text:
On the Mexican Dia de los Muertos holiday, the living remember the dead. Some believe they are communing with the deceased. While it may sound morbid, Pati Jinich, a Mexican-born blogger, food show personality and author of Pati's Mexican Table, says it's a joyous occasion.
"People get ready to welcome people — those who have deceased and that presumably have license to visit just once a year," Jinich told All Things Considered host Melissa Block.
The day before Halloween, people mark the day by cleaning their homes and sprucing up the graveyards of departed loved ones with flowers and decorations.
Death becomes whimsical on the Day of the Dead. People joke about death, they display miniature skeletons in fancy clothes, and children enjoy sugar skulls and other spooky confections.
Dia de los Muertos is also an occasion for traditional pan de muerto. While many buy this aromatic sweet bread, Jinich is not one of them. She says the dough can be "capricious" because it takes a lot of patience and requires multiple rises, but it's worth it.
"It is very messy, but it's so much fun," Jinich says.
Day of the Dead is also a time for families to make and share the favorite foods of their deceased loved ones, and Jinich says that often involves a mole, a thick sauce that has many variations and can be complex to make. But she has created one that's easy and a reflection of her Mexican heritage and her life in the U.S. It's a seasonal take on a traditional mole that's made from pureed pumpkin and ancho chiles.
Here are Pati Jinich's recipes for both pan de muerto and pumpkin ancho mole.
Pan De Muerto
1/2 cup lukewarm whole milk
2 packages active dry yeast (1/4 ounce each), or about 4 heaped teaspoons
1/2 cup all purpose flour, plus 3 1/2 cups for later on
1/4 cup unsalted butter at room temperature, plus more to grease the bowl, and 2 tablespoons to melt and brush on top
1/2 cup granulated sugar to make the dough, plus 1/2 cup for dusting the bread
6 large eggs, at room temperature
2 tablespoons orange blossom water, or plain water
1 teaspoon anise seeds, optional
1 teaspoon orange zest, optional
Pinch kosher or coarse sea salt
In a small bowl, pour the lukewarm milk — making sure that it is not hot nor cold or the yeast will not react — and stir in the dry yeast granules. Give the yeast a couple of minutes to sit in the liquid, and stir with a spatula until it is thoroughly and evenly dissolved. Give it time: Stir a little, pressing gently on the yeast that has not yet dissolved with the spatula, give it a bit more time to sit in the milk, stirring again, press again. Once it has completely and evenly dissolved, add 1/2 cup flour. Mix it, combining thoroughly, until it has no lumps. It will be gooey, runny and sticky. Leave it in the warmest area of your kitchen, for about 20 to 30 minutes, until it puffs up (to about double or triple its volume) and has bubbled on top. I like to place a saucepan or cup with boiling hot water right next to it, but it's not necessary.
In the bowl of a mixer, over medium low speed, beat the butter until soft. Add the sugar and beat until combined and fluffy. Add one egg at a time. Once eggs are incorporated, add the milk and yeast mixture. Then, 1/2 cup at a time, add the rest of the flour (3 1/2 cups). Stir in the orange blossom water if using or plain water. Also add the anise seeds and a pinch of salt. The dough will look wet, runny and sticky, but continue beating anywhere from 7 to 10 minutes, until all the dough comes off the sides of the mixing bowl. It will be elastic and sticky, but it will hold itself together.
Butter a large mixing bowl that can hold the dough and will be able to hold it as it doubles or triples its volume. Place the dough in the bowl, cover it with a cloth or clean kitchen towel and leave it in the warmest area of your kitchen, that is draft-free, making sure it is not next to a window or door that gets opened. Leave it to rest and puff up anywhere from 2 to 3 hours, until it doubles its volume at least.
Punch the dough with your fist, flip it over, cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, remove the plastic wrap, place a cloth or kitchen towel on top and let it to come to room temperature.
Take off a third of the dough to make the bread decorations: Make a 1- to 2-inch ball and use the rest to make 2 ropes. They need not be smooth or perfect, as the dough is quite sticky, and no need to worry because they will look beautiful once the bread is baked and covered with sugar.
Butter a baking sheet or a bread or pizza stone, and make a ball with the rest of the dough. Place it in the center of the baking sheet and flatten it a bit on top. Place the dough ropes making a criss-cross — Mexican bakers usually shape the ropes to resemble bones, having thicker and thinner parts — and the ball on the top, right where they cross. Cover the bread with a cloth or kitchen towel, and let it rise and puff up again, for 1 to 2 hours.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Bake the bread for for about 35 minutes. Halfway through baking, after about 20 minutes, cover the loaf with parchment paper or aluminum foil to prevent it from browning too much.
When they are ready, they sound huecas, or hollow, if you hit the bottom of the bread.
Melt the butter and brush all over the bread. Sprinkle sugar all over until completely covered.
Ancho Chile And Pumpkin Mole (Mole De Chile Ancho Y Calabaza)
Makes 6 servings
1/2 white onion, peeled, charred or broiled
6 garlic cloves, charred or broiled, peeled
3 ancho chiles, stemmed, seeded and opened
1/4 cup slivered almonds
5 whole cloves
1/2 stick, about 1 inch, true or Ceylon cinnamon (or substitute 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon)
8 whole allspice berries (or 1/8 teaspoon ground)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 15 ounce can pumpkin puree (about 1 3/4 cup)
3 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt, or more to taste
3 tablespoons brown sugar, or more to taste
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds, lightly toasted
Place the onion and garlic in a baking sheet under the broiler. Char for 9 to 10 minutes, flipping once in between. Once they are soft and charred, remove from the heat. When the garlic is cool, peel.
In an already hot skillet or comal set over medium-low heat, toast the ancho chiles for about 15 to 20 seconds per side, until they brown and crisp without burning. Place toasted ancho chiles in a bowl and cover with boiling water. Soak for 10 to 15 minutes until they are plumped up and rehydrated.
In the same skillet or comal, toast the cloves and allspice until aromatic, about a minute. Remove from the heat. Toast the almonds and cinnamon, stirring often, until lightly browned, 4 to 5 minutes.
Place the onion, garlic, chiles, 1/2 cup of chile soaking liquid, almonds, cloves, cinnamon and allspice in the blender and puree until smooth.
In a soup pot or casserole dish, heat the oil over medium heat and pour in the pureed mixture. Add the salt and sugar. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently to help prevent the sauce from sticking to the bottom of the pan. The color will darken considerably.
Add the pumpkin puree and chicken broth to the sauce. Stir well until the pumpkin puree has dissolved; it will have a silky consistency. Continue to cook for about 12 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Use the mole sauce to pour over grilled, broiled or boiled chicken, meat or fish. Sprinkle with toasted pumpkin seeds for some added flavor and crunch.
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
And I'm Melissa Block.
BLOCK: Chef Pati Jinich has a brand new mixer.
PATI JINICH: I feel like I have a new car, let me tell you.
BLOCK: It's a rich persimmon color, a perfect match for her kitchen in the D.C. suburbs.
JINICH: OK. So I'm adding half a cup of flour.
BLOCK: Pati Jinich is a blogger, food show personality and author of "Pati's Mexican Table." She was born and raised in Mexico and she's teaching me two recipes for next week's holiday, Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. And she's breaking in her new mixer for the first one. It's a sweet, fragrant bread dough.
JINICH: It's incredibly powerful.
BLOCK: Oh, yeah. It smells like perfume.
We are making pan de muerto.
JINICH: The Day of the Dead bread is a necessity. You will not see a home or an altar without Day of the Dead bread.
BLOCK: For the Day of the Dead, the living remember the dead. Some believe they're actually communing with the deceased.
JINICH: It's actually a very joyous occasion where people get ready to welcome people, those that have deceased and that presumably have license to come visit just once a year. And the day before, what everybody here celebrates as Halloween, people start cleaning their homes. And I know it sounds a little bit morbid, but it's not, people go and clean the graveyards and put flowers and decorations and make it impeccable and gorgeous-looking.
BLOCK: Now, many Mexicans will buy their pan de muerto from a bakery. Pati is not one of them.
JINICH: This dough is capricious.
BLOCK: And it takes patience, with multiple rises. That means you have to get a head start at least a day before the holiday. Pati has several batches of dough going today in different stages. One is just about ready to bake, but it needs to be shaped and it is super sticky.
JINICH: It is very messy, but it's so much fun.
JINICH: It is so much fun.
BLOCK: Death becomes whimsical on Dia de los Muertos. People joke about death. They display miniature skeletons in fancy clothes. Children eat sugar skulls and other spooky confections.
JINICH: And I'm going to make two ropes that are going to cross the bread, resembling bones.
BLOCK: Like the cross bones.
JINICH: Exactly.
BLOCK: Pati makes a skull out of a small ball of dough and sticks it playfully on the top of the loaf. And while it may now resemble death, it smells heavenly.
Oh, it smells fantastic.
JINICH: And you can play with what you put in here. So I put rose water this time and a little bit of anise seeds. But you can put orange blossom water and some orange zest or a little bit orange juice or maybe a little bit of orange liquor. You can really take it places.
BLOCK: What's the significance of that? Why the flavors?
JINICH: So all the aromas and smells are meant to attract and to help those deceased coming back to visit find their way back home. And the foods are all very aromatic and intense.
BLOCK: OK. A final rise to the dough, then into the oven it goes. And 35 minutes later...
JINICH: Oh.
BLOCK: ...the Day of the Dead bread is done. A quick brush with butter, a generous sprinkle of sugar, and then it gets the knife.
JINICH: Ooh. Oh, my gosh, you guys. It's really beautiful.
BLOCK: The grain of the bread is so light and fluffy, and it's a beautiful creamy yellow color.
JINICH: I couldn't resist myself.
BLOCK: How is it?
JINICH: You have to try it. It's so good.
BLOCK: OK. Oh, it's delicious.
JINICH: It is delicious. It's the signature food of Day of the Dead, and it reminds you of why you're celebrating and it's satisfying and gratifying. And it's what you want to greet your guests and the people who are coming from the underworld.
BLOCK: But you cannot feast on bread alone. Pati says there is another thing essential for a family's celebration.
JINICH: So when people make the meals for Day of the Dead, they usually make the most favorite thing of the people that have left, and it most always is a mole.
BLOCK: A mole, a thick sauce made by grinding ingredients together. And yes, you might be thinking of the ever-popular mole poblano with its rich, chocolaty flavor. That's what I was thinking. But Pati Jinich says there are plenty of other moles, some very complicated. Her favorite, the one she created for her family here in the U.S., is easy. It's a pumpkin mole made with ancho chilies(ph).
JINICH: They've been dried for a long time. We have to wake them up and bring them back to life.
BLOCK: Good plan for The Day of the Dead, don't you think? We toast the chilies on a comal, a griddle, then simmer them in a saucepan.
JINICH: And look what happens to them, beautiful and plump and meaty. And you have transformed this ingredient.
BLOCK: That's a lot of chilies.
JINICH: Yes, but they're not spicy at all. They're like a mildly spicy prune.
BLOCK: Pati's mole requires more stovetop alchemy. She toasts garlic, onions, almonds, cloves, a cinnamon stick, allspice berries, toasts them for just a few minutes, not long at all. She puts them in a blender with the plumped chilies...
BLOCK: ...then pours that mixture into a pan of hot oil.
JINICH: OK. That's what you want.
BLOCK: You want to hear that sauce sizzle. It cooks and thickens. And three more ingredients are stirred in: brown sugar, pumpkin puree - yes, from a can - and chicken broth. Now, don't worry. We have the recipe at npr.org.
Now, hypothetically, I'm thinking, you could put a little chocolate in there. Yeah?
JINICH: You could, of course.
BLOCK: Why not?
JINICH: But I think there is no need.
BLOCK: Need is never the question. You know that.
BLOCK: A few more minutes on the stove and the mole is a warm shade of dark brown. It makes Pati's kitchen smell like a spiced-up pumpkin pie.
JINICH: My husband likes it so much, he would eat it as a soup.
BLOCK: Just eat it right out of the pot with a spoon?
JINICH: Eat it right out of the pot. But you can cook some chicken, shrimp, meat, fish, whatever you want in whichever way, boiled or baked, and just ladle a couple of spoonfuls on top of it.
BLOCK: She ladles the pumpkin mole over chicken enchiladas and I have to tell you, as a Day of the Dead meal, it's worth coming back for.
Oh, that's really good. It's got such a great nuttiness to it. And the spices are - it's powerful, but it's not overwhelming.
JINICH: Is it spicy for you (unintelligible)?
BLOCK: It's just got a nice buzz to it.
JINICH: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Would you add chocolate?
BLOCK: I think it couldn't hurt.
JINICH: Well, Pati Jinich, thank you so much for making these wonderful things.
Oh, thank you so much for coming.
BLOCK: Pati Jinich is the woman behind "Pati's Mexican Table," the book, TV show and the blog. You can get a head start on your Day of the Dead cooking with recipes at npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


text:
FreeBSD jails with ezjail
At work, we've decided to virtualize all of our FreeBSD production systems with jails. We're hoping this will help with upgrades and potential system failure, as we'll be to move virtual systems around, where neeeded, with relative ease.
While setting up jails with FreeBSD directly isn't a difficult task, there is one major limitation, if you're going to have multiple jails on the same host. The entire base system (/bin, /usr/bin, etc), needs to reside within each jail. Using a very well written set of shell scripts to help manage our jails, however, we're able to mount, with the help of nullfs in FreeBSD 6+, read-only, our entire base system.
Here, I'll describe in great detail the entire process I used to install ezjail, build our basejail, and create a flavour [sic] that meets our needs.
With this setup, we have a base system with postfix as our MTA. Skip the appropriate parts if you use sendmail or another MTA.
Build host system
Install/Update FreeBSD
To begin, we build out host FreeBSD system. This includes performing a full installation of FreeBSD 6.2, and doing all the updates. Whereas freebsd-update is a rather nice binary update tool, it is advisable to build/install directly from source, and you'll end up doing it for your jails anyways. You won't be saving yourself any time doing binary updates.
Install Common Ports
Once we have a basic install of FreeBSD, our network requires we install postfix with sasl to send email. This allows email to be sent to a user with a simpel 'mail <user>' and everything will get translated correctly. Along with setting up mail, continue with installing any ports that you'll need/want on all your jails, onto the base system. Individual jail ports, such as apache, mysql, etc, should not be installed at this time. Only ports you want on all jails should be installed.
We've installed the following ports:
- sudo (security/sudo)
- vim-lite (editors/vim-lite)
- bash (shells/bash)
- rsync (net/rsync)
- postfix (mail/postfix)
Jail-Friendly Host Setup
In order to allow for things like ping, etc, we need to change that security.jail.allow_raw_sockets to 1.
echo 'security.jail.allow_raw_sockets=1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf

Install ezjail
Now install the ezjail scripts from the FreeBSD ports tree at sysutils/ezjail. You will be left with an ezjail.sh script, an ezjail-admin.sh script, and an rc script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. To enable our jails to start at system boot, we needed to add ezjail_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf:
echo 'ezjail_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

There is a configuration file for ezjail in /usr/local/etc/ezjail.conf.sample, we want to move that to /usr/local/etc/ezjail.conf and edit the file. Make appropriate changes for your network. We run our own CVS mirror, so our file looks like this:
 ezjail_jaildir=/usr/jails
- Location of the tiny skeleton jail template
- Location of the huge base jail
- Location of your copy of FreeBSD's source tree
- In case you want to provide a copy of ports tree in base jail, set this to
- a cvsroot near you
- This is where the install sub command defaults to fetch its packages from
- base jail will provide a soft link from /usr/bin/perl to /usr/local/bin/perl
- to accomodate all scripts using '#!/usr/bin/perl'...
ezjail_uglyperlhack="YES"

Change <our_local_FTP/CVS_mirror> for your correct values.
Build basejail
At this time, we should be ready to build our basejail!
Run the following command to build basejail within your configured jail home:
ezjail-admin update -ip

- The -i option above tells ezjail that we've already built-world (when we updated FreeBSD on the host system), so it simply does a make installworld to your jail home. Omitting the -i causes this process to take a considerable amount of time because 'world' is built.
- The -p option above tells ezjail that we want the ports tree included in our jail. This will take additional disk space equal to that of the size of your ports tree.
When this process is complete, you should have a directory structure similar to this in your jail home (/usr/jails by default):
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 512B Sep 26 14:57 . drwxr-xr-x 18 root wheel 512B Sep 25 13:11 .. drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 512B Sep 26 13:42 basejail drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512B Sep 26 14:43 flavours drwxr-xr-x 12 root wheel 512B Sep 26 13:58 newjail

If yours checks out, we're ready to start building our localized flavour!
Building Our ezjail Flavour
Version 1.2 of ezjail introduces the concept of Flavours. A flavour corresponds to a preconfigured Jail. Basically it is a directory being copied recursively over a new Jails root and a script being run on its first startup to do some initialization.
Assuming your jail home is /usr/jails (which we will assume for the remainder), you should have a /usr/jails/flavours/default directory. We want to copy that directory to a name for our own customized flavour. Ours will be called clx.
# cd /usr/jails/flavours
- cp -Rp ./default ./clx

Copy /usr/local
When your jail is finally built, anything within the corresponding flavour directory will be copied over the basejail that is installed. Our first order of business is to copy our entire host's /usr/local directory into our flavour directory. This will get us all those common ports we installed earlier:
cp -Rp /usr/local/* ./clx/usr/local/

- Note, this process will probably take quite a while, depending on which ports you have installed.
Copy /var/db/pkg

# mkdir ./clx/var && mkdir ./clx/var/db
- cp -Rp /var/db/pkg ./clx/var/db/

Create /etc/<config> files
Your jails, by default, have a very limited, and very incorrect setup. Here are the specific files we had to copy from our host /etc/ to our flavour's etc:
|Puts our jail in the correct timezone.
|Allows our system to resolve domain names and URLs.
|Create's a login banner for ssh users.
|Since we installed bash, we need an appropriate shells file.
|We've enabled all.log and console.log in our systems. We want those changes to apply to our jails, as well.
In addition to the copied files, we made some extensive changes to /etc/periodic.conf and /etc/rc.conf. First, rc.conf:
# Miscellaneous Configuration network_interfaces="lo0" # No network interfaces aside from the loopback device kern_securelevel_enable="YES" # Enable 'securelevel' kernel security kern_securelevel="1" # See init(8) rpcbind_enable="NO" # Disable RPC daemon cron_flags="$cron_flags -J 15" # Prevent lots of jails running cron jobs at the same time syslogd_flags="-ss" # Disable syslogd listening for incoming connections sendmail_enable="NONE" # Comppletely disable sendmail clear_tmp_enable="YES" # Clear /tmp at startup
- Mail Config
postfix_enable="YES" # Enable postfix at boot. sendmail_enable="NO" # Disable Sendmail sendmail_submit_enable="NO" # Disable sendmail submit sendmail_outbound_enable="NO" # Disable sendmail outbound sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO" # Disable sendmail msp queing
- SSHD Configuration
sshd_enable="YES" # Enable sshd

- Note that our rc.conf doesn't contain any IP address, etc. This is to be handled entirely by the host system.
Next, our periodic.conf file:
daily_status_network_enable="NO" daily_status_security_ipfwlimit_enable="NO" daily_status_security_ipfwdenied_enable="NO" weekly_whatis_enable="NO" # our jails are read-only /usr
daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO" daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO" daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO" daily_submit_queuerun="NO"
daily_show_empty_output="NO" daily_show_success="NO" daily_show_info="NO" daily_status_security_inline="YES"
weekly_show_success="NO" weekly_show_info="NO" weekly_show_empty_output="NO"
- monthly_show_info="NO" # Show login accounting
- man periodic.conf if you're interested in what's going on here.
Inside your flavour's root directory, you should see an ezjail.flavour file. This file is essentially a script that get's run the first time a jail that was created with the flavour is started. In our case, we are going to add some users (and their groups), add the postfix/cyrus users and groups, and perform a few other initial maintenance tasks. Here's our file as an example:
#!/bin/sh
- Prevent this script from being called over and over if something fails.
rm -f /etc/rc.d/ezjail-config.sh /ezjail.flavour
- Groups
- You will probably start with some groups your users should be in
pw groupadd -q -n cyrus -g 60 pw groupadd -q -n admin -g 100 pw groupadd -q -n admin2 -g 101 pw groupadd -q -n postfix -g 125 pw groupadd -q -n maildrop -g 126
- Users
- You might want to add some users. The password is to be provided in the
- encrypted form as found in /etc/master.passwd.
- The example password here is "admin"
- Refer to crypt(3) and pw(8) for more information
- ADMIN Accounts
echo -n '<passwd_hash>' |\ pw useradd -n admin -u 100 -s /bin/bash -m -d /home/admin -g admin -G wheel -c 'Admin' -H 0
echo -n '<passwd_hash>' |\ pw useradd -n admin2 -u 101 -s /bin/csh -m -d /home/admin2 -g admin2 -G wheel -c 'Another Admin' -H 0
- Daemon/System Accounts
echo -n '*' |\ pw useradd -n postfix -u 125 -s /usr/sbin/nologin -m -d /var/spool/postfix -g postfix -c 'Postfix Mail User' -H 0
- Postfix gripes if /var/spool/postfix isn't owned by root/wheel
chown root:wheel /var/spool/postfix
- CYRUS Mail Server
echo -n '*' |\ pw useradd -n cyrus -u 60 -s /usr/sbin/nologin -m -d /nonexistent -g cyrus -c 'Cyrus Mail User' -H 0
- Packages
- Install all packages previously put to /pkg
- Remove package files afterwards
[ -d /pkg ] && PACKAGESITE=file:// pkg_add -r /pkg/* rm -rf /pkg
- Postinstall
- Your own stuff here, for example set login shells that were only
- installed just before.
- Create all.log and console.log (chmod all.log, too)
touch /var/log/all.log && chmod 0600 /var/log/all.log touch /var/log/console.log

- Any other shell commands you need to run to setup your jail can be put in this file.
Building a Jail
Now that we've got all the configuration and defaults set up for our jails, building an actual jail is pretty darn easy. Let's say we want to create a jail using our clx flavour for www.example.com with an IP of 10.0.0.5. Simply use the following command:

# ezjail-admin create -f clx www.example.com 10.0.0.5

Yeah, it's that easy. Once the build is done, it'll take a couple of minutes, we need to assign that new IP to our jail host, and put that IP in /etc/rc.conf to make it persistent through reboots:
# ipconfig <interface> alias 10.0.0.5/16
 rc.conf:
ifconfig_interface_aliasX="inet 10.0.0.5/16"
 Note: Replace interface with your actual interface and aliasX where X is the incremental IP alias.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
This was published 6 years ago
Aaron Swartz: a beautiful mind
Computer genius and online activist Aaron Swartz wanted to change the world - one download at a time. Then the US government decided enough was enough, with tragic consequences. By Paul McGeough.
His mind raced as the taxi hurtled towards Brooklyn. Sam McLean had dropped in for drinks with mates at an office in SoHo, in Lower Manhattan and now, as the cab crossed the East River, he was assailed by a rising sense of unease.
The day had started badly. He'd been supposed to meet his friend Aaron Swartz for brunch, but his calls and texts had gone unanswered. Miffed, McLean had arranged with Swartz's Australian-American girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, for the gang to gather for dinner.
As national director of the Australian activist movement GetUp!, McLean, then 25, was on a Manhattan stopover after attending a retreat for online activists from around the world in Holmes, 80 kilometres north of New York City. There, the Online Progressive Engagement Networks (OPEN) had taken over a conference centre to "collectively dream and scheme about the future".
At about 7pm, McLean's mobile rang - a frantic call from Ben Margetts, another member of the Australian activist network in New York, insisting he get to the apartment Swartz shared with Stinebrickner-Kauffman urgently. Soon came another call, this time from an agitated Stinebrickner-Kauffman demanding to know how long he'd be.
Less than 10 minutes later, McLean piled out of the taxi into a rainy evening. Barrelling into the newish apartment block, he took the elevator to the seventh floor. The door was open and a stricken Stinebrickner-Kauffman, 32, and Margetts, 27, were standing outside. Swartz was inside, dead, they told him. When she got home that afternoon, his girlfriend had found him hanging by his belt from a window jamb. It was January 11, 2013.
Variously described as a genius, wunderkind and prodigy, 26-year-old Aaron Swartz had become a rock star in a burgeoning, global internet-based activist movement. From his early teens, he had bent an agile mind and a rare wizardry with computers to a self-appointed mission that he often, and perfectly seriously, described as saving the world.
Stinebrickner-Kauffman, his girlfriend since 2011, had been so worried about what Swartz might do to himself that morning that she'd tried to prevent him going to the bathroom alone. Unable to reach him through the day, she was so filled with a sense of foreboding on her return to the apartment that as she rode up in the elevator, as she later told The New Yorker, she readied her mobile to be able to dial 911 immediately.
On entering, she found Swartz hanging from the window. He was still in the clothes he'd been wearing when she'd left that morning: black V-neck T-shirt, brown corduroy trousers and jacket. There was no suicide note.
Police and paramedics brought Swartz down from the window jamb and by the time McLean entered, the body had been zipped into a black bag. McLean grabbed a few things for the deeply shocked Stinebrickner-Kauffman and, with Margetts, they headed to the nearby home of another activist friend, American Ben Wikler.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide just two days after federal prosecutors in Boston had rejected his last bid to avoid jail time. Two years earlier, he'd been busted using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) network to download almost 5 million documents ordinarily locked behind a pay-wall on one of the world's most preeminent scholarly archives, JSTOR - a conflation of "journal storage".
When the prosecutors hit Swartz with a raft of charges, under which he might have been jailed for decades, the plea-bargaining process became a stalemate. Swartz rejected any outcome that would brand him for life as a felon when he believed he'd committed no crime; prosecutors insisting, on the other hand, that he was guilty and must do time.
Simon Sheikh, the Canberra-based activist entrepreneur and a failed Greens candidate at the 2013 federal election, was also at the OPEN summit in upstate New York early last year. As McLean's predecessor at GetUp!, Sheikh had first reached out to Swartz the previous year. Swartz was then working for Avaaz, a relatively new, online, global activist movement drawing followers by the millions, and Sheikh had been keen to tap into its campaign inventiveness.
He did not commit suicide, he was killed by the government.
Later, he'd introduced Swartz to the leadership at ThoughtWorks, a privately owned company with a staff of thousands working across the globe to revolutionise software design for positive social change. In April 2012, the organisation snapped up Swartz as a software developer.
Both Sheikh and McLean spent time with Swartz in New York that went way beyond the pro-forma office appointments and conference interactions they might have expected. What was to be a one-hour meeting at the ThoughtWorks office on Madison Avenue, says Sheikh, became a talkfest on machine learning environments that went into the early hours of the next day and reconvened a day later at a restaurant in Brooklyn.
At Holmes, Swartz dragged McLean up to an attic room, where they huddled for hours as he shared his latest dramatic thinking. McLean remembers being struck by what he considered an oddly phrased afterthought. "He told me he had cracked his idea on how to change the world," McLean remembers. "And [he said] he would do it that year - or he would die."
Later, Swartz's collaborator at the Edmond J. Safra Centre for Ethics at Harvard, law professor Lawrence Lessig, described his complex young friend in these terms: "Aaron was a hacker. But he was not just a hacker. He was an internet activist, but not just an internet activist. Indeed, the most important part of Aaron's life is the part that most run over too quickly - the last chunk, when he shifted his focus from this effort to advance freedom in the space of copyright, to an effort to advance freedom and social justice more generally."
Recently, when I track Sam McLean, now 27, to a beach house on the south coast of NSW, he tells me in a Skype video exchange: "We all can see the world one way and think that it should be another way, but most don't feel they have the agency and a responsibility to [change it]. Aaron believed he had both."
Simon Sheikh noticed a healthy tension when Swartz was in a room. "Even without speaking, he could communicate his disappointment with ideas that were not well formed and with people whose values did not match his own," he says. "His values were simple, clear, pure - and he wouldn't budge."
On the night Swartz died, McLean and the others set up a memorial website. Within days, there were tens of thousands of tributes from around the world. "Aaron Swartz is what I wish I was," wrote an introspective John Atkinson. "I am a bright technologist, but I've never built anything of note. I have strong opinions about how to improve this world, but I've never acted to bring them to pass ... If I were able to stop being afraid of what the world would think of me, I could see myself making every decision that Aaron made that ultimately led to his untimely death. This upsets me immensely."
Aaron Swartz, the eldest of three sons, was born in 1986 to bookish parents Robert and Susan in affluent Highland Park, 30 kilometres north of Chicago. By the age of three, he'd taught himself to read. Robert, a 63-year-old computer consultant, remembers his son as an exceptionally bright, inquisitive boy who picked up things quickly.
Aaron grew up with the internet - and was fascinated by it. "He was interested in computers because they were interesting - not because he might go off to Silicon Valley to become another Mark Zuckerberg," Robert tells me recently when we meet at his Chicago office-workshop.
Robert and Susan didn't worry when, complaining of being bored, Aaron opted to drop out of high school after year 9. "I had felt the same thing at school, so it didn't surprise me at all," says the father now. But his parents did worry about his health. All his life, Aaron had suffered from debilitating bouts of ulcerative colitis, a digestive malady with similar symptoms to Crohn's disease. He ate only "white" foods - cheese, bread, rice, eggs, pasta, and tofu and cheese pizza. His friend Ben Wikler tells a story of Swartz coming to dinner and eating nothing but bread because he did not want to burden his hosts with his dietary demands.
Swartz hated to impose himself on others. In the days before he died, he was hugely stressed by the realisation he would have to ask others to help fund his legal defence. Similarly, he was acutely uncomfortable in dealing with the likes of waiters and cabbies because of the power imbalance he perceived in his relationship with them.
As a boy, Swartz insinuated himself into online internet hacking workshops, stunning older collaborators with his computing genius. In photos from back then, first as a 12-year-old and then through his early teens, he can be seen in his trademark ill-fitting T-shirts, sometimes looking like the tag-along child of an adult participant.
Among other projects, Swartz designed a Wikipedia-like site called The Info Network, which was selected as a finalist in the prestigious ArsDigita contest for teen programmers. He then launched watchdog.net, an online political activist website. By the age of 14, he was already considered "a figure in the industry", sharing the heavy-lifting in a team that invented the RSS format that updates websites - news reports, blogs and the like. At 15, he became a co-founder of the Creative Commons copyright-sharing organisation.
Just as he had dropped out of high school, he also quit Stanford University after his freshman year. On day 58, he blogged: "Kat and Vicky want to know why I eat breakfast alone reading a book, instead of talking to them. I explain to them that however nice and interesting they are, the book is written by an intelligent expert and filled with novel facts. They explain to me that not sitting with someone you know is a major social faux pas and not having a need to talk to people is just downright abnormal. I patiently suggest that it is perhaps they who are abnormal ... They patiently suggest I'm being offensive and best watch myself if I don't want to alienate the few remaining people who still talk to me."
At 19, he moved to Cambridge, near Boston in Massachusetts, where he co-founded Reddit, the social news and entertainment website accessed by millions, which was subsequently acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. Afterwards, he was required to move to California to work in the office of the Condé Nast-owned Wired magazine, an arrangement that had been a condition of the Reddit buyout. He hated the demands of his conventional new job and on his first day at Wired locked himself in a bathroom and cried. "I was miserable," he said later. "I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired." He told a flatmate he was heading back to Boston because San Francisco didn't have enough books.
From his new base, Swartz launched OpenLibrary, a vast online book and data repository that these days is accessed free of charge by millions. After that, he co-designed Strongbox, by which sources could anonymously drop documents to The New York Times without fear of disclosure, then SecureDrop, which allowed whistleblowers to communicate with journalists without revealing their identity. He also founded Demand Progress, an online activist website.
The thread running through all his endeavours was a passion for computers, online freedom and freedom of information. Its ultimate expression was his obsession with the web as a vehicle for social and political campaigning - especially his leadership role in a 2012 campaign that spectacularly defeated a bid by Hollywood and the music industry to have Washington rubber-stamp the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, which activists claimed would severely curtail internet freedom.
Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who became romantically involved with Swartz just weeks before he was formally charged, laid out for reporters what she described as a finely honed aesthetic sense: "[Aaron] could get deeper, truer joy [than anyone I've met] out of a perfect corn muffin, a brilliantly constructed narrative arc, a beautiful font." But she added, "He was human. He wasn't happy at every moment and I'd be the first to say he could be a real pain to live with."
Certainly, as the JSTOR case began to gather momentum, those around him noticed signs of growing paranoia. His friend Alec Resnick recalled sitting in a car-share vehicle with Swartz, who would insist on putting all their electronic devices outside it and turning up the radio volume, to guard against eavesdropping. Soon after his arrest, he proposed setting up his Linux server to record any sounds at the door so he'd know if "they" were coming. Worried by prosecutors' bully-boy tactics, his lawyers warned them that Swartz had become a suicide risk.
Swartz's death brought dramatic focus to a global insurgency war in which information is power and the battlefield is the net. In the words of Glenn Greenwald - the former Guardian journalist who reported on much of the Edward Snowden disclosures on the reach of Washington's global and domestic spying network - this is a "war over how the internet is used and who controls the information that flows on it, and [Swartz's] real crime in the eyes of the US government [was that he] challenged its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that information."
While at a conference of hackers held in Eremo, Italy, in 2008, Swartz was one of a group of activists who wrote what became known as the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Running to just 600 words, it begins: "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." It ends with this exhortation: "There is no justice in following unjust laws ... We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world."
Swartz was putting this manifesto into practice when he hacked into JSTOR in 2010. First, he created a script to download JSTOR documents, then he hardwired his new laptop into the MIT network from a closet in a building on the Boston campus. Using a fake profile, he programmed the laptop to suck in a motherload of information over a period of months.
Swartz dodged efforts by MIT's cyber security team to shut him down while he downloaded almost 5 million documents, nearly the entire JSTOR archive. Unknown to him, however, the campus cyber sleuths were able to locate the laptop and to train a surveillance camera on the closet to record his comings and goings.
He was arrested on January 6, 2011, after abandoning his bicycle and attempting to escape on foot in a street near the Harvard University campus in Cambridge. Later, when Aaron and his father Robert went to collect the abandoned bicycle from the MIT campus police, an officer told them he was keeping Aaron's USB drive. "It's all in the hands of the Secret Service now," he told them. Robert can't now remember which of them asked, as they walked away, "What's the Secret Service involved for?"
This wasn't Aaron Swartz's first such caper. In 2006, Swartz had got his hands on the Library of Congress's bibliographic dataset, access to which ordinarily required payment of a fee. Swartz made it available free on his OpenLibrary and got away with it - because, as a government-owned document, the dataset was without copyright.
By 2008, the year in which he helped write the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, he'd become more daring. Exploiting a government trial that allowed limited online access to court documents, he moved almost 3 million of them from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records website to offer them free outside the usual costly and cumbersome system of access. The FBI opened an investigation that went nowhere. Again, these were public documents without copyright.
Swartz might have thought he was nipping through a similar loophole with the JSTOR material. The MIT network was open to all on campus, so he wasn't hacking the system. And as a research fellow at nearby Harvard, where he was studying political corruption, he had legitimate access to JSTOR, which charges institutions such as MIT as much as $50,000 a year for access. Further, there was no real complainant. As soon as the data was returned to JSTOR, the archive's management refused to co-operate with authorities.
It has never been clear what Swartz planned to do with the JSTOR files. Had he made the download just to make a point? It is almost certain, given his ideology, that he didn't intend to personally profit from it. The initial reaction of Massachusetts state prosecutors suggested that here was a stunt in keeping with a colourful history of student pranks at MIT. They were examining the possibility of a simple breaking-and-entering charge when they were elbowed aside by their federal counterparts.
This time, the Feds ignored the copyright issue. Instead, they went for Swartz under a much-criticised 1980s statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), alleging he had accessed a "protected computer" and had done so "without authorisation". Despite the "victimless" nature of the case, Washington's chief prosecutor in Boston, Carmen Ortiz, defended the severity of the charges. "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars," she declared. "It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."
Initially, Swartz was indicted on four charges: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging the protected computer. He could have gone down for 35 years and been fined $US1 million but, despite the seriousness implied in all that, prosecutors were set to bargain it away to just six months in jail - if he would plead guilty.
Swartz was horrified. Jail would be awful enough, but he couldn't countenance having the career-destroying term "convicted felon" permanently attached to his résumé. When he baulked in the negotiations, the prosecutors doubled down, belting him with another raft of charges under which he would face 50 years inside.
The bulk of these charges were under the CFAA, a law so badly written that in 2012, Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court ridiculed prosecutors in a similar case: "Under the government's proposed interpretation of the CFAA ... describing yourself as 'tall, dark and handsome' [on a dating website] when you're actually short and homely will earn you [jail time]." In an era of hacker threats to corporate and government websites and mainframes, it seemed Federal authorities wanted to make an example of Swartz.
"Aaron did not commit suicide, he was killed by the government," his father said at the time of his death. When I meet him in Chicago, he elaborates: "The response of the prosecutors was totally out of proportion compared to what he had done."
He characterises the prosecution as "cruel, vindictive, sadistic" and later ticks off the names of the key characters in the drama - Carmen Ortiz, US Attorney General Eric Holder and MIT president Rafael Reif. "They all say they acted appropriately; none has said they made a mistake."
The opposing reactions of the two revered academic institutions involved was also vexing for the Swartz family. Why would MIT sit on its hands, seemingly happy to leave Swartz to the mercy of prosecutors determined to make an example of him, when JSTOR was determined to make it known it did not want to see him in the dock?
The stark contrast between the two performances was on public view two days before Swartz died, when JSTOR announced that all the files he had downloaded would become available free over the internet. Forty-eight hours later, the archive's management acknowledged Swartz as "a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit".
Describing the JSTOR download as "like a pie in the face" - by which he meant annoying for the victim but of no lasting consequence - Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu invoked the names of "two other eccentric geniuses": Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. "In the 1970s, [they] committed crimes similar to, but more economically damaging than, Swartz's," he wrote. "Those two men hacked AT&T's telephone system to make free long-distance calls and actually sold the illegal devices [to others] to make money ... Jobs and Wozniak were never prosecuted [and] instead got bored ... and built a computer. The great ones always operate at the edge."
In january 2013, Swartz was excited about the future of the web as a campaign tool - and what organisations such as his Demand Progress and Australia's GetUp! might achieve. Invigorated by the success of the campaign to derail the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), he wanted to map out a new age of citizen power. He warned in his SOPA victory speech: "It will happen again. Sure, it will have another name, and maybe another excuse, and it will do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: the enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared."
In his attic meeting with McLean during the OPEN summit at Holmes, Swartz had sketched the contours of a new order, in which he envisaged corporate power being severely weakened and political parties replaced by internet-based people power. In contrast to efforts by activists such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who sought to reduce state power that derived from secrecy, Swartz's objective was to build citizen power to counter that of governments and corporations. He revealed a grand design by which he envisaged artificial intelligence making activists such as himself and McLean redundant.
"He knew it had to be big enough to combat that kind of [corporate] power," McLean recalls. "The idea was Fordian, as in mass production. Being able to automate or to build computer intelligence around numbers of increasing scale and power. He was working on an intelligent logarithm - artificial intelligence - to devolve leadership to lower organisational levels.
"His argument was that we'll have to fight more SOPA-style campaigns. So we need an algorithm or computer program that would encourage lots of people to identify the fights and to start the campaigns. We'd put the tools that we have at our disposal in their hands."
The following evening, Thursday, January 10, Swartz was one of a small group at Spitzer's Corner, a bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The technologist and blogger Andy Baio, 36, reported seeing a seemingly happy Swartz who was "deep in conversation, smiling and chatting".
"denial is a wonderful thing, but it wears off," Robert Swartz tells me. "I can distract myself and make it seem like it didn't happen but, as time goes by, reality becomes more strange."
He dwells on his son's pain: "I miss Aaron terribly. It was incredibly hard on him. He was devastated and it made him sick. You could see the stress he was under." In sidestepping the drudgery of school and college, is it possible Aaron missed an opportunity to acquire skin that might have served as an extra layer of protection in life? Was he less resilient for having missed these rites of passage? "This may have happened," Robert allows.
Stinebrickner-Kauffman, now the founder and director of SumOfUs, a San Francisco-based corporate and government watchdog group, declined to be interviewed for this story, but told The Guardian last year, "I think I understand how it happened, [but] the biggest problem with the decision is that it's permanent. Other dumb decisions, you can usually recover from."
I ask Sam McLean if there was an inflexibility in Swartz's temperament, by which he couldn't face doing what he didn't want to do, and McLean tweaks the construct: it was more about Swartz not being able to do what he so wanted to do. "Perhaps his excitement and suicide were sides of the same coin - every goal he believed he could and must achieve was also something he might not be able to achieve," he ventures. "It was a sword of Damocles. He knew all of his plans could be kyboshed by a ridiculous law and a petty prosecutor."
What is it like now on the activist ramparts without his friend? "It's scary without Aaron," says McLean. "We relied on him to be brilliant."
Lifeline: 13 11 14.
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Paul McGeough is chief foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald.


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I know there are people out there who are as lean as they want to be, but I believe that the vast majority of individuals who are exercising (and especially those who aren't) would be happy to be to lose a few pounds of body fat.
I've decided to drop roughly 10 pounds of fat over the next four to five weeks and I thought it might help others if I share the experience.
My life revolves around fitness, both personally and professionally, and it's important for me to stay fit and healthy. For my own peace of mind, and credibility with my clients, this includes maintaining a healthy body composition.
Most of the time I carry a relatively low level of body fat. I'm not what I would consider "ripped" all the time, but I feel the amount of fat on my body is acceptable and healthy.
Sometimes, however, there's a need to modify my training plan and drop some extra weight. This is one of those times.
In early July I'm committed to a magazine photo shoot where I'll be demonstrating one of my signature conditioning exercises. To me, this is a great reason to shake things up a bit and get as lean as possible in the time available.
I want to do this in a safe and sustainable manner, so I'm not going to be fasting or cleansing or anything too extreme. I just plan to drop two or three pounds of fat each week before the shoot, which I know is very achievable for me.
As I plan my month, there are a number of key factors that will help me to be successful, and I feel that this information will help many of you.
Ultimately it would be great to hear from hundreds of readers that they too have dropped five or 10 pounds by working along with me.
To be sure you stay safe and healthy, always get medical approval before beginning or modifying a fitness program.
This principle is critical to my fat-burning success. There are many different eating strategies for fat loss, but I know what works for me.
I'll be diligent about eating all of my daily food in five or six small meals, evenly spaced about three to four hours apart, with no snacks in between. I'll start as soon as I get up in the morning, and have the last meal just before bed. Every meal will contain some protein, so I make sure to maintain my muscle mass.
I'll increase my intake of vegetables, avoid empty calories such as simple carbohydrates and alcohol, and target roughly 2,000 calories per day.
Personally, because of my busy schedule and activity level, I'll use a variety of quality supplements to achieve optimal nutrition.
I lose the most body fat when I hit the gym hard.
Resistance training with high intensity helps me to stimulate and maintain my muscle mass even when I'm in a negative caloric balance and my body is losing weight.
Even if you don't have access to a gym you can do this with body-weight exercises.
I also burn a lot of calories when I'm strength training, which is great for fat loss.
Although cardio training isn't something that I find stimulating, there's no doubt that the extra caloric expenditure and the cardiovascular benefits of endurance exercise are important.
Over the next month I'll be adding regular cardio workouts to my plan, which will include running, cycling and hiking the Grouse Grind.
As much as possible I'll do these cardio sessions first thing in the morning, before I have my breakfast, to maximize the utilization of fat as the primary fuel source. My goal will be 40-60 minutes, three times per week.
Another important consideration when I'm trying to reduce my body fat levels is always to consider what's happening with my metabolism. The more calories my body burns during exercise and at rest, the better.
This is why I want to make sure I'm constantly stimulating and elevating my metabolism by eating and training more frequently, consuming plenty of liquids and getting enough sleep to maximize my post-workout recovery.
There are always going to be challenges and obstacles to achieving your goals. The key is commitment and resilience.
The small achievements, like avoiding that dessert, or pushing yourself to exercise even when it's raining, will add up to big rewards.
As much as possible, try to establish a support system to help you through these challenges. Make commitments to yourself and to others that will help keep you motivated and on track.
Right now I have a few clients who are also focused on losing fat, and we're working together for our shared success.
Rob Williams is a kinesiologist and posture specialist in downtown Vancouver.


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Institute Strengthens Education Ties between NZ and India
Victoria University is heading up a new organisation to deepen educational ties between New Zealand and India.
The New Zealand India Research Institute, based at Victoria and directed by Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, an authority on Indian history and development, involves nearly 40 academics in five New Zealand universities?Victoria, Auckland, Massey, Canterbury and Otago.
It is modelled on the highly successful New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre, also based at Victoria, which carries out a wide range of initiatives and promotes research to ensure New Zealand engages effectively with China.
?Because of New Zealand?s size, no university has a large number of academics working on research related to India. By coming together in a national centre of Indian studies, we can have an impact both in terms of the research we carry out and in our engagement with academics in India,? says Professor Bandyopadhyay.
He says the Institute will carry out research on Indian diaspora in New Zealand and also leverage the knowledge of Indian expatriates in New Zealand.
The Institute is one of a number of initiatives under the umbrella of the India-New Zealand Education Council (INZEC) which is co-chaired by New Zealand?s Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment Minister Hon Steven Joyce and India?s Minister of Human Resources Development.
The Council has a jointly funded budget of $1 million and was set up last year to drive greater cooperation in education between New Zealand and India.
The Institute will focus on five areas ? society and culture, migration, economics and business, environmental sustainability and politics and security.
In addition to promoting research on India and New Zealand-India relations, it will encourage postgraduate studies on India in New Zealand universities and facilitate academic exchanges between India scholars in New Zealand, India and other parts of the world.
A key benefit for New Zealand, says Professor Bandyopadhyay, will be greater visibility of its education capability in India.
?There is significant potential for more engagement in the education field, both in terms of Indian students coming to New Zealand to study and carry out research, and for our India scholars to be involved in research projects with colleagues in India.?
For India, he says, there is the opportunity to work with universities in New Zealand that are ranked in the top 500 in the world.
The Institute has already signed a Memorandum of Understanding with India?s top university?Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi?and is negotiating an MOU with another leading university, the University of Hyderabad.
It is planning to hold two conferences in New Zealand next year for academics from New Zealand and India as well as a joint Indo-New Zealand conference in India.
In addition to its research role, says Professor Bandyopadhyay, the Institute is well placed to be a leader in other activities of INZEC.
?The Institute has the expertise to manage and promote higher education and research activity between the two countries.
?India is a major education market for New Zealand. The Institute can help to realise the significant potential that exists.?


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Some people regard black magic as a misuse of spiritual energy. Some define it as any act that interferes with another person's free will and believe that no witchcraft, even healing, should be conducted without the permission of the subject. Some modern ceremonial magicians call it "the left hand path." Some warn that it is karmically dangerous to the spell caster.
But, none of this is really relevant in traditional witchcraft. In fact, the purpose of most of traditional witchcraft is to affect the outer environment and those around us and what is commonly called black magic is only an integral part of witchcraft, itself.
The definition of "black magic" used by Winter Tempest Books authors is that it is simply malefic witchcraft, meaning it is witchcraft used for the purpose of causing harm or injury to another. Moral judgments and ethical considerations are withheld and reserved for the individual, who is the only person fit to judge his or her own particular situation. Moreover, we always advocate that, for your protection, such witchcraft should be done secretly and without violating the laws of whatever state, country or other legal jurisdiction you live in.
Some members of modern witchcraft religion state that no "real witch" would use black magic. But, if this were true, why is that that most of the documentation of witchcraft in Western Europe, New England and around the world is full to the brim with instances of curses and demonic visitations? Obviously, this assertion doesn't hold water.
The dominant class of popular, modern religious witches often warn against the use of black magic because of a fear of it "recoiling" on the one who cast the spell. They have various names for this, such as the "Law of Returns," and the "Three-fold Law," and it appears that this modern dogma evolved from the Hindu concept of Karma.
The Doctrine of Karma
The ancient Hindu religious principle of Karma is similar to, but, also, differs from the modern New Age concept, which is described below. In Hinduism, which includes a belief in reincarnation, karma occurs after death and it determines the soul's path in its next incarnation. Both this life and the next incarnation could be affected by your past deeds. At the core of the doctrine is the concept of cause and effect, the idea that your actions in this life and past ones have have effect on the present and the future. Suffering is seen as a "spiritual gift" by which a person learns and becomes stronger, so disease and other adversity is seen as part of life's lesson.
This doctrine of karma has been recycled and revamped by Western New Agers and Christianized. Then, it was adapted by Wiccans. (Read more about the Christianization of Wicca in the U.S. in a previous article, "Differences Between Traditional Witchcraft and Wicca: How Wicca Became Mainstream Modern Witchcraft.")
By contrast, in traditional witchcraft, suffering is not regarded as a spiritual gift. People do not need to learn cosmic lessons by disease, injury, violence, etc. There is no God or system that judges and rewards or punishes.
A danger of this kind of thinking is that it engenders the false belief other people want or deserve to suffer or that we, ourselves, deserve to suffer because of some imagined transgression in this or a past life. Crime survivors might internalize the abuses that have been perpetrated against them by others and imagine that they are somehow deserving because of some imagined bad behavior. For instance, an abused wife may be convinced that she deserves to be abused because she abused her husband in a past life – this is the kind insanity that can flourish when this notion of karma is taken to an extreme.
Karma is a religious doctrine that has no place in traditional witchcraft, which is not a religion, at all. Such thinking prevents people from looking for solutions to health issues, excuses criminal behavior and allows evil-doers to prevail.
Then, there is the negative psychological aspect of accepting this religious belief.
Click here to visit Psychic Powers and Magic Spells
Wiccan Guilt
Wiccans believe that witchcraft and, indeed, all of life is governed by their version of the law of karma. They are constantly warning people about the dangers of bad karma and bad intent.
Among Wiccans there is a common belief that the things you do now can affect completely unrelated events down the road, either for good or evil, based on the nature of the action you have taken.
Wiccan belief is that if you send out negativity, this causes more negativity in the world, which will inevitably boomerang its way back to you. But, if you send out positive energy, positive energy will come back to you. (To that I say, if you're a woman, try walking down a street in New York City beaming positive energy at everyone you encounter and see how much positive energy comes back to you. A word of warning: Don't try this without years of martial arts training.)
This concept of karma within Wicca can become absurd, leading to Wiccan guilt, which is a lot like Christian guilt. Neither are mentally healthy. The New Age belief in past lives affecting the present one is similar to the the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The Wiccan belief of being cosmically punished if you step out of line is similar to the Christian doctrine of Judgment.
Many Wiccans and New Agers swear this Westernized karmic dogma is true. This is because religious people often have a confirmation bias – if they believe a doctrine, they will look for proof of it where none exists.
For example, a Wiccan who gives a sum of money to charity, then experiences some kindness from a stranger in the next day or two might attribute the kind behavior of the stranger to having made a charitable contribution, when in fact, it was just an encounter with a kindly stranger and nothing more. If the same Wiccan had knocked down an old lady and stolen her grocery money the day before instead, he or she would still have experienced an encounter with a kindly stranger the next day. There is no cause and effect in this situation because there is no cosmic overseer judging and punishing your every move. This is simply a religious belief similar to those held by Hindus and Christians.
To further illustrate, if you think a bad thought about someone and then trip over a piece of loose carpeting and stub your toe, this injury is not a result of your "transgression." Or, if you fail to adequately tip a waiter and a month later your house is foreclosed on, it is not reasonable to say this is because of a karmic law.
Wiccan guilt comes in when you do good, but good does not return to you – then, you may feel you have not been good enough. If some accident befalls you, a loved one dies or you become the victim of a violent crime, you may be encouraged to believe that this was because of some wrong action or thought vibration on your part. Karma-based beliefs engender a remarkable degree of self-blaming, victim-blaming and criminal enabling.
Letting Go of Harmful Beliefs
The doctrine of karma is simply a religious belief, the key word being "belief." Such cultural and religious conditioning is a form of mind control.
Holding onto such unfounded beliefs is ultimately destructive. It leads to a state of being in which the person constantly fears they are doing something wrong. To let go of this programming, you only have to allow your rational mind to overcome this irrational and unfounded religious belief.
If you have had the misfortune of being subjected to either Christian or Wiccan indoctrination and consequently fear stepping out of line because of imagined cosmic repercussions, you may have to do some deprogramming before you feel comfortable using black magic.
Click here to visit Psychic Powers and Magic Spells
The Power of Black Magic
Fortunately, black magic can help break the chains of religious conditioning. Traditionally, black magic rituals involving such things as the recitation of the "Our Father" prayer backwards or meeting a spirit in a cemetery or a crossroad at midnight mark a witch's passage into the world of witchcraft.
Former Wiccans who want to make a break from their religion might perform a short ritual by writing the "Rede," "The Law of Returns" or whatever other dogmatic belief on a sheet of paper and burning it in a little ceremony to break the psychological tie to this religious philosophy.
Of course, none of this is really necessary. Simply performing acts of black magic is enough to make the break.
The use of black magic is often a matter of survival. Sometimes violent crime survivors discover their ability to use it very spontaneously.
Sometimes using black magic is the right thing to do in a situation to prevent harm to yourself or someone else. Black magic can be a means of restoring justice and peace – and maintaining it.
Black magic can provide the ultimate form of protection. Once you begin practicing black magic, you will naturally require more protection, but the acquisition of this protection is part of the process of learning more about witchcraft, especially communicating with and employing spirits.
Black magic thinking has the power to release people from a sense of being victimized. It helps crime survivors regain control over their lives. If you have been through a terrible ordeal at the hands of some malefactor, black magic helps you heal, restore balance and re-establish more control over your own life.
Above all, black magic is a mindset. It is a strong self-defense mentality. It helps to undo some of the damage done to us by living in a victim-blaming society in which we are blamed for the failures and evil actions of other people. It helps to restore power and autonomy to the individual.
Get Practical Black Magic at…
Smashwords: Practical Black Magic: How to Hex and Curse Your Enemies by Sophia diGregorio
Amazon in paperback & for Kindle: Practical Black Magic: How to Hex and Curse Your Enemies by Sophia diGregorio
To obtain this and other Winter Tempest Books in paperback using cryptocurrency, please, click this link.


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B.J. Hoeptner Evans, Manager, Communications, Phone: (719) 228-6800, E-Mail: email@example.com
USAV Facebook - @USA_Volleyball
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (May 13, 2013) – The playoffs in Italy and Russia are now over, which completes the 2012-13 overseas club season for U.S. men's players competing around the world.
| Max Holt attacks for Copra Elior Piacenza earlier this season.
U.S. middle blocker Max Holt (Cincinnati, Ohio) and his Italian Serie A league team Copra Elior Piacenza put up a good fight, but fell to Itas Diatec Trentino in the deciding match of the league playoffs, 25-23, 21-25, 25-22, 19-25, 15-12 on May 12. Holt finished with 12 points on six attacks (66.7 kill percent, .667 hitting efficiency), three blocks and three aces.
The U.S. Men's National Volleyball Team will prepare for the 2013 World League with a Red vs. Blue scrimmage at 7 p.m. on May 25 at JSerra Pavilion at JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. Tickets will be $10 at the door. Only general admission seating is available.
U.S. outside hitter Matt Anderson (West Seneca, N.Y.), a 2012 Olympian, and his Russian Super League team Zenit Kazan won their league playoff for third place, defeating Guberniya Nizniy Novgorod, 2-0 in the best-of-three match series. On May 7, Kazan defeated Novgorod, 25-21, 25-20, 25-14. Anderson scored 12 points on 10 attacks (50.0 kill percent, .400 hitting efficiency) and two blocks. He was also credited with 17 receptions, 41 percent positive. On May 10, Kazan beat Novgorod, 25-23, 25-22, 25-20. Anderson again finished with 12 points. To view photos, click here.
Tickets for all three U.S. stops for the 2013 FIVB World League are now on sale. For information on how to purchase tickets, click here.
The U.S. Men's National Volleyball Team will play Argentina on June 7-8 at Charles Koch Arena in Wichita, Kan. It will play France on June 14-15 at the Tulsa Convention Center Arena in Reno Nev. It will play Bulgaria on June 28-29 at the Reno Events Center in Reno, Nev.


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That is completely self imposed, and can be addressed internally. When I worked in recruiting, 5.e. was within the CFRC CO's authority, and it was one form. It is simply a matter of delegating the correct release item to the proper authority (CBG Comd/Unit CO) or making use of one of the release items already available to them.I get that, but that is no reason to accept an inefficient and ineffective process.We will have to agree to disagree on that one. I was a Prod O and MCC for three years, conducted hundreds of interviews and thousands of files went across my desk. In my experience, criminal issues were rarely a surprise. Credit issues were more complicated, but the issues found in the reports were rarely showstoppers. An applicant might forget about their overdue fees from the library, but they aren't going to forget that they are under bankruptcy proceedings, and if they do we are completely in our rights to treat that as a breach of trust, and process as an irregular enrollment.Incorrect. PRes attractions is the responsibility of the elements. The entire CAF applicant processing capability is either organic to, or operates under the control of CFRG. If PRes applicant processing was not a CFRG responsibility, it would be resourced and manned completely differently.I would be happy to take that to the PMs. I have observed that process on both sides of the fence for more than a decade, and it has proven extremely problematic.
It appears that someone somewhere feels that the US Recruiting Model (Recruiting Stations and Processing Stations) is a suitable option for use here in Canada, so it appears that's what we are slowly moving towards.
Does a higher population density and larger military make that a more logical model for the US than perhaps it might be in Canada?
It appears that someone somewhere feels that the US Recruiting Model (Recruiting Stations and Processing Stations) is a suitable option for use here in Canada, so it appears that's what we are slowly moving towards.
Sorry, I haven't figured out how to quote a previous post. But recruiting was never, at least during the 90's, a dumping ground for the CMs. I resent the implication made, on a personal and professional level. Not just for myself but all others who were just slagged as well as all the recruits we brought in despite the tall forehead meddling and change predicated by a senior officer's visit to the States resultant in our system of today. (1 or more years to process!).
You're confounding different issues. Quotas are set by the Army, not by CFRG.
December 2, 2016 – Halifax, N.S. – National Defence / 5th Canadian Division On December 1st 36 Canadian Brigade Group (36 CBG) commenced an evaluation of the Primary Reserve Expedited Enrollment Trial (PREET) for selected Army Reserve units in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Western Newfoundland. The PREET evaluation will run from December 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017 and will utilize a modified process that aims to have applicants to the Army Reserve enrolled after two scheduled visits to the unit they seek to join. Once an applicant becomes a recruit, the remaining processing steps will take place concurrent with the initial recruit training.Improving the recruiting process is a major priority for the Canadian Army (CA). In the coming years the CA will be undertaking a series of initiatives aimed at further strengthening the Primary Reserve, including the PREET.
This will be a go all most brigades Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Does this mean they're going to allow PRes NCMs administer fitness tests again or do we still have to sit around and wait for PSP to send a representative?
Why don't we just contract out our hiring to any number of private sector businesses that find thousands of people for big employers?One example: http://gthiringsolutions.ca/
The 'pana" is a play on the Greek 'pan' meaning 'all' or 'encompassing' - not quite but similar to UBIQUEsome think I just misspelled "para" :-)
We have already devised some interleaving in the scheduling of SQ and DP1 which shortens the time required for the recruit to be employable in some capacity. Before, it would take a year and a half or more to get a recruit through BMQ, SQ and DP1 as most times the courses did not line up and the recruit had to wait a full year for the next DP1 serial.Progress is being made but we need to go beyond this.
Pentagon could easily save $125 billion over 5 years in bureaucratic waste and inefficiency The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.The 77 page report issued in January 2015, identified "a clear path" for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.US Federal Budget over TimeThe federal budget has more than doubled since 1993 from $1.96 trillion to just short of $4 trillion. This is 20% faster than inflation and the budget in 1993 was not austere.This shows that the government has been getting more bloated and wasteful over time. This is not including complete overspending and misspending.The Defense department buying the F35 for a total program cost of over $1 trillion when they acquire over 2000 planes.Aircraft carriers costing $13 billion each and submarines about $5 billion each.Spacex spending 320 times less to develop the dragon capsule compared to NASA spending on Orion. $200 billion of total spending on each of the Space Shuttle and the Space Station. The Space shuttle had 135 total launches. Heavy lift launches could have been had for at least ten times less cost.


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When we showed you the pair of men wearing suits holding signs saying "Occupy a Desk" and "Get a Job" this morning, we knew they looked familiar.
Meet financial technology entrepreneurs Derek and John Tabacco from LocateStock.com.
You might recognize Derek (pictured on left) from Patti Stanger's reality television series "Millionaire Matchmaker."
In the episode, Derek, 40, selected a "smokin' hot" girl named Colby, who was a much younger date.
For the date, he picked her up in his ridiculous party van that he calls "P2" and took her to a Yankees game. Sadly, the couple didn't work out.
His brother John is known for being extremely vocal about naked short-selling.
Check out a video of them boxing together.


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Study of High Dose Carfilzomib in Multiple Myeloma Patients Who Have Progressed On Standard Dose Carfilzomib
|The safety and scientific validity of this study is the responsibility of the study sponsor and investigators. Listing a study does not mean it has been evaluated by the U.S. Federal Government. Read our disclaimer for details.
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01775553
Recruitment Status : Completed
First Posted : January 25, 2013
Results First Posted : June 21, 2017
Last Update Posted : June 21, 2017
- Study Details
- Tabular View
- Study Results
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
|Condition or disease
|Relapse Multiple Myeloma Refractory Multiple Myeloma
|Drug: Carfilzomib
|Phase 2
This is an open label, single center, phase II study of high dose carfilzomib. Patients with relapsed or relapsed/refractory myeloma and with progression of disease on standard dosing (20/27 mg/m2) and schedule of carfilzomib will be initially treated at dose level 1, carfilzomib 20/56 mg/m2. During Cycle 1, patients will receive either 20 mg/m2 on days 1,2 (if the subject has not received carfilzomib as part another clinical trial within the last 4 weeks) or 56 mg/m2 (if the subject is enrolling in the present study after progression of disease on carfilzomib within the last month - for example subjects enrolled in CMAP compassionate use carfilzomib). Thereafter, all subjects will receive 56 mg/m2 for the remaining doses given Cycle 1 Day 8 onwards. If a minimal response or better is achieved (and therefore disease response is recaptured) a bone marrow biopsy will be repeated.
If 56 mg/m2 is not tolerated, the dose of carfilzomib will be reduced to dose level -1 i.e. 45 mg/m2. If a subject does not tolerate 45 mg/m2 then the dose would be further reduced to dose level -2 i.e. 36 mg/m2. If the subject does not tolerate 36 mg/m2, then this subject would have to come off study.
Dexamethasone 8 mg po/IV will be administered prior to all carfilzomib doses.
Once a patient develops disease progression on this study, the patient may return to receiving the maximum tolerated dose of carfilzomib by that patient with the addition of a therapeutic dosing of dexamethasone (a total of 20-40 mg weekly). An IMId (e.g. thalidomide or lenalidomide) and/or an alkylator can also be added to carfilzomib 27 or 36 mg/m2 per investigator discretion either concurrent with the addition of dexamethasone or subsequent to disease progression on carfilzomib with concurrent therapeutic dexamethasone.
|Study Type :
|Interventional (Clinical Trial)
|Actual Enrollment :
|13 participants
|Intervention Model:
|Single Group Assignment
|None (Open Label)
|Primary Purpose:
|Official Title:
|Recapturing Disease Response: A Phase II Study of High Dose Carfilzomib in Patients With Relapsed or Refractory Multiple Myeloma Who Have Progressed on Standard Dose Carfilzomib
|Study Start Date :
|September 2013
|Actual Primary Completion Date :
|May 2016
|Actual Study Completion Date :
|May 2016
Experimental: Carfilzomib
All patients will receive Carfilzomib
Drug: Carfilzomib
During Cycle 1, patients will receive either 20 mg/m2 on days 1,2 (if the subject has not received carfilzomib as part another clinical trial within the last 4 weeks) or 56 mg/m2 (if the subject is enrolling in the present study after progression of disease on carfilzomib within the last month - for example subjects enrolled in CMAP compassionate use carfilzomib). Thereafter, all subjects will receive 56 mg/m2 for the remaining doses given Cycle 1 Day 8 onwards. Each cycle is 28 days.
Other Name: High Dose Carfilzomib
- Safety and Efficacy of High Dose Carfilzomib [ Time Frame: up to 4 years ]The safety and efficacy of high dose carfilzomib who developed disease progression on the standard dosing and schedule of carfilzomib as measured by number of participants with adverse events
- Progression Free Survival (PFS) [ Time Frame: up to 4 years ]
- Overall Response Rate (ORR) [ Time Frame: up to 4 years ]Overall Response Rate defined in categories
- Duration of Response to High Dose Carfilzomib [ Time Frame: up to 4 years ]
- Markers of ER Stress [ Time Frame: up to 4 years ]The markers of ER stress signaling (both apoptotic and prosurvival) in MM cells from patients in this study and to determine if the balance of apoptotic versus prosurvival signaling changes upon recapture of response with carfilzomib dose escalation relative to the time of study entry.
Choosing to participate in a study is an important personal decision. Talk with your doctor and family members or friends about deciding to join a study. To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contacts provided below. For general information, Learn About Clinical Studies.
|Ages Eligible for Study:
|18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult)
|Sexes Eligible for Study:
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers:
Inclusion Criteria:
- Multiple myeloma
Subjects must have measurable disease, defined as one or both of the following:
- Serum M-protein ≥ 1.0 g/dL
- Urine M-protein ≥ 200 mg/24 hours
- Free light chains: Only in patients without measureable serum and urine M-protein levels: the difference between involved and uninvolved FLC levels must be at least 10 mg/dl.
- Refractory to the most recently received therapy. Refractory disease is defined as ≤ 25% response or progression during therapy or within 60 days after completion of therapy.
- Subjects must have progressed on standard dose 20/27 mg/m2 and schedule of carfilzomib without having had any carfilzomib related grade 3 or 4 toxicities.
- Subjects must have received ≥ 2 prior regimens for relapsed disease. Induction therapy and stem cell transplant will be considered as one regimen
- Subjects must have received prior treatment with bortezomib, and either thalidomide or lenalidomide
- Subjects must have received an alkylating agent unless contraindicated. Subjects may have received these agents alone or in combination with other myeloma treatments.
- Age ≥ 18 years
- Life expectancy ≥ 3 months
- Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status 0-2
- Adequate hepatic function, with serum ALT ≤ 3.5 times the upper limit of normal and serum direct bilirubin ≤ 2 mg/dL (34 µmol/L) within 14 days prior to randomization
- Uric acid, if elevated, must be corrected to within laboratory normal range prior to dosing
- Absolute neutrophil count (ANC) ≥ 1.0 × 109/L within 14 days prior to randomization independent of G-CSF for ≥ 1 week and pegylated G-CSF for ≥ 2 weeks
- Hemoglobin ≥ 8 g/dL (80 g/L) within 14 days prior to randomization (subjects may be receiving red blood cell [RBC] transfusions in accordance with institutional guidelines)
- Screening platelet count ≥ 50 × 109/L independent of platelet transfusions for at least 2 weeks
- Creatinine clearance (CrCl) ≥ 15 mL/minute within 7 days prior to randomization, either measured or calculated using a standard formula (eg, Cockcroft and Gault)
- LVEF ≥ 40% within 30 days before Cycle 1 Day 1. 2-D Transthoracic Echocardiogram (ECHO) is the preferred method of evaluation; MUGA is acceptable if ECHO is not available.
Exclusion Criteria:
- Glucocorticoid therapy (prednisone > 10 mg/day or equivalent) within the last three weeks
- POEMS syndrome (polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal protein, and skin changes)
- Chemotherapy with approved or investigative anticancer therapeutics including steroid therapy within the three weeks prior to first dose (unless enrolling on this study after progression CMAP compassionate use carfilzomib protocol, in which case subject may proceed with current study treatment on next expected date of treatment)
- Radiation therapy or immunotherapy in the previous four weeks; localized radiation therapy within 1 week prior to first dose
- Participation in an investigational therapeutic study within three weeks or within five drug half-lives (t1/2) prior to first dose, whichever time is greater (unless enrolling after progression on CMAP compassionate use carfilzomib protocol)
Concurrent Conditions
- Pregnant or lactating females
- Major surgery within 21 days prior to randomization
- Acute active infection requiring treatment (systemic antibiotics, antivirals, or antifungals) within 14 days prior to randomization
- Known human immunodeficiency virus infection
- Known active hepatitis B or C infection
- Unstable angina or myocardial infarction within 4 months prior to randomization, NYHA Class III or IV heart failure, uncontrolled angina, history of severe coronary artery disease, severe uncontrolled ventricular arrhythmias, sick sinus syndrome, or electrocardiographic evidence of acute ischemia or Grade 3 conduction system abnormalities unless subject has a pacemaker
- Uncontrolled hypertension or uncontrolled diabetes within 14 days prior to randomization
- Nonhematologic malignancy within the past 3 years with the exception of a) adequately treated basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell skin cancer, or thyroid cancer; b) carcinoma in situ of the cervix or breast; c) prostate cancer of Gleason Grade 6 or less with stable prostate-specific antigen levels; or d) cancer considered cured by surgical resection or unlikely to impact survival during the duration of the study, such as localized transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder or benign tumors of the adrenal or pancreas
- Significant neuropathy (Grades 3-4, or Grade 2 with pain) within 14 days prior to randomization
- Known history of allergy to Captisol® (a cyclodextrin derivative used to solubilize carfilzomib)
- Contraindication to any of the required concomitant drugs or supportive treatments, including antiviral drugs, or intolerance to hydration due to preexisting pulmonary or cardiac impairment
- Subjects with pleural effusions requiring thoracentesis or ascites requiring paracentesis within 14 days prior to randomization
- Any other clinically significant medical disease or condition that, in the Investigator's opinion, may interfere with protocol adherence or a subject's ability to give informed consent
To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contact information provided by the sponsor.
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier (NCT number): NCT01775553
|United States, New York
|Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
|New York, New York, United States, 10029
|Principal Investigator:
|Ajai Chari, MD
|Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
|Responsible Party:
|Ajai Chari, Associate Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|Other Study ID Numbers:
|First Posted:
|January 25, 2013 Key Record Dates
|Results First Posted:
|June 21, 2017
|Last Update Posted:
|June 21, 2017
|Last Verified:
|May 2017
Relapsed Multiple Myeloma
Refractory Multiple Myeloma
High-Dose Carfilzomib
Standard Dose Carfilzomib
Multiple Myeloma
Neoplasms, Plasma Cell
Neoplasms by Histologic Type
Hemostatic Disorders
Vascular Diseases
Cardiovascular Diseases
Blood Protein Disorders
Hematologic Diseases
Hemorrhagic Disorders
Lymphoproliferative Disorders
Immunoproliferative Disorders
Immune System Diseases


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COVID-19 Updates for CR Students, Faculty, Staff, and Community
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Back to the Professional Development home
Event date: 3/8/2018 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Export event
Reno Giovannetti will provide drop in Canvas training to faculty on Mondays and Thursdays between 9am and 10am and again from 1pm to 2pm in room LRC 104B.


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Alas, it's been a while since Stewart, or Stewie as she calls him, her 125cc Genuine Buddy scooter had gotten some exercise. So after cleanup chores were done in the garage this morning, I took Stewie out for a ride in brisk low 30s temperature. I did find its battery completely dead, apparently the key had been left in the "on" position. This is actually something very easy to do, bad design on the part of Genuine's ignition keylock supplier in my opinion. No problem though, I deployed the scoot's kick-starter and after a few kicks, was off and running.
I buzzed around the neighborhood roads, past the 1 mile mark where her high school is located where she works as the school nurse. I continued northward on Picadilly, past the open fields and subsequent neighboring housing developments until I reached the Plains Conservation Center where I posed Stewie:


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Creative Spotlight: Pete the Duck
Recently, we discovered an Adobe Ideas fan that incorporates the app into his creative workflow to publish an entertaining web comic series. This fan, who prefers to go by an alias of one of his creations – "pete the duck" – uses the Touch Apps throughout his comic creation process.
We caught up with him to better understand his creative process and learn how Adobe Ideas plays a role in his comic-creation development. See his responses in the full Q&A below, and check out our new Twitter background featuring his work.
Creative Layer: When were you first introduced to Adobe Touch Apps? What was your very first creation?
pete the duck: Last Fall, I was directed to Adobe Ideas after searching online reviews of the best drawing apps for the iPad. Since then, I've tried other drawing applications, including some that even cost more than Adobe Ideas, but none have had the quality and ease of use of Adobe Ideas. I primarily have used Adobe Ideas to create comics based around the Halo video game franchise that feature a character of my own creation, pete the duck.
How have the Adobe Touch Apps change your creative workflow?
In short, Adobe Ideas has made my creative workflow possible. I would not be creating the work that I create without this tool.
Where's your favorite location to create? Outside? Inside? On the go?
As my work is very casual, I enjoy a casual environment to draw in. I create most of my art while relaxing on my couch.
What time of day do you find yourself creating with Adobe Touch Apps? Morning? Afternoon? Night?
I use it throughout the day. It's easy to pick up Adobe Ideas and sketch an idea in the morning and then come back and compete it in the afternoon or evening.
How much of a difference has direct touch input made to your creations?
Although I am not a professional artist, I have always had an interest in drawing. Several years ago, I purchased an art tablet and professional graphics program for my computer. I used them for months, but I could never overcome the disconnect that occurs when you draw on a tablet while the image appears not where you are drawing, but on a monitor several inches away. I have always been better with paper and pencil, where there is no disconnect and you have a precise and tangible connection with your drawing as you create it. I resorted to drawing in pencil, scanning the image, and attempting to enhance and color the image digitally–often with poor results. Adobe Ideas has let me retain that real connection with my work that you get from paper and pencil while gaining all of the quality advantages of fully digital drawing.
Of the different Touch Apps, which is most instrumental to your creative process and why?
The only Adobe Touch App that I use is Adobe Ideas – but it is a powerful drawing App and is the only tool that I need to express my creativity!
If you had the opportunity to travel to anywhere in the world with your Touch Apps, where would it be and why?
I would love to visit Japan and use Adobe Ideas in studying their calligraphy.
What are the top three sources you look to for inspiration?
I have always had an interest in art in general and I especially enjoy natural landscapes and skies. I am a fan of science fiction, which is a great source of inspiration as well. I also have a one-year old daughter who has given me much lighthearted inspiration that I can't resist instilling in my work.


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INSIDER MKII active loudspeakers are completely Digital, from the first stage of pre-amplification to the power amplifier – it's a complete digital domain.
Elevated performance in quality and power
Real power and signal management of power which is adaptable for any use
Oongoing reliability
Directly from audio engineers and the entertainment business, a series of "daily-use" tools help characterize these professional loudspeakers.
There's a powerful 12-band Anti-Feedback system to handle emergency situations. A series of processing blocks constantly analyze the vital parameters of the system, guarding against possible anomalies and intervening to protect the circuits of the electro-acoustic components.
|Power - EIAJ
|Woofer Amplifier
|Tweeter Amplifier
|Frequency response
|Input Sensitivity
|Max SPL (Medium value calculated)
|Active Protective Circuitry
|Thermal, overload, short circuit
|Subsonic Filter
|Nominal Impedance
|input bal 15kohm
|Powercon ac input, Powercon ac out, fem. XLR input, male XLR link
|10" neodimium 2,5" VC, vented gap
|compression driver 1,7" neodimium, aluminium VC, Polymide diaphragm
|Dispersion Angle
|100° > 50° Hx45° with asimmetrical rotable horn
|Crossover Frequency
|High frequency protection
|Metal Stand Pole Mount
|1 bottom side
|Dimensions (WxHxD)
|mm 351 x 494 x 347 - 13.81" x 19.44" x 13.66"
|Colours / Finishes
|Black painted
|Kg 16 / Lbs 35,27
|Nominal Diameter
|PC Control
VERSE D:SIDER and Insider MK II speaker series are constructed with the highest quality materials and care.
The Cabinets are made with 15/18 mm. birch plywood finished with a special anti-scratch coating which is highly impact-resistant.
Skilled carpenters have realized a design which is super functional and highly durable. The wooden structure of the D: SIDER uses a series of metal angles for the internal frame reinforcement making the satellites practically indestructible.
The durable front grill has been engineered to provide excellent protection while allowing maximum sound dispersion.
VERSE speakers can be combined in many different configurations, allowing you and your art to grow and adapt over time.
Practical, lightweight, ergonomic, powerful.. these are VERSE speakers.
Control panel INSIDER MKII
INSIDER MKII's control pannel in addition to the audio connections has also RS485 sockets for connection to a computer.
You have the following controls:
- Dynamic Loudness On /Off (compensation psychoacoustic perception of low and high frequencies).
- High Pass Filter On/ Off (Changing the cut frequencies for the use of the speaker associated with a Sub)
You have the following displays:
- Power On (Displays the operating status of the device)
- Protection (indicates the operation of the protective device)
- Temperature (Indicates the entry into operation of the thermal protection)
- Limiter High (indicates the signal limiting of the acute part)
- Limiter Low (indicates the signal limiting of the low part)
- Signal On (Indicates the presence of a music signal)
D: SIDER and INSIDER MKII are equipped with Powersoft Class-D amplifiers. These are very high-performance amplifiers with advanced switching technology, including automatic fan-on when exceeding a predetermined temperature threshold. The preamp stage is digital with x-over filters, equalization, low frequency signal protection (low-cut filter), multiband limiter (with protection functions and anti-clipping). There are also special features such as anti-feedback and dynamic loudness.
The loudspeakers used on VERSE speakers are supplied by B & C, one of the most prestigious speaker makers in the industry. VERSE speakers have been specifically customized and optimized by B & C's proprietary "Finite Element Analysis (FEA)" software. This guarantees the utmost durability, efficiency, quality, and uncompromising sound. VERSE woofers are neodymium, making them much lighter but with exceptional performance in terms of power handling, low distortion and sensitivity (SPL).
All VERSE loudspeakers have the following features:
- increased sensitivity
- increased power handling capacity
- increased excursion capabilities
- lower distortion levels
VERSE D:SIDER and INSIDER MKII speakers have been designed for easy transport and quick set-up.
The speakers are equipped with comfortable and convenient side handles moulded into the chassis – making it easy to grab and move.
Hang Points
The permanent installation of D: SIDER is easily accomplished using the fly bar (optional), with a regular secure anchor, which allows a lot of flexibility and a quick and secure position in fixed installations.
Support for speaker stand
Each satellite is equipped with a sturdy metal support for speaker stands – which can also be used to attach to it's own subwoofer.