground. He couldn’t find them all. In the after-math, Aravena put on his scuba gear and retrieved bodies, including his grandfather; the wave swept his grandmother, niece, and nephew out to sea.
“Tsunami,” he whispered. “Tsunami tsunami tsunami tsunami.”
The Contender reached 850 feet of depth, and Fischer radioed McBride and Goggins to come back in.
Fischer went down on deck, and one of the cameramen trained a camera on him. “Chris,” he said, “what are you doing right now?”
“Right now we have a tsunami warning,” Fischer boomed. “The wave is supposed to get here in ten or twelve minutes. We’re moving out to deep water. I’m trying to get my last two guys on this ship!”
The Contender arrived, and soon we were all squeezed into the galley. Vince Cisclo, the boat’s engineer, started his head count. A satellite phone was passed around: one call each, to tell our families we were OK.
An hour passed, then two. We reached 3,000 feet of water. Eventually, the Chilean navy called. The warning was over. A six-foot wave had hit the mainland, but no tsunami materialized in the islands.
A few of us walked down on deck. A pack of cigarettes made the rounds, and someone cranked up Capital Cities’ “Safe and Sound.” Rudy circled the ship, hugging people. I saw a whiskered biologist from the Universidad Austral named Julio Lamilla, whom Fischer referred to as the godfather of Chilean shark science and whom everyone else simply called Professor, hanging out on the starboard rail. He pointed and winked. In the sodium lights, a silver shape broke the surface of the water just off the bow: a dolphin leading the boat out. There was something in the water after all.
Contributing editor Abe Streep (@abestreep) wrote about rebooting your career in November.
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The Sneeze is happy to announce 4 new inductees into...
************************* Inductee #1: TREASURE PUFFS
For years people have searched deep beneath the ocean's surface for the greatest lost treasure known to man: a chest full of fake Honey Smacks. These puffs aren't just plain old "milk-soggy," these are the kind of soggy you can only get from soaking in salt water for decades. Mmmm.
These rare and valuable puffs of treasure have an estimated value of nearly $2.00 a box!
Even the makers of this cereal knew it had so little to do with lost treasure, they felt compelled to put them in a jewel encrusted bowl. But remember, you don't HAVE to do this. It is only a serving SUGGESTION.
************************* Inductee #2: MARSHMALLOW MAGIC
Welcome to the enchanting world of Marshmallow Magic. If you look in their spellbook, you'll find a single, powerful spell: Ripofficus Luckycharmium.
The marshmallow pieces come in fun magically-themed shapes like shooting stars, blue dolphins, orange phalluses, red & orange things, and last but not least, pink things.
It should be noted that in addition to being cheap-ass cereals, Marshmallow Magic and Treasure Puffs are also both pretty good euphemisms for "boobies."
The next time you are pawing at your wife or girlfriend or whore with a heart of gold, try whispering something like "Oh baby, let me get some of that marshmallow magic." She'll melt, trust me.
*************************
Inductees #3 & 4:
FRUITY NUGGETS & COCOA NUGGETS
Here are two cereals that closely resemble Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles.
Fruity Nuggets features a burly fellow whose task in life is to search out all things "fruity." His special friend has a device used to drill for chocolate.
Hmmm. I'm sure there's something funny to say about these two, but I can't seem to think of it. Oh well.
Congratulations to our newest inductees!
All inductees can be found here.
Posted by Steven | Archive
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From PoliticusUSA, a reminder that the massive media corporations just aren't all that interested in covering anything that might give people (or politicians) ideas. After all, they'd rather pay out money in dividends than in salaries and benefits, right?
Over 100,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin were joined by thousands of other Americans around the country in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from the state’s unionized workers, but you would not have known any of this if you watched cable news on Saturday as the coverage of the protests ranged from disappointing (MSNBC) to scant (CNN) to non-existent (Fox News).
AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale estimated that the crowd was over 100,000 people before the rally began at 3 PM. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, police estimated the crowd size at around 70,000 three hours before the rally began, “Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said the number of protesters around the Capitol is on the scale of last Saturday’s peak crowd of an estimated 68,000 and could swell even more for a 3 p.m.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country march on their governments in an event that would be a perfect fit for the 24 hour cable news cycle. Even better, the protests were occurring during the news cycle dead zone of Saturday afternoon. The coverage should have been everywhere in the media, but if you turned on your television in hopes of watching the rally from Wisconsin live, you were disappointed.
As the official state run television of the Republican Party, Fox News has been openly and loudly supporting Gov. Walker. It is no surprise that the right wing network would ignore the events in Madison and around the country today. A propaganda outlet never spends much time relaying information that is detrimental to their message.
CNN, which is supposed to be moderate network in the cable news ideological spectrum, sort of thought they should cover the story, so they did a few minute and half live cut ins here and there. No wall to wall coverage of course, but they at least managed to pull themselves away from celebrating the Tea Party long enough to take a quick glance at Madison.
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