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Turkey's rising clout leaves Iran fuming on sidelines of Arab Spring 3 novembre 2011Posted by Acturca in Middle East / Moyen Orient, Turkey / Turquie.
Tags: Arab uprisings, Iran, Middle East, Syria, Turkey, Turkey / Turquie
The Christian Science Monitor (USA) November 2, 2011
By Scott Peterson, Istanbul, Turkey
The fast-emerging split between Turkey and Iran has revived a centuries-old rivalry between the Ottomans and the Persians.
Once friends, Turkey and Iran are finding that their reactions to the Arab Spring revolutions are driving them apart and renewing an old regional rivalry.
One sign of the deepening divide was obvious from the attendee list for an international conference on Afghanistan security that opened today in Istanbul.
Every primary player is here: 14 regional nations, with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan in attendance, as well as more than a dozen other countries, including the United States. But Iran had planned to send just its low-ranking deputy foreign minister, despite its long border with Afghanistan and claims of being a regional superpower.
While Iran relented at the last minute and sent Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, the diplomatic tension indicates how the people-power uprisings have helped transform the Turkey-Iran friendship into an escalating rivalry.
So far, analysts say, Turkey appears the winner in pushing for secular, democratic outcomes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and especially Syria – even if more by default than by design. And Iran, offering little more than nondemocratic Islamic rule and anti-Western vitriol, at this point appears the loser.
The result is a rekindling of a centuries-old rivalry for influence between the Persians and the Ottomans, with an outcome that « will affect the security architecture of the Middle East for years to come, » according to Gonul Tol and Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute in Washington in a recent analysis.
Iran has claimed, with scant evidence, that the Arab Spring changes are an « Islamic Awakening » modeled after Iran's own 1979 Islamic Revolution. Popular protests against the regime of Iran's close ally Syria are an exception, argues Tehran.
Those views – and Iran's brutal 2009 crackdown against its own pro-democracy protests – have undermined Iran's appeal across the Arab world, even as Turkey has gained more traction as a model that blends secular, democratic rule with an Islamist bent.
Turkey shifts support from autocrats to democrats
The fast-emerging split between the former allies is perhaps most clear in Syria, where Turkey and Iran now have dramatically opposing views about the repressive actions of President Bashar al-Assad.
On Tuesday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised the months-long uprising in Syria, calling the 3,000 who have died there at the hands of security forces « martyrs. »
« The Syrian people will achieve results from their glorious resistance, » Mr. Erdogan said. « Democracy will show its true self in Syria. Justice and freedom will be obtained by the Syrian people by their own will. »
Yet until the Arab Spring took root earlier this year, Turkey had been cozying up to authoritarian powers with little apparent regard for the regional « democracy » that it espouses today.
In 2009, Syria's president and his Turkish counterpart affectionately called each other « brother. » Erdogan said Syria is « our second home » and Assad hailed their « joint future » as a model of « brotherly ties. » But Turkey's top priority appeared to be economic and political connections, not yielding to the popular will.
« Turkey had gone overboard in making these kind of gestures, » says Ersin Kalaycioglu, a political scientist at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
« Earlier, the only major forces that Turkey supported were the anti-Israeli, relatively radical forces such as Hamas, » says Mr. Kalaycioglu. « Now that democracy is a rising force, Turkey seems to be shifting grounds, ditching [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi first, and then Bashar al-Assad, and also supporting developments in Egypt as much as possible. »
Turkey moves back toward the West
On many fronts, Turkey's rhetoric – including its increasingly strident anti-Israeli views – had prompted Western analysts to question whether the NATO ally was forsaking its pro-West outlook to join the Iranian-led axis of resistance.
But the Arab Spring has changed Turkey's calculation. That may have factored in to Turkey's decision in September to end years of foot-dragging and accept US anti-missile radar units on Turkish soil – part of a NATO missile shield aimed at thwarting Iranian ballistic missiles.
Turkey's adjusted approach is not a « coordinated number of steps, following each other, complementing each other, » adds Kalaycioglu. « Rather there are lots of disparities, trials and errors, some erratic moves, and it looks as if the Turkish government currently is testing the waters…. The former policy is completely down the drain, of 'zero problems with neighbors.' Now we have mounting problems with neighbors. »
Iranian officials have sharply criticized Turkey as a sellout to the West, but recent polling of Arab views indicate that they don't buy it, and Iran's popularity has dropped.
« Not only have Arab revolutionaries and protesters seen right through Iran's clumsy attempt to claim some credit for the Arab Spring, but Turkey has adroitly capitalized on the dramatic changes taking place in the Middle East to increase its influence and prestige among Arab publics, at the expense of its former partnership with Iran, » write Mr. Tol and Mr. Vatanka of the Middle East Institute in Washington in their analysis, published this week on the Tehran Bureau website.
« The recent actions of the Turks have now effectively killed any Iranian hopes that Ankara will join the so-called rejectionist camp made up of Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah aimed at confronting the West, » they write. Instead, Turkey has shown that its « basic security interests are anchored to the West. »
Iran left fuming on the sidelines
Iranian-Turkish relations began to improve when Erdogan's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002.
Turkey came to be viewed by Iran as a trusted interlocutor on the nuclear issue, among other things. In May 2010, Turkey and Brazil facilitated a nuclear fuel swap agreement with Tehran in a bid to forestall a fourth round of United Nations sanctions against Iran.
Turkey's sharp rebuke of Israel over the Gaza flotilla incident that same month added to the sense of Turkey moving out of the Western orbit. Israeli commandos boarded the flagship of a largely Turkish aid flotilla aimed at breaking the Israeli siege on Gaza, killing eight Turks and a dual US-Turkish citizen.
The Turkey-Israel alliance soured, Turkey cut off military ties, and the large flow of tourists from the Jewish state dried up – all prompting more Iranian rhetoric that Turkey was on the right side of history.
That was Tehran's view, too, when Erdogan forged a personal friendship with Assad, whose family has ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than four decades.
But months of street unrest across Syria, and repressive attempts to crush it that prompted thousands of Syrians to flee across the border into camps in Turkey, prompted Erdogan to finally cut ties with Assad in September.
Turkey has since hosted several meetings of the Syrian opposition – including one in Istanbul that saw the creation of an exiled Syrian National Council in September – and more recently has provided a haven for ranking officers deserting from the Syrian Army.
Iran, as Syria's primary backer in the region, has been furious, but could do nothing but complain loudly – and watch from the sidelines as Erdogan took a « victory » lap through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia in September to cement ties with new revolutionaries and call for « Islamic democracy. »
Iranian officials have made no such high-profile visits.
« There was no concern [by Turkey] about democracy until the summer of 2011 in Syria, » says Kalaycioglu. « Previously there was the same authoritarian regime [in Syria], and we were getting enormously close to it, unnecessarily close to it. Therefore I'm not sure that democracy played any role…. I'm going to disregard that as empty rhetoric. »
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By Malorye Allison* and Steve Dickman, CEO, CBT Advisors
We always thought that innovation in biomedical science started in western countries and pretty much stayed there, where the money is. The role for developing countries, if they ever got their hands on new biomedical technologies at all, was as consumers, not innovators, and not exactly desirable consumers at that.
But lately we have noticed a countervailing trend. We call it "the boomerang": technologies invented in the developed world that are designed (or re-designed) to work better, cheaper and more efficiently in developing countries. Once every extra penny has been shaved off the cost of goods; once the moving parts have been reduced to the bare minimum to stand up to harsh conditions or other demands; and once the innovations have been adopted by thousands if not millions of consumers, then, their owners figure out how to reintroduce them to the countries whence they originally came.
We are far from the first to observe that the United States is burdened with excess regulation, perverse incentives and entrenched interests barely affected by the recent insurance reform, which was mislabeled "health care reform" (HCR). At the same time, we observe burgeoning opportunity and a willingness on the part of both U.S.-based and developing-world inventors to focus on the less affluent but larger markets outside the United States and Europe. This is turning the markets of the developing world into hotbeds of innovation.
The limitations on implementing new healthcare technologies and delivery approaches in the United States are well known. We will give a couple of examples later on of how new technologies outside the boundaries of reimbursed care (think iPhone apps and Facebook) are leapfrogging the current U.S. healthcare system. But first we will look at some new technological and business innovations in healthcare that are getting their start or at least a big boost elsewhere.
Our thinking about this topic began with a visit to the recent World Health Care Congress (WHCC). This, backed up by an Economist article, convinced us that we are onto something. Some of the next radical or gentle upheavals in surgical techniques, medical devices and healthcare delivery may start in the labs of Minneapolis and Mountain View but then they will be tested and optimized in India, Mexico, Bangladesh and Africa. Eventually, if we are lucky, some of them will return.
At the World Health Care Congress in Washington in early April, we heard Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen give a fabulous set of talks. Christensen, whose 2009 manifesto The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, coauthored with Jerome Grossman, M.D. and Jason Hwang, M.D., was a sensation in healthcare circles, said that US health care "reform" legislation did nothing except to "cement the current unsustainable model." He said that nothing innovative can really happen in the United States for another ten to twenty years (!). But what's happening in India and Africa is stunning, he said. "When you have no other options, that's the perfect model for innovation."
In another WHCC talk, Grameen Bank founder and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus pointed to a similar phenomenon. The new paradigm he cited: Build cheap practical versions of high tech tools and clinics that focus on a narrow range of badly needed treatments: think "surgery factories." Here, the innovation focuses as much on the process of care delivery as it does on the care itself, reminiscent of the "business model innovation" cited by Christensen in The Innovator's Prescription as one of the key needs of the U.S. healthcare system.
Consider eye surgery, ironically one of the profit centers for physicians even in countries like Canada which have "socialized medicine." In India, for example, Aravind Eye Hospitals can offer $25 cataract surgery. Each doctor at Aravind does about 2000 surgeries a year. As The Economist put it in its startling April 15 survey of developing-world innovation "The World Turned Upside Down", "Aravind [is] the world's biggest eye-hospital chain [and] performs some 200,000 eye operations a year. It takes the assembly-line principle literally: four operating tables are laid side by side and two doctors operate on adjacent tables. When the first operation is done, the second patient is already in place." The price is lower, but the process is still profitable. What a refreshing thought for those of us in countries like the United States, where each incremental innovation feels exponentially more expensive!
Then consider the upstream impact of such massive scale: costs must be lower, so technology must adapt. Krishna Reddy of Care Hospitals said at WHCC that his organization looks at every opportunity to lower costs. When designing a device for heart surgery, for example, they try to make only the part that will touch the heart disposable. In many cases, Aravind and Care have found ways to manufacture their own devices more cheaply than their first-world cousins.
Then look at childbirth. Elsewhere at WHCC, we heard about birthing centers created by LifeSpring in India that, according to The Economist, have reduced the cost of giving birth in a private hospital to $40 by looking after many more mothers. They charge $1.60 for a consultation with a physician and about $38 for an average delivery. They are teaching the people WHY there is value in paying for a delivery (versus mother and child possibly dying on a dirt floor out in the middle of nowhere). They market to husbands and mothers-in-law, and they paint the places cheery colors and make them comfortable and appealing. They are profitable and expanding, and the patients demand quality care for the price, which is of course well below the Western market price. Of course, we surmise that care is available so cheaply only via "paraskilling" e.g. deliveries by midwives or nurses, with physicians in the background if needed, which is not (yet) allowed to such a great extent in the developed world.
How about the business of healthcare? Take electronic medical records, for example, which received a chunk of government support in the US HCR package. India is rolling out a smartcard that can be printed up in any village and contains biometric information along with the patient's health record. Standards are imposed from above: Local governments have to make sure these cards can be read anywhere if they want to get their share of government funding for the program. About fourteen million cards have been created already and the goal is to get one for each of the 300 million Indians who qualify for this plan, specifically – and only – those poor workers who tend to move a lot. Interestingly, Anil Swarup, Director General in the Indian Ministry of Labour & Employment, said in his talk at WHCC that it is important to charge something, not nothing, otherwise patients don't think the service has any value and won't use it. Furthermore, charging something, even very little, shows respect for the patients' dignity. Swarup claimed that a large part of the project's success was due to his complete naivete regarding health insurance. Certainly, no one anticipating the usual landmines would have attempted something as simple and yet far-reaching as he appears to be well on his way to achieving.
As more users are brought into the healthcare system, this drives up demand for "low-tech" services such as cheap, practical, point-of-care diagnostics. That theme came up again in a recent lecture by biotech financier and big-picture thinker Stephen Burrill held at MIT on April 14. "China passed its own health care reform in April, 2009," Burrill said. "They want to provide healthcare for all 1.2 billion of their people." Just think of the economies of scale! Innovation in low-tech areas such as healthcare delivery will be massively rewarded.
Consider three low-cost healthcare innovations from the developed world described at the World Health Care Congress:
- Mobisante's smartphone/ultrasound device: Mobisante has developed a smartphone that can serve as an ultrasound scanner. It stores information, sends images to hospitals for diagnosis, and employs a touch-screen interface
- Diagnostics for All's postage-stamp sized, paper-based "laboratory." (This device won the top award at the event.)
- Voxiva's mobile phone platform for transmitting key messages among healthcare providers, for example to allow care providers in Rwanda to keep their clinics stocked with vital HIV/AIDS drugs, medicines that would routinely run out in the pre-cellphone era. This company was the subject of yet another Economist article
We'll look at each of these one at a time along with a look at how two boomerangs have already begun to return.
Mobisante: the smartphone-based ultrasound
Mobisante is based in Redmond, WA, and run by Sailesh Chutani, a former Microsoft executive. It has developed a smartphone that can serve as an ultrasound scanner. It stores information, sends images to hospitals for diagnosis, and employs a touch-screen interface. The first market for the device is the developing world, where its makers say seventy per cent of people cannot get access to ultrasound services. The device will cost approximately $5,000, which may still seem steep by developing nation standards, but will be attractive to public health departments and NGOs, since having access to ultrasound is to vital to many medical diagnoses. Chutani predicts the device will allow ultrasounds that cost less than $1 a patient.
Boomerang: In his talk at WHCC, Chutani said that their next market will be primary care physicians in the developed world. While the device doesn't replace high-end ultrasound equipment found in most U.S. hospital radiology departments, it is perfectly suitable for taking "a quick look" for example to confirm a pregnancy or determine that a baby is in the breech position. Such devices could thus expand the range of services that primary care doctors do, taking business away from specialists. This could be especially important for the twenty million (!) patients in America treated in community health centers. The needs of this community have traditionally not been the main focus, to say the least, of big-company health care technology developers but that seems to be changing as we shall see below when we come to General Electric.
Diagnostics For All's paper diagnostics laboratory
For a former venture capitalist who used to attend an annual "lab-on-a-chip" conference that was all about silicon, glass and plastic, the appearance of a lab made of paper from Diagnostics For All (DFA) comes as a bit of a shock. It apparently impressed the jury of the WHCC poster competition, which awarded DFA the conference's top prize. But there it is: a network of channels on a single tiny device routing blood, urine or other bodily fluids to tiny assay spots that give easy-to-detect color readouts. The product is based on the elegant microfluidics and materials science work of the serial biotech entrepreneur George Whitesides of Harvard University and the company's board is studded with some of Boston's biotech elite, e.g. former Vertex CEO Josh Boger. According to the non-profit's web site, the nearly-all-paper chips are "designed for resource-poor settings", are "less expensive to manufacture and deploy than alternatives" and are intended for populations that would otherwise have no access to the high-tech wonders of the modern diagnostics lab.
The DFA lab-on-a-stamp has not yet boomeranged back to the United States but one could imagine myriad developed-world applications beginning with self-monitoring for disease or for medication compliance.
Voxiva: Taking "mHealth" ("mobile health") to the developing world – and back
Voxiva is one of these U.S.-based innovators that started out serving healthcare providers and patients in developing countries and has already made the leap back to the developed world. The company started in 2001 deploying mobile phones for public health with its disease-outbreak reporting system. Speaking at WHCC, William Warshauer, Voxiva's Executive Vice President, pointed out that mobile phones are a game-changing technology in public health. By the end of 2010, 90% of people in the world will be living within reach of a cell phone signal. Voxiva anticipated this trend, and has built a range of platforms that use cell phones to address health needs. The company first established the HIV/AIDS health management system in Rwanda which helps that country manage drug stocks and avoid the type of shortages that once plagued them regularly. The power of wireless, Warshauer points out, is that you can not only pull information from multiple sites, you can also push it. The health care worker who is reporting the number of vaccines distributed can get a message back saying "your district is 15th in terms of vaccination rate."
Boomerang: Recently, Voxiva launched its first service in the United States. Text4baby promotes safe motherhood among lower income women. The service is free to the users because mobile carriers have donated the messages. Women are asked for their due date and zip code and then get three messages a week.
These reports resonate with project work CBT Advisors did last year about how innovations in telemedicine were likely to find their way to the market. Our overpowering conclusion from that assessment was that iPhone apps, distance treatment by physicians and all manner of new services were being introduced both in the developed and developing worlds. But virtually none of it was being reimbursed! The innovation was finding its way to the end users with very little intermediation. And consumers outside of highly regulated countries like the United States were likely to derive earlier advantage from it.
Escaping the morass
While non-profits and for-profits avidly mine developing nations for future health solutions, what do companies here do? Plenty, obviously. But they are plagued by a morass of regulations, some well-meaning and efficient and some just stifling, imposed by a large number of federal and state agencies (HIPAA and FDA to name just two). We attended another conference in Cambridge, this one sponsored by Xconomy and held at the MIT Media Lab. See Xconomy's report on the conference here.
What caught our attention was how many of the innovations featured at this star-studded conference were "workarounds" for some of the more outdated U.S. regulations. Two excellent examples of this are fax transmission of medical records and transmission of images only on CDs, not over the internet. Most physician offices still do it this way in order to comply with patient privacy regulations under so-called HIPAA rules. Thus the fax and CD have been "locked in." Other transmission methods might be permitted under the regulations but compliance is so cumbersome that they have not yet been widely implemented.
Hamid Tabatabaie, CEO of Life Image, is focused on providing technology to cut costs for storage and sharing of images, and at the same time improving image quality. One billion medical images are expected to be taken annually in the United States by 2012, with waste that Tabatabaie estimates at $15 billion to $20 billion a year due to repeat imaging. Related to that is the lack of image management abilities in the form of networks for storage, retrieval and sharing of images.
At the Xconomy conference, Tabatabaie showed a slide of a skateboarder and an X-ray image. "We're here to fix the problem that this guy's buddies on Facebook saw his wipeout before his surgeon saw his X-ray," Tabatabaie said. Typically, images are passed around the U.S. health care system on CDs. But many of these CDs never reach the right hands, or don't work when they get there, which leads to repeat imaging. Life Image, a Massachusetts-based, venture-backed company is like a home page for images. Access to the images is tightly controlled, but once a physician is granted access, she needs only to click a mouse to see them. It has been adopted in nine northeastern U.S. hospital groups and now the company is expanding to Florida.
So to put it bluntly, developing-worlders innovate to improve care; we innovate to overcome our own bureaucracy.
Innovation inching closer all the time
Going back to boomerangs: which technologies are likely to turn up soonest on U.S. shores? Some higher-cost technologies are here already. As Christensen pointed out in his talk at WHCC, Pfizer and General Electric (GE) are creating many of their innovative products for the developing world, where there is less regulation to get in the way, and then bringing them to the United States and Europe years later. Last year, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt published an article in Harvard Business Review ("How GE is Disrupting Itself"), outlining why, in healthcare and other markets, GE is pursuing what he and his co-authors dubbed "reverse innovation". He cited two products that have already boomeranged, a "$1,000 handheld electrocardiogram device and a portable, PC-based ultrasound machine that sells for as little as $15,000." Both were "originally developed for markets in emerging economies (the ECG device for rural India and the ultrasound machine for rural China) and are now being sold in the United States, where [GE is] pioneering new uses for such machines. They are part of a $3 billion initiative of GE to introduce technologies in the United States that actually lower healthcare costs.
And some of even the more technology- and physician-intensive procedures – think heart surgery – that developing-world-based pioneers have taken on are moving closer to that key milestone. Witness this Nov. 25, 2009 Wall Street Journal piece.
It described the growing franchise of Dr. Devi Shetty, whose hospitals in India perform huge numbers of heart bypass operations (officially called coronary artery bypass graft or CABG) at a price point of $2,000, just a bit below the typical $50,000 to $100,000 charged by Western hospitals – with a lower mortality rate. Dr. Shetty is planning to build and run a new hospital in the Cayman Islands, an hour away from Miami by plane, offering surgeries at a middle-level price point.
Besides heart surgery, what other technologies will arrive soon? The intersection of smartphones and personal health monitoring is one sweet spot. Self-administered diagnostics (think home pregnancy and home HIV testing) and treatment compliance monitoring could be another.
Eventually, maybe even in less than twenty years, market forces are going to even things out. Pricing of healthcare is just so arbitrary and, at least in the United States, so unrelated to value. Yunus has said he hopes to build a health care system that provides quality care so cheaply "even Westerners will want to use it."
Reading The Innovator's Prescription again in the wake of healthcare "reform," we are struck by the observation that there is virtually no reason for any health care provider in the United States to lower prices. Indeed, Harvard's Christensen wrote, affordable innovation virtually always arises outside of standard systems including healthcare. And the Obama healthcare reform has more or less cemented into place the misplaced incentives. In the book, Christensen identified eight different categories of U.S. healthcare regulation that "now impede disruption and must be changed" (page xliii) i.e. that these regulations are preventing innovation from taking hold. But insurance reform did not affect even one of them! Maybe that's why he sounded so frustrated in his talk. It's as if every "must" in the book has been replaced with "won't."
So in the United States, we have well-meaning but strangling regulation. Elsewhere, there is rampant innovation. We think we know which will win. One way or another, the innovation we are noticing overseas will soon reach US consumers in ways that will be both remarkable and necessary.
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*Malorye Allison is a Boston-based freelance writer who writes and blogs regularly about innovations in healthcare.

subset: commoncrawl


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How social media might make you more efficient at the office
I may be America's most-beloved workplace advice columnist, but I am not a master of efficiency when it comes to work. I'm easily distracted and routinely succumb to the siren song of social media.
I may be America's most-beloved workplace advice columnist, but I am not a master of efficiency when it comes to work. I'm easily distracted and routinely succumb to the siren song of social media.
(I'll give you a moment – it's always hard to learn one of your heroes has flaws.)
Work distractions have always existed, but we now have a world of distractions literally at our fingertips. So the question is: What's the best way to blend this technology into our daily work?
Recent studies by Gloria Mark, a professor in the University of California-Irvine's Department of Informatics, and a team from Microsoft Research shine a light on this issue and come up with some unexpected results.
In a paper titled "Bored Mondays and Focused Afternoons: The Rhythm of Attention and Online Activity in the Workplace," the researchers closely monitored 32 information workers and found how their focus ebbed and flowed throughout the day.
They found that our ability to focus picks up steam throughout the morning, cresting around 11 a.m., then hits a daily peak around midafternoon. But those periods of focused work, when you'd think we'd be the most "into" what we're doing, are not when we're the happiest.
The subjects reported their highest levels of satisfaction while doing routine busywork, or "rote work" as Mark calls it in the study.
"I thought we were going to find that focused work makes people happiest," Mark said in an interview. "But people are happiest when they're doing rote work, just mechanical kind of work. The question is: Why aren't they happy when they're focused? I think it's because when you're focused, you're also stressed."
Rote work also might provide us with the short-term gratification that doesn't come from chipping away at long-term projects. If we take care of some paperwork and respond to a few lingering emails, that allows us to feel we've accomplished something.
The study also looked at how the use of Facebook interplays with people's focus on work, finding that the social media site may not be so much a distraction as a quick way to take a break. According to the study, "it may not be the interruptions that break focus; it may be that lack of focus comes first, leading to susceptibility to interruptions."
The study continues: "Activities that are more personal and less critical, e.g., Facebook and personal email, may allow people to slowly ease into a more engaging and productive state."
Mark said: "Social media does offer a break from work. So we might extrapolate that, in the workplace, social media is providing not so much a distraction but a break that relieves stress."
Which leads us to another paper by Mark and Microsoft Research that found that Facebook interactions at work can leave us in better moods at the end of the day than face-to-face interactions with people.
"At the end of the day, when people reflected back on their day, the more time they were on Facebook, the happier they were," Mark said. "The more Facebook people do, the more engaged they report being at work."
Part of the reason, Mark posits, is that every human interaction we have requires a certain time commitment: "You have to stop what you're doing, there's a greeting ritual, you have to make eye contact, there's a parting ritual. With Facebook, you can just go in and out so quickly. It gives you more control of the interaction."
Don't misread that as an endorsement of online-only interactions. Our face-to-face activity at work is crucial not just socially, but also in terms of innovation and the ability to brainstorm.
Mark's point is that something often viewed as slacking off can be a beneficial activity for workplace morale and productivity.
There have to be limits, of course, and that's where Mark sees that the technology tempting us away from work could also be used to draw us back in and take advantage of our natural work patterns.
"Technology is the culprit, but I believe it can be the solution as well," she said. "These rhythms can inform the design of technologies that can detect when people are focused and when they're not and could offer ways that can get us back on track, by having smart computers that redirect our focus. I think there are interventions that can be done to get people back on track."
Say you're using a work-related program and haven't changed windows for quite some time. That's an indication you're focused – which is good. But holding that focus too long can lead to stress and unhappiness.
So, after a certain amount of time – perhaps determined by some kind of wearable device that monitors stress levels, like the fitness bracelets that are becoming popular – your computer could prompt you to take a break. It might open up Facebook for you or otherwise lead you in a de-stressing direction.
On the other hand, if you're lingering too long on a social media site, a prompt could direct you back to work.
These are approaches that would recognize the natural ebb and flow of our attention, respect our human need for interaction and distraction, and help make our workdays more efficient.
The bottom line is this: Social media sites are here to stay, so isn't it best to harness them, along with other workplace distractions, and make them work in the company's favor?
With closer study and open minds, we might find ourselves more-efficient workers. And that's something that will make everyone, even the most-beloved among us, better at what we do.
Rex Huppke writes for the Chicago Tribune. Send him questions by email at email@example.com or on Twitter @RexWorksHere.
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With the mindset of focusing more on sewing on this blog, I've decided to break up my look back at last year's goals and my look forward to plans for 2019. My upcoming plans will be posted on
the 31st, as is my tradition January 1 (because I need to finish my Sew Your Kibbe Series first!), but I thought I would take a look back at 2018 today.
Bonus Goal: I've learned that setting goals of making specific items doesn't usually work for me, but there are certainly some "staple" items that I've never made and would like to try, just to increase my skill set. The top three of these being a button-down shirt, jeans, or a corset. I'm also dying to make a few t-shirt quilts. Said shirts are taking up a lot of space in my sewing room, and I've never made a quilt before. If I make any of these items in 2018, I'll consider it an accomplishment.
WIN! I made Ginger Jeans as part of my Spring Sew Geeky Capsule. The fit is far from perfect, and I don't wear them as much as my RTW jeans because of the fit issues, but, still. I made jeans!
(5) Sew more exercise clothes.
FAIL. I don't think I made any clothes for myself that were intended to be worn for exercise purposes.
(4) Cosplay for Wondercon/Costume-Con.
QUASI-WIN. I did make my stealth cosplay for The Magicians, so I think that counts, but not in time for any conventions this year. I still need to add all the accessories, but the major parts of the costume are done, so I'll be able to use it in the future!
(3) Improve my embroidery skills.
QUASI-WIN. I did make new embroidery files and updated old ones to improve the quality, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. I am learning and getting better, but I still have a lot to explore in this field.
(2) Finish my trench coat UFO.
Probably a fail… I'm pretty busy, but I've still got a few days to make something happen!
(1) 2018: The Year of Sew Geeky!
QUASI-WIN. I had lots of goals with this project, so let's look at this goal in more detail…
Create 4 seasonal capsule style wardrobes.
QUASI-WIN. I was able to sew one mini-capsule, and a few pieces from my fall plans. I didn't manage to make anything from Summer or Winter plans.
Choose one Geeky Inspiration from movies, TV shows, books, etc. to help me come up with a general "theme" for the collection. Right now I've got a lot of possible inspirations to choose from, and I'm trying to narrow it down, and slot everything into areas where I'll find a good match of seasonal pieces, fabrics, and colors.
WIN! I really enjoyed choosing the themes for each capsule and coming up with patterns and color palettes for each season.
Use the ideas from the Craftsy course Sew to Flatter: Plan Your Best Wardrobe to choose what types of garments to make and what fabrics will coordinate well to sew.
QUASI-WIN. I did use my color fans to create coordinated color palettes, which was good, but I haven't really gone through and pulled/culled my fabric collection, which really needs it. I do think I will use the fans to create more coordinated color plans in the future though.
Choose styles and silhouettes that fit into the "classic" mode, but up the game with details inspired by my geeky fandoms.
FAIL. But it was an important fail. My chosen patterns worked really well to communicate the inspiration fandom (at least in my opinion), but they definitely weren't Kibbe's definition of "Classic" by any means. As it turns out, neither am I, and this experiment really helped me realize that. A successful failure then?
Use the Curated Closet formula to come up with a color palette. I'll use my Winter/Bright Winter Colors, but choose color schemes that fit with my chosen inspiration.
WIN. I loved making these color palettes, and I want to make another one for myself for next year. I think I've really realized which colors I want to be the core of my wardrobe, and which colors I included more because they fit with my inspiration more than because they were "me."
Within each seasonal sewing capsule I want to plan to make: 1-2 Coats/Jackets/Cardigans/Sweater, 1-2 Dresses, 3-4 Tops, 3-4 Bottoms
FAIL. I made no where near this amount of clothing this year. I think understanding this is key to making realistic goals for next year.
Sew one season ahead, one month in advance. Where I live winter is pretty mild, and I want to take the first part of the year to plan out my capsules and finish up some of my old/current projects, so I'm not bothered that my final "season" gets cut a bit short. If this is working for me as a strategy, I'll likely continue with it into 2019, and if it isn't, then it won't matter that the last segment of this plan is a bit short.
QUASI-WIN. I did start my sewing "on season," though this really meant I had to miss out on sewing some of my capsules, because the majority of my sewing tends to be for others during the summer/winter. I also realize I don't really need fall clothes until the last week of October, realistically, so summer sewing could have been a bit extended.
Hopefully I'll use Pinterest to create a mood board, and Polyvore to play around with outfit ideas, as I'd like to utilize these resources more effectively.
QUASI-WIN. I used Pinterest a lot, which has been great, but Polyvore ceased to exist this year. I've been trying to use Shoplook to fill in, but early difficulties with adding personal images made it much less useful than Polyvore was for creating outfits from sewing pattern garment images.
Incorporate pieces I already have in my wardrobe plans where I can. Although I plan to sew as many of the 8-12 pieces as possible, and the ultimate goal is to have more of a me-made wardrobe that I love to wear, it doesn't make sense if I can't also use other things I already own with the new pieces. Items I already have might be considered "bonus items," but would be included in the capsule planning.
QUASI-WIN. This would have worked best with my summer plans, which I wasn't able to get to at all, but I did plan to incorporate these pieces, so I think partial points there?
Final Take-Aways
I really, really enjoyed doing the planning for the Sew Geeky Challenge, and I'm still sad about a lot of the pieces I didn't get to make. I realize how over-ambitious these plans were, and so I hope to be more realistic in my plans for next year. I also hope to figure out a way to incorporate some of the pieces I didn't have a chance to make this year. Even though I wasn't as successful at making all of the garments I wanted to, I do consider this year an overall success, because I feel like I learned a lot about what I want my style to be. I feel like I needed to take this step of pulling inspiration from outside sources to really help me make cohesive plans, and that I learned a lot from this exercise. But I also feel like this was sort of a stepping stone to help me realize what I want my style to be, and that I don't need to pull looks from characters I love to achieve that. I think it's been a journey of self discovery more than a feat of output, but I also feel like that's what I needed this year. Looking ahead I'll hopefully be making slightly more achievable goals and plans, but for now I'm quite happy with what I've learned this year, and the direction it's allowing me to go. My sewing plans for next year will be coming up soon, so stay tuned!


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I have been privileged to take part in the 10th Anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I was made aware of and signed up for a blogging event in which 95 bloggers each write a post on the same agreed date, April 28th, about one of the "95 theses" from the Manifesto. Details about this event and Cluetrain's history are found here. I will provide viewpoint on thesis number #89.
For years marketers like me have believed that advertising had the strength to influence consumer attitudes and behaviour. Advertising had more power when ad vehicles were few. As consumers, we were easy to get a hold of – we read the same papers, listened to the same radio programs, and watched the same television shows as everyone we knew. Marketers had it easy…but it was rare for consumers to see an ad that was relevant to them. That was ok for marketers because 2% response rate or a break-even ROI was all they required to deem a campaign successful.
These days, technology has made it increasingly difficult to reach consumers. Media has become fragmented. Access profileration has allowed the consumer to be in multiple devices simultaneously including: access from radio, TV, mobile, MP3s, search, print, billboards, videogames, IM, email, video consoles etc. Overlay the incredible explosion of the number of radio and TV channels, magazines, newspapers. This pace of change is making it increasingly difficult to pin target consumers down with a relevant message at the right place and right time.
It's become increasingly apparent that the difficulty in reaching the consumer has been compounded over time. Access proliferation has put the consumer in control of how, when and what media they consume. At the same time these same channels are giving the tools to communicate to many people at a much faster pace. Universal McCann's Worldwide Comparative Study on Social Media Trends, April 2008 indicates the growth of social media since 2006. Some highlights include:
- 73% of active online users have read a blog
- 45% have started their own blog
- there are over 184 million bloggers worldwide, with approx. 1/4 from China
- 57% have joined a social network
- 34% post opinions about products/brands on their site/blog
People are talking about brands to each other and surprisingly many brands are oblivious to this; or if they are aware, they don't realize the enormous impact it has to their reputation as a company. The power shift from the corporation to the consumer is apparent. Advertising messages do not influence as effectively as marketers have always believed.
The very medium that divides the brand from the consumer also has the ability to bring them together. Consider this stat from the Universal McCann Study: 36% of active online consumers think more positively about companies that have a blog. Start-ups have easily figured this out and from day one are leveraging the conversation with the consumers to help shape and evolve their businesses. They have figured out that unless they listen and respond to the market needs, there will be no market for their product or service offering. Coming from a start-up, the lack of big marketing budgets forced me as a marketer to really understand social media if I was to effectively drive reach:
- Use the networks to bring awareness of your offering.
- Engage with relevant target groups to help you fix the current bugs and improve your product over time.
- Take it on the chin and be willing to accept the good with the bad.
- Continually engage your consumers for feedback. Develop relationships and nurture them over time. Do NOT bail on your community.
Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" provides the best illustration of the power of conversation. He points out, " I'm convinced that ideas …. move through a population very much like a disease does….Ideas can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is." It doesn't take much effort to pass along a cool idea but the very nature of one idea being passed along from person to person can result in an epidemic. "The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly." In this way, the effectiveness of word of mouth begins to produce a clear picture of the power of the individual:
Dell found out the hard way how consumer opinion could negatively impact their business. Now, the emergence of Ideastorm, and Twitter engagement has catapulted the company into social media success and has effectively put their Dell Hell days behind them.
Customers talking about brands are making it clear what they want, how they want to be serviced, and what they consider good value for their dollar. The great thing for marketers is that engaging in these discussions limits the guessing game. Companies can now provide a product or service that the customer wants….what a concept!
Other top brands are getting on the band wagon and they are capitalizing as early adopters:
- Starbucks Coffee created a site that allows users to submit suggestions to be voted on by Starbucks consumers, and the most popular suggestions are highlighted and reviewed. Their heavy presence on Twitter has also helped the company to disseminate information and gauge consumer opinion in real time.
- Zappos and CEO Tony Hsieh have become known for embracing Twitter as an essential tool for exceptional customer service. Tony, himself, through his Twitter account has become accessible and has helped personify Zappos as a company who is friendly, trustworthy and helpful. Twitter is ingrained in the company culture..so much so in fact that the Zappos site aggregates the Twitter streams.
- Ford Motor Company and its head of social media, Scott Monty have used the channel as a way to inform the public in real time of company happenings especially during periods of volatility. It was this kind of transparency in communication that helped quell much negative public opinion and, in my view, has helped elevate Ford's brand presence above GM and Chrysler during the government bailout period.
So, for those brands that are afraid to dip their toe in this new conversation, who are afraid to engage with consumers, it will only be to their detriment. Consumers will continue to speak about your company and your brand(s) with or without you. Social media is not a fad. It will continue to grow and evolve and as new devices are invented, conversation will multiply at alarming rates. The opportunity for big brands and businesses is enormous. Begin to engage in discussions at a peer level…listen and understand…develop important relationships…and build strong brand advocacy and a sustainable model in the meantime.
Credits for this thesis go to P Furey and A Wong for some really cool slides I used from their presentations.


text:
Indiana finally has a department of agriculture. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed HEA1008, creating the Indiana State Department of Agriculture and the separate Office of Rural Affairs.
A number of existing agencies will be folded into the new agriculture department. Among those will be the soil and conservation functions within the former Department of Commerce, the Land Resources Council and the State Fair Board.
"Our agriculture department is the vehicle to comeback for Hoosiers in this important sector of our economy. There's so much more that we can do to develop the untapped potential we have in Indiana agriculture, such as expanding production of bio-based fuels and food processing," says Daniels.
Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman was named secretary of agriculture and rural affairs. Andy Miller was appointed the department's first director.


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ARRA-Funded Scientists Put RA Diagnosis, Therapy in Research Sights
People with the common autoimmune joint disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), have benefited significantly in recent years from drugs called biologics, especially those from a group known as anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) agents. But despite these drugs' success, says William Robinson, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University's School of Medicine and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, approximately one-third of RA patients show no improvement with the therapy. Using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), assisted by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, Dr. Robinson and his team have embarked on a project to develop tests that will help diagnose RA earlier—a factor that has been linked to a better disease outcome—and identify those RA patients who would benefit most from anti-TNF drugs.
Photo ID: Dr. William Robinson
In developing tests for the early diagnosis of RA, the researchers are using microarray technology to examine factors at work in the body before arthritis manifests. The technique allows them to profile autoantibodies (protein that destroy the body's own healthy tissues) and cytokines (cell communication proteins) in pre-disease blood serum samples from people who later developed RA, as well as in patients with established RA. Such information, the scientists say, will tell them the specificity and concentration of the autoantibodies involved, and the levels of cytokines (such as tumor necrosis factor) in the blood serum before RA manifests. (Cytokine levels have been found to be elevated in some people with early RA.)
The investigators are also using the technology to find biomarkers that will predict a person's response to anti-TNF treatment. Further, Dr. Robinson's group intends to translate these biomarkers into tests for use in clinical practice. The project has the potential, Dr. Robinson declares, to "shed light on mechanisms that underpin the development of autoimmunity in RA and on the molecular basis for response to anti-TNF therapeutics.""
Dr. Robinson explains that ARRA funding has "dramatically accelerated our research efforts to develop diagnostic tests for RA." ARRA support has also allowed him to hire both a promising new scientist and a bioinformatician to lead the project.
"The project's success," he declares, "would transform care for patients with RA."
# # #
The activity above is being funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). More information about the National Institutes of Health's ARRA grant funding opportunities can be found at https://grants.nih.gov/recovery/. To track the progress of HHS activities funded through the ARRA, visit http://www.hh.gov/recovery/. To track all federal funds provided through the ARRA, visit http://www.recovery.gov.


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Girl behind the blog
- Wanna know more about me? About me page.
Search YA-Aholic
Current Giveaways
Come back soon!
Rating system
- 1 star: Wasn't my cup of tea
- 2 stars: It was okay
- 3 stars: Was an enjoyable read
- 4 stars: Enjoyed this termendously
- 5 stars: Wow, perfection, I'm in love
Hey Everyone! Today I am starting another BIG giveaway that will go on for the next month AND is international so anyone can enter (: I know, I am actually already past 600followers, but I thought it sounded a bit weird saying my "648 follower giveaway" haha so were gonna go with 600 (:
- There will be 1 winner
- The winner will win one of the series below of their choice
- (not the whole series just the first 3 books shown)
- You must be a follower to enter
- You must fill out the form below to enter
- The more entries you put in, the more likely you are to win
- Giveaway will end September 8th
(both of which you can find on my sidebar)
Fill out THIS form to enter
Spread the word of the giveaway, and good luck! (:
If you have any questions please feel free to comment on this post, or to email me at email@example.com
70 comments:
- Jessica said...
Amazing Giveaway! Thanks so much for hosting it, I'm a new follower :)
Jess @ The Midnight Bookworm
- August 8, 2011 at 9:40 PM
- Chey said...
Really great giveaway! Thanks and congrats on the amount of followers! :D
- August 8, 2011 at 9:42 PM
- Unknown said...
thank for contest!
- August 8, 2011 at 9:43 PM
Thanks for the GIVEAWAY. I have a silly question. The books will be in hardcover or paparback
- August 8, 2011 at 9:47 PM
- Shawn Kirsten Maravel said...
This giveaway is EPIC! You're the best!!!
- August 8, 2011 at 9:51 PM
- Haley @ YA-Aholic said...
Welcome everyone! :D And oh thank you Shawn hahha I try (;
Ronyka7: Good question! If the book is available in paperback then I will order paperback...but I know alot of the books above the last book released in the three are mostly hardbacks so in that case it might be a mix and match lol, it will basically all depend on who wins and what they picked, I have no problem ordering them in hardback if there only a lil more expensive then the paperbacks (: ..that was along answer ahah sorry!
- August 8, 2011 at 9:57 PM
- Mary Preston said...
Absolutely brilliant thank you!!
- August 8, 2011 at 10:24 PM
- Saribonita said...
What an awesome giveaway!!! BIG Congrats on your 1st 600!!! And many more! Thank you for the chance to enter! :)
- August 8, 2011 at 11:00 PM
- Christie (Neliss) said...
Haley, good god, you're amazing! I'd love to own first three books of tmi or va. <3 So I'm definitely in.^^
- August 9, 2011 at 12:23 AM
- Melissa @thereaderandthechef said...
Awesome giveaway! I'm a new follower :)
- August 9, 2011 at 12:40 AM
Thanks for this amazing giveaway !
- August 9, 2011 at 1:50 AM
- Unknown said...
Awesome Giveaway!!! Thanks a lot, Haley :D
- August 9, 2011 at 2:00 AM
- _yay_ said...
Thanks so much!!
Congrats on 600+ followers :-)
- August 9, 2011 at 2:08 AM
- Naj said...
Thank you so much for this giveaway! :D And congrats on the 600 members!! <3
- August 9, 2011 at 2:29 AM
- Book Passion for Life said...
Immense Giveaway Hayley! I entered! Congrats on the 600 followers. And fingers crossed.
-Jess :D
- August 9, 2011 at 3:14 AM
- Kiwi Ivashkov said...
OMG! WOW!! Congratulations on hitting 600!! :D
That is a super choice of books, especially the fact that your giving away the first three of the series!!
- August 9, 2011 at 3:58 AM
- Unknown said...
awesome giveaway! very very generous!
- August 9, 2011 at 4:22 AM
Thanks so much for the giveaway! This is really cool!
- August 9, 2011 at 4:50 AM
- Evie said...
Congrats on your followers!
And thanks a lot for this amazing giveaway.
- August 9, 2011 at 5:12 AM
- rthemion said...
Awesome give away... Thanks!
- August 9, 2011 at 8:46 AM
- Holly said...
Congrats on having so many followers and thanks so much for this fantastic giveaway!
- August 9, 2011 at 9:10 AM
- Unknown said...
thank you for the chance to win in such an amazing give away!! and congrats on all the followers!!!! here is too 600 more lol
- August 9, 2011 at 9:35 AM
- Minas said...
Thanks for the giveaway!
- August 9, 2011 at 11:04 AM
- Stephanie said...
Congrats on all the followers! That's exciting :)
And thanks for this awesome giveaway!! SOOO many good series to choose from!
- August 9, 2011 at 11:56 AM
- Sahina said...
Congrats on the awesome number of followers Albino kid lover ;) haha I entered too, this is such a huuuge giveaway! I'll be posting and spreading the link for you :)
- August 9, 2011 at 2:20 PM
Thanks for hosting this giveaway :-)
I see you have The Predicteds by Christine Seifert in your sidebar. Christine is hosting a giveaway for an ARC on my blog in connection with an interview, if you're interested.
- August 9, 2011 at 2:37 PM
- Jennie said...
Thank you for this awesome giveaway!! :D
- August 9, 2011 at 4:25 PM
- Bookish Brunette said...
Awesome and congrats!!
- August 9, 2011 at 5:46 PM
- SarahSparrow said...
Thank you for the generous giveaway!
- August 9, 2011 at 9:53 PM
- Book Passion for Life said...
AWESOME giveaway Haley. I'm not entering but I know you will have a fab time hosting it! :) Donna
P.S CONGRATS on over 600 followers. You deserved it!!!!! :)
- August 10, 2011 at 6:24 AM
- Author Sherry Gammon said...
Great Giveaway!! Hooray on the 600+ followers too. Great job!
- August 10, 2011 at 10:38 AM
- ashley said...
thanksn this is awesome!
- August 10, 2011 at 12:14 PM
- Cherry said...
Congratulations on reaching a milestone and more power to your blog! :)
And thank you for the chance to win a fab series!
Cherry Mischievous
- August 11, 2011 at 10:47 AM
- Lilith said...
congrats on your 736 (!!) followers :D
thank you for hosting this giveaway ^^
- August 11, 2011 at 4:13 PM
- Sarah said...
Wow congrats you're way over 600 :D! You've got a lot of great series listed. Thank you!
- August 11, 2011 at 9:55 PM
- DhesiX said...
Jeez! You Rock, Girl!! Awesome, Thanks! :))
- August 12, 2011 at 2:57 AM
- Nikita said...
Awesome giveaway! Thank you very much! :)
- August 12, 2011 at 7:23 AM
- Books for Company said...
This is amazing, thanks! =)
- August 13, 2011 at 3:15 AM
- Alba said...
forever greatfull for this chance thanks!
- August 13, 2011 at 11:05 AM
- Zemira said...
Awesome giveaway. :D
- August 13, 2011 at 11:11 AM
- Aleksandra said...
Thank you for this amazing giveaway!
- August 13, 2011 at 11:11 AM
- Ana Lucía said...
wow! This giveaway is awesome it was so hard to choose just one series.. thank you so much, fingers crossed! And THANKS for making it international! :D
- August 13, 2011 at 12:11 PM
- Lulu (The Bookworm is Here!) said...
Oh.My.I.Think.I.Am.Dreaming *slaps self* Are you serious? Thank you so much!! Thia is an amazing giveaway! I hope I win, I would love the Perfect Chemistry series :)
- August 13, 2011 at 2:50 PM
- In Julie's Opinion said...
What an awesome, awesome giveaway!! Keep this up and you'll have 1600 followers in no time at all! Word WILL get out - you'll be beating them off with a stick :) Big congrats!!
- August 14, 2011 at 9:12 AM
- Janhvi said...
awesome!!thanks for the giveaway!
- August 15, 2011 at 1:41 AM
- Lauren said...
Thanks for the awesome giveaway, girl! :)
- August 15, 2011 at 1:41 PM
- Penelope @ The Reading Devil said...
This is awesome!
- August 16, 2011 at 8:42 PM
- SweetMarie83 said...
What an amazing giveaway! I've done everything and filled out the form, and I'm now your 779th follower! Your blog is beautiful, btw, I love it. :-)
- August 18, 2011 at 2:15 PM
- Darlene said...
Congrats, and thanks for the giveaway!
- August 20, 2011 at 2:20 PM
- Kat said...
OMG! OMG! OMG! This giveaway is so amazing! And it's international *squee*
- August 21, 2011 at 3:24 PM
- l0raah_ said...
I've just entered, thanks for this giveaway! and congrats on all your followers (808 now, wow! lol)
- August 24, 2011 at 4:56 AM
- Aneesa V said...
Just entered your giveaway!
Awesome blog and congrats on hitting waaayy over 600 followers!
Aneesa V x
- August 25, 2011 at 4:07 AM
- Eli Yanti said...
wow.. all the books i love so much. want it.. want it ^^
- August 25, 2011 at 5:30 AM
- Leonor (Ner) said...
CONGRATULATIONS on your 600 followers
Thank you so much for this giveaway ^_^
- August 25, 2011 at 3:40 PM
- Hannah @ Dragons and Whimsy said...
Congrats on your 600 (800!!) followers! And thank you for the giveaway, I was seriously torn by what to pick! :x
Once Upon A Time
- August 29, 2011 at 6:54 AM
- TheReadingOwl said...
Congrats on 600 followers (or should I say 800)! That's wonderful! :D
- September 6, 2011 at 3:48 PM
- Obsession with Books said...
Congratulations on reaching the 600+ follower milestone!
Thank-you for the wonderful giveaway, you have listed some amazing series.
Would love to see you at my 500 follower giveaway www.obsessionwithbooks.blogspot.com :)
- September 7, 2011 at 2:32 PM
- Tiffany Holme said...
I just found this today... I hope I didn't miss it lol I tried to enter anyway:) Regardless I'm glad to be here!! Thanks for the amazing giveaway and good luck to all who entered!!
- September 8, 2011 at 6:28 AM
Awesome giveaway. Thanks for the chance to enter =)
Good luck everyone ^_^
- September 8, 2011 at 8:21 AM
- Dani @ Refracted Light said...
New follower :) Thanks so much for the opportunity to win THREE books! That's awesome!
Congratulations on almost 900 followers. That's so exciting!
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text:
- May 31, 2012
A Bay Shore Road home tops all sales in this week's real-estate transactions. John and Glynis Murray, of Sarasota, sold their home at 4521 Bay Shore Road to Bank of America NA, trustee, for $3 million. Built in 1929, it has five bedrooms, five baths, a pool and 4,171 square feet of living area. It previously sold for $2.3 million in 2005.
Aqualane Estates
Fifth Third Bank sold the home at 1436 Ridgewood Lane to Zakaria Ghayalini and Amanda Ghayalini, of Sarasota, for $900,000. Built in 1962, it has four bedrooms, four baths, a pool and 3,851 square feet of living area. It previously sold for $1.85 million in 2004.
Harbor View on Golden Gate Point
Louis Fisher and Gregory Singleton, of Cobb, Ga., sold their unit 203 condominium at 650 Golden Gate Point to John and Marsha Sidoni, of Saint Marys, Pa., for $595,000. Built in 1962, it has two bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and 1,837 square feet of living area.
Regency House
Robert Moriarty, trustee, sold the unit 701 condominium at 435 Gulf Stream Ave. to Ross Cibella, of Sarasota, for $380,000. Built in 1972, it has three bedrooms, two baths and 1,687 square feet of living area. It previously sold for $525,000 in 2004.


text:
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RICHMOND, Ky. (Dec. 30, 2006) - Jenny Norman (Peachtree City, Ga.) scored a career-high 17 points and Brooke Wilhoit (Sevierville, Tenn.) sank six threes as the ETSU women's basketball defeated Eastern Kentucky, 83-73, Saturday evening inside McBrayer Arena. The Lady Bucs picked up their first-ever win against the Lady Colonels on their home floor, and move to 6-6 while EKU falls to 5-8.
Norman and Michele DeVault (
An 8-0 run by the Lady Colonels cut the deficit to 57-44, but ETSU would rattle off five unanswered points to push their lead back to 18.
The Lady Bucs finished the game hitting a season-best 11 three-point field goals and shot 55.0 percent (11-20) from beyond the arc. ETSU had four players score in double figures, with DeVault and Wilhoit leading the way with 18 a piece. Freshman Siarre Evans (
In the first half, the Lady Bucs held the Lady Colonels to one field goal in the first eight minutes, and opened up to a 16-5 lead with 12:48 remaining. The hot hand of Wilhoit extended the ETSU lead to its largest of the half at 24-10, as she hit her fourth three-point field goal at the 10:05 mark.
Seven of the nine ETSU players who saw action in the half scored, with Wilhoit leading all scorers with 12 points and was four-of-six from beyond on the arc. Andrea Jenkins led the Lady Colonels with seven points. Turnovers helped ETSU in the first stanza as they forced 18 and converted them into 24 points. The Lady Bucs shot 40.0 percent (16-40) from the field, while
After playing five of their last six games on the road, the Lady Bucs will ring in the New Year at home on Thursday, Jan. 4 when they host conference foe Lipscomb. Tip is set for 4:45 p.m. in


text:
K-CAP 2001 Workshop October 21, 2001, Victoria B.C., Canada
Capturing knowledge by using markup techniques and by supporting semantic annotations is a major technique for creating metadata. It is beneficial in a wide range of content-oriented intelligent applications.
One important Application for instance is the Semantic Web. The research about the WWW currently strives to augment syntactic information already present in the Web by semantic metadata in order to achieve a Semantic Web that human and software agents can understand. Here, one of the most urgent challenges now is a knowledge-capturing problem, i.e. how one may turn existing syntactic resources into knowledge structures. A solution is to markup web document in order to create metadata on the web.
Another application is the indexing and searching of multimedia (and multilingual) data. It is difficult to completely process the content of multimedia data, even with technologies based on natural language processing, image processing, machine vision and speech recognition. Therefore, Semantic annotation is one of the promising methodologies to define semantic structures on the content.
The workshop intends to
bring together researchers and practitioners from such research areas
as the Semantic Web, knowledge acquisition, computational linguistics,
document processing, terminology, information science, and multimedia
content, among others, to discuss various aspects of knowledge markup
and semantic annotation in an interdisciplinary way.
Topics of Interest includes, but not limited to:
Practitioners and researchers interested
in participating should submit either a full paper (less than 6000
words) or a position paper (less than 1500 words). Submit before July
15, 2001 in electronic form in postscript or pdf to:
Although not required for the initial submission, we recommend to follow the format guidlines of K-Cap 2001, as this will be the required format for accepted papers.
Last modified: October 30, 2001 11:43 PM


text:
In remembrance of Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) on his birthday, let me share anew my tributes to his memory, his life, and his ideas from over the years:
To Washington DC, Virginia, and Philadelphia I Go, In Search of Thomas Jefferson
To Paris, France I Go, In Search of Revolution-Era Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Jefferson
and my thrilling interview with Clay Jenkinson, Jefferson scholar
Interview with Clay Jenkinson as Thomas Jefferson
I hope you enjoy following me as I followed in the footsteps of Jefferson!
*A version of this piece was previously published at Ordinary Philosophy
~ Ordinary Philosophy is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Any support you can offer will be deeply appreciated!


text:
Change is never easy. But when it comes to adopting new agricultural practices, some farmers are easier to convince than others.
A group of researchers at the University of Illinois wanted to know which farmers are most likely to adopt multifunctional perennial cropping systems–trees, shrubs, or grasses that simultaneously benefit the environment and generate high-value products that can be harvested for a profit.
"We surveyed farmers in the Upper Sangamon River Watershed in Illinois to learn their attitudes about growing MPCs on marginal land. We then looked at their demographic data to classify people into different categories related to their adoption potential," says University of Illinois agroecologist Sarah Taylor Lovell.
Using statistical clustering techniques, the team discovered that survey respondents fell into six categories. The "educated networkers" and "young innovators" were most likely to adopt MPCs. On the other end of the spectrum, survey respondents classified as "money motivated" and "hands-off" were least likely to adopt the new cropping systems.
The goal of categorizing farmers was to tailor strategies for each group, given their general attitudes. "If they're very unlikely to adopt at all, we probably wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about those groups," Lovell explains.
However, Lovell thinks some low-likelihood adopters could be swayed. "One of the groups–the one we called "money motivated"–was really connected with GPS in their yield monitoring, so we thought we could target that. We could review high-resolution maps of their farms to point out the areas that are unproductive for corn and soybeans. We'd try to make the case that alternative perennial systems could bring in profits," Lovell says.
High-likelihood adopters were motivated by environmental concerns, and were especially interested in converting marginal land to bioenergy crop, hay, or nut production systems. "Farmers were probably most familiar with bioenergy grasses and hay," Lovell explains. But it was important to them that an existing market was in place for MPCs products.
Another major factor was land tenancy. Considering that most MPC crops don't mature for years after planting, rental contracts would need to account for the long-term investment.
"The person leasing the land might be really interested in agroforestry or perennial cropping systems," Lovell says. "The lease arrangement has to be long enough that the farmer will get back their investment in that period. For example, some of the nut crops take a long time to mature. But if you integrate some of the fruit shrubs, they'll become productive in maybe 3-4 years. You could get an earlier return on investment in those cases."
Lovell's graduate students–housed in the crop sciences department at U of I–are now following up with several of the farmers who were interested in MPCs and offering custom designs to establish the new cropping systems on their land.
"That was part of the overall goal for this study. We wondered if the barrier to adoption is a lack of information about design options and the economic potential," Lovell says. "If we overcome that barrier by developing good planting plans, projecting the market economics, and providing them with that information, will that help them implement the change?"
Stay tuned.
The article, "Identifying barriers and motivators for adoption of multifunctional perennial cropping systems by landowners in the Upper Sangamon River Watershed, Illinois," is published in Agroforestry Systems. Lead author Chloe Mattia and co-author Adam Davis are also in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I. Funding was provided by the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture.


text:
WASHINGTON -- Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House communications director after just 11 days on the job - and just hours after former Gen. John Kelly took over as President Donald Trump's new chief of staff.
Hoping to turn the page on a tumultuous opening chapter to his presidency, Trump had insisted earlier Monday that there was "no chaos" in his White House as he swore in the retired Marine general as his second chief of staff.
Not long after, Scaramucci, who shocked many with his profane outburst last week against then-chief of staff Reince Priebus, was gone.
In the words of the White House announcement, he was leaving because he "felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team." The three-sentence release concluded, "We wish him all the best."
The statement about Scaramucci's departure used the same "clean slate" language that departing press secretary Sean Spicer used to describe his reason for resigning on July 21 - the day Trump brought Scaramucci aboard.
Spicer was at the White House on Monday, saying he was assisting with the communications transitions.
As the Scaramucci news spread, Kelly was in the East Room smiling and taking pictures with guests who were gathering for a Medal of Honor presentation.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump felt that Scaramucci's profanity-laced comments against Priebus "were inappropriate for a person in that position" of White House communications director. The president had not publicly expressed disapproval of those comments in the days after they became public.
Sanders added that Kelly has "the full authority to operate within the White House and that all staff will report to him," a change from Priebus' tenure.
Earlier, in an Oval Office ceremony, Trump predicted Kelly, who previously served as Homeland Security chief, would do a "spectacular job." And the president chose to highlight the rising stock market and positive jobs outlook rather than talk about how things might need to change in his White House under Kelly.
Trump on Friday ousted Priebus as chief of staff and turned to Kelly, who he hopes will bring military discipline to an administration weighed down by a stalled legislative agenda, infighting among West Wing aides and a stack of investigations.
Scaramucci's brief tenure shoved internal White House disputes into the open. In media interviews, he trashed Priebus as a "leaker" and senior White House aide Steve Bannon as a self-promoter. One of Scaramucci's first - and it turns out only - acts was to force out a communications aide seen as loyal to Priebus.
Spicer, Priebus and Bannon had all objected to Trump's decision to hire Scaramucci, who would have reported directly to the president.
While Trump is looking for a reset, he pushed back against criticism of his administration with this tweet: "Highest Stock Market EVER, best economic numbers in years, unemployment lowest in 17 years, wages raising, border secure, S.C.: No WH chaos!"
In fact, economic growth averaged 2 percent in the first half of this year, a pace Trump railed against as a candidate and promised to lift to 3 percent. The stock market first hit a record under President Barack Obama and has kept growing. The unemployment rate, too, started to decline on Obama's watch. And wage gains have been weak.
Trump on Monday convened his first Cabinet meeting with Kelly at his side, telling his team it is "doing incredibly well" and "starting from a really good base." On how he would deal with rising tensions with North Korea, Trump said only: "It will be handled."
Seated across from Trump was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has stayed on the job while Trump has publicly savaged him in interviews and on social media.
Kelly's success in a chaotic White House will depend on how much authority he is granted and whether Trump's dueling aides will put aside their rivalries to work together. Also unclear is whether a new chief of staff will have any influence over the president's social media histrionics.
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was ousted from the campaign in June 2016, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he expected Kelly would "restore order to the staff" but also stressed that Trump was unlikely to change his style.
"I say you have to let Trump be Trump. That is what has made him successful over the last 30 years. That is what the American people voted for," Lewandowski said. "And anybody who thinks they're going to change Donald Trump doesn't know Donald Trump."
Kelly's start follows a wild week, marked by a profane tirade by Scaramucci, the president's continued criticism of his attorney general and the failed effort by Senate Republicans to overhaul the nation's health care law.
In addition to the strains in the West Wing and with Congress, Kelly starts his new job as tensions escalate with North Korea. The United States flew two supersonic bombers over the Korean Peninsula on Sunday in a show of force against North Korea, following the country's latest intercontinental ballistic missile test. The U.S. also said it conducted a successful test of a missile defense system located in Alaska.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that she hopes Kelly can "be effective," and "begin some very serious negotiation with the North and stop this program."
Another diplomatic fissure opened Sunday when Russian President Vladimir Putin said the U.S. would have to cut its embassy and consulate staff in Russia by several hundred under new sanctions from Moscow. In a television interview, Putin indicated the cutback was retaliation for new sanctions in a bill passed by Congress and sent to Trump.
Trump plans to sign the measure into law, the White House has said. After Putin's remarks, the State Department deemed the cutbacks "a regrettable and uncalled for act" and said officials would assess the impact and how to respond to it.
While Trump is trying to refresh his team, he signaled that he does not want to give up the fight on health care. On Twitter Sunday, he said: "Don't give up Republican Senators, the World is watching: Repeal & Replace."
The protracted health care fight has slowed work on Trump's other policy goals, including a tax overhaul and infrastructure investment. But Trump aides made clear that the president still wanted to see action on health care. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said on CNN's "State of the Union," that senators "need to stay, they need to work, they need to pass something."
The House has begun a five-week recess, while the Senate is scheduled to work two more weeks before a summer break.
Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire, Darlene Superville, Julie Bykowicz and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
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text:
Oh, dear, I certainly opened a can of worms yesterday with my comments about 80s babies, didn't I? Honestly, it didn't occur to me that my comments would be seen as so terribly offensive. I didn't really say anything that hasn't been discussed in lots more places than DW. I understand feeling sensitive, but this idea that I'm wrong for stereotyping an entire generation of people is a little … well, silly. Entire generations of people have been generalized for decades — it's why there are names for so many generations: Generation Y or the Millennials (or, as I call them "80s babies"), Generation X, the Baby Boomers, the Silent Generation, and the Greatest Generation. You also have "depression era kids," "flappers," and the "beat generation" as well as many other sub-cultures within a specific generation. Say any of these names and people not only know whom you're talking about, they have an instant idea of prevalent characteristics among that generation.
Is it a gross generalization to associate specific characteristics to an entire generation of people? Of course. But there's a reason we all do it: because there are trends among each generation that hold true. Because the generalized characteristics often fit enough people to be considered a trend. Because they help us understand behavior of people we work with, associate with and call family. It's easy to point to a certain behavioral trait that co-workers of a certain age exhibit, for example, and say, "Oh, that must be a generational thing." Because, pretty often, it is a generational thing.
Yesterday I mentioned one generational trend — well, two, really — that I have noticed among people born in the 80s and early 90s: a kind of arrested development (a slowness to move into adulthood compared to generations before/ a bit of over-dependence on their parents) and some sense of entitlement. Does this describe everyone born in the 80s and early 90s? Absolutely not! Maybe it doesn't even describe most, but based on my personal observation (of people I've worked with, people who write letters to me on a daily basis, people in my family, friends, people I meet out and about, people whose conversations I overhear on the subway, blogs I read, etc. etc.), these behavioral traits fit enough people from a certain age group to be considered a trend. It's not the only trend I've noticed among 80s babies. I've also observed some wonderful things — traits I admire, like an unwillingness to settle for the status quo, an eagerness to create careers that fit them rather than trying to squeeze into already existing careers, and a desire to achieve a strong work-life balance.
We are all products of the environment in which we were raised, from the culture of our own homes to the culture of society as a whole. It's healthy to look at your peers and ask yourself if you see common traits and if so, which traits you like and which ones you don't. It's healthy to analyze the culture of your childhood and try to determine what common experiences may have influenced and led to common behavioral traits among your peers. It helps us to understand each other — and ourselves — a lot more. I hope it helps us to be more empathetic, too.
I'm sorry if I came across more accusatory and finger-pointing than I meant to. The truth is I have a lot of empathy for you 80s babies. You are coming of age in a turbulent time. It's not the first turbulent time society has experienced, though, and you have a lot of benefits that generations before didn't have. But you also have a lot of challenges to contend with that generations before could never have imagined. Not to get all mushy and sentimental, but I feel privileged to be in a position to watch how you handle these challenges. Maybe I can even help you past some of them, through my own words and by creating a place where you can share your words and experiences with each other. That's one of my goals, anyway. And in pursuing that goal, I learn some things I hope will make me a better parent, and a better person.
Anyway, this is me apologizing for offending you — you 80s babies — and opening the dialogue further in a way I hope is a little less hostile than yesterday's dialogue. Many of you have already weighed in on whether you agree or disagree with some of my generational observations (You disagree, you disagree! You have been heard!), but are there observations you've made — of either your own generation or others? How do you think the culture you were raised in influenced the person you are today? Discuss.


text:
MEXICO CITY – Americans, in the hundreds of thousands, are crossing the border into Mexico -looking for work.
There were ZERO jobs created in the United States last week. Unemployment remains over 9.1% and if you consider all the Americans that have stopped looking for work, the number is closer to 20%.
The answer for a large group of Americans: Mexico.
The Mexican economy is booming. Many of the illegal immigrants that have come to the United States have turned around and headed back to Mexico. Yes, there are drug cartels killing citizens, police officers and government officials, but there are jobs there and Americans are willing to take the risk.
"I'm not worried about the drug dealers, I need a job. I need to take care of my family," said Steven Rivera of El Paso, Texas. Rivera's family will remain in El Paso, while Steven works in at a Tequila Farm in Baja. "I'll only be making about $3,000 a month, but the cost of living is low. I'll be sending most of the money back to my family."
Mexican Border Patrol has seen a spike in Americans running across the border into Mexico – looking for work.
But the MBP has different approach to illegal immigration. "If we see anybody running across the border, we will kill them on the spot. We will use as many bullets as it takes to make sure the illegal is no longer a threat to Mexico."
Still, Americans are running across the border in record number, with only backpacks and bottles of water. "Many are making through the desert of Mexico and getting to Mexico City, but many, unfortunately, are not making it," said White House head Mexican-American relations, Jill Bonderas, says that the Obama Administration is doing all it can to keep illegal immigrants safe in our country and "we hope the Mexicans are keeping the Americans who cross the border safe as well."
Thousands of Americans are seen standing outside Hardware Y Siseno (the equivalent of Home Depot), hoping to be picked up for day labor jobs.
"Hopefully, if America can create jobs again, and Americans won't have to leave to find jobs in Mexico, but the trend seems to be increasing," said Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis. "But, in the meantime, we are sure they will have a good time in Mexico. It's so beautiful down there"