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January 17, 1987 was a special day. It was the date of the largest peace protest in Florida history when well over 5,000 people marched onto the front gates of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in protest of the planned test launch of the first Trident II nuclear missile. I was then coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice where I worked for 15 years. We initiated the call for the protest and asked for help from groups around the country. Our march to the gates that day was led by famous baby doctor Benjamin Spock and he was the first person to climb a ladder to get over the barbed wire fence. We called the protest "Cancel the Countdown".
In all 186 were arrested for symbolically trying to enter the base to sit on the launch pad where Trident II nuclear missiles would be test fired. About 50 were arrested in the days preceding the January 17 event when they tried sneaking onto the launch center that is located inside the national seashore and surrounded by ocean and swamps. Some hiked up the beach toward the launch towers along the shore and others trudged through the alligator infested swamp marshes. Some were arrested at night with military helicopters searching for them. For a solid week the media around Florida was intensely covering the arrests prior to the January 17 rally. Peter Lumsdaine from California came to help and was a key organizer of these back country actions at the Cape.
Events really got going two weeks prior to the January 17 rally and march. We organized a Peace Pilgrimage to Stop the Trident that began with a protest at Kings Bay nuclear submarine base on the Florida-Georgia border. John and Martina Linnehan took on the responsibility for making the pilgrimage such a success. The peace pilgrimage was led by Buddhist monks and more than 200 people made the two week trek to the space center.
When Jimmy Carter was president (after saying during his campaign that "the arms race is a disgrace to the human race") he went on to build the huge new Trident sub base in the sleepy north Georgia fishing town called St. Marys. Once the Trident missiles were tested they were to be put inside the nuclear submarines at Kings Bay and at the other Trident nuclear sub base at Bangor, Washington.
As the pilgrimage came south, affinity groups were formed that began to plan the back country occupations of the space center in hopes they could get on the launch pad and delay the launch.
From Boston a peace train was organized by the national peace coalition called Mobilization for Survival (Mobe). They reserved several rail cars on Amtrak and the train went from Boston to Orlando stopping along the way holding quick news conferences in major cities at the rail stations and a couple hundred activists jumped on-board the train for the ride to Florida. It was Mobe who got Dr. Spock, Peter Yarrow and Odetta to come to Florida for the protest.
Other organizers streamed into Florida in the weeks prior to the protest to help and we put them to work across the state helping build turnout. Thanks to local supporter Smitty Hooper in Cocoa Beach we opened an office there to coordinate local organizing near the space center.
It was my job to coordinate the overall operation and it was one of the most thrilling campaigns I every worked on. There were lots of threads weaving this protest together and in the days prior to the Internet and Facebook we had to organize the old fashioned way - traveling the state, talking to people, phone calls, mailing leaflets, and the like. One night while speaking to a peace group in southwest Florida I mentioned that we needed to raise $1,500 to pay for a trailer with port-a-toilets for the peace walk. After the meeting a woman walked up and handed me a check for $1,500.
In the end I spent about five days in jail along with many others, some stayed in the lock up for weeks. The Brevard County jail was so over crowded the night of January 17 that they had to set up a huge tent in a parking lot to hold the men who had been arrested. It was cold and raining outside and we chanted for hours demanding better treatment. Eventually, late in the night, they brought us plastic pads to lay on but I refused to do so. I held out for us being moved to a warm and dry inside location. I lost the battle and held tightly to the tent poles through that long and memorable night. I admit there were moments that I regretted taking such a hard line but my pride was at stake here - I'd made a demand and was going to stick with it - through thick and thin, and cold and rain.
Some years later I was shopping at the Albertson's grocery store in downtown Orlando near where I lived. In those days they had bag boys push your cart of groceries into the parking lot and they loaded your car. As we approached my car the young man noticed my bumper stickers and got excited. He told me a story about the Cape Canaveral protest a few years before and how he and his father were watching the news reports on TV about peaceniks going over the fence. "I loved it," he said. "My dad hated it and screamed at the TV."
I realized in that moment that the protest had not just been about the 5,000 people there. The audience for this public participatory production had been extensive, even national. It made me wonder even more what other creative ways we could find to get our message beyond our limited confines.
In the end this bold day of action was the kind of direct citizens challenge that we need to mount against the military industrial complex. We were proud to have organized many of these events at the space center in Florida over the years.
A few other friends yesterday have offered their memories of that protest.
Long-time Catholic Worker activist Patrick O'Neill from North Carolina writes:
"As 5,000 people (from dozens of cities around the nation) converged on the gates of Cape Canaveral 27 years ago today, we soon discovered the Air Force had changed plans on us -- the gates -- which were always open, were closed to prevent our plan to occupy the base to protest the Trident II D-5 missile, the most diabolical first-strike weapon ever made. Undeterred, the late great activist and famous baby book author, Dr. Benjamin Spock, (then 86 years old and leading the march) walked straight up to the 8-foot fence and scaled it with his wife right behind. More than 200 others followed Spock over or around the fence line [by going into the river], joining one of the greatest mass acts of nonviolent direct action ever staged in the South. That day marks one of the strongest efforts ever carried out in opposition to US nuclear policy."
Frank Donnelly (then in Florida but now living in Maine) writes:
"I'll join in on this, 27 yrs ago I along with others rode bus from Lake Worth, Florida to the protest where I saw Patrick for the first time since prison, I was still on probation . I remember that most of the folks on my bus where older Jewish women along with a friend visiting from Maine, he was worried we'd be arrested .It seemed to me there was more than 5,000 but maybe I was just hoping. It was a great day for the peace movement we sure could use lots more like that day. Peace to you both."
Leslie Cagan (then national coordinator of Mobe in New York City) writes:
"In the 1980's, Mobilization for Survival was a fairly strong national network of about 125 organizations - mostly local groups with several national organizations as well. Committed to trying to build a strong national peace and justice presence meant we did what we could to help nurture grassroots, community based activism. As is so often the case, the most creative, the boldest and most challenging ideas came from that grassroots activism and our national work was given shape by those initiatives. Such was the case with the plans for an action in Central Florida at the time of the 1st flight test of the Trident nuclear weapons missile. Here was an opportunity to take the widespread opposition to nuclear weapons right to the front door of one of the facilities directly involved. It was a no-brainer - Mobilization for Survival quickly jumped into the work.We did what we could to let people far and wide know about the plans for the protest in Florida. Most importantly, we encouraged those who could to make the trip there themselves. And we facilitated this by organizing a peace train that came down the East Coast picking up folks along the journey. I don't recall now how many stops it made or how many people got on board. But that didn't really matter since everyone knew the great majority of the people at the demonstration would be Floridians. What did matter was that people in other parts of the country were taking notice, helping in whatever ways they could, and being inspired to think about what anti-nuclear actions they could take in their own backyards.I had the good fortunate of people able to go to Florida for several days before the action, and of course was there on that great day. It was exciting to watch the buses roll in and to be there as people gathered for the rally and march to the front gate of the facility. I'll never forget the sight of hundreds of senior citizens who had retired to Florida opening up their folding chairs and taking out their lunch baskets...rejoicing in the fact that they did not have to travel all the way up the Washington, DC or New York City (where so many of them had come from) to be part of this protest! Some of these folks were too frail to do the march to the front gate, let alone to climb over the fence that day. But their full support for the action was evident, and inspiring.It was a great day, and another one of those important reminders that a national movement is grounded in communities all across the nation. Mobilization for Survival was thrilled that we could help build this protest, and I, personally, was honored to have been a part of it."
I thank Patrick for the reminder of this special day. He is good at remembering these important landmarks in our life and celebrating them. His joyous and loving personality brings us all great gifts.


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Boys Read opposes the NRA's proposal to put armed officers in every school. We strongly support having therapy dogs in every school. A School-Resource Officer (SRO) can be helpful for curbing violence in schools. However, they are simply cost prohibitive and a reactive and defensive approach. In 2007, the Department of Justice estimated the annual cost of employing a law-enforcement officer averaged $116,500.
Boys Read believes that schools need more counselors; especially male counselors that can identify boys that are at-risk of dropping out of school and of being incarcerated or violent to themselves or others. Boys need men and women to connect with. Every school needs at least one male and female counselor. Every child must be accounted for. Every child deserves our best effort to connect them to our society as a whole. There is a place for each unique individual.
One best-practice that can be accomplished is to bring therapy dogs into schools. A creative university in Canada recently had success with using therapy dogs as stress-relievers. For the full best-practice story, click here.
Also, click here for a doggone good way to get reluctant readers to read.
In summary, as educators, we must stand up and fight for creative, proactive ways to help our kids. If we don't speak up now, we will all be the victims of big business, political driven mandates.

subset: commoncrawl


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In the Garden column: Gardening for longevity
Choosing landscapes with quality features (patios, decks and fences) and plantings with ongoing interest and blooms makes complete sense for building long-lived gardens. Planting in mind with plants counted on to perform over a long time costs the owner and our planet less in the long run. Here are steps to achieve such a garden.
Step 1: Do a little planning. Whether you are tackling your garden from scratch or doing a garden refresh, take stock of where things could go. Make a basic plan on paper for your area. Then lay tracing paper over the top, and sketch ideas in pencil starting with the functional stuff like paths, patios, deck and driveways. Once finished, start on the garden beds. Looking out from your living areas or walking up to your front door, decide where the best views are of your garden.
Step 2: Get the hard stuff sorted. List any hard landscaping to be done - decking and fencing. Once hard landscaping is done, then bring in the living part of the landscape - the plants.
Step 3: Choose your favorites. Stick to proven performers so what you plant will keep providing joy year after year without being demanding. Use plants that flower for weeks and weeks on end. Then the garden will look lovely through spring, summer and into fall. To make it look good, there is the "white-to-make-it-right" trick: either plant all white flowering plants, or add white flowering plants in with whatever plants you put together.
Step 4: Take a look at these: For easy-to-grow and long-lived plants, roses are high on the list for many gardeners. Flower Carpet roses are a great choice because they are easy to maintain; they cover themselves in masses of blooms, and there are loads of color options. They work in zones 5-11. Salvia (Salvia spp. thrives in zones 5-11 and is a lovely companion plant with the Flower Carpets.) Salvias are easy to grow and throw off spires of flowers all summer long in a range of colors from soft pink and blues to deep purple. Warm-climate gardeners can add African daisies Osteospermum to borders and beds. They are a brilliant classic daisy accent and offer a blanket of different colored daisy flowers for weeks. Colder climate gardeners will appreciate Volcano Phlox for non-stop color in zones 4-10. Volcano Phlox is available in a range of colors from soft to bold and bloom from mid-summer to early autumn, and as a bonus, are particularly attractive to butterflies.
Step 5: Vary texture in the garden. Adding texture to the garden is another way to keep the garden going. Plant strappy foliage into the mix with Storm Agapanthus, best in zones 8-11. The leaves are more refined than traditional agapanthus, and they will grow to sizable clumps with bucket-loads of flowers held high for many weeks over summer. Sedums are gorgeous additions with color and texture. They thrive in almost every climate condition. Hardy to zones 7-11, Canna Tropicanna's bright tangerine flowers linger for months over striped broad leaves. When the sun shines through its strappy, bold-textured leaves, Canna Tropicanna is fully appreciated.
Choose plants to be counted on for dependability and your garden will reward you for years of enjoyment.
Carole McCray resides in Cape May, New Jersey and is an award-winning garden writer who has been writing a monthly garden column, The Potting Shed, for regional newspapers for nearly 20 years. Her articles have been published in The Christian Science Monitor Newspaper, Coastal Living Magazine, Cape May Magazine, Growise Garden Guide and Ideals Magazine. She won the Garden Writer's Association Award for newspaper writing for The Christian Science Monitor Newspaper.


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I just put up a Photosynth of my family room. Unfortunately you need a Windows machine to view it. But, this is a combination of 50 images I made this afternoon with my Canon 5D.
It took only a few minutes to upload them all and complete the Photosynth. Very easy to do. Anyone can do it, you just need to plan out your Photosynth a bit. Sort of like a big stitched panorama, except that people can "walk" through the images and zoom into different ones.
Can you find the photo of our 11-month-old son, Milan?


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Keshia Knight Pulliam wants the world to know she's keeping her head above water.
On her weekly podcast, Kandidly Keshia, the actress revealed the name of her unborn daughter with estranged husband Ed Hartwell on Friday.
"I was back and forth on if I wanted to share this or not, but I decided that I would because it is so hard for me to keep it in," Keshia teased. "I'm so excited about her. Her name is… Ella Grace."
As reported by E! News, the 37-year-old actress explained that while she had already picked her daughter's first name, her middle name was inspired by recent events surrounding Hartwell.
Last month, the former NFL player filed for divorce from Pulliam after an eight month marriage. Citing "irreconcilable differences" there's been a lot of drama in the weeks since— including him wanting a paternity test for the baby.
But despite it all, Pulliam seems really excited about her little one.
"I knew Ella was going to be my first baby girl's first name. Then in the midst of all of this is when she's earned her middle name, Grace."
Adding, "When I tell you through all of this the grace of God has so been with us and has covered us and protected us—she's been my saving grace to get through it. It's knowing that it's not about me. Knowing that on days when I want to curl up in the bed, pull the covers over my head and cry until my eyes fall out, that is not an option because she feels everything I feel and right now, it is bigger than me—it's about her. It is about her being OK."
Keshia Knight Pulliam Claim's Ed Hartwell Is A Threat To Unborn Baby
The Petty Chronicles: Lisa Wu Claps Back At Keshia Knight Pulliam
Keshia Knight Pulliam Tells Her Side Of Her Divorce Drama
Keshia Knight Pulliam Reveals Her Baby's Divorce-Related Name was originally published on hellobeautiful.com
8 Signs You Are Under Spiritual Attack
Deitrick Haddon Ex-wife, Damita Haddon, Finally Breaks Her Silence!
How much does it cost to field a car in the Indy 500?
How did Gospel Artist Tonex Become Gay Activist B-Slade?
Israel Houghton Reveals Divorce From Wife, Accepts Blame: 'I Failed And Sinned In My Marriage'
TV Mom Comes Out About Being Gay!
Gospel Artist Tye Tribbett Says Homosexuality May Be 'Natural' But It's Not 'God's Best'
The Light Community Calendar


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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a mathematician, contemporaneous with Newton. It turns out Leibniz was also a philosopher, and there is something called the Leibniz Principle that equates to data conflation. In colloquial terms, the Leibniz Principle says, 'If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck.' That principle is the basis of Microsoft's new Leibniz Platform.
Currently search engines are thought of as tools to find text but Ashok Chandra, Microsoft distinguished scientist and general manager of the Interaction and Intent Group at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, believes people soon will think of search engines as "task engines."
"Search technology began with words," says Chandra. "We built a whole search infrastructure around words. But in this new era of search, we are working with entities, because people think in terms of them, such as a hotel, a movie, an event, a hiking trail, or a person. The Leibniz platform is designed from the ground up to deal in entities, with the goal of making it easier for people to accomplish the tasks they set out to do."
The Leibniz entity-resolution system is now the underlying platform used in the task of booking hotel rooms, a feature of the Windows 8 Travel app. The hotel-booking feature of the travel app is the result of collaboration between the Microsoft Bing Applications Experience (AppEx) group in Bellevue, Wash., and a team from the Interaction and Intent Group, consisting of Chandra, researcher Bo Zhao, senior program manager Dhyanesh Narayanan, and contract developer George Puchalski. The Travel-app project, which began in January, has been one of the most challenging deployments of Leibniz to date.
Research for Leibniz began with a large-scale case study in resolving movie entities, described in the technical paper Improving Entity Resolution with Global Constraints, co-authored by Chandra and Silicon Valley lab colleagues Jim Gemmell and Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein. The system automatically resolved entities across movie-database websites such as IMDb, Netflix, iTunes, and AllMovie by conflating the data—matching and combininginformation from disparate sourcesto create a data set that is more useful than the original data.
The movie-search functionality went into Bing in late 2010. Leibniz aggregated movie information and gave the search engine richer capabilities for supporting entity actions such as "rent,""watch,"and "buy."
"If you run into a few errors while searching for movies, the consequences are not serious," Narayanan says. "For hotels, however, if a booking goes wrong, the user`s trip can be spoiled. Our biggest challenge was accurate conflation of hotel information. When we pulled together information about a hotel from various sources, we had to be sure it really was all about the same hotel."
The challenge was to achieve data accuracy of 99.9 percent, in an industry in which accuracy typically runs between 90 to 95 percent. Another challenge: Because the Travel app is bundled as part of Windows 8, the project had to meet hard deadlines for supporting global markets, either at initial rollout or no more than a few weeks after. At the time, the AppEx group dealt with a single hotel provider, KAYAK.com, which only supported markets in the United States, Europe, and India. To achieve broader global coverage, the AppEx group added another hotel provider, Booking.com. This meant Leibniz had to conflate data from both partners.
The researchers began by running a simple model for matching, which then enabled Leibniz's machine-learning algorithms to discover rules about how different providers described hotels and their attributes, such as the synonyms and semantics of various terms. As the rules were applied and put back into the model, the system could continue to learn more about how hotels were represented. The system became "smarter" with each iteration until it achieved the required level of accuracy. The researchers found that using hotel names and addresses to match information was no guarantee of success, a problem complicated by data errors and inconsistencies in both databases. Narayanan cites a typical example of inconsistency.
"For example, in Las Vegas, one provider listed the Bellagio hotel as 'The Bellagio,'" he says. "The other provider called it 'The Bellagio Casino Hotel.' So initially, the app was not able to make the match. But then Leibniz helped us notice that Las Vegas hotels and casinos are pretty much the same thing, and the system augmented the model."
"In some cases, the same entity looks quite different to the system," Zhao explains. "An inn could be listed as a B&B by one provider and as a bed and breakfast by the other. We often had to resolve between different address formats or sometimes deal with addresses that were just plain wrong."
In one memorable case, similar-sounding entities turned out to be quite different: two Marriott properties were at the same address and bore similar names, but operated as separate hotels.
"We had to arrive at 99.9 percent precision for each new market as quickly as possible," Zhao says. "Whenever you add a new country, there are different conventions for hotel names, addresses, and attribute descriptions, so the system has to learn and apply some new rules. There is no existing list of equivalents or synonyms. Fortunately, Leibniz is always building on what it already understands so it just has to learn a few more."
"With the first market we brought onboard, we had to run about 20 to 30 iterations to achieve 99.9 percent precision," Narayanan recalls. "But a lot of those rules carried over to the next market, and the next, and so forth. The number of iterations started falling off pretty quickly. Some of the markets we onboarded near the end didn't need any iterations at all. China and Japan were quite different, especially Japan, but even those were not too bad."
In a previous version of the Travel app, people would see only the cheapest room deals for a hotel, even if it was not be the type of room the person wanted. With the new Travel app, the booking page has been redesigned to show information from Kayak as before, but it also brings in other options via Booking.com to provide rooms and rate-plan details, empowering people with richer information for making decisions. While Leibniz is the underlying engine for conflation, it is a platform that comes with a comprehensive set of tools—all of which proved extremely useful for the project's administrators, program managers, labelers, developers, and testers. The tools simplified the work of labeling and training the models while also streamlining the deployment and management of the system during production.
"The key goal of the AppEx team is to build high-value experiences that help attract users to our device platforms," Batterberry says. "With the Liebniz technology from Microsoft Research, we're able to conflate content from multiple sources with an unprecedented three nines of precision to help the user more effectively complete their task with the best possible experience."
What's next for Leibniz?
"The Leibniz platform is domain-agnostic," Zhao says. "The models for each domain are different, but the same code base can be used to conflate data, whether movies or TV shows or hotels. Therefore, Leibniz is ideal in any situation where applications need to gather data from multiple sources and require high-quality conflation."
Source: Microsoft Research


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That's pretty much all I can say. As you might have seen yesterday, I ran a BookBub ad for book #1 in my suspense thriller series (Multiples of Six by Andy Rane). The first book was released back in 2011 and did reasonably well over the years (~1200 actual sales). But, being a slow writer, I saw little to no response when I released book #2 in the series, nearly 2.5 years later. I then went on a run of failed BookBub submissions. I'd gone down the free road with Multiples in the past. I'd probably given away just over 20k copies of that book prior to yesterday. So, in my mind, it only made sense to run a sale promotion instead of a free promotion. I wanted my $0.99, darn it! Well, it wasn't to be, and after countless rejections, I finally asked for a free run. Apparently, I just had to say the magic word (free!) and that would've gotten me in long ago (kidding, but it kinda felt like that). Finally, the BookBub folks relented and let me into the pool.
I decided to add an incentive to buy book #2 in the series by lowering that book's price, in a Kindle Countdown Sale, from $2.99 to $1.99. The joy of the Countdown is that you still get your regular royalty rate, even if your sale price is less than $2.99. So, I would make $1.39 on each copy of the sequel that sold. This was going to be how I recouped the BookBub fee (US$250 for a free thriller). That meant I would need to sell ~180 copies to break even.
I'm a closet optimist. I wear the pessimists mask in public, but I've always got high hopes, no matter what. But even I was leaning toward pessimism on this one. I thought the exposure would be good, but I held out no hopes of getting some of the kinds of numbers that romance authors see on a regular basis (a 40k free run is very common for romance, from what I've seen). I'm happy to say that my fears were alleviated by midday on Tuesday. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
In preparation for this week, I had notified several sites of my book going free (Pixel of Ink, Ereader News Today, to name a few). So, I was pleased when I cleared 400 copies of Multiples on Monday alone, with 11 sales of Divisible. Eleven down, 169 to go! Not sure where they came from, as I couldn't find a major site listing my book, but it was a nice start and pushed me up to just over #1000 in the free store by late Monday. My expectations at that point were at least to get into the Top 100 Free list on Amazon. Knowing BookBub's past successes, I thought I could get that far.
Then I woke up Tuesday morning to a surprise. At 7:24, Multiples was already at #610 on the Free list. I watched the numbers climb slowly during the morning, despite telling myself I wouldn't keep checking. What can I say? I'm weak. I was really waiting to see what happened when I got the suspense/thriller email from them. It arrived around the same time it normally does, at least for me; ~11:45 AM. That was when things got crazy. Like, stupid crazy.
It was so torrid for a while that the rankings couldn't catching up. Two hours after I'd received my email, I'd crossed the 20,000 unit mark. Amazon was still saying it was ranked higher than it should have been. I left the house and my KDP dashboard behind for a while in the afternoon. If it was this crazy during the afternoon, what would happen as evening approached? When I returned, I saw what I could have only hoped to see.
Multiples was the #1 free book in the entire Kindle Store. No categories to get in the way. Just #1 overall. It's 11:08 PM Tuesday evening as I write this bit. I have given away 44,718 copies of Multiples of Six, and sold 379 copies of its sequel, Divisible by Six. It's now 11:38, and I'm entering this into WordPress. In the half hour that's elapsed, the numbers are now 45,190 and 382. 472 books in 30 minutes. And that's slowing down! Oh yeah, and I made my ad fee back… and then some. 😉
As I polish up this post on Wednesday morning, the ride isn't quite done, but we're on that slow coast back into the station. Tuesday's grand total for book #1, according to Amazon, was 47,295. I'm not sure where their cutoff for the day is, but I'm guessing 12 AM PT. Today, I've added another 1641 copies in the wee hours, giving me a 60 hour total of 49,343. Oof! Book #2 fared well overnight and reached 409 units sold on Tuesday. Another 16 have sold this morning, giving me a 60-hour total of 434. Multiplied by $1.39 = ~$603. Not bank-breaking by any means, but not too shabby either.
Multiples of Six is still #1 on the free list as I post this. Later, however, someone else's book will appear on BookBub and more than likely push me out of the way. Sure, I'll get some play for a few days. My sale lasts until the 5th on both books. But the rocket to the top is over. Looking at Monday's BookBub freebie, Jackpot by Susan Fleet, it's still at #14 on the Free list. I'll have to see where I stand in 24 hours. For now, though, I'm just excited to see how long the tail end lasts. At this point, it's not unrealistic to expect over 55k total giveaways, possibly more. The 'Bub turned out to be everything I had imagined it could be. Now, as my wife said, "Guess you'd better get your ass in gear on book #3, huh?" Yes dear!
If you've got any questions about my experience with BookBub, I hope you'll ask them in the comments below. No secrets here! Or, if you've had experience yourself, please feel free to share! Thanks for stopping by. 🙂


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Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank issues world-first Basel III compliant Sukuk
Source: http://www.ifre.com/adib-pushes-sukuk-boundaries-via-perp/21051902.article
Investor appetite for bank capital issuance from emerging market lenders shows no signs of abating, with Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank printing a blowout deal last week that was the first Basel III-compliant sukuk issue.
The innovative Hybrid Tier 1 non-call six perpetual note offering raised US$1bn at 6.375% on the back of an incredible US$15bn book from 330 orders as private bank accounts, predominantly in Asia as well as in other regions, European fund managers, and even the odd sukuk investor scrambled to get their hands on the paper.
"There was a huge response to the roadshow, which underpins the groundbreaking nature of the transaction," said James Nelson, director, bond syndicate at Standard Chartered, which co-led the deal with HSBC, Morgan Stanley and NBAD.
Rival bankers were critical of the execution process that saw pricing ratchet down by 62.5bp from initial guidance of the 7% area. "Investors are not happy when the pricing is dragged so tight and the books get so big in the process," said one official.
While acknowledging that the tightening was aggressive, bankers close to the deal argued that it was in line with the performance of other recent bank capital transactions.
Gazprombank's US$1bn perpetual non-call 5.5-year note issue started in the mid to high 8% range and was priced at 7.875%, for example, while a US$575m perpetual non-call six issue for Friends Life began in the mid-8% range before also pricing at 7.875%.
"It was key to engage every investor in this price discovery process and test yield sensitivities, given the innovative nature of this trade," said Souhail Mahjour, an official on the EMEA debt syndicate desk at HSBC.
Part of the challenge for the leads was the wide range of investor views during the roadshow, with one account arguing that the notes should come at low to mid-5% at one extreme, while others sought 8% at the wide end. "You could drive a bus through investors' views," said one banker.
One way to calculate fair value is to take ADIB's outstanding senior 2016 notes, which were trading at a bid yield of 2.80% earlier last week, and work backwards.
Assuming that a new 10-year non-call five Tier 2 issue from the lender would come 80bp back of that for the subordination and then a another 30bp or so for the curve extension, fair value for that bond offering would be in the high 3% area. Adding a further 150bp–220bp for the difference between Tier 2 and old-style Tier 1 for some emerging market banks takes fair value from high 5% to low 6%.
Private anchors
As expected, private banks anchored the trade, taking 60% of the allocation, followed by fund managers at 26% and banks at 11%. By geography, Asia was the biggest recipient with 38%, followed by the Middle East at 32%, Europe at 26% and US offshore at 4%.
The sukuk investor base was a marginal participant in the trade.
"The local investor base – dominated by banks – wasn't expected to play as big a role as they usually do for a sukuk issue as they have limited scope to buy other banks' capital instruments," said Mahjour. "Only the most overcapitalised banks had the power to buy pieces of this trade."
Key features of the structure include an issuer call option in year six and on every periodic payment date thereafter, coupon resets (without step-ups) every six years and non-cumulative coupon suspension (optional and mandatory), subject to a dividend stopper.
One banker added that the Tier 1 structure was perfectly attuned with Sharia principles, given that the flexibility to cancel coupons and the perpetual maturity provided equity-like features to the instrument. The deal is unrated. ADIB's senior ratings are A2/A+; Moody's/Fitch.


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An outdoor living space, driveway, pool deck or patio is a large investment that requires a lot of planning. After all, a landscape project is something that doesn't get updated each year, like other home projects. So, it is very important to do your homework and choose a paver or wall product that will suit your style and taste for years to come!
The perfect place to start planning and to become inspired is our beautiful outdoor showroom! It is a one stop shop where you can ask our experts questions, see incredible design ideas and take home samples. Here is a check list of things you should do during your visit:
- Ask as many questions as possible – our friendly and knowledgeable sales team is always available and willing to help! Mark down your project goals so they can provide you with the best options!
- See, touch and experience each product – make sure the texture is appropriate for the type of project you are planning.
- Ask for samples – if you find a product you love, ask for a sample to bring home to match your existing landscape, brick color, garage doors, etc.
- Learn about unique design ideas like borders and accents – our outdoor showrooms display the latest design ideas, like incorporating an accent paver in your paver and wall designs.
- Get a FREE estimate – if you are planning to have the work done by a landscape professional, request a free estimate so that a skilled Authorized Contractor will get the job done right!
- Take a design ideas catalog with you – there are even more design ideas in our 100+ page catalog, be sure to ask for one so you can reference pages at a later date.
- Ask for a local Unilock Authorized Dealer – after the selection process, our sales staff will gladly direct you to a retail location where you can purchase our product!


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2013 Subaru XV Crosstrek: Drive ReviewMon, 12 Dec 2011
What is it?
To put it simply, the 2013 Subaru XV Crosstrek is an Impreza five-door with a raised suspension, specific front and rear fascias, body-side cladding and exclusive wheels. However, the company line is that the XV is not an Impreza but its own model targeting a new group of customers: urbanites.
Traditionally, Subaru does well with active outdoor hobbyists with its lineup of crossovers, but none of the company's models put an emphasis on targeting the city-slicker crowd until now.
What's Subaru's plan of attack to appeal to Starbucks drinkers? Provide a sleek and sporty appearance, offer a fun driving character and flexible interior space. Drivetrain options, not surprisingly, mirror the Impreza's with a 2.0-liter boxer four-cylinder producing 148 hp connected to a standard five-speed manual transmission or an available continuously variable transmission.
What is it like to drive?
Well, like a tall Impreza five-door hatchback. Unfortunately, the test vehicles we drove were European models shod with Yokohama winter tires. Our test drive took place in and around Florence, Italy, in December, where snow is usually the norm. But during our two days of driving, temps were in the high 50s with not a flake of snow in sight--not ideal conditions for full-fledged winter rubber.
As expected, the car exhibited more lean than we would like in corners and gradual sweepers on the expressway, and steering response was numb, which no doubt had much to do with the tires. We fully expect things to be more composed with proper, stock all-season tires mounted. Ride quality was surprisingly stiff with larger bumps giving us a good jolt in the driver's seat, but smaller ruts were smoothed out by the suspension without a hitch. Cabin isolation from road noise and wind noise was also good.
The first day had us in a six-speed-manual-equipped XV (which the Impreza and the XV get in Europe; U.S. models are saddled with a five-speed unit because of cost constraints), which helps get the most out of the flat four-cylinder. Power is adequate, but merging onto the expressway and getting past slower traffic requires a hearty stomp on the throttle.
We also had the opportunity to pilot an XV with Subaru's 2.0-liter turbocharged diesel boxer four-cylinder with 148 hp and 258 lb-ft of torque mated to a six-speed manual gearbox. With peak torque available from 1,600 rpm, it gives the XV more grunt than you'll ever need for slicing through the urban jungle. Unfortunately, there are no plans in the immediate future to bring the diesel to the States in any Subaru vehicle.
Being a Subaru with standard all-wheel drive, our route took us through some light off-road duty, which the XV handled without a hitch.
Do I want it?
If you value hatchback flexibility (22.5 cubic feet of cargo space behind the rear seats, which grows to 52.4 with the rear seats folded down), all-wheel-drive traction and hipper looks, then the XV is an enticing offering. As we said, it's a raised Impreza five-door, but the small touches designers used to turn it into the XV are slick. The 17-inch aluminum wheels with black-painted spoke insets stand out, and the car is available with an orange paint job to really make it pop.
The cabin is exactly the same as the Impreza's, which is a good thing as Subaru went to great lengths to up quality with soft-touch surfaces on all major touch points. There's also a great view from the driver's seat with the skinny A-pillars made possible by the use of high-strength steel. Numerous storage spots provide lots of space to stash items, and major controls are laid out in an intuitive manner.
Then there is the fuel economy, which should be quite good when equipped with the CVT gearbox. EPA ratings aren't available yet but should closely mirror those of the Impreza, which is rated at 27 mpg in the city and 36 mpg on the highway with the new Subaru 2.0-liter. And keep in mind that's with all-wheel drive.
If you're on the fence about the XV, you'll have plenty of time to think about it: The car doesn't arrive in the United States until next fall as a 2013 model. Initially, the U.S. Subaru arm didn't want to bring the XV over at all, but after seeing the vehicle they had a change of heart and saw the potential to appeal to a new group of customers.
Being diesel fans and having had a chance to sample Subaru's latest oil-burner, we think Subaru should also reconsider bringing that engine to America.
2013 Subaru XV Crosstrek
On Sale: Fall 2012
Base Price: $19,745 (est)
Drivetrain: 2.0-liter, 148-hp, 145-lb-ft H4; AWD, five-speed manual
Curb Weight: 3,020 lb
0-60 MPH: 9.9 sec (est)
Fuel Economy: 28 mpg (est)
More information: Check out the Subaru Impreza at shopautoweek.com
By Jonathan Wong


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Mood Indigo
The surreal and poetic tale of Colin, an idealistic and inventive young man, and Chloé, a young woman who seems like the physical embodiment of the eponymous Duke Ellington tune. Their idyllic marriage is turned on its head when Chloé falls sick with a water lily growing in her lung. To pay for her medical bills in this fantasy version of Paris, Colin must go out to work in a series of increasingly absurd jobs, while around them, their apartment disintegrates and their friends, including the talented Nicolas, and Chick - a huge fan of the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre - go to pieces.
Starring Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Gad Elmaleh
Director Michel Gondry


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BKP's Opening Today – Why Did Donna Brazile Mention Seth Rich in her Book ?FYNTV, GMFTO November 6, 2017
In BKP's opening monologue today he discussed the following issues:
Do you have a Risk Assessment for your church?
26 killed at a First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on Sunday. Why is the media is not talking about the shooter? Maybe he was an atheist connected to the leftist Antifa movement who supported Democratic candidates. Instead they are discussing mental illness, saying Republicans caused this and we must do something about semi-automatic weapons/gun legislation. America don't be fooled… They are coming for your guns!!!
In Donna Brazile's new book "Hacks," she discusses security fears as the DNC Chair. What was she in fear of? Why did she even mention Seth Rich in her book? Could Brazile's new book begin to connect the dots between Imran Awan, former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Seth Rich. Is Hillary Clinton finally going to be exposed!?!
The real reason the Trump campaign hired Paul Manafort – Does anyone remember the Republican brokered convention of 1976 between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford?


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[b]Dust Cover Jettisoned From NASA's Kepler Telescope[/b]
Engineers have successfully ejected the dust cover from NASA's Kepler telescope, a spaceborne mission soon to begin searching for worlds like Earth.
"The cover released and flew away exactly as we designed it to do," said Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This is a critical step toward answering a question that has come down to us across 100 generations of human history -- are there other planets like Earth, or are we alone in the galaxy?"
Kepler, which launched on March 6 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., will spend three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy for signs of Earth-size planets. Some of the planets are expected to orbit in a star's "habitable zone," a warm region where water could pool on the surface. The mission's science instrument, called a photometer, contains the largest camera ever flown in space -- its 42 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) will detect slight dips in starlight, which occur when planets passing in front of their stars partially block the light from Kepler's view.
The telescope's oval-shaped dust cover, measuring 1.7 meters by 1.3 meters (67 inches by 52 inches), protected the photometer from contamination before and after launch. The dust cover also blocked stray light from entering the telescope during launch -- light that could have damaged its sensitive detectors. In addition, the cover was important for calibrating the photometer. Images taken in the dark helped characterize noise coming from the instrument's electronics, and this noise will later be removed from the actual science data.
"Now the photometer can see the stars and will soon start the task of detecting the planets," said Kepler's Science Principal Investigator William Borucki at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We have thoroughly measured the background noise so that our photometer can detect minute changes in a star's brightness caused by planets."
At 7:13 p.m. PDT on April 7, engineers at Kepler's mission operations center at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, Colo., sent commands to pass an electrical current through a "burn wire" to break the wire and release a latch holding the cover closed. The spring-loaded cover swung open on a fly-away hinge, before drifting away from the spacecraft. The cover is now in its own orbit around the sun, similar to Kepler's sun-centric orbit. See an animation of the event.
With the cover off, starlight is entering the photometer and being imaged onto its focal plane. Engineers will continue calibrating the instrument using images of stars for another several weeks, after which science observations will begin.
Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission. NASA's Ames Research Center Ames is the home organization of the science principal investigator, and is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo., is responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supporting mission operations.
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Madonna Goes Ballistic, Threatens to Cancel Concert Over Smoking Fan
During an open-air concert in Santiago, Chile, on Wednesday, Madonna got a bit testy with a fan who decided to visit flavor country in the middle of her set.
After sensing some cigarette smoke wafting in her direction, Madge immediately put on her mom pants and instructed the smokers to stop.
When that failed, she tried to put the offending audience members in a time out: "If you're going to smoke cigarettes, I'm not doing a show."
Things quickly became heated when Madonna realized that her schoolmarm-esque chiding was getting her nowhere.
"All right? Are we going to play that game? I'm not kidding. I can't sing if you smoke," the "Human Nature" singer fumed. Trying desperately to speak their language, she added: "Entiendes?"
Finally, her line of sight met the perpetrator but, shockingly, they continued to puff away with abandon. "You're looking right at me and smoking cigarettes, like I'm a stupid fucking idiot," the flabbergasted 54-year-old exclaimed.
TMZ reports that cigarette standoff was ultimately resolved, and Madonna carried on with the concert and the smoker was never heard from again.


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Here's the second of two previews for the first week of September, this one covering the weekend which has just arrived. Four gigs on Saturday (from post-classical to garage rock, from Afrobeat and kosmiche-influenced art pop to Canterbury-inspired lo-fi, from witty post-prog to Southern rock) and a chamber jazz gig on Sunday.
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After ten years of putting on post-classical club nights in east London, some way outside the heart of the British classical establishment, the Nonclassical organisation gets to play in the centre – a festival role, a high-profile corporate sponsorship, ads on the Tube and all. Come and judge whether they're changing the game or being absorbed (beneficially or otherwise) into the belly of the beast. Whichever way this is going, the concert itself looks fascinating.
Nonclassical Club Night (Deloitte Ignite Festival @ Paul Hamlyn Hall, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, WC2E 9DD, UK, Saturday 5th September 2015, 8.00pm) – £10.00
Nonclassical label leader Gabriel Prokofiev (a polystylist composer with a background in electroacoustic work whose works include a Concerto for Turntables & Orchestra, an "orchestral remix" of Beethoven's Ninth and production work on hip hop, grime, and electro records) will be performing at the event, as will five-string-electric-cellist/composer/technologist Peter Gregson (whose adventures in sound include film soundtracking, multiple premieres of newly composed work plus three albums of original compositions, and a "data sonification" of Twitter).
Also performing will be the amplified prepared-piano artist Klavikon (a.k.a. Leon Michener, who uses various pickups, real time analogue processing and playing-mechanism inventions including a robot dog to fuse aleatoric ideas from Stockhausen and Cage with electronic dancefloor work including "cascading batteries of percussion, sub-basses and abstract soundscapes"); the "post-a-cappella" group Juice Vocal Ensemble (whose voicework encompasses everything from classical sources to hip hop, Irish folk, close-harmony vocal jazz and the experimental approaches of Meredith Monk and of Björk's 'Medúlla'), and Gabriel's DJ collaborator Mr Switch.
There will also be a collaboration between classical soprano Sarah Dacey and the "Tendons" music theatre project initiated earlier this year by Holly Lowe and Nwando Ebizie. Based around harp, spoken word, performance art and electronics while mingling repertoire work with improvisation, this draws on and expands two modern classical pieces (Salvatore Sciarrino's 'L'addio a Trachis' and John Cage's 'Dream') plus the 'Siciliano' from Bach's 'Sonata in E flat' and was premiered in June at the Nonclassical Downtown Loft Concert at The Russet in Shacklewell – one of the label's ongoing attempts to encourage a London equivalent of the New York loft-music scene of the '70s and '80s.
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If you prefer to have your brain tickled by other means, Group Therapy are presenting what they call a night of "good ol'-fashioned noise rock" down at an east London art-rock stronghold.
Trojan Horse + Thumpermonkey + Godzilla Black (Group Therapy @ The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, London, E2 9AG, United Kingdom, Saturday 5th September 2015, 8.00pm) Entry £7 otd £5.50 advance
What this actually seems to be is a night mixing a sharp-minded self-aware take on post-progressive rock and a rollicking contemporary version of what my local library used to call "popular instrumental", and would stick in a rack alongside James Last and The Shadows (from which, long ago, in the early days of my musical education, I'd pull out the likes of Mike Oldfield, Sky and Vangelis' 'Heaven and Hell', and later the raging electric jazz raga of David Torn's 'Cloud About Mercury' – ten years later, I'd might been using it to catch the Deodato lounge revival). But if my comment makes the gig sound as if it's in any way mild or lounge-friendly or mild, think again. This is very much a rock evening and it's explicitly clear that this night's crop of bands have soaked up Boredoms, Swans, Big Black, Sonic Youth and The Melvins alongside any Genesis or King Crimson which they might have imbibed. It's just that it's refreshing to be able to go along to one of those gigs, with that label, and not encounter yet another bunch of predictable art-punks posing with their distortion pedals and their feedback zones while reheating old daydreams about free jazz and No Wave…
I'm bitching. I don't like doing that. Let's have a look at the bands on the bill.
Manchester's Trojan Horse are post-prog omnivores with tuneful hearts and a refreshing lack of shame. While their records pillage, digest and absorb a wide diet from Pink Floyd to James Brown to The Kinks to the 13th Floor Elevators, they also use their appetites to build their own muscle and identity – one through which they filter a broad, contemplative awareness of British and Mancunian history and how it soaks through into the lives of present-day people (although you don't need to analyse that in order to enjoy one of their rambunctious gigs).
Simultaneously theatrical and punk-lean, Thumpermonkey can stake a claim to being one of the smartest British bands this side of Everything Everything (with whom they share a geeky brainiac quality driven home by vigorous, tuneful force). Couched in a crunching but colourful hard-rock vein with big pinches of post-hardcore and prog, their dramatic convoluted stalk-and-punch compositions are playful but melodious and rewarding. You can bang your head to a Thumpermonkey song, but you can also think to it. In Michael Woodman (a man like a knowing fusion of Peter Hammill, Nick Cave and Peter Blegvad) they've also got a frontman who's one of the best singers and cleverest current lyricists in rock, delivering allusive and elusive barrages of sly wordplay in a resonant rock-operatic voice.
Finally, the big, bold, brazen sound of Godzilla Black lands precisely midway between No Wave and pin-sharp easy-listening film themes, or between James Black and the John Barry Seven, with rollicking drums, tight stunt brass (and yes, all right, distortion and computer sleet). They also play at a blistering, speaker-pummelling volume, so maybe there's something in that noise rock description).
In case you needed any more wheedling, here's a typically effusive pre-gig write-up from 'Organ'.
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An alternative is this friendly North/South art pop nudge down in Brixton.
Canteloupe + Barringtone + Gurglez + tbc (The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, UK, Saturday 5th September 2015, 8.00pm) – price tbc
Headlining, Nottingham's Canteloupe offer an omnivorous mix of pop, Krautrock, Afrobeat and disco. London's Barringtone (featuring former Clor frontman Barry Dobbin) continue to pursue their motoric English art pop in the wake of the 'Fever Head' single. From Bradford, Gurglez blend what their neighbours Jumbo Records call "the power of prog, the drama of opera and the AOR grooves of the 70's… poetic moments à la Terry Durham and free-jazz à la Nice" and "(turn) them on their head with a kind of left of field madness that Zappa would be proud of" (which, to these ears. also makes them sound more than a little like Sleepy People…) There should also be one more act to be added, which you can find out about in due course with the other gig information here and here.
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If you'd prefer something a little looser (or, as a clincher, something that was free to get into) for Saturday night, there's this literally free-for-all concert taking place in the middle of Hackney and hosted by Sound Events Solutions, who have also provided the summary…
The Little Things + Alkatraz + Picturebox + Marianne Hyatt + Pit Ponies (Sound Events Solutions @ Bohemia Hackney, Unit 2, Bohemia Place, Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 1DU, United Kingdom, Saturday 5th September 2015, 7.45pm) – free
With The Little Things it's funk, and then it's 70s New York new wave alt-rock, and then it's pop, but it's all seamless and it's funky and cool as fuck – an uncanny indie-ish dance party band that just never suck no matter how much they flirt with mass appeal.
Alkatraz provide the psychotic reactions and spontaneous psychedelic combustions of trippin' psychedelic garage rock.
Picturebox (centred around home-recordist Robert Halcrow) are leading lights (and probably the main constituents) of Canterbury Lo-Fi, a new clandestine pop movement encapsulating all the charm but none of the noodling of the legendary old Canterbury Scene. When Halcrow sings a song like Ruth Bakes A Cake, he is neither being ironic nor twee nor coquettishly kitchen-sink. There is a light-hearted, profoundly uncynical love for humanity running through his lyrics that can sometimes remind you of the way Syd Barrett used to sing about the lost idea of simple kindness. Special things don't always hit you over the head with a mallet, and neither will Picturebox. But you just never know, sometimes a movement can start with an instrumental named in allusion to a little hi-fi shop next to a supermarket car-park in Canterbury, some heartfelt tributes to pop stars, and lots of tea and cake.
Frontwoman of (variously) Dragstripper, Temple of Sound, Anarchistwood and Country Dirt, Marianne Hyatt is a London-based deep southern songstress from Austin Texas. She's equal parts Patsy Cline, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, has sung with The Frogs at ATP, with Bill Callahan at Meltdown Festival and played a late-night pickup in Richard Linklater's 'Slacker'. She writes and plays platonic lovesongs to sexworkers, country reggae odes to schizophrenic madames and protest tunes to natural disasters… a walking triumph of lost causes and no-longer living legends.
Pit Ponies are renegades from Naughties rockney/post-punk/knees-up beer boys Corporal Machine & The Bombers, fusing '90s indie with pissed pub fights and '70s pub-rock. (In spite of this preamble, they'll actually be playing an acoustic set.)
Up-to-date gig info here, some tasters here:
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After all of this, on Sunday, there's jazz via the return of the LUME evenings via the Vortex. Blurb for the first evening is below.
Mark Pringle's A Moveable Feast & Rebecca Nash (LUME @ The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8AZ, UK, Sunday 6th September 2015, 7.30pm – £10.00
A Moveable Feast is a group led by jazz pianist Mark Pringle (a Peter Whittingham Award winner for the year 2015, following in the footsteps of previous recipients Gwilym Simcock, Trish Clowes and Elliot Galvin). Heavily inspired by time spent studying in Paris in 2013, the music draws on multiple cultural influences, containing themes of nature, wildlife, literature, the chaos of cities, the lives of people who inhabit them, woodland creatures and strange beasts… This autumn sees the group undertaking a national tour to promote the release of their album, 'A Moveable Feast', on Stoney Lane Records.
Featuring a twelvetet line up of strings, horns and rhythm section, the group explore Mark's music with great freedom of approach, resulting in music that is eclectic, adventurous and highly unique. The band are Mark Pringle (piano), Percy Pursglove (trumpet), Chris Young (alto saxophone), Dan Searjeant (tenor and alto saxophones, flute), Alicia Gardener-Trejo (bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, alto flute), Ben Lee (electric guitar), James Banner (double bass) and Euan Palmer (drums), plus a string quartet of Christine Cornwell, Sarah Farmer, Megan Jowett and Lucy French.
Rebecca Nash's music, written with the intention of creating a new cohesive sound, blends together all the things she loves about music. Most important is a sense of purpose, identity and beauty. It is inspired by many musical influences which primarily include jazz musicians such as Pat Metheny and Wayne Shorter but also other styles too, such as electronica and folk music. Rebecca's own style, rooted in the contemporary jazz genre, blends acoustic and electronic elements with strong melodies, underpinned by dense harmonies and unusual grooves with the aim of creating one overall soundscape.
This latest project is Rebecca's first as a bandleader, and all of the music performed is original material from her forthcoming album, due to be recorded later this year. Tonight she leads a small group with herself on piano, Percy Pursglove on trumpet, Matt Fisher on drums, and Chris Mapp on bass guitar.
More information on the event is here, with tickets available here.


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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Institute of Medicine recommended Friday that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan undergo annual screening for post-traumatic stress disorder and that federal agencies conduct more research to determine how well the various treatments for PTSD are working.
Of the 2.6 million service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, it's estimated that 13 percent to 20 percent have symptoms of PTSD.
Federal agencies have increasingly dedicated more resources to screen and treat soldiers, but considerable gaps remain, according to the Institute of Medicine, an independent group of experts that advises the federal government on medical issues. Its recommendations often make their way into laws drafted by Congress and policies implemented by federal agencies.
Barely more than half of those diagnosed with PTSD actually get treatment, often because many soldiers worry it could jeopardize their careers. Also, when soldiers do get care, they're not tracked to determine which treatments are successful in the long-term.
The Defense Department provides medical care to active members of the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs cares for those who no longer serve. Sandro Galea, the chairman of the Institute of Medicine panel, said both departments offer many programs for PTSD.
"But treatment isn't reaching everyone who needs it, and the departments aren't tracking which treatments are being used or evaluating how well they work in the long term," said Galea, a professor and chair of the epidemiology department at Columbia University. "In addition, DOD has no information on the effectiveness of its programs to prevent PTSD."
The report concludes only the first phase of the Institute of Medicine study. The panel, which advises the government, is hoping to release a second report in 2014 that will provide more specifics about the number of service members and vets who have PTSD and the outcomes and costs of their treatments.
Nick Colgin, who served for 15 months in Afghanistan as a combat medic until April 2008, suffered a traumatic brain injury after a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into his Humvee. While he showed symptoms of PTSD upon his return to civilian life, he waited to get treatment until just last month.
"I just didn't want anyone to know I had that issue. I didn't want to know myself," said Colgin, 27, now living in New York City and working with the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
Jason Hansman, the group's membership director, said the stigma of seeking treatment is even more prevalent among those on active-duty.
"A lot of people believe their career will end if they seek treatment," Hansman said.
In a recent speech to mental health provides, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said commanding officers must make it understood that seeking help for the stresses of war should be seen as a sign of strength rather than as a sign of weakness.
PTSD is triggered by a specific traumatic event, such as being in combat or witnessing death. The symptoms of the illness include a numbing of emotions, difficulty concentrating and exaggerated startled responses to events.
The institute recommended therapies supported by robust evidence, such as working with patients to change their thinking and emotional responses to stress. But the committee's analysis of other innovative treatments, including yoga, acupuncture and animal-assisted therapy, is hampered by a lack of evidence on their effectiveness.
Galea said that the two departments have been under quite a bit of pressure to get programs up and running to deal with the growing number of vets with PTSD.
"There hasn't been as much premium placed on tracking than there has been on implementing treatment," Galea said.
The panel praised the two departments for issuing joint guidelines for managing PTSD, but it's unknown whether their providers adhere to the guidelines. The panel said that primary care doctors within the VA screen Iraq and Afghanistan veterans annually for symptoms of PTSD, and it recommends that the Defense Department do the same.
The panel said it is hopeful that the departments will make more use of therapy through videoconferences that will allow patients in remote locations to get care.
The panel also called for more research to shed light on the brain's defense mechanisms for stress, identify factors that can influence the timing and severity of symptoms and identify signs that could help lead to earlier diagnosis and more precise drug treatments.
The report said that the VA treated more than 438,000 veterans for PTSD in 2010, showing evidence of the widespread scope of the problem. Similar numbers are not available for the Defense Department.
Cynthia O. Smith, a DOD spokeswoman, said the department has already taken steps to address some of the issues raised in the report.
"The department recognizes the need for continued improvements," Smith said.
The VA said it would review the report and noted that it recently announced it was adding 1,600 clinicians and 300 support workers to its mental health staff.
"We have already made strong progress, but we need to do more," the department said in a written response to the report.


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Today's not a good day to be a LinkedIn user—doubly so if you use LinkedIn's iPhone or Android app. Researchers have discovered that the app scrapes users' calendar items and sends the data back up to its servers, even when those calendar items were created outside of the LinkedIn app. The scraped data includes participant lists, subjects of entries, times of meetings, and any attached meeting notes (such as dial-in details and passcodes).
The LinkedIn app manages to gain access to your calendar items because it has a feature that allows you to view your calendar from within the app itself. According to security researchers Yair Amit and Adi Sharabani, the app then transmits this information to LinkedIn's servers without any clear indication to the user that this is happening—a throwback to the Path controversy that revealed the social networking app (among many others) had been transmitting users' contact lists to a remote server without explicit user consent.
Amit and Sharabani plan to present their report at a cyber security conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. In their report seen by Ars, they note that the information being collected by the LinkedIn app has no apparent relevance to the app's functionality, though they don't believe LinkedIn has included this functionality maliciously. "However, we are concerned by the fact it collects and sends-out sensitive information about its users, without a clear indication and consent," the researchers wrote.
LinkedIn defends itself by arguing that the calendar-viewing feature is opt-in, according to a statement given to the New York Times. "We use information from the meeting data to match LinkedIn profile information about who you're meeting with so you have more information about that person," a spokesperson told the newspaper. Still, the company did not go into detail as to why it sends calendar data to its servers or why it doesn't make this feature obvious to users, potentially adding itself to the list of app makers being grilled on user privacy by members of Congress.
LinkedIn has now also made a blog post explaining its position on the app.
"In order to provide our calendar service to those who choose to use it, we need to send information about your calendar events to our servers so we can match people with LinkedIn profiles. That information is sent securely over SSL and we never share or store your calendar information," the company wrote. "In an effort to make that algorithm for matching people with profiles increasingly smarter we pull the complete calendar event, including email addresses of people you are meeting with, meeting subject, location and meeting notes."
LinkedIn points out that it does ask for permission when accessing the calendar (though it doesn't explicitly tell users it's going to upload the data), and says the feature can be turned off at any time. LinkedIn also insists that it doesn't actually keep any of the data transmitted to its servers, and it doesn't share the data "for purposes other than matching it with relevant LinkedIn profiles."
As for what the app will do moving forward: "We will no longer send data from the meeting notes section of your calendar event. There will be a new 'learn more' link to provide more information about how your calendar data is being used." LinkedIn says these updates are already live on the Android app and will be coming to the iOS app shortly.


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Star Ride Review
- Publisher: Andrea Mazzini
- Genre: Lifestyle
- Released: 31 May, 2009
- Size: 19.4 MB
- Price: FREE!
- Very calming and tranquil game tone set by the visuals and game sound.
- Players are able to use their iPod during gameplay.
- All highscores can be submitted to the global leaderboards via OpenFeint.
- The game doesn't have that many power-ups to help you out.
- There is only one main game mode, no variations or other modes.
If you want a high-flying arcade game to unwind with, then Star Ride is the game for you.
- Full Review
- App Store Info
Star Ride is a Doodle Jump style arcade game where players must bounce off stars in order to soar higher into the night sky. Players will start on Earth and then jump up in hopes of chaining together different star jumps to get a new highscore.
Players start the game by flicking up on the screen to jump up and control movement by dragging their finger across the screen. Once you hit a star you'll have to keep hitting them to keep jumping up. There are also different coloured stars that will give you temporary multipliers and boost your score.
Visually the game hosts a simple but effective presentation that suits the tone of the game. The serene soundtrack also helps in setting the mood and giving the game a calming, casual feel. The game features one main game mode with access to global leaderboards via OpenFeint.
Star Ride is a tranquil play that fans of Doodle Jump or any other highflying arcade game will enjoy. The game doesn't have that many power-ups to help you out, so it's up to you to concentrate on where you move your character if you want to go for the highscore. The online score access via OpenFeint means there's always room for personal improvement and the option to use your iPod during gameplay keeps things fresh. So if you enjoy this style iPhone game and casual gaming, then Star Ride is worth a look at.
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To celebrate the release of the brand new game Chrominance, Star Ride is now free and supports Game Center
- iPad Support(version 1.5)
- Universal App: play on iPhone or iPad(version 1.5)
- OpenFeint support for achievements, leaderboards, friends and chat.
- Charming atmosphere
- Old school gameplay
- Original soundtrack
- iPod support
"Star Ride is a fun and rewarding game with a unique style and appearance. The hand drawn graphics are high quality and give the game loads of charm. The sounds are captivating and soothing. With all the cookie cutter Apps in the Store, Star Ride is a nice burst of fresh energy. If you like carefully crafted games with nice feel and pick up and play ability, Star Ride is a must have."
"A gently soothing oddity which requires you to propel a hand-drawn character into the night sky by leaping from star to star. The synth-laden music and twinkling sound effects lull you into an almost hypnotic state. Perfect for stressful commutes"
AppShouter (http://appshouter.com/)
"I really enjoyed this game [...] is just so musical and soothing that it is really just a great game to play."
iPhone Games Network (http://www.iphonegamenetwork.com/)
"soothing sounds, impressive visuals, and an overall artistic feel. This provides an overall mellow and peaceful experience that isn't found in other similar games."
no dpad (http://nodpad.com)
"The game really feels like a unique experience when you can propel yourself from one star into the next, and so on. If you can get lucky and land at least five in a row to keep going directly up, the sounds of hitting the stars almost feels like it's making a song."
Star Ride is an ability based game where you control the flight of your character, up to the highest point in the sky, jumping from star to star.
Every star you hit will make you fly higher and will increase your score. Take the blue stars to increase your score multiplier.
It's very easy to pick up and play, making it the perfect kind of game for iPhone and iPod Touch.
Its hand drawn graphics and an its original music contribute to create a surreal and unique atmosphere.
To play, move the character horizontally with your finger, swipe up just to jump on the first star, then follow the other falling stars to fly as high as possible. To pause the game and go back to the main menu, tap the screen with two fingers.
What's New in Version 1.8Updated OpenFeint
Added non intrusive iAD just in the main screen, sorry guys, hope you'll keep supporting us ;)


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Today I'm sharing my non-fiction reads from 2018! I read 290 books last year and 79 of those were non-fiction so I've picked my top 12. Yesterday I shared my favourite fiction reads of the year and you can find that here if you'd like to read it.Illusion of Justice by Jerome Buting
I was late getting to Making a Murderer but I finally watched season one earlier this year and immediately looked to see if there were any books on the case. This is written by one of Steven Avery's lawyers and was a really fascinating read. I watched season 2 as soon as it was on Netflix and see that there's a possibility that these lawyers could have done more but at the time of reading it felt like a really good insight into the case and that they'd done all they could within the restraints they had.
My Life in Football by Kevin Keegan
I listened to this on audio and really enjoyed it. It was a hard listen at times being a Newcastle United fan and hearing in Keegan's own words how badly he was treated at the club. It was interesting to learn more about Keegan's life though and I found this book near impossible to stop listening to.
How Not to be a Boy by Robert Webb
I got this for Christmas in 2017 and it'd been calling to me from my TBR all year so I was glad to finally read it. It's such an open and honest memoir and I found it such an interesting read.The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
This is a really in-depth book about what led to 9/11. It's obviously not always an easy subject to read about in terms of what happened but the way this book is written makes it one you don't want to put down. It gave me a much better understanding of what happened in the years preceding 9/11. It's such an important book and one I definitely recommend.
Knowing the Score by Judy Murray
I very much enjoyed this book having been a fan of Judy Murray for a while now. It gave such insight into her character and her strength and I was so inspired by just how much she's done for female tennis players over the years. I have a full review of this book so if you'd like to know more click the title above.
Life to the Limit by Jenson Button
I listened to this as an audio book after buying it in an Audible sale a few weeks ago. I used to be such big F1 fan so was keen to know more behind the scenes of Button's career. There is much of that but this is also a love letter to his late father, John and I found is so much more moving than I expected.So Here It Is by Dave Hill
I initially wanted to read this because I grew up hearing Slade as my late mum was a huge fan. The book is so well-written and is so full of honesty and openness that I enjoyed it on its own merits. I have a full review of this so if you'd like to know more about what I thought click the title above.
Bookworm by Lucy Mangan
This book was sheer joy to read! I love books about books anyway but this one really grabbed me as I'm assuming Mangan is a similar age to me as we read many of the same books in childhood. It was a real nostalgic read and led to me buying copies of childhood books that I loved but had sadly long since lost. I recommend this to all bookworms!
The Light in the Dark by Horatio Clare
This is a beautiful, lyrical journal about the changing of the season into winter. It's a mediation on all the changes that occur as winter hits. This book struck such a chord with me and gave me such comfort and solace at a time of year that I needed it most. This is a book I will return to again and again.This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
This was another Christmas gift from 2017, which I read fairly early on in 2018 but it's stayed with me ever since. It's a funny book, and a sad book but mostly it's just an honest diary of a junior doctor's experience of working in the NHS.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
I bought this as soon as it came out as I can't resist well written true crime. This was a fascinating account of one woman's growing obsession with the Golden State Killer and her feeling that she had his name almost within her grasp. The author sadly died before she finished this book so there is a real poignancy in the reading experience because of that. It's a brilliant book though.The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (and Spark Joy) by Marie Kondo
This had to be my number one non-fiction book of the year because it has changed my life. Spark Joy I read for the first time in 2018, whereas The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was a re-read (although the first time I read it, I didn't grasp the good bits as I was too focused on what felt odd in her methods). I read these books at the start of the year and immediately wanted to follow her method properly as my house was over-run with stuff. It really worked for me this time and I've spent months going through every single item that I own and have finally got rid of all the clutter. I naturally want to hoard things but I'm now so much better at just getting rid of things that I don't love. I've never had so much space in my own home before and it feels wonderful. I've definitely got the decluttering bug now as every time I'm dusting I immediately put in the charity box anything that doesn't make me happy.
So that's my favourite non-fiction that I read in 2018. Did you read any good non-fiction last year? I'd love to know what your favourite book (or books!) was. Don't forget you can find my favourite novels in yesterday's post here if you'd like to see my fiction book picks of the year.


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Christmas 1971/Gene Autry/ & Daddy
Christmas 1971
What a haul that year! I was 5 years old. I am forgetting quite a bit, but I got a Hot Wheels Track set, a cat clock that wagged its tail and blinked its eyes, a portable record player, and records just to name a few things. One of my records was the album you see today, Gene Autry: Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer And Other Christmas Favorites. Several days ago I heard Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer by Gene Autry, and my heart sank a bit when a wave of childhood memories of my father and Christmas flooded my heart and soul.
My father, Oliver Haven Caylor, truly loved giving us presents and seeing us enjoy our Christmases during childhood. He loved cowboys, and he loved Christmas, so it was natural and a pleasure for him to buy me this album. My heart still misses him so much especially during Christmas. He passed on May 28, 1982: Three weeks after my 16th birthday.
It just so happened that Carter and Ammon heard Gene's version with me, and I told them about my album and a few words about their Papa Caylor. He would have such fun with these two!


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The evolution and launch of Black Crown, Budweiser's latest attempt to throw a white collar around a red neck, shows that the mega-brewer is trying like hell to drag its brand into the 21st century. You can see it in the way the beer came to market and in the crazy media kit they sent out to beer writers like yours truly.
Let's Start from the Beginning
The genesis of Black Crown was Budweiser Project 12, a contest of sorts where the brew masters from Bud's 12 regional breweries went "wild" and each made a "special" beer to compete in a series of public tastings (most likely at tractor pulls and Tim McGraw concerts). The winner would be brought to market as the newest member of the Budweiser family.
Bud even stole a page from the Sam Adams/Sierra Nevada Longshot/Beer Camp playbook and released the three finalists for the beer-buying public to taste in a special twelve pack. I reviewed it for Today.com, and dubbed the beers Bud Plus, Bud Hop and Bud Roast, because each "wild" and "special" beer tasted exactly like regular Budweiser with a little something extra squeezed in.
When the dust settled, Bud went with the most conservative choice, the one I called Bud Plus, which basically tastes like a Bud turned up to 11. While it was in development, Bud called the beer Batch No. 91406, named for the Los Angeles area code from which it originated. But for its official launch, they decided black is the new…uh…black, and called it Black Crown.
The Pre-Launch
Now that I've been a big boy beer writer for a while, packages of promotional goods have begun to steadily roll into my house. I get beers and tasting kits and other geegaws from brewers large and small from across the country. I'll be honest and say I appreciate this – inspiration comes in many forms, and it's terrific to have a cool story (or a great beer) appear at your doorstep.
But of all the swag that's shown up, NOTHING compares to the kit Budweiser sent out for the launch of Black Crown.
I received a rather large box, and this is what's inside (along with some marketing information that I quickly discarded):
Holy crap, I thought – it's a spy kit! Budweiser wants me to be a secret agent!! What could be inside? A handgun? Top secret recording equipment? Deeply average beer? Ever the optimist, I flung it open to find…
Deeply average beer! But wait, there's more. Along the left side of the protective case, nestled safely in custom-cut foam, were six small vials and a USB thumb drive. What could they be? Special aromas? Tasting companions? Marketing nonsense? A closer look revealed that they were…
Marketing nonsense! It looked as if each vial was meant to represent part of the essence of this very "premium" beer. As I had thrown away the literature that came with my Black Crown Spy Kit, I had to decipher their meanings myself. Here's what I came up with:
Beechwood: This is easy – Budweiser's always prattling on about Beechwood aging, blah, blah, blah, so obviously thy're proud that Black Crown actually touched some wood.
Caramel Malt: Better than a vial full of rice, I guess.
Passion: This vial had a smear of lipstick on it, so obviously Budweiser's brew master is a cross dresser who's waaaay into Black Crown. Eww.
A Great Show: Glitter – whee! Perhaps this can be used to blind an enemy during a fight and flee unharmed – there's still hope that this is a spy kit after all!
Handpicked: I dunno – looks like someone left a "to do" list in this vial. Maybe it's my first mission…
The Unknown: Now this just seems lazy to me.
Account Exec (wearing hipster glasses) "What do we put in the sixth vial, you guys?"
Copywriter (bearded and wearing an ironic sweater) "I dunno."
Graphic Designer: (A young female dressed like a sk8r boi *stomach rumbles*): I want sushi.
Account Exec and Copywriter: Hells yes!
Account Exec: But the vial…
Copywriter: I got it – "The Unknown" – we can leave the damn thing empty. Who cares, anyway?
Account Exec: I like it – mysterious!
Graphic Designer: Whatever – let's eat!
The Launch
After attempting to grease the skids by showering the bloggers and media types with metal suitcases full of beer, it was time to officially launch the beer, and Bud went back to what they know best – Super Bowl ads.
Black Crown had the first commercial slot after kickoff last Sunday, a very forgettable spot filled with premium beer commercial clichés; confident and scruffy men dressed in fitted black shirts, stick-thin ladies in glittery dresses, and some kind of weak stab at portraying a secret society of taste makers.
The commercial was so unoriginal that it was almost over before I realized that this was the "big launch" I'd been waiting for. It was really ordinary and kind of disappointing – it did nothing to shake people up and make them take notice. It was a wasted opportunity to do something special.
After all the public tastings and the special 12 packs and spiffing the media with spy kits, Budweiser dropped the ball on the goal line.
What To Do with the Kit?
I looked up the case on Amazon, and it turns out that a new one will run you about $35.00. I hate to be wasteful, and besides being Budweiser branded, it's a decent aluminum hard case of a very usable size. Here's what it looks like with all the padding stripped out:
I think if I got some new foam for the innards, that this would make a cool case for my Nikon, or my laptop, or a dirty bomb – the possibilities are endless!
Of course, I'll have to do something about the Bud logo on the cover. The aluminum plate that it's on seems fairly well glued to the top of the case, so if all else fails, I guess I can "re-brand" it with all those beer stickers I never put on my fridge:
Anyway, nice try Budweiser – maybe next year.
Thanks for the fancy case.


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