text:
On May 20th all our servers are going to be down because of a power maintenance at our computer center. Sorry for inconvenience! We are going to be back as soon as possible.
On May 20th all our servers are going to be down because of a power maintenance at our computer center. Sorry for inconvenience! We are going to be back as soon as possible.
Global Names developers Dmitry Mozzherin and Richard Pyle were invited to attend a workshop called "Names in November", organized by the Catalog of Life and GBIF and hosted in Leiden. The three-day meeting involved more than twenty people from key taxonomic and nomenclatural organizations, and focused on discussing ways that a global information system of taxonomy, including both names data and accepted species information, could be designed to more seamlessly interconnect biodiversity data through organism names. Although the theme of the meeting was certainly not new (many participants in this meeting had attended similar meetings going back decades discussing essentially the same idea), the tone of the discussion was refreshing in that it focused comparatively little on politics and technical details, and instead concentrated on identifying whether such a shared taxonomic infrastructure was even possible (given the political, financial, and technical circumstances currently existing within the main likely partners), and what conditions would need to be met.
Many of the points that participants agreed on in terms of needs and services very closely matched the fundamental goals and infrastructure we have developed (and continue to develop) within the context of Global Names. Now that GN is much more closely coordinating with the Catalog of Life, GN data indexes and services will likely play an important role in implementing the shared global taxonomy resource envisioned during the meeting. Following this meeting, we have a renewed sense of focus within GN development to finish harmonizing integration of GNI and GNUB services, and especially to rapidly increase the effort to bulk-populate GNUB from existing data.
We are happy to announce the release of
Changes in the v0.3.3 release:
add year's range to AST node that is encoded with
Year's field
rangeEnd: Option[CapturePosition]
parse names ending on hybrid sign (#88)
support hybrid abbreviation expansions (#310)
support raw hybrid formula parsing (#311)
continuous build is moved to CircleCI
and many structural changes, bug-fixes and quality improvements. They are described in the release documenation.
To avoid confusion – gnparser is a new project, different from the formerly released biodiversity parser.
We are happy to announce the second public release of Scala-based
Global Names Parser or
gnparser. There are many significant
changes in the v. 0.3.0 release.
Speed improvements. Parser is about 50% faster than already quite fast 0.2.0 version. We were able to parse 30 million names per CPU per hour with this release.
Compatibility with Scala 2.10.6: it was important for us to make the parser backward compatible with this older version of Scala, because we wanted to support Spark project.
Compatibility with Spark v. 1.6.1. Now the parser can be used in BigData projects running on Spark and massively parallelize parsing process using Spark platform. We added documenation describing how to use the parser with either Scala or Python natively on Spark.
Simplified parsing output in addition to "Standard output": It analyzes the name-strings and returns its id, canonical form, canonical form with infraspecific ranks, authorship and a year.
Improved and stabilized JSON fields. You can find complete description of the parser JSON output in its JSON schema. We based names of fields on TDWG's Taxon Concept Schema, and we indend to keep JSON format stable from now on.
There were many structural changes, bug-fixes and quality improvements. They are described in the release documenation.
uBio and Nomenclator Zoologicus online experienced difficulties this year and had been down a lot lately, mostly because there is no system administrator to look for them at Marine Biological Laboratory anymore.
I moved uBio from old hardware at Marine Biological Laboratory to Google Container Engine, and it is running again. Some functionality is not back yet, mostly due to some hard-coded configuration parameters in files. I hope problems with the code will be fixed eventually by interested parties (I do not plan to rewrite the code). I'll coordinate my efforts with Dave Remsen and Patrick Leary, and hopefully together we will preserve uBio for the community.
Please note that being a system administrator for uBio is not part of my job. I like the project, I consider it to be a 'precursor' of GN, I will try my best to keep it running on my spare time. MBL/WHOI library pays for the cloud.
Docker containers to run uBio are located at dockerhub. We use Docker and Kubernetes at Google Container Engine to keep it alive.
(Please note that gnparser is a new project, different from the formerly released biodiversity parser.)
We are happy to announce a public release of Global Names Parser
gnparser – the first project that marks transition of Global Names
reconciliation and resolution services from "prototype" to "production". The
gnparser project is developed by @alexander-myltsev and @dimus in Scala
language. GNParser can be used as a library, a command line tool, a socket
server, a web-program and RESTful-service. It is easiest to try it at
Scientific names might be expressed by quite different name strings. Sometimes the difference is just one comma, sometimes authors are included or excluded, sometimes ranks are omitted. With all this variability "in the wild" we need to figure out how to group all these different spelling variants. Name parsing is an unexpectedly complex and absolutely necessary step for connecting biological information via scientific names.
In 2008 Global Names released Biodiversity Gem – a scientific name parser written in Ruby for these purposes. The library in its 3 variants enjoyed a significant success – about 150 000 downloads and a notion as the most popular bio-library for Ruby language. It allowed to parse about 2-3 million names an hour, and had been the basis of name reconciliation for many projects from the moment of its publication.
GNParser is a direct descendant of the biodiversity gem. It serves the same
purpose and input/output format of both projects are similar. It also marks
eventual discontinuation of 'biodiversity gem project' and migration of all
Global Names code to the new
gnparser library.
Why did we go through the pain of making a completely new parser from scratch? The short answer is scalability and portability. We want to be able to remove parsing step from being a bottleneck for any number of names thrown at resolution services. For example finding all names in Biodiversity Heritage Library took us 43 days 3 years ago. Parsing step alone took more than 1 day. If we want to improve algorithms of finding names in BHL – we cannot wait 40 days. We want to be able to do it within one day and improve whole BHL index every time our algorithms are enhanced significantly.
We have an ambitious goal of making time spent on sending names to resolution services over internet and then time spent on transferring the answers back to be the bottlenecks of our name matching services. For such speeds we need a very fast parsing. Scala allows us to dramatically improve speed and scalability of the parsing step.
Having a parser running in Java Virtual Machine environment allows us to give biodiversity community a much more portable parsing tool. Out of the box parser library will work with Scala, Java, R, Jython and JRuby directly. We hope that it will speedup and simplify many biodiversity projects.
This is the first public release of the library. Please download it, run it, test it and give us your feedback, so we can improve it further. Happy parsing
WARNING: JSON output format might change slightly or dramatically, as we are in the process of refining it. The JSON format should be finalized for version 0.3.0
I decided to figure out how can I write scientific papers in truly Open Source fashion. And here are practical decisions that allowed me to do it:
To use full power of revision control system a project should be mostly in text format of some sort. We currently keep practically all our code on GitHub, so Git was a natural choice.
I decided to go with LaTeX, as it is tried and powerful markup, very well suited for scientific writing. It allows to work with plain text, so we can easily keep revisions in Git.
Vim is my editor of choice, but nothing prevents me or co-authors to use any other modern text editor for LaTeX.
With LaTeX and Git it is easy to provide early access to the work in progress, especially with 2 commercial products that give free access for open projects – GitHub and OverLeaf. Overleaf supports git, although not as well as GitHub does. So currently is it better to have GitHub as the main repository, and keep Overleaf as a glorified viewer and use it only as a secondary repository. Another useful tool is Mendeley for finding and organazing bibliography.
I am still learning my ropes, but excited about the progress. And the paper about Global Names Parser is now on GitHub and OverLeaf! Overleaf allows anybody interested to see the paper in user-friendly PDF format. It also simplifies submission of papers to a large variety of open access journals.
I created a post on my personal blog describing how did I set up my system with LaTeX, vim and tmux.
Does a culture exist out there which considers a process of writing scientific papers to be akin to writing an open source code?
For the last 8 years I had been blessed being paid for doing open source development. It means that for that long about everything I do is almost instantly available publicly. This model fits my way of thinking, my values, and I see an advantage in making all I do available for public to see, comment, and enhance.
Now I am writing a paper, and I feel being thrown into "dark ages". Whole paper writing and publishing culture was one of the reasons I left molecular biology and went to programming. I assume the following is usually true when people write a scientific paper –
Obviously there is a progress with the last point, but what about other 2?
Last week (October 5-9 2015) @deepreef, @dimus, @alexander-myltsev had a workshop in Honolulu at Bishop Museum to sync ideas, learn more about each other work, and design new generation of services. The meeting had been productive and I think in the end our two GN groups get integrated. We are moving all our code under one roof at GitHub now.
We had an interesting meeting with @jar398 from Open Tree of Life trying to figure out how can we connect OTOL with all the other resources on the web, and @deepreef suggested to use his BioGuid project for these purposes. We moved BioGuid to github and added all the GitHubbish bells and whistles like a blog and [gitter][bioguid-gitter] for example to the project. I think it is pretty cool that we will have a downloadable csv file from all the IDs @deepreef collected that can be used by all other projects in new exiting ways.
Another interesting conversation was with Phylotastic project. We worked on an idea of making an application which will allow convert pictures of scientific names people take at museums or from pages of research papers into texts, extract names appeared there and build phylo-trees from these names using Open Tree. Also the app would show pictures from Encyclopedia of Life and pages from Wikipedia. Such app will mash up interfaces of Global Names to find and reconcile names, Open Tree to build trees, and EOL to get information about species.
As we annouced previously, BioGUID.org has been incorporated into the Global Names suite of indexes and services. Within two days of this happening, we recieved some wonderful news: BioGUID.org won second place in the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge! We're very excited about this recognition, and it re-inforces our decision to incorporate BioGUID into the GNA system. You can follow continuing developments on the new BioGUID Blog.
BioGUID.org, an indexing service that cross-links identifiers assigned to data objects in the biodiversity information universe, has now been incorporated into the Global Names suite of indexes and services. BioGUID.org represents the third major data component of Global Names (along side GNI and GNUB), and replaces a less robust identifier linking service that had previously been included within GNUB. In addition to the crucial role of cross-linking identifiers within the general GN architecture itself, the broader function of BioGUID.org falls within the scope of Global Names in the sense that identifiers can be thought of as names, and names play the same functional role as identifiers.
We are currently in the process of porting BioGUID into the GN GitHub, and you can follow developments on the new BioGUID Blog.
Bishop Museum, in partnership with the Catalogue of Life, iDigBio, GBIF, WoRMS, PLAZI, BHL, the International Congresses of Dipterology, and Pensoft Publishers, submitted a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation's Advances in Biological Informatics (ABI) program, to develop the Global Names Usage Bank. This proposed project will dramatically improve the core infrastructure behind GNUB in particular, and globalnames in general.
Moving Global Names to a stable ground… On October 1st I did sign a job offer from Species File Group and going to start at the new position on November 16th. This position is supported by a fund created by David Eades (thank you David) and allows to think of grants not like a vehicle for GN's survival, but means of further enhancement of the system. I am honored and touched that David, and Species File Group created this amazing opportunity for Global Names. This move should also lead to a tight integration between Catalogue of Life and Global Names, which in my view is a win/win situation for both projects and for biodiversity.
Our next steps are releasing JVM-based scientific name parser, building scalable, reliable and fast name resolution service and integratation of name resolution with the key Global Names project developed by Rich Pyle and Rob Whitton – Global Names Usage Bank for which Rich just submitted a grant proposal.
Yesterday @hyanwong and @jhpoelen mentioned on eol and global names gitter chats that it would be great to be able to crossmap names from different sources by IDs.
What would be a use for such a crossmap? It would allow to quickly mashup data from various projects in interesting ways. For example to show images of species from EOL API on phylo-trees generated using Open Tree of Life API.
OpenTree Taxonomy has mapping of OTT IDs to NCBI IDs. Encyclopdia of Life also has mapping of NCBI IDs to EOL IDs. So if someone wants to map NCBI names to EOL using the same algorithm as EOL used – they only need to query data about IDs. Even better – it would create a very fast connection of one aggregator (Open Tree), to another aggregator (EOL) through IDs of other sources without doing explicit name resolution.
Such queries would be much faster, as they would be just about comparing indexed columns in a table. However the quality of the results from such approach would depend on the quality of name resolution used by the aggregators.
I am thinking about trying just that. As a pilot – we can generate Darwin Core Archive files from OTT and EOL which would contain information about IDs from other sources. Then we will need to add an API that would make it possible to run queries from such information.
Another good suggestion from @jhpoelen – is to publish data about this kind of crossmap as a csv file, that can be easily put in some kind of a database and used separately on its own.
Global Names is happy to welcome a new member – Alexander Myltsev (@alexander-myltsev on GitHub). Alexander is of parboiled2 fame. Parboiled2 is a Parsing Expressed Grammar parser for Scala, and it did originate from Alex' code which he wrote as a Google Summer of Code participant in 2013.
Alexander lives in Moscow and currently works on a port of biodiversity parser to Scala; the project is called gnparser. The new parser is compatible with Java, JRuby, Jython and everything else written for Java virtual machine environment. When the parser is ready it will be the basis of a new Scala-based collection of GN tools.
Alexander had been working with us for a few months now, but I had been waiting with the announcement until major paperwork hurdles were solved.
Last week was the end of the Google Summer or Code season. Out of two projects that we had been mentoring one was not really about biology. It was a project for system administrators. A visualization tool for staistics about cpu usage, memory, disk space etc.
Everybody who runs involved biodiversity informatics projects knows how important it is to monitor your systems. There are several open source tools for that – Nagios, Sensu, Graphite, Systemd, Collectd…
Our monitoring system of choice is Sensu. It is very flexible and powerful tool, well designed and suitable for large number of tasks. One of these is collecting statistics from computers and store them in about any kind of database. As a result Sensu can be used for monitoring critical events and for collecting data about systems. The question is however how to visualize all the collected data.
We designed Sysopia to do exactly that. During the summer @vpowerrc expanded original prototype and created powerful and flexible visualization tool which is capable to give system administrator an understanding what is happening with 2-20 computers at a glance, receive life updates, and compare today's statistics with up to one year of data. We already use Sysopia in production, and we are going to deploy it for Global Names as soon as our new computers are in place.
You can read more about sysopia on its help page
For quite a while we used to have a Drupal-based site for GlobalNames. As we do have now a Jekyll-based blog, it was logical to move our static site as well. And now it did happen – both of them are accessible via globalnames.org
This new site will continue to be an 'official' blog for news about GNA, we will publish information about new releases of software here, documents and discussions about scientific names.
One great thing about this move – it is possible for anybody with account at github to participate – if you want to add a document, or a blog item – just fork the repository, add a post to the _posts directory and send a pull request. At some point we will add detailed instructions how to do that.
New version 3.4.1 of GlobalNames Parser gem biodiversity is out.
It adds ability to parse authors names starting with
d' like
Cirsium creticum d'Urv. subsp. creticum
which now is parsed correctly
New version 3.4.0 of GlobalNames Parser gem biodiversity is out. It adds new method that allows to add infraspecific ranks to canonical forms after the fact.
It was possible to add ranks in canonical forms before using the following code:
Now it is also possible to add ranks to canonical forms after the fact using
static method
New version 3.3.0 of GlobalNames Parser gem biodiversity is out. It adds new
option to socket server
-H or
--host to change default 127.0.0.1
host setting. To see full set of options run
There was a short meeting about Catalogue of Life future directions organized at Species File Group at Champaign/Urbana. Concerning Global Names it was a very productive meeting. It was great to understand the current state of Catalogue of Life, to see that CoL is not loosing momentum inspite of financial problems of biodiversity informatics in general. There was definitely interest in creating more bridges between various projects.
Yuri Roskov did present a 'pilot' project of cooperation between Encyclopeia of Life species pages group and CoL. Data about ~2000 species of scorpions had been harvested from html-based site to be used in both projects. I think it was a great exercise and I do hope it will be just the first example of such cooperation.
From the point of Global Names there were good news too. I think it was everybody's feeling that Global Names resolution is an important complementary service for Catalogue of Life. Cooperation between various biodiversity projects was brought up again and again, and organizing biodiversity infrastructure as a mix of several projects where GBIF, EOL, CoL, GN etc work as modules of a bigger puzzle, complement and enhance each other.
One thing that was brought up is lack of nomenclatural component in GN. I talked about our plans to integrate GN Usage Bank and GN Resolver and demonstrate the flow of nomenclatural data into resolution/reconciliation process. We will try to make such connection by November and demonstrate the workflow on upcoming GBIF/CoL workshop.
If you use Global Names Resolver and you are interested in vernacular names associated with scientific names you can add with_vernaculars=true flag to see them. If you are most interested in particular data sources you can add data_source_ids setting.
This release has some backward compatibility issues with output.
In previous versions we did strip empty spaces and new line characters around the name to generate "verbatim" field. Now name stays the way it was entered into the parser.
Old behavior:
"Homo sapiens " -> …"verbatim": "Homo sapiens"
"Homo sapiens\r\n" -> …"verbatim": "Homo sapiens"
New behavior:
"Homo sapiens " -> …"verbatim": "Homo sapiens "
"Homo sapiens\r\n" -> …"verbatim": "Homo sapiens\r\n"
Read more about UUID v5 in another blog post
Such names are often used in representations of phyo-trees. Parser now substitutes underscores to spaces during normalization phase
I am removing behavior introduced in v3.1.10 which would preserve apostrophes in normalized version of names like "Arca m'coyi Tenison-Woods". Apostrophes are not code compliant.
New behavior:
We are releasing a new tool - gn_uuid to simplify creation of UUID version 5 identifiers for scientific name strings. UUID v5 has features which are particular useful for the biodiversity community.
Universally unique identifiers are very popular because for all practical purposes they guarantee globally unique IDs without any negotiation between different entities. There are several ways how UUIDs can be created:
|UUID version
|Uniqueness is achieved by
|version 1
|Using computer's MAC address and time
|version 2
|like v1 plus adding info about user and local domain
|version 3
|Using MD5 hash of a string in combination with a name space
|version 4
|Using pseudo-random algorithms
|version 5
|Using SHA1 hash of a string in combination with a name space
UUID v5 is generated using information from a string, so everyone who uses this method will generate exactly same ID out of the same string. Interested parties do need to agree on generation of a name space, and after that no matter which programming language they use – they will be able to exchange data about a string using their identifiers.
This gem already has a DNS domain "globalnames.org" defined as a name space, so generation of the UUID v5 becomes simpler.
I believe UUID v5 creates very exciting opportunities for biodiversity community. For example if one expert annotates a string or attaches data to it – this information can be linked globally and then harvested by anybody, without any preliminary negotiation.
Quite often researches make an argument that a scientific name is an identifier on its own and there is no need for another level of indirection like UUID. They are right, scientific name string can be an identifier, however, scientific names have severe shortcomings in such a role.
More often than not identifiers end up in databases and used as a primary index to sort, connect and search data. Scientific name strings vary from 2 bytes to more than 500 bytes in length. So if they are used as keys in database they are inefficient, they waste a lot of space, become less efficient for finding or sorting information – indexes key size is usually determined by the the largest key.
UUIDs have always the same, rather small size – 16 bytes. Even when UUIDs are used in their "standard" string representation – they are still reasonably small – 36 characters. Storing them in a database as a number is obviously more efficient.
It is very hard for human eye to spot the difference between strings like this
Corchoropsis tomentosa var. psilocarpa (Harms & Loes.) C.Y.Wu & Y.Tang
Corchoropsis tomentosa var. psilocanpa (Harms & Loes.) C.Y.Wu & Y.Tang
Much easier for their corresponding UUIDs
Currently Latin1, UTF-8 and UTF-16 are most popular encodings used in biodiversity. If authorship or name itself has characters outside of the 128bits of ASCII code – identically looking names will be quite different for computers.
When names are moved from one database to another, from one paper to another sometimes they do not survive the trip. If you spent any time looking at scientific names in electronic form you did see something like this:
Acacia ampliceps ? Acacia bivenosa
Absidia macrospora V�nov� 1968
Absidia sphaerosporangioides Man<acute>ka & Truszk., 1958
Cnemisus kaszabi Endr?di 1964
Usually names like these had been submitted in a "wrong" encoding and some characters in them were misinterpreted. UUID on the other hand is just a hexadecimal number, which can be transitioned between various encodings more safely.
Homo sapiens
Homo sаpiens
These two strings might look exactly the same on a screen or printed on paper, but in reality they are different. Here are their UUIDs:
The difference is that the second name has a Cyrillic
а character, which in
most cases will look exactly the same as Latin
a character. And when the
names are printed on paper there is absolutely no way to tell the difference.
UUID will tell us that these two name strings are not the same.
One argument that people often give – it is much easier for users to type
For most of us it is definitely true and nothing prevents developers to create links of the first type, while still using UUIDs behind the scene.
They can be generated independently by anybody and still be the same to the same name string
They use SHA1 algorithm which does not have (extremely rare) collisions found for MD5 algorithm
Same ID can be generated in any popular language following well-defined algorithm
Version 0.1.6 of
gn_crossmap tool is out.
Global Names Crossmap tool allows to match names from a a spreadsheet to names from any data source in Global Names Resolver.
Fixes a bug in rank inferring by Global Names Parser.
New version of gn_crossmap tool is out.
Global Names Crossmap tool allows to match names from a a spreadsheet to names from any data source in Global Names Resolver.
The main change in this version – output file with crossmap data now contains all fields from original input document and it allows to filter and sort data using any field from the input.
Other changes are
@dimus - #5 - All original fields are now preserved in the output file.
@dimus - #3 - If ingest has more than 10K rows – user will see logging events
@dimus - #4 Bug - Add error messages if headers don't have necessary fields
@dimus - #2 - Header fields are now allowed to have trailing spaces
@dimus - #7 Bug - Empty rank does not break crossmapping anymore
@dimus - #1 Bug - Add missing rest-client gem
In a few weeks there will be an iDigBio API hackathon. As I menioned earlier we decided to add another API client written in Ruby before the hackathon starts. And Greg Traub and I are releasing iDigBio API Client written in Ruby today.
Greg started to make a Ruby client at iDigBio. I took his code and refactored it into a Ruby gem. So now instead of 0 we have 2 Ruby clients
This is the very first release, so if you will start using it and find something is wrong/missing please submit an issue. The gem uses beta API, so sometimes it might get 'stuck'. This problem will go away when beta API will move to production.
Addressing most of Issue #7
If a name was not detected as a virus but contains RNA word it will not be parsed anymore. It is a problem for some surrogate names, like Candida albicans RNA_CTR0-3 but they are very rare.
|Candida albicans RNA_CTR0-3
|Not parsed
|Alpha proteobacterium RNA12
|Not parsed
|Ustilaginoidea virens RNA virus
|Not parsed, marked as virus
|Calathus (Lindrothius) KURNAKOV 1961
|Parsed as before
Names containing
*particle are marked as 'viruses' and
not parsed
Gossypium mustilinum symptomless alphasatellite
Okra leaf curl Mali alphasatellites-Cameroon
Bemisia betasatellite LW-2014
Tomato leaf curl Bangladesh betasatellites [India/Patna/Chilli/2008]
Intracisternal A-particles
Saccharomyces cerevisiae killer particle M1
Uranotaenia sapphirina NPV
Spodoptera exigua nuclear polyhedrosis virus SeMNPV
Spodoptera frugiperda MNPV
Rachiplusia ou MNPV (strain R1)
Orgyia pseudotsugata nuclear polyhedrosis virus OpMNPV
Mamestra configurata NPV-A
Helicoverpa armigera SNPV NNg1
Zamilon virophage
Sputnik virophage 3
Names like below are now parsed correctly. Their normalized/canonical forms preserve apostrophe
Junellia o'donelli Moldenke, 1946
Trophon d'orbignyi Carcelles, 1946
Arca m'coyi Tenison-Woods, 1878
Nucula m'andrewii Hanley, 1860
Eristalis l'herminierii Macquart
Odynerus o'neili Cameron
Serjania meridionalis Cambess. var. o'donelli F.A. Barkley
I did some soul-searching, advise-gathering, thinking, planning, and crystal ball gazing. And it seems that moving Global Names grant and myself to Species File Group is a right decision. Why? Because Marine Biological Laboratory is a hard core research institute, which completely depends on grants and as such is not well-suited for infrastructure projects. Global Names is definitely an infrastructure project and I know very well how bad it is to be responsible for an infrastructure project and not being able to work on it. It is just not a good way to do business.
It is my 8th year at MBL. I enjoy MBL, I love living on Cape Cod. I love an immense energy of MBL collective mind. I met really amazing people, amazing scientists here. I worked with great people at Encyclopedia of Life project. And also I was never sure if I will be there next year, or sometimes next month. I had weeks and months when I had no ability to move forward with Global Names, because it had no financial support at that time.
Species Files Group is long term financed, allowing a long term commitment. They are interested in Global Names, they do want me to continue to develop it, integrate it with Catalogue of Life. And these are my goals too. David Eades understands that Global Names will need a long-term investment in hardware, and he provides a generous annual fund for that. It means no more 7 year old computers running Global Names services. I also hope it will help to integrate Global Names Usage Bank, a crucial GN component developed by Rich Pyle and Rob Whitton.
Another big factor is ability to work closely with programmers and taxonomists of the SFG group. At MBL I am now the only one on EOL project (Jeremy is remote), and I feel I am getting stale without nomenclators/taxonomists around.
Of course we need to figure out how to move current GN computers without shutting down services for a few weeks. I imagine I would have to rent an expensive cloud setup for a month or two, and run GN from there while machines are in transit. We will have to figure out how to transfer grant, make a new hire for the project etc. But all of these are good problems to solve. I believe GN suddenly got a brighter future ahead.
Yesterday I released a new command line tool for name resolution called gn_crossmap. It is designed for people who work with checklists of scientific names using a spreadsheet software (MS Excel, Apple Numbers, Open Office, Libre Office, Google Sheets etc.) and want to compare names that they have with another reference source. The program takes a spreadsheet saved as csv file as input and generates another csv-based spreadsheet with resolution data. Examples of input and output are included into the code. README file describes how to use the project from a command line or as a Ruby library.
This program requires internet connection, Ruby >= 2.1 installed on the machine.
Basic usage is:
$ gem install gn_crossmap
$ crossmap -i input.csv -o ouput.csv -d 1
|long attr
|checklist's spreadsheet saved as csv file
|path to the output file. Default is output.csv in the current directory
|ID of one of the GN Resolver data sources, Catalogue of Life id (1) is default
Web interface to this program is also in works
This project started at the Catalogue of Life workshop in Leiden, which happened in March 2015. The main focus of the hackathon was to figure out how to help national checklist teams to create, maintain and compare data in their data. We determined 3 main approaches
A hackathon group which worked on crossmapping produced a
code which would compare checklists against Catalogue of
Life. The
gn_crossmap program I am releasing is based heavily on what we
learned during the hackathon. Crossmaping code is mostly based on use cases
from Rui Figueira and Wouter Koch. During the hackathon we
also determined ways to improve quality of name resolution further by:
Yesterday Arlin Stoltzfus organized a kickoff meeting for the project that got funded by NSF this year - "Collaborative Research: ABI Development: An open infrastructure to disseminate phylogenetic knowledge". Global Names is participating in project and I believe it will be an interesting ride.
The idea behind is pretty cool. Imagine that someone works on a group of organisms. They submit names of the organisms to a service and the service builds a phylogenetic tree out of the names. When tree is created it will start its own life similar to a repo on Github. People will be able to reuse it, annotate it for their own purposes, create derivative trees. It would be a pretty nice feature for Encyclopedia of Life to see how species belonging to a particular clade are related to each other through phylogeny. One problem with creation of such trees is name normalization. Scientific names can have many alternative spellings, so to find phylo-information we will need to be able to map names from user list to names which are recognized by the service.
I suspect that a crossmapping tool I am working on this week might be adjusted for this particular task, but as usual – the devil is in details and we will find out the requirements during the design process.
Bob Corrigan sent around an email pointing at a paper in PLOS
which describes new classification adopted by Catalogue of Life. After
looking through the paper my understanding is that it is a step forward and at
the same time business as usual for
Catalogue of Life needs a solid managerial classification for their data and
according to article the goal is achieved:
Our goal, therefore, is to provide a hierarchical classification for the CoL and its contributors that (a) is ranked to encompass ordinal-level taxa to facilitate a seamless import of contributing databases; (b) serves the needs of the diverse public-domain user community, most of whom are familiar with the Linnaean conceptual system of ordering taxon relationships; and (c) is likely to be more or less stable for the next five years. Such a modern comprehensive hierarchy did not previously exist at this level of specificity.
Classifications are a dirty business so as usual –
These actual complexities of phylogenetic history emphasize that classification is a practical human enterprise where compromises must be made
Altogether looks like CoL gets a new hierarchical face.
Our Google Summer of Code student – Viduranga Wijesooriya and I had our firts meeting today to start Google Summer of Code project – Sysopia. The purpose of the project is not names, however I do consider it to be important for EOL and for GN as it allows to spend less time on administration of computers and more time on writing code.
The idea behind the project is to create a dashboard that allows us to see what is going on with all computers in a system with one glance. The system shows several metrics graphs, each of which shows information about all machines at the same time. By default it shows data for 24 hours, so if everything works well it is enough for sysadmin to check out sysopia once a day to have a very good idea about what is happening with the system from the moment Sysopia is installed. We did install it for EOL and I find it very useful.
Not much functionality is there yet, but graphs show well, and it is possible to get a point data by hovering over a line, and highlight a particular machine when hovering over the machine name in the dialog box.
Currently the only backend for sysopia is Sensu but we are going to expand it to other backends after we nail down the user interface.
Trying to find a permanent home for GN I travelled to Champaign-Urbana on Thursday-Friday to visit Species File Group at the University of Illinois. I do know this group rather well, as Lisa Walley and I went there more than a year ago for a hackathon organized by Matt Yoder.
I am quite impressed with work this group does and when Matt suggested me to join them – my first thought was – this might be a way to make Global Names financial situation more reliable!
Currently Global Names completely depends on grants, and grants come and go. It is a pretty bad way to finance an infrastructure project, as you do not want to have roads or electricity depend on unstable funding. We always want to be able to drive to a store or a concert, and we want to always be able to have lights in our homes. Same goes with projects like GN. If people start using them – they start depend on them and it is really bad situation when funding dries out and service deteriorates as a result.
The visit went well. I had a great opportunity to talk to David Eades, Matt, Dmitry Dmitriev, and Yuri Roscov. It was especially great to talk to Yuri, as he is the main person behind the Catalogue of Life content. I consider Catalogue of Life to be one of the most important use cases and partners for GN, and talking to Yuri for an extended amount of time was extremely helpful.
Originally position was about helping Yuri to automate his work-flow, however when Matt and I talked on Skype the accent started to shift towards supporting Global Names. David Eades, Matt, and Yuri all believe that GN is a missing link in Catalogue of Life functionality and as such by working closely with Yuri, and figuring out what GN can do for Catalogue of Life actually does help to automate some of hard parts of Yuri's work.
The meeting was very encouraging and inspiring. Now I have to think hard and make a decision. I would love be able to keep my house on Cape and I would love to be able to come in summer and work with MBL and RISD. And it seems nothing prevents me to spend 3 months on Cape in summer if I move. On Monady I am going to talk about my trip at my work at MBL.
Just had a great conversation with Jorrit Poelen from GloBI. Jorrit uses GN Resolver to clean up names for Globi, and on top of knowing that name exists in GN Resolver he also needs to know if the name is actually valid.
Resolver by design contains 'good' and 'bad' names. We do need to know what kind of misspellings exist in the wild and map information associated with them to good names. These misspellings and outright wrong names make Jorrit's life much harder, as we do not have a tool that clearly marks 'good' names as good. There are ways to be more or less sure if a name is good:
But all these approaches are not universal, and do not give a clear answer. So what would be a solution?
It seems that a good solution would be to write a classifier which takes in account all relevant features and meta-features of a name, considers them and then puts the name into 'good' or 'bad' bucket. Every name has several features associated with it and we can train a Bayes classifier to make a decision if name is 'good' or 'bad' using these features. When it is done running through our ~20 million names – each of them will be marked as trusted or not.
I am pretty much sure that such classifier, especially at its first iteration will make mistakes. How can we deal with them? Here is an idea – when API returns back data back to a user – data will have two new fields – 'trusted' as yes/no and a URL to complain about this decision something like:
People can just copy and paste this URL into browser, or set it as a "Report a mistake" button for every name in their results html. If this button is pushed GN Resolver will register human curation event and data from this event will be used to improve performance of the classifier algorithm. Human curations will trump computer algorithm and they can be collected in a new data source for feedbacks…
Details of the interface can be decided later when we build the classifier. I know that the problem of separating trusted names from untrusted is a task that about everybody who uses resolver actively asked me about one time or another. So who and when can build it? And now I am thinking that our Google Summer of Code student might be interested in making it happen instead of improving NetiNeti. I personally think automatic curation of names is more important.
On June 3rd I am going to iDigBio hackathon meeting which will be about finding ways to enhance their API. Today there was a pre-hackathon meeting where iDigBio folks explained how did they implement their API, it's backend, and how do they use their own API for their GUIs.
I had been very impress with what they have done. Backend is based on Elastic search, API is RESTful and json based. What was a surprise for me – the API calls are often take pure json as arguments. It was also great to see how did they simplified Elastic search queries for API, keeping their API queries simple and powerful at the same time.
They also made Python and R clients for the API. So I will try to make Ruby version of the API client before the hackathon.
Today we had our first meeting to start NetiNeti enhancement project funded by Google Summer of Code. The studend who was selected do do the job is a 4th year graduate from University of Philadelphia Wencan Luo.
The purpose of the project is to improve performance of our NLP-based scientific name finding tool – NetiNeti, developed 5 years ago by [Lakshmi Manohar Acella][lakshmi]. Lets see how it will go…
Official coding time starts on May 27th – for now we are going through a design phase – figuring out who are the users of the application, then we will try to do idealized design of its features, find implementaion paths and limitations existing to implement the features and then Wencan is going to do exploration of features.
For the process we are going to use
ZenHub to manage issues, obviosusly
GitHub for the code and ability to have a project related blog with Github
Today is the official start of Google Summer of Code work. Up to now organizations submitted their ideas, organizations had been chosen by Goggle, students decided which ideas and organizations they like and submitted their proposals, Google decided on how many projects from every organizations they are willing to fund, and finally – the best proposals from students were matched to the funded ideas. Encyclopedia of Life and Global Names submitted 4 proposals and we got 3 of them funded, so congratulations to us and to students :)
|Avinash Daiict
|Amr Morad
|Viduranga Wijesooriya
|Wencan Luo
I had been very happy to see how many people were interested in the idea of finding scientific names in texts – we had 12 proposals, so competition was fierce this year! I think we got great students and I am looking forward to the Google Summer of Code 2015.
Encyclopedia of Life folks made a truly glorious present to Global Names consisting of several Dell 710 servers which were used for running EOL at Harvard. Now, when site moved to Smithsoninan EOL donates some of these computers to GN, and 10 of them are already at Marine Biological Laboratory, waiting to be plugged to internet and electricity. Another truly amazing gift from EOL is 14 100gb hard drives which will run GN databases.
I feel happy warm and fuzzy – thank you EOL! I hope with this new hardware I will be able to increase GN capacity about 5x using current code! Next step – installing Chef, Docker, and GN applications to serve the biodiversity community.
Last year we did get the second round of funding for Global Names Architecture development. Our first grant had been about exploration of how to find scientific names in texts, how to crossmap different spelling variants of the same names to each other, how to connect names to literature collected at Biodiversity Heritage Library, how to organize scientific name usages, how to register new zoological scientific names electronically. Several intersting projects spanned out of this effort and you can read about them at Global Names site.
It was a hard year for Encyclopedia of Life where I work, and for Global Names. I did have to spend most of the first 8 months since our second NSF grant got funding helping EOL with system administration support and transfer EOL site from Harvard to Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. It is done now, and I am happy to be able to work on Global Names project again!
What kind of resources do we have now? 2 months of Paddy (David Patterson) time, 2 months of Rich Pyle time, About a 1.5 years of mine, and 1 year of another developer. We also got 2 excellent participants for Google Summer of Code this year, so it is 6 months of their time as well. And a quest for further funding continues as I write.
Encyclopedia of Life kindly donated a lot of hardware, and Marine Biological Laboratory provides us with a whole rack of space, fast internet connection. So we are set for an exciting year ahead!
What are the plans? This grant covers work on name finding and name resolution. We try to find major use-cases (Arctos, EOL, iDigBio, Catalogue of Life, GBIF) and satisfy their needs. We expect it will cover needs of 90% of other users, and the remaining 10% of functionality will trickle by means of going through github issues, fixing bugs, adding features, thinking about new ideas.


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An Edera Jewelry Bride: Giulia
Lovely bride-to-be Giulia contacted me last year about making a pair of earrings for her garden-themed wedding. She recently sent over these beautiful images from the big day, and I just had to share. Giulia selected a pair of drop earrings incorporating handcrafted lace motifs in ivory silk to complement the lace of her wedding gown. The earrings blend elements from the "Celestina" and "Marcella" styles. Vintage crystals gave the design a subtle sparkle.
Photography: Tanja Malnar
Congratulations to Giulia and her husband! More photos and praise from past clients can be viewed in the Real Brides section of my website.


text: Oliver Proudlock launches his #ProudlockStyle pop-up shop in aid of the BHF 22 October 2015 Reality TV star, fashion designer and artist, Oliver Proudlock launched the #ProudlockStyle pop-up shop in @BOXPARK, Shoreditch, this evening to help raise vital funds for our life saving research. The #ProudlockStyle pop-up shop will be open until Sunday 25 October offering fashionistas four days to snap up some of Proudlock's style. Items for sale include designer and high street brands, such as New Era caps, a Kooples coat, Ralph Lauren t-shirts, True Religion jeans and much more. Funding life saving research Recognising that funding medical research is the only way to fight heart disease, Oliver is keen to do as much as he can to help raise essential funds for us. Oliver said: "The launch event of #ProudlockStyle has been fantastic. I am always keen to find new ways to raise funds for the BHF and their life saving research. The charity is particularly important to me as I have a history of heart conditions in my family. "The BHF is funding essential research to stop people suffering and dying prematurely from heart disease so I decided to clear out my wardrobe and set up the #ProudlockStyle pop-up shop to generate vital funds for the charity to help them continue their vital work. Every item sold will enable the BHF to continue its life saving research. I'd like to encourage everyone to come and have a nosey and join the fight for every heartbeat" When and where Oliver's pop-up will also be collecting bags of unwanted items for our shops. The pop-up shop is located at Unit 26 BOXPARK, 2-10 Bethnal Green Rd, London, E1 6GY, and open: Tuesday – Saturday 11:00 – 19:00 Thursday – 11:00 – 20:00 Sunday – 11:00 – 18:00


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"ENERGY STAR® is the government-backed symbol for energy efficiency, providing simple, credible, and unbiased information that consumers and businesses rely on to make well-informed decisions. Thousands of industrial, commercial, utility, state, and local organizations—including more than 40 percent of the Fortune 500®—rely on their partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deliver cost-saving energy efficiency solutions. Together, since 1992, ENERGY STAR and its partners have helped save American families and businesses $430 billion on their energy bills*—while also achieving broad emissions reductions—all through voluntary action."
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April 2019


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Riffa Views Corporate Video
Offering a luxurious lifestyle, Riffa Views is a magnificent residential development, with three unique residential estates; The Oasis, The Lagoons and The Park. Each of them individually themed and includes multiple facilities within wide open spaces.
The $1 billion development includes several modern amenities that are set to enhance living standards, these includes a golf academy, a country club with a tennis facility, a shopping mall, a hotel, an international school and leisure facilities, all surrounded by pleasant walkways and spacious parklands. There are few precious places that stand apart as an idyllic areas to live, no one doubts that Riffa Views is one of them.
Riffa Views Corporate Video (Short Version) – YouTube.See More


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1/2 medium red onion (halved lengthwise, with root end intact)
1 tsp. olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 1-1/4 lb. flank steak
1 large Marczyk Made Ciabatta quartered and halved.
1/2 oz. finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1/4 cup mayonnaise
3 Tbs. prepared horseradish
1/4 tsp. cayenne
2 cups loosely packed mixed spring greens
1. Heat a large grill pan over medium-high heat until hot, or heat a gas or charcoal grill to medium-high.
2. Cut the onion half through the root end into 6 wedges, keeping the root end intact.
3. In a medium bowl, toss the onion wedges with the olive oil, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1/4 tsp. pepper.
4. Grill the onion for 5 minutes, then flip over and continue to grill until softened and lightly charred, 4 to 5 minutes.
5. Season the steak with 1 tsp. salt and 1/2 tsp. pepper and grill, flipping once, until cooked to your liking, about 10 minutes for medium-rare (130°F) or 12 minutes for medium (140°F). Transfer the steak and onion wedges to a cutting board, tent the steak loosely with foil, and let rest for 5 minutes.
6. Toast the bread cut-side down on the hot grill pan until lightly browned.
7. Combine the cheese, mayonnaise, horseradish, and cayenne in a small bowl and spread it on the bottom halves of the bread.
8. Trim the root ends from the onion wedges. Thinly slice the steak across the grain. Divide the onion, steak, and greens among the bread and serve.


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It's tempting to say we've all done Sandro Perri wrong. Collectively, as a think tank, purely as music fans – however you want to put it. Granted, he hasn't been his own greatest ally, with a buffet's worth of projects, and often unpredictable hiatuses between them, but at this point something should have stuck. What's more, there's no overselling the value of an artist so restless. From the indie-ready material under his own name to the leftfield electronic greatness of Polmo Polpo, a man so ready and willing to push his own boundaries and delve into completely different projects should be celebrated. Somehow, we've almost all missed the boat.
His latest incarnation, Off World, from which 2 is (gasp!) his second proper entry, is no less ambitious, even startling, than any of his previous works. There are prominent shades of ambient, its most ready comparison being Brian Eno's On Land, but it's never quite ready to simply drift fully into the background. The moniker is no mistake, while it does retain something of the earthiness of the said Eno opus, it does not quite sound earthly. It's hard to imagine the setting in which this music would sound at home, which only makes it all the more gripping.
It is strangely suited to late night sleepless musings, as it is to strolls through unfamiliar surroundings; this is eerily discomforting music that nonetheless manages to embrace its listener. Opener 'Wet Max' instantly has that Eno vibe, with perhaps even some shades of Julian Lynch, yet still manages to sound like something its own. 'Island Fanfare' briefly gives a feeling something like being lost at sea, only for 'Scrubdown' to blast back into space, roaming alien terrain. Not long after, 'The Mask' sounds truly hectic, doing away with any sense of ambient in favor of a stressed out, frantic race of sound. Naturally, Perri completely dials it back next with 'Play Room', a pleasant romp as carefree as its title suggests.
Throughout its forty-minute run time, 2 remains constantly fresh, darting in a different direction any time it begins to grow comfortable. It may not be a particularly easy listen, but what it lacks in regard for grace, it entirely consumes in energy and a will to discover. In a sense, this is primal music. It's high time we gave its creator his due.


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In 2006, Soul artist India.Arie released a song called "I Am Not My Hair". I. LOVE. THIS. SONG. Check out some of the lyrics:
"I am not my hair,
I am not this skin.
I am not your expectations, no…
I am not my hair,
I am not this skin.
I am the soul that lives within."
There were times when I felt the need to sing this song at the top of my lungs, to remind myself that I am more than what you see when you see me. My hair, my skin…they mean something, many things that I have never asked for them to mean. But beyond and beneath the exterior package is a real person who defies the simple definitions and stereotypes given to me. And so, this refrain is my soul song, proclaiming that "God don't make no junk". I am not an accident, and who and what I am is absolutely okay.
Hair – oh yes. The Black woman and her hair. That relationship is special. I had what was termed "good hair" – which basically means my hair was relatively easy to straighten. Or code for, "your hair is almost as good as White hair". This, combined with my fair complexion was the bane of my existence. "A shy, nerdy Black chick with fair skin and "good hair" must be stuck up, must think she's better than everyone else. And she 'talks White' too? Uh-huh, she think she White…".
No, I think I'm just who God created me to be. No better, no worse. Just – me. But back then, I didn't see it that way, couldn't see it that way. Shame dwelled where contentment should have lived. And so, when this song hit the airwaves, it struck a chord in me (pardon the pun) that still rings in my heart. It gave voice to something I could feel but not articulate. And it made it okay for me to be confident in everything about who I am.
'Fro Chronicles
Fast forward 10 years to the summer of 2016. That was the point at which I had reached the end of my patience with my hair. For most of my life, I had straightened my hair. Some of my earliest memories are of me sitting in front of a stove on a little wooden stool, while my mom worked through my hair with a pressing comb. As I got older, she transitioned to chemicals to straighten my hair. The natural coils were forced into submission by these chemicals. This was just the thing to do. Most of the Black girls and women I knew were either pressing or "relaxing" their hair.
But years of such abuse left my hair a hot mess. My hair was thinning, breaking off, and looking dry and lifeless. Something had to give. After years of debating back and forth, I decided to take the plunge. I went to my friend Valena's home and let her do the "big chop". All the processed hair fell to the floor and I was left with a little baby fro (picture on the left above) to start my journey. A journey into loving my hair just the way it was meant to be.
Loving My 'Fro
I love my 'fro! It is fantastic! My hair loves it too – I have not put heat or chemicals on my hair in two years, and my hair is thanking me for it. Breakage and thinning are no longer a problem, and it is growing like crazy! It has taken me most of these two years to really get to know my hair and how to treat it properly. I've learned that I have at least two different hair textures, which makes the curl pattern tighter in the back than in the front. I've spent crazy amounts of money trying to find the right mix of products that keep my hair and scalp healthy and keep my curls poppin'.
I have also developed a renewed and deepened respect for my mom and the drama and travail she went through taking care of this stuff when I was young. She should be sainted.
I've been asked a number of times if my decision to rock the natural is a political statement. It's kind of sad to me that my hairstyle preferences must carry so much weight and meaning. It's just hair! But it is a big deal. Back in the day, natural hair was looked down upon. Even with my so-called "good" hair, the idea of keeping my hair natural bothered my grandma so much she went behind my mother's back and straightened my hair when I was two. Proper young ladies didn't wear their hair like that, she said. She was the product of her generation, and many generations before her being told that what was intrinsic to our African heritage was ugly or wrong. Practically uncivilized.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the fro was a sign of Black pride. The image burned in my brain of Angela Davis with her beautiful coily crown and raised fist makes me stand a little taller. Yes, I do believe that 'fro made a statement – I will not bow down to European standards of beauty or femininity. No doubt a political statement. No doubt a statement of identity, in a kind of pride in identity that makes no apologies for it.
My initial desires were not political in the least. They were practical – I didn't want to be bald-headed! But as I have journeyed through this process, it has morphed into something more for me. Not a political statement so much as a spiritual one. Yes, a spiritual one.
I am fearfully and wonderfully made. God knit me in my mother's womb. He gave me my physical features, my skin, my hair. Yes, even my hair. He knows how many hairs are on my head. And He knows how He created my hair. It's no mistake. It's not a defect. It is what it is. In all its glory. For His glory.
My hair, my skin, my nose, my eyes, my forehead – my being carries the history of my family. There is beauty, toil, pain, joy, sorrow, violence, love, hate, bondage, and freedom written into the coils on my head and the hue of my skin. All that my ancestors lived and died for lives on in me. I am not ashamed of these things. That history combined with my experiences are knit together just as truly as my physical being and form the foundation of my life as "ministry", my life as a witness and testimony to God's infinite patience, grace, and love. I will not live out who I am supposed to be in my generation until I claim all that transpired in the generations before me.
So, I am (not) my hair. I am (not) my skin. The soul that lives in me is shaped by the way God made me. And I will not be ashamed of it anymore.


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Robin Thicke doesn't see any similarities with fellow R&B singer Justin Timberlake, other than they are both male singers who can hit the high notes.
Robin Thicke resents being compared to Justin Timberlake.
The singer - whose new track 'Blurred Lines' with Pharrell Williams is the fastest-selling single of 2013 so far in the UK - can't see any resemblance between himself and the R&B crooner and doesn't understand why people think their high-pitched vocals sound similar.
He told The Sun newspaper: ''The weird thing is, people don't compare Justin to the people that I get compared to. The only connection that Justin and I have is that we're both white.''
Robin, 36, has no desire to work with female singers in the future and only wants to collaborate with big time rappers or producers because of his own capacity to hit the high notes.
He said: ''I only really want to work with producers or rappers. I have no desire to work with singers.
''Mary J. Blige hopped on a song and I did one with Estelle, but I don't really get excited about that. I guess maybe it's because I can sing the female part.''
The US star has written songs for the likes of Usher and Christina Aguilera over the course of his career, but didn't launch himself as a solo artist until 2002 and believes waiting until he was a little older has made him more grateful and humble.
Robin added: ''I started out as a songwriter and by the time I was 21 I'd worked on two dozen gold and platinum albums.
''When I finally put a song out of my own, it was a very sweet redemption to have this type of success and get emails and texts from people in the industry throughout every day congratulating me, saying they're so happy for me.
''It's because they've known me for 20 years trying to get a Number one hit. If I could go to an awards show, rappers, rockers, popstars, everybody - I know all of them.''
Blu is a rare macaw parrot who never learnt to fly, after all he's never...


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Welcome to our page dedicated to the Daily Rigour, your FREE numeracy newspaper. We provide a new edition every week where we focus on stories in the news from the past week and the numbers behind them!
The aims of our newspaper are;
1. To enable young people to develop their numeracy skills and to apply them in new and unfamiliar contexts
2. To aid the development of literacy skills
3. To encourage young people to take an interest in the news
4. To provide a starting point for all teachers to promote the importance of numeracy within the context of their own subject.
Let us know what you think and feel free to tweet us your own articles @cdmasterworks #DailyRigour. We would love to hear from you!
Issue 179 - Sunday the 10th of November 2019...
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Kirby finally has a reason to be angry
Tales of Zestiria was the best-selling game in Japan last week, netting over 340,000 sales in its domestic debut, according to data compiled by Media Create.
For reference, here's how previous entries in the series fared in their initial weeks at market:
Meanwhile, The Legend of Legacy, a Nintendo 3DS role-playing game from Unchained Blades studio FuRyu, was the week's runner-up with 54,000 sales.
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse was another notable new release, though its reception was rather tepid. Nintendo's pink puffball trailed at number three with a deflating 32,000 units sold.
「テイルズ オブ ゼスティリア」34万本。「レジェンド オブ レガシー」や「タッチ! カービィ スーパーレインボー」もランクインの「週間販売ランキング+」 [4Gamer via Siliconera]
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aogden1 needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 82 designs submitted by 23 freelance designers.
We are a company who wants to sell bad-ass pool tools to desert southwest dwellers. Those who know about the trials and tribulations of a desert pool during typical monsoon season
I would like the logo to be dynamic enough to be seen from the bottom of a pool . It could also second as a beer retriever.
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


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I want to share with you another story of a strong woman, as shared by Bonnie Oscarson in this talk, who lived her life in a fearless meaningful way. Her full story can be found here.
I recently read the story of Marie Madeline Cardon, who, with her family, received the message of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ from the first missionaries called to serve in Italy in 1850. She was a young woman of 17 or 18 years of age when they were baptized. One Sunday, while the family was holding a worship service in their home high in the Alps of northern Italy, an angry mob of men, including some of the local ministers, gathered around the house and began shouting, yelling, and calling for the missionaries to be brought outside. I don't think they were anxious to be taught the gospel—they intended bodily harm. It was young Marie who marched out of the house to confront the mob.
They continued their vicious yells and demands for the missionaries to be brought out. Marie raised her Bible up in her hand and commanded them to depart. She told them that the elders were under her protection and that they could not harm one hair of their heads. Listen to her own words: "All stood aghast. … God was with me. He placed those words in my mouth, or I could not have spoken them. All was calm, instantly. That strong ferocious body of men stood helpless before a weak, trembling, yet fearless girl." The ministers asked the mob to leave, which they did quietly in shame, fear, and remorse. The small flock completed their meeting in peace.
I love this image. Of all the people at this meeting who could have gone out and confronted this mob, a young woman, sure of her own intent and beliefs, didn't wait for the men to go deal with the problem. She stood up and confronted the angry mob of men, head on. I imagine it was pretty scary, but she didn't let that stop her. I hope that I can be like her when faced with doing what is right and necessary.
We are each more powerful than we often believe that we are, and through reading about people like Marie, I hope that we will see that it is possible to stand up for what we believe and face our fears with dignity, considering more about the benefits of doing what is right, rather than worrying about what might happen to us. Make it a great weekend. – Laura


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Stunning custom brick home to accommodate any large family or entertainment challenge. Formal entrance with circular driveway, dramatic two story marble foyer, huge family room with vaulted ceiling and stone fireplace. Chef's delight with well equipped kitchen; 4 Sub-0 ref/freezers, two gas cooktops, double oven, 2 dishwashers. 42" cabinetry and granite counters. Storage galore to fit every imaginable need. Full bath on first floor along with formal powder room. Large first floor study, formal living and dining rooms. 5 BR upstairs entirely with hardwood floors. Master BR w fireplace and sitting area/office. In-law suite with full bath and large living area.Third floor has hardwood and skylights; could be fitness center or art studio. Full English lower level is finished with caterer's kitchen, knotty pine walls, full bar, fireplace & full bath. Professionally designed full 5 acres with hundreds of trees, shrubs and perennials. Newer roof, many new mechanicals.Notice required
Horse-Riding Trails, Street Paved
Vaulted/Cathedral Ceilings, Skylight(s), Hardwood Floors, In-Law Arrangement, 1st Floor Laundry, 1st Floor Full Bath
Oven-Double, Dishwasher, High End Refrigerator, Freezer, Washer, Dryer, Disposal, All Stainless Steel Kitchen Appliances, Cooktop, Range Hood, Water Softener Owned, Other
Horses Allowed, Landscaped Professionally, Mature Trees
|Status Changed from New to Active
The data relating to real estate for sale on this website comes in part from the Broker Reciprocity program of Midwest Real Estate Data LLC. Real Estate listings held by brokerage firms other than RE/MAX Synergy are marked with the Broker Reciprocity logo or the Broker Reciprocity thumbnail logo (a little black house) and detailed information about them includes the names of the listing brokers. Some properties which appear for sale on this website may subsequently have sold and may no longer be available. The information being provided is for consumers' personal, non-commercial use and may not be used for any purpose other than to identify prospective properties consumers may be interested in purchasing. Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Many homes contain recording devices, and buyers should be aware they may be recorded during a showing.
Listing information last updated on November 22nd, 2019 at 12:50am CST.


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Acupuncture in Herpes Zoster Neuralgia (ACUZoster) (ACUZoster)
|The safety and scientific validity of this study is the responsibility of the study sponsor and investigators. Listing a study does not mean it has been evaluated by the U.S. Federal Government. Read our disclaimer for details.
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00885586
Recruitment Status : Completed
First Posted : April 22, 2009
Last Update Posted : August 10, 2018
- Study Details
- Tabular View
- No Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
Symptoms that herald herpes zoster include pruritus, dysesthesia and pain along the distribution of the involved dermatome. The most distressing symptom is typically pain and the most feared complication is postherpetic neuralgia (PHN), the persistence of pain long after rash healing. PHN is defined as pain persisting more than 3 months after the rash has healed. Both, the acute pain associated with herpes zoster and the chronic pain of PHN, have multiple adverse effects on health-related quality of life.
The primary objective of the trial presented is to investigate whether a 4 week semi-standardised acupuncture is non-inferior (first step) or superior (second step) to (a) the anticonvulsive drug gabapentin and (b) sham laser acupuncture in the treatment of pain associated with herpes zoster in addition to standardised analgesics. Secondary objectives include an assessment of the change of sensoric function, of long-term effectiveness, the occurrence of PHN and an evaluation of several pain specific questionnaires
|Condition or disease
|Herpes Zoster Postherpetic Neuralgia Pain
|Device: Sham-laser acupuncture Drug: gabapentine Procedure: Acupuncture
|Phase 4
|Study Type :
|Interventional (Clinical Trial)
|Actual Enrollment :
|68 participants
|Intervention Model:
|Parallel Assignment
|Double (Participant, Outcomes Assessor)
|Primary Purpose:
|Official Title:
|Analgetic Effectiveness of Acupuncture When Compared to a Standardised Analgesic Regimen in the Treatment of Herpes Zoster Neuralgia
|Study Start Date :
|November 2008
|Actual Primary Completion Date :
|August 29, 2017
|Actual Study Completion Date :
|April 5, 2018
Sham Comparator: Sham-laser acupuncture
Sham laser acupuncture (c) is applied at equivalent points as needle acupuncture. Laser irradiation is faked.
Device: Sham-laser acupuncture
Laser irradiation is faked, approaching a non-functioning laser pen.
Active Comparator: gabapentine
standard analgesic treatment
Drug: gabapentine
Patients in this arm are treated individually with gabapentine 900 mg/d - 3600 mg/d, according to the recommended scheme given by the manufacturer
Active Comparator: Acupuncture
Acupuncture treatment is semi-standardized, i.e. beside a scheme of basic points, individual points can be chosen according to the TCM diagnostic pattern.
Procedure: Acupuncture
The needle acupuncture technique used in this trial is performed according the traditional way (TCM) using expendable needles.
- Alteration of pain intensity after treatment [ Time Frame: 5 weeks ]
- Quantitative sensory testing [ Time Frame: 6 months ]
Choosing to participate in a study is an important personal decision. Talk with your doctor and family members or friends about deciding to join a study. To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contacts provided below. For general information, Learn About Clinical Studies.
|Ages Eligible for Study:
|18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult)
|Sexes Eligible for Study:
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers:
Inclusion Criteria:
- Confirmed diagnosis of acute HZ
- Pain intensity > 30 mm visual analog scale
Exclusion Criteria:
- Patients with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus or other diseases influencing the peripheral sensibility (e.g., polyneuropathia, chronic pain syndromes, cutaneous irritations i.e. burns)
- Patients under age
- Uncompliance
- Pregnancy or lactation
- Surgery within the last 3 month
- Severe heart/lung/kidney disease
- Diseases influencing the quality of life
- Psychiatric diseases (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, dementia)
- Chronic intake of analgesics, neuroleptics, antidepressants, corticoids, alpha-agonists
- Acupuncture, transdermal electric neurostimulation or other Complementary and Alternative Medicine treatment within the last 4 weeks
- Contraindications according to the summary of product informations against analgesic treatment (i.e., metamizol, paracetamol, tramadol, morphine) or the investigational medicinal products (gabapentine, acupuncture needles)
To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contact information provided by the sponsor.
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier (NCT number): NCT00885586
|Multidisciplinary Pain Unit, University of Munich
|Munich, Bavaria, Germany, 80336
|Responsible Party:
|Dominik Irnich, PD Dr. Dominik Irnich, Ludwig-Maximilians - University of Munich
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|NCT00885586 History of Changes
|Other Study ID Numbers:
AcuZoster Effectiveness 2006
|First Posted:
|April 22, 2009 Key Record Dates
|Last Update Posted:
|August 10, 2018
|Last Verified:
|August 2018
herpes zoster
neuropathic pain
randomised controlled trial
acute herpes zoster
Herpes Zoster
Neuralgia, Postherpetic
Herpesviridae Infections
DNA Virus Infections
Virus Diseases
Peripheral Nervous System Diseases
Neuromuscular Diseases
Nervous System Diseases
Neurologic Manifestations
Signs and Symptoms
Varicella Zoster Virus Infection
Sensory System Agents
Peripheral Nervous System Agents
Physiological Effects of Drugs
Anti-Anxiety Agents
Tranquilizing Agents
Central Nervous System Depressants
Psychotropic Drugs
Excitatory Amino Acid Antagonists
Excitatory Amino Acid Agents
Neurotransmitter Agents
Molecular Mechanisms of Pharmacological Action
Antimanic Agents


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Masked men assaulted a security outside Castleford supermarket in a smash-and-grab cash raid.
Wakefield CID have issued a witness appeal following the robbery at the Asda on Leeds Road in Glashoughton at 7.32am this morning (Thursday).
Two men assaulted a member of security staff, who is believed to have been delivering money, outside the store and made off with what police have said is a "substantial amount of cash".
The men were both masked and made off in a black Peugeot car.
Detective Inspector Tim Hunt of Wakefield District CID, said: "Initial enquiries are ongoing regarding this incident and we would like to speak to anyone who witnessed what took place.
"The security staff was left shaken by what occurred but was otherwise uninjured."
An Asda spokesperson said: "We are assisting police with their investigation, but in the meantime our store and petrol forecourt remain open to customers."
Anyone with information should contact Wakefield District CID on 101 or the Crimestoppers charity, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.


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For three hours on one Saturday every month, Rwandans are required to participate in a nationwide clean-up effort. more...
November 11 , 1918 : World War I ended. more...
Learn something new every day
More Info... by email
Psychotic mood disorders affect the way a person interprets reality. Some of the major types of psychosis include schizophrenia, delusional disorder, schizoaffective disorder, psychotic depression and substance-induced psychosis. Symptoms of psychotic mood disorders include visual and auditory hallucinations, flat emotional responses, delusions and paranoia. Depending upon the severity and type of mood disorder, the symptoms may last anywhere from one month to several years.
Schizophrenia is one of the most widely recognized psychotic mood disorders. The disease is characterized by hallucinations, which may include hearing voices that aren't really there. Individuals who develop schizophrenia may experience delusions, such as the idea they are being stalked or that they are on some sort of special mission to save the planet. Paranoia may be present in addition to marked changes in behavior that negatively affect work and school performance.
All types of psychotic mood disorders adversely affect social relationships. Since the majority of them involve some sort of delusional thinking, those with psychosis may feel that others are out to get them or that significant others are having a romantic affair. Individuals with a mood disorder may become emotionally unexpressive and even cold.
People who suffer from some form of psychosis might become disinterested in basic tasks, such as personal hygiene, eating or getting out of the house. Schizoaffective disorder is characterized by a combination of depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. Those with this disease experience both sets of symptoms associated with clinical depression, bipolar disorder and hallucinogenic thought patterns.
Closely related to schizoaffective disorder is psychotic depression. This is one of the types of psychotic mood disorders that stems from severe emotional negativity. The depression becomes so extreme that it induces delusional thinking and hallucinations. Those afflicted with the disorder may start to believe that they have a severe medical disease, such as cancer.
Substance-induced psychosis is a mood disorder that is brought on by withdrawal symptoms from toxic substances, such as drugs and alcohol. The hallucinations and delusions are usually temporary and subside once the individual recovers from substance abuse. Extremely high levels of stress are also thought to bring on spontaneous bouts of psychosis that subside once the stressor is removed from the patient's life.
Delusional behavior can be classified into several subcategories or types. The term grandiose delusions is used to refer to the idea that someone believes he has special powers. In somatic delusional thinking, an individual believes he is afflicted with a severe medical condition or has a severe physical deformity. Jealous delusions in contrast are characterized by thinking that loved ones are cheating or are accomplishing something that the individual feels he should be.
Post 2
@Grivusangel -- That is sad. Poor woman. I'm not sure how much can be done for some people who have a mood disorder. Medication just doesn't work for some people, or they have to try so many different combinations of medications at different dosages, until they hit the right one. And even then, it might work for a while and then stop working.
There's so much about the brain's structure and chemistry that we just don't understand, which makes it difficult to treat mental illness, since we don't know if the illness stems from a structural problem within the brain, or a chemical imbalance -- or both. Clearly, a lot more research is needed to help people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness.
Post 1
I'm not sure exactly how to characterize this behavior, but I work for a newspaper and this lady came in and wanted to talk to a reporter. She was visibly upset and said men had been coming into her house at night and beating her with laser beams.
We called an ambulance for her and got hold of her son, who said she was paranoid schizophrenic and had these delusions all the time because she wouldn't take her meds.
She was clearly frightened and I felt sorry for her. It must be awful to live with a disorder like that. It was sad.
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Riding The Wave
Crimson Tide Club
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I recall distinctly coach Saban telling the press that Mack Wilson was struggling with offensives changing formations and getting the right calls to his teammates. I don't blame Wilson, personally, I put the blame where it ultimately belongs, on the coaches. Even if Wilson was over his head, it's up to the men in charge to make it happen.As to your "intellectual dexterity" comment on those two. If the breakdown happens from the booth to the sideline, are you going to fault the last in the chain?
Golding has a lot to prove based on on-field results. And Jeff Banks and his COY award also need to tightnen it up. It's surreal to me that these are almost the last 2 coaches standing in our latest purging.


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Ballard Power Systems is a leading global provider of PEM fuel cell solutions for stationary and transport applications.
Arcola Energy works with both the FCgen® and FCvelocity® fuel cell stacks as part of our engineering and integration services, where they offer high performance and good value for our clients' product development needs.
Recent work includes the integration of Ballard air-cooled stacks into our automotive system for Microcab, a stationary product development programme using liquid-cooled stacks and a bus powertrain development project with the FCvelocity system. Ballard's commissioning engineer described the bus project as the "one of the smoothest FCveloCity-MD30 commissioning I have ever done".


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Hey guys!
Today is the last beauty post of #20DaysWithMYD and it is one of the most requested posts - a simple and basic makeup look! Since we covered topics like skincare, finding the right foundation, lipstick hacks and tips to apply mascara in the past weeks, it now seemed apt to tell you all about my simple and go to make up routine.
My knowledge in makeup is very limited as I am not a makeup artist and this might not be the way you do your makeup. Whatever I know is what I have learned by a trial and error method and it's worked for me pretty well.
Now since that's out of the way keep reading to know how I do my make up. :D
This is a simple day look which you can pretty much wear anywhere and on any outfit. You can obviously jazz it up a bit depending on what kind of a look you are going for. :)
The first thing you need to do before applying any makeup product is to prep your face. You can do so by applying some sunscreen (DO NOT skip this!) and then a moisturizer over it. I make sure I use the moisturizer especially during winters so that my skin doesn't become flaky.
Next I start with my base makeup. Now this is the most important part of your entire routine. Getting your base right is really important to make your makeup look flawless. I use L'oreal's Infallible foundation and its a full coverage foundation. It's very build-able and blends into your skin seamlessly. If you need help in picking up a perfect foundation then do read my post on foundation basics.
Once you have got your foundation in place it's time for concealer. Now since it's a build-able full coverage foundation, I just double it up as a concealer and it works really well. I use a technique called baking under my eye. Its basically just blending in your concealer and then applying a coat of translucent powder on it for about 5 - 10 minutes and then dusting it off. This hides the dark circles very effectively and also sets your under eye makeup in place.
So while I bake my under eye area I move on to the other steps. I apply a thick layer of any lip balm and I do this to prep my lips for lipstick.
Now that the base makeup is almost sorted I move on to the eyes. I curl my lashes before applying liner because if I do this step after then I might remove off a little bit of the liner. After curling, I draw a very thin line using my gel eye liner and I do this because it looks very natural. I use Maybelline's gel eye liner for this step. This look doesn't use eyeshadows on the eye lids but if you are going for a more dramatic look then feel free to thicken up your eye liner and also add some shimmery eye shadow. Then I tight-line my upper and lower water line using my plum kajal. [Tight-lining is basically just applying a nice generous layer of kajal on the upper and lower water lines.] The last step is to apply mascara to give my lashes that extra lift. I use Maybelline's Colossal Volum Express Mascara.
By now my under eye would be set so I dust off the excess translucent powder and then apply a little bit of the champagne color from my Maybelline Nudes Palette in the inner corner of my eye. This step brightens up my eyes and makes my eyes look more open. I finish my eyes by setting my eyebrows in place using a spoolie. You can apply a brow gel at this point if you are filling in your brows. I am going to skip it because I don't generally fill my brows.
Now just use a compact powder to set your entire face. I use Maybelline's Super Fresh Compact. Once you have set your makeup, apply just a tinge of blush to the apples of your cheeks to give it that flush of color. For this look I have used Lakme's 9 to 5 blush as it's really subtle and natural.
So here it is, a simple makeup look which is very easy to recreate. This look is something I wear a lot because it's very light and natural.
I believe that one should wear makeup not to look like someone else but to enhance the features that you already have. Wearing makeup is a personal choice and it's something I enjoy doing.
I hope this post answered all your questions. I have tried to break down every step. :)
We will be back tomorrow with our last post for this month! :)


text: Though sometimes it feels like negativity easily takes over your life, this is not our natural human state of being. Our brains WANT to be happy. In fact, they ARE naturally very happy. Why then, are do so many of us struggle to remain positive and find happiness on a daily basis? There are many factors in our life which cause anxiety, stress, worry, frustration and a whole host of other negative emotions. But what happens if we remove these negative contributors from our lives? We are left in our default, or instinctive state of happiness and bliss. Learn 5 ways to find your own natural happy state from some of the world's happiest countries and how to remove the bad so you are only left with the good…and so you can experience joy regularly, rather than rarely.Read More


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Over the last few months we've had a couple of video shoots over in Muskogee. Traveling to the various locations revealed a few interesting moderno style buildings amongst the azaleas. Here are a few we stumbled across.
I noticed this unusual light (right) in the parking lot of Wall's Bargain Center. It appears light was emitted from the Saarinen-esque shape on top. Unfortunately we may never know. As darkness fell, it never lit up.
The front of the Tony Goetz School has a distinctive maritime feel with the flagpole thrusting forward from a "keel" of sandstone. This school building also featured the wall o' glass treatment with glass bricks on the south-facing exposures.
Here's an aerial shot of Muskogee Regional Medical Center. It's easy to see the building's many additions over the years. A three-wing expansion in the Sixties used an interesting zig-zag pattern. I assume the idea was to provide the most windows but with some level of privacy.
Speaking of zig zags- this medical office building has a great awning and a very unique facade (below) made of glass and concrete block. I couldn't resist including that sign in the shot.
Ooops... someone parked a pickup there!
That's just some of the neat buildings we managed to photograph. We spotted others, like east end of the high school is kinda' cool, and I'm sure there are even more. Feel free to send us pics or links if you know of others.
Featuring our visits to modern architecture in and around the Sooner State.
Atomic Age | Mid Century | Recent Past | Googie | International
Friday, March 6, 2009
Moderns from Muskogee
2 comments:
east end of the high school is kinda' REAL cool!
- March 7, 2009 at 9:39 PM
- Yogi♪♪♪ said...
I liked the angled flag pole at the school. It seems that I've seen the effect before but can't remember where.
- March 13, 2009 at 12:32 PM
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apoBank starts turnaround
- Six-point programme agreed
- Value adjustments for structured products in the low triple-digit million range
- "Structured Financial Products" portfolio to be halved from Euro 5.4 billion to around Euro 2.5 billion by 2014
- Sustainable hedging of equity ratios by the BVR
- Recruitment of additional staff to strengthen the core business
- Günther Herion, Chief Risk Officer, is leaving the Bank by mutual agreement
When Herbert Pfennig, new Spokesman of the Board of Directors of Deutsche Apotheker- und Ärztebank (apoBank), took up his post in July 2009, he announced that structured financial products would be subjected to intensive internal and external review in order to achieve complete transparency about the Bank's risk situation.
On the basis of first interim results, apoBank's Board of Directors presented a six-point programme at today's regular Supervisory Board meeting. The programme's goal is the sustained expansion of the stable and efficient operating business and at the same time the gradual reduction of the "Structured Financial Products" portfolio. The six points are:
- By the end of 2009, apoBank will make additional value adjustments in the low triple-digit million range on its known "Structured Financial Products" portfolio of Euro 5.4 billion. The exact amount will be announced with the presentation of the preliminary results for the first quarter of 2010.
- The value adjustments will be largely offset by the healthy operating core business. However, if there is an annual deficit, it could be offset many times by reserves of over Euro 700 million. Thus, the payments for the hybrid Tier I preferred securities (silent partnership) and for the Genussscheine is ensured.
- The portfolio will be gradually reduced while preserving its value in order to minimise the risk of loss. Already in 2014, the portfolio is to be halved from Euro 5.4 billion to around Euro 2.5 billion.
- In order to achieve a capital relief, the Federal Association of German Cooperative Banks (BVR) has pledged the necessary support to the Bank. The support in form of a guarantee by the protection scheme of the BVR, which is still subject to the usual approval of a committee, is aimed at sustainable and long-term hedging of the equity ratios expected in the capital market. apoBank's current equity ratios are at the half-year level. The guarantee in the amount of Euro 120 million provided by the BVR in August will expire on 20 December 2009 as the guaranteed securities fall due. In view of the current risk assessment of the guaranteed assets, it is not to be expected that the guarantee will be invoked.
- Under the guidance of the newly appointed Chief Representative, Dr. Thomas Siekmann (Generalbevollmächtigter), the Bank's interdisciplinary competences will be bundled in such a way that all options for a reduction in equity tied up can be exercised. The resulting free resources will be used to focus on the growth potential in the customer business.
- With the already initiated sales offensive and in strong cooperation with the Federal Association, apoBank will significantly expand its sustained good core business next year, both regionally and in view of the individual customer. Apart from strengthening its position in the field of asset management, the Bank will recruit additional advisors for its sales department in 2010. Furthermore, the opening of additional locations in Germany is under review.
Herbert Pfennig, Spokesman of the Board of Directors: "We adopted these measures today together with the Supervisory Board. With these measures, we will start the turnaround for apoBank. In a first step, as announced in summer, we had identified and adequately assessed the total amount of charges incurred in connection with the "Structured Financial Products" portfolio. Thus we have created transparency, also taking account of further charges in the second half of the year. In a second step, we have drawn up a concrete plan of measures, which helps us to gradually remove the portfolio from the Bank, improve our equity situation and expand the profitable core business in order to strengthen our earnings situation."
Beyond of the extraordinary charges, apoBank's operating business has continued its very positive development this year. At almost EUR 4.0 billion, new advances in the loans sector once again significantly exceeded the high level of the previous year. From today's point of view, net interest income will exceed the previous year's level and is well ahead of schedule. Herbert Pfennig: "This development clearly shows that our business model provides a stable basis for our sustained earnings power. We will build on this basis, to tie in with times of apoBank's good profitability. Our goals are focused on our customers from the medical professions with their individual demands made on the banking business; as THE bank in the health care sector, we will continue to offer them high competence, competitive products and quality service in all areas of banking."
In the context of the measures adopted by the Bank today, the Supervisory Board reached an agreement with Mr. Herion to cancel his contract. After almost seven years in the position as Chief Financial and Risk Officer, Mr. Herion is leaving the Bank by mutual agreement. The background for this decision is the reorientation of the Bank's business policy to be pursued in the future in view of the credit substitute business.


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New England Resources
The New England Coalition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (NECON)
NECON is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization and a coalition of the New England state health departments, the region's schools of public health, and federal health agencies led by Region I of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, as well as medical societies, legislators, and representatives from industry, labor, and voluntary associations. Its mission is to serve as an instrument for the development and enhancement of disease prevention and health promotion public policies in New England.
Graduate Programs in Public Health:
University of New Hampshire - Health Management and Policy
Dartmouth Medical School - Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice
Boston University School of Public Health
Harvard School of Public Health
University of Massachusetts, Amherst - School of Public Health and Health Sciences
University of New England's - Graduate Programs in Public Health
University of Southern Maine- Muskie School of Public Service
State-Affiliate Members of the American Public Health Association:
Maine Public Health Association
Vermont Public Health Association
Massachusetts Public Health Association
Connecticut Public Health Assocation
Rhode Island Public Health Association