text:
I'm online over the holidays but everyone's so busy there isn't much point in blogging during this period. More important things dominate so I won't be posting until early January.
Have a great holiday.
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201
Yesterday Nanosolar announced it has started to sell cheap solar panels at a materials cost of roughly $1/W and a finished panel cost of ~$2/W: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1846022020071218. As a reference point, coal powered electricity is about $1/W when considering the fully burdened cost of the plant and operations. When a new technology is within a factor of two of an old, heavily invested technology, I get excited. This is getting interesting.
Nanosolar was founded in 2002 and has plants in San Jose, CA and another near Berlin, Germany. They received $20M from Mohr Davidow Ventures. Other investors include Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
More articles on Nanosolar: http://www.nanosolar.com/articles.htm. Thanks to Will Whitted for directing me to Nanosolar.
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | firstname.lastname@example.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh
This note on the Google infrastructure was sent my way by Andrew Kadatch (Live Search) by way of Sam McKelvie (Cloud Infrastructure Services). It's not precise in all dimensions, but it does a good job of bringing together the few facts that have been released by Google, and it points to its references if you are interested in a deeper dive.
The infrastructure summary is at: http://highscalability.com/google-architecture. No new data here, but a good summary if you haven't read all the direct sources from which the summary was drawn.
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-C/1279, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | firstname.lastname@example.com
Last week Google announced their Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. This is a two pronged effort combining external investment with internal Google research. The external investments include $10M in Makani Power, a startup aiming to harness high altitude winds. Makani explains that high altitude winds have the highest energy density of any renewable energy source. Google also invested in eSolar as part of this program. eSolar is a startup aiming to produce utility scale solar energy farms ranging from 25MW to 500MW.
More detail on:
· Makani: http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/makani.pdf
· eSolar: http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/esolar.pdf
In addition to the external investments, Google is staffing a team with a mission of assembling 1 Gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. More detail at: http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/index.html.
It's hard to argue with the "cheaper than coal" target. If renewable resources actually could be less expensive than coal, they would be used without social pressure, government subsidies, or other external tweaks to the market. Looking at the business side, this looks like a good marketing investment for Google as well. Google's datacenter footprint continues to grow at an unprecedented pace while, at the same time, datacenter power consumption is becoming an social concern and attracting regulatory attention. This investment is clearly a well timed and well thought through business investment as well.
The number 1 Amazon AWS requirement just got met: structured storage. Amazon announced SimpleDB yesterday although it's not yet available for developers to play with. I'm looking forward to being able to write a simple application against it – I've had fun with S3. But, for now, the docs will have to do.
In the announcement (http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb), it's explained that SimpleDB is not a relational DB. AWS notes that some customers run relational DBs in EC2 and, those that need complex or strictly enforced schema, will continue to do this. Others that only need a simple structured store with much less administrative overhead will use SimpleDB. AWS explains that they will make it increasingly easy to do both.
The hard part of running a RDBMS in EC2 is that there is no data protection. The EC2 local disk is 100% ephemeral. Some folks are using block replicators such as DRBD (http://www.drbd.org/) to keep two MySQL systems in sync. It's kind of a nice solution but requires some skill to set up. When AWS says "make it easier" I suspect they are considering something along these lines. A block replicator would be a wonderful EC2 addition. However, for those that really only need a simple structured store, SimpleDB is (almost) here today.
My first two interests are data model and pricing. The data model is based upon domains, items, attributes and values. A domain roughly corresponds to a database and you are allowed up to 100 domains. All queries are within a domain. Within a domain, you can create items. Each item has an ID (presumably unique). Every Item has attributes and attributes have values. You don't need to (and can't) declare the schema of an item and any item can have any number of attributes up to 256 per item. Attributes have values and the values can repeat. So a given item may have an attribute or may not and it can have the attribute more than once. Attributes have values and value are simple UTF-8 strings limited to 1024 bytes. All attributes are indexed.
The space overhead gives a clue to storage format:
· Raw byte size (GB) of all item IDs + 45 bytes per item +
· Raw byte size (GB) of all attribute names + 45 bytes per attribute name +
· Raw byte size (GB) of all attribute-value pairs + 45 bytes per attribute-value pair
The storage format appears to be a single ISAM index of (item, attribute, value). It wouldn't surprise me if the index used in SimpleDB is the same code that S3 uses for metadata lookup.
The query language is respectable and includes: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH, AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION. Queries are resource limited to know more than 5 seconds of execution time.
The storage model, like S3, is replicated asynchronously across data centers with the good and the bad that comes with this approach: the data is stored geo-redundantly which is wonderful but it is possible to update a table and, on a subsequent request, not even see your own changes. The consistency model is very weak and the storage reliability is very strong. I actually like the model although most folks I talk to complain that it's confusing. Technically this is true but S3 uses the same consistency model. I've spoken to many S3 developers and never heard a complaint (admittedly some just don't understand it).
Pricing was my second interest. There are three charges for SimpleDB:
· Machine Utilization: $0.14/machine hour
· Data Transfer:
o $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
o $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
o $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
o $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB
· Structured Storage: $1.50 GB/month
$1.50 GB/month or $18 GB/year is 10x the $1.80 GB/year charged by S3. Fairly expensive in comparison to S3 but a bargain compared to what it cost to manage an RDBMS and the hardware that supports it.
More data on SimpleDB from AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb.
Sriram Krishnan has an excellent review up at: http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2007/12/amazon-simpledb-technical-overview.html
Thanks to Sriram Krishnan (Develop Division) and Dare Obasanjo (WinLive Platform Services) for sending this one my way. I'm really looking forward to playing with SimpleDB and seeing how customers end up using it. Overall, I find it tastefully simple and yet perfectly adequate for many structured storage tasks.
SpecPOWER is the first industry standard benchmark that evaluates power and performance characteristics of high volume servers. Yesterday the final spec was released (see below thanks to Kushagra Vaid of GFS H/W Architecture & Standards).
I have quibbles with this benchmark but they really are mostly quibbles. Generally, I'm thrilled to see a benchmark out there that shines a light on server power consumption. The entire industry needs it. Benchmarks drive action and we have lots of low hanging fruit to grab when it comes to server power/performance.
The press release is up at: http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/ and early results are at http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/power_ssj2008.html.
I remember working on IBM DB2 years back when we first ran TPC-A. Prior to the benchmark we had a perfectly good database management system that customers were using successfully to run some very large businesses. When we first ran TPC-A, let's just say we didn't like what we saw. We got to work and ended up improving DB2 by a full factor of 10 in that release and then went on and improved by a further factor of 4 in the next release. Yes I know the only way to improve that much is to start off REALLY needing it. That's my point. As a direct result of the benchmark giving us and customers increased visibility into OLTP performance, the product improved 40x in less than 5. Customers gained, the product got better, and it gave the engineering team good goals to rally around. Benchmarks help customers.
As benchmarks age, it's harder to find the big differentiating improvements. Once the easy changes are found and even the more difficult improvements have been worked through, benchmark specials typically begin to emerge. Companies start releasing changes that help the benchmarks and do nothing and, in rare cases, can even hurt real customer workloads. Eventually, this almost always happens and causes industry veterans, myself included, to distrust benchmarks. We forget that in the early years of most benchmarks, they really did help improve the product and delivered real value to customers.
I'm very happy to see SPEC release a benchmark that measures power and I'm confident that it will help drive big power efficiency gains. Sure, we'll eventually see the game playing benchmark specials but, for now, I predict many of the improvements will be real. This will help the industry evolve more quickly. Now can someone please start working on a data center efficiency benchmark? Huge innovations are waiting in data center design and even more in how existing designs are deployed.
From: email@example.com [mailto:email@example.com] On Behalf Of Alan AdamsonSent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 8:44 AMTo: email@example.com: (osgmembers-363) SPECpower benchmark availability
I am delighted to announce the public availability of the initial SPECpower benchmark, SPECpower_ssj2008 - you can find the initial press release here http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/ , and see initial results here : http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/power_ssj2008.html This benchmark release is the result of a long and strenuous process (I cannot recall a committee meeting four days a week for several hours each day), needed partly because of the new ground being plowed. I expect that all forthcoming benchmark development groups will be thinking about how to incorporate power measurements, and that the power committee will be looking at extending the scope of its workloads, and also helping other committees learn from their experience. And now, on to several other benchmarks in or heading for general membership review. This is a pretty exciting time for the OSG! My thanks and congratulations to those who worked so hard on this initial SPECpower benchmark. Alan Adamson 905-413-5933 Tieline 969-5933 FAX: 905-413-4854OSG Chair, SPEC Internet: firstname.lastname@example.com Technology CentreIBM Toronto Lab
Google announced a project in October 2006 to install 9,212 solar panels on the roof of its headquarters complex. Currently over 90% of these panels are installed and active. They expect the installation will produce 30% of the peak power requirements of the headquarters buildings. For example, as I post this, they report 0.6 MW have been produced over the last 24 hour period. The roughly ½ megawatt is arguably in the noise when compared with the Google total data center power consumption which remains a carefully guarded secret. With high 10's of data centers world-wide each consuming in the 10WM range, the 0.6 produced on the roof of the HQ building is a very small number. Nonetheless, 0.6MW is MUCH better than nothing and it's great to see these resources committed to making a difference.
The real time power production report for this installation can be found at: http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home. Thanks to Lewis Curtis for sending this my way.
I've long argued that the firm and clear division between development and operations common in many companies is a mistake. Development doesn't feel the pain and understand what it takes to make their services more efficient to operate. Operations tends to hire more people to deal with the mess. It doesn't work, it isn't efficient, and it's slow. The right model has the development/ops line very blurred. The Amazon model takes this to an extreme with essentially a "you wrote it, you run it" approach. This is nimble and delivers the pain right back where it can be most efficiently solved: development. But it can be bit tough on the engineering team. The approach I like most is a hybrid, where we have a very small tier 1 support team operations with everything else going back to development.
However, if I had to err to one extreme or the other, I would head down the Amazon path. A clear division between ops and dev leads to an over-the-wall approach that is too slow and too inefficient. What's below is more detail on the Amazon approach, not so much because they do it perfectly but because they represent an extreme and therefore are a good data point to think though. Also note the reference to test-in-production found in the last paragraph. This is 100% the right approach in my opinion.
When I was at Amazon (and I don't think anything has changed) services were owned soup to nuts by the product team. There were no testers and no operations people. Datacenter operations, security, and operations were separate, centralized groups.
So 'development' was responsible for much of product definition and specification, the development, deployment and operation of services. This model came down directly from Jeff Bezos; his intention was to centralize responsibility and take away excuses. If something went wrong it was very clear who was responsible for fixing it. Having said that, Amazon encouraged a no-blame culture. If things went wrong the owner was expected to figure out the root cause and come up with a remediation plan.
This had many plusses and a few negatives. On the positive side:
· Clear ownership of problems
· Much shorter time to get features into production. There was no hand-off from dev to test to operations.
· Much less requirement for documentation, (both a plus and a minus)
· Very fast response to operational issues, since the people who really knew the code were engaged up-front.
· Significant focus by developers on reliability and operability, since they were the people responsible for running the service
· Model works really well for new products
· Developers have to carry pagers. On-call rotations, with people on-call required to respond to a sev-1 within 15 minutes of being paged 24 hours a day. Could lead to burn-out.
· Ramp up curve for new developers is extremely steep because of the lack of documentation and process
· For some teams the operations load completely dominated, making it very difficult to tackle new features or devote time to infrastructure work.
· Coordinating large feature development across multiple teams is tough.
The one surprise in this is that in my opinion code quality was as good as or better than here, despite having no testers. People developed an approach of deploying to a few machines and observing their behavior for a few days before starting a large roll out. Code could be reverted extremely quickly.
Michael Hunter, who authors the Testing and Debugging blog at Dr. Dobb's Journal, asked me for an interview on testing related topics some time back. I've long lamented that, industry-wide, there isn't nearly enough emphasis on test and software quality assurance innovation. For large projects, test is often the least scalable part of the development process. So, when Michael offered me a platform to discuss test more broadly, I jumped on it.
Michael structures these interviews, and his subsequent blog entry, around five questions. These ranged from where I first got involved in software testing, through the most interesting bug I've run into, what has most surprised me about testing, what's the most important thing for a tester to know, and what's the biggest challenge facing the test discipline over the next five years.
Michael's interview is posted at: http://www.ddj.com/blog/debugblog/archives/2007/12/five_questions_39.html.
Mike Zintel (Windoes Live Core) sent this one my way. It's a short 2:45 video that is not particularly informative but it is creative: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o.
Amazon doesn't release much about its inner workings which is unfortunate in that hey do some things notably well and often don't get credit. My view is that making some of these techniques more public would be a great recruiting tool for Amazon but I understand the argument for secrecy as well.
Ronny Kohavi recently pointed me to this presentation on A/B testing at Amazon. It's three years old but still well worth reading. Key points from my perspective:
· Amazon is completely committed to A/B testing. In past Bezos presentations he's described Amazon as a "data driven company". One of the key advantages of a service is you get to see in real time how well it's working. Any service that doesn't take advantage of this and is just making standard best guess or informed expert decisions, is missing a huge opportunity and hurting their business. The combination of A/B testing and cycling through ideas quickly does two wonderful things: 1) it makes your service better FAST, and 2) it takes the politics and influence out of new ideas. Ideas that work win and, those that don't show results, don't get used whether proposed by a VP or the most junior web designers. It's better for the service and for everyone on the team.
· The infrastructure focus at Amazon. Bezos gets criticized by Wall Street analyst for over investing in infrastructure but the infrastructure investment gives them efficiency and gives them pricing power which is one of their biggest assets. The infrastructure investment also allows them to host third parties which gives Amazon more scale in a business where scale REALLY matters and it gives customers broader selection which tends to attract more customers. Most important, it gives Amazon, the data driven company, more data and this data allows them to improve their service rapidly and give customers a better experience: "customers who bought X…"
· Negative cost of capital: Slide 8 documents how they get a product on day 0, sell it on day 20, get paid on day 23, and pay the supplier on day 44.
· Slide 7 shows what can be done with a great infrastructure investment: respectable margins and very high inventory turn rates.
The presentation is posted: http://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/emetricsAmazon.pdf.
Some months back I finished a paper with Joe Hellerstein and Michael Stonebraker scheduled to be published in the next issue of Foundations and Trends of Databases. This paper is aimed at describing how current generation database management systems are implemented. I'll post a reference to it here once it is published.
As very small part of this paper, we cover the process model used by Oracle, DB2, MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. A process model is how a database maps the work it's doing on behalf of multiple concurrent users onto operating system processes and/or threads. This is an important design choice in that it has fundamental impact on the number of concurrent requests that can be supported, development costs, maintainability, and code base portability amongst other issues.
These same design choices are faced by most high scale server designers and is equally applicable to mail servers, web servers, app servers, and any other application needing to service large numbers of requests in parallel. Given the importance of the topic and it's applicability to all multi-user server systems, it's worth covering separately here. I find it interesting to note that three of the leading DBMSs support more than one process model and one supports four variants. There clearly is no single right answer.
Summarizing the process models supported by IBM DB2, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server:
1. Process per DBMS Worker: This is the most straight-forward process model and is still heavily used today. DB2 defaults to process per DBMS worker on operating systems that don't support high quality, scalable OS threads and thread per DBMS worker on those that do. This is also the default Oracle process model but they also supports process pool as described below as an optional model. PostgreSQL runs the Process per DBMS Worker model exclusively on all operating system ports.
2. Thread per DBMS Worker: This an efficient model with two major variants in use today:
a. OS thread per DBMS Worker: IBM DB2 defaults to this model when running on systems with good OS thread support. This is the model used by MySQL as well.
b. DBMS Thread per DBMS Worker: In this model DBMS Workers are scheduled by a lightweight thread scheduler on either OS processes or OS threads both of which are explained below. This model avoids any potential OS scheduler scaling or performance problems at the expense of high implementation costs, poor development tools and debugger support, and substantial long-standing maintenance costs. There are two sub-categories of this model:
i. DBMS threads scheduled on OS Process: a lightweight thread scheduler is hosted by one or more OS Processes. Sybase uses this model and began with the thread scheduler hosted by a single OS process. One of the challenges with this approach is that, to fully exploit shared memory multi-processors, it is necessary to have at least one process per processor. Sybase has since moved to hosting DBMS threads over potentially multiple OS processes to avoid this limitation. When DBMS threads within multiple processes, there will be times when one process has the bulk of the work and other processes (and therefore processors) are idle. To make this model work well under these circumstances, DBMSs must implement thread migration between processes. Informix did an excellent job of this starting with the Version 6.0 release. All current generation systems supporting this model implement a DBMS thread scheduler that schedules DBMS Workers over multiple OS processes to exploit multiple processors.
ii. DBMS threads scheduled on OS Threads: Microsoft SQL Server supports this model as a non-default option. By default, SQL Server runs in the DBMS Workers multiplexed over a thread pool model (described below). This SQL Server option, called Fibers, is used in some high scale transaction processing benchmarks but, otherwise, is in very light use.
3. Process/Thread Pool: In this model DBMS workers are multiplexed over a pool of processes. As OS thread support has improved, a second variant of this model has emerged based upon a thread pool rather than a process pool. In this later model, DBMS workers are multiplexed over a pool of OS threads:
a. DBMS workers multiplexed over a process pool: This model is much more efficient than process per DBMS worker, is easy to port to operating systems without good OS thread support, and scales very well to large numbers of users. This is the optional model supported by Oracle and the one they recommend for systems with large numbers of concurrently-connected users. The Oracle default model is process per DBMS worker. Both of the options supported by Oracle are easy to support on the vast number of different operating systems they target (at one point Oracle supported over 80 target operating systems).
b. DBMS workers multiplexed over a thread pool: Microsoft SQL Server defaults to this model and well over 99% of the SQL Server installations run this way. To efficiently support 10's of thousands of concurrently connected users, SQL Server optionally supports DBMS threads scheduled on OS threads.
Most current generation commercial DBMSs support intra-query parallelism, the ability to execute all or parts of query in parallel. Essentially, intra-query parallelism is the temporary assignment of multiple DBMS workers to execute a SQL query. The underlying process model is not impacted by this feature other a single client connection may, at times, have more than a single DBMS worker.
Process model selection has a substantial influence on DBMS scaling and portability. As a consequence, three of the most successful commercial systems each support more than one process model across their product line. From an engineering perspective, it would clearly be much simpler to employ a single process model across all operating systems and at all scaling levels. But, due to the vast diversity of usage patterns and the non-uniformity of the target operating systems, however, each DBMS has elected to support multiple models.
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | Msft internal blog: msblogs/JamesRH
There are few things we do more important than interviewing and yet it's done very unevenly across the company. Some are amazing interviewers and others, well, I guess they write good code or something else J.
Fortunately, interviewing can be learned and, whatever you do and wherever you do it, interviewing with insight pays off. Some time back, a substantial team was merged with the development group I lead and, as part of the merger, a bunch of senior folks many of whom do As Appropriate (AA) interviews and all of which were frequently contributors on our interview loops. The best way to get in sync on interviewing techniques and leveling is to talk about it so I brought us together several times to talk about interviewing, to learn from each other, and set some standards on how we're going to run our loops. In preparation for that meeting, I wrote up some notes of what I view as best practices for AAs but these apply to all interviewers and I typically send these out whenever I join a team.
Some of these are specific to Microsoft but many apply much more broadly. There is some internal Microsoft jargon used in the doc. For example, at Microsoft the AA is short for "As Appropriate" and is the final decision making on whether an offer will be made. However, most of what is here is company invariant.
The doc: JamesRH_AA_Interview_NotesX.doc (37 KB).
I also pulled some of the key points into a ppt: AA Interview NotesX.ppt (156.5 KB).
Ted Wobber (msft Research) brought together the following short list of SSD performance data. Note the FusionIO part claiming 87,500 IOPS in a 640 GB package. I need to run a perf test against that part and see if it's real. It looks perfect for very hot OLTP workloads.
A directory of "fastest SSDs":
Note that this contains RAM SSDs as well as flash SSDs. This list, however, seems to be ranked by bandwidth, not IOPs.
This manufacturer make a very high-end database accelerator:
Among the things that they do are: most likely logical address re-mapping, way over-provisioning of free space, highly parallel ops
Then there are these guys who do the hard work in the host OS:
They clearly do logical address re-mapping, but their material is strangely devoid of mention of cleaning costs. Perhaps they get "free" hints from the OS free block table.
Nevertheless, the following article is worth reading:
FusionIO: http://fusionio.com/.
Google has been hiring networking hardware folks so it's been long speculated that they are building their own network switches. This remains speculation only but the evidence is mounting:
From http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-secret-10gbe-switch/ (Sent my way by James Depoy of the OEM team and Michael Nelson of SQL Server):
Through conversations with multiple carrier, equipment, and component industry sources we have confirmed that Google has designed, built, and deployed homebrewed 10GbE switches for providing server interconnect within their data centers.
We believe Google based their current switch design on Broadcom's (BRCM) 20-port 10GE switch silicon (BCM56800) and SFP+ based interconnect. It is likely that Broadcom's 10GbE PHY is also being employed. This would be a repeat of the same winner-take-all scenario that played out in 1GbE interconnect.
This article attempts to track Google consumption by tracking shipments of 20 port 10GigE silicone. Not a bad approach. In their determination, Google is installing 5,000 ports a month. If you assume that servers dominate over inter-switch connections, the implication is that Google is installing nearly 5k servers per months.
Last week I attended and presented at USENIX LISA (http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/) conference. I presented Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Applications and the slides are at: PowerPoint slides.
I particularly enjoyed Andrew Hume's (AT&T) talk where he talked about the storage sub-systems used at AT&T research and the data error rates he's been seeing over the last several decades and what he does about it. His experience exactly parallels mine with more solid evidence and can be summarized by all layers in the storage hierarchy produce errors. The only way to store data for the long haul is with redundancy coupled with end-to-end error detection. I enjoyed the presentations of Shane Knapp and Avleen Vig of Google in that they provided a small window into how Google takes care of their ~10^6 servers with a team of 30 or 40 hardware engineers world-wide, the software tools they use to manage the world's biggest fleet and the releases processes used to manage these tools. Guido Trotter also of Google talked about how Google IT (not the production systems) were using Xen and DRDB to build a highly reliable IT systems. He used DRDB (http://www.drbd.org/download.html) to do asynchronous, block level replication between a primary and a secondary. The workloads runs in a Xen virtual machine and, on failure, is restarted on the secondary. Ken Brill, Executive Director of the Uptime Institute made a presentation focused on power being the problem. Ignore floor space cost, system density is not the issue, it's a power problem. He's right and it's becoming increasingly clear each year.
My rough notes from the sessions I attended are at: JamesRH_Notes_USENIXLISA2007x.docx (21.03 KB).
Three weeks ago I presented at HPTS (http://www.hpts.ws/index.html). HPTS is an invitational conference held every two years since 1985 in Asilomar California that brings together researchers, implementers, and users of high scale transaction processing systems. It's one of my favorite conferences in that it attracts a very interesting group of people, is small enough that everyone can contribute and there is lots of informal discussion in a great environment on the ocean near Monterey.
I presented Modular Data Center Design and Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services. A highlight of this year's session was a joint keynote address from David Patterson of Berkeley and Burton Smith of Microsoft. Dave's slides are posted at DavidPattersonTechTrends2007.ppt (442.5 KB). Burton's not in the office right now so I don't have access to his but will post them when I do.
I'm the General Chair for the 2009 HPTS which is scheduled to be October 25 through 28, 2009. Keep the date clear and plan on submitting an interesting position paper to get invited. If you are doing high scale data centric applications, HPTS is always fun.
For the last year or so I've been collecting Scaling Web Site war stories and I've been posting them to my Microsoft internal blog. I collect them for two reasons: 1) scaling web site problems all center around persistent state management and I'm a database guy so the interest is natural, and 2) it's amazing how frequently the same trend appears: design a central DB. Move to functional partition. Move to a horizontal partition. Somewhere through that cycle, add caching at various levels. Most skip the step hardware evolution of starting with scale-up servers and then moving to scale out clusters but even that pattern shows up remarkably frequently (e.g. eBay, and Amazon).
Scaling web site war stories:
· Scaling Amazon: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/02/early-amazon-splitting-website.html
· Scaling Second Life: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/web_20_and_databases_part_1_se.html
· Scaling Technorati: http://www.royans.net/arch/2007/10/25/scaling-technorati-100-million-blogs-indexed-everyday/
· Scaling Flickr: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_3_flickr.html
· Scaling Craigslist: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_5_craigsl.html
· Scaling Findory: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/database_war_stories_8_findory_1.html
· MySpace 2006: http://sessions.visitmix.com/upperlayer.asp?event=&session=&id=1423&year=All&search=megasite&sortChoice=&stype=
· MySpace 2007: http://sessions.visitmix.com/upperlayer.asp?event=&session=&id=1521&year=All&search=scale&sortChoice=&stype=
· Twitter, Flickr, Live Journal, Six Apart, Bloglines, Last.fm, SlideShare, and eBay: http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2007/04/29/3616/the-top-10-presentation-on-scaling-websites-twitter-flickr-bloglines-vox-and-more
Thanks to Soumitra Sengupta for sending the Flickr and PoorButHappy pointer my way and to Jeremy Mazner for sending the MySpace references.
Earlier in the week Dr. Tachi Yamada of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation presented the work they are doing on health care in developing countries. Some years back Bill Gates gave a similar talk at Microsoft and it was an amazing presentation. Partly due to the depth and breadth of Bill's understanding of the world health care problem but what impressed me most was the effectiveness of applying business principles to a social problem. Applying capital to the highest leverage opportunities. Don't just invest in the breakthrough but also in the social and political barriers to uptake. Tailor the solution to the local environment. Work on the supply chain. Influence the economic factors that cause phara companies to invest in a given solution.
The same techniques that allow a company to find success in business can be applied to world healthcare. I love the approach and Dr. Yamada's talk this week followed a similar theme. My rough notes follow.
· Speaker: Dr. Tadataka (Tachi) Yamada
o Excellent presentation. He quitely relays the facts without slides and just lays out a very compelling and very clear picture of their approach to health care.
· About ½ the foundation focuses on health, ¼ on learning in the US, and ¼ on improving economic situation
· 1,000 babies will die during this talk.
· Life expectancy: 50 in sub-Sahara and close to 80 here in North America
· Bill "finally graduated" from Harvard last June and in his commencement address he said:
o humanities great advancements are not the discovery of technology but the application of it to fight inequity.
· $2T spent on healthcare in the US. A few billion from Gates foundation won't correct the lack of political will in how this is applied. $2B will have a fundamental impact spent in the developing world. This is where we can have the greatest positive impact and that's why the foundation focuses its healthcare resources in the developing world.
· HIV battle is using prevention. Lifetime cost of treatment makes it very expensive to battle via treatment.
o Circumcision has been shown very effective in reducing the transmission of HIV.
o Long term approach is vaccine (note that 25 years of research haven't yet found this)
§ We're investing $500m over 5 years in HIV vaccine research
· We focus on all phases of taking science to improved health outcomes:
o To science, then to local opinion, then to policy, and then to application. Without cover all four, full impact will not be relized.
· In developing world 70% of all care is private, often for profit, health care.
o Individuals purchasing directly from pharmacies (e.g. Malaria treatment)
o Basic point is that you need to understand the entire system (economics, policy, social factors, etc.)
· Mass customization is required for global success in business AND also in not-for-profit. The same ideas apply.
· Yamanda points out that bed nets are effective in the fight against Malaria but aren't in heavy use. He shows how companies market products and argues that we need to do the same thing in public health care. People have to want a treatment, people have to believe in it or it won't work.
· Peer reviews kill innovation. Need innovators reviewing innovation. Standard peer review tends to seek out incremental improvements to existing systems.
· 10m children lose their lives each year. Must stay focused on the prize: reduced mortality.
· Quote from one of his ex-managers: "If you aren't keeping score, you are just practicing"
o Metrics driven approaches are needed
· Birth rates: 30% lack of control and 70% demand side problem.
· We believe that a healthy pharmaceutical industry and believe in IP but need affordable prices in under developed world.
· Pharma makes less than 1% of the profits in the developing world. Selling at cost would drive volume and not impact the profit picture.
I wrote this back in March of 2003 when I lead the SQL Server WebData team but it's applicability is beyond that team. What's below, is a set of Professional Engineering principles that I've built up over the years. Many of the concepts below are incredibly simple and most are easy to implement but it's a rare team that does them all.
More important than the specific set of rules I outline below is to periodically stop, think in detail about what's going well and what isn't; think about what you want to personally do differently and what you would like to help your team do differently. I don't do this as often as I should – we're all busy with deadlines looming – but, each time I do, I get something significant out of it.
The latest word document is stored at: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/content/binary/ProfessionalEngineering.docx and the current version is inline below. Send your debates and suggestions my way.
Professional Engineering
James Hamilton, 2003.03.13
Update: 2007.03.09
· Security and data Integrity: The data business is about storing, managing, querying, transforming, and analyzing customer data and, without data integrity and security, we would have nothing of value to customers. No feature matters more than data integrity and security and failures along either of these two dimensions are considered the most serious. Our reputation with our customers and within our company is dependent upon us being successful by this measure, and our ability to help grow this business is completely dependent upon it.
· Code ownership: Every line of code in the system should have a non-ambiguous owner and there should be a back-up within that department. Generally, each team should be organized roughly along architectural boundaries avoiding components spread over many or multiple teams. There should be no files "jointly" owned by multiple teams. If necessary, split files to get non-ambiguous ownership.
· Design excellence: Utilize the collective expertise of the entire team and, where appropriate, experience from other teams. Design for the long haul. Think through cross-component and inter-feature interactions before proceeding. Never accept quick hacks that we can't maintain over the long term and don't rush something out if it can't be made to work. A good general rule: "never promise what you don't know how to do." Of course, all designs must be peer reviewed.
· Peer review: Peer review is one of the most important aspects of the engineering process and it's through code and design review that we get more IQ involved on all important and long lasting decisions. All designs and all code changes must be reviewed before being checked in. Make sure your reviewer has the understanding of the code needed to a good job and don't accept rushed or sloppy reviews. Reviewing is a responsibility and, those that do an excellent job deserve and will get special credit. All teams should know who their best reviewers are and should go to them when risk or complexity is higher than normal. When there are problems, I will always ask who reviewed the work. Reviewing is a responsibility we all need to take seriously.
· Personal integrity: It's impossible for a team to function and be healthy if we're not honest with each other and especially with ourselves. We should be learning from our mistakes and improving constantly and this simply isn't possible unless we admit our failures. If a commitment is made, it should be taken seriously and delivered upon. And, when things go wrong, we need to be open about it.
· Engineering process clarity: The engineering process including Development, PM, and Test should be simple and documented in sufficient detail that a new team member can join the team and be rapidly effective. It should be maintained and up-to-date and, when we decided to do something differently, it'll be documented here.
· Follow-through and commitment to complete: In engineering, the first 10% of the job is often the most interesting while the last 10% is the most important. Professional engineering is about getting the job done. Completely.
· Schedule integrity: Schedules on big teams are often looked at as "guidance" rather than commitments. Schedules, especially those released externally, are taken seriously and, as a consequence, external commitments need to be more carefully buffered than commitments made within your team. One of the best measures of engineering talent is how early scheduling problems are detected, admitted, and corrected. Ensure that there is sufficient time for "fit and finish" work. Ensure that the spec is solid early. Complete tests in parallel. Don't declare a feature to be done until at least 70% of the planned functional tests are passing (a SQL Server specific metric that I believe was originally suggested by Peter Spiro), and the code is checked in. Partner with dependent components for early private testing. When a feature is declared done, there should be very few bugs found subsequently, and none of these should be obvious.
· Code base quality: Code owners are expected to have a multiple release plan for where the component is going. Component owners need to understand competitors, current customer requirements, and are expected to know where the current implementation is weak and have a plan to improve it over the next release or so. Code naturally degrades over time and, without a focus on improvement, it becomes difficult to maintain over time. We need to invest 15 to 20% of our overall team resources in code hygiene. It's just part of us being invested in winning over multiple releases. We can't afford to get slowed or wiped out by compounding code entropy as Sybase was.
· Contributing to and mentoring others: All members of the team bring different skills to the team and all of us have an obligation to help others grow. Leads and more experienced members of the team should be helping other team members grow and gain good engineering habits. All team members have a responsibility to help others get better at their craft and part of doing well in this organization is in helping the team as a whole become stronger. Each of us have unique skills and experiences -- looks for ways to contribute and mentor other members of the team.
· QFEs: must be on time and of top quality. QFEs are one of the few direct contacts points we have with paying customers and we take them very seriously prioritizing QFEs above all other commitments. Generally, we put paying customer first. When a pri-1 QFE comes in, drop everything and, if necessary, get help. When a pri-2 or Pri-3 comes in, start within the next one or two days at worst. Think hard about QFEs -- don't just assume that what is requested represents what the customer needs nor that the solution proposed is the right one. We intend to find a solution for the customer but we must choose a fix that we can continue to support over multiple releases. Private QFEs are very dangerous and I'm generally not in support of them. Almost invariably they lead to errors or regressions in a future SP or release. The quality of QFEs can make or break a customer relationship and regressions in a "fix" absolutely destroy customer confidence.
· Shipped quality: This one is particularly tough to measure but it revolves around a class of decision that we have to make every day when we get close to a shipment: did we allow ourselves enough time to be able to fix bugs that will have customer impact or were we failing and madly triaging serious bugs into the next release trying to convince ourselves that this bug "wasn't very likely" (when I spend time with customers I'm constantly amazed at what they actually do in their shops – just about everything is likely across a sufficiently broad customer base). And, there's the flip side, did we fix bugs close to a release that destabilized the product or otherwise hurt customer satisfaction. On one side, triaging too much and on the other not enough and the only good way out of the squeeze is to always think of the customer when making the decision and to make sure that you always have enough time to be able to do the right thing.
· Check-in quality: The overall quality of the source tree impacts the effectiveness and efficiency of all team members. Check-in test suites must be maintained, new features should get check-in test suite coverage, and they must run prior to checking in. To be effective, check-in tests suites can't run much longer than 20 to 40 minutes so, typically, additional tests are required. Two approaches I've seen work in the past: 1) gauntlet/snap pre-checkin automation, or 2) autobuilder post-checkin testing.
· Bug limits: Large bug counts hide schedule slippage and the bugs count represents a liability that must be paid before shipping and large bug counts introduce a prodigious administrative cost. Each milestone, leads need to triage bugs and this consumes resources of productive members of the team that could be moving the product forward rather than taking care of the bug base. We will set limits for max number of bugs carried by each team and limits that I've used and found useful in the past are: each team limits active defects to less than 3 times the number of engineers on the team and no engineer should carry more than 5 active defects.
· Responsibility: Never blame other teams or others on your team for failures. If your feature isn't coming together correctly, it's up to you to fix it. I never want to hear that test didn't test a feature sufficiently, the spec was sloppy, or the developer wasn't any good. If you own a feature, whether you work in Test, Dev, or PM, then you are responsible for the feature being done well and delivered on time. You own the problem. If something is going wrong in some other part of the team and that problem may prevent success for the feature, find a solution or involve your lead and/or their manager. "Not my department." is not an option.
· Learn from the past: When work is complete or results come in, consider as a team what can be learned from these results. Post mortems are a key component of healthy engineering. Learn to broadly apply techniques that work well and take quick action when we get results back that don't meet our expectations.
· Challenge without failure: A healthy team should be giving all team members new challenges and pushing the limits for everyone. However, to make this work, you have to know when you are beyond your limits and before a problem is no longer solvable, get help. Basically, everyone should step to the plate but, before taking the last strike, get your lead involved. If that doesn't work, get their manager involved. Keep applying rule until success is found or the goal doesn't appear to be worth achieving.
· Wear as many hats as needed: On startups, everyone on the team does whatever is necessary for the team to be successful and, unfortunately, this attribute is sometimes lost on larger, more mature teams. If testing is behind, become a tester. If the specs aren't getting written, start writing. Generally, development can always out-pace test and sometimes can run faster than specs can be written. So self regulate by not allowing development to run more than a couple of weeks ahead of test (don't check in until 70% of the planned tests are passing) and, if works needs to be done, don't wait – just jump in help regardless of what discipline is in short supply.
· Treat other team members with respect: No team member is so smart as to be above treating others on the team with respect. But do your homework before asking for help – show respect for the time of the person whose help you are seeking.
· Represent your team professionally: When other teams ask questions, send notes, or leave phone messages ensure that they get quality answers. It's very inefficient to have to call a team three times to get an answer and it doesn't inspire confidence nor help teams work better together. Take representing your team seriously and don't allow your email quotas to be hit or phone messages to go unanswered.
· Customer Focus: Understand how customers are going to use your feature. Ensure that it works in all scenarios, with all data types, and supports all operating modes. Avoid half done features. For example, don't add features to Windows that won't run over Terminal Server and don't add features to SQL server that don't support all data types. Think about how a customer is going to use the feature and don't take the easy way out and add a special UI for this feature only. If it's administrative functionality, ensure that it is fully integrated into the admin UI and has API access consistent with the rest of the product. Avoid investing in a feature but not in how a customer uses the feature. For example, in SQL Server there is a temptation to expose new features as yet another stored procedure rather than adding full DDL and integrating into the management interface.
· Code Serviceability & Self Test: All code should extensively self check. Rather than simple asserts, a central product or service wide component should handle error recording and reporting. On failure, this component is called. Key internal structures are saved to disk along with a mini-dump and stack trace. This state forms the core of the Watson return data and the central component is responsible for sending data back (if enabled). Whether or not Watson reporting is enabled, the last N failures should be maintained on disk for analysis. There are two primary goals: 1) errors are detected early and before persistent state is damaged and 2) sufficient state is written to disk that problem determination is possible on the saved state alone and no-repro is required. SQL Server helped force this during the development of SQL Server 2005 by insisting that all failures during system test yield either 1) a fix based upon the stored failure data, or 2) a bug opened against the central bug tracking agent to record more state data to allow this class of issues to be more fully understood if it happens subsequently. If a customer calls service, the state of the last failure is recorded and can be easy sent in without asking the customer to step through error prone data acquisition steps and without asking for a repro.
· Direct Customer feedback: Feedback directed systems like Watson and SQM are amazingly powerful and are strongly recommended for all products.
· Ship often and incrementally: Products that ship frequently stay in touch with their customers, respond more quickly to changes in the market to changes in competitive offerings. Shipping infrequently, tends to encourage bad behavior in the engineering community where partly done features are jammed in and V1 ends up being a good quality beta test rather than a product ready for production. Infrastructure and systems should ship every 18 months, applications at least every 12 months, and services every three months.
· Keep asking why and polish everything: It's easy to get cynical when you see things going wrong around you and, although I've worked on some very fine teams, I've never seen a product or organization that didn't need to improve. Push for change across the board. Find a way to improve all aspects of your product and don't accept mediocrity anywhere. Fit and finish comes only when craftsman across the team care about the entire product as a whole. Look at everything and help improve everywhere. Don't spend weeks polishing your feature and then not read the customer documentation carefully and critically. Use the UI and API even if you didn't write it and spend time thinking of how it or your feature could be presented better or more clearly to customers. Never say "not my department" or "not my component" … always polish everything you come near.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.


text:
- Welcome, Guest! (Log In)
- View Cart
- Contact Us
Review Details
Milk Kefir Starter Kit
Product Rating:
Value | |
Quality | |
Price |
Product Review (submitted on June 24, 2014):
I received the grains in the mail and in two days had my first taste of kefir and have even shared with my parents. Made my first soft cheese last night and plan on making a cream cheese also. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Leading the Region in Healthcare!
Dedicated to serving the needs of Pratt, Kansas, Pratt Regional Medical Center is a progressive medical center serving south central Kansas and the panhandle of Oklahoma.
Sylvia Health Care Clinic
Located at 200 S. Main in Sylvia, Kansas, Sylvia Health Care Clinic is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Dr. Fredrick J. Farmer, III, D.O., A.M.E., and his physician assistant specialize in family medicine, aviation medicine, and wilderness medicine. Call (620) 486-2985 for an appointment.
Sylvia Health Care Clinic services include: family medicine, routine exams, school/sports physicals, pap smears, urgent care for illness and injury, referrals to specialty physicians, influenza and pneumonia vaccinations, administration of injectable allergy medications. As one of the area`s few aviation medicine specialists, Dr. Farmer also provides pilots with annual physicals required to retain their licenses.
PRMC Affiliated Medical Practices
Dodge City Women's Health Clinic Farmer Clinic Kinsley Rural Health Clinic Pratt Internal Medicine Group Satellite Clinic Services South Central Kansas Bone & Joint Center St. John Clinics Surgicenter Sylvia Health Care Clinic


text:
Please suggest a comprehensive bog/marsh book for the Midwest. I am in NE Illinois by the Wisconsin border.
I have The Natural Water Garden from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It does not have the in depth information I am looking for. I am currently interested in bog plant requirements. I have several pond books but these types of plants are only addressed in passing to fill planting pockets around ponds for aesthetics. I have a need for a more comprehensive bog/marsh book and would like a few suggestions. Thanks in advance. |
Follow-Up Postings:
- Posted by Into_the_woods z6 NJ (My Page) on Tue, Mar 30, 04 at 9:18
Waterscaping has separate chapters on marsh, swamp, pond, bog, wet meadow, even container gardening with water plants. The emphasis is on native plants but it does also include some non-natives. The author is Judy Glattstein. |
Hi Laura, This might be useful: The Book of Swamp and Bog: Trees, Shrubs, and Wildflowers of the Eastern Freshwater Wetlands by John Eastman, Amelia Hansen (Illustrator) Marie |
- Posted by LauraZone5 Illinois 5 (My Page) on Thu, Apr 1, 04 at 0:10
Why Thank You! |
I would highly recommend 'Gardening with Prairie Plants' by Sally Wasowski. Extensive coverage of bog and marginal plants for our area. Great photos and descriptions. |
- Posted by Veronicastrum z5 IL (My Page) on Tue, May 25, 04 at 9:47
Laura, IDNR sells a book called A Field Guide to the Wetlands of Illinois. It's not as comprehensive as I'd like to see but at least it is specific to our area and it's only $12.00. The book talks about the different types of wetlands and what plants are found in each type. There's a link below to an IDNR page selling the book. |
Here is a link that might be useful: WetlandsField Guide
Please Note: Only registered members are able to post messages to this forum. If you are a member, please log in. If you aren't yet a member, join now!
Return to the Book Reviews Forum
Information about Posting
- You must be logged in to post a message. Once you are logged in, a posting window will appear at the bottom of the messages. If you are not a member, please register for an account.
- Please review our Rules of Play before posting.
- Posting is a two-step process. Once you have composed your message, you will be taken to the preview page. You will then have a chance to review your post, make changes and upload photos.
- After posting your message, you may need to refresh the forum page in order to see it.
- Before posting copyrighted material, please read about Copyright and Fair Use.
- We have a strict no-advertising policy!
- If you would like to practice posting or uploading photos, please visit our Test forum.
- If you need assistance, please Contact Us and we will be happy to help.
Learn more about in-text links on this page here


text:
Arcane Brilliance: Mage leveling guide, 11-20
So, your mage is leveling nicely. You've wandered out of the starting area and into the wider zone beyond, done a bunch of quests, learned a rudimentary spell rotation (Frostbolt-->Fireball-->Fireball-->Fireball-->Conjure Water-->Drink) and now you've gone and hit level 10. This is a milestone for a number of reasons:
- The mage staff quest we talked about two weeks ago.
- You can now begin doing PvP in an actual battleground against players in your level bracket (as opposed to doing PvP against bored 12-year-olds who think it's fun to run around the starting areas with their level 80 death knights ganking lowbies).
- Your first talent point!
Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, Tips, PvP, Quests, Features, Leveling, Guides, Classes, Talents, Alts, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Battlegrounds


text:
School of Music
Home › Academics › Colleges › Henry Kendall College of Arts and Sciences › Departments and Schools › School of Music › News Events and Publications › Events Calendar › Jazz Youth Concert
Friday, October 12, 2012 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Free and Open to the Public
The School of Music presents the Jazz Youth Concert with the TU Jazz Band at the Lorton Performance Center in Gussman Concert Hall. The concert will begin at 10 a.m. The concert is free and open to the public.
Contact:Ana firstname.lastname@example.com
School of MusicLorton Performance Center2nd FloorPH: (918) 631-2262FAX: (918) 631-3589


text:
Research Topics
| REBECCA BARONSummaryAffiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital Country: USA Publications
Research Grants
| Collaborators
Detail Information
- Maternal smoking and the retinoid pathway in the developing lungSara E Manoli
Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, Brigham and Women s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Respir Res 13:42. 2012..Thus, abnormalities in this pathway could mediate maternal smoking effects. We tested whether maternal smoking disrupts retinoic acid pathway expression and functioning in a murine model... - Chronic endotoxin exposure produces airflow obstruction and lung dendritic cell expansionPeggy S Lai
Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Am J Respir Cell Mol Biol 47:209-17. 2012..These findings point to a novel underlying mechanism of airflow obstruction as a result of occupational LPS exposure, and suggest molecular and cellular targets for therapeutic development... - Genetically manipulated mouse models of lung disease: potential and pitfallsRebecca M Baron
Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women s Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol 302:L485-97. 2012..We will attempt to review the current technological approaches of generating gene-targeted mice and the enormous dataset derived from these studies, providing a template for lung investigators... - Pathobiology of sepsis: are we still asking the same questions?Rebecca M Baron
Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Brigham and Women s Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Am J Respir Cell Mol Biol 34:129-34. 2006 - Distamycin A inhibits HMGA1-binding to the P-selectin promoter and attenuates lung and liver inflammation during murine endotoxemiaRebecca M Baron
Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Brigham and Women s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
PLoS ONE 5:e10656. 2010.... - High-mobility group-I/Y proteins: potential role in the pathophysiology of critical illnessesIrvith M Carvajal
Pulmonary and Critical Care Division, Brigham and Women s Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Crit Care Med 30:S36-42. 2002.... - Heme oxygenase-1-derived carbon monoxide enhances the host defense response to microbial sepsis in miceSu Wol Chung
Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
J Clin Invest 118:239-47. 2008..These data advocate HO-1-derived CO as an important mediator of the host defense response to sepsis and suggest CO administration as a possible treatment for the disease...
Research Grants
- HMG-1/Y Regulation of NOS2 Expression in EndotoxemiaREBECCA BARON; Fiscal Year: 2007..These experiments will allow us to determine the role of HMG-I/Y in regulating NOS2 expression during endotoxemia and may reveal a novel target for improving outcomes from sepsis. ..
- Role of NOS2 in Sepsis-Induced ARDSRebecca M Baron; Fiscal Year: 2010..Achievement of the AIMS of this proposal hold significant promise for gaining novel insights into the pathobiology of sepsis-induced ARDS that can inform the development of new treatment strategies for these devastating syndromes. ..


text:
Reviewed Roasted Salmon With Walnut-Pepper Relish
Jul 21, 2013 in Food Network Community Toolbox on FoodNetwork.com
"Absolutely loved this recipe! I substituted sun-dried tomatoes for the roasted red pepper and loved it that way. Pine nuts would've been wonderful with this version, too. It's a bit of work, but every step is easy and the results delightful! Presentation is equally delightful -- & a great option for company, too.
Going on the list of..."
Reviewed Good Eats Roast Turkey
Dec 10, 2010 in Food Network Community Toolbox on FoodNetwork.com
"After several years of fiddling with turkey recipes and techniques, this way is now the ONLY way we fix the turkey. I recommend watching the video to see how to make the foil triangle to protect the breast and where to place the thermometer. I HIGHLY recommend purchasing the food thermometer/alarm so that you can take the turkey out exactly when..."


text:
Latest News
Under Attack! Contestants On Heidi Klum's 'Next Top Model...
Contestants on Heidi Klum's popular reality show Next Top Model have caught disgusting head lice!
At least two of the prospective top models on the G… READ MORE
Heidi Klum & Seal's Divorce Battle Heating Up
When they first split in January it was hoped that Heidi Klum and Seal's unexpected divorce would be amicable for the sake of their chil… READ MORE
Heidi Klum's On-Set Date With German Hunk
Just days after her soon-to-be ex-husband was spotted getting cozy with Aussie star Delta Goodrem, Heidi Klum proved she's moved on t… READ MORE
Seal Who? Heidi Klum Getting Cozy With German Top Model Co-Star
Seems that Heidi Klum might have found romance again.
According to Entertainment Tonight, the supermodel is getting mighty cozy with hunky… READ MORE
NEW DETAILS: Germany's Next Top Model Home Now A Crime Scene, Au...
The charred Hollywood Hills home rented by Heidi Klum's Germany's Next Top Model to house contestants in has been declared a crime scene by au… READ MORE
EXCLUSIVE: Heidi Klum Hunting For New 'Top Model' House Fo...
Supermodel Heidi Klum and her team of producers are frantically searching for a new house to film Germany's Next Top Model after a fire badly damaged … READ MORE


text:
Most Popular in:
Cosmetics Treatments
Future Trends in Mineral Makeup
By: Diane Ranger
Posted: October 27, 2010, from the November 2010 issue of Skin Inc. magazine.
Values in clients' personal lives have changed and that leads to a change in how they consume. People are spending more time with friends and family, and are focusing on what they consider to be the more important things in life. Consuming for the sake of consumption is no longer a way of life. Cosmetic consumers are demanding more quality products with multiple benefits, and what is inside the package will soon become more important than the package itself. Although packaging and presentation will always be very important, it will not be enough to hold a client, and it will not be the foundation upon which to build a business.
To predict how and where mineral makeup will grow in the future, it is important to revisit its history and evolution. Traditional makeup was initially used to add color accents to the face, and after a while, it was used to cover up imperfections. Mineral makeup brought the evolution to not only color and cover, but also to protect and enhance. Mineral makeup today is almost as much about skin care benefits as it is about the color and coverage.
That is not to say that mineral makeup is intended to replace skin care; it is meant to enhance it. The mineral makeup category must continue to offer innovative and exciting formulations in order to lead the cosmetic industry. Currently, most mineral formulas are cosmetic-grade only, but the future could bring drug formulas right into color formulas. The beauty of this is that the consumer is more likely to use color more consistently than skin care. The more a person uses products with beneficial ingredients, the better the results will be.
Following are the coming trends for mineral makeup.
Face color formulations. Formulations for the face will do more than just correct uneven skin tone; they will address texture issues, such as large pores, scars and pitted skin. The coverage will camouflage without a heavy look or feel. Look for products that will address issues such as discoloration; not just covering it, but also reversing its symptoms, whether red (rosacea and acne), blue (dark circle and bruising), brown (hyperpigmentation) or white (hypopigmentation).


text:
I have a small turbine. Puts out maybe 150watts if the wind is blowing well, I've never seen it produce more than 17volts. Could I just wire it directly into a 12v 100watt lighting fixture ...to get a little light in my back yard when it's spinning?
I have a battery bank, charge controllers, dump load... all that good stuff, but it's packed away in a storage shed a couple hundred miles away. I wont be able to get to that stuff for another couple of months. Sort of wanted to put up my wind turbine, I like watching it spin!


text:
- Windabweisend
- Reißverschlusstasche hinten
- Wasserabweisend
- Den Körperbewegungen folgende Stretchbereiche
- Flacher Bund passt unter Klettergurt
- Herringbone-Stoffgürtel
- Schlitztaschen auf der Vorderseite
- Strapazierfähig
- Eingriff mit Reißverschluss und zwei Druckknöpfen
- Kordelzug am Knöchel
- Hosenbund mit weichem Trikot-Innenfutter
- Atmungsaktiv
- Gürtelschlaufen
- Vorgeformte Knie
- Oberschenkeltasche mit Reißverschluss
Fit: Standard Paßform
Fabric 86% nylon, 14% spandex, stretch woven
Avg. Weight (oz./g): 10.3oz / 293g (8)
- Great pants! (Review by SL)
These pants are awesome. I've added another color and a convertible pair to my collection. The material is stretchy enough for climbing and active activities. They are water resistant - keeping you dry from the morning dew - but probably wouldn't stand up to a torrential downpour.
They are quick drying - and breathable enough to wear in warm weather when you still want some protection for your legs. I highly recommend these pants!(Am 23.06.14 gepostet)
- Women's Ferrosi Pant (Review by Outdoor Animal)
Wonderful pants! In fact, I have spent the past year endlessly trying similar style pants by many different brands and always something wasn't right. These pants are absolute perfection. I am 5'4" 125 pounds and very athletic build. They are loose-ish fitting but look flattering and move very easily. I bought a size 4 and I still have room to throw an extra layer on underneath. I will probably buy every color. Great job OR!
(Am 12.12.13 gepostet)
- Women's Ferrosi Pants (Review by Alice)
My new favorite climbing pants! They are light weight and stretchy enough to not restrict movement while climbing and are comfortable under a harness all day. They also have a feminine enough cut, that they can be worn around town or when traveling. I will definitely be ordering several more pairs!
(Am 02.12.13 gepostet)
- I wear them climbing... always. (Review by Liz)
My favorite pants for climbing.. no matter the weather. Just bought a third pair! LOVE THEM!!
(Am 10.11.13 gepostet)


text:
Best Selling
Health & fitness (6)
Human Science (2)
English (8)
French (0)
German (0)
Spanish (0)
Italian (0)
All (8)
DRM Free (0)
Unhappiness, says bestselling author Harriet Lerner, is fueled by three key emotions: anxiety, fear, and shame. They are the uninvited guests in our lives. When tragedy or hardship hits, they may become our...
"Anger is a signal and one worth listening to," writes Dr. Harriet Lerner, in her renowned classic that has transformed the lives of millions of readers.While anger deserves our attention and respect, women...
In her most affirming and life-changing book yet, Dr. Harriet Lerner teaches us how to restore love and connection with the people who matter the most. In The Dance of Connection we learn what to say (and not...
With wit, wisdom and uncommon sense, Dr. Harriet Lerner gives readers the tools to solve problems and create joy, meaning and integrity in their relationships. Women will find Life Preservers (more than 40,000...
When The Dance of Deceptionwas published, Lerner discovered that women were not eager to identify with the subject. "Well, I don't do deception" was a common resonse.
We all "do deception", often with the intention...
Coupling up is complicated-Dr. Harriet Lerner's marriage rules are not.
This marriage book provides couple's therapy in a unique format perfect for today's world. The renowned author of The Dance of Anger gives...
In The Dance of Intimacy, the bestselling author of The Dance of Anger outlines the steps to take so that good relationships can be strengthened and difficult ones can be healed. Taking a careful look at those...
From the celebrated author of The Dance of Anger comes an extraordinary book about mothering and how it transforms us -- and all our relationships -- inside and out. Written from her dual perspective as a psychologist...


text:
Before taking cranberry, tell your doctor or pharmacist if you are allergic to it; or if you have any other allergies. This product may contain inactive ingredients, which can cause allergic reactions or other problems. Talk to your pharmacist for more details.
If you have any of the following health problems, consult your doctor or pharmacist before using this product:
Typically cranberry juice is thought of as a home health remedy to treat urinary tract infections (UTI's). Some recent research indicates... Read more »
Cranberries. What would Thanksgiving be without them. It's delicious on the day itself, and it's also delicious with the leftover turkey we... Read more »
The Home Remedy: Drinking tart cherry juice or eating tart cherries helps reduce arthritis pain and inflammation. The tart or sour... Read more »
Whenever I become conscious of a word or concept new to me, I began to notice it everywhere. All of you probably have had this... Read more »
Editor's note: Each day in January 2008, Dietitian Heather Reese will encourage you to keep your New Year's Resolutions by giving a diet... Read more »


text:
If you're looking for a convenient, high-performance auto dishwashing product, look no further! Consider these tablets your secret weapon for sparkling dishes. This is the phosphate-free tablet you've been searching for - one the really works and now, fragrance free! Personal benefits: * cleans and degreases effectively * easy dosing * hygienic, efficient and safe * no residue * no fragrance Environmental benefits: * plant based ingredients * phosphate free * quick and complete biodegradability * minimum impact on aquatic life * not tested on animals * safe for septic tanks Instructions for use: Remove large food scraps from dishes. Use only one tablet per wash cycle. Remove the wrapper and place in the dispenser. If the tablet does not fit the dispenser, place in cultery basket. Regularly check the Rinse Aid. Run the machine according to the manufacturer's instructions. Packaging material: Carton is made of 95% recycled cardboard. The plastic wrappers are made from Polypropylene and are 100% recyclable. (The wrappers protect the tablets from moisture damage.)
Privacy Statement - The Short Version We do not spam - we hate it as much as you do. If you sign up for our email, you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell, rent or give your email address to anyone. Period.shopOrganic ® is a registered trademark of Border & Black Ventures, LLC.© Copyright 2007-2014. All rights reserved.


text:
30 Sheet - 20.00 lb - Ruled - 2 / Carton - White Paper
Bright white easel pad features a carrying handle and a unique built-in marker holder for more convenience. Each sheet of 20 lb. paper is bleed-resistant and self-sticking so you can post your notes anywhere. Each pad contains 30 sheets.


text:
The ADSP-CM40x mixed-signal control processor family is based on the ARM®Cortex®-M4 core and is designed for motor control and industrial applications. The ADSP-CM40x Evaluation Hardware provides a low cost hardware solution for evaluating the Analog Devices ADSP-CM40x mixed-signal control processor family, and consists of the ADSP-CM403F and ADSP-CM408F EZ-Boards™, J-LINK LITE ARM debug probe from Segger and optional probing boards .
The ADSP-CM403F EZ-KIT Lite and ADSP-CM408F EZ-KIT Lite include all hardware necessary to immediately begin evaluation.
The ADSP-CM403F EZ-Board and the ADSP-CM408F EZ-Board can also be purchased separately, if a debug probe is already available to the customer.
The ADSP-CM40x Board Design Database contains all of the electronic information required for the design, layout, fabrication and assembly of the ADSP-CM40x EZ-Boards, and is available to download from the Products Download area on this page.
Two expansion connectors are available for connecting probing boards that extend the system's evaluation capabilities:
The probing boards are available separately as daughter boards that plug onto the ADSP-CM403F or
IAR Embedded Workbench is a complete high-performance C/C++ compiler and debugger toolchain that incorporates a compiler, an assembler, a linker and a debugger into one easy-to-use IDE. It is required for development and purchased directly from IAR Systems. Free evaluation versions are available for download.
The CM40x Enablement Software package provides C language programming environment and Application Programming Interface (API) supporting a quick and easy functional interface to the Analog's ADSP-CM40x mixed-signal control processor family products. The API abstracts the low-level details of various peripherals (Controller Registers, DMA Engine and Interrupt Controller) into a simple, easy-to-use programming model. It comes in source form with various example programs to shorten your application's time to market. Current and future versions of the software are available free of charge and always downloadable from here.
The software and documentation pack for the J-Link LITE ARM is available directly from Segger and requires entry of the serial number displayed on the back of the probe to activate it.
For applications that require use of the Ethernet or USB peripherals, the ADZS-CM40x family is supported by Micrium's uC/TCP-IP™ and uC/USB Device™ ARM M-Series solutions. Both of these items require use of uC/OS-III® RTOS and all must be purchased directly from Micrium.
ADSP-CM408F EZ-Board
ADSP-CM403F EZ-Board
© 1995 - Analog Devices, Inc. All Rights Reserved


text: In case you're looking to get a Blu Cigs Review, then you are already conscious of how much better electronic cigarettes are than the older kinds. Blu Cigs is one of the most widely used brands currently on the market, and that's not surprising considering how well designed they're. The flavors are made locally in America by a company called Johnson Creek. They've a facility that is FDA registered, meaning you're having the top of the line flavors. They've only released a new Premium model, which has improved operation, added technology, and better functionality.The electronic cigarette is a terrific option. Not merely does it deliver the nicotine that addicts crave, but it does so in ways that lets them appreciate exactly the same sensations that smoking supplies. It's like smoking a smoke without the horrible side effects. Your clothing won't smell, your loved ones won't whine, and you can use an electronic cigarette everywhere without disturbing a soul. You may also "light up" in a hospital or library without giving violation.Why must they try to command those of us who really don't use illegal substances, do not drink and drive, do not drink and damage people because we drank. Why can they not strive harder to command those people in America that WANT controlled. I know a few of them smoke smokes as well but smokes are the lesser of MANY evils that they must be fighting. The people using street drugs normally get off quite close to scott free. All they need to do is give a name and they get a suspended sentence and probation no matter how many violations they've had. The more intelligent ones will provide a name of a dealer so they can take above their business while the dealer is in jail. In order that they earn more money in the long term.Using a safety pin or a toothpick, stir the e-liquid in the cartridge. This can help in ensuring that the centre of the cartridge is moist e cigs which in trun helps in the efficient utilization of the unit.If you're a late night man, pull up a Cigarette Store on the PC and look through all of the products that they carry. Get the facts about your quality of life and how E-Cig Kits aren't just better for you but also everyone around you. If morning is better, shopping at the cigarette Store continues to be a choice. And you never have to leave home to get it done.Vapor volume. Just how much vapor you are in a position to get on one puff is a big deal for many smokers. Generally, more volume equals a more satisfactory and realistic smoking encounter.The remainder is just a custom of holding a smoke and putting it to your own mouth. The ecig trick my mind and body that I am smoking, but I am just getting flavoured vapour that's all.The other component of the finest electronic cigarette uk is the cartridge where the e-liquid is put. The cartridge is characterized with stuffing or filling. It may resemble a sphere of cotton but then it's not cotton but polyester fiber or poly fill that holds the liquid employed for smoking.Jim is an American living in Merida, Mexico. He and his lovely wife created Yucatan Living, an extensive resource for expatriates in the Yucatan peninsula. They can be role models for business owners and anyone following a wish. Jim started using the electric cigarette and was nice enough to share what he knew with us.You begin attaining high self-esteem by losing the guilt of being a smoker. Once you purchase an e-cig you become a nonsmoker or vaper. Folks around you will not give you ugly looks. This enhances your trust and improves your self esteem.


text:
Note: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
My only gripe is that there is (to my knowledge) no port to Windows. I'm currently the treasurer in a small NFP organization, and if I use GnuCash to track finances, it's kind of hard to pass the books on to the next person if they don't run Linux...
It's not free, but it's also not expensive, very easy to use and install, and runs Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
But, I'm hoping that one of the apps (GNUCash, etc..) does step up and incorporate alot more of the online updating with stocks, etc..I don't know what "etc." you are referring to, but GnuCash DOES update stocks. You can trigger the update manually from within GnuCash or you can put this in your cron
<TT>gnucash --add-price-quotes ~/mygnucashfile</TT>.
But one thing they do well is name their products simply and to the point. Want to manage your money? Use Money!
Word lets me print documents. By extension, Money should allow me to print money. Brilliant!
And, of course, Excel is a completely intuitive name. I mean, if somebody said "hey, did you hear about this new program Excel?" I'd immediately know it was a spreadsheet because... well... I mean... yeah, never mind.
The name should be a hint, not a literal one-word description. Unlike you, most people have the intelligence to realize that.
It's difficult to come up with a suggestive name for a spreadsheet, because there is no non-computer equivalent. Microsoft does not bat 100% at the naming game. Something like 60% of their names are good, as contrasted with about 2% of the Free Software world's names. In other words, the original post was pretty much right, for those of us who are not nit-picking literal-minded droids.
But one thing they do well is name their products simply and to the point.
No they don't. They name there products with generic, non-specific names used in everyday English, thus causing endless confusion. Nobody can talk about a word processor without mentioning word. Nobody can talk about accessing a database without mentioning access. Nobody can talk about a windowing system without mentioning windows.
It's not clever, it's a classic example of irresponsible marketing 'droids perverting the language for their own ends to get some unconscious advertising in. Language inflation in a sense. Other vendors at least try to come up with unique names so there's no confusion and no manipulation.


text:
Undergraduate Information/Counselling Sessions
For students new to the program, whether first year or transfer students:
click to see presentation
Attend one of these two sessions if you intend to return in 2014-2015 with Communication Studies as your major (click for presentation).
1. Wednesday, March 5, 4 PM, Schlegel Building SBE2260
2. Thursday, March 6, 1:30 PM, DAWB 1-101A
Topics to be covered:
-program and course requirements
-progression and graduation requirements
-new Research Specialization Option
-and more
Both sessions will cover the same material; you may chose to attend either session. You do not need to attend if you are graduating or not returning next year.
We hold these information sessions so that you can be advised of your requirements and where they can be found in a quick and easy fashion; and to answer questions you may have. Should you have questions regarding the items covered in these sessions because you did not attend, we will be unable to book appointments for each of you to see the Undergraduate Officer in a timely manner (for example, getting an appointment within a week or two); but will be directing you to various Laurier sites so you can look up the information yourselves.
Click for information on Program Requirements & Selection
Click for information on Course Registration


text:
I was blessed to be able to fill in for our pastor again this Sunday. I realized later that trying to preach on the NT theme of "Resurrection Life" was probably too much to try to accomplish in one message. But then again, my opportunities to preach are limited and I pack as much in as I can, when given the chance!
I won't spell out the sermon here, but you can peek at my notes or download the audio (mp3) of my message. I hope it is a blessing to everyone. I know it was a blessing to me. I should also note that I am indebted to G.K. Beale's A New Testament Biblical Theology for many of the lines of thought that I trace out in this message.
Place: Beacon of Hope Church, St. Paul
Date: July 22, 2012
Title: Raised for Our Sake
Text: 2 Cor. 4:16-5:17
Notes: Download PDF
Audio Link: Listen online or download (right click the link and save it to your computer)
~ Originally posted at Fundamentally Reformed


text:
If you look back through the annals of fashion you'll see that there have been some drastic changes over the years concerning skirt hem lengths. Up until the early 20th century women were expected to wear floor length skirts all the time and it wasn't until around 1915 that shorter skirts came into fashion. Of course, there have been periods in fashion where longer skirts have been the in-thing again (take the maxi skirt, for example), and one of the best things concerning the rise and success of feminism is that women can now wear whatever they want.
However, there are still social conventions that you'll need to stick with when wearing skirts. For instance, you wouldn't wear a miniskirt to a funeral or a job interview, so it's important you know what kind of skirt to pick for certain occasions. However, it isn't just the occasion that you need to think about – when choosing your skirt for a specific occasion you should also consider these factors:
Dress for your height
One of the keys to looking great in a skirt is dressing for your height. Generally, shorter ladies should go for shorter skirts (although the occasion may limit the overall shortness of it) and taller ladies should go for longer skirts. Either option will complement the frame well and ensure the skirt looks just right.
Dress for your age
This one can be a bit of a touchy subject for some, but the fact is that older ladies generally can't get away with shorter skirts. However, it really all depends on the kind of skirt older women choose to wear. There is a definite shift in fashion past the 40-year-old mark, at which point 'younger' fashions should be avoided, but this doesn't mean older women can't still be stylish. As long as you wear it right, a mid-thigh skirt can look amazing in your mid-forties or fifties.
Dress for your size
Even if you're going on a night out, wearing a miniskirt might still not be appropriate. You should always dress to suit your shape and, unfortunately, if you have larger hips a mini skirt will only emphasise this part of your body even further. Similarly, if you feel self-conscious about your legs you shouldn't go for a bodycon miniskirt that will show them off to all the world – instead choose your skirt strategically so you can wear something short that doesn't make you feel on display.
And finally… Dress for the occasion
Dressing for the occasion can be incredibly tricky, especially if there's no set dress code available. Here are some ideas for you:
Wedding – you could get away with a mid-thigh skirt at a wedding, although go for knee length if you want to err on the side of caution.
Funeral – never wear anything above the knee at funerals – you need to be considerably conservative in this setting.
Cocktail party – for a cocktail party you could easily go for anything between mini-skirt length and knee length, it just depends on how casual a party it is.
Dinner party – this occasion is another calling for the knee length skirt, although mid-thigh skirts would also be suitable.
Corporate party – in this setting you'll want to look as professional as possible, so choose knee length or mid-calf length skirts (as long as they suit).
Job interview – knee length again! Try not to wear anything too clingy though, as this may be uncomfortable and cause difficulty.
First date – for a first date you could wear almost any length of skirt, but remember not to go too short otherwise it may give the wrong impression!
What length of skirt would you wear for these occasions?
This post was contributed by Christina Jones a freelance writer specialising in women's fashion such as maxi dresses and party dresses.


text:
We've been blessed with three beautiful children. Two of our children 5yrs and 3yrs have broken capillaries on their cheeks. Our 5 yr old also has eczema, keratosis pilaris, hives, warts and cysts. As a a baby she suffered from ptosis. Two of them are suffering with molluscum contagiosum at the moment. We're a very clean family with no pets! Our 5 yr old is currently being picked on for broken capillaries. Is there anything that can be done? I can see where this may lead to low self esteem. Thanks
My Children Have Broken Capillaries on Their Faces & my Daughter Also Has Cysts on Her Eyelid?
Doctor Answers (1)
Thank you for your question. You need to be followed by a board certified dermatologist specializing in pediatric issues. The capillaries can be treated with a V-Beam if the skin pigment is compatible. Your dermatologist should be able to guide your through your vascular options. Lasers can reduce vessels in dramatic fashion. I hope this helps.
These answers are for educational purposes and should not be relied upon as a substitute for medical advice you may receive from your physician. If you have a medical emergency, please call 911. These answers do not constitute or initiate a patient/doctor relationship.


text:
Revised Standard Version (RSV) | New International Version (NIV) |
1 Woe to the proud crown of the drunkards of E'phraim, and to the fading flower of its glorious beauty, which is on the head of the rich valley of those overcome with wine! | 1 Woe to that wreath, the pride of Ephraim's drunkards, to the fading flower, his glorious beauty, set on the head of a fertile valley-- to that city, the pride of those laid low by wine! |
2 Behold, the Lord has one who is mighty and strong; like a storm of hail, a destroying tempest, like a storm of mighty, overflowing waters, he will cast down to the earth with violence. | 2 See, the Lord has one who is powerful and strong. Like a hailstorm and a destructive wind, like a driving rain and a flooding downpour, he will throw it forcefully to the ground. |
3 The proud crown of the drunkards of E'phraim will be trodden under foot; | 3 That wreath, the pride of Ephraim's drunkards, will be trampled underfoot. |
4 and the fading flower of its glorious beauty, which is on the head of the rich valley, will be like a first-ripe fig before the summer: when a man sees it, he eats it up as soon as it is in his hand. | 4 That fading flower, his glorious beauty, set on the head of a fertile valley, will be like a fig ripe before harvest-- as soon as someone sees it and takes it in his hand, he swallows it. |
5 In that day the LORD of hosts will be a crown of glory, and a diadem of beauty, to the remnant of his people; | 5 In that day the LORD Almighty will be a glorious crown, a beautiful wreath for the remnant of his people. |
6 and a spirit of justice to him who sits in judgment, and strength to those who turn back the battle at the gate. | 6 He will be a spirit of justice to him who sits in judgment, a source of strength to those who turn back the battle at the gate. |
7 These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment. | 7 And these also stagger from wine and reel from beer: Priests and prophets stagger from beer and are befuddled with wine; they reel from beer, they stagger when seeing visions, they stumble when rendering decisions. |
8 For all tables are full of vomit, no place is without filthiness. | 8 All the tables are covered with vomit and there is not a spot without filth. |
9 "Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from the milk, those taken from the breast? | 9 "Who is it he is trying to teach? To whom is he explaining his message? To children weaned from their milk, to those just taken from the breast? |
10 For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little." | 10 For it is: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there." |
11 Nay, but by men of strange lips and with an alien tongue the LORD will speak to this people, | 11 Very well then, with foreign lips and strange tongues God will speak to this people, |
12 to whom he has said, "This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose"; yet they would not hear. | 12 to whom he said, "This is the resting place, let the weary rest"; and, "This is the place of repose"-- but they would not listen. |
13 Therefore the word of the LORD will be to them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little; that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken. | 13 So then, the word of the LORD to them will become: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there-- so that they will go and fall backward, be injured and snared and captured. |
14 Therefore hear the word of the LORD, you scoffers, who rule this people in Jerusalem! | 14 Therefore hear the word of the LORD, you scoffers who rule this people in Jerusalem. |
15 Because you have said, "We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement; when the overwhelming scourge passes through it will not come to us; for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter"; | 15 You boast, "We have entered into a covenant with death, with the grave we have made an agreement. When an overwhelming scourge sweeps by, it cannot touch us, for we have made a lie our refuge and falsehood our hiding place." |
16 therefore thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: 'He who believes will not be in haste.' | 16 So this is what the Sovereign LORD says: "See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts will never be dismayed. |
17 And I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet; and hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm the shelter." | 17 I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line; hail will sweep away your refuge, the lie, and water will overflow your hiding place. |
18 Then your covenant with death will be annulled, and your agreement with Sheol will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes through you will be beaten down by it. | 18 Your covenant with death will be annulled; your agreement with the grave will not stand. When the overwhelming scourge sweeps by, you will be beaten down by it. |
19 As often as it passes through it will take you; for morning by morning it will pass through, by day and by night; and it will be sheer terror to understand the message. | 19 As often as it comes it will carry you away; morning after morning, by day and by night, it will sweep through." The understanding of this message will bring sheer terror. |
20 For the bed is too short to stretch oneself on it, and the covering too narrow to wrap oneself in it. | 20 The bed is too short to stretch out on, the blanket too narrow to wrap around you. |
21 For the LORD will rise up as on Mount Pera'zim, he will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon; to do his deed--strange is his deed! and to work his work--alien is his work! | 21 The LORD will rise up as he did at Mount Perazim, he will rouse himself as in the Valley of Gibeon-- to do his work, his strange work, and perform his task, his alien task. |
22 Now therefore do not scoff, lest your bonds be made strong; for I have heard a decree of destruction from the Lord GOD of hosts upon the whole land. | 22 Now stop your mocking, or your chains will become heavier; the Lord, the LORD Almighty, has told me of the destruction decreed against the whole land. |
23 Give ear, and hear my voice; hearken, and hear my speech. | 23 Listen and hear my voice; pay attention and hear what I say. |
24 Does he who plows for sowing plow continually? does he continually open and harrow his ground? | 24 When a farmer plows for planting, does he plow continually? Does he keep on breaking up and harrowing the soil? |
25 When he has leveled its surface, does he not scatter dill, sow cummin, and put in wheat in rows and barley in its proper place, and spelt as the border? | 25 When he has leveled the surface, does he not sow caraway and scatter cummin? Does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in its plot, and spelt in its field? |
26 For he is instructed aright; his God teaches him. | 26 His God instructs him and teaches him the right way. |
27 Dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge, nor is a cart wheel rolled over cummin; but dill is beaten out with a stick, and cummin with a rod. | 27 Caraway is not threshed with a sledge, nor is a cartwheel rolled over cummin; caraway is beaten out with a rod, and cummin with a stick. |
28 Does one crush bread grain? No, he does not thresh it for ever; when he drives his cart wheel over it with his horses, he does not crush it. | 28 Grain must be ground to make bread; so one does not go on threshing it forever. Though he drives the wheels of his threshing cart over it, his horses do not grind it. |
29 This also comes from the LORD of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in wisdom. | 29 All this also comes from the LORD Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom. |
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. (Revised Standard Version - Holy Bible) | Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NIV) are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica. All rights reserved worldwide. (New International Version Bible Online) |