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Before I started this website I had never heard of Don Coxe but early on some readers sent me some of his weekly missives. I found a lot of similar thought processes [Jan 18, 2008: One Lonely Voice Agrees with me on Food Inflation] [May 2, 2008: Don Coxe on Food Crisis] - specifically having to do with agriculture and in a larger sense commodities as a whole. Apparently after reading around I'm a Malthusian at heart [Mar 24: WSJ - New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears] as too many humans arrive on this planet, and more importantly too many are escaping stark poverty and striving for middle class (hence require much more of the world's limited resources) [Jun 20: World Population to Hit 7 Billion by 2012]. This has major implications as Americans (3% of the world's population sucking up 25% of its resources) We are in a great global competition for resources and it's just getting started. So Coxe & I share some very long term thoughts.
In yet another great irony just as Mr. Coxe launched his specialized fund [Apr 22: Don Coxe Offers Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund] he basically called the top in commodities within a month or two. Much like Ken Heebner's CGM Focus mutual fund peaked within weeks of his cover story on Fortune Magazine. [May 28, 2008: Ken Heebner - America's Hottest Investor]
Coxe had a VERY rough latter 2008 [Sep 11, 2008: Don Coxe with his Views on What "Just Happened"] and this is why I say constantly it is so much easier to be a pundit / strategist than an actual money manager. But 2008 was so bad, even pundits/strategists who can hide behind "being early" or "general time lines" were blasted left and right. Even if you are correct in the "long run" it doesn't matter if you lose 30,40,50,60% of your money being wrong in the "short run". After losing 50%, you need to make 100% just to break even. With that said, I still like to hear the thoughts of those with good long term track records, even if 2008 was horrific for them.
Coxe had a very lengthy article in Toronto's Globe & Mail of which I'll cut some snippets below - if you are interested in the rest just follow the link.
Donald Coxe, 73 years old and unbowed, offers no apologies for getting it wrong on commodities in 2008. ... Coxe is not merely reminiscing. He also has a serious point. Well, two. The first is to let the listener know that he has been around for a long time, and seen more than a little bit of history— financial and otherwise. This is not some 36-year-old economics graduate who was still a university student when the early 1990s recession hit. Coxe doesn’t hesitate to remind people that he entered the world of Bay Street in 1972, and thus has lived through the horrific bear market of 1973 and 1974—an event that had him convinced, by the dawn of 1975, that “I’d probably come into the wrong business.” But his second point is about the importance of leaders and leadership in tough times. Thatcher had a plan, and it pulled Britain out of stagnation, inflation and economic decline. Reagan’s policies had a similar effect in the United States. Deng Xiaoping, who placed China on the road to a market economy, changed the world. So did Manmohan Singh, the current Prime Minister of India and the Finance Minister in 1991, who used a financial crisis to shake that country out of its decades-long embrace of socialism. “I’m not a believer in the idea that we’re caught up in forces beyond our control,” says Coxe. The right policies, combined with political will, matter. “So once I’m satisfied that we’ve got the smart people in there who are prepared to do whatever is necessary to prevent a collapse, I assume it will be done.” All of which serves to explain why Coxe—who in December left his post as Bank of Montreal’s global portfolio strategist, to start Coxe Advisors LLC— believes that history will vindicate him and prove that his difficult 2008 was an aberration. While Coxe wasn’t shocked to see a market meltdown last fall, he was caught badly off guard by the way the concomitant financial crisis destroyed prices for the commodities and commodity stocks that he has for years touted as the fastest way for investors to increase their wealth. Oil, after peaking at just short of $150 (U.S.) a barrel in July, fell to $45 (U.S.) by year-end. Corn, from a summertime high of roughly $8 a bushel, plunged to $4; copper went from about $4 a pound, to $1.40. Few resource companies were spared, except for gold stocks. The shares of many junior mining companies lost most of their value. In the oil patch, even a blue chip like Suncor Energy Inc., a Coxe favourite, was down 56% in 2008. As for Coxe himself, he called the recession correctly, but stumbled on how to play it. “Stay overinvested in commodity stocks whose earnings and performance are tied to stronger economies in the Third World,” he advised his readers in one of his “Basic Points” reports. The date was July 3, 2008. As it turned out, that was the best time not to buy commodities, but to sell them. The Reuters/ Jeffries CRB commodity price index peaked on July 2. Over the next six months, it plummeted by half. Worse still, the market now had a simple way to track his mistakes. The $300-million Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund, after debuting to a warm reception from investors in June, was down 55% by mid- October. For Coxe, there’s little escaping responsibility; even the ticker symbol, COX.un, makes it clear who is driving the fund. Coxe says that at one point during the downdraft, he had lost $2 million, or 40% of his personal equity portfolio. “From July 14 until, I would say, roughly last week, has been the most stressful [period] of my recent working life,” he said in an interview shortly before Christmas. “You’re talking to me at a time when I’m feeling somewhat beaten up.” Coxe says he underestimated the role of the hedge funds. He knew that many of them had gone long on commodities and short on financial stocks—that was rather obvious, and amplified the sharp rise in commodity prices in 2007 and the first half of 2008. What he didn’t realize, or fully appreciate, was how many billions of dollars of those bets were made on borrowed money. Since commodities futures themselves are a leveraged investment, the result was a series of bets in which leverage was piled on top of leverage. The whole edifice came tumbling down during the summer, as hedge fund losses began to pile up and the margin calls came pouring in. (not working in the industry, I had the exact same issue: not realizing how much leverage was in the system, and more specific - how much was in the hedge fund food chain; but it appears many inside the industry had no clue either) “None of us, or nobody I talked to, thought that much of it was hedge funds that were leveraged 30 or 40 or 50 to 1,” says Coxe. One rough year is not going to cause his loyal followers to stray. “For my money, he’s the best in Canada,” says Seymour Schulich, the billionaire investor and philanthropist. “Some of these guys, you look at and you think they’re from Mars.... You know what I like about him is, he’s got a real grasp of financial history.” Like all strategists, Coxe got some predictions badly wrong. His bullish calls on gold in the early and mid-1990s were duds. For a time, he was an alarmist about the Y2K problem, writing: “Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the once-in-a-millennium crisis came because creditors were unready for Y2K?” Other predictions he got dead-right. He warned at the end of 1997 that the Asian crisis was far from over, which it wasn’t. He raised a skeptical eye at the absurd valuations on many technology companies in 1999 and 2000, and was right. So he’s bruised. But wrong? Coxe doesn’t think the word applies. “When the market seems to have gone to hell, you say, ‘Well, aren’t you realizing in the middle of the night that you were all wrong?’ No!” He believes in the impact of strong leaders, and therefore believes the world—because of the efforts of Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke and the leaders of China and India and Europe, among others—will avoid spiralling into a 1930s-style depression. Not only will their policies breathe new life into the economy, Coxe predicts, they’ll do it so quickly that Bernanke, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, will be worried about inflation by the end of this year. “I’m more and more of the view that we’re going to find out that the surprise will be how strong we come out on the other side of this,” he says. “It won’t be long before inflationary pressures will show up. And, of course, they will show up first in the commodities.” It’s a forecast fit for an optimist, and one that few economists share in the winter of 2009.
But on this we both agree... I've said many times, if you have a 30-40 year time horizon arable farmland will be one of the best investments on the planet.
He is as convinced as ever that China and India will be the world’s great economic powers by the middle of this century, that the standard of living of their people will grow, and that the next great investment is food.
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Home News Sports Opinion Obituaries Features Special Sections Classifieds Public Notices
PESTICIDE USE EXPLAINED
Information has been shared in local media concerning pesticide use, some of which have been grossly misrepresented.
Many people have legitimate concerns about the safety of pesticides. So, are pesticides completely safe?
As you consider that question ask yourself if driving a car, eating a tomato, or swimming in the ocean is completely safe. There are risks associated with each.
If you currently subscribe or have subscribed in the past to the Gazette, then simply find your account number on your mailing label and enter it below.
Click the question mark below to see where your account ID appears on your mailing label.
ZIP Code:
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Appraisal Service Now Available! Appraisal services are now available this includes reports for charitable or cultural property donation, estate planning and division of assets, insurance coverage, damage and loss claims, purchase or sales advice, determination of probate fees or capital gains tax, divorce and/or partnership dissolution and bankruptcy. Our clients are for private and corporate collectors, financial institutions, government, public galleries and museums, registered charities and law firms.
Our staff, Belinda Chun is a member by the the International Society of Appraisers (ISA) which is a not-for-profit, member-driven association who serves the public by producing highly qualified and ethical appraisers who are recognized authorities in professional personal property appraising. ISA’s professional development and credentialing programs, along with its strong code of ethics and professional conduct, serve as the foundation for the organizational mission – to advance the professionalism and effectiveness of personal property appraisers.
What an Appraiser Determines Whenever there’s a question about the value of your personal property, there’s also a risk involved. It may be the risk of selling too low, or of paying too much; the risk of being under or over insured; the risk of not getting your fair share in a division of the property; the risk of incurring tax penalties or being audited when claiming a deduction for charitable contribution or when calculating estate taxes.
A professional appraiser helps you manage these and other such risks by providing a written opinion of value upon which you can base your financial decisions. Rather than being just an “educated guess,” the professional appraiser’s value conclusions are based on prescribed methods or evaluation, research, and report writing. Bankers, financiers, investors, insurers, adjusters, estate managers, trustees, executors, attorneys, judges, federal and state tax agencies—all are dependent upon the knowledge and expertise of the appraiser, and so are you.
Too often and too late, people find out that the appraisals they have are inaccurate or misleading, resulting not only in greater risk to themselves but also in an annual waste of millions of consumer dollars. A competent appraiser helps you manage financial risk.
What a Appraisal Includes (Standards of ISA and the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice) A cover document explaining in detail what type of value is being sought (“purpose”) and how the appraisal is to be used (“function” or “assigned use”). The methodology and resources relied upon, including market analysis and market(s) selected. A complete and accurate description of the property written in such a manner that it can be identified without photos. The date(s) and location of inspection, and the effective date of value. A statement by the appraiser that he or she has no financial interest in the property or that such interest is disclosed in the report.The appraiser’s qualifications and signature.
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Overview
A species of wild tomato, Australia's passion berry plant (Solanum cleistogamum) produces a small, sweet and aromatic fruit. The plant grows wild in the central desert regions of Australia, but is now cultivated for commercial use.
Habit
The low-growing, prickly foliage is grey-green. The fruit hangs low to the ground and falls off the plant when ripe.
Requirements
The passion berry plant grows in rocky or gravelly soil. Also known as "bush tomato," Solanum cleistogamum is a fast-growing shrub that fruits heavily after soaking rains.
Fruits
The marble-sized yellow fruits taste similar to bananas. They are a favorite food of desert birds and reptiles.
Flowers
Small, lilac-like flowers appear in late summer or early autumn.
Pests
Passion berry plants are a primary food source for emus, a large desert-dwelling bird. Emus eat the seeds and pass them undigested in their dung, ensuring the passion berry's survival. Feral goats, cows, horses and camels, however, fully digest the seeds, preventing propagation.
PlantNET
Outback Pride
Absolute Astronomy
Keywords:
passion berry, bush tomato, Australian wild tomato
About this Author
Moira Clune is a freelance writer who since 1991 has been writing sales and promotional materials for her own and other small businesses. In addition, she has published articles on VetInfo and various other websites. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hartwick College.
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A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true. The greater the military’s involvement in national security and contribution in the management of national crises, the greater its alienation with the nation’s governing apparatus and those who exercise influence over it. The point is best illustrated by the fallout of the reports of successive pay commissions. The defence services expectations from the Sixth Pay Commission for a change in trend set by the previous pay commissions are again belied. For them one more nail into their coffin of hope.
Despite angry protests and representations the final dispensation promulgated has widened the chasm and brought disaffection within the services to the point of despair. Fervent appeals from the top brass of the three services and considerable lobbying by the retired fraternity of the armed forces evoked little or no sympathy in the quarters that matter. Public support is evidently there but it is of no solace to the armed forces if such adulation does not impact favourably on the outlook of those who decide.
Strangely the media support has also been quite muted and hardly discernible. To some observers it appears as if a ‘gag order’ had been sent out by the powers that be. Whatever the reasons the media support that the armed forces were hoping for has not been forthcoming; no-prime time features — other than the recent burst by one TV channel – or front page headlines espousing the case of the armed forces. To the contrary we have had some esteemed columnists regrettably castigating the service chiefs on the position taken by them — to withhold the new pay implementation orders.
Much has already been said on the subject of the chiefs making public their decision to hold back the dissemination of the government notification on the new pay packages.
However some points merit emphasis.
Firstly, our chiefs in office currently are not flamboyant, iconic personalities in the mould of a few army chiefs of yesteryears.
These gentlemen are reputed to be steady, solid and competent professionals, not the hungry for publicity kind. So it is somewhat ironic that instead of wondering as to why the chiefs have been driven to protest in the manner that they have, we chastise them.
Secondly we should appreciate that that by adopting the position that they have, prospects of their benefiting from the Government’s largesse after retirement have been foreclosed. Sadly their sacrifice of personal interests for the sake of the uniformed family to which they belong has gone quite unacknowledged. Elsewhere such commitment would have been cited as exemplary leadership.
But again curiously if we were to conduct an opinion poll on whether the chiefs were right or wrong across two segments: the bureaucracy and the defence services, my guess is that 90 per cent of the bureaucrats would disapprove while over ninety percent of the service officers would wholeheartedly endorse what the chiefs did. Is there a case for a better understanding of the ethos of the armed forces? Our military may not be perfect but it has served the nation very well. Its role in safeguarding the security and integrity of our country has been invaluable. Contrary to the beliefs and concerns persistently expressed in certain influential quarters it has also remained obsessively apolitical, a strength that has failed to attract the recognition that it deserves. Altogether there is much reason for the nation to be proud of its armed forces.
Right from Independence, our security environment has been far from benign. The future promises to be no better. Even a cursory scan of our security scenario would indicate that the defence services might well be called upon to deal with much bigger and newer challenges. So we must heed their morale. Ignoring the sentiments of the services or turning a blind eye to the simmering discontent which is virtually now out in the open would be unwise. Anger and resentment — are widespread and deep rooted sentiments in the armed forces.
The issues that agitate the defence services go well beyond the scope of the dispensations that a pay commission can award.
Even while remaining strictly within the charter of a pay commission the armed forces are in a way wishing and expecting that all the accumulated injustices heaped on them over the previous pay commissions can now be set right in this instance. This of course is unlikely to happen. So what should be done? For the government the important thing that must first be done is to shed the accountants approach to dealing with the grievances of the services. What is required is empathy and understanding. Let us not grudge the services the little things like the canteen or rum or the sahayaks or the bungalows in Delhi. Instead the focus should be on addressing the many grievances that the men in uniform nurture.
What are the major issues? The most important — a better deal for the soldier who retires in his forties. His pathetic plight remains unchanged. A pension of about 75 per cent of the last pay drawn that the government is likely to concede albeit reluctantly will not be enough. Much more needs to be done. Next for the officer: what he justifiably seeks is some kind of equivalence in status and pay related to the length of service. To tell the officer that the problem lies within the organisational pyramid of the three services and therefore the government is helpless is rank evasion of responsibility and a brazen display of insensitivity.
There are many more concerns not being dwelt on due to space limitations.
In the short term the government should look at getting over the immediate crisis of the Sixth Pay Commission award. After having crossed this bridge it would be unwise to let matters drift. Instead a committee should be constituted to specially look into all the issues that agitate the military. The importance of careful selection of the members of this committee should be obvious.
Equally important would be the formulation of its terms of reference.
Another grave matter is the grievances that the officer community of the three services especially the army has against the bureaucracy. This is a serious issue. Of late the sentiments being expressed against the bureaucracy are bordering on hate and anger.
If the bureaucrats and the armed forces do not work in harmony and in tandem we will not get the best from our national resources.
How has this grave ‘disconnect’ come about? Then there is the bigger issue of the ramifications of this polarisation. Do we blame the country’s inherited military ethos and the national character of its people? There are no clear answers. This underscores the imperative of reflection and introspection especially but the services, the bureaucracy and the political leadership.
As watch dogs the media must also step in; national security could be at stake
About the author:
Vinay Shankar is a former Director General of the artillery
Courtesy – Expressbuzz.com – The New Indian Express Group
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Phone technology plateaued two years ago about the time of the Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Since then improvements have been incremental.
Sure todayís processors are faster and cameras are better. Battery life is a little longer. Some apps are smarter. None of this changes much in the real world.
You wonít be much more productive with a 2016 phone than with a two year old one. Nor will you have much more fun. Since 2014 upmarket phones from top brands have been good enough for most purposes.
There could be an evolutionary jump when mobile networks move to 5G. And thereís always a possibility a new technology will emerge from left field.
That’s all folks
Yet for the most part, thatís it. Phones have evolved to the point where they do everything we need and they do it well enough for most people.
There are few compelling reasons to upgrade phones. Unless youíre rough with your hardware, there is no urgent need to spend on new kit every two years or so.
You may want the newest features, but you wonít get productivity benefits or more fun. The returns on phone investment have diminished. At this point it becomes a matter of fashion or cosmetics. Some many view phones like they see jewellery.
Nobody needs a phone that does iris recognition. Features like this are like chrome and tail fins on 1960s American cars. They do little more than tell you this yearís model is different from last yearís model.
Todayís phone market is a replacement market.
Wear and tear
Phones wear out. They wear out faster than PCs. Thatís because you use them more often. You drop them more often, charge and discharge their batteries more often.
You can expect to get a good two years from a phone so long as you donít drop it or use it to stop bullets. If you are more careful, three or four years is possible. There are people using even older phones.
Switching from constant upgrades to a replacement market means phone sales will stop growing. They may decline. This is already happening.
Top of the phone market declining faster
The downward sales trend is more noticeable at the top of the market. And itís even more noticeable in the Android world.
With Apple you get the benefits of a wider ecosystem if you also use iPads and Macs.
This effect is less pronounced with Android. There are no less expensive ways to get an Apple ecosystem phone.
Samsungís top phones are twice the price of similar models from, say, Huawei. Most of us would struggle to think of useful things to do on, say, a Galaxy S7 that we canít do on a Huawei P9.
Where more means less
The more expensive phone may have five or ten percent more functionality.
It could be worth the money if the extra features make you more productive or stay entertained longer. Otherwise, itís money that could be better spent elsewhere.
This poses a problem for phone brands like Samsung and Apple. For now, they still have momentum from the glory years and there may be pockets of untapped growth.
Yet they need to find ways to persuade existing users to upgrade before existing models wear out. They need to give users reasons to switch brands. They are running out of headroom.
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About Unibail-Rodamco
Unibail-Rodamco is the largest commercial real estate company in Europe, with properties located across thirteen countries. It specializes in shopping centers, convention centers and office properties.
The Challenge
After conducting a customer survey, Unibail-Rodamco determined that providing shoppers with personalized experiences across malls was key to its future success. “We realized that most of our shoppers were anonymous, so we needed to learn who they were to give them the relevant experiences they were requesting,” said Julien Marlot, Digital IT Manager at Unibail-Rodamco. “We wanted to create something seamless, personally interactive and at the forefront of connected technology – so identity had to be at the center of the entire experience.”
The Solution
To turn anonymous shoppers into known customers, Unibail-Rodamco began implementing Gigya’s Registration-as-a-Service (RaaS) across shopping mall sites and mobile apps. RaaS reduces the authentication process to just two clicks by giving users the option to sign in using a username/password or an existing social network account. All data created as shoppers log in and interact across properties, including demographics, Facebook Likes and behavioral shopping patterns, is stored within Gigya’s dynamic schema Profile Management repository, where it is automatically normalized and indexed for easy reporting and analysis.
The Benefits
Giving users a convenient way to identify themselves, paired with the incentive of a personalized experience, resulted in a 26% increase in total registration rates, with 76% of new registrants opting to authenticate via social login. The ability to authenticate with touch versus type grew mobile share of registrations by 35X.
A centralized understanding of user identities enables UnibailRodamco to extend this connected experience to include users’ cars. With Smart Park, customers’ license plates are scanned and connected to their accounts as they enter the mall’s parking garage, and recognized vehicles are provided automatic entry. A user’s parking spot is automatically sent to her via push notification and saved in the app. At the end of her shopping session, she can use the app to guide her back to her spot.
Similarly, Smart Map pinpoints shoppers’ locations in the app to help direct them to the shops they want to visit across the mall. They can see stores with special offers near them, as well as create custom itineraries by shop category and loyalty offers. The app features a single loyalty card that can be used to find and redeem offers at any store. Socially logged-in users are also able to connect with friends shopping at the same time and meet with them in the mall.
Not only do these geolocation and loyalty features improve the user experience, resulting in a 92% growth in loyalty card subscriptions, but they also enable Unibail-Rodamco to collect valuable first-party data, including when shoppers visit, top stores and deals, users’ journeys through the mall and more. This information is used to create increasingly personalized content and communications for shoppers both in the app and across channels including email.
For example, when shoppers register with their Facebook accounts, Unibail-Rodamco gains permission-based access to their Likes. It is then able to surface promotions, events, store openings and other items relevant to these brands in shoppers’ app newsfeeds, as well as send them push notifications and emails.
While Unibail-Rodamco has deployed this connected shopping experience across twenty apps and shopping centers, it has plans to expand its Gigya implementation across more than sixty additional properties by the end of 2016.
By Don Kianian
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Underground Locating Equipment Information
Underground locating equipment includes a variety of technologies that accurately locates pipes, cables, and other objects such as septic tanks or blockages in sewer lines.
Data collected from underground locating equipment ensures proper clearance for construction workers, utility crews, professionals, and homeowners who may be excavating. Additionally, many local governments require proper demarcation of underground systems before work can begin.
Types
After locating and tracing a line, operators will typically note line locations with utility spray paint or flags.
Electronic marker systems (EMSs)
EMSs utilize buried locating markers to facilitate quick mapping of underground lines for future purposes. A passive antenna and circuit is buried in a color-coded housing, and it uses the radio signal from an above-ground transmitter to power a response. This method is more expensive than others, but is very efficient, and is therefore used for critical applications such as power and fuel lines.
Cable fault detectors
Cable fault detectors locate electrical faults in power lines. Damage to underground power lines will increase the resistance of the line, and also poses a hazard for overheating, arcing, and loss of circuit. Cable locators consist of a receiver that perceives the electromagnetic field created by a power line or telecommunications line. A transformer can strengthen a weak field as well as measure voltage and resistance. To find the fault within the line, a time-domain reflectometer (TDR) is commonly used. It pulses narrow electrical charges that are reflected by flaws in the line. The shape, size, and time-delay of the reflection pinpoints the location of a fault. A TDR requires a separate cable locating device.
Ground penetrating radar (GPR)
GPR emits high-frequency electromagnetic pulses into the ground to map subterranean features. Soil penetration increases as frequency decreases, but spatial resolution suffers. Changes in the dielectric constant of the soil medium reflect the radar, identifying the location of materials. Collection occurs by rolling a GPR system over the area. This is a fast, inexpensive locating technique that also registers non-metallic utilities.
Metal detector
A
metal detector uses an oscillating electromagnetic field to detect metal objects that reflect the signal via induced eddy currents. The detector can also interpret distance and will use tones or beeps, and possibly a visual display, to indicate the presence of metal. Many metal detectors can also indicate the type of metal located as each metal has a different phase response. Detectors often allow the operator to set parameters such as sensitivity, sensing width, and track speed, amongst others. RF transmitter
An RF transmitter uses an electromagnetic field, like other locating technologies. For locating a conductive utility, the transmitter is directly attached or clamped to the line or it can wirelessly induce a signal. A snake mechanism can be inserted into non-conductive conduits to radiate the field along the snake. An above-ground receiver is used to trace the line.
Sound detectors
Sound detectors utilize a microphone mechanism to identify leaks, primarily in pressurized water and gas lines. These leaks have characteristic sounds that are propagated for hundreds of feet along the line. Auditory detection is influenced by factors such as pressure, pipe specifications, soil type, compaction, depth, and surface texture. Operators can initially identify the presence of a leak by listening to hydrants and meters, and then following the sound to where its loudest.
Video credit: drainbrain12 Sonde/beacon locators Sonde/beacon locators utilize remote probes, called sondes, that emit a signal and are inserted into the utility line. They help identify blockages and collapses in non-metallic sewers, drains, ducts and pipes. Sondes are intrinsically safe and manufactured for specific applications. They are inserted into lines on the end of rods or a device akin to a plumber's snake. An above-ground receiver locates the position of the sonde within the line. Safety
Excavation hotlines and websites allow anyone to request that local utilites demarcate utility lines on-site. Requests are usually completed in several days for free. This service reduces the danger and disservice risks from uninformed digging. Resources include:
USA: dial 811 Canada: Click Before You Dig UK: Before You Dig Australia: dial 1100 Configurations
The majority of line locating equipment is handheld, for use by an individual or crew. However large units and modules, such as those with a generator to induce a strong electromagnetic field, as well as GPR, will be mounted on wheels so the user can push or tow the unit. Automobiles can be equipped with the above equipment, though it is uncommon.
Specifications Display: most modern utility locating equipment includes a digital display for visual representation of line location and depth; it is commonly a backlit LCD Operating frequency: the communication channels of the transmitter and receiver; multiple frequencies are common Detection depth: the maximum at which lines or markers can be buried while still being perceived by the receiver; depths of more than 20 feet are uncommon Power source: locating equipment is usually powered by batteries, though some may include a rechargeable lithium-ion battery; some models offer the user a choice between batteries or recharging Transmitter power: the maximum wattage the transmitter can apply to a line to enable tracing Receiver to transmitter range: the farthest distance at which the locating equipment can communicate; distances of one mile are possible, though transmission distance is affected by soil traits and surface obstacles Couple style: how the transmitter resonates the frequency in a buried line, either via a clamp or wireless induction Features Carrying case: a package to transport and protect the equipment when not in use GPS: the locating equipment is GPS enabled to help trace lines on a digital map Connectivity: the device can export readings to a separate device, such as smartphone, tablet, or computer Audible alert: the equipment uses a tone, beep, or chime to indicate line location Auto power up/down: automated on-off features preserve battery without affecting operation Self-test: the equipment has a diagnostic program to assess defects Standards
Underground utility detection standards include:
ASCE 38-02 Guidelines for detecting and depicting subsurface utilities BS PAS 128 Specifications for underground utility detecting, verifying, and locating CSA S250 Mapping underground utilities Applications
Industries and applications that use underground line locators include: electric utilities; water and sewage; oil and gas utilities; cable and telephone companies; and mass transit and rail companies.
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If you have a brand worth licensing you’re probably too busy to read this article. Having said that, if you’ve recognised that licensing is a profitable way of extending your brand’s reach to new consumers, then you may consider the 4 minutes required to browse the next 1,000 words a worthwhile investment.
Having survived many years developing licensing programmes for large corporations without sacrificing 100% of my weltanschauung to cynicism, I am now able to map out a timeline (slightly jaundiced) of the intertwining relationships that need to be developed if you’re looking to create a successful licensing programme.
Year 1: Connecting
Your first stop on the licensing continuum should be with a reputable licensing agency. Preferably one that has some relevant experience with similar brands and some knowledge of the categories that you consider an obvious fit with your brand.
Having spent some time getting to know said agency, you’ll need to contract with them for a significant period of time (3 years at least) in order for them to really commit to developing a licensing programme for you.
In the first 12 months, provided you have a brand of value and a capable agency, you should be aiming to sign two or three new licensees which, depending on the quality of your brand guidelines and approvals process, will get some of your brand spanking new licensed products in front of suitable retailers and on shelf towards the end of year 1.
Year 2: Learning
So your first products are hitting the shelves and, once you’ve swallowed the initial excitement, you’ll probably find yourself looking at financial reports and scratching your head over the disparity between initial projections and actual royalties. This second year is all about examining performance of the founding licensees, learning the lessons of what worked and why, and sharing any good news stories both with retailers and potential new licensees.
If products aren’t getting the traction you expected at retail, expect licensees to come to you for help, either for marketing support or (more likely) reductions in royalty rates or minimum guarantees. This is where your agency should be earning its crust, sifting through the excuses for legitimate complaints and gathering the arguments for internal support whilst deflecting any demands for leniency if the product is genuinely underperforming.
Getting the founding licensed products to perform is a critical part of the licensing agency’s job. This can include helping the licensee with the sell-in to retail, ensuring that all licensees have access to any usable elements of the brand’s own marketing plans, and generally kicking people into doing what they’re supposed to do.
If, by the end of year 2, the founding licensees are beginning to deliver on their initial forecasts, then 2 or 3 additional licensees should be joining the programme by the end of year 2.
Year 3: Action
With a full year’s figures available for review and new licensees launching, the programme is beginning to gain in substance making it a talking point at the top of the organisation. It’s at this point that it should be possible to leverage some additional support for the licensing programme from within. Perhaps the most successful products can be used as an incentive or promoted on the packaging of the core product. Such activity should be tested to see if it yields any results. This can then be incorporated into the offering to new licensees in harder to target categories that need that extra push to secure.
At this point in the programme you may want to consider aggregating all of the licensed products into an on-line retail channel and, potentially, developing materials for licensees to use that communicates the benefits of the full range of products rather than just their own category. It might be worthwhile co-ordinating an exhibition stand at a relevant show where licensees can share the costs to communicate the appeal of the full range of products. This will allow you to develop some retailer contacts.
Given the lifecycle of most branding campaigns, it would be no surprise if new brand guidelines came into effect at this point. This means licensed products will need to be updated to incorporate a new visual identity. At the very least those products that were successful in year 2 will need a revamp and the founding licensees should be coming back to you with suggestions for new products or product categories that they’d like to explore. Again, this is where your agency earns it corn, reviewing these proposals, ensuring that they fit the category, or sourcing new partners where appropriate.
Year 4: Partnership
With a mature licensing programme in place, processes need to be tightened up and documented. One or two founding licensees should be audited to ensure that the books are kept honestly. There may be an argument for bringing all of the licensees together once a year for an annual update where they can share war stories and best practise. Your licensees are now customers and need to be treated as a mixture of a supplier and a trading partner.
Having marketed the licensing programme to licensees and retailers, you should now consider how to further market it to consumers. Should licensing be included in your marketing mix? What additional benefits can licensing bring the business? For example, can licensed products be included in branded experiences as a retail concession? What about a pop-up shop with retail, would licensees be able to fund this? If you have a subscription arm, can licensed products be used as an incentive to join. Your agency should be bringing you suggestions for how to connect your brand and licensing strategy as part of the ongoing development of your licensing programme.
Year 5: Share
Your biggest year to date. Now licensing is part of your overall marketing mix, a useful tool that has extended your brand into markets and to consumers that were previously unattainable. The new generation of licensed products are competing with the leading brands in the market and the revenues are now at a level that the bottom line makes licensing feel like a serious enterprise. Don’t be surprised if, at this point in the programme, senior level management start asking themselves what it is the licensing agency does to earn such a significant amount of money. Expect pressure to renegotiate the agency contract from above. As long as everyone has taken a long-term view from the beginning, however, the value added by the agency in developing the programme should be recognised in the renewal of their contract. Alternatively, you may consider bringing the whole programme in house now that there’s enough revenue to pay for a full-time team of employees.
A summary of the development of a programme:
Year 1: Connecting
Brand strategy to licensing strategy
Company to Agency Company to Licensees Licensed Products to the brand Year 2: Learning
Understand which products have succeeded
Work with licensees and retailers to ensure sufficient distribution Develop the outline of a licensing process Year 3: Action
Revitalise licensed products with brand refresh
Test how to involve licensed products in core brand activity Co-ordinate marketing of licensed product range Secure senior level support for the licensing programme Year 4: Partnership
Treat licensees as trading partners
Provide licensed product support package Create annual licensee event Reassess connection between licensing strategy and retail and brand strategy Year 5: Sharing
Licensing appears on senior management radar
Evaluate agency performance and either bring in house or renew Incorporate licensing into the overall brand story
We give this the acronym
, because licensing is all joining together the left and right hands to make a new noise in the market. For more about how Golden Goose can bring your licensing programme to life, please contact us CLAPS
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There's no glamour in consolidation. Often sold as a way to rein in IT costs, CIOs are usually stuck with selling what's perceived as a negative by most agencies. Staff members dislike the disruption, the change and cost cutting. In the end, many CIOs end up drained of all momentum for initiating anything of strategic value.
That's not the case with Utah CIO Steve Fletcher. In 2005, out of the dysfunction and failure of running IT as separate agency fiefdoms, the state created the Department of Technology Services (DTS) and hired Fletcher to run what has become one of the nation's few fully centralized state IT departments.
Fortunately the state hired someone with both prior government IT experience - as CIO for the U.S. Department of Education - and a solid business private-sector background. Fletcher also has a flair for leadership that enabled DTS to succeed.
Since taking over, Fletcher streamlined how technical staff service remote government locations in the large, mountainous state - reducing travel time and labor costs. He also took control of an IT project that many government CIOs would gladly avoid: a state enterprise social service system. It is, in theory, a Holy Grail of systems integration. In reality, it can be an unwieldy IT project that may often buckle under the weight of federal policy mandates, cost overruns, cultural issues and inflexible software.
Fletcher took over the state's fledgling enterprise program for health and human services (HHS) eligibility and case management, after removing the systems integrator who was struggling to keep the project on track. Fletcher made DTS the project integrator, partnered with the system's software vendor to ensure quality in the system's modules, and worked with the state's HHS agencies to maximize project management success.
Why did Fletcher believe it would succeed? "For one thing, we have control over the entire project and it's cheaper this way," he said.
That control is balanced by solid relationships with the software vendor and the various business managers who have a stake in the project's outcome. Fletcher's unique background as both a public CIO and businessman makes him uniquely positioned to lead government IT in the 21st century.
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Forgiveness is an issue about which most of us are of two minds.
When it comes to our own transgressions, whatever few we can bring to mind, we are hoping — no, we expect — abundant and copious grace overflowing. In fact, we would be quite surprised if all of our errata in life were not able to be expunged from the record.
When it comes to forgiving others, the abundant grace does not flow quite the same way. We are judicious in our parceling of forgiveness when we are the offended party.
The truth is we judge others by their actions, and we judge ourselves by our intentions.
Ironically, every week we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In other words, we are praying, “In the same measure as we have forgiven others, so forgive us, O God.”
We tend to hold grudges and seek revenge. If our own forgiveness depends on our ability to forgive, we are on shaky ground. It is really God’s forgiveness that we need to mimic. His is complete; ours claims reservations.
The book “Picking Cotton” is the true story of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton. Jennifer was raped at knifepoint in 1984 by a man she identified in a lineup, a man whom she came to know as Ronald Cotton. He served 11 years on a double concurrent life sentence before being exonerated by DNA evidence. Jennifer had mistaken him in the lineup for another man. Certain as she was that Cotton was the perpetrator of her crime, she was wrong.
After Cotton’s release from prison, Jennifer feared facing him. After two years she summoned the courage and wrote, “I said to Ronald, ‘If I spent every second of every minute of every hour or every day for the rest of my life telling you how sorry I am, it wouldn’t come close to how sorry I am. How I feel in my heart.’
“And Ronald said, ‘I forgive you. I’ve never hated you, and I want you to be happy.’”
The two speak publicly together against the death penalty and for judicial reform, because there was a time when Ronald as a black man might have been put to death for the crime of which he was convicted.
So forgiveness happens sometimes, but it is often mixed with guilt and remorse and sadness. Even when forgiveness happens, we don’t always forget.
Ask the wronged persons to be civil to the offenders, and perhaps it can be done. Ask them to be kind, and maybe they can muster that, too. Ask them not to exact revenge, and that can at times be achieved.
But do not ask them to forgive, to completely heal the relationship, to withdraw all of the painful memory and to extract any lingering poison. Civility is within our grasp, but true, deep-down, New Testament forgiveness is not a human possibility.
This is why our standard for forgiveness of our own sins cannot be our own spotty record in forgiving others. We must take as our model what God has done for us. In Christ we have already received true, deep-down, thoroughgoing forgiveness. We are meant to draw as close to that destination as we can.
Real forgiveness takes time, but God has the time to heal all the world’s brokenness, to restore all that has been shattered.
All of the Christian life is this way. We are always living God’s future in a broken present. The gospel is always a word of reconciliation from God’s future spoken ahead of its time.
As for the past, God knows and remembers our sin. As for the future, God remembers our sin as forgiven. As for the present, in the words of Ephesians, “Forgive one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.”
Dave Wise is pastor of Otterbein United Methodist Church in Greenfield. This weekly column is written by local clergy members.
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REV. Ariel Ferrari: What the Bible says, and does not say, about homosexuality Updated 9:29 pm, Friday, August 26, 2011
The seven or eight biblical passages quoted when homosexuality is the theme of our conversations are plainly critical of same sex relations.
Yet a growing number of folks in the Jewish-Christian tradition believe these passages are outdated and even irrelevant.
Let me call these folks the "critical" or "dissident" voices. A heated controversy is all but unavoidable.
For the most part, traditionalist readers read these scriptures literally -- whatever the Bible says about same sex relations, that's final and carries significant weight in our conversation about homosexuality today. On the other side of the aisle, our dissident readers, often called "progressive," argue that once you place these biblical passages in their immediate historical, religious and cultural context, you sense they don't address the issue of homosexuality as such -- or at least the way we might understand it today. Rather, these scriptures were meant to deal with very local and specific religious, moral and ritual concerns in the life of Israel and later on in the life of the emerging Christian church. We think here of the dangers posed by deviant and abusive sexual behaviors and practices attributed to "pagan," "idolatrous" neighbors, from sodomy with Gentiles because of their inherent uncleanliness and the sexual slave trades to ritual prostitution and pederasty, among others.
Let's see what these scriptural passages have for us. First, the Sodom incident (Gen. 19, and the parallel story in Judg. 19). One evening Lot, a nephew of Abraham, hosts two divine messengers. Because of their unparalleled dislike of foreigners in their midst, Lot's neighbors in Sodom plot to gang rape the distinguished guests. Male rape was common on the battlefield and even in local communities as a means of further humiliating vanquished enemies and disgraced neighbors, respectively.
Traditionally understood as an attempted male homosexual gang rape, and where the name "sodomite" comes from to describe a male's penetration by another male, for dissident readers this story has to do with the unacceptable violation of ancient laws of hospitality. A reference in Ezek. 16 and words attributed to Jesus in Mt. 10 reinforce the interpretation that Sodom's sin was lack of hospitality.
As you run out of Sodom and neighboring Gomorrah lest you be consumed by heavenly fire and brimstone, you may want to notice two disturbing pieces of information. Firstly, in order to spare his heavenly guests from the mob, Lot volunteers his own virgin daughters, telling the mob "to do to them as you please." If that mob had homosexual appetites, I wonder why Lot offered them his own daughters instead? Secondly, right after Lot and his daughters run from Sodom for their lives, the old patriarch engages in incestuous sex with his own daughters to secure descendants.
As for the Leviticus commandments that no male shall lie with a male "as with a woman" (18:22; 20:13), traditionalists believe this "abomination" brings us full circle back to the intended order of creation, wherein any kind of significant sexual bonding, and ideally marriage, was to happen between a man and a woman. Dissident voices have problems with this. According to them, such precepts, embedded in the so called Holiness Code, and not in a higher ranking than other pagan "abominations" -- such as having sex with a menstruating woman, eating pork, slandering, getting tattoos, not welcoming the foreigner as a citizen and cheating, among others -- are to be avoided at any price lest Israel succumbs to ethnic contamination and idolatry. The prescribed punishment for some of these abominations was death by stoning!
Once in New Testament territory, we need to contend with a theological heavyweight such as Paul. His personal remarks, or those attributed to him, can be found in 1 Co. 6: 9-11 and 1 Tim. 1:10. Echoing the list of abominations in Leviticus, Paul provides several expanding lists of sins, from fornication and adultery to robbery, greed, drunkenness, and "male prostitutes and sodomites." Even though this last sin does not rank higher than the others, traditionalists believe it still represents a very explicit condemnation of homosexuality. Dissident voices argue that not everything is so obvious as traditionalists pretend it to be, since the Greek term in Paul's discourse routinely translated as "sodomites" probably refers to pederasty -- wherein an adult male retains the sexual services of a "soft," "effeminate" boy -- not to homosexual behavior in general. Incidentally, the term "sodomites" does not appear in the Hebrew scriptures, and it was first introduced by the King James version of the Bible in 1611.
As for Paul's remarks in his letter to the Romans (1:26-27), where Paul finally makes reference to female homosexual behavior, traditionalists feel this is the last nail in the coffin. Once again, Paul includes same-sex relations together with -- although not higher than -- envy, murder, deceit, craftiness, gossiping, slandering, insolence, boasting, even rebelling against parents. Once again, dissidents appeal to Paul's larger context, namely, his fight to the death against idolatrous practices that often included intercourse with sacred prostitutes, both male and female, and which threatened the spiritual well being of emerging Christian communities in the Greek-Roman world. Once in context, what you have here is a not a targeted condemnation of homosexuality as such, but rather of very specific behaviors that promote idolatry.
What then, do the Jewish-Christian scriptures say, or not say, about homosexuality? I prefer not to see them as literal statements, for that does not seem to be the way God encourages us to search for truth and meaning. So I would be willing to accept their relatively narrow focus and limited relevance, yet this causes me no anxiety. On the contrary, I am reassured by the fact that these scriptures apparently never meant to be an indiscriminate, frontal, full force attack against something that might have been part of God's creation from day one.
The Rev. Dr. Ariel Ferrari is pastor of First United Methodist of Greenwich, located at 59 E. Putnam Ave.
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Reviewed by Gary Cohen (Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota) Published on HABSBURG (January, 2006) Civil Society and National Identification in Nineteenth-Century Budapest
It is an odd circumstance that, four decades since urban history began to attract significant attention among scholars in Western Europe and North America, there are still few western-language scholarly studies of modern cities in the former lands of the Habsburg Monarchy. There is considerable work in several languages on Vienna, and native scholars in the region have published general histories of many other cities in their own languages. Nonetheless, Robert Nemes's work is one of the few books on modern Budapest in English other than John Lukacs's
Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (1988). The new book is most welcome, though, for a number of reasons beyond the dearth of other works.
Nemes traces the development in Buda, Pest, and Obuda (or "Buda-Pest" as he terms the conurbation before the formal merger in 1872-73) of civil society, national identification, and Hungarian national politics from the late eighteenth century to around 1890. The demographic, economic, and spatial growth of the city provides the context for a closer examination of public life and national culture in what was becoming the central metropolis for the modern Hungarian nation. Significant political events provide signposts for the long-term development of national culture, identity, and politics. Prominent nationalist leaders such as István Széchenyi, Lajos Kossuth, Miklós Wesselényi, and Sándor Petofi appear in due course alongside various Habsburg palatines and high officials to provide faces and voices for those developments; but the book examines most directly the emerging civil society based in voluntary associations, newspapers, political action, and the evolving political culture of Hungarian liberal nationalism.
Drawing on extensive and careful research, Nemes traces with analytical sophistication the many-sided cultural and political transformations that occurred in Buda-Pest and Hungarian urban society during the nineteenth century. Beginning with the early efforts of small groups of prosperous burghers, officials, clergy, and aristocrats to create local voluntary associations, theaters, and other forms of public life, he examines the emergence of civil society and the struggles of early nationalists to advance the use of Hungarian and to articulate Hungarian national solidarity. We learn of the formation of a range of early voluntary organizations, political mobilization at various levels of urban society, changes in general modes of sociability and dress, the changing social roles of women, and evolving relations among the various religious and linguistic groups within the urban population. Nemes portrays with considerable sensitivity the ambiguities in creating the elements of modern public life and the beginnings of a civic culture between 1790 and 1830 in what was still a society of corporate ranks and orders where strong loyalties to the Habsburg dynasty and a traditional
Landespatriotismus were still the rule for the great majority of the population. With the reinvigoration of the Hungarian Diet in the 1830s and the rise of Hungarian nationalist politics among various segments of the nobility and urban burghers, a modern civil society emerged. Nemes offers a particularly vivid depiction of life in the metropolis and the development of politics and civic life during the 1830s and early 1840s and an equally telling analysis of the crosscurrents in public life and political culture during the periods of the 1848 revolution and the neo-absolutist 1850s. A more extensive treatment of the reemergence of liberal nationalist civic life and political action after 1859 and the impact on the city of Hungary's new constitutional government after 1867 would have been welcome, but Nemes defines the general trends deftly, illustrating them with well chosen soundings in specific local political and social developments.
There is much originality here in the basic approach, research, and findings. To my knowledge, few previous publications in English, other than Nemes's own articles, have examined the developments in the civil society and public life of Buda-Pest that are presented here. Even if other scholars have worked on individual aspects of urban society and politics in nineteenth-century Buda-Pest, they have not put the various phenomena together in the larger construct that Nemes presents. His work is clearly informed by recent work in cultural history and cultural studies, but he does not divert attention from the analysis of the historical developments that concern him to engage in any superfluous theorizing.
In order to cover such a long span of time in relatively brief compass, Nemes has selected particular moments in the development of urban public life, civic culture, the developed landscape, and politics to illustrate the larger trends that are his focus. I have already used the word "soundings" in this review, and that term describes well the approach used in much of this book, an approach shared with many other recent works in cultural history and cultural studies.[1] Nemes does not attempt to present a full urban history of nineteenth-century Budapest with a carefully balanced grand narrative; and the reader will not find here a full treatment of the development of the city's population, economy, constructed environment, or even its politics. Nemes's readings of the moments he has selected strike me as thoughtful, cogent, and generally well grounded in evidence. One might wish, though, for somewhat greater treatment of the major changes in the urban economy and the developed urban landscape of the city for each major chronological period and for a fuller, more balanced description of developments in civic life and political action for all major strata of the urban population. That would have made for a significantly longer book, but one could argue that this would be merited given the meager English-language literature on nineteenth-century Buda-Pest. As is, the book offers little on the lower social strata before the 1840s. When artisans and wageworkers do appear, they are dropped into the narrative somewhat abruptly and get relatively little space.
Overall, though, the historical threads which Prof. Nemes has chosen to follow produce a well-woven book. The excellent writing, cogency of analysis and argumentation, and clarity of description make the study a pleasure to read. Particularly telling are the points the author makes about the constructed, voluntary character of national identification for the Buda-Pest populace and the function of everyday practices above and beyond the use of language itself in the development of national loyalties and public life, whether it be clothing, cuisine, or dances and other amusements. Nemes also illustrates well the reality that the cultural differences were often small between those who identified with the Hungarian national cause and those who did not.
Note
[1]. For examples in studies of East-Central Europe, see Alice Freifeld,
Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848-1916 (West Lafeyette: Purdue University Press, 2005); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/habsburg.
Citation: Gary Cohen. Review of Nemes, Robert, The Once and Future Budapest.HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews.January, 2006. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11326
Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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Presenters
How do you move from a one size fits all performance management process to one size fits one? In this HCI Keynote video, Brooke Orr discusses how Coca-Cola used data to transform its performance management approach and iterated toward improvement.
Key insights:
Examine whether your cultural values are supported by your processes. Does your compensation strategy support the experimentation necessary to achieve innovation? Roll around in the data and listen to the story it really tells; use it to contextualize and personalize your organization’s performance management strategy. Don’t ask whether someone is a poor performer; consider framing it as whether they are “at risk for poor performance.” You can’t change the past, but you can prevent future problems by giving someone more of what they need to be successful.
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According to The Conference Board, 40% of the US workforce will be poised for retirement within the next two years. What's your human capital strategy to hold onto and stay connected with this valuable talent, their contacts, and business wisdom?
Like many forward - thinking organizations, particularly in the science and engineering industries, Dow Chemical is embracing Corporate Social Networking technology to keep retirees engaged and connected with each other and the organization. Dow recognizes that relationships and connections with retirees through Corporate Social Networking technology will place them ahead of the looming brain drain and the global race to retain the institutional knowledge that retirees possess. In this webcast, Trish Bharwada will discuss how Dow Chemical is leveraging their Corporate Social Network to connect with their mature talent to accommodate cross-cultural considerations, ensure milestone successes, and achieve desired outcomes. Anne Berkowitch, CEO of SelectMinds, will present best practices and strategies to launch a networking initiative and stay connected and engaged with retirees for knowledge transfer, mentoring, and a just-in-time talent pool.
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FDA Approves Risperdal for the Treatment of Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder in Children
The approval by the FDA for the use of Risperdal in the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in children is a momentous event. The decision was apparently made on the basis of a few very short term studies populated by a small number of subjects, a decision which is most uncharacteristic of the FDA. I have a number of acquaintances involved in drug development who have indicated to me that it is very difficult to find children available for any studies involving neuroleptics, let alone longer term studies. It is my opinion (and to a degree, my experience) that Risperdal and many other anti-psychotic medications have been prescribed off-label for children by psychiatrists for years because of the dearth of approved medications.
Risperdal is a powerful drug with both substantial benefits and significant side affects. Many fear that children may react differently than adults to such medications. In any event, because of this, and the short term nature and small populations of the studies done with children, the decision of the FDA is a courageous one. Because of this it is imperative that the consequences of the decision be closely monitored on a long term basis.
When I was diagnosed with schizophrenia at thirteen years of age over fifty years ago, I was immediately put on what at that time was the only neuroleptic available to anyone regardless of their age. It did not work well for me. My doctor and I then systematically tried every new medication that was introduced over the next ten years until we finally found a combination of drugs that returned me to full functionality. It is my firm belief that without the medications we tried over this 10 year period, I would almost certainly have experienced an increasing and irreversible loss of functional capacity over this ten year period and well beyond. In the end, after spending many years on the back ward of a state mental hospital, I would probably have long ago died on the streets. The trade-off in the use of these medications, at least for me, was enormous. The fact that my psychiatrist employed these medications profoundly changed my life for the better.
The many psychiatrists that have been prescribing neuroleptics off-label in an attempt to rescue the children in their care from the disastrous consequences of crippling and progressive brain diseases have done so at considerable personal and professional risk. Personally, I am pleased to see that the FDA has recognized the trade-off in the use of these medications in children and has now begun to share that risk by joining these psychiatrists in their compassionate struggle.
Read more SharePosts about the FDA's approval of Risperdal in children.
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Reference: AJCN July 2011 Author Joanna Mitri from Harvard School of Public Health
Competency: Vitamin D
Yeah! A Randomized placebo controlled trial that unequivocally shows that Vitamin D works with diabetes in improving pancreatic function. Dr Mitri and her team had to work hard to get this study done. They had to screen over 911 subjects to get 44 perfectly matched folks with diabetes that were split into 22 and 22 subjects. They had 45 in a parallel control group who got a bit of calcium as their treatment option. The study only ran for 12 weeks but that was enough to show meaningful changes. What did they look at? The ability of the pancreas to secrete insulin and control blood sugar is the whole story of diabetes. This study looked at a composite index of pancreatic function and showed that the Vitamin D group improved their function by a score of 300 while the control group dropped 126 points. That was statistically significant to a very high degree.
As we get heavier and put on weight (these folks were average BMI of 31) we soak up more vitamin D into our fat tissues. It’s hard to raise your D level when you are overweight. In this study they only raised their Vitamin D levels from 24 to 30 ng with the 2000 IU dose they gave. So, that was cautious to say the least. But the study only ran 12 weeks.
Readers of this column will know that 2000 IU will raise your blood level about 20 ng if you stick with it for a year. And from our Antarctic study, we know that 2000 IU will never get you much higher than 30 ng, which is about what this study accomplished with folks living in Boston where they had sunshine, some of the time.
What’s the meaning of this study? It’s huge. We ALL have diabetes risk as we get a little chubby. Much of it is subclinical. If you have a blood sugar of just 102, your doctor will tell you to lose a bit of weight and exercise more. Now, the script changes. “Lose weight, exercise more and make sure you are on at least 2000 IU. “ We know from the American College of Cardiology meetings last year that Vitamin D levels of 45 and above correlate with reduction in cardiac risk of some 70%, so a level of 30 is cautious, but in the right direction.
This is the first good RCT (randomized placebo controlled trial) of 2000 IU on diabetes that I’ve seen. This is good science. We now can unequivocally state that any recommendation of Vit D less than 2000 IU for someone at risk for diabetes is not enough.
WWW. What will work for me. Well, I want a D level of 60-80 by my read of the literature. But I’m projecting from physiology studies that show continuing improvement in function. This is a study showing outcome to match. We now need the same study giving 5000 iu a day, and just aiming for blood levels of 60. ng It’ll come. And I’ll try not to gloat. (And my two minutes are now up.)
Written by John E Whitcomb MD
Brookfield Longevity and Healthy Living Clinic
http://www.LiveLongMD.com
262-784-5300
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New DMCA exemptions for 2012
Every 3 years since 1998, the Librarian of Congress has been allowed to issue new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA is the act which (among other things) makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection schemes and DRM.
The 2012 crop of exemptions (here’s the official document) goes into effect today. The document itself is pretty lengthy, but Ars Technica has a great distillation of the important points. In bullet point form, here’s the new things that the DMCA no longer outlaws:
Jailbreaking your iPhone (or any other smartphone) is now legal. There’s a notable distinction here though: the exception applies to only phones. Tablets are specifically excluded. In the words of the rule, “…this aspect of the proposed class was broad and ill-defined, as a wide range of devices might be considered “tablets”…” Essentially, if it’s hard to define a tablet then how can it be made an exemption? An interesting point, though I don’t agree with the results. Unlocking your smartphone (making it compatible with a competitor’s cell network) without a carrier’s permission was previously exempted but will no longer be allowed if you buy your phone after January 2013. Why? Court rulings since the 2009 exemptions place more emphasis on the fact that we don’t own software – we just license it. The new exemptions also note that “…there are ample alternatives to circumvention”. The difference between jailbreaking and unlocking seems like splitting hairs to me, but it is what it is. We’re allowed to rip DVDs (but if I read it right, notblu-rays) and use excerpts in noncommercial, documentary, or educational films. That’s great, but I’m sad that the proposed exemption to allow “space shifting” of DVDs was denied. That would have let individual movie owners transfer movies to their PC, home server, or mobile device. Alas. Visually impaired users who purchase an ebook can remove DRM to allow the text to be electronically read aloud. The 2009 exemptions already allowed this one, but only in the case that content providers had specifically disabled read aloud functions. Now that requirement is gone, so this one’s a slight win. But it comes with a big caveat – the exemption does not include distribution of DRM-removal software to those blind users. So as the Ars Technica article points out: the visually impaired are welcome to remove DRM, but only if they can write software to do it themselves.
That last contradiction reinforces my belief that the DMCA is a fundamentally broken piece of legislation. It’s nice that it allows for periodic exemptions, but that process is too narrowly scoped. Looking at Ars’ excellent analysis again:
“The space-shifting ruling is a good illustration of the fundamental brokenness of the DMCA. In order to convince the Librarian to allow DVD ripping in order to watch it on an iPad, a court would first need to rule that doing so falls under copyright’s fair use defense. To get such a ruling, someone would have to rip a DVD (or sell a DVD-ripping tool), get sued in court, and then convince a judge that DVD ripping is fair use. But in such a case, the courts would probably
never reachthe fair use question, because—absent an exemption from the Librarian of Congress—circumvention is illegal whether or not the underlying use of the work would be a fair use. So no fair use ruling without an exemption, and no exemption without a fair use ruling. A classic catch-22.”
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The government should give fiscal incentives like duty refund on more technical textiles products and excise duty reduction on man-made fibres and yarns to give a fillip to the sector, industry body Ficci has said.
In its recommendations to the textiles ministry for taking up the issues with the finance ministry, the chamber said that technical textiles have high export potential and there is a need to incentivise the sector under the Special Focus Product Scheme of Foreign Trade Policy.
Under the scheme, the sector would be eligible for grant of duty credit certificates equivalent to 5% of the final value of exports.
Technical Textiles are specially engineered products used for various applications including medical, protective clothing, automotive, industrial and fire retardants.
Since man-made fibres and yarns are the major raw materials for technical textiles, the excise duty on it should be reduced from 10% to 4% to promote the indigenous production at an affordable prices.
It said that the government should also allow duty free imports of certain speciality fibres and yarns that are not produced in India.
The chamber further recommended to fix drawback and refund rates for new technical textiles products and keep the industry out of the ambit of the proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST) for at least two years.
"There is a huge potential for their exports to developed countries but unfortunately they are bulky in nature and involve prohibitive costs for transportation," it said adding "there is a need for higher export incentives for such products".
FICCI has also sought customs duty exemption on imports of certain raw materials.
The market-size of the technical textile industry is about Rs 41,000-crore. It is estimated that the number would grow at the rate around 12% every year.
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The company car: status symbol or tax nightmare?
HR magazine, April 01, 2002
As the tax changes begin to bite, the company car may be in danger of losing its pulling power. By Larissa BannisterProvision of company cars can be a potential minefield for the hapless employer insurance, high accident rates among company car drivers, tax, maintenance, the possible introduction of congestion charges, falling resale values. And for the employee, ever-increasing tax on fuel and on the cars themselves has taken some of the gloss off the traditional status conferred by a shiny new company wagon.
Nevertheless, following a slowdown in the market for company cars in 1999, sales in 2000 were up again by 2.5% and despite economic uncertainty, analysts predict some market growth over the next two years. Part of the reason for this buoyancy is the high number of business need users employees whose cars are intrinsic to their roles. But as well as these users, there remain large numbers of perk car drivers, generally those at a more senior level, who receive cars as a measure of their status. The emotional value of the car remains a factor they can be important tools for both recruitment and retention of staff. And the more junior the employee, the more likely they are to see their car as a status symbol and get enthusiastic about it. Meanwhile, for many senior management roles, provision of an expensive motor is seen as a prerequisite. But now the company car market is facing its biggest shake-up for years. The new CO2 tax on vehicle emissions, which comes into force this month, penalises drivers based on the emissions of their cars rather than the amount of business miles they drive. The likely effects of the changes are significant and raise a number of options for employers who want to alleviate the increased burden on their staff. Perhaps the most obvious way forward is to ensure that employees have access to vehicles that are environmentally friendly and that they understand how the vehicles they drive will affect the tax they pay. This is particularly important for business need users who will now face a significantly heavier tax burden but do not have the option of giving up their cars. An employer must ensure that drivers understand that the increased tax burden is a government not an individual business initiative, and educate them as to ways that the burden can be reduced. Gerard Gornall, market development manager, PCP, for Lex Vehicle Leasing, says that companies are already changing their fleet policies as a result of the new rules to include cars with lower emissions. We are seeing employees start to choose more environmentally-friendly vehicles, he adds. Graham Rees, business development director of independent fleet management company Fleet Logistics, says the legislation will have a profound effect on the cars that people choose to drive. It can even save the employer money, he adds. If, for example, drivers choose diesel cars then there will be savings on petrol costs. Another effect for employers will be that a large number of drivers will now make an effort to understand the tax laws because the car they choose will affect how much they pay, he continues. So employees will want more input on the manufacturers the company selects its cars from and will want to be more involved in fleet management generally. Giving up performance for a greener machine is not, however, the only way to stop tax levels increasing. Another option for consideration is introducing financial compensation for drivers who will pay more tax under the new rules. But business does not have a history of compensating drivers for increased government-imposed tax burdens and the financial cost would only increase every year, as cars with high CO2 emissions attract progressively higher taxes. This could, however, be a short-term solution until the employer can alleviate the problem by making changes to its fleet. These changes could involve provision of more flexible options. Personal contract purchase (PCP) schemes where employees use a cash allowance from the employer to purchase their own car avoid benefit in kind (BIK) tax because the employee rather than the company has ownership of the vehicle. Lex Vehicle Leasing anticipates significant growth in the PCP market itself as a result of the new laws an increase of as much as 10%, according to managing director Jon Walden. But variations on this theme are making PCP more attractive by offering company-wide PCP plans that retain economies of scale and, in some cases, employer control. Although the details vary, these new schemes basically transfer ownership of the car to the employee. The employer, meanwhile, pays the employee a cash allowance which they can spend on funding a car through the scheme. Like PCP, the schemes are flexible an employee can add to the employers allowance to get a better car, or choose a cheaper car and pocket the difference. Fleet finance company Alphabet has introduced the Alternative Car Scheme. Unlike traditional PCP schemes, ownership is passed to the employee from the beginning, with the option that Alphabet will buy back the car at the end of the three-year term at a pre-arranged price. The employees are assessed on an individual basis and dont have to arrange anything themselves. Mike Baldry, chief operating officer for Alphabet, says, From the drivers point of view, not only are they better off in terms of vehicle choice and tax payments, they also avoid exposure to the financial costs associated with private ownership, such as maintenance cost or falling residual values. A similar scheme called Driver Assured is run for Greene King by fleet management company CLM. Some schemes even retain employer control over the type of car an individual purchases like Lex Vehicle Leasings soon to be launched Your Choice product. Although the car belongs to the individual as with any PCP scheme, the company will be able to stipulate model and will arrange the funding and maintenance, explains Gornell. But an individual cannot sign up to these new schemes on his own, as he can with PCP if an employer does not subscribe then neither can the employee. The problem for the employer is that converting a fleet entirely is a costly and time-consuming business. According to HSBCs Business Car Expectations report 2002, just 15% of employers offer even a cash allowance as an option, let alone a personal purchasing scheme. And the benefit to the employer, in the main, is not financial its just that its better for the employee. Which for some is enough in itself. Pat Turner, general manager for HR at the Norwich & Peterborough Building Society which has just converted all its cars to the Alternative Car Scheme says that the benefits of the switch are significant. We wanted a scheme that offered choice and flexibility to the employee but enabled us to contain costs and make our car provision as tax-efficient as possible, he adds. This does all that and it enables staff to run the same sort of car that they had last year without being penalised. Ian Bradley Commercial Director Rees Bradley Hepburn (advertising agency Car Facts Ian Bradley is a bit of a car buff. Hes a big fan of motor sport and has owned three British racing cars over the past few years. Hes just had delivery of his new company car the impressive and sporty-looking TVR Cerbera. The Cerbera was originally devised in 1993 and like all TVRs is hand-built in Blackpool. Bradleys new company car will reach 60mph in 3.9 seconds, 100 mph in 8.1 seconds and has a top speed of nearly 200mph. He has chosen chameleon paintwork, which means the car changes colour from purple/black to dark green depending on the light. Its not a car for everyone, as Bradley himself admits. Although it is a four-seater, it is designed for speed rather than comfort and for fun rather than practicality. So if you drive 24,000 business miles every year, why choose this as your company car? Id always admired the TVR as a marque, explains Bradley, but they were never practical when I had a young family. Its only in the last four years that Ive been able to treat myself to a lightweight, powerful sportscar. It looks very special and even though its a pain to get into, once youve got in you dont want to get out again. As well as its impracticality, the TVR is a thirsty machine Bradley says he only gets 20 miles out of every gallon. Its also a noisy car to drive Bradley admits he rarely listens to the CD player because of the engine noise. TVRs have a reputation for being unreliable, he adds, but I did 36,000 miles in 18 months in my last one. I use it every day and it has let me down occasionally but its pretty good on the whole. Bradleys car is owned by his company, Rees Bradley Hepburn a top-three Midlands advertising agency. All directors, account directors, heads of department and some account managers have company cars. The directors cars are bought outright and appear on the company balance sheet as assets the remainder are on financial lease. As you would expect from an advertising agency, no opportunity for self-promotion is wasted a number of the cars also sport personal RBH numberplates. Distribution is based on need, says Bradley, and if you qualify, you can choose whatever car you want within a price band. Company cars are still a big perk for our employees even though they need them for work, he adds. My gut feeling is that people put a high value on them as status symbols. Because of the new CO2 emissions laws, Rees Bradley Hepburn is looking at alternative ways of financing its cars drivers will be hit badly because of high mileage and their high-performance vehicles. We are still working out whether to offer cash instead of cars or whether to increase salaries to compensate for the higher tax burden, says Bradley. The problem is that if we offer cash, people are likely to have to trade down which I know they wont be pleased about. Personally, Id be very unhappy if I had to give up my car, he adds. I dont really view it as a status symbol not many people want to drive TVRs but its important to me because of the link with racing. I will pay a big tax penalty next year although thats how it will be for most drivers of high-performance cars. Im not a special case and despite the cost, Ill be keeping the car. Ian Preece Assistant Managing Director Safeguard (health and safety consultants) Car Facts Ian Preece is one of the first company car drivers in the UK to choose to drive Toyotas new petrol/electric hybrid car, the Prius. The car has two engines, one normal petrol engine and one electric. When accelerating or going uphill, the car uses petrol normally. But at the same time, the engine, wheel and braking movements charge up the electric engine. Then, when the car slows down, the electric engine comes on and powers the movement. There is no need to plug in either the car itself or any batteries and the car looks much like any ordinary four-door saloon. It drives like any other car as well, says Preece. The only real difference is that its so much quieter when its slowing down, the engine is nearly silent and there is no air pollution. Preece used to drive a Toyota Lexus a meaty, powerful vehicle rather like a BMW 3 series. Last year, he agreed to carry out the first UK commercial trial of the Prius and was so impressed with it after three months that he decided to make the switch permanent. The major difference between the old and the new car is the running cost, he says. In the Prius, I managed an average of 54.1 mpg over the 7,000 miles I drove during the trial and the tank only costs 32 to fill on the motorway much less than my old car. I then worked out that a typical company car driver would save around 1,000 in petrol costs in one year, he adds. This could make a big difference to employers for a company that runs 1,000 company cars, the potential saving would be 1 million. The only downside to the Prius, he says, is the 1500cc engine. Its not a boy racers car, it wont accelerate at 100mph going up a hill, he adds. But it is a lot roomier inside than it looks and Im not a boy racer anymore anyway. Company car tax laws have got so prohibitive now, says Preece, that he no longer views his car as a perk, as he did 10 years ago. Its still worth having a company car because it removes all the maintenance and high mileage worries, he says. Its not a perk because I couldnt do my job without it like I couldnt without a computer, but my computer isnt taxed. He chose to trial the car in anticipation of the new CO2 rules. Now he has switched permanently, his potential tax savings are set to be significant. Under the old rules, he paid 3,225 in tax every year on the Lexus. When he got notice of his coding for next year, he saw that his tax figure had risen to 6,021 an increase of 2,796 on the same car. Changing to the Prius, he estimates, will cost him 50 less tax per month than the Lexus did under the old rules. The Prius is the lowest rated car in terms of CO2 emissions on the UK market other than purely electric cars which run from batteries. There really are no disadvantages and so many pluses, he adds. Im now going to make an effort to let people know how good the car is internally in the hope that a few of the staff will want to get one as well. John Roberts Group HR Director Greene King (brewery) Car Facts John Roberts chose his company car when he joined the company in October 2000 and just before he revamped company car provision across the business. Roberts selected a BMW for his family as well as his business needs. The car is luxurious, fast, fantastic to drive, he says, but it also offers great security and safety features and theres plenty of room for the three kids, child seats and their related baggage. Introducing more choice and flexibility to company car policy was one of Roberts first projects on joining Greene King. Previously, all cars were leased and staff were given few options. Employees can now opt out if they want to as long as they drive less than 8,000 business miles a year, he explains. Or they can choose to join a scheme we devised with our fleet management company, CLM, called Driver Assured. Its for high-mileage drivers who like the control of having their own cars but it gives them the option to bring those cars into our fleet management system. They avoid the tax and I dont have to worry about roadworthiness and other safety issues. Greene King employees are now given allowances dependent on their seniority. They then get to choose their car from around 3,000 vehicles. Drivers also have the option of contributing up to 20% above their allowance of their own money to get a better car or they can flex down to the bottom grade and take the cash difference. Why make all these changes? Company cars are an emotional subject, Roberts says. People do get het up about them and if they feel things are not right, you hear about it very quickly. In addition, says Roberts, having a competitive company car policy is important for recruitment and retention of staff. Its not a dealbreaker for me, but it can be for some people so its important to ensure that your car policy is competitive with or better than the competition, he adds. He also believes that different types of employees respond to company cars in different ways. People generally feel proud to have a nice car but there are some areas of the business where the type of car is more important than others, he says. Those in operational roles tend to be more concerned with cars than those in functional roles on the other hand, in my experience there is little difference in attitude between men and women. Personally, Roberts says, he is not particularly attached to his BMW. Its nice to have a good car with a nice badge but Id really prefer an off-roader. But when I joined they werent an option here. He anticipates that the new laws will have a widespread impact. I think itll work for the chancellor. Hes using an HR strategy reward for a certain type of behaviour. There will be a migration to smaller cars and diesel engines. The new laws presented Roberts with his own HR challenge. We did lots of presentations on the new policy, explaining that high business mile drivers would be paying more tax. Some of the staff were confused and had seen it as a company rather than a government initiative so we had to make it very clear that it was being imposed by the Government. The other problem facing Roberts and other HR directors is the delayed Budget Gordon Brown has moved it to 17 April, 11 days after the start of the new tax year. It struck me today that I will have to second-guess what the Budget is going to contain, Roberts comments. I dont know what changes the chancellor is going to make to tax on personal petrol, for example. If he does raise the burden, it might be better for a lot of people to hand in their fuel cards [which are used when filling up with petrol/diesel] and buy their own personal fuel. The problem is that by 17 April they will already have used them and so theyll be penalised for the year to come. What now for the company car? Tax changes Traditionally, company car drivers have been taxed on their cars as perks. Drivers were taxed on a percentage of the list price of their cars and the more business miles they drove, the less tax they had to pay. Under the new rules, drivers will be taxed on between 15% of list price for cars with the lowest emissions and 35% for those with the highest. Diesel cars attract an extra 3% on the tax percentage, although diesel models will fall into a lower CO2 band than their petrol equivalents. The effect on employees What this means for drivers will depend on the number of miles they do. Business need drivers, whose cars are essential to their work and who drive more than 18,000 miles a year, will now pay more tax than the 15% they paid before unless they drive cars in the lowest CO2 band. But in this band are vehicles like Ford Ka and the Nissan Micra not really practical for those long motorway trips. On the other hand, perk drivers, who receive cars as a measure of status, may well be better off under the new rules. If they drive less than 2,500 business miles per year, their old tax level was 35%. Now, only the most gas-guzzling machines like the Mercedes S Class - attract tax levels as high as 35%. So their burden is likely to be reduced pushing company car provision back to being an effective means of compensation. What if you fall between the two and drive between 2,500 and 18,000 miles a year? With previous tax levels set at 25%, Deloitte and Touche estimate that anyone in this band whose car emits less than 215g/km will be better off. So, unless your car is particularly high performance, your tax burden should remain largely unchanged. A BMW 3 series, for instance, will attract 25% tax under the new rules the same as it would have done under the old rules for drivers in this band.
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I still remember important discoveries. I learned about unhealthy elements of my family's diet, such as the abundance of white rice that was habitually eaten in my household, but not anymore -- thanks to my research.
Read Whole Story
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The financial system is fragile again and regulators are not clever enough to see the full picture, with U.S. moves to starve watchdogs also not helping, Financial Services Authority (FSA) Chairman Adair Turner said on Thursday.
One sometimes feels that this financial system is like some incredibly complicated waterbed, when you try and deal with something here and then something happens at the other end, Turner said in an interview with Prospect magazine.
We're just not clever enough to see it, Turner said.
He is worried the U.S. financial industry is persuading lawmakers to row back a sweeping reform of Wall Street known as the Dodd-Frank Act.
What is going on in Congress is deliberate action to starve some U.S. regulators of funds, which I think has a degree of motivation coming out of some financial interests through campaign money to members of Congress, Turner said.
Turner, a senior member of the Group of 20 (G20) leading economies' Financial Stability Board, appeared to back further money printing or quantitative easing by the Bank of England to stimulate a UK economy some analysts see going into a recession.
He expects global finance to shrink once all the tougher new bank capital and other rules have been applied.
The FSA is being scrapped next year and will be replaced by two new regulators, one inside the Bank of England, the other a standalone consumer watchdog with no role for Turner so far.
He has been touted as possible governor of the Bank of England but would not be drawn on his next job.
I think first of all, I'll just have a very, very long sleep. And then beyond that, I'll do something else, he told Prospect.
(Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by David Holmes)
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This month sees the publication of the latest in a glut of follow-these-simple-rules-for-a-better-life books, their "unique" selling point: tips from times past. The Perfect Hostess: Perfectly Charming Etiquette Advice - an almost direct reprint of a 1930s book by Rose Henniker-Heaton - is the apotheosis of what could be described as nostalgia publishing. These books centre on the home, they offer domestic advice and the era most often raided for inspiration seems to be the Fifties. The catch however is that, unlike The Perfect Hostess, most of these books are not reprints. They have been written by women of my generation, in the 21st century. What is going on?
I'm talking about books like House Rules and Domestic Bliss. A typical sentence from House Rules: The Stylish Guide to Running a Home and Having a Life by Clare Coulson (2005) reads like this: "Most of us fantasise about a domestic idyll where we bake cakes on a Saturday afternoons and friends come round in the evening and marvel at our delicious canapés... the reality is that many of us don't know where to begin." Over the next 280-odd pages advice is given on how to do so. And whether it's baking, ironing or "detoxing a toxic wardrobe" each topic, no matter how banal, is treated with house-mistressy rigour .
What bothers me, apart from the nauseating pastel-pink book jacket, is the assumption that "we" all want to live out a fantasy from the 1950s. Since when? I don't want to swap my iPod for a mint-green radio and I certainly don't want to find myself thinking: "Right, I'm going to iron my sheets." Who has the inclination to obsess about pillowcases? And more to the point, who has the time?
Cultural commentator Peter York regards the recent deluge of domestic goddess books as a middle-class trend. "It's Marie Antoinette; it's decorative and done as therapy. Making fairy cakes is fine, but in an economic sense it's a nonsense. If you had a tough job and no child-care you wouldn't have time. It's doing it as a luxury because you don't have to - whereas 40 years ago there was no choice."
In Domestic Bliss, Rita Konig talks of "styling one's life". Her tips include "decant washing up liquid into an olive oil bottle" to "having a mélange of antique bedlinen". When she suggests her perfect week - Sunday cinema, Monday TV supper, Tuesday get some people over because it is the "dreariest of nights" - you have to remember something. These ideas are from someone who admits she used to spend hours organising her "mother's glass cupboard". It's a manifesto of perfectionism; it's the Stepford Wives, only without the black humour. I object to being told "how to live" by Konig, and how to "have a life" by Coulson. I say get a life. I can't understand why women of my age are writing books like this. The tone of voice used is so straight-laced, it's as if they've taken the most anachronistic elements of boarding school and distilled them into a book. They're peddling an image of cake-baking and tea parties where people swan around in frilly aprons. It's a doctrine of a so-called perfect life, but not one I want to live.
Brought to book 'House Rules: The Stylish Guide to Running a Home and Having a Life' by Clare Coulson, Bantam Press, £12.99
With chapters on "how lead a crease-free life" to "the fundamentals of a good night's sleep", Coulson has got insider tips from people like Lulu Guiness and Kelly Hoppen. Good if you want to organise your toiletries, bad if you're looking for a laugh.
'The Perfect Hostess: Perfectly Charming Etiquette Advice' by Rose Henniker-Heaton, Conran Octopus, £9.99
Etiquette from another era, the author devotes a page to how to prepare lunch for the woman your husband nearly married. And under things a husband ought to know, "how to make excuses for you over the telephone". Frivolous and fun.
'Domestic Bliss: How To Live', by Rita Konig, Ebury, £16
Top tips on how to wrap presents ("feathers and artificial flowers add a lot of flair") and bringing cakes into work because "office life can get so tedious". Enjoyable if you're fascinated with life on another planets.
'Manners', 'Style' and 'Occasions' a trio of books by Kate Spade, Simon & Schuster, £12.99 each
An American handbag designer's take on what to wear and how to behave in tricky social situations. Spade says: "Exercise your manners 365 days a year." No slacking now ladies.Reuse content
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Forget the stigma, it's good to rent Published 12/03/2010 | 05:00
HAving spent the first 25 years of my life in a rented house I can never quite understand the reluctance of people to rent.
Okay, so you don't OWN your house -- but the truth is that until a mortgage is fully paid off a person doesn't, in fact, own his or her own home. The bank or building society owns it.
Paying off the loan is a process than can take up to 30 years. So the argument about rent being 'dead money' doesn't really hold up. If you are renting you are, in fact, paying for a commodity -- four walls, a roof and possibly a garden -- for as long as you want it.
A case could be made for living within one's means by paying as you go, instead of investing in what our grandparents called 'the Never-Never', and carrying the burden of a €300,000 plus debt for years.
My experience of renting -- and I have rented three times during my life so far -- has been nothing but good.
My parents came down to Dublin from Belfast in the 1930s and hadn't the money for a deposit on a house, so they looked around for a house to rent, which was quite common practice in those days.
They wanted a newly built house and it had to be unfurnished. (This, to my mind, is one of the most important things when renting. As soon as you put in your own furniture, and hang your own pictures on the walls, the house becomes your home, and whether it is rented or not is immaterial.)
I wasn't aware of any stigma attached to not owning our own home. Our house was lovely, well kept, well maintained. Joey, the handyman employed by our landlord, was our saviour whenever anything went wrong. He painted the outside of the house every few years, checked locks on the windows and doors and coped with the very occasional plumbing problems that occurred.
Our landlady was also from the north, a forthright businesswoman who took a great fancy to my elegant mother and gave her the job of choosing a name for our new road, taken from a list of four Ulster castles.
The friendship between the two women became very strong over the years.
So important were my family to our landlords that when their only daughter ran off and married a Dutchman, she came to my father's place of work and begged him to break the news to her parents!
My next experience of renting was after 30 years of marriage. Our house had become too big for us, after the children moved away, and we decided to sell and buy in Greystones, Co Wicklow.
We sold at the start of the boom for an acceptable, but fairly modest, price and then discovered, to our horror, that nothing was, as yet, being built in Greystones.
In danger of having no roof over our heads I frantically contacted my auctioneer friends and they gave me the name of a young man -- a builder -- who had just bought a house that he worked on, and which he now wanted to rent out.
What a lovely house that was! Our young landlord, Paul, was one of the early Celtic Tiger cubs who decided to invest in property. He ended up owning several houses, all of which he let out.
This house, also, was new and in tip-top condition. Everything worked to perfection. We brought our own furniture and paintings. Only the garden was poor -- levelled, but badly sown with grass. We were fond of gardening and we put a shape on it. (A law introduced a couple of years ago specifies that the landlord is now responsible for the garden.)
We lived in that house for a year, waiting, all the while, to get some place to buy in or around Greystones. No luck. Zilch!
We accepted defeat, moved back to Dublin, having spent a happy year in Wicklow and bought an apartment.
Fast forward 13 years and we decided to have another shot at Wicklow. This time picking Kilpedder, beside our daughter. We tried to sell our apartment, but had no luck, so ended by renting a lovely bungalow in Kilpedder and renting out our apartment, until such time as the market would improve.
It didn't, as everyone now knows, and we had no option but to return to Dublin. Wicklow, it appears, is not for us.
Thinking over it all, "physician, heal thyself" seems to apply. After 30 years as a property writer I should have known better!
But one thing was proved to us -- we had nothing but good experiences from the exercise of renting. We got on well with our landlords. They kept the houses in good nick, as did we. We didn't bother them and they didn't bother us.
As a nation, we have bad memories of having landlords. But the number of renters has been slowly rising over the past couple of years -- through immigration and due to fluctuations in the property market. Maybe we are ready to let go of the past.
Irish Independent
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India has always looked to the United States of America as an ideal, striving to become more like that country in many ways. In fact, in many ways, we could not have chosen a worse ideal, given that the consumerist culture and proclivity for bigotry that country shows from time to time is definitely not worth emulating. But one fascinating aspect of American life that India could do well to replicate is the Public Library system.
The USA’s public library system originated in the 1880’s with a push for literacy leading to the establishment of a number of libraries that were funded from tax revenues and private donations, and whose membership was free to the public. They remain open to this day, providing the service, incalculable in worth, of bringing the magic of books, words and education to every person in the community.
India, by contrast, has very few public libraries. Most of the quality libraries operate on a subscription model, and are as often as not, run by the British Council or a similar body. There are some libraries that run on donations, which are relatively inexpensive, but the list of quality public libraries in India is tragically short.
In order to understand the effect of public libraries on society, it would be helpful to look at the experiences of citizens in other parts of the world. A survey conducted in Vancouver concluded that as many as 73% of its citizens had visited the public library at least once in the year, with 62% stating they simply would not be able to read as much as they did in the absence of the public library. Another study conducted in Germany concluded that by offering a place for meeting, learning and working, a public library was an essential pillar of society. In fact, the Indian Library Association has tried to push for making Public Libraries a part of the ‘Smart City’ initiative, integrating the #DigitalIndia push with the function of a library in bringing not just books, but online databases and internet access to the masses.
One of the major objectives of the ‘Smart City’ initiative is to ensure the development of a knowledge-based economy where skilled workers are able to continuously improve themselves and align their capabilities for the work of the future. Public libraries would be an important facet of this endeavour, by making the resources freely available to the workers of the future.
Interestingly, there is historical precedent. The ancient University of Nalanda is recorded as having one of the biggest public libraries in the world, which is what attracted many Chinese scholars to come and study there. More recently, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaikewad of Baroda, a noted lover of European culture, tried to implement a public library system in India, funding a number of free libraries in his kingdom.
In India, the formation of Public Libraries is a state subject, but half of the states in India have not passed legislation or earmarked funds for formalising an effective Public Libraries policy. And this is tragic, because Libraries are reservoirs of knowledge, which will stagnate if not replenished with new books, better facilities and so on.
A Public Library system is an essential part of a country’s knowledge base, enabling the citizenry to grow intellectually and become a part of the future. If Digital India does not want to leave behind the majority of its citizens, it is essential that we invest in the Public Library system.
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The Ireland-domiciled Ucits fund will be the latest addition to the business’s suite of systematic liquid alternatives products.
It has been launched to meet demand from investors for portfolio-diversifying products that invest in strategies with uncorrelated returns to traditional markets, the company said.
Target and strategy
Star will have a volatility target of 8% and aims to deliver positive total returns on a rolling 12-month basis, uncorrelated to bond and equity markets.
The strategy seeks to capture returns via exposure to a range of systematic investment styles, or style premia, generating long-term results across markets and asset classes.
The core underlying styles are value, quality, momentum and carry, across equities, fixed income, and currency asset classes.
The team
Star’s lead manager, Leif Cussen, has worked on OMGI’s systematic alternative products since joining the business in 2005, including co-developing OMGI’s statistical arbitrage strategy.
Cussen will be supported on the fund by Paul Simpson and John Dow as portfolio managers.
In addition to the management team, a style premia investment committee will provide an additional level of support, oversight and governance to ensure that the fund remains in line with customer expectations.
Diversification
Cussen said: “Star is designed to meet a growing demand for cost-effective systematic strategies. The fund gives investors access to the diversifying benefits of four core systematic styles across multiple asset classes. In addition, it utilises our proven proprietary statistical arbitrage capability to further enhance diversification and mitigate crowding risks typically associated with style premia exposures.”
Donald Pepper, managing director of alternatives, said: “Star is designed to have a very low correlation to traditional assets. We believe the strategy will be a good diversifier to market driven exposures in clients’ portfolios. Further, given its long/short orientation, we see the strategy as a complement to hedge fund strategies, but at a significantly reduced cost.”
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Financial Lessons from an African Dictator
by Rich Checkan,
Investment U Contributor
Friday, June 24, 2011: Issue #1542
[
Editor's Note: Richard Checkan is one of the smartest investment minds I know. The Vice President of Asset Strategies International, Rich has often contributed unique moneymaking insights to Investment U. His specialty: building wealth using gold, silver and other hard assets. Today's piece is one of his most provocative... and potentially valuable. ~ Garrett Baldwin]
Core holdings.
These represent your emergency finances. Your ace in the hole - the gold and silver (and maybe some platinum) that you hope you never have to use, but thank the heavens you have if you do. They are your bridge across social, political and economic chaos. And the world is full of chaos.
With Libya now looking like America's third war in little more than a decade, it's hard to imagine what the people of Tripoli are doing in order to make ends meet with the country burning around them. I was reminded of the importance of core holdings recently when I saw a
Financial Times article about Libya's beleaguered dictator, Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
The article explained that Gadhafi had only one hope of financing his war against the insurgents who were threatening to topple his regime. He couldn't borrow the money. He couldn't even access funds Libya had moved abroad. His accounts were frozen worldwide...
Gadhafi Saved By Libya's Core Holdings in Gold
His only source of funds was his "core holdings" - the gold that he had stored at the Libyan Central Bank. While most central banks store their gold in London, Switzerland, or New York City, this is not the case with Libya. Gadhafi had always insisted that Libya's gold be stored at the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli.
We're not talking about some coins or bars tucked away in a safe-deposit box, by the way. Libya's gold holdings rank in the top 25 in the world. It is estimated that the bank is sitting on roughly 144 tons of the world's oldest and best form of money. At today's prices, that is $6.5 billion worth of the yellow metal. That may only represent a few minutes worth of government spending in this country; but in Libya, it's enough to finance a war.
So while no legitimate business or government will loan Gadhafi money now, or even trade with him, his hoard of gold may be the answer to his financial needs. He can use it to acquire currency, arms, food and other supplies for his military.
Wealth Insurance: Core Holdings of Gold and Silver
As I read the article, I was struck by this real-world example of the message we have preached so many times: When markets are volatile, you need some "core holdings" of gold and silver. There is simply no better "wealth insurance" than having precious metals as part of your portfolio.
We saw the value of gold as emergency money when the Vietnamese refugees fled South Vietnam in the 1970s.
We saw it repeated when South Korea emerged from the Asian currency crisis several years ago. Gold helped them rebound faster than most other countries from the Asian flu.
We saw it in this country when the stock market tumbled. In many cases, margin calls could only be met by the liquidation of gold and other precious-metals holdings (which, by the way, maintained their value while paper assets were crumbling).
Time and time again, we have seen the value of gold as wealth insurance. Granted, almost every cause is nobler than that of Libya's dictator. In good times and bad (and for good guys and bad), throughout history the role gold can play in solving a financial emergency is well-documented.
A Liquid Store of Value for Financial Emergencies
Simply put, gold is a store of value, in a liquid form, for a financial emergency that you pray you never have. You buy it and you hold onto it regardless of price fluctuations. If you have a financial emergency, you sell the gold to meet those obligations. That's what it is there for.
And successful investing begins by conceding that - to a degree - uncertainty will always be your companion. That's why it's critical that you have a sound strategy that does more than just "diversify."
The
Investment U Asset Allocation Model provides a sound philosophy that helps you invest in an array of domestic and foreign stocks, bonds and precious metals. Doing this has allowed us to survive, prosper and build our wealth during the longest bear market since the Great Depression.
And precious metals are an important part of your portfolio. You don't need an African dictator to remind you of that...
Good investing,
Rich Checkan
Editor's Note: For more information about core holdings, email Rich Checkan at info@assetstrategies.com or call 800.831.0007. When you write or call, be sure to ask for a free subscription to ASI's weekly alerts and monthly newsletter, Information Line. They won't cost you a penny.
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In their book,
Transient caretakers: making life on earth sustainable, Mervyn King and Teodorina Lessidrenska demonstrate that the sustainability of Earth is threatened by irresponsible corporate citizens.
King and Lessidrenska are regarded among the leading global experts on corporate governance and sustainable reporting.
Among others, some firms are endangering the environment through carbon emissions, depletion of natural resources, ocean dumps, hazardous waste, industrial waste, deforestation and nuclear waste. Other than compelling companies to act responsibly through legislation and regulatory requirements, companies should be taught and be encouraged to embrace the African values of Letsema.
The concept of Letsema originates in the African tradition of volunteering one’s labour to community projects. It is also linked to old African adages that say: “Two heads are better than one”, and: “A single finger cannot remove fluff”.
In terms of the African communal model, development is seen as the movement or progression of the community, group or individual from their current socio-economic status to the desired one. Development is the responsibility of the individual in the first instance, and is supported by others as a group or a community.
The development of the individual is the result of the joint efforts and contributions of everyone in the community and outside the community. Whenever one person succeeds, it is the community that succeeds and the individual feels obliged to give back to the community that has empowered him. This entrenches a sense of responsibility and unity in the community. When an individual has a vision to achieve, he or she needs the community to support, develop and grow that vision in order to benefit the individual and the community as a whole.
Collaboration in Letsema is not just about teamwork among community members, but it also entails a partnership with the land, rivers and nature at large. To this end, Basotho people have an old saying that says: “Re seng: We are all related, all humans and non-humans.”
The significant aspect of this view is the web of relationships that constitute the whole. The African people’s history of the land and indigenous farming practices are entrenched in the Letsema values and put an emphasis on the relationship, interdependence, reciprocity and collaboration of nature and people. Working jointly to plough each other’s fields or doing joint community work collaboratively brought a strong sense of rootedness and an aspect of belonging among African people.
Other than individuals working together jointly, Africans have always viewed the land as one of their collaborators (a patriot). This view is illustrated by Mathabo Tsepa (2008) who wrote: “The elders stories illustrate that food such as sorghum is central to maintaining the relationship between people and their lands. The connection among people, land and food is brought to life through the traditional farming practices that involve Letsema. Direct participation with the land and growing food appears to establish and maintain a context for respecting the land.
“As elder Maleshonae points out, ‘respecting the land, these crops and all that goes with it is not something you can learn sitting in your hut… you go to work with land, or seeds, or the crops or whatever it may be. In the long run, that interaction and communication you have with your crops and the land lead to developing respect.”
Unlike contemporary entrepreneurs who respect the environment due to regulatory enforcement of integrated reporting, indigenous African entrepreneurs cared about nature many centuries ago due to their appreciation of the Letsema values (collaboration with environment).
It is important to note that Letsema is not just an empty metaphor, but a way of life that emphasised the significance of the Africans maintaining caring relationships with the environment while working on the land to provide food security.
Through storytelling and oral history, Africans taught their next generations the importance of maintaining interconnectedness with nature by practising traditional farming methods. Among others, this included promoting biodiversity and protecting insects, birds, fish and animals.
The Letsema values discouraged greed; one only had to take what was sufficient for the family and give back to the land through traditional fertilisers (animal dung). This compost would rejuvenate the land that had become tired of production to become fertile again. This demonstrated the Africans thanksgiving and giving back to nature.
Mathobo Tsepa wrote about how the Basotho would appreciate their inter-connectedness and interrelatedness by leaving some of the sorghum in the field during harvest as a way of giving back to the land and earthworms.
Moreover, surplus sorghum is fed back to the cattle, and the resultant cow dung is deployed on to the fields as manure to enrich the soil.
Letsema values instilled the sense of responsible and sustainable farming among the Africans. It became the reservoir of African indigenous knowledge long before there were academic journals on biological diversity.
Actually, in the absence of environmental and farming publications, Africans regarded nature as a greater teacher who would guide them on how to relate respectfully with the environment.
It is sad to note that due to the dearth of indigenous story-telling, Africans have largely lost the Letsema value, which was the foundation for community well-being and the collaboration among people, and between humans and nature. If current entrepreneurs and other business people could embrace the Letsema values, malfeasance such as the poaching of rhinos and environmental degradation will be mitigated.
In the same vein, I posit that the negligence of decommissioned mining shafts and the escalation of acid water would be reduced if the Letsema values were embraced.
If corporate entrepreneurs can implement some of the values espoused in this treatise, our companies shall become better corporate citizens.
The inference is that Letsema can help us execute our role of being responsible caretakers of the Earth, so that future generations can inherit a better place to live and thrive.
Modipa is the founder and executive chairman of Sebata Group
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The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has committed itself to its IBM Lotus platform as it pushes forward with its seven-year transformation program to 2017.
The so-called ABS 2017 program (pdf) aimed to update statistical business processes and information management infrastructure, some of which had been in place since the 1970s.
It aimed to reduce the cost of doing business and “industrialise” ABS processes, including rationalising disparate survey systems and some 400 applications, many of which rely on Notes and associated software products.
ABS may be the last major federal agency to retain Notes as central to its applications development but chief information officer Patrick Hadley described the platform as a strong ally in the department’s transformation quest.
“We have Notes programming skills in our team. They are very smart and very technologically literate,” he said. “We are a happy Notes camper.”
The bureau adopted Lotus Notes and Domino for its workflow, messaging, knowledge repositories, subscription business intelligence services integration, records management and web content management in the 1990s.
It added IBM's enterprise social computing platform, Connections, to its portfolio in 2008 with extended Knowledge Management functions now supported across Connections and Notes/Domino.
The IBM suite integrates with ABS' core statistical and support business functions, and can be deployed remotely by staff in mobile computing.
Last year, the ABS issued a request for tender seeking a secure email system that would be compatible with its Lotus Notes/Domino applications and other systems and infrastructure.
ABS uses Microsoft’s Windows 7 desktop software. But Hadley said there were huge collaborative pay-offs in using Lotus Notes, Sametime (for unified communications) and Connections.
“A lot of people are hooked on the Microsoft office suite. But then what does that do for your collaboration, knowledge management and records management?” Hadley said.
“We’d only be trying to make SharePoint do what we can already do with the Notes platform.”
Change management
Hadley likened his transformation task to upgrading an aircraft engine while the plane was inflight.
“There is a real tension there and it means we have to manage risks effectively across ongoing programs and dedicate our efforts across enterprise solutions,” he told
iTnews.
The ABS’ 500 IT applications and services staff were previously distributed into individual systems and survey teams, with a separate team providing technical support and development.
The new enterprise approach called for “a change in mindset and culture through to different tools, test centres, competencies, methodologies and so on”, Hadley said.
Hadley’s previous experience as general manager for technology integration for the big bang 2011 merger of Medicare, Child Support Agency and Centrelink fitted well with ABS’ challenges.
Hadley said he loved his experience with the Human Services' merger but found it became more difficult to provide the focus that would match the promise with the implementation.
“There’s no shortage of good ideas but sometimes too little attention is paid to the capability to execute the change,” he said.
Hadley said change management was a greater challenge in large organisations, which tended to have silos that needed to be managed and gradually reduced.
He noted that ICT needed to be regarded as a valued business partner and not a backroom “order taker”.
“It’s crucial you have strength in depth,” he said, highlighting plans to tap the bureau’s strong systems integration capabilities as the organisation evolved.
“We face a major challenge in building a bridge from where we are today to where we aspire to be".
Collecting and disseminating data
Earlier this year, the bureau established an ABS 2017 Group to change how it collected, collated, processed, managed, used, reused and disseminated statistical information.
The bureau aimed to deliver a "digital census" by 2016, collecting information from 60 percent of Australian households through its web-based eCensus and deploying tablet devices to its field workers.
Hadley said the bureau had recently trialled tablets for data collection from 10,000 households in Canberra, and planned to run a major test in 2014.
“If this works out, it will reduce the cost of doing ABS business,” he said. “The more we move to a digital type survey, the more opportunities [emerge] to reduce costs.
“[But] everything depends on funding,” he noted.
ABS 2017 also included two key projects – Acquire@ABS and Dissemination@ABS – to automate more components of its data acquisition and dissemination processes.
“These initiatives will also assist us to keep pace with society's expectations for a relevant and responsive ABS as well as to meet whole-of-government requirements for electronic reporting,” Hadley said.
Disseminate@ABS targets the release of survey data, offering “content agnostic” statistics for multidimensional aggregate or macro statistics and the ability to have microdata “confidentialised on-the-fly”.
Hadley expected Dissemination@ABS changes to address WCAG accessibility requirements that have bedeviled many Government websites.
Earlier this year,
iTnews reported that ABS’ home page scored poorly on WCAG 2.0 testing, recording some 43 errors on its home page, which is underpinned by Domino.
Hadley said he was confident ABS will make significant progress but stopped short of promising ABS would meet its December 31 deadline for meeting the WCAG 2.0 A standard.
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The author would like to thank R&P Assistant Vice President of Operations, F. P. "Pete" Calhoun and the several members of the R&P engineering department who made suggestions and provided information about the many technical aspects of the Ernest mining operation.
The story of the Ernest plant began in 1902, when officials of the Rochester & Pittsburgh Coal & Iron Company started looking to Indiana County in search of new coal fields. In May, 1903, the rails of the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway reached the new town of Ernest, and the first coal was shipped the same month. From the early days of its existence, the Ernest plant was a marvel of engineering. In an era when most coal companies were dependent upon the lowly mule for motive power, the R&P's new operation utilized electric motors to haul coal to the steel tipple where a system of endless chains hoisted it up a long incline into the plant for cleaning and grading.
Within three years of its opening, the plant underwent the first of several renovations as the R&P constantly searched for more efficient mining and preparation methods to produce, clean, size, and market coal. In 1906, Heyl and Patterson of Pittsburgh constructed the first washing plant. This firm had also built the original tipple and most of the buildings used for coal storage and preparation at Ernest. The Fairmont Machinery Company and McNally-Pittsburgh also did important work for the R&P as the complex at Ernest expanded.
The R&P also established a coke industry at Ernest and eventually built a battery of 278 beehive coke ovens at the plant. Coke production figures from the Ernest ovens reflect general economic trends of the first half of the twentieth century as well as the effects of the later development of more sophisticated methods of making coke. By the mid-1920s, lack of demand for coke caused the temporary shutdown of the line of coke ovens at Ernest. The plant began production again in 1929, with the addition of mechanical unloading to replace the old hand drawing method. Annual production ebbed and flowed until a peak of 145,977 tons was reached during World War Two.
While the manufacture of coke formed a significant part of the activities at the Ernest plant, the mining, processing, and sale of clean fuel remained the prime factor in the success of the operation. In the early days, railroads, primarily the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh, consumed the greatest percentage of Ernest's coal. It was particularly desired as high grade stoker coal for passenger engines. By the mid-1920s, the original tipple had been remodeled, and a huge bin constructed for storage of clean, sized, coking coal. In the next decade, a "dry" plant for cleaning coal by air, and a wet" plant for cleaning coal with water, were installed at Ernest to bring the operation up to date.
By the beginning of World War Two, the Ernest coal plant began to resemble the plant best remembered by most Indiana Countians. As the war effort increased, Ernest kept pace with a growing need for coal; and, in 1945, the mining and preparation plant worked together to produce over a million tons of coal. In 1952, the McNally plant was built an the hillside behind the original site. Using a wet cleaning method to separate the coal from impurities, the McNally plant had a capacity of fifty tons per hour for coking coal. R & P later expanded this plant to clean four hundred tons per hour, and it contained all of the cleaning equipment used at Ernest.
By the early 1960s, R&P officials decided that coal could no longer be mined profitably at Ernest. In 1965, the plant was closed. Within a few years, equipment and buildings gradually disappeared from the landscape as scrap companies dismantled the mining operation that had taken over fifty years to construct. But the McNally preparation plant and the skeleton of the coking coal bin still remain on the blackened site. These, the foundations of the coke ovens, and a brick office and machine shop are all that survive of the R&P's Ernest operations, an Indiana County landmark to remember with pride.
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The French may be making lots of noise about trying to upgrade quality and make the
appellation system really mean something, but it seems that a spot of bad weather is enough to dissolve those good intentions.
In the Rhône Valley at any rate, which admittedly suffered dire weather leading up to the 2002 harvest without enough sunshine to ripen the grapes fully and with galloping rot thanks to a surfeit of rain, the minimum alcoholic degree for virtually all red wines has been conveniently reduced by 0.5 so that Côtes du Rhône musts, for example, needed only to reach 10.5 per cent alcohol to be granted full
appellation status.
I was assured by a spokesperson for the region however that this was not too important since all the wines would simply receive an extra half a degree's worth of added sugar. So that's ok then.
You may ask whether half a degree of alcohol can matter much but I think it would be an important statement of intent if wine producers were to acknowledge that Nature doesn't always cooperate and pay the price of living in a climate which, because it is not guaranteed to ripen the grape fully, usually produces wines of such subtlety.
What I think we all want to see is a dramatic decrease in the amount of 2002 wine sold under top labels in much of Europe. This will show real intent and consciousness of true quality - and could provide us with some reasonably priced second- and third-tier wines that will be ready for drinking much sooner than usual.
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Hokkaido-born architect Jun Igarashi seems to be a bit out of his comfort zone in the stultifying humidity of Tokyo. As he chats in the Toto Gallery, where he is holding his first solo exhibition, he explains that he’s accustomed to the cooler and more temperate climate of his northern prefecture, which many of his designs are testament to. His buildings protect against the heavy snowfall and bitter winds of the Hokkaido winter and yet are still comfortably cool in summer.
Though much of Igarashi’s work is in Hokkaido, the number of recent accolades he has garnered since the creation of his independent company 15 years ago is putting the 40-year old’s work on the map. His award-winning designs include a temporary theater in Osaka made entirely from soft, vinyl tubes of air, and a conceptual design for a lifelong learning center in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture. It is clear that Igarashi prefers to focus on projects that have a social emphasis, often taking designs back to the raw basics and then utilizing materials to improve the buildings’ natural ventilation and lighting.
His insistence on using natural materials and utilizing structure and design for energy efficiency are also pertinent as Japan continues to struggle after the March 11 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake. Many in the Japanese and international architectural industry have begun to look into how they can help rebuild the devastated coastal communities.
Igarashi explains the influence of his roots in Hokkaido and how, as a member of ArchiAid, a nonprofit network of architects that actively supports earthquake reconstruction efforts, he thinks his work could help.
Why do you think your designs differ from those of your peers?
I was raised in Hokkaido, so the cold climate as well as the large and open landscape there has had a major influence on my work as an architect. I find Tokyo a very attractive city, but as a Hokkaido native, I believe my approach to design is quiet and different compared to my more urban counterparts.
Does your life in Hokkaido present itself in your designs?
My concept of vitality is shaped by Hokkaido’s harsh winters, and although Tokyo is not as cold as Hokkaido, I find it beneficial for my clients to understand and apply the same concept. It is better to enhance a building’s ability to survive in all sorts of climates.
A more specific example is the traditional Japanese
engawa (a type of terrace) design, which creates a space that is something between being outdoors and indoors. In old Japanese buildings this usually comes in the form of a nice sitting area that acts as a buffer between the garden and indoor space. The engawa plays a very important role in my designs, providing a smooth transition between the two spaces. I developed this idea from a need to create a comfortable living space for a climate that is extremely cold in the winter and pleasantly cool in the summer. Do you have any construction material preferences?
I use lots of wooden materials. My grandfather, who encouraged me to become an architect, was a carpenter and he had a significant influence on my designs. I guess using wood was a habit I picked up from practicing in Hokkaido, as concrete and steel don’t retain heat so well.
How did you become involved with ArchiAid?
After going to volunteer in the devastated region in Tohoku, I felt helpless. Though I have the knowledge and skill, I realized there is a limit to what one person can do for Tohoku as an individual architect. We can be much more effective when we act as a group, which is why I decided to become involved in ArchiAid. It is a charitable organization started by an architecture professor in the United States to help the quake and tsunami victims.
What kind of emergency housing do you think should be created for the earthquake and tsunami victims?
Emergency houses are usually like lightweight model houses, which is unavoidable. But the houses also need to be strong and capable of withstanding whatever the weather throws at them.
Right now, it would be beneficial if the structures could reflect heat, in order to make them cooler and more energy efficient. Obviously, there’s no need to consider aesthetics — the functionality of the building should be the priority.
Do you think the Tohoku crisis will have a wide impact on the future of Japanese architecture?
There is nothing architecture could have done to withstand such a huge tsunami. For earthquakes, though, Japanese buildings are already built to quite a high standard of quake-resistance.
With the energy shortages brought about by the problems at the Fukushima nuclear crisis, I think it is inevitable that energy-efficient buildings will become ever more important. This could be done through designs to suit the climate of a building’s location.
For example, in Hokkaido it is warm inside most buildings during the winter, whereas it is still cold indoors in Tokyo because of the way the buildings are built. If architectural designs put greater emphasis on the functional efficiency of the building, it would cut their energy usage.
It is easy to change the designs of future buildings; the problem lies with improving the efficiency of existing buildings. When we manage to overcome that issue, perhaps Japan can survive without nuclear energy.
“Jun Igarashi: The Construction of a State” at Toto Gallery Ma runs till July 9; admission free; open 11 a.m.-6 p.m. (Fri. till 7 p.m., closed Sun. and Mon.). For more information, visit www.toto.co.jp/gallerma/about/index_e.htm.
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SEPTEMBER 22, 2009
The U.S. Department of Justice has given a public university a special grant to help illegal immigrants in the Midwest and teach their employers, primarily in the meatpacking and construction industries, how to curb discrimination against foreign-born workers.
Indeed, the government agency charged with defending the nation’s interests and enforcing the law is helping those who have violated it. The Justice Department is supposed to ensure public safety against foreign and domestic threats and seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior not reward them.
Instead, the agency has given the University of Iowa a $50,000 grant to help empower the illegal immigrant labor force that, according to a press release, substantially benefits significant Midwestern industries. The taxpayer money went to the school’s Center for Human Rights, which plans to stop the exploitation of immigrant workers who are too often vulnerable to discrimination and unsafe working conditions.
Among other things, the school will use the cash to extend significant outreach activities to immigrant workforces in Iowa and Nebraska and provide educational opportunities to the business community relating to immigration law and the rights of foreign-born workers. Industries notorious for hiring illegal aliens, such as meatpacking and construction, will be heavily targeted.
The Justice Department has a history of protecting illegal immigrants and accommodating them in exchange for their testimony in the criminal prosecutions of U.S. law enforcement officers. The agency recently brought deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to testify against an Arizona sheriff who enforces immigration law through a federal partnership.
A few years ago, Justice Department officials actually went into Mexico to give a drug dealer immunity to testify against two veteran Border Patrol agents who intercepted his U.S.-bound vehicle loaded with 743 pounds of marijuana. The admitted Mexican drug smuggler got shot trying to evade the federal officers and the Justice Department prosecuted both of them. Incredibly, the agents got convicted of causing serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm and violating the drug smuggler’s civil rights.
© 2010-2017 Judicial Watch, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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A determined group of Wichita marijuana advocates is hoping that by the next Fourth of July weekend, you’ll be able to light up more than fireworks.
They think they have enough, or nearly enough, petition signatures to force a citywide vote on changing the municipal code to decriminalize marijuana.
If it passes, the initiative would change possession of marijuana or related paraphernalia from a criminal offense to a civil matter like a building code violation. The penalty would be a $25 fine, down from the current maximum of $2,500 and a year in jail.
The advocates are affiliated with the Peace and Social Justice Center, Kansas for Change and the Community Voice, a newspaper focused on Wichita’s black community.
There’s more to their campaign than just the freedom to toke.
The petition organizers believe the marijuana possession laws are a gateway into the criminal justice system for young people, especially black youths. And they say those small-time convictions create thousands of criminal records that can close off employment and educational opportunities.
Organizers have begun a painstaking process of checking thousands of petition signatures to make sure they have enough after weeding out nonvoters, nonresidents and those whose current addresses don’t match the ones on file at the election office. They’re also calling on people who downloaded petition sheets to get them notarized and turned in.
The group is aiming to turn in the petitions later this month to meet the deadline for including the initiative on the November general election ballot.
The petitioners recognize that changing the city code won’t change state and federal laws that could still be enforced against marijuana users. There’s no provision in Kansas law for citizens to bring a measure to a statewide vote without approval from the Legislature.
But they say it would send a powerful message to the Capitol if the state’s largest city votes to follow neighboring Colorado’s example, where voters legalized marijuana in 2012.
At least one legislator has been helping in the effort. Rep. Gail Finney, D-Wichita, signed the petition and has been collecting signatures.
Finney, who periodically undergoes chemotherapy for lupus, has tried futilely for years to get the Legislature to vote on a bill she wrote to legalize medical use of marijuana.
She said the city could divert the money it is spending now to enforce marijuana laws to pay for the things it is hoping to fund through a proposed 1-cent sales tax increase already slated for a November vote.
“I just think we can be spending our tax money better, to bring in jobs and better businesses and get a reliable water source and more buses and put money into our roads,” she said.
Petitioners also said they think if the city decriminalizes pot, local police will decide it’s not worth the effort to arrest small-time users.
Longtime progressive activist Janice Bradley, a leader of the petition drive, said she and others were gathering signatures at the corner of 13th and Madison last weekend when an officer in a patrol car drove by.
“We waved and the policeman gave us a thumbs-up,” she said. “I think they want to change their relationship with the populace and this is one of the ways they can do that.”
Enforcing marijuana laws takes a lot of effort for not much gain, said Esau Freeman, another leader of the petition drive.
“It’s interwoven in the fabric of society, and we need to stop being in denial and deal with it,” he said.
If the petitioners are successful in gathering the 2,928 valid signatures they need, the City Council will have 20 days to decide whether to adopt the initiative as a city ordinance, or put it to a public vote within the next 90 days.
It is almost certain the council would decide to put it to a vote. All five of the council members who attended Thursday’s agenda review meeting said afterward that they think marijuana decriminalization is a matter for voters to decide.
“It’s still illegal at the state and federal level, and a number of issues have to be addressed if it were to pass,” said council member Janet Miller. “I’m not confident it would pass on a ballot.”
Council member Jeff Blubaugh said the change would allow police to focus more time on dangerous and violent criminals and help the perennially beleaguered city budget.
“We’ve got so many other things we need to put resources in, other than locking people up for marijuana,” he said.
City Attorney Gary Rebenstorf said he hasn’t seen the petition and he’s not sure whether Wichita’s home-rule powers give the city enough authority to downgrade marijuana possession from a criminal matter to a civil issue.
Wichita officers make about 1,800 to 1,900 marijuana arrests a year, according to Police Department records the petitioners obtained through the Kansas Open Records Act.
The records show that between 30 and 40 percent of those arrested are black, although black people are only 11.5 percent of the city’s population.
A national study by the American Civil Liberties Union found similar overall rates of marijuana usage among teens and adults; 14 percent for black people and 12 percent for white people.
In a June 26 signed editorial, Bonita Gooch, editor in chief of the Community Voice, cited racial disparity in enforcement as a major reason why she and her paper support the decriminalization petition.
“The facts show in Wichita, KS, people of color are disproportionately targeted and charged for simple possession,” she wrote, adding that the marijuana arrest rate for black Wichitans averages nearly four times what it is for white residents.
“The impact of this profiling begins to really show up on the back side of the arrest since so many people of color don’t have the money or resources needed to bail out of jail, nor can they afford a fancy attorney to help them get the charges dropped or set aside,” she wrote.
Freeman said he spent a couple of days in jail and 18 months on probation when he was 22, after police caught him with a small quantity of marijuana and a switchblade knife.
After he got out, “I was constantly being monitored by the system” and was regularly stopped and searched, until he finally filled out a form and paid a court fee to have his convictions expunged, he said.
“There was definitely a difference between my life before I got my record expunged and after,” he said.
Two years ago, the Legislature passed a law legalizing the possession of switchblades.
“Today switchblades are legal. Let’s get on with the rest of it,” Freeman said.
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About the Cover
Our cover design by Nanette Black features a detail from an 8” x 10” silver gelatin print by André Kertész titled
Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe, Paris 1926. This is one of a series of images that Kertész created to communicate the fact that he understood and was sympathetic with Piet Mondrian’s non-representational paintings. At the time, they were limited in their ability to converse as they had no common language. Mondrian was Dutch and the Hungarian-born Kertész had only recently arrived in Paris.
Throughout his life, Kertész quietly influenced the development of photojournalism and the art of photography, serving as a mentor to the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. In 1925, Kertész moved to Paris where his pioneering vision soon brought him great success, defining the shape of photojournalism in Europe. During the next eleven years, Kertész built an extraordinary body of work, influenced by and influencing the many artists with whom he interacted in Paris between the wars. Kertész moved to New York in 1936 and later worked at
House & Garden magazine—his “lost years”—creating architectural photographs. In 1962, Kertész broke his magazine contract to pursue his art. For the next twenty-three years, he reestablished himself as a major figure in fine art photography. By the time of his death in 1985, Kertész’s work was honored by artists and photographers, collected by major museums and galleries, and studied by scholars. Photo and biographical information courtesy of Estate of Andre Kertesz © 2006. Special thanks to the International Center of Photography for their assistance. Editor’s Notes
We here introduce a new and regular feature for
KR: “The Casual Reader” by André Bernard. André, who served as the long-time editor in chief at Harcourt before assuming the role of their publisher, will gather books he has been reading for his own pleasure, whether in bed or train or armchair, volumes newly arrived on the scene or old friends rediscovered, and spread them before us in unexpected juxtapositions. As you will see, his brief engagements are delightful in and of themselves. But they also strike sparks off each other. I trust you will find pleasure in these, as I do, and look forward to each new installment.
I was recently asked my reaction to the fuss and fury in recent months over memoirs that, exposed by a little curious sleuthing, have proved to be more fiction than non. From my point of view there is an irony here, because literary nonfiction is a loosely defined genre in which much of the most exciting writing today is being realized. Conventional fiction, on the other hand-stories and novels-must all too often struggle against its own conventions, not to mention the expectations of readers. I hate to say it, but fiction is a rather tired genre. It’s very hard to find stories or novels that are truly fresh and surprising and delightful.
Now, before you leap to your pen or e-mail account to lambaste me, there are, of course, countless exceptions to this claim. Every year sees marvelous new fiction appear. I immediately think of novels by Ian McEwan, or
The March by E. L. Doctorow, which may well be his masterpiece, or Marilynne Robinson’s marvelous Gilead. And I won’t blush with the assertion that each issue of The Kenyon Review contains very fine short stories as well—last year alone, for example, our stories received two O. Henry awards.
But nonfiction—memoirs, essays, travelogues, meditations, and so on—is bound by no particular set of conventions or expectations. Just the variety of monikers is indicative—and inadequate. They leap and twist and go off on a thousand tangents. No one is looking for a simple dramatic trajectory or a neat denouement.
The real problem with the recent exposures of fraud with James Frey and JT LeRoy is, it seems to me, a matter of truth in advertising. The fact is that Frey wrote his book as a novel—that’s how he conceived it; that’s the guiding precept he used while writing it; that’s how he tried, over and over again, to find a publisher. It was only belatedly that the idea of labeling the manuscript as memoir came to him. Memoir, in other words, was more of a marketing decision than a literary one.
If
A Million Little Pieces had been published as a novel there would have been no fuss (and probably none of the notoriety or financial success either). All writers, as is well known, draw to a greater or lesser degree on their own experience in crafting fiction. It nourishes the illusion of reality that they are striving to create. Had readers thus discovered that Frey had drawn on personal experience in writing a novel, no one would have blinked an eye.
JT LeRoy, it turns out, apparently never existed at all. Pure hoax and hokum. I rather like the chutzpah.
So why does it matter when the label “memoir” or “autobiography” is attached? Why do so many readers feel bamboozled, let down, betrayed? Partly, I suspect, it’s a matter of degree. The furor over Frey and JT really caught fire only when the public came to realize that so much of these vastly popular tales were fabricated. The very sinews of the sad stories were shown to be fraudulent. That’s rather different from a careful nip and tuck to make oneself look a little better or to enhance the drama or the moral lesson.
We also happen to live in a moment of deep skepticism. Some will try to make an easy political/philosophical point and say this is due to the sins of so-called post-modernism—that the notion of any stable truth has been mocked or shown to be an illusion. I really don’t think that’s it at all. Rather, our age doesn’t permit much in the way of secrecy. When politicians lie, they’re likely to be found out, sooner or later. When journalists pass off fabrications as stories that have been duly reported and checked, they too are likely to be exposed. (And know it, which begs a further question.) When businesses employ creative accounting to pass off fraud, well that too is likely to come to light, though not before many people are hurt. The point is, the public is all too weary of such stories of deceit, and when an author gains enormous popularity—and many sympathetic tears—by sharing the painful triumphs of what turns out not to have been his life at all, one can’t be too surprised that there’s a backlash. Though one can be a little appalled at the self-righteousness of the author’s and publisher’s defense.
But truth to tell, none of this troubles me greatly. After all, aren’t we always trying to train students to read “critically”? Certainly I want mine to treat texts with some skepticism, to stand back or to wrestle with them, not to accept claims of truth simply on the face of the claim itself.
Would we suggest that anyone accept Caesar’s versions of his triumphs as unvarnished and reliable? Saint Augustine certainly had a rhetorical point to his
Confessions, and we should be wary of looking at the letter more than at the spirit of that narrative. Ben Franklin famously records the “errata” of his life, which he seeks to correct, in part, through his own confessions in the Autobiography, but there again, we shouldn’t imagine that plenty of fiction doesn’t go into the mix.
We human beings are truly creatures of language. We need stories, we use stories to help us understand our experience, both personally and as part of a larger community of readers, as well as from generation to generation. But as soon as a writer—any writer—puts the rough hurly-burly of human experience into language, that experience is fundamentally transformed. Fiction becomes part of the very fabric of truth.
So I return to where I began: I’m fascinated by those writers who seek to explore, openly and honestly, that gray, treacherous, marvelous border region where fiction and memoir and reportage blend together. W. G. Sebald, the remarkable German writer who lived for many years in England, is a prime exemplar with such books as
Austerlitz, as is the art historian Simon Schama, in Dead Certainties. Truman Capote got it right when he called In Cold Blood a “nonfiction novel.” He was suggesting that the great strength of novels is precisely that they can give us, through the transformative magic of narrative and imagination, deeper insights into those human truths that matter most.
—David H. Lynn
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Developing a New Cambodian NGODecember 5, 2006
As the director of the Hathaway Gender Consultancy Ltd., I work closely with international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to provide empirical research on issues related to gender.
The efforts of the NGO community in dealing with gender-issues in Cambodia have been laudable. Through strengthening education, providing cultural training, and fostering the mainstreaming of gender in society at large, it has been remarkably successful in empowering women and overthrowing the hegemonic regime of patriarchy in Cambodia.
Yet, in researching a recent article, – Performative Genders, Perverse Desires: a Bio-History of Cambodia’s Shappic Subculture? (Asian Womens Studies Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 17, Spring 2006), I went in-depth into the Sapphic love affairs that occur between hostesses* sharing cramped quarters in the nation?s capital and found that there are definite lacunae in Cambodia?s gender work program.
While I was in close contact with these hostesses, I got an insider’s view of their often tumultuous relationships with Western men. I decided to attempt to chart the complex geography of these cross-cultural love affairs by conducting in-depth, open-ended qualitative interviews with twenty-six such men. In the process of this research, I was confronted with egregious examples of previously overlooked gender-based violence.
I have come to believe that Western men in relationships with hostesses are locked in a dark closet of fear and shame, and it is the duty of the international community to recognise this issue and rescue them from continued gender-based violence. Therefore, this month I have been writing proposals, meeting with government officials, and securing funding from the World Bank and Asia Development Bank (ADB) to establish a new gender-based organisation.
Few people are truly aware of the nature and extent of gender-based violence perpetrated against Western men by hostesses in Cambodia. However, recent research has shown that this disturbing trend has increased by twenty-two percent in the past five years and six percent in the past year alone (Hathaway, de Sade, and von Krafft-Ebbing, 2006). Clearly, something needs to be done, not only to prevent this violence from occurring, but also to help men deal with the trauma and bring it to the attention of society.
The statistics cited above correspond to a change in the socio-demographics of Phnom Penh’s nightlife scene. Along with an influx of visitors from Thailand, renowned for attracting desperate white men who spend all their money on hostesses before jumping from condominiums or getting dragged into the jungle by axe-wielding cousins of hostesses, there has also been an increase in the number of hostess bars in the capital over the years.
Whereas other kinds of bars are often blamed for much of the petty theft suffered by Western men, the hostess sub-culture seems to breed gender-based violence. This problem is compounded by the social realities of the hostess bar environment. For example, the financial incentives provided by ?ladydrinks? encourage hostesses to consume large quantities of alcohol, and studies show that bargirls are fifty-six percent more likely to perpetrate gender-based violence while intoxicated (Hathaway and Kinsey, 2005).
There is a common misconception that attacks against men by hostesses seldom result in serious physical injury. Research comparing the relative muscle density in the arms of hostesses and ordinary women, however, has revealed that hostesses, while slightly less powerful than rice planters, have a twenty-one percent advantage over ordinary urban women. This has been attributed to the rigors of performing frequent neck massages on patrons (Hathaway, 2003). The most troubling injuries, however, are not even physical. They are psychological.
In the course of my research, I have amassed an index of the most commonly occurring types of gender-based violence using advanced statistical methods. The most prevalent form of abuse in the early stages of relationships is twisting of the nipples causing swelling and rawness. It is also common for hostesses to slap men?s buttocks causing serious bruising. More serious abuse has involved back passages being seriously damaged by the sudden insertion of pool cues. In rare cases, male members have been severed and flushed down toilets or fed to ducks.
With the establishment of this new NGO and the securing of significant funds from international donors, men in Phnom Penh will soon have access to a shelter (the “Jinja Centre”) where they can feel secure and receive professional counselling and legal advice; there will be a vigorous awareness-raising campaign to educate society by taking out advertisements on television, in magazines, and on the Internet; we will continue to conduct research, and publish the latest findings, in order to develop a more sophisticated theoretical framework in which to understand this form of gender-based violence; and, finally, we will lobby the government for changes to policy and legislation, consult with stakeholders at the grass-roots level, and build the capacity of local staff based on the outcomes of this research in order to ensure the end of this scourge to society.
* Note. The term – hostesses – has come under critical scrutiny by feminist scholars who see it as a linguistic fossilisation of patriarchal ideology. In the critical literature on the subject, therefore, these women are sometimes referred to as ‘alcohol-related establishment-employed women? (AREEWs). In this article, I have chosen the shorter term for the sake of easy readability. The reader should be aware, however, that it is used in invisible inverted commas in order to signify its non-patriarchal connotativeness.
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To The Daily Sun,
I'm sorry that Nancy Parsons (see her letter of November 6) needed surgery recently, I'm happy it was successful. And, I'm happy that insurance paid most of her medical bills. In her letter Ms. Parsons charges, without evidence, that insurance companies do horrible things, like "dropping people who are very ill". So, why didn't the insurance company just cancel Ms. Parsons' policy rather than pay over $180,000 for her medical bills? According to the New Hampshire Insurance Department, it is illegal for an insurance company to cancel a policy if the premiums are paid. In addition, ensuring that commitments are fulfilled is a legitimate government function, e.g., via insurance regulators, politicians, and courts. If insurance companies act as many radical leftists charge, it would indicate a major failure of government. Almost everyone knows people for whom insurance paid enormous medical bills. Insurance companies must deal fairly with people and fulfill their obligations or they will lose business and face regulator actions. Ms. Parsons likes Obamacare, the "solution" to mostly imaginary problems that the radical leftists have imposed on the American people. Obamacare requirements force cancellation of millions of health insurance policies that responsible people bought to protect themselves and their families. (There will be many times more cancellations next year.) For example, some cancer patients report that the policies that are paying their medical bills have been cancelled. Replacement policies are often not affordable and/or don't allow access to their health care providers. These patients face heart-wrenching choices. Before Obamacare, people could choose the insurance with the features they desired. Obamacare's "experts" created four almost identical policies for us to choose from. These policies are much more expensive than current policies, may not be accepted by current doctors and hospitals, and all require coverage that many people don't want or need, e.g., 60-year-old couples must buy policies covering birth control and maternity costs. The radical leftists didn't impose Obamacare on us just to insure a few more people. Obamacare's purpose is to grow government and to control people. Higher health care expenses harm middle income Americans by straining already tight budgets and/or making previously independent people become dependent on government, e.g., for help paying insurance premiums that were forced high to provide unnecessary and mostly undesired insurance coverage. I am happy that Ms. Parsons received the care she needed and that her insurance honored its commitments. But, I wish her experience would make her wake up to the greatness of our health care system, the benefits of the free market, the responsibilities of regulators, and of the harm that Obamacare inflicts on our country and the American people. Don Ewing Meredith
Letter Submission
To submit a letter to the editor, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Letters must contain the author's name, hometown (state as well, if not in New Hampshire) and phone number, but the number will not be published. We do not run anonymous letters. Local issues get priority, as do local writers. We encourage writers to keep letters to no more than 400 words, but will accept longer letters to be run on a space-available basis. Letters may be edited for spelling, grammar, punctuation and legal concerns.
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Nordic model is a new tag on this website, and it doesn’t refer to leggy blondes. People contact me ever oftener asking for what I’ve written on prostitution laws in the Nordic countries, so I have now tagged everything I could find. This is a sub-set of the Sweden tag, which includes other sorts of issues related to gender equality. Norway’s law is even more stringent than Sweden’s. Iceland is the third country that has passed the law, but many others are considering it.
What you will not find are quantitative, definitive, bottom-line debunkings of abolitionist and anti-prostitutionist claims. Those don’t exist,
they cannot exist, and anyone who says they can is spinning a line. There’s widespread disagreement about how to define trafficking and who is a victim of it, so when you see numbers you should immediately be skeptical. Sometimes ideology is at the bottom of large figures for victims. Other times the issue is that different countries and organisations use non-comparable categories for counting people. Where sex businesses operate in the informal sector there are no formal lists of employees. Where sex workers are supposed to register with the state (as prostitutes) many do not. Undocumented migrants are not eligible to register anywhere as workers and are not counted at the border. Everyone estimates all these numbers; the words research and evidence are tossed about wantonly. The most egregious example I know of ideologically based, subjective, sloppy counting is Siddharth Kara’s. There are other grotesque examples I describe as Garbage In, Garbage Out.
When someone asks for ‘the most reliable statistics on the effect of the Swedish Model of prostitution criminalisation’, they are assuming those exist somewhere. To understand why they do not exist, look at critiques of the government evaluation of its law. They were unable to evaluate it, they didn’t know how, I wouldn’t know how either, so no conclusions can be drawn from the evaluation. There are only
claims. Go to the nordic-model tag and find things like Big claims, little evidence: Sweden’s law against buying sex Trafficking Convictions in Sweden: tortuous laws about sex What do sex-buying statistics mean? Doubtful report on sex-purchase law Smoke gets in your eyes: Evaluation of Swedish anti-prostitution law offers ideology, not methodology
Moral entrepreneurs go on pretending large numbers prove their points. People say the Nordic model – laws that prohibit the purchase of sex and punish purchasers – is effective in reducing prostitution and trafficking. As for reducing prostitution, the only thing that
possibly has been reduced is the number of people selling in the street, but those were tiny numbers to begin with and already shrinking. The Swedish evaluators anyway used famously wrong Danish numbers for street prostitution to make their claim and never issued a correction after being informed of their error. On any other kind of commercial sex, they had no numbers at all because they did not know how to do that research (and they admitted it).
As for claims about trafficking, you cannot know you have ‘reduced’ something for which you had
no baseline numbers in the first place. All you have are police officials’ impressions and claims. The ‘effect’ of the law is unmeasurable.
I’ve begun tweeting, by the way, and realise I am starting to reach people who don’t know why anti-trafficking campaigns are so conflicted and unsuccessful. Do come join me (@LauraAgustin) in the challenge to make incredibly complex subjects lucid in under 140 characters.
–
Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
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New Veterans Bill Honors Veterans with Welcome Changes, Says Veterans Disability Advocate Tampa, FL (Law Firm Newswire) August 27, 2012 - The U.S. House just passed H.R. 1627, the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act, which is now awaiting the President's signature.
The Act is slated to provide a number of welcome changes to veterans and military families, including health, education and housing benefits.
"It's heartening to see how comprehensive the bill is and how quickly it has made its way through the system," remarked David Magann, a Tampa veterans’ disability attorney. "The VA system currently in place has long needed additional measures to meet the needs and tackle the concerns, goals and problems of our returning and disabled service people."
As outlined in H.R. 1627, the VA has agreed to contract veteran homes to provide nursing care in all 50 states, expand rehabilitation services to veterans with traumatic brain injury, increase case management and additional care to homeless veterans, streamline the disability process and extend eligibility for home loans to include not only spouses of those killed in the line of duty, or death due to service-connected disability, but also to surviving spouses of veterans who had permanent, service-connected disabilities for a decade prior to their deaths, even if their death was not service-connected. Also, VA home buyers now can count their dependent children to satisfy the occupancy requirements, which will allow home purchases by single-parent veterans and by married military couples while deployed.
Other changes include waiving co-payments for veterans using online, or other remote health care programs due to their rural locations, as well as possible travel reimbursements to veterans seeking care at distant centers, tracking and reporting policies to monitor facility-based assaults, and expanded housing grants for adaptive housing.
Also under the new bill, the VA Funding Fee, a mandatory charge applied to each purchase and refinance loan, will be waived for borrowers with a service-connected disability. Additionally, there is a provision stating that disruptive protests at military funerals, such as the kind orchestrated by the Westboro Baptist Church in recent years, will be considered criminal offenses, punishable by jail time and fines, and may even be subject to civil liability.
The bill passed through the House just two weeks after a unanimous vote in the Senate.
Magann has been practicing social security law for 14 years and recently completed his 1,400th hearing. Magann is a Marine Corps Veteran who earned his law degree at the University of Miami, and has a criminology degree from the University of South Florida.
David W. Magann, P.A. Main Office: 156 W. Robertson St. Brandon, FL 33511 Call: (813) 657-9175 Tampa Office: 6107 Memorial Hwy Tampa, Florida 33615 South Tampa Office: Bank of Tampa Building 601 Bayshore Blvd Ste 105 Tampa, FL 33606
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PTSD, "Post" Means After And At Any Time Government analysis finds Veterans with PTSD can suffer for decades before acknowledging the disorder. The year 2014 marks the 100th-year anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the so-called war to end all wars. And in a bit of irony, a study was released on August 8 that has found that, like the consequences of the “Great War,” the after-effects of combat stress among veterans, just like the after-effects of old wars upon conflicts years later, seems to linger for decades. The study, which was commissioned by the Department of Veterans Affairs, tracked veterans from as far back as the Vietnam […] Attorney Fees in VA Compensation are Contingent Upon You Winning Attorney fees in VA Compensation claims are contingent upon winning benefits. The VA’s General Counsel office and regional offices must approve of all fee agreements, which allows 20% of the veteran’s BACK benefits, not future benefits, to be withheld to pay the representative. The attorney does not collect the fee directly from the veteran, but reasonable costs may be collected directly from the veteran claimant. By law, an individual must be accredited by VA as an agent, attorney, or representative of a VA-recognized veterans service organization to assist in the preparation, presentation, and prosecution of a claim for VA benefits. […] Camp Lejeune Tainted Water Claim? New Rules You Can Use: Justice Delayed For decades there has been medical complications statistically abnormal for those who were based in Camp Lejeune. Recently there has been considerable media and Congressional attention to the past contamination of the water supply at Camp Lejeune. From 1953 to 1987, the water supply was contaminated with TCE, PCE, benzene, vinyl chloride and “other compounds.” see https://clnr.hqi.usmc.mil/clwater/Site/background_information.html. Because of legislation passed in 2012, the VA now recognizes the medical problems caused by the Camp LeJeune water contamination. There are two areas that a Veteran may be awarded benefits listed below: (1) VA health care benefits may be available. These are […]
See other news sources publishing this article. BETA | Tags: Brandon Social Security disability attorney, Brandon Social Security disability lawyer, Tampa Social Security disability attorney, Tampa Social Security disability lawyer
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Doctors at a Swedish
eating disorder clinic are reporting that at least one modelling agency is trying to recruit female patients right on the clinics doorstep.
Some reports even claim a modelling scout approached a girl who was so weak she was being transported in a wheelchair.
In an
interview with the Metro, The Director and Chief Physician at the clinic, Dr. Sandeberg said, “We think this is reprehensible. People have stood outside our clinic and tried to pick up our girls because they know they are very thin."
According to staff reports, this appalling behaviour by talent scouts has been going on for more than a year and many of the girls are very sick teenagers. These girls have a BMI that is far below what is considered healthy or even underweight.
What makes this particularly disturbing is the fact that, aside from the behaviour of the scouts being deplorable, what they are doing has the potential to do a great deal of harm. By offering someone a modelling job when they have an
eating disorder, it can reinforce the persons eating habits and reward their negative body image. It could also encourage young people who have disordered eating patterns to take their behaviours to the next because they see it as a legitimate way to become a model.
Christina Lillman-Ring Borg, a care coordinator says that her daughter was approached by the agency when she was in for treatment. She told the metro, “It is awful. Part of the disease is that you have a
distorted body image, and you get a sudden flattery and a job offer. It does not facilitate the treatment of the disease."
This type of behaviour could set eating disorder treatment back years as it reinforces the negative relationship with food that all ED’s have.
Currently the only country that has laws that could stop this sort of behaviour is Israel. They recently passed a law that makes it illegal to use clinically underweight models. It is also illegal to display underweight models in catwalk shows and advertisements .
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Should We Outsource Compliance?
By Todd Cipperman, Managing Member, Cipperman Compliance Services
Private fund firms should consider outsourcing to meet their ever-increasing compliance needs. In recent years more firms have turned to compliance outsourcing firms because they can leverage compliance teams to quickly and efficiently implement an SEC-ready compliance program. The old default option of hiring an in-house full-time equivalent employee (FTE) may simply not make sense in the current regulatory and personnel environment. Many firms, paralyzed by indecision, simply do nothing, which can lead to very bad regulatory, reputational, and business outcomes.
Because of Dodd-Frank, private fund firms have wrestled with how to implement an effective compliance program, which is required by Rule 206(4)-7 of the Advisers Act.Although the Rule doesn't say exactly how to implement such a program, we now have 10 years' experience since the SEC adopted the Rule and 3 years since Dodd-Frank to form an understanding of what a compliance program should include.Most significantly, every fund manager must hire a Chief Compliance Officer that has experience and knowledge about an adviser's regulatory obligations. Additionally, based on enforcement actions, speeches, examinations, and statements, we know that a reasonable compliance program must include the involvement of senior management, have adequate financial and human resources, adopt customized policies and procedures, train staff, and maintain records.
Confronted with all the required compliance activities and their associated costs, a fund firm has three alternatives: Retain a reputable compliance services firm; Hire a full-time equivalent employee (FTE) to serve as the CCO; or Do nothing or the bare minimum until the SEC or a client forces a change.
Outsourcing to a Reputable Compliance Firm
Using a third party compliance firm to provide your compliance services, including utilizing one of the third party firm's personnel as Chief Compliance Officer, offers many benefits over hiring one or more FTEs. A compliance firm can implement a compliance program quickly and efficiently with an experienced team that applies an industry-wide perspective. Some of the concerns about outsourcing have diminished over the past few years, making outsourcing a more viable option.
Why Firms Outsource Compliance:
Regulatory Knowledge A reputable compliance services firm with a reasonable staff (e.g. more than ten) should give a fund firm the
breadth of knowledge necessary to implement an effective compliance program. A group of experienced professionals will have more regulatory knowledge
than any one person a firm could hire. Depth
A group of professionals work together to support a firm's compliance needs.They can draw on each other's experience and knowledge.Also, their knowledge is not firm-specific.A team can utilize cross-industry and multiple firm intelligence to serve each client. A firm also retains an adviser's institutional compliance knowledge even if personnel turn over. Business Knowledge
A compliance services firm will have broad industry experience and apply it to the particular issues facing the firm. A large team will have more industry knowledge than any one FTE. Management and Turnover
When a service issue arises, the fund firm can appeal to the compliance firm's management for corrective action.A firm, unlike a person, does not take vacation or sick days or ask for a promotion.Also, a change in compliance providers does not become the same type of emotional decision as firing an employee.
Turnover among internal compliance officers has become an industry-wide problem.Faced with a limited career path, many compliance officers leave after a few years to make more money or to experience a different type of firm.Then, the firm must go through the decision-making and hiring process all over again.
Very often, the outside compliance firm becomes the keeper of a firm's institutional regulatory history even as internal personnel come and go.Much like using an audit firm or a law firm, an adviser can institutionalize its knowledge with a compliance provider.
Independence
A compliance services firm brings an independent perspective to the compliance function. Institutional clients and regulators value this independence and often give more weight and credibility to a compliance review prepared by an outside party rather than somebody reporting to senior management.
Conversely, an in-house CCO is inherently conflicted because he/she reports to senior management that may be the cause of the problem.In many cases, the CCO gets blamed because senior management views the CCO as the cause and not the solution.Unlike an outside firm which has many clients, an in-house CCO faces significant disruption if a compliance breakdown fractures the relationship with management.
Cost
Based on our experience, utilizing a compliance services firm usually costs between 40%-60% of the cost of hiring comparable in-house resources.An adviser can also vary the services utilized to meet its budget constraints. Utilizing a compliance firm avoids the fixed cost (including benefits) and commitment of hiring FTEs.
To hire a competent compliance officer generally costs at least $200,000 in salary and benefits. The price tag goes up for larger, more complex advisers and may require hiring multiple people. Costs obviously vary depending on the market, but an adviser should compare the available talent against the personnel offered by a compliance firm.Hiring an FTE also involves a fixed commitment of resources including head count, benefits, and management.
Liability
The Chief Compliance Officer has direct regulatory liability better retained by an experienced compliance professional provided by a third party firm than undertaken by a senior executive without a regulatory background. The SEC has brought several cases against non-regulatory senior executives that served as CCO in addition to other responsibilities because they did not have sufficient knowledge or did not devote sufficient time to their compliance responsibilities.Some of these cases resulted in industry bars, which had the effect of putting the firm out of business.
In addition to retaining a competent CCO, retaining a compliance services firm also ensures that somebody has responsibility for the compliance infrastructure. In the event of a compliance problem, a fund firm can look to the compliance services firm and its contractual service commitments.The Agreement may provide for a cause of action and/or indemnity for significant failures. The only remedy against an employee would be termination.
Regulators
The regulators have increasingly accepted outsourcing as a viable compliance solution. In the most recent proposed Form ADV amendments, the SEC has recognized the outsourcing trend by requesting firms that use an outsourced CCO to identify the third party firm that provides compliance services.We believe that the SEC is recognizing outsourcing as an option for firms that are challenged to hire a competent in-house CCO either because of size or geographic location.
Also, the SEC has acknowledged that the use of third party compliance firms may help answer the criticism that it only examines about 10% of advisers per year.Recently, SEC Commissioner Gallagher has recommended that the SEC require investment advisers to engage third party compliance firms as a legitimate alternative to increasing SEC funding, handing regulatory oversight to FINRA, or creating a new SRO.Mr. Gallagher noted the benefits of using an accountable and independent compliance firm to review regulatory compliance and compared the model to requiring public companies to obtain a financial statement audit.In response, Chairman White, has requested that the staff review requiring firms to engage third party compliance firms to perform reviews.
The SEC now has a track record examining firms that use a third party compliance firm for CCO and other compliance services.Several firms (including our firm) provide this service and their clients have experienced dozens (hundreds?) of exams during the last several years.Our experience has been that the SEC focuses on the quality of the program, not how the firm specifically executes.With respect to outsourcing, the SEC wants to make sure that the designated CCO does not manage too many relationships.No staff member has told us how many is too many, although we believe that 10 relationships should be the most that one person manages, and that number should decrease with larger or more complex relationships. In our experience, the SEC will criticize an adviser that demonstrates lack of commitment to compliance by spending too little (e.g. less than 5% of revenue), outsourcing to a firm that does not provide the necessary resources and services, or fails to empower the compliance services firm.
Hiring an FTE to Serve as CCO
Private fund firms should pursue retaining an employee (i.e. FTE) dedicated to compliance if the business is large enough to afford the required talent and complex enough to require a dedicated resource.Hiring an in-house CCO also allows a firm to control the compliance function and leverage resources.
Firms must be large enough to afford the right compliance officer for the business.As any recruiter will tell you, finding a quality compliance officer can be challenging.There is more demand than supply, and the talent gap grows every day.Firms generally must pay at least $200,000 per year to retain a quality CCO. If a firm has less than $5 Billion in assets under management, it may not have the resources to allocate such a large amount to one position that does not manage or raise assets.Also, growth may require hiring several compliance officers, thereby expanding the required budget.However, if a firm can afford the position and can find the right talent, it may make sense to retain one or more FTEs.A firm that pursues an FTE CCO should conduct significant due diligence to ensure that it finds the right person with the appropriate temperament, knowledge, and skill set, because hiring the wrong person can hurt the firm, waste resources, and delay implementation.
Certain firms are so complex that only a full-time in-house resource will suffice.For example, if the firm's trading strategy requires unique knowledge or the firm has multiple product lines, an in-house resource expert in that firm's particular business may be the best choice in the long run. Also, if a firm has so many employees that only an in-house resource can monitor for wrongdoing, an in-house staff may be necessary.
Hiring an in-house FTE also allows firm management to control compliance outcomes.The CCO will report directly to senior management who will determine pay and tenure. Although firms lose the ability to claim an accountable and independent compliance function, senior management may feel more comfortable with one of its own team serving in a regulatory monitoring function.
Firms may also leverage internal compliance personnel to perform additional operational responsibilities.For example, many in-house compliance personnel perform finance or operational control functions in addition to their compliance responsibilities.However, as firms grow, senior management must monitor workloads and focus to ensure that the firm has dedicated enough to compliance.
Delaying or Doing Nothing
Few firms actually acknowledge that they have done nothing meaningful to implement a compliance program. However, many have either intentionally or unintentionally ignored compliance.
What are the signs that a firm has done too little to implement a compliance program?They fail to spend enough on compliance. In our experience, firms should spend at least 5% of revenues or 7% of total operating costs on compliance. Firms that spend less than that are “do nothing” firms.
Firms also fool themselves into thinking they have done something significant.For example, they buy a canned compliance manual online or from a vendor, adopt policies and procedures but decline to implement their requirements, tell the CFO he/she is now the Chief Compliance Officer, promote an administrative assistant to CCO, allocate minimal resources to compliance, etc. These are also “do nothing” firms because the SEC has cited these practices in various enforcement actions as examples of failures to implement effective compliance programs.
We also see doing nothing disguised as rationalization: “We do the right thing.” The compliance rule does not require a firm to do the right thing.It requires the firm to adopt, implement, and test policies and procedures reasonably designed to achieve compliance with the Advisers Act and its rules.
Doing nothing doesn't work as a business strategy.The SEC does not offer a free pass for regulatory violations just because it is a firm's first cited deficiency. In many cases, the SEC has brought significant enforcement actions and penalties, which have included fines and personal liability including industry bars, even without a prior warning. Firms should also consider the potential reputational costs.Enforcement actions are available on the web to be forever cited by clients, competitors, potential employees, and regulators.
Failing to implement a compliance program also will not work with institutional clients.Most public plans, fund-of-funds, mutual funds, and other institutional investors perform significant due diligence on a firm's compliance program in addition to investment and operational due diligence.Also, once a firm makes it onto the SEC's bad actor list, expect to see them on a regular basis.
CONCLUSION
Using a third party firm to provide compliance services including a CCO has become more accepted as both private fund firms and the SEC have seen the model work effectively. Outsourcing allows a private fund firm to access a deep compliance team, avoid the fixed costs and management issues of hiring an FTE, demonstrate compliance independence, share liability, and lower costs.If your firm is large and complex and you can find the right person, it may make sense to hire an FTE for your compliance needs.Doing nothing or delaying only invites regulatory, reputational, and, ultimately, business risk.
Cipperman Compliance Services (CCS) provides managed compliance services to alternative investments, including hedge and private equity funds, as well as registered funds and money managers. With 80-plus domestic and international relationships, services delivered include: acting as the firm's Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) to providing a team of resources that executes and delivers compliance support. Todd Cipperman is the founding principal of Cipperman Compliance Services (CCS.) During his two decades of experience Todd has represented a wide range of investment management clients with a focus on distribution issues facing investment managers and broker-dealers. Todd previously served as general counsel of SEI Investments, a public mutual fund and financial technology firm, prior to that, Todd spent several years in private practice on Wall Street representing both buy and sell side clients in investment management and capital markets transactions.
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UK Minister Rebuffs Plea to Delay SOx Limit Implementation An attempt by the UK’s Chamber of Shipping last week to persuade the British government that the industry needed more time to comply with new sulphur emission limits entering force on 1 January next year received short shrift from the shipping minister. However the Chamber, along with other European shipowners' associations, is reported to be determined to continue its campaign, reports shipping trade association Maritime London.
The owners’ organisations say that switching to distillate fuel will be too costly and would lead to job losses and modal shifts from sea to road transport while the other option of fitting scrubbers has only just become available and it will take time to to fit this equipment.
Addressing MPs in the House of Commons, UK minister for shipping, Stephen Hammond, said: "I am pretty disappointed that the Chamber of Shipping continues to act as if these are new limits, and that these limits are inherently undesirable and that the UK government should have avoided them." He referred to a statement made by the Chamber in June 2008 that described the deadlines agreed at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as realistic and giving the shipping and oil industry sufficient time to prepare. The minister said that the Chamber had been brought into government consultations about the new Emission Control Area (ECA) sulphur limits agreed in 2008 at every stage. Mr Hammond said: "So to pretend today that this is something new is slightly disingenuous by the Chamber of Shipping." The Chamber's case, which it has set out in a letter to prime minister David Cameron, is that although it agrees with the 0.1% sulphur limit within ECAs, it points out that IMO recognised that new technology would need to be developed. For this reason and due to concerns over low sulphur fuel supply, IMO said that the implementation of these regulations should have a degree of flexibility, to allow companies to transition into the new era without damaging their business. The Chamber, and the European Communities Shipowners Associations (ECSA), argue that the European Commission removed this flexibility and pragmatism – and jobs will be lost as a result. ECSA has sent an open letter to EU member states and the European Commission. In presenting its case, Chamber quotes a recent AMEC report that said implementing new regulations before the technology is ready could cost 2,000 UK jobs could be lost, thousands more lorries will clog up roads and 12 million tonnes of additional Co2 will be emitted into the atmosphere. AMEC puts the cost of switching to distillate fuel at over GBP300-million. The Chamber's CEO, Guy Platten, said: “We support the move to reduce sulphur emissions and the introduction of tough new limits. “But the sharp increase in demand for low sulphur fuel will see a massive spike in costs both for shipowners and potentially for ordinary diesel car users - so we need to use the new technology instead. But that technology is only now beginning to work, and could take up to two years to fit properly to all of our ships.” He continued: “Reducing sulphur is a job we agree needs doing, but it needs to be done in a pragmatic way that protects jobs as well as the environment. All we’re asking for is the EU to understand the practical realities we face and give us the time we need to comply.” Source: Maritime London
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I myself was working in an IT industry. But I left it coz i too had issues with the working environment. I used too slog for hours but still my salaries were nominal. Also, when there was work, it was too hectic, else we had to sit on the bench. SO there is no specific reason but as u said its lesser pay and low recognition that causes attrition.
I partly agree with you but its like employees are never satisfied.People find issues with their jobs no matter what.What i believe is that the sector which is very competitive and creates a lot of jobs suffers from high attrition rate.
The real problem for high attrition is ample opportunities in the market as well as lack of recognition for good work. If you consider the big IT companies of India, they are like factory of software workers where an individual is gets lost in the crowd. He is not able to create an indentity for himself and starts looking elsewhere for the same.
I think this is a pure demand supply problem. Since IT Industry has grown too fast in too little time and supply of skilled people available in market don't match the demand for the same.
Consider these details as of today:
1. All Indian IT Services companies started with product support and maintenance work during 90s and it remained so till early 2000s. Development work was seldom outsourced.2. All IT Services MNCs have majority of work done in India now.3. All IT Products companies have their majority of workforce working/originating in India.4. Almost all Fortune 500 businesses have completely shut down or reduced their IT departments to 5-10% of their 1999-2003 levels.
These facts continue to make outsourcing lucrative and so jack up the demand for IT professionals. With each projects profitability at 25-35%, companies can continue to do head hunting for skilled IT people.
There is more to it.IT firms do not care about the employees especially the so called top 4.The perception if one leaves there are 100 standing, which is not wrong but till when this attitude can carry on.The attrition rate of one top IT company stands at 17.5% which is ridiculous.Its not about demand supply but mainly the bad policies and attitude of the companies towards the employees else how do you explain this unrealistic attrition rate@17.5%.
India is the IT Capital of the world and has umpteen jobs in the IT. Here people have lots of option to switch to other companies, which are also having almost the same environment as thier previous company(ofcourse some are exceptions).So, why does a person changes his job ?I feel that money is the ultimate motivator by changing the jobs people can get good hikes. Even recognition also matters but only in case of a person having more than 7 or 8 years experience and we know that the maximum attrition is in the group of 3-4 years exp people.
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Publishing business models assume costly production and distribution, and expect a few hits to fund the misses. Going digital changes this.
Perfect digital copies make distribution cheap; digital editing and recording tools make production cheaper too. It is easier than ever to create and give away work, and Creative Commons will help you do that.
Getting heard and getting credit are great, but wouldn't you like to get paid too? mediAgora defines a fair, workable market model that works with the new realities of digital media, instead of fighting them.
Principles and goalsmediAgora defines a new market model, based on coherent principles and goals. Principles: Creators should be credited and rewarded for their work. Works can be incorporated into new creative works. When they are, all source works should be credited and rewarded. Customers should pay a known price. Successful promotion of work should be rewarded too. Individuals can play multiple roles - Creator, Promoter, Customer Prices and sales figures should be open Relationships are based on trust and reputation Copy protection destroys value Goals: Creators have 3 main goals - getting heard, getting credited and getting paid Customers want to find works and pay a fair price Creators set the price, customers decide to pay it (or not) Promoters have an incentive to promote Works, but not to compete with other promoters for the same work Working within the system is more attractive than subverting it Details Definitions
A
Work is a creation that can stand alone, embodied in digital form. It may be a song, a poem, a novel, a photograph, a video sequence, a computer program, a learned article or a combination of any of these.
It may have sprung fully formed from the mind of the creator, but in many cases it will be based on
Source Works and will refer to these explicitly.
The work will have a list of
Creators associated with it, and their relative contributions.
A work will have a
price, set by the creators. This will include the prices of any source works.
When a
Customer pays the price and receives a copy of the work, it is divided between the creators in the defined percentages, and the prices for the source works are similarly divided.
While this can fulfil the 'getting credit' and 'getting paid' aspects, getting heard is still a problem - as works are abundant, easily created and easily copied, the competition for the customers' attention becomes more important.
This is where
Promoters come in. They are paid by the creators for sales.A promotional fee is fixed as part of the price charged for each work. If I buy the work from the original artist, they earn this fee. If I buy it through a promoter, he earns part of the fee. If I tell a friend to buy it, I receive a part, the promoter I bought it from also receives part of the fee and the original artist keeps the remainder. Whoever the customer hears about the work from, she pays the same fee.
Each person adding value and creating a new work can specify their fee and promotional fee, so there is competition at that level between works, but they can't reduce the fee or promotional budget of their source works (except by subsidizing it themselves).
As well as specifying this fee, the creator specifies a
sales target and accounting period. At the end of the accounting period, the promotion fees are distributed by the ratio of the number of actual sales achieved by each promoter and his downstream promoters divided by the sales target, and passed down the line.
A small percentage of each purchase is also paid to the operator of the marketplace.Copyright Kevin Marks 2001-2002
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Komli Media , India’s leading digital advertising and technology company, today announced the beta launch of ViziSense MediaMix , India’s first online media planning tool that helps media planners and marketers identify the optimal mix of websites to attract the relevant target audience for online campaigns.
ViziSense MediaMix has been developed with the aim of delivering accurate and reliable India-specific Web statistics for media planners, media buyers, and marketers. The easy-to-use MediaMix user interface can filter through thousands of websites and identify those that a selected target audience is most likely to visit.
Media planners and buyers have so far lacked reliable demographic level data that identifies online preferences and browsing habits of the Indian audience. Moreover, marketers have often been challenged with the lack of an unduplicated view of their target audience across multiple websites.
“The lack of reliable standards in online audience measurement has been one of the main reasons why Internet advertising has seen such a low share of overall ad budgets,” said Prasanth Mohanachandran, Executive Director – Digital Services, . “ViziSense Media Mix helps us overcome this issue and further allows targeting of specific audiences on the Internet, enabling us to take full advantage of the medium.”
ViziSense MediaMix presents a site’s demographic composition for the selected target audience, along with overall statistics on unique unduplicated visitors, reach, and page views. MediaMix also contains features that allow agencies and marketers to save, export and compare media plans for future use.
Uma Sivakumar, Head of Online Media, Tribal DDB India said, “We feel that this tool has come at the right time and will help online planners in creating media plans that are more scientific. It also helps that Komli Media is an indigenous company and hence has a better appreciation of the Indian Internet scene.”
Currently in beta, MediaMix is based on the ViziSense platform, which employs statistical techniques and industry-led best practises to combine data from two continuously monitored sources: The ViziSense Panel, which captures the complete Internet behaviour and consumption pattern of more than 15,000 online users in real time. Panelists are recruited across a cross section of various demographic segments to ensure a well-diversified and representative sample. The ViziSense Tag, embedded by publishers on their Web pages, that provides actual traffic data for a given Web site.
Satish Kadu, Vice President of Products, Komli Media said, “In our continuing efforts to improve audience measurement standards, we’re confident that MediaMix will be a useful tool for the Indian online advertising industry.”
Access to ViziSense MediaMix is currently available by invitation only.
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King, who is director of academic affairs at St. Joseph's Health System in Atlanta, agreed that adding a balloon "especially for patients who have really, big anterior infarcts" made sense but he added that "we can't recommend something that is not supported by evidence."
And the evidence from the CRISP AMI trial, which was published online by the
Journal of the American Medical Association, and reported as a Hot Line at the European Society of Cardiology, does not support use of IABC in patients who are not in cardiogenic shock, King told Peggy Peck, MedPage Todayexecutive editor.
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My friend Scott was able to sneak off to the Tesla showroom on his lunch hour last Thursday to make his reservation for the Tesla Model 3. He's one of about 276,000 people who are similarly gaga over that car.
“I will need help in figuring out how to wait the two years until it is delivered,” Scott emailed to me, adding a perhaps unnecessary :). Scott sees the Tesla Model 3 as an entry-level luxury car, on par with the BMW 3-Series. The 215-mile range makes it feasible transportation for long-distance ski trips.
Scott raves, “At $35,000, the Tesla 3 is a great deal. If the incentives are in place — which is why I rushed to the mall to make a deposit, so I’ll be near the front of the line — it’s a downright steal at $24,500.” That’s the federal income tax credit plus the state rebate at work.
The Chevy Bolt is a potent entry, with more than 200-mile range, and it will beat the Model 3 to market. Will that be enough to overcome the Tesla cool factor? (Photo: Dave Pinter/flickr)
I find Tesla mania fascinating, and it proves that the company — without advertising — has succeeded in creating a highly desirable brand. That’s why it’s such a favorite against a car, on the market first, with almost identical stats — the Chevrolet Bolt. You know how people want a Mercedes-Benz more than they want a similarly equipped Hyundai, and are willing to pay extra for the prestige of the three-pointed star? Bingo.
I was talking to Mike Cetera, personal loan and credit analyst at Bankrate.com, and he told me some amazing things about the market right now and about Tesla’s curious appeal. “I would love to have one of those cars,” he told me, adding that he wouldn’t accept a Bolt as a substitute. “Tesla has a lot of cachet; it’s cool,” he told me. “My wife and I have talked about reserving one, but it may have to wait because we’re finishing up an auto loan.”
Cetera also had some news for me. According to Bankrate.com research, one in six Americans is planning to buy a car in the next year, and people making between $30,000 and $49,000 annually are “almost two times more likely to be planning a car purchase this year than those earning more than $75,000.”
What’s more, millennials are the most likely age group planning to buy a car this year. That’s interesting, because these are the folks who are supposed to not buy cars at all. And what cars are most likely to appeal to millennials? Tesla, Tesla, Tesla. And this is a group increasingly confident about its buying power. Reports Bankrate:
While Americans of all ages are feeling optimistic about their finances, millennials are the most comfortable with their savings, debt, net worth and overall financial health.
All of this suggests that Chevy might have done well to create a new division — like BMW’s i — to sell its electric cars. Hyundai did just that for luxury cars, with the upmarket Genesis, a big hit at the New York Auto Show. And it also introduced the green Ioniq line (three new cars, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and battery electric) at the same venue. Not quite a new brand, but a separate identity.
This graphic reflects the received wisdom, but maybe millennials are getting into more of a car-buying mood. They're making better money these days. (Photo: Geekstats/flickr)
Prius has some luster as a name, as do the Japanese luxury divisions—Infiniti, Acura and Lexus. Chevrolet is simply, despite a luminous history, a meat-and-potatoes brand. The Chevrolet Volt has done OK, but suppose it was the Gaia Volt or some such?
The Bolt will be on the market as early as the fourth quarter of 2016, a full year before the Model 3. A lot of people won’t want to wait for the Tesla. But the pull of the Model 3 is strong. And that gets us back to those millennials, not to mention the $30-$49,000 income folks definitely planning to buy a car in the next year. They really, really want Teslas, too, and now there’s one they might — stretch, stretch — actually afford. At least on a layaway plan.
“It’s the cool factor,” says Automotive News. “There is no other way to explain the people plunking down $1,000 refundable deposits even before the Model 3 debuted last week to a fire hose of gushing media coverage.” Auto writer Aaron Gold sums it up. “Comparing Tesla and Chevy is like comparing Apple and Microsoft. Brand matters.”
Here's a video look at the Model 3 from the introduction in Hawthorne, California, last week:
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PARKING standards for new supermarkets are to be reinforced by Angus Council to avoid challenges in the wake of approval for Sainsbury’s Montrose development.
This week the authority’s infrastructure services committee was asked to rubber-stamp a report confirming the council’s current supermarket parking standards to clarify for developers what the requirements are.
At a meeting of the council’s development standards committee at the end of August, councillors voted overwhelmingly against planners’ recommendations to refuse the Brechin Road store on the grounds that it had insufficient parking.
In his report, infrastructure services director Eric Lowson also said there is a risk that the current regulations could be challenged by applicants who consider the decision had set a precedent they could follow.
He said: “Since 1996, numerous planning applications have been assessed against the Roads Standards and subjected to objections by the roads division where appropriate.
“This includes a number of high profile developments and in particular the recent supermarket development in Montrose. Following the decision by the development standards committee to approve the supermarket development, it is now unclear to developers what the requirements will be in the future for developments in Angus.
“The committee is asked to endorse the continued use of the current Roads Standards for parking, to enable officers to advise developers of the council’s requirements.
“There is a risk that the council’s application of parking standards will be challenged by future applicants who consider the recent high profile decision has set a precedent unless the committee endorses the existing standards or otherwise advise appropriate standards.”
Sainsbury’s submitted revised plans for the Brechin Road store in mid-March after an earlier application was turned down, also on the grounds of insufficient parking.
The revised plans now include a smaller store of 22,500 sqare feet with 190 car parking spaces, instead of 172, to help meet planning policy, along with some additional tree planting and soft landscaping.
But in his report to the committee in August, Mr Lowson said that while the new plans comply with national planning policy, parking provision still fell short of that required by the council by 20 per cent.
He this week reiterated that the council’s requirement, between seven and 10 spaces per 1,076 sq ft of floorspace, is in line with those elsewhere in Scotland.
Mr Lowson also said that parking standards have to be maintained to counter the likelihood of reduced public transport in the county and more reliance on cars.
He said: “While maximum standards may be appropriate in the centre of major urban areas with a comprehensive and frequent public transport service this is not the case in an environment such as Angus, Supermarket developments in the towns in Angus are only viable where there is sufficient parking.
“Car use and ownership in Angus continues to grow. Any suggestion that there is less need for parking is misplaced.
“The pressures on public funding in the foreseeable future will not lead to improved public transport provision.”
Mr Lowson concluded: “It is essential when setting standards and dealing with development proposals to consider both the long-term impact and the short-term benefits. A failure to require developers to provide sufficient parking will lead to longer term problems.”
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problem 1: Why concept of testing is very significant?
problem 2: Under what condition would you consider not test marketing a product? describe a product or service which meets this no-need to test criteria.
problem 3: Generate ideas for a new consumer product which fills an existing need but doesn’t currently exist. Choose the one idea which you think is best. What process would you see for idea generation and screening?
problem 4: What is a planned innovation?
problem 5: Describe step by step how would you convert the planned innovation to a new product development and its successful commercialization at the market place speedily? Make and state your supposition clearly.
problem 6: What are the different phases of new product development?
problem 7: Pick an industry and a product or service. Engage in a creative thinking process to produce an enhanced offering. Do the same to make an entirely new offering which uses one or more of the assets and competencies of the firm.
problem 8: Pick a firm and business and use the eight suggestions recommended by Gary Hamel to come up with a big idea.
problem 9: How would you raise the usage of products if you were the manager of Eureka Forbes?
problem 10: Starbucks coffee is now being offered by United Airlines in flight services and Starbucks Ice Cream is distributed by Dreyer’s. Assess these two growth initiatives. In each case, what is the asset or competency which is being leveraged? Was it as wise decision?
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Xenophon, suppose I think you have a spear. You deny it. You had a spear at one time, you say, but you got rid of it. Yet I believe you retain it. Could you convince me you do not?
Of course I could, wise Socrates. I would swear an oath that I had no such weapon.
But suppose you are not the man of honor I know you to be. Suppose you lack integrity, and have lied and deceived many times before. Should I be convinced merely by your oath?
By the gods, you should not.
Then how else might you convince me?
You might enter my home and see for yourself I have no spear.
Could I search your home, that is, not simply observe, but inspect?
Certainly.
And could I come at any time, without announcement?
If this was required to redeem my honor, then yes, you could.
And could I bring a group of men with me to validate my findings?
Of course.
But if we assume you are a man of guile, would you hide a spear in your home, where there is a chance it might be found?
I am certain I would not, were I such a man.
Would you hide a spear in the places where spears once were manufactured?
Surely not.
Would you hide it where spears were known to have been stored?
That would be absurd. Even spears forgotten but thought destroyed would make me look a liar.
But if you were artful in the ways of trickery, might you not bury the spear in the desert, in a place far from those traversed by men, and give no indication to me that such a place exists?
That would be a superior stratagem. Who can know every desert dune?
And if more clever still, perhaps you could place your spear in a wagon full of goods, a nondescript cart that is kept moving and seems a mere part of the city bustle?
I could hide many spears in many such carts. I could move them between cities, between countries. You would be none the wiser.
Indeed. And perhaps spears could be kept in the private homes of those I would have no reason to suspect. Could I possibly search every building in the city?
Such an undertaking would require many hundreds of men and a like number of days.
So you could hide your spear, and thus deceive me.
It seems that it would be so.
You would be content.
Undoubtedly.
But let us assume that you are not satisfied. Let us assume you are psychopathic and paranoid. And that you rule over a city that is held in awe and fear of your wrath.
Very well.
You commit torture and murder when necessary.
As it must be.
But you also subvert with various forms of influence, bribery, blackmail, extortion.
Such is the way of things.
Would you not try to so influence me? Would you not seek to blunt the vigor of my inquiries through some corrupt means?
This is foolishness. What man would seek to corrupt Socrates?
Then consider those who conduct the inspections for me. Perhaps they would be more corruptible?
It seems likely. A few, at least.
And if some of the spear seekers were so influenced, would I likely be able to find a spear?
It is doubtful. Were some of the men seeking the spear under my thrall, they could tell me in advance where you would look, and I could move the spear before you arrived, if necessary.
But let us assume that I have been seeking your spear from a position of true knowledge. Assume that I know a spear exists, in fact, many of them do, and I may even know where they are.
But how could you, wise one?
Could I not have informers? Could I not have sources of information from within your city? Could not the fear you inspire also lead to betrayal? Would not other cities that fear your spears give me information they have amassed from years of patient observation?
This would be reasonable. Yet, if you knew such, why not reveal it?
Perhaps the information was given me by someone close to you. Perhaps the source would be compromised if I let the information be known. And maybe I have more important things for the source to accomplish in the future. Prudence would counsel against such a revelation.
This, too, is reasonable. Nevertheless, could you then not simply tell your seekers the information in private and let them appear to find the spear on their own, without artifice?
But we have already concluded that you may have corrupted them. I cannot trust them.
Just so. Giving them information might also compromise the source or sources that you value.
So again, it appears that deception prevails.
This is a conundrum.
But all is not lost, young warrior. One can suggest hints that will guide the assistants. One can make insinuations that point to the truth. Such methods would not betray my sources. Moreover, even a blind squirrel will find an occasional acorn.
Hope is a slim reed, Socrates.
True. But bear in mind your task. You must prove to me that you do not have the spear that I already know you have.
You set an impossible charge, my teacher. I cannot prove false what you know to be true.
So you would give me the spear?
I would not. If you cannot speak the full truth, I can continue to deceive. If no spear is uncovered, it will seem as though there is no spear to be found. If you cannot convince others, they will think you demented. They will give up the search.
Therefore, reality is reduced to mere words and perceptions, and the chanting of the hoi polloi.
It would seem so.
And the spear remains hidden, until such time as you need to use it.
Barring my ill fortune, it does.
But I am not convinced, for I know the truth.
Yet, O Socrates, does the truth matter? Given what we have concluded, what can one man do armed only with the truth?
Assume also precision-strike weapons.
— James S. Robbins is a national-security analyst & NRO contributor.
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[Blogger’s Note: This post is submitted as a necessarily-lengthy formal comment to the November 20, 2015 draft guidance of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, PM-602-0122, interpreting the phrase, “the same or [a] similar occupational classification” as used in the “increased job flexibility” provisions of Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) §§ 204(j) and 212(a)(5)(A)(iv). This comment incorporates by reference the … Continue Reading
Terabytes of text have already been generated in the course of extolling or excoriating President Obama for his November 20 Executive Actions on Immigration. The prolific foaming of bloviating mouths has mostly been prompted by the promise of deferred action and work permits for undocumented immigrants under the DACA and DAPA programs. Surprisingly, however, his equally profound measures to improve … Continue Reading
Since 2008 American employers have been burning mad about how U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has gone from fairly reasonable to highly restrictive in its interpretation of the L-1B “specialized knowledge” visa category. This statutory visa category allows certain “intracompany transferees” to enter and work in the U.S. for a qualifying employer if he or she “has a special … Continue Reading
Samuel Herbert, Her Majesty’s Home Secretary from 1931-32 (the British equivalent of the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security), could well have been speaking about two recent immigration-related events when he quipped that “bureaucracy” is “a difficulty for every solution.”
U.S. employers have likely grown accustomed to the longstanding controversy over the highly coveted H-1B … Continue Reading
[Blogger’s Note: This post — originally published on March 31, 2013 — is a guest column (updated on April 3, 2013) to reflect actions by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The original post was authored by a former federal government official who played a substantial role in immigration policy. The revisions were added … Continue Reading
The purpose of the [Immigration and Nationality Act is] to prevent an influx of aliens which the economy of individual localities [cannot] absorb. . . . Entrepreneurs do not compete as skilled laborers. The activities of each entrepreneur are generally unique to his own enterprise, often requiring a special balance of skill, courage, intuition and knowledge. . . . The … Continue Reading
“U.S. immigration law is like stratified rock, revealing layer on layer of Congressional accretions laid down over many years, with the superstructure upended in tectonic shifts triggered by the baffling and contradictory interpretations of multiple agencies and courts.”
As we count out the final hours of 2012, let’s recall the highs and lows of the past year in America’s dysfunctional immigration ecosphere.
Nation of Immigrators is pleased to confer its third annual IMMI Awards. (Full disclosure: As in past years, these are my personal choices. If you disagree or believe I’ve missed an obvious awardee, feel free to … Continue Reading
As Republicans join Democrats in contemplating reform of the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system, the final line of the Pledge of Allegiance (“with liberty and justice for all”) is the best place to start.
Revitalizing our broken and outdated 20th Century immigration laws to respond to the needs of 21st Century America will turn in large part on how we face … Continue Reading
Youthful fans of Saturday Night Live may be forgiven for assuming, however mistakenly, that SNL invented satirical television comedy. The patent for this invention probably ought to go instead to other earlier contenders, Jack Paar, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coco or Steve Allen. While I love these past and present paragons of humor, I’ll never forget the laughs my Dad … Continue Reading
“[A] riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” ~ Winston Churchill
The most quotable of British Prime Ministers could well have been talking about the American immigration system rather than describing Russia in 1939. U.S. immigration law is like stratified rock, revealing layer on layer of Congressional accretions laid down over many years, with the superstructure upended in … Continue Reading
It’s been a momentous, startling and exasperating two weeks. The Supreme Court ended the term with three blockbuster decisions, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) held a less-noticed public engagement that knocked the socks off one important segment of the stakeholder community.In
Arizona v. United States, the Court — notwithstanding the ludicrous claims of victory from AZ Gov. … Continue Reading [Blogger’s note: Whether by dint of nature or nurture, lawyers love to argue; immigration lawyers perhaps more so. Unlike our colleagues (outside of immigration practice) for whom sources of law are better defined, immigration attorneys can access a wider array of law and non-law sources with which to fashion our pro and con arguments. As a change of pace … Continue Reading
The federal government regularly auctions airwaves and drilling leases. Should it also auction humans? This is the startling question posed recently at a May 15, 2012 Hamilton Project conference in a paper, a slide presentation and the transcript of remarks offered by Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California (Davis). Prof. Peri provides an intriguing, … Continue Reading
The historian said to the venture capitalist, “Let’s drop the pious baloney,” as each sought the highest office in the land. No, this post is not the set-up to a joke, except perhaps a nod to the risible circular firing squad that the GOP presidential candidates have formed.
And it’s not about a sliced and packaged meat sausage, more accurately … Continue Reading
Europe is at a tipping point. Will the European Union be dashed on Greek or Italian shores. Will France follow Greece and Italy in losing the esteem of bondholders? Will the EU revert to an Uncommon Market and again suffer its historic curse, a mash-up of competing and warring states whose citizens must proffer passports to cross borders and each time … Continue Reading
The U.S. Supreme Court freed a herd of immigration “elephants [hiding] in a mousehole” on May 26. That’s when five Justices used a four-word exception to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) — an act which, among its extensive provisions, banned the employment of foreign citizens whom the employer knows lack work permission — to trample the immigration landscape. The … Continue Reading
Our government leaders often ignore elementary rules of ecology and economics when trying to grapple with America’s immigration problems.
Ecology teaches that a system cannot thrive or long function if inputs far outnumber outputs. When rainwater enters the Mississippi in a volume that exceeds the river’s carrying capacity, levees are breached, adjacent lands are flooded, and people are devastated.
Economics … Continue Reading
A trip abroad, as I took recently for a speaking gig, often allows intellectual curiosity to gallivant more freely. It also provides opportunities to question accepted truths or cause germinating notions to blossom into convincing arguments, especially if serendipity or divine providence creates chance meetings with strangers. These thoughts crystallized after my return as I read Peggy Noonan’s op-ed … Continue Reading
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http://www.naturalnews.com/040245_GMO_ban_Peru_Monsanto.html
(NaturalNews) The only other country in the Americas besides Ecuador to completely ban genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) from being cultivated within its borders, the South American nation of Peru has taken charge to help protect not only its own citizens but also the people of the countries to whom it exports food crops from the horrors of biotechnology. As reported by
CSMonitor.com
, Peru has successfully implemented a 10-year moratorium on GMOs while extensive, long-term safety tests are conducted.
Accomplishing what practically no other country in North, Central, or South America has yet had the willingness or boldness to even attempt, Peru has essentially told the biotechnology industry to take its untested "Frankencrops" and shove them where the sun does not shine. Not only are GMOs dangerous for the environment and humans, agree many local experts and farmers, but they also threaten to decimate the rich biodiversity that has sustained the many civilizations of Peru for millennia.
"They're a big monoculture, which is why people usually end up using GMOs," says Chef Pedro Miguel Schiaffino about the detriments of factory farming, as quoted by
CSMonitor.com
. Schiaffino owns two restaurants in Lima that serve clean, native foods, including many unique varieties found only in the Amazon rainforest. "[W]hen you have monocultures, the crops end up getting diseases, and you have to look for these extreme ways to fix them."
So to prevent the complete loss of a farming tradition that has long incorporated the diverse cultivation of a plethora of native and indigenous crops, Peruvians have decided to simply disallow the raping and pillaging of their rich soils with toxic GMOs
. And in the process, this embargo will help perpetuate the native biodiversity practices that have sustained Peruvians since the days when the Incan Empire reigned supreme.
GMOs and life-sustaining biodiversity simply cannot coexist
Recognizing what the vast majority of our own domestic politicians and grossly-overpaid corporate talking heads refuse to acknowledge, GMOs, by their very nature, contradict actual nature. The ways in which GMOs are planted, cultivated, and harvested are all highly unsustainable and lead to major problems both for the environment and for humans. Americans are now seeing the consequences of GMO
adoption in the form of chronic illness epidemics; widespread soil depletion; the emergence of resistant "superbugs" and "superweeds;" and chemical pollution.
"In the end, it's not a law that's 'against' anything," says Antonietta Gutierrez, a biologist at
National Agrarian University
, about Peru's GMO ban
. "This is a law in favor of biosecurity. The idea is that there should be a responsible way of using technology so that it helps us develop resources - and at the same time, doesn't destroy what we already have."
At the present time, foods containing GMOs that were cultivated in other countries are still allowed to be sold in Peru
. A law passed back in 2011 was intended to require the labeling of GMO-containing food products, however the terms and conditions for such requirements have yet to be set. A recent study conducted by the
Peruvian Association of Consumers and Users
found that among 13 standard food products tested, roughly 77 percent tested positive for GMOs.
Sources for this article include:http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2013/0425/Peru-says-no-to-GMOhttp://www.peruviantimes.comhttp://www.globalpost.com
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Focus Point - Fast TrackCommentary by Pete du Pont
December 10, 2001
I'm Pete du Pont with the National Center for Policy Analysis. The house will soon begin a debate that should be a no-brainer: whether or not to give the president fast track authority on trade pacts.
Fast track lets the president expedite trade without deals getting bogged down by political bickering or special interest meddling. Every president from Richard Nixon had it, until it lapsed in 1994. Since then the rest of the world has been opening up to free trade, while we've been sitting on the sidelines.
With the economy lagging, trade becomes even more important. Exports accounted for about a third of all economic growth over the past decade. The economies of countries that are open to trade grow faster than those that aren't. When we get it right, as we did with the North American Free Trade Agreement, everybody prospers. In fact, Mexico has taken the lesson to heart far more than we have, and has turned into more of a free trading country than the U.S., making eight free trade agreements with more than 30 nations.
The house needs to get this right, and do it now.
Those are my ideas, and at the NCPA we know ideas can change the world. I'm Pete du Pont. Next time, historical dopes.
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What are the ethics of platform design? One of the reasons that Facebook study on user emotions was so controversial is that it touched on the kinds of ethics we expect — or don’t expect — from platform designers. The public debate was divided, right down to the words used to describe what happened: science, experimentation, customization, manipulation, effect, significance, consent, harm, algorithm, users, audiences. All these words mean different things to people depending on their experiences, training, values, and expectations. And the simple summary of ethics as the “study of what we ought to do” is often unsatisfying because it invokes hard questions about who is the “we” who does the deciding, what “oughts” are up for debate, and who bears responsibility. Journalists and news technology designers are increasingly finding themselves in the middle of this debate about how platforms should work.
Many people interested in journalism followed the Facebook study debate because it was, in part, about a new era of press ethics. The press’s freedom — its rights and obligations as a distinct institution — rests, in part, upon bearing responsibility to focus our attention, influence who we learn from, and affect change.
But the press doesn’t bear this responsibility alone. Today, press ethics are intertwined with platform design ethics, and press freedom is shared with software designers. The people at Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, Pulse and elsewhere have a new and significant role in how news circulates and what we see on our screens. We’re only just beginning to understand how these companies’ algorithms work and why they matter to the editorial calculations
shaping today’s news.
We recently conducted a study on designers of news apps and their work in this space between software design and news circulation [
Digital Journalism / SSRN].
When designers create a personalized news app, they aren’t just designing software. They are creating a platform that participates in constructing an
idea of news. An app can give you exactly the type of stories you’re interested in ( soccer and marmots only, please) or it can suggest and display stories that it suspects you should be reading. You can, if you want, design a personal service with a preference for positive news that also avoids negative terms, something which NPR reported Google was doing in its “experimental newsroom” during the World Cup.
A decision like this is significant, with wide-ranging and unanticipated effects, but it’s the latest moment in a long history of value driven news decisions. Newspaper publishers in the colonial United States were in a similar situation: “None of the early papers reached out to collect news; they printed what came to them.” Selection decisions gradually became norms of news production; they created expectations and responsibilities for journalists and publishers. Likewise, app designers are currently making choices that are reshaping our experience of everyday news reading.
Traffic data show that people are increasingly encountering news through smartphones and tablets; breaking news alerts are starting to be tailored to geographic locations; and online news organizations of various stripes are implementing “mobile-first” design strategies to make sure that their content and experiences are optimized for small screens. Emerging academic literature tells us that these mobile technologies are not simply smaller, more portable versions of desktop-era websites. Instead, they represent new news terrains that are “immersive, pervasive, and constantly updating” and may also be leaving us vulnerable to new forms of “data-mining and surveillance.”
These emerging mobile platforms are being made by designers who must make their own decisions about what is important for news delivery. What do they value? While some traditional news organizations are creating their own news apps, mobile news also emerges from a parallel industrial culture of start-ups and commercial software design, with a different inheritance of norms and values to those associated with the fourth estate.
With this in mind, we set out to understand how designers of these apps constitute what we call a “liminal press”: people and systems existing outside — but alongside — online news organizations that create the conditions under which mobile news circulates. To get a sense of how these designers understand themselves and their roles, we interviewed senior programmers, designers, and decision-makers at Storify, Zite, Google News, Emporia, AOL Editions, News.Me, Fluent News, and Scoopinion (leaders in mobile news experience design when we conducted our fieldwork in 2011 and 2012).
We conducted interviews in Palo Alto, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Cambridge U.K. For this paper in Digital Journalism, we focused on two questions: how these designers define journalism as a process and as a profession; and how they see themselves as like or unlike others in the field of online news. Here’s what we found.
Relationship to journalism as a profession and process
Four themes emerged in how news app designers understood their work in relation to journalism: organizing information; meeting user demands; strategic transparency, and, at times, distancing themselves from journalism.
Organizing Information: A senior leader at Storify described the company’s goal as essentially information organization — helping people pull out things they think are important and worth preserving “from the noise of all this social media.” A leading designer at AOL Editions agreed, saying that a key challenge they aimed to solve was information overload: “So you’ve got TweetDeck beeping at you, and Flipboard is always refreshing, and there’s always a new story…how do you keep up with all that?” Designers did not think that they were simply providing information but, rather, helping people “sense-make”: processing ambiguity, creating plausible meanings, and feeling in control of the surfeit of data. Meeting user demands: Part of organizing information means learning about users and delivering only the content they want to receive. For example, Zite’s co-founder says their app could teach editors what news should be: “No matter what an editor thinks is important, I’m never going to consider a story about Lindsay Lohan important, ever. I just don’t want to see that in my feed. So I think that how this transforms media is that it teaches reporters a lot more about what people are talking about, what they should be writing about.” And a senior Google News executive said that their sense of success comes not only from giving people what they want to see, but from “helping you discover things that might be of interest to you that aren’t resident in your social graph today.” For these designers, meeting user demand means not simply giving people what they say they want—it means delivering what they think users should want based on their previous behavior and the data patterns they produce. The data produced by a user is fed into a model that determines what news is seen — even when those signals conflict with what the user has asked for, or what judgments the editors might make. Strategic transparency: All the designers we spoke with wanted to tell users why they make content recommendations, with each having a slightly different understanding of “transparency.” The Google News executive aimed to highlight types of news expertise they value: “We’re starting to surface these authorship annotations to help you see who’s behind the news … to show expertise, which we believe strongly in.” This doesn’t mean Google News is going to tell you how its algorithm works but, rather, that its algorithm is going to favor reporting that it judges to be open and transparent. Distancing from journalism: Although all of our participants talked about themselves in relation to press practices and traditions, many of them also distanced themselves from journalism altogether, claiming little or no relationship to news work. “I don’t know if anyone is thinking about practical journalism as fair and balanced storytelling,” confessed a senior News.me designer. When asked about the kind of journalistic ideals motivating designers working on these types of products, a senior AOL designer said: “I don’t think that the people in this space who are doing this are familiar with these ideas of journalism that you’re talking about, except in the most cursory way. And even there, I don’t think that they believe they’re important. I think essentially, zero. I think there are no ideals being pursued.” His colleague agreed saying “You know, I’m building an entertainment product. I don’t even consider all the things that you guys are talking about.” How interstitial designers see themselves
Scholars of journalism have been increasingly interested in the kind of boundaries — organizational, technological, ideological — that divide and structure aspects of news work. Our goal was to better understand these “interstitial designers,” people who create news products that fall somewhere in between pure content and user experiences. Our aim was to describe the boundary work of these news app designers: How do they see similarities and differences in each other, or with journalists. Four themes emerged in this boundary work, in how they described their identities, their technologies, and their roles within the field of news technology design:
Heavy versus light infrastructure: Some participants described themselves as having a more open participatory framework than traditional news organizations, drawing on countless non-professionals who will contribute content to their service. One Storify co-founder contrasted his company against the Associated Press, but said that it raises a whole new set of questions: “What would you do if you wanted to recreate the AP [Associated Press] today? You know, would you build the news service by getting a bunch of offices all around the world and hire people and translators and assistants and drivers and create all this infrastructure for sending the reporters everywhere, which the AP has done?” Instead he aims to create a new kind of AP based on “curation of social media; building a platform where we enable journalists, bloggers or whoever wants to really to find the best of social media and use human intelligence.” They aim to resemble the AP’s reach and global power, but to do so without its heavy infrastructure. App designers versus mainstream media: News app designers mark their sector out as different, while defending themselves against perceived criticism from mainstream media. A senior Google News executive says that what they do is like what the press has always done: “on the one hand, I can look at some of those [aggregation] practices and easily say [it is] inappropriate leveraging of someone else’s work. On the other hand, news reporting is largely derivative work, right? I mean there are pieces of additive facts and value, but so much of news coverage, understandably, is building on prior news coverage.” Other designers described themselves as partners of news organizations, as a senior News.me developer did: “We wanted to figure out a way for publishers like the Times to get what they want, which is money for their content, which is information about the people that are consuming their content. So how do we set something up where people can consume New York Times content, outside of their walls, in a place that they enjoy, but also have The New York Times benefit, and not lose anything from it?… They can benefit from this ecosystem.” News app designers seemed to be trying to both differentiate themselves from the mainstream media (articulating the value they give them), while simultaneously describing their apps as consistent with the kind of news circulation practices the press has always relied upon. Curation versus aggregation: The dividing line between curation and aggregation emerged frequently, as a contested ground where some designers spoke passionately about why they were not “mere aggregators” and instead curating a series of complex signals, from social media and users reading patterns as expressed in metadata (time reading a story, what genres they clicked, what their friends were reading). For example, News.me distinguished itself from the basic RSS reader model: “A lot of people thought, ‘Okay, RSS is the future, RSS Reader.’ And it didn’t really go anywhere. People still use it that way. And now you see these apps coming to iPhone and iPad, particularly Flipboard and Pulse. They’re really just RSS aggregators. To this point, they’re not really doing anything behind the scenes other than like a different presentation.” The designers saw their algorithms as providing a kind of critical, signal-driven curation, a key distinction from a history of simple aggregation they saw their systems challenging. App designers versus gatekeepers: Finally, designers described their frustrations with not having final control over how their apps are published and distributed. Rather than seeing themselves as gatekeepers, they described their reliance on the gatekeepers who run app stores. A senior designer with AOL Editions said: “Yeah, well there’s another piece that I think is really lost in this which is that probably the most important player in this is Apple as the gatekeeper. Like, they’re the gatekeeper of news now, right? For instance, I’m still upset with them, you know, they wouldn’t let us into Newsstand even though our thing is the most episodic of all of them, okay, they wouldn’t let us into Newsstand because we were aggregating content.” Closing the divide between journalists and software designers
We continually heard designers invoke different traditions and ideologies. They talked about journalism as an information-focused practice and the need to give people individual, personalized views of the Internet’s surfeit of data. They described news consumers in customer-like ways, aiming to create designs that would meet their demands and desires. They judged success in terms of how large their audiences were. Some of them questioned their relationship to journalism altogether, distancing themselves from what they saw as the press’s outdated and complex infrastructures; instead, they aimed to create lightweight architectures that used crowd-sourced, participatory labor to do the work of news professionals. That is, instead of seeing simple divides between algorithms and editors, between curation and aggregation, between “old” or “new” journalism, we saw a complex mix of motivations and self-stated identities.
News app design seems to constitute an emerging organizational field: a “community of organizations that engage in common activities and are subject to similar reputational and regulatory pressures.” Our interviewees invoked and rejected the traditional press — sometimes differentiating themselves from it and other times aligning with it, while not always even agreeing on what “it” is.
Although this is an early step in characterizing this hybrid press of entrepreneurs and technology designers, much of what they do certainly resembles a kind of boundary work considered key to contemporary online journalism.
The Facebook study and the discussion emerging from it highlighted the need for journalists to understand how social media signals are interpreted, manipulated, or monetized by platforms like Facebook. But it also showed their need to have conversations with software designers outside of their own newsrooms — to talk across divides between algorithm and editorial that live beyond their organizations, to create new ethics of press responsibility.
Photo of an iPhone stencil by Robert Occhialini
used under a Creative Commons license.
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Almost all of Shakespeare’s plays begin with a state of order or stability, which gives way to
disorder or confusion.
That disruption could take place in individuals. Macbeth is told that he is going to be king and as a result of that becomes consumed by ambition; Othello believes his wife to be unfaithful and is overwhelmed by jealousy; Hamlet learns that his father has been murdered by his father’s brother and becomes obsessed with revenge. Other human causes of disruption are love, hatred, the lust for political power or any other strongly felt emotion. The disruption drives the dramatic action.
Disruption could also occur in society – for example civil war or rebellion. Sometimes disruption in an individual will lead to social disruption, and vice versa.
Disruption in individuals is often echoed by disruption in nature. For example, Lear’s madness is reflected in the storms and tempests that take place throughout; Macbeth’s unnatural killing of his king is reflected in unnatural happenings such as the horses in the stables going mad and biting the grooms, earthquakes, unusual downpours etc.
Order is restored in the end. The suffering individual is usually dead by the end of the play, but even in the plays that aren’t classical tragedies the disrupted individual comes to new understandings and a new outlook on humanity, even though that may be minutes before his or her death.
Although order may be restored it is seldom all perfect and harmonious. There are loose ends, such as the treatment of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. On the surface, it looks like the Christian community has triumphed in the face of an attack from an enemy and restored order to their community. As Shylock slinks away in defeat after he is humiliated in his court case against Antonio though, we are appalled by the nastiness of the Christian characters as they mock him, and we also see the seeds of an even worse disruption of Venetian society as its anti-Semitic character is affirmed. Most of the plays have such hanging threads in their show of order at the end. In real life order never lasts and new conditions lead to new threats. Shakespeare’s plays reflect that reality.
Some of the plays deal specifically with the theme of order and disorder, making it almost ‘what the play is about’ (although one can never say about a Shakespeare’s play that it’s ‘about’ one particular thing). A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of those. The social order of Athens demands that a father’s will should be enforced. That is also particularly true for the order of the family. Egeus’ family is threatened because his daughter refuses to marry the husband of his choice and insists on her own choice. When she runs away from the ordered, hierarchical society of Athens, followed by her lover and their friends, to the chaos of the woods, order is disrupted: in the woods the relationships are fragmented. There is also a row going on between the rulers of the forest, the Fairy King and Queen, and even the seasons are disrupted. It is only when Oberon and Titania are reconciled and the natural order of the fairy world is restored that the lovers’ relationships can become ordered once more and their return to human society can in turn restore its order. Egeus’ daughter gets her way regarding her choice of husband, however, and the drama ends with this threat to the social order.
Some of the plays begin with a significant measure of disorder, only to see the restoration of order, which then proves to be a mere illusion of order. Macbeth is one such play. It begins with battle raging between the Scots and the Norwegians, aided by Scottish traitors – extreme disorder and chaos everywhere, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Two great military captains, Macbeth and Banquo defeat the Norwegians and restore civil order. A scene in which the king punishes the traitors and rewards the loyal is all about the restoration of social order. Everything now seems ordered and harmonious, but the rest of the play is a demonstration of how disruption within an individual – Macbeth’s over-reaching ambition – can bring about disorder again, after which order has to be restored once again. This play can also be seen as being ‘about’ order and disorder, although we know that it is impossible to say what any Shakespeare play is ‘about.’ One can only explore some of its ideas, but the idea of order and disorder is central in Macbeth.
The centrality of the theme is reinforced by the language throughout. Macbeth’s comment,
‘so foul and fair a day I have not seen’ echoes the witches’ chant and links him with the chaos of their dark world. As Macbeth and Lady Macbeth talk they frequently invoke the darkness that allows evil and disorder to flourish – ‘come thick night and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell’; ‘stars hide your fires’ and so on.
The contrast between order and disorder is demonstrated in various places throughout the play. The banquet scene is probably the finest illustration of this theme in all of Shakespeare. Macbeth has just become king after murdering Duncan, and is holding a state banquet with noblemen of all degrees, each knowing his place in the seating order. The irony of his welcoming statement,
‘You know your own degrees, sit down’ is striking since he has just disrupted the order by killing his king. This is the scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears.
Macbeth’s guilt makes him lose control and the banquet ends in chaos as everyone runs for the door. Lady Macbeth’s urging,
‘stand not on the order of your going but go at once’ confirms the breakdown of order, and it is from this point that the disruption of Scottish society is worked through, to culminate in its restoration with the defeat and death of Macbeth and the restoration of the rightful king, Malcolm, to the throne.
Again, with the reminder that no Shakespeare play is ‘about’ any one thing, a central theme of The Tempest is the conflict between order and chaos, with order being a fragile thing, perpetually threatened by chaos. In the background of the text is the almost continuous interplay between stormy weather and music, graphically illustrating that wavering interaction. Prospero is like a gardener, tending his garden, continually trying to combat the weeds that keep springing up to disrupt the garden’s order. Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo, Antonio and Sebastian require constant watching and regulating as they attempt to overthrow the order that he has established on the island.
It’s notable that even here, on this magical island, tamed and ordered by Prospero’s arts as a magician, having restored order after the disruption brought about by the royal visitors from the real world of human politics, the resolution is not perfect. He has to return to that world and assume his old life there – a life that was disrupted by political ambition – with all its threats.
Every one of Shakespeare’s plays can be examined from the perspective of the conflict between order and disorder, whatever its other, and sometimes more dominant, themes are.
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The UN Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN) says fast-growing, low income urban populations are facing a nutritional
“double burden”. “While they continue to face undernutrition, cities are now experiencing a double burden of malnutrition with the additional presence of over nutrition and obesity, which is associated with non-communicable diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer,” the report says.
It will be presented at the UN Habitat 6th World Urban Forum in Naples, Italy, on September 4, 2012.
It says city dwellers have,
“limited time for shopping and cooking, and therefore rely on processed and convenience foods, which are widely available in urban environments.” “ This signifies less fiber, minerals and vitamins, and more sugar, salt and fat.”
UNSCN notes action taken by the likes of the UK Department of Health which has instigated a salt reduction campaign in processed foods.
A regional French government initiative called Program for Nutrition, Prevention and Health of Children and Adolescents has improved the availability of healthy food at schools.
Food deserts
But urban zones where healthy food was unavailable continued to rise – zones known as food deserts.
“ As a result of this expanding urbanisation and food supply chain, urban food deserts are becoming apparent,” UNSCN observes. “These are areas within city centres with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, causing people to rely on small grocery or convenience stores that are more expensive and lack all foods needed for a healthy diet.”
The problem has won the attention of the US government which has created the Healthy Food Financing Initiative to identify food deserts and,
“bring them more healthy food sources.”
UNSCN said zoning policies could help the problem by promoting healthy food outlets and grocery outlets and restricting fast food establishments in certain areas such as schools.
It concludes:
“Malnutrition in all its forms creates a burden on cities and national health systems as well as on the lives and wellbeing of humans. Capacity building and awareness within the public sector, the private sector and civil society can help to address these issues by promoting the right to adequate food, ultimately leading to health and nutrition for all .”
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An ambitious Bloomberg administration plan to coordinate the city's so-called street furniture and, at long last, install public toilets is proving no easier than renovating a luxury penthouse for finicky clients.
The sometimes-competing concerns of money, design and pedestrian flow were among the issues raised at a City Council hearing yesterday, the first at which the public testified on the plan, a Council spokesman said. The proposal would grant a franchise to a single company to design, install and maintain bus shelters, newsstands, news racks, benches and automatic public toilets.
The city has long sought to fill the need for public toilets. During the Dinkins administration, officials installed experimental pay toilets but eventually abandoned their proposal. Later, under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, there was a plan to give one company the contract to build and maintain street furniture, but it was canceled. A subsequent Council plan to build toilets fell apart as well.
The city's most recent proposal is modeled on the Giuliani plan and is in some ways more sweeping than those in other cities.
Its supporters say that it would reduce clutter and coordinate the overall appearance of the city's streets, as well as provide a financial incentive for a private company to maintain the structures while generating revenue for the city.
The company granted the franchise would cover capital and maintenance costs by selling advertising space, and the city would get a fee from the company estimated to bring in $400 million over the 20-year life of the franchise.
But critics yesterday took on everything from what should be in the proposal to who should build the structures and how they should look.
The biggest obstacle to toilets these days may be newsstands. Currently, newsstand vendors own and operate their stands and pay a yearly licensing fee to the city, but they are not allowed to use the outside space for advertising. Under the street-furniture proposal, the company the city selects would replace the newsstands and have control over the outside to sell advertising.
''Newsstands are not the city's street furniture,'' said Robert S. Bookman, counsel to the New York City Newsstand Operators Association, a group of newsstand owners, employees and newspaper publishers. ''They are privately owned and paid-for businesses that hard-working people work in every day. On what legal theory is the city going to tear down our newsstands so as to maximize profits for the toilet companies?''
But city officials said that the big difference for the newsstand businesses under the proposal was that they would get a new stand provided by the private company. The entire franchise would also be more attractive to a potential company if the newsstands were included, because their locations make them attractive advertising outlets.
Some who testified yesterday raised concerns that if a single company created the designs, the particular flavors of individual communities could somehow be lost.
''Designers should be encouraged to provide multiple design schemes, be it the Asian elegance of Sunset Park, the brownstone splendor of Park Slope, Fort Greene or Bed-Stuy, or the neon pizazz of Coney Island,'' Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, told the Council.
Others argued that even more elements, including bicycle racks, public phones and sidewalk cafes, should be included, but cautioned against too much intrusive advertising.
Tony Avella, chairman of the subcommittee on zoning and franchises, said that although he would keep his promise to the administration to move the bill forward quickly, the Council still had to take into account both the resistance of the newsstand owners and the rising clamor for more bus shelters.
Nonetheless, he said he had always leaned toward the idea of toilets as an ''important public amenity that the city should provide.''Continue reading the main story
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Blanca Murillo’s morning routine, for the most part, would seem unremarkable to any woman: she washes her face, brushes her teeth, runs a comb through her hair and daubs on makeup. Then, as she has for the past seven years, she tugs on her girdle.
Known as a faja, from the Spanish word for wrap, it was imported from Colombia, one of the world’s cosmetic surgery centers, where until recently it was used mostly for postoperative wear by recovering liposuction patients to keep swelling to a minimum and ensure that the skin tightens properly. But it has been embraced by young Latinas — and increasingly by other women — as a shortcut to a curvaceous body.
For over 50 years, women in America have largely cast off such constrictive undergarments, which feminists criticized as symbols of repression. The nylon and Lycra underwear brand Spanx has been credited with reintroducing, and reacclimating, women to the concept of extra help for figure problems, but it may have also opened the door to a new generation of young women embracing the faja, which is far closer to the real thing — in all its organ-shifting, curve-exaggerating strength.
Such girdles are a resurgent fashion phenomenon to a growing number of women who wriggle into them each day without a thought of what Gloria Steinem might say. Their newfound popularity is very much in evidence — or at least, the results are — on the streets of Corona, Queens, where Reggaeton music accompanies the rumble of the elevated subway, and where many immigrants from Colombia live.Continue reading the main story
“You see the love handles?” asked Ms. Murillo, 33, a trim hairdresser who stands a doll-like 4 feet 3 inches tall, as she pinched a small fold of flesh at her midsection and lifted her shirt to reveal a well-worn faja. “With this, you hide it.”
The comeback of fajas has surprised even those in the business of selling them; they had fallen out of favor before they were adopted for medical use.
“I’m from the ’70s; we rejected it,” said Lisa Cipriani, 57, the proprietor of Caralinda Mis Fajas, one of the dozens of stores in Queens specializing in fajas.
“This is the new generation,” she said, “and this is an option.”
The demand has been soaring. Colfajas, which manufactures fajas and exports them from Colombia, raised its production by 47 percent last year and exported 60,000 items, thousands more than in past years, said Jean Pierre Velez, who helps run the family-owned company.
Y & K, a small clothing and lingerie shop on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, regularly sells out the roughly 4,000 fajas it ships in each year.
The fajas comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, from full-body jumpsuits to tight belly bands, for women as well as men. The effects depend on the fabric heft of the fajas; they come in Lycra, cotton, nylon and latex. The less forgiving the material, the more flattering the effect. Prices typically run from $20 to over $70, depending on the fabric and how much of the body it covers.
“There is a Spanish saying, you want to look ‘like a Coke bottle,’ ” said Lilliana Rios, 33, who reflects on the faja on her blog ThingsLatinosLoveorHate.com. “A lot of Spanish songs talk about women with shapes like a guitar, so that’s the curved look that Latina women want.”
Getting the look requires some grit. Tugging on a faja can become a desperate bout of woman versus fabric. Flesh must be coaxed inside, battened down by hooks and, finally, sealed with a zipper that can force the air out of your lungs.
“The first day you can’t stand it,” Ms. Murillo said. “But then it loosens it up.”
Hidden under clothes the results may be sexy, but fajas are not. Most are the color of an Ace bandage and resemble body casts. Some are configured to squeeze certain areas and leave others to jiggle.
Juan Lopez and his partner, Monica Arias, import the PonteBella brand of fajas from Colombia to Valley Stream, N.Y., on Long Island. Though they started out selling to medical spas and plastic surgeons, orders from the fashion market overtook medical sales about five years ago, Mr. Lopez said.
More recently, calls have been pouring in from unexpected places: retailers in Great Neck and Garden City, also on Long Island, where the Latino populations are small.
“In the beginning, it was almost only for Latinos and black women,” Ms. Arias said. “Now the white people are asking for fajas.”
Recognizing the changing market, Ms. Arias said, the company began selling softer versions to appeal to a wider audience: some women’s ideal body might not involve the roller-coaster curves favored in Latin America. Girdles, once de rigueur, mostly disappeared during the 1960s, said Valerie Steele, the author of “The Corset: A Cultural History” and the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“Clothing was showing more of the body, so it wasn’t good enough to just push the fat around,” she said. “The other reason was the thought that you shouldn’t have to rely on it, you were supposed to be healthy and in good shape already.”
The feminist movement, Ms. Steele added, rejected the girdle as a symbol of repression, even as it fell out of fashion.
The newfound popularity of fajas comes at a time when skyrocketing obesity rates crash into a body ideal that seems skinnier than ever. “There’s this radical disjunction between an ideal, which is slender and muscular, and a reality that more and more people are dramatically overweight,” Ms. Steele said.
At Aishti, his store in Jackson Heights, Queens, Moussa Balaghi has begun carrying girdles in size “extra small,” because, to his shock, so many teenagers and even younger girls were coming in to request them. “Only chubby fat girls used to use this; now, everybody is,” he said, shaking his head. “If she has the smallest little thing at her waist, she wants to use this.”
Ms. Rios, the blogger, said new fabrics had replaced the rubberized material of the old corsets, which were often reinforced with stiff struts called boning. And implicit celebrity endorsements helped popularize the new version for a new generation.
“Fajas to me were something my mother would wear,” Ms. Rios said. “Now Spanx came along and you see Eva Longoria wearing it, Jennifer Lopez wearing it. Now it’s at a comfort level that women at any size and any age are wearing them.”
At Caralinda Mis Fajas, clients ease their way into tighter and tighter fajas. A seamstress will resize the faja once or twice as a customer’s weight shifts downward. And it often does: a faja can hold the stomach so tight, Ms. Cipriani said, the wearer loses her appetite.Continue reading the main story
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Want to get rid of bloated belly? If yes, cut down calories from your meals to begin with your weight-loss plan. Besides, bringing the caloric value of your dish down makes it healthier as well. Here are 7 low-calorie cooking tips that will help you reduce calories in your plate. [Read: How to Cut Calories Gradually?]
You can also consult a nutritionist or dietician to know the best techniques to cut calories from your food items.
Read more articles on Weight Loss.
Related Questions
Even a diabetic can enjoy delicious yet healthful meals at home.read more
The fat gain on your body is tell tale signs of a bad lifestyle, but do you recognise the causes? Here are the causes for weight gain after 30.read more
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Gluten-free baking, when done well, is looked upon by some as art even finer than the Mona Lisa. Many of us have experienced the worst of it, from cupcakes with the density of a sponge to cookies with the flavor of sidewalk chalk.
Two ladies who seem to have mastered this art are Christine and Sandy Penney, co-owners of the gluten-free (GF) bakery Something Sweet Without Wheat. With many years of experience – starting with a lot of trial-and-error – these sisters have developed and perfected a knack for creating delicious GF desserts. Christine and Sandy recently sat down for a Q&A to share some of their secrets to successful GF baking, from knowledge of celiac disease and flour types to money-saving tips and tricks.
How would you define gluten-free?
A. When we’re asked what exactly it means, we explain that gluten is a protein found in wheat that can be problematic for many people. For people with celiac disease, gluten attacks the small intestine, disallowing the body to absorb certain nutrients. This can cause headaches, fatigue and stomachaches, but there are many ways wheat can affect people.
What did you first struggle with when you began GF baking?
A. When we first began baking with gluten-free flours, it was a disaster. A niece was the first to be diagnosed and she wasn’t taking the news well, so we tried [working with] some gluten-free white rice flour.
It was not edible. It took a lot of horrible cakes and cookies to figure out that we needed to mix about three different kinds of flours, add xanthan gum and figure out the right textures of the batters. Sometimes, you also need to figure out the exact amount of guar gum that’s necessary.
What kinds of flours do you use and for which pastries?
In our bakery, we use a mix of bean flours, with sorghum and brown rice flour. That way, you get some fiber from the beans. It’s really about mixing the right amounts of up to four different flours and “playing” until you get the consistency – and most of all, the taste – right. It can’t taste grainy or gummy. That’s the tricky part.
To make an easy GF brownie or cookie, try replacing traditional flour with a combination of three different flours, or use a multi/all-purpose GF flour (see these from Bob’s Red Mill and King Arthur). Using an all-purpose GF flour simplifies things by allowing you to follow old recipes. In fact, many of my recipes are the same ones I always used before; I just replaced the traditional flours and added xanthan gum.
Any money-saving tips for regular folks who want to try GF baking?
Unfortunately, GF flours can be more expensive, which is hard to avoid. But you can – and really have to – shop around. Some stores are very pricey compared to others. Ordering online, too, directly from your preferred flour company or a wholesaler, is often cheaper.
For more tips on gluten-free foods and lifestyles, check out these
6 Gluten-Free Foods To Live By. image: REL Waldman
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Last summer, Bob Litan and Lesa Mitchell of the Kauffman Foundation sent a short memo to Esther Lee at the Dept. of Commerce entitled “Accelerating the Commercialization of Government-Funded University-Based Research.” Although the Foundation, based in Kansas City MO, has been interested in university tech transfer at least since 2003 when it issued a report “Accelerating Technology Transfer & Commercialization in the Life & Health Sciences” (PDF at end of posting), this memo attracted little attention until, in December, The Harvard Business Review named it as containing one of the “Ten Breakthrough Ideas for 2010.” The alleged breakthrough is the proposal in the memo that, while universities will continue to own inventions made with Federal funding, professors should be free to not use their university’s technology transfer office (TTO), but to have the option of licensing their inventions through whatever agency they prefer. The Kauffman premise, to put it bluntly, is that most TTOs are “suboptimal” and that professors would be better off, in many cases, shopping their technology to faster-moving licensing entities (of some sort). The stated goal is to speed up the commercialization of new technologies while allowing universities to collect the same royalties as under the current system.
So the Kauffman team feels that there are lots of professors with under-appreciated technologies who would benefit by being able to leave the corral of their institution’s TTO and ride off, if not into the sunset, into the arms of a third-party licensing entity who would make the translational connection needed to get the technology “from bench to bedside.” Really?
To begin with, it is difficult to see how this would work in practice. The Kauffman memo suggests that the professor might have the option to prevent the TTO from even trying to license the technology while he or she shops it. Or will we now have dueling TTOs trying to license the same technology? (The memo suggests that a professor with an automotive invention who lives in, say, Kansas might want to use a TTO in Detroit.) And what will prevent third-parties from taking most of the licensing royalties? The memo mentions ownership, but it does not seem to consider who will pay for the patent costs, especially if a statutory bar date looms. A system in which the professor’s TTO is paying the patent costs while the professor is out trying to license the IP portfolio via a different organization is difficult to imagine. And about conflicts of interest….
The Kauffman fellows seem to have no sense of the chaotic history of tech transfer prior to Bayh-Dole (BD) (or in its early years). When I was doing patent prosecution at a big IP firm, one client I was given was a professor from a prestigious university that did not have a tech transfer policy. Since he was free to do what he wanted with his new method of cancer treatment pre-BD, he had paid the firm to file applications on it, and eventually licensed them to big pharma for a lot of money (in those days). The university got nothing at all. The first talk I ever gave was about the BD Act and the audience was professors, not administrators.
Also, there were a number of “for-profit non-profit” entities gathering up loose technologies from universities without technology policies (let alone TTOs). Research Corp. Technologies (RCT) was one of the most successful. RCT would not take on a technology unless it could get an assignment (not a license) from the inventor(s) and institution(s) in question (if the university even asserted any ownership rights). RCT would then front all the patent costs and attempt to license the technology. If it was successful, the inventor(s), and sometimes the institution (if it cared), would get some of the royalties. Before the rise of TTOs that developed their own licensing expertise, RCT and other organizations like it scored some major tech transfer homeruns, but they could only handle so many proposals at once. BD has been referred to as an “unfunded mandate,” but it did motivate universities and other institutions getting NIH and other Federal funding to step up to the plate and swing, at least at the fat pitches.
There are still a few lone wolves out there trying to make it as “hired guns” (pardon the metaphors). Believe it or not, I am still approached by small companies that want to file on inventions brought to them by university professors who are either unaware that their universities have TTOs (or at least tech transfer policies) or think they can ignore them. They can’t. The present system is not “optimal,” but at least it is organized. A few years ago, a prominent researcher told me that his colleagues used to look down on him because he was patenting his discoveries and licensing them (often to start-ups). He was using a TTO, incidentally. He said that today it is the professors who are not patenting and licensing who are considered to be out of step. I don’t believe that there are hoards of break-through technologies languishing in dusty lab notebooks in academe and, if there are, I don’t believe that loosing professors trained in life sciences to bring them to market is going to change anything for the better.
TechTranPanel_Report.pdf
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The Pension Protection fund (PPF) has appointed seven farmland and timberland fund managers. Some managers will be funded immediately, while others are appointed for deferred investment.
The selected managers are Brookfield Asset Management, Dasos Capital Oy, GMO Renewable Resources, Hancock Timber Resource Group, Macquarie, New Forests Pty, and Stafford Timberland. The PPF said the decision is part of the development of its alternative investment portfolio so it can benefit from greater diversification and reduce its overall risk. The investments will be predominantly in land and the operations needed to cultivate and market agricultural produce or to grow and sell timber. PPF executive director for financial risk Martin Clarke said: “We now have an investment portfolio worth more than £12bn and the size of our assets means that we can take advantage of a broader range of investment opportunities. “Investing in farm and timberland will complement our existing alternative investment portfolio, allow us to diversify our investments more widely and make our portfolio more resilient. “But we do need to be aware that there are some risks in these asset classes, for instance land price risk. Therefore, our approach will be to invest conservatively – which is consistent with our overall low-risk strategy.” The proportion of PPF assets allocated to farm and timberland will vary over time and depend on the opportunities available now and in the future, the fund said. All managers are appointed for four years, with the flexibility for two extensions of up to two years. Farmland and timberland will be added to the list of permitted asset classes in the existing PPF Statement of Investment Principles.
Francesca Fabrizi meets Mark Adamson, director at JLT Employee Benefits, to discuss the current trends in pension scheme administration today
Laura Blows provides a summary of the big pensions stories to have hit the headlines this week
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Surprising summertime pet health dangers
Posted on June 11, 2010 under Uncategorized
By: Dr. Jack Stephens, DVM
Pets Best Insurance President One of the most costly dangers and causes for dog health care in the summer may surprise you.
Grass Awns, most commonly called “Foxtails,” often become lodged in pets’ fur and can cause severe infection and other pricey pet health problems.
Foxtails, also known as “cheat grass,” come from tall grass that has gone to seed. They have sharp points and are difficult to extract given their barbed shape. They are also the same aggravating plants that get stuck in your socks when walking through high, dry grass and are usually found in vacant lots or overgrown areas.
Foxtails often get stuck in between pets’ toes, inside their ear canals, in their eyes and in extreme cases they can be inhaled through the nose. If this happens, a dog will suddenly have a violent repeated sneezing episode. When they become lodged in fur or other body parts they can cause abscesses which often require surgery and immediate dog health care. Generally, long-haired dogs and dogs with floppy ears are are at a higher risk.
Cats can also get Foxtail infections, but these are not nearly as common, likely because they groom themselves and are able to remove the Foxtails before they become problematic.
Foxtails can also become lodged deeper into the oral cavity, chest cavity or abdomen causing life- threatening pet health problems. Once they migrate into these cavities, major surgery, which can be very expensive without pet insurance, may be required.
Sometimes the Foxtail is so hard to find and has migrated into the pets’ body so deeply, it can require multiple surgeries to locate. The migration may also cause infected tracts that can go into the lungs.
Untreated, these migrations can result in serious pet health problems and even death.
The treatment costs depend on how complicated, how much infection and where the Foxtail ultimately lodges. But the bills can be upwards in the hundreds of dollars for surgery alone, and additional for aftercare and medications.
The ultimate key to preventing the pet health problems caused by Foxtails is brushing and inspecting your pet often and keeping grassy areas where your pet has access well-manicured so Foxtails don’t grow.
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Phnom Penh’s much-maligned waste-collection firm Cintri yesterday used a meeting with City Hall to ask for help in collecting between $10 million and $20 million in unpaid fees it says it’s owed by residents in the capital.
Speaking after the meeting – which was held to discuss the company’s performance – Cintri manager Ith Chenda said the municipality should push customers to pay and help find a solution, complaining many simply ignored the waste-management charge.
“According to the agreement, the company will collect, transport and clean, while the authority has the responsibility to encourage people to pay the fee,” Chenda said.
Chenda said the figure, which fluctuated regularly, included debt from the beginning of the firm’s service in September 2003 and comprises between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals and corporations – the latter, he said, were “most responsible” for the arrears.
“Some of them have not paid for 157 months, meaning from the beginning of our service,” Chenda said, saying staff constantly reminded residents about their debt.
“We cannot force them to pay.”
He added that the company was not considering legal action against households, but had pursued some companies in the courts.
The issue, born of vague contracts which do not stipulate which agency is ultimately responsible for collecting payment, according to an expert, is one of many challenges in a tumultuous relationship between authorities and the city’s sole garbage collector.
After years of threatening to cancel its contract over poor services, City Hall officials in July extended the firm’s contracts for four districts and gave it four new districts to service.
Coming after a review of the firm, the decision appeared to reflect improvements in Cintri’s performance, with Phnom Penh Governor Pa Socheatvong even vowing the city would cover losses the company incurred from households not paying, provided the “service is good and the capital is trash free”.
Reached yesterday, City Hall spokesman Mean Chanyada would not confirm the figure, saying “what the company says is up to them”.
Chanyada noted that some citizens, disputing their bill, refused to pay, but said the only solution the municipality could provide was to facilitate negotiations between customers and the company.
Daun Penh District Governor Kuoch Chamroeun also said it was not authorities’ responsibility to collect the cash.
“It is not our duty,” he said. Fees for garbage collection are tacked on to residents’ power bills, which are collected by state-run energy utility Electricite du Cambodge. Larger commercial operations, however, have direct contracts with Cintri.
EdC chief Keo Ratanak could not be reached yesterday. However, an employee who answered the agency’s phone said the group was not responsible for collecting waste-management fees listed on their bills.
“For waste, it depends on the customer; if they want to pay or not it is up to them; if they want to pay, we will accept it,” they said.
Phnom Penh-based waste-management consultant Jon Morales said that the problem was that contracts between the company and authorities did not stipulate exactly who was responsible for collecting unpaid fees.
“The contracts are just really, really vague in every direction,” Morales said, adding Cintri had long complained about unpaid fees. “There are no real enforcement mechanisms.”
Morales also added that Cintri’s calculation of the unpaid fees may also be off, as the company had been known to include areas that it didn’t service.
Additional reporting by Shaun Turton
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It used to be at Wild Willies Ski Shop there was a set schedule of hours and a specific job description for employees.
That was when employees flocked to Whistler and workers were a dime a dozen.
Now Wild Willies owner Bill Lamond has to make a new work schedule every week to accommodate his employees. He tries to be more flexible with hours and moves workers among his three store locations to fill in the gaps in staffing.
He had just enough employees this winter to make it through the busy ski season but he admits it was touch and go at first. These days he finds himself working more, not less, to make up for staffing shortfalls.
"Every year we take on one more job ourselves," he said. "And that would be nice if that trend could stop."
That trend, by all accounts, looks like its only going to get worse.
The employment growth rate in the region for tourism related jobs is expected to grow between two and two and a half per cent on an annual basis, according to draft figures presented to go2, B.C.s tourism industry human resources association, this week.
Go2 commissioned the tourism labour study in the Sea to Sky corridor in December 2005. The draft report was presented this week.
"Its good to know because up until this report we didnt really have a handle on what was happening in the region," said John Leschyson, director industry human resource development with go2.
But the gap created by the growing job market is increasingly exacerbated by the rapidly shrinking labour pool.
The labour market is being affected by a variety of factors.
The baby boomer population is aging, with more people retiring than are able to fill their jobs. The Canadian economy is booming with unemployment levels lower than they have been in more than 30 years. And young mobile workers are being rapidly enticed to high-paying jobs, unbeatable benefit packages, and over-the-top signing bonues in Albertas oil sands.
In the last quarter of 2005, 17,000 Canadians moved to Alberta from other provinces.
While the lack of good employees is a familiar refrain in Whistler come shoulder season, for the first time ever employers are concerned with more than just the natural ebb and flow of workers in a resort town.
"If theres one thing I wake up thinking about and go to bed thinking about, its recruiting," said Whistler-Blackcombs Kirby Brown.
Labour shortages have been on Whistler-Blackcombs radar screen for the past six years but it wasnt until last year that the reality of the problem really set in.
January 22, 2017, 12:00 PM
While Whistler unlikely to follow suit, both communities looking to streamline enforcement efforts More...
January 21, 2017, 11:20 AM
Also, RMOW seeking feedback on proposed transportation plans More...
January 19, 2017, 1:03 AM
Whistler welcomes family of Syrian refugees More...
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Superstorm Sandy: The (Survey) Miracle of Route 35 A look back at how surveyors rallied in recovery efforts.
Superstorm Sandy—or, officially, Hurricane Sandy—was the deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane system and was, after the infamous Katrina, the second-costliest storm in United States’ history. Damage estimates exceed $70 billion. But those simple, stark metrics don’t capture the horror and dismay felt by the people of coastal New Jersey when they began to assess the damage on Oct. 30, the day after landfall. Surges from the storm had absolutely destroyed many familiar landmarks, and even whole islands had disappeared. Residents of Mantoloking, N.J., were shocked to find that a major interchange at Route 35 and County Route 528 had been essentially erased by seawater—Sandy had opened up a 400-foot wide breach between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay. This was more than an inconvenience; the interchange is the only practical connection to Mantoloking, New Jersey’s richest borough, and about 15 smaller communities in Ocean County, located on a long, narrow barrier island.
The missing interchange was just one of many disturbing images that fascinated TV viewers around the globe in the wake of Sandy. But to those who live in
Superstorm Sandy wiped out part of Route 35 in New Jersey. Photo from the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
Ocean County and to Chris Christie, New Jersey’s popular governor, the wiped-out intersection was a call to action, one of many obstacles that simply had to be surmounted in order to get New Jersey working again. And thus the stage was set for the reconstruction effort now known as “The Miracle of Route 35.”
According to an article in the Asbury Park Press, the reopening of the interchange “may be the ultimate transportation miracle.” Work that was done included:
Removal of mountains of debris-laden sand from the highway, some of which were 10 feet deep. Removal of 89 vehicles and 25 boats from the highway. Removal of 27 buildings. Repair of several washed-out sections of roadway, the longest being 200 feet. About 8,000 dump truck loads to cart out debris from Route 35 to landfills, at a cost of about $4.5 million. Reconstruction and replacement of all utilities. Assessment of bridge damage, and minor repairs.
All of this work took place over less than two months—Route 35 was open to Ocean County residents in time for Christmas.
The project was followed closely in New Jersey, and Gov. Christie visited the construction site several times. It’s a rare example of an infrastructure rehabilitation project capturing the public’s interest. But even with all the attention, one story hasn’t been adequately covered: Some of the first boots to hit the ground at Mantoloking belonged to surveyors, from multiple agencies and private firms, and without their coordinated work, the Miracle on Route 35 would never have happened. And amazingly, the very day they arrived on site for initial survey work, they had access to SmartNet, the real-time kinematic (RTK) network, thanks to foresighted planning.
Overwhelming and Scary
The bridge approaching Mantoloking was fairly new and survived the storm, so surveyors were at least able to
get to the site. The scene was apocalyptic; many surveyors said that the damage exceeded anything they expected to see in the United States. A force main had broken, so sewage was leaking… and that wasn’t even the worst smell; gas leaks were everywhere, and the stench (methyl mercaptan, the agent added to make odorless natural gas leaks obvious) was extremely strong. The gas company was keeping the gas main open, hoping to avoid collapse, so leaks were active and explosions were a real danger. Cars and boats were tossed around like litter, buildings were collapsed, and the sand that had washed over the intersection was covering over serious pitfalls. One surveyor abruptly realized that he was standing on sand that was on top of a pool cover, meaning that the pool cover was all that stood between him and a nasty fall (he was able to gingerly step away).
The first order of business was to find control, which should have been plentiful—a road redesign had been underway prior to the storm, and many control monuments had been set in the area. But sand was covering everything and, even worse, the swing ties provided were typically from power poles that had been snapped off by Sandy. Survey crews could find power pole bases, usually, but the pole tags were often gone. Without those, they didn’t know where to start.
Fortunately, another little known Sandy miracle was about to make itself known: a technological triumph that greatly amplified the efforts of surveyors and other first responders, and sped up recovery efforts dramatically.
The RTK Network Never Failed
Surveyors who arrived on site the second morning after Sandy’s devastation were pleasantly surprised to find that SmartNet was up and running; even cellular links were working. This made a big difference to survey work; for starters, crews were able to use state plane plan coordinates to locate existing monumentation and start digging. Most monuments were covered by three to four feet of sand.
Route 35 reopened to traffic after repair work. Photo from the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
SmartNet is a popular service in the New Jersey and New York region, and it provides more-or-less instant geolocation to GPS and GNSS receivers, via cellular links, without the need for base stations—most area survey firms subscribe. John White, Leica Geosystems’ territory manager in northern New Jersey, confirms that the service never failed, and explains why. “We started establishing the receiver network for SmartNet about 15 years ago,” he says, “and from the beginning we placed a priority on good locations.”
“Good locations” meant primarily government buildings; these sites were well maintained, secure, unlikely to change hands, and typically had emergency power backups. This last factor turned out to be absolutely crucial in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. “We didn’t lose a single receiver in the whole network,” White says. “The backup power kicked in, and coordinates were available.”
Locating receivers on government buildings wasn’t automatic or easy; White says that there was a lot of resistance at first. But as he steadily made his case, he says most agencies came to realize that the network served the public good and began to willingly cooperate.
White says he wasn’t especially surprised that the system kept working without interruption—“It’s a standalone system, and as long as power is available, it works”—but he was certainly pleased; a foresighted plan going back 15 years had proved itself dramatically and made a major contribution to post-Sandy recovery efforts.
Of all the stories coming out of Superstorm Sandy, this is one of the most remarkable; a sensitive and highly sophisticated system not only survived the storm of the century (one hopes); it actually never failed, and a location system that surveyors and other had come to rely on was immediately available for important—even lifesaving—work.
Getting Things Done
With control established and work underway—notwithstanding the Nov. 8 Nor’easter that set the project back to “square one”—survey crews turned their attention to topographic and stakeout surveying in order to keep reconstruction work moving as smoothly as possible. The schedule was rigorous—10 to 12 hour days, seven days a week, and most meals were from food trucks brought to the site.
On this project, it seemed like field crews led the way—meaning that conditions were changing so fast (topographic surveys, for example, had to be redone constantly as sand and debris was removed) and the pace of work was so rapid that field crews were unusually empowered to make decisions in the field. An early example was the ‘big meeting’ held early on with all the site’s surveyors. This was a meeting of all the surveyors from all the agencies trying to get work done in Ocean County. In a display of the esprit de corps and ‘can do’ attitude that prevailed in the recovery effort, the survey teams shared control schemes, recovered monuments and other information to minimize duplicated efforts and keep work moving efficiently.
This same attitude applied at the highest levels. Everyone involved says that the efforts of Gov. Christie were remarkable and inspiring. Indeed, the governor’s importance to this project can hardly be overstated; given the seaside location and the many agencies and jurisdictions affected by the reconstruction work, permitting alone could have taken 18 months. It was an impressive display of executive power put to use for the public good.
The efforts of Gov. Christie, IEW Construction Group (the state contractors) and hundreds of other stakeholders were successful; despite the intervening Nor’easter and many, many challenges a new steel-and-sand seawall was installed and the intersection was completely reconstructed and open to traffic by Tuesday, Dec. 18, well before the governor’s Christmas deadline. It was an outstanding surveying and construction achievement, and a genuine infrastructure miracle.
Angus W. Stocking, L.S. is a licensed land surveyor who has been writing fulltime on infrastructure topics since 2002. For more information about SmartNet, visit www.smartnetna.com .
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Opinion Contributor Health law boosts care, lowers cost
We’re creating Accountable Care Organizations and bundled payment programs that will reward doctors and hospitals for working together to provide higher quality care to patients rather than bill for each individual procedure or test.
The new Innovation Center will build and test models that will save money for both Medicare and the private sector, and then expand the use of the models that work.Continue Reading
And the law implements a Independent Payment Advisory Board. Some opponents have said IPAB will take all the power away from Congress, ration care and kill Medicare. Nothing could be further from the truth.
IPAB members will be experts who are appointed by the president after consultation with congressional leaders and confirmation by the Senate. The IPAB will make recommendations to Congress on ways to reduce Medicare cost growth. If costs exceed a certain threshold, and Congress fails to act, the board’s recommendations will be implemented. It’s an incentive for Congress to spend more time solving problems before we reach a crisis point, and in that regard, it’s similar to preventing an illness, rather than waiting until you have to go to the emergency room for treatment.
After serving on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission for six years and seeing our well-researched suggestions for controlling costs go unused and ignored, I don’t have much confidence in the old way of doing things. Prominent economists and experts, though, agree that the IPAB is an important way to control costs.
All of these provisions will take time to implement, but we are already making progress.
The new rules in the law and the spotlight we have placed on unreasonable premium increases are already helping to reduce costs for families and businesses. In North Carolina, Blue Cross and Blue Shield issued $156 million in refunds to more than 200,000 customers. Connecticut rejected plans from an insurer to raise premiums by 20 percent.
We have eliminated some of the worst insurance abuses. Insurance companies can no longer drop your coverage when you get sick or limit the amount of care you may receive in a lifetime.
And more than half of all states have taken steps to establish an affordable insurance exchange.
But there’s more work to be done to achieve the full potential of health reform, and we are moving forward, working to cut health care cost growth, not just pass the buck.
Nancy-Ann DeParle, deputy White House chief of staff for policy, previously served as director of the White House Office of Health Reform.
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Nancy-Ann DeParle
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Maybe it's time to sign off the social and start studying, hmm? A recent study examining the academic impact of Facebook has shown that people who use the site on a daily basis are more likely to earn lower grades than their peers — as much as whole letter grades!
The inevitable conclusion is that the site is a big time-waster (although I've noticed I spend less time on Facebook since its latest redesign, so thank you for that time back, FB), causing students to sacrifice the time they should have spent studying.
The Internet itself is an addictive place, but what is it about Facebook that sucks up our time so much? Are we just curious about other people, or are we all just narcissists? Either way, we could all use some Facebook breaks — after all, it'll all be there tomorrow.
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This week, Prevalent published an infographic developed by analyst firm EMA focused on vendor threat management.
The infographic starts with a simple question
‘Do We Need Vendor Threat Management?’ It highlights a senior executive speaking with a team member asking whether his organization is prepared to take on third-party risk. The team member answers that they are not, but neither are 92% of other organizations. The simple fact that EMA’s research identifies most companies are not prepared for 3rd party risk management is indicative of overall cyber risk preparedness given the trends in outsourcing, the use of the cloud, and managed services.
The next scene is set in the board room with the same executive asking about whether the company is monitoring vendors who have access to business resources. These vendors include: IT firms, accounting firms, law firms, insurance firms, and others. The team in the room starts to identify key statistics about the state of 3rd party risk management in an effort to help the executive understand where things stand. Some of the highlights include:
63% of breaches were tied to third-party IT providers. 38% of organizations prioritize security investments based on risk or impact to overall business strategy. 64% of organizations do not conduct regular security audits.
The third scene has the executive discussing how other organizations have been impacted by third-party breaches as well as whether this was a must for the business. In addition to the risks identified in the board room and detailing some recent breaches, the executive also identifies other reasons for vendor threat management:
Compliance with regulations like OCC, PCI, and HIPAA Maintaining vendor and client relationships Maintaining industry reputation Reducing financial risk
The goal of this infographic is to highlight the risk, business, and readiness most organizations are facing. It does not discuss a solution, but we know the old ways of inconsistent, non-standardized questionnaires managed manually without technical monitoring and threat intelligence is never going to help companies get the visibility and risk management they need to combat the growing threat.
It is clear that a model based on threat intelligence monitoring insights tied to automated assessments using standardized content like the
Shared Assessments SIG as well as continuous threat monitoring is necessary to help get the insight organizations of all sizes need to help reduce third-party risks. Prevalent is the first, purpose built unified platform for third-party threat management to offer these capabilities for enterprises of all sizes.
View the infographic
HERE.
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Today is Friday and we have a rather delicate message, in the form of the Three of Arrows. It carries the key word of “jealousy” and with it, a cautionary piece of advice.
Friday nights are often the start to the weekend and for some, that is where the problems can start. Remember, that Arrows in this deck are Swords in most RWS / WCS decks. From a wrong word said in a semi drunken state, to blaming going off with the wrong partner on drink to saying something out of turn or letting someone get under your skin for whatever reason, jealousy can hit at any time and its causes can be infinite. Social insecurity is something of a regular cause for it.
The trick, is not letting the negative feeling burn us, which is what might happen here if the fire in this heart is not extinguished soon. However, it is bleeding, so the fire is probably of lesser consequence to the bearer. But probably not to the tree supporting the heart in question.
Now, what to do about it? Usually, with a fire, you’d pour water onto it: can we do that here? In truth, this might not be any exception. Letting the emotions pour out so that they can be dealt with and discussed, rather than just with logic, which is what the Arrows hint at. Also, keeping things to yourself probably won’t help. The longer you keep negative thoughts in your head, the longer the fire might burn.
There will always be someone who has more, who are more gifted with good fortune. The book suggests that healing balm is humility, forgiveness and acceptance, even in the face of bitter rivalry and anger. And that is the hard part: refocusing your energy into a positive and creative momentum in your own life.
If you’d like some help in this regard, you can buy your reading here.
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Men in pink: The NFL goes to the defense of women with breast cancer By Steve Savant
Throughout much of the country, the fall colors in earth tones and hues paint a spectacular display of natural beauty during October. But there’s a color in October worn by a greater beauty than nature — the color of pink, worn by American women to draw attention to breast cancer. It’s October. It’s that time again. It’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, now synonymous with the fall.
The pink ribbon campaign started to surface around 1991 as a small grassroots movement. But today, breast cancer awareness is spotlighted on the largest televised stage in the country, bigger than any other crusade, larger than any media extravaganza. It’s now center stage with the National Football League. Welcome to team testosterone, as the NFL highlights their uniforms with pink shoes, pink hats and pink arm bands that stretch over the biceps of the biggest linemen in the league. Men in tights? OK in the day of Robin Hood. But pink? The most feminine color on the most macho of men? That’s the point! It just stands out. And it needs to stand out.
Just last year, the National Cancer Institute estimated 230,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed among women, as well as an estimated 57,000 additional cases of in situ breast cancer. Almost 39,000 women were expected to die from breast cancer.
Over 2.6 million U.S. women with a history of breast cancer were alive in January 2008. And more than half were diagnosed less than 10 years earlier. This is quite a leap from the Egyptian prognosis of death in 1600 B.C., where the Edwin Smith Papyrus refers to several tumor-like cases being treated with cauterization. But in the 17th century, physicians establish a link between breast cancer and lymph nodes because of a greater understanding of the circulatory system. This led to the surgical removal of lymph nodes, breast and muscle tissue. In 1882, William Stewart Halsted began performing radical mastectomies to prevent recurrences, a standard protocol until the 1970s, where a new understanding of systemic illness led to more “sparing” procedures.
Today, medical research and advancements combined with early detection have impacted tens of thousands of lives; even conservative life insurance companies have altered their underwriting offers based on new and improved mortality.
That’s why the October awareness campaign is so vital, because breast cancer typically has no symptoms when the tumor is small and most treatable. So it’s critical for women to follow recommended screening guidelines for detecting breast cancer at an early stage, before symptoms develop.
So when you watch your favorite NFL team this weekend and see them sporting the color pink, pin your pink ribbon on and join the country in supporting breast cancer awareness month.
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Here is a tale of two retailers and a salutary warning to any business leader tempted to rest on past laurels.
A decade ago, Marks & Spencer and Woolworths faced similar predicaments. Both were ubiquitous presences on the high street. Both had lost their relevance to consumers and both were in serious financial trouble.
Fast forward and Marks & Spencer is thriving - it has even reopened the Champs elysees branch it was forced to close during the dark days of the early Noughties. By contrast, Woolworths has ceased to exist.
Why did one prosper and one go bust? The reason is M&S adopted a Thought Leadership approach and Woolworths did not. In 2007, M&S launched a bold, 100-point sustainability strategy, known as Plan A, which helped place this once frumpy brand at the heart of the ethical consumer zeitgeist. Woolworths, meanwhile, failed to innovate and define what it stood for, selling the same pick 'n' mix sweets for ever-diminishing returns.
There is a lot of discussion about who or what a Thought Leader is, as well as the benefits that this status confers, much of which frankly misses the point. Put simply, a Thought Leader is an individual, or business, that changes attitudes and behaviours.
Thought Leadership is a means to an end: a stronger reputation and, as M&S discovered, stronger business performance. That is why TLG has spent the past five years analysing the individual elements that combine to create Thought Leadership, as well as the practical steps needed to become a successful Thought Leader.
There is no silver bullet to a better reputation. There is, however, according to our research, a significant link between businesses that enjoy strong reputations and those regarded as successful Thought Leaders.
In particular, being a Thought Leader leads to higher scores on the crucial metrics that companies measure, such as trust. Thought Leadership can also help a brand transcend national geographies, a phenomenon that TLG is measuring in its ongoing research in the emerging BRIC nations. Our research with opinion formers suggests there are three types of Thought Leader firms: First, the 'category leader'. Think Apple. Second, the 'issues leader'. Think M&S. Third, the 'values leader'.
Think The Co-operative Group.
It is worth dispelling a few myths. First, Thought Leadership status does not inevitably follow from being a market leader. Many do not even feature in the TLG top 20. The omissions include the biggest players in the banking and FMCG sectors.
Second, being a 'challenger brand' does not equate with being a Thought Leader. Opinion formers do not regard brands such as Ryanair or comparethemarket.com as Thought Leaders.
Third: Knowledge capital firms such as management consultants should not assume that they are Thought Leaders just because they publish so-called 'Thought Leadership reports'. Too many of these are built around the repackaging of other people's views rather than genuinely original insights.
In conjunction with a leading business school, TLG has developed a methodology for measuring, evaluating and developing Thought Leadership.
This transforms an abstract concept into a tangible campaign tool to measure and build reputation. We call it the PROACtiv model(TM).
Underpinning the model are five elements critical to Thought Leadership: the Pioneer, challenging established wisdoms; Rigour, developing robust services; Objectivity, delivering benefits for stakeholders; Authenticity, what the business says reflects what the business does; Clarity, communicating clearly the core mission.
As our research among opinion formers shows, successful Thought Leaders can enjoy an enviable status as 'most trusted' and 'most admired' brands. If brands want to enhance their 'trust' rating, they should pursue a Thought Leadership strategy, rather than focusing merely on becoming 'trusted'.
In short, trusted brands can go out of fashion - and business.
Thought Leaders do not go out of business, they become market leaders.
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Spiritual Growth
In our modern culture, spirituality is too often linked with woo-woo, fantastical concepts like thinking your way to riches or manifesting success out of thin air. These simplistic views of spirituality miss the mark and more often than not, do not produce results.
Spirituality is not about waving a magic wand or simply believing that everything will be alright. The spiritual path involves deep inner work. It means exploring difficult places and integrating your shadow side.
If you’re feeling stuck in your life or feel that you are not living your purpose, but can’t quite put your finger on what is wrong, you may be having a spiritual emergency.
Spiritual Growth through Counseling
Believe it or not, spirituality and psychotherapy are intimately linked. By working through unconscious processes and exploring parts of yourself that you have disowned or denied you begin to integrate lost parts of yourself. This personal work is deeply spiritual in nature.
By stepping into the fire and integrating your shadow, you will suddenly find your life has more meaning and that you are able to clearly see your purpose and path in life. Obstacles that once seemed impossible to overcome will turn out to be doorways to new and richer experiences. The spiritual path is not easy and it requires hard work and dedication, but the rewards are more than worth the effort.
Work with Me
If you are on a spiritual path and would like the help of a mentor to guide you through your own unique process, I am here to help. Simply fill out the contact form to the right or call me directly at 1-425-488-5496 to schedule your free consultation.
I look forward to working with you.
All the Best,
Dr. Wayne Carr
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Previous Section Back to Table of Contents Lords Hansard Home Page
Baroness Darcy de Knayth: My Lords, I support these amendments most warmly. I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, said, with a few reservations. We all want the same thing: to remove the arbitrary line. Of course, I acknowledge that the number went down from 20 to 15 in December. We disagree on when this should be removed. In Committee on 4th February (at col. 1672 of Hansard) the Minister said that she felt the Government needed to find out more about how the courts and tribunals were interpreting the concept of reasonableness so as to help them to inform and reassure the small employers. Indeed, that was very much what the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, had in mind.
However, there is another side to the argument. Indeed, it was compellingly argued by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on the second day in Committee on the Disability Discrimination Bill on 15th June 1995. She said--and I shall paraphrase her remarks to begin with in the interests of time--that all organisations were protected from having to make adaptions which were unreasonably costly. She went on to say that if the small firms were excluded at that stage, then what counted as unreasonably costly would actually be determined by the larger firms to which the Act would initially apply. So the concept of reasonableness would be determined by the larger firms. Therefore, smaller companies might have lost their voice and might actually lose out.
Earl Russell: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Addington has fully dealt with the human rights aspect of the amendment. I should like to address rather tentatively the area to which the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, drew our attention; namely, the agreement between the two noble Baronesses on the other two Front Benches. He is not the first person to composite them. Indeed, I think it was the Guardian at the beginning of this Parliament which composited them under the title of, "Baroness Tessa Blatch". The common point that they have brought forward is the belief in flexibility and in keeping down business costs. This is the area about which I want to think tentatively and in an exploratory way.
We all agree that business must be able to make a profit; if it does not, there is no future for any of us. We all agree that costs which are impossible to bear are likely to have serious effects. The real question is how far one goes in that direction. If one studies views about labour market flexibility over the past century or so, it will be seen that those views have always been cyclical. We have periods of unregulated competition; then the tide swings back the other way; and, finally, it goes round the circle again.
I do not know how many noble Lords present in the Chamber today watched the television programme "Newsnight" on the day when the Fairness at Work White Paper was published. The programmed claimed--and its research is, I think, quite often good--that among people working in business schools there is now a tendency to suggest that firms that have a rather less unregulated approach to their employees and which are rather more generous about pay, tenure and holiday conditions, and so on, in fact do rather better in profit terms. I do not know what is behind that suggestion. I hope that the Minister does. However, if she does not, she may possibly find out and ascertain how seriously the Government want to take it.
It seems to me that we may be at the beginning of another turn in the cycle of views on the question. It will not be the first; indeed, I am sure that it will not be the last. There obviously must be a limit as to how far labour flexibility can go. In the first place, there is clearly a potential truth in the fact that a satisfied workforce may be capable of putting more effort and more loyalty into the business than a dissatisfied one. The other point of real substance is that if labour market flexibility goes too far and wages go right down and conditions get harder, in the end the employees of these firms will find difficulty in buying others' products.
Last summer there was the prospect of a world recession. It seems to have stopped just short of that, but it was a fright which caused many people to do a certain amount of thinking. We might wonder whether flexibility may perhaps go too far. Of course, the key point is that we are dealing with measures which are designed to enable people to enter the labour market who might otherwise be unable to do so. The general
If we do the costings of all this properly and we consider the overall effect on the national economy and on the world economy, the balance may not be quite as much in favour of flexibility as we think at present that it is. I say this with great tentativeness, but I shall be interested to note whether other people who know much more about this than I do also start thinking about it.
Lord Swinfen: My Lords, I am not a lawyer and I have absolutely no legal training, but I have always understood that it was a principle of law that all should be equal under the law. As the situation stands at the moment disabled people employed by smaller firms are not in an equal position to those employed by larger firms, and that is wrong. It is morally wrong. The fact that allowances have to be made for those people and alterations made to premises is protected by the concept of reasonableness. The reasonableness will depend on the firm concerned. Some small firms will struggle to exist and therefore it would be unreasonable for them to pay the cost of installing a ramp. Other small firms will make huge profits with no trouble at all and therefore in their case it would be unreasonable for a ramp not to be installed. Each case must be considered on its own merits. That can be done quite easily by considering the firm concerned and the disability of the person concerned. The same also applies to the large firms. It is, in my view, quite wrong that this discrimination--for that is what it is--should be allowed to continue. To misquote George Orwell, I am reminded of the situation that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. I strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Ashley.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, I hope that Members of your Lordships' House will forgive me if at this time on a Thursday evening I do not pick up some of the rather broad points that have been made in this debate. While I endorse what the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said about the need for joined-up policy thinking, the importance of considering matters such as the Fairness at Work White Paper and the social security Bill, and seeing how they all fit together, I do not think an amendment at the Report stage of the disability rights Bill is perhaps the right vehicle to address such issues.
As with the similar amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Ashley in Committee, the purpose of Amendment No. 25 is to try to have another consultation about the small firms threshold before 1st January 2000. My noble friend wants to ensure that the Government reduce the small employers' threshold without necessarily waiting for the commission to be established. I know how strongly he feels about that.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, I am grateful for that clarification. However, the commission would have to be consulted, as we intend, because that requirement in the Bill would not be amended. The noble Lord's purpose is therefore to ensure that a consultation takes place as early as possible while trying to meet our concern that the commission should be involved. I have considered again the comments that a number of noble Lords made in Committee, but I am afraid to say that I have not been entirely persuaded by them as to the virtue of beginning a consultation before January. That does not mean to say that I and the Government are not extremely sympathetic to lowering the small firms threshold again. However, the question concerns when that should be done.
We have made clear our commitment to achieving comprehensive civil rights for disabled people. Where we differ from noble Lords who have spoken on this is on the timing of implementing further change to the exclusion threshold. We believe that effective rights for disabled people require the support and understanding of business. Seeking the involvement of the commission in the future is entirely right given that we are establishing it in part to advise us on reviewing the working of the DDA and in improving awareness of disability issues among employers.
The noble Baroness, Lady Darcy de Knayth, quoted what my noble friend Lady Hollis said when the Disability Discrimination Act was going through this House. I follow that by saying that in December we made a reduction in the threshold from 20 employees to 15. That is a significant step forward. We did that fairly soon after coming into government. I reiterate that it has widened the coverage of the employment provisions of the DDA to bring in 45,000 more employers with around 800,000 employees--that is an awful lot of additional people--any of whom may need protection in the future and 70,000 of whom are currently disabled. Every disabled applicant for a job in these firms is also covered. Over 75 per cent. of disabled employees are now covered by these provisions. Of course I agree with my noble friend that eventually we shall want to reach those who are not covered.
The concept of reasonableness which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, will certainly help to ensure that small employers are not unfairly burdened. However, at the moment we do not know how the courts will interpret the meaning of reasonableness. Preliminary findings from research that will be published soon shows that there is concern about what might count as reasonable, even among those employers covered by the DDA since December 1996. There was an expectation that case law would probably make the
No one will benefit from the very smallest employers having to learn by trial and error how this law applies to them. Such employers rarely have specialist personnel who can devote time and expertise to dealing with some of the issues that are involved here. There is a fear--which I think we should recognise--among very small firms that relatively small mistakes will prove costly at a tribunal. It is not so much that the costs of employing disabled people need necessarily be high, although I have to say that I do not think we should completely dismiss those costs either. There are sometimes costs. That is, I believe, recognised by everyone who has spoken.
Although many small firms already employ disabled people, a number do not. Even some of those that do know less--I think perhaps understandably--about disability than larger firms, and they do not always know how to respond effectively, as they should, to the needs of individual disabled people. All the information and advice that the commission will provide ought greatly to help in this process.
Some small firms may know about a particular disabled employee but if another develops a disability or someone with an uncommon condition applies for a job, the circumstances may not always be quite so clear. That is the reality we need to accept.
That said, disability issues are often fairly straightforward. Everyone, whether disabled or not, has their own requirements. Most can be met relatively simply and cheaply. Employers are generally quite skilled at getting the best from their employees in any event. However, the legislation is new; it is in places quite complex. We believe that difficulties in understanding and applying the law may be rather greater for those businesses that are currently below the threshold. We do not want extended protection of employees under the Disability Discrimination Act to create unjustified fears for smaller businesses which we are, through various measures at present, trying to encourage. Our economy very much depends on them. It would be unfair and, I think, would cause some employers either to avoid their duties or make very poor attempts to ensure compliance, perhaps leading to bad employment relations.
One of our key objectives is to ensure that evidence is available on the effects of the provisions on very small employers. Some of that will remove uncertainties and provide both the Government and the commission with a really informed basis for considering further change. Once again I want to reassure those noble Lords who feel strongly about the matter that we are very supportive of that. Our comprehensive programme evaluating the Disability Discrimination Act will produce findings which should help us further reassure and help business and underpin future decisions
It is also important that those businesses are aware of the assistance available, whether it is in a case requiring expert help or simply seeking more routine information. We have already begun the process by improving the Disability Discrimination Act helpline. That provides an increasing range of information on the Act and can help businesses and others by giving advice and helping them to make contact with specialist organisations. It is very gratifying and significant that so many voluntary organisations have joined with us to try to make this system work.
The Employment Service will continue to provide specialist help to employers who want to take on and keep disabled employees. The DRC will also help to ensure that there is appropriate awareness raising and provision of information and advice. As noble Lords will recall, we are also developing a communications strategy in co-operation with the National Disability Council and disability and employer bodies to help ensure that small businesses and others are more informed and aware. That is a very important step on the route to the wider coverage that we all seek through this legislation.
I recognise the great passion of my noble friend for making change in this area. We want to bring down the small firms' threshold further, but I hope that I have made clear why the Government believe that they should take the matter gradually and not in too much of a rush. We feel that we must await the establishment and full involvement of the DRC before we consider further change. Our proposals will ensure that the threshold is monitored and lowered in an effective and appropriate way. I make that pledge to my noble friend. I hope therefore that those noble Lords who have put their names to, and supported, these amendments--my noble friend in particular--will feel able to withdraw them.
Next Section Back to Table of Contents Lords Hansard Home Page
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Matukituki Charitable Trust
Stu Thorne with a trap that has caught a stoat, and Gillian Crombie with a tracking tunnel (all images: A. Ballance)
The Department of Conservation recently declared a Battle for the Birds, in anticipation of a mass seeding event in New Zealand’s southern beech forests this summer. The mast seeding could lead to an explosion in predator numbers next summer, and conservation groups such as the newly-formed Matukituki Charitable Trust are monitoring the situation to work out what response they will need to mount.
Alison Ballance joins the Trust’s founder Gillian Crombie, and volunteer and ex-DoC ranger Stu Thorne, on the Rob Roy Glacier track (left) just off the West Matukituki Valley, an hour’s drive from Wanaka. In September 2013 the Trust began a monitoring and trapping programme in the valley, using tracking tunnels to monitor mice, rat and stoat numbers, beech seed funnels to collect and measure beech seeding. They are also adding to the existing network of stoat traps run by DoC. Depending on the results of the latest monitoring the Trust and DoC will decide whether an extended network of traps is sufficient to deal with the expected explosion in stoat numbers, or whether the best solution will be an aerial drop of 1080, which is the main tool DoC will be using to counter the expected stoat plague.
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Jazz is one of the most influential American art forms of our times. It shapes our ideas about musical virtuosity, human action and new forms of social expression. In Going for Jazz, Nicholas Gebhardt shows how the study of jazz can offer profound insights into American historical consciousness. Focusing on the lives of three major saxophonists—Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, and Ornette Coleman—Gebhardt demonstrates how changing forms of state power and ideology framed and directed their work.
Weaving together a range of seemingly disparate topics, from Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis to the invention of bebop, from Jean Baudrillard's Seduction to the Cold War atomic regime, Gebhardt addresses the meaning and value of jazz in the political economy of American society. In Going for Jazz, jazz musicians assume dynamic and dramatic social positions that demand a more conspicuous place for music in our understanding of the social world.
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While San Francisco's overall office market has been strong, subleasing has become more prevalent in the Bay Area recently as tech companies aren't hiring as fast as they once were. For example, this month Twitter listed over 180,000 square feet of its San Francisco office for sublease, a sign, some say, that indicates the social media giant's growth plans aren't coming to fruition.
And it appears that trend is also playing out in Chicago, where subleases have also spiked as tech firms are no longer hiring at breakneck speeds.
Sublet supply in Chicago increased by nearly 20% in the last year, and could continue to rise as tech firms re-evaluate their hiring needs, according to a report from commercial real estate services firm Savills Studley. Avant, a Chicago online lending startup that announced plans to lay off 60 employees and will scrap plans to open new business lines in credit cards and refinanced auto loans, is among the tech companies currently listing sublet space in Chicago, Savills Studley said.
"Some companies we’re seeing put their space on the market for sublease are those that were in a scaling mode and were really focused on growth, and anticipated growth through acquisition of talent and headcount needs," said Savills Studley Chicago Region Co-Head Robert Sevim. "When that growth doesn't necessary materialize, you have to mitigate. And that's where we are..."Chicago Office Subleases Spike as Tech Hiring Cools, Report Finds
Related Stories2016 Savills Effective Rent Index National Office Sector Report (Q2 2016)
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Is Your PIN at Risk from Revalidation
The revalidation process has seen a large spike in the amount of concerns amongst practicing nurses and midwives that their PINs could be at risk.
Brought in as an attempt to rectify the failures of institutions such as Stepping Hill by improving standards of care amongst all practicing nurses and midwives, it also means that a more thorough approach to renewing your membership/PIN has been introduced.
The NMC backed process will require nurses and midwives to submit online evidence that they are:
Keeping up to date with the industry’s ever changing procedures and medicinal developments Maintained a safe and effective practice in their work Show they have undertaken means to improve their caring standards
During the revalidation process these seven key requirements must be demonstrated and submitted to the NMC's online portal.
Practice Hours – a minimum of 450 hours over a three year period Continuing Professional Development (CPD) – 40 hours of professional development (20 of which is participatory learning) Practice related feedback – Five pieces of practice-related feedback Reflection & Discussion – A minimum of five written reflections on the Code of Practice and your professional development or feedback. Health & Character – An acknowledgement of any formal cautions or criminal conviction imposed during the last three years. Professional indemnity Arrangement – Demonstrate you have an IA in place. Confirmation from a third party – Have a third party sign off the fact you have completed the previous six steps.
With this new structure in place, all nurses and midwives must keep on top of their registration details including when their renewal date is due. This is because of a more robust enforcement of lapsed and incomplete registrations by the NMC.
Currently nurses and midwives who allow their registration to lapse are immediately stricken from the register with their PIN removed in the process. They are then made to undertake a four to six week period of readmission during which they cannot work. Those who do continue to practice without a PIN could face criminal charges and long term suspensions from the NMC. So an inability to complete revalidation fully and submit it on time will result in your PIN being removed from the NMC registration resulting in a loss of income and money after paying the re-entry fee.
Revalidation may seem overly complicated at first but do not worry as in practice the process is very simple and we are happy to assist you with any problems you encounter.
If you have any questions regarding the revalidation process please contact a member of the Search Medical team in your nearest England office or visit our specialist revalidation page - go.search.co.uk/revalidation
By Jason Paterson
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The Top Technology Trends of 2017
The only thing constant in the IT industry is that technology trends are never static and are always changing.
Spotting the next key trend is vitally important for businesses and individuals in order to maximise their revenue or career opportunities. Things that have been gaining underground traction are either ready to emerge in the mainstream or become essential for IT professionals to know.
Leading market research firm Gartner and other think tanks have been releasing their predictions for the upcoming 12 months. Here is our summation of what we think could be the key 2017 technology trends to look out for.
AI & Advance Machine Learning
Blade Runner and AI are no longer science fiction. AI is now a reality and is being used routinely in Cloud platforms by the likes of Google and Microsoft.
This phrase still triggers visions of ‘The Matrix or ‘The Terminator’ style machines becoming more intellectual than humans. But according to Jerry Kaplan, a Silicon Valley lecturer at Stanford, AI in today’s world is more about the “continuation of longstanding efforts to automate tasks.”
In practical terms, both established brands and startups are recognising that AI-infused analytics software and algorithms vastly increase their operating potential.
The advanced techniques can potentially “create systems that understand, learn, predict, adapt and potentially operate autonomously,” according to Gartner.
AI probably still won’t be able to do all the things the current hype machine suggests in 12 months. Even so, 2017 could be the year that it finally becomes a normal or desired business service.
Blockchain
The buzz surrounding Bitcoin might have subsided but the technology behind the digital currency called blockchain has enormous potential.
Blockchain is a way of distributing a database across many far-flung computers, keeping track of digital ledgers, transactions and possibly coins. These entries – or blocks - are digitally signed off ensuring their authenticity and integrity and are then distributed across an established infrastructure.
Significant cooperation still needs to occur in order for blockchain to be become the favoured transaction for digital businesses. But seeing as blockchain can be configured to work in a variety of supply chain industries – such as healthcare - Gartner estimates the first $1bn blockchain corporation will exist by 2022.
Conversational Things
One of if not
the most favoured technology trends in the 21 st century has been the ability to personally communicate with devices. This has mainly been possibly through our own voice or through ‘chatbots’.
2017 promises to be a year where interfaces will be become increasingly intelligent and conversational. Not only will we be able to routinely verbally interact with Siri or Alexa but also text apps asking them to carry out tasks.
These conversational things can understand anything from predermined commands to complex inferences depending on the complexity of the interface.
In the long term, these conversational bots could streamline the multitude of apps that are routinely rolled out by major companies into one easy to use service.
VR & AR
Pokemon Go demonstrated how Augmented Reality could become mass market. It made millions of children go outside and explore the ‘real world’ – albeit still through a screen.
Suddenly the lampooned VR/AR trend that has never come close to matching the buzz it has generated for over two decades has arrived and is almost mainstream.
Giants such as Facebook, Samsung and Sony have launched a raft of headset devices in time for the Christmas season. These are now not only user friendly but affordable for the consumer – in line with the long established games consoles.
Media companies like the BBC are also committing to launching VR programming on Google’s Daydream app.
Cloud Computing
Although recognised as potentially significant and important, businesses are still unsure how to integrate the above technology trends into their daily operations. On the other hand, Cloud Computing is the trend that the majority of public and private businesses
will be trialling for the first time in 2017.
Cloud Computing in theory will allow businesses to set up what is essentially a virtual office providing connective flexibility in terms of location and time. With the IoT on the rise, the number of web-enabled devices used in today's business environment means access to data has never been easier.
Migrating to a Cloud based system could also improve IT maintenance costs, business continuity and efficiency.
Companies are expected to increase their spending on software and services - as opposed to hardware - as they all rush to buy technology via the cloud computing model. Here, tech is hosted in the vendor's data centre and delivered as a service over the Internet.
Search Consultancy is a champion for IT evolution and dynamic new innovations! We are currently recruiting for a wide range of jobs within the IT sector, focusing on IT & Digital and IT & Business Change. Contact your nearest office today to find out more about how Search's team of IT consultants can help you.
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I’ve been meaning to blog about your desperate need for sucky links for some time, because I have not seen this aspect of link quality discussed anywhere.
People approach me all the time asking for high-quality links. Not surprising – who would want low quality links? But if you ask an SEO consultant to build you only PR6+ links, consider what message that sends to the search engines.
At worst, Google will assume you are buying links to buy PageRank…and we all know how much Google loves link-buying to boost PageRank, don’t we. At best, the search engines will think your site appeals only to some kind of an elite. How else would you explain that only high PageRank (high traffic, high-trust, etc.) pages link to your website? Why do smaller blogs not link there? How come your website is not included in any normal directories? Why does this website have no appeal to normal people…and why should we rank it if it has no popular appeal?
No, the search engines won’t ask these questions outright. But remember that all algorithms are created to simulate what would be normal linking and trust patterns that real people would follow. Having links only form high quality, top-ranked websites does not look normal. It’s a giant red flag.
Ironically, the more high-quality links you have, the more poor quality links you need.
CAUTION: By “poor quality”, I do not mean spammy websites. I do not mean you should be on pages full of words related to enhancing body parts and gambling away the kids’ inheritance.
But I do mean, that you want links form websites with a variety of linking profiles, ones that might be new or might not be running any link-building campaigns, ones that we might consider much less significant. In short, you want a normal linking pattern.
The ideal way to build links is still the tried and true…
Step one, create awesome content such as useful articles, instructional videos, samples and demos, all the things that are generally called “link bait”. Step two, publicize this content. If it really is good, many websites will link to it, including top-rated websites and many smaller less significant websites. They will do it naturally. So you will have a natural linking pattern.
To answer the obvious question, yes you will surely want to put extra effort into publicizing your content to high-trust, authoritative websites. But those links are the kind of links that less-significant website owners will follow, read and link to, as well.
So don’t forget to get links form a wide variety of insignificant websites as part of your link-building campaign. With algorithms designed to simulate something like democracy, votes from “the little guys” count, too.Written by David Leonhardt
Grab The Bookmarketer For Your Site
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CARI is a Geographic Information System (GIS) dataset of wetlands, streams, and riparian areas consisting of polygon and line features with data-rich attributes that can be used for developing broad- or fine-scale landscape level summaries of aquatic features. Its associated editor is an online browser-based interface that facilitates the careful editing of aquatic feature locations by the public. The innovative interaction with the dataset and submission for review values ease of use and accessibility.
This statewide dataset is hosted online through EcoAtlas, an online toolset that supports the State’s three level monitoring and assessment framework described in the Tenets of a State Wetland and Riparian Area Monitoring Plan (WRAMP), which in-turn advances the State’s Wetland and Riparian Area Protection Policy (WRAPP). The WRAMP framework employs the Federal Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recommended three level monitoring and assessment framework for wetlands of which the first level includes landscape level assessments and profiles. CARI is the statewide base-map for those assessments.
Additional Background
EcoAtlas tools are being developed to support data management and information dissemination for aquatic resources statewide. CARI was initiated in 2009 by the California Wetland Monitoring Workgroup (CWMW) with the goal of achieving an updateable, standardized map that could be used by environmental managers, planners and the public to assess the diversity and abundance of wetlands across the State. EcoAtlas employs the CARI base-map to visualize the location of wetland projects (with links to detailed project information), monitoring assessments (based on the California Rapid Assessment Method [CRAM]), and summarize the diversity and extent of wetlands via a Landscape Profile tool.
Pre-CARI mapping efforts for California contained varying levels of detail, vintages, coverage, and classifications, which made comparisons of wetland diversity and extents across the state challenging. To improve wetland and riparian map data across the state, CARI has the following goals:
Develop detailed and standard mapping methodologythat can be applied ( and adapted) to all regions across the state. This includes developing region specific methods for specific wetland types as warranted. Maintain a standardized classification systemthat can be applied (cross-walked) to different datasets in order to incorporate them into the statewide CARI base-map. This allows ongoing updates to the CARI base-map when new GIS datasets are identified that improve the accuracy and detail of the current CARI map. Be supported by a statewide technical advisory teamof GIS and aquatic resource experts so that the mapping standards and classification system can expand and adapt to support the scientific monitoring and assessment goals of the WRAPP and associated tools
Current Version
The current version of CARI (CARI v0.2, released in May of 2016), is available on SFEI's Data Center and is a compilation of local, regional, and statewide aquatic resource GIS datasets into a seamless, statewide coverage of aquatic resources that employs a common wetland classification system. Although the dataset varies in detail, and represents different time periods for different areas across the state,
CARI is the only statewide aquatic resource dataset that has been compiled and standardized to a common classification system, which can be used to develop landscape level profiles of aquatic resources at a local, regional, or broader scale (as seen with the Landscape Profile tool). The CARI v0 dataset includes: the National Wetland Inventory (NWI, last updated in 2010) of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD, high resolution dataset at 1:2400 scale, last updated in 1999) of the US Geological Survey, three regional datasets developed by SFEI’s GIS team using CARI’s standardized, and more detailed, mapping protocols and used to demonstrate the WRAMP framework. Links to more information about these mapping efforts are listed below under "Subprojects" (below). Six County Aquatic Resources Inventory (including Sacramento, Placer, Yolo, El Dorado, Yuba, and Sutter Counties, California) developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers (Sacramento District) through federal funding - 2010.
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Imagine a scene 25 years from now. Or 50. Or even a hundred, at the start of the next century. A family time capsule is discovered. The dust is blown off, the seal broken. And inside, are the pictures and writing of your ancestors. Discover here how you can preserve your family history!
Reaching Out to the Future
The concept of the time capsule as we know it was invented by G Edward Pendray of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Pendray's capsule was buried at the site of the 1939 New York World's Fair on September 23, 1938, and is scheduled to be opened in 6939.
You can make a time capsule by using a kit, such as the Ark to the Future kit -- which includes a metal capsule, memory album and scrapbook, family tree chart, decorative labels and an instruction book. Alternatively, buy something like a watertight cashbox and carefully place your memories inside! Actual burial isn't recommended simply due to concerns about weather, exposure, construction, etc. But if you do keep it tucked away deep in a closet or the attic, be sure it's sealed and the date to open is clearly marked on the outside!
It was the intention of the organizers to "represent all the enormous variety and vigor of life" and to deposit "information touching upon all the principal categories of our thought, activity, and accomplishment; sparing nothing, neither our wisdom nor our foolishness, our supreme achievements nor our recognized weaknesses."
Since that time, numerous capsules have been buried, placed in the foundations of buildings, or catapulted into space. Now, at the turn of the millennium, it seems a particularly poignant time to speak to those who will inhabit the earth in the future.
What should go inside?
The variety of material that can be included in your time capsule is almost infinite. It includes:
Copies of birth certificates, marriage certificates, driver's licenses, diplomas, report cards, college IDs, passports, deeds, mortgage papers, awards, certificates, military papers and other official documents. (Note: Unfortunately, you need to be careful about including documents that could potentially lead to identity theft if the capsule is "discovered" before its time.) Cards, letters, postcards, telegrams, stamps, envelopes and printed email. Notes describing your take on current events. Clean and dry packaging from your favorite products. A pic of your computer setup. A printed screenshot of your MySpace page. Pressed flowers, leaves, feathers, and locks of hair. Maps, ticket stubs, tour attraction brochures, travel itineraries and hotel stationery. Wallpaper or fabric swatches. Special scrapbook pages. Menus, wine labels, matchbook covers and business cards. Favorite quotes, song lyrics, poems, and prayers. Heirloom or other favorite recipes. Children's drawings and other family artwork. Tags, ribbons, and wrappings from gifts. A DVD or flash drive with documents, photos and other scans. Maps and house plans. Photocopies of your hand or a group of hands; thumbprints or hand prints. Political or current-events memorabilia, such as newspaper clippings. Professional and candid portraits, vacation photos, pictures of the inside and outside of your home and your family members' homes, reproductions of antique photos, and school or team photos. Jewelry and other small items or family heirlooms. Personal items that individuals might have carried with them, such as a wallet, medallion, religious object, key or keychain, lucky coin. Household items such as pipe, pen, paperweight. Small articles of clothing such as a scarf, tie or handkerchief. Items that document an era -- such as a fax, a computer mouse, train schedule, advertisements for clothes or cars, the cover of a contemporary magazine, paper money or coins (which some experts feel will be obsolete in the future). The dedication ceremony
Usually, when community time capsules are dedicated, the mayor gives a speech, the local clergy recites an invocation, and a band plays the national anthem. The 1939 World's Fair capsule was lowered into the ground at exactly noon, as a gong tolled.
You and your family will probably opt for a somewhat less elaborate ceremony, but it is an event that should be attended by all available family members. If there is a prayer, poem, or quotation that has personal meaning, you might have the oldest or youngest person recite it, and someone should read aloud the text of the dedication page.
When to close and open the capsule
You should select a day of significance, either universally or personally. Some obvious days are January 1, Christmas Day or another religious holiday, the vernal equinox, July 4, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Mother's Day or Father's Day, or a day of historical importance.
How long you choose to keep the capsule closed is entirely up to you. We feel that twenty-five years is the minimum length of time. To a child, that will seem like an eternity, but most adults realize that it passes in a veritable blur.
Each year the time capsule is in transit will add to its power and mystery, as time and events reveal the secrets of the future. Today's society craves instant gratification, and so this concept is entirely contradictory to our present way of life.
Be patient. It will be worth the wait.
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China Pushes the Use of Clean Coal in Hopes to Curb Air Pollution
Chen Jining, China’s environmental protection minister said that the country is now promoting the clean use of coal in hopes to curb air pollution. The air quality in China is mainly caused by the energy structure, specifically coal consumption. China attaches great importance in adjusting the energy structure and is part of one of the tasks in the drafting of the 13
th five year plan.
The country is promoting the use of clean coal which is now being boosted by low emission facilities for coal fired power plants that rival gas powered or fired plants. Considered a revolutionary effort that will overturn conventional wisdom that coal is not clean and will positively help efforts in curbing smog. China is also cutting down emissions form household bulk coal, as emission from one ton of coal is already equivalent to five or ten tons of coal that is used on power plants. Since living standard is rising, so is the bulk coal consumption increases as well.
Emissions coming from bulk coal contribute to the heavy smog last year, and the government is now looking for ways in curbing them. Experts are saying that there will be a long period of adjusting to the energy consumption structure wherein they are prompting the use of clean energy, strengthen adjustments to energy consumption and to further promoted the use of clean coal.
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Mastery’s great accomplishments require time and a willingness to release a sequence of prototypes. Perfectionism means you don’t ship until it’s perfect. Which means you never ship or what you ship has not learned from problems or needs that only visible post deployment.
Randall Munroe’s “The General Problem” embeds this observation:
“I find that when someone’s taking time to do something right in the present, they’re a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they’re a master artisan of great foresight.”
Randall Munroe in “The General Problem“ No Significant Accomplishment Was Easy
When we look back at a significant accomplishment we miss all of the groundwork, the necessary trial and error, the sequence of working prototypes giving way to working solutions that were successive approximations to the final masterpiece. Eric Hoffer captured this in “Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.”
Bootstrappers make this same mistake either when they try and proceed directly to a business model that maps to a large and successful business or they focus only on the final fully instantiated version of their idealized business or product. We have to become comfortable with making things viable and then better over time.
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Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. See our User Agreement and Privacy Policy.
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Validation of Forensic Computing Software Utilizing Black Box ...
1.Validation of Forensic Computing Software Utilizing Black Box Testing TechniquesTom Wilsdon & Jill SlayUniversity of South AustraliaSouth Australiatom.wilsdon@unisa.edu.auAbstractThe process of validating the correct operation of software is difficult for a variety of reasons. The need tovalidate software utilised as forensic computing tools suffers the same fate and is hampered to a greater extentwith the source code of said tools usually not being accessible. Therefore a testing regime must be developedthat offers a high degree of correctness and high probability of finding software faults with limited ability toview source code. Software testing is a complex component of software engineering in its own right. Thiscomplexity is encountered with an infinite number of environments posed by hardware, and cohosted software;one can never determine an absolute range of tests to determine the software in each potential environment orcustom setting. Therefore a finite set of tests are developed to validate the software. As the software being testedis not disclosed to the source code level the testing is developed around the functions of the software. Usingtechniques categorized in the black box methodology this regime must attempt to tender a validity status to thesoftware’s functions.KeywordsForensic Computing, Software, TestingINTRODUCTIONThe variety and number of digital devices available to the domestic user is growing at a phenomenal rate(Grabowski 1998; Etter 2001). Unfortunately such technology is not solely being used for the betterment of life.The misuse of devices to either conduct, or be used as a tool to conduct, crime is well publicised. Theunfortunate reality is people embrace, interpret and abuse the added ability one can inherit from the acquisitionof digital devices.To date the significance of encountering digital devices by law enforcement agencies has yielded the creation ofdedicated investigators dealing with the interrogation of said devices. A common misconception is that aninvestigation involving digital means is isolated to a high tech crime when in reality quite the opposite of this istrue (Etter 2001).One such example of this is the uptake and usage of mobile phones. A seemingly isolated device can produceassociations between individual parties by reviewing incoming and outgoing communications on the handsets.Any two or more devices offer the ability to identify relationships between devices and subsequently theirrespective owners. Mobile phones are only one example and similar processes can be applied to computers,personal digital assistants (PDA), fixed line telephones (billing), email accounts, websites, closed circuittelevision cameras. All devices and many more, potentially offer the investigator the ability to create a series ofrelationships between individuals via their devices. The usual caveat of proving the individual used the devicefor a specific message, call, etc still exists.What this translates to is the fact that evidence exists on countless devices and there must exist some way toextract this in a sound manner. Forensic computing investigators are in the frontline of the analysis of thedevices. With this knowledge, law enforcement agencies have equipped their digital forensic investigators with avariety of tools and training to seize, analyse and report relevant information from a truly infinite number ofsources.
2.Most of the tools utilized to conduct such investigations are proprietary software applications developed byspecialised application vendors. As the trade secret is the application, they are not willing to disclose source codefor testing and evaluation. It is unrealistic to expect companies to do so to law enforcement community, or otherparties, to evaluate the ‘under the bonnet’ as the risk of is too great.NEED FOR EVALUATIONThe need for the evaluation of all forensic computing software is well documented (Reust 2006; Meyers &Rogers 2004. Evaluation frameworks for computer forensic tools do exist, such as NIST Computer Forensic ToolTesting programme and SWGDE, and their work is extremely comprehensive and scientifically sound. However,the output of such organizations is failing to satisfy the demand of the rapidly developing industry. It is thereforeproposed that an alternative testing framework be developed and implemented to offer a similar, if notequivalent, level of testing but be more efficient with respect to time, output and financial requirements. Suchtesting alternatives have been proposed by numerous sources in the Australian context as no such evaluationexists beyond an individual’s environment (Armstrong 2003; Wilsdon 2005). This papers proposes a high levelarchitecture for such a streamlined framework.It is important to reiterate that this evaluation is concentrated on the accuracy, reliability of forensic computingtools and not the processes associated to the investigation. The discipline is well documented with theseprocesses and guidelines for investigators but evaluation of tools is lacking in comparison. The underlyingreasons for this are not documented but the authors assume to be a lack of skills in the computer science domain,the financial burden, experience & time.The technical component of forensic computing can be seen as the most critical with respect to the effectivenessof an investigation. Without the correct tools a tradesman can only deliver a substandard product – this does notdiffer from the physical to the digital world. So what constitutes a forensic computing tool? To the authorscurrent knowledge there is no definition as to what a forensic computing tool is. Many may have their opinionson this but for the purpose of this research a forensic computing tool is ‘a software application, or a componentof an application, that is utilized to perform some function on a digital device as part of a forensic computinginvestigation.’While this definition is broad and non specific so to is the real world of forensic computing tools being embracedby investigators. Mainstream tools such as Guidance Software’s EnCase or Access Data’s Forensic Toolkit (FTK)are well known and utilised by most agencies. Further to these mainstream suites there are countless scripts andinhouse developed applications that perform forensic tasks. Also the adoption of software developed for anotherpurpose is being utilized more and more. Examples of this include system administration tools, scripts and evenoperating systems.Such a range of tools with a variety of purposes increases the problem of testing – if we have one common toolwith one clear objective the testing requirements is clearly defined. Unfortunately quite the opposite exists withmany tools such as EnCase and FTK providing numerous functions. Complicating this further is the ability forusers to create their own functions to extend the existing application. The creation of, and utilisation of existing,tools is growing at a phenomenal rate. It is naive to assume each tool and its functions can be evaluated. Thecurrently testing of tools is a mere drop in the ocean suggesting we must optimise the process and harness allresources to address this shortcoming. Compounding this is the need to examine new devices regularly and theirimplications.Holzmann explores the economics for software developers to include as many functions/features into theirsoftware and charts a graph suggesting the greater the features the greater the defects. It is then the onus of thedeveloper to employ sufficient quality assurance mechanisms within the development life cycle to identify suchdefects and address these as required. According to the DFRWS 2005 Workshop Report one vendor of softwaresuggested ‘vendors cannot anticipate all uses in all situations therefore they can only test a finite set ofpermutations of systems and uses’ (Reust 2006). This raises the question whether proprietary software is more
3.reliable and accurate than open source software. Numerous observers actively participate in this debate and atthis time there is no clear evidence to suggest to the authors that one model is better than the other.Holzmann also documents the benefit of testing to identify all defects to suggest there exist some point of timewhere a majority of defects have been identified within the software development life cycle. Testing beyond thispoint is unviable for the developer, as the main defects identified are the more likely to occur and causepotentially less impact. Unfortunately the remaining defects within the software are less likely to occur but ifthey do materialize the impact will be greater. (Holzmann)So if the vendor is potentially distributing software tools with defects residing within their applications, why is itthe forensic computing community’s responsibility to identify such defects?To address this question we must determine what the software, and its results, are utilised for. The word forensiccan be categorized as suitable for use in courts of judicature, or in a public discussion (AAFS 1996). We mustsatisfy the most stringent standard. Therefore it is imperative the processes and procedures undertaken to deriveresults from a forensic computing investigation is sound in its foundations and execution ensuring results areadmissible within the court room as evidence.Software testing is a science that exists within the discipline of software engineering and computer science. It isa major component of the software development lifecycle and all software engineering methodologies havestrong emphasis on testing in various stages of the lifecycle. Within the field of evaluation we have a limitedcapacity to test software as the lifecycle has evolved from development to deployment. While the testingcomponent is still available, the ability to conduct testing to the same rigor as is available during thedevelopment stages is significantly reduced. In addition the accessibility to the source code is dubious at best.Within this research an assumption has been made that testing is occurring on proprietary software and thereforesource code is not available. The debate between open source and proprietary software is active and the authorsdo not wish to discount the added benefits of an open source testing model but this decision has been made tothe following rationale:•It is acknowledged open source applications offer a greater ability to truly examine the working of theapplication (due to the ability to examine the source code) but a standard or common denominator mustbe identified. The reason why a common standard must be identified is due to the objectives of thetesting process to validate and verify forensic computing tools correctly and efficiently with as muchstandardisation as possible. Separating standards between open and closed source does have benefitsbut also introduces complications which will impact on the efficiency of the framework.•Individual organizations can conduct lower level examinations to either independently validate or verifyresults from the validation result achieved.•Crystal box testing has more available processes in place which may identify defects but it is hopedsoftware engineering methodologies will identify these. The level of familiarity is greater to thedeveloper than an independent party performing validation with constraints of time and resources.•Creates a universal or standardised testing environment for both open source and proprietary solutions.TESTING REGIMEThe following sections refer to various standards to guide the testing procedure. The definitions of some testingterminology must be clarified prior to continuing – the IEEE Standard 610.121990 provides the followingdefinitions;Test – ‘An activity in which a system or component is executed under specified conditions, the results areobserved or recorded, and an evaluation is made of some aspect of the system or component.’Validation – ‘The process of evaluating a system or component during or at the end of the developmentprocess to determine whether it satisfies specified requirements.’
4.Validation and Verification (V&V) – ‘The process of determining whether the requirements for a systemor component are complete and correct and the final system or component complies with specifiedrequirements.’It is assumed some independent agency will undertake the role of the tester for this process. Such an agencywould have to be funded from either a consortium of government and potentially software companies. Thisstructure suggests bias to vendors and developers that contribute to the consortium but the task of establishingsuch an agency will require major support from vendors and practitioners alike. Therefore their contribution maynot come in the form of a monetary value but an inkind contribution to establish an agency and its processes.The role of the independent agency acting as the tester is assumed to be the following. Acquire software toolsalong with all documentation and knowledge required for the evaluation of the product. With respect to ISO170252005 standard appropriate logging of this acquisition is mandatory and must be developed by the agencyto suit their business model. Once acquisition is achieved the testing process begins. It is important that the goalof the testing is made apparent before the process evolves to any subsequent state. The goal of the testing is toevaluate a software product to act as a forensic computing tool and determine whether the tool’s function(s)operate correctly and accurately within a prescribed environment. The software product is referred to as acollective form but may consist of a set of functions and each of these functions are required to be identified,documented and tested.Whittaker (2000) suggests the starting point prior to conducting tests is to plan the testing environment. Insummary the four categories described are1. Modelling the software’s environment2. Selecting test scenarios3. Running and evaluating the test scenarios4. Measuring testing processWhile this process appears self explanatory it is important that each of these categories are explored andcustomized to the proposed forensic computing evaluation architecture.1. Modeling the Software EnvironmentKnowledge of the software must be included when preparing for the testing of a forensic computing tool’sfunction(s). This environment must be created with minimal possibility of contamination from any sources. Suchsources of contamination may include remnant data, conflicting software, ill equipped testers, etc. ISO 170252005 describes clear guidelines to achieve such a state which should be considered when undertaking theprocess. It is imperative the environment must be able to be recreated (To recreate testing is discrepanciesidentified). Therefore the documentation must be precise and blatant. A process to document and achieve thisrequirement will be created along with testing to ensure the environment is uncontaminated prior to the testing.2. Select Test ScenariosThe selection of applicable test scenarios is potentially the most important component of validating forensiccomputing software. A process to identify functions, requirements and test cases is examined later in this paper.The ability to select appropriate scenarios to be tested requires experience and knowledge of the tester (andagency). As the assumption for this research is that all applications will be tested as closed source the variety oftest types is reduced considerably and limited to black box testing.3. Running and Evaluating the Test ScenariosThe undertaking of the tests as selected in stage 2 and executed in the environment as derived from stage 1requires careful observation and consideration in preparation, execution and evaluation. The preparation phaseensures the tester is familiar with the objectives of test and interacts with the system in a prescribed anddocumented manner. It is assumed that this prescribed manner is obtained from documentation supplied with thesoftware or determined in stage 2. Complete logging of the execution of the tests is required and ISO 17025
5.2005 provides framework for this requirement. Results must be recorded to allow the evaluation against expectedoutcomes and judgments must be considered to determine whether the function/feature has achieved the desiredoutcome. Results evaluation is explored in a later section of this paper.4. Measuring the Testing ProcessWithin the context of the Whittaker publication the measurement of the testing process suggests that aprogression of the testing is monitored and updated to reflect the actual state at any one time. Within the contextof the testing of forensic computing tools it is deemed that the measuring testing process will have an alternativeuse. As forensic computing tools have the potential to contain multiple functions it is naive to assume that the allfunctions should be tested collectively. The reasoning for this judgment is due to the fact that some obscurefunctions offer no benefit in the real world or the process of testing these functions is too complex to consider ifthe demand does not exist. Within the context of forensic computing tool evaluation, it is therefore proposed thatthe measuring testing process tracks the functions tested and displays identified functions which have not beentested (Whittaker 2000).The Process of EvaluationThe process for evaluating software applications will consist of the following:1. Acquirement of software2. Identification of software functionalities3. Development of test cases & reference sets4. Development of result acceptance spectrum5. Execute tests & evaluate results6. Evaluation results releaseIt is imperative that all phases of the evaluation are transparent in the form of acquirement, testing, resultsreporting and evaluation. The process may consider input from a number of sources such as practitioners,vendors and academics to assist in each of the phases. An example of where such input will be beneficial is todetermine the function(s) of a software application if no documentation is supplied, or is of substandard nature.The process of testing will generate documentation which then may be considered as an standard operatingprocedure (SOP) of types. This is just one such side effect of such a community engaging architecture.The phases of evaluation are:1. Acquirement of SoftwareThe process of acquiring the relevant software applications to be evaluated is the beginning of the evaluationlifecycle. Once an application is ‘acquired’ the documentation begins satisfying ISO 170252005 and AS 40061992.Once the initial documentation is acquired a signature of the software must be developed to ensure that anysubsequent versions, patches or modifications are not misinterpreted as already tested. It is expected a MD5checksum or similar could be used to generate such a unique signature.2. Identification of Software FunctionalitiesOnce the acquirement requirements are satisfied the identification of a set of the application’s functionality isrequired. Only the identified functions will be tested.If documentation is available when acquiring the software then this phase is much simpler. If no documentationis available then the tester must identify functions to be tested by whatever means available. This may include,but is not limited to, execution and trialling of the application, community input, vendor input or mininginformation about functions from other sources such as websites, discussion boards, guidelines etc.
6.A function is considered some component of the software which delivers a result when executed. This functioncan be complex in its nature or simple – but only functions identified in this phase will be tested and given anevaluation result at the completion of the subsequent phases.If all functions are not identified within this phase the application can be retested at a later stage. Newlyidentified or untested functions can be appended to the test documentation.All functions must be clearly documented as an item to be tested. This requires an experienced tester withknowledge of how the tools functions are utilised. It is imperative that any functions that act as a dependency toanother function are documented as this will be reflected within the next phase of evaluation.3. Development of Test Cases & Reference SetsThe development of test cases and reference sets is critical to determine the correctness of the application.When all functions to be are identified during the previous phase, tests must be developed to determine thecorrect operation. The assumption has been made that all testing will be on applications treated as proprietary access to the source code is not available. Therefore all tests will be based on black box testing techniques wherethe data is organised to test as many functions as identified into an image referred to as a reference set. Thereference set will differ for each evaluation process determined by the functions being evaluated. Differentapplications with the same functions may use the same reference set.Utilizing the black box testing technique the data in the test case is known and determined to be an example ofreal world scenario. The reference set will be developed by the tester and must not only test the real worldexample in isolation but must also test the true operation of the software. Examples of this may includeencryption, modification of file headers, placing keywords across clusters, modifying data so that the expectedformat is not within standards – these are just a few examples of such tests that may be included.Due to the critical nature of this testing phase input maybe sought from outside the test organization to determinewhat the real world case is and how to truly test the extent of the function. As with all phases the test phasereference sets will be made available so individuals can verify the software, and its functions, within their ownenvironment.It may become practice that once a reference set has been developed and documented this is shared with thecommunity. The community can then assess whether the tests are appropriate and comprehensive enough tocover the real world usage. Request for comments would expire prior to the penultimate phase and all feedbackwould be considered before undertaking any subsequent phases of evaluation.Test cases and reference sets not only are designed to test the functions identified but also the operation of theapplication as a whole. Focus is predominantly on determining the correctness of functions identified but it isacknowledged if the host software is incorrect then it must be determined whether this impacts on the functionsoperations. Therefore environment testing, hardware configuration, co hosted software and processes may beconsidered and tested to determine their impact. Such testing must be included within the documentation asfaults or defects may directly, or indirectly, be attributed to the environment hosting the test bed.As within the previous phase if a function is determined to be excluded on an evaluation cycle this can added at alater time – it is essential once again that any dependants on this function(s) are evaluated together.4. Development of Result Acceptance SpectrumResult acceptance spectrum is a metric used to assess the test results against what was expected. As the testingmethod is black box and the reference sets and test cases have been developed all results of tests are known.Dependant on the environment (law enforcement, military, civil, etc) of tool use determines the level of accuracyrequired. It is therefore expected that numerous levels of acceptable ranges will be identified allowing a greaternumber of practitioner domains benefit from the evaluation process.ISO 14598.12000 provides a methodology to document the result acceptance spectrum by dividing the potentialresult set into 4 mutually exclusive groupings; exceeds requirements, target range, minimally acceptable and
7.unacceptable. How these groupings are determined must include previously undertaken phases including phases2 & 3. From these phases the metric of acceptance and expected can be identified and documented – this maydiffer for example between law enforcement and military domains and this would require input from therespective communities.If a function does not meet the acceptance range then that function and all dependant, and codependantfunctions, will be rendered as incorrect. Therefore it is essential that dependencies of functions are recognized inthe prior phases as this may cause one function to a ‘pass’ evaluation status when coupled with the incorrectfunction will render the outcome as invalid.5. Execute Tests & Evaluate ResultsThe execution of the tests is undertaken by the tester and each process of testing will be documented as per ISO170252005 and AS 40061992 requirements. Any unexpected intervention required will be documented andassessed as this may bear impact with results.All results from all tests will be collected and assessed against the acceptance spectrum compiled in the previousphase. All functions found to be below the acceptable range will be evaluated as ‘failed’ and documented. Allfunctions found to achieve in, or above, an acceptance rating will be evaluated as ‘passed’ with alldocumentation included.It is possible for a function to pass evaluation without passing all test cases. As described in phase 3 extraneoustests will be executed with the intention to identify limitations of the application. These will be included withany evaluation and have a significant component of the documentation exploring the limitation so all users canrecognize this.6. Evaluation Results ReleaseUpon conclusion of the previous phases all results must be made available to the community. Once a tool isevaluated it is not immune from future evaluation or reevaluation.Furthermore if the application is modified in any capacity (patches, updates, etc) the evaluation is notautomatically inherited. Therefore software patches usually released by vendors to address identified defects willrender their already evaluated application as unevaluated. If this evaluation framework is adopted it will forcevendors to supply a product with a greater emphasis on quality to the consumer. If patches are frequent the use ofan unevaluated tool may motivate a consumer to select a competitor’s product due to more ‘uptime’.DiscussionAs highlighted in the DFRWS Final Report 2005 (Reust 2006) the ability to test tools in a variety ofenvironments is limited due to both the financial and time constraints. The current models of tool testingframeworks (NIST CFTT, etc) do not offer a solution to this as there methodologies are testing in isolation.Whittaker (2001) documented the invisible user in a paper highlighting the fact that it is difficult for testenvironments to truly recreate all potential live environments. Furthermore systems, particularly operatingsystems, are prone to react in unexpected manners and these actions are difficult to identify and simulate.Although software is deterministic in isolation once the interaction occurs with the host and other software theresults can vary.The evaluation framework proposed offers an evaluation of a software application identified as a forensiccomputing tool at one point of time in one environment. Therefore, by releasing the evaluation framework phasesto all, this allows for individual organizations and practitioners to undertake the same testing process within theirenvironment. This is referred to verification and their results should resemble the evaluation results which arereferred to as validation results. If they do not correspond it must be determined if the error lies within thevalidation/evaluation process, the verification process or both. If the error is determined to exist in the validationprocess then the evaluation status of the software tool, and all functions, must be revoked immediately untilrevalidation is completed and verified.
8.With this knowledge it is imperative that tools are tested in the greatest combinations of environments aspossible. A study being conducted by the authors of digital forensic laboratories currently within Australiahighlighted that no two laboratories used examination workstations of the same specification. An example issome workstations using single core processors while others used dual core within the same organisation. Writeblockers varied in brand and connectivity along with countless other hardware and software variations.Other beneficial side effects of the proposed framework are that it offers a centralized agency the ability toregister practitioners to create a community. This allows for the collection of input from numerous domains andthis can be included within the validation process. Documentation maybe created, or extended, if new functionsare not already documented and practitioners maybe exposed to a library of tools if these are free for use.Further workEstablishing an Testing AuthorityThe formation and allocation of resources to implement the described evaluation process is requiredimmediately. The funding for a project such as this should not be solely the onus of a government but should be aconsortium of government, private industry and academia to put in place the processes to create such anauthority.Automated Reference Set Generator ToolAn automated tool to create mountable disk images with dynamic content is the concept behind this tool. Whena tool is to be validated the functionalities are identified and represented in the preceding screens of theautomated tool. Once all functionalities are included at the initial execution of the software the applicationgenerates a dynamic image creating custom reference set for the image and embedding these into a disk image.Upon completion of execution a unique identifier for an image is created and a corresponding reportdocumenting all embedded test cases such as keywords, partition types, file structures, deleted files, slack space,cross cluster files, etc.When this image is used for validation the corresponding report is available to testers to allow for acomprehensive assessment of the tool being validated. This will significantly improve the efficiency of theevaluation process; particularly phase 3 of the previously described framework.The automated reference set generator tool can also be used by vendors to increase their testing domain withminimal increase in time and cost.CONCLUSION:The proposed evaluation framework utilizes black box testing techniques via reference sets and test cases todetermine the correctness of software applications utilized as forensic computing tools. While the testingtechniques are fully described it is important to describe the process that encompasses the tests to appreciate thebenefit this offers to the forensic computing community.The proposed framework has numerous benefits such as a streamlined process, community input, multipleenvironment testing and a community point of contact. It addresses shortcomings of other similar frameworksand extends their capabilities. Is must be determined if such a framework will function and be a truly completesolution to the needs of the forensic computing community. Whether this framework is the solution or not thegap between tools and their evaluation is widening at an alarming rate.REFERENCES:AAFS. (1996) What is Forensic Science? [online], American Academy of Forensic Sciences,http://www.aafs.org/Armstrong, C. (2003) Developing A Framework for Evaluating Computer Forensic Tools, Curtin University ofTechnologyAS 40061992 Software Test DocumentationEtter, B. (2001) The Forensic Challenges of ECrime. Australasian Centre for Policing Research.
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A year ago my colleagues and I in the Program in Physical Therapy piloted a wiki project to thread concepts from earlier and current coursework. We have continued with this project, albeit with some improvements. This project stretches the students to scaffold previously learned information in order to move from recall to application into clinical practice. The objective of the wiki project is to assist the students in recognizing “why” the content is pertinent for their future practice. Because each medical condition is multifaceted, the wiki assists the students to recognize the complexity of the disease process and all of the factors that impact patient care.
For those of you unfamiliar with a wiki, it is a website in which a community of users can add and delete content collaboratively. Wikispaces is a secure dedicated wiki website that remains private until the collaborators are invited by the designer. No one outside of the classroom has access unless invited. For this wiki project, four students are randomly selected into a group and assigned a topic/pathology. The students are required to recall, integrate, and apply information when discussing the pathophysiology, diagnostics tests, pharmacologic treatments, and implications to physical therapists. The students are assessed on content, citations, ease of navigation, and grammar. Students are required to collaborate and integrate key concepts necessary to developing their clinical reasoning utilizing technology.
Last year, I reflected on several barriers, which resulted in the limited success of the project.
These included:
Poor understanding of the purpose or value of the project Poor recall of previously learned concepts Inability to accept imperfection and learn from their errors
After meeting with a focus group and reflecting on comments from a mid-year review by the Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning and on course evaluations, my colleagues and I implemented several changes. The following will reveal lessons learned and the steps we took to improve the project.
We made a number of changes early in the semester to improve student understanding regarding the purpose of the project. These changes included an email sent collectively to the students explicitly stating the purpose of the wiki project. In addition, we developed detailed directions on each of the course webpages and syllabi. On the first day of class, we provided an overview of our expectations and resources to address frequently asked questions from the previous year. We enhanced the rubric to model our expectations for the project. Finally, we provided a sample project with a sample rubric. This sample project illustrated common errors and how points would be deducted. As a result of these changes, we have had fewer questions regarding the purpose or how to complete the project. The projects are improved with enhanced content and details. Students have stated the project assists them in realizing the importance of the course content in becoming better practitioners. Overall, the student feedback reflects a more positive experience with the changes. As one student commented, “Great way for many people to view created ‘web-pages’ and an easy way to work as a group on a project since we have such different schedules.”
To assist with recall, I had several students, who were physiology tutors, and had successfully completed the course, construct study guides or mini Tegrity lectures on previously learned concepts. A study by Cortright et al (2005) found that peer instruction enhances meaningful learning of information and therefore, improves a student’s ability to problem solve. Students who had previously completed the course guided and enhanced the learning of students currently enrolled in the course. In addition, these students, acting as peers, could provide insight on why the content would be meaningful for future coursework and clinical practice.
We attempted to address student imperfections and learning from errors by providing more written feedback. The students receive feedback from each course coordinator through a collaborative rubric on Blackboard Learn. This technique helps to clarify expectations from content experts. In addition, students provide feedback on the collaborative learning experience, which facilitates the development of self, and peer assessment. As students move toward clinicals or employment, it is imperative they develop the skills to receive formative feedback and implement this feedback into their daily practice. Our goal is to have students move from reflection
on action to reflection in action by the time they graduate. This project allows for students to begin the process for critical thinking by giving real-world relevancy in a safe environment.
The wiki project offers flexibility of access and fosters autonomous student learning. Although we utilize wiki spaces for a pathophysiology course, it can be applied to any course content. The implemented changes have guided the students towards greater success in problem solving. This use of technology provides the students a multimodal approach to learning. By modeling expectations and explicitly stating objectives, we can focus students on their development through integration of coursework into current practice.
To read about Kim’s earlier wiki-teaching experiences, please visit her December 2012 blog post, “Helping Students Connect the Dots Using a Wiki” .
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It’s hard to believe, but Jay-Z’s
99 Problems turns 10 years old this month. The song, which was ranked #2 on Rolling Stone’s top 100 songs of the ’00s, recounts a real-life anecdote from when the rapper was stopped by police in 1994 while transporting cocaine in a secret compartment in the sunroof of his car.
To commemorate the anniversary, Caleb Mason, author of “Jay-Z’s
99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps“, agreed to provide some insights about his essay and what Jay-Z’s song has to say about the criminal justice system. What inspired your essay? Are you a Jay-Z fan?
“As it says, it was a teaching tool for my class, to help them learn the constitutional rules governing searches. Michael Morse and Jennifer Duval, I believe, suggested it. I’m not an academic and haven’t been teaching for awhile, and have forgotten 99% of their names, sadly, but those two I remember. Duval I haven’t kept up with, but Morse I still talk to. He’s a finalist for a DA position here in LA.”
Are there other examples of things that pop culture gets wrong about criminal justice that you think are important to correct?
“Yes. Lots. Some shows do better than others, of course. I don’t watch enough to really give you a catalogue, but I think the original Law and Order was pretty good on the law. Obviously it compressed the hell out of the process, but at least they gave you those “Trial Part 43” cues so you could infer that there was a lot going on that you didn’t see. I am currently pitching a pilot for a lawyer/doctor-themed drama, and we will get everything right! (My co-author is a doctor.)”
Do you have any plans to write about any more legal-themed lyrics? Maybe do a series?
“Sure! When I was teaching I had some others that I used. And it would certainly be fun to write more essays like this. Which reminds me, you probably don’t know that the one vacation I’ve taken in probably five years happened to be kayaking in Alaska in July of 2012, which happened to be the week the piece went crazy on the internet. I was out of contact for eight days, and then I came back to find I’d missed an invitation to be on Morning Edition, as well as a publishing agent who wanted to talk about a book of law-and-culture essays. Fortune being what it is (fleeting, fickle, whatever), neither one was interested in me anymore when I called back. I shouldn’t say not interested– they were polite and friendly, but I wasn’t the flavor of the month anymore. I did make Lawyer Hottie of the Week or something for one of those Above-the-Law-clone websites, but I’d rather have the book deal. That’s all a long way of saying yes, that sounds like a great idea.”
Did this idea ever make it into your Crim Pro class before publishing? It would have been a difficult exam problem.
“Yes. I collaborated with my class throughout the writing process.”
Now that you are back in practice, have you given the article to any of your clients?
“I don’t do much criminal work now, and what I do is white-collar stuff.”
Have clients come to you for advice after reading the article? You provide your phone number in the final footnote – have you received any phone calls as a result?
“I get a lot of calls. I’m mostly surprised at how positive the feedback is across the political/legal spectrum. One week I had the Salt Lake City FBI field office and the Oklahoma ACLU office both calling asking for permission to use it in trainings. I would estimate that it’s been used in several dozen professional training programs that I’m aware of. I’m in the middle of a trial now, and the other day one of the deputies working the courthouse came up to introduce herself and tell me that they’d used it in her classes at the Academy. I am thrilled and delighted that legal professionals find it useful. That’s the highest praise a piece of legal writing can have.”
Could you give us some traffic stop advice (in the form of a short rap, of course)?
“There’s only one piece of advice, and it’s easy, but people forget it so easily. Keep your mouth shut, and call a lawyer.”
What is the most interesting piece of feedback you’ve received from your article?
“I’ve gotten a ton of feedback on the various state laws governing recording of police-citizen encounters. (You may recall I cautioned that in a number of states, recording the stop might violate state law.) And the federal constitutional law has developed a bit here, too. I think in a couple more years we may have a definitive Supreme Court case on whether you have a First Amendment right to record the activities of police in public (and I think the answer will be yes).”
Any idea if recording of police-citizen encounters is common practice, and whether it causes any controversy? Does the recording have to be concealed or can it be outright in the officer’s face? It seems like that could make for a very awkward situation and could be distracting for police officers.
“See answer above. As for policy, my view is that police work should be recorded. This should be done via body cameras worn by the officers. The public should do it, too, and as noted above, it’s likely a First Amendment right.”
In states that require two-party consent, what is the reasoning for requiring the officer’s consent in a traffic stop to film it and what do you think that reasoning? Furthermore, in those states, if the consent is two-way, does the officer need to get the driver’s consent as well before recording the interaction?
“See above. I suggest openly recording the stop, and if the officer tells you you can’t, make a record of it and get a lawyer.”
In your paper you advise police to arrest for the traffic violation and impound the vehicle. You cite a Supreme Court case that upholds such arrests under the Fourth Amendment. I was just curious if you knew how many states actually had laws in place allowing for arrests for minor traffic violations? If state laws did not address these types of arrests, would the arrests nonetheless be okay since they are constitutional or do they also need to be specifically authorized under a state statute? Do these arrests happen often and has there been any backlash to such laws that you are aware of? It seems like a lot of power in the hands of the police.
“Virginia v. Moore. Supreme Court case. Interesting case. Answers all your questions. Here’s the rule: sure, some states do have state laws specifically prohibiting arrest for minor traffic violations. But unless the state law *also* has an explicit provision specifying a suppression remedy, there’s no implied suppression remedy under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment, says the Court, does not incorporate individual state statutory law. It permits arrest for any offense based on probable cause. So if you are on a legislative committee and want to draft a “no arrest for minor traffic infractions” law, you should put the suppression remedy right there in the law. (Then suppression would come under state law, not the Fourth Amendment. Of course, in a federal prosecution– e.g. a referral to federal court for a gun or drug charge– your perp is still out of luck.)”
You mention probable cause several times throughout the article (in fact, you say that Jay-Z should have replaced the line “you go’n need a warrant for that” with “you’ll need some p.c. for that”) – is there a bare minimum for probable cause? If so, what is it?
“Well, that’s your Crim Pro course, isn’t it?”
Along this same lines, would refusing an officer’s order to step out of the vehicle be enough for probable cause?
“Almost certainly, in front of nine judges out of ten, including me. The next question, though, is “probable cause for what offense”? Is it probable cause to search the car for drugs? Probably not on it’s own.”
You mention racial profiling and biases by law enforcement when it comes to drug busts and prosecutions – what is your opinion of sentencing guidelines that punish crack cocaine offenses (typically done black and other racial minority offenders) harsher than powder cocaine offenses (typically done by white offenders)?
“I’m glad they’re finally going away, albeit slowly. Should have been much quicker, and they should never have been written that way. AG Holder is doing great work on this.”
Did you ever hear from Jay-Z on anyone affiliated with him?
“No, but I’m easy to find.”
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| 0.94096
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The great divide over detox
It is midday and the mood in the room is intensifying. Separated by flimsy hospital curtains, three men are battling to push an addiction out of their bodies and the fight is getting physical. Tom moans and mutters as he paws at the wall. Rafik flings his bare legs repeatedly against the metal barriers around his bed. Jonathan tries to haul himself away.
Their detoxification from opiate dependency will peak within the next hour as the drug naltrexone purges the body's sensitivity to heroin or its synthetic substitute, methadone. It is like going cold turkey on fast forward, with all the symptoms of withdrawal packed into a couple of hours.
The men are sedated, so they will remember nothing of this afternoon's struggle in the small treatment room behind an Ultimo medical centre. But they are conscious enough to breathe and swallow independently and respond to instructions.
A doctor and a nurse calm them, repeatedly whispering in their ears, stroking and soothing them, taking their blood pressure and checking vital signs. They lie quietly for a moment, then the fight starts up again.
When they wake they will feel exhausted and wrung out. Insomnia, appetite loss, aches and pains and possibly nausea and diarrhoea, will persist for a week or two. But the soul-tearing agony of withdrawal itself will be behind them. Before they leave, each will have a slow-release pellet of naltrexone implanted in his abdomen. For the next three months it ensures that even if they were to take an opiate they would feel no effect from it.
Long considered the rogue in the addiction treatment pack, rapid opioid detoxification is back. With revised treatment regimes, heavy-duty psychological support to keep the recently detoxed on track, and $150,000 in grants from health minister Tony Abbott, its proponents say it has a new legitimacy.
Certainly its old image was thoroughly tarnished. The last time the technique was in the news was in 1999, when Dr Siva Navaratnam's Liverpool clinic, which had conducted an aggressive publicity campaign, offered to waive its $7000 fee for people referred by an MP. The local state MP, Paul Lynch, complained in Parliament: "Heroin addicts have quite enough difficulties without being exploited in this fashion." The clinic later closed its doors.
The people Ross Colquhoun treats in the Ultimo clinic, Psych n Soul Addiction Treatment and Psychology Services, are far removed from stereotypical street users. At least a third want to be free of methadone - the government-funded maintenance drug for addicted users- rather than illegal heroin. Almost all hold jobs and have family responsibilities.
For one young father recently detoxed at the centre, "not even his wife knows what's going on," says psychologist Colquhoun. "Each of them reports being overwhelmed by an addiction that's hard to beat and has the potential to destroy their lives. There's a whole lot of issues, particularly for men. They find it difficult to confront mental health issues."
Colquhoun says the ethical way to offer rapid detox is to select patients who are highly motivated to succeed, maybe only 10 per cent of those wanting to go drug-free. They must commit to counselling to tackle their addiction psychologically as well as physically, and they need good social support.
They also need to be able to pay. The package of six counselling sessions and the detox costs $3500, plus $1000 for an implant, which is not registered for medical use in Australia and is imported under a waiver.
Counselling costs $150 a session. It is critical because naltrexone wipes out the drug-tolerance patients have built up, so there is no safety net if they start using again. Overdosing at this stage is a real risk, and can be fatal.
Colquhoun says he will soon publish a study of his patients that found 80 per cent of 41 patients given an implant had not returned to drug use six months later, compared with 55 per cent of 42 who took naltrexone orally.
So in the range of treatments for addiction, where does naltrexone fit? "In a museum," says Dr Alex Wodak. "In a glass case, with a panel on the front saying this treatment was popular from this period to this period .. The evidence tells us it's expensive, it's ineffective and it kills people."
Wodak, the director of alcohol and drug services at St Vincent's Hospital, says methadone service providers have a responsibility to help people off the treatment, but only if they are medically, psychologically and socially prepared. "You tell me you've been on methadone for four years and haven't been on heroin for 18 months, and you're back with your husband, and your parents see you again, and you've paid off your debts, and you've got your little girl back, and you think you can manage; then we'll make out a plan and I'll help you to do this - slowly and carefully," he says.
Phasing methadone doses down to zero typically takes three to six months, says Wodak.
Statistics do not say who is in methadone maintenance, or for how long or how successfully. Of about 50,000 in NSW who have ever been treated since its debut in the 1970s, 16,000 are receiving treatment now. The NSW Health Department says 38 per cent of people who start methadone treatment are still in the program a year later. It is apparent that many people do quit methadone; whether this is a happy transition to a drug-free life or through death and disaster is unclear.
According to a pooled analysis of 13 Australian drug treatment trials, conducted by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in 2001, rapid detoxification was the most effective way of getting people off drugs in the short term, but in the longer term many dropped out of naltrexone treatment. By contrast, methadone was judged the most cost-effective therapy and patients were more likely to remain in treatment.
For every 100 people retained on methadone for a year there are 12 fewer robberies, 57 fewer break and enters and 56 fewer vehicle thefts, according to an estimate last year by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
If Abbott's largesse to the naltrexone camp is meant to express disapproval towards services like methadone, which keep people away from crime and unsafe injecting, then Wodak is livid. "What's wrong with the guy? Rapid opioid detoxification has failed as a science - there isn't a study he can quote that shows it works - and it's failed in the market."
But Wodak says drugs policy may be very different from drugs politics.
"Publicly they attack harm-minimisation. Then discreetly, when no one's looking, they're very supportive they've given $70 million over seven years to enhance needle and syringe programs, and that's a wonderful policy. Thank God they didn't walk the talk. I far prefer them being hypocritical than being ideological."
When Dr Andrew Byrne saw Abbott's cheque go to naltrexone, he called the minister's office in dismay. If anyone could use a cash infusion it is Byrne, a Redfern GP whose methadone clients suffer horrendous poverty and social dislocation on top of their addiction.
"The naltrexone implant industry apparently continues unchecked, uncontrolled and largely unreported, despite hundreds of Australians having these implants every year," says Byrne. "It's distressing to think that either it's a good modality that you can't extend [because there is insufficient scientific evidence to convince authorities], or you believe good doctors shouldn't be touching it with a barge pole. We're dealing with a life-threatening condition. It's not the place for amateurs, enthusiasts or people with a good hunch."
That does not move Colquhoun. He detects a lingering view in some quarters that, "if you don't do a hard detox you're not going to appreciate it".
But every patient he treats has made previous attempts to come off drugs - in residential facilities, where the dose is agonisingly scaled down, or alone in bed. Rapid detox, he says, "gives them a positive start to their recovery. They've suffered enough in my view. They deserve an option."
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Knowledge can be successfully transmitted and received only by those who recognise its value. If our governments have regarded education as valuable, however, it is usually as a means to some political goal unconnected with knowledge. As a result, our school system, once the best in the world, is now no better than the average developed country for numeracy and literacy.
Many on the left see schooling as a form of social engineering, the purpose of which is to produce a classless society. Equality is the real value, and when knowledge gets in the way (as it often does) it must be downgraded or set aside. Many on the right look to education for the skills that the country needs in order to maintain our economic position in a competitive world. On this view, those children who show no aptitude in hard subjects, or who take up too much classroom time to achieve too little, should not be allowed to hold back the ones whose skills and energies we all supposedly depend upon.
Those two visions have fought each other in the world of politics, and descended from there into the classroom. Teachers meanwhile have been forced to take a back seat, spectators of a quarrel that can only damage the thing that is most important to them, which is the future of the children in their care.
The abolition of the 11-plus examination and the destruction of state grammar schools, the amalgamation of the CSE and O-level examinations, the flight from hard subjects at both GCSE and A-level, and the expansion of the curriculum into areas where opinion rather than knowledge sets the standard: all those changes were motivated by the commitment to equality. Until recently very few reforms stemmed from the desire to support the high-fliers, or to improve the country’s standing in the hard sciences. And right-wingers will say that our standards have declined because the left has triumphed. In Kingsley Amis’s words, more means worse.
But one thought should now be obvious, which is that ideological conflicts have undermined the real motive on which education depends. This has nothing to do with social engineering, of the leftist or the rightist kind. Education depends on the love of knowledge and the desire to impart it. The ones who suffer most from the refusal to recognise that simple truth are the children. Our country is full of people who know things, and children who want to learn things. A successful education system brings the two together, so that knowledge can pass between them. That is how the system grew during the 18th and 19th centuries, and why it was, until the politicians got wind of it, one of our national treasures.
The conclusion to draw is that schools should be liberated from the politicians and given back to the people. The school is a paradigm of the ‘little platoon’ extolled by Edmund Burke. It ought to be a place of free co-operation, in which each member has a shared commitment to the collective purpose. It should be a place of teams and clubs and experiments, of choirs and bands and play-acting, of exploration, debate and inquiry. All those things occur naturally when adults with knowledge come into proximity with children eager for a share of it. It is in the classroom that the relation of trust between teacher and pupil is established, and it is when the school can set its timetable, its budget and its educational goals that an ethos of commitment will emerge.
Of course, it has been acknowledged for two centuries that schools must account for their results to the state — which is the highest legal authority. But accountability to the state does not mean control by the state. Schools thrive in the way that other enterprises thrive, by assuming responsibility for their activities and planting in their members the seeds of a shared commitment.
For this reason we should surely welcome the present government’s policy of creating schools outside the control of local authorities. A free school can settle its own curriculum and contracts of employment. It can open the way for those with unused knowledge to impart it in the classroom, and for volunteers to help with extra-curricular activity. Anyone can apply to set up such a school, provided they have sufficient educational and financial expertise in their team, and the willingness to make a substantial time commitment. Parents, local businesses and volunteers can all join in the enterprise, whose goal is to rescue children from disadvantage and once again to open the channels through which the social and intellectual capital of one generation can flow into the brains and bodies of the next.
The educationists complain that these free schools provide a free education to the middle classes, and that they do so by withdrawing the more able children from the state schools on which the poorer social strata depend. You still hear this kind of complaint from the Labour front benches, including from the mouth of education spokesman Tristram Hunt who, as the Oxford-educated son of a lord, can just about maintain the fiction that he is not middle class. But it has no relation to the realities.
Free schools take in children of all abilities and backgrounds. I have visited Greenwich Free School, which is in a deprived area, with 30 per cent of pupils on free school meals and the characteristic ethnic mix of an inner London borough. I encountered the same atmosphere of co-operation between pupils and teachers. To set up a free school in such an area, with the goal of taking children of all abilities, is to take an undeniable risk, and it is too early to say whether the risk has paid off. Nevertheless, the venture has the support of parents in the neighbourhood, with seven applicants for every place. And touring the school with two little girls who wanted me to see into every classroom, I felt the vibrations of their manifest joy that this place with real lessons, real teachers and real after-school activities had come to rescue them. And let’s be clear: in our inner cities, rescue is what education means.
My guides bombarded me with questions about my own career. The ability to present oneself freely and engagingly to a person with useful information is part of what these two children had learned. They had absorbed from their school its fundamental meaning, which is that we live and prosper by taking responsibility for our lives. For too long our education system has been opposed to that fundamental principle, regimenting the classroom, the curriculum and the ethos of our schools according to a frankly antiquated idea of social progress. When schools have become locked into goals that are both futile and unachievable, it is surely time to liberate them, to give them back to the parents, teachers and children whose property they are.
Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less –
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| 0.974487
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It said lower-income and rural drivers are losing mobility faster than better-off motorists as motoring taxes rise.
The AA is now urging Chancellor George Osborne to revert to the old system of setting annual fuel duty, which takes into account current economic and social conditions and not the "automatic turning of the screw based on inflation".
The AA said that earlier AA/Populus surveys of AA members showed that less well-off drivers had suffered more since the price of fuel peaked at 137.43p a litre for petrol, with diesel at 143.04p. Petrol has since remained within 3p of that record.
A May 2011 survey of 11,548 members showed that those cutting back on car use, other spending or both rose dramatically with lower income.
Also, a poll of nearly 16,000 in July this year "exposed the knife-edge that lower-income drivers endure budgeting on a set amount on fuel".
Of the 28% who say they spend a set amount on fuel, the impact of pump prices which were 16p-18p a litre higher than a year before showed it was the poorer motorists who were being hit the most.
In a letter to Mr Osborne, AA president Edmund King said: "The private car is, for most people, a necessity not a luxury. It is their means to a job, healthcare, doing the shopping, visiting relatives and friends, and also for improving the quality of their lives.
"We were disappointed that the January fuel duty rise went ahead at a time of rising oil prices and higher VAT. The AA firmly believes that business and households should be given a break from the annual cycle of fuel duty increases."
Mr King continued: "Motorists do not understand the logic of high fuel duty rises which further increase RPI and force demand down at a difficult time for family and business budgets which need mobility to stay afloat. Although we fully recognise the need to balance the books we also believe the time has come for activity to be stimulated through lower pump prices."Reuse content
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| 0.975579
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If you experience alcohol dependency, you may delude yourself into thinking that you’re just consuming alcohol. The fact is that it is alcohol addiction that’s consuming you, your hard earned money, time, energy and most importantly your health.
Alcohol dependency means addiction to consuming alcoholic beverages in-spite of the knowledge of their detrimental physical and social effects. Doctors define alcohol dependency as a disease which disables somebody from controlling the urge to take alcohol. Alcohol dependency, therefore, implies a tendency for addictive consumption of alcohol and a failure to acknowledge its unwanted effects. Alcohol Abuse Many people consume alcohol, have issues with it but suppress its characteristics and symptoms. This is termed as “alcohol abuse”, classified as indulging in excessive drinking of alcohol without completely losing control over, although, becoming totally dependent on it like an alcohol addict, is not necessarily the case. A Widespread Problem Based on the estimates of the National Council of Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, around 18 million People in America abuse alcohol. More than 100,000 American die of alcohol generated health issues. Half of road accident deaths are caused because of driving under the influence of alcohol. Symptoms Of Alcohol Addiction Even the hardened alcohol drinkers quite often refuse to admit they’re addicts. They, therefore, try to drink stealthily, keeping their quota of drinks hidden in unlikely places round the house, place of work or in the car. Once they start drinking, they find it difficult to control their urge to drink more, and will begin gulping down liquor greedily, while ordering “doubles”.
They tend to forget their social promises and conversations, termed as “blacking out”. They lose their interest in healthy entertainment, activities and hobbies which would normally bring them pleasure. They expose Pavlovian symptoms as their drinking time nears, and their desire for drink becomes irresistible as the minutes pass by.
They become irritable if they’re denied their daily doze of alcohol. Alcoholics, generally, get into legal disputes with their relatives, employers and financiers. They build a kind of tolerance towards alcoholic beverages, and the more they drink it, the more they want it to really feel its effects.
Physical Effects Of Alcohol Addiction Alcohol addiction or physical dependence on alcohol takes place gradually. The rise in intake of alcohol alters the balance in brain chemicals such as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which impedes its impulsiveness while glutamate excites the nerves.
Alcohol also elevates the dopamine level in the brain which is associated with the excitable aspects of drinking alcohol. Too much and continued intake of alcohol affects the status of the chemicals by either raising or depleting them. This process causes the body to crave for alcohol to restore the enjoyable feelings and to avoid the negative feelings without it.
Contributory Factors – There are many other factors that contribute to the problem of alcohol dependency, such as…
Hereditary – Dependence on alcohol may be genetic, so it may be in somebodies genes making them vulnerable to alcohol addiction.
Emotional Causes – Some times high levels of stress, anxiety, tension or emotional trauma compel a person to look for diversion in alcohol. Certain stress hormones are meant to promote alcoholism, so people take to drinking to fight out the mental turmoil.
Psychological reasons – Inferiority complex, low self respect or acute depression may lead a person to take to alcoholic drinking to distract his negative obsessions in life.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
ajv
DWFII, I am not sure to fully understand and in order to improve our deconstruction methodology I would be grateful if you could explain what the gemming exactly is and how it differs from cememting.
According to J.H Thornton there are 12 recognized methods of bottoming and attaching an outsole. Not all of them are applicable to high quality...or perhaps better to say...high priced shoes. Among the foremost is "Goodyear welted." (Parenthetically, no one, including myself, seems sure if this applies to hand inseamed as well as machine inseamed shoes). Shoemakers, trained in Traditional techniques, attach the welt directly to the insole in a process that cuts a channel into the insole and then hand stitches the welt to the leather "holdfast" that is created in the substance of the insole. Done properly this is the most secure and long lasting means of attaching welt. It will never compromise the fit and the welt can be replaced whenever wear or overzealous repair has left it too narrow to be usable. There are even machine techniques that can create the holdfast from the substance of the insole and the welt can subsequently be sewn, by machine, to it. All of this is, of course, predicated on a high quality insole with some thickness that can be incorporated into the inseam. But if done by hand, it takes time...far more time than almost any other production method...which is why it is almost never found in anything other that really high quality shoes (forget about price and the cache of brand name...I'm talking
quality
not $$'s). That said, there simply is no other method that creates a better, more stable shoe. Although to be fair, Blake/rapid probably comes close provided it is done with the same high quality materials. Gemming is a process that involves laying down a canvas rib around the perimeter of the under-surface of the insole. The rib is called gemming. And its purpose is to substitute for the leather holdfast...and to do it cheaply and quickly. It can be recognized by the white strip you see in most of those photos...sometimes "pinked" sometimes not. The gemming is cemented to the insole. That is the only thing holding it (and the shape of the shoe) in place. The welt is machine stitched to the gemming and the resultant insole cavity is filled with cork. Now, it bears repeating...in almost all instances, the gemming is held in place solely by cement. And that is its first weak spot. The cement
will
fail, probably even before the shoe is in need of a resole. When the cement fails the gemming slips and the shoe will walk out of shape. And anyone attempting to resole without the original last, faces the nearly impossible task of trying to re-position the gemming. Moreover, canvas is far more fragile than leather. If cotton canvas is used, it is subject to bacterial action--rot, in other words. Stitches pull through, the welt itself comes loose, and moisture and dirt enter the shoe. Gemming also frees the manufacturer to select thinner and cheaper grades of leather for the insole...or eschew leather altogether and use fiberboard insoles. Nothing visible, nothing immediately apparent will alert the customer to this further debasement of sound shoe technologies. Many manufacturers put a Poron or other cushion insole on top of the fiberboard insole and tout the whole as a "comfort" insole. If an insole is made of good leather it will last for literally decades. If the shoe is inseamed directly to the leather, the inseam...and therefore the shoe...has the potential to be worn frequently, repaired regularly and might still be passed onto the next generation. What is more, a leather insole will form a "footbed" under the foot that will ensure comfort for the life of the shoe. Gemming creates the need for cork filler. That cork is fugitive and will move away from pressure points. Insoles filled with cork are nearly always bare of cork under the ball of the foot. And if the insole is fiberboard or thin, poor quality leather, the insole itself may wear out (developing a hole)...it certainly will not provide any cushioning to the foot nor will it mold itself to the bottom of the foot. Gemming is the cheapest and quickest way to get a shoe together. It literally is the default method for bottoming on the cheapest (think $40.00 a pair) shoes on the market--think Walmart. Even cement construction is a better alternative simply because it is not masquerading as anything other than what it is--quick and easy...and ultimately short-lived. And everyone knows it--you cannot pass off a cement construction as a really high quality shoe.
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Senate’s Secret Bill Will Cost More Than Half a Trillion, and You Should Know About It
An F-35 fighter jet is a pricey little piece of aviation innovation, with each plane costing around $159 million, part of a $400 billion program run by the Pentagon—the most costly program in the history of the world. How many new ones do we need and why? It’s unclear. How many more of them will we buy in the future? Again, who knows.
But it might be worth noting that, by comparison, the cost to provide health care services to all veterans through the VA is estimated to be $69 billion to $85 billion.
The government is in the midst of deciding how to spend more than half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money, and much of it is happening in secret. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee met Wednesday to debate and amend the National Defense Authorization Act. To the frustration of government transparency advocates, the meeting—or markup, as it is known in political parlance—is behind closed doors.
Defenders of the process argue that keeping it private is a matter of protecting classified information and national security interests. However, the House Armed Services Committee has proved that it’s possible to steward the bill through committee in a much more open and participatory way. All of the House markups of the bill are streamed online and archived for the public to see. To get the Senate to change its tune, the Project for Government Oversight, along with dozens of other groups, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Americans for Tax Reform, are lobbying the committee “to bring the NDAA into the light of day.”
TakePart chatted recently with transparency advocate Angela Canterbury, director of public policy at POGO, to discuss why this is such a big deal. These excerpts from the interview have been edited for clarity.
TakePart: It’s fairly routine for Washington to spend a ton of money. Why is it important for us to know more about this bill? Angela Canterbury: This is one of the few bills that Congress passes every year, and it authorizes more than $600 billion dollars in Pentagon spending. It includes many important wide-ranging policies. For the Senate to mark up any of the unclassified provisions of this bill in secret shuts the public out of how a huge chunk of taxes are spent and policies are made.
Last year, not even other members of the Senate were able to influence what eventually became law. There was not, in the end, an opportunity for senators who are not on the Armed Services Committee to amend the bill. There was a lot of frustration around that.
TakePart: What’s the justification for keeping it so secret? Canterbury: When they vote to close the markup, the impetus is the fact that national security issues and classified information are discussed. On the House side, they don’t see any reason to close the markup. They are able to conduct the vast majority of their business on the bill completely in public. In our estimation, there is not a lot of legitimacy around the national security concerns when the House can do it transparently. In the end, it’s probably just because it’s harder to the do work when you have to more carefully segregate the classified discussions, as the House does. TakePart: Is this an unsavory power grab by the senators who want to keep the process behind closed doors? Canterbury: No. I think it’s just been a tradition for Chairman [Carl] Levin [D-Mich.]. Most people think the process yields good results. The committee members feel they are very well staffed. But now that Chairman Levin is going to retire, there is a real opportunity for the incoming leadership, whether its Democratic or Republican, to increase transparency and public participation in the NDAA and in the Senate in general. TakePart: What are some examples of controversial programs that were funded by the NDAA and disclosed after the fact? Canterbury: There was frustration on a handful of issues last year. There weren’t any votes taken on Iran or drones and other hot-button issues. The one issue that did get a public airing was the epidemic of sexual assault in the military. That was a real exception.
An open hearing was held on sexual assault—it was the only part of the NDAA that the full [Senate] committee debated in public. We got to see very thoughtful deliberations. It was an example of how it should work on other aspects of the bill.
TakePart: What issues are you most concerned about going forward? Canterbury: The coalition we have assembled, which includes 56 organizations from across the political spectrum, have different perspectives. Some fiscally conservative groups are most concerned about the amount of money that’s being wasted on ineffective programs. Other members are really concerned with war spending in general. These are groups that care about peace and security and would like consideration for a faster drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, for instance.
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BROOKSVILLE — Michael McHugh walked out of Tuesday's County Commission meeting with a few new lures in his tackle box.
McHugh, the county's director of business development, hopes to use the bait to reel in some much-needed new business, industrial and manufacturing growth.
Commissioners on Tuesday unanimously approved a new program that will pay employers for creating jobs paying modest and high wages, expands the kinds of companies that would qualify for county incentives and adjusts some of the rules to qualify for such help.
The Job Creation Incentive Program gives a company $2,000 for every job it creates that pays the average Hernando County wage of $13.29 per hour. That goes up to $3,000 for every job that pays 115 percent of that average.
For new businesses setting up in the south Brooksville Enterprise Zone, the payment will be $3,000 per job paying the average wage.
Targeted industries include aviation and aerospace firms, corporate headquarters, green technologies, research and development, and distribution and warehousing businesses.
The commission also gave McHugh the go-ahead to work with the county's other departments to make sure that infrastructure such as roads and utilities are ready in the areas of the county set aside in the Comprehensive Plan for business and industrial growth.
Commissioners praised the new measures.
"That gives us a leg up compared to surrounding counties,'' said Commissioner Dave Russell.
Businesses want to see what a county has to offer, said Commissioner Rose Rocco. "It's important that we get information out there that we are a business-friendly community,'' she said. "They don't want to start from zero.''
Commissioner Diane Rowden questioned whether there is enough educational opportunity available locally so that new businesses could find educated workers.
McHugh said opportunities are here and more are coming through the school district's career academies and expanded offerings at Pasco-Hernando Community College.
He also said the county is drawing up a development agreement for the large tracts of land on Kettering Road slated for big-box industrial development and hopes to see more infrastructure investment for another future business area at U.S. 301 and State Road 50.
Rocco, who has been meeting with existing small-business owners who say they need help, too, asked what was in the package for them.
Any existing business can get the same incentives if they are expanding their operation and meet certain qualifications, McHugh said. These vary by the kind of company and other criteria.
Rocco has also been working with the small businesses on questions about their appraisals for tax purposes. Their complaint has been that, even though the market is dropping, their property values have gone up.
Also during Tuesday's meeting, a report from Property Appraiser Alvin Mazourek and his staff shed some light on why that is. Nick Nikkinen, special projects director for Mazourek, gave a presentation about how the office does its appraisals.
He also showed information that indicated that the values residential properties saw on last year's bills peaked last year. Commercial properties appear to have peaked this year.
Property taxes are charged based on last year's values.
Barbara Behrendt can be reached at behrendt@sptimes.com or (352) 848-1434.
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National Journal: Premiums Rising Under Obamacare National Journal is one of the most respected political and news reporting organizations in Washington. As of August 29, that influential voice is firmly on the side of Tea Party activists when it comes to the higher premiums Americans will pay under Obamacare:
Republicans have long blamed President Obama’s signature health care initiative for increasing insurance costs, dubbing it the “Unaffordable Care Act.”
Turns out, they might be right.
For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they’re currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a
National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers’ monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.
The analysis from
National Journal is absolutely devastating to Obamacare’s effects on costs. Here are a few highlights:
First, employers are likely going to continue dropping employee insurance coverage – despite what the law’s supporters say:
Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won’t apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that’s only if employers continue to offer that coverage–something that’s looking increasingly uncertain.
In other words, you can keep your doctor if you want, unless your boss can’t afford to provide insurance, at which point you’ll either have to find a new doctor or pay more to keep your doctor.
Second, the Administration is claiming lower premiums – but only compared to prior projections, not to current premiums. Emphasis added:
“In 16 states that HHS studied, premiums were on average almost 20% lower than what the Congressional Budget Office projected,” [HHS spokesperson] Peters wrote in an e-mail.
Premiums may be lower than predicted, but they’re not competitive with what workers are now paying for employer-sponsored care.
On average, a worker paid between $862 and $1,065 per year for single coverage in 2013, according to Kaiser’s numbers. For the average family plan, defined as a family of four, insurance cost between $4,226 and $5,284.
Fewer than half of all families and only a third of single workers would qualify for enough Obamacare tax subsidies to pay within or below those averages next year.
National Journal points out that while 81% of employers don’t plan on dropping employees, according to a report by Deloitte, there exists a great level of uncertainty, as the state exchanges and subsidies haven’t been implemented yet. And dropping employees is, to quote National Journal, “just logistically easier than trying to meet the law’s employer mandate”:
The truth is, Obamacare is doing what it was intended to do: make health care affordable for the nation’s lowest earners by spreading out the costs among taxpayers.
The trap is that the exchanges also present a savings for some employers but a rate hike for their employees.
And shifting employees to the exchanges also is just logistically easier than trying to meet the law’s employer mandate.
Finally, the crux of the problem with Obamacare is identified in the closing of the article:
Perhaps the biggest obstacle Obamacare faces today isn’t getting people in the system, but making sure those who do get in actually receive affordable care.
Exactly. Getting people into a system is easy – first, incentivize employers to drop care. Next, incentivize individuals to sign up for the system by providing “free” money for enrolled people.
Under Obamacare, both systems have been set up. The problem now is, as it was long predicted to be, actually finding affordable having health insurance. Therein lies the problem – government-controlled health insurance and health care cannot compete with free market-based systems. Obamacare needs to be repealed before there’s nothing left to compete with.
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| 0.572853
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So much money is on the line, so many departments are involved, and so little time remains before the deadline. This statement could describe too many information technology projects. In this fast-paced and stressful environment, planning is essential, and IT project managers have little room for error.
Perhaps that’s one reason why several organizations are targeting the IT industry by offering classes and certifications for project managers. Download a list of project management certifications for a compilation of the essential information you’ll need to select the project management coursework and certification that fit your needs.
Back by popular demand
This download is actually the second version of the project management certification list. Earlier this year, TechRepublic compiled a list of project management certs into a download that was so popular we wanted to update it with new certification programs.
Project planning is one of the most-discussed topics on TechRepublic. In a recent article on project management, several members explained how they often struggle with management issues. One member,
mary.dempster, described the internal battle within her organization:
“It is extremely difficult to be successful in large corporations that want the moon, and they want it now. We keep hearing, ‘We're on Internet time, we don't have time for processes.’
All of us that have earned the stripes the hard way know you cannot be successful with a chaotic project where the decision makers don't want process and at the same time want everything NOW.”
—mary.dempster
What to expect
Planning techniques are the cornerstone of project management and the certification programs reflect that reality. For instance, here’s an outline for scope definition and planning classes that comprise half of the cert program from the Gartner Institute:
Scope definition
Identify stakeholders' needs and expectations including boundaries for project budget, duration and risk. Identify and define high-level business-related requirements, outcomes, and criteria for success. Perform a project-requirements analysis to determine if the requirements are complete, achievable, and within the defined project scope. Define the project manager role/authority in various business environments. Create a scope document that accurately represents the project size and specifics. Build consensus among stakeholders and obtain written approval from stakeholders.
Planning
Create an accurate and realistic work breakdown structure (WBS). Demonstrate the ability to perform risk assessment and mitigation. Recognize and explain the issues considered in project effort, time, and cost estimation. Identify and list the components needed to generate a workable project schedule. Create and manage a project budget. Identify selection criteria for project team members. Perform an analysis of vendor tasks and deliverables and create the plan. Create and manage an appropriate communication plan. Determine the quality performance measures. Organize a comprehensive project plan.
The Gartner Institute coursework provides a list of action items for two more project phases: execution and closure.
Earlier this year, Gartner Institute awarded the maintenance and development of their certification program to Wave and Prometric. However, the program will retain the name, Gartner Institute.
The Gartner Institute program is one of 11 project management certification programs we’ve outlined. To learn more, download the informative list now.
Do you have a project management certification? Would you recommend this to other IT pros? Post a comment to this article or send us an e-mail.
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| 0.938114
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When the UK government isn't losing its databases, it's plotting to create new ones of unprecedented scale and reach. Indeed, the word ‘database' might turn out to be the term that defines its whole period in office.
It started in 2004 with proposals for a national ID card scheme to makes machine-readable passports look like museum pieces, building on various pieces of legislation that had since 1997 widened the collecting scope of the UK national DNA database used by police to fight crime.
This week came confirmation from Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, of plans to create a massive database of every phone number dialled, ever website visited, and every email address contacted, by everyone in the country.
What would not be in this new database is the content of these communications, a feat of storage beyond even governments for now, though it's hard to rule that out for the future once the basic infrastructure is in place.
The next step? Tie them together with the UK's huge surveillance camera network and make DNA profiling a necessary element of biometric passports. This would give the UK government a level of informational power beyond that found in even the most totalitarian of today's states.
What makes this extraordinary is that nobody in the UK government actually wants to create such a state. They propose these ideas in good faith, sure in their conviction that checks and balances are in place, that the databases themselves would not be compromised, and that it is all necessary to fight the evils of terrorism and organised crime.
It's disquieting that the UK could be the template from which other states develop their own plans. They might not admit it, but there are plenty of people in the free and non-free world beyond the UK who are watching what happens with great interest.
The overbearing older sibling of Orwellian nightmare this is not because his totalitarians wouldn't have wasted time telling people what they were about to do. Power, and the fear it illicits, should always remain partly latent and undefined the better to stop people knowing what to try to topple.
But it seems to me the greatest failure of these databases is that they will work, but only in the wrong ways. They will spread their negative power over the vast majority of innocents while failing to counter the ability of the determined criminal to circumvent them.
The government knows as much when it admits it has no easy way through the minefield of encrypted communications such as Skype, for instance. And Skype is only one of the many ways that communications can be hidden or scrambled.
The answer is to accept that the police need enhanced powers to monitor communications in a targeted way but not by building databases of information on the whole population and creating a new layer of weakness.
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| 0.999082
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The social workers of Haringey are notorious for having failed to prevent the deaths of Baby P and Victoria Climbié. But in their zeal to avoid any repetition of these tragedies, they are now at the forefront of those councils which have pushed the number of children taken into care to an all-time high. In all the cases I have been following where children have been taken from their families for what seem like dubious reasons, no single instance has been more disturbing than the plight of a 10-year-old girl seized by Haringey last year, who seems in the past 10 months to have vanished off the radar.
“Girl X”, as I shall call her, was taken into care on the basis of three allegations. One turned out to be so laughably erroneous that it was soon dropped; a second was likewise dropped when medical tests completely disproved the council’ s claims. The third, highly questionable, has still not been put to any evidential test.
The last time Girl X was seen by her mother was at a supervised contact session last August. Having complained of sexual abuse by her foster carer’s 19-year-old son, she asked to be given, as a birthday present, a journal with a lock in which she could record her “secret thoughts”. Since that day she has not been seen by her parents or, since the autumn, by her siblings, who are also in care. It seems she has since been interviewed by three people – an independent social worker, an independent psychiatrist and her guardian, all of whom reported that she wished to see and be reunited with her mother.
No one representing the family has been allowed to see her, including the girl’s grandparents, who came from abroad specifically to visit her. Her parents have been forbidden to telephone her or even send a Christmas card. Her whereabouts are a mystery. When I put questions about her to Haringey last year, the council’s only response was to ask for a court order forbidding me to refer to the case at all. (It was not granted.)
What makes all this particularly disturbing is that, in several respects, it seems to defy the Children Act, which insists that councils must do all they can to encourage contact between children taken into care and their parents, who continue to share parental responsibility until a child is adopted. “The responsible authority,” says the Act, “has a duty to endeavour to promote contact” with the parents and “any relative, friend or other person connected to the child”. In particular, parents must be allowed to see medical or school reports relating to their child. The law also insists that, if children are old enough, they should be allowed to appear in court to express their wishes. None of these things has happened.
Why – when even Baby P’s mother was last year allowed out of prison to enjoy supervised contact with her surviving children – has Girl X been shut away as a silent prisoner, seemingly denied her rights? What has happened to Girl X?
For legal reasons, comments on this story have been disabled.
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| 0.802889
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Life can seem so hard when your relationships are out of balance, especially when someone is always jumping over your fence and intruding in your life with unwelcome expectations, criticism, or impositions. It happens to all of us at some time or another and it can turn our lives upside down. We all want to be valued, respected and loved by the people in our lives, but the truth is that has to start within ourselves first.
The key to great relationships, including the one we have with ourselves, is good fences, or boundaries. Building healthy boundaries with each person in your life creates a sense of wellbeing, a solid respect for yourself and others, and it allows you to be your most confident and genuine self.
Terry Barnett-Martin’s award winning book, Tending Fences is a timelessly insightful collection of parables that explore relationship boundaries through the adventures of its main character, Avery Soul. Avery discovers that in order to feel safe and happy, he must build and maintain the fences that run between his ranch and his neighbors’ land.
"Good fences make good neighbors.” Robert Frost
“Tending Fences is quietly brilliant. The stories get into your heart, sort out complicated relationship boundaries, and make a real difference.”
Ann F.
“I read Tending Fences when I was struggling to find a balance in some difficult relationships in my life. These parables put them into a concrete light, and by seeing them that way I was able to create the boundaries I needed to make my life more secure. This is a book you want on your bookshelf to go back to again and again.”
Phyllis L.
“What I appreciate about Tending Fences is that the stories are not about blaming someone for problems in a relationship. Rather, they are focused on fixing or building a fence that creates a safer, more respectful connection.”
Joseph F. M.
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| 0.972189
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