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I'm not having great success finding an answer in google for this question. I wanted to try to format a double into a percentage using the String.format() method (not the number format classes). I was trying to figure out a String which would work, and the closest I've gotten is this: The problem, is that I am wanting it to treat my value as a percentage in decimal form, meaning the output I want to get is:0.75% Is there a format which will treat it like a percentage? If not, is it possible to do math inside of the format String (multiply the value by 100)?75.42%

ATTN. Players: The Self-Promoting Musician and Project Management for Musicians Are Now Available from Berklee Press (Published: November 21, 2013) The latest edition of The Self-Promoting Musician lets you take charge of your music career with crucial do-it-yourself strategies. If you are an independent musician, producer, studio owner, or label, you should own this book. Written by Peter Spellman, director of the Career Development Center at Berklee College of Music, this updated guide will teach you everything you need to know to become a success in the music business. It's filled with empowering tips and resources for self-managed musicians. The Self-Promoting Musician will teach you to: create a goals-driven plan to help you fulfill your musical passions; multiply the power of every gig you play using 15 proven methods; turbo-charge your social media strategy; get radio airplay-online and offline; protect your creative works; keep your career organized and growing using the best low-cost practices; and much more! Get organized, and take charge of your music projects with Project Management for Musicians! This book will help you harness your creativity into clear visions and effective work plans. Whether you are producing a recording, going on tour, developing a studio, launching a business, running a marketing campaign, creating a music curriculum, or any other project in the music industry, these road-tested strategies will help you to succeed. Music projects come in all sizes, budgets, and levels of complexity, but for any project, setting up a process for planning, executing, and monitoring your work is crucial in achieving your goals. This book will help you clarify your vision and understand the work required to complete it on time, within budget, and to your highest possible quality standard. It is a comprehensive approach, with hundreds of music industry-specific tools for keeping your work on track, mitigating risk, and reducing stress, so that you can complete your project successfully. You will learn to: develop work strategies; delegate tasks; build and manage teams; organize your project office; develop production schedules; understand and organize contracts; analyze risk; and much more. More Information: http://www.halleonard.com Hal Leonard Corporation

Gene Ammons' Boss Tenor is arguably the tenor saxophonist's best known and most critically acclaimed album. With songs like Canadian Sunset, Close Your Eyes and Blue Ammons, the June 1960 album has enormous cohesion and creative aggression. But as rich as Boss Tenor is, I've always been more partial to Ammons' Up Tight! and its sister album, Boss Soul. Recorded on October 17, 1961 for Prestige, Up Tight! featured Ammons with a sound that seemed bigger, fatter and more gospel-influenced than past outings. Joining Ammons on the date were pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., bassist Art Davis and drummer Art Taylor, with Ray Barretto on conga. The personnel remained the same on October 18, except for a switch at the piano: Patti Bown replaced Walter Bishop, Jr. Up Tight! has a tough, sad history, which makes the recording that much more meaningful. Ammons recorded the album between prison terms. Addicted to heroin since the mid-'50s, Ammons was arrested in 1958 and charged with possession. After his conviction, Ammons was sentenced to Statesville Penitentiary near Joliet, Ill. Shortly after his release in 1960, Ammons was re-arrested for violating the terms of his parole. Apparently playing in nightclubs was against the agreed-upon terms set by the parole board. When he was released the second time in 1961, Ammons began to record with a soul-jazz feel that was heavy on the blues and deeply introspective. Up Tight! is from this period. Mindful of Ammons' continued addiction and risks the musician was taking with his health and the law, Prestige owner Bob Weinstock in 1961 decided to record Ammons as often as possible to build up a treasure chest of material to release in case the tenor saxophonist was re-arrested. Ammons agreed. So the day after Ammons recorded Up Tight!, he recorded another album's worth of material, which was placed on the shelf. Weinstock's gut proved to be accurate. In late 1962, Ammons was arrested again for heroin possession, and this time he was sentenced to seven years at Joliet. Material from the session recorded a day after Up Tight! was released in 1966 as Boss Soul. In the liner notes to the second album, Bob Porter wrote: "Perhaps a young jazz fan will hear Boss Soul by accident or out of curiosity and discover something. The something he gets from the LP will be hard to explain, perhaps just a feeling for the man and his music, but this is what Ammons wants and needs. "In letters to Prestige president Bob Weinstock, Ammons continually hopes that the company has enough albums "to keep my name alive." Fortunately thus far it has had enough but the supply is dwindling. For those discovering Ammons for the first time, there is much to go back for, and for those who have passed him by, there is much to re-discover and re-evaluate. For those of us who have been there, we, like Gene Ammons, can only wait." If you're like me, you'll be swept away by I Sold My Heart to the Junkman, Soft Summer Breeze and Don't Go to Strangers. Up Tight! and Boss Soul is Ammons at his very best. JazzWax tracks: Up Tight! and Boss Soul together document two of Gene Ammons' most perfect recording sessions. Patti Bown's piano playing on the latter is deliciously bluesy and relentlessly interesting. You'll find both albums together on one glorious CD, called Up Tight!, at iTunes and here. JazzWax clip: Here's The Party's Over, with Gene Ammons (ts), Patti Bown (p), George Duvivier (b) and Walter Perkins (d). Though this track does not appear on Up Tight! or Boss Soul, it is from the same period (1962)...

One of the most complex aspects of the divorce process can be dividing marital assets — and debts. When a court divides a divorcing couple’s debts, its goal is primarily to divide the debts in a way that is fair to both parties. In a simple world, this would mean allotting each side half of the marital debts, but this is much more complicated. Debts are often only in one party’s name and different types of debts have features which make them very difficult to divide. To understand any of this, its important first to know that there are primarily, two kinds of debts: secured and unsecured. In theory, the division of secured debts (a mortgage, car loan or student loan) is pretty simple: The party who takes the piece of property also takes the debt associated with it. This process is complicated when the secured property depreciates in value, or if a lender requires the now-single divorced spouse to show a second source of income in order to refinance the property. The division of unsecured debts (things like credit cards and student loans), usually works the way the division of assets works — what is gained during marriage is deemed as part of the marriage and divided evenly. Problems arise, however, when one spouse is required to pay the debts that are solely in the other spouse’s name. Of course the problems are exacerbated if and when there is a default on any such debt. In short, the issue of debt division in divorce is complicated. It is critical to understand the fine details of these issues before going to the negotiating table. Anyone considering divorce or in the middle of one should have an experienced divorce attorney by their side. Contact Boyer, Dawson & St. Pierre in Sterling Heights today at 888.559.4705. Posted in Divorce and Custody

WhatsApp is an instant messaging service for smartphones that has over 450 million users, and it is growing globally at a rate of one million users every day. How WhatsApp operates promises to influence Facebook as much as its mobile technology. Tweet this That has lessons that can help your business ensure its relevancy moving forward. #1 – Don’t Fall in Love with Your Business Model Facebook’s business model is clearly driven by revenue from advertising. This enriches Facebook at the expense of advertisers and users. That’s right, the content that finds its way into your newsfeed is largely the result of advertising. We tend to forget that. This is one reason why I have never liked this model, and have instead suggested a subscription model, much like the one that WhatsApp employs. They charge all of their users 99 cents per year, with the first year being free. I’m sure you can expect that to go up in the future. Is there anything wrong with that? Keep reading to learn why some form of subscription model may prove to be beneficial for everyone concerned. #2 – The User Experience Matters Wouldn’t your business gladly pay a few hundred dollars/year to have all of its content delivered to 100% of its fans? Would you as a user pay fifty dollars/year to have an unfiltered Facebook experience? Would you pay one hundred to have no advertising at all? Thankfully, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum is an industry veteran who now has a seat on Facebook’s board of directors. If his voice is heard it will hopefully encourage more focus on earning revenue while respecting the user experience. It’s doubtful Facebook will ever adopt a pure subscription model, but a hybrid incorporating some of its qualities is a possibility. #3 – Partner with Relevant Businesses From the beginning Facebook has encouraged it’s employees to “move fast and break things.” Breaking things will often get you into trouble, and over the years it has for Facebook, especially in regards to privacy. However, now that Facebook is a public company it is taking more prudent risks. Facebook recognizes that it is not cool anymore, especially with the younger crowd that is gravitating towards applications like Instagram and WhatsApp. Thus, in order to ensure its future relevancy Facebook is buying relevancy. While making acquisitions may not be a possibility for your business, it can partner with those in your industry that have different perspectives, approaches, and platforms. Many are lauding Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, with some even beginning to compare Mark Zuckerberg’s forward thinking wisdom to that of Steve Jobs. If this acquisition influences Facebook as suggested here, then count me in that camp too. Facebook has never been more profitable. That’s the best time to break things. Is it time to reconsider your business model to provide a better customer experience? About the Author: Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley 2013)

GESTAPO (abb. Geheime Staats Polizei; "Secret State Police"), the secret police of Nazi Germany, their main tool of oppression and destruction, which persecuted Germans, opponents of the regime, as well as Jews at the outset of the Nazi regime and later played a central role in carrying out the "*Final Solution"; originally the Prussian domestic intelligence, which became a quasi-Federal Bureau of Investigation, though initially with much less power. The right-wing revolution in Prussia in late 1932 brought about a sweeping purge of "left-wing and Jewish elements" in its political police and paved the way for the changes of the Nazi era. After Hitler's ascent to power, he appointed Hermann Goering as the new Prussian minister of the interior and Goering completed the purge and gave the secret police executive powers, transforming it from a shadowing and information agency into a wide executive arm to persecute enemies of the Nazi regime. The head office of the secret state police – the Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, or Gestapa – was given powers to shadow, arrest, interrogate, and intern; however, it had to struggle against the Nazi Party organizations, the SA (Storm Troops) and *SS, which also "fought" the regime's opponents, but without the supervision of traditional state bodies. Simultaneously, with relatively few changes in the Prussian political police, the Reichsfuehrer of the SS, Heinrich *Himmler, achieved control over the Bavarian political police and established direct ties between the SS, the political police, and concentration camps. Thus Himmler snatched the secret police administration out of the hands of the state conservatives and in collaboration with the Bavarian minister of justice, Hans *Frank, and with Hitler's direct support, created an independent organization for shadowing, interrogation, arrest, imprisonment, and execution along the lines of the Nazi ideology (see SS and *SD, and *Hitler). The Bavarian political police under Reinhard *Heydrich's direction was able to evade the laws that still applied in Germany in order to influence individuals, disband political parties, and liquidate trade unions. It led campaigns through the newspapers and radio against political opponents, interrogated individual "enemies," and sent them to the central concentration camp *Dachau. The officials of the political police all remained civil servants but were simultaneously drafted into the SS and subordinated to Himmler, both through the civil service and Nazi Party. Many of the officials had never been members of the Nazi Party, as was the case of Heinrich *Mueller, an old Weimar secret police man who became Heydrich's assistant and eventually headed the Gestapo. From the outset Heydrich's prisoners included many Jews, most of whom were intellectuals or active in left-wing parties. During 1933 the political police began shadowing and investigating Jewish organizations and Jewish community life and thus set up its own network for imprisonment and uniform repression of all the Jews of Bavaria, in the wake of the policy of isolating Jews that was part of the first stage and was followed by exerting pressure, openly and insidiously, on the Jews to emigrate. Unification of the Political Police From August 1933, Himmler managed to rise from his starting point in Bavaria to take over the political police of the various Laender, including Prussia. From the head office of the Prussian Gestapo in Berlin, which also became the headquarters of the SS, Himmler and Heydrich directed all the political police services in Germany. The Gestapo then became the authority that investigated, along with the SD, every aspect of life in Germany, and especially watched over the regime's "enemies of alien race." The Jews headed the list. Until the end of 1939, the Gestapo's Jewish Department was directed by Karl Haselbacher, a lawyer who was among those who drafted the first anti-Jewish laws. Until the outbreak of World War II, most of the murders in the camps were carried out on Gestapo orders under various cover-ups, such as "killed while attempting escape," but eventually these pretenses were dispensed with, especially where Jews were concerned. As an institution in charge of shadowing, interrogating, arresting, and imprisoning "enemies of the Reich," the Gestapo became a massive authority employing thousands of government officials and SS men who together persecuted the regime's "enemies" or other opponents. Various groups in the population were turned over and left to the Gestapo's sole discretion; they were subjected to "neutralization" in camps without prior trial or forced to emigrate or face physical liquidation. From 1938 onward, the Gestapo began increasingly to deal with Jews who had previously been subject to other Nazi authorities. It had a hand in the *Kristallnacht and enforced Jewish emigration. In competitive cooperation with the SD, the Gestapo set up the Zentralstelle fuer juedische Auswanderung in annexed Austria, directed by Adolf *Eichmann and headed by Mueller. Other centers for forced emigration were set up in 1939 in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia and in Germany proper to accelerate the emigration of Jews by eviction and persecution, impoverishment, and degradation. When the Gestapo and part of the SD were joined under the *RSHA of the SS in November 1939, Office IV (Gestapo) of the new main office acquired sole authority over all Jews who were not yet imprisoned in camps. During World War II the Gestapo, along with the SD and Security Police, constituted part of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) in Poland and other occupied countries. These units dealt with the murder and internment of numerous Jews and especially with the expulsion of the inhabitants After the invasion of Russia in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen, headed by Gestapo men and directly responsible to Heydrich and Mueller, renewed the massacres on an enormous scale. The Einsatzgruppen carried out executions of Jews in the Baltic states and in Belorussia and wiped out part of the Ukrainian Jews. Later in 1941, the decision was made to kill all the Jews of Europe in gas chambers and the Gestapo was to supervise the dispatch of the Jews to the camps specially adapted or constructed for the program of mass murder (see *Holocaust, General Survey). The Gestapo section headed by Eichmann was in charge of the dispatch of Jews to the camps, and it also directly supervised at least one camp, *Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia. The section also supplied some of the gas used in the chambers, negotiated with countries under German domination to accelerate the murder, and dealt with Jewish leaders, especially in Hungary (see *Kasztner) in an effort to smooth the process of the impending destruction of various Jewish communities (see *Judenrat). The local Gestapo offices in Germany supervised the dispatch of Jews to death trains and the confiscation of their property. The Gestapo was largely responsible for the actual implementation of the dispatch orders and could choose its victims. It especially held the fate of people of mixed parentage (Mischlinge) in its hands. It excelled in its unabated and premeditated cruelty, in its ability to delude its intended victims as to the fate that awaited them, and in the use of barbaric threats and torture to lead the victims to their death, all as part of the "Final Solution." At the same time the Gestapo acted as the principal executive arm of the Nazi regime in all the campaigns of terror, liquidation, looting, starvation, confiscation of property, and theft of cultural treasures (see Desecration and Destruction of *Synagogues; *Poland) throughout Europe. The Gestapo also repressed the anti-Nazi partisan movement and stamped out resistance in the Western European countries. Thus the term Gestapo became an accepted synonym for horror. After the war, very few of the important members of the Gestapo were caught and brought to trial. The courts in the Federal German Republic from 1969 discussed the question of several principal contingents of the Gestapo. G. Reitlinger, SS, Alibi of a Nation (1956); H. Hoehne, The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS (1969); K.D. Bracher, W. Saver, and W. Schulz, Die Nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (1968); S. Aronson, Reinhard Heydrich und die Fruehgeschichte von Gestapo und SD (1970); H. Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS State (1968); F. Zipfel, Gestapo und SD in Berlin (1961); R. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews (1961, 19852, 20033). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: R. Gellately, Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy (1991); E. Johnson, Nazis Terror: The Gestapo and Ordinary Germans (1999); G. Broder, Hitler's Enforcers: The Gestapo and SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution (1996); S. Aronson, The Beginnings of the Gestapo System: The Bavarian Model (1970). Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Two Orthodox Jewish groups issued a joint statement opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York state. Agudath Israel of America and the Orthodox Union, which represent a broad spectrum of Orthodox Jews in New York state, said in a statement that "discarding the historical definition of marriage would pose a severe danger to society in a variety of ways." "Moreover, we are deeply concerned that should any such redefinition occur, citizens of New York who are members of traditional communities like ours will incur moral opprobrium and risk legal sanction if they refuse to transgress their beliefs," the groups said. "That prospect is chilling, and should be unacceptable." The groups said that they approach the issue "through the prism of the Jewish religious tradition, which forbids homosexual acts and sanctions only the union of a man and a woman in matrimony, the bedrock relationship of the human family." The New York state assembly is scheduled to vote as early as next week on a bill that would extend marriage to same-sex couples.

Welcome to Jusr Answer: It appears that you are experiencing dizziness associated with vertigo and double/blurred vision, which is seasonal. While your symptoms may be in part be related to seasonal allergy as a trigger, but it is likely there is an underlying susceptibility of your sinuses that make it easier for you experience this persisting seasonal problem. At the back of the nose, inside, there is a common meeting point between the nasal, ear and eye sinuses. With chronic or recurrent inflammation of these sinuses, any exacerabtion by seasonal allergy can cause imbalance of the fluid/pressure within and outside the sinuses, and so can cause vertigo and dizziness (ear sinus related) blurred/double vision (due to nystgamus-due to effect/pressure on the orbital sinuses). Although you need to continue with your current medications focused on reducing your allergy and inflammation, I suggest that your doctor closely evaluate you with CT Scan and/or MRI of the sinuses to exclude any persisting chronic infection that needs to be treated with a more effective antibiotics. Augmentin, instead of amoxicillin, for a longer duration may be necessary. Please, feel free to clarify any further question(s). I'm always here to assist you. I hope this information is helpful. If agree, please press the ACCEPT button. Thank you so much. A positive feedback and/or bonus is welcomed and appreciated. This is for information only, and should not replace the recommendation of your doctor. Thank you so much.

AN INTERNATIONAL dairy farming advocate from Jamberoo believes the Showgirl competition is suffering an identity crisis, and needs to be reinvented to better spread the message of agriculture. Sixth generation dairy farmer Lynne Strong said a name change was integral to the competition's long-term survival. Picture You in Agriculture is an entity which aims to provide professional and personal development for young people, including the Showgirl finalists for the Sydney Royal Easter Show. Mrs Strong, the chief executive and national program director, said equipping young females with the necessary confidence, skills and knowledge was vital. "It's an organisation which aims to get out there and tell the great story of agriculture," she said. "Showgirls play a significant part of that, [telling the public] that rural and regional Australia is an exciting place to be. "They don't know how to tell the story, so we want to give them the tools so they can do it in their own communities, and build those networks. "We want them to be out there talking about Kiama, and agriculture just happens to be part of Kiama." In recent years, she has been helping mentor Showgirl regional finalists from throughout NSW as part of The Land Sydney Royal Showgirl Competition, as well as interstate competitions. The state final presentation will be at the Sydney Royal Easter Show on April 13. For the past few years she has also advised the Kiama Showgirl winner. Mrs Strong has also been associated with Art4Agriculture's Young Farming Champions program, which trains young farmers from regional Australia to actively engage with students in their area's schools, as part of the Archibull Prize. She said Showgirls acted as vital ambassadors for rural and regional communities, and were the ideal vehicle to relay key messages. "It's important to show the rest of the world that young people are excited about rural and regional Australia, and there are opportunities. "One of the many challenges facing us today is the lack of comprehension of the complexities of how our food is produced. What is happening with that disconnect is people have begun to value price over quality. "We want to see agriculture taking its story out there, so now people in the cities can make the best decision they can around food." Mrs Strong said before she got involved she thought the Showgirl competition was a somewhat antiquated notion, but now hoped to help make it sustainable. She believed it had some negative connotations, and that Showgirls taking ownership of its profile would help ensure its viability. "It's always a pivotal competition. We just need to change the name, so people can point at this competition and know exactly what it represents. "It would be good to see that the name actually reflected that you are an ambassador for your community. If we are to attract young women to the competition, it's important it has a name that sells itself."

Nasal deformities in children may be secondary to trauma or birth defects, the most common of which is cleft lip and cleft palate. Other less common birth abnormalities include Binder's syndrome, nasal bifidity, and nasal duplication. While discovering that your child has cleft lip or another nasal deformity may be discouraging, it's important to remember that treatment options are available. If you're ready to take the next step, request a consultation online or call us at (469) 375-3838 for more information about nasal deformities. Since the nose does not attain adult dimensions until mid to late adolescence, surgical treatment must be carefully weighed to make sure that permanent bridges are not being burned. Things that we avoid in the early treatment are the transfer of skin replacement flaps which fail to reach adult dimensions and thereby permanently limit the expected outcome. A good example of this is the use of forehead flap tissue which makes a near perfect replacement of nasal skin but which should ideally be used only one time to minimize forehead donor scarring. Rib grafts to replace underdeveloped or injured skeleton may be used on repeat occasions to keep up with growth as long as the donor source on the chest is not exhausted. The nasal airway in children deserves special consideration as the adjoining sinus cavities are only partially developed. In our series of cleft lip and palate patients, less than 3% required work on the septum before their definitive rhinoplasty in adolescence. Though the airway is more restricted on the cleft side, the septum is seldom the sole cause of sinus blockage and infection. Almost all of our children requiring septoplasty have had concomitant allergies as a part of their disease. When airway work is required, we make a special effort to preserve septal cartilage. This is important since the septal cartilage is used as a very essential part of the definitive tip reconstruction in adolescence. Complete or partial blockage of the airway may occur in infancy. Choanal atresia (complete blockage) may involve one or both sides. Bilateral choanal atresia is an airway emergency and is diagnosed soon after birth. Surgery to open the passages and nasal stinting to maintain the airway is required. Unilateral choanal atresia is more subtle and may simply present as a continuous "runny nose" on one side. Surgical treatment is required. We routinely treat the nasal deformity of cleft lip and palate in infancy at the time of lip repair. Having followed these children to adulthood and performed over 1500 cases, we are certain that there is no interference of growth with this repair (Byrd et al., The Primary Correction of the Unilateral Cleft Nasal Deformity. Plast Reconstr Surg. 1985 Jun; 75(6):791-9). Our emphasis is on balancing the muscle forces on the lip and nose. We do not reposition the nasal septum. We do expect to perform a definitive rhinoplasty in the mid teen years (age 15 to 16 for girls; age 16 to 18 for boys).

\"Made in the USA\" Makes a Comeback Whether it was General Motors’ cars or Procter & Gamble’s diapers, most products Americans bought through the late 1970s were made in the USA. From the end of World War II, manufacturing erupted into a major propellant of the U.S. economy. But as emerging economies started to manufacture products with cheaper labor, manufacturing moved from the U.S. to places such as China -- and so did many of the manufacturing jobs. A strong U.S. dollar didn’t help. Since the late 1970s, the manufacturing industry has been largely in decline. Until now. Since the Great Recession ended, an increase in exports has helped fuel our economy’s recovery. But is this resurgence a short-term trend or the end of a decades-long decline? For insight, we spoke with Jim Paulsen, an economist and chief investment strategist of Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis, Minn ., who has been outspoken about manufacturing’s revival for some time. Here are some edited excerpts from our conversation. KIPLINGER: After decades of lagging, the manufacturing sector seems to be on its way back. Is this the beginning of a longer renaissance? PAULSEN: Yes. The manufacturing sector is leading this recovery for the first time since the 1970s and, despite recent short-term turmoil, I think it’s sustainable. The U.S. manufacturing sector is becoming more competitive again globally. What makes the manufacturing sector more competitive now? Two tough decades have forced manufacturers to cut costs and improve productivity, and they’re squeezing out more profit per job than at any time since World War II. In the last decade, virtually no new manufacturing plants were added and the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen from an average of around 18 million in the early 2000s to 12 million jobs now. It also helps that the gap between Chinese wages and U.S. wages is beginning to narrow as Chinese wages rise. How does a weaker dollar help? As the Chinese allow their currency to appreciate against the U.S. dollar, and other emerging markets allow their currencies to appreciate as well, the dollar is likely to continue a slow but steady decline against emerging world currencies over the next couple of decades. As emerging markets’ currencies appreciate, their economies will shift from exports toward consumption. The big prize for U.S. manufacturers will be winning new emerging-world consumers. What does this trend mean for outsourcing? You’ll see less outsourcing. As we become more competitive with emerging producers, companies will start building more factories in the U.S. than overseas. We won’t regain all of what we used to make, such as apparel or electronics. It’s more likely we’ll produce new things -- something we don’t even know yet. And we’ll regain leadership by using new manufacturing processes. Will this mean more manufacturing jobs created? Yes, we’ll see more jobs from the manufacturing sector than we have for decades. Wages will rise, too. But there’s not much of a trained workforce. We’re going to need more scientists and engineers in manufacturing. What does this trend mean for consumers? There is a chance that prices of goods may climb. But if we revive manufacturing, we may start to bring more blue-collar manufacturing workers back into the middle class and close the income gap that has been widening between the wealthy and the rest of the population. Selling goods to younger consumers in emerging markets also means more economic growth domestically and therefore jobs, which will help finance some Social Security and other programs consumers depend on. President Obama wants to double exports over the next five years. Is that goal achievable? Yes. But doubling exports isn’t the only key. The problem is also that our imports need to grow much more slowly. We have to sell to Chinese consumers, sure. But we also have to get U.S. consumers to buy U.S. As wages go up in developed markets and as the dollar weakens against those emerging market currencies, that can occur. Are there investment opportunities? Yes. Invest in stocks of materials and industrial companies. [We like Baker Hughes (BHI) and Caterpillar (CAT). For more, see 2011 Midyear Outlook: Stocks and the Economy Face Off.] The whole manufacturing sector is lean and mean -- because if you weren’t you’re gone. That means as demand picks up, profits will grow more quickly. Do prices of manufacturing stocks have room to run? Yes. In the early 1990s. the materials and industrial sectors together made up almost 20% of the market value of Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. If you go back to the 1960s, it might have been closer to 50%. Today they make up only about 14%. If there’s just a little bit of recognition that investors want some exposure to the manufacturing industry, it could push the values of manufacturing stocks a lot higher.

Silverdale — If the preliminary results of a demographic study hold true, Central Kitsap School District will continue to face budget cuts — and might consider closing schools to save money. An analyst studying local enrollment trends told school board members this week that the school district can expect to continue losing students through at least 2014. Enrollment at Central Kitsap schools already has dropped by nearly 1,000 students since 1997. Current enrollment is 12,114, still making it the largest school district in Kitsap. Reed Hansen, an analyst based on Bainbridge Island, said the current population growth rate for Kitsap County is so low that there likely will be no enrollment gains over the next eight years. Since state funding for education largely is based on enrollment, Central Kitsap School District likely will have to cut its expenses for the next few years. Administrators anticipate costs will exceed revenues by up to $3 million for the 2006-07 school year. The current budget is about $103 million. Superintendent Greg Lynch says the district has enough of a financial cushion to cover the upcoming budget. But he warns that the long-range outlook could be painful. It can become cost-inefficient for a district to maintain and operate a school that is well below capacity. The fixed costs don't decline just because enrollment does. School boards are reluctant to close schools or lay off teachers because of public pressure. When Lynch mentioned the possibility of closing schools at Wednesday's meeting, he said it was the first time it had been publicly discussed since fall 2004. Central Kitsap is hardly alone in this quandary. Aside from Bainbridge Island, each school district on the Kitsap Peninsula has either declining or stagnant enrollment. Analysts say it's difficult to precisely say why enrollment at many Kitsap school districts is declining. The biggest factor is the declining birth rate, which peaked in 1992. Another possible explanation is that many new homes being built in Kitsap are so expensive that only "empty-nesters" and retirees can afford them. Regardless of the reasons for the decline, Lynch says this summer the board likely will address the possibility of closing schools. "Unfortunately, none of this is related to school performance," Lynch said. "This is just financial reality." Hansen is expected to present the completed demographic study by early July. Need Help? Call us at 1-877-304-7764. Monday-Friday: 5am-6pm / Saturday: 5am-8pm / Sunday: 4am-11am

Ismailova Habibahon` Group Habibahon is a farm worker who also owns some livestock. She has been in this business since the early 1990s. She started it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when most government agricultural land was privatized. At the present time, her seasonal income from farming exceeds $1500 USD. Habibahon usually spends all her income in covering family expenses. Her business earnings have meant that her family could marry both children, build a house for her son, and increase the number of livestock. In the near future, Habibahon is planning to open a food market near her house. This is her first loan from Kiva partner, Mol Bulak Finance, and it will be used to buy potato seeds and 300 kilos of mineral fertilizers. Hojiumar, 49, is a father of two married children. He is a farmer, and will use his loan to buy potato seeds and fertilizers. Hojiumar has a dream of building a pharmacy and barber shop in the village center because the local population has to go to the district center to buy drugs. Adinahon, 41, is also a farmer. Her family has a total of 0.47 hectare of land. She cultivates potatoes and wheat there. She is requesting a loan to prepare for the spring sowing by plowing and buying potato seeds. Adinahon is married with two children. Her husband works in a cotton plant, and all her family members take an active role in the family business. Gaznahan is 47 years old. She is a widow with four children, the eldest two of whom are married. The other two children are students. Gaznahan will use her loan to buy 500 kilos of potato seeds and 100 kilos of fertilizer. In the future, Gaznahan hopes that she will be able to build a house for her second son. For her, the most important thing is the happiness of her children. About Mol Bulak Finance This loan is brought to you by Mol Bulak Finance, a young and ambitious socially-focused MFI in Kyrgyzstan. Mol Bulak Finance is strongly committed to the principles of sustainable development on the basis of the 3-Ps concept - People (building human capital and taking care of its customers and the society as well), Profit (to be profitable in order to grow further) and the Planet (taking care of the environment). It is also the only MFI in Kyrgyzstan that delivers its services to customers 365 days a year. To learn more about Mol Bulak and view a video presentation about the organization, please visit: www.kiva.org/about/aboutPartner?id=135. If you would like to support and learn more about Kyrgyzstan and micro-finance in Central Asia, please join our Lending Team - Supporters of Kyrgyzstan - at www.kiva.org/team/kyrgyzstan. Members will get special updates and news from the Kiva Fellows in Kyrgyzstan and from Mol Bulak staff. This is a Group Loan In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan but is part of a larger group of individuals. The group is there to provide support to the members and to provide a system of peer pressure, but groups may or may not be formally bound by a group guarantee. In cases where there is a group guarantee, members of the group are responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members in the case of delinquency or default. Kiva's Field Partners typically feature one borrower from a group. The loan description, sector, and other attributes for a group loan profile are determined by the featured borrower's loan. The other members of the group are not required to use their loans for the same purpose. 82View loans » Success!! The loan was 100% repaid

Hilda is group president. She sells products she produces in her fields. Her wish is to continue making progress with Fundación Paraguaya and that the group continues to get stronger every day. She states that she feels very comfortable in her committee and expects to have many more of the benefits that the Fundación is offering. She is asking for the loan to buy seeds, fertilizer and other supplies to continue working her fields and thus help to support her family. She is grateful for the opportunity she’s getting from Kiva and Fundación Paraguaya. La sra Hilda, es Presidenta del grupo, ella se dedica a vender los producto que producen en su plantío de cultivo, su deseo es seguir progresando con la Fundación Paraguaya y que el grupo se vaya fortaleciendo cada día más, manifiesta que se siente muy a gusto en su comité y espera muchos beneficio más que la Fundación le están ofreciendo. Ella solicita el crédito para la compra de semillas, fertilizantes y demás insumos para poder seguir trabajando en su campo y así ayudar a mantener a su familia. Agradece por la oportunidad que esta recibiendo de Kiva y fundación paraguaya. About Fundación ParaguayaFundación Paraguaya is a financially self-sustaining social enterprise that promotes entrepreneurship in urban and rural areas through microfinance, education programs, and more. Its focus on agriculture has helped many farmers boost their crop yields. And a number of other borrowers have taken out loans to start and grow social businesses that have helped deliver eyeglasses, medicines and other helpful services in their local communities. This is a Group Loan In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan but is part of a larger group of individuals. The group is there to provide support to the members and to provide a system of peer pressure, but groups may or may not be formally bound by a group guarantee. In cases where there is a group guarantee, members of the group are responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members in the case of delinquency or default. Kiva's Field Partners typically feature one borrower from a group. The loan description, sector, and other attributes for a group loan profile are determined by the featured borrower's loan. The other members of the group are not required to use their loans for the same purpose. 122View loans » Success!! The loan was 100% repaid

Janet K. is forty one years old. She is married and has four children who are currently in school. She is a very hardworking woman, who is able to combine numerous household demands with pressure from her business. She sells smoked fish in one of the busy local markets. Many homes enjoy her fish because it has a good taste and is moderately priced. She wants to use the loan to buy an increased stock of assorted fish to make increased sales and income to support her children’s education and business. She belongs to the community group called Shepherd Trust Group. Members guarantee one another as social collateral to access loans.

Meresi is 40 years old and lives in the town of Mbale in the Mbale region of Uganda. She is married and has three children with two of them currently in school. For the past three years, Meresi has been working hard to manage her shoe making business, which sells shoes for men, women and children. To help expand her business, Meresi has requested a loan of 2,500,000 Ugandan Shillings from BRAC Uganda. The loan will be used to buy more shoes and materials, and will help Meresi to generate greater profits and increase the daily income. Meresi hopes that in the future she will be able to have more houses to rent. Meresi is a member of BRAC's Small Enterprise Program (SEP). The program primarily serves small entrepreneurs like Meresi who do not have enough collateral for commercial loans, but have businesses that have grown too large for microloans. About BRAC Uganda This loan is administered by BRAC Uganda, a registered non-governmental organization (NGO) in Uganda that is also a part of the BRAC international network. BRAC Uganda attempts to address poverty through a holistic model, offering programs in education, health, water & sanitation, agriculture, and microfinance. BRAC Uganda’s microfinance program aims to provide the poor with easy, reliable, and efficient access to institutional financial services, and reaches over 150,000 families in Uganda. For more on BRAC Uganda, please see our partner page, and join our lending team, Friends of BRAC Uganda.

The kidnapping of a 9-year-old Pueblo girl has prompted response from people all over the state, including folks in her own neighborhood. Missy Champlain is a mother of two small children. When she heard the news of the missing girl, she knew she had to help. At first she just watched as the hours went by and still no word of the child. Then she decided to be proactive. Champlain created a group on Facebook called "No Child Walks Home Alone." The purpose of the group is to ensure no child is left vulnerable walking to and from school, by using volunteers to accompany kids. Champlain says anyone who has a child that walks home alone can call on her new group. She hopes this concept will spread throughout Colorado. The group is getting a lot of feedback: a number of people from Pueblo and Colorado Springs schools have already agreed to help. Members of the group hope that by having adults walking kids home, who would otherwise be walking home alone, will work as a deterrent for child predators. For more information on "No Child Walks Home Alone," just click on Find It, or click here to go directly to the Facebook group. KKTV firmly believes in freedom of speech for all and we are happy to provide this forum for the community to share opinions and facts. We ask that commenters keep it clean, keep it truthful, stay on topic and be responsible. Comments left here do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of KKTV 11 News. If you believe that any of the comments on our site are inappropriate or offensive, please tell us by clicking “Report Abuse” and answering the questions that follow. We will review any reported comments promptly.powered by Disqus

- March 10 The 2010 Census reveals a more ethnically diverse county than ever before. We've started to pour through the numbers and we'll have an early look at what they mean. - March 8 The 2010 Census shows the White population dropped during the decade, while several minority groups made significant gains. ‹ Newer Stories Older Stories ›

[Bytes] creates a byte stream that can be used to work with binary data or to convert strings from one character set to another. The [Bytes] tag can be used to instantiate a new bytes object, or it can be used to cast string data types as bytes types. Only string data types may be cast as bytes data types. The [Bytes] tag has two optional parameters. The first specifies the size of the memory buffer in bytes that should be allocated to hold the byte stream. The second specifies the number of bytes that should be added if the initial memory buffer is too small to hold the entire byte stream. Note that the [Bytes] tag does not accept the data of the byte stream directly. The data is imported into the byte stream using the [Bytes->Append] or [Bytes->Import...] tags. <?LassoScript Var: 'Bytes1' = (Bytes: 'String Value'); Var: 'Bytes2' = (Bytes: 1024, 256); ... ?> |Buffer Size||The initial size of the buffer for the byte stream in bytes.| |Grow Size||The increment in bytes to grow the byte stream buffer.| See the Lasso 8 Language Guide for examples of how to use this tag. This tag is documented on page 92. Please note that periodically LassoSoft will go through the notes and may incorporate information from them into the documentation. Any submission here gives LassoSoft a non-exclusive license and will be made available in various formats to the Lasso community.

Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone Review "They should have been the band that went way beyond any of us who were influenced by them," says Primus' Les Claypool about groundbreaking African-American band Fishbone in the documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone. The film, co-directed by Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler, is a love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, the film solidly makes the case that, throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Fishbone were one of rock's best live acts ever — furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song. A slew of talking heads, from Vernon Reid to Gwen Stefani (who should pay Fishbone frontman Angelo Moore royalties), sings the group's praises, as Laurence Fishburne narrates a whiplash-inducing career ride: High school friends form a punk/ska/funk/fill-in-the-blanks band, create groundbreaking music, travel the world, influence countless other bands, but crash and burn before achieving the success they deserve. The reasons for liftoff failure are familiar: record-label ineptitude, the love/hate dynamics within the group that eventually gave way to alcoholism, mental breakdowns and bitterness. Anderson and Metzler get it all down but are so enamored of the band that they don't shape their material as tightly as they could have, and it occasionally drifts into redundancy. An unexpected upside to the film is its timeliness. As conversations about "post-blackness" drift from the art world and academia onto the op-ed pages — see: Touré's controversial new book Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? — it's refreshing to hear group members repeatedly stress that their art was rooted in black culture and consciousness, as the film itself becomes a dialectic on black masculinity. —Ernest Hardy (Sunset 5) Get the Film Club Newsletter Stay up to date on the best new movies with our critics' latest reviews, interviews and trailers for the films coming to a theater near you each week.

What is a Key phrase? What is a Key phrase? or Keyphrase? For a website to be ranked higher in the eyes of the search engines and have its products and services located very easily on the worldwide web it should properly construct a key phrase. A key phrase is made up of many words but it can be arranged in different orders and sequences. It is highly vital for the company to think and emphasize the key phrases, which can be used to get to its website, products, and services through a search engine. For key phrases to work they should first be tested to see whether they can effectively link the searcher to the company or not. For example, a key phrase “power play” is used in several games but if we added, “cricket” to it that would only mean the power play in cricket. 47167/9%Last update: 2008-02-02 11:48 You can comment on this entry

Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture Date: January 20, 2009 Location: Wood Hall, Room 7, Law School Wood Hall, Room 7, Law School Professor Gerald Torres of the University of Texas School of Law, one of the top civil rights scholars in the nation, will deliver a lecture to honor Dr. King. The lecture is titled “Transformative Thinking in the Domain of Civil Rights: President Obama and Extending the Vision of Dr. King.” On the date of inauguration of the nation’s first African American President, Professor Torres will lead a celebration of the fruits of Dr. King’s work to advance civil rights. The lecture will take place at Lewis & Clark Law School, Wood Hall Room 7. A reception will follow the event

ARTICLE VII. OPINION AND EXPERT TESTIMONY RULE 702. TESTIMONY BY EXPERTS If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise. [Effective February 1, 1985.]

Top Stories Security - How To Skip The Line And Manually Update Your Nexus Device - How To Block All The Companies Tracking You On Facebook - What Windows 10's 'Privacy Nightmare' Settings Actually Do - How To Survive A Browser Hijack - Five Common Granny Scams (And How To Avoid Them) - How To Configure Windows 10 To Protect Your Privacy Android updates take forever. While that’s OK most of the time, it can be a problem when a new, terrible security vulnerability is found. Whether you want to protect your phone, or just can’t wait for new updates, here’s how to skip the line and update your Nexus phone (and occasionally other devices) manually. Last month, a hacker collective known as The Impact Team stole 37 million users’ data from the infidelity “dating” site Ashley Madison. Today, that data was unleashed to the masses. Many consider this to be just deserts or even divine justice. But hang on a minute. Doesn’t everybody deserve the same rights to privacy? Facebook is a great utility if you want to stay in touch with friends and family, share photos, and see what other people are up to in their lives. It’s free, of course, but that doesn’t mean it comes without a price. If you’re using Facebook, you’re giving the company a ton of information about yourself which it is selling to advertisers in one form or another. Dear Lifehacker, I have bought an online digital code for Windows 10. Is there a website I can use to verify if it’s genuine? Obviously I know that when installing the software it asks for the code and if you pass that point it is valid, but I’m thinking of checking a code before installing to verify its authenticity. The average user doesn’t give much thought to mobile operating system security, but with the number of threats increasing every day, the likes of Samsung and Apple are paying a lot more attention. The former even announced recently that it would be dramatically improving its Android update process to respond faster to vulnerabilities. With all the noise regarding Windows 10 and its somewhat flexible definition of privacy, it might be worth giving the rest of your most-used applications the once over to make sure they’re not sending your information back home without your knowledge. Dear Lifehacker, It was recently reported on the ABC that hundreds of Australian computers are being infected with ransomware, which I guess is a form of the cryptlocker virus. It seems that this problem is becoming more widespread. My question is: how can I prevent my computer from being targeted? And is there anything I can do if it’s already too late? Android: Last month, we got news of a particularly nasty Android vulnerability called Stagefright that affects nearly every Android device. If you want to find out if you’re vulnerable, Stagefright Detector can let you know.

An intramuscular (IM) injection is a shot. The needle goes into the muscle to deliver medicine. This is usually done by a doctor or nurse. Sometimes, your doctor may teach you to inject yourself. IM injections are deeper than subcutaneous injections (given under the skin). A needle passes through skin and fat layers into the muscle fibers to deliver medicine. Copyright © Nucleus Medical Media, Inc. Some medicines are better absorbed when given in the muscle; if taken by mouth, they may not work. Other medicines may be given in the muscle if you are unable to take them by mouth. Some examples of medicines given using an IM injection: Complications associated with IM injections are: Depending on the medicine, there is usually some discomfort at the injection site. Soreness in the muscle is also common. Tips for minimizing pain include: for general care. Contact your doctor if any of the following occurs: In case of an emergency, call for medical help right away. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseaseshttp://www.niaid.nih.gov/ Canadian Diabetes Associationhttp://www.diabetes.ca/ Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health: Intramuscular Injection . BNet website. Available at: . Accessed June 10, 2008. Intramuscular injection (IM). Cincinnati Children's Hospital website. Available at: . Updated September 2007. Accessed June 10, 2008. Selecting, evaluating, and using sharps disposal containers website. US Health And Human Services website. Available at: . Accessed October 14, 2005. What are the different methods of drug delivery? Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center website. Available at: Accessed June 10, 2008.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - More active men seem to have a rosier outlook on life, new research from Finland shows. Dr. Maarit Valtonen of Kuopio University Hospital and colleagues found that men who spent less than one hour a week doing moderate to vigorous leisure-time physical activity were 37% more likely to report feeling hopeless than men who logged at least 2.5 hours weekly. Feeling hopeless has been linked to worse heart health and greater risk of dying, the researchers note, independent of the effects of depression. To investigate whether physical exercise might influence hopelessness -- just as it has been shown to help reduce depression -- the researchers surveyed 2,428 men, 42 to 60 years old, about their mood and physical activity levels and tested their fitness. The men reporting the highest levels of hopelessness had "more pronounced features" of the metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms that boosts risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. They were also less active and less physically fit. The men who got at least 2.5 hours of moderate activity each week were significantly less likely to be hopeless than men who were active for an hour or less weekly, and this association remained even after the researchers adjusted for age, socioeconomic status, smoking, and other relevant factors. Vigorous physical activity had a particularly strong effect. When the researchers adjusted for depression, the link between hopelessness and activity remained. But while low levels of fitness were also tied to greater likelihood of feeling hopeless, further analysis found depression was the responsible factor. Many people, including those who aren't depressed or otherwise mentally ill, feel hopeless, the researchers note. The current findings, they say, suggest that "hopelessness and depression are overlapping, but distinct entities." The findings also suggest that being active can help "ameliorate or protect against feelings of hopelessness" even if a person's fitness levels don't improve. SOURCE: BMC Public Health, online June 25, 2009.

North Carolina ranchers will have the opportunity to vote Thursday on whether to continue paying $1 per animal sold to fund community agricultural education programs, farm research and other needs for area agriculture. The Lincoln County Cooperative Extension office will serve as the local election center for those interested in casting a vote for or against the N.C. Cattle Industry Assessment Referendum. “The dollars will continue to allow the funding of educational programs, youth programs, judging contests, leadership programs,” said Libby Yarber, an area agriculture extension agent for Lincoln County as she talked with the Times-News on Thursday. “There’s a huge statewide beef industry tour trip for youth (that it funds), too. And some of it is political — it helps inform legislature groups on what’s going on in the beef industry; the funds are divvied up equally between those things.” For those who aren’t entirely in favor of the mandate, a refund of the $1 will be given 60 days after the sale of the animal if they choose, Yarber noted. Though the money is coming out of the pockets of some local residents per animal, those in favor of the policy argue that the funding will be coming full circle to go back into programs that boost the cattle industry, and aren’t just dollars paid away in a tax never to be seen again. Conservation Farm Family of the Year winner for 2012 Robert Kalmbacher has been raising and selling cattle in North Carolina for the last seven years — many of which he has taken part in voting on the matter. Coming from a research-based background, working for the University of Florida’s Range Cattle Research and Education Center until his retirement in 2005, Kalmbacher stresses the importance of research and the need for funding to make it possible. “There used to be a time when the state could fully fund the kind of research we need to be able to support producers,” Kalmbacher said, “but today, there is so much competition for state dollars that we need to have additional money to cover the cost of research that is so important for production agriculture. “It supports the producers’ industry, and they need to get behind it and give support. A certain portion goes back for the nuts and bolts — things that help — and we need all the help we can get.” Though this may seem like an issue that only affects ranchers, the general public has and can benefit from the funding raised through the mandate, Yarber assured, as she remembered four local children who participated in a beef judging contest — a type of event that is possible partially from the dollar bills their neighbors paid to sell their animals — who were able to attend the event and learn more about the industry. President of the N.C. Cattlemen’s Association Bill Cameron said in a press release that the referendum will help assess the number of cattle sold and marketed in the state, with hopes of bettering the industry. Cameron also mentioned the dairy farmers will see benefits of this mandate, too; it’s not beef exclusive. Those who will be filling out ballots next week, keep in mind: No one under the age of 18 will be eligible to vote. Any resident who claims ownership of cattle may attend. An affidavit must be filled out to verify age,ownership and residency. All eligible voters must vote in their county. Absentee ballots may be obtained by contacting the N.C. Cooperative Extension office at (704)736-8452, and must be completed and received before 5 p.m. Oct. 4. Voting hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

CairoPlot Makes Pretty Python Plotting a Possibility Intro to CairoPlot Data aficionados constantly on the lookout for better ways to display charts and graphs will appreciate CairoPlot. ServerWatch looks at this Python-based plotting software that is pretty enough to impress even the most jaded Mac user. As a data junkie, I'm forever looking for better ways to display charts and graphs, especially from Python. There are lots of Python plotting packages available, but if you want output that's pretty enough that even your Mac friends will be impressed, consider using CairoPlot. CairoPlot isn't packaged for most distros, but it's an easy install. The current release is version 1.1 at the CairoPlot Launchpad page. You can download the cairoplot-1.1.tar.gz from there, or check it out with bzr if you prefer. (Once 1.2 is ready the project may move to Sourceforge.) First, extract the tarball: then, copy one file, cairoplot-1.1/CairoPlot.py, to the directory where you'll be developing your Python script. Pie Charts: Who's Sending Spam? When playing with plotting, finding a good source of data is always the first step. For this project, let's analyze a Postfix log file, /var/log/mail.info to look at the sources of one class of spam. A casual glimpse through the file reveals we're getting a lot of mail delivery attempts where the sender claims an address that doesn't really exist, like this one: Read the rest of "Pretty Python Plotting With CairoPlot" at ServerWatch Solid state disks (SSDs) made a splash in consumer technology, and now the technology has its eyes on the enterprise storage market. Download this eBook to see what SSDs can do for your infrastructure and review the pros and cons of this potentially game-changing storage technology.

Geeks404.com: Introduction to PythonMay 30, 2000, 19:07 (1 Talkback[s]) (Other stories by David Booss) [ Thanks to BeOpen for this link. ] "You've probably heard about Python, whether it's been a brief glimpse at an online article or browsing through a book, Python is gaining popularity rapidly. More developers are switching from other languages, such as Perl and Tcl, to Python. What is all the fuss about? Object oriented programming (OOP). Primarily, OOP lets programmers create reusable modules giving them greater flexibility and efficiency. One of the main attractions to Python is it's ability to deal with object oriented code, similar to C++ and Java. Whether you're coming from a heavy Unix C/C++ programming background, or you're new to programming, Python is a great choice for a wide variety of applications. Its syntax is clear and precise, and while similar to Perl, Python is simpler. If you're looking for a powerful yet easy solution to any kind of task, Python will soon be your native tongue." "The Python interpreter is available for many operating systems, including most Unix flavors, GNU/Linux, Windows 95/98 and NT (Intel), Macintosh, OS/2, Amiga, BeOs, QNX, VMS, Psion, Windows CE, RISC OS, VxWorks, and finally Windows NT for Alpha processors. Some of these ports are still under development, but most major operating systems have stable releases at this time. For all other operating systems, you should check the Python web site, and see if someone is porting Python to your OS and then download a copy of Python." 0 Talkback[s] (click to add your comment)

In successful nanny care situations, the nanny has full authority over the child while the child is in the nanny’s care. This allows for the healthy development of the child and a strong and secure bond between the child and the caregiver. However, when the parents send the message that the nanny isn’t in charge or the nanny is unsure of her role and the rules she is supposed to be implementing, the children often sense that uncertainty and challenge the nanny’s authority. This is not only frustrating for the nanny, but can also put the child’s well-being at risk. Here are some of the common ways this plays out. “You’re not the boss of me!” Some children don’t easily accept the authority of a nanny. They see the nanny as a person who’s there to care for them and to play with them, but not as someone who can stand in their way when it comes to what they want. Of course, this attitude can also be a natural part of a developmental stage where the child questions the authority of every adult in her life. The nanny can’t enforce rules she doesn’t know about. For nannies that are new to a job, it’s impossible to know about the countless rules that govern a house and a child. While the parent and caregiver can cover the big “what if…?” questions that the nanny will likely have to make an educated guess about, there are many other questions that come up throughout the day. Can he eat his snack in the living room? Can she talk on the phone for as long as she wants? Does he have to eat his carrots before getting up from the table? Kids know when a nanny is unclear about what is allowed and not allowed, and they will attempt to push the envelope as far as possible in these types of situations. The refrain, “But Mom lets me do it!” is well known to new nannies. Only time on the job and lots of checking in with the parents will overcome this challenge. “I’m going to tell mom on you!” In situations where the parents and the nanny don’t work as a team and instead work as leaders and a follower, children quickly hone in on the hierarchy of the relationship. While they may not fully understand the dynamics of the relationship, they pick up on the idea that one party has a lot more power than the other. In these cases, the nanny is often fearful of making a mistake, of failing to live up to the parents’ expectations, or of stepping outside of her role. Children often sense this fear and use it to challenge or even manipulate the nanny. Kids know when the nanny doesn’t have the power to allow for natural consequences. Often the parents and the nanny have different perspectives when it comes to natural consequences. The nanny is often focused on allowing the child to learn by letting events take their natural course. If you dawdle through breakfast, you’ll be late for school. If you don’t pick up your toys now, you can’t go to your friend’s birthday party until you do. If you don’t put your dirty clothes in the hamper, your favorite shirt won’t be clean for the school picture at the end of the week. While the parents may like the idea of natural consequences in theory, they often feel that natural consequences are too harsh, and kids with rescuing parents know it. The child who dawdles through breakfast knows he won’t be late for school because Mom will ask the nanny to just give him a breakfast bar in the car. The child who refuses to pick up his toys knows he won’t miss his friend’s birthday party because Dad will tell the nanny to make him pick up the toys when he gets home. And the child who regularly throws her clothes anywhere but the hamper knows she won’t get her picture taken in anything but her favorite shirt because a quick phone call to mom at work will result in the nanny spot cleaning and pressing the shirt before school. Kids with parents that don’t allow natural consequences to happen often don’t even have to involve the parents in the conversation with the nanny. The nanny is well aware of how the parent feels and won’t jeopardize her job by allowing the child to experience the consequence of his choice. In the best case scenario, children respect and recognize the authority of the nanny entrusted to care for them. However there are a lot of factors that affect a child’s understanding of a nanny’s role. When a child challenges a nanny’s authority, it’s an issue that the nanny, the parents and the child must work on together.

LLU procures collection of rare Sanitarium menus This menu from Christmas, 1913, is just one example from the collection of menus that was procured last month. It’s been said that anything under the sun can be found on eBay. Michael Campbell, MA, interim chair of the department of archives & special collections of the Loma Linda University Libraries, certainly found this to be true last month. While searching through the infamous online auction site, Mr. Campbell discovered a rare collection of Loma Linda Sanitarium menus. Previously, the University had a series of menus dating back to 1919, but this new collection of 25 menus dates from as early as 1913—thus helping to push the department’s collection of historic menus back to within the first decade of this institution’s history. “While these ephemera do not shed light on any major historical event or person, it does give a glimpse about what life was like during the first 50 years of this institution’s history or at least what you might have had to eat,” says Mr. Campbell. “They also give insight about the simple elegance early Sanitarium workers took in the care and preparation of campus events.” According to Mr. Campbell, the menus also illustrate the fine work of those who printed the programs at the College Press. Patients partake in a meal in the Sanitarium dining hall in 1913. uo;Christmas Menu” for 1913, the earliest in the collection, is illustrative of the rest of the menus. It has several verses such as: “May your days be as fair as the sunlit sky, and your heart free from care as the pumpkin pie!” In addition to dessert, for those who partook of this meal, they had a choice of two soups (cream tomato or vegetable consommé), several relishes, and entrees that included cereal nut roast with cranberry sauce and pecan nut croquettes. “From these menus, it’s clear that a vegetarian diet could be far from bland!” says Mr. Campbell. Desserts included a variety of fruits, and a choice of loaf cake, pumpkin pie, apple pie, plum pudding, and ice cream. On other parts of the program important values are prominently placed: grace, a clear conscience, kindness, good cheer, charity served with discretion, peace, love, and truth. The newly acquired menus will be on display on the third floor of the Del E. Webb Memorial Library through April 13. Historic pictures of early meals and original Loma Linda Sanitarium dishes will also be on display. By Dustin Jones

How To Improve Lone Worker Protection And Workplace Safety? This year's LONE WORKER SAFETY 2015 Conference & Exhibition is taking place on Tuesday 24th November 2015 at London's great Olympia Conference Centre... and it is once again all about improving the protection of lone workers. We have to accept the fact that local government employees, such as parking enforcement, environmental health, housing officers, as well as and social workers, security guards, civil enforcement officers, and others working for utility, insurance or other private firms can be at risk. It's easy to come up with examples of workers who spend time on their own and whose work is likely to bring them face to face with irate or aggressive members of the public. But to the list of vulnerable lone workers we now have to add paramedics, public transport employees, market researchers, even community nurses; people whose jobs are either innocuous or should put them on the side of the angels. There is no agreement on the reasons for increased violence against public-facing workers, but what is clear is that employers have to take seriously their legal duty to protect their employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. When sending their lone workers out into this increasingly hostile environment, these health & safety professionals now must be sure the protection and security of their workforce has been given plenty of consideration, and everything appropriate is done to ensure their safety. More and more organisations are adopting lone worker policies and lone worker safety training, backed up in some cases by new lone worker protection technology and monitoring devices to raise the alarm when they run into trouble. So what are the key elements that can help you to effectively improve lone worker lone worker protection? I will just highlight VERY briefly what I think are the most important elements you want to have covered (however, I am of course more than happy to put you in contact with professionals specialised in any of the below fields) Lone Worker Protection Policies The intention of a lone worker policy is to ensure the protection and safety of lone workers or staff who sometimes work alone, by minimising the risks that they face and putting in place appropriate measures to improve their safety. - Legal requirements - Applicable Laws - Places of Work - Personal responsibility - Working outside normal hours - Risk Assessment - Health & Safety - Safe System of Work - Organisational responsibilities This year's LONE WORKER SAFETY 2013 Conference & Exhibition will have an entire 40 minutes speaker slot to cover this so very important subject. I would like you to come and see us in case this subject is of interest or in case you are charged with designing and completing a lone worker safety policy. Lone Worker Protection Training Statistics suggest it would be wise to train vulnerable staff working alone to deal with aggression when they are faced with it. Self defence training is a very controversial option since many experts argue that it can send staff the wrong message, which would be to stay and fight... and subsequently this might get them into even more trouble... when their best defence actually would be to run away. I am very unsure about such argument. I would rather equip lone workers with all available tools to survive in case things get out of hand. Not allowing lone workers to have 'all access' to all available tools is something I seem to struggle with? But conflict resolution training, aimed at helping employees diffuse aggression before it escalates, is becoming more and more popular... and righty so. However, please make sure you pick a trainer who knows what he/she is talking about. There are so so so many trainers out there who really should not be doing this job! A number of years ago I was speaking with the NCP (one of the largest employer of parking enforcement officers) and it became know that every single of their lone workers had to receive at least a full week's counter-aggression training, reflecting the hazardous nature of their work. But their Director of Communications at that time Tim Cowen says the company also used other means to protect its staff. "They also carry radios, and can radio back to supervisors in their depot, so someone can get to them within a couple of minutes," says Cowen. Having a computerised ticketing system also offers staff protection, he adds: "Once they press that button, it is recorded in the system, which helps to reduce pressure on parking attendants to tear up a ticket." There is no question about it effective lone worker protection training can make a massive difference to the person working alone. Lone Worker Protection Devices The arrival of 'mobile technology' has been a massive advance for lone worker protection. But we need to understand thatsimply providing a phone and relying on employees to call if they are in trouble is not always enough, since violent situations do not always offer such opportunities. However, ensuring your lone workers benefit from the same levels of protection and safety as your office-based employees is critical, and there is a rapidly growing number of suppliers keen to offer devices and services to meet those needs. The problem now is in choosing what you really need, rather than what you might have been told you need; and it's compounded by the range of products on the market, all of which claim to be 'The Best In The Whole Wide World'. If you are currently looking for lone worker devices in order to help protect your staff more effectively you really have to do your homework properly. There are clear British Standards a very good lone worker device needs to best tested against and comply with, and there are of course a couple of rather important features that can make a real difference for your lone workers. If you have all the answers then that's great... if you have not, then please drop me a line and I will do my utmost to redirect you to experts I feel I can trust whole heartedly. I know (based on many years of operational frontline experience) that a person who is either intoxicated, simply has a serious dislike for the organisation you represent or aggressively disagrees with any decision you are about to make can overreact to anything you say or do. A lightweight stab resistant vest or body armour will protect you in such case from any impulsive physical assault such person might commit (and possibly deeply regret the following day for the rest of his/her life). Truly outrageous physical attacks on traffic wardens, licensing enforcement, housing, community safety, anti social behaviour and trading standards teams, have been revealed in data released by local authorities across the UK and many other countries. To make it very clear, I am of course not saying everyone working for a local council or ambulance service is at risk of getting stabbed or brutally assaulted... of course not. This is of course depending on a number of factors e.g. are you working alone, time of work, location of work, and job responsibilities. However I feel strongly that body armour can help improve lone worker protection effectively. Dynamic Risk Assessments A great article about this so very important subject has been written by Nicole Vazquez of Worthwhile Training. I can only suggest you give this article a good read. Behavioural Based Safety For me personally one of the most fascinating subjects out there... I personally LOVE this subject! Behavioural Based Safety is a process that can help improve lone worker protection by reducing unsafe behaviours that can lead to incidents occurring in the workplace. The process works by reinforcing safe behaviour and identifying the causes of unsafe behaviour. The Three Generic Types of Approach: A behavioural safety process can be introduced in numerous ways but can be categorised into one of three generic types, these are: A management driven process that typically has supervisors measuring behaviour and providing one to one feedback and relaying recommendations for improvement to the management team. An employee driven process which encourages front line participation in safety. This works on the basis of using peer-to-peer observations which are fed back to a workforce run behavioural safety team who then conduct analysis to develop recommendations for managers to implement. A collective approach is where both managers and front line personnel conduct observations. Analysis is then conducted by a behavioural safety team (represented by both managers and front line personnel) to identify the root causes of unsafe practises. Recommendations are then identified and implemented to improve safety performance. It should be noted that whilst organisations may initially be considering either a Top Down or Bottom Up approach, all organisations should eventually aim towards adopting a collective approach! Having worked with Dr Tim Marsh (BSc MSc PhD C.Psychol, FIOSH) of Ryder Marsh Safety at previous LONE WORKER SAFETY Conferences... I can clearly say that 'he is the man' you want to speak with in case you are keen to lean more. Behavioural Based Safety is a process that reduces unsafe behaviours that can lead to incidents occurring in the workplace. The process works by reinforcing safe behaviour and identifying the causes of unsafe behaviour. Book your ticket now and learn how to stay safe when working alone

In the continuing battle against crimes of "hitism", let me take a gentle swipe at an otherwise excellent piece on the cultural implications of the peer production age by music critic John Pareles in today's NYT. He writes: "The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from unsigned bands on MySpace — some played two million or three million times — tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals. The key word there is "aggregate". Popularity is simply a place where many roads--each one a single consumer's path through culture--intersect. Each road is different, but for a brief moment many crossed that point. Hits are products that reflect the coincidence of our collective tastes, and the reality is that most of the things that we agree on are relatively banal (that's why they call it the lowest common denominator). Individually we may have excellent taste, but collectively we're as low-brow as they come. This is simply an artifact of the statistics of the Long Tail--when demand is spread over a huge number of products, most things won't be popular. And the things that are popular won't necessarily define their consumers. T'was ever thus: Yogi Berra's quote in the title reflects the reality of minority taste. We're as likely to avoid doing what everyone else is doing as were are to join them. For the discriminating, popularity is often a curse, even if it was their early embrace that kick-started that popularity in the first place. Once the most popular fare defined our culture. Now a million niches define our culture and the few blockbusters are the exceptions that define none of us, even through many of us brush by them. David Foster Wallace, writing about television, said it best: "TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." (Image taken from our photo shoot this month for our cover story on LonelyGirl15, an example used in the NYT.)

Things are heating up a little, aren’t they? Settlement – forced or “chosen” – was tantamount to giving up Romani identity. Children were often forcibly taken away from their families and made to speak the local language exclusively – a cultural death sentence. Adults were often forced to live in conditions that went utterly against their strict purity laws. (In many Rom cultures the lower half of the body is considered very impure – to the extent that living in the bottom floor of a house could be considered unclean because of the lower parts of the people walking above.) Ancient family trades dating back to life on the Indian subcontinent would have to be abandoned in favor of subsistence living. Many families who did concede to settlement (rather than being forced by local law enforcement efforts) had virtually no choice in the matter; losing your horses or wagons or being cut off from a traditional trade route could be a crippling blow. This particular family has had a rough year for its patriarch to be giving thought to the matter.

1Alfred E. Kahn, "Deregulation and Vested Interests: The Case of Airlines," in Roger G. Noll and Bruce M. Owen, editors, The Political Economy of Deregulation (Washington, D. C.: The American Enterprise Institute, 1983), p. 140. 2David B. Kopel, Access to the Internet: Regulation or Markets?, Policy Study No. 92, The Heartland Institute, September 24, 1999, p. 3 (hereinafter referred to as Heartland Policy Study). 3Broadband Today, A Staff Report to William E. Kennard, Chairman, FCC, On Industry Monitoring Sessions convened by Cable Services Bureau, October 1999, p. 9. 4"Cable Modem Market Stats & Projections," Cable Datacom News, accessible via Internet at http://www.cabledatacomnews/cmic/cmic16.html. 5These data are estimated from the "Breakdown of Online Universe" chart in the FCC Broadband Today report. 6See NetAction, "Broadband Cable: The Open-Access Debate," accessible via Internet at http://www.netaction.org/broadband/cable/current.html. 7See Broadband Today for some background on the OpenNet coaltion's position. 8See Broadband Today, pp. 14-15, for more details. 9Senate Bill No. 667, June 17, 1999. 10A portal is the first page the user sees when a connection is made. This page typically offers users many features like email, news, information organized by specific categories, and so forth. 12This distinction, which is based on access speed, is arbitrary and likely to change as current technologies improve and new and faster technologies emerge in the marketplace. 13Federal Communications Commission, Trends In Telephone Service, September 1999, "Household Telephone Subscribership in the United States," 17-3 (hereinafter referred to as Trends In Telephone Service report). 14Heartland Policy Study, p. 22. A brief survey of prices charged in several Michigan cities reveals that the price for broadband access is generally around $39.95. See Cable Datacom News at http://www.cabledatacomnews.com. 15See Broadband Today, p. 19. 16Heartland Policy Study, p. 22. 17The bandwidth capacity is also shared with the transmission of video programming. 18Nonetheless, cable firms are likely to address these problems as this technology becomes used more widely to provide access. 19Heartland Policy Study, p. 45. 20For example, AT&T/TCI's affiliate ISP is @Home and Time Warner's affiliate is RoadRunner. 21Cable firms are currently developing a new type of modem that can be easily installed by consumers. For more details, see Broadband Today. 22See Broadband Today for more detail. 23See "In a Race to the Web, Phone Upstarts Grab Turf," Wall Street Journal, October 18, 1999, p. B1. 24See United States Internet Council, "The Explosion of High-Speed Internet Competition," for some examples. 25Heartland Policy Study, p. 44. 26Economists refer to this phenomenon as "opportunistic behavior." 27Benjamin Klein, Robert A. Crawford, and Armen A. Alchian, "Vertical Integration, Appropriable Rents, and the Competitive Contracting Process," Journal of Law and Economics, 21 (October 1978): pp. 297-326. 28Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-104, 110 Stat. 56 (1996). 29Report to the Michigan Governor and Legislature on Public Act 1991 as Amended Section 353, Report on Local Telephone Interconnection, February 1998. 30See Trends in Telephone Service, 9-1, for more details. 31For an example of how firms can voluntarily cooperate in a market setting similar to the Internet access market, see Paul A. Cunningham and Robert M. Jenkins III, "Railing at 'Open Access,' " Regulation, Spring 1997. 32In this context, rent-seeking behavior refers to activities that reduce society's welfare, but improve the chances of the ISPs competing in the marketplace with assistance from the government. 33This quote by the NTIA is taken from Thomas W. Hazlett and Matthew L. Spitzer, Public Policy Toward Cable Television: The Economics of Rate Controls (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 39. 34See Donald L. Alexander, "Laying Cable and Competition," Michigan Privatization Report, Summer 1999, Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Alvin Valenton sits on his living room couch surrounded by four of his five children as he explains what kind of father he doesn’t want to be: He doesn’t want to be like those here in the Philippines who, while their spouse is working abroad to support the family, turns to alcohol due to feelings of inadequacy over not being the breadwinner. And he doesn’t want his young children—grinning as they play with their colouring books—to feel neglected, or worse, abandoned. He’s seen it happen too many times. In the Philippines, 10 per cent of the labour force now works abroad, and almost half of them are young women like Valenton’s wife, Erna. Two years ago, she left to work as a domestic helper in Macau after her husband went blind in one eye and temporarily lost his job as a tricycle taxi driver. For the first time in his life, the 37-year-old had to run the household. He needed help. “Taking care of the kids, doing the household chores, looking for food, everything was a challenge,” he says. So last year Valenton joined a new two-month program in Mabalacat City, roughly 90 km north of Manila: a school for stay-at-home dads. The program, called AMMA (an acronym that, translated, stands for “A father that excels in nurturing his child”) teaches everything from how to communicate and bond with children to financial management for Filipino fathers whose wives are working abroad. In recent years, the Philippines has experienced dramatic growth in overseas migration. As of 2012, more than four million Filipinos are working abroad as temporary labourers, making the Philippines one of the top 10 emigration countries in the world. (Canada consistently ranks among the top 10 destinations.) Last year, they contributed close to US$23 billion in cash remittances—a record high—accounting for more than eight per cent of the country’s GDP. Each day, thousands of female workers leave to become caregivers and domestic helpers, earning money that has become a lifeline to the Philippine economy. Meanwhile, their husbands are in the Philippines, exploring new territory in a conservative, predominantly Catholic country, which still believes that a real man financially supports his family. “There’s a strong machismo here,” says Honey Carandang, a clinical psychologist who spearheaded AMMA. Many of the fathers she’s met nurse a bruised ego when their wives become the breadwinners. “The men are at a loss when it comes to parenting. How do I discipline my child? How do I divide the household chores?” In the Philippines, men rarely raise kids alone. Often times, when mothers leave to work abroad, female relatives take over. Aurora Javate de Dios, chair of the migration studies department at Miriam College, just outside Manila, describes extended families as a buffer, but also points out that their presence can complicate an already difficult situation. “By asking other people to take care of your children, they have a claim to your remittances,” she says. “Then they start meddling in your finances.” Valenton was one of the program’s first 10 participants. For the longest time his daily routine had been simple: wake up at lunchtime, eat and go to work. After his injury his life was turned upside down. Mornings now begin at 5 a.m.—cooking breakfast, bathing the kids and dealing with the occasional tantrum before school. He says that before his wife left, he didn’t talk to the kids much. Now, the program’s instructors and his fellow stay-at-home fathers have encouraged him to take more of an active interest in his children’s lives. “I ask them questions like, ‘Where’s your assignment?’ ” says Valenton. “When I wash the clothes, I hear the kids singing, then we sing together.” Soon the stay-at-home dads at AMMA will undergo training to take over the program from Carandang and her staff. The men insisted. Their plan is to go to other areas of the city, hold the same kinds of sessions, and become a support group for other fathers coping with the challenges of having a wife abroad. “I want to show other families what they can do even if the wife is away,” says Valenton. The city’s mayor has volunteered to issue an ordinance that would give the stay-at-home fathers who join AMMA formal recognition, making it easier for them to apply for government funding. Back at his home, Valenton turns to his nine-year-old daughter, still in her school uniform, and asks, “Baby, what do you want to be?” “Teacher,” Alena exclaims. “I want to be a stewardess,” says his other daughter, six-year-old Angeline. Aljon, his 11-year-old, peeps out from behind his book and offers a wide smile. Valenton smiles back and proclaims, “Butcher.” For one of the first times in his life, he can proudly boast: “I’ve started dreaming for the children.”

Click any word in a definition or example to find the entry for that word if something that you do pays off, it brings you some benefit to have a good result something has features that make it useful or attractive to be useful in a particular situation if it is worth your while to do something, you can get some benefit or advantage from doing it even though it may take some time or effort to be extremely useful or valuable to bring you a lot of benefit to be helpful or useful a start-up … whose value has reached more than one billion US dollars to ask people to vote in order to decide an issue an afternoon full of crafts A must for anyone with an interest in the changing face of language. The Macmillan Dictionary blog explores English as it is spoken around the world today. Free thesaurus definition of to be advantageous and yield benefits from the Macmillan English Dictionary - a free English dictionary online with thesaurus and with pronunciation from Macmillan Publishers Limited.

updated 07:55 pm EDT, Thu September 27, 2012 New York address does not exist according to USPO An advertisement for a Motorola smartphone showing Google Maps as better than Apple's Maps app came under criticism itself today. The ad, promoting the Droid Razr M compared both versions of the Maps app, with the Razr M appearing to have found a fictitious location correctly while the iPhone 5 seemed to complete the same task with the wrong result -- with the only problem being that the address doesn't actually exist. The location, 315 East 15th Street in Manhattan, does not currently exist when checked with the US Postal Service, as no odd-number addresses are listed there -- the area is in fact a public park, with the only buildings or residences nearby having even-numbered addresses. While the iPhone shows the "wrong" location on a plain-looking map, the Razr M shows a map using satellite imagery -- but is also the wrong location. The iPhone reports the fake address as being on a part of Marlborough Road, which is actually correct -- since there is no such place as 315 East 15th Street in Manhattan, the iPhone located the only "real" 315 E 15th Street in New York City -- in Brooklyn, where Marlborough Road was formerly named E 15th Street. The ad taunts the iPhone 5's Maps by asking readers "Looking for 315 E 15th in Manhattan? Google Maps on Droid Razr M will get you there & not #iLost," but in fact users would not be looking for a public park through a non-existant mail address, making the Google Maps response incorrect as well. Searches for nearby locations that do exist come up with correct listings in Apple's Maps, and it has been suggested that Motorola could have used a real location that Maps gets wrong instead of faking it. Screenshots (seen below) show that if users attempt to enter in a real address -- 314 E 15th Street address in "NY" -- it will offer two options, both correct (the correct even-numbered Manhattan address, or the same address but in Brooklyn), both with impressive "Flyover" imagery. If users attempt to put in 315 E 15th Street in Manhattan, Apple's Maps drops the pin in the public park -- something Google's maps did not do, instead dropping the pin on the street corner. The Maps app from iOS 6 received a considerable amount of complaints relating to its location data in the days after the iPhone 5's release. Satellite photos for locations have been found to have issues ranging from black and white imagery, low resolution stills, and cloud covering some places, while some addresses have been found to be in completely incorrect locations. Apple is now searching for people with experience in Google Maps to help fix the errors. Nokia also came under marketing-related fire earlier this month, for misrepresenting photos and video it said were created by the Lumia 920. Marketing materials for the phone, including stills and video, were found not to have come from the camera, but instead from a professional-grade DSLR lens. Nokia has since apologized for the error. [via AppleInsider]

Everything you need to know about sharing iPhoto images In our last lesson, I walked you through the process of creating printed books, cards, and calendars from within iPhoto. While printing your images is a great way to pass around your photos, some people prefer sharing via digital means. And that’s exactly what we’ll focus on in this lesson. Exporting your images In the earliest versions of iPhoto, the tried-and-true method of moving images out of iPhoto was to use the Export command found in the File menu. That command remains and, when selected, reveals an Export window that contains three tabs—File Export, Web Page, and Slideshow. Here’s how they break down. When you drag an image out of your iPhoto library and onto the desktop, it will be copied in its native format (unless it’s a Raw image, in which case it’s converted to the JPEG format). If you’d like the image to be in a different format, quality, and/or size, turn to this tab. Within it you can choose to export your image in original, current, JPEG, TIFF, or PNG format. If you decide to export it as a JPEG, you can choose a quality setting—Low, Medium, High, or Maximum. And if you opt to export your images in either the JPEG or PNG formats, you can choose to include a title and keywords as well as location information. You can also select from among a handful of sizes—Small, Medium, Large, or Full Size. Or if you’d like to use a custom size, choose Custom and you can configure the image’s dimensions. This tab also offers naming choices. Click the File Name pop-up menu, and you’ll find these options: ‘Use title’, ‘Use filename’, ‘Sequential’, and ‘Album name with number’. ‘Use title’ will, of course, use the title you’ve assigned to the image. ‘Use filename’ will instead use the title assigned by your camera—DSC_1129, for example. In the case of ‘Sequential’, your images will be assigned numbers, as in 01.jpg, 02.jpg, 03.jpg, and so on. If you choose sequential titling, you have the option to add a prefix for your images in the ‘Prefix for sequential’ field below. You might, for example, add “Borneo” if all the images were from your recent trip abroad. When you choose Album name with number, the image will be assigned the name of the album in which it lives, along with a number. For instance, if you’re exporting two images selected in your Rhumba Lessons album, the images would be titled ‘Rhumba Lessons – 01’ and ‘Rhumba Lessons – 02’. When you select more than one image, a Subfolder Format pop-up menu will appear in the Export window. Here you can choose to export without a subfolder or, when you choose Event Name from the menu, have a folder created that’s named after the image’s host event—‘Jul 11, 2012’, for example. In this age of photo-sharing sites and easy-does-it website creation tools, the idea of creating HTML pages and links that you can then upload to a website seems almost quaint. But if that’s a course you wish to pursue, you’re welcome to. Within the Web Page window, you can name your page, choose the number of columns and rows per page, select a Plain or Framed template, choose background and text colors, determine the size of the thumbnails (and whether they show titles and descriptions), and configure the dimensions of the “full sized” images you’ll export (as well as choose whether to show title, description, metadata, and location information). When teaching you how to view your images, I mentioned the iPhoto feature where you can view your images as a slideshow. I can now admit that I was holding something back. Not only can you view slideshows, but you can also export them in the form of movies. One simle method for doing this is to click this Slideshow tab, choose a size (Mobile, Medium, Large, or Display), and then click Export. The result will be a movie that employs the Ken Burn’s “pan and scan” effect accompanied by a tinkling jazz piano track. This is an easy way to create an enjoyable slideshow, but you can do far more. Read on to find out how. Configuring shared slideshows The slideshows you export can be more interesting than what I’ve described. To make them so, close the Export window and instead select the images you wish to include in your slideshow, click the Create button at the bottom of the iPhoto window, and choose Slideshow. If you were to then click the Play button at the bottom of the window, you’d see your slideshow with the pan-and-scan effect and hear that same jazz track. But let’s move beyond the basics. Click on Themes at the bottom of the window, and a Slideshow Themes sheet appears. Here you’ll find 12 themes, including Ken Burns (the default), Origami, Reflections, Vintage Prints, Snapshots, Sliding Panels, Scrapbook, Photo Mobile, Holiday Mobile, Shatter, Places, and Classic. Part of the fun with these themes is discovering what they do, and I don’t want to spoil that fun. So go ahead and give them a go. Just know that each has its own effects and soundtrack. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be configured. For instance, you may want to accompany your slideshow with a song other than the default—a tune from your iTunes library, for example. That’s easily done. Just click on the Music button (or, when a slideshow is playing, move your cursor to expose the slideshow tools and click on the Music button). In the resulting window, you’ll see that the Play music during slideshow option is checked. Uncheck it you want a silent slideshow. Below this is the Source pop-up menu. Click it to select a track from Apple’s Theme Music collection, a GarageBand track, or your iTunes library (or a playlist within it). In the list below are all the tracks that belong to whatever you’ve picking from the Source pop-up menu. To preview a track, just double-click it (or select it and click the Play button). You can also use the Search field to search your music by title. If you have a long slideshow and you don’t want the same track to repeat over and over, enable the Custom Playlist for Slideshow option and drag tracks into the field that appears. The songs will play in order during your slideshow. “Yeah, but…” I can hear you yeah-butting, “I’d really like my slideshow to end when the music does rather than cut off a tune midway through.” Apple is one step ahead of you. Click the Settings button at the bottom of the screen, and there’s your answer. You have two options in regard to timing and music. The first—Play each slide for a minimum of x seconds—allows you to set a specific time for each slide to play (5 seconds, for example). However, if you enable the Fit slideshow to music option, iPhoto will do the math and create a slideshow that lasts the approximate length of the soundtrack. It’s also within this All Slides tab that you can choose to Show Title Slide, Repeat Slideshow, and choose an aspect ratio for your slideshow (options include This Screen, HDTV, iPad/TV, or iPhone). In addition, when you click on the This Slide tab, you can elect to apply a Black & White, Sepia, or Antique filter to the slide currently displayed in the main iPhoto window. (You can move between slideshow images by clicking on the slideshow’s thumbnails at the top of the window.) Finally, if you want to create breaks in your slideshow that display a bit of text—“Later that day…” or “The crocodile slowly approached…” for example—select a thumbnail image above and then click Text Slide below. Depending on the theme, either a slide that contains nothing but editable text will appear or a slide will be created that has a text field appended to it. Highlight the default text and enter whatever you like. You can change that text’s style by choosing Edit > Font > Show Fonts (or by pressing Command-T); selecting your text; and choosing a different font, typeface, and size. Once you have things tweaked in exactly the way you like, click the Play button to see how your slideshow looks. If you like what you see, click the Export button and choose an export format in the sheet that appears. If none of the formats suit you and you know something about QuickTime’s export settings, click the Custom Export button in this sheet and then ultra-tweak your movie via the Export pop-up menu and its accompanying Options button. Which sharing format to pick? Apple does its best to provide clues via the sheet’s devices table. If you know that your intended victi… er, audience is likely to view the slideshow on an iPhone, the Mobile setting is the one to use. If you’re making the slideshow for yourself—to show on your Apple TV, for example—Apple suggests you choose Medium or Large. If you need more specific information about the format and size of the resulting slideshow, just hover your cursor over the Info button that appears to the right of each setting. A yellow tooltip will appear that provides the movie’s settings as well as how much storage space it’s likely to consume. (This is particularly helpful information when you intend to attach the movie to an email message. If the slideshow weighs in at over 10MB, it may be too large an attachment for your Internet service provider’s email gateway. In such a case, you’d want to choose a smaller setting or find some other way to share your images.) And speaking of other ways to share your images… (continue on to the next page) The Share menu iPhoto provides a very broad clue that its images can be shared with others. That clue comes in the form of the Share menu in iPhoto’s menu bar and the Share button that appears at the bottom of the window. Each of them contain Photo Stream, Messages, Email, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter entries. We’ve already covered Photo Stream, so there’s no need to go there. In the case of Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, you’ll first need an account for the service you choose to use. Once you have that account, just enter your username and password, and you’ll be able to post your images to the service. When you choose Email, a new empty email message will be created within iPhoto and the image will be attached. On the right side of the message, you’ll see a number of templates. Select one that you want to use. From the Photo Size pop-up menu at the bottom of the template pane, choose an appropriate size—Optimized (designed so that the message will fit through an email gateway), Small, Medium, Large, or Actual Size. To send your message, fill in the To field, change the subject heading if you like, enter some text in the appropriate areas, and click Send. You don’t have to email photos using iPhoto, however. To choose a different email client, select Photos > Preferences and then click the General preference. Click the Email photos using pop-up menu and select a different email client—Mail or Microsoft Outlook, for example. When you do that, a window will appear that prompts you to choose a size for your images and that gives you the option to include titles, descriptions, and location information. To complete the process, click the Compose Message button. The selected email client will open, and the images will be attached to a new email message. To send images via Messages, you may select no more than 10 pictures and then choose Share > Messages. The images will be compressed and added to a message window that appears. Just choose the person you’d like to send the message to, enter some text if you like, and click the window’s Send button. Other share options When you click the Share button at the bottom of the window, you’ll additionally find the Order Prints option. Select some images and choose Order Prints, and a sheet appears. In this sheet choose the size of the prints and the number you’d like to order. Click Buy Now and you’ll be walked through the payment and shipping process. When that’s complete, the images will be uploaded to Apple, printed by the company Apple deals with for this sort of thing, and shipped to you when they’re done. Click the Share menu that appears in iPhoto’s menu bar, you’ll see two other entries—Burn and Set Desktop. In order for the Burn command to do anything other than send up an error message, you must have a CD/DVD burner attached to your Mac. New Macs don’t have such devices built into them, but if you add an external disc burner, you can use that. If you have an older Mac that does carry such hardware, choose Burn and you’ll be prompted for a disc to record the images to. Note that this command creates discs that can be used only in iPhoto. If you want to create a picture disc that can be used by a photo processor (or read by a Windows PC), you’ll have to copy the images you want to burn to a folder in the Finder, select that folder, and then choose File > Burn [name of folder] to Disc. Clicking the Set Desktop command allows you to select an image and then use that image for your Mac’s desktop image. Creating the top-secret digital project Before closing out the lesson, here’s one final tip for sharing your images digitally. I’ve told you how to create printed books, cards, and calendars. If you’d like to “print” digital versions of them for free, here’s how. Create the project and then choose File > Print. In the resulting Print window, click the PDF button in the bottom-left corner and choose Save as PDF. In the sheet that appears, name your project and click Save. A PDF version of your project will be saved to the location you’ve chosen. While not exactly an ebook, it’s a way to present your friends and family with interestingly formatted projects that cost neither of you a nickel. Next week: iPhoto’s Faces and Places features

Posts Tagged ‘ninja crafts’ It has been one crazy week here at my house so I haven’t had a chance to be very crafty. I thought about crafts as I cleaned up after sick kids. I also thought about crafts when I sat in the doctor’s office waiting for him to tell me that my baby does have R.S.V. And I thought about crafts while I washed loads of laundry. I did not actually do any crafts though, so no blog post this week, right? Wrong! I’m going to tell you about the ninja birthday party I hosted for my 7 year old’s birthday. First, a disclaimer: I have never attended a kids birthday party, not even as a kid. Thus, I was really nervous about what to do. The Boy wanted a ninja party so I started searching the web for and thinking of ideas. I started with Chinese lanterns just like I remember making in elementary school. My kids were able to help, which makes them extra fun. Then we hung them from banisters and things. The guests were sent invitations to a ninja training. We rolled up the invitations like a scroll and tied them with red ribbon. When each child arrived at the party they were given a ninja head band so they felt more like ninjas. I assumed that there are games at a typical party so I set out to think of some for the party . I remembered that my brother used to make paper ninja stars when we were kids so I found instructions online and made each child their own color of stars. We played a game where we improved our aim by throwing them at pictures of dragon faces on the wall. I found an idea online for a game where you try to keep a balloon afloat using ninja swords, so my quest for cheap ninja swords began. I searched dollar stores and party stores but alas no swords. I also didn’t want to spend $1 per kid for them because I was doing other stuff too. Then my brain came up with a great idea (this doesn’t happen all that often). I made these ninja swords by rolling up sheets of newspaper from corner to corner. Then I taped it so it wouldn’t unroll. I folded up the bottom to make the handle a bit more substantial then wrapped it in electrical tape. Finally I wrapped the sword in tin foil. I love the results. The kids did too. They weren’t awesome at the game. They just wanted to pop balloons with their swords, but that kept them busy. Instead of cake we had candy sushi. It turned out so cute and super tasty. I keep trying to think of other things to do with rice krispy treats covered in fruit roll up. For party favors I wanted take out boxes from a restaurant. I looked at party stores but they were so expensive. Then my sweet husband brought home the perfect boxes that he asked for at a restaurant where he had lunch. They gave them to him for free, but he said he left a big tip. We filled the boxes with fortune cookies, Chinese finger traps, and plastic ninjas that I got at the dollar store.

Innovative public-private partnerships to maximize the delivery of anti-malarial medicines: lessons learned from the ASAQ Winthrop experience 1 Sanofi-Aventis, Access to Medicines Department, 74- 82 Avenue Raspail 94255 Gentilly Cedex, France 2 Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, 15 Chemin Louis-Dunant,1202 Geneva, Switzerland Malaria Journal 2011, 10:143 doi:10.1186/1475-2875-10-143Published: 23 May 2011 This case study describes how a public-private partnership initiated to develop a new anti-malarial combination, ASAQ Winthrop, has evolved over time to address issues posed by its effective deployment in the field. In 2002, DNDi created the FACT project to develop two fixed-dose combinations, artesunate-amodiaquine and artesunate-mefloquine, to meet the WHO anti-malarial treatment recommendations and international regulatory agencies approval standards. In 2002, Sanofi-aventis had started a development programme for a fixed-dose combination of artesunate and amodiaquine, to replace its co-blister combination. DNDi and sanofi-aventis joined forces in 2004, with the objective of developing within the shortest possible time frame a non-patented, affordable and easy to use fixed-dose combination of artesunate and amodiaquine adapted to the needs of patients, in particular, those of children. The partners developed Coarsucam®/Artesunate Amodiaquine Winthrop® ("ASAQ Winthrop") which was prequalified by the WHO in 2008. Additional partnerships have since been established by DNDi and sanofi-aventis to ensure: 1) the adoption of this new medicine by malaria-endemic countries, 2) its appropriate usage through a broad range of information tools, and 3) the monitoring of its safety and efficacy in the field through an innovative Risk Management Plan. Discussion and evaluation The partnership between DNDi and sanofi-aventis has enabled the development and pre-qualification of ASAQ Winthrop in a short timeframe. As a result of the multiple collaborations established by the two partners, as of late 2010, ASAQ Winthrop was registered in 30 sub-Saharan African countries and in India, with over 80 million treatments distributed in 21 countries. To date, 10 clinical studies, involving 3432 patients with ASAQ Winthrop were completed to document efficacy and safety issues identified in the Risk Management Plan. The speed at which ASAQ Winthrop was adopted in the field shows that this drug fits the needs of patients and health authorities. It also demonstrates the power of partnerships that combine different sets of strengths and skills, and that evolve to include additional actors to meet new global health challenges for poverty-related diseases.

When those affected by the September 2004 flood born out of the last vestiges of Hurricane Ivan begin to talk about those dark days five years ago, they recall the shock, the devastation and the frustration. But usually, they can also find something to smile about. For Ellen McVicar, a first-grade teacher at Marietta's Harmar Elementary School, that smile comes when thinking about her late aunt, a retired teacher living at that time in the Westerville area. When she heard her niece's classroom, located in the basement of the west side school, had been filled with nearly two feet of water, she and a friend, Pam, got together a group to help. EVAN BEVINS The Marietta Times Harmar Elementary first-grade teacher Jean Caldwell, left, talks to a student Friday in her basement classroom. Five years ago, the room’s wall was damaged by nearly two feet of water in the building, resulting in the lower portion being removed. Until it was replaced, Caldwell covered the opening with paper to keep her students from being distracted by their peers passing in the hallway. "Pam and my aunt Ann came down with this van-load of supplies," McVicar said. Floodwaters entered the building through backed-up drains and came up to the bottoms of the first-graders' desks. The water sloshed into the compartments, soaking and ruining supplies like crayons, paper and painting shirts. "The kids didn't realize we had lost everything," McVicar said. "They were reaching into their desks and there's nothing there." The worst flood in 40 years Five years ago Saturday, a good portion of downtown Marietta was under water. Businesses and homes from Belpre to Macksburg were inundated by the worst flooding in 40 years. Matters were made worse by the fact that many of those hit hardest went to bed two nights earlier thinking there would be little, if any, problems. The impact of the September 2004 flood can still be seen today - whether it's the "Ivan was here" markers on Front Street or the nearly empty town of Elba. This edition of The Marietta Times looks back on those days and the community's efforts to rebuild and recover. Anatomy of a disaster More than a week earlier, the remnants of Hurricane Frances dropped nearly 4 inches of rain on the region. In Frances' wake came Hurricane Ivan, once again battering the southeastern United States. As early as Sept. 14, the National Weather Service began issuing flood watches for the Ohio River as Ivan moved across the Gulf of Mexico. What was left of the storm reached the Mid-Ohio Valley three days later, dumping almost 5 inches of rain. The National Weather Service predicted the Ohio River at Marietta would crest just above the 35-foot flood stage. That afternoon, however, the forecast called for the water to crest more than a foot below flood stage. Many people breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the area had dodged a bullet. It was 10 p.m. when the weather service issued a new forecast, this one predicting a crest at 41.5 feet. On the morning of Sept. 18, the rain had passed, but the water kept rising, fueled by heavy rains to the north. Water spilled over the banks of the Ohio, the strong current tearing away riverbank sediment and depositing it in homes and businesses. Nearly 1,000 structures in Washington County alone were affected, with Monroe, Morgan and Noble counties and Wood and Pleasants counties in West Virginia also battered by flooding. When the river finally crested on Sept. 19, it reached 44.97 feet. It was the worst flooding in Marietta in 40 years. And that was only the beginning of the story. For a couple of days, the students shared supplies. But then McVicar's aunt and her friend arrived, bringing enough items to supply both first-grade classes and stock the school's supply room. A group from the Barlow-Vincent area also donated books, some of which McVicar still has in her classroom today. "That's what people should do in a tragedy," McVicar said. "It would have been a real hardship for some of the families to purchase those supplies again." The donors' actions also provided an opportunity to teach the students, McVicar said. "I think it was a lesson learned that way too, that people were very giving toward us," she said. Home and work Belpre resident Barbara Griener can also see positives when she thinks back to five years ago. She and her husband, Doug, received a "double whammy" as water filled the basement of their Blennerhassett Avenue condo and their business Turqoise Spirit, on Front Steet in Marietta. Then it kept going. "The river basically was coming in the front door and flowing out our back door," Griener said of the scene at Turqoise Spirit. The shop was closed for six weeks as carpet, tile and drywall were replaced. "We had loads of wonderful people helping us," Griener said, citing friends, family, customers and fellow church members. "We couldn't've done it by ourselves. And they also helped with our house, too." Through that time, she said, they never thought about not reopening. Sticking it out Tonya Robey, co-owner of Mad Hen Primitives in Marietta, admits she did consider throwing in the towel a couple of times, and not just because of the September flood. The building had been struck by a fire in November 2003 at its Pike Street location. A flood followed in January 2004. "Giving up is one of the first things that goes through your head," Robey said. The September flood helped the owners of Mad Hen decide to move to their current Front Street address. Then the January flood hit. Since they hadn't finished moving into their new space, a loss of inventory wasn't a problem, Robey said. "But we did have another cleanup to go through," she said. The support of friends and customers helped Mad Hen keep going. "They're always right here at the door waiting to help us," Robey said. Churches pitch in With the water rising, churches swung into action, including First United Methodist Church in Williamstown. "We fed a lot of people," said church secretary Kianna Anderson. "Three meals a day at the church were available." The food, provided mainly by families from that church, as well as First Baptist and First Presbyterian in Williamstown, was also taken out to people working on the cleanup. Anderson recalled one young family who lived near the Ohio River and lost everything. The church provided them transportation to stay with relatives in Parkersburg and other forms of support. "We had entertainment for the kids and a safe place for them to be while other people were trying to clean and find what they could to salvage," Anderson said. That was another key function of the church, she said - to provide a place for people "to get out of all the mud and the muck" and be able to relax, if only for a little while. "It was such a horrible experience, but I think the community came together to make sure everyone was taken care of," Anderson said. Back to school Harmar Elementary also had plenty of help in getting things back at least closer to normal in the wake of the flood. On Monday, Sept. 20, Cheryl Cook saw the school, where she had been principal since 1982, standing on "an island of green" in the receding floodwaters. Inside, she found the 23 1/2 inches of water standing in the basement. "I just wanted to sit down and cry," Cook said. "But I didn't. I started calling." The silver lining in that day's clouds was the response from the community, the principal said. "The fire department from Devola came with a pump and then AEP came with a gigantic pump and workers," she said. The Marietta City school district divided its maintenance workers between Harmar and Phillips, the other school hit by flooding. Although most staff was kept away for health concerns, Cook insisted on helping with the cleanup. She was joined by fifth-grade teacher Todd Caltrider, who, with his wife, owns Simply Regal Cleaning Service. The Caltriders donated their time to the effort. "The most devastating thing was thinking about all the kids' desks and all of the things you'd lost," said Caltrider as he recalled throwing away wet and muddy papers and tests students had taken. "It was heartbreaking." Marietta schools were closed for the entire week after the flood. They reopened the next Monday. "It was a major cooperative effort so that the following week we were clean and ready to begin," Cook said. More work to do Even so, repairs at Harmar went on for more than a year. Insurance money covered most of it, although there were some challenges along the way. The lower portion of the wall between first-grade teacher Jean Caldwell's classroom and the hallway was so damaged by water it had to be replaced. "For several months, I taught with only the top part of the wall" in place, she said. Caldwell's students were quite curious about the legs they saw walking by their room. Often, students on the outside were none too shy about stooping to take a peak into the classroom. So Caldwell had to improvise, using a large roll of purple paper. "I took paper off of the roll and made a paper wall for the months that it took to get it repaired," she said. Eventually, Caldwell's wall was replaced and the school's library, also located in the basement, was remodeled. A custodian had stacked many of the books in the library on tables before the flood, sparing many of them from the muddy waters. Five years later Schools reopened in a week. Most businesses reopened within a month or two. Many people were able to return to their homes eventually. Others decided to move on, either after the September flood or when the follow-up came in January. At least then, the water didn't rise quite as high and the lessons learned four months earlier - as well as better advance warning - helped head off some problems. Today, McVicar still uses the same desk she had in 2004. The change in its coloration about halfway up provides a physical mark of how high the water was in their classroom. For most of her students, it's the only reminder of something that happened just a year or so after they were born. "That's something that's kind of hard for them to fathom," McVicar said.

The fresh fruits and vegetables on your family table may be from the farms of Portugal, having made the six-day trip across the ocean in refrigerated containers hips from Lisbon to the States. And nearly 2,000 passengers recently steamed into Venice aboard the Grand Princess, which, running the length of two and a half football fields, is the largest cruise ship in the world. About 90 percent of its passengers that day, as is the case every day on most cruise ships, were Americans. In Pennsylvania, hundreds of our products - among them Cannondale bikes, Cove shoes, JLG lifts, Freedom Forge Wheels, Letterkenny ammunition, and Empire chickens - travel by rail or truck to our ocean ports for shipment across the oceans of the world. With the growth of the global economy, coupled with better transportation systems, the hills and valleys of central Pennsylvania are as close today to Europe and the Far East as Pittsburgh was to Philadelphia a hundred years ago. Pennsylvania is now ocean-shipping $5.3 billion annually around the world. Most of it in 20- or 40-ft. containers on giant ocean ships. The U.S. container trade has nearly tripled in the past 20 years from 48 to 137 million tons, and is projected to more than double again in the next 20 years. Thousands of Americans now depend on that trade. Our prosperity is tied to our ability to transport our products effectively and economically to their destinations. Our maritime transportation system moves over two billion tons of foreign and domestic cargo annually, contributing $742 billion to our economy, and generating 13 million jobs. The great containerships of the world each carry over 6,000 20-ft. truck-like containers, requiring ports with depths of about 50 ft. Yet six of America's largest container ports, which handle 80 percent of U.S. container traffic, do not have depths that great. They cannot handle the giant ships, which are increasingly diverting to ports in Nova Scotia, Canada and the Bahamas. Our harbors need to be dredged, and our terminals and intermodal connections to trucks and rails need to be modernized. Not only are American port jobs in jeopardy, but the increased cost of shipping U.S. products overseas puts all our export-related jobs at risk. The good news is that a Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund already exists, receiving fees from users. The bad news is that, while it has collected about $733 million annually, it has spent only about $500 million each year, leaving a balance of $1.3 billion. Instead of investing at the level the Trust Fund can support, much of the money is withheld to offset unrelated government spending. Further compounding the problem, the Supreme Court has ruled a portion of the fees unconstitutional. We must both unlock the fund and restructure it to pass constitutional muster so it can be used to modernize our maritime infrastructure. Likewise, the products flowing through our inland waterways - our rivers, lakes and canals - many on their way to loaded onto ocean carriers for shipment overseas, suffer from both our outdated ports and harbors and an antiquated system of locks and canals. Barges move 800 million tons of cargo on these waterways each year, representing 15 percent of the nation's freight for less than two percent of the nation's total freight cost . Yet, over half of the 270 locks making navigation possible are antiquated, well beyond their 50-year design lives. A 15-barge grain tow moves the equivalent of 870 trucks or 255 railroad cars, but because of outmoded locks, must be broken apart to pass in smaller clusters, raising the cost of shipping and slowing deliveries. Without modern navigation systems - such as electronic charting and transponders - the vessels on our inland waterways are needlessly unsafe. If the fog-blinded tow that hit a bridge, causing an Amtrak train to plunge into the Mobile River in 1993, killing 47 people, had had modern navigational equipment, the tragic accident could have been avoided. Again, the good news is that an Inland Waterways Trust Fund, paid into by the users, already exists to help modernize the system. But it is not being spent for its intended purpose. Last year, the fund invested only $77 million, about 25 percent of the $304 million available, for improving the 25,600 miles of our inland and coastal waterways. Just as we have unlocked the Highway Trust Fund to invest the money paid into it to improve American highways and transit systems, and as the U.S. House this year has overwhelmingly passes legislation to unlock the Aviation Trust Fund, it is time to begin the battle to rededicate our harbors and inland waterways trust funds so they, too, can be used for their intended purpose to help rebuild the nation's maritime and river systems. -- (By Congressman Bud Shuster,U.S. House Transportation And Infrastructure Committee Chairman) Congressman Shuster recently led a delegation to inspect ocean shipping and shipbuilding facilities in Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. His article is based, in part, on knowledge gained on that trip.

To download Bob Richard's PowerPoint presentation (about 8 megabytes) click here. These slides will be updated as the presentation is improved over time. They were last revised on March 30, 2015. Douglas Amy, Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen's Guide to Voting Systems (New York: Praeger, 2000). Out of print but available through used book sites. Also available in Kindle format at Amazon.com. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Electoral Systems Design: The New International IDEA Handbook (Stockholm, 2005). Download for free at www.idea.int. British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, Making Every Vote Count: the case for electoral reform in Britishi Columbia (Victoria, B.C., 2004). The Citizens' Assembly website has disappeared. To download the 16 page final report click here. To download the 264 page technical report, click here. Welcome to Marin Ranked Voting. We were formed in 2005 to promote instant runoff voting (IRV) and proportional representation in Marin County, California. Our website is currently off-line for a major overhaul, but will be relaunched soon. Please check back often. Meanwhile, you may reach us at: Marin Ranked Voting PO Box 235 Kentfield, CA 94914-0235 Please visit these election reform organizations and resources. Last updated April 1, 2015

Criticism can be difficult to take, especially from a customer. But for any business to survive, negative comments must be addressed, and promptly, no matter how they’re received. Word of mouth used to spread to only a handful of people—usually the customer’s friends and family. Now, customers can broadcast their experiences to the world via social media, amplifying the reach of your company’s service, good or bad. This can also lead to additional publicity when social media messages go viral. A strategy for handling public complaints should be part of any integrated marketing program, especially given the growing number of new media channels for customers to air their grievances. The fact is, negative reviews can be seen as valuable opportunities to convert unhappy customers into enthusiastic brand evangelists. Here are eight principles to keep in mind in order when dealing with bad online reviews. 1. Don’t Delete or Fake Deleting negative comments only infuriates the disgruntled, causing them to redouble their efforts and vitriol. By the same token, don’t try to write your own positive reviews. Review websites can find out when someone is writing multiple positive reviews for one business. Eventually you’ll get found out. That would be negative. 2. Respond Promptly Your customers are living at Internet speed, always plugged in and connected. The longer it takes to respond to a negative (or potentially false) representation of your business, the more time it has to spread. Then the proverbial genie is out of the bottle. 3. Show You Care When you get a negative comment or review, don’t ignore it. Reply respectfully and sincerely. But rather than emailing privately, use the same forum in which the negative remark was received to post your response publicly. Show other readers and prospective customers that you are listening and acting accordingly. 4. Take Serious Complaints Offline Once you’ve responded publicly to let everyone know you’re addressing the situation, take the details offline. After apologizing, ask the customer to email you so you can resolve the matter. This helps to protect the privacy and dignity of both sides and reach a more positive outcome. 5. Monitor the Conversation You don’t have to subscribe to every blog or forum to see what people are saying about your company online. Sign up for Google Alerts. It’s a free service that notifies you with an email alert every time your name or any other key phrase you specify is used on the Web. People pay big money for focus groups to get the kind of consumer opinion that’s now available free online. 6. Make It Right Acknowledge the mistakes. Apologize—even if it’s not your fault. Then make it up to the customer somehow. This is the opportunity, the chance to exceed expectations with a huge potential return on investment. Do whatever it takes to turn that frown upside down. 7. Bury the Bad If you don’t have a website, LinkedIn profile, or any social media presence, then any negative reviews have a higher likelihood of rising to the top of search results. By consistently generating your own positive online content through blog posts, press releases, videos, and social networks, it’s possible to bury the negative results further down in the listings. 8. Watch for Trends One bad review could be a fluke or an off night for someone. Or it could be an early warning sign of an operational problem. Investigate the incident carefully. Ask open-ended questions of your customer to learn more than they may have been willing to write in a public forum.

Outlook for solar cells is sunny An assembly line of solar cells at SolarWorld, the largest solar-cell manufacturing plant in the Western Hemisphere, which just opened in Hillsboro, Oregon, near Portland. TEXT OF STORY Bill Rakde: How are you supposed to feel these days if you're in the renewable energy business? There has been a big push for new energy sources because of high oil prices, Mideast tensions and climate change. But now oil has gotten much cheaper, which hurts the renewable business. And it's harder to borrow money now to expand production and research. As Mitchell Hartman reports, a newly open solar-cell plant in Portland, Oregon, is trying to take all these developments in stride. Mitchell Hartman: How big is the biggest solar manufacturing plant in the Western Hemisphere? Well, SolarWorld VP Bob Beisner walked me down one corridor a quarter-mile long. At one end: Bob Beisner: This is our growing room floor. We melt down raw polysilicon at 1,400 degrees centigrade, then . . . At the other end of the plant, 100,000 solar cells, each about the size of a CD case, will come off the line every day. That's as much solar-energy capacity as the entire U.S. produced back in 2003. Bob Beisner is American, but his boss isn't. SolarWorld is a German company. Its biggest competitors are Kyocera, Sanyo, and Sharp from Japan, and Q-Cell, another German firm. Marc Tarpenning scopes out renewable energy prospects for a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He says countries like Germany and Japan are way ahead. Marc Tarpenning: Other countries say for the next 20 years, here are the investment tax credits, or the feed-in tariffs, or whatever it is that they're using to stimulate alternative energy. That's given foreign businesses the edge up until now. But the outlook for solar entrepreneurs here has improved with Congress's extension of renewable energy tax credits for eight more years. That's good timing, because the solar industry faces a squeeze right now-with financing tougher to come by, and oil prices down from historic highs. SolarWorld's Bob Beisner says his company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in solar production. Beisner: This is what drives the cost of solar down. So that actually, in the not-distant future, we'll be at a grid-parity. That it would cost you about the same amount of money to get a solar array up as it would to be buying it from your local utility. When could we reach that point? Ron Pernick crunched the numbers for his research firm, Clean Edge. He says in some places, we're already there. Ron Pernick: If I live in San Diego and I'm paying 28, 32 cents-per-kilowatt-hour, solar can look pretty good. Especially if I can get some rebates from California, which are available, and a tax credit. Then it's already at cost-parity." Pernick predicts cost-parity nationwide as early as 2012. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

A bill was recently introduced in the Senate which would prohibit corporations from including arbitration clauses in their standard contracts with consumers and non-union employees. Though the Federal Arbitration Act, passed in 1925, was originally intended to cover only certain types of disputes, such as those between merchants and where a specialized knowledge of a particular industry would aid in deciding disputes, arbitration clauses have proliferated to the extent that it is now nearly impossible to find any standard customer agreement that does not include an arbitration clause. This means that anytime a consumer signs up for a credit card, phone service, or otherwise seeks to obtain some service or product from a corporation, the fine print will most likely include an arbitration clause which deprives the consumer of important rights. Namely, the consumer almost always is forced to give up the right to pursue a class action or to even join his or her claim with other consumers who may have been subjected to the same unfair or deceptive trade practices by the corporation. The customer agreements almost always require that any dispute be submitted to binding arbitration and prevent a consumer from pursuing a lawsuit in court. An arbitrator, who may regularly decide cases involving the corporation, would hear the dispute and the result may be confidential and subject to only limited review by a court. Nowadays, whenever a consumer has a grievance against a company over a service or product obtained through any standardized agreement, the consumer may only pursue his or her claim on an individual basis and only in arbitration. In most cases, the consumer would not be able to find a lawyer who would take on the case, meaning the consumer would have to pursue his or her claim against a large corporation and its team of attorneys in an arbitral forum in which the corporation is well-familiar because it has required any and all disputes with it to be heard in that setting. Corporations are now very frequently including arbitration clauses in their employment agreements with their employees, meaning that any employment issues would also be decided by an arbitrator as opposed to a jury of one's peers. The Arbitration Fairness Act of 2011 would prevent corporations from requiring that consumer disputes and employment cases be heard in arbitration. Employees and consumers would have the right to have disputes heard in court if they so chose, with that choice being made after the dispute arose so that an informed decision about the individual's options could be made. The rights at stake with consumer and employment disputes are too important, both for the nation as a whole and for the individual employee or consumer, to have those matters decided by an arbitrator with little oversight and without the openness that accompanies court proceedings. The Arbitration Fairness Act of 2011 would serve to protect critically important rights of employees and consumers. Concerned citizens should contact their representatives to urge support for the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2011. A copy of the draft of the bill can be accessed here.

A rare look inside an eating‑disorder clinic reveals the hard‑fought recovery of women who've spent their lives battling anorexia and bulimia. By Joyce Ross Photo Editor: Claudia Lebenthal Last August Tracey Rauh, 34, passed out in the women's locker room of the local YMCA after a swim with her 12‑year‑old daughter. She woke up a few seconds later on the wet tiles, alone and terrified. "It was the first time I thought I could die from what I was doing to myself," she says. At 5'6", Rauh, a newspaper editor in New Hampshire, weighed 88 pounds. She admits that her behavior had become extreme. "I was paranoid," she says. "I even thought about writing to the company that made my toothpaste to see how many calories it had." Rauh has anorexia nervosa. She had been hospitalized four times before near her home in York, Maine, for her eating disorder. But this time, desperate for a treatment that would end her 18 years of starvation, she called the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Florida. The manor house at Renfrew’s Philadelphia facility. The day before she left home, Rauh biked 30 miles and began taking laxatives. "It was like, I'm not going in at 88 pounds," she says. "I knew I could drop 4 or 5 more." Though covered by a sleeping bag and two blankets in the car, she shivered as her family drove her to the airport. It was 79 degrees out. "I ate nothing on the plane," she remembers. On August 14 she checked into Renfrew weighing 85 pounds. Until just over a decade ago, the only inpatient treatment available for severe cases of anorexia or bulimia was in locked psychiatric facilities, where women were strictly monitored, often forcibly fed, and even given shock treatments. The Renfrew Center in Philadelphia, which opened in 1985, was the first residential treatment center for women with eating disorders. The Coconut Creek location followed five years later. Dying to be thin. Twenty-five-year-old Anne Walsh checked into the Renfrew Center in Florida last fall weighing 102 pounds. At 17 she had sometimes lived for weeks on slices of lemon. We try to normalize a woman's eating patterns and behavior," explains Lynn Siegel, a psychologist and the co‑clinical director of the center in Philadelphia. "But we don't believe in punishing the patients if they don't eat." It's unsettling at first to look at these women, to reconcile their vulnerable, almost girlish features with the ravages of the disorder. Most are dressed in shorts and T‑shirts and appear to be in their 20s, but they move with none of the energy one expects to find in young women. Their faces are pale, slender, and sensitive; their bodies, frail skeletons of bulging bones and withered flesh. A woman who weighs only 75 or 80 pounds may be in grave medical danger. She has usually stopped menstruating; she may have damaged her reproductive system and increased her risk of endometrial cancer. Some, like Rauh, develop osteoporosis, and for those with bulimia, years of purging can do permanent damage to the esophagus. "As the body continues to lose potassium and calories," 25‑year‑old patient Anne Walsh says, "it will eat at the bone. The last thing it will go after is your heart." A patient's day usually begins around 6 A.M. with a weigh‑in call. "I hate waking up for it," says Chris, a 27‑year‑old fabric stylist who chose not to give her last name. After years of dieting too intensely, drinking too much, and clinging to a dead‑end relationship, Chris tried to gain control by not eating. At Renfrew she didn't want to know how much she weighed (she was admitted at just under 100 pounds at 5'4"). "My therapist suggested blind weigh‑ins at first," she says, "so I looked away from the scale." The atmosphere at breakfast, where Chris goes after weigh‑in, is equally tense. The women look anxious as they reluctantly gather their silverware and confront the day's menu, sometimes tearfully. Chris was too distracted to eat during her first week in treatment, so she focused on other people compulsively. Some ate only with their fingers, crumbling bread into hundreds of pieces, or mixed everything on their plate into mush. Chris began with tiny portions of food, using a very small fork to feed herself. Finally she gravitated toward a group of teenagers, "a strong table, really serious about eating everything. The girls said, 'Eat the food; it will make you feel better." Robyn DiDonato, a petite 31‑year‑old with dark brown hair who came in weighing 81 pounds, initially sought out the most severely ill patients. "I used to sit with the thinnest anorexic in the dining room," she says. "This woman was incredibly smart, she had gone to Yale, and she weighed around 65 pounds. I idolized her but feared her. To me, she stood for death and put some fear in me, like, 'You could end up like this." Because those at extremely low weights may not be able to tolerate much solid food, Tracey Rauh began her treatment at Renfrew with small portions of vegetables and melon and Ensure Plus, a calorie‑and‑vitamin‑packed liquid supplement. She remembers her first glass: "I was in a room with a therapist and some other patients. Some of us were crying. I had a panic attack. I didn't want to take it. But I did." Daring to eat The atmosphere at the dining room can be tense, and some patients aren’t able to eat at first. They may crumble a slice of bread into hundreds of pieces or mix everything on their plate into mush. As a woman's metabolism increases from its slower starvation level, her nutritionist will suggest that she eat more. "In order to gain 1 to 2 pounds of weight per week," says Karin Sargrad, a Renfrew nutritionist, "a woman may need 2,500 to 4,000 calories a day. When you have a woman who is going from 300 to 4,000 calories, it can be shocking." "Your body changes very quickly," Rauh says. "It's like a speeded‑up puberty ‑suddenly you have hips again." To help patients deal with depressive reactions and feelings of utter helplessness ‑particularly the sense that gaining weight amounts to losing control‑ Renfrew offers individual and group therapy daily from 8 A.M. to 9 P.M. For the most part, when the women aren't eating, they're in therapy. The sessions target issues like sexuality, relationships, substance abuse, and others common areas to women who have eating disorders and promote the freewheeling involvement of consciousness‑raising groups. "I was put with people who really understood my background," says Rauh, who was sexually abused as a child. At Renfrew, she finally met others like herself. A 1993 Renfrew study found that 61 percent of its anorexic and bulimic patients had been sexually abused before the age of 19. In a session on body image last fall, Anne Walsh, who at 17 had sometimes lived for weeks on slices of lemon, was startled when her therapist traced the outline of her body with a marker. It was dramatically thinner than the one Walsh had drawn herself, just minutes earlier. Rauh also had no idea how emaciated she appeared to others. "Once," she says, "I was waiting in line in a restaurant and looked across the room at a woman. I thought, she must be anorexic. And then I realized that I was looking in a mirror. That's the only time I've ever seen what I looked like." Some patients, like Tracey Rauh, are surprised that they are allowed to exercise‑albeit with restrictions‑while in treatment. "I ran two miles three times a week after I'd gained a certain amount of weight," Rauh says. Psychologist Lynn Siegel emphasizes that a patient is given permission to exercise only after careful evaluation of her weight, vital signs, and nutritional intake, and that ‑at least in Philadelphia‑ women are given a choice of a 15‑minute walk or a Stretch and Tone class. In a session on body image, Walsh was startled when a Renfrew therapist traced the outline of her body with a black marker. It was dramatically thinner than the one Walsh had drawn herself, just minutes earlier. Before the rise of HMOs and managed-care programs, the average stay at Renfrew was seven to nine weeks; today the usual stay is two weeks, followed by graduated levels of outpatient treatment. According to the American Anorexia/Bulimia Association, an estimated 6 percent of American women now have eating disorders. Research done by Timothy Walsh, a professor of psychiatry and the director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute's Eating Disorder Research Unit in New York City, says that 30 to 50 percent of anorexic women will go in and out of hospitals and treatment centers, perhaps making slow, limited gains; 10 to 20 percent of the women who are hospitalized will die. And some, like Robyn DiDonato, will live normal lives again. DiDonato had suffered from anorexia for almost five years before treatment, but she left Renfrew in 1989 "with ammunition," she says. "A meal plan." She also sees a therapist once a week and attends a 12‑step group for people with eating disorders. Her weight has been stable at 110 pounds. "Food will always be a discomfort for me," she says. "But eating doesn't pose the same threat that it used to." Rauh, who left Renfrew last fall after putting on 21 pounds, says, "It was like saying good‑bye to your arm. I was so scared and depressed." She is continuing her therapy and is struggling to stabilize her weight. "I've lapsed a bit," she says. "I'm at 100 pounds. And I know every calorie I ate three days ago. But that doesn't stop me from eating them." When Rauh hears that anorexic voice, "You're fat, you're fat, you're fat," she still falls back on a Renfrew technique. "I write down the bad voice on one side of a piece of paper," she says. "On the other, I write down good thoughts. It helps me to see what's happening." Rauh's body, however, may never fully recover. "My knees are so bad from the osteoporosis," she says. "But there's deeper damage, with myself, my family, and my job. I missed my child's first day of school. That's permanent." Now that Chris is on her own, she starts her day with the same breakfast she ate at Renfrew: an English muffin, a teaspoon of peanut butter, a banana, and some orange juice or fruit. "It centers me," she says. She also keeps in touch with a dozen women she met at the center, women whose stories she knows almost as well as her own. "Once, in a group meeting," Chris says, "a friend of mine at Renfrew who weighed 75 pounds and had terrible medical problems heard me say that I couldn't even win at anorexia, that I never got thin enough. And she said, 'This isn't winning, Chris. This isn't winning." Everything to gain. The day before beginning treatment, Tracey Rauh, 34, biked 30 miles and began taking laxatives. At 5’6”, she checked in weighing 85 pounds. “I’d thought about writing to the company that made my toothpaste to see how many calories it had,” she recalls now. A Thin Line It's been eight years since I was hospitalized in Washington, D.C, with bulimia and anorexia. Some of the women I shared time with there are dead now, others are still in and out of treatment. Had someone asked me when I weighed 95 pounds or was popping one of the 40 laxatives I took daily if I would ever be able to have a life not ruled by food, I would have said no. I was hospitalized at the beginning of my senior year of high school. My bingeing had become so bad that I would leave class in the middle of an exam to eat. Once home (both of my parents worked), I'd inhale cartons of ice cream, whole bars of cheese, entire quiches, and boxes of cereal, allowing myself only an hour to eat so that the food would not begin to be digested. Then I'd drink a bottle of ipecac and throw up. Afterward, I'd take laxatives to remove whatever the ipecac had left behind. During the anorexic phase of my illness, I saw vomiting as a dirty habit and imagined that I was attaining a purer state by nearly fasting ‑meticulously counting calories and dropping to the floor for 500 sit‑ups each time I was alone in a room. The feel of my rumbling stomach was like a drug high. When I began to binge again, I gained some weight, and my parents heaved sighs of relief. They didn't know what I was still doing to my body. When I began to binge six or seven, times a day, I finally chose to enter the hospital. The bulimics there sometimes had black gaps in their months, or their teeth were yellow and rotting from stomach acid. The anorexics looked like walking skeletons. One woman had been a nuclear physicist. Down to 65 pounds, she would weep over the food she was forced to eat and would make ten trips to the microwave per meal, always moving to burn calories. Calories were strictly counted at mealtime, and nurses locked bathroom doors to keep women from purging. Exercise was banned, walks on the hospital grounds were chaperoned until you had earned enough "points" to stroll alone. The telephone and television were monitored, and therapy took place nearly 24 hours a day. I needed this intense schedule. I needed to be taken out of my routine of self‑destruction. But the hospital is only temporary. I was in for more than six weeks and then the insurance ran out. My doctor said, "You'll either make it or you won't." They don't just spit you out and leave you. There is aftercare, a once‑a‑week therapy session at the hospital in which people who've been out for different amounts of time discuss life "outside." I saw my psychiatrist from the hospital biweekly in his private office, where he continued to weigh me. I vividly remember my first trip to the grocery store after getting out. I wheeled my cart up and down the aisles, each a sea of endless possibilities of what to avoid or indulge in. I ended up buying one 32‑ounce tub of vanilla yogurt and fleeing the scene like a criminal. I was not, by any means, instantly cured, and initially I lost a good deal of weight. I still binged, though sporadically, and I still made myself throw up. But I began to see what triggered these episodes. Stressful family arguments, college applications, anything dealing with impending adulthood sent me to the refrigerator. It is never simply over. Eventually I stopped purging and only hinged. I gained a good amount of weight, something I was extremely uncomfortable with at first. But at some point, though I'm not sure exactly when, I made a choice to get better. I can't remember the last time I made myself throw up. Though my friends assure me that I am still thin, once in a while I look in the mirror and hear the sick voice tell me, "You've sure got a set of thighs." But I don't diet. It’s like smoking cigarettes; just one, at night, with a drink, and I am buying cartons the next day. I eat what I want now, even chocolate‑chip cookies. I am not a do‑gooder like some of the recovered people I know. When I go out to eat and see a woman at the table next to me picking at her undressed salad, her collarbones sticking out from her neck like the handlebars of a bicycle, I am not filled with sympathy. I do have the urge to shake her by her toothpick arms because, I believe, if she could only see a sliver of light in the dark room I know she lives in, she could recover. But I don't. It has to be her choice.

Groom: I,____, take thee,_____, to be my lawful wedded Wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth. Bride: I,_____, take thee,_____, to be my lawful wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth. These are the traditional wedding vows read at any marriage ceremony. Husband makes vow to wife and vice versa but in my opinion think that people don’t take these vows seriously because the vows were not written personally by the couple. Chances are that it is easier to forget them when things go rough. I think couples should take time to think about the reasons why they wish to be married and what they are willing to bring to the table and then write their personal vows to each other and read it on the day of the wedding in the presence of the congregation, and after the wedding they can frame the vow in their bedroom to have as a reminder of what was promised to each other on the day of the wedding. For instance, if you tell someone to quit a bad habit, chances are that they will agree to quit but usually may not take it seriously just because someone else asked them to do it. So in order to get the person off their backs, they say they will quit but they honestly wouldn’t. But when that same person wakes up one day and decides to quit a habit, they usually will follow through with it (not without some struggles though). The same principles can be applied to marriages. A priest/pastor/court tells the couple to say the vow and the couple do, probably with the intention of keeping to it or not. Soon after, things go sour and the first thing anyone thinks of is leaving the marriage without first taking time to think about the vows made and the possibility of saving the marriage. Whereas if they have their personal vows on the wall as a reminder, instead of just jumping ship, there’s a conscious reminder of the need to make the marriage work against all odds. I advise would-be couples to take some time to write a personal vow and type it out before the day of the wedding and then keep it in a safe place afterwards. This might help to curb the rapid rate at which relationships and marriages are breaking down.

This morning, MBAE issued School Funding Reality: A Bargain Not Kept, our report on school funding and spending trends in Massachusetts. We did the study to look at how the foundation budget was working and found that the explosive growth in the cost of school employee health insurance has crowded out funding for other portions of school budgets that directly impact students such as spending on books and other classroom materials as well as teacher training. Education funding has increased by $5 billion since the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, school districts all over the state are laying off teachers and cutting back on book purchases, teacher training, library services and athletics. Our members wanted to find out why and this report answers the question. The study found that school employee health benefits are eating up school budgets. From fiscal year 2000 to fiscal year 2007, state education aid (known as Chapter 70) rose by $700 million per year; over that same period school spending on employee benefits rose by $1 billion per year. In contrast, spending on classroom teachers, teacher professional development, and purchases of books, software, and other educational materials – areas of the budget that have a significant impact on student learning – when adjusted for inflation has actually been falling since 2000. Spending on instructional materials fell by 11.3% per year from 2000 to 2007. There is almost no increase in the number of teachers and no improvement in average class size despite an almost $5 billion increase in total school spending since the Foundation Budget formula went into effect in 1996. After 11 years of education reform, the student/teacher ratio was significantly less favorable in 2007 than it had been a decade earlier. The report also found that spending between Massachusetts school districts has not been made equal, a central goal of the Act. The neediest districts are the farthest below the state spending goal and have the lowest growth in spending. At only 2.3% per year from 2007 to 2010, their per pupil spending growth was a full percentage point less than the wealthiest suburban districts (3.4%). The report comes at a critical time. Massachusetts faces an unprecedented education funding crisis as the slow recovery of state revenues and a concurrent drop in municipal income are compounded by the impending end of federal stimulus funding. The immediate need for financial efficiency and a recent resurgence of education reform efforts makes this an opportune time to reexamine the school finance system and evaluate what changes are needed to achieve its goals – delivering high quality public education to all students. The Boston Foundation provided funding for this work and released the report as part of its Understanding Boston series at a forum this morning. MBAE Executive Director Linda Noonan and Board members Michael Widmer and Joseph Esposito joined MBAE co-Founder and Secretary of Education Paul Reville for a panel discussion. The research for this report was conducted by Ed Moscovitch of Cape Ann Economics and the Bay State Reading Institute. Ed worked with MBAE to establish the original foundation budget.

Who governs the information that runs your company? Written by Thomas M. Stockwell We've all witnessed the explosion of information within our organizations. Recent studies have estimated that nearly 15 petabytes—15 million gigabytes—of data are created every day. This data represents the backbone of how our industries interact, how they manage their businesses, how they perceive themselves, and how they position themselves to compete. It doesn't reside on any individual computing platform, application, or corporate silo, but it has an incalculable value that represents the lifeblood of our commerce. The free service stores your passwords online using AES encryption and offers features that provide essentially one-click access to multiple password-protected Web sites. Written by Chris Smith Have you ever wished that passwords were easier to remember so that you could use ones that were a little stronger? And is your three-ring binder containing your list of passwords just a little too accessible for anyone actually snooping around your office? Or maybe you keep your passwords in a secret Word document with a filename that matches your daughter's Girl Scout troop. If you're not using some kind of password vault today, you might want to reassess your procedures because there are many new choices today for either free or low-cost software and hardware vaults that keep your passwords safe through AES encryption. The question then becomes which is most convenient rather than which is the most secure, since all of them are likely more secure than what you are doing currently. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise runs your SSIS packages automatically. Written by Tom Huntington More than 90 percent of the servers running next to IBM i servers are running Windows. And more than 50 percent of these Windows servers run MS SQL Server to perform some form of reporting against data that was stored on the IBM i system. This reporting process uses SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages to bundle data and generate business reports.

Festivals of Bangladesh have always played a significant role in the life of the people of Bangladesh.Those are parts and parcels of Bangalee culture and tradition. These festivals include traditional, cultural, religious and political. It is said that Bangladesh have Baro Mashe Tero Parbon (Thirteen festivals in twelve months). Salient features of the major festivals are given here. Pahela Baishakh : The advent of Bengali New Year is gaily observed throughout the country ON 14 April. Colorful procession, daylong gatherings along with arrangement of cultural program at and around Ramna Park , Dhaka is a special feature of Pahela Baishakh. Fairs, tournaments, boat races etc. are held in cities and villages amidst jubilation. 21st Feb, the Language Movement Day and World Mother Language Day : 21 February is observed throughout the country to pay homage to the martyrs’ of Language Movement of 1952. Language Movement started to establish Bangla as a state language, when leaders of Pakistan declared Urdu to be the state language. Police fired to control the agitation, where at least four persons died on 21 February 1952 near Dhaka Medical College Hospital . The Shahid Minar (martyrs monument), erected on the spot of action, is the symbol of sacrifice for Bangla, the mother tongue. Mourning procedure begins at midnight with the song Amar vaier raktay rangano ekushay February (Stained with my brothers’ blood is 21st February) and nation pays homage by placing flora wreaths at the Shahid Minar. The day has been declared World Mother Language Day by UNESCO. Independence Day : March 26 is the day of Independence of Bangladesh. It is the biggest state festival. This day is most befittingly observed. The citizens of Dhaka wake up early in the morning with the booming of guns heralding the day. Government leaders, sociopolitical organizations, freedom fighters and persons of all ages place floral wreaths at the National Martyrs Monument at Savar. Socio-cultural organizations hold cultural functions. Public buildings are illuminated to give the capital city a dazzling look at night. Eid-ul-Fitr : The biggest Muslim festival observed throughout the world. This is held on the day following the Ramadan or the month of fasting. In Dhaka big congregations are held at the National Eidgah and all mosques of the country. Eid-ul-Azha : Eid-ul-Azha is held marking the Hajj in Mecca on the 10th Zilhaj, the lunar month. Eid congregations are held throughout the country. Animals are sacrificed in reminiscence of Hazrat Ibrahim’s (AM) preparedness for the supreme sacrifice of his beloved son to Allah. It is a public holiday. Eid-e-Miladunnabi : Eid-e-Miladunnabi is the birth and death day of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). He was born and died the same day on 12th Rabiul Awal (Lunar Month). National flag is flown atop public and private houses and special food is served in orphanages, hospitals and jails. At night public buildings are illuminated and religious function are held. Muharram : Muharram procession is a ceremonial mournful procession of Muslim community. A large procession is brought out from the Hussaini Dalan Imambara on 10th Muharram in memory of the tragic martyrdom of Imam Hussain (RA) on this day at Karbala in Iraq . Same observations are made all over the country. Durga Puja : Durga Puja, the biggest festival of the Hindu community continues for ten days, the last three days being culmination with the idol immersed in rivers. In Dhaka the big celebrations are held at Dhakeswari Temple , where a fair is also held and at the Ram Krishna Mission. Buddha Purnima : It is observed by the Buddhist community of the country, like all over the world. It is observed on the three full moon days of April, June and September. Christmas : Christmas, popularly called “Bara Din (Big Day)”, is celebrated in Dhaka and elsewhere in the country. Several day-long large gatherings are held at St. Mary’s Cathedral at Ramna, Portuguese Church at Tejgaon, Church of Bangladesh on Johnson Road and Bangladesh Baptist Sangha at Sadarghat Dhaka. Functions include illumination of churches, decorating Christmas tree and other Christian festivities. Rabindra & Nazrul Jayanti : Birth anniversary of the noble laureate Rabindranath Tagore on 25th Baishakh (8 May) and that of the National Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam on 11th Jaystha (27 May) are observed throughout the country. Their death anniversaries are also marked in the same way. Big gatherings and song sessions organized by socio-cultural organizations are salient features of the observance of the days. Rabindra Nath Tagore is the writer of our national anthem while National Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam is famous as Rebel Poet.

Income inequality and wealth concentration have grown consistently since the 1980s, but today play a growing role in American discourse. Occupy Wall Street. Mitt Romney. A millionaire tax. The Buffet rule. Returning growth in some luxury markets. Goldman Sachs resignation letters. The list goes on. We set out to explore opinions of Affluent Americans about these trends, and added a series of relevant questions to our February online survey of 1,017 adults living in households with at least $100,000 in annual household income. In some ways, the survey is a paradoxical, self-reflective exercise for them – affluent individuals describing how they feel about their growing collective affluence, but at a time when few feel particularly affluent as individuals. The results are clear: for affluent Americans, issues of income inequality and wealth concentration are familiar, important, and quite polarizing. Key take-aways include… Familiarity with the issue is widespread: when asked about the issue of gaps between the wealthy, middle class and poor, 85% of Affluents described themselves as at least somewhat familiar with the issue, and 45% are extremely or very familiar. The issue is widely considered important as well: 75% consider the issue at least somewhat important, and 39% consider it an extremely or very important issue. Most Affluents support higher taxes: 58% favor higher federal income tax rates on higher-income Americans. However, polarization is stark and growing: 84% of Democrats are now in favor, compared to just 29% of Republicans. A substantial but shrinking minority support Occupy Wall Street: 39% agree with the opinions of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, down from 49% since October 2011. Among Democrats, 68% agree, compared to just 9% of Republicans. Affluents are split on government involvement: Our December survey found that 28% want government to have a major role in the issue, and another 23% prefer a minor government role; in contrast, 41% want little or no government involvement. Given that income inequality and wealth concentration have grown steadily for three decades, some might argue that these issues are long overdue in playing a central role in American discourse. Despite that history, these issues now clearly shape Affluent mindsets, and influence how they think about fundamental elements of life and society such as success, taxation, equality, meritocracy, and the role of government in wealth distribution.

The Marcus Shelby Quartet is scheduled to perform at 8 p.m. April 14 at UC Merced, inside the school’s Lakireddy Auditorium. According to the event’s Facebook page, Shelby will tell the remarkable story of Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave who worked in the Underground Railroad and became a leading abolitionist. Throughout her life, she worked to unite American women and men of all colors and classes in a common struggle for liberty. The event is free to the public. UC Merced is located at 5200 Lake Road.

SACRAMENTO — When it comes to campaign dollars, the May 19 special election is shaping up as a lopsided affair. Led by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the campaign for a slate of ballot measures designed to shore up the state budget is outraising opponents by at least 6 to 1 — and as much as 13 to 1, depending on how you count. But the governor and his supporters may need every cent. With early polling showing voters angry at the state's political leaders and wary of the tax increases and borrowing that the measures would authorize, opponents are gambling that it won't take much cash to sink the measures. "People are already against them, so we don't have to convince them of anything," said Kenneth Burt, political director of the California Federation of Teachers, a leading opponent of the cornerstone measure, Proposition 1A. "It's a good place to be." Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders drafted the ballot measures as part of their plan to close a $40 billion deficit through mid-2010. Proponents warn that the state budget will be in dire shape if the propositions fail. The fiercest campaign is being waged over Proposition 1A. It would limit the annual growth of state spending and place unexpected revenue in flush years into a special reserve. The measure also would extend a series of tax increases that are now in effect through mid-2010 for an additional one or two years, generating $16 billion. A companion measure, Proposition 1B, would set aside 1.5 percent of state revenue, starting in 2011, to essentially pay back public schools for the funding cuts they sustained in the recent budget deal. That set-aside would continue until public education receives $9.3 billion over and above what schools are guaranteed under the state constitution. The measure would take effect only if Proposition 1A passes also. The governor is collecting cash from a bevy of business interests that are frequent supporters of his political causes. Among the biggest donors so far, according to campaign records: Spanish-language media mogul A. Jerrold Perenchio ($1.5 million); Chevron ($500,000); developer Henry T. Segerstrom Properties ($250,000); Netflix CEO Reed Hastings ($250,000); and Constellation Brands, the beverage giant that owns Robert Mondavi wines, Clos du Bois, Ravenswood and other popular brands ($100,000). Schwarzenegger also has transferred more than $1 million to the ballot campaign from his own political account. The Schwarzenegger-led committee pushing for the propositions also has accepted large checks from a frequent adversary of the governor: the California Teachers Association. The association has kicked in $6.7 million, although most of that has gone to a campaign committee focused solely on promoting Proposition 1B, the education measure. Altogether, the campaigns for Propositions 1A and 1B have collected about $13 million. The opposition campaign, by contrast, has collected just over $1 million, with about $600,000 of that total coming from the Service Employees International Union's state council. The California Faculty Association has contributed $177,000, and the California Federation of Teachers, a rival to the CTA, has given $116,000. Union opponents say Proposition 1A's spending cap would starve state programs that help the needy, Perhaps more notable than who has given money to the opposition campaign is who has not. While Proposition 1A has come under fire from some fiscal conservatives who dislike the tax increases it would prolong, so far, two of the most vocal and well-heeled critics of the measure — state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman — have declined to open their wallets. Both are Republican candidates for governor in 2010. "They're saying the right things," said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, "but it would certainly help the cause of fiscal conservatism to have them donate something in the seven figures." Spokesmen for both candidates responded virtually the same way: They said they are keeping their options open about a possible contribution, but suggested that spending money against the propositions would be a waste of money because voters will probably reject them anyway. "The reality is, the measures don't seem to be faring well in the polling," said Kevin Spillane, a Poizner adviser. A poll by the Public Policy Institute of California last month showed the key ballot measures well below the 50 percent mark — an ominous sign for any proposition early in a campaign. And a long list of factors is working against the measures, from the difficulty of selling voters on higher taxes in the midst of a recession, to the governor's and Legislature's dismal approval ratings, to the mind-numbing complexity of some of the measures themselves. But with proponents continuing to rake in large contributions — Schwarzenegger has scheduled two $100,000-a-head fundraisers at his Brentwood mansion, including one last night — it's hardly a given that the measures are destined to fail, analysts said. Proponents plan to use their financial advantage to drive home the importance of the propositions to the state budget. The deficit would grow by $6 billion immediately, and possibly by tens of billions more in future years, if voters reject the measures. "We think that as voters learn the consequences if these don't pass, they'll continue to come on board," said Julie Soderlund, a spokeswoman for the "yes" campaign. Contact Mike Zapler at firstname.lastname@example.org or 916-441-4603. prop. 1a supporters Some other top contributors to Proposition 1A on the May 19 special election ballot: California Alliance for Jobs (represents construction industry) Brian L. Harvey, Cypress Land Anschutz Entertainment Group A.G. Spanos Cos. California State Council of Laborers Charles T. Munger Jr., Stanford physicist E. & J. Gallo Winery Gerald Forsythe, CEO of Indeck Energy Services GTECH Enterprises (gaming technology) Wine Institute of California

We hope we never have to use it, but we have a Contingency Plan for a reason. Mercy Corps has been working in Bentiu, Unity State, since 2005, and for the past year specifically helping people make a living in the local market with small business and farming support. Two months ago, when border clashes erupted in the area, we made the decision to move our equipment and key files to our office farther south, in Leer. Eventually, the skirmishes turned into aerial bombings — and general violence escalated in the area. We were forced to suspend our work and officially close the office to keep our two dozen staff members safe. Most of them — guards, cooks, drivers, program officers and managers — are from Bentiu and live there. They, like all South Sudanese, have been optimistic about their country's future after its official independence from Sudan last July. But the two countries continue fighting over borders and shared resources like oil, while hundreds of thousands of people are caught in the middle. Much of our work is about giving people the resources they need to build healthy, safe and productive lives for the longterm. To do so in areas where conflict threatens not just livelihoods, but lives, can be especially challenging. We were able to return to Bentiu last month after the bombings stopped. The security situation is better, but there is a new normal here. Soldiers are everywhere. Bentiu is the rear military base, where the hospital is. All the wounded are treated here, and soldiers returning from the front are always streaming in. You can feel the tension in the humid air. One bomb fell just 20 yards away from the bridge that we use everyday — Sudanese planes were targeting the strategic river overpass. It left a crater and a frail, charred tree standing alone. It's a warning to people who drive by (including us) to slow down and look at the sky before crossing the bridge. In the market, we saw a couple of small craters and one shop entirely burned to the ground, another scarred by shrapnel. It seems there are less women and children, who escaped the danger and have not yet returned. The recent events definitely shook some confidence in the market. Trade was disrupted and prices are off the charts, fuel almost unavailable. But the resilience of the community is quite extraordinary. Life goes on. Shop owners have reopened their doors. Farmers are tending their fields. More local production generates more local profit. And we'll keep working to help individuals build their income, thereby strengthening the economy against shocks like this.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin discusses benefits of neurologic music therapy at UM Bank United Center as part of the Stamps Distinguished Visitors Series. Dr. Daniel Levitin meets with music therapy students from Frost School of Music after his lecture at the UM BankUnited Center. Neurologic Music Therapy Research Expands Understanding of the Human Brain. March 4, 2011—By Julia Berg About 20 years ago, a young indie rock ‘n’ roll producer sat in a San Francisco Bay recording studio while Carlos Santana recorded a new album…and he felt goose-bumps. Even though it is a common physical reaction, the producer, Daniel Levitin (who also worked with Stevie Wonder and such groups as Blue Oyster Cult) found himself fixated on figuring out WHY we have physical reactions such as goose bumps when listening to great music. After the Santana project wrapped, Levitin audited a class at nearby Stanford to learn more about the field of neuroscience, and soon after entered a fascinating new field of research focusing specifically on music and the brain, ultimately earning a Ph.D. Now a leading expert on the subject, he is the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada with additional appointments in music theory, computer science and education. The author of the best-selling “This is Your Brain on Music” and “The World in Six Songs,” Dr. Levitin enthralled an audience of 400 at the University of Miami’s BankUnited Center on March 3 as a guest lecturer for the Frost School of Music’s 2011 Stamps Family Charitable Foundation Distinguished Visitors Series. Still an active guitarist, producer and songwriter, Levitin believes that music “reinvents and reinvigorates the brain.” His research is used in clinical settings to help study and rehabilitate damaged brains, and has brought significant international attention to the type of neurologic music therapy research that is being done by Shannon de l’Etoile and Teresa Lesiuk at the UM Frost School of Music in conjunction with the UM Miller School of Medicine. During the lecture, he also summarized research findings on musical expertise, and what gives rise to the “super-genius” in music. He notes that “all of us are expert music listeners: by the age of five, most children have internalized rules about which chord progressions are “legal” or typical of their culture’s music.” Recognizing that the brain has a “music acquisition device” similar to the “language acquisition device” that enables the human brain to acquire language skills in any language (there are over 6,000 languages currently in use throughout the world), he notes that studies have shown that if music is denied to a young person in the first 10 years of life, he/she may never be musical, just like if language is denied during the first 10 years of life. So, conversely, what gives rise to the rare super-genius in music? “Music engages more regions of the brain than anything else,” Levitin explains, but “musical expertise manifests in many ways.” Those who play and study music do not all become super-geniuses, but more often develop an “expertise domain” in a dominant musical area such as rhythm, pitch, playing and instrument, composing, arranging, or professional listening (such as DJs, hit-makers and producers). He also explains that language researchers define “expert” as being superior in things that we socially care about, such as emotions, music, art, intellect, and athletics…and not things that we don’t care much about, like being good at crossing your arms. “Brain studies also indicate that components of expertise that contribute to superior performance include memory, attention, will power, belief in self, physical configuration and an ability to view multiple failures as necessary steps to succeed,” and that these qualities manifest themselves in musical geniuses, as well as geniuses in other fields. So, music students…rev your engines. Activate your auditory cortex to invigorate your brain, engage your brain in all musical domains, and take your audiences on a scenic brain journey. You’ll maximize your musical expertise and invigorate your brain. Follow Daniel Levitin’s research blog at twitter.com/danlevitin

America is Moving Beyond Coal By MikeBloomberg.com - JUL. 26, 2012 One year ago, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Sierra Club formed a partnership with the goal of retiring one-third of the remaining 500 coal-fired plants in the U.S. by 2020 and replacing them with clean energy. As the Sierra Club announced today, 112 coal plants have announced plans for retirement and America is moving beyond coal towards a cleaner energy future. “We are clearly witnessing the end of our dependency on coal and the move toward a cleaner energy future," said Mike Bloomberg, whose Bloomberg Philanthropies has contributed $50 million to the Beyond Coal Campaign. “Coal-fired power plants and the pollution they produce—including mercury—are the number one threat to our public health and the environment. This is an issue of the American people's public health versus a narrow special interest. And we will not stop until we have achieved our goal.” According to the Clean Air Task Force, the removal of 112 coal-fired power plants translates into the prevention of around 2,166 deaths, 3,426 heart attacks, and 35,210 asthma attacks every year. Largely due to the decrease in coal use, the U.S. has experienced the largest reduction in carbon pollution of any country, with C02 emissions falling by 7.7 percent, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. U.N. Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change and President of the Board of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. IN MIKE'S WORDS There are so many facets to climate change that make it difficult to address, but you don’t give up just because it’s difficult. You work harder. 70% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from cities. Cities also present the greatest opportunities for protecting the environment. Mayors around the world are rising to the challenge.