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At 10:20 on a Wednesday morning, the only real talk-radio station in Houston is doing what any good talk-radio station should be doing: delving into a burning local controversy.
In this instance, it's yet another cop shooting -- the killing of a man outside a local hospital. Coming in the wake of a protest-igniting jury decision that saw a white ex-cop receive only probation for murdering his black neighbor, the latest incident is ripe for discussing the issues of race and violence and police behavior.
On KPRC-AM, though, they're talking with the police officer's pastor.
"I want you to know that this [officer] came to my church a few years ago and he fell to his knees, and when he came up he was a different man," says Pastor Bill Livingood.
He also offers a detailed explanation of the Bible's view on shooting people. "The Bible says, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but that is the King James Version; the ancient Hebrew actually translates as 'Thou shalt not premeditatedly kill someone,' " the pastor explains to host Dan Patrick, who also runs the station.
Just two days before, KPRC, 950 on your AM dial, had been ablaze, like every other talk-radio station across the country, with talk about Hillary Clinton's interview about her husband's infidelities. Afternoon host Mike Richards scorned the First Lady's comments, saying she is absolving him of responsibility for his actions and, like all Democrats, painting people as victims.
"There is another way, and it's not victimhood. It's God," intones Richards, a former state senator.
KPRC is not a Christian station, one of those weak-signaled outlets with shouting preachers and treacly hymns. It's the second-largest AM station in town, second only to all-news KTRH, and it's the city's highest-rated AM station from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. And when it comes to political talk, KPRC is effectively the only outlet in the fourth-largest city in the country.
It's not unusual, given the tendencies of talk radio and Houston's generally conservative outlook, that the station is a hotbed for those who think Democrats are evil and Republicans are saints. What is surprising, though, is a trend that has become much more pronounced over the past two years: At KPRC, God is in the house and on the air.
The usual partisan back-and-forth on the station's local shows has become more and more colored with religion. The Bible is quoted time and again by callers and hosts, as support for everything from banning abortions to tax cuts to the never-ending Clinton-bashing. There's an occasional God Squad segment where a Muslim, a rabbi and a priest talk about why they think they're going to heaven and the others are going to hell.
These days, if you want to talk about local or statewide political issues on the radio in Houston, you better be prepared to talk about religion, too.
"Of all the large secular stations in the country, we probably have more religious content than anyone," says station manager Dan Patrick.
But, he says, "This isn't a church, and this isn't a Christian station. It's a secular station with Christian overtones."
Some wonder, though, if the only bastion of local political discussion isn't being hijacked by the religious right.
For years, political talk-radio here and across the country avoided religion as a topic. Hosts would reach for the kill button as soon as a caller started in on God. Even today, the most famous conservative talk-show hosts shy away from the subject.
"Generally when you get into a Bible-quoting contest on the air, it's not a good idea. It gets old very quickly," says a former KPRC insider.
Rather than shunning God, though, KPRC is embracing him. And for that, blame or credit goes to Patrick, the station manager who first hit Houston as the wacky sportscaster who painted himself in Oilers colors on the air, then went broke in the sports-bar business, and then became rich after he took a tiny radio station deep in the woods of Tomball and parlayed it into a local radio empire.
According to Patrick, his improbable rise can be traced to two things: a call from God, who turns out to be a shrewd businessman, and a call from a then-obscure guy looking to syndicate a talk show, who went by the odd name of Rush Limbaugh.
Patrick says his station is having "a profound impact" both on the bottom line of the media giant that bought it from him four years ago, and on the lives of his listeners.
"I don't take any credit for that," he says. "That is God. It's clear to me that's what God wanted to happen with this radio station. It's clear to me that in this country today, [a country] that you might argue is becoming more immoral and a lost nation, that in the fourth-largest city in the United States of America, God said, 'I'm going to take a radio station and I'm going to use it to reach people in that community.' I believe that."
Such talk seems improbable for anyone who remembers the 49-year-old Patrick from his first days in Houston 20 years ago.
As the lead sportscaster at KHOU-TV during the height of the city's "Luv Ya Blue" passion for the Oilers, Patrick specialized in inane antics: wearing huge foam cowboy hats, painting himself Columbia Blue, taking part in any silly stunt that might get attention.
He opened a sports bar in Rice Village. He made outrageous comments. He was the toast of the town, or at least that portion of the town that appreciated idiotic gimmicks.
He was also, he says, leaving the station in between the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. broadcasts each Wednesday night to attend services at the First Baptist Church.
Raised in Baltimore by a not-terribly-religious family, Patrick says he found something in the preaching by Pastor John Bisagno that he hadn't heard before.
"Church to me had been more pomp and circumstance.When I heard some of the Baptist preachers, I thought for the first time I was hearing someone speak to me about what was going on in my life," he says.
He considered quitting television to become a minister, but Bisagno warned him of the financial and personal sacrifices such a decision would create.
"He told me, 'Even if you are willing to make that sacrifice, we don't need more preachers; we need more Christians in the workplace; we need Christian politicians and business people and doctors and lawyers and broadcasters,' " Patrick says.
For all of his burning, though, Patrick's fervor started to ebb. "Preachers will tell you that's not unusual," he says. "I just became kind of a part-time Christian."
He also became a full-time bar owner, and not a very good one. KHOU had been purchased in 1984 by the Belo Corporation, owners of the staid Dallas Morning News. Unsure how receptive the new bosses would be to his flamboyant style, Patrick pushed for a long-term commitment as his contract came up for renewal.
The station manager refused to commit, and Patrick was out of television when his contract expired soon after.
He concentrated on Dan & Nick's Sports Bar in the Village, but he wasn't making much of a go of it. He had declared bankruptcy in 1986 and was struggling to reorganize and keep the place afloat in Houston's tanking oil-bust economy.
His first step on the path to radio Godliness came from a discussion held in the big toe of a foot-shaped swimming pool owned by a Tomball podiatrist.
The podiatrist had raised money from patients and friends and had purchased KTVT, a radio station in Tomball that broadcast from 700 AM on the dial. The station mostly aired big-band music, but the owners wanted Patrick to host a sports talk show from his bar.
A month after he took to the air in June 1987, Patrick says, he called the station to set up that day's show and no one answered. He soon discovered the station was deeply in debt to the IRS and a bank was seeking to repossess it.
Frantic investors "looked at me like a savior because they didn't know anything about radio, and I had been on radio and TV," he says. He convinced the investors and the podiatrist to drop lawsuits they had filed against each other, and the Federal Communications Commission appointed him to head the station, renamed KSEV, in a receivership status in August 1988.
A few months later, through a patron of the bar, Patrick came up with $1 million from a varied group of investors and purchased the station. The plan was to apply for a boost in signal power from the FCC and then sell the improved asset.
While trying to implement that strategy, they played syndicated programming from the Business Radio Network, Patrick did his sports show, and the station languished in obscurity, hardly able to be picked up at night, a seemingly amateurish operation headed by someone who appeared to have made an astoundingly bad career move by leaving his television gig.
All that changed early in 1989 when he got a phone call from a guy named Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh was trying to sell his radio show, without much success. Political talk radio was anathema to programmers at the time; they were certain they'd simply be pissing off half their listeners, who would move on down the dial.
In Houston, KPRC's talk lineup was dominated by Alvin Van Black, whose listeners called in about poor garbage service or how there's nothing good on TV, and TV weatherman Doug Johnson, who spent much of the day rhapsodizing about country biscuits or sea cruises he was hosting.
Limbaugh was offering his show to stations, who would let him sell some of the ad time each hour. No one was interested.
"What Rush was reduced to in those early days was contacting any [station] that was near a big city and getting on the air," Patrick says. "Tomball was near a big city. So I listened to the show and I liked it.I thought this guy was going to attract attention and it wouldn't cost me anything and I wouldn't have the boring Business Radio Network on all day."
Within six months, the tiny Tomball station was outdrawing its Houston rivals during Limbaugh's 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. time slot. "It was astonishing because we had no money to promote it, no billboards, no newspaper [ads]; no one had ever heard of our station."
Limbaugh's phenomenal popularity, duplicated all across the country, put an end to the plans of Patrick and his partners to sell the station.
Rush, he says, changed their whole game plan. We said, 'Gee, we can compete with these guys.' "
They moved the studio to Houston and hired recently out-of-work names such as former Oilers coach Bum Phillips, former Astros announcer Gene Elston and Ed Brandon, the Channel 13 weatherman who had lost his job in a drug scandal.
(One programming possibility never considered was the syndicated Howard Stern shock-jock show. "For my money, he shouldn't even be allowed on the air," Patrick says.)
The station rode the Rush juggernaut for all it was worth, but by 1992 that limit seemingly was reached.
"KSEV had a good day signal, but a bad night signal," Patrick says. "We had gone about as far as we could go. We were like a really good racecar driver in a car that just couldn't keep up with the pacesetters at the Indy 500. So I needed a better station."
Patrick's luck continued to improve. In 1992, the FCC changed its rules to allow a single entity to own more than one AM station in a market. That same year, the Hobby family decided to sell KPRC.
A representative of the family contacted Patrick. "The family didn't want to sell it to someone from out of town, and they didn't want KTRH to buy it because that would create too much of a monopoly," Patrick says. "And had KTRH bought it, we would've been just wiped out because it would have been two powerhouses and they would eventually have convinced Rush to change stations, and we would have been back to selling corn in Tomball."
Finding financing wasn't easy -- 43 banks turned them down. "The last year KPRC was owned by the Hobbys it lost $1.5 million, and my little business had just barely started turning a profit," he says.
Patrick and his investors, calling themselves Sunbelt Broadcasting, purchased the station for a reported $3.5 million in October 1992.
The sale came shortly before the election of Bill Clinton, God's gift to conservative talk radio. The once-maligned format became hotter than it had ever been.
In 1995 the media giant Clear Channel Communications of San Antonio was in the midst of a huge expansion, one that would eventually see it own such major Houston FM stations as Majic 102 (KMJQ), The Boxx at 97.9 (KBXX) and The Buzz at 107.5 (KTBZ).
Clear Channel offered to purchase Sunbelt's properties for $27 million (Patrick says he is "a sweat equity partner" who received a relatively small portion of the net proceeds left after paying Sunbelt's debt and taxes). Under the deal, Patrick would run the stations, and he and his partners would keep a 20 percent stake in the operation.
"It was too good an offer not to move forward on because a radio station is no better than the programming you have, and what I had to look at seriously in 1995 was that if Rush Limbaugh had a heart attack, or decided to quit, if he decided he had all the money he needed or some TV network gave him a big offer, our ratings would suffer dramatically and our revenues would suffer dramatically," Patrick says. "A radio station is a very fragile business."
With the sale, Patrick was in the best financial shape of his life. He decided to use his station to thank the person most responsible. In his mind, that person is not Rush Limbaugh, but Jesus Christ.
"I know God had his hand in my life because the things that have happened to me and this station, no man could have accomplished," says Patrick. "There is no question in my mind that it was part of God's plan for my life and God's plan for this radio station."
The words come pouring out of Patrick when he's in his full preacher mode. Even his nonreligious acquaintances don't doubt the sincerity of his faith. He's no longer the frantic yahoo of his TV days, but getting a monologue out of him is not a problem.
Patrick says he never had a blinding road-to-Damascus moment of religious discovery; instead he just looked around at his growing commercial success and decided there was something more to it than luck or skill.
"In the early '90s I was still searching. And it occurred to me that when I looked at my life and how I'd been kind of a phoenix rising out of the ashes, that I had nothing to do with that. [I said,] 'Why are all these good things happening to me?'
"I had never gotten mad at God because of all the bad things that had happened to me, frankly because I had made some bad decisions.If we look at our life, the good things that happen to us are God-inspired and the bad things that happen in life are things that we are the reason for.When I make a business decision now, unless it is clear to me that that is what God wants me to do -- clear to me -- then I won't do it."
"Jesus the entrepreneur" may not strike some as the world's deepest theological theory, but there are probably worse things than discovering religion in a time of personal prosperity rather than crisis. Whatever the personal reasons for his being born-again, what's important from a public standpoint is how Patrick's religious beliefs began influencing whatever on-air debate is taking place in this city.
KPRC's office, in a nondescript tower in far west Houston, doesn't exude a particularly churchy feel. Producers in the booth aren't necessarily constrained -- "Oh God, what the hell happened?" one panicked when a network feed was temporarily lost recently. A sign on the booth's TV says it should "remain on Ch. 25 CNN at all times," but it's instead showing a babe-laden aerobics show from ESPN2.
A quick look at the computer screen identifying callers on hold, though, makes it clear that this isn't the gardening show on KTRH. Somehow -- Patrick later can't remember specifically how -- the subject this day has turned yet again to abortion. Dee Ann is on line one, wanting to talk about "Psalm 139 @ this issue." Kenny's on line four, ready to weigh in on "abortion done for selfish reasons."
By the time they have all said their piece, the callers have pretty much agreed, as they almost always do, that abortion is a heinous sin.
Seldom is heard a dissenting word, leading some to wonder if KPRC is just preaching to the converted. At any given quarter-hour during Patrick's show, 33,000 Houstonians are tuned in, making it the highest-rated AM show in its time slot. How many of those are tuning in simply to reinforce what they already agree with is not so easily quantified.
"They do just preach to the choir, and they have absolutely no effect on politics in this town," says one Democratic political consultant, who preferred anonymity despite professing the station's impotence. "Every once in a while if they really get on something, like the bottled-water issue, then the other media will pick it up.But if I'm thinking of political ads, I can go to a country station for the Bubba vote, and do it with listeners who have less of an extreme feel."
A Republican consultant disagrees. "They have a terrific audience, and the major personalities there all have their own following. When they are active, their personal endorsements mean a lot," says Allen Blakemore.
In the biggest political fight of KPRC's life under Patrick, the station came up short. Patrick became the poster boy for opposing the 1996 referendum to build the Astros a new baseball stadium. Patrick says the fact that the referendum barely passed is evidence of his station's influence; other observers say the vote would have been close anyway and note that Patrick failed despite giving tons of free publicity to his cause.
Patrick fights hard against any "preaching to the choir" characterization. "If we were a Christian station, yeah, but on KPRC we're not," he says. "A huge percentage of our audience believes in God, because a huge percentage of Americans believe in God. But in terms of what percentage of our audience is committed Christians, it would be larger than any other station, but it still is not going to be the majority of the audience."
Still, a Houstonian who may not be born-again, one who's curious about what the public is saying about tax hikes or the police department or gun control, may find it a little jarring to tune into the city's major talk-radio station and hear about the search for faith.
That's how God wants it, Patrick says. "I can tell you that there are callers who ask me questions on faith issues that I don't know where the answer comes from, but it seems to be the right answer," he says. "I will sit there literally while they're asking the question, and I'll say, 'Lord, I need a little help here, give me an answer.' And people will say to me after the show, 'That was a really good answer,' and I don't even know what it is I said."
Critics of the station's programming find the piousness hard to square with the venomous Clinton-bashing that KPRC's hosts revel in.
"All the while that they're professing brotherly love, they're willing to entertain any vicious rumor if it's about the right people," says one former station insider.
When rumors surfaced about Clinton fathering a crack whore's baby, morning host Jon Matthews gleefully polled listeners on whether they believed the prostitute or the president. Almost all, naturally, chose to believe the rumor. When the story fell apart soon after, Matthews and other hosts had moved on to other subjects.
"We are going to have some bad shows; we are going to have some shows we're embarrassed about," Patrick says. "So you can pick out this example or five more examples, and I'd say okay, that's five shows out of 1,500 we've done since last August."
On another recent broadcast, Patrick lapsed into a faux-Chinese accent when he thought he heard a network correspondent call Clinton, in the midst of the Chinese-espionage scandal, "President Crinton."
He talked of Clinton having an operation "to make his eyes slanted." The performance was particularly galling coming from Patrick, who landed in hot water six years ago for referring to then-CBS correspondent Connie Chung's "Eye to Eye" interview show as "Slanted Eye to Eye" for a piece it had done.
It's not hard to be taken aback at times by the near-feral tone of voice KPRC callers and hosts use in regard to Clinton. Patrick insists, however, that his product cannot be labeled "hate radio."
"I took a position when we bought KPRC to not allow viciousness on the air, to not allow hateful callers on the air, to not allow extremists and I think we do a pretty good job of following that policy," he says. "I don't think anyone can listen to this station and say there's a hateful sound."
And if Patrick has called the Clintons "pathological liars" and "Marxist-Socialists" who are determined to lead the country down the path to Communism?
"That's not hateful," he replies.
But wouldn't you hate such a person if those claims were true?
"You know, I don't hate anybody. I don't hate anybody. But those people who would do that to this country I think are very dangerous, and I don't want to see them in positions of power. But I don't hate them."
So what would be hateful?
"Hateful, a lot of it is the tone of voice. Hateful would be 'I wanna see something happen to this guy.' Hateful would be 'He's a murderer, he used to run drugs in Arkansas.' "
Claims that have been aired on KPRC more than once.
"It's all right for someone to bring that up and for that to be discussed, but it's a far different thing for a radio station to let that go on and people call in with it unchallenged."
But KPRC runs the Michael Reagan show at night, which wallows in such unchallenged claims.
"Mike Reagan -- the truth is, I don't listen to the station 24 hours a day, so I can't say."
Michael Reagan isn't the only person Patrick seeks to distance himself from. He eagerly opines that there are far-right-wingers who give Christianity a bad name. Patrick says he gets more complaints from people saying the station isn't Christian enough than from people complaining it's too religious.
"When people call in or write me a letter and say, 'Well, I'm a Christian,' I'm not so sure they really are, because they would never be that hateful to begin with," he says.
Some on the far right are too rigid, he also says. Winning political offices requires some compromises. "I don't have much patience for people in the Christian movement who would rather lose and be able to be high and mighty about where they stand on something while the country is going to hell," he says, citing as an example Gary Bauer, the GOP presidential hopeful and hard-line conservative activist. "The stridency in his campaign platform turns people off."
Governor George W. Bush, on the other hand, is someone who understands common sense.
"I think George Bush is a person of true faith. I think he is born-again, as I am and millions of people have been," Patrick says. "I think he is pro-life, but I also think he is smart enough to understand, as some pro-lifers don't understand, that the object is not to convert America.The object is to get 51 percent to vote for you."
Patrick's desire to not be broad-brushed as a Christian Right station is understandable -- advertisers might be scared off by overt proselytizing.
Talk-radio expert Michael Harrison, publisher of the Massachusetts-based Talkers trade publication, says a growing number of outlets nationwide are addressing religious issues but don't want to be tagged as church or religious-right stations.
"The trick for any radio station, with any kind of format, is to get a big enough core audience but not to cater to them so much that they don't get other listeners," he says. "You always have to piss off your core some, maybe by not doing as much of what they want as you like. That's the game you have to play."
Hosts at stations like Patrick's "sound a lot like Rush Limbaugh or Gordon Liddy or Oliver North, but they'll cite the Bible every so often." "Sometimes you can't tell if you just listen casually, and much of the radio audience is casual, so they just hear the conservatism and not the religion," Harrison says.
Patrick insists that he brings up religion simply for discussion purposes, not to propagate the word.
"I would not use this radio station as a vehicle for my Christian faith. My first responsibility as the general manager and programmer is to the shareholders of the Clear Channel company to do the best I can to have the highest ratings and the biggest revenues, make the most money. That's what my job is," he says. "I have not been shy in sharing my faith, but I don't think we're trying to convert or preach, I just think we're talking about a fascinating subject."
He says he's proud that he invites discussions of other faiths, through the God Squad show or in an hour-long discussion with Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon about Islam.
"Obviously the Christian faith is the number-one faith in our community, and because of the faith of the host, that's going to dominate," he says. "But I can't think of any other radio show in the history of this city that has had a Muslim on for a full hour to talk about his faith or for me to have the God Squad on.Forget the faith issues for a moment -- I think people are fascinated by it, and I think it's a topic worthy of discussion."
Patrick has heard no complaints from Clear Channel, for whom he says the station generates a healthy $10 million a year in revenue. (Clear Channel does not publicly break down revenue figures by station.)
"We definitely entrust our general managers with the stations, and he's clearly more in touch with his market than we are," says Kathryn Johnson, a Clear Channel vice president.
"Our revenues have never been higher, our ratings have never been higher, so talking about God on the air, and even sharing my faith from time to time, has been a positive," Patrick says.
Whether it has been a positive for the city is another question. "Good talk radio should be a little more diverse," says the former KPRC staffer. "And this town doesn't have it. And what I fear is that [KPRC] has kind of salted the ground for talk radio here, because that is the perception -- that talk radio is what they are doing. And it doesn't have to be."
Attempts to topple KPRC from its talk-radio perch have been futile, however. A "moderate" station called 97 Talk failed after a short run a year ago, both because of a weak signal and because it was on the FM side of the dial.
KTRH is seemingly content with limiting its talk shows to gardening, home repair and sports. Other stations reach too small an audience to make much of an impact.
So the talk-radio game in Houston is pretty much limited to Dan Patrick's KPRC. And as long as he's calling the shots, that game is going to be focused, to an unusual degree, on religion.
"The only people who would put us in the group of being 'too strident' are nonbelievers, people who don't want to be accountable for their lives," he says. "The reason most people don't want to hear you talk about God, or moral absolutes, is because no one really wants to look at their own life and decide to be accountable for it. And so you kind of shoot the messenger."
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There are people, of course, who think religion is a private matter, who think politics can be discussed without getting into deciding who's a sinner and who's going to hell.
Dan Patrick doesn't care about those people.
That's not why God put him here.
E-mail Richard Connelly at email@example.com.
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text: Mention Hong Kong and most people think big city shopping, skyscrapers, crowded streets and junks jostling in the harbour. Somehow surfing doesn't seem to fit into the picture, but that's because all the surf is at least an hours drive away and set in a much more peaceful rural setting. Although some reefbreaks can produce some quality waves, they require very specific conditions, so many of these remain a secret and beachbreaks are the norm in Hong Kong. It's generally agreed that GI's like Derek Bailey were the first to surf Big Wave Bay, Hong Kong in the 1960s. By the 1970s he was one of a dozen local surfers including lifeguards, but when Australian expatriate Rod Payne tried to paddle out there in 1979, he was removed from the water by police. The national government contracted Peter Drouyn in 1985 and he began giving lessons to a group of Chinese student/gymnasts in Hainan. Californians and Hawaiians followed the mainland trail and meanwhile surfing had taken root in Hong Kong, culminating in the founding of the HK Surfing Association In 1997.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
802.11n Draft 2.0 Certs Around the Corner
The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced plans for a new test bed, to be launched in late June.
The Wi-Fi Alliance will launch its certification program for 802.11n Draft 2.0 products in late June as expected. The program features a new test bed of products for interoperability testing, plus a brand new logo design for the packaging of certified products.
"The logo focuses on 11n capability and backward compatibility to a or g or both," says Karen Hanley, senior director of marketing for the Alliance. "It was a design we choose from more than 200 options, which we tested with consumers and took to the membership for approval. Everyone thought it did the best job of showing the backward compatibility element." She says for now the Alliance can't make guarantees to anyone about upgradeability to the final 11n spec, even if vendors promise the firmware. Because of that, "backwards compatibility is what we're most worried about."
The logo, as shown, includes the word "DRAFT" but that will be dropped once the 802.11n specification is ratified in 2008 and products are tested (or even retested) for the final standard.
The new test bed of products the Alliance will utilize in its seven certification labs around the globe are mostly reference designs from chip makers Atheros' Xspan, Broadcom's Intensi-Fi, Marvell's TopDog, and Ralink's MIMObility, each with a router/AP and client card. There's also a Cisco ()AP and the Intel ()Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN-- the chip powering the Wi-Fi in the new Centrop Pro/Centrino Duo laptops. All the products have been tested, as per Hanley's comments above, as interoperable with 802.11abg legacy products.
The test bed software tool is WildPackets OmniPeek Workgroup Pro.
The Alliance test will only include 40MHz channels -- an option of 802.11n to increase bandwidth -- in the 5GHz spectrum. A possibility of interference exists with 802.11b and 11g products using the 2.4GHz band. Newer 11n products (which can support both 5GHz and 2.4GHz) are expected to be a good neighbor to existing networks, so all products are expected to dummy down to 20MHz channels when legacy networks are in range. This ability to find older networks and respect them is called the " greenfield preamble."
Hanley says the labs are currently doing quality control tests with the test bed and praised the companies providing products: "It represents a big commitment by them to invest the engineering hours." It also doesn't hurt that they can market their reference designs as already Wi-Fi Certified of course, giving their OEM ( define)customers reassurance that their final products are more than likely to pass certification testing the first time around.
Starting with the 11n testing, the formerly optional Wi-Fi MultiMedia (WMM) test for Quality of Service (QoS), as specified in the 802.11e spec, is now mandatory. Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (based on 802.11i) is still mandatory. Other options that vendors can request testing of include power savings and Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), the Alliance's first standard of its own, building an ease-of-use feature on top of the WPA security.
"We expect strong uptake of [11n certification testing]," Hanley told Wi-Fi Planet. "We expect to see certified products on shelves in the summer -- in fact, the logo is available to vendors now so they can prepare their packaging. Once they're certified, they can sell in the channel."
The Alliance will have a white paper available today for both retailers selling 11n Draft 2.0 products, and consumer buying them, discussing the up and downsides of the still unratified specification.
Researchers at Telecom Trends International say the market for Wi-Fi products will reach $5.6 billion in revenue by the year 2012, with 11n adoption a major factor in the growth. 11n will offer both upgrades in speed and range over the current 802.11abg products.
Article courtesy of Wi-Fi Planet


text:
Frustrated by money problems, Winsted public works director steps down
WINSTED >> Three years of battles over funding and benefits were enough for public works director Jim Rotondo.
The longtime Winsted resident had headed up the department since 2010, but Rotondo formally submitted his resignation notice on Feb. 15. The letter to town manager Dale Martin cites the ongoing fiscal instability in town, as well as cuts to benefits and staff, as reasons for his departure.
"I have found the current climate of financial uncertainty, unrelenting divisiveness and frequent turnover in the Town Manager's office to be discouraging," wrote Rotondo in his resignation letter.
Primarily, Rotondo cited the ongoing issues with the town's budget, as well as the lack of any raises or performance reviews, in his letter. When he was hired in March 2010, Rotondo agreed to a $75,000 annual salary, and that did not change during his time with the town. Rotondo came to Winsted after five years as Warren's town engineer, and according to the resignation letter, Rotondo has found another job "that provides opportunities for personal accomplishment, professional growth and financial stability."
Rotondo didn't state what his new job will be.
"The salary and benefits provided in this new position are much more in line with my level of experience in the current marketplace," the letter continues.
Since Rotondo tendered his resignation on Feb. 15, his contract states that his last day on the job will be April 15. Martin said that Rotondo has accrued approximately 30 days of paid time off and would use those days, rather than accept a buyout, meaning that his last day in the office would be March 15.
Rotondo's recent budget presentation laid bare some of his concerns with the town's support of the public works department. During the Jan. 22 presentation to the Board of Selectmen, Rotondo noted the aging fleet of vehicles and importance of preventative maintenance. Winsted's failure to engage in the latter, Rotondo said, meant that repairs were exponentially more expensive and the costs had become prohibitive due to the lack of funds.
"My point is to say that," Rotondo said at the meeting, "if we're going to make improvements in infrastructure, we've got to completely change course. This isn't a minor tweaking. This is a major change."
When he was hired as Winsted's public works director, Rotondo noted that "I have four kids that have all grown up here in Winsted, and I'm tickled that I'm going to be working for the town." However, those warm feelings were hamstrung by economic factors, notably the lack of funds for maintenance or improvement of town infrastructure or tools. Rotondo's department was praised for its work clearing the snow during and after the blizzard earlier in February, but six trucks broke down and needed repair, while three other vehicles were damaged and repaired during the storm.
"While I enjoyed using my technical skills," Rotondo wrote, "it was often frustrating that my plans to rebuild and properly maintain infrastructure were never funded or implemented. I regret that the taxpayers of Winchester never got to see tangible results from these efforts."
Rotondo is the second town official to leave in just over one month due to fiscal matters, although he was the first to leave by choice. Financial director Henry Centrella was fired on Jan. 17 after nearly 36 years with the town after a preliminary investigation unearthed numerous issues, ranging from requests to delay paying town vendors to unauthorized fund transfers. This investigation is ongoing and is in the hands of the Connecticut State Police Major Crimes Squad.
Rotondo's departure, though, is much less acrimonious. The outgoing public works director pledged to cooperate throughout the rest of his tenure, capping his letter by thanking the town "for the trust you placed in me while I was here."
"I am proud of what I accomplished with regard to elevating the effectiveness of the department, and instilling accountability and professionalism," Rotondo wrote. "Although many improvements were made that didn't require a financial investment on the town's part, there are still enormous challenges that lay ahead."
Reach Jason Siedzik at (860) 489-3121, ext. 321 or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RCjsiedzik.


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After spending years denying that he used performance-enhancing substances during his cycling career, it only took Lance Armstrong a matter of minutes into his sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey to admit otherwise.
Winfrey kicked off the highly publicized interview, part one of two, by asking the seven-time Tour de France champ a series of yes or no questions. Armstrong, 41, admitted that yes, he used banned substances including performance-enhancing substances like testosterone, and blood-doping. His confession came three months after he was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and hours after he was also stripped of his Olympic medal.
Armstrong admitted he started using banned substances cortisone and EPO during the mid-'90s. When asked by Winfrey why he chose to admit to his usage now, he said he didn't have a good answer. "I will start my answer by saying that this is too late. Too late for probably most people, and that's my fault. I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times," he said. "I know the truth. The truth isn't what was out there. The truth isn't what I said, and now it's gone. This story was so perfect for so long."
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Armstrong found it "impossible" to live up to the "mythic perfect story" that was created and said he lost himself in the media coverage and the fans surrounding him. "All the fault and all the blame here falls on me," he said. "I certainly couldn't handle it. I was used to controlling everything. I controlled every outcome in my life."
Armstrong attributed his years-long use of banned substances partly to the entire cycling culture, which he said made it easy to dope because athletes were not tested outside of competition. Doping was simply "a question of scheduling" according to Armstrong. "I didn't invent the culture but I didn't try to stop the culture," he said. "The sport is now paying the price because of that so I am sorry for that. I don't think I didn't have access to anything else that nobody else did."
Because of this culture, at the time, Armstrong didn't feel that using the substances was wrong or bad. "I looked up the definition of cheat, and the definition of cheat is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe that they didn't have," he said. "I didn't view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field."
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Another big reason behind Armstrong's decision to use these substances was his battle with testicular cancer, for which he underwent brain and testicular surgery and extensive chemotherapy from 1996 to 1997, at which point he was declared cancer-free. He said that struggle helped him justify his cocktail of EPO, blood transfusions and testosterone. His battle with cancer also gave him a "ruthless" desire to win. "It served me well on the bike, served me well during the disease, but the level that it went to, for whatever reason, is a flaw," Armstrong said. "And then that defiance, that attitude, that arrogance, you cannot deny it."
Armstrong was speaking about his adamant denial of using banned substances over the years. When looking at an old video in which he denied such actions, he called himself "an arrogant p-----" and also said cancer turned him into a bully. "I was a bully in the sense that I tried to control the narrative, and if I didn't like what somebody said," he said, "I tried to control it and I said, 'That's a lie. They're a liar.'"
During the interview, Armstrong still denied several allegations to Winfrey. He denied using any sort of performance-enhancing substances in 2009 and 2010 when he came out of retirement and placed third and 23rd, respectively, in the Tour de France. He also denied pressuring other members of his team to use these substances when he was using. "The leader of any team leads by example. There was never a direct order," he said. "That never happened. It was a competitive time. We were all grown men. We all made our choices."
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However, he acknowledged, "I'm not the most believable guy in the world."
Looking back at his lies, as well as his defiant fight against these accusations, Armstrong said he was paying the price now and that his behavior was inexcusable. "These are people that supported me, believed in me, believed me ... and they have every right to feel betrayed," he said. "I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn back trust and apologize to people."
The second part of Armstrong's interview on Oprah's Next Chapter airs Friday at 9/8c on OWN.
What do you think of Armstrong's admission? Will you watch the second part of his interview?


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Outside the austere 1825 royal palace in Munich that serves as the world headquarters of
Löscher doesn't use the S word. He's talking mostly about more affluent parts of cities loaded with Siemens products, from electrical transformers and computer-operated trains to $100 million water-treatment systems. By definition, slums are the places that don't have a lot of the stuff Siemens makes.
But that's rapidly changing. The explosive growth of new megacities, including their outer rings of slums, favelas, barrios and shantytowns, will power Siemens' sales and earnings for the rest of this century. Mass migrations from rural to urban areas worldwide is creating unparalleled opportunity. Staggering numbers tell the tale: Already 51% of the world's 6.9 billion people--3.5 billion souls--live in cities; by 2050 demographers think it will be 70%, or 6.2 billion people. Nearly all of that growth will be in emerging markets like Asia, Africa and Latin America. By 2100, the United Nations estimates, Europe's share of the world's population will be cut in half to 6%, while Africa's will double to 25%.
The developed nations, with their massive industrial infrastructure and huge consumer markets, still account for 70% of Siemens' sales. "But when you talk about incremental growth, more than 50% of it will happen in emerging markets," Löscher says. "This is a huge, huge opportunity."
Löscher needs a huge opportunity to reach his goal of $149 billion in sales even as he discards lagging divisions like the Osram lighting unit. Buoyed by a recovering global economy, Siemens revenue should climb 8% this year to $109 billion, with earnings surging 44% to $12 billion. To help hit his higher target, Löscher recently announced a new division: Infrastructure & Cities. Already a mighty unit, with 81,000 employees and $24 billion in revenue, it will sell electrical equipment, building technology and other products aimed at urban areas.
Siemens doesn't have these markets to itself, of course. GE, with about $84 billion in industrial revenue, is a worldwide competitor; so are Sweden's
There's plenty of business to go around, however. Siemens economists estimate the world infrastructure market runs about $2.8 trillion a year, with $423 billion of that in products the company already sells. Megacities are magnets for contracts. Roland Busch, head of strategy at Siemens, says 50% of the world's GDP is generated in the 645 cities with populations above 750,000; the largest 40 cities represent 20% of global GDP. The momentum is firmly in emerging markets. While Germany has 3 cities with a population over 1 million, India has 46 and China has 160.
"There's a huge wave sweeping through Siemens, which is being led by India and China," says Armin Bruck, managing director of Siemens India in Mumbai, a city of 20 million. Instead of peddling high-priced, feature-rich German machines to customers who can't afford them, Siemens India has set up five research centers to design lower-cost products like medical scanners that can withstand Mumbai's high humidity and huge variations in line voltages.
One product to come out of the shop is an X-ray machine that sells for $15,000 plus taxes, less than half the price of an imported German model. Launched seven years ago, it's being exported to 36 countries. Indian engineers, meanwhile, have come up with a $5,000 portable X-ray unit and are working on a solar-powered one aimed at rural clinics. Lower price per unit but lots of units: Siemens India thinks such devices designed in and for emerging markets can generate $1.4 billion in orders by 2020.
Urban Outfitter: Siemens bets on explosive growth in the world's largest cities.
New Lands of Opportunity: Urban slums are better than rural poverty.
Megaslums: Salvation or Sinkhole, a Forbes conversation.
There's a critical multiplier effect. When multinationals invest in megacities--supplying infrastructure and cheaper products to deliver basic services--they create new opportunities for small entrepreneurs (see New Lands Of Opportunity").
At Bhiwandi, a textile hub 40 miles from downtown Mumbai, Arshad and Sahil Rais, a father-and-son team of doctors, run the Rais Diagnostic Center. Started in 1978 by U.S.-educated Arshad as a tiny radiology unit of 350 square feet, it's now a 10,000-square-foot clinic with a staff of 55, including 9 doctors. Workers from the nearby textile units pay $4 for an X-ray on one of two high-frequency machines Rais bought for $20,000 each. The clinic must keep the machines humming. Sahil says that in the monsoon, peak season for illness, 30 people an hour go through the scanners.
On a recent Friday morning the center was packed with patients. School dropout Hina Kausar, 19, took off her traditional burka to don a green gown and receive an X-ray for possible kidney stones. Raj Mangal, a 36-year-old power-loom weaver who earns $110 month, came for a chest X-ray. He will pay in cash, since he has no insurance.
On the other side of the globe in the densely populated favelas of Brazil a similar story unfolds: Poor residents pursue entrepreneurial dreams while relying on products from industrialized nations. São Paulo, with 20 million residents, ranks third among the world's megacities, behind Tokyo (37 million) and Delhi (22 million). Others in the top ten: Mumbai; Mexico City; New York; Shanghai; Kolkata, India; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Karachi, Pakistan.
São Paulo is a voracious consumer of electricity, railway gear, manufacturing equipment and everything else Siemens sells. Brazil's richest 5% of the population have grown wealthier with the country's economic boom, but so have its poorest citizens. In recent years at least 25 million people have moved up two or more steps from staggering poverty to the aspiring working class.
Electropaulo, partly owned by the U.S. company AES, has pushed electrical poles deep into the favelas, even though residents say much of the power is stolen by gatos ("cats"), who make dangerous illegal connections to the grid at night. That creates tension between the older favelas, where most residents are on electric meters, and newer ones that many here believe are siphoning off juice and inflating their bills.
Either way it's all business for Siemens. Seventy percent of Brazil's power flows from Siemens generators, the first of which was installed in 1894. Siemens is working with Brazil's national grid operator to install "smart grid" technology to balance the flow of the 33,000 gigawatt hours of electricity São Paulo swallows a year, much of it flowing out to the favelas.
Brazil must install 6,000 megawatts of generating capacity each year just to keep up with demand, equivalent to seven state-of-the-art gas-fired power plants. The cost of upgrading its electrical grid in time for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro has been estimated at $260 billion. That may be just a down payment. "It will take 50 years more to bring Brazil's infrastructure" up to the demands put on it, says Alaor Scardazzi, head of Siemens' power transmission unit at Jundai, a manufacturing center north of São Paulo where the company makes turbines, transformers and medical equipment.
Siemens' prospects in China, where it has 34,000 employees and $8.3 billion in sales, are even brighter. That country's electrical demand should increase by 4.5% a year through 2035 to more than 10 trillion kilowatt-hours, or almost double expected U.S. consumption by then. Electricity is emblematic of rising wealth and presages demand for many more sophisticated products--especially for ways to use energy more efficiently, to ease the burdens of growth on the country and the environment. "We have a number of projects we're working with various cities and the leadership about how we can help them design the cities to improve carbon emissions and improve energy efficiency," says Mei-Wei Cheng, president and CEO of Siemens Ltd., China. That includes smart-grid technology, energy-efficient lighting for buildings like the Water Cube, the aquatics center for the Beijing Olympics, and even a parking-management system for Shanghai's Hongqiao Airport, part of $1.5 billion in contracts related to the 2010 World Expo.
Urban Outfitter: Siemens bets on explosive growth in the world's largest cities.
New Lands of Opportunity: Urban slums are better than rural poverty.
Megaslums: Salvation or Sinkhole, a Forbes conversation.
Siemens is a top provider of high-voltage, direct-current technology. Without it utilities lose electrons delivered to big cities from far-flung generation sources like the windmills Brazil is building in its northeastern provinces and the Three Gorges Dam in China, 600 miles west of Shanghai on the Yangtze River. This year Siemens is due to complete the world's longest and highest-capacity HVDC line, stretching 1,240 miles from the Xiangjiaba Dam in southwestern China to Shanghai, a $240 million job for the company.
Next to power outages, killer commutes threaten to choke growing young cities. A Siemens-commissioned study of more than 500 city managers, municipal employees and private company executives around the world found that transportation was rated the highest priority for investment, ahead of environmental protection and even education.
China has a multitude of clogged urban centers, like the central Chinese city of Wuhan (pop. 10 million). Siemens has automated systems to help smooth traffic there and has just won a subway contract. The company was involved in two of Beijing's new subway lines built for the 2008 Olympics, is supplying 93 trains to the Shanghai Metro and expects to win similar orders across the country as growing cities confront the twin problems of asphyxiating traffic and smog. A trip across town in Beijing can take two hours. "We're continuously bidding on these metro lines across China," Cheng says.
Like its competitors Siemens is also a big player in China's ambitious high-speed rail project, teaming up with Chinese state-owned partners. Two years ago the company won a $1 billion contract to help build a hundred 220mph
In São Paulo, where the richest Paulistanos avoid traffic by commuting in helicopters, Siemens won the bidding for Via Quatro, or Line 4. One of the world's most advanced subway systems, the driverless electric trains can carry 900,000 commuters an hour. After years of bureaucratic delay the city turned the job of modernizing Line 4 over to Grupo CCR, a huge Brazilian construction firm, in 2006. Within months Siemens won the bidding for $200 million worth of equipment, including 14 six-car trains, electrical equipment and a computerized control room.
The city still owns the rail bed, but the public-private partnership jump-started a project that had inched ahead for 20 years amid construction and legal delays. "It's a question of efficiency," says Luis Valença, the Grupo CCR executive in charge of Via Quatro. "You can't imagine how complex it would have been for the government to get the money and buy all these systems in a short period of time." The bright-yellow Siemens trains are now operating on a 3-mile stretch of the line and by 2014 should be whisking passengers 8 miles from the Vila Sônia neighborhood to downtown in 17 minutes, a fraction of the rush-hour commute time in a car or bus.
GE is also investing $500 million in Brazil, including a $100 million technology center. It has 13,000 employees in India. But Löscher is lucky in his rival: For several years before joining Siemens he worked for GE, reporting directly to Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt while heading the company's global health care business. "I have a great advantage," he says. "I am the first Siemens CEO who has an insight about our key competitor."
Löscher, 53, is also the first outsider to sit in the top office at the company's headquarters on Wittelsbacherplatz. A native of Villach, a town in southern Austria five minutes from the Italian border, he studied for his M.B.A. at Hong Kong University and spent much of his career in Asia involved with chemicals and health care. "My forefathers were Italian, my parents are Austrian, my wife is Spanish, two of my children are American, and the third is Spanish," Löscher says. "So I have the United Nations at home."
The 6-foot-1-inch executive was recruited to run Siemens in 2007 after revelations of widespread foreign bribery took down his predecessor, Klaus Kleinfeld. For most of its history Siemens, like other exporters, relied on bribes to grease its way into foreign markets. Such payments weren't only legal in Germany but served as tax writeoffs to boot. (Kleinfeld, now chairman of Alcoa, wasn't implicated in any wrongdoing.)
Urban Outfitter: Siemens bets on explosive growth in the world's largest cities.
New Lands of Opportunity: Urban slums are better than rural poverty.
Megaslums: Salvation or Sinkhole, a Forbes conversation.
Founded in 1847 by Werner Siemens, the company first prospered by selling the "pointer" telegraph, a sort of early graphical user interface that spelled out letters instead of requiring a knowledge of Morse code. By the 1860s Siemens had dispatched his brothers to the U.K. and Russia and was stringing telegraph lines from Finland to India.
It often had to buy its way into contracts. An indication of Siemens' international clout comes from reports following a 1914 bribery scandal in Japan. In a letter to the home office in Berlin, a Siemens executive in Tokyo downplayed the threat from a Japanese naval attaché in London who was asking embarrassing questions. If the attaché "continues to annoy us he must go; it will not be hard for us to manage it," he wrote.
Germany outlawed bribes in 1999, but Siemens clung to its old habits. In 2008 the company pleaded guilty to U.S. charges that it had made $1.4 billion in questionable payments between 2001 and 2007; it paid a $449 million fine.
Löscher fired half the company's 100 top executives and installed an online, real-time system that allows compliance and legal officers to monitor contracts and payments for suspicious activity. Last year it investigated 500 substantiated internal tips. Siemens still has to fire people for breaking the rules--"There are always individual cases," Löscher says--including former executives who pleaded no contest to paying bribes in Italy in 2009 and a current probe into an alleged bribery scheme in Thailand.
"Despite this case, what we had to deal with, our sales went up," Löscher says, downplaying, perhaps, the momentum Siemens still derives from more than a century of pay-to-play. "We had the highest order book in the history of the company."
The business is changing, anyway. There's simply not enough government money in most countries to pay for needed infrastructure, so Siemens increasingly must find private partners and financing sources like development funds. Back in the 1970s, 70% of the company's orders in Brazil came from the government. Now it's 15%, says Adilson Antonio Primo, chief executive of Siemens Brazil. "All this bad culture is much more in the public sector," says Primo, an electrical engineer who is exquisitely well connected as vice president of the powerful infrastructure industry association and adviser to left-leaning President Dilma Roussef.
While much of Siemens' emerging-markets growth so far has been in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), Löscher is looking for new targets. São Paulo's growth rate probably peaked in the 1960s. A recent McKinsey & Co. report says 400 midsize cities that most executives "have never heard of"--Hangzhou, China; Chennai, India; and Florianópolis, Brazil among them--will produce 40% of global growth over the next 15 years. "When you talk about the emerging markets you have to think about the second tier," Löscher says, citing Vietnam, Turkey, Colombia and Chile. "This is where I spend a lot of time, where we're building infrastructure, where we have huge customer links, and they are very important to the growth story of Siemens."
Siemens claims the world's largest water-treatment business with revenue of about $2 billion a year. The bulk of the customers are industrial users, but the company has identified a growing market in cities that have inadequate water supplies. It has developed mobile water-treatment systems and a Sky Hydrant, or a portable device with lightweight filters, that it has airlifted into remote Kenyan villages. It is working with the Belgian Finexpo to rebuild parts of Ghana's water system.
Mansoor Ali works with Practical Action, a U.K. nonprofit that has helped install clean-water kiosks from the slums of Nairobi to Nepal. It's a tricky assignment. Companies like Siemens are built to deal with "a city that is planned, with residents who pay regularly and have a bank account," he says. "But 60% of the people in Nairobi are slum dwellers with no bank account, who don't even know what a light is."
Urban Outfitter: Siemens bets on explosive growth in the world's largest cities.
New Lands of Opportunity: Urban slums are better than rural poverty.
Megaslums: Salvation or Sinkhole, a Forbes conversation.
The 250,000 residents of Nairobi's Mukuru settlement, for example, were paying five times the price of richer neighborhoods for unsanitary water peddled by entrepreneurs who frequently got it from illegal connections to the city's water system. In 2007 Practical Action, with funding from the European Union, helped the Nairobi water company build ten new water kiosks with 26 to 30 taps apiece every 400 meters along a water main through Mukuru. The water merchants slowly came around, and the new flow of revenue can finance further expansions of the water system.
Water happens to need a lot of electricity: 3% of the U.S. load goes to water and sewer treatment. That produces demand for turbines and transmission lines. It's one reason GE's Immelt loves the business. "I like it, too," says Löscher.
He has realigned Siemens to address targeted markets in emerging economies. Löscher personally championed a London "sustainability center" that will promote energy-saving technologies. The company is also backing the Climate Leadership Group (current head: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg), which is trying to shame cities into reducing carbon emissions and pollution through energy efficiency. Instead of bribing its foreign customers, Siemens is trying to proselytize them.
Löscher is counting on his thousands of engineers and sales executives spread across 190 countries--resources that some of his competitors have blithely slashed. While he's cut $2 billion from operating expenses since taking over and dismantled a bureaucracy that once contained 200 separate management boards, he isn't scrimping on R&D (unchanged at 5.1% of revenue in 2010) or on engineers. "This is not overhead," he says. "This is our competitive advantage."
Urban Outfitter: Siemens bets on explosive growth in the world's largest cities.
New Lands of Opportunity: Urban slums are better than rural poverty.
Megaslums: Salvation or Sinkhole, a Forbes conversation.


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Nothing official about Karan Johar's film: Kareena
Filmmaker Karan Johar is keen on roping in Kareena Kapoor, Ranbir Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan in his next untitled film, but the actress says nothing is official about it
"It's not true. Karan had approached me for that film, we had a talk on it, but nothing is official right now. Nothing is concrete. Karan has a script in mind and he has offered me a role, but it's too early to talk about it," Kareena told IANS.
"I will be more than happy to work with Karan. I am very comfortable working with him," she added.
Recent reports also indicated that Kareena's husband, Saif, will have an extended cameo in the film.
But Kareena says, "It is absolutely untrue."
According to rumour mills, the movie will be a period drama.
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ALCS. Top of the sixth. Man on second. One out. His Texas Rangers down 2-1. That's when Josh Hamilton lost his grip on a swing which, in turn, sent his bat into a front-row Tigers fan's head. Looks like it hurt. But it doesn't look like it hurt enough to stop guy there from yanking the souvenir from a lady's hands.
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GAINESVILLE (CBSSports) – Mike Gillislee took a screen pass and went 45 yards for a touchdown, and No. 8 Florida survived a scare to beat Southeastern Conference newcomer Missouri 14-7 on Saturday.
The Gators rebounded from a turnover-filled loss to rival Georgia and kept alive hopes of winning the SEC's Eastern Division. They need the Bulldogs to lose one of their remaining games, against Mississippi on Saturday or Auburn next week, to clinch a spot in the league title game.
At times, Florida looked less than interested in staying in the SEC hunt. The Gators (8-1, 7-1) were shut out in the first half, managing just 111 yards and failing to contain Missouri quarterback James Franklin.
Like so many other games this season, though, Florida played considerably better in the second half.
The Gators turned two short fields into touchdowns, with Omarius Hines scoring on a 36-yard jet sweep to tie the game in the third before Gillislee put Florida ahead for good in the fourth.
Jeff Driskel lofted a pass to Gillislee in the right flat, and with two blockers out front, Gillislee made one cut and went untouched for his eighth score of the season.
Florida's defense did the rest, shutting down Franklin and the Tigers (4-5, 1-5) over the final 13 minutes.
Josh Evans sealed the victory, intercepting Franklin's fourth-down pass in the end zone with five seconds remaining. The Tigers drove to the 21-yard line, but had to try to make something happen as the clock wound down.
Franklin finished with four interceptions.
Franklin, who sprained his left knee against Vanderbilt on Oct. 6 and sat out all or part of the last two games, completed 24 of 51 passes for 236 yards. He overthrew open receivers much of the day and had less mobility than normal.
Still, he ran for 29 yards and burned Florida several times with scrambles.
The Gators were flat to start the game, no surprise since it was a noon start and came after a disappointing loss against Georgia. Florida turned the ball over six times in the 17-9 loss that left coach Will Muschamp needing help to get to Atlanta.
The Gators vowed to play better against Missouri, but it didn't happen early.
It didn't help that they were without left tackle Xavier Nixon and defensive end Lerentee McCray. Place-kicker Caleb Sturgis also was limited, leaving the game after a blocked field-goal attempt in the second quarter.
Florida also lost starting guards Jon Halapio and James Wilson in the second half.
Gillislee ran 16 times for 68 yards — his fourth consecutive game under 70 yards. Driskel completed 12 of 23 passes for 106 yards. Florida's defense was on the field for 86 plays, but allowed just 335 yards.
The Gators totaled 276 yards, but made enough big plays on both sides of the ball to eclipse last season's win total.
Copyright 2012 by STATS LLC and The Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and The Associated Press is strictly prohibited.
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Geraldine (Jerrie) Stutheit is a mother of three and grandmother of seven who was diagnosed with a large brain tumor. She had started having difficulty in her thinking, left-sided weakness, double vision, anxiety and personality changes about four months before she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. "I was actually relieved. I thought I was 'going crazy,' and finally the problems I was experiencing could be explained." After diagnosis, she and her husband of 53 years, Tom, consulted with one surgeon who wasn't very positive about her prognosis. "A friend from our church suggested getting a second opinion and gave me the name of a someone in the Kansas City medical community." Jerrie had an appointment to see Geoffrey Blatt, M.D., a neurosurgeon at Research Medical Center, within a matter of a few days. "Dr. Blatt explained the kind of tumor exactly like the first doctor I went to, but Dr. Blatt seemed so much more confident that I would have positive results. I trusted him immediately."
Jerrie underwent brain surgery at Research Medical Center and spent four days in the hospital after surgery. "I really didn't feel like myself for about six months. But, I was very happy to be able to function again—which was a big concern of mine before my surgery." When the pathology report came back, it revealed that the tumor was a hemangiopericytoma, which is a rare form of a non-cancerous tumor that acts more like it is cancerous. Due to this diagnosis, Jerrie continued to get yearly MRI scans.
During one of Jerrie's regularly scheduled MRI scans, it became apparent that the tumor had started to grow back again. "Dr. Blatt gave me several options for treatment, including observation, conventional surgery (another craniotomy) or Gamma Knife radiosurgery.
I chose Gamma Knife. "I was a little scared, but trusted Dr. Blatt and put it in his and God's hands." The Gamma Knife procedure allowed Jerrie to be treated on an outpatient basis with no general anesthesia. She felt she was back to her usual self within six weeks, which was a far cry from the six months she spent recuperating from her previous brain surgery.
Jerrie has had a total of three Gamma Knife procedures-- every time due to new areas in her brain being affected by the initial tumor. "I feel the whole Gamma Knife experience has been great. Everyone involved -- nurses, doctors and physicist -- were fun and pleasant people." Jerrie hopes for no further recurrences of her brain tumor, but she does have trust in the recommendations of her neurosurgeon, Dr. Blatt, the Gamma Knife team and her tremendous faith.


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Nokia, in an effort to gather interest on their upcoming X3 touchscreen + keypad phone, just made an Apple-like promo video. Unfortunately, they got Homer "one transition" Simpson to direct it. Also, it's lens-flarey. [Business Insider]
And if you don't remember what I'm talking about, here's the dialogue from the episode where Homer keeps filming Flanders, complete with scene with his enormous blurred out junk.
Lisa: OK, I finished editing the gardening sequence. . .
Homer: OK, from here we star wipe to a glamour shot of Flanders paying his bills, then we star wipe to Flanders brushing his teeth...
Lisa: Dad, there are other wipes besides star wipes..
Homer: Why eat hamburger when you can have steak?
Lisa: I'm taking my name off this thing.


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BOISE, Idaho -- Three former dairy workers with Idaho's largest dairy operation have been charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty after undercover video shot by an animal rights group showed workers stomping, dragging and beating cows inside a milking barn.
The video was shot using a hidden camera by a member of Mercy for Animals who got a job at Bettencourt Dairies' Dry Creek Dairy in Hansen for a few weeks this summer.
It shows workers at the dairy beating cows with a pink cane as the animals slipped and slid on the wet concrete floor; workers kicking and stomping cows that have fallen between the metal bars in the milking stalls; and a cow being dragged out of the barn by a chain around her neck as she lies on the concrete floor.
Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs said he filed misdemeanor animal cruelty charges against Jesus Garza, Jose Acensio and Javier Victor Rojas Loayza in late August after an investigation that was prompted by the video. If convicted, the men face fines of up to $5,000 each and six months of jail time on a first offense.
Luis Bettencourt, the owner of the dairy, said that when the Idaho Department of Agriculture told him about the video and allegations, he was "sick about it." Bettencourt's dairy operation is the largest in Idaho, with 13 facilities and about 60,000 milk cows.
"We don't tolerate animal abuse. That's a big issue for us," Bettencourt said. "Animal care is a No. 1 issue in our facilities."
Bettencourt said he fired the five workers seen in the video the day after he viewed the footage. He's since installed video cameras throughout his facilities and hired an additional supervisor.
"And we also showed the video to all the rest of the employees in our dairies, all 500 employees, and they had to sign a deal that said they understand that there's zero tolerance for animal abuse in our dairies," he said. "We've been in business 30 years, and we've never had this happen before. We're all devastated here."
Nathan Runkle, the executive director of Mercy for Animals, hopes the video will convince Kraft Foods, Burger King and other companies to stop using products made from milk from the Idaho company and send a "clear message to the industry that animal abuse will not be tolerated."
Neither Kraft nor Burger King has a direct relationship with Bettencourt Dairies. Kraft works with a cheese processing company in Idaho that uses milk from Bettencourt's facilities, and Burger King officials said the dairy is an indirect supplier of a small percentage of cheese used by the restaurant chain.
"We believe this abuse is ongoing and was allowed to flourish, unchecked, until Mercy for Animal sent a hidden camera in," Runkle said.
The organization wants Kraft and Burger King to require suppliers to adhere to its policies on the care and treatment of cattle.
Angela Wiggins, a spokeswoman for Kraft, said the company works voluntarily with dairy suppliers to make sure they meet or exceed animal care guidelines.
The video was upsetting, and Kraft doesn't condone the abusive behaviors, she said.
Burger King spokesman Bryson W. Thornton said his company doesn't tolerate or condone cruelty to animals and has launched an investigation that will result in "swift action" if there is evidence of systemic violations to Burger King's animal welfare policies.
Loebs, the prosecutor, said Bettencourt Dairies has cooperated fully with law enforcement, and investigators don't believe any of the dairy's upper management knew about the mistreatment.
Pam Juker, spokeswoman for the Idaho Department of Agriculture, said the agency has not received any other animal welfare complaints involving Bettencourt dairies.
Associated Press reporters Tammy Webber in Chicago and Suzette Laboy in Miami contributed to this report.


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Recent enforcement actions taken by FINRA and the SEC include an alleged $60 million investment fund run like a Ponzi scheme by a California advisor; a fine and crackdown on VA sales by Cadaret, Grant; a fine on suitability requirements for Morgan Stanley; and charges against two south Florida individuals who fed a Ponzi scheme to the tune of over $157 million.
The Securities and Exchange Commission charged an investment advisor in Scotts Valley, Calif., on May 24 with running a $60 million investment fund like a Ponzi scheme and defrauding investors by touting imaginary trading profits instead of reporting the actual trading losses he incurred.
The SEC alleges that John A. Geringer, who managed the GLR Growth Fund, used false and misleading marketing materials to lure investors into believing that the fund was earning double-digit annual returns by investing 75% of its assets in investments tied to major stock indices. In reality, Geringer's trading generated consistent losses and he eventually stopped trading entirely. To mask his fraud, Geringer paid millions of dollars in "returns" to investors largely by using money received from newer investors. He also sent investors periodic account statements showing fictitious growth in their investments.
"Geringer painted the picture of a successful fund weathering America's financial crisis through a diversified, conservative investment strategy," said Marc Fagel, director of the SEC's San Francisco Regional Office, in a statement. "The reality, however, was the complete opposite. Geringer lost millions of dollars in the market, tied up remaining investor funds in a pair of illiquid private companies, and lied about it in phony account statements."
According to the SEC's complaint filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., Geringer raised more than $60 million since 2005, mostly from investors in the Santa Cruz area. Geringer used fraudulent marketing materials claiming that the fund had between 17% and 25% annual returns in every year of the fund's operation through investments tied to well-known stock indices like the S&P 500, NASDAQ and Dow Jones. Although the fund was started in 2003, marketing materials claimed 25% returns in 2001 and 2002 — before the fund even existed.
The marketing materials also falsely indicated a nearly 24% return in 2008 from investing mainly in publicly traded securities, options and commodities, while the S&P 500 Index lost 38.5%.
Unsuitable VA Sales
Broker-dealer Cadaret, Grant was fined $200,000 and censured by FINRA, and will be required to rebate living customers for sales of variable annuities (VAs) that were identified as unsuitable.
At the heart of the matter were elderly customers who were sold VAs recommended to them with enhanced death benefit riders that were of limited value because of their age. The recommendations, said FINRA, indicated that the representative "did not understand or appreciate the significance of an age restriction or the reduced benefit of the rider when sold to a person close in age to the cutoff."
The registered representative who recommended them already had several complaints on her U4 prior to joining Cadaret, Grant—some of which related to VA sales—and she was the subject of additional customer complaints after joining; this was reflected in amended U4s filed by the company.
Despite this, however, according to FINRA, she was neither subjected to heightened supervision nor her VA transactions reviewed by supervisors. She had been the subject of a FINRA Wells Notice for unsuitable VA sales at her prior firm, and Cadaret, Grant was advised of this; however, the notification did not result in additional supervisory measures. Some of the unsuitable recommendations occurred after the firm received the Wells Notice.
While the sales were subjected to review by the rep's supervisor and also to a second level by the firm's VA department, FINRA found that procedures and systems were inadequate to prevent inappropriate sales.
In addition, FINRA found that the rep, her supervisor and another colleague were using personal e-mails for business-related correspondence, and the firm knew or should have known about them but failed to retain those e-mails.
The firm submitted a Letter of Acceptance, Waiver and Consent in which it agreed to the fine and censure, as well as the rebate to customers, without admitting or denying findings. It also agreed to undertake a comprehensive review of its policies and procedures concerning suitability of VAs, and provide the results to FINRA within 90 days of its notice of acceptance.
Morgan Stanley Hit on Suitability
Suitability was an issue for Morgan Stanley as well, with the firm fined $600,000 by FINRA over findings that it did not have a firm-wide structured product-specific suitability policy. Instead, it had an overall suitability guideline that directed supervisors to consider concentration when reviewing all securities purchases.
In previous settlements with customers over unsuitable recommendations and their purchases of structured products based on those recommendations, the firm had already paid approximately $329,000.
Morgan Stanley issued selling memoranda specific to each of its proprietary structured product offerings, with some of those memoranda including a 10% concentration guideline for the specific issue, and a minimum net worth concentration of $100,000. However, despite that, structured products were sold at concentrated levels and to customers who failed to meet minimum net worth requirements.
The findings also included that the firm failed to create reasonable systems or procedures to notify supervisors whether structured product purchases complied with the firm's internal guidelines, and that it placed the responsibility with branch supervisors to ensure, among other things, that structured product purchase recommendations financial advisors made were suitable.
Daily transaction reports failed to identify structured product purchases as such, and did not reflect any supervisory action regarding such transactions. FINRA also determined in a sampling of structured product purchases that in addition to the concentration and net worth issues, recommendations were found that were unsuitable based on customers' financial situation and investment objectives.
Morgan Stanley submitted a Letter of Acceptance, Waiver and Consent in which it was censured and fined $600,000. Without admitting or denying the findings, the firm consented to the sanctions and to the entry of findings that it did not have a firm-wide structured product-specific suitability policy.
SEC Goes After Alleged Ponzi Schemers
In an SEC action, George Levin and Frank Preve of the Ft.Lauderdale area were charged in an ongoing investigation with raising more than $157 million from 173 investors in less than two years in a Ponzi scheme. In its complaint, the SEC seeks disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, financial penalties, and permanent injunctive relief against Levin and Preve to enjoin them from future violations of the federal securities laws.
In the complaint, filed in federal court in Miami, the SEC alleged that Levin and Preve issued short-term promissory notes from Levin's company, Banyon 1030-32 LLC, and interests in a private investment fund they operated. Beginning in 2007, they used investor funds to purchase discounted legal settlements from former Florida attorney Scott Rothstein through his prominent law firm Rothstein Rosenfeldt and Adler PA. In 2009, looking for more money from investors, Levin and Preve formed a private investment fund called Banyon Income Fund LP that invested exclusively in Rothstein's settlements.
However, the settlements Rothstein sold were not real and the supposed plaintiffs and defendants did not exist. Instead, Rothstein used the money he received from Levin and Preve in classic Ponzi scheme fashion to make payments due other investors and support his lavish lifestyle.
In fact, by the time the Banyon Income Fund offering began in May 2009, Rothstein had already ceased making payments on a majority of the prior settlements Levin and his entities had purchased. Rothstein's Ponzi scheme collapsed in October 2009, and he is currently serving a 50-year prison sentence.
Read about more scams busted up at the SEC & FINRA Enforcement Roundup page at AdvisorOne.


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Blanton's rocky outing closes first half on sour note
Trumbo lifts solo shot, but offense unable to rally back vs. Iwakuma
SEATTLE -- Joe Blanton is not one to be questioned for his passion for the game and pride in his performance.
That passion was in full view Sunday in the Angels' 4-3 loss to the Mariners, who swept the three-game series to end the first half.
Returning to the dugout after the fourth inning, Blanton let loose on the dugout cooler, then he and catcher Chris Iannetta became involved in a heated discussion with pitching coach Mike Butcher intervening.
"Anytime things aren't going good, it kind of bring things to a little volcano, a head, whatever you want to call it," said Blanton, who finished the first half with a 2-12 record and 5.53 ERA. He has never lost more than 13 games in any of his 10 seasons in the big leagues.
In regards to the confrontation, Iannetta said it was, "something between us. Not really that big a deal... just some things that happened."
The root cause of the shaky outing was likely tied to the fact that Blanton had a severely limited pitching arsenal.
"All I could throw today was the fastball. That makes it tough when I didn't have my change or curveball, either one," he said. "That usually doesn't happen, but it did today."
"It just kind of happened out there. I'd throw [the changeup] down and it's in the dirt. I throw it up and it goes off. I couldn't get in between today."
Blanton had his shortest outing of the season -- four-plus innings. He allowed four runs on five hits, walked four and struck out two.
"It is what it is," he said when asked if the confrontation in the dugout is behind him. "Things aren't going well. It's a long season. You try to do more. You're out there competing with everything you have. Things happen.
"Guys get mad when they're giving up runs. Guys get mad when they strike out. Guys get mad for a ton of different reasons when you're playing the game. It's part of it sometimes."
Mark Trumbo homered and Alberto Callaspo had two RBIs, but the Angels could not crack Mariners right-hander Hisashi Iwakuma.
Trumbo hit his 21st home run on the first pitch to open the fifth, making it 3-1. It was his fourth homer against the Mariners this season.
The Mariners would push ahead, 4-1, in the bottom of the inning on an RBI double by Raul Ibanez, but Callaspo answered with a bases-loaded, two-run single in the sixth to close it to 4-3.
The Angels could not rally again off Charlie Furbush and Tom Wilhelmsen, who picked up his 19th save in 23 opportunities.
It was the fourth time the Angels have been swept this season, the first time on the road.
"That's a big win for us, especially going into the break," Mariners manager Eric Wedge said. "It's something we haven't done this year. It's hard to win a series. It's real hard to sweep, whenever you do that, you make up some ground."
Josh Hamilton and Albert Pujols were a combined 3-for-23 in the series with one RBI and eight strikeouts.
Iwakuma went seven innings, allowing three runs on seven hits. He walked one and struck out seven. He is now 5-0 with a 1.49 ERA in six appearances against the Angels. Last season, he was the only pitcher to pick up four victories over the Angels.
"He gets out of jams when he needs to," Howie Kendrick said. "Last year we were surprised when we see him coming out of the pen for these guys. Once he started in the second half, he was getting a lot of guys out. The guy has great stuff."
Kendrick posed a threat in the second with a two-out double into the right-field corner. But Trumbo struck out and Callaspo bounced out to second.
The Mariners started with two in the second. With the infield shifted to the right, Justin Smoak bounced a one-out single through the wide left side. Michael Saunders followed with his sixth home run into the right-field seats.
That extended the Mariners club record of hitting at least one home run in 22 straight games. The big league record is 27 set by Texas in 2002.
In the fifth, Brad Miller opened with a single and Nick Franklin walked. Ibanez sent Miller home with a double to right and Franklin was held at third. That also ended Blanton's afternoon.
Michael Kohn took over with runners on second and third and no outs. He quickly quieted the Mariners, striking out Kendrys Morales, intentionally walking Kyle Seager, then striking out both Smoak and Saunders. He has stranded 19 of 22 inherited runners this season.
"Mike Kohn did an incredible job to keep us in the game," Angels manager Mike Scioscia said.
The Angels finished under .500 (44-49) at the All-Star break for the first time since 2006 (43-45).


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The Veepeak Rechargeable Motion Sensor Light offers a simple solution to lighting any area inside your home. The portable and detachable design makes it versatile enough to be used as a night light in hallways and bedrooms or as a cabinet or closet light for dim areas. Installation is a breeze, the magnetic strip with 3M adhesive allows you to quickly mount wherever you need extra light. This light is motion activated and will automatically turn on once it detects motion; when no movement is detected for about 20 seconds, the light will automatically turn off. This LED light is powered by built-in Lithium battery which can be charged with included USB cable by a phone charger or PC USB port. No electric wire, no need to replace batteries and one full charge provides up to 500 times of sensing at full brightness. This light currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars (read reviews) and is discounted 30% down to just $13.99. For more information and buying options, see the discounted LED Motion light on Amazon.
This story, "30% off Veepeak USB Rechargeable LED Motion Sensor Light for Closet with Magnetic Mounting - Deal Alert" was originally published by TechConnect.


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Know more about this business than we do? Cool! Please submit any corrections or missing details you may have.Help us make it right
Be the first MLive.com user to add photos or videos of Merecourt Machine Systems
Merecourt Machine Systems can be found at Beaufait Dr 2118. The following is offered: Industrial Agents & Representatives. The entry is present with us since Sep 8, 2010 and was last updated on Nov 14, 2013. In Grosse Pointe Woods there are 2 other Industrial Agents & Representatives. An overview can be found here.


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Adobe's Bold Plans for Online Ad Business Don't Include Advertising
But watch out if you're Salesforce, comScore, Chartbeat or Brightcove
Once an looming outlier, Adobe wants to play a central role in the online ad business. Despite lots of speculation, the company says it doesn't want to get into the media or advertising business—but it does have bold plans for plenty of disruption.
Adweek recently caught up with Bill Ingram, vp of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, to talk about where Adobe is and isn't going when it comes to taking on the entire Luma Partners Slide.
Adweek: You guys have made a bunch of acquisitions in the ad tech space, as well as an ad agency/search shop. That's led to a lot of popular theories about your ambitions. One theory I've heard is that given all the magazines you support on tablets, you could build an iPad ad network.
Ingram: That's not in the cards. Ad networks are about advertising arbitrage. That business is falling down. We're really about digitizing the word. Helping advertisers get their stuff on the Web. We're a content enabler. With print, there is a short-term opportunity to help publishers digitize.
What about an ad exchange?
What about taking on the Web video ad business? You guys have made a lot of inroads here. Adobe is one of the companies cited that could help Web video finally incorporate sophisticated targeting. You could make dynamic ad insertion a reality for the Hulus of the world, or even VOD.
We're not interested in selling video ads. We want to own the market for video tech. We can host delivery of video. We can do dynamic delivery, packaging, serving. We can help content companies better monetize it. But we don't want to get into distribution, and we don't want to sell ads.
With your acquisition of Omniture, could you see Adobe taking on comScore in terms of video research and reporting?
Yes, that's in the cards.
Some of what you offer seems to compete with Chartbeat?
Oh, we are going to crush Chartbeat.
Should FreeWheel, Brightcove and those types of companies be worried?
Yes. We want to disrupt the video market. It has to be sustainable.
You also have built up a large suite of tools for campaign management [things like Adobe Media Optimizer], ad serving, and for helping brands manage social campaigns. Does that mean you want to take on Buddy Media?
We're going to crush Buddy Media. That's going to turn out to be the worst acquisition Salesforce has ever done.


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Funk edges Waldorf to win Greater Hickory Classic
Fred Funk won the Greater Hickory Classic for his second Champions Tour title of the year and eighth overall, holing a 2-foot birdie putt on the final hole to beat Duffy Waldorf by a stroke.
The 56-year-old Funk closed with a 3-under 69 on Rock Barn's Jones Course to finish at 15-under 201. He also won eight times on the PGA Tour.
''I really wanted to win here really bad,'' Funk said. ''I've been knocking at the door on this tournament a lot ... but I was feeling the heat. When you get in contention, you always want to finish it.''
Funk had a bogey-free tournament and has gone 60 holes without a bogey since the 13th hole last week in the final round of the SAS Championship. He also extended his run of bogey-free holes at Rock Barn to 84, beginning with the seventh hole in the second round last year.
Also the winner at The Woodlands in Texas in May, Funk opened with consecutive 66s to take a one-stroke lead into the final round.
Funk made his first birdie of the round on No. 12 after hitting his second shot out of a fairway divot, and added a second birdie on No. 14. The birdies allowed Funk to keep a share of the lead with Waldorf, who began the day at 8 under but climbed into contention with six birdies. Waldorf finished with a 66.
''I had two great days of putting, and that made the difference,'' said Waldorf, a four-time winner on the PGA Tour who became eligible to play the 50-and-over tour in August. ''That really got me going. I would've liked to have hit the ball closer a few more times, because I was rolling in the putts.''
However, Waldorf came up short on a 20-foot birdie putt on No. 18 that would have given him the lead. That opened the door for Funk, who put his second shot on the fringe, then chipped to set up the winning putt.
''I assumed Duffy was going to birdie No. 18,'' Funk said. ''When I saw that I needed a birdie to win, I played real aggressive with my tee shot. I just smoked a 3-wood, and hit a great chip. Still, I was pretty nervous about that putt.''
Mark Wiebe, the winner last year in a playoff, also birdied No. 18 to move into third at 10 under. He had a 70.
Chip Beck, Jay Don Blake, John Cook, first-round leader Dan Forsman and Peter Senior tied for fourth at 9 under. Blake and Cook shot 68, Forsman and Senior had 70s, and Beck shot 71.
Bernhard Langer, who the Charles Schwab Cup points leader who also tops the money list, had a 69 to tie for ninth at 8 under. Tom Lehman, second in the points race, finished at 3 under after a 71.


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HOODZ Jobs
Receive alerts when this company posts new jobs.
About Us
Commercial & Residential Services/Support
Company Size
1000+ employees
Ann Arbor, MI
Build a career you love
Imagine a job where you get to protect lives, have great hours and the work doesn't follow you home. We offer that, and more, at HOODZ. HOODZ is North America's leader in kitchen exhaust cleaning.
According to the NFPA (National Fire Protection Association), over half of all restaurant fires are a direct result of the cooking equipment. You can make a difference and get paid to do so.
Career Paths
We want you to thrive and realize your potential at HOODZ, which is why we will work with you to fulfill your ambitions. Whether you want to grow in your role as a Cleaning Technician or one day own your own HOODZ location, we will do what we can to keep you challenged, productive, and happy.
With a job at HOODZ, you can:
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- Transition into another role.
- Own your own HOODZ business.
Employee Testimonials
I like working for HOODZ because we get a sense of completion, and a job well done, as we finish cleaning each dirty duct and make it look brand new.
Most people have jobs where they constantly check the clock and dread how slow time moves. I look at the time and say, 'How did 10 hours go by that fast?
I love working nights at HOODZ because there are not as many people out and about and the night time feels more peaceful.
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Open Diversity Jobs
HIRING NIGHT SHIFT ** Manual Labor Entry Level ** On the Job TrainingAustin, TX
Hood Cleaning Technician - Night ShiftLevittown, PA
Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning/Pressure Washing - Jacksonville AreaJacksonville, FL
Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning Assistant ($14/hr No experience required)Austin, TX
HIRING NIGHT SHIFT **Manual Labor Entry Level *** On the job training!Lake Arthur, LA
Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning TechniciansWindham, ME


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Our educational consultancy is based in Marlborough, Wiltshire.
We focus on learning and learners...
We aim to nurture the self-belief within individuals to achieve more than they ever believed possible.
We encourage the development of wise minds, confident in their own creativity and individuality, and capable of recognising what is best for themselves and the world.
Upcoming Events...
Tweets by @LearningWorksUK Tweets by @DysMLD
- Learning Works staff very welcoming and were willing and able to give us information and guide us into the right room at the right time.Able Gifted and Talented Conference
- The course was, as ever, fantastic! I have come back to school buzzing with ideas and one day in some are already being implemented.Annual SEND Residential Conference
- Fil shows such passion and enthusiasm for your subject. I felt today's presentation was wonderful. It was so relevant to our classroom.Dyscalculia & MLD Tour with Fil Came
- This is one of the best short courses I have attended in terms of meeting its stated aims and having material that accurately matches the course content.Teaching Children with SpLD
- I loved the course. Not a moment of it was wasted on me and I enjoyed the intensity.Managing the Role of the SENCo
- Excellent training which is tailored to the independent sector and the opportunity to meet colleagues doing the job of SENCo in different schools.Managing the Role of the SENCo
- I would have no hesitation in recommending the event to colleagues.Able Gifted and Talented Conference
- Glynis is an excellent lecturer. Her ability to convey the depth of her knowledge is superb.Teaching Children with SpLD
- I have never been on courses that are as well prepared and personalised to delegates needs as Fils. I am very impressed with Learning Works.SEN Policy Writing
- Truly inspirational - Tandi explains the maths topics so clearly and demonstrates everything with ease. Maths really does make sense when she teachesOvercoming Barriers to Learning in Maths
- It was really great to be given the time to actually discuss our assignments and be given immediate feedbackOvercoming Barriers to Learning in Maths
- I really enjoyed working with Learning Works - I've had six bookings from teachers at the event so I'm very happy! Brian Moses, Performance Poet at the 3rd English conferenceTeachers of English Conference
- It's good to be on the receiving end of learning something new for a changeNational Dyscalculia & MLD Conference
- I would highly recommend this conference. The positivity and enthusiasm of those presenting and other delegates was great. I can't wait to try out some of the new ideas with my students.National Dyscalculia & MLD Conference