text:
Patches and Petals
Timeless Variety
Bolts of fabric, quilted samples, and a variety of gifts created by local craftspeople fill Patches and Petals quilt shop in Belleville, Wisconsin. The building, which was once a furniture store, charms with its original wood floors and tin ceiling.
Meet the Staff
Front row, from left
: Kathy Gile, Andrea DeSmet (co-owner), Lynn Alme (co-owner), and Linda Groffy; middle row: Joan Wick, Hannah Lacy, and Corrine Ringgenberg; back row: Mary Nelson and Sue Dunphy.
Well-Rounded Offerings
The selection of fabrics offered at Patches and Petals runs the gamut. Quilters can choose from North Woods and nature prints, batiks, black-and-white prints, reproduction-inspired fabrics, and holiday prints.
Quilts Aplenty
More than 1,000 samples hang at Patches and Petals. Many samples are created with juvenile prints in cotton, flannel, and plush.
Pastime Relived
From the second floor of Patches and Petals quilters can get a bird'-eye view of the wide variety of fabrics available.
Warm Regards
Patches and Petals co-owner Lynn Alme designed Warm Regards for Quilt Sampler® Spring/Summer 2012 magazine. This delightfully cozy quilt comes together more easily than you might think, and the side-by-side block placement yields a surprise secondary design.
Machine-Quilting Details
Kate Hendrickson machine-quilted a continuous flower-and-leaf design across the quilt top.
Warm Regards Color Option
Animals are on parade across quilt tester Laura Boehnke's playful baby quilt version. She fussy-cut a novelty print so a different animal motif would star in the center square of each block. By choosing a blue and yellow palette for the triangle-squares, a secondary pattern emerges. Fabrics are from the Safari Sweet Hearts collection by Diane Eichler and Rhapsodie Colorée II by Ricky Tims, both for Red Rooster Fabrics.
For more information about Patches and Petals, visit patchesandpetals.com.


text:
Multiplus – A perfect start up template for companies, individuals and professionals. This template was designed with Responsive design, Popup/slideout Login and registration/signup forms, Video Support, Working slideout contact form and much more. Its multipurpose, can be used for all type of Business / Products / Apps .
This template is Valid Html so will work cross platforms and browsers.
- Responsive
- Foundation framework
- Responsive slider
- Working slideout contact form
- Pop up Login form
- Pop up signup / registration form
- Pricing Table
- jQuery toggle
- Video support (vimeo & youtube)
- Well Documented
- No coding knowledge required
- Valid HTML
All files and resources I've used are located below. A big thanks goes out to those who have made it possible to let us use there resources for commercial purposes.
- Images used from http://www.behance.net/gallery/Designinstituttet/3244397
- Images used from http://www.behance.net/gallery/Packaging-Development-AIAIAI-Denmark/3365021
- Images used from www.flickr.com/photos/markjsebastian/
- Image Slider plugin – Bootstrap Carousel
- Photo Gallery plugin – Bootstrap Gallery
- Fonticons by – Free Icon Font
- Demo images from – Pixeden.com
- Demo images from – Free Library
- Google WebFont used – Open Sans
Images in live preview are not included to the template.
Need help? Just ask nicely and i'll try to rescue you as soon as possible.
Updates log
Fixed html bugs on pricing_table.css file

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Court favors Abercrombie in Oklahoma suit over hijab
TULSA (AP) — A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of an Oklahoma woman who says she wasn't hired by Abercrombie &Fitch because her headscarf conflicted with the retailer's dress code, which has since been changed.
A federal judge initially ruled in favor of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which filed the lawsuit for Samantha Elauf. The EEOC alleges that Elauf wasn't hired in 2008 at an Abercrombie store in Tulsa's Woodland Hills Mall because her hijab violated the retailer's "Look Policy."
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision Tuesday, finding that Elauf never told Abercrombie she needed a religious accommodation — even though she was wearing the headscarf during her interview.
The company changed its policy three years ago to allow the head coverings.


text:
This section describes PostgreSQL's functions for operating on sequence objects. Sequence objects (also called sequence generators or just sequences) are special single-row tables created with CREATE SEQUENCE. A sequence object is usually used to generate unique identifiers for rows of a table. The sequence functions, listed in Table 6-26, provide simple, multiuser-safe methods for obtaining successive sequence values from sequence objects.
Table 6-26. Sequence Functions
|Advance sequence and return new value
|Return value most recently obtained with
|Set sequence's current value
|Set sequence's current value and is_called flag
For largely historical reasons, the sequence to be operated on by a sequence-function call is specified by a text-string argument. To achieve some compatibility with the handling of ordinary SQL names, the sequence functions convert their argument to lower case unless the string is double-quoted. Thus
nextval('foo') operates on sequence foo nextval('FOO') operates on sequence foo nextval('"Foo"') operates on sequence Foo
The sequence name can be schema-qualified if necessary:
nextval('myschema.foo') operates on myschema.foo nextval('"myschema".foo') same as above nextval('foo') searches search path for foo
Of course, the text argument can be the result of an expression, not only a simple literal, which is occasionally useful.
The available sequence functions are:
Advance the sequence object to its next value and return
that value. This is done atomically: even if multiple
sessions execute
concurrently, each will safely receive a distinct sequence
Return the value most recently obtained by
nextval for this sequence in the current
session. (An error is reported if
nextval has never been called for this
sequence in this session.) Notice that because this is
returning a session-local value, it gives a predictable
answer even if other sessions are executing
nextval meanwhile.
Reset the sequence object's counter value. The
two-parameter form sets the sequence's last_value field to the specified value and
sets its is_called field to
true, meaning that the next
nextval will advance the
sequence before returning a value. In the three-parameter
form, is_called may be set either
true or false. If it's set to false, the next
nextval will return exactly the specified
value, and sequence advancement commences with the
nextval. For
SELECT setval('foo', 42); Next
nextval()will return 43 SELECT setval('foo', 42, true); Same as above SELECT setval('foo', 42, false); Next
nextval()will return 42
The result returned by
setval is just the value of its second
Important: To avoid blocking of concurrent transactions that obtain numbers from the same sequence, a
nextvaloperation is never rolled back; that is, once a value has been fetched it is considered used, even if the transaction that did the
nextvallater aborts. This means that aborted transactions may leave unused "holes" in the sequence of assigned values.
setvaloperations are never rolled back, either.
If a sequence object has been created with default parameters,
nextval() calls on it will return
successive values beginning with one. Other behaviors can be
obtained by using special parameters in the CREATE SEQUENCE command; see its command reference
page for more information.


text:
Advanced Micro Devices' bottom line changed from black to red on Thursday when the company posted a loss after two straight quarters of profits.
Advanced Micro Devices' bottom line changed from black to red on Thursday when the company posted a loss after two straight quarters of profit.
The company reported a loss of US$20 million, or $0.03 per share, for the first quarter of 2014, an improvement from its loss of $146 million in the same quarter last year.
AMD had reported a profit for its two previous quarters, as a restructuring program led by CEO Rory Read showed positive results.
AMD's revenue for the quarter, ended March 29, was $1.40 billion, up 28 percent year over year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected revenue of $1.34 billion.
As part of the restructuring over the past two years, Read appointed a new management team, reshaped the product road map, laid off staff and established a new division to make custom chips.
The transformation has helped AMD generate more revenue from products other than PC chips, Read said on an earnings call.
AMD is on track to generate about half its revenue by the end of 2015 from "high-growth markets," which includes chips for dense servers, professional graphics and embedded use, as well as semi-custom chips, Read said.
Revenue growth last quarter was driven mainly by the Graphics and Visual Solutions unit, which makes graphics chips like the R7 and R9 and "semi-custom" chips. Revenue from that group totaled US$734 million, up 118 percent. AMD's semi-custom chips include processors sold to Microsoft for the Xbox One and to Sony for the PlayStation 4.
"There was strong demand in the first quarter for the AMD-powered Microsoft and Sony game consoles," Read said.
Shipments of console chips will be higher in the second half of this year than in the first half, said Lisa Su, general manager of AMD's global business units.
PC chip shipments and revenue declined during the quarter, however. Revenue from AMD's Computing Solutions division -- which deals in PC, tablet and server chips -- was $663 million, down 12 percent.
PC shipments will decline by 7 percent to 10 percent this year, which is not as bad as previously expected, Read said.
"The commercial market has been a bit stronger," he said.
The decline in PC shipments was softened partly by Microsoft ending its support for Windows XP, Read said. The end of support triggered some PC upgrades.
AMD introduced new Sempron and Athlon chips during the quarter in the U.S. and Asia. It also shipped new Kabini processors for PCs.
PC makers are preparing laptops based on AMD's Kaveri and Beema chips, Read said. Beema will also appear in tablets in the second quarter, along with AMD's Mullins chip, Su said.
Intel has talked about going after the low-end tablet market, where devices are priced between $125 and $250. AMD doesn't want to sacrifice profit for market share and will focus on higher-value products, Su said. AMD's tablet chips are differentiated by strong graphics capabilities originating from its Radeon graphics cores.
"If we miss out on some units in the low end, so be it," Su said.
Intel has a very different business model from AMD when it comes to tablets, Read said. Intel has been subsidizing tablet makers to use its chips through its "contra revenue" program.
"This idea of contra revenue is foreign to us," Read said.
Still, Intel reported significantly higher profits for the quarter than AMD.
Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
|Jun 08, 2011
Researchers discover superatoms with magnetic shells
|(Nanowerk News) A team of Virginia Commonwealth University scientists has discovered a new class of 'superatoms' – a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table – with unusual magnetic characteristics.
|The superatom contains magnetized magnesium atoms, an element traditionally considered as non-magnetic. The metallic character of magnesium along with infused magnetism may one day be used to create molecular electronic devices for the next generation of faster processors, larger memory storage and quantum computers.
|In a study published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ("Hund's rule in superatoms with transition metal impurities"), the team reports that the newly discovered cluster consisting of one iron and eight magnesium atoms acts like a tiny magnet that derives its magnetic strength from the iron and magnesium atoms. The combined unit matches the magnetic strength of a single iron atom while preferentially allowing electrons of specific spin orientation to be distributed throughout the cluster.
|A proposed assembly of FeMg8 magnetic superatoms where the directions of magnetic moment is indicated by arrows. (Image courtesy of Victor Medel/VCU)
|Through an elaborate series of theoretical studies, Shiv N. Khanna, Ph.D., a Commonwealth professor in the VCU Department of Physics, and his team examined the electronic and magnetic properties of clusters having one iron atom surrounded by multiple magnesium atoms. The team included instructor J. Ulises Reveles and Victor M. Medel, a post-doctoral associate, both from VCU; A. W. Castleman Jr., Ph.D., the Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics, and Eberly Distinguished chair in Science in the Department of Chemistry at Penn State University; and Prasenjit Sen and Vikas Chauhan from the Harish-Chandra Research Institute in Allahabad, India.
|"Our research opens a new way of infusing magnetic character in otherwise non-magnetic elements through controlled association with a single magnetic atom. An important objective was to discover what combination of atoms would lead to a species that is stable as we put multiple units together," said Khanna.
|"The combination of magnetic and conducting attributes was also desirable. Magnesium is a good conductor of electricity and, hence, the superatom combines the benefit of magnetic character along with ease of conduction through its outer skin," he said.
|The team found that when the cluster had eight magnesium atoms it acquired extra stability due to filled electronic shells that were far separated from the unfilled shells. An atom is in a stable configuration when its outermost shell is full and far separated from unfilled shells, as found in inert gas atoms. Khanna said that such phenomena commonly occur with paired electrons which are non-magnetic, but in this study the magnetic electronic shell showed stability.
|According to Khanna, the new cluster had a magnetic moment of four Bohr magnetons, which is almost twice that of an iron atom in solid iron magnets. A magnetic moment is a measure of the magnetic strength of the cluster. Although the periodic table has more than one hundred elements, there are only nine elements that exhibit magnetic character in solid form.
|"A combination such as the one we have created here can lead to significant developments in the area of "molecular electronics" where such devices allow the flow of electrons with particular spin orientation desired for applications such as quantum computers. These molecular devices are also expected to help make denser integrated devices, higher data processing, and other benefits," said Reveles.
|Khanna and his team are conducting preliminary studies on the assemblies of the new superatoms and have made some promising observations that may have applications in spintronics. Spintronics is a process using electron spin to synthesize new devices for memory and data processing.
|Source: Virginia Commonwealth University
Subscribe to a free copy of one of our daily
Nanowerk Newsletter Email Digests
with a compilation of all of the day's news.
Nanowerk Newsletter Email Digests
with a compilation of all of the day's news.


text:
Address by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Ninth AKAA Cycle, New Delhi
"In Islam, the Holy Qur'an says that man is God's noblest creation to whom He has entrusted the stewardship of all that is on earth. Each generation must leave for its successors an enhanced and sustainable social and physical environment. I am sure every responsible citizen in every part of the world would share this aspiration."
Prime Minister,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure to be here in Delhi this evening to recognise the winners of the ninth cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. We are particularly honoured by the presence of the Prime Minister whose leadership and ideas have contributed so much to improving the quality of life and economic well-being of the citizens of India.
I would also like to thank the departments and agencies of the Indian government who have been so supportive in mounting the Award events in India, and in facilitating the presence of so many people from different parts of the world. Many of our international guests have prominent and responsible positions at home and their presence here honours us.
The recognition we are giving tonight carries the name Award for Architecture. But it represents much more. The Award recognises the efforts of architects and their clients, builders - large and small, governments, planners, international organisations, granting agencies, village organisations and individuals. All of them are collectively responsible for the creation of a humane and socially-supportive built environment that is so important to our quality of life.
It is therefore most appropriate that this event is taking place in India, a country rich in cultural heritage and pluralistic traditions. Here, many cultures have maintained their distinct identities while combining and co-operating to create something even greater, the dynamic and vibrant India of the modern world. This is also a country where the struggle for social justice and improved quality of life has made tremendous strides over many decades through the continuous efforts of governments and civil society.
This year's Award recognises projects that cover the entire spectrum of human capability and human need. The striking differences in these award winners reflect the enormous range of need for human habitat that must be met in the world today.
It is now 27 years since the Award was launched. At that time, I was becoming increasingly disturbed by the loss of cultural identity and appropriateness in the architecture and built environments of much of the Muslim world. A few centuries ago, architecture was one of the great forms of artistic expression in the many diverse Muslim societies.
It permeated all types of buildings and spaces, both secular and religious, rural and urban, in the multiple Islamic cultures spread across the world and in neighbouring non-Muslim societies as well.
This magnificent structure, built to honour the second Mughal Emperor, Humayun, is one of the early examples of the spectacular architectural legacy the Mughals left to the people of the subcontinent. The Taj Mahal, built almost a hundred years later, is one of the world's most admired buildings of all time. Before these, the early Muslims had already made their distinctive architectural mark in Syria, Iraq, Fatimid Egypt, Spain, Persia and Anatolia.
But in recent years, Islamic architecture seemed to have lost its identity -- I should perhaps say identities -- and its inspiration. Occasionally, construction tended to repeat previous Islamic styles, but much more often, it simply absorbed imported architectural forms, language and materials.
There were several reasons for this. In part, it was because "modernity," equated with all that was Western, had come to be seen as representing improved quality. And most Muslim architects were trained in western schools and had little knowledge and understanding of the traditions of Islamic architecture.
The net result was that our cities, villages, and rural areas were being transformed by the insidious introduction and expansion of inappropriate and irrelevant architecture and planning.
In Islam, the Holy Qur'an says that man is God's noblest creation to whom He has entrusted the stewardship of all that is on earth. Each generation must leave for its successors an enhanced and sustainable social and physical environment. I am sure every responsible citizen in every part of the world would share this aspiration.
Therefore, we set out on a long journey to try to understand the causes of this sad situation which Muslim and non-Muslim architects alike recognised as unfortunate, but which none knew how to alter. They included some of the most eminent architects, and men and women of different disciplines and cultures who joined me in this endeavour to understand the causes of this decline in quality and design.
The enormity of the challenge caused many to doubt that a significant result could be achieved. It seemed certain that decades would pass before results, if any, would be seen.
The evolution of the Award has been first, engaging constituencies to develop consensus about the nature of the problem; second, developing the means to support change; and finally, exposing solutions to the many who are involved in the process of developing human habitat.
Now, as we enter our second quarter century of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, we might ask ourselves: Are the lessons we have learned in this particular cultural endeavour applicable to other environments and other cultural traditions that are stagnating or under threat?
I, of course, start with the basic assumption that the world is a much better place because it is pluralist and multi-cultural. Imagine what it would be like living in a world of no diversity, a world where we were all the same colour, shape and size, ate the same biryani, told the same jokes and combed our hair identically. Aside from the fact that my comb, sadly, serves less purpose these days, I would find a world like that quite boring!
I am therefore convinced that supporting diversity and cultures under threat is a worthwhile and fruitful venture.
This leads me to the fundamental question we sought to answer in establishing these awards. It is one which I think is applicable to any initiative which is aimed at nurturing and supporting cultures at risk: How do we protect the past and inspire the future?
Put another way, how do we reshape and reposition knowledge and taste and appreciation in the public psyche, and among those who play a role in developing human habitat?
From the beginning, we knew that to have a realistic chance of bringing about fundamental and lasting change, we had to reach out and raise awareness, not just among architects, but among clients, corporations, governments, planners, educators and financiers.
That meant we needed to build an all encompassing profile of people and habitat, not only in the Islamic world, but in countries where Muslims live and interact with other communities, both urban and rural.
We broadened the definition of architecture from one that tended to look only at individual structures, to one that encompassed entire neighbourhoods, including informal settlements, village communities and open public spaces. In the first nine cycles, some 2,661 projects have been assessed and documented in 88 countries, an unparalleled data resource base. The independent Master Juries have recognised 97 projects in 25 countries.
They demonstrate widely different aspects of architectural solutions that affect quality of life, ranging from the restoration of historic urban fabrics and monuments, to the reforestation of a university campus of over 300 hectares. They have included generic models of individual houses and modest individual efforts, large civic complexes and high-tech, ultra-modern buildings that set new trends for the future.
Another important step in the process was to promote awareness and understanding of appropriate technologies and solutions. The Muslim world is multi-cultural, diverse in geography, terrain and climate and it exhibits extremes of wealth and poverty. This diversity required us to be sensitive not only to local needs, but to local capacity and resources available to meet those needs.
And finally, new initiatives outside the Award itself became necessary. In education, our Trust for Culture supports the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at Harvard and M.I.T.
The Trust's Historic Cities Support Programme helps create new examples and models for reviving historic buildings and spaces.
Our efforts have been richly rewarded in the growth of knowledge and awareness of Islamic architecture and landscaping in educational bodies around the world. In the most eminent Western schools there is a much greater academic offering and commitment to the field of Islamic architecture.
And in Muslim countries we have seen the birth of new schools and a new generation of architectural teachers and scholars in the field. Most important, as we have seen from the winners recognised this evening, we are getting better habitat. I think that the Award and the cluster of initiatives born from it are truly protecting the past and inspiring the future.
But while we can be pleased with this progress, there is much more to be done.
Quality housing remains the most essential need for societies everywhere, both in rural and urban environments. Industrial facilities and workplaces are not at a level of excellence that makes them exceptional.
Rapidly-expanding urban centres throughout the world lack public parks and open urban spaces. Problems of transport, congestion and pollution have too few solutions emerging. The growth of slums, the consequence of the relentless forces of urbanisation, has not been stopped or even slowed down.
And although many fine examples of rural projects have been represented in past Award cycles, still there are not enough. We have much yet to strive for. But I believe the process we have launched has become a self-sustaining and unstoppable force for change in human habitat not only in the Muslim world, but in much of the developing world as well.
The larger and perhaps more interesting question is whether this approach might be adopted to support other cultures that are at risk.
The issues we have been attempting to address through the process of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture are not exclusive to the Muslim world.
The non-Muslim world struggles equally with explosive population growth, poverty, environmental degradation, exodus from rural areas, globalisation and the impact on cultural identity of new forms of media.
I hope that the lessons learned in the process we have established would be applicable to the many others in similar circumstances.
Perhaps these lessons will one day be seen as an important contribution from the Muslim world: A contribution to the broader cause of maintaining and enhancing a multi-cultural, pluralist world and a responsive, appropriate human habitat.
Thank you.


text:
The following story is based on real-life events and was told to me by several people directly related to the events in question, including those living in and around Peshawar in 1997.
Although I have fictionalised the conversations and some minor details for ease of reading, the basic facts of the story are true as I have verified from multiple sources. This story is longer than my usual blog posts but it is a very important post. Please let me have your comments…
Peshawar, North West Pakistan, 1997
It was late in the evening and the wedding party was in full swing. Earlier in the day Asma's sister had taken her to one of Peshawar's beauty salons to be made up and have henna decorated on her hands. She was wearing a red wedding dress lined with golden brocade.
Although of modest means, her family had travelled to Peshawar from Lahore for the wedding. Still only 23, it had been two years since Asma completed her six year "Alimah" (female Muslim scholar) course at the Darul Uloom seminary in Lahore.
Since then, she had been teaching Islamic studies to girls at a local school.
It was September 1997. The dusty north western frontier Pakistani city of Peshawar was bustling with foreigners: mainly Afghan refugees who had settled in the city, but also a few Arabs.
It had been eight years since the Soviet Union withdrew its troops in February 1989 after suffering heavy losses at the hands of the Mujahideen freedom fighters.
Three years later in April 1992, the Mujahideen went on to capture Kabul and overthrew the Communist regime of Soviet-puppet Najibullah.
This triggered the start of the Afghan Civil War. Afghan warlords began to fight amongst each other over who would be incharge of the newly "liberated" Afghanistan.
Thousands of civilians were killed as rival warlords lobbed artillery shells into Kabul as one might throw rotten apples into a garbage heap.
These particular warlords, despite calling themselves "Mujahideen", so-called "soldiers of God" had no regard for killing the innocent servants of God. In doing so, they dishonoured the legacy of the real Mujahideen.
It was in the midst of this civil war that a group of religious students known as the Taliban and led by a man named Mulla Muhammad Umar appeared.
Within two years they swept through Afghanistan, restoring some semblance of security and stability for the ordinary Afghans fed up with the civil war.
In exchange for security, ordinary Afghans tolerated the Taliban banning everything from girls' schools to kite-flying, hoping that with time they would relax these policies.
In September 1996, one year before Asma's wedding, the Taliban conquered Kabul and declared the new name of the country to be the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
It was while she was a teenager during the late 1980s that Asma first heard of the Afghan Jihad. Throughout the 1980s, Afghan Mujahideen freedom fighters had been fighting to expel invading Soviet troops from their land.
They were supported by the United States, Britain, Europe, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia along with most of the world.
They were also supported by thousands of Arab Mujahideen: foreign volunteers from the Muslim world who had arrived in Afghanistan to help their Muslim brethren liberate a Muslim land occupied by a non-Muslim invader.
From time to time, Asma would hear of these legendary Arab Mujahideen with their long black beards and flowing locks of hair facing Russian tanks armed only with rifles.
She would read about their heroic feats in the Urdu language newspapers supporting the Afghan Jihad.
Asma admired these Arab Mujahideen, in fact, she idolised them. To her, they were heroes; modern-day equivalents of the Sahabah, Companions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) whom she had studied about in the books of Islamic history.
She would pray day and night that she married one of these heroes.
So when news reached Asma one day that an Arab Mujahid from Peshawar had arrived in Lahore looking for a Pakistani girl to get married to, she could not believe her ears.
She jumped at the opportunity. "This must be God's answer to my prayers," she thought and a meeting was arranged at Asma's house.
Abu Adil was an Algerian in his early 20s. A fair-skinned man with a wispy beard, he clearly looked different to Pakistani men, almost exotic. Asma was mesmerised by him as he spoke.
He told Asma that he had been fighting in the Afghan Jihad for several years, first against the Soviets and then against the Communists. He wanted to live and die for Islam and participate in Jihad for as long as he lived.
Asma was too awe-struck to ask him any questions of her own. She didn't ask him why, after the end of the Afghan Jihad in 1992, he had not followed his fellow Arab warriors to the lands of Jihad in Bosnia or Chechnya or Tajikistan.
She didn't ask him why he was living in Pakistan when the Taliban had announced an Islamic Emirate next door.
She didn't even ask him for any character references, to verify his background and history. To find out about his character.
"Why bother with these silly questions?" Asma later thought to herself after she had agreed to marry him, after that single meeting.
"He is a Mujahid, an Arab, he must be of exemplary character. He must be brave, fearless, romantic, protective, noble, hospitable, generous… just like the Sahabah [Companions of the Prophet Muhammad ss] were," Asma thought to herself.
Unsurprisingly, Asma's response to Abu Adil's proposal was a resounding yes.
The wedding party finished and Asma was picked up by the groom. "I live in Pabi," Abu Adil told her as his car left Peshawar for the 30 minute drive to Pabi. Asma did wonder why Abu Adil did not live in Peshawar as he first claimed, but she dismissed it.
Who cared where her Mujahid husband lived? He was a hero and that was all that mattered.
The next day Abu Adil's friends came round to visit the new bride with their families. Asma was shocked by what happened next. The women took off their hijab headscarves and sat in the company of all the men.
As a scholar herself Asma knew that devout Muslim women did not take off their hijabs infront of men outside their immediate family. Something didn't seem right, but she dismissed it as whisperings of the devil.
Over the next couple of days Asma realised more strange things. Abu Adil's friends would come round to his house, with their wives, and they would sit and chat and laugh all day long.
But when time came for prayer, they were not in the least enthusiastic about it, including Abu Adil. They did pray, but only when the time for prayer was almost finished.
Asma did not need a scholar to tell her that praying the five times salah prayer on time was the most important thing that a Muslim needed to do.
There were about six or seven families living close to Asma's new house in Pabi. Two of them were in the same building as her. These were all Abu Adil's friends.
Among them was a Sudanese man whom all the others called, "Sheikh." His name was Abu Ayub Al-Barqawi.
At her husband's insistence, she served the guests but Asma was starting to feel very uncomfortable. The behaviour of the men, their character, their manners and personal hygiene were more like slumdogs rather than noble warriors or clerics.
OK, putting feet up on dining tables to cut toenails infront of guests was not haram (forbidden) in Islam, but it was definitely disgusting manners. This was not the way Asma had been brought up and she found some of the behaviour of the men very odd.
Nevertheless, Asma put on a brave face whenever her family called. Perhaps her expectations were too high and it would take time for her to adjust?
The first slap came before the week was over. Asma had put too much chilli in the food, the way she was taught by her mother.
Abu Adil had not liked it, so he spat it out and slapped Asma across the face as he swore at her, "Anti aahirah ya kalbah!"
Asma understood enough Arabic to know that Abu Adil had just called her a "whore" and a "b***h".
Asma left the kitchen in tears and went straight to her bedroom. She put her face in her pillow and cried. She was homesick and missed her family.
A short while later Abu Adil entered the bedroom and apologised to Asma for hitting her too hard. "I'm sorry I hit you so hard but the Quran says that I can beat you," he said to her.
"Did the Prophet (ss) ever raise his hand at a woman?!" Asma cried out in response. "Tell me! Did he? Tell me!"
Abu Adil was silent, then he said. "Let's try again, maybe we got off to a bad start?"
Asma felt better in the morning but she was still a little upset. She began to feel guilty. Maybe she was in the wrong by putting too much chilli in the food? Maybe she deserved the slap?
As the days went by Asma noticed that although none of the men worked, they always seemed to have money. The women wore the best jewellery and clothes, the men drove good cars and had good watches.
She wondered where all this money was coming from.
"Fai," she heard one of the men say one day as he grinned and pointed to a new watch that he was wearing. All the other men laughed. Asma knew that "fai" was a type of war booty that fighters acquired from the enemy without fighting.
Asma began to wonder whether the watch was stolen so she asked Abu Adil about it. "Since we are Mujahideen Sheikh Abu Ayub says that we are allowed to take anything we want to support ourselves."
But who was the "enemy" and where was the "fighting"? The families were living in a small town about 15 miles from Peshawar. All the people in Pabi, Peshawar and surrounding areas were Muslims. There was no war or Jihad in Pabi.
"But that's stealing!" Asma said to Abu Adil. "And what's worse is that your friends are stealing from Muslims."
"They are not Muslims," Abu Adil replied. "They are apostates, because they haven't pledged allegiance to the Caliph."
"Caliph?!" Asma exclaimed. Asma had heard of Mulla Umar, the leader of the Taliban movement who had just taken power across the border in Afghanistan, but even he had not declared himself to be a caliph. "So who is this 'Caliph' and where is he?"
Asma didn't know that just like the 'former Islamist' industry today, the 'caliphate' industry was ripe in Afghanistan/Pakistan during the 1990s. 'Caliphs' were popping up everywhere.
First there was Jamil-ur-Rahman, who was the head of a 'caliphate' in Nuristan province of Afghanistan in 1991. His caliphate was short lived, and he was killed a few months later after fleeing for his life to Pakistan.
Then there was the controversy surrounding Mulla Muhammad Umar, leader of the Taliban movement that took control of Afghanistan in 1996. However, while Mulla Umar himself never declared that he was a caliph, others raised him to that pedestal. And then…
"The Caliph's name is Abu Isa Muhammad Eid Ar-Rifaei, also known as Abu Hammam Al-Khalifah. He is a Jordanian man descended from the Quraysh tribe of the Prophet (ss)."
"He was living here with us in Pabi but for the last few years he has been living in Britain because he suffered health problems here."
Asma wondered whether Abu Adil was out of his mind. But then she remembered that neither Abu Adil, nor his friends, ever attended prayers at any of the local mosques. Maybe they really don't consider all these people Muslims, she wondered.
"You mean the 'Caliph' is living in Britain?" Asma asked Abu Adil. "You are joking, right?"
Abu Adil was silent. He did't tell Asma that the Abu Isa 'The Caliph' was living on income support (Government social security welfare) in the city of Slough, a few miles west of London.
The second beating came a few days after this conversation. This time Asma had mistakenly burned one of Abu Adil's kameez shirts while she was ironing it.
Abu Adil had picked up a sandal and, while swearing at her with the most vulgar language, beat Asma with it so severely that her nose began to bleed.
He would have continued had she not managed to run away and lock herself in the bathroom.
A short while later, the same thing happened. Abu Adil apologised and promised he would never hit Asma again. She found it quite strange.
Why apologise and promise never to hit me again if you believe that you are obliged to beat me according to the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet (ss), Asma wondered to herself.
The cycle of beatings and apologies continued for the next few weeks. Asma began to realise that this was how it was going to be. The final straw came one night after Abu Adil dragged Asma by her hair and threw her down the stairs.
Asma had to run away. She was in fear for her life.
The next morning, as Abu Adil slept, Asma managed to slip out of the house and get a rickshaw to the bus station. There she mingled among some local women and then got on a bus to Peshawar.
Asma remembered that she knew someone in Peshawar. Fatima, one of Asma's classmates was living in Peshawar, having moved there after she got married. Somehow, Asma managed to reach Fatima's house and explained to her what had happened.
She knew that Abu Adil would be hunting her as soon as he found out what had happened. Her life was in danger.
"Go to the house of Asadullah As-Sindhi," Fatima told him. "He is the most well-connected Mujahid in Peshawar. You will be OK with him." Asadullah was certainly well-known not just in Peshawar, but in Jihad circles across Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Unlike most of the "armchair Mujahideen" living in Pakistan, Asadullah was a real warrior, Fatima told Asma. He had actually fought in Jihad, on a battlefield.
Asadullah had spent many years fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and was one of the 50 fighters that took part in the famous 1987 "Lion's Den" operation in Jaji, successfully defending the base of the foreign Mujahideen fighters from a Soviet attack.
Asma somehow made it to Asadullah's house; his wife was at home. In tears, Asma explained to Asadullah and his wife everything that had happened.
"I think you have got caught up in the 'Caliphate' cult," Asadullah told Asma.
"Most of them arrived in the region long after the Jihad in Afghanistan ended," he carried on. "None of them have any significant history or legacy in the Jihad. They consider every Muslim who is not with them to be an apostate."
"There are only a handful of them," he continued. "All the Mujahideen of the area hounded them out of Peshawar so they went to live in Pabi."
"They kill anyone who leaves them but here you will be safe with us inshallah [God willing]."
Somewhat reassured, Asma ate and fell asleep in the spare room. At 1 o'clock in the morning there was a loud knocking on the gate to the house compound. Asma peered out of a corner of the curtain.
Asadullah went to the gate and opened it. Standing there was Abu Adil. He began shouting angrily at Asadullah. Asma was terrified.
Asadullah meanwhile tried to calm Abu Adil down and reason with him.
And then Asma saw what was in Abu Adil's hands. She glimpsed the steel of a handgun before she saw the muzzle flashes of the multiple gunshots. Asadullah fell to the floor and remained there motionless.
"Now it's your turn you whore!" Abu Adil shouted as he began to make his way to the house. Asma froze in fear and recited her shahadah Islamic declaration of faith.
That was the last thing she did. Abu Adil entered the room where Asma was. There were gunshots, Asma never left that room alive.
Within the space of a few seconds, two people who had rendered great service to Islam and Muslims lay dead. One was Asadullah As-Sindhi, a warrior and veteran of the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad. Another was Asma.
Both were killed not by a foreign enemy or non-Muslim invader; they were murdered by a fellow Muslim who had become blinded by the cult that he was part of.
Epilogue: Abu Isa 'The Caliph' was arrested by UK authorities in 2006 on an immigration violation and imprisoned briefly in HMP Belmarsh. I saw him in the Belmarsh visiting hall in December 2006 while his family came to visit him. He was in a wheelchair and in poor health. He was soon given bail and released. He died in March 2014, while I was in an American Supermax prison.
As for Abu Ayub Al-Barqawi (the 'cleric' of the Abu Isa Caliphate group), following the murder of Asadullah As-Sindhi in 1997, he fled for his life from Pakistan after learning that associates of Asadullah were hunting him. He is believed to have been killed a few years later in a foreign country.
Finally, Abu Adil was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and detained in Guantanamo Bay for seven years. He was released to Algeria in 2010 after it was revealed that he had been working for the intelligence services of two Western nations. His current whereabouts are unknown.
Enter your email address in the form below to receive a notification every time I update my blog.
Read the story of why I was in prison in the interview I gave to The Guardian newspaper here.


text:
Celebratory Fund Challenge Fund Challenge Fund - World of Work FLA/ELA Ambassadors Instant Impact Our future in Europe Partnerships in Learning School Partnership Bursaries WWI projects Youth Challenge Fund
Home > Programmes > Going to Germany > Magical Christmas Trips > What did the teachers think?
What did the teachers think?
Quotes from teachers
"It reinforced the notion that we do indeed have European friends and can share each others' language and culture."
Primary Headteacher
"This visit was the catalyst for the German Exchange that is now in place."
Secondary Teacher
"The impact on the school and the image of German has been huge. The visit provided a springboard for us to promote German and Germany even further."
Secondary Teacher
"More pupils now want to learn German and the wider community has also gained a greater awareness of our school, language teaching and extra-curricular opportunities like this"
Secondary Teacher
"We now teach German as a result of the visit."
Primary Teacher


text:
I took lessons of humility
from the worn roadside stones.
Nothing can teach civility
so well as the shattered bones.
That's why my posture is queenly
and my manners are aesthetic.
Your sense of beauty knows so keenly
when reality is prosthetic.
by TETIANA ALEKSINA
© All rights reserved 2015


text:
2014, 2015, 2016, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Akai Gurley, Alberta Spruill, Alesia Thomas, Atlanta, Blue Hurt, Blue Lines, Blue Lines Blog, California, Chapel Hill, Cleveland, college, Connecticut, Dante Parker, Darnisha Harris, December, Dontre Hamilton, Elaine Rothenberg, Eric Garner, Eric Harris, Ezell Ford, Freddie Gray, Georgia, Happy, Happy New Year, Jerame Reid, John Crawford, Kathryn Johnston, Kendra James, Key Yemaya Walker, Malissa Williams, Michael Brown, Miriam Carey, Ohio, Philip White, Rekia Boyd, Rumain Brisbon, Sacramento, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Shereese Francis, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Tarika Wilson, Tony Robinson, UNC, UNC Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Walter Scott, Yvette Smith
As I look back at the year, I could easily expound on life, growth, gratitude, and love in 2015, and how I look forward to continuing those things in 2016. I can easily use vague comments to reference the people I love and hold dear. However, in my posting life, I've done that enough, and simply because I feel a certain way, does not mean it resonates.
What do I mean? In all of my "happiness," and "hopefulness," I still live in a country that fails to bring justice to the family of a murdered teen. No Life Matters…especially Black, the evidence is growing in support of that. Tamir Rice is another casualty in an increasing epidemic of injudicious police murders in this country. My heart is heavy for a myriad of reasons, this just augments that weight. It makes you wary, but what am I going to do? Lock myself inside and hide from the world? No.
Happy New Year? What about them?


text:
This article: http://www.cricketcountry.com/news/chinaman-bowlers-kuldeep-yadav-lakshan-sandakan-tabraiz-shamsi-and-others-in-international-cricket-2-588700
gives a comprehensive history of all those who have bowled in the Chinaman style (left-hand wrist-spinner) at some point in their Test careers. I am going a little further in studying the performances of those who exclusively bowled in this style (even if they were not regular bowlers). A number of famous names including the alleged inventor Ellis Achong, Johnny Wardle, Gary Sobers and Bernard Julien bowled in various other styles.
So here are the "exclusively Chinaman" bowlers and their careers in brief. This is in chronological order:
Even the change bowlers have taken fivers and tenners.
The best innings bowling in this category is 7-75 by Lindsay Kline:
The best match bowling is 10-106 by Paul Adams:
There is also Michael Bevan's tenner along with 85*, which makes him among the relatively few to score a fifty and take 10-wickets in a match:
A few years before that Allan Border also scored 75 and took 11 wickets with his little-used left-arm spin against the West Indies:
The full list of those who scored 50 and took 10 wickets in a match:
Sir Richard Hadlee is the only one to do this more than once, while "Sir" Ravindra Jadeja also makes an appearance.
It is interesting to see that these occasional bowlers achieved a ten-wicket haul which well-known bowlers such as Willis, Brett Lee, Kallis, Thomson and Sobers were not able to manage during their long careers:
Over 200 wickets with no 10-for:
Coming back to the Chinamen bowlers, here are the best innings and match bowling figures on debut:
The trio of PADLR Sandakan, LO Fleetwood Smith and Kuldeep Yadav have the best performances in innings as well as match bowling. Here is Sandakan's debut:
We now look forward to competition between Sandakan and Yadav for being the best current Chinamen bowlers.
Footnote: Michael Bevan, who seems to have had some Indian ancestry, was soon dropped from the Test team as his batting was not good enough. He then became one of the mainstays of Australia's ODI middle-order.


text:
Stratfor, the company that provides "global intelligence" to the world, seems to have completely lost its collective mind. It is currently in the middle of publishing a four part series on "Russia's Expanding Influence." (The reports are only accessible through the website to subscribers, though they are being reprinted in Johnson's Russia List.) No author is listed, so I must assume this means it is a collective product that has the imprimatur of the entire corporation.
To summarize briefly, the introduction indicates that because of its geographic indefensibility, Russia needs a buffer zone around its borders to be a stable and strong state. The next part is the core of the argument and worth quoting in full:
First are four countries where Russia feels it must fully reconsolidate its influence: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Georgia. These countries protect Russia from Asia and Europe and give Moscow access to the Black and Caspian seas. They are also the key points integrated with Russia's industrial and agricultural heartland. Without all four of them, Russia is essentially impotent. So far, Russia has reconsolidated power in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and part of Georgia is militarily occupied. In 2010, Russia will focus on strengthening its grasp on these countries.
This analysis is so wrong as to be funny. To say that Russia has reconsolidated its influence in those three countries is to be completely ignorant of current events. Belarus has recently turned away from Russia and is trying to get closer to the EU. Kazakhstan is primarily focused on developing its economy and is turning more and more to China in the economic and even inthe security sphere. And anyone who thinks that Yanukovich will do whatever Russia wants will be sorely disappointed. All signs in Ukraine point to him driving a hard bargain and making Russia pay for what it wants — it won't be the knee-jerk anti-Russianism of Yushchenko, but he won't meekly submit either.
Furthermore, as Keith Darden has shown in great detail in his recent book, for most of the last 20 years, Belarus and Kazakhstan have been spearheading re-integration efforts in the former Soviet space, efforts that Russia has repeatedly resisted. The story of the Belarusian efforts to increase political integration with Russia is instructive in this regard. After years of getting nowhere on implementation, Belarusian President Lukashenka has finally given up and has turned to the EU to balance his previously completely Russia-focused foreign policy. With Kazakhstan, Stratfor discusses the gradually increasing Chinese influence but underplays its current role in the country and in Central Asia as a whole. In fact, rather than Russia having "reconsolidated power" in Kazakhstan, there is a three-way competition for influence in Central Asia between Russia, China and the United States. Russia is for the moment the strongest player in this competition (and the US is clearly the weakest), but its influence is waning while China's is increasing. Kazakhstan, just like the other states in the region, is quite happy to play off these three powers against each other to preserve its own freedom of maneuver.
Anyone who thinks that the result of the recent Ukrainian elections means that Ukraine is returning to Russian orbit will be in for some nasty surprises in the coming months. As we saw as far back as 1994, Ukrainian politicians who campaign on pro-Russian themes are likely to adopt a more middle-of-the-road foreign policy once they get elected. Yanukovich's early signals indicate that he is likely to follow the same trajectory as Kuchma did more than 15 years ago. Even analysts who are deeply suspicious of Russia, such as Jamestown Foundation's Vlad Socor, believe that Yanukovich will try to balance Russia and the West in order to preserve his own freedom of action. In today's Eurasia Daily Monitor, Socor writes:
The Brussels and Moscow visits have probably set a pattern for Yanukovych's presidency. He is moving almost without transition from a pro-Russian electoral campaign to a double-vector policy toward Russia and the West. Meanwhile, Yanukovych has no real popular mandate for new policy initiatives, having been elected with less than one half of the votes cast, and lacking a parliamentary majority (although he and Donetsk business may cobble together a parliamentary majority). For all these reasons, the president is not in a position to deliver on any agreements with Russia at this time.
Ukrainian-Russian relations will certainly be less strained than they were over the last five years, but by no means does this mean that Russia is anywhere close to controlling Ukrainian politics.
Overall, I find this analysis puzzling. I can't imagine that the folks at Stratfor are so clueless that they don't already everything I wrote above. The only alternative, though, is that they are distorting the situation in the region in order to pursue some kind of political agenda dedicated to resurrecting the Cold War-era confrontation between Russia and the United States. I find this possibility even more disturbing than the possibility that they are actually unaware of the political situation in the region.
Update: I just read part 2 of this series, which includes a section about the Baltics. While I have no desire to go into it at length, the following sentence was just too amusing not to note: "Estonia is also mainly Ugro-Finnish, which means that Russians are surrounded by Ugro-Finns on both sides of the Gulf of Finland." Now I can't quite get the image of Russia being surrounded by Estonia and Finland out of my head.


text:
I've had it. I see ow.ly links all over Twitter and I'm not going to take it anymore.
What's the issue? Framing and search engine optimization (SEO).
I just read through a comment thread on "The Day I Decided to be Evil [URL Shorteners]" at SiliconAngle.com on whether we should use URL shorteners at all.
I'm on the "yes" side of this argument, both because I would be horrifically hypocritical (I've shared thousands of shortened links on Twitter) and because microblogging virtually requires the use of shorteners to work as a means to share and spread data, links, pictures and other forms of media.
So there's that, in the interests of disclosure.
My post comes late to the SEO debate and, to be frank, there are others who are much better equipped to argue the point. Fortunately, since this is the Web, I can point you in the right direction:
The authority on the subject is absolutely Danny Sullivan, who posted Which URL shortening service should you use? last month. What's the nut of the SEO issue? The kind of redirect used. As Sullivan writes:
"A top issue to me, and many others, is that a URL shortening service does a "301 redirect" to the full URL. That number stands for the code a web server issues to a browser (or search engine) when a URL is requested.
A 301 redirect says that the URL requested (the short URL) has "permanently" moved to the long address. Since it's a permanent redirect, search engines finding links to the short URLs will credit all those links to the long URL (see the SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites section of the Search Engine Land members library for more about redirection).
In contrast, a 302 redirect is a "temporary" one. If that's issued, search engines assume that the short URL is the "real" URL and just temporarily being pointed elsewhere. That means link credit does not get passed on to the long URL.
In short, if you're hoping that links you tweet will generate link credit for your web site, you want a service that issues a 301 redirect. Also keep in mind that while 301s might be issued today, a shortening service could shift to 302 directs at any time (and if they do, I hope scorn gets poured upon them).
Ok, so there's the SEO background and issues at hand. So which does ow.ly use? I tried Rex Swain's "Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer" tool, linked to from Danny's post, on the following link: http://ow.ly/cB3E
Here's what I received:
Sure looks like a 200, not a 301 redirect, right? That would imply that A.J. Ghergich of AuthorityDomains was wrong when he wrote that ow.ly uses 301 redirects. When I tried the HTTP Status Codes Checker tool provided by SEOConsultants.com, however, I received two different server responses:
#1 Server Response: http://ow.ly/cB3E
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
#2 Server Response: http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/06/40-second-toothbrush-complicates-horrifies/
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
So that looks like both! Ah, confusion. Hootsuite certainly thinks that it's doing it right, as evidenced by the following statement on their blog:
"Ow.ly links won't harm SEO because they're designed to allow Google and other search engine spiders access to the content without stealing any Google juice."
Color me unconvinced. I think I'll stick with bit.ly, which I know uses the correct redirect every time.
As Jennifer Van Grove (@jbruin) points out on Mashable in "HootSuite 2.0: Get More Twitter Tabs, Columns and Stats," the HootSuite platform itself has continued to improve and offer easier management of everything from "profile feed options (like mentions, DMs, pending tweets), multiple keyword tracking (up to 3 keywords per column), search terms, and groups." That's a compelling offering. As she writes, "ow.ly links via HootSuite to track click-throughs will also love that stats are more detailed. So, summary stats on links are supplemented with individual tweet statistics showing total clicks and user rating."
That's long been one of the more attractive features of ow.ly for publishers, given the need for them to prove ROI, measure audience feedback and test different compositions of microcontent. That said, bit.ly offers similar features without the burden of that bar.
In other words, I think Web publishers who use Hootsuite are getting good value, especially considering that the cost is precisely zero.
I do, however, think they risk damaging their brand equity and irking users with the social bar – and that there's a larger ethical issue around the framing that the ow.ly bar creates, including potential violations to terms of service and copyright. If you read Malcolm Coles, "Ow.ly and Hootsuite are in widespread breach of newspaper and other sites' TOCs," you'll gather that he does as well.
Hootsuite itself writes the following:
"Generate money from your tweets! Add your Google Adsense code to enable ads on your ow.ly links. We'll show your ads half the time, and our ads half the time."
Also of note: when I clicked the "Learn more" link below the Adsense copy, I ended up at a 404 page with the following URL: http://blog.hootsuite.com/monetized-twitter-yes-we-did
Of course, thanks to Google, you can still view the page in cache:
Following is a quote from the post, entitled in a decidedly Yoda-esque fashion: "Monetized Twitter: Yes We Did."
"Got a link that prompts a re-tweet? As your ow.ly link gets passed from person to person, so does the featured ad! If your link is retweeted by enough people, it can continue to make you money.
Ever wonder how Twitter's getting monetized? We've just shown you. It's easy to configure, it's easy to share, and it easily integrates with Twitter.
Note: So that we can keep HootSuite as a free service for our users, there is a 50% chance that your ad will appear in a link, and a 50% chance that one of our ads will appear."
Got that? As the link to the third party's content is passed along – content that the user (who shortened it) and Hootsuite (the shortener) did not create – both of those parties will earn money by framing it with ads.
It's worth observing that Hootsuite does provides an option NOT to include Adsense in Settings, simply by leaving the field unoccupied: "(leave empty to disable AdSense)"
Also crucial to note is that the updated, slimmer version of Hootsuite's social bar does not appear to play well with Google Adsense, though the precise reason for the issue isn't clear.
According to Hootsuite, "We are currently experiencing issues with AdSense integration. Your ads may not be displayed. We are in communication with Google about this issue, and we will keep our users updated."
I should note that I'm not a lawyer, but a quick read of Google's Adsense policies would seem to put ow.ly in violation:
"Copyrighted Material: AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on webpages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information."
Framing another site's content with a bar that contains advertising to other parties would appear to do precisely that.
It could be a formatting issue, it could be something else entirely – I wonder whether Google's notoriously savvy legal team has seen this issue.
If any publishers do decide to use ow.ly, I believe they would be well-advised to do so.
At least one lawyer shares that view. In the comments section of Greg Lambert's post on GeekLawBlog, Product Review: HootSuite & OW.LY – Do The Benefits Outweigh The Problems?, Doug Cornelius posted a strong opinion, albeit one filtered by his standard lawyerly disclaimer:
Incarnation of Satan may be a bit much, but definitely a spawn of Satan.
I am not a copyright expert, but it seems to me that framing is a copyright violation. (There was the TotalNews case, but it was settled before we could could get some law on this. Infer what you want from TotalNew stopping the framing as part of the undisclosed settlement.) I expect that this feature of Ow.ly won't last long, once the lawyers start sniffing around.
Even if it is not illegal, it robs websites of traffic. You, like me, put up blog posts because we feel like saying something. We don't sell ads, we don't have sponsors and nobody pays us to write. All I (and I assume you) want in return is some page hits and the occasional comment. We want to know that someone is listening and that we are not just talking to ourselves.
Ow.ly seems to rob us the page hits so I would not know that you viewed my page or where you came from. I don't ask for much, but it is nice to know that you stopped by and who sent you. Ow.ly takes that away.
Don't get me started on the adsense feature of ow.ly. If I wanted ads associated with my site, I would put them there. I don't want someone framing my content with a Viagra ad.
Lambert himself expresses considerable reservation:
The Whole "OW.LY" Thing….
Alright, this is the big one. I barely got my first test Tweet out on HootSuite when someone called me out for "annoying" if not "illegal" framing of web content. Now, I confess that I didn't realize what OW.LY was doing until after I had sent out the Tweet, so I was pretty ignorant of the drawbacks of using OW.LY as my URL shrinker. At first glance, the frame is a little annoying, but also a little useful. So, I had a nice little discussion with Doug Cornelius about the benefits. Whereas I thought HootSuite's ability to gather statistics and feedback could be a benefit to the person Tweeting the link — Doug thought it was something close to the incarnation of Satan himself (okay, I'm being a little over dramatic on Doug's response… but, not that far off!)
After looking at the positives and the negatives, I decided that framing of other people's content really isn't a great idea. It is annoying for one, and it borders on the unethical for another. I would ask the folks at HootSuite to give the users of their product an option to use a non-framing version of OW.LY that would still gather the metrics of who did the click-thru, without annoying the hell out of them!!
As for the putting Google Adsense code on OW.LY to generate revenue from your Tweets, I'd have to say that would not be something that I would do, or recommend. Some may argue that people would not have gone to these websites if it were not for your Tweets, but I'd have to say that there seems to be a certain sliminess about that type of revenue generating that I do not like.
There are other reasons to be concerned, as content publisher. As Espen Antonsen writes on cloudave.com in "The Problem with URL Shorteners: Ow.ly server errors," your audience may be confronted with a server error by the shortener, even if the end resource is live. I should note that has nothing to do with SEO or framing issues, but it's worth considering:
"If you currently click on a ow.ly shortened URL you will be shown a server error page at ow.ly – not the URL you or the publisher intended you to see. Proponents of these services have so far ignored the main problem; trusting a third party. I guess they see the problem now when potential visitors to their site are stopped by a server error on someone else's site.
The question of trust in this regard is especially important because these services has no working business model. Also any developer can create such a service in less than an hour making the barriers of entry for this service extremely low. Expect to see URL shortener services changing their tactics: Digg launched their already much hated DiggBar last week. This service unlike most other url shortener services wraps the actual landing page in a frame and adds a top-frame bar with Digg information. Ow.ly is also now doing this (unsure if this feature is new to this service). The problem for site owners is that they have no control over how these services will change. DiggBar is already "stealing" link-juice by having a digg-shortened link on Delicious instead of the original url. Also DiggBar and Ow.ly responds with a frameset (200 http status code) instead of a redirect (301 http status code). This can result in a lower pagerank as Google will not see the link from "Site X" to "Site Y" but instead from Digg.com to "Site Y". In my view URL shorteners are just plain evil. They add an extra unnecessary layer on the web."
Angie Haggstrom, of ProfessionalWebContent.com, expressed similar reservations to Cornelius in the comments of that post:
"After one of my readers complained about me using HootSuite's ow.ly links (he thought the framing raised some copyright issues), I asked HootSuite about giving me the option to remove it.
They responded that the ability to move the frame will be an option in their "premium" account, meaning that you will have to pay for it.
By the way, the HootSuite tool bar has been in place as long as I have been using it, which is for 3 months."
"The other beef with services such as Ow.ly that many haven't mentioned is the fact that they are making money off content that doesn't belong to them. Google Adsense for example. Shouldn't web owners get a cut? At least those who do not want to share their content?"
So where does this leave me?
The Hootsuite blog states that it offers an opt-out, that doesn't fix the ad framing issue:
"One click opt-out. We recognize everyone is different. So, if you or your users happen not to like it? Not a problem. One click and anyone can opt-out of ever seeing an Ow.ly social bar again."
That doesn't do it for me: I won't be using ow.ly.
As I've previously stated, I will not share or retweet ow.ly links.
I'll look for another provider that is sharing the same news.
If it's original content from that publisher, I'll navigate to the source and re-shorten the link, if the story is compelling enough to do so.
Thankfully, I can shorten URLs using http://bit.ly and Twittelator Pro, simply replacing "http" with "twit" in mobile Safari on my iPhone, though it's obviously onerous to do so.
I hope that Hootsuite will simply permanently remove the Adsense feature. After all, it's not working now.
And I hope that I'm wrong about the SEO issue – though as I wrote, it appears ow.ly has a 200, not a 301 redirect. That's something Hootsuite can and should fix soon.
The social bar isn't likely to go away, just like the social bars from LinkedIn, Facebook and Digg. It's not hard to anticipate scenarios where content publishers raise copyright concerns should third-party advertising end up in those bars as well, a future that may well be coming given the considerable pressures to monetize these platforms and social networks.
In the meantime, we as users and publishers can choose not to use them and encourage reforms in their technical underpinnings.


text:
The company is based on Proverbs 31, you know the chapter in proverbs that makes you feel bad about your house-keeping. Just kidding! Actually my very good friend Jessi and senior elder at my church (by the way you should check out her inspirational blog!) Anyway, Jessi says that becoming the Proverbs 31 woman is a life-long process.Whew!!
This post is actually not a promo for Thirty-One, though if you have the ability to find a consultant you should check it out! Actually, this post is how I made a cover for my sister's skirt purse.
I'm not going to showcase it in my normal one million picture tutorial, because most people don't even have skirt purses. So, I'll just show you the finished product!
|Fabric from Ikea


text:
When multitudes of Windows 8 users start playing with newly purchased hardware in the coming weeks and months, they'll encounter an indignity that once afflicted only smartphone and tablet users: dirty, smudgy, fingerprint-riddled touchscreens.
Ah, yes, the dreaded smudge. It's a problem we've all come to grudgingly accept on mobile device screens, but PC users generally aren't so accepting of people touching—let alone leaving fingerprints on—their desktop displays.
If Microsoft executive Keith Lorizio has his way, some 400 million Windows 8 devices will be active by July 1, 2013. Lorizio was surely including nontouch legacy machines when he made this optimstic declaration last week, and Microsoft has already backed away from Lorizio's comments. But the fact remains that desktop computing is about to get very, very dirty.
So just what is the tech industry doing to head off the collision between PC screens and fingers? Or will desktop users simply resign themselves to a life where dirty screens become the new normal?
If we look to the mobile industry for answers, we see that accessory makers are taking the lead in fingerprint control, answering consumer demand for products that protect phones and tablets from not just smudges, but cracks.
Meanwhile, the hardware manufacturers and their touchscreen suppliers have so far not invested heavily in new science that might stop screen smudging. Rather, they're taking a much more measured, less expensive approach.
"Our impression is that smudge-proof touchscreens are still pretty far from becoming commercially available," says IDC tablets and displays analyst Linn Huang. "Right now the most elegant solution available is the manufacturers including a free, small terrycloth to use to wipe the screen with each tablet they ship."
Nor are computer manufacturers investing heavily in in-house research that might lead to an effective smudge-resistant surface. Instead, this type of research is happening in universities like Northwestern and MIT, and in various institutional research facilities around the world, such as the Max Planck Institute in Germany and GE Global Research.
Two approaches to resisting smudges
Researchers pursue two strategies for making better oleophobic screens (oleophobic literally means "lacking affinity for oils"). Some scientists try to advance the chemical treatment approach now used by Apple and others, while others work on applying new physical textures on screen surfaces, textures that are unfriendly to oil and liquid.
Chemical treatments
Apple was the first large tech brand to apply an oleophobic chemical treatment to the screens of a major product line. The glass screen of the iPhone 3GS was covered with an organic, carbon-based polymer that prevents oil from the skin from sticking to the screen. Instead, the oil (from the user's fingers, cheek, ear, or nose) stays bonded together in droplets, but not bonded with the screen.
Apple's solution didn't rid the phone of fingerprints and smudges very effectively, but Apple has stuck with its oleophobic surfaces. New iPhones and iPads ship with oleophobic screens. And the company has certainly invested in research on oil-resistant screens: In February 2011, Apple filed a patent on a special process for applying an oleophobic polymer to the surface of a touchscreen.
Physical screen texturing
The most promising research in oleophobic surfaces involves the physical texturing of screen surfaces. Last December, Max Planck Institute researchers published a paper in the journal Science saying that regular soot—the carbon residue released from a burning candle—can create a rough, oil-resistant surface.
The researchers coated a slide with candle soot, then covered the layer of carbon residue with a layer of silica structures and baked the whole thing at 1112 degrees Fahrenheit, which made the layer of soot transparent.
During tests afterward, the researchers found that oil and dirt particles were repelled by the surface, that they bounced right off the surface of the slide, and did not break apart and scatter about.
Not only did the surface seem to work exceptionally well against fingerprinting, but it was a relatively cheap and simple solution. The only problem was that the surface wasn't very robust and stable and could easily be scratched off.
Hybrid approach holds most promise
The most promising attempts to create the transparent, oleophobic surfaces that touchscreen makers need use a hybrid approach. "Simply using chemicals will not get it done; what is needed is a dramatic combination of chemical treatment and texturing," says Neelesh A. Patankar, professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at Northwestern University.
Patankar says (and others agree) that the research with the best chance of leading to a real nonsmudge touchscreen is a hybrid solution being developed by a pair of MIT researchers named Gareth McKinley and Bob Cohen.
The two began a project in the mid-2000s developing liquid-resistant surfaces for the Air Force, which wanted to make materials like O-rings resistant to liquids like jet fuel. Jet fuel, McKinely explains, is a liquid with "low surface tension," which means, in very simple terms, that it forms droplets easily.
Liquids like fingerprint oil and sweat, as it happens, also have low surface tension, because they're both full of bodily secretions like lipids and fatty acids, McKinley says. "This is why they are so hard to remove," he says. "They want to spread over everything."
The suggestion that McKinley's and Cohen's surface treatment might repel finger oil and sweat caught the attention of the computer industry. "After we released a couple of research papers in 2007 and 2008 describing our results, we immediately began getting calls from technology companies," McKinley explains. Some in the tech industry saw in the research a possible opportunity to make smudge-resistant touchscreens.
McKinley and Cohen are developing techniques for texturing surfaces with nanofabricated structures that form a forest of microscopic structures that look like tiny round platforms held up from below by thin pedestals. The structures are only about 200 nanometers in size; this is smaller than the wavelength of light, making them potentially transparent, McKinley says.
Theoretically, the tiny nail-shaped structures could be spaced at just far enough apart to prevent the liquid and oil droplets resting on top from combining with other droplets and spreading out. This coalescence and spreading out into a thin oily film is what causes surface smudging and smearing.
Today, McKinley says, he and Cohen in conjunction with another MIT professor, George Barbastathis, have successfully developed a highly transparent surface texture and chemical treatment that repels water, but doesn't yet effectively repel finger oil. "Nailing" that oil-resistant quality, however, is probably just a matter of time.
Daily wear and tear
Perhaps the most serious roadblock McKinley and Cohen are working through is the same one the researchers at the Max Planck Institute struggle with: Their surface treatment still is not durable enough to withstand a reasonable amount of the wear and tear that comes with the day-to-day life of a touchscreen device.
"The real concern is the mechanical robustness, the reliability of the treatment," McKinley says. "The oleophobic coating has to be tough enough to resist being scratched or rubbed off after coming into contact with objects like keys."
McKinley compares the challenge to the one faced by the developers of the Teflon surfaces used in nonstick frying pans. "When they first came out with frying pans treated with Teflon to make them nonstick, they had same kind of reliability problems, but they still went to market," and, McKinley adds, the Teflon coatings got more and more durable after their introduction. McKinley believes the same thing will likely happen with smudge-resistant treatments used on computer touchscreens.
How long we consumers will have to wait for smudge-free touchscreens depends in part on the willingness of tech companies to get behind the research. Despite the computer makers' knowledge of the research going on at MIT, none has provided funding, and licensing discussions are still at the beginning stages. With sufficient funding, McKinley says, he believes they could deliver a working, scalable, and cost-effective solution to touchscreen makers within two to five years.
"Money is the limiting factor," McKinley says. "It's a question of how much are we willing to pay; how much are we willing to add to the price for something for a smudge-free screen?"
No big rush
The truth is, creating smudge-free screens isn't at the top of most manufacturers' priority lists. "Manufacturers typically see brightness, color saturation, and resolution or pixels per inch as their primary marketing issues for displays on tablets and smartphones," says research scientist Dr. Raymond Soneira, who developed the widely used DisplayMate testing utility.
But touchscreens, especially those for smartphones and tablets, have become a commodity whose main distinguishing feature is simply price. Device makers like Samsung, Dell, HP, and HTC play in an extremely competitive market where margins are squeezed to the limit. These companies are eager to pay lower and lower prices for touchscreens. So naturally the device makers and their touchscreen suppliers are in no hurry to introduce expensive new features—such as oleophobic texturing—to the screens.
IDC's Huang believes that sooner or later one of the major touchscreen device makers will take the plunge and invest in and license an oleophobic technology that it believes is cost-effective. The other major brands will then follow suit to avoid the perception in the marketplace that they're being left behind, he says.
Accessory makers try to fill the gap
Right now, it is the accessory makers that have a commercially viable solution to screen smudging. Smartphone and tablet makers can find a wide array of coverings for their devices, featuring different materials and different finishes that provide either a glossy, glass-like finish, or a smooth matte finish instead.
The most popular type of screen protectors appear to be thin plastic film overlays that cover the touchscreen, but are actually made of more complex polyurethane. Wrapsol makes film for a variety of smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and its Ultra screen covers feature three layers: a clear polyurethane resin on the top, a clear hybrid copolymer acrylic pressure-sensitive adhesive in the middle, and finally a film liner on the bottom that sticks to your device.
Wrapsol claims that each layer combines to create a cover that keeps your screen smudge free and that is shock absorbent—a great feature for mobile devices that are prone to drops, but less important for larger touchscreen PCs. Polyurethane covers shouldn't affect the touch sensitivity of your screen, so you won't have to apply more pressure or use it any differently. Other popular screen protectors made from polyurethane include Moshi's iVisor and Zagg's InvisibleShield.
Polyethylene terephthalate—more commonly known as PET—is also used in making screen protectors. BodyGuardz uses PET, which is a polyester-based plastic, to make its ScreenGuardz line to resist fingerprints and reduce glare.
The company actually uses different materials to protect against different elements: Its high-end cases are made from PET that protects against glare, scratches, and fingerprints, but the company's Classic screen protector is made of clear vinyl and is not as strong. Vinyl covers are cheaper and meant to be disposable—just toss it and install a new one when it wears out. But PET and polyurethane covers are meant to be more long-lasting.
While mobile devices have plenty of accessories that are designed to help clean their touchscreens or to prevent them from getting smudgy to begin with, the market is a little far behind when it comes to touchscreen PCs.
Perhaps this is because such PCs aren't quite mainstream enough to warrant their own line of screen protectors, or because the touch displays are easy enough to keep clean with basic household glass cleaners or good old distilled water.
TouchWindow makes a series of touchscreen overlays and protective films for desktop monitors, as does Posr.us, and these overlays will reduce fingerprints, but at a cost—your beautiful display might look less polished and dull. If you prefer the crisp look of the display, it might just be easier to clean it every once in awhile.
Touchscreen history
The first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen—one that responded to touch instead of a stylus—was the LG Prada, which debuted in 2006. Touchscreen phones soon because the norm, starting with the original iPhone in 2007. Capacitive touch tablets didn't become popular until 2010, and although commercial touchscreen PCs have been around since the 1980s (like the HP-150 that came out in 1983), they became more widespread around 2007 with the introduction of all-in-one touchscreen TVs.
Younger users have grown up with touchscreen devices. Even if they're not using the devices themselves, this type of navigation is ever present, from point-of-sale cash register systems to self checkout registers at the grocery store, flight check-in kiosks at the airport, ATMs, children's toys, TV remotes—and of course, tablets, mobile phones, e-readers, and handheld video game consoles like the PSP and Nintendo DS. Kids are used to touching stuff, as so many of their everyday screen products have a touch-based interface.
So, for these youngsters, touching a desktop monitor or a laptop display probably doesn't seem like a big deal. Where some of us are a little hesitant to just reach out and swipe across a computer monitor, others embrace it.


text:
Nick McCrory and David Boudia celebrate with their bronze medals during the July 30 medal ceremony for Men's Synchronized 10m Platform Diving
David Boudia and Nick McCrory smiled and chatted during their Olympic diving competition Monday, their lack of nerves perfectly in sync.
"We just joked back and forth," said McCrory, 20, of Chapel Hill, N.C. "That's always when we dive our best.
"We do a fist bump before every dive, like 'Let's do it.' That puts us both at ease and prepares us mentally for doing a dive just like we would in practice without the added pressure of, you know, 17,000 people watching."
And that's not to mention the millions of people around the world who saw the diving duo win the bronze medal in men's synchronized 10-meter platform. The medals ended a 16-year-medal drought for the U.S. men in the sport.
Kelci Bryant and Abby Johnston, who took silver in women's synchronized 3-meter springboard on Sunday, had already won the first U.S. diving medal since 2000.
Now it was the men's turn for a breakthrough at the Aquatics Center. In 10-meter synchronized diving, they had to climb a tower as high as two London double-decker buses stacked end to end, dive off so their flips and twists mirrored each other, and try not to make too big of a splash.
"We're so excited to be able to dive two days and get two medals out of it," said Boudia, 23, of Noblesville, Ind., the reigning world silver medalist on platform. "There's so much more in the tank. Nick and I are now excited to be going individual (Aug. 10-11). We got everything out of the way, now we can go in there with the exact same mind frame -- relaxed -- and stay in control one dive at the time."
In the 2008 Olympic Games, Boudia placed fifth in the same event with partner Thomas Finchum. This time, he and McCrory had a new perspective that involved "not being so wrapped up in getting this thing right here," Boudia said, holding up the medal around his neck, but simply in striving for their best performance.
The two divers, who became partners in early 2010, finished with 463.47 points. They trailed Mexican pair Ivan Garcia and German Sanchez, who had the highest difficulty in the six-dive competition, by fewer than six points (468.90). China won its second gold of the Games in diving, with Cao Yuan and Zhang Yanquan scoring 486.78.
Surprisingly, the Chinese did not lead with three dives down and three to go. That honor belonged to crowd favorites Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield of Great Britain. But the Brits botched their fourth dive, a reverse 3½ somersault, and eventually wound up fourth (454.65).
"It was a really, really pressure-cooker compared to yesterday," said Steve Foley, the high-performance director for USA Diving. "The British crowd were incredible… the noise. Tom and Pete dive really, really well, and that crowd can make a little bit of difference to the scores. It's like having the 12th judge with the crowd. Ultimately, they folded a little."
But Boudia and McCrory also had a dive that could have been better, their third, an inward 3½ somersault. They more than made up for it on their next dive, a forward 4½ somersault (92.13 points), surpassed only by their final dive, a back 2½ somersault with 2½ twists (95.04).
"That was the key; Nick absolutely drilled his," Foley said. "It kept them in the ballgame, because that was where they could have lost it in one fell swoop."
McCrory was determined not to repeat the 2011 world championships, when he and Boudia dropped out of medal contention because of a bad fifth dive.
"It's almost harder to continue hitting dives when another team opens the door, because then you see, 'Wow, I can medal, I can do this,'" he said. "We had a silver medal in the palm of our hands and I lost sight of the dive that we were on. I was thinking about getting on the podium.
"I made my mistake and I wasn't going to make it twice."
Boudia said that when he and McCrory got out of the pool for the last time, they had no idea where they were placed.
"We were back in the locker room, and if the Brits (who dove after the Americans) hit it then they got third," he said. "If they didn't, we get third. I actually put on the blue shirt hoping to get the medal instead of the white shirt going home."
He didn't have to change, although he said he felt for the Brits and "their dreams getting crushed."
"But it was a little triumph for Nick and I and a cool win for USA Diving," Boudia added "The moment was incredible."
McCrory is now the second Olympic medalist in his family. His uncle, Gordon Downie, who married his mom's sister, won a bronze medal for Great Britain in 1976 in the 4 x 200-meter relay.
Two summers ago, McCrory asked to see the medal for the first time. "He had to go find it," he said. "It was somewhere in the closet. He pulled it out and it was really incredible to hold it in my hand."
McCrory didn't put it around his neck, though. He wanted to wait for his own medal.
Now the wait is over.
Karen Rosen is a freelance contributor for TeamUSA.org. This story was not subject to the approval of any National Governing Bodies.


text:
When a computer is running with the application it will occupy the available memory and each and every the applications is taking place it just continues without releasing it properly and finally the accumulation of the process due to memory leakage results the system slow, a clean up is needed over unused memory and this what VC RamCleaner utility does.., read more>>>
Search It!
Recent Entries
- How Human odour based technology helps to identify criminals
- Acer Aspire 5738PG 3D Laptop the first geared with 3 dimensional
- Microsoft new eXtreme Computing Group R&D technology solutions for problems
- Acer Aspire Z5610 U9072 PC intuitive multi touch technology
- Sony PSP CORE SYSTEM LE 1GB MEMORY ST
- Parkway Cancer Centre cancer Awareness program
- Samsung advanced LCD display 55inch 3D Screen
- G24i Bagpack Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells to power gadgets
- Solar system eco friendly gadgets you can do it own!
- Openmoko WikiReader first electronic wikipedia without Internet connection


text:
Our Partners' grassroots leadership continues to drive sustainability, resiliency, and self determination in communities around the world. Historically disenfranchised communities are disproportionately facing the effects of a warming climate and industrial pollutants. Solar energy presents a simple, elegant, and scalable way to bridge that widening equity gap.
- Peter Walle
- Communications and Operations Coordinator
Honnold Foundation


text:
Ad and marketing creatives
Semper Sci Fi
On July 7, 2009, NBC Universal's Sci Fi Channel — the network responsible for the hit series "Battlestar Galactica" and such original movies as "Ice Spiders," "Android Apocalypse" and "Mansquito" — will complete a radical rebranding process. When it emerges from the laboratory, it will offer a retooled programming menu and a new name: Syfy.
The reason? For one thing, "Sci Fi" was too ubiquitous a term, the net's owners reasoned, and they needed a brand name they could fully own. And so, after receiving the divinations of expensive consultants, they purchased "Syfy" from a web portal. Why Syfy?
"When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you'd text it," network president Dave Howe told TV Week. "It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise."
Ah, texting equals the coveted youth demographic, which equals "cutting-edge and hip." Though one is advised to avoid using terms like "hip" around said demo.
But the new name will also ostensibly open up fresh possibilities for the brand. "It gives us a unique word and it gives us the opportunities to imbue it with the values and the perception that we want it to have," explains Howe. It will also presumably spawn an array of entertainment properties beyond the tube.
It is a unique word, to be sure, one that can function as a corporate property rather than a public-domain genre; Howe also underlines that the new spelling could suggestively allude to "fantasy." And there's no denying it represents a net loss of one character (a net gain in text-messaging circles). But what it signifies is unclear; thus far, public statements regarding its genesis have been more about how it can be owned than how it serves TV viewers when they aren't texting.
Indeed, if the comments posted by readers of the TV Week story are any indication — Mac Breck's "What chimp dressed up as a network suit thought this one up?" sums up the majority sentiment, though I'm also fond of "Sy Fy ... I think he's my mom's podiatrist," from a guy named Scott — this thing could come back to bite the network like the proverbial Mansquito.
Let us consult Tim Brooks, who participated in the earliest branding of the Sci Fi Channel. "The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that," he opined to TV Week, "as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular."
I'm no TV guru, nor have I purchased the wisdom of media oracles; the following rhetorical question issues from a civilian on the sidelines — albeit one who has spent a bit of time watching Sci Fi (and a lot of unaffiliated sci-fi). But isn't it possible that Brooks' explanation, which says aloud what Howe and company have been dancing around, might alienate the network's core viewership by reducing them to a maladjusted stereotype?
One can only wonder what attendees of the yearly genre confab Comic-Con will make of this. Their collective sensibility now wags the dog of popular culture, and yet the masters of Syfy have, it seems, chosen to cast them aside."The real issue isn't the name but the rationale that went with it," agrees Matthew Kruchko, Senior Associate at the innovative branding firm Applied Storytelling. "The Sci Fi Channel's big mistake was justifying the name change in part as a way to reach a broader audience. They pissed off a truly passionate viewership in doing so. If they'd instead said something like, 'We're changing our name so our loyal viewers can find us even more easily,' they might not have taken so much heat. Their viewers might even have seen the new name as a gift — something they could claim as their own."
"As markets have become more segregated, I?m wondering why the Sci Fi Channel thinks going mainstream is the best approach," muses Ilyse Pallenberg of Canyon Design Group, an advertising and design agency serving numerous major media companies. "The new name feels awkward; I only hope the creative surrounding it will continue to emphasize the core brand appeal. I understand wanting to grow your audience. But isn't it better to do that with programming and not rebranding with a name that feels contrived and ultimately still has the same narrow definition? I think the marketing department must be pretty nervous right now."
I also consulted Russell Scott, who knows a great deal about both branding (as cofounder of acclaimed multimedia creative agency Jetset Studios, beloved of Judd Apatow and other movie mavens) and science fiction (I would say his knowledge of the genre is encyclopedic, but that seems a little retro — it's positively wikipedic). He's the kind of guy who knows that '60s sci-fi writers like Harlan Ellison were the first to shun the label, preferring "speculative fiction" (which nonetheless retained the "SF" fans used as shorthand).
Scott (who, by the way, insists that owning the SciFi.com URL was much more of a boon than its possessors could've imagined) also focuses on the question of running away from the core audience.
"The owners of this brand have long attempted to distance themselves from 'the sci-fi crowd,'" Scott says. "There's a certain self-hatred at work that's reminiscent of Ted Haggard. And yet, if they would only stop and embrace who they are, they could have the biggest party ever."
"Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is, when you have a niche audience that's loyal, you grow that niche slowly and steadily," he adds. "You serve it and it grows and forms a community and takes on a life of its own. These fans love forming communities; fandom was invented by science fiction. The original conventions were science-fiction writers and their readers, people like Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman. The 'Star Trek' conventions preceded Comic-Con. Sci-fi kids were responsible for the first buzz surrounding 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,' and their efforts kept those franchises alive for more than a decade until they were revived."
These "nerdy" constituencies, in other words, turned fringe art into monster brands, and their community-based nurturing of entertainment properties formed the very DNA of contemporary pop marketing. Brands in the, er, space space would do well to recognize this.
Since Editorial Emergency is a copywriting agency, it also behooves me to address the small matter of Syfy's new tagline: "Imagine Greater." I'm not the first to object to this tag's grammatical shapelessness, nor will I be the last. But jeez — imagine greater what? Wouldn't "Imagine More" pack a bigger wallop? Or "Imagine Farther" or "Imagine Deeper" or "Imagine Pickled Herring?" One suspects the word "imagine" was agreed upon quickly but that the second word sparked some contention. And as often happens in writing-by-committee scenarios, coherence died an ugly death, "communication-wise." Of course, it's conceivable that some copy maven submitted "Imagine Greater" to unanimous huzzahs.
But now we've entered the realm of speculative fiction.
Special thanks to Northampton, Mass., reader Fred Zinn for bringing this story to our attention.