Apple's Product Strategy Is Changing
This year’s WWDC felt different. While every WWDC keynote is filled to the brim with new features, this year’s announcements included highly anticipated items like a new Mac Pro and differentiated iPad software features. In addition, there were some genuine surprises such as SwiftUI (a big deal with wide-ranging implications for Apple’s ecosystem). Despite there being no discernible change to the grand vision behind Apple’s product development, there does appear to be a noteworthy change to strategy.
Apple had been following a product strategy that can be thought of as a pull system. The company was most aggressive with the products capable of making technology more relevant and personal.
One way of conceptualizing this product strategy is to think of every major Apple product category being attached to a rope. The order in which these products were attached to the rope was determined by the degree to which technology was made more personal via new workflows and processes for getting work done. Accordingly, Apple Watch and iPhone were located on the end of the rope held by Apple management. Meanwhile, Mac desktops were located at the other end of the rope while iPads and Mac portables were somewhere in the middle.
As Apple management pulled on the rope, the Apple Watch and iPhone received much of the attention while the Mac increasingly resembled dead weight.
The preceding exhibit may make it seem like all of Apple’s product categories moved in sync with each other as Apple management pulled on the product “rope.” In reality, the quicker Apple pulled on the rope, the more chaotic the end of the rope moved. The following exhibit does a better job of demonstrating the chaos found at the end of the rope.
The Apple Watch and iPhone were Apple’s clear priorities while the iPad, Mac portables, and Mac desktops ended up facing a battle for management attention. The iPad seemed to have the clear advantage in that battle, at least when it came to capturing mindshare among Apple’s senior ranks. Recall Tim Cook’s comment about the iPad being the clearest expression of Apple’s vision of the future of personal computing.
Over the past two years, we received clues that a major change was beginning to take hold in Apple’s product strategy. This change was on display during this year’s WWDC. Consider the following announcements:
The Apple Watch continues to gradually gain independence from iOS and the iPhone with its own App Store and the ability to create watchOS apps without an iPhone app.
iPadOS is a promise from Apple that iPad will be given unique software features versus iPhone. Features like multitasking and Apple Pencil support give iPad differentiation from its more popular sibling (iPhone).
The new Mac Pro is clear evidence of Apple industrial design, along with the engineering and product design teams, attempting to come up with a long-term solution for the most powerful computer in the product line.
SwiftUI is the kind of foundation Apple needs to properly leverage a thriving iOS developer ecosystem in order to benefit other product categories.
Apple no longer appears to be relying so much on a pull system when it comes to advancing its product line. Instead, a push system is being utilized, and every major product category is being pushed forward simultaneously. The change was designed to reduce the amount of chaos found at the end of the “rope” that Apple was pulling. Accordingly, the primary benefactors arising from this new strategy are the iPad and Mac. This explains why this year’s WWDC announcements felt more overwhelming than those of previous years. Apple was able to move its entire product category forward at the same time.
This revised strategy ends up supporting a core tenet of my Grand Unified Theory of Apple Products - a product category's design is tied to the role it is meant to play relative to other Apple products. (A deep dive into Apple’s product vision and the Grand Unified Theory of Apple Products is available here for Above Avalon members.) By pushing the products geared towards handling the most demanding workflows, Apple has a greater incentive to push the products capable of making technology more personal and relevant.
It’s not that every product category in Apple’s line is now on equal footing in terms of importance and focus. Some products will receive updates every few years while others require more attention due to needing annual updates. In addition, Apple’s revised product strategy likely won’t change the sales ratios between product categories (iPhone outselling iPad by four times while iPad outsells Mac by more than two to one). Instead, the change from a pull to push system manifests itself with each product category being given a defined and unique role to handle within the Apple ecosystem.
Wearables are tasked with handling entirely new workflows in addition to a growing number of workflows that had been given to iPhones and iPads.
The iPhone is the most powerful camera and video player in our lives.
iPads and Macs are content creation tools.
There are a number of product-related implications arising from Apple’s revised strategy:
Mac Desktops. Despite being in the post-PC era, desktops are experiencing some kind of renaissance. Some of this isn’t entirely surprising given how the desktop has always been viewed as an antidote to some of the ideals found with mobile. However, what is new is the realization of the desktop’s role in the AR era. Mac desktops are niche in terms of the number of users relative to other Apple product categories, albeit a very powerful and crucial niche.
Mac Portables. It is time to take Apple management at its word when it says the Mac is important to Apple’s future. Mac portables will likely retain a place in Apple’s product line for the foreseeable future. A few years ago, low-end Mac portables seemed to be on a dead-end path thanks to iPads. There is no longer any evidence that such thinking is widely held in Apple’s senior ranks. An ARM-based Mac portable seems inevitable at this point.
iPad. Just a few years ago, some in the tech pundit world thought the iPad lacked a future. Such thinking was due to slowing iPad sales combined with larger iPhones being able to handle many of the use cases originally given to iPad. While the iPad has always been viewed as the future of computing within Apple, we are starting to see that vision materialize. iPad sales are now routinely surprising to the upside as Apple adds a “pro” layer to the iPad category in terms of powerful hardware and software.
iPhone. The iPhone as a product category continues to mature, as seen with a longer upgrade cycle. Going forward, the iPhone will primarily be known as the most powerful camera in our lives and a video consumption device. Many of the less intensive use cases and workflows currently given to the iPhone will naturally flow to wearables over time.
Wearables. Apple is the wearables leader. Fitbit would arguably be the closest from the perspective of unit sales but even then, the company is quickly losing momentum. Lessons that Apple learned with iPhone and iPad are now giving the company a wearables advantage that is likely at least five years. An independent Apple Watch not requiring an iPhone to set up is inevitable. The move would increase Apple Watch’s addressable market by three times overnight. In addition, Apple is well on its way to establishing a wearables platform as it competes for prime real estate on our wrists, in our ears, and in front of our eyes.
Is Apple making the right product strategy decision moving from a pull to push system? It’s too early to tell. At first, the revised strategy may seem like a no brainer as each product category ends up benefitting from more attention. However, it’s not a given that such a dynamic is in Apple’s best long-term interests.
The source of my hesitation in Apple’s new product strategy is that the company’s long-term success is dependent on one item: making technology more personal. Anything that takes away from that goal ends up being a hurdle. Is Apple supporting legacy workflows to the detriment of Apple’s long-standing mission of making technology more personal and relevant?
One reason Apple decided to change product strategies in the first place was to avoid an all-out uprising among the 1% of the user base creating content consumed by the other 99%. The mistake Apple made over the past few years was pulling the product “rope” too fast and in the process, leaving many of its pro users, defined by the workflows needed to be supported, behind.
For a company that is resource constrained when it comes to time and attention, there is no guarantee that Apple’s functional organizational structure and design-led culture can realistically scale to push an endless number of product categories at the same time. This was the key benefit found with Apple’s pull system. The focus was to advance the products capable of making technology more personal and relevant while trying to bring as much of the broader product portfolio along for the ride. The move to a push system is inherently more complex. Apple finds itself doing a whole lot more that it did just a few years ago.
Some will push back at the claim that Apple is resource constrained considering the company has $113 billion of net cash on the balance sheet. However, such a view doesn’t take into account how Apple functions. Apple could have thrown together some components in a big box and shipped a new Mac Pro shortly after realizing that the previous Mac Pro design was a dead end. Instead, Apple’s industrial designers, working in close collaboration with various teams, took a little over two and a half years to come up with what is marketed as a long-term solution for handling the most demanding content creation workflows. Similar questions now plague Apple pertaining to its approach to “pro” Mac portables.
My concerns regarding Apple’s revised product strategy would be alleviated if Apple came up with a plan to push legacy platforms forward by doubling down on future initiatives involving making technology more personal. This is why SwiftUI is intriguing. Apple is positioning SwiftUI as a way to improve a developer's productivity by requiring less code, resulting in better code. What if that is only scratching the surface as to Apple’s ultimate objective? What if the Mac is being repositioned as an AR creation platform while iOS is gradually positioned as a platform for developing wearables apps? Using a billion iPhones to develop apps consumed on billions of wearable devices is the type of goal that would require years of work, foundation building, and periodic changes to product strategy.
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Tags: Apple product strategy, Apple Watch, iPad, Mac, iPhone, WWDC


Dialysis – from hate to hope?
By Matt Brady and Mark Varley
Renal disease is an extremely important target for effective medical treatment. It affects 26 million adults1 in the US, and every year nearly 50,000 Americans die from the condition – more than from breast (41,000) or prostate (28,000) cancer. The regular form of treatment is dialysis, first developed in 1943, which is a procedure for cleaning the blood when the kidneys stop functioning effectively - most commonly by haemodialysis which circulates the patient’s blood through a machine with a special filter called a dialyser. Whilst both the process and the equipment have seen significant enhancements over the years, kidney transplantation still has a substantial lead in terms of both survival rates2 and quality of life.
The key aims of nephrologists (specialist doctors who treat kidney diseases) are to manage chronic kidney disease to prolong kidney function for as long as possible; and secondly, only once the disease has progressed to end stage renal disease (ESRD), provide renal replacement therapy (RRT) until a suitable donor kidney can be found3. This clear priority order arises because RRT, which currently comprises a range of dialysis techniques, falls a distant second to a functioning human kidney in terms of both quality of life and long term patient outcomes.
From a patient perspective, haemodialysis (HD) considerably affects quality of life, not only due to the time spent on dialysis three times a week (including travel for the vast majority who are treated in dialysis centres), but also feeling ill before, during and after any given treatment session. Further lifestyle limitations include a constant requirement for close control of diet and fluid intake. These considerations help explain why the leading internet forum4 for the patients who benefit from this miraculous, life-saving treatment is called www.ihatedialysis.com.
Yet as dialysis remains the main form of therapy for those with this serious condition, how can the impact on patients’ lives be improved?
Recent evidence suggests that haemodialysis in the home setting, where feasible, can bring both reduced lifestyle impacts and improved outcomes – especially where it enables more frequent dialysis, widely believed to provide better results. Accordingly, this option is now becoming supported or encouraged by payers5. Based around this trend, recent and new market entrants6 are already offering more streamlined, ’user-friendly’ equipment for home use, seeking to unlock the potential for more frequent home treatment. Doubtless the major market players will also be investing R&D dollars in this space.
So, what other improvements can we hope to see in the management of kidney disease for the future?
A good place to start is the way in which the patient and his/her disease are managed by the nephrologist. An important recent trend is the effort to educate general practice in making timely referrals so active management can begin earlier – with the promise of significant positive impacts, such as reduced patient mortality, or an increased likelihood of receiving a transplant7.
In the medium term, the wearable artificial kidney (WAK8) offers a vision where HD becomes continuous – with potential benefits including reduced lifestyle impact (including lifted dietary restrictions and ambulation during treatment), reduced cardiovascular stress, and elimination of inter-treatment toxin build-up. The current prototype, which leverages the miniaturisation possibilities offered by use of lower flow rates over longer periods, is a 10 -pound device which has already demonstrated promising results in an FDA-approved proof-of-concept trial9. Future prototypes are expected to be even smaller.
Projecting this further into the future, it’s tempting to imagine artificial kidney technology becoming sufficiently miniaturised that it could be implanted into the patient. However this would require a fundamental change in the HD operating principle of transferring toxins and excess fluids into a secondary dialysate circuit – and at this point we are not aware of any proposed mechanisms which would allow this using conventional micro-fluidic technology.
Tissue engineering: improving incidence of kidney transplant
Whilst both quality of life and outcomes are in general significantly better following kidney transplant than on RRT, unfortunately demand significantly outstrips supply: out of the 100,000 or so people waiting for a kidney transplant in the US, each year only 17,000 actually receive one10. Of these 7% of transplants fail within one year, 17% after three years and 46% after ten years. In reality over 20% of kidney transplants each year are re-transplants.
Around a quarter of kidney transplants are from a living donor11 – and this figure would doubtless be many times higher if willingness on the part of potential donors were the only limitation. There is a long list of factors which contribute to the suitability of a given donor kidney for a particular patient, which severely limits the number of matches which can be made. The more conditions are met, the more successful a transplant is likely to be. Conversely, if too few conditions are met, a transplant cannot go ahead at all.
These considerations have driven considerable research and development in tissue engineering of kidneys: the attempt to ‘grow’ a new organ within a laboratory setting, ready to be implanted into the patient. There are three main strategies currently being seriously considered:
Self-assembling stem cells – extracting stem cells from the patient and causing them to differentiate and self-assemble into kidney-like structures. These could then be implanted near the damaged kidney and connected to the existing renal blood supply and ureter. Due to the perfect tissue match which should result, the body should naturally integrate these structures, so replacing lost kidney function.
Decellularization – by removing the cells from a non-matched donor kidney, the complex kidney architecture can be preserved. It’s hoped that such a structure could be re-filled with cells from the patient, so creating a new kidney with an exact tissue match and effectively zero risk of acute immune rejection upon implantation.
3D printed scaffolds – creating an artificial structure which can then be colonised by the patient’s cells. In this concept the scaffold can potentially be allowed to dissolve over time, as the structure is replaced by genuine tissues.
Of these, the 3D printed scaffolds is the furthest away in development terms: due to the incredible complexity of the kidney, replicating the structure, signalling proteins and cellular niche is exceptionally difficult and unlikely to be possible even given foreseeable short to medium-term developments in 3D printing technology. The technique most likely to form a viable tissue-engineered kidney is decellularization – yet even this most promising solution is estimated at 20 -50 years in the future, with early animal models still being developed and clinical trials a pipe dream for now.
Bridging the gap: disruptive possibilities
Perhaps combining the best of conventional technology with the best of biological science might generate a disruptive technology far sooner.
A bio-artificial kidney12, consisting of thousands of microscopic filters and a bioreactor containing patient liver cells to replicate the metabolic and water balancing roles of the kidney. This would be implanted into the patient and function 24 hours a day using the patient’s own blood pressure to filter the blood. Proof of concept has been carried out and clinical trials will hopefully start this decade.
Organs harvested from human-animal chimera13 – an idea which has existed for decades but which is currently seeing spectacular progress following the discovery of CRISPR/CAS9 genome editing. Issues remain – from the risk of the unintended introduction of ‘human-like’ cognitive changes to the chimera, to the risk of porcine material in the organ causing rejection. However the promise of biologically-grown organ with a perfect genetic match for the patient is hard to ignore.
Meanwhile for us the message is clear: this is a sector where there is an urgent need for innovation, and where several potentially-feasible pathways to radical and market-disrupting products have already been proposed. Today’s big industry players (both equipment suppliers and service providers) will need to monitor these developments closely, and ensure they are in a position to benefit from them as they advance – or risk obsolescence tomorrow. The best way to stay on board is likely to be by stepping into the innovation driving seat now: as Lincoln is often quoted, the best way to predict the future is to create it.
The real payoff, though, has to be the transformation of millions of lives promised by these innovations.
1https://www.kidney.org/
2See, for example, ERA-EDTA Registry Annual Report 2013 which shows 5-year survival rates for the 2004-2008 cohort of around 82% for transplant, versus around 53% for dialysis.
3Kidney transplantation is sometimes also considered under the RRT heading, especially in the context of outcome comparisons with the various forms of dialysis.
4At time of writing, more than 10,000 members and over half a million posts since 2005. The forum’s strap line is “We are not being negative, we just hate dialysis.”
5Ibid
6E.g. NxStage and Quanta FS
7Timing of referral of chronic kidney disease patients to nephrology services (adult) – Nephrology 2010; 15, S2-S11
8http://www.wakfund.org/, wearable HD endeavours also underway at AWAK / Neokidney
9http://www.NephrologyNews.com, November 2015
10https://www.kidney.org/
11ERA-EDTA Registry Annual Report 2013
12http://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney
13http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/06/pig-human-embryos-scare-stories-stem-cells-organs
How much does sleep cost?
By Adam Turner
Even though we spend around a third of our lives asleep, society it seems, has been mis-sold the value of a full night’s sleep.
What’s next for Hemodialysis?
By Matt Brady & Jess Carroll
Matt Brady & Jess Carroll consider the future of renal disease patient care, and how the growing home dialysis market could drive innovation.
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Gaza Exodus to Egypt: A 'Blessing in Disguise' for Israel?
Gaza Exodus to Egypt A 'Blessing in Disguise' for Israel?
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have flooded across the border into Egypt since militants smashed down the border wall early on Wednesday. Israel is reacting with remarkable calm -- despite the added security risk.
By Pierre Heumann in Tel Aviv
Pierre Heumann
E-Mail: pierre.heumann@weltwoche.ch
Mehr Artikel von Pierre Heumann
The border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt is gone. In the early hours of Wednesday morning masked Palestinians blew massive holes in the wall that had divided the two territories. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have since flooded across to Egypt.
So what is Israel doing about it? The open border to Egypt should surely be a security nightmare for the country. Terrorists are now free to bring weapons and ammunition into the coastal strip, which is controlled by the radical Islamist Hamas movement. Not all Palestinians who are going into Egypt, one suspects, are just bringing back bread and butter. The Israeli military is also worried that militant Palestinians could now leave Gaza to go to terrorist training camps for training in weapons and explosives. But the politicians in Jerusalem are reacting with remarkable restraint.
The truth is, the Israeli government doesn't regard the opened border as a new threat. After all there are hundreds of tunnels linking the Gaza Strip and Egypt through which weapons and ammunition have been smuggled in for years. These entrances are so cleverly concealed that they have only seldom been discovered by the Israelis. "What has been happening underground in the Gaza Strip is now happening above ground," one government spokesman said.
In Jerusalem the opening of the border with Egypt is even being greeted with some relief. "Cairo now has to solve the humanitarian problem that we have been dealing with until now," said one Israeli official. Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel told reporters Wednesday: "It's the responsibility of Egypt to ensure the border works properly," pointing to the agreements signed between the two states.
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But, as Jerusalem sees it, Egypt now has responsibility for more than just the Gaza Strip's southern border. "The opening of the border relieves us of our responsibility for Gaza," a government official said, "and if the international community demands that the Israeli border with Gaza be opened, we will now point to the Egyptian role." This view was echoed on Thursday when Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said that Israel wanted to "disconnect" from Gaza. He told Army Radio: "We are responsible for it as long as there is no alternative."
In fact the opening of the Egyptian border is being seen as a "blessing in disguise," according to one diplomat. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that he would not allow the situation in the Gaza Strip to turn into a humanitarian crisis. But he has also insisted that the inhabitants there can not expect a normal life so long as Israel is being pounded by rockets coming from Gaza.
Last Friday Israel imposed a complete closure of the Gaza Strip in reaction to the continuing rocket attacks by militant Palestinians. The blockade forced the Palestinians to close down the sole power plant in the strip, due to a lack of fuel. The shutdown left 800,000 people without electricity, particularly in Gaza City and its suburbs. The blockade also affected the supply of food, gas and medicines.
Although Israel did relax the restrictions on Tuesday in the face of international pressure, the situation is still disastrous, Palestinian Amani Abu Rahmeh said by telephone. Since the border opened, one in four Palestinians has at least temporarily left the Gaza Strip. Around 350,000 got into their cars, if they had enough gas, took a taxi if they could afford it, or simply got on a donkey in order to avail of the one-off opportunity to be able to freely leave the Gaza Strip, usually completely cut off from the outside world. Tens of thousands more Palestinians were flooding across the border again on Thursday.
The isolation of the Gaza Strip has not only increased the misery of the 1.5 million people living here, a Palestinian diplomat warned. The blockade could also pose a problem for Israel's partner in the West Bank, President Mahmoud Abbas and his Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The peace process that was re-launched in Annapolis in November is losing credibility due to the boycott of Gaza.
Abbas had claimed that he wanted to negotiate with Israel despite the crisis in Gaza. (The two Palestinian territories have been divided since Hamas won a power struggle with Abbas' Fatah movement in Gaza last June.) However, observers in Ramallah, in the West Bank, can hardly imagine that a substantial Israeli-Palestinian meeting can take place while there is such abject poverty in the Gaza Strip. And the complete closure could also end up being counter productive for Israel, the Palestinian diplomat says. Hamas is exploiting the misery of the people for its own gain and provoking a wave of sympathy across the Muslim and Arab World.
There are differing opinions as to how the crisis will affect Hamas' popularity within Gaza itself. Supporters of the radical Islamists speak of a "conspiracy" against Gaza, since the deterioration of the flow of supplies coincided with the visit of the US President George W. Bush to the Middle East. Fatah supporters, however, accuse Hamas of provoking Israel with rocket attacks.
In an effort to improve the lot of the Palestinians in the West Bank, Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad is currently in Europe to hold talks with those countries that pledged a total of $7.4 billion (5 billion) in financial aid over the next three years at the December donors' conference in Paris. Experience shows that only around half of the money pledged is ever handed over, a Palestinian diplomat says. That is largely to do with the lack of transparency about how the money will be used. The Palestinian territory officials now want to establish clear and binding rules.
Pierre Heumann is the Middle East correspondent for the Swiss weekly Weltwoche.
Article...
Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links
The World from Berlin: 'Hamas Is Not Going to Disappear Into Thin Air' (01/23/2008)
Photo Gallery: Gazans Flood Into Egypt
The World from Berlin: No 'Swiss Cheese' for the Palestinians (01/11/2008)
No Collective Punishment: Israel Criticized for Power Cuts to Gaza (10/30/2007)
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He Wanted Dirt
By Steven Crist
However you look at it, I Want Revenge was dazzling winning the G3 Gotham Saturday by 8 1/2 lengths, an effort that may have been even better than Quality Road's Fountain of Youth a week earlier. Both races earned extraordinary Beyer Speed Figures of 113, but I Want Revenge's came around two turns and in a race half a furlong farther.
There's nothing fishy about the figure, which fit perfectly with the G3 sprint stakes that preceded it and the claiming route that followed it:
Nevertheless, the figure is being viewed with skepticism by some who find it impossible to believe that I Want Revenge improved around 20 points off his most recent California efforts. The figures must be broken, they argue, and either I Want Revenge isn't anything special, or the rest of the Californians with whom he's been in blanket finishes on synthetic tracks are all going to start running 113's when they head east and hit the dirt.
I wouldn't bet on it. I Want Revenge instead strikes me as a good example of Bob Baffert's accurate pronouncement that synthetic tracks can "make good horses look mediocre and mediocre horses look good." There's simply no way to torture the figures to conclude that I Want Revenge ran no better in the Gotham than he had in California. Even before the race, his connections were saying that he was "spinning his wheels" on synthetic tracks. Jockey Joe Talamo said he thought he was going to win the R.B. Lewis by open lengths at the quarter pole and that the horse virtually stopped running. That's why he was sent to New York and became Jeff Mullins's first starter here since the 2005 Breeders' Cup.
Rather than trying to reconcile his previous figures with the Gotham, handicappers would be better served by acknowledging that this horse wanted dirt and his quality was being camouflaged by the California tracks.
I Want Revenge is not the only Gotham runner worth following. Imperial Council's distant second was better than it looks on paper. It was his first try beyond seven furlongs, and he fell far back behind moderate fractions before storming past six horses through the stretch. He earned a respectable 98 Beyer in defeat and should only improve with distance and experience.
--The three Grade 1's at Santa Anita Saturday were all won by very nice horses with very different career arcs: the improving 4-year-old Gio Ponti, the steady 7-year-old Einstein and the stalled 3-year-old Stardom Bound.
Einstein, who became the nominal leader of the handicap division winning the Santa Anita Handicap, is the flip side of an I Want Revenge -- he runs about the same race every time regardless of whether it's dirt, turf or synth. He's no match for a true world-class champion on any surface, but he's a very admirable and consistent performer at the Grade 1 level and it's easy to root for him.
Gio Ponti, who nosed out the the excellent mare Ventura to win the Kilroe, may have found his niche as a turf miler. He was one of the nation's top middle-distance grass 3-year-olds last year but might be at his best at a mile and seems to have taken a step forward as a 4-year-old.
Stardom Bound, however, seems not to have improved at all from her 2-year-old to 3-year-old seasons. It might seem untoward to criticize a champion who has won five straight Grade 1 races, but her desperate nose victory in the Santa Anita Oaks was a disappointment -- not just to hypercritical turf writers but to her own connections, who have dialed back the talk about trying her against colts in Kentucky.
Stardom Bound didn't have a perfect set-up Saturday. She trailed early behind moderate fractions and forced to go at least seven paths wide on the stretch turn. But she caught up to her mediocre opponents by mistretch and then just couldn't put them away, winning a four-way photo by a whisker. She ran a better race against a better field on the same track over four months ago in the BC Juvenile Fillies, and is going to have to step up her game in the months ahead to maintain her dominance of the division.
--There's the first Magna 5 carryover of the year up for grabs next Saturday after no one came up with the sequence of Saarlight ($5.60), Sweet August Moon ($20.40), Discreet Treasure ($14.20), Judy Patootie ($22.00) and Apoplectic ($27.60) last Saturday. The pool was a season-low $374,692 and the carry is $218.895.
The Magna 5 was outhandled by the Aqueduct late pick-4 (the pool was $418,226), which offered outstanding value: a $4,257-for-$2 payoff on winners who paid $8.80 (Banker's Buy), $16.80 (Ah Day), $8.30 (I Want Revenge) and $14.60 (Friendly Pocket) -- nearly double the $2 parlay of $2,239.
I didn't even notice there was a $117k pick-six carry into Sunday's card at Gulfstream and neither did many horseplayers -- the Sunday pool was only $188,013, an unusual case of a six-figure carryover attracting so little fresh money. The largely chalky sequence paid $18,260.


‘Guerrilla’ trailer: Freida Pinto and Idris Elba star in Sky’s ’70s activism drama
Posted February 21, 2017 by William Martin Filed under
The first trailer has been released for Sky Atlantic’s Guerrilla.
Created by Academy Award®-winning writer John Ridley (12 Years a Slave), the six-part drama series follows a group of activists in 1970s London.
Guerrilla begins on Thursday 13 April on Sky Atlantic.
The all-star international cast includes Freida Pinto, Babou Ceesay, Rory Kinnear, Nathaniel Martello-White, Daniel Mays, Denise Gough, Brandon Scott, Zawe Ashton, Nicholas Pinnock, Wunmi Mosaku with Idris Elba.
The official synopsis reads: “Guerrilla follows politically active lovers Jas (Freida Pinto) and Marcus (Babou Ceesay) and their friends as the political becomes personal. Based in 1970s London, the group of activists go head-to-head with a racist police force who are dedicated to crushing them. Guerrilla explores the nature of a relationship under pressure and poses the question: what if the original Black Power movement in London had used violence?”
Writer and director John Ridley commented: “Though a created narrative, Guerrilla is rooted in the realities of an era when the young and the passionate of differing backgrounds found themselves united by a struggle for the rights of people of colour, of the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalised.
“If those rights could not be obtained by way of public referendum, they would be had with the blast of a bomb, or from the end of a gun. These beliefs are personified in our lead characters Jas and Marcus. They are reflected, as well, in an ensemble that must deal with the consequences of their own actions – and at times in action – both for and against ‘the cause’.”
Executive producer Idris Elba, who also plays Kent – a second generation Brit dedicated to achieving equality for black people in Britain through peaceful and intellectual methods – said: “Guerrilla has been the culmination of many ambitions.
“First and foremost, the opportunity to tell a little-known story from our recent history, a story which not only feels relevant to our life in London today, but informs our understanding of it. Collaborating with John Ridley has been a longtime desire of mine. His work here is nothing short of a masterclass in character-building and storytelling.
“I’ve had the honour of working on both sides of the screen on this project and coming back to my home town, working in East London, has made this experience, this story, even more personal. I know one thing for sure: this is a very special drama and TV is in for a treat.”
Guerrilla will air on Showtime in the US later this year.
Are you looking forward to Guerrilla? Let us know below…
Tags: Babou Ceesay, Brandon Scott, Daniel Mays, Denise Gough, Freida Pinto, Guerrilla, Idris Elba, John Ridley, Nathaniel Martello-White, Nicholas Pinnock, Rory Kinnear, Sky Atlantic, Wunmi Mosaku, Zawe Ashton


Philipp Plein: The Most Successful Designer You've Never Heard Of
“First rule, no rule,” says German designer Philipp Plein of his soon-to-be-launched athleisure brand Plein Sport. You had best make no mistake, it’s not a diffusion line of the main Philipp Plein label. “It’s an independent brand that wants to reach a different target group. You won’t find any Swarovski or studs,” says the flamboyant fashion impresario. “I want to keep it simple and basic, and each piece has to be functional and perfect for action.”
Plein will launch Plein Sport by opening stores in Milan, where many of his products are made, Paris and Amsterdam by the end of the year. And what of Greater China? “We are opening one store in Hong Kong, three stores in China and one in Macau in 2017,” he says.
Plein and action are symbiotic. The 38-year-old took to Instagram last month to announce the Plein Sport news, posting a red-and-white logo and the caption: “#PLEINsport is going to be the first luxury ACTIVE SPORTSWEAR BRAND in the market!!! Next week we will officially #UnleashTheBeast and start the global distribution of this NEW and ‘independent’ brand”.
Plein has often produced sportswear items for his eponymous label, which he set up in 1998 but which didn’t become a fashion label until 2004. After many years studying the market and observing the Nike and Adidas duopoly, he’s decided to charge out of the blocks with his own offering on the strength of what he sees as a niche for something new. “The luxury brands have not really explored the territory,” he says. He adds that he feels their products are not very active and are very expensive. “I want to fill the gap,” says Plein. “My product is for action and performance but at the same time it has a luxury touch and the price range is between Nike-Adidas and the luxury brands.”
There’s also the cultural point about customer habits in matters of recreation. “Activewear is extremely successful because there is always a high demand for it. People are doing sports and they are taking care of themselves and their bodies more than ever. Everybody keeps buying activewear way more than they buy couture.”
The observation mirrors Plein’s previously held thinking about furniture and fashion. Trained not as a fashion designer but at a law school that did not overly enamour Plein, he began to design luxury furniture, largely constructed of stainless steel, in Berlin. “It was a completely different look and feel from the Philipp Plein brand today; it was Bauhaus-style, clean lines and steel. It was a passion.” Plein touted his luxury wares around trade shows in Europe, developed a niche clientele of interior architects working on hotel projects, private houses, planes, boats and restaurants, in which everything he created was custom-made. His small business became a “two or three-million-euro turnover” entity in as many years, so he bought a house in Munich at the age of 24 with the aim of growing the business.
The fashion came more or less by mistake. “I was starting to work with leather, covering furniture with it, and then, with leftover leather, we made some bags and belts and sold them at trade shows. I started to realise it’s easier to sell a pair of high heels for €1,000 than a chair for €1,000. And how often does a woman buy a pair of shoes compared to a chair? So I saw big potential.”
Plein had a fashion epiphany. His clothing, accessories and interior design collections interpret his version of the new contemporary luxury lifestyle. Mostly made in Italy, his innovative designs are constructed from the finest materials with meticulous attention to detail. “I found a niche market with something special, strong and loud. With this niche, we created a demand and a market for our product.”
Plein’s an oddity in the business – as unusual as the trademark Murano glass chandeliers and Swarovski crystal-studded macro-skulls that distinguish his stores – and an outsider; the most famous and seemingly profitable designer you’ve never heard of. Yet he works alongside photographers such as Terry Richardson, Steven Klein and Francesco Carrozzini to create original images for his advertising campaigns and the brand is a favourite among celebrities. He’s closely bound to the music industry and has hired emerging talents such as Angel Haze and Iggy Azalea, along with world-renowned artists including Rita Ora, Grace Jones and Snoop Dogg, to perform at his fashion shows.
Counting more than 100 employees around the globe, the Philipp Plein brand is available at the world’s most prestigious boutiques and in such exotic locales as Casablanca, St Petersburg, Montenegro, Saint- Tropez, Marbella, Seoul and Miami.
Plein’s not one to toe the line, either. His mindset and mantra are always distinct. “Most of the time, someone who’s successful on the market is someone who did something different from others. The biggest secret is not to be on a level with others. You will always lose. So, be out of range, then they cannot compare you. If you are different, they cannot say you are better or worse than others because you don’t give them the possibility to compare with others.” His cadence at times is redolent of former Chelsea and now Manchester United football manager José Mourinho, and much like two icons of the fashion world – Karl Lagerfeld and Tom Ford – who speak in paragraphs and chapters. You don’t so much converse with Plein as listen to him speak.
Here’s Plein in full flow. “People always like to judge, especially when they don’t understand. They are always sceptical. It’s important to have an open mind. Ninety-five percent of people are followers, who follow trends; so what magazines say is right, and what the blogger says, they are not able to develop their own style or their own taste themselves, so they are followers. On the one hand it’s easy because people like to get manipulated and this is what they are doing, manipulating people. This is what the industry does. Tell them what they want to hear, give them what they want to have and make them feel. The cosmetics industry is the best example. We like to believe. We like to dream. When we are in a bad situation, we like to believe.”
Plein cites two examples of retailing that he finds inspirational. “Selling is about psychology,” he says. “Look at Apple. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the telephone, it already existed. The market was already saturated, and touchscreens were already in the market. Nokia, Motorola and BlackBerry already had that capability. What did Steve Jobs do? He sold a phone with emotions. He created an aura around a normal telephone and made it a luxury object, and with all these kinds of emotions he transformed something normal into something special. It’s all about emotions. I respect brands and people who have this kind of possibility.”
And then he singles out Louis Vuitton. “I am not a fan, but I think it’s really impressive what they have built because they are so, so huge. They became so commercial on the one hand, yet they still make people believe that they are luxury on the other hand. But luxury and commercial don’t fit together. Everyone has something from Louis Vuitton. The taxi driver, the cleaning lady, the manager, everyone has something. This doesn’t fit anymore, in my opinion, with the luxury image but still people believe it’s luxury. So they build the dream, they build the brand and they build around the brand the dream which makes people believe that they buy luxury, even though it’s commercial. There is success in what they’re doing. I really look up to that.”
In which case, who best represents the Plein Sport man other than the ubiquitous Herr Plein? “The man that perfectly represents the brand is the anti-hero, extreme athletes who push their minds and bodies to the farthest possible and that are not famous but have many followers.” Plein himself is no slouch in matters of fitness. “I love working out in the gym, I always work out wherever I am in the world and I also love swimming in my pool in Cannes.” Plein’s primary residence is Lugano, Switzerland, but he has vacation homes in Cannes and New York, and is currently building a new house in Bel Air.
“We are selling dreams,” he says. “We are working in the dream factory. It’s like movies. People like to find, live and believe the dream, because we are all dreamers and dreams make people get up and go through hard times and survive.” And, in his case, prosper. Be it Philipp Plein fashion, sport or interiors, it’s always Plein time.
In This Story: #style /fashion
Deborah Hung, Philipp Plein Throw Day of the Dead Party
#style /runway
Philipp Plein Spring/Summer 2017
Go on a heist with Diesel
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Art exhibitions to check out in Hong Kong this July


Open efforts slash 3D costs
Bioengineering researchers have modified a commercial-grade laser cutter to create a low-cost laser sintering platform that can print intricate 3-D objects from powdered plastics and biomaterials.
A team from Rice University in the US has launched OpenSLS – a system that could greatly reduce costs and allow researchers to work with their own specialised powders and materials.
The OpenSLS platform is designed as an open-source device similar to commercially available selective laser sintering (SLS) platforms, but the system costs at least 40 times less than its commercial counterparts.
The first OpenSLS system was built using low-cost, open-source microcontrollers at a cost of less than $10,000, whereas commercial SLS platforms start at around $400,000 and can easily reach $1 million.
“SLS technology has been around for more than 20 years, and it's one of the only technologies for 3-D printing that has the ability to form objects with dramatic overhangs and bifurcations,” said engineer Jordan Miller, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice, specialising in 3-D printing for tissue engineering.
“SLS technology is perfect for creating some of the complex shapes we use in our work, like the vascular networks of the liver and other organs.”
He said commercial SLS machines cannot usually fabricate objects with custom powdered materials, which is particularly important for researchers experimenting with biomaterials.
The team has already showed OpenSLS can be used to print a series of intricate objects from both nylon powder (commonly used for high-resolution 3-D sintering) and polycaprolactone, or PCL; a nontoxic polymer used to make templates for engineered bone.
“Our goal from the outset has been to do this in a way that makes it easy for other people to reproduce our work and help the field standardise on equipment and best practices,” said study co-author Ian Kinstlinger, a graduate student.
“We've open-sourced all the hardware designs and software modifications and shared them via Github.”
The Github files are accessible here.
More details are available in the full report, published in PLOS ONE.
The device is demonstrated in the video below.


Nike Reacts To Accused Murderer Oscar Pistorius' 'I Am The Bullet In The Chamber' Ad
Laura Stampler
Nike came under the spotlight for an ad featuring double-amputee Olympian Oscar Pistorius that reads “I am the bullet in the chamber” after the track star was charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. She was shot to death in their South Africa home on Valentine’s Day morning.
While the ad has already been pulled from Pistorius’ personal website, Nike has now spoken out on the incident and the nature of the company’s sponsorship.
Photo: Nike
Nike issued an official statement: “Nike extends its deepest sympathy and condolences to all families concerned following this tragic incident. As it is a police matter, Nike will not comment further at this time.”But more insight was given when Nike South Africa spokesperson Seruscka Naidoo told Agence France-Presse, “We’re not commenting on our sponsorship or relationship.”
She continued, “At this moment, it’s a matter that’s being investigated. We’re not speaking about the sponsorship, [there’s an] issue at hand here which is much bigger than a sponsorship.”
Naidoo was sure to clarify, however, that the ad was displayed on “Oscar’s website, it’s not a Nike-owned website.”
Oakley and BP Global also had deals with Pistorius. Ad Age reports that both are “shocked” by the incident but wouldn’t provide further comment.
A different Nike commercial, however, that features Pistorius has been pulled from South African television.
“Out of respect and sympathy to the bereaved, M-Net will be pulling its entire Oscar campaign featuring Oscar Pistorius with immediate effect,” M-Net Movies tweeted.
Although Pistorius is only shown running, the commercial has another athlete giving a voice-over about how athletes’ bodies are their weapons.
Watch the ad below — Pistorius appears 37 seconds in.
While Nike has dealt with controversies surrounding sponsorships in the past — including Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Lance Armstrong, and Michael Vick — an athlete charged with murder is relatively uncharted territory for the company.
Disney decided to go with Ravens quarterback Trent Diller rather than Super Bowl MVP Ray Lewis in its “I’m going to Disneyland” ad probably due to the fact that Lewis was charged with two counts of murder in 2000. (The charges were reduced after he testified against another other defendants.)
Although the most notable endorsed American athlete charged with murder is O.J. Simpson, Ad Age notes that Hertz dropped Simpson two years before his arrest, when he was accused of domestic violence in 1992.
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The Problem of Solo Civic Engagement: An Interview with Doug McAdam
Cynthia M. Gibson
Teach for America (TFA), a program that enlists recent college graduates in urban areas, has asserted that its value proposition goes beyond its immediate benefits to schools and students in that its participants, the teachers who emerge from the program, are likely to be more civically engaged than average. TFA leader Wendy Kopp has likened the program’s outcomes to those of Freedom Summer. Stanford professor Doug McAdam, the recent recipient of Tufts University’s Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize, wrote a book on the Freedom Summer participants. He studied the TFA question at the invitation of Kopp, and his findings have now become a source of controversy. Here Cynthia Gibson, an expert on civic engagement, interviews McAdam to see what the fuss is about.
Cynthia Gibson: The TFA study has generated some lively discussion among those who are impressed with its rigor and breadth and those who have concerns about its conclusions. Then there are some in between who believe that service and service learning have long-term civic outcomes but want more solid data to affirm that. I would call them hopeful skeptics, perhaps.
Doug McAdam: I think that actually describes nicely where I’m at. I don’t doubt that some forms of youth service or youth activism have longer-term civic impacts, but I’m also convinced that you can’t assume those impacts.
CG: So let’s start with what interested you in pursuing this particular study.
DM: Well, I’m a political sociologist who has mostly studied social movements and other forms of nonroutine politics, and the focus of that work has been either at the meso level looking at social-movement organizations or looking at the most macro level: under what conditions do movements emerge? How do they develop over time? What impacts, if any, do they have? And so on. So, with one notable exception, I haven’t been looking at individual-level data on the enduring effects of youth service or youth activism. I did a study 25 years ago where I looked at the biographical trajectories of all those who applied to take part in something that, at the time, was called the Mississippi Summer Project but which has come to be known as “Freedom Summer.” And I stumbled upon the original applications from that project. I realized as I was looking through these applications that I had the applications not only for those who applied, were accepted, and went to Mississippi, but also a large number of applications for people who applied, were accepted, and for whatever reason didn’t go.
So I had this wonderful naturalistic experiment dropped in my lap. You have two groups that look similar on the eve of the summer. One has the experience of Mississippi;? the other does not. Simple question: what difference, if any, did Freedom Summer make in their subsequent lives? And the answer was it made a huge difference. The biographies went in very different directions, largely, I would say, as a result of what they did or didn’t experience in Mississippi.
The work I did on Freedom Summer is also where the TFA started. In 1998 or ’99, Wendy Kopp [of Teach for America] called me and said, “Our 10-year anniversary is coming up. I just read Freedom Summer [by Doug McAdam]. I’m convinced that what you showed for the Freedom Summer volunteers is what happens for our alumni on a more regular basis, and I’d be interested in your doing a study of that.”
With funding from [the William] T. Grant Foundation, I conducted the study, which looked at three groups of applicants. Wendy was most interested in the impact on graduates: that is, people who are offered positions, take them, and fulfill their two-year teaching commitment. We were equally interested in two control groups: “dropouts,” or those who began the program but left sometime before completing the two years, and “nonmatriculants,” those who were accepted by TFA but declined the offer.
When I took the study on, I was skeptical that there would be big enduring effects for the graduates, largely because TFA is not like Freedom Summer. I never regarded Freedom Summer as a typical youth-service experience at all because it was much more intense, much more collective, much more explicitly political, and it also took place at a particularly pregnant moment in U.S. history: the summer of 1964, just as the ’60s wave was starting to build. So I assumed a lot of what happened to those who went to Mississippi was a function of what happened immediately afterward—not just about what happened that summer.
There are other significant differences as well. Compared to Freedom Summer, TFA is much less explicitly political. Freedom Summer was also a very collective—intensely communal—experience, whereas TFA is a more solitary service experience. Finally, there are huge selection effects in TFA. That is, the most service-oriented, graduating seniors apply to TFA, and then TFA gets to select the most active of the most active. So I expected there would be small or minimal differences between the three groups, and I was really intrigued as a social scientist to see if in fact that was true.
CG: What did you find?
DM: We looked at six or seven measures of subsequent service—civic and political activity—and found that pretty consistently, TFA graduates lagged behind the nonmatriculants, who were consistently more active on all subsequent dimensions of civic participation, service, politics, etc. The contrast between the dropouts and the graduates was less clear. In general, the dropouts ranked slightly higher on some dimensions of subsequent service, but the differences weren’t that great or as consistent as the differences between nonmatriculants and graduates.
I should say, parenthetically, that all three groups are wildly active. They would outpace their age peers by a factor of three or four. So these continue to be very civically engaged folk, and that has to be made clear. But it’s the differences between the groups that were intriguing and somewhat surprising even to me. As I said, I was not expecting to see big differences favoring the TFA graduates, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to see that they would lag behind nonmatriculants.
CG: Your points about all three groups being very civically active is one that others have made to highlight the importance of this level of civic engagement, even among a cohort that may not include the entire youth population. That is, isn’t it good to see that some programs attract young people interested in being engaged and that support that engagement?
DM: Absolutely. I think these programs are terrific, and I think TFA is terrific, especially in the educational service it provides. But that’s not the issue here. The question in this case goes beyond the educational service to a second claim made by the organization. TFA says it enhances the level of civic engagement of its graduates.
But we found that, relative to these other two groups, it doesn’t in fact increase subsequent civic engagement. That’s not a criticism of the organization. It’s a finding that reflects differences among three groups of subjects who were all very active before they applied to TFA, all three are accepted, but exhibit different trajectories afterward. TFA graduates wind up being, in general, less active than the other two groups and especially the nonmatriculants. That raises all sorts of interesting questions it seems to me about the impact of this particular service experience. What is it about that experience that’s seemingly depressing the levels of subsequent service? That’s the interesting question.
CG: Almost a decade ago, there was quite a lot of debate about whether service led to more political engagement, and among some, there was the belief that service needed to lead to political involvement;? otherwise, it wasn’t “deeper” civic engagement. As a result, there was a great deal of effort in trying to ascertain—using data—whether service led to long-term political involvement among young people—efforts that included the development of new sets of variables representing political or civic engagement.
Today, there doesn’t seem to be as much discussion about this issue. So is it important that these programs make an effort to prove that they lead to civic outcomes if they’re doing other things just as well?
DM: It seems to me that TFA’s main mission is to provide important educational services to resource-poor school districts, urban and rural school districts. That’s a terrific mission. I’m persuaded that they do it pretty well and that that ought to be the fundamental basis for judging TFA. The fact that it doesn’t dramatically enhance the subsequent civic participation of its graduates seems to me to be a relatively minor matter. As a social scientist, it’s an interesting issue to me personally, but it shouldn’t be seen as a devastating critique of TFA given its central mission.
CG: So why are the civic outcomes interesting or important, though, to you or to anyone else?
DM: I go back to [political scientist] Bob Putnam, who claims that the foundations of civic life in the U.S. are weakening, that in some sense civic participation is in trouble in the United States and [that] for a democracy to be viable, there has to be an engaged civic sector.
I think it’s a legitimate concern that the civic sector is atrophying and that young people are not encouraged to engage in civic behavior. So besides debating what the reality of civic life in the United States is, we ought to be concerned with what kinds of experiences encourage a kind of enduring commitment to civic participation among young people. Lots of people have worried about that, and I think, in general, we’re at a moment where we assume that any kind of youth service—youth civic engagement—invariably produces positive effects, and I think that’s absolutely false.
I believe that, if we really did a series of systematic comparative studies of the long-term effects of various kinds of civic engagement or youth service, we’d see highly variable effects. That’s what I see in the study of Freedom Summer versus the study of TFA. I think if we took these studies seriously, we would see variation in effects, and we ought to then be interested in identifying those features of service experiences that help us understand the variation in impact. We ought to try to identify those features of youth service—youth civic engagement—that produce longer-term effects. If we’re concerned that civic life is on the wane in the United States, we ought to be interested in finding out what specific kinds of programs or activities encourage a longer-term engagement in politics, civic life, etc.
I don’t like the fact that we simply assume that if kids do service-learning courses or people participate in Teach for America that, invariably, this is going to have long-term positive consequences for increased civic participation. I think that’s almost certainly not true, and we ought to be interested in looking at variation and trying to understand what’s producing it.
CG: Recently there was a public back-and-forth about whether service—and people’s increasing interest in it—was a movement. Do you think it is?
DM: I don’t think I would call it a movement. I think we throw that term around very loosely. And by movement, I think we should mean something a little more restrictive.
CG: Why not?
DM: For me, a movement typically involves some kind of organized, sustained effort to produce change—or maybe resist change—and that change effort has to involve—at least to a certain degree—some kinds of nonroutine, noninstitutionalized forms of collective action, and I think that’s the distinctive feature of a true social movement.
There are lots of activities in the world where people are allegedly trying to change something, but are we going to call all that activity social movements? That’s not fine grained enough. I think movements in general involve forms of collective action that are nonroutine, sometimes disruptive, and that’s what differentiates something that I would call a movement from other kinds of institutionalized change efforts.
CG: One of your study’s findings is that graduates of TFA report lower levels of employment in pro-social jobs. How was pro-social employment defined? Did you look at post-TFA employment in terms of nonprofit work or government service? Also, what about people who work in these spheres and see that as part of their “service”?
DM: Yes, that’s why we looked at, again, six or seven different measures, because we wondered whether people whose paid employment was very service oriented would not count that as volunteer service on some of our other measures. So we wanted to definitely differentiate the two.
Pro-social employment—I don’t have the specific operational definition in front of me—but it was jobs clearly in the so-called helping professions. That included teaching, but also nonprofit work, etc. Certain kinds of legal work were counted, but it depended on the kind of law. So we had lots of detailed information on what their current job was, and we had a set of criteria by which we defined some positions as pro-social employment, and we applied that across the three groups;? and again, all three groups were—the rates of pro-social employment were pretty darn high, pretty impressive—but the TFA graduates ranked lowest on that dimension as well.
CG: Why is that?
DM: In analyzing the data, we tried hard to figure out what kinds of factors explained this slightly lower rate of subsequent civic participation, service, etc., and it was hard to identify specific factors. Here’s as much as I can say: about 20 percent of the graduates report feeling disillusioned by their TFA experience at the end of the experience. Again, we tried to unpack that;? we tried to look at the factors that seemed to predict disillusionment, and we didn’t get very far. All we know is that about 20 percent in the end concluded that they were somewhat disillusioned by their experience, and they were also very likely to say they felt like they were not very effective as teachers, and then we had a lot of open-ended items. And so we’ve looked at a lot of what people actually told us on those open-ended items, and there was a fairly consistent story.
A small percentage of all graduates—just under 20 percent—got to the end of the experience—they hung in there to the end—but in the end, came to see this whole issue of educational inequality as much bigger and much more systemic and they came to see the TFA approach as not very effective.
Yes, TFA was a great organization for trying to do the work it was doing, but the problem was much greater than the approach suggested. And so, they exited feeling somewhat ineffective themselves and disillusioned with this particular approach to this daunting problem of educational inequality. It doesn’t necessarily mean they were down on TFA, although some of them were. They simply came to doubt that this was an effective way of addressing this very challenging issue, and they felt pretty ineffective as teachers. If you feel that way, your willingness to re-up and engage in another really intensive service experience, I think, is obviously going to be diminished.
If you take that 20 percent who felt disillusioned out of the graduate group, the rates of subsequent civic participation, service, etc. are statistically indistinguishable from the nonmatriculants. So my sense is that—for a small percentage of the TFA graduates—their experience actually discourages subsequent participation. For the vast majority of graduates, they have a terrific experience, they feel positive about what they’ve done, and it has no real implications for subsequent service, political activity, etc. They’re very likely to stay very engaged and to continue to focus their energies on educational inequality, which is something that TFA does very well. It encourages the majority of their graduates to stay active on this issue, and that’s another part of TFA’s mission. They are committed to gradually building a very large alumni community around this issue.
CG: Have you considered digging deeper into the data regarding that 20 percent and finding out whether there something that’s common to them that distinguishes them from the other 80 percent?
DM: Yes, this is the core of this issue. It’s the key to the finding in general. The difference between these three groups is this 20 percent. And yes, I’d love to dig into it more.
I think it would require interviews of some sort. This is a very intensive experience, and for graduates with very different characteristics, some percentage of them—again, in this case 20 percent—at the end wind up going, “Well, I worked really hard and I admire what this organization is trying to do, but I don’t think I was ultimately very effective, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not the most effective approach to this very tricky issue” and that they came to that [conclusion] for very different reasons or with very different background characteristics. So you’d want to interview them and say, “How did you come to this conclusion? What was it about your experience that led you in the end to this conclusion about your own efforts and about the effectiveness of the organization?”
CG: One of the most interesting things in your article is your distinction between service learning and school-based community service and also between school-based service that stresses civic engagement and school-based activities that don’t. And that the latter seems to encourage more civic engagement over the long term. Can you talk about that?
DM: I’m very interested in this issue too, and this is my provisional take on the matter. There are kinds of activities in schools, but also, I suppose, in the community where it’s not that the goal is to encourage service or civic engagement but these are collective activities where people are—whether they know it or not—engaged in civic life. They’re involved in collective action around some issue, even if that issue is not really about politics or civic life. They’re involved in some club on campus, and they’re developing a set of civic skills on the one hand and maybe an orientation to collective life that may pay dividends in the future.
So they’re developing a sense of themselves and their competence in groups that may in fact translate into various kinds of group participation—some of it civic—in the future. I touched on this earlier, but the more collective the service or civic experience—whether or not we call it that—I believe the greater the likelihood that you will engage in collective activity in the future.
The point is the Teach for America experience for many graduates is also a very individual one. They are up at 1:00 in the morning slogging through the next day’s lesson plan or grading papers or whatever. They weren’t engaged in the community in any meaningful way, and although TFA has all sorts of regional associations, they weren’t very involved in the regional TFA association;? they basically slogged through two years as a “lone” teacher. And that also appears to be related to whether you wind up being disillusioned.
You’re not getting this collective sense of empowerment or mission because your experience is fundamentally isolating. Freedom Summer—these folks were housed communally in freedom houses or in private homes in Mississippi with other volunteers, and on the outside was this hostile white community. So there was this really strong us-them dynamic, and they really came to feel a part of this movement community, and many of them came out of Mississippi absolutely committed to finding other versions of this experience in the North.
So if we really did this set of careful, systematic, comparative studies of youth activism or youth service, we’re going to find variation in the long-term effects, and what we really ought to try to identify are the mechanisms that account for that variation. I would bet that one of the big features that differentiates the longer-term effects is just how communal or collective the experience is.
CG: The personal/?individual versus the collective service experience—and whether the latter results in a better one—continues to be debated, especially given the advent of online activism, which some argue is more individual. But some believe that these efforts can be just as effective in social change and that behind the arguments about “collectivity” is a mindset of a 1960s-sort of notion of civic engagement (e.g., protests, etc).
DM: I’m not pushing politics with a capital P. I’m not pushing a version of ’60s politics. All I mean is that if your service experience [takes place] in the year 2010, the more collective it is, I’m betting that it’s more likely to produce enduring effects. And again, as I mentioned earlier, so you’re the president of the French club at your high school. Nobody is going to confuse that with ’60s politics. But I’m saying that probably has much greater implications for your behavior in the future than being in a service-learning course.
Essentially, the more collective the experience, the more I think you are encouraged to engage in the future, and my point about Teach for America is that it looks like those who slogged through as individual teachers were more likely to get to the end of the experience and were more likely to go, “That was exhausting;? I don’t think I was all that effective;? I don’t see educational inequality changing in a big way;? I’m going to get back to my life;? I’m going to divest here a little.” And so, this is not about ’60s politics versus [today’s levels of civic engagement] to me. This is about how collective is this civic experience that you’re having—whether we characterize it as politics or not.
CG: It’s interesting to me that your study found that the TFA organization was important to so many and that they got identity from it at a time when the way in which people—particularly young people—are choosing to engage and be excited about engagement is not about organizations. In fact, research shows [that] young people mov[e] away from organizations as their primary outlet for civic engagement, as evidenced by the decline in membership among large, nonprofit advocacy and political organizations. So what does it mean for civic engagement when TFA alumni feel so connected to TFA, the organization, but not necessarily to other forms of civic and political life?
DM: I’ve got two daughters. They are densely connected, but not through formal organizations at all. They live on Facebook, among other things. They are wildly more interactive, engaged with other people, than I am, but it’s mediated through technology, as you’re pointing out. But fundamentally, people still are social creatures who derive their sense of themselves and their values and priorities through interaction with others. Nothing has changed. The medium through which they interact has changed,? but it’s not as if people are no longer influenced by their peers or something. My point here is that if, like TFA, you can create a set of procedures—a program that encourages people to engage with the organization—those organizations can continue to be central sources of meaning and identity in people’s lives.
It’s not that organizations have lost the capacity to do that;? it’s that they’re now competing with other mechanisms, other vehicles that connect people. So we go, “Oh, organizations are dying.” Well, yes, they’re in a much more competitive environment, and lots of young people don’t identify with organizations and seek their social connections through much more direct forms of mediation like Facebook, etc., which are themselves, again, communities of a sort. But it doesn’t mean that organizations can’t compete effectively. But they’re going to have to design programs that young people come to value, and if in fact they can successfully recruit individuals, those organizations can be again just as important as sources of identity and meaning as they’ve always been.
CG: As you know, there’s a lot of energy around national service, with policies being promoted and passed, money allocated. Do you see this as a positive trend? Will they help to encourage civic engagement across the country?
DM: I know I’m repeating myself here, but I really think we have to move away from the assumption that we’re going to invariably see effects from youth service or youth activism. I’d love to see a richer set of really systematic comparative studies of the longer-term effects of a range of service experiences, because I think what they would show is highly variable effects, and I think that would be very important for policy makers to understand. Just because you create a service program it’s not going to necessarily produce long-term civic engagement.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved by the Nonprofit Information Networking Association, Boston, MA. Volume 17, Issue 1. Subscribe | buy issue | reprints.
Cynthia Gibson, who helped design one of the first national participatory grantmaking initiatives with the Case Foundation, is a philanthropic consultant and author.
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[ July 8, 2019 ] Eagle Scout, valedictorian, state tennis champ — here’s how he found time for it all	Eagle Scout
Eagle Scouts among this year’s NFL draft class
May 3, 2019 Michael Freeman Eagle Scout, Scouting in the News 3
David Montgomery credits what he learned in Scouting with leading him to this year’s NFL draft. Last week, he was drafted by the Chicago Bears.
“To become an Eagle Scout was an experience I needed for me in my life that brought me here to this point and also influenced my mindset and the way that I carry myself every day,” Montgomery says in a recent interview in STACK, an athletic lifestyle magazine.
A few picks later, the Indianapolis Colts selected Bobby Okereke, a Stanford linebacker and Eagle Scout (Class of 2013) from Troop 243 in Santa Ana, Calif., at the 89th overall pick. Pat McAfee, a former Colts punter and now football analyst, colorfully announced the pick, referring to Okereke as a “future Hall of Famer.”
While in Scouting, Okereke attended the National Jamboree in 2010, completed National Youth Leadership Training and was elected to the Order of the Arrow.
On the field, in the classroom
Okereke, a fifth-year senior at Stanford, speaks just as highly about his academic endeavors as his achievements on the football field. In 2014, he received the Watkins Award as the nation’s top African-American high school player for academic and athletic excellence.
He did two internships in college, one with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, helping with a program for underprivileged children. His major — management science and engineering with a concentration in finance and decision analysis — prepares him for a career in private investments after his playing days, he says. He’s also working on a master’s degree.
Analysts predict he could be a quality NFL player, citing his football intelligence, speed and range as strengths. He served as a team captain for the Stanford Cardinal as he led the team in tackles with 96 last season. The Cardinal went on to win the Sun Bowl.
Okereke has 162 career tackles, nine sacks and four interceptions, two of which he returned for touchdowns. He helped his squad win the 2016 Sun Bowl and 2015 Rose Bowl titles as well.
Rushing for success
Montgomery, a junior Iowa State running back and Eagle Scout (Class of 2014) from Troop 772 in Cincinnati, Ohio, promised his mom she wouldn’t have to pay for his college education. He’d practice running drills in the front yard and in the street.
David Montgomery
“I was pretty driven at a young age,” he says in STACK.
He was ranked as the 67th-best high school running back in the country and recruited by Iowa State, Illinois, Purdue, Indiana and Marshall.
He chose Iowa State and finished his collegiate career with 2,925 rushing yards (6th in school history), 26 rushing touchdowns (8th in school history), 15 100-yard rushing games (3rd in school history) and 3,507 all-purpose yards (6th in school history). He helped the Cyclones win the Liberty Bowl in 2017.
Analysts spoke highly of Montgomery’s vision and leadership on the field, saying he would be a good fit in the Bears’ lineup. He was taken in the third round as the 73rd overall pick.
About Michael Freeman	91 Articles
The same topic came up in all four of this Eagle Scout’s interviews for West Point
Dog gone! The puppy ate this Scout’s merit badge, and wait till you hear which one


Jane Chastain
Politically Direct
Why the Media Shunned Jessica Lynch
Jane Chastain	Military, Women in Combat	 May 3, 2007 3 Minutes
Last week, Jessica Lynch, America’s media sweetheart in 2003, testified before Henry Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform beside Kevin Tillman, whose brother, Pat, was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. This is the first time the former POW has made a major public appearance in three and a half years, and the media yawned.Why did the press give the West Virginia beauty the cold shoulder this time around?She didn’t follow the script that had been carefully crafted of her capture on March 23, 2003, after her Army maintenance company lost its way and was ambushed by the enemy. She didn’t toe the radical feminist line of
I am a warrior, hear me roar!
The story of her capture, first reported by the Washington Post, quoted an “unnamed” U.S. official as saying Lynch fought valiantly and was taken by the enemy only after she succumbed to gun shot and stab wounds.
An investigation showed that her weapon jammed due to poor maintenance and was never fired. After she was retrieved by Special Ops forces, it was learned that Lynch had no battle wounds but was seriously injured by the crash of her Humvee and/or by her captors.
Nevertheless, the slight 105-pound maintenance clerk could have played along, since the other passengers in that vehicle were all dead. She could have said that she hit one of the enemy combatants with her rifle butt, threw a grenade, some rocks or anything to perpetuate the female warrior myth – but no, to her credit, she was honest. When the fighting started, she ducked down on her knees and prayed. That is the last thing she remembers before waking up in an Iraqi hospital.
Not surprising, we haven’t heard much about her since the interviews for her book, which flopped.
Unfortunately, Jessica is either misinformed or she misspeaks when she blames the fabrication of her story on the Pentagon. Who was the “unnamed” U.S. official who gave the story to the Washington Post? That tag could fit hundreds of people. The military is awash with feminists anxious to prove that men and women are interchangeable fungibles.
The first official report on Lynch’s actions released by the Pentagon said that she did not appear to have fought back against her captors. Nevertheless, the press ran with the Post report. On April 8, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clark was asked directly,
Can you corroborate the Post story pretty much as they described it?
Clark answered,
No. I can’t.
Nevertheless, the Army did give in to demands from congressmen from her state that she be awarded a medal for bravery. It unwisely gave her the Bronze Star, essentially for being there.
What happened to Jessica Lynch and other female soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since the attack on America is unconscionable, and there is plenty of blame to lay at the feet of the Bush administration and Congress, which has oversight of military personnel.
As of Feb. 27, 75 women deployed to these areas have been killed. Currently, the Army is illegally placing female soldiers in units required to be all male, and the excuses being used are disingenuous and insulting. The military is a dangerous profession, but this sop to the feminists has made things even more difficult for the men in these units.
When Jessica emerged from her trying ordeal, she unknowingly stepped into the middle of the debate over women in combat, and, by refusing to play the warrior role, she unwillingly poked her finger in the eye of the mainstream media, which seems hellbent on selling us on this notion. Yes, she can write a letter to Diane Sawyer or a network news organization and it will be read, but she isn’t likely to get more airtime because she is considered no longer useful.
Jessica was never a war hero. She is no longer a media hero. However, if she will go to the Center for Military Readiness and do some research on this issue of women in combat, she could use her position to wake up America and be a hero to all clear thinkers who don’t wish to see enlisted women used as cannon fodder just so a few female officers can make it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It may not be fair that the average man is six inches taller, 50 pounds heavier and has 42 percent more upper body strength than the average woman, but it is reality. There are many things women can do better than men, but being a warrior is not one of them!
Published by Jane Chastain
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4 thoughts on “Why the Media Shunned Jessica Lynch”
I agree 100% with this and I am a woman!!
I can’t believe this…Wake up to the 21st century. If someone told you that you couldn’t have a news column or opinion as they did in the 18th century because your a women and it’s just not your place would you agree? Guess what, some men in America still believe that women should be seen not heard. Try moving to the middle east.
lexi says:
thats bull ——. Like she said wake up in the 21st century just because we dont have a —– doesnt mean any thig i no women who have beat huge male athletes down so ya
Scott Drake says:
Well it would seem that my website jessica-lynch.com had much more on this subject. Although most of women in combat has little to do with my wife, I think that the media shuns the people who are shunned (like me) who stalk anal warts on fat women!


09/07/2019 CyprusDriving
Vehicle registrations dropped by 10 per cent in the first six months of 2019, compared with the respective period of 2018, the Cyprus Statistical Service (Cystat) has said.
In the period of January – June of 2019 total vehicle registrations declined to 23,449 compared with 26,059 in the respective period of last year.
New cars recorded the highest decrease with an annual 11.2 per cent dropping to 8,887 in the first six months of 2019, compared to 10,005 in January – June 2018, while used vehicle registrations dropped by 9.3 per cent to 14,562 compared with 16,054 in the respective period of 2018.
Registration of saloon cars dropped by 11.7 per cent to 19,102 compared with 21,642 in the period of January – June of 2018.
According to Cystat, goods conveyance vehicles increased by 2.6 per cent to 2,680 in January-June 2019, compared with 2,613 in January-June 2018. Light goods vehicles increased by 3.3 per cent to 2,306, heavy goods vehicles decreased by 2.2 per cent to 273 and road tractors (units of trailers) decreased by 1 per cent to 101.
Scooters registrations increased to 165 in January-June 2019, compared to 149 in January-June 2018.
Motorcycles (with engines over 50 cubic centimetres) sales dropped by 8.6 per cent to 1,189 in the first six months of 2019, compared with 1,301 in the corresponding period of 2018, Cystat added.
Source: Vehicle registrations drop by 10% in the first half of 2019 – Cyprus Mail
Cyprus will have mobile traffic cameras in place by next year and a full system up and running by 2022, Transport Minister Vassiliki Anastasiadou said on Sunday.
The issue has been going on since 2006.
Anastasiadou said the bidding process for the €35m system would last three months, which will be followed by an evaluation and the awarding of the contract, and “it is hoped by 2020 to at least have the mobile cameras” the minister said.
She said it would positively contribute to road safety. “Where this system has been implemented it has shown that accidents have been reduced dramatically but also the number of deaths from accidents,” she added.
By 2022, the minister said 90 fixed cameras would be in place at accident black spots, and 20 mobile units would also be in use.
After years of delays, the latest was said to be due to the ministry decided to choose a more sophisticated system, which can photograph vehicles from the front and back.
As well as recording speed, they can also check for other violations such as not wearing a seatbelt, talking on the phone while driving, driving through a red light and crossing the white line at the traffic lights.
The request by police in mid-2018 came after the initial plan by the ministry was to install cameras that only photographed vehicles from behind.
The changes were to delay the previous plan by about a year as the tender process will now need to account for the new, more sophisticated cameras.
In late July 2018, the ministry’s initial plan was to have the tender process completed and the first cameras installed by the first quarter of 2019.
A traffic-cams network was set up in 2006 but was quickly discarded. The cameras had numerous problems, including failure to store photographs, and extensive bureaucracy that in some cases resulted in fining a person twice for the same violation while letting others go unpunished.
The cameras were taken down in 2007 and in 2008 it was announced that new cameras would be put up by 2010. In 2011 the Tender Review Board challenged the specifications outlined in the process and cancelled the government’s plan for the fifth time. Failing to find a way of effectively setting up the system, the government decided to outsource the venture to a private firm.
The ministry of finance has decided to fund the latest attempt using a private company and will do so in one-year instalments over five years. The company that is chosen will install the cameras and be responsible for their functionality over those five years.
Source: Full traffic-cam system by 2022, mobile units online next year, minister says – Cyprus Mail
Road works on the Nicosia-Limassol highway will be carried out from Monday until Friday, the public works department announced.
According to the department, the right lane in both directions will be closed for approximately 300m close to the Moni exit between 10am and 4pm.
The works are expected to finish at around noon on Friday.
Source: Road works to cause disruption on highway – Cyprus Mail
The bundle of seven new bills on implementing tougher traffic penalties is unlikely to be voted through by parliament before summer recess but more likely in the following autumn, it emerged on Friday.
The draft legislation was submitted to parliament in March but the European Parliament elections and change in leadership of the justice ministry has delayed the discussion of the bills in the House transport committee, which convened on Friday.
Included in the bills is an increase in the fines for speeding from €1 per kilometre to €5 while using a phone while driving will fetch a €300 fine instead of the current €85.
Failure to wear a seatbelt will cost €400, also up from €85.
Not wearing crash helmets on motorcycles, running red lights, and parking on pedestrian crossings and spaces reserved for handicapped drivers will cost €200 from €85. Reckless driving that ends up causing bodily harm will be punishable with up to three years in jail and or a fine of up to €10,000.
MPs do not unanimously agree on the fines and parties may try put forward amendments which is likely to mean the bills won’t be voted through in parliament before recess later this month.
Source: New bills for tougher traffic penalties delayed again – Cyprus Mail
Traffic police will no longer hide behind bushes to catch offending drivers, in line with instructions from their new head, Phileleftheros reported on Tuesday.
It said that Yiannis Georgiou, the new chief of the traffic unit at police headquarter had told a meeting with district traffic police heads that the presence of traffic police on the roads should be ‘evident’, with no officers hiding behind trees and bushes.
Drivers should be aware of the presence of police officers on the roads and know that they could be subject to checks at any time, he said.
Traffic heads were also asked to focus on black spots and on stretches where drivers tend to speed. Traffic police officers will no longer stand at spots where the speed limit suddenly changes so as to ‘trap’ drivers but instead some 500 metres away from where the limit changes, Phileleftheros added.
Instructions were also given to focus on the secondary road network, while traffic police have been told not to pursue young motorists found to be breaking traffic regulations through the streets, but instead to take down their registration numbers and seek them out later.
TISPOL President Volker Orben spoke at a road safety conference in Cyprus, on Friday 28 June, organised by the delegation of the European Commission in Cyprus and the Cyprus Police, at the House of the European Union, in Nicosia.
Volker spoke about the mission of TISPOL, which is responsible for the coordination of activities at a European level, for the effective and efficient enforcement of traffic legislation as well as the implementation of road policing, a fundamental model for the prevention of criminality on the roads, which many European countries – including the Cyprus Police – adopted during the current decade.
He highlighted the impact Project Edward can have on casualty reduction and awareness raising – while also stressing the utmost importance of enforcement in the sector of the respect of traffic legislation and the prevention of road deaths and serious injuries. In this respect, he presented the operational results of TISPOL.He stressed that TISPOL appreciates the fact that the European Commission established in 2018 a new Strategic Action Plan on Road Safety to halve road deaths by 2030 and he indicated the importance of the joint cross-border road traffic enforcement operations organized in cooperation between police bodies.
He explained that the target set by the European Commission of a 50 per cent reduction in road deaths and serious injuries by 2030 is an important commitment of TISPOL and a key issue, indicating that in the frame of their daily duties the members of TISPOL are called to exchange information and best practice on a constant basis, bearing in mind the Valetta Declaration. He thanked the Cyprus Police for their contribution in the road safety campaigns, which include enforcement and publicity of the actions undertaken, especially for speeding, drink and drug driving, distraction and the non-use of seat belts.
Police on Thursday afternoon arrested a biker who attacked a police officer and an ambulance driver on the Nicosia-Larnaca motorway.
Around 4.25pm, while the 36-year-old man was riding his motorbike near Koshi, a 35-year-old woman who was a passenger on the bike fell down and hit the asphalt.
The man stopped to help her while at the same time a police patrol car carrying out routine checks nearby also moved towards them to help.
As soon as the police car arrived, the 36-year-old allegedly started shouting at the officers and hit the bonnet of the car, damaging the vehicle.
He is said to have repeatedly punched an officer on his head.
A few minutes later, when an ambulance arrived, the biker hit the 51-year-old ambulance driver with his helmet.
The ambulance transferred the woman to Larnaca hospital, from where she was taken to Nicosia general hospital and treated for burns.
The police officer and the ambulance driver were treated for head injuries.
The 36-year-old man was arrested. Both he and his passenger were wearing helmets.
Source: Motorcyclist arrested after hitting policeman, ambulance driver – Cyprus Mail
“Bike SAFE” motorcycle training program
Motorcyclists are trained by members of the Police
The risks that motorcyclists face in the road network and the ways in which they can predict and cope with them were the subject of a training program that was held yesterday 16/6/2019) at the Police Headquarters Department of Traffic Police.
The program was attended by 15 civilian motorcyclists, who were briefed by trained members of the Special Motorcycle Squadron and the Police Driving School on the proper use of motorcycles on the road network, but also on how to prevent and deal with various dangers that lie ahead during driving. The training contained both theoretical information of the participants and practical training.
The “Bike Safe” training program is part of the general framework of the Police’s actions to inform and raise awareness of road safety and the prevention of traffic accidents.
Μοτοσικλετιστές εκπαιδεύονται από μέλη της Αστυνομίας
Οι κίνδυνοι που διατρέχουν στο οδικό δίκτυο οι μοτοσικλετιστές και οι τρόποι με τους οποίους οι ίδιοι μπορούν να τους προβλέψουν και να τους αντιμετωπίσουν, ήταν το αντικείμενο προγράμματος εκπαίδευσης, που πραγματοποιήθηκε χθες στο Τμήμα Τροχαίας Αρχηγείου Αστυνομίας.
Το πρόγραμμα παρακολούθησαν 15 πολίτες μοτοσικλετιστές, οι οποίοι ενημερώθηκαν από εκπαιδευμένα μέλη του Ειδικού Ουλαμού Μοτοσικλετιστών και της Σχολής Οδηγών της Αστυνομίας, για την ορθή χρήση των μοτοσικλετών στο οδικό δίκτυο, αλλά και για το πώς μπορούν να προλαμβάνουν και να αντιμετωπίζουν διάφορους κινδύνους, που ελλοχεύουν κατά την οδήγηση. Η εκπαίδευση περιείχε τόσο θεωρητική ενημέρωση των συμμετεχόντων, όσο και πρακτική εξάσκηση.
Το εκπαιδευτικό πρόγραμμα «Bike Safe», εντάσσεται στο γενικότερο πλαίσιο των δράσεων της Αστυνομίας, για ενημέρωση και ευαισθητοποίηση του κοινού σχετικά με την οδική ασφάλεια και την πρόληψη των τροχαίων συγκρούσεων.
Wear helmets, police tell motorcyclists after three accidents overnight – Cyprus Mail
Police on Sunday appealed to motorcyclists and moped drivers to take measures to protect themselves in case of an accident.
After three accidents overnight between Saturday and Sunday involving motorcyclists, one of whom is in critical condition and at least one of whom was not wearing a helmet, Limassol police traffic officer Michalis Michael called on motorcyclists to wear the appropriate gear, CNA reported.
Only on Tuesday, a report by the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) highlighted the dangers to motorcyclists in Cyprus.
Although Cyprus didn’t rank high in terms of pedestrian and cyclist deaths on city streets, a high level of traffic law violations leads in particular to the deaths of drivers of PTWs (powered two-wheelers). Motorbike and moped riders account for 31 per cent of all fatalities in urban areas.
“Mopeds are widely used on urban roads by young and inexperienced people who are mostly students or delivery service providers. Most of the young moped users ride with a learners’ licence and they lack proper training,” the report said. It also said the use of safety helmets was not as widespread as desired and often when helmets were used, they were not properly strapped. It added that a culture of respect for PTW riders was lacking among other vehicle drivers.
“Notwithstanding the above, an indepth study is required to provide evidence for the actual reasons for the large number of PTW deaths in Cyprus,” the report added, quoting George Morfakis, a Cypriot road safety expert.
Michael said police planned to increase their weekly road safety campaigns to three weeks.
“The weekly campaigns will last for three weeks,” he told CNA. “The first week will be on enlightenment and prevention issues and advice on legislation in an effort to raise public awareness for accident prevention and repression. Beyond that, the remaining weeks will be targeted to checks on motorcyclists and mopeds so as to limit as far as possible the number of deaths.”
Source: Wear helmets, police tell motorcyclists after three accidents overnight – Cyprus Mail
Hands-free phones ‘just as distracting as hand-held’
Hands-free phone chats at the wheel are as risky as driving while holding your mobile and should be banned, expert warns
MPs were told hands-free phone conversations are no less dangerous while driving. Experts warn that using a hands-free kit is as risky – if not more so – than driving at the UK’s legal alcohol limit.
A hands-free phone conversation while driving is just as dangerous as chatting while holding your phone, MPs were told yesterday.
Experts also said using a hands-free kit is as risky – if not more so – than driving at the legal alcohol limit.
In March 2017, the Government doubled the punishment for using a hand-held phone at the wheel to six penalty points and a £200 fine.
But Dr Shaun Helman, of the Transport Research Laboratory, said it should be extended to the use of hands-free devices.
He told the Commons transport committee that hands-free conversations are just as distracting.
This was echoed by Open University’s Dr Gemma Briggs, who said a conversation with a passenger is less dangerous than talking to someone on a hands-free device.
She explained: ‘This is because you create mental images of where they are, what they’re discussing, what they’re up to, and the mental resources required to create those mental images are also required for accurate perception of that driving situation.’
Source: Hands-free phones ‘just as distracting as hand-held’