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Isoda Koryusai: man of mystery in the ukiyo-e art world
Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Isoda Koryusai is a man of mystery even today because much remains up in the air about important aspects of his life. Koryusai was born in 1735 and died in 1790 and he was active during the 1760s and until a few years before his death. However, major aspects remain debatable but despite this he was a fine artist who graced ukiyo-e and Japanese art.
Unlike the vast majority of ukiyo-e artists Koryusai was born into an elite samurai family and he was one of only a few who entered the ukiyo-e art world from such a lofty background. This meant that he saw aspects of Japanese society and culture from a different way to the majority of ukiyo-e artists.
Koryusai understood the importance of stratification and Confucian thinking because his early life was based on conformity and not upsetting the applecart. However, either he turned to the art "within him" or he was forced to enter the world of ukiyo-e because of financial factors. Sadly, this area is disputed by many scholars of ukiyo-e and much is open to interpretation.
Therefore, some scholars claim that he became a ronin and because of this he took to art in order to survive financially. Others, however, claim that he voluntary entered the art world and gave up being a samurai because art was embedded in his soul. This area is very important because in order to feel the passion and soul of Koryusai a great deal relies on this.
Of course, nothing can take anything away from the art of Koryusai irrespective of the real reasons behind changing his lifestyle. However, the vagueness of knowledge means that it is difficult to get close to the "real" Koryusai.
On the website Artelino (http://www.artelino.com) it gives a lot of information about Koryusai and Dan McKee comments about the background and influence of this overlooked artist. This applies to the background and influence behind Koryusai and if he was a pupil of Harunobu Suzuki.
Dan McKee comments that "There is no certain evidence to prove this fact, but it is often assumed that Koryusai began his printmaking work as a pupil of Harunobu Suzuki, whose style can indeed be seen in Koryusai's early work, though also in the work of some other print artists (Shunsho, Shiba Kokan) whose connection to Harunobu seems even less direct. The same can be said for Koryusai's early signature, Haruhiro, under which he designed his first prints at around the time of Harunobu's demise (1769-1770), for use of the "haru" prefix may imply only an effort to appear in the Harunobu line, rather than an actual master-disciple relationship (ala Harushige)."
"Similarly, the inscription on one 1770 print, claiming it to be a design by Harunobu, for which Koryusai was asked to add color, could as easily represent an attempt to place Koryusai as the direct descendant of Harunobu for commercial reasons, to fill the void left by the death of the first nishiki-e master. It is notable that Koryusai states in this inscription that he "does not know Harunobu's way but have finished the print with his [Koryusai's] own brushwork."
Robyn Buntin (http://www.robynbuntin.com) on the other hand comments that "Though possibly a pupil of Shigenaga, Koryusai was influenced most by his friend Harunobu whose style can be seen in Koryusai's early work. His most original work, in which he excelled, was in pillar prints, bird-and-flower prints, and shunga."
Jack Hillier concludes that "There is always, especially among collectors, a tendency to make comparison between artist and artist, and with Koryusai it is perhaps a case of we look before and after and pine for what is not."
Koryusai remains a man of mystery but he produced stunning art and gave much to the ukiyo-e art world. Therefore, it is best to let the man of mystery remain to be this, rather than creating or trying to formulate conclusions which are incorrect.
Another mystery about Koryusai is why his art appears to be overlooked and the same applies to the individuality of his work. After all, he did produce art which carried his own individual style and the spectrum he focused on was very intriguing.
The final years of his life appear to be based on focusing on his roots because many designs had Chinese connotations and based on typical pillars of samurai elites. Therefore, the foundation laid down in Koryusai's early life remained deeply within his soul.


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For Louis and Rosemary Howard the quest for a Bible-teaching church led to a long-standing relationship with Dallas Seminary. More than four decades ago the couple found a place where they could grow spiritually along with their two children, Randy and Teresa. As it happened, their pastors were DTS graduates. The Howards' Sunday school teacher was now-president emeritus, Dr. Don Campbell. And DTS Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Bible Exposition Dr. Dwight Pentecost ("Dr. P") often led Bible studies as a guest speaker.
Years later when Randy, who today serves on the DTS board, bought a home in Colorado, it was "within walking distance of Dr. P's place." Whenever the elder Howards visited Colorado, they would have "long talks on the porch with Dr. P." Rosemary said, "It was really through talking with him that we fell in love with DTS. We had this very personal connection."
The connection continued as the Howards met DTS students at donor events. One group in particular inspired them: international students training for the pastorate. Rosemary said, "Professors would tell us of young students who came to seminary with nothing, or carrying only a suitcase."
As Randy's work as a vice president for Exxon Mobil took him overseas on business, his parents followed his travels. And in doing so they experienced a growing awareness of the spiritual needs across the world as well as the challenges for DTS's international students. But they also focused on ministry stateside.
About a decade ago Rosemary and Louis helped plant a new church where they were among the oldest founding members. Leaders encouraged everyone to join intergenerational life groups, so the Howards poured their lives into the young families in their group. This experience combined with their own children's independence led Louis and Rosemary to formalize their long-term giving plans.
Randy and his wife, Betty, had already met with Foundation staff members, and they encouraged Randy's parents to do the same. "Betty and I didn't need them to leave us anything beyond the time and love they had already invested. And the same was true for my sister, Teresa, and her husband, Max. So my parents thought, 'If not to the kids, then to whom?'"
While they supported DTS through the usual giving channels, the Howards wanted to do more.
"Dr. P encouraged us to do something lasting for the Lord," Rosemary said. "And DTS was the logical choice. Our entire family talked it over and decided this was what we all wanted."
"Our parents included DTS in their wills, and it was a good incentive for us," Teresa said, referring to herself and her husband.
As each couple met with representatives from the Dallas Seminary Foundation, they found that the staff listened to their desires and helped craft estate plans designed for investment in ministries beyond each couple's own lifetimes. "The Foundation does such a great job helping the nonfinancial person," Teresa said. "Everything was explained so well. It gave us comfort to put plans in place."
"What we've done seems minor," Rosemary said. "But our desire is mainly to help make it possible to bring to the seminary more young people, particularly those training to be pastors."
When Louis passed away suddenly last year, the family was thankful they had all expressed their wishes to each other and formalized their desires. Teresa said, "It gave us such a peace that we didn't have to try to figure out what my father would have wanted. We knew."
Because of their foresight, documents were already in place to assure a legacy even beyond what Louis invested in his wife, his children, their families, and the many people he led to Christ and discipled.
Rosemary said, "Having the expert counsel of the Dallas Seminary Foundation is a blessing I would recommend to anyone."
In 2 Corinthians Paul talks about how the Macedonian churches generously participated in the "privilege of sharing in this service to the saints" (2 Cor. 8:4). To learn about how you too can share in "serving the saints," contact Carrie Park, CPA and senior planned giving officer, in the Dallas Seminary Foundation office at 214-841-3546, send a message to email@example.com, or go to dts.edu/foundation.

subset: commoncrawl


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Digital Camera News: Kodak Discontinues Digital SLR Bodies, Canon Star Camera, Olympus Cost Cutting
Kodak Discontinuing the SLR/n and SLR/c Digital SLR Bodies
From Imaging Resource, word from Kodak to dealers is that they will be discontinuting the SLR/n and SLR/c digital SLR bodies that they manufacture as of June 30, 2005. They will continue supporting the cameras until 2008.
When asked if Kodak was getting out of the Digital SLR market completely, Kodak representatives responded that we shouldn't "draw that conclusion".
Canon Announces Camera for the Stars
Canon has announced that in July, for an estimated street price of $2199, they will start selling the Canon EOS 20Da. The new cameras is a version of the Canon EOS 20D specifically configured for those who do astrophotography. The camera will have a live-preview LCD and a modified low-pass filter.
From the press release:
"The low-pass filter positioned in front of the EOS 20Da's 8.2-megapixel CMOS sensor has been modified from the EOS 20D to yield sharper and higher contrast images of various astronomical phenomena such as diffuse reddish nebulae. The modification increases the transmission of light at the specific wavelength of 656nm, known as the Hydrogen Alpha line, or Ha wavelength, by a factor of 2.5x compared to the standard EOS 20D digital SLR. Although optimized for astrophotography, the EOS 20Da can also be used for most conventional photography by mounting an optional filter on the lens in use."
Cost Cutting Measures At Olympus
From Bloomberg.com, Olympus is going to attempt to cut production costs for their digital cameras by 30 percent. The cost cutting is an attempt to stay ahead of the falling price of digital cameras. Olympus President Tsuyoshi Kikukawa stated that prices will decline 15-20% this year.
Last month, Olympus cut about a third of the jobs in its camera unit, mostly in China as part of $121 million plan to save costs.


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In Mapping Decline, Colin Gordon chronicles the historic causes and contemporary consequences of the urban crisis in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Students of U.S. urban history will already be familiar with St. Louis' story. It follows the archetypal narrative of decline in the postwar era: government programs for urban renewal fail to revitalize the central city while public subsidies for development at the urban fringe enable centrifugal forces that strip the urban core of investment, population, and tax revenue. Underlying this transformation is the dual process of White flight to the suburbs and the containment of Blacks in the urban core. Mapping Decline thus follows the path worn by Hirsch (1998) and Sugrue (2005) in their respective examinations of urban crisis in Chicago and Detroit. While Gordon's explanation is not new, he adds a visual dimension to the narrative by including an extensive battery of maps and figures. Furthermore, Mapping Decline contributes to the empirical urban literature by tracing the trajectory of St. Louis' decline to the end of
the 20th century.
This political history of St. Louis' urban crisis unfolds over five chapters, which are organized thematically....Chapter 2 describes the private efforts and public policies that have isolated Blacks in particular neighborhoods of St. Louis that are bereft of private investment. To support this point, this chapter features an especially rich set of maps that show the geographies of restrictive deed covenants, race restrictive practices of realtor associations, redlining designations of the Home Owner's Loan Corporation, slum clearance, construction of public housing, and patterns of disinvestment by the mortgage lending industry.
Gordon has nevertheless prepared an engaging text that should be accessible to a broad audience....Mapping Decline distinguishes itself from other historical accounts of the urban crisis by showing how the deleterious effects of local, state, and federal government policies continue to thwart the recovery of the central city. Toward this end, Gordon presents a convincing case for why the decline of St. Louis is not by any means inevitable. Mapping Decline thus provides an impassioned call to arms to rescue St. Louis and other cities like it.


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Tell me about your new Fender Yngwie Malmsteen "Play Loud" Custom Shop Stratocaster.
It's crazy. When I first came to the states I took an extra pair of pants, a toothbrush and one guitar. I just went! That guitar is the guitar you can see on the cover of Rising Force ('71 Fender Stratocaster). It has a lot of miles on it. Fender told me they wanted to do a tribute. It's an incredible honor. The way they made it is absolutely frightening! It's mind bending how they could make a guitar that looks and feels exactly like a guitar that's over thirty years old. It's just amazing.
Is your original "Play Loud" guitar retired?
Yeah. I don't really take it out anymore. I have a few of the new ones on tour. I alternate them with the regular Fender Yngwie Malmsteen model guitars. Those are amazing guitars too. It's ridiculous how good they play. I had a special one made in Ferrari red.
Have you bought any new gear lately?
No, I haven't. I'm a purist. Once I find something I really love then I never change from it. Once I find it, that's it. That goes for my guitar, amps, even down to watches and cars. I'm very particular about what I use. I view my instruments more like a violinist would appreciate a Stradivarius. He's not going to go look for a different one. It has the sound and now the sound is there. All I have to do is be inventive and not push a button to get something else.
Yeah, but I saw you play a Flying V in Alcatrazz.
I have a lot of different guitars. I have Les Pauls, Flying Vs and all kinds of things. I like them. They're really good but they're not even in the same universe as far as the actual tool of what I use. It's about getting my sound and having that feel.
Do you have a favorite Marshall head?
I have so many now. I have one I left at home that I used for the last few albums. It's an old Marshall Plexi 50 watt. It's got a really nice tone. I like the 50 and 100 watts and I also have a couple of 200 watt Majors as well. I use that on stage. It's called a Marshall Major. It's very rare. They only made them for a couple of years. It's 200 watts! (Laughing) I love the way it looks. It looks the same as a regular Marshall head but it's fatter. I use old stuff, vintage amps and cabs. I might have to replace some of that stuff because it's really old. They're all stock too, nothings changed.
What about effects? Do you still use your DOD signature overdrive?
They don't make them anymore, but I've been using the original DOD 250 Overdrive since the seventies. It's always been there. Boss made me a really good noise gate and a good chorus. I don't use effects that much. I use a couple of delays to split the signal across the stage to get a fugue effect. I also have a super old echo unit that's a piece of shit that I like to make noise with (Laughing).
How do you have your delays set up for solos?
It's totally dry. No delay. It's dry all the way through but I have a pre-set where I can split the signal in stereo. I think it's eight milliseconds where I can play counter point with myself. That's the only effect, but for solos it's completely dry.
Tell me about your book.
I started it a couple of years ago and I took a break. It's going to be out one of these days.
Is this a tell all book about you on the road and getting arrested?
It's everything! From me growing up in Sweden, to all the bad things and all the good things. Things completely involved with the musical thing, but lots of personal things as well.
When you're driving around in your Ferrari what music do you listen to?
Lately all the stuff I work on, but if I were to put something on it would be Vivaldi, Bach, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and stuff like that. Sometimes I turn on the radio and listen to classic rock.
One of my favorite records of yours is Inspiration. You covered a lot of great bands. Rush, Kansas, Rainbow, …even Holdsworth! (Laughing)
That was a fun record! I would like to do another one but my hands are full. I don't have time to do anything. Even when I'm not on tour I wake up in the morning and I do interviews all day. Perpetual Flame is the top priority for everything right now.
When you have down time do you try not to play guitar to take a break?
No. I always have a little Marshall hooked up to a guitar. Even when I watch TV I play quite a lot. I do a lot of other things like play tennis, but the music is always there.
Does it ever feel like work?
It hardly ever feels like work. The work part is the traveling and all that, but the playing is not work.
Is there a side to your playing that people don't know about? Do you sit and play Beatle love songs for example?
Sure, why not! I can do that! (Laughing) Most of time I just noodle around. I don't play set things. I improvise. I just play whatever. That's how things come out. Improvisation is the genesis of composition. You can't compose if you don't improvise. That's how new tunes come out.
It's a tuning issue. I play the guitars really hard. Sometimes the high E will be a little low and move around. I don't like that. The tailpiece or bridge can move and I'd rather just switch it.
Even your critics admit you have excellent pitch and vibrato. Where does that come from?
I've always been very particular about pitch and vibrato. It's always been the back seat of people's view of what I do. They always talk about the speed. Pitch and vibrato is really where it's at for me. It just goes along with the whole plethora of expression. I always was very much into the classical violin sound. I always loved the dramatic sound of that. Pitch is just something that came naturally because I came from a musical family. We were very particular about that as I grew up. You couldn't be singing out of tune or anything like that! (Laughing)


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The Forex world is constantly evolving and during its weekly trading hours there is a wealth of news a trader must keep on top of if they want to make the most money possible. Indeed, because the market can be affected by a number of dynamics, it is essential they know exactly what's happening at all times in order to avoid any unprofitable deals.
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Knowing the value of each currency based on various internal and external factors is crucial and the reason why FXBrokerSearch.com's Forex news centre is a vital resource. Drawing on a number of resources, our information section provides the latest information and data from which users can refine their trading activity.
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It's A New Year! Will It Be a New and Improved You?
Donna Quirk, RD, LD, MBA at LMC
Happy New Year! Did you make your New Year's resolutions? Do they include taking steps to improve your health? If so, I hope it is going well. Or, are you thinking about making positive changes but you just don't know what to do or how to start?
It's been shown that the strategies that can lead to successful long-term weight loss include:
– Keeping a food journal to be mindful food choices
– Avoiding carry-out and restaurants at lunch
– Eating more fruits & vegetables
– Eating less sugar, sugary drinks, meat, and cheese
– Being active
– Getting adequate sleep
Often times change is tackled with an "all or nothing" mindset but in reality setting a goal of implementing one small change can add up to big results. Not sure what change to start with? Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you choose a starting point.
• Are you eating 5 servings of fruits & vegetables per day?
– Can you add one per day?
• Are you eating 3 servings of whole grains?
– Can you add one per day?
• Are you drinking soda, sweet tea or other sugary beverages?
– Can you cut this in half?
• Are you eating out more than you are eating in?
– Can you commit to eating in one more time a week?
• When you eat are you hungry?
– Can you wait until you are hungry?
• Has your "screen" time increased?
– Can you add 30 minutes of exercise into your day?
• Does 'screen" time include snacking?
– Are you hungry? If not, can you avoid snacking?
• Are you eating meals in your car or on the run?
– Can you move meals back to the table?
• Are you sleeping?
– Can you create a bedtime routine to get the sleep you need?
Stick with your goal for at least a month before adding something new. This gives you time to get used to your change and time to contemplate what you can succeed at next.
Before you know it, you will be The New and Improved You!


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|System: Xbox 360
|Dev: Bethesda
|Pub: Bethesda
|Release: December 4, 2012
|Players: 1
|Screen Resolution: 480p-1080p
|Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Use of Alcohol
by Josh Wirtanen
Fans are a whiny bunch, aren't they?
When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim first came out, it gave us this massive world to explore and fight monsters on, endless amounts of side quests, and an almost disturbing amount of content to play around with. But even though the base game is big enough to easily consume several hundreds of hours of our time, the first things fans asked for was more content.
Now, even though there are several fairly game-breaking bugs in the base game, Bethesda felt obligated to appease the fans' hunger for more stuff, first with the Dawnguard DLC, then with Hearthfire. (To be fair, Hearthfire only added a few things like the ability to build houses and adopt children. These are fine additions to the game, but Hearthfire never really pretended to be the big expansion that Dawnguard tried to be.)
But there are two things fans have been clamoring about since Skyrim launched: They wanted to return to Morrowind, and they wanted to ride dragons. The newest content, Dragonborn, addresses both of these things. Sort of.
See, Dragonborn lets you return to the island of Solstheim, which longtime fans will undoubtedly remember from Morrowind's Bloodmoon expansion. It's not Morrowind, per se, but, at this point in time, its whole vibe is sort of this hybrid between Skyrim and Morrowind. Parts of the island will feel completely familiar to Skyrimmers, though there is a portion that's covered in the ashy fallout of Red Mountain's big eruption. This section of the island tends to be more Morriwind-ish in appearance, and you'll get to collect herbs and things that you weren't able to find in Skyrim. In fact, you'll even stumble upon some mushroom buildings, a type of architecture you simply didn't see in Skyrim proper.
As for riding dragons, yes, you'll learn a new Word of Power that allows you to tame a dragon, climb onto its back, and ride around. Here's the thing, though: You don't actually control the dragon's flight path. You're just kind of along for the ride (though you can command it to attack enemies below or swift travel to various locations across the map.) Again, this is a cool new addition to the game, but it might not be exactly what we were all hoping for.
So, like I said, Dragonborn sort of gives fans what they've been asking for, but not really.
Still, Solstheim is a decent-sized chunk of land, and there is a ton of stuff to explore here, even when you've finished the main Dragonborn storyline. And that's good, because the new quest line is pretty short. I breezed through it in about six hours, and that included a lot of time just wandering around Solstheim to see what I could find.
The story itself is excellent. You basically must use magical Black Books to travel to an alternate dimension called Apocrypha (which seems to me like a strange cross between Oblivion and a demonic library) to bring down the original Dragonborn. Here's the kicker, though: If he kills you, he'll absorb your dragon souls and become even more powerful than he already is. So there's a lot at stake here.
Like I said, this quest line is pretty short, but even so, it feels artificially padded at times. Some of the sections of Apocrypha feel too long; you'll spend a lot of time walking down long hallways that don't seem to really take you anywhere. Even though the atmosphere of the whole place is super creepy and weird, I was ready to be done with it long before I actually was. Also, and this is admittedly a weird complaint: You'll encounter the Daedric prince Hermaeus Mora, who plays a fairly important role in the Dragonborn storyline, and he talks excruciatingly slow. Seriously, it was painful to listen to him talk sometimes. It almost felt like Bethesda stopped and said, "Hey, our main quest line is way too short. How much longer could we make it if we slowed down Hermaeus Mora's dialogue by about twenty percent?"
Of course, all of this fresh content comes with a heaping side order of bugs. (Is anyone really surprised?) For example, there's one part toward the end of the main quest line where you are supposed to use your new Dragon Shout to tame a named dragon and ride it. A lot of players are having problems with the dragon not responding to the shout.


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Happy to share that http://CUBEAC.com has launched. It must be one of the first publicly accessible Rest API based software on top of TM1!
Here's a quick 1 minute video to give you a flavour of it (video autostarts): http://cubeac.com/video/cubeac-for-tm1-overview/
So if you're curious how a Rest API tool can work and what it can do give it a go, it has a free trial that connects either to a demo model or *to any* Rest API enabled TM1 model you point it at, no installs required!
You can use it as an admin console or planning portal: launch processes in parallel, cancel threads, analyse data flow and automatically generate documentation.
Blog posts are coming up on how it was built on top of the Rest API and what the technology can do for you. Subscribe on the website to get notified..
CUBEAC, a Rest API based web admin console with Free Developer Edition
Advertisements, add-ons and other commercial information
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CUBEAC, a Rest API based web admin console with Free Developer Edition
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Catfish are a serious problem in online dating. Catfish are people who pretend to be someone they are not online. They create false IDs in social media and dating sites in order to pursue deceptive online romances. They can string people on for years and apparently, have no remorse for their actions. They steal other people's photos,... Read More ›
The post 5 Five Ways To Avoid Being Catfished While Online "Dating" appeared first on Staked in the Heart.]]>


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FOTM is delighted to have a guest blogger today!
His nom de plume is Trail Dust, whom you already know because he's a regular commenter on FOTM for a year now. 😀
My thanks to FOTM reader "Richard David Hayes" for placing the link to a must-see documentary "Agenda: Grinding America Down" in his comment on Dr. Eowyn's Dec. 12 post, "U.S. physicist Tom Fife: Obama was groomed to be President by Soviet Communists."
Everything in the documentary is stuff I've been aware of since the early 1970s. This film names the real names of people and organizations who have wrecked America. Shocking because of its accuracy. When looking for the trouble makers, look to the grey pony tails in the colleges.
The YouTube video below is a 6:45-min. excerpt from the documentary.
You can see the ENTIRE movie, free, for a limited time by CLICKING HERE or go to https://vimeo.com/52009124.
This guy is really worth listening to.
~Trail Dust


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QNO Europe
Nieuwe supersnelle en betaalbare QVF730x series.
QNO, a leader in Asia, is now available on the European market. The new 730x series shows QVF QNO all competition far behind. Both in price as pure performance.
The high data rate (up to 2Gbps ) and the huge amount of simultaneous sessions QNO routers can handle the performance on average 3-4 times higher than competition.
Read a test of QVF7305 on the site of Hardwareluxx (german).
KPN increases speed up to 500 Mbit
KPN is going to give the speed of its fastest fiber-a five-fold increase in subscription by the end of this year. The company informs that in quarter-and half-yearly figures. The top speed of glass fiber is now 100 Mbit per second, from the end of 2011 that will be 500 Mbit.
The hefty increase the top speed is in the English press release (PDF) about the quarterly figures that the provider presented Tuesday morning. The increase in speed suggests that KPN sees more bread in the market for fiber. Some time ago, the provider says to see more in a large-scale rollout of VDSL2.
The number of customers with glass fiber at KPN experienced a strong increase. Where this time last year about 26,000 customers had a fibre optic connection, now already 61,000 customers have fiber-to-the-home. That number will increase, because there is some time between order and activation of the internet connection, says KPN.


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FLNA(redirected from XLVD)
FLNAA gene on chromosome Xq28 that encodes filamin A, an actin-binding protein which crosslinks actin filaments, binding them to membrane glycoproteins. Filamin A is involved in remodelling the cytoskeleton to effect changes in cell shape and migration; it interacts with integrins, transmembrane receptor complexes and second messengers.
Molecular pathology
Defects in FLNA cause:
• Cardiac valvular dysplasia X-linked;
• Frontometaphyseal dysplasia;
• Melnick-Needles syndrome;
• Otopalatodigital syndromes types 1 and 2;
• Periventricular nodular heterotopia types 1 and 4; and
• Terminal osseous dysplasia.
Defects may also cause macrothrombocytopaenia.


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1. Write Well and Write Often
Frequently updating your blog with useful content is the first step to building your blog's audience. The content you write is what will keep readers coming back for more. Make sure you have something meaningful to say to them and say it often to maintain their interest and keep them loyal.
Furthermore, post frequently to increase the number of chances you have for your blog's content to be noticed by search engines such as Google or Technorati.
2. Submit Your Blog to Search Engines
Get on the radar screen for the popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! by submitting your blog's URL to them. Most search engines provide a 'Submit' link (or something similar) to notify the search engine of your new blog, so those search engines will crawl it and include your pages in their results.
It's important to understand that simply submitting your blog to search engines doesn't mean your pages will appear at the top of a Google search results screen, but at least your blog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up by a search engine.
3. Use and Update Your Blogroll
By adding links to sites you like in your blogroll, the owners of those blogs will find your blog and will be likely to add a reciprocal link in their blogrolls. It's an easy way to get the link to your blog in front of many readers on other blogs. The hope is that some of those readers will click on the link to your blog on the other blogs' blogrolls and find your content interesting and enjoyable turning them into loyal readers.
4. Harness the Power of Comments
Commenting is a simple and essential tool to increase your blog's traffic. First, respond to comments left on your blog to show your readers that you value their opinions and draw them into a two-way conversation. This will increase reader loyalty.
Second, leave comments on other blogs to drive new traffic. Make sure you leave your blog's URL in your comment, so you create a link back to your own blog. Many people will read the comments left on a blog post. If they read a particularly interesting comment, they are highly likely to click on the link to visit the commentor's website. It's important to make sure you leave meaningful comments that are likely to invite people to click on your link to read more.
5. Syndicate Your Blog's Content with an RSS Feed
Setting up an RSS feed button on your blog makes it easy for your loyal readers to not just read your blog but also know when you publish new content.
6. Use Links and Trackbacks
Links are one of the most powerful parts of your blog. Not only are links noticed by search engines, but they also act as a tap on the shoulder to other bloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps to get you noticed by other bloggers who are likely to investigate the sites that are linking to them. This may lead them to become new readers of your blog or to add links to your blog from theirs.
You can take links to other blogs a step further by leaving a trackback on the other blog to let them know you've linked to them. Blogs that allow trackbacks will include a link back to your blog in the comments section of the post that you originally linked to. People do click on trackback links!
7. Tag Your Posts
It takes a few extra seconds to add tags to each of your blog posts, but it's worth the time in terms of the additional traffic tags can drive to your blog. Tags (like links) are easily noticed by search engines. They're also key to helping readers find your blog when they perform searches on popular blog search engines such as Technorati.
8. Submit Your Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites
Taking the time to submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more can be a simple way to quickly boost traffic to your blog.
9. Remember Search Engine Optimization
When you write your blog posts and pages, remember to optimize your pages for search engines to find them. Include relevant keywords and links but don't overload your posts with too many relevant keywords or completely irrelevant keywords. Doing so can be considered spamming and could have negative results such as your blog being removed from Google's search entirely.
10. Don't Forget Images
Images don't just make your blog look pretty, they also help people find you in search engine listings. People often use the image search options offered by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, and naming your images with search engine optimization in mind can easily boost your traffic.
11. Consider Guest Blogging
Guest blogging can be done when you write a guest post on another blogger's blog or when another blogger writes a guest post on your blog. Both methods are likely to increase traffic as your blog will be exposed to the other blogger's audience. Many of the other blogger's readers will visit your blog to see what you have to say.
12. Join Forums, Web Rings or Online Groups
Find online forums, web rings, groups or social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn where you can share ideas and ask questions of like-minded individuals. Add a link to your blog in your signature line or profile, so each time you post on a forum or participate in another online network, you're indirectly promoting your blog. Chances are many people will click on that link to learn more about you.
13. Promote Outside Your Blog
Promoting your blog shouldn't stop when you step outside the blogosphere. Add your blog's URL to your email signature and business cards. Talk about it in offline conversations. It's important to get your name and your blog's URL noticed offline, too.
14. Nominate Yourself and Other Blogs for Blog Awards
There are a number of blog awards given out throughout the year. Nominating yourself and other blogs and bloggers can draw attention to your blog and drive traffic to it.
15. Don't Be Shy
The most important part of the blogosphere is its community and much of your success as a blogger will be tied to your willingness to network with that community. Don't be afraid to ask questions, join conversations or just say hi and introduce yourself. Don't sit back and hope the online world will find you. Speak out and get yourself noticed. Let the blogosphere know you've arrived and have something to say!
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Monday, November 29, 2010
Tips to Increase Blog Traffic
2 comments:
- kanadiakubagia said...
I make a link from your post
- December 1, 2010 at 8:24 PM
- Pickme india said...
Your thought processing is wonderful. The way you tell the thing is awesome. You are really a master. Great Blog!! That was amazing.
- April 16, 2012 at 1:50 AM
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It's not often that you find two siblings more in sync than Andrew and Jennifer Barry. They go on long runs together along the Charles River, play Frisbee together during the summer and both study robotics at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). They work just one floor apart at the Stata Center, meeting each other for candy breaks and long runs where they often spend mile after mile ruminating over their latest research problems.
The Barrys' interest in robotics was cultivated at a young age thanks to the encouragement of their parents. Both of their parents are active scientists — Dan Barry is a retired NASA astronaut with a passion for robotics, and Susan Barry a neuroscientist — and Andrew and Jennifer grew up in a household where building robots and remote control cars were regular weekend activities.
The two recalled one of their first projects, a contraption they dubbed RoboDad. As their father was often traveling for work, either at NASA's Houston headquarters or flying missions in outer space, Andrew and Jennifer rigged up a system whereby they could communicate with their father with the simple touch of a button, even if he was hundreds of miles away.
"We made a very early telepresence robot for which we got a remote control truck, and strapped a camera to the top. Then we got one of the very early wireless video transmitters," Andrew says. "We did a bunch of circuit design, and we did some programming, but this was really beginning engineering for us. At the end of the day, though, Dad could be in Houston or Japan and press a button and the car would drive forward, and he could see and talk with us."
Nowadays, Jennifer works on robotic mobile manipulation planning as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student in Professor Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Professor Tomas Lozano-Perez's Learning and Intelligent Systems Group. She works mainly with Willow Garage's PR2 robot, developing algorithms that will allow robots to maneuver a variety of items under uncertain conditions. Her work helps robots advance far beyond their traditional range of movement, which is currently confined to simply grasping objects between their grippers.
Andrew, a graduate student in Associate Professor Russ Tedrake's Robot Locomotion Group, works on developing control systems for making small aircraft fly through dense forests at high speeds. He is currently working on developing an autonomous aircraft capable of fast, accurate and repeatable flight that Tedrake hopes will one day be able to navigate both urban and rural environments like a bird.
While they both currently work in the field of robotics, the siblings took different paths to studying the field at CSAIL. Jennifer, who is two years older, found herself more drawn to math and physics as a child, and besides a few small programming projects she undertook — including an eighth grade science fair she won by developing a prime number solver — she steered clear of computer science and programming until college. She majored in physics at Swarthmore College, but her father encouraged her to sign up for robotics courses, which piqued her interest in the field. Andrew, meanwhile, was constantly building things as a child and loved programming and fixing computers. After graduating from Olin College, he came to MIT, following a more traditional engineering trajectory.
The two were thrilled when Andrew joined Jennifer at CSAIL and have found their relationship blossoming on a whole new level now that they work in the same environment. The two carry on a playful banter in conversation, joking about which one is conducting the more interesting research, yet clearly exhibit a deep appreciation and innate understanding for one another. Andrew will not let Jennifer, who is quite humble, undersell her achievements, while Jennifer provides Andrew with compassion and care.
From expounding on research ideas during their runs to providing a non-judgmental ear to share their troubles, the Barrys have found new ways to help one another grow and mature, both personally and professionally.
"It's nice to have a person who has close enough interests to what you are doing to understand your work, but has no stake in them. We're not in the same research group, we're not trying to do the same things, but he's someone I can go talk to about what I'm doing, and he can just listen to the problems I have. My lab mates are also great for that, but it's good to be able to get away from people who are trying to do the same thing and talk to someone else sometimes," Jennifer says. "Andy is someone I can always ask for advice without having to worry he's going to judge me."
Jennifer is expecting to graduate this spring, and is eyeing a potential move to the West Coast. Both siblings are hopeful that they will eventually end up on the same coast so that they can continue to build upon their CSAIL traditions and their close friendship.
"It's been really great being here with Jenny. I know when I first got here, there were a lot of things where I didn't know what was going on and Jenny was always there for me. When we get sick we bring each other food. Well, mostly Jenny brings me food," says Andrew, sharing a laugh with his sister.


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A UK for-profit firm called The Gadget Helpline surveyed 5,000 people to ferret out the industry's most confusing tech jargon. Luckily, they found most of the top 10 confusing terms are antiquated or proprietary:
• Dongle
• Cookie
• Phone jack
• (Nokia) Navi Key
• Time shifting
• Digital TV
• Ethernet
• (Nokia/Others) PC Suite
• Desktop
It's an odd list. Even though the UK loves its Nokias, the inclusion of two proprietary Nokia terms seems innately disproportionate. "Time shifting" was an awkward term to begin with that's specific but antiquated now that "DVR" has taken over. And as for "phone jack" and "desktop," yes, it's disconcerting that laymen don't understand this "jargon," but I can't remember the last time that I used either of these technologies.
So that pretty much leaves "cookie," "dongle," "ethernet," "digital TV" and "WAP" as the terms people need to learn. Please call your grandmothers and inform them as to the proper definitions immediately. [BBC and image]


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Newspapers To Court: We Don't Care About TheFlyOnTheWall, But Please Don't Take Away Our Hot News
from the they-will-regret-this deptYesterday we wrote about Google and Twitter's amicus brief in the infamous FlyOnTheWall hot news case, and the folks over at the Associated Press were kind enough to send over a link to the amicus brief from a huge coalition of newspapers. Basically, every big US newspaper or newspaper organization signed on to this one, including the Associated Press, AFP, the NY Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, McClatchy, Belo, Scripps, Time, and the Newspaper Association of America (just to catch everyone else). Considering that the AP has been leading the charge to bring back hot news, you can probably guess where this one is going:
I'm still sort of amazed that any serious news organization supports the hot news doctrine, because it's almost guaranteed to come back and bite them if it is regularly used again. All of the newspapers above rely on rewriting news from other publications to some extent, whether they admit it or not. If they really support this, they're going to run into trouble themselves, even if they're apparently unwilling to admit it. It's incredibly short-sighted.
Also weird is the claim that these newspapers "rely" on hot news today. They don't. Sure, the hot news doctrine has technically been around for about a century, but it's barely been used at all in the last few decades. It was, for all intents and purposes, a dead doctrine that many considered not worth keeping around (pdf). To claim that these organizations have relied on the hot news doctrine is ridiculous, because it's barely been showing up in court until recently.
Either way, it looks like lots of parties who are concerned about "hot news" have realized that TheFlyOnTheWall case has become ground zero for whether or not "hot news" is actually allowed.
Filed Under: hot news
Companies: afp, ap, belo, gannett, mcclatchy, naa, ny times, scripps, theflyonthewall, time, washington post


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The voluminous scale of political favoritism, and in some cases downright corruption, in the current administration has undermined taxpayers and trampled on the U.S. Constitution, as corporate bailouts, legislative kickbacks, and shady government appointments have become commonplace in the Obama White House.
Crony capitalism, also referred to as "cronyism," takes place when entities use the power and authority of government to capitalize in the marketplace. These entities, which are often large corporations, commonly receive lavish government favors after offering public endorsements and bulky bundles of donations during an election season.
During the 2008 election cycle, Obama raised a record-breaking $745 million, with some of his largest campaign contributions streaming from Google, Microsoft, General Electric, WilmerHale, and Goldman Sachs. Indeed, Obama's top 20 donors doled out $13,382,825 in 2008, more than three times the $4,034,622 contributed by John McCain's top 20 donors.
For clarification purposes, the figures do not reflect contributions from the organizations themselves; instead the money came from the organizations' political action committees, individual owners and employees, and immediate family members.
Owing to contribution limit restrictions, organizations that bundle together large individual contributions have often ranked among the top donors to presidential candidates, which was particularly true of Obama's 2008 campaign. This, of course, raises an essential question: Why contribute such vast sums of money to a presidential candidate? Are big donors supporting a candidate solely because of political ideologies, or are they expecting a return on their investment?
Some assertions of Obama's corrupt cronyism may seem speculative, or maybe coincidental, but when digested as a whole, the comprehensiveness of Obama's 2008 campaign strategy, combined with his administration's inexorable devotion to political bargaining, establishes almost unquestionable guilt of cronyism. (The donation amounts cited were compiled from OpenSecrets.org.)
Goldman Sachs (donated $1,013,091)
Goldman Sachs was one of Obama's largest contributors, shelling out more than one million dollars to the President's 2008 campaign. Though to Goldman Sachs this amount of money is a pittance, it bought a lot, including a slew of executive appointments to make sure federal money and rules work to Sachs' benefit.
On January 21, 2009, Mark Patterson joined the Obama administration to serve as Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, where he now monitors the "day-to-day management of Treasury Department staff and programs." Patterson, a registered lobbyist for Goldman Sachs until April 11, 2008 and Geithner's top aide, played a role in overseeing the $10 billion that Goldman harvested from the TARP bailouts.
Eileen Rominger, before being appointed as the director of investment management at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), worked as the global chief investment officer of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, where she reported $57.5 million in income between 2010 and 2011 and earnings of $2.3 million to $13.2 million in investment income. According to the SEC, Rominger's role in the administration is to "protect investors and promote capital formation through oversight and regulation of the nation's multi-trillion dollar investment management industry."
Rominger's government-insider status could be a critical asset to Goldman, as financial-related economic policy often has a meaningful impact on corporate planning. "Protect[ing] investors" generally involves, as Rominger's purported role indicates, more oversight and new regulations. In fact, Rominger is now in charge of overseeing mutual funds and administering new oversight of hedge funds required by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Naturally, deploying an ally in this sector of government could muster a significant advantage.
As Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner opined, "The President who said he would stop the revolving door between Wall Street and the executive branch — the President who poses as the scourge of the big bankers — hires Goldman Sachs' top asset manager to run the agency regulating asset managers."
A catalog of other former Goldman Sachs employees (although some have since resigned) joined the Obama administration, including Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Rahm Emanuel, Robert D. Hormats, Diana Farrell, Gene Sperling, and Gary Gensler. These people are privy to the government's monetary and executive decisions prior to other investors, giving Goldman Sachs valuable information that is little, if any, short of "insider trading."
Last August, Obama announced that the Departments of Agriculture and Energy will invest up to $510 million during the next three years "in partnership with the private sector to produce advanced drop-in aviation and marine biofuels to power military and commercial transportation."
"Biofuels are an important part of reducing America's dependence on foreign oil and creating jobs here at home. But supporting biofuels cannot be the role of government alone," President Obama affirmed. "That's why we're partnering with the private sector to speed development of next-generation biofuels that will help us continue to take steps towards energy independence and strengthen communities across our country."
Conveniently, Goldman had already become a leading investor in biofuel production, and has underwritten initial public offerings for multiple biofuel companies: In August 2010, Goldman took on biofuel company PetroAlgae — a speculative development-stage enterprise that had lost $58 million over the previous three years — as a client to help manage an initial public offering and probe the market for buyers.
Moreover, Goldman has become a prominent stakeholder in biofuel companies Iogen Corp. and Green Earth Fuels, and has become a vocal advocate for the industry.
Goldman Sachs employees are also undoubtedly advising President Obama on legislation regarding the financial industry.
Part of this financial legislation signed into law on July 21, 2010, purportedly to curb Wall Street speculation that allegedly spurred today's stagnant economy, was deemed by critics the "most comprehensive financial regulatory overhaul since the Great Depression." While the mere act of endorsing regulatory reform may seem repugnant to Goldman Sachs, and against its own self-interests, company lobbyists and executives have touted adamant support for financial regulations. In fact, one Goldman lobbyist stated, "We're not against regulation. We're for regulation. We partner with regulators." Nothing could be more true: They are "partnering with regulators." And there is good reason for doing so: The new regulations often hinder smaller competitors from pursuing risks needed to effectively compete in the marketplace.
While some regulations would certainly impinge on Goldman's business model, many regulations position the company with a telling competitive advantage. For instance, in an annual letter to shareholders, Goldman championed more stringent federal capital and liquidity requirements, reporting on a conference call that the company holds 15 percent "Tier 1 capital," meaning it is low-risk and very liquid. If need be, because of new regulations, Goldman can afford to play its investments safe, but smaller competitors do not have this fortune. As the annual letter indicated, "Given that much of the financial contagion was fueled by uncertainty about counterparties' balance sheets, we support measures that would require higher capital and liquidity levels."
In solidifying the proof that many Goldman executives are pro-regulation, on a conference call with private wealth management clients, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein assured his customers he is not concerned with the new financial reform law. In fact, Blankfein asserted, "We will be among the biggest beneficiaries of reform."
One might suggest that Goldman's support of Obama has generated a handsome reward. As Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist, asserted, "Almost everything that the White House has done has been haunted by the personnel and the money of Goldman … as well as the suspicion that the White House, particularly early on, was pulling its punches out of deference to Goldman and its war chest."
Google Inc. ($814,540)
Google, whose employees, executives, and political action committee have been loyal Obama proponents, has been another beneficiary of Obama's generous political offerings.
After Google contributed $814,540 to Obama's campaign, the Obama administration used taxpayer dollars to purchase Google advertising so that typing "ObamaCare" into the Google search engine would guide users to healthcare.gov. The administration, specifically the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), also bought paid-for results for searches such as "ObamaCare facts," "ObamaCare summary," "ObamaCare info," and other keywords and phrases.
The government watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained documents from the HHS revealing that the White House helped launch a multimillion-dollar taxpayer-funded marketing campaign to use search engines such as Google to drive traffic to the HHS website. According to a budget summary laid out by representatives of the Ogilvy Group, which helped coordinate the campaign, from October 2010 to February 2011 the Obama administration spent more than $1.4 million on the online advertisements alone, the vast majority of which went to Google.
The benefit was reciprocal: Google secured a massive new customer and the White House procured a taxpayer-funded ad campaign that hawked the bullet points of its healthcare overhaul. In describing the administration's web-based marketing campaign, an HHS official wrote in an e-mail, "We are using a bunch of search term[s] to help point people to HealthCare.gov. Part of our online efforts to help get accurate information to people about the new law."
Similar to Goldman's remarkable presence in the White House, several employees of Google became advisors to the Obama transition team, and the company's former head of global public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, was named White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer in June 2009 (although he left the administration in December 2010).
Last year, supposedly acting on a rather bizarre declaration by the United Nations that high-speed Internet access is a basic human right, the White House unveiled an initiative last November to invest more than $400 million to expand broadband Internet access to poor, rural areas of the country. Google's benefit? More people logged onto the World Wide Web and, in turn, more people used its search engine.
The final item on the Google-Obama cronyism list illustrates the corporate favoritism that large Obama donors tend to inherit. Last year, Google acquired ITA Software — a company that builds online flight information software for travel websites — which stirred a wave of protests from the travel industry, as critics argued that enhancements in Google's search engine would translate into the mass extinction of hundreds of travel-related websites. Critics charged that a monopoly was being created. Furthermore, Google recently purchased Motorola for $12.5 billion, which supplied Google with thousands of patents that would help deflect infringement lawsuits.
Ironically, while the politicized Department of Justice turned a blind eye to Google's controversial buyouts, it filed an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T — which, note, is largely bipartisan in its political donations — to block its buyout of T-Mobile, arguing that the measure would severely hurt competition. One can only wonder: Would AT&T have been treated differently if it would have been more liberal with its donations to Obama?
Microsoft Corporation ($852,164)
Microsoft Corporation, another major Obama donor, contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Obama's 2008 campaign, and in return was granted a key executive appointment and benefited from several pivotal legislative measures.
Steven VanRoekel, a former Microsoft executive from 1994 to 2009 — which included a period where he directly assisted Bill Gates — was appointed by the President on August 5, 2011 to operate as Chief Information Officer of the United States. VanRoekel joined the administration with an explicit agenda: "To make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government." The authority granted to VanRoekel gave him a portal to the federal government's inner workings, while delivering an ample opportunity to "play favorites" in the technology sector.
In obtaining a government role where he manages $80 billion in annual information technology spending, VanRoekel is in a central position to dish out favors to his former employer. The federal government is the world's largest customer for IT services and products — and VanRoekel has been handed the government's credit card.
Again the favors were reciprocal; VanRoekel donated $50,000 to Obama's 2009 inauguration, along with thousands of additional dollars more from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Bill and Melinda Gates.
On the legislative front, shortly after taking office, Obama ordered a review of federal efforts to improve cybersecurity, and later proposed legislation to enact regulations to crack down on cyber-related crimes. Microsoft's cybersecurity czar hailed the President's proposal, asserting that "it's not reasonable to expect the market" to effectively safeguard cyber-attacks.
The rise of cyber-related crimes has been a financial burden for computer manufacturers, software companies, and virtually all aspects of the information technology industry. Microsoft retains a position at the center of the industry, spending thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars generating prevention measures to counter cyber-attacks. Having allies in government could lead to an array of federal benefits, including financial relief, and as Obama's legislative proposal indicates, new regulations that may help stave off cyber-attacks.
Moreover, Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, was appointed to the Obama administration's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a presidential advisory board consisting of leaders in key industries. In response to the President's cybersecurity efforts, Charney wrote, "I look forward to working with the other members of the committee to address the challenges of security and reliability in communications, in turn fostering a more resilient national security and emergency preparedness posture."
Microsoft provides a wide range of products for federal agencies.
While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called Obama's Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011 "regulatory overreach," since it would grant Homeland Security the authority to dictate measures to privately owned computer systems if the President declared a "national cyber emergency," Charney gave the proposal an official stamp of approval.
General Electric ($529,855)
The cronyism between Obama and General Electric is undoubtedly one of the most publicized, and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt's January 2011 appointment as the President's top outside economic advisor was seen as the cronyism it is by the public at large. Immelt has retained his position at GE while at the same time providing "outside economic advice" to the executive branch.
Of course, one might suggest that the top dog of one of the largest U.S. multinationals is hardly the appropriate person to advise the executive branch on domestic job creation when he spent the last decade terminating 2.9 million U.S. jobs while adding 2.4 million abroad. But such damning facts are seemingly inconsequential to the President.
In addition to doling out more than half a million dollars to Obama's 2008 campaign, GE spent a sizeable $39 million on lobbying efforts in 2010 alone — more than any other U.S. company. In response to its ardent lobbying efforts, GE reaped a myriad of federal kickbacks, including $210 million from Obama's $787-billion economic stimulus law signed in February 2009.
Even if government did have the authority to bail out corporations and dish out plush subsidies to failed business models (which it doesn't), GE would hardly be the prime candidate, as it had total 2010 revenues of more than $150 billion, and has weathered the recession better than just about any other U.S. company.
GE's aggressive lobbying efforts and its immodest donations to the Obama campaign are a viable explanation for its governmental fortune — and company lobbyists and executives pursue federal handouts without any shame.
GE even expects to cash in on federal contracts that offer literally no value to the government. For instance, the nation's top corporate spender on lobbying unabashedly pursued a jet engine contract that Obama, the Pentagon, and Congress all said they weren't interested in. "GE will continue to press our case in the U.S. Senate and elsewhere," Immelt proclaimed after a House vote last Spring terminated funding for GE's Joint Strike Fighter engine, designed as an alternative to an engine already built by rival company Pratt & Whitney. The Pentagon ended up issuing a stop work order on the controversial engine — calling the billions of dollars it cost a "waste of taxpayer money" — as it provided virtually no benefit to the U.S. government.
In the area of "green" energy programs, GE secured a contract to provide wind turbines for the 845-megawatt Shepherds Flat wind farm project in eastern Oregon, where the majority of the $1.9 billion in funding will be provided by American taxpayers. The government-subsidized project is a boon for GE and its partners on the project, who include Google, Sumitomo, and Caithness Energy.
Furthermore, not only is the Energy Department handing over a one-billion dollar loan guarantee to GE and its partners, but as soon as GE's 338 turbines begin their operation at Shepherds Flat, the Treasury Department will funnel a $490-million cash grant to the project developers. The deal was so fortuitous for the developers that some of Obama's top advisors wrote a memo alleging that GE and its partners had "little skin in the game," while the federal government would be supplying "a significant subsidy."
Lastly, GE was a prominent supporter of cap-and-trade, a staple of Obama's 2008 candidacy. The company lobbied heavily for the President's 2009 cap-and-trade proposal (which ultimately failed). GE is not only the largest wind turbine manufacturer, but it stood to pocket millions or billions of dollars from the "secondary market" — also known as the carbon-trading market. In fact, the company had reportedly been gearing up for the legislation with an entire unit dedicated to operating in the "secondary market."
WilmerHale ($550,668)
WilmerHale, a law firm that offers legal representation for dozens of large corporations across a myriad of industries, was also rewarded handsomely by President Obama — after forking over more than half a million dollars to Obama's 2008 campaign. The company publicly acknowledged this fact in a June 10, 2009 statement: "The Obama Administration has certainly delivered on its promise to alter the face of government, and nowhere can that be felt more than at WilmerHale. Every week, it seems another attorney (or two) is leaving the firm to take a position within the new administration. The list of former WilmerHale lawyers working for the government now totals more than 20."
The most notable Obama appointment is WilmerHale's litigation partner Jonathan Cedarbaum, who joined the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to provide legal advice to the President and all executive branch agencies. Cedarbaum left the administration after two years of leadership at the Justice Department and rejoined WilmerHale's Washington, D.C., office as a partner in the Litigation/Controversy Department and member of the Government and Regulatory Litigation Group.
As a member of the Government and Regulatory Litigation Group, a key division of the law firm, Cedarbaum's role includes handling "complex cases in which clients' interests intersect with governmental, regulatory or public policy issues," and his former government doings and the connections he made at the Justice Department could serve as an asset for WilmerHale. In fact, the law firm boasts that "on behalf of clients in the defense and other industries," it has provided representation before the Defense Department, the State Department, the Commerce Department, and the Justice Department.
Along with Cedarbaum, former litigation partner Jeannie Rhee left WilmerHale to become Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the OLC (although she also later rejoined WilmerHale), and two other partners, Stephen Preston and Bill Wilkins, left the firm to serve as general counsels for the Central Intelligence Agency (Preston) and the Treasury Department (Wilkins).
WilmerHale represents several companies that would benefit from cybersecurity legislation, including communication companies such as AT&T, which secured an eight-year, $5-million deal to provide managed security services and Web hosting services to the Federal Trade Commission.
Further connecting the dots, the Obama administration's May 2011 proposal for comprehensive cybersecurity legislation consisted of seven separate proposals that would, according to WilmerHale, "have a far-reaching impact" on several sectors of the economy, "including the defense, telecommunications, energy, electricity, banking, and financial services." With this in mind, one must look only to the law firm's following clients: AT&T, Boeing, Broadcom, CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and General Electric.
Coincidence or Not?
Some of these interactions between the Obama administration and these companies may seem coincidental, but when taken as a whole, it's hard not to conclude that there's a potent brand of cronyism filtering throughout the Obama administration.
It is, after all, simply logical: Why contribute so much cash to a political candidate if there is no expected return?
The U.S. Constitution was largely designed to curb these perilous effects of cronyism, which has plagued economies and governments, at least in some form, for centuries. If our political leaders returned to the constitutional principles of limited government, where lavish federal subsidies and legislative bargaining were non-issues because the federal government has no power under the Constitution to legislate in these areas, the issue would be moot.
The Constitution was meticulously crafted with structural provisions designed to enact a separation of powers and checks and balances in government. If U.S. voters — thereby our political leaders — were to embrace these abiding principles, the incessant draining of economic resources for the purpose of subsidizing select businesses or sectors would be stunted, and so would the blatant abuses of taxpayer dollars. But as of yet, the current administration has seen little in the way of repercussions for its actions.
Countless politicians, including past Presidents of the United States, have exhibited crony tendencies, but in reflecting on the reported evidence, it could easily be argued that Barack Obama has generated a crony capitalist sentiment in his administration like no other President before him.
— Photo: AP Images


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Monday, March 10, 2008
Views shared by many involved in new music?
johnsonsrambler has left a new comment on your post "A tale of two continents":
Pliable is right, the criticism on Radio 3 had very little to do with Ross's coverage of British music - this was merely a (cheap) ploy by the presenter to get a debate going, but it wasn't bait that either reviewer rose to. Their own concerns - expressed most forcefully by Morag Grant - were that:
1. The book exhibits a remarkable bias towards American music above all else (more words on Copland than Debussy and Ravel combined is the comparison made - not much British flag waving there!)
2. The musical discussion is extremely thin, with most of the book taken up with personal anecdotes about each composer and very little about the notes they composed
3. There is almost nothing on the last 20 or 30 years of music, despite the book purporting to be a survey of the whole of the 20thC
4. Ross's understanding or recent trends in European music is extremely scant, leading him to make generalisations about German music in particular that have little to do with the music that is performed 'on the ground' as it were (this is the source of the Rumsfeld comparison)
This last point is also expressed in the Observer review Pliable links to:
"But Europe's self-destruction is halted just in time by America. ... The new country has a levelling influence on the deified artists who arrive on tour: Strauss gives a concert in a New York department store, Mahler rides on the subway. It all sounds uncomfortably similar to Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history', with the dialectical opposition between left and right resolved in the triumph of liberal democracy and the market economy.
Commenting on Stravinsky's negotiations with Walt Disney and Barnum & Bailey's Circus, Ross hails the United States as 'a marketplace in which absolutely anything can be bought and sold'. At times, his grand narrative paraphrases the messianic imperialism preached by George W Bush. As Ross sees it, Messiaen brings God back to earth during a tour of America's national parks, whose geological radiance he transcribes in From the Canyons to the Stars; Bartok, having migrated from Budapest to Manhattan, plans his Concerto for Orchestra as a 'parting gift to his adopted country - a portrait of democracy in action'. It's a shame that rich America disregarded the offering and left Bartok to die in misery."
These are views that are shared by many involved in new music who have read Ross's book, and it is good to hear this alternative approach to the book in contrast to the gushing praise that has characterised its reception so far.
Posted by johnsonsrambler to On An Overgrown Path at 12:25 PM
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
7 comments:
- Pliable said...
I can't help but repeat a comment made on the Sequenza21 thread on this topic:
Comment from Kyle Gann
Time: March 10, 2008, 12:41 am
I'm so tired of the Brits shoving their immature wunderkind composers down our throats, and whining about being left out of music history in general, that I wouldn't give a flying f**k about any criticism coming from that country.
As for the Germans, after reading the book I wrote Alex a message complimenting the accuracy of his pessimistic assessment of that country's current activity.
- 2:02 pm
- petemaskreplica said...
Any book that casts its net as wide as Alex Ross attempts to is going to come up short somewhere (and why would an American writing for a predominantly American audience not emphasise American composers?). But surely in-depth analysis isn't the point of it? It's (at least this is how I see it) about putting 20th century music into a social context, something frequently lacking in much writing on the subject, and trying to introduce the stuff to a general audience which is at best indifferent, at worst hostile to pretty much anything written after 1911. In fact I think it's in the parts where he starts talking too much about specific works (e.g. Peter Grimes) that the book's at its weakest. If the earlier chapters are more successful in painting a picture of the place composers held in society, maybe that's because later composers have to some extent abdicated that place?
As for the last 20 or 30 years, maybe (to paraphrase Zhou Enlai) it's too soon to tell.
Gotta love Kyle Gann, as ever! We should all take a moment this side of the pond to feel the love.
- 2:40 pm
- Pliable said...
What a lot of noise! But it seems to me that both Tim R-J and PMR make fair points, and Tim should be commended for putting forward a view that is very much against the 'wisdom of crowds'.
A cursory bowse through the Index shows the book is not comprehensive - Arvo Pärt receives ten mentions against twenty-six for Morton Feldman. A section on feminism would have usefully balanced the three pages devoted to homosexuality in classical music.
The book is not inclusive and it is anectdotal. (There are also a few small factual errors, e.g. page 94, Granados did not drown 'in the middle of the Atlantic', he drowned 1500 miles away in the English Channel.)
But Alex doesn't claim to have written the definitive history of 20th century music. In fact, in the Preface, he clearly says ' ... there is no attempt to be comprehensive: certain careers stand in for entire scenes, certain key pieces stand in for entire careers, and much great music is left on the cutting room floor.'
Alex may not claim to have written the definitive history. But the American media, critics and bloggers are making the claim instead, which is where things start to go wrong.
Once again hype and spin hijack the true message. Which is sad, because The Rest of Noise is a compelling personal view of twentieth-century music written by a master story-teller. In the end it's the music that matters, and that is the message of the book.
As for Kyle Gann, who needs Donald Rumsfeld?
- 5:52 pm
- Ben.H said...
"A cursory bowse [sic] through the Index shows the book is not comprehensive - Arvo Pärt receives ten mentions against twenty-six for Morton Feldman."
Sounds like Ross getting it right to me! But seriously, Feldman died 20 years ago, whereas Pärt... (Zhou Enlai, if you please).
- 8:16 pm
- Pliable said...
Many of Pärt's masterpieces were written before the end of the century, e.g. -
Berliner Messe - 1990 rev 1997
Passio - 1982
- 9:10 pm
- Rodney Lister said...
Nobody who says that something proves that the United States is a market place in which anything can be bought and sold is making a positive remark about the United States---and anybody who tries to construe it that way is more anxious to think badly of the United States (which there's some justification for doing--especially on that count)and Americans at all costs than to understand what's being said.
One of the points of the middle third of the book is the contrasting of how the issues which are the main ones for composers in the century and in Ross's book--whether the composer is entitled to think that history will justify what he writes whether his contemporaries like it or not or if "old-fashioned" music which those contemporaries might find comprehendible and, maybe, pleasing, is, just because of that, not valid---played out in the US in the 30's as opposed to in Germany or in the Soviet Union. Mostly in the US composers were not dissappeared or executed or officially repressed by the government, but they were controlled and suppressed and comodified (and trivialized) mainly by financial means--even the effects of McCarthy were mostly financial.
Of the problems with the book, I find the presentation of Schoenberg the most important, also of Stravinsky. The organization of the last third of the book also seems to me to be problematic, since rather than interviewing various parts of the story, as he did in the first two parts, Ross presents things much more separately and sequentially, and implies a teleology unlike the one that Schoenberg is supposed to have created, in which the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow is John Adams. (I have to say that the serious difference between the middle of the Atlantic 1500 miles from the English Channel is lost on me--I suppose more Amero-centrism.
Also, by me, Feldman deserves to be mentioned twice as many times as Part). There's more to be said about this, and I said it in a review that's going to be in the next issue of Tempo.
- 9:50 pm
- Henry Holland said...
I'm so tired of the Brits shoving their immature wunderkind composers down our throats
It's not like the UK has a monopoly on overhyped wunderkinds: Jay Greenberg, anyone? A 60 Minutes profile and all that?
So, let's see: Kyle Gann's opinion vs. that of Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is obviously in the bag to Norman Lebrecht and those musical Stalinists at the Gramophone because how else would that explain Thomas Ades, for example, being a fixture of concert life here in Los Angeles for at least the last 5 years? Hmmmm....
and whining about being left out of music history in general, that I wouldn't give a flying f**k about any criticism coming from that country.
Funny, that's how I feel about Kyle Gann!
As for Mr. Ross' book, I never took it to be anything more than a book about his enthusiasms, using the social aspects of music as a scaffolding. He has his likes and dislikes, he wears them on his sleeve and I've read his stuff enough to know that I agree with him on some stuff (Schreker, for example), while some of his other enthusiasms, like his almost-PR-work praise for John Adams, leave me cold. When Adams' A Flowering Tree was premiered in Europe (Vienna, I think), Mr. Ross was quite put out that certain European critics weren't on board the John Adams Is A Genius train.
I listened to the BBC clip at the link provided and I think the reviewers they had on after the interview were consistent with what T R-J pointed out. Mr. Ross' book is now outside of its US cocoon, it's going to take some lumps, especially when (or if) it's translated in to German.
- 7:17 pm


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Silently, billions of bees are dying off and our entire food chain is in danger. Bees don't just make honey, they are a giant, humble workforce, pollinating 90% of the plants we grow.
Multiple scientific studies blame one group of toxic pesticides for their rapid demise, and bee populations have soared in four European countries that have banned these chemicals. But powerful chemical companies are lobbying hard to keep selling this poison. Our best chance to save bees now is to push the US and EU to join the ban — their action is critical and will have a ripple effect on the rest of the world.
We have no time to lose — the debate is raging about what to do. This is not just about saving bumble bees, this is about survival. Let's build a giant global buzz calling for the EU and US to outlaw these killer chemicals and save our bees and our food. Sign the emergency petition now, and send it on to everyone and AVAAZ will deliver it to key decision makers:
Bees are vital to life on earth — every year pollinating plants and crops with an estimated $40bn value, over one third of the food supply in many countries. Without immediate action to save bees we could end up with no fruit, no vegetables, no nuts, no oils and no cotton. No NUTS!?! OMG!!!
Recent years have seen a steep and disturbing global decline in bee populations — some bee species are now extinct and others are at just 4% of their previous numbers. Scientists have been scrambling for answers. Some studies claim the decline may be due to a combination of factors including disease, habitat loss and toxic chemicals. But new leading independent research has produced strong evidence blaming neonicotinoid pesticides. France, Italy, Slovenia and even Germany, where the main manufacturer Bayer is based, have banned one of these bee killers. But, Bayer continues to export its poison across the world
This issue is now coming to the boil as major new studies have confirmed the scale of this problem. If we can get European and US decision-makers to take action, others will follow. It won't be easy. A leaked document shows that the US Environmental Protection Agency knew about the pesticide's dangers, but ignored them. The document says Bayer's "highly toxic" product is a "major risk concern to non target insects [honey bees]".
We need to make our voices heard to counter Bayer's very strong influence on policy makers and scientists in both the US and the EU where they fund the studies and sit on policy bodies. The real experts — the beekeepers and farmers — want these deadly pesticides prohibited until and unless we have solid, independent studies that show they are safe. Let's support them now. Sign the petition below, then forward this email:
We can no longer leave our delicate food chain in the hands of research run by the chemical companies and the regulators that are in their pockets. Banning this pesticide will move us closer to a world safe for ourselves and the other species we care about and depend on.
Bee decline could be down to chemical cocktail interfering with brains
Bee briefing
$15 Billion Bee Murder Mystery Deepens
"Nicotine Bees" Population Restored With Neonicotinoids Ban
EPA memo reveals concern that pesticide causes bee deaths
Beekeepers want government to pull pesticide
British Beekeepers' Association to stop endorsing bee-killing pesticideshttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/16/beekeepers-end-pesticide-endorsement?INTCMP=SRCH
Pesticide industry involvement in EU risk assessment puts survival of bees at stake
I signed! Did you? That part about having no nuts… freaked me out totally.
AVAAZ Race against time to save the bee's
January 7, 2011
avaaz, Bayer's, bee decline, beekeeping, bees, cotton, factory farming, honey, nicotine, nuts, pesticides, polination, vegetables Leave a comment
Silently, billions of bees are dying off and our entire food chain is in danger. Bees don't just make honey, they are a giant, humble workforce, pollinating 90% of the plants we grow.


text:
I must be getting old as just before Christmas I needed my first pair of reading/sewing glasses. They needed a nice case so I used the tutorial over on Lilipopo's blog. She has some lovely embroidery patterns and they are a style that I find adorable....plus she lives in Cornwall.
I used a tiny, tiny scrap of Liberty fabric for her dress and as Sarah is encouraging us to put our scraps to work this year then I am linking up at the end of the month.
I'm also just in time to link up with Amy, who is hosting TGIFF this week. I hoped to have this finished by Friday but had a bit of the sniffles that I brought back from our Valentine trip to Bristol.
Tim's Valentines card was found in a charity shop while hunting for vintage sheets. It's like a simplified game of Beetle.
Although I have loads of WIP's .... I seem to have started another one! I didn't feel like concentrating on much last week and as my very thoughtful friend Karen had bought me this for Christmas I had another look through it. I love the travel quilt idea as we are always off out and about in Libby our little campervan, blogged at LibertyBlueVan.
They are 2" diamonds and stitch up quite quickly. I've completed 3, but cut and basted quite a few more.
Though these all look coordinated, as I've used the remains of a Moda Scrap Bag, I think the rest will be quite scrappy. I don't have many scraps, as some of you know, I've been swapping, buying, begging and borrowing scraps from everyone...can you borrow scraps??? I'm not sure. Anyway it's a great project as you can see below the selvedge gets turned under and the maths geek in me worked out that the minimum strip width, to give 1/4 inch seam, is 2.23".... Do you remember SOHCAHTOA?
Years ago I found these in a charity shop and they are great for fussy cutting.
Jessica also has a link up on her blog, Lifeunderquilts for how many stars are finished My Total = 3


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Chick tract
Chick tracts are small evangelical comic book pamphlets produced by Jack Chick.
The stories in Chick tracts often follow a set formula:
- Setting the stage: the characters and situation are introduced. The situation involves the central theme of the comic.
- Exposition: a narrator character explains why another character is mistaken or wrong, and/or explains God's plan of salvation, with many references to the Bible.
- Repentance and/or damnation: one common ending has a main character die; he or she appears before God to be judged, and is condemned to Hell. In another common ending, one of the main characters turns to Jesus and is saved.
Last page[edit]
The last page of each comic is always the same. It says:
- Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." John 14:6
- "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Rom. 10:9
- Admit you are a sinner. See Romans 3:10
- Be willing to turn from sin (repent). See Acts 17:30
- Believe that Jesus Christ died for you, was buried and rose from the dead. See Rom. 10:9-10
- Through prayer, invite Jesus into your life to become your personal Saviour. See Rom. 10:13
- Dear God, I am a sinner and need forgiveness. I believe that Jesus Christ shed His precious blood and died for my sin. I am willing to turn from sin. I now invite Christ to come into my heart and life as my personal Saviour.
- Did you accept Jesus Christ as your own personal Saviour?
- Yes ( ) No ( )
- Date _________
- If you trusted Jesus as your Saviour, you have just begun a wonderful new life with Him. Now:
Recurring themes[edit]
Certain themes appear over and over in Chick tracts, including:
- Catholicism (Man in Black)
- Evolution and the supposed intolerance of its believers (Big Daddy? and Moving on Up!)
- Homosexuality (Birds and the Bees)
- The importance of faith and the insufficiency of good works (Gun Slinger)
- Islam (Men of Peace?)
The main argument Chick uses, practically to the exclusion of all others, is avoidance of hell.
Chick tracts have clearly-defined "good guys" and "bad guys". "Good guys" are inevitably handsome, and "bad guys" are always unattractive, often cartoonishly so.
- Apes, Lies and Ms. Henn
- Big Daddy?
- Dark Dungeons
- Gun Slinger
- Here, Kitty Kitty!
- There Go the Dinosaurs
External link[edit]
- Chick Cartoon Tracts (English list)
- Humorous dissections of many Chick Tracts
- Cthulhu-themed Chick tract parody
- Copy of email by Chick Publication resulting in the removal of a Cthulhu-themed Chick tract parody
|Jack Chick
|General information
|Tract list
Apes, Lies and Ms. Henn | Big Daddy? | Dark Dungeons | Gun Slinger | Here, Kitty Kitty! | There Go the Dinosaurs


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What to Do About Baby's Sleep Schedule When Clocks "Fall Back" This Weekend
Nov 2012
I'm usually so unprepared for clock changes when they happen in the fall and spring — and we spend what feels like weeks getting my son's sleep schedule back on track. But this year I feel ready. Since my son's been off school all week because of Hurricane Sandy (we're all fine; his preschool is just pretty wet), I haven't been sticking with the usual bedtime, and I've been letting him stay up a little later than usual. As a result, he's been sleeping a little later in the mornings. Turns out, this is a good strategy for getting him prepped for when the clocks "fall back" early the morning of Sunday, November 4 (2 a.m.).
I talked to Angelique Millette, a family sleep consultant in San Francisco, and she said pushing baby's bedtime about 10 minutes later each night for six days will get him used to going to bed an hour later. That's perfect for the fall clock change.
Read more tips on getting your baby or toddler prepped and adjusted to the time change.
How do you plan to get baby used to the time change?


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43 best cabin getaways
Related: Pitch your tent at the best Yosemite campgrounds
Yosemite may be only 12 miles away, but Far Meadow's Base Camp, in some ways, trumps the iconic park. No valley floor swarmed with bus tours or crowded cafeterias—just you, your friends, and family tucked into a 750-square-foot pine cabin, with 5 glorious High Sierra acres all to yourselves. The Base Camp cabin—undamaged by this summer's Rim Fire, which actually stopped 100 miles north—was remodeled in 2013, with the addition of a second bedroom and French doors that open onto the deck. In autumn, you'll find the kind of Technicolor fall foliage that'll make you think you've landed in New England. A bit farther east, above Bass Lake (and the snow line), Far Meadow maintains five additional properties in the Sierra National Forest: a new A-frame was added this season alongside a log cabin, two outfitted trailers, and another A-frame. From late May to November, you can swim, fish, and hike your heart out. After that, these five solar-powered accommodations remain open, but getting there gets more complicated. In winter, after the road closes, they're accessible only by snowmobile or snowcat, and guides will take only the adventurous in—to cross-country ski, snowshoe, make snow angels—with a friendly reminder to stay safe. As manager Kris Roni puts it, "This is the High Sierra, and we are, always, at the whims of nature."
Best time to go: November if you're adventurous, or June for the Sierra's sunny, clear-sky days.
$$$; 3-night min.;
Published at


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Policy Based Management has 4 evaluation modes and if you are not already familiar with them you can go HERE to get more information. Today I want to talk about the "On Change: Prevent" mode and why you don't always see it as an option.
The options you see available are dependent on the facets used in your check condition. In order for the "On Change: Prevent" option to be available your condition must check something that raises a DDL event.
Let's use Auto Shrink as an example and start by verifying if it raises a DDL event or not. We'll use the old DDL trigger method to see what happens. Here's the code to create the trigger, and it just does a simple PRINT statement back to the screen if it fires:
CREATE TRIGGER trg_CatchShrink
PRINT 'Auto shrink was changed and fired the trigger'
Now that we have our trigger setup let's use the below code to enable Auto Shrink and see if it fires. Make sure to change the database name to your TEST database.
USE [master]
ALTER DATABASE [MyTestDB] SET AUTO_SHRINK ON WITH NO_WAIT
If you're following along and running the code then you will have seen the text of the PRINT command in your output. We have now verified that enabling Auto Shrink on a database does indeed raise a DDL event. So now your homework is to go create a policy that checks to make sure Auto Shrink is not enabled. Are you done, yet? That's okay I'll just give you the answer. If you create a policy that checks the Auto Shrink setting then you will see that the "On Change: Prevent" option is NOT available.
So why is that option not available when we have proven that changing the Auto Shrink setting does raise a DDL event? It's because you can only use facets where ALL properties of that facet raise a DDL event. That's right. Every single property in a facet has to raise a DDL event for the "On Change: Prevent" option to be available. Now don't get too excited because you know Auto Shrink is in more than one facet and you think you can just use another facet. Surprise! None of those facets support "On Change: Prevent" either, but good for you for knowing it was in more than one place.
So which facets support the "On Change: Prevent" evaluation method? The following script will tell you:
SELECT name
FROM [msdb].[dbo].[syspolicy_management_facets]
WHERE execution_mode & 1 = 1
Let's not forget to clean up after ourselves and remove our trigger as well as the Auto Shrink setting we changed.
DROP TRIGGER trg_CatchShrink
ALTER DATABASE [MyTestDB] SET AUTO_SHRINK OFF WITH NO_WAIT