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Europe may be lagging behind the American tech scene, but there's still a lot to be impressed by.
Sure, the US has Facebook, and Snapchat, and Twitter. But Europe has contributed some serious heavyweights to the modern app economy: Just take Sweden's Spotify. Or the British Citymapper. Or TomTom, the venerable navigation app, hailing from the Netherlands.
With the help of Google, we've put together a list of some of the hottest, most popular and best-received Android apps, from more than a dozen different countries.
Check it out.
Runtastic Running PRO is a fitness tracker focusing on running.
The premium app can provide audio feedback, map your runs, track goals and targets, and will work in combination with smartwatches like Android Wear. The Google Play Store pegs it at between 1 and 5 million downloads.
In August 2015, Adidas acquired Runtastic— the Austrian studio behind the app — for $239 million (£158 million).
Google Play Store link »
You can probably guess what "World of Tanks Blitz" is from the name: A massively multiplayer online tank battling game.
It is developed by Wargaming, a games studio hailing from Belarus, and boasts 90 million players. It's also free-to-play, and is supported — like many modern mobile games — by in-app purchases.
Google Play Store link »
Endomondo bills itself as the "personal trainer in your pocket." Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, it acts as a kind of fitness tracker with extra social functionality — users can share their progress and routes with their friends, with metrics to quantify their exercise.
It was founded in 2007, and made a successful exit earlier this year, when it was acquired by fitness brand Under Armour for $85 million (£56 million).
In an interview with Tech.eu a few months after the acquisition, CEO Mette Lykke praised the Danish tech scene: "Copenhagen and Denmark in general are starting to get on the radar more often, it seems. There have been some interesting exits, and there's a couple of potentially big companies coming out of the scene. I think it's exciting to see it evolve."
Google Play Store link »
TransferWise is a red-hot money transfer service based in London and Tallinn, Estonia. It promises to reduce the fees to send money overseas by using a sophisticated peer-to-peer model — but this complexity is hidden from the end users.
In January, it closed a hefty $58 million (£38 million) round of funding that is believed to value the company at $1 billion (£660 million), with buzzy Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz as the lead investor.
"We're truly a global business with even bigger ambitions," cofounder Kristo Käärmann told Business Insider in October. "We're open in all of Europe, US, Australia, and a bunch of other things in the pipeline. Our headcount, we're now 400 people, we were 40 people 2 years ago."
Google Play Store link »
The clue's in the name: BlaBlaCar is a car-share service with a twist — users can select how talkative they are with a "Bla" scale.
The French app is different to taxi-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft because it doesn't use any professional drivers. Instead the focus is on longer journeys: If you're planning to drive from Paris to Berlin you'd put up a listing on the app. Someone signs up, and in return pays you a contribution towards your costs — but not enough to really profit off, meaning it doesn't face strict taxi regulation.
Following a $200 million (£133 million) series D round in September 2015, BlaBlaCar — led by CEO Frederic Mazzella — is now worth around $1.5 billion (£1 billion). Mazzella says the company is looking to expand into new territories, telling The Wall Street Journal that "there is a huge play in emerging markets."
Google Play Store link »
EyeEm is a German app focused on mobile photography. Users can edit and share photos — kind of like Instagram — as well as sell them for a profit on a special marketplace.
The company is led by Florian Meissner, who founded EyeEm in 2010, and in April 2015 it raised $18 million (£11.9 million) in new funding. At the time it had 13 million registered users, with Meissner telling Re/code that "our next big step is understanding and really thinking about how we can attract people to acquire the images and make money for our photographers."
Google Play Store link »
Moovit is a popular Israeli app that provides bus and train times, and crowdsources service alerts from other users of the app. It also integrates with Android Wear, Google's wearable OS.
It operates in hundreds of cities, including Seattle, London, Madrid, Napoli, Warsaw, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Lima, Manila, Seoul, and more. It says it has 15 million users.
At the start of 2015, it raised $50 million (£33 million) in new venture capital funding. CEO Nir Erez told TechCrunch: "We believe that once we get hundreds of millions of users we will be able to monetise in multiple ways, such as adding extra services, like connecting to taxis, or value ad advertisement, or selling bus and train tickets."
Google Play Store link »
Musixmatch is, it says, "the world's largest lyrics catalog." It will displays the lyrics for music playing in your library, as well as identify the lyrics of songs playing similar to Shazam, and let users search for lyrics directly.
It also integrates with Spotify and Apple Music, displaying lyrics as the music streaming apps play.
Google Play Store link »
The Lithuanian Trafi is similar to Citymapper, but with extra functionality: It also crowdsources data from its user about traffic conditions, automatically adjusting its recommended routes to account for hold-ups and problems.
It currently operates in 20 different cities, in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Turkey, Brazil, and Russia.
Google Play Store link »
TomTom is a brand that has seen its core business disrupted by the shift to mobile: Historically, it has produced an incredibly popular line of satnavs for cars, but the rise of mapping software on smartphones has threatened the need for a separate mapping device.
The Dutch company, founded in 1991, now offers an Android app that does much the same as its standalone satnavs — providing directions, traffic info, and speed camera alerts.
Users can also download their required map data in advance — meaning an internet connection isn't needed to navigate.
Google Play Store link »
First launching in 1995, Opera long predates the current app ecosystem — but managed to successfully make the jump to mobile nonetheless. It's web browser and has, according to its Google Play Store page, been downloaded more than 50 million times since it launched.
Google Play Store link »
4 million people use Todoist to help organise their lives, the Portuguese company Doist claims. It's a productivity app that lets users create to-do lists and manage tasks.
Todoist was first launched in 2007, and made the jump to mobile in 2012.
Google Play Store link »
Telegram has made headlines over the last few weeks, but not necessarily for the right reasons. A secure messaging and social networking service, the Russian app is a firm favourite of ISIS for spreading their propaganda.
In response, the company recently released an update that makes it easier to crack down on the groups that are being used as distribution channels by the terrorist group.
And ISIS isn't the users by any means — more than 50 million people have downloaded the app, which uses encryption to prevent unwanted third parties from snooping on your conversations.
It was created in 2013 by the Durov brothers, who were previously responsible for Russian social network VK.
Google Play Store link »
The Spanish Minube is an all-purpose holiday app. Its functions range from storing ideas and planning itineraries, to organising your photos after a trip and creating interactive memories of a holiday.
You can book hotels via the app — a source of funding for the company — and the company had around €10 million (£7 million) in sales in 2014.
Google Play Store link »
One of the hottest European apps out there, Spotify is a music streaming service with a library of tens of millions of tracks.
It offers two options — a paid subscription, and an ad-supported free version, which sets it apart from competitor Apple Music as the music streaming market heats up.
It was launched in 2008, and cofounder Daniel Ek remains CEO. In June 2015 it raised a mammoth $526 million (£349 million), in a funding round that valued it at more than $8.5 billion (£5.65 billion).
Google Play Store link »
Threema is a messaging app with a focus on security. It launched in 2012, and received a boost in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations of US government surveillance: All messages sent on its platform ar encrypted end-to-end, making it impossible for the authorities — or Threema itself — to intercept and read them.
Threema is based in Switzerland — home to "some of the most user friendly privacy laws in the world," CEO Martin Blatter told Business Insider. It's one of the most popular paid apps in Germany, and has more than 3.5 million users, it said in June.
Google Play Store link »
Tell Citymapper where you want to go and it'll tell you the fastest way to get there, taking into account closures, holidays, subway alterations and more. You can save key locations (work, home, etc.) for easy access, pick your preferred method of transport (bike, taxi, trains, walking, etc.), and get push notifications about changes to train lines you rely on.
It operates in more than a dozen cities across the globe, including Hong Kong, Berlin, Lisbon, New York City, Mexico City, and San Francisco — but is headquartered in London.
It was launched on iOS in 2012, coming to Android the following year, and is the brainchild of Azmat Yusuf, now the CEO. "How you get around a city is really core to its culture," he told Wired in 2014. "I am fascinated by cities and I want to help people make the most of the one they live in."


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A group of Concordia University Wisconsin alumni recently competed in a charitable "Alumni Chili Cook-Off" event, sponsored by Kohl's Corporation, and took home second place for their "Freddie's Fiery Finest" chili recipe.
The CUW alumni included Shanta DeBoer, Heidi Lange, Linda Lemon, Brooke Worzalla, Samantha Luedtke and Jill Busch. Zoey, CUW's comfort dog, also made an appearance at the event, along with two of her student handlers.
The annual event brought together alumni from 11 different Wisconsin universities to raise money and awareness for Children's Hospital.
Chili Cook-Off judges included noted Milwaukee restaurant owner Joe Bartalotta, Children's Hospital CFO March Cadieuz, and Kohl's Senior Vice President of HR Ryan Festerling.
This was Concordia's first year participating in the event.

subset: commoncrawl


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'Fighting!' to eat at this restaurant
Jan 19,2008
The no-frills exterior of Sigol Yachae Doenjang matches its interior.
Easily intimidated expats should psych themselves up before they take a trip to Sigol Yachae Doenjang.
This is not the typical dining experience, where a hostess greets you with a smile and a bow at the door and your waitress is at your every beck and call.
Here, consider yourself lucky if the staff doesn't swear at you.
And make sure you don't need to use the restroom in the middle of your meal here. Not only is the toilet seat like ice, but there's also a total lack of toilet paper, soap or paper towels.
But all that being said, this rough-around-the-edges eatery is worth all these negative factors. What matters most ― that is, what ends up on your table ― is even better than the homemade stuff.
Even in the middle of the week, the afternoon rush here can be suffocating. I suggest taking a friend fluent in Korean if you want to keep apace with your lunchtime diners.
Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am is what Bak Geung-si, the owner of this restaurant, prefers. This probably does not bode well for those who want to slowly sound out the Hangul on the menu and fumble through their meal on a quest for discovering Korean culture.
But honestly, Bak doesn't care to take customers by the hand. The sense that I got was that you were going to take your meal, eat it fast, and like it ― or else.
The delicious fixings for the perfect bowl of doenjang jjigae, or soybean paste soup. By Ahn Yoon-soo
You see, Bak is one of Korea's yokjaengi halmeoni, which translates to "a grandma who will swear at you." But seriously, all it takes to enjoy a meal here is a sense of humor, not a chip on your shoulder.
When I got to the table, I was reluctant to sit down when I saw the piles of dirty bowls that hadn't been bussed yet. But as the waitress shuffled by, she ordered me to sit, and sit I did.
Soon, a hodge-podge of banchan, or side dishes, was plunked atop my table. There was the gaeranjjim, the requisite steamed, fluffy Korean take on an egg souffle, along with a wealth of vegetables. Quite appropriate, as translated into English, this restaurant's name means "countryside vegetables and soybean paste."
This is precisely why we ordered doenjang jjigae, or soybean paste soup. This comes sizzling hot in a black earthenware bowl. But instead of spooning the soup straight into your mouth, the best way to go about consuming this smorgasbord is to put a little muscle into it.
This means taking one of the extra (clean) bowls at your table, dumping in the contents of your stainless steel rice bowl, then mixing in helpings of the banchan, spoonfuls of doenjang jjigae, a big squirt of sesame oil and a couple heaping scoops of gochujang, or chili pepper paste.
The result is a remix of bibimbap (literally, mixed rice) so spicy that it'll make your nose run, featuring a dose of vegetables that would make your mother smile.
Believe it or not, the stink eye that your waitress gives you may actually enhance your meal; in this case, the faster you eat it, the better, as this dish loses a considerable amount of its delectability once it's cold.
If the searing mix of rice and doenjang jjigae starts burning your tongue a little too much, the mild gaeranjjim comes as a worthy adversary for neutralizing your fire breath.
All in all, for a meal that included more food than I could eat, the price of 10,000 won ($10.67) was right. Add in a little bit of hilarious local Korean flavor, and you've got me sold.
I had no idea of this when I stepped through its doors, but it comes as no surprise to me that Sigol Yachae Doenjang is actually considered quite a legendary restaurant among Korean nationals. Although its Gangnam neighborhood is rapidly changing with its vibrant nightlife and rapid influx of money, this place's hot, familiar bowls of soup don't appear to be going anywhere.
And if the staff ends up hurting your feelings, at least you can go home crying to your real grandmother. I hope she's more comforting.
Sigol Yachae Doenjang
English: None
Telephone: (02) 3482-7626
Subway: Gangnam Station, line No. 2, exit 6
Parking: Difficult to find, some on street
Hours: 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week
Dress: Come as you are
By Hannah Bae Contributing Writer [firstname.lastname@example.com]
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Shaming + Blaming: Unconditional Self Love
Often it is hard to be honest, to get the words out especially when talking about anger and pain. I wrote this to a friend early this morning who has become my pen pal. We are both aligned so deeply with our own feelings and creativity - it is a blessing to have people like this in my life. I share it because this has been on my mind.
Hello R-------,
Thank you so much for your kindness and patience. I don't apologize anymore for "not writing back sooner" only because there are just too many emails and I find in this life I've apologized for too many things, for myself every day. So I am not apologizing, but I am writing back!
Thank you for becoming my pen pal! It's so funny that we've barely spoken longer than a minute or two - I know we will! - it's nice to get to know one another through our writing. I find I express myself so clearly this way and with you.
Thank you for the loving critique of my posts. You're right - it really is vulnerability pouring out of me because that's where courage comes from. In the beginning (in the first week), everyone told me how courageous I was, how brave I was for speaking so openly about the miscarriage (I often find myself almost saying abortion - it was technically a "spontaneous or natural abortion" and I feel like my body is a smart body, a good body because she knew to abort and reject a dead fetus). I didn't believe them - I felt that I had to talk about it for my own sanity and I just couldn't help it. But now I accept and open myself to the idea that I can be courageous. I can be brave. I am brave.
I have to say that there are the difficult experiences of living with loss in your life, grieving and being so open to it, even terrified of the madness of grief (and the accompanying madness of creativity). N------- tells me I'm unhinged and I say Yes I am unhinged! Yesterday was a particularly rough day for me. I feel insane, I feel unhinged, I feel crazy, I feel the madness. I know it's all ok because all feelings are valid. A friend, who had a miscarriage last year, wrote that to me when I announced the loss of our pregnancy and it's stayed with me. I frequently say it to people after I talk about feeling failure, shame, embarrassment, and like an outsider. Everyone wants to "silverline" the hardships (coined by Brené Brown during The Power of Empathy!). I opened a tiny window to this conversation with U-------- and she shamed me for my feelings. I was sobbing and shouting, All feelings are valid! but she comes from another time and place and has her own story of struggle. Everyone has their own story. I have never been shamed so intensely, publicly and on so many levels. Others have said shaming/blaming things to me about the miscarriage and every time I call them on it, for every single person regardless of who it is. At this point, I love myself too much - I mean I actually love myself! I think before I loved myself only a little bit in different ways but now I am in love with myself and that love is unconditional. And this means that I also have a deep confidence in myself to be anything, say anything, accept myself and my flaws, embrace the vulnerability, embrace myself and embrace those around me. But when these people shame me, when she shamed me in front of everyone...she put into words what I'm sure many think and feel. She had the gall to say those things to me - you would be ashamed for her for saying those things! I was in shock. I was in a raw place and the more she invalidated what I was feeling, the more I sobbed. She told me Don't ruin your marriage. I said I'm not ruining my marriage - this is making us stronger! She said, You need to live life and look forward! I said I am living my life! That's why I paint and write every day! And I look to the past and I look to the present and I look to the future - I have so many plans for myself! She said, Well what if you carried that baby to a full term, to all nine months - and I interrupted Yes that would be worse! And she said, You see?! And again I have to say that all feelings are valid. But it's as if she hears nothing. I shout and cry It's only been a month! Later N------- tells me she didn't realize this. But how long is "long enough" for grieving? I've spoken to so many people who have lost babies in their wombs at 5 weeks and 4 months and 9 months and for those who haven't lost a baby, they have a story to share about their friend, their mother, their grandmother, their aunt. Often I am told it was last year, it was 5 years ago, it was 25 years ago and I still grieve the baby that I lost. That is honest. It is so hard to be honest and we are also so different in our ways and in our grieving (or our non-grieving-grieving).
I am grateful to have the confidence and the language to speak up for myself, to explain myself, to attempt to make myself understood even if I can't be heard by others. And I appreciate those, like you, who are so open to what is happening to me, what happens to millions of women (yes U------- - I know!) because even though it happens and has happened to so many all throughout time and will continue to happen because there is no such thing as just pregnancy or just miscarriage, it is the wide spectrum of pregnancy which includes miscarriage and still birth, it does not take away the sting and confusion and madness of loss and it does not mean my feelings and what I am experiencing is invalid.
Because all feelings are valid.
love, dawn


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Garden Windows
Add more light to your kitchen or bathroom with a classic Solace Garden Window. With a streamline frame design, we have mastered the balance between beauty and performance.
- Operating Trapezoid Windows open away from your home to allow maximum airflow
- Insulated seat board available in single and double insulation packages
- Pionite® seat available for a clean, waterproof surface that is safe for your indoor plants. This option is recommended when using the window space for live plants and flowers
- Adjustable height glass shelf is standard
Projected Frame Windows
Endless possibilities exist when it comes to providing an elegant look for your home. Our custom sized Projected Frame Windows can be built with virtually any type of window, any glass design, or any color combination in order to give your room a beautiful view.
- High quality seatboards, headboards and side panels manufactured from furniture grade 1 1⁄8" thick oak veneer plywood versus typical 3⁄4" thick plywood
- Interior surfaces available with optional Pionite® laminates, which eliminate the need to paint or stain the window's interior
Full Frame Replacement Windows
Solace Windows' Full Frame Replacement System takes replacing old windows with new ones a step further, thoroughly restoring the structural integrity of the window opening while installing an energy-efficient, low maintenance replacement window.
Geometric Windows
Solace Windows' geometric shaped windows let you complete the distinction to your home's exterior view, while allowing you to capture more of the world around you. From the simple to the sublime, you can select both shape and size to create your own home's personality, or simply to grace a special space with sunlight.
Available Geometric Windows:
- Full Circle
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- Eyebrow
- Eyebrow extended legs
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- Architectural single hung


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- Albert Shih
- Professor, College of Engineering
- Professor, Mechanical Engineering
- Professor, Biomedical Engineering
- More about...
After receiving his PhD from Purdue University in 1991, Dr. Shih worked at Cummins Inc. at Columbus, Indiana for 7 years. He developed the precision machining processes for advanced engineering materials. From 1998 to 2002, he was Associate Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, North Carolina State University at Raleigh, North Carolina. In January 2003, Dr. Shih joined University of Michigans Mechanical Engineering and Wu Manufacturing Research Center.
Currently, Professor Shih's research and teaching focus are in biomedical design and manufacturing the application of advanced design and manufacturing technology to advance medical device, healthcare operations, and patient safety. He works closely with collaborators in the Medical School and is a founding member of the Medical Innovation Center on joint research in aging society related assistive device design and manufacturing, 3D printing / additive manufacturing in orthosis and prosthesis, clinical simulators, ultrasound and bioimpedance for non-invasive diagnosis, bio-heat transfer in clinical procedures, and advanced needle and needle devices. He continues to conduct research in machining of advanced materials.
Professor Shih is an ASME and SME Fellow and the recipient of 1999 ASME BOSS Award, 2000 NSFCAREER Award, 2004 SAE Ralph Teetor Education Award, and 2009 Fulbright Scholar. He is the associate editor of the SME Journal of Manufacturing Processes and was the associate editor of ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering and served as the guest editor for the special issue of Biomedical Manufacturing. He also served in the Board of Director and Scientific Committee of NAMRI/SME and the review committee of International Journal of Machine Tools and Manufacture. He has 5 US patents and over 230 publications, including over 130 journal papers.
Professor Shih can be heard here addressing the need for Global Automotive Manufacturing and the many ways the ISD program prepares students to be leaders in the field.


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I am claiming my blog on Bloglovin' via this post, and I would love if any of you would follow me on there! It's a great and easy way to keep track of all of your favourite blogs, in one place.
Enjoy, and Cheers!
Follow my blog with Bloglovin


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JAG Hotel
St. John's
Opened in 2014 with 84 rooms, JAG Hotel sparkles in the city's west end with its slick classic-rock-themed decor.
What we loved Checking out the art in the lobby and the Exile Lounge, like photos and posters of Eric Clapton and Ray Charles from owner John Steele's collection.
If you only have one night Wander 15 minutes to Raymonds (you can't miss the striking red exterior), named Canada's Best New Restaurant 2011, to see what local meat and fish dishes chef Jeremy Charles is cooking up, like halibut filet with Berkshire pork rillons.
Bonus The custom-made Ossetra bath products, such as the birch bark exfoliating soap, are made from iceberg water.


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How to Make It
Step 1
Combine apples and 1 1/2 cups brown sugar in a large mixing bowl. Arrange a layer of sugared apples in a 13- x 9- x 2-inch baking dish; dot with 3 tablespoons butter. Cut lemon slices in half. Arrange half of slices over apple mixture. Repeat layers, ending with apples. Dot with remaining butter. Sprinkle cinnamon over top. Bake at 350° for 35 minutes or until apples are tender.
Step 2
Cut each bread slice into 4 triangles. Dip triangles in melted butter. Arrange on top of casserole; sprinkle remaining brown sugar over top. Broil until triangles are lightly toasted. Let stand 10 minutes. Garnish with apple rose, if desired.
Oxmoor House Homestyle Recipes


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Genworth subpoenaed by SEC in finite probe
Alistair Barr
May 12, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Genworth Financial Inc. said Thursday that it was subpoenaed by the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of the agency's investigations of finite reinsurance."
Genworth said it conducted an initial review of its reinsurance arrangements early in the fourth quarter of 2004 and did not identify issues of concern.
"In light of recent market events, the evolving nature of insurance industry examinations, as well as the receipt of the subpoena, Genworth will continue its review as it cooperates with the SEC," the company said in a statement.
Genworth shares slipped 6 cents to $27.90 in morning trading Thursday.
Genworth (GNW), the majority of which was sold by General Electric Co. (GE) in an initial public offering last year, is the latest insurer to get such a request. Chubb Corp. (CB) said Wednesday that it received a similar subpoena.
There is no clear definition of finite reinsurance, but generally it's a blend traditional reinsurance and financing. The products are usually purchased by other insurers looking to protect themselves against the financial risk of future liabilities.
Regulators including New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the SEC are investigating whether companies have used finite reinsurance to manipulate their financial statements.
The probes precipitated the departure of longtime American International Group (AIG) CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg in March and forced the giant insurer to admit to a series of accounting improprieties that could wipe $2.7 billion, or 3.3%, off its net worth.


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Spielberg does not compose images... not in the way Hooper does. Spielberg excels at the dramatic, the pop image and the action image (not in the Deleuzian sense... probably). It's no disconnect that he cut his teeth on the sets of dramatic television at the height of its classical period, lending episodes of Night Gallery and Columbo his incredible savant eye whilst propelling the tradition of dramatically and psychologically-attuned camera work, melding the classical aptitude of Preminger and Mackendrick and Lumet with his soon-to-be realized interest in spectacular image-making, largely as part of the high-thrills action tale.
Hooper, on the other hand, is less attuned to dramatic emphasis and the keenness of image-making (let's call this his documentarist instinct). He composes images, like Spielberg composes images... but is much more propended toward atmosphere (which hovers at a noumenal level over the dramatic image), toward ideas and a mimetic relationship to the real rather than the pure images and a relationship to realism-cum-cinema. Hooper's filmmaking, thus, is invariably more severe, more demanding of emotional separation. It is the ideated image, or the atmospheric idea, which, suggested in the label itself, upends the dramatic idea in order to form in the air - the atmosphere - itself, always at a disconnect with the dramatic or psychological in order to become something more inanimate: like a metaphor or idea, instead of an appeal, an authorial motion (towards an effect). This "disconnect" and "inanimateness" works in an odd way, stripping much of the pop sublimity one finds in a Spielberg film or a Preminger film, but treating on the image a much greater capacity for outside analysis, for a documentarian's inexactitude, for finding reality's indeterminacy (and thus reality itself) in an inert piece of ideated art.
This disconnect lies at the center of the first image of this post, which does not psychologize young Robbie but views him as an object. This does not make Hooper an inhumane filmmaker, or an impersonal filmmaker, or a thoughtless filmmaker (there is thought behind even the [non-alive] idea), but one who finds his sense of empathy not by inhabiting a character but simply by observing them. Hooper of Poltergeist (and later of Djinn) is the most [neo-]neo-realist filmmaker in Hollywood, these ghost stories somehow embodying this disconnect between an ethnographic reality, which Hooper honors through his composing of inanimate images, and the invisible realm of the supernatural (or the noumenal, the pretense of the atmosphere that must be ideated), thus the concerted sense of ethnography that seems to run through these two pictures, albeit of two vastly different subsets (most importantly, besides geographic, one childish [Poltergeist], the other consumingly adult [Djinn]). In other words, the best way to study the impinging of the supernatural on our world is by being as "neorealist," as unimpinging on reality, as possible. The images he composes effectively work to inanimate the film. In disconnecting the dramatic and psychological aspect of framing, there is no longer a separation between the real world (in which there is no framing, no keen image-making) and the film. The idea of the supernatural thus reaches an uncanny apex. This is his ideation, his motivation to pure atmosphere.
Hooper "composes" this following image with no sense of dramatic narrative continuity, that's why it seems to go on much longer than is necessary: a medium-speed dolly shot into a close-up of Robbie, asphyxiated by childhood fear, motivating and motivated by nothing. What shot of Elliott in E.T. really compares, in its needlessness and its inanimate analysis?
These shots are unspectacular (though I cannot say those spatial relationship-delineating shots of the clown below are not terrifying, at least in first viewing), but Hooper has room for the unspectacular shot in his constructions, especially when cornered into a place of pure narrative service, as is likely the case here. Spielberg, meanwhile, is constantly trying to create an "image," often betraying his lack of investment in reality (in relationship to cinema) in the process. His clown sequence would have surely been more baroque (yes, I did call Hooper the more baroque artist earlier), the more adorned. Although there is not a great deal here to append to the larger conversation about noumenon and ideated atmosphere in this droll and childish episode with the clown doll, effectively communicated is the droll and childish narrative of any child's uncanny valley nightmare.
Robbie: *firing sound*
The film shock-cuts to a close-up of the clown, then cuts to another, more extreme close-up of the clown. I like to entertain the idea of Hooper's rough cut having no such inclination to milk the moment for all its worth. Invaders from Mars includes no such frivolity, despite having a make-up much like Poltergeist. There is also such a thing, though, as "When the time and tide calls for...", or "When in Rome," and Poltergeist is its own beast, of which Hooper, an intelligent and pragmatic maker of films, is surely aware, surely not begrudging Spielberg and Michael Kahn (if my hypothetical is to be assumed true) for making this moment as effective and pleasurable as it can be for an audience ready to be given the heebie jeebies - in an enlightened way.
In the shot below, a nonsensical wind blows through the clown's hair. I'd like to think this is Hooper and his spacious room for the nonsensical, rhetorical flourish (this is pretty much the entire game-play of the whole of The Mangler). The movies are both a place of seriousness and a place of play, and no dreary fact of shuttered windows can stop him from blowing a fan in the toy's face for a particularly representational glamor shot. "Are you ready for my close-up, Mr. Hooper?" one can say of this shot, but instead of Vaseline on the lens, we have an arch exacerbation of a child's fears.
The childish bombast of Robbie's "night terrors" sequence is truncated in order for us to be dropped back into the meandering adult stonerisms of Steven and Diane's bedroom. We last left them making ridiculous, real-time noises (Craig T. Williams doing impressions of water, as well as a weight-loss ad; JoBeth Williams's un-mother-like snickering) and we return to them in a similarly non-verbal state: the adult, leisure class homo sapien in their natural habitat. It's often counter-intuitive, but Hooper is as much interested in his creation of characters, of performances, as he is interested in the visual side of things. His naturalism isn't a simulated naturalism - that is to say, at least that's how he wants his films construed - and it is apparent through his sense of scene-creation and performance-directing. Again, Hooper has room for the unspectacular - and thus partly "documentative" - shot (Hooper's "ethnography"), although this elevated angle of JoBeth Williams in a diagonal exchange with her recumbent and presently gargoyle-like (by way of Daffy Duck) husband is an exquisite contrast to the perspective soon picked up when Robbie enters the scene.
"Storm's coming closer..."
It is an exquisite cinematic dialectics - of framing and contrastive frames - at play: long to wide lensing, angled to non-angled, mixed perspectives we're not entirely too sure of (the angle on Steven and Diane could be something of a POV from Robbie's stance, but rather it is more like an uneasy intermingling of the child's POV with the visual decadence he is not a part of, for we the viewers are with the parents while we are wide and distant from Robbie; we cannot, however, say that the shot of Robbie is anything approximating the POV of the parents).
Steven: "Hey, partner."
Diane: "Hey honey."
Diane: "Is everything okay?"
Let's not ignore the fact Diane goes in for one last toke before putting the joint out. There is a space for parents, somewhere within their brains, still independent from the responsibility of parenthood, a fact which will go to pot for the rest of the film, but that fact being something I have no problem with. Poltergeist, probably thanks to Hooper, presents a portrait of a section of life with observational spaciousness, putting us along no path of romantic formula, and it thus can go from a depiction of the homo sapiens in their natural habitat to a directed tale of those same homo sapiens fighting heroically to preserve the family without a true discrepancy in the realist portrait, due to the many little things involved in Hooper's least fascistic impulses. Poltergeist, after all, in the end, is about a family persevering, but not for the sake of uplift: rather, for facing a chaotic world of cultural and social baggage that leaves them as displaced as the ghosts that served up their reckoning.
The disembodied, wide perspective of Robbie cements itself as a divorced perspective, essentially morphing, through a pan, into the wide shot that joins Robbie with his parents. This strange, exquisite grammar is further propped up by the use of a lamp that ends up in foreground, strangely draped with one of Steve's shirts, as if to further denote the parents' adult imperfections.
"It's thundering!"
Steven: "Come on, hop up."
Hooper's camera simply pans (Diane, inactive, fazed out), Hooper's discourse is in cinematographic banalities, his dialectic in the multivariant tones cinema can offer.
"I'm the wind..."
"... and you're - the feather!"
Steven: "Say goodnight to mom."
Robbie: "Goodnight, mom."
Diane (OS): "Goodnight, sweetheart."
A distant shot from inside the children's bedroom watches Steven carry Robbie in, then pans along with them to the boy's bed.
The father and son and their "collision" into his bed is objectified with this shot that faces the window currently in discussion, beginning a series of shots concerned with spatial relationship to the window.
"I don't like the tree, Dad!"
Steven: "That's an old tree... it's been around here a long time. It was here before my company built the neighborhood."
Robbie: "I don't like its arms... It knows I live here, doesn't it?"
Steven: "It knows everything about us, Rob, that's why I built the house next to it, so it could protect us."
(OS) "You, and Carol Anne, and Dana, and your mom and me."
Steven: "It's a very wise old tree."
Robbie: "It looks at me. It knows I live here."
Robbie: "How do you know?"
Steven: "'Cause I can count."
"You know what you do?"
"When you see the lightning, you count 'til you see the thunder. If you can count higher each time, that means the storms moving away from us."
Steven: "Wanna try it?"
Steven: "Okay."
This shot above reveals itself a very purposeful shot aesthetically, one of directionality and an angular off-screen suggestion, the window the third point (in a diagonal) just outside the frame. A pointed rack focus as Steven arches to face it essentially serves as suggestion for its elided, but explicit, unquestioned, presence.
Steven: "Wow...
Okay... one... two... three..."
"Okay, but I bet next time, you'll be able to count to at least four or five."
"Daddy, it's for you."
"Now you tell him to take a message, sweet pea."
"Dad wants to take a message."
Steven: "Okay."
Steven: "Goodnight."
Carol Anne: "It's too hot!"
Steven: "Okay..."
"Goodnight, angel. Happy dreams, OK?"
Carol Anne: "Goodnight, Daddy!"
An elaborate shot of careful composition occurs next, below: Steven in florid motion in the foreground, donning his robe (in exquisite action-relationship to the previous shot), kept in soft focus while Robbie, in his bed, is sharp, the focus only shifting once Steven has exited the room and begins closing the door. This is all orchestrated in addition of a dolly backwards of the camera, as he exits, all leading to the inclusion of the frame of the door in the shot. This careful, visually mellifluous rendering of interiors, doted over with butter-smooth playing of focus and depth, is revived in remarkable ways in Djinn, his other ghost film, although it is also of marked importance in the likes of Invaders from Mars. This shot is a mirror of Diane's own exit from her children's bedroom, a potent structural repetition within this first quarter of a mundane domestic study.
Dana (OS): "I did not!"
Dana (OS): "Come on!"
Steven: "Goodnight, Dana."
Dana: "Goodnight, Dad..."
Steven: "Get off the phone, Dana."
Dana: "Okay, Dad..."
Steven: Mhmm."
Robbie: "One... two..."
Carol Anne: "Three... four..."
Robbie: "Five..."
(Thunder crashes loudly.)
(I guess there was only time to shoot one Tree FX shot, I suppose. Or it was deemed overkill to have two Mechanical Tree scares, which is actually astute.)
Here we go again: a separation from the dramatic and psychological apparatus of the camera, and a totally and completely narrative-halting drop into the completely formal. A Hooperian concept shot, devoted to idea and an atmosphere suggesting both the supernatural and the theatrical...
A contorting, slow, picturesque pull-out on the family in an indelible image of repose, Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter for the horror-fantasy set.
It's not just a pull-out, but a complete, moment-to-moment recomposing of the image elements within the frame through Hooper's snaky but fully controlled camera path.
... the supernatural is hinted by the ghostly POV perceiving the family from above, the theatricality in how the shot is ultimately far less a ghost's POV than one might initially think, instead rendering the room as simply flat, objectified space from the camera proscenium. It then, further, leaves the mechanical proscenium in order to become ghostly again with a "movement-symmetrical," parallel camera crawl back down and towards the television set. This shot plays out over slightly over a minute, which is an inordinate amount of time for a mainstream film ASL, and a shot where little to nothing is happening.
At its widest, it resembles a shot of a stage, the entire expanse of the room in audience view. This, rather than a ghostly POV, is further cemented by the return to a similar wide shot later on to take in the supernatural earthquake that occurs, Hooper deciding on a fusion of "theatrical" and "objective" to depict a supernatural event.
Again, the television image of the Iwo Jima statue is an unsettling suggestion of numerous things: a sickly congealing of bodies, such as the separate-but-one entities that inhabit the Freelings' household, the facelessness of our dead representatives, shadow figures and politicized specters of loss... more politically speaking, the hive-mind, the Mass Ornament, individuals perceived as one to promote the fascism of those cultural and social forces that demand our conformity, lest we escape and evade the sad fate of becoming our own future poltergeists.
I mentioned earlier the "woolliness" of Poltergeist, in companionship with The Funhouse and other Hooper films as opposed to Spielberg's utmost precision, or "keenness" of visuals. This sequence is made up of images that are, yes, "composed," and framed with deliberateness (we've got some POVs going on here, Carol Anne's and the TV's), but there is still a raggedness that seems to fall short of Spielberg's intent image-making. The images of Poltergeist lack the affect, the emphasis, and the romantic qualities of a Spielberg sequence. This sequence seems to me all Hooper, not asking for too much, depending on grammar over graphics.
These are indelible images, though, no doubt. A narrowing of perspective between Carol Anne and the TV eventually builds up to the shot-reverse shot culminating in her reaching out to touch the screen.
(The room begins to shake violently.)
"They're here."
Goldsmith's (brilliant) score is really working overtime here, switching stealthily from the cacophonous brass of his terror suite over to the chiming lullaby in order to usher in Carol Anne's immortal line with the appropriate playful creepiness. This massaging of tone and affect is definitely the sign of Spielberg making sure the mainstream, crowd-pleasing, and attention-holding blockbuster he set out to make is realized... but a producer often massages films to their liking, and a director remains the builder of the ground-floor components of the film.
Such action montage, though, with the introduction of the pool installers through close-ups of a shoe, an arm, etc. - is this precedented for Hooper? It is a cinematic trope not instinctual to Hooper at all, and we see one reason here a Spielberg script is such a heavy boot to crawl out from under.
One cannot say Hooper doesn't respond, though, to the images he created from the scripted text, and while it would be hard to find much freedom in the close-up shot of a boot, he seems to have found more room for painting with his personal brush the following shot of the tractor outside the window, a shot beginning stationary but then slowly withdrawing in another snaky Hooperian curve.
(OS) "Now listen to me, Jeff... no no, no no..."
Hooper's musicality with the edges of the frame isn't quite unheard of from other directors, but no one matches the sense of timing and the sense of surprise that one finds in Hooper's choreographing of the movements within his frames. Steven swiftly swings himself into the frame, as the camera continues its slow withdrawing, even his speech idiosyncratically timed to his appearance on the screen.
Steven: "... I'm not kidding!'
"I know, how could anyone sleep..."
"... during a 6.5."
"There was damage, yeah... the bedroom."
"I mean, there's stuff in pieces, all over."
Robbie: "Force field!"
Robbie: "Got my nose."
A camera crawl past the TV. This will become an important part of the larger scenic framework to be gradually revealed as the scene progresses, the deliberate and gradual revelation of internal structures being one of Hooper's greatest artistic instincts.
Robbie: "You're a big barf bag!"
Carol Anne: "You're a doggie bag!"
Diane: "Sweetheart... last night, when you said, "They're here"?
Carol Anne: "Can I take my goldfish to school?"
Dana: "You know, maybe the fault line runs just directly under our house. Wouldn't that be a scream?"
Diane: "(inaudible disagreeable reply)"
Robbie: "The ceiling got crumbs all over my bed!"
Diane: "Sweetie. Remember, last night? Do you remember when you woke and you said, 'They're here'?"
Carol Anne: "Uh huh..."
"The TV people."
Robbie (OS): "She's stoned!"
Dana (OS): "Oh yeah, what do you know about it?"
Robbie: "More than you! Ask Dad!"
- "Ask Dad!"
- "Ask Dad!"
"Ask Dad!"
Robbie: "Mooom!"
Diane: "All right..."
"... give me this..."
Robbie: "It's not my fault!"
Diane: "... before you cut yourself."
The earlier shot of the push-in past the kitchen TV is paid off here. We return to the same image, but this time it purposefully draws Carol Anne out from her seat, catching her running to sit herself in front of the small TV:
Musicality and timing is the calling card of Hooper: Craig T. Nelson emerges into the shot from his previously demarcated position in the anterior half of the kitchen, which was previously kept completely separate (visually) from the posterior half of the kitchen that has housed his wife and children. The two spaces suddenly combine in a construction of evolving shot morphology that has direct correlates in moments I can recall, off the top of my head, from The Funhouse and Night Terrors.
Steven (patting Carol Anne): "Bye Sweet Pea."
Steven: "I'm outta here."
Diane: "Bye, honey."
Robbie: "I'm outta here!"
Diane: (to Robbie) "Uh-uh! You I can handle."
Robbie: "I got school."
Diane: "Yeah, well, breakfast first."
Robbie: "Alright, I'll just flunk."
The morphology of this shot reveals incredibly a third foot, individual from the first two functions it has revealed (the continuations of the previous ideas: the view of the kitchen table scene from behind the TV, then its joining of the spaces, through this shot, between Diane/the Kitchen Table and Steven/Kitchen sink cranny). Now, the shot has formed a new appendage, forgetting about what is before and behind it and tracking in rightwards towards Carol Anne and the TV (after Steven has left the scene - removing one element of direction - and all whilst Diane and Robbie have their little exchange, creating a polyphony of narrative layers and perspectival contrast within the camera).
This whole morning kitchen scene I find one continuous rolling display of Hooper's great, rigorous, and musical instincts. It is, moment after moment, a fabulous series of the most controlled and precise camera movements and plays with perspective. As Dana walks her bike to go to school, she passes both the leering construction men and the great V-shaped nook of the kitchen below bayed windows looking out. From action that was begun outside, Hooper picks up the action from inside with a musical camera pulling out from the tableau of a mother's watchfulness. Her back is to us, her face not revealed, a sublime instinct to musicalize an objectivity of reality, not to spell or wring out emotions for us.
Interestingly, Dana's supremely crowd-pleasing show of defiance is not in Spielberg's script, although such a placatory and gratifying bit of levity (as opposed to the uneasy thread it would be if Dana just walked away like in the script) seems like something Spielberg would have inserted, while Hooper would be more inclined to accept the implications of sexual darkness occurring in reality. Whether it was Hooper or Spielberg who decided to revise the scene, it is probably the best option, a work of elevated family entertainment best represented by promoting the demystification of bad behavior and a teenager's spunk. Or, like before, "when in Rome," and Hooper does not necessarily revel in negativity as much as other filmmakers do.
The stream of distinctly Hooperian cinematic rhetoric continues with the use of the established window shot of Diane to segue seamlessly into the next scripted matter-at-hand - the dog E. Buzz climbing on the kitchen table and Diane shooing him away - through the use of one of Hooper's offbeat destabilizations of perspective, mood, and viewer orientation.
Diane: (suddenly) "NO!"
Diane turns, smiling, but in a second's notice, she bellows out a reprimand, seemingly unprovoked. Without showing us what she looks at, Diane's sudden reaction to something unknown to us is a perfect and ingenious orchestration of the minds and sensibilities of the audience, one that goes beyond even Hitchcockian precision and enters a realm of Hooperian discourse.
One can also call this a trademark Hooperian "false scare," family to the rhetorical, self-reflexive scares that populate Salem's Lot and The Funhouse. These scares bring attention to cinema as a representation of real-life environments that can be manipulated - and thus, made metaphorical, representational - through the rigorousness of cinematic tools of framing and tone.
Diane enters this shot from the edge of the frame, the same way Steven entered it earlier on. The suburban household, so says Hooper, is a place of quotidian repetitions and unalterable materialism, in which the objects and artifacts that make up the space are a constant comment on our lives and psychologies. This modus operandi of a visual-cinematic art is, it must be proclaimed to the cinema world, revived and revitalized with new purpose in, again, Hooper's latest work Djinn.
Diane: "No-no, get down."
Diane: "Robbie!"
Diane: "Carol Anne, I told you guys to push your chairs in when you get done at the table."
"Oh honey, you're going to ruin your eyes, this is not good for you."
(*War movie sounds*)
Again we stay at a distance, before another threshold. The camera delicately adjusts focus between Diane in the foreground and the distance she traverses.
"What's the matter, E. Buzz?"
Hooper's observational but also fluid, sumptuous visual style consistently perceives its characters as figures separated from the camera, allowing the camera to constantly work with activated characters moving and repositioning themselves within the mise en scene in precise ways.
Diane: "What are you doing?"
This segment with "Pugsley" (Lou Perryman) announces the start of the famous moment involving the stacking chairs.
Again, the way characters enter the frame is given surprising, intricate blocking and choreographic precision, something which is seen everywhere in Hooper's films, notably a dancing couple in Spontaneous Combustion which is essentially "remade" in a shot in Djinn.
Diane: (sarcastic) "How is it?"
Pugsley: "Great, Mrs. Freeling!"
Diane: "Okay, Bluto, give me my cup."
(I've always thought that "Bluto" was a bit rarefied of a reference to direct at the pool guy.)
Pugsley: "You sure make good coffee!"
An off-kilter dolly-in movement into Diane as she turns around...
... ends with her off-center, so as to accommodate her movement forward, between frames, again to connect the two spaces of the kitchen which have yet remained unconnected - and will further remain until a later scene... that is, outside of the one single pan that will constitute the famous chair stack trick shot - essentially the climax of this "household morning" sequence.
There is only sustained silence as she stares at the disturbed table set and a small hand softly reaches up into the frame.
Diane: "Oh!"
I'd like to call this a quintessential Hooper "non-scare," or "rhetorical scare," our second one in this short sequence, Carol Anne's hand creeping into the frame with not more than an ado.
Diane: "Jesus, oh, don't do that, honey!"
Diane: "Do you want to see mommy..."
"... lying in a cigar box covered with licorice."
Carol Anne: "Uh-uh."
Diane: "Did you do this?"
Carol Anne: "Uh-uh."
Diane: "You guys... I asked you not to pull the chairs out."
Diane: "Ahh!"
I know, don't deny it, the moment you've all been waiting for.
Hooper remembers the shooting of it and the dailies sounding "like a stampede of buffalo" (or something to that effect), the trick achieved simply by having crew quickly erect the preassembled pyramid on the table as the camera has panned away with Diane. A practical bit of sleight of hand, of trickery through misdirection - surely a pleasure to witness for Hooper, magic and the profession of prestidigitation being one of his early fixations as a child.
Diane: "TV people?"
Diane: "Do you see them?"
Carol Anne: "Do you?"
(The dissolve was definitely the way to go, as opposed to the jump cut envisaged in the script.)
Steven: "I tell ya, I think you're gonna really enjoy this kitchen. This is our latest development. We call it Phase 4."
A Hooper oner...
... made up of a constant, slow, curving and rightward crawl...
Woman: "Where do you live, Mr. Freeling?"
Steven: "Actually, we were the first family to set up housekeeping in the Cuesta Verde estates."
Man: "Oh, Phase 1!"
... the room viewed through the lens as a bubble-like enclosure, achieved by a wide-angle lens and a camera placed low...
Steven: "Yeah, we had to pass by my neighborhood to get to here this morning."
Woman: "Oh, that area with the lived-in look!"
Steven: "Yeah, it has that, but I think in a couple of months, you're not going to be able to distinguish Phase 1 to Phase 3... to..."
The blocking brings the characters up closer to the camera once. The camera adjusts but continues its crawling rightward motion.
"... You know, we have a saying around here. 'The grass grows greener... on every side.'"
(They all laugh.)
Steven: (almost sardonically) "Yeah, that's the way I feel about it..."
Man: "Honey, I can't tell one house from the other."
The blocking brings the characters closer to the camera, now twice (the camera finally stops crawling). The dialogue is finely blocked out and sectioned between the characters' movements forward, expertly shaping the scene and adding shades to Steven's character, who is already showing the cracks in his belief in what he sells, but who nevertheless commands this couple's attention the same way he does the adjustments of the frame.
Steven: "Well, you know something, I think you're right. But I think our construction standards are really very liberal."
Steven (VO): "... And that house was featured in last months issue of Time & Country... Come on, I'll show you the den..."
Diane: "Honey, come here, quick!"
Diane: "Hurry, before it stops again!"
Steven: "But the cans---"
I'll return to this shot in our next installment, for it perfectly encapsulates Hooper's elegant distanciation instincts, his painterly sense of image composure (utilizing objects, in careful arragements), and his conceptions of space, unraveling architectural interiors with precise and off-kilter framing.


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eSafety information
Chesterton takes eSafety very seriously
At Chesterton we educate and protect our students in their use of technology and the internet. We aim to constantly reinforce the responsibilities that our students have when surfing the web through Computing lessons, PSHE lessons (Humanities curriculum) and Assemblies. We run collapsed days teaching students safety concepts, including eSafety. We regularly train our staff on various aspects of child protection and this includes elements of eSafety. Staff are also trained on the potential risks of online radicalisation and extremism.
You can view our eSafety policy here – esafety2016
You can view our eSafety curriculum map here – curriculumoffermap
Technical solutions
Within school we have several technical solutions to assist us with child protection and eSafety. We have filtered internet usage for any connected device on site which is continuously monitored. We also have monitoring software installed on all College computers and laptops which monitors for unacceptable use; including elements such as grooming, sexting, radicalisation and cyber-bullying.
Our securus system protects vulnerable young people from a wide variety of the issues that on line technology presents, such as:
• cyberbullying
• attempts to reach banned websites – even via proxy servers
• viewing explicit images or files
• attempts to copy unauthorised material to/from memory cards/USB devices
• child sexual exploitation
• faith/gender/racial discrimination and abuse
• teenage relationship abuse
• sexting
• potential suicide or self-harm
• radicalisation and extremism
Unlike blocking and filtering software, securus monitors all online and offline applications and captures incidents in:
• all web activity, including social media
• all messaging and email applications
• all standard office applications such as Wordpad MS Word, PowerPoint etc.
• all unsaved and deleted content
• all keyboard activity
We are also proud to provide monitored filtered internet usage outside of school for Chesterton provided iPads. All internet traffic from anywhere in the world is directed back through our managed filters which can trigger alerts for Chesterton and Local Authority staff.
The management software allows us to block applications we feel are a barrier to a healthy digital lifestyle; including chat applications, video messaging and social networking apps. We also block the internet for certain vulnerable students, in partnership with parents.
The system also allows students to self-police the network, including a self submit for review button if they feel a site has not been categorised correctly.
The web filter allows us to easily create granular reports to view student online activity, customisable down to a user level. this can help us ensure students do not spend too much time on the internet.
We feel that students are likely to be safer online using a Chesterton device outside of school than using a home device.
Information for Parents & Students
The use of online social networking sites and instant messaging apps is increasing, it is vital to remember that while the internet is a great resource, it is unfortunately open to abuse. As technology moves forward so do the criminals and risks can appear where they have not been before.
It is vital that parents and carers also keep abreast of the latest developmentsin technology that now present our children with new dangers – Visit InternetMatters.org for the latest information.
CEOP commissioned a MORI poll that showed around 80% of UK children aged between 5-15 years are regularly online everyday, while OFCOM findings for the same age group reveals that 61% of parents had failed to set adequate online controls or didn't have filters in place to keep their children safe. (For more information about protecting your computer, identity and your children on-line go to 'Get Safe on Line').
Parents fear of understanding technology still seems to be a major obstacle so the CEOP has gone back to the 50's with newly styled material that encourages parents to take their parenting skills into the online world.
The online show – "The Parents' and Carers' Guide to the Internet" – takes a light hearted but thought provoking look at internet safety from a parental point of view. It provides practical advice on what children may be doing online, covers issues that are sometimes hard to discuss and helps parents talk to their child about online worlds that for the child are often very private and vitally integral to their lives.
Further highly recommended and comprehensive e-Safety information can be found on the 'Who is Hosting This' website; including information guides for parents about Snapchat, Kik and Ask.FM
A simple Message from CEOP – "Protect your Online Identity Profile"
Social Networking
There are many social networking sites and apps that people use to stay in touch with their friends and make new friends. These sites have dangers you should be aware of.
You should also know that for most of these sites, like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr or Twitter, you need to be at least 13 years old to sign up. For some, like Whatsapp, you need to be even older.
Many students have people in their "friends" list on social networking accounts who they do not actually know. We advise that our students delete "friends" from Facebook, or similar social networking accounts, if they do not know them in person, and are not actually friends with them.
The dangers of having strangers on these sites are increasingly concerning.
Parents, please encourage your children to:
1. Delete anyone who they do not know in person as a friend.
2. Talk to yourselves or staff at school if they feel compromised.
3. Report anything they feel uncomfortable about to CEOP(Child Exploitation & Online Protection).
Students who have not appropriately set their privacy settings on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are liable to have their pictures or details from these websites come up in a Google search. This means that any picture a student uploads to one of these websites will be open for anyone to see and people viewing the picture could find out when and where the picture was taken.
Please can we encourage you to check the privacy settings on your child's Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts or any other social media sites they are signed up to.
Self Taken Images – 'Sexting'
Someone taking an indecent image of themselves, and sending it to their friends or boy/girlfriend via a mobile phone or some other form of technology is sometimes referred to as 'sexting'.
Once these images have been taken and sent to others, control is lost of them and they can end up anywhere. They could be seen by friends and family, a future employer, or even, in some cases, end up in the possession an offender!
This also puts that person who originally sent the images in a vulnerable position, as somebody they may or may not know now has these images and could use technology to bully, harass or even try to locate them. Cyber Bullying is very often associated with sexting
Just think – if you wouldn't print and pass these images around your school or show your mum or dad, they are not appropriate to share via phone or other technologies.
Click the image below to view parent information videos regarding Sexting (Nude Selfies) from CEOP
Is it legal?
Indecent photos of those under 18 are images of child abuse
Taking the photo is illegal
Sending the photo to someone else is illegal
Sharing the photo further is illegal
Online Bullying
Online bullying, also known as cyber bullying, is when someone or a group of people upset, humiliate or hurt another person via the internet or digital technology. This could be on social networks, through email, text, gaming, and on a load of different devices.
Why is it so bad?
Online bullying can happen anywhere, at any time. You can be in your own personal, safe space like your bedroom and still be bullied. It can also come from lots of places at once, like on different social networks, from lots of different accounts. It can also be anonymous, and can cause more harm than other forms of bullying.
Sometimes it can seem like cyber bullying will never end, but there are some things you can do to make it stop. Nobody has to go through online bullying alone. Often the first step in stopping it is telling someone about it.
Someone you trust could help you report the cyber bullying and give you more confidence to deal with the situation.
You could talk to:
- a friend
- an adult you trust
- a teacher
If you're being bullied, an important first step is to tell someone what's happening.
Reporting abuse
The symbol on the 'Report Abuse' button, which looks a bit like an eye on legs, represents the Virtual Global Taskforce (VGT), a group of law enforcement agencies who work together to fight online abuse relating to children. If you click on the button you will be reporting a problem directly to someone at CEOP (the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency) You are then likely to be contacted by a social worker or a police officer, to talk through your report in more detail. They need to do this to make sure you are safe. It is also a good idea to talk to your parents about your report to CEOP, although if your report concerns a family member, CEOP will not make contact with them until an investigation has been completed.
ChildLine is a free helpline for children and young people. You can contact ChildLine about anything. No problem is too big or too small. Whatever your worry, it's better out than in.
If you do not want to make a report by pressing the button but are still worried about something online, then please talk to your Head of House, Form Tutor, or to an adult you can trust.
Going online
Here are some important tips to remember when you go online:
If we accidentally see something inappropriate on the internet, we should inform a responsible adult and not feel bad about it.
We need to think carefully before publishing videos or images of ourselve on the internet.
When using the internet at home or in school, we should always inform a responsible adult if we think someone or something is suspicious.
In school we have the right to explore the internet so long as what we are doing is safe and legal.
We have the right to keep our personal information private and to only give it out when we believe it is safe to do so.
We accept responsibility for treating everyone online with respect and agree not to use any behaviour or language that could be offensive or upsetting to anyone else.
We have the right not to be bullied on the internet or by text message and should report incidents of this to a responsible adult.
We should think carefully before filling out forms or answering questions on the internet.
Remember, if you are worried about your safety online, please click on CEOP 'Report'.
We should have the right to enjoy using the Internet for all the fun and safe things it has to offer.
We should have the right to use the internet to contact other people so long as it is safe and we know who they are.
Remember, it's always safest to create your own password.
Being able to 'game' with people all over the world is exciting and allows you to make 'friends' online.
Just like in the real world though, you need to be careful when playing with strangers. Some people you meet online may not be very nice!
Visit ThinkuKnow – https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/11_13/Need-advice/Gaming/ – for information on potential dangers and how to stay safe whilst gaming.
You can check out the suitability of video games using the common sense media service at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/game-reviews
Further reading
For further information and practical advice on staying safe on-line, please take the time to visit the following websites:
For Parents / Carers:
Highly Recommended
CEOP Channel on YouTube
Think U Know
eSafety Guide – 'Who is Hosting This'
Internet Matters
Kidshealth.org – Cyberbullying
Bullying.co.uk – Cyberbullying
Get safe online
Childnet International – Know IT all for parents
Parents Centre – Using computers and the internet
CEOP – Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
Virtual Global Task Force – Making the internet a safer place
Parents Against Child Sexual Exploitation
For Students:
CEOP Channel on YouTube
Bullying.co.uk – Cyberbullying
Childnet International – ChildNet Hub for Young People
Childnet International – Cyberbullying 'Let's Fight it Together'
Get safe online
BBC Bitesize – eSafety Information
BBC Bitesize – eSafety Activity
CBBC – Stay Safe
CBBC Newsround – Safe Surfing
Think U Know
Information on removing information and images about yourself:
Here's where to find the rules and how to report forthe most popular social networks and messaging apps:
If you email Tumblr about harassment:
- Use the keyword "harassment" in your title and in your email.
- Take a screen grab as evidence and attach it to your email
- Put your Tumblr link and the details of the person harassing you in the email – give as much detail as possible.
Read Ask.fm's 'terms of service'
Reporting on Ask.fm:
You do not need to be logged into the site (i.e. a user) to report.
When you move your mouse over any post on someone else's profile, you will see an option to like the post and also a drop down arrow which allows you to report the post for one of four reasons.
- Spam or scam
- Hate speech
- Violence
- Pornographic content
It is also possible to block other users, by scrolling to the bottom of their profile page and clicking on but users need to be logged in to do this. Users can also remove any questions from their own profile by clicking on the cross in the top right hand corner of every question and answer.
If you are using the app through Facebook, there is an option to report the application by clicking on "report/contact this app" which is displayed in the final tab in the right-hand column.
Otherwise, it appears that the block function acts a form of reporting, however, there is no evidence on the site that carrying out the blocking process alerts moderators to inappropriate content.
Kik Messenger


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I. Purpose
A. The Sustainable Agriculture Club strives to help the Penn State Community better understand the importance of sustainable agriculture. This is advocated through educational community programs and activities.
II. Membership
A. Membership in the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club is reserved for persons who are interested in making a positive sustainable difference within the PSU community.
B. The majority (50%+1 of the active membership) shall be awarded to any undergraduate students registered within the University, and faculty and staff currently employed by this University.
C. There must be at least 10 active members at all times.
1. Active members of the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club shall comprise of the General Assembly and shall be accorded voting rights, preside, officiate, or solicit funding on the organization's behalf.
2. All members must uphold the Constitution of the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club,
D. The Club reserves the right to expel a member who is not following the policies of the organization with a super majority vote of attending members – quorum is 75% of active members.
III. New Membership and Recruitment
A. Any and all new members will be given full disclosure during recruitment, including but not limited to the disclosure of:
1. New Membership Manual
2. Schedule of New Member Events and Activities
3. A list of responsibilities
4. A definition of personal rights, and a copy of the University Hazing policy, prescribed by Policies and Rules for Student Organizations.
All of these documents will be available upon request by the USG Supreme Court.
B. All members, including but not limited to new members and recruits, reserve the right to refrain from participating in any activities without consequence, based upon personal/religious beliefs, personal values, or moral reserve as defined by the member.
C. Any and all interaction/activity between members and/or new members will be limited to guidelines stated by university policy, as well as local, state, and federal laws.
D. The Sustainable Agriculture Club may not restrict membership based on characteristics of a student, which are intrinsic to the identity of that student, and are not essential to the potential value of that student as a member of the Sustainable Agriculture Club and the Penn State University at large.
IV. Officers
A. Only full-time, officially registered active student members shall be eligible to serve as appointed or elected officers in the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club. Further limitations are subject to USG Supreme Court/GSA Judiciary Committee approval.
B. Officers
1. The President is the spokesperson for the organization.
a. The President of the Sustainable Agriculture Club will preside at all meetings and is therefore ultimately responsible for the overall operation of the entire organization.
b. The President shall have the right to delegate any responsibility, with the majority consent of the General Assembly, to anyone within the organization.
2. The Vice-President shall serve as the President when the President is unable to do so.
a. The Vice-President of the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club shall, with the advice of the General Assembly, determine the scheduling, procedures, and rules of the activities and programs.
b. The Vice-President is responsible for keeping good relations with any other organizations or persons that help the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club activities or programs.
3. The Treasurer shall be charged with handling all organizational finances.
4. The Secretary is responsible for all record keeping and archiving for the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club.
a. The Secretary is responsible for keeping accurate, up-to-date attendance records and minutes from all meetings.
b. The Secretary is responsible for writing letters addressed from the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club.
C. Filling unexpired vacancies.
1. Nominations are taken at the meeting following vacancy. Elections also occur at this meeting.
2. If a majority (50%+1) is not obtained by any of the candidate receiving the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and the active members shall vote again.
3. When nominations are being taken to fill unexpired terms, any member of the organization may nominate another member of the organization by simply raising his/her hand and indicating such when recognized.
V. Meetings
A. The PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club will meet at least on a biweekly basis.
B. The President, with the consent of the General Assembly, may change the meeting frequency.
C. Adequate advance notice must be given to all active members.
D. Members shall be notified of all meetings by e-mail.
VI. Voting
A. Only active members may vote.
B. Quorum for all voting shall be thirty-three percent (33%) of the active membership.
C. A simple majority (50%+1) shall be necessary for all voting. This majority shall be derived from the active members present.
VII. Finances
A. All organizational funds must be deposited and handled through the Associated Student Activities (ASA) in 240 HUB.
B. The PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club shall collect dues that will not be excessive.
C. The Treasurer, with consent of the President, will determine dues.
D. Dues will be collected every fall and spring semester.
VIII. Elections
A. Nominations and elections shall take place at the last two meetings of the fall semester.
B. These meetings will be publicized in the meetings preceding it and by e-mail.
C. Election Codes:
1. Any member may nominate an active member for any office by raising his/her hand at the appropriate time and being recognized by the presiding official. Next, the active members shall cast secret, written ballots for the candidate of their choice. Each active member shall have one vote per office.
2. If 50%+1 cannot be obtained, the candidate with the lowest number of votes shall be dropped from consideration, and the active members shall vote again.
3. In the event of a tie, the ballot will be recast.
4. No member involved in conducting elections may be an official candidate.
D. All officers serve for a term of one year, beginning in the month following elections and ending the month of elections. (For exceptions, view Amendment 1)
IX. Amendments to the Constitution
A. Amendments to this Constitution may be created when needed to revise, update, or add to the basic guidelines of the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club.
B. An amendment to this Constitution may be proposed, in writing, at any time to the President.
C. At the second meeting of every semester, time will be set aside for the proposed amendment to be discussed and debated. If a two-thirds majority feels the proposed amendment should be formally considered, the proposed amendment shall be discussed and debated at the next mandatory meeting of the General Assembly. If two-thirds of the General Assembly approve, then the newly ratified amendment will be added to the Constitution under the heading List of Amendments.
D. If the proposed amendment is rejected through the above-stated process, it may not be proposed again until the following spring or fall semester.
E. All amendments are subject to the approval of the USG Supreme Court/GSA Judiciary Committee.
X. Parliamentary Authority
A. Robert's Rules of Order, Newly Revised. by Sarah Corbin Roberts shall be used in all cases not covered by this constitution.
XI. Accessibility of this Constitution
A. Copies of this constitution shall be made available to anyone upon request.
XII. Advisor
A. The Sustainable Agriculture Club must retain an advisor(s) that is/are full-time Penn State University employee/s.
B. All advisors must be a part of the University and will sign a statement acknowledging his/her responsibilities.
XIII. Safety Considerations
A. The Sustainable Agriculture Club will also abide by the following safety guidelines.
1. No member will use any undue force in any contact activity.
2. Members will not use any weapons in conjunction with the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club's activities.
3. All members will use safety equipment as outlined in our Participation Waiver during all PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club Activity.
4. The PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club will abide by the Penn State Department of Health and Safety's current version of Safety Considerations for Registered Organizations.
B. Members are required to acknowledge and abide by all of the safety considerations, and to sign a participation waiver as a condition of membership. Any violation of stated guidelines is grounds for immediate dismissal from the PSU Sustainable Agriculture Club.


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Blade Runner 2049: The Wait Is Almost Over
Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. He is the man behind Alien (1979) as well as the dystopian science fiction film Blade Runner (1982). On October 6th 2017, Blade Runner 2049 will be released in the cinemas.
Blade Runner (1982)
The sci-fi classic starred Harrison Ford. He played a detective hunting rogue androids in the future. Blade Runner is a cold and bizarre thriller. Although it's not a film that many could watch comfortably, it is also mesmerizing and bulges eyeballs.
Blade Runner is set in 2019 in Los Angeles. There are flying cars, space stations and a constant barrage of TV commercial hype writhing on the side of buildings. Ridley Scott tells the story of Rick Deckard and his battle with the replicants. The replicants are man made creatures that possess all human attributes, except feelings. They have been built to serve as slaves and if they rebel, the blade runner will hunt and kill them.
As mentioned before, Blade Runner is not easy to consume. The story is not explained coherently and the plot has great lapses, from the changeable nature of one key character to the frequent disappearance of others.
Blade Runner 2049
The long awaited Blade Runner sequel – Blade Runner 2049 – is arriving in cinemas on October 6th 2017. The recent trailer teasers have led to widespread anticipation. It is directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), scripted by Hampton Fancher (Blade Runner) and Michael Green (Alien: Covenant). Furthermore, it also stars Ryan Gosling who joins Harrison Ford on screen.
The film takes place 30 years after the events of Ridley Scott's groundbreaking original. Ryan Gosling is an LAPD officer named K who unearths a long-buried secret that could potentially drive the world into chaos. Gosling is on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) who may or may not hold a key piece to the puzzle.
Reviews have been flowing in on Twitter and many have said that the film lives up to the high expectations created by the original. Cinematographer, Roger Deakins, has also been praised. Perhaps, he will win an Oscar this year for his efforts.
The Critics Response
Blade Runner 2049 was one of the most mind-blowing films I've seen. It's breathtaking and transportive. Denis Villeneuve has a masterpiece.
Blade Runner 2049 is sci-fi masterpiece; the kind of deep-cut genre film we don't see anymore. Visually mind blowing, absolutely fantastic.
I saw Blade Runner 2049 and it is BREATHTAKING. It's an impressive follow-up, preserving mysteries, adding new ones, expanding the universe.
– William Bibbiani, IGN Movies
Good news! Blade Runner 2049 is a terrific continuation and expansion of the original. Wasn't hoping for much, ended up LOVING it. (Even Leto!).
– Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian
I saw Blade Runner 2049 a few days ago, and the more I think about it the more I love about it. Gorgeously directed. Sylvia Hoeks is AMAZING.
Astonishing. More than just a visual wonder, it's a groundbreaking science fiction masterpiece.
– Jimmy O., JoBlo's Movie Emporium
Everyone bow down to Denis Villeneuve. He's done the impossible and delivered a huge home run with Blade Runner 2049. Loved it. You do not have to have seen the original Blade Runner to watch Blade Runner 2049. But it will definitely make the film better if you have. Even if you have no interest in the film, the breathtaking cinematography by Roger Deakins is worth the price of admission. He's a God.
I've seen Blade Runner 2049. I looks amazing, characters and performances are strong, stays true to the original but there are flaws.
Blade Runner 2049 is phenomenal. Visually mind-blowing sci-fi with noir roots shining through in a tight, twisty mystery. Best of 2017 so far. Denis Villeneuve is unquestionably one of the elite working directors and there's no excuse if Deakins doesn't win the Oscar.


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Please note that past papers orders will be processed as soon as possible after placing your order and will generally be dispatched within 5 working days via courier.
An invoice will be provided with all despatched orders based on the scale of fees shown on our Terms and Conditions page.
Our payment terms are strictly 28 days from date of invoice.


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My dearest Lindsey & Bryce have been making their rounds on the blogosphere this week, and rightfully so! Their notable San Juan Capistrano wedding was the most perfect fusion of handmade, heartfelt, and hands-down lovely. I could not have dreamt of a more perfect day for them if I tried.
I wish I had the words to describe how much I love Lindsey & Bryce. I wish I could explain to you how fitting every last detail was. And while I'm at... I wish I could make you understand how terribly awesome Noa is for bringing their day alive again through these pictures. Goodness gracious, these pictures!
In every way... Perfection.
And hugs to Noa at Feather Love for sharing pics with us! There's tons more cool photos from this wedding on her blog. Click HERE to check it out!


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CASATA 1 – two bedroom apartment, located in Romana area, nearby Everest, McDonalds, KFC fast-food restaurants, 2nd floor, nice and clean entrance, safe and quiet building, renovated, furniture and appliances in warm colours, nice and sunny living room, fully equipped kitchen, 2 bathrooms (one with Jacuzzi, one with shower cabin), oak parquetry, Italian tiles, nearby shops, 24/h supermarket, market, coffee bars and restaurants.
The apartment has: air conditioning, fully equipped kitchen with appliances, such as cooking stove, hood, microwave oven, toaster, coffee maker, refrigerator, and washing machine and other facilities like study desks, orthopedic mattresses, extensible couch, TV sets, cable TV, Stereo CD, hair dryer, iron and ironing board, boiler for hot water in case of emergency, cordless phones, wireless internet connection.
It will be our pleasure to provide you (included in the rental price) the following services :
• Welcome pack, hotel products and mini-bar
• Technical assistance 24 hours per day;
• Costs for heating, gas supply, electricity, water, wireless internet connection, TV cable, sewage and garbage.
• Maid service every three days (she will clean the apartment change the towels and the bed linen)
Cleaning fee: 25 EUR.
Additional fees to be charged upon arrival
Cleaning Fee: 25€
Reservation Detail:
After you successfully submit your reservation request, you will receive an e-mail response from the home owner or property manager, within the next 24 hours. At this point, the full details of your confirmed reservation including the address of the property and the contact details of your local host will be shared with you through e-mail.
We hope you have a pleasant stay!


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|Message view
|« Date » · « Thread »
|« Date » · « Thread »
|"Tsz Wo (Nicholas), SZE (JIRA)" <j...@apache.org>
|[jira] Commented: (MAPREDUCE-1280) Eclipse Plugin does not work with Eclipse Ganymede (3.4)
|Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:56:39 GMT
[ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAPREDUCE-1280?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12913169#action_12913169 ] Tsz Wo (Nicholas), SZE commented on MAPREDUCE-1280: --------------------------------------------------- I was going to commit this. Which versions should this be committed? 0.20, 0.21 and trunk? > Eclipse Plugin does not work with Eclipse Ganymede (3.4) > -------------------------------------------------------- > > Key: MAPREDUCE-1280 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAPREDUCE-1280 > Project: Hadoop Map/Reduce > Issue Type: Bug > Affects Versions: 0.20.1, 0.21.1, 0.22.0 > Environment: Windows XP with Eclipse "Ganymede" 3.4 > Reporter: Aaron Kimball > Assignee: Alex Kozlov > Fix For: 0.20.3, 0.21.1, 0.22.0 > > Attachments: alex-HADOOP-3744.patch, HADOOP-3744.patch, HadoopApplicationLaunchShortcut.diff > > > The newest version of Eclipse seems incompatible with the plugin. The plugin as released in 0.16.4 will allow you to add/remove MapReduce servers, and will allow you to browse/manipulate the DFS in the DFS Browser, but will not allow you to run programs. Clicking "Run As * Run On Hadoop" will simply not cause the run-on-hadoop server selection window to appear. No error message is given. > Dropping the 0.17.1 copy of the plugin JAR into the eclipse/plugins/ directory does not fix the issue; it is in fact worse: Eclipse does not seem to regard the 0.17 plugin as real. No "MapReduce Perspective" is made available in the perspectives selection window. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.
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During last night's State of the Union, Bush said, "As we fix Social Security, we also have the responsibility to make the system a better deal for younger workers. And the best way to reach that goal is through voluntary personal retirement accounts." This morning the Wall Street Journal has a review of other countries who have experimented with privatizing government retirement programs. It hasn't gone very well. Here's a few highlights from the article:
Argentina's transition was initially projected to cost a little less than 1% of gross domestic product annually, or around $2.5 billion. When the law was drafted in the early 1990s, Argentina's economy was booming, tax revenue was high and officials were confident they wouldn't have to borrow much…By 2001, the cost of the entire social-security overhaul had grown to about 2.7% of output…That amount approached the entire government budget deficit that year. Financing the shortfall forced Argentina to borrow billions of dollars more at high interest rates, adding to an already towering debt…. investors eventually became so worried about the country's solvency they wouldn't lend it more money. The result was an economic collapse in December 2001.
Transition costs also helped to batter Bolivia, which adopted private accounts eight years ago in place of a traditional pension system. Bolivia's budget deficits more than doubled because of higher-than-expected transition costs. Even with additional borrowing, the government hasn't been able to pay promised benefits to many retirees. Some have joined in recurrent anti-government street protests.
In 1988, worried that baby-boomer retirement might someday bankrupt the state system, the Conservative government let consumers opt out of the supplementary state plan and set up private accounts… Insurance-company salespeople persuaded many people to switch out of workplace plans to private accounts…Trouble was, that advice often wasn't sound. Reason: The returns from the market would have had to have been gigantic to make salesmen's scenarios work…Regulators in the 1990s cracked down on what was called the "mis-selling" scandal, and insurers had to compensate customers who'd done worse by switching to private pensions…Given all the new rules, insurance-company salesmen complain it takes as long as 12 hours to sell a personal pension. But ever since the bursting of a stock-market bubble in 2000, fewer people have wanted the private accounts anyway, despite stocks' 2003 rally.


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The customer is the center for any company that wants to be relevant in the market. Listening, understanding, learning and offering unique and consistent multichannel Customer Experiences is a challenge that DatapointEurope responds to via efficiency and profitability.We propose solutions developed and specialized in the detection and linking of the variables involved in the experiences that customers live, and that can provide valuable and accurate information for the business and the development of a differential branding. They take the customer to the center of your organization in three ways:
- Helping to analyze the intelligence contained in interactions across all channels,
- Giving the client a voice, measuring and knowing their assessment of the brand, services and products and care to learn and improve,
- Improving the Customer Experience for differentiation and "engage" with an increasingly more expert and demanding client.


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There has been a lot of progress on the movement of gay rights but even with more states approving same sex marriage there are still millions of Americans who oppose it. Often liberals who support gay marriage will paint with a broad brush and call anyone who does not support marriage equality as 'intolerant' or as 'bigots'. These sort of insults on people serves no purpose other than to make people hide their beliefs but it certainly does not move them towards changing them. There is a big difference between people who oppose gay marriage for religious reasons and those who oppose gay marriage due to bigotry but claim that it is for religious reasons.
1. Those who oppose for religious reasons.
There is a large segment of the population who opposes gay marriage due to strongly held religious beliefs. The Bible clearly states that homosexuality is a sin and these people of faith do not want to endorse something (by making gay marriage legal) that they find to be immoral.
The people that have these views tend to be soft spoken and extremely polite. Often times people are surprised when someone that 'seems so nice' opposes gay marriage. The reason that this comes as a shock to people is that religious people who oppose gay marriage don't hate gay people. They don't harbor ill will towards gay people. You won't hear them use slurs like 'faggot' 'fag' 'homo' or 'queer' nor would you witness them mistreating gay people (being rude, etc). That is because the bible commands them to be good people and treat everyone with dignity and respect.
There really is no use arguing with them about whether or not homosexuality is a sin in the bible. It is pretty clear in the Bible that homosexuality is a sin. What is not clear is what the implications of that are in a society. The Bible never states how Christians are suppose to behave when they are ruling a society. This is based on when the Bible was written.
There are some reasonable discussions/arguments to be made with these people like how the new testament pretty clearly states that men are superior to women or that there are a bunch of rules in that no one follows (like having a women's head covered and men growing beards).
But these people shouldn't be labeled as bigots nor should they be screamed at that they should practice tolerance. There are two things fundamentally wrong with the tolerance movement. The first is that people aren't looking for tolerance they are looking for acceptance. I tolerate a screaming baby on an airplane but what gay people are looking for is acceptance as equal members of society with an equal ability to marry whomever they want.
The second problem with the tolerance movement is that it has no answer for people that they perceive to be intolerant. People will argue that religious people need to 'be tolerant' of gay people, while at the same time ridiculing their beliefs.
2. Pseudo-religious/bigots
This is a group that does not like gay people, they don't feel comfortable around gay people and they don't want anything to do with gay people. This group often isn't particularly religious but will often harbor their feelings of resentment towards homosexuals as being religious in nature. That is because they don't want to own up to the fact that they don't like gay people and want to use something to deflect that.
It is in fact relatively easy to distinguish people in this group from the people who are actually religious for a couple of reasons. The first is that you will hear slurs about homosexuals in this group. The seconds is that they aren't particularly religious so they will have a hard time quoting multiple Bible passages and are easily stumped about where their belief in homosexuality being immoral comes from (unlike the actual religious group who will be quoting enough Bible passages that you'll have to go look them up). These individuals may be rude to homosexuals or make snide remarks either around a gay person they interact with or behind their back.


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Hi Thomas Anderson,
I'm inviting you to "Join Us" here on "All" of these Groups (They are for Everyone: Males & Females). Thanks in advance for your support. Feel free to add your own personal Photos (Old & New) to all of the Groups and to leave comments!
01- The Centennettes, Cheerleaders, Song Girls, Flag Girls, Drill Team, Majorettes (Rally Club Members) & All Centennial High Alumni members (Males & Females) Are Welcome!! Group
02- The "All In The Family" Group
03- "Big Ten" Apache Sharing Corner Group
04- PROMS 'R' US Group
05- GRADS 'R' US, ARROWS, CSF& ASB OFFICERS Group
06- COUPLE MATCHES, ALUMNI WEDDINGS & MARRIAGES Group
07- C.H.S. CLASS REUNION EVENTS & HIGHLIGHTS Group
08- Apache Homecoming Photo Gallery Group
09- COMPTON "Hub City's Finest!! Group
10- Apache Alumni "IN MEMORIAM" Group
11- APACHES at Work (On Their Jobs & During Retirement)!! Group
12- Classmates Celebrations (Birthdays, Anniversaries, Holiday Celebrations, Class Get-Togethers)!! Group
13- The Way We Were "Then and Now" Group
14- You Know You Are A "True Apache If"? Group
15- "THE BROOK" Willowbrook Jr. High School "PIONEERS" Group
16- "Big Ten" Apache SPORTS Group
17- Apache BAND, NJROTC, CHOIR & MODERN DANCE!! Group
18- "Big Ten" Apache Entrepreneurs & Their Businesses!! Group
19- YOUR CLASS Group
Love and Blessings, Phoebe Macon c/o '75
© 2019 Created by Wayne Ware c/o '75 (WebMaster). Powered by


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PROJECT 12, 46. 6m (153ft) offers an incredible opportunity for cruising this summer. Brand new to 2013, the owner strongly encourages inspections in order to appreciate the exquisite quality on board.
Built for an experienced yacht owner, PROJECT 12 combines impressive build quality with exhilarating performance and excellent guest spaces. An intelligent arrangement takes full advantage of the yacht's volume to provide generous living areas throughout and accommodation for up to 16 guests in luxurious surroundings. Outstanding features include the full beam sky lounge on the upper deck with large sliding doors to port and starboard and bulwarks that fold down to create a balcony on each side with spectacular 180° views.
The same dedicated build team has worked on PROJECT 12throughout the build, from Cantieri di Pisa through to completion at Pisa Superyachts, to ensure the very highest standards of finish and delivery. The success of the build is supported with exhilarating performance, generated by twin 4,670hp MTU engine.
New reduced asking price: EUR 19,500,000
PROJECT 12 is offered for sale by Burgess as Joint Central Agents
For more information on this fantastic yacht, please contact a BURGESS broker now.


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Go to our Wild Images Photographic Tours
Welcome to Birdquest
Please use the options below to view photos from specific places or of particular creatures. Alternatively, scroll though the pictures using the arrows at the bottom of the page.
Painted Sandgrouse is a subcontinent endemic, and is easily found near Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve (Craig Robson)
Call us: 01254 826317 (international: +44 1254 826317) Email us: email@example.com