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Celebrating World Trade Throughout May
Created on May 2, 2013
May brings warmer weather, longer days, and, most importantly for us at the Department of Commerce, World Trade Month. For years, this has been a special time to reflect on the importance of trade to our nation's economic well-being.
Investing In The U.S. Is Good Business and Helps To Create Jobs
Created on April 30, 2013
U.S. Deputy Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank just announced that the inaugural SelectUSA Investment Summit will be held in Washington, DC from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1, 2013.
The Summit will be the first of its kind, connecting businesses and investors from around the world with economic development organizations (EDOs) from across the country in an effort to promote investment in the United States and support the creation of American jobs. The two-day event will also amplify the work of SelectUSA in delivering on President Obama's agenda to increase direct investment in the United States as a way to spur economic growth and create jobs.
The Summit will bring together international and domestic investors; national, regional, state and local economic development organizations (EDOs); senior Obama Administration officials; business leaders; and industry and technical experts, providing them with a unique opportunity to discover all the reasons why the U.S. is the ideal destination for companies that are weighing options for locating or expanding their operations. During the two-day event, participants also will be able to explore potential investment opportunities in this country, as well as share best practices and build networks.
Are You Ready to Export?
Created on April 25, 2013
Exporting your product and services requires planning. Like any successful project, one of the first steps is making a plan. Whether you're going on vacation, conducting a domestic business transaction or starting a new venture one common trait is essential for success . . . careful attention to detail. A great starting point to determine your company's level of preparedness for international market entry is completing an export readiness assessment.
Selecting the appropriate markets for our products and services, determining how to strategically engage target markets, and securing the financial and managerial resources are just some of the analyses needed to ensure that your export venture is a long-term success. The results of such an assessment may, for example, lead to modifying and ramping up production in order to ship your products to South America or perhaps giving consideration to a more complex venture of opening an office abroad.
Guide to Going Green
Created on April 25, 2013
Going green isn't just good for the environment—it can be great for your business as well! Companies known for proactive environmental policies often find that their reputation as a green business allows them to better attract and retain high quality employees, improve community relations, and strengthen customer loyalty.
Learn how to "green your business" and work toward creating a cleaner, healthier environment for the community and for the planet. We've updated our Green Business Guide for 2013 with the latest tips on what you as a small business owner can do to protect our ecosystems and promote a sustainable, successful business.
Green Business Practices
From changing a light bulb and using recyclable products to installing energy efficient equipment and systems, every business can make simple changes that save energy costs and natural resources. Start by brainstorming a variety of options to reduce your business's environmental footprint, then choose the most impactful and cost effective options for your business. For additional tips on ways to green your business, our partners at SCORE also offer a number of resources. If you're interested in getting into the business of helping others get green, SBA has also produced an online training course on how your business can take advantage of these eco-trends.
Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership
Created on April 23, 2013
The Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership (IMCP) is a new Administration-wide initiative that will accelerate the resurgence of manufacturing and help communities cultivate an environment for businesses to create well-paying manufacturing jobs in cities across the country.
Through the IMCP, the President is directing Federal agencies to provide coordinated assistance to manufacturing communities through a new partnership that will align Federal economic development resources and help U.S. localities make coordinated, long-term investments in their public goods in partnership with universities and industry. These investments will ultimately help regions become more attractive for manufacturers and supply chains. The Partnership will be led by the Commerce Department with support from other federal agencies.
Five to six U.S. communities in 2014 would be competitively selected as pilots, each receiving up to $25 million from the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration, in addition to funding from other government agencies. Federal agencies will also align and coordinate their funding opportunities to maximize the effectiveness of Federal expenditures and ensure that localities are able to more seamlessly access the Federal resources they need to fund strategies for attracting long-term business investment.


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By John W. Goodwin Jr. and Joe Scalzo
On Thursday morning, 2,500 miles away from Youngstown, a boxing trainer named Robert Garcia got on the Internet, read the latest story on Kelly Pavlik and thought, "That's why we need to get him out of his hometown."
"We've seen it before," said Garcia, Pavlik's trainer-to-be, who spoke by phone from Oxnard, Calif. "In your own hometown is where you get into the most trouble. If you have a drinking problem, being there makes it worse. And even if you don't, it's in your hometown that you get a lot of criticism and a lot of people hating on you.
"I think moving him and his family and staying here in Oxnard is a good idea. In your hometown, there's always envy and little things turn into big things."
Pavlik, the former middleweight boxing champion, faces arraignment today in Mahoning County Area Court here on charges of operating a vehicle while impaired, failure to control and leaving the scene of an accident.
Pavlik declined to comment for this story.
He spent a brief time in the county jail on the three misdemeanor charges after being arrested Wednesday night at his Sugarbush Drive home in Canfield.
Police say Pavlik, 29, and a friend wrecked two all-terrain vehicles on a neighboring piece of property, destroying a lamppost and causing other damage.
Reports say Pavlik smelled of alcohol and was belligerent to deputy sheriffs investigating the accident.
The incident began when a homeowner in the 3900 block of Sugarbush Drive called police to report that two men on ATVs — one ATV being red and one larger green one — had hit a lamppost and telephone pole in his yard and driven away. The homeowner identified Pavlik as one of the men.
The man told police he went outside about 10:30 p.m. and saw Pavlik and another man on his property with the ATVs. He said both men were aggressive toward him and appeared to be drunk, with slurred speech and a noticeable smell of alcohol.
Deputies went to Pavlik's home and discovered a red ATV sitting in the driveway covered in fresh mud and grass. A larger, green ATV was located inside an open garage. The larger ATV had heavy front-end damage and the top of a lamppost in the passenger seat.
Daniel Ferreri, a Pavlik friend, met deputies in the driveway of the home and said he had wrecked the green ATV into a lamppost down the street from the house.
Deputies report Pavlik came out of the house as they were speaking with Ferreri and demanded the deputies leave his property. The deputies reported that Pavlik was belligerent and continually disrupted their attempts to interview Ferreri.
Ferreri, after extensive conversation with deputies, said Pavlik was actually the driver of the green ATV involved in the accident. Ferreri was then arrested, charged with obstruction of official business. He will be arraigned in the Canfield court Jan. 4.
Deputies observed Pavlik swaying side to side as he walked and noticed his speech was slurred. He was asked to submit to field-sobriety tests but refused. He was placed under arrest and taken to the jail.
Deputies noted that Pavlik was bleeding from a cut to the back of his head but refused medical treatment.
The fighter was released from alcohol-abuse treatment and returned to Youngstown in January after two months of rehabilitation at the Ranch Recovery Center in Desert Hot Springs, Calif.
Police reports show that Pavlik also was involved in a fight with his brother Michael Pavlik in July. The two men were reportedly drinking at the time.
According to police, Kelly, after exchanging words with Michael, "punched the west-facing side door of the home and pulled his brother, Michael, out of the broken window."
Reports say officers found broken glass and blood on nearby steps. Michael Pavlik, police said, appeared to have minor cuts to his arms and hands but told officers at the scene that he did not need an ambulance or medical attention.
Kelly Pavlik had left the home before officers arrived, and police could not contact him for questioning. Michael Pavlik reportedly told officers repeatedly he did not wish to file charges against his brother.
The fight between the brothers was witnessed by Michael's girlfriend, who was at the home.
Kelly Pavlik split with his longtime trainer, Jack Loew, in October and planned to begin training with Garcia soon after the holidays.
Garcia said he has not talked to Pavlik recently — "I mostly talk to his manager, Cameron Dunkin, and Top Rank," he said — but said he is still interested in working with Pavlik.
"I think if he's surrounded by fighters like Brandon Rios and Miguel Garcia, that should give him a little motivation and a little help in trying to come back and come back strong," said Garcia, who runs the Robert Garcia Boxing Academy.
"I'm still hoping things work out," Garcia added. "If he's willing to make that move and make that change, it could be the best thing that could happen to him."
Neither Dunkin nor Top Rank chairman Bob Arum, Pavlik's trainer, responded to phone messages. Top Rank spokesman Lee Samuels said, "Top Rank and any of its staff are not making any comments on Kelly." Loew said he had no comment.
Don't care where this obnoxious punk moves to, he will always be the same classless a**hole from an arrogant low-life family who will never have the guts to crawl out of the bottle.
Kelly is my main man. Quit hatin on him JLow...you taught him how to throw a sucka punch then head to the bar and down some cold ones.
He's a drunk and will always be a drunk till he ends up in prison or on skid row. No more needs to be said.
Kelly apparently has the disease of alcoholism. I hope eventually he will seek the treatment he needs.
Kelly did a lot for the valley.Now that he is having a problem every one wants to bash him. forget about boxing and get your life together Kelly. You have a family to think about.Don't you want to walk your daughter down the isle some day? I agree with the trainer,there are to many hangers-on here. As far as boxing I think he is done.But that's not important,he needs to rid himself of the sickness that has over taken him. God Bless you Kelly.You gave me some good times in front of the tv watching your fights.I will be in your corner for your most important one.
Kelly Pavlik vs. Jermaine Taylor I - Was one of the all time great fights...Kelly picked himself off the apron and came back and knocked out Taylor, simply awesome. People feel in love with the guy immediately after Larry Merchant interviewed him because of his candor, because he represented everything people front the area are about. It was the resolve and backing that Kelly needs to apply to getting his mind right and all of us to continue to stay behind him and provide support!!!
How about his loser friend Dan Ferrarro who encourages Pavlik to drink. This loser leach should be separated from Pavlik soon. He is the biggest loser possible.
Kelly you keep making bad decisions, you will be lucky to get another fight.
Time to walk the line.
Better think about selling used cars.
Dan Ferrerri is the hangerons name that gets Pavlik into trouble.
He has disgraced Youngstown and should leave the city
It's tough enough figuring out and correcting (real and perceived) problems without alcohol and/or other drugs. It's up to you, and you alone, Kelly. You certainly have it in you to be a great boxer again. Remember when, not long ago, you were down to earth, not stumbling and slurring, not hurting yourself and others (outside of the ring)...you were just a good, hard-working, straightforward person. Maybe Ojai, or somewhere warmer and more "worldly"(?), would be better for you than ENE Ohio?
Pavlik - don't come out to Oxnard unless you are serious. Being a tough guy from Youngstown doesn't mean jack in the barrios of Oxnard, where 30% of the population grew up in dirt-floored huts.
You want to be washed up, be washed up at home.
Its a rough world. A lot of the time things are set in motion during childhood that determine the outcome of an adult. Kelly never had a chance from birth. Most boxers resort to that brutal sport because they have no viable options to make a living. You don't see valedictorians in sweaty gyms getting their brains beat in. Kelly's upbringing plays a major role in his behavior today. He was always in bars; when he made money the first thing he did was buy a bar. His friends behave in a similar fashion. You are seeing his fate played out in the media. Kelly never had a chance really. He reached the pinnacle of his profession through hard word and determination; but he is empty now, just like so many boxers end up.
He'll be lucky if Top Rank doesn't drop him. Bad move Kelly ... smarten up.
Before his last "supposed" fight, he backed out because he wasn't getting paid enough. Now we all know why! Nobody will ever pick him up on a fight card after this last debacle. He will never fight again, so good luck paying for that Mercedes and good luck paying that big mortgage you have, Kelly. Since you are a complete idiot with no "life skills" to be a contributing part of society, it will be tough finding a real job, tough guy. Quit beating up women and quit drinking yourself silly. You are a has-been!

subset: commoncrawl


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We say that such and such an exponent means that the base to which it is affixed is multiplied by itself the number of times specified by the exponent. We can use such an expression to determine the root of another number. Suppose 2^8 = 256. We would say that 2 is the 8th root of 256, that 4 is its 7th root, and so on. Keep in mind that 256 has two different 8th roots, because -2^8 and 2^8 both equal 256. All positive numbers have two square roots: its positive square root, and the negative counterpart of that positive square root. Indeed, positive numbers have square roots, 4th roots, 6th roots, 8th roots, and so on. These even roots of positive numbers are known as "principal" roots.
This is not true, however, of negative numbers. Negative numbers have no square roots. The reason for this is obvious: There is no number which, if multiplied by itself, yields a negative number. This is true of both negative and positive numbers multiplied by themselves. Negative numbers do, however, have real 3rd roots, real 5th roots, real 7th roots, real 9th roots, and so on. Rather than having two of such roots as is the case with the even roots of positive numbers, however, negative numbers, though they have odd roots, only ever have one root. Each root, moreover, is a negative number.


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Are you looking for something to do to brighten up your lunch hour? Des Moines Performing Arts and the Downtown Community Alliance announced the lineup for the 2014 Lunch Unplugged concert series yesterday afternoon. The annual concert series will run from February 27 to April 24 and has expanded its scope this year to include comedy, magic, and ballet as well. Each event runs from noon to 1 p.m. at the Temple Theater, and admission is only $5. Tickets for the events can be purchased through Des Moines Performing Arts, and they go on sale on Monday, February 10. Here is a look at the schedule for the fourth year of Lunch Unplugged.
Thursday, February 27 – Des Moines indie pop band Parlours
Thursday, March 6 – Milwaukee jazz pop diva Roxi Copland
Thursday, March 13 – Des Moines folk band The River Monks
Thursday, March 20 – Ballet Des Moines
Thursday, April 3 – Comedy & magic with John & Patrick (of Triple Espresso)
Thursday, April 17 – Des Moines alternative pop band Annalibera
Des Moines Performing Arts and the Downtown Community Alliance have not announced anything about this year's food options or pricing as of yet. For more information on the 2014 Lunch Unplugged concert series go to the Des Moines Performing Arts website.


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Thomas James Feely (twitter: @jayfeely)
Position: K
Height: 5-10 Weight: 206 lbs.
Born: May 23, 1976 in Odessa, FL
High School: Jesuit
College: Michigan (school history) (Feely college stats)
Weighted Career AV (100-95-...): 31 (3206th overall since 1950)
Other SR Links: College Football at Sports-Reference.com
Promote your website or business by sponsoring this page for $10 on Pro-Football-Reference.com. Your message will replace this ad.


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Liberal junior basketball player Jai Chapman is the Mead Lumber Athlete of the Week. Chapman leads the 4-8 Lady Redskins at 16 points and eight rebounds per game. Chapman scored a career high 29 points last Thursday in a 59-58 double overtime win over Scott City in Colby. Liberal plays that same Scott City team tonight at 6:30 in Scott City and on 1270 and kscbnews.net. Chapman is also an all WAC volleyball player and track athlete. Chapman was Liberal's lone basketball all WAC selection last year.
©2016 Seward County Broadcasting Company, Inc.
1410 N. Western Ave. Liberal, KS 67901


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Jul 9, 2012 10:50 AM
"Tiger on acid" is a popular look this year, and this Karen Kane Painted Print Knit Folded Waistband Skirt ($108) is driving that point home. Waist-to-floor red and blue "stripes" entertain the eye and may cause temporary blindness. We like it for its comfort level and ease of wear. Our Tiger Wannabe likes it because it creates a direct climbing path from the floor to the treat in one hand.
If you've got a product or service that you'd like to promote on Outblush, click here to find out about our advertising opportunities.
Outblush is a blog for girls who love to shop. Our staff digs up the best clothes, home stuff, beauty items, and more. New items are posted every day — bookmark us and check out:


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Physiological Factors Contributing to Postflight Changes in Functional Performance (Functional Task Test) - 08.12.15
The Physiological Factors Contributing to Postflight Changes in Functional Performance (Functional Task Test) payload tests crew members on an integrated suite of functional and physiological tests before and after long-duration space flight. The study identifies critical mission tasks that may be impacted, maps physiological changes to alterations in physical performance and aids in the design of countermeasures that specifically target the physiological systems responsible for impaired functional performance. Science Results for Everyone
Information Pending
OpNom: N/A
Principal Investigator(s)
Jacob J. Bloomberg, Ph.D., Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, United States
Ajitkumar P. Mulavara, Ph.D., Universities Space Research Association, Houston, TX, United States
Alan H. Feiveson, Ph.D., Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, United States
Lori L. Ploutz-Snyder, Ph.D., Universities Space Research Association, Houston, TX, United States
Millard F. Reschke, Ph.D., Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, United States
Michael B. Stenger, Ph.D, Wyle Science Technology and Engineering Group, Houston, TX, United States
Stuart M. C Lee, Ph.D., Wyle Science Technology and Engineering Group, Houston, TX, United States
Scott J. Wood, Ph.D., Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA, United States
Barry A. Spiering, Ph.D., Wyle Laboratories, Houston, TX, United States
Jeffrey Ryder, Ph.D., Universities Space Research Association, Houston, TX, United States
Brian T. Peters, Ph.D., Wyle Laboratories, Houston, TX, United States
NASA Johnson Space Center, Human Research Program, Houston, TX, United States
Sponsoring Space Agency
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Sponsoring Organization
Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD)
Research Benefits
Space Exploration, Earth Benefits, Scientific Discovery
ISS Expedition Duration 1
October 2009 - March 2016
Expeditions Assigned
Previous ISS Missions
Functional Task Test began operations during ISS Expedition 21/22. Landing site data was first collected following the return of 34 Soyuz (return of the ISS Expedition 35/36 crew).
Experiment Description
Research Overview
- Exposure to space flight causes adaptations in multiple physiological systems including changes in sensorimotor, cardiovascular, and sensorimotor systems. These changes may affect a crew member's ability to perform critical mission tasks immediately after landing on a planetary surface. The overall goal of this project is to determine the effects of space flight on functional tests that are representative of high priority exploration mission tasks and to identify the key underlying physiological factors that contribute to decrements in performance.
- To achieve this goal this study uses an interdisciplinary testing protocol that evaluates both astronaut functional performance and related physiological changes. Functional tests include ladder climbing, hatch opening, jump down, manual manipulation of objects and tool use, seat egress and obstacle avoidance, recovery from a fall and object translation tasks. Physiological measures include assessments of postural and gait control, dynamic visual acuity, fine motor control, plasma volume, orthostatic intolerance, upper- and lower-body muscle strength, power, endurance, control, and neuromuscular drive. Crew members perform this integrated test protocol before and after long-duration (ISS) space flight. Data are collected during three sessions before flight, and 1, 6 and 30 days after landing. For some subjects, a subset of the protocol is collected on R+0 at the landing site in Kazakhstan with possible repetition of the tests during a refueling stop on the way to JSC, at JSC Astronaut Crew Quarters, and at R+60.
- The information obtained from this study will be used to design countermeasures that specifically target the physiological systems most responsible for the altered functional performance associated with space flight.
ISS Science Challenge Student Reflection
ISS Science Challenge Selected Project
This project really interested me from the start. In microgravity, the human body is affected physiologically, and this inhibits our abilities to perform certain tasks. But what tasks? And how are we inhibited? Thus, this experiment tests how and what functions are affected by microgravity. However, the experiment is still ongoing, but the results will be intriguing. When it's finished, it'd be interesting to see what scientists come up with to help us adapt to microgravity or how they change certain tasks on the ISS to better suit our bodies. -- Melody
I chose this because I thought the topic was interesting since it has to do with technology. It was also listed to have results in the chart, so I thought it would be nice to analyze the results. Although it didn't have results to analyze, I still kept the topic because I liked how it had pictures and showed the different machines tested various physiological functions. I learned about what functions were affected by space flight and how NASA intends to reduce the damage. -- Solana
-Solana, Grade 10 and Melody, Grade 12, Princeton High School, Princeton, New Jersey
Crew members experience alterations in multiple physiological systems due to exposure to the microgravity conditions of space flight. These physiological changes include sensorimotor disturbances, cardiovascular deconditioning and loss of muscle mass and strength. These changes lead to disruption in the ability to ambulate and perform functional tasks during the initial reintroduction to a gravitational environment following a prolonged transit and cause significant impairments in performance of operational tasks immediately following landing on a planetary surface. To date, changes in functional performance have not been systematically studied or correlated with physiological changes. To understand how changes in physiological function impact functional performance, an interdisciplinary testing regimen has been developed that systematically evaluates both astronaut postflight functional performance and related physiological changes.
The Physiological Factors Contributing to Postflight Changes in Functional Performance (Functional Task Test) study identifies the key underlying physiological factors that contribute to changes in performance of a set of functional tasks that are representative of critical mission tasks for planetary operations. Crew members test on an integrated suite of functional and interdisciplinary physiological tests before and after short- and long-duration space flight.
Using this strategy, Functional Task Test identifies critical mission tasks that are impacted by alterations in physiological responses, maps physiological changes to alterations in functional performance and designs and implements countermeasures that specifically target the physiological systems responsible for impaired functional performance.
To achieve the experimental goals a basic set of seven functional tests (Functional Task Tests) and a corresponding set of physiological measures were developed that specifically target the sensorimotor, cardiovascular and muscle changes associated with exposure to space flight. Physiological measures include: assessments of vestibular function, dynamic visual acuity, fine motor control, postural and locomotor stability, plasma volume, orthostatic (pertaining to an upright standing posture) intolerance, upper and lower body muscle strength, power, fatigue, control and neuromuscular drive.
Types of Functional Task Tests:
- Seat Egress and Walk: This test measures the ability to rise from a seated position (with seat upright and seat positioned with back to the floor) and walk while avoiding obstacles. Upon completion of the obstacle course, subjects attempt to walk 10 steps on the floor with the eyes closed, arms and hands folded across the chest, while placing the feet in the traditional tandem heel-to-toe position for each step.
- Recovery from Fall/Stand: For this test, subjects lie on a foam mat with their face down and then stand up as quickly as possible when a tone sounds. After standing up, subjects then perform the Stand Test by taking a step onto the solid floor and maintaining a quiet standing position for 3 minutes.
- Rock Translation: To simulate the task requirement of carrying objects, subjects pick up one of 3 weights (6, 10 and 20 pounds) that have a handle grip, and carry the weight a distance of 8 feet proceeded by placing it in a receptacle positioned 20 inches above the floor. This procedure repeats until all 3 weights have been individually transferred to the receptacle. The subject then returns each weight one-by-one to its original location 8 feet away from the receptacle.
- Torque Generation: A wheel attachment affixes to a PrimusRS system is used to simulate a hatch-opening task. Subjects stand on the floor while performing the hatch-opening task under both isometric and isotonic conditions. Subjects apply a torque to a wheel assembly under two conditions: a) Wheel Fixed--subject applies peak torque, and b) Wheel Free--subject moves wheel with constant resistance (50% of preflight peak) for 20 seconds.
- Ladder Climb: Crew members perform ladder climbing soon after landing on a planetary surface. To gain a better understanding of ladder climbing ability, subjects climb a passive treadmill ladder at a self-generated pace until they complete 40 rungs.
- Construction Activity Board: To assess changes in the ability to perform manual assembly and repair tasks, each subject completes a standard EVA training task. While standing, subjects perform a variety of standard construction and assembly tasks including connecting hoses to receptacles and mating a series of electrical connectors to the appropriate receptacles. Subjects also use a cordless power tool to tighten bolts on a handle assembly.
- Jump Down: Crew members are required to jump down from landing vehicles, habitats, and on uneven terrain during exploratory EVAs. During this test, subjects use a 2-footed hop to jump from a height of 30 cm and land on a force plate to measure the peak vertical impact force and postural stability on landing. Lower limb muscle activity in this test is measured using surface electromyography.
Types of Physiological Tests:
- Plasma Volume: Plasma volume is measured to determine changes in volume caused by space flight. This is measured through a cycle of quiet rest, 100% oxygen rebreathing, and carbon monoxide rebreathing with blood draws during carbon monoxide rebreathing.
- Fine Motor Control: To assess changes in fine motor control, this test uses the Grooved Pegboard Test that is a widely used test for neurological and vocational assessment of fine motor control. It is a manual dexterity test consisting of a 5x5 matrix of randomly oriented slotted keyholes with corresponding pegs that rest in a storage dish at the lower half of the board. Subjects complete the test as quickly and accurately as they can.
- Dynamic Posturography: Changes in the vestibular contributions to balance control are evaluated using a computerized dynamic posturography system. Trials are performed with eyes closed, on a sway-referenced base with the head erect and while subjects perform dynamic head tilts (forward, backward, or actively moving at 0.33 Hz paced by an audible tone).
- Treadmill Locomotion: This test simultaneously assesses changes in locomotor stability, head movement control and dynamic visual acuity. Subjects walk at 6.4 km/h for 90 seconds on a motorized treadmill while performing a Dynamic Visual Acuity (DVA) test consisting of Landolt C optotypes (standardized symbols used when testing eyesight) of various sizes being presented on a laptop screen placed 4 meters in front of the subject at eye level. Optotypes are oriented such that the opening of the C is pointed in one of four directions; up, down, left or right. By comparing the resulting visual acuity thresholds to the thresholds determined while the subject is stationery (i.e. sitting), the visual acuity decrement associated with head and body motion is assessed.
- Muscle Performance: Muscle Performance tests include; isometric strength, isometric force control, isotonic power endurance, and neuromuscular drive assessments. The primary purpose of these tests is to determine the contribution of muscle performance changes to alterations in FTT outcomes. Lower body measures for the isometric strength and isotonic power assessments are conducted using an inclined leg press device specifically instrumented for these purposes. Lower body measures for the isometric force control and neuromuscular drive are also assessed. Lower body measures will be conducted bilaterally. Upper body measures are performed bilaterally using a bench press with a braking system.
- Testing of crew responses following the long-duration flights typically does not begin until a minimum of 24 hours have elapsed between landing and the beginning of the testing. The R+0 testing using a subset of the FTT tests was designed to characterize balance, gait and cardiovascular disturbances as soon as possible (within 2 hours) after return at the Soyuz landing site when performance deficits are most profound and have greatest operational impact in terms of vehicle control and emergency egress. A clear identification of impairments and assessment of their extent at this time point is critical for addressing both vehicle control and egress risks for exploration class missions.
(1) Sit-to-Stand Test: crew member is asked to rise from a seated position (without assistance) to a standing position. Once standing, the crew member remains standing for up to 10 seconds then returns to the seated position.
(2) Recovery from Fall Test: crew member begins in the prone position on the ground and then stands for 3 minutes while cardiovascular parameters are measured and postural ataxia data are acquired.
(3) Tandem Walk Test: to determine changes in dynamic postural stability crew members are asked to attempt to walk placing the feet in the heel-to-toe position with arms and hands folded across the chest with eyes closed for up to 10 steps.
Video, cardiovascular parameters (heart rate and blood pressure), data from body worn inertial sensors and severity of postflight motion sickness are acquired for analysis.^ back to top
Space Applications
Information obtained from this study aids in the design of targeted countermeasures that mitigate physiological changes that impact operationally oriented functional performance.
Earth Applications
A better understanding of the physiological factors that influence functional performance aids in defining more effective rehabilitation interventions in clinical populations. For example in the elderly population, activities of daily living are often impaired by multiple physiological causes. The information obtained from this study will aid in the design of clinical interventions and rehabilitation programs that can target specific systems responsible for decline in functional performance.
Operational Requirements
Thirteen subjects are requested to perform the preflight and postflight baseline data collection for Functional Task Test. Additionally, some subjects in Increments 38 to 43 will perform the FTT with Pilot Field Test (Bridge) protocol and data will be collected before and after the yearlong mission of the US crew member launching on 42S.
Operational Protocols
This investigation only requires baseline data collection (BDC) both preflight and postflight. No inflight testing will occur.
Results/More Information
On-going data collection continues to improve the statistical power required to map changes in functional task performance to alterations in physiological systems. The information obtained from this study will be used to design and implement countermeasures that specifically target the physiological systems most responsible for the altered functional performance associated with space flight.^ back to top
Results Publications
Miller CA, Peters BT, Kofman I, Phillips TR, Batson C, Cerisano JM, Fisher E, Mulavara AP, Feiveson AH, Reschke MF, Bloomberg JJ. A comparison of tandem walk performance between bed rest subjects and astronauts. 39th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Biomechanics, Columbus OH; 2015 August 5-8 3 pp.
Miller CM, Peters BT, Kofman I, Brady R, Phillips TR, Batson C, Mulavara AP, Feiveson AH, Reschke MF, Bloomberg JJ. A comparison of torso stability between bed rest subjects and astronauts during tandem walk:Preliminary findings. 37th American Society of Biomechanics, Omaha, NE; 2013 September 4-7 2 pp.
Madansingh S, Bloomberg JJ. Understanding the effects of spaceflight on head–trunk coordination during walking and obstacle avoidance. Acta Astronautica. 2015 October; 115: 165-172. DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2015.05.022.
Arzeno NM, Stenger MB, Bloomberg JJ, Platts SH. Spaceflight-induced cardiovascular changes and recovery during NASA's Functional Task Test. Acta Astronautica. 2013 November; 92(1): 10-14. DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2012.05.023.
Ground Based Results Publications
ISS Patents
Related Publications
Related Websites
NASA Image: jsc2008e156468 - Subject demonstrating the Seat Egress and Walk Test at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image: jsc20008e156463 - Subject demonstrating the Ladder Climb Test at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image: jsc2008e156464 - Subject demonstrating the Rock Translation Test at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image: jsc2008e156462 - Subject demonstrating the Torque Generation Test at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image jsc2008e156471 - Subject demonstrating the Construction Activity Board Test at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image: jsc2008e156475 - Subject participating in the Fine Motor Control Test at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image: jsc2008e156469 - Subject participating in the Treadmill Locomotion Test at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image: jsc2008e156477- Subject participating in the Muscle Performance Tests at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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NASA Image: jsc2008e156479 - Subject participating in the Muscle Performance Tests at Johnson Space Flight Center, Houston, TX.
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Geminid Meteor Shower - The Heavens Last Hurrah of 2013
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Join us on the beach to view the last major meteor shower of 2013! Bring a lawn chair, a thermos of your favorite warm drink, and a cozy blanket. Reflect on the past year, as we enjoy some of winters best constellations. Preregistration required, meet at the beach parking lot.
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One May 5, 2014, news broke that Powerade, one of the most popular sports drinks in the country, would be dropping a controversial ingredient from its recipe. Powerade, which is owned by the Coca Cola company, is following a precedent that was set by Gatorade last year. However, does this change come much too late?
MSN News reports that this change to the sports drink recipe comes as a result of a petition from a Mississippi teenager who was questioning why the ingredient was present in the sports drink to begin with. The ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, has been linked to flame retardants and is actually banned for use in Japan and the European Union.
Last Year, PepsiCo stop the practice of using this potentially harmful substance in their sports drink brand, Gatorade. It seems that Coca Cola is playing catch up, and only as a result of an external petition to remove the substance from their recipe. The two flavors, fruit punch and strawberry lemonade, are the two products that are being updated.
In certain markets such as Detroit and Washington D.C., the products are already being sold without brominated vegetable oil as an ingredient. As of this afternoon, the Powerade website still lists the controversial ingredient on some of the product pages. It is still not known what is being used as a replacement ingredient.
This news about a potentially harmful chemical in FDA approved products is nothing new unfortunately. From the "yoga mat chemical" in certain types of bread, to Naked drinks getting caught with their pants down on social media for their use of GMO's, the use of potentially harmful ingredients in many different consumer products is a practice that will continue. The unfortunate truth is that we may only know about them when news breaks or a study has been released about the harmful affects of the ingredient. Until then, it may be better to at least choose a new flavor of sports drink for your refueling needs.


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Philly may have finally stopped their NBA record-tying losing streak at 26 following a 123-98 win against Detroit on Saturday. The Hawks made sure the Sixers wouldn't win their second game in a row following a 103-95 Atlanta victory on Monday.
Paul Millsap led all players in both points and rebounds as he recorded 28 and 17, respectively. Millsap was the only player to record a double-double tonight, his 24th of the season.
The game didn't start out the way Atlanta hoped as Philly built up a 31-18 lead after the first quarter. Georgia Tech alum and current Sixer Thaddeus Young started out the game strong, scoring 11 points in the first quarter including going 3-for-4 from beyond the arc. He finished the game going 7-for-10 from the field and 5-of-6 from beyond the arc for a team-leading 23 points.
Atlanta had to spend the all of the second quarter and the majority of the third quarter crawling back into the game. DeMarre Carroll made a layup with less than two minutes left in the third quarter to give Atlanta a 75-73 lead, their first since the first few minutes of the game when they led 5-4. Carroll finished the game with only nine points but he added five rebounds, four assists and two steals during the game.
The teams traded the lead for the rest of the game and it wasn't until the last three minutes of the game that Lou Williams put Atlanta up for good with a 94-92 lead. Williams finished with 22 points and was one of the four Hawks to score in double figures for the night. Jeff Teague and Kyle Korver finished with 12 and 11 points, respectively.
For Atlanta, this win stops a six-game losing skid of their own. The Hawks will stay at home as the Chicago Bulls come to Philips Arena this Wednesday. Tip-off is scheduled for 7:30 pm EST.


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Benefits of automated functional testing (was: Why unit testing is a waste of time)
Update 2009-06-30: Despite the attention seeking title and first few paragraphs, the point I was trying to make with this post was about the benefits of automated functional testing. Since it's been posted to proggit and hacker news, a number of people have objected to the misleading intro. Apologies for that, and please start reading from "Benefits of automated functional tests" if you're not interested in the misdirection! — Tim.
In the last few years of writing "enterprise" software in Java I've created and maintained thousands of unit tests, often working on projects that require 80% or better code coverage. Lots of little automated tests, each mocking out dependencies in order to isolate just one unit of code, ensuring minimal defects and allowing us to confidently refactor code without breaking everything. Ha! I've concluded that we'd be better off deleting 90% of these tests and saving a lot of time and money in the process.
The stem of the problem is that most "units" of code in business software projects are trivial. We aren't implementing tricky algorithms, or libraries that are going to be used in unexpected ways by third parties. If you take most Java methods and mock out the services or components they call then you'll find you aren't testing very much at all. In fact the unit test will look very similar to the code it is testing. It will have the same mistakes and need parallel changes whenever the method is modified. How often do you find a bug thanks to a unit test? How often do you spend half the day fixing up test failures from perfectly innocent code changes?
The complexity that does arise in this kind of software is all down to interactions between components, messy and changing business requirements and how the whole blob integrates at runtime.
Should we do away with automated testing all together then? No. In fact I have found "functional" end-to-end automated tests to be incredibly useful. By functional tests, I mean those that test software in more-or-less the same way as a human tester does, covering wide swathes of the application without checking the result of every possible variation.
The benefits of functional tests are outlined below, and after discussing the one big downside I admit where unit tests can be appropriate.
Benefits of automated functional tests
Smoke testing
If we deploy this release of the application, is the application going to release a deployment of toxic fumes and metal scraps?
I've worked on a project where, with the "final" release looming, we were creating a release for manual testing at the end of every day. And the next morning, testers would try to run a few simple scenarios and the application would fall over at the first hurdle. Incorrect database patches, configuration errors, NullPointerExceptions in critical paths and the like.
Later on I developed a set of a dozen or so functional tests, covering just a few basic scenarios. Nevertheless, this was sufficient to ensure that manual testers were able to find useful bugs in the application rather than having to sit around for days twiddling their thumbs because nothing works.
New developers
It's tough being a new developer on a project. Faced with a mountain of code I haven't seen before, performing some process I don't really understand – wait, what does this application do again? – the first thing I like to do it run the damned thing and get a few ideas on what it actually does. To play tester for a while. Unit tests aren't very useful here. We're wanting a high-level overview of the application rather than worrying about how some tiny part of it might be implemented.
So how do you get the application up and running on your development environment. If you're lucky, there'll be some up-to-date instructions for getting it to kind of start up. Then you'll get one of the other developers to show you how to run a few things. "Um, let's do it on my machine," they'll say. See, you need to hack up the reference data in the database like this and take this sample XML file I've got sitting around and modify this, this and this field, stick it in this table with these dozen values, and then … it goes on. Good luck ever replicating that yourself.
If however, you have some automated functional tests, you can say "run this test that covers the simplest scenario with everything going right". They can then explore the database and see what kinds of information has been written and even create breakpoints in a debugger to step through the application and get an idea of how everything sits together.
This is massively handy, not just for the new developer but for everyone around them. Instead of having to spend weeks or months babysitting each new developer you can just point them at a set of tests and tell them to play around for a while.
What's more, a "new developer" is not just one who is new to the entire project. With any project of a reasonable size, you will naturally find that each developer has parts of the application that they don't see, touch or understand. If you don't want to maintain the same part of the application for all time then it's in your best interests to make sure you can hand it over to another person with the least impact possible. Having functional tests is a great way of doing this.
The benefits described here give us a few clues to how our functional tests should be implemented.
First, they need to set up their own reference data so that a new developer can sit down and run them straight away without hacking their database. In fact, the first thing any test should do is to clear out all the reference data, and set up just the absolute minimal data required to run through this test successfully. This helps people understand the impact of setting difference reference data values (this is often woefully under-documented!) and by having the data be independent, we avoid the problem where adding a new test requires jumping through hoops to avoid breaking every other test in the system. (Aside – I have a convenient method for setting up reference data in code that I may share at some future stage.)
Second, if people are going to be running through the test in a debugger and stopping at breakpoints to explore the runtime state of the application, then we can't get away with putting in sleep(fixedTime) calls through the tests. You can't say "the application should have finished processing by now" if someone has actually paused it for half an hour. Tests that sleep are slow and unreliable in any case.
Experimentation and Precise Requirements
If a client asks you "how does the application behave in this weird scenario," how long does it take you to give an answer? The requirements documents probably don't have that level of detail, and in any case the question is how the application really behaves.
If you have functional tests already, then it's probably straightforward to modify one that checks a related scenario. After you've written it, you can read over it again to check that you're actually testing what you intend to. Checking it manually would be error-prone and involve a lot of set up time.
Odd special cases
I've had cases where we decided that one particular client would be able to submit input data that was incorrect in a couple of specific ways, and we'd accept it anyway. The last was one of those good times where something that's causing major headaches at a high-level in the business turns out to be an issue that I as an individual developer could make go away with some minor code changes. I think sometimes we take for granted how fortunate we are as developers to be able to make such a direct impact on problems instead of being wholly dependent on others.
Right, so I've put this worthwhile hack in. What's to stop another developer coming along and changing the code again? There's no obvious reason for why it behaves in this way – it's just down to history. I can put comments in the code, get requirements to update their documents, but no-one reads documents anyway What's more, even though I only had to make some minor changes, that was due to some co-incidental reasons of how other parts of the code just happen to be currently implemented.
What I did was to write a functional test that takes the exact sample file from the client and runs through the applicable scenario, checking that it is accepted. (I also wrote another test to check that the same file is rejected if it's from any other client.) If a developer ever makes a change that breaks the test, the first thing they'll do it open it up and find a big comment at the top that I wrote explaining all the history around why this is necessary and what it does.
This makes the requirement discoverable when it matters. Bonus points!
Fixing a bug, really
A tester raises a defect. "When I do this, the application gives an error." You check the code and find, oops! We're doing something stupid. A quick fix, commit, mark the defect as fixed. Weeks later they re-test it, re-open the defect because the same series of steps still fails in the same place. It's a different error message though! As a developer you can try to say that the original defect was "fixed", it's just the application it now getting further along and hitting a different issue. No-one cares though.
If you write a functional test to verify the scenario now works (even if this is just an ad-hoc test that you don't commit) you'll ensure that the tester will agree with you that it's been fixed.
Downsides of automated functional tests
There's really only one – they are SLOW. Whereas you can easily run a hundred unit tests in a second if you're using a lot of mock objects, a single functional test may take 2 minutes to complete. This is a big problem. Whenever I've been talking about writing an ad-hoc test, and it being beneficial even if you don't commit it, I'm alluding to the issue that it's practical to write a functional test for every defect raised, but not so practical to run them all every time someone commits, or even once a day, as a way to guard against regressions.
Because I think that functional tests have enormous benefits, I also think it's worth investing time getting them to run as fast as you can. This may include running tests in parallel on a cluster of servers (hey, seems I've found a way lots of companies could utilise "cloud computing"). It also tends to be better to add more assertions to existing tests than to construct an entirely new independent test. You can make tests that are "data-driven", so that a single test may have a table of a dozen different options that it loops through, without having to start from the beginning each time.
The slowness means that you'll only be able to have a small number of functional tests – under a hundred – and this means that there'll be a lot of scenarios (particularly negative scenarios) that you're still not testing.
On the other hand, an automated functional test still runs faster than a human tester. It's not unusual to have teams of testers that take a week to run through a hundred scenarios. With every release they have to go through this entire process again. What's the cost of this, in both money and time? More than the cost of a set of servers?
(The other option, a key feature of Rails and becoming popular in other recent web frameworks as well, is to support "integration tests" that work at a lower level than functional tests, but still well above unit tests. Such a test would, for example, request a URL and assert that the response is to be forwarded to a different URL, without actually going through a web server or web browser. The exact level at which you test will depend on the type of application, and how easy it is to simulate a user.)
There's an interesting post on the RunCodeRun Blog called It's Okay to Break the Build. It argues that it's unreasonable for developers to have to run an entire set of slow tests before every commit. I agree, and have found that simply running a couple of "relevant" functional tests before committing ensures that it is unlikely that you will break any other tests. Breakages can be quickly reverted after the test failure shows up on the main build server. (Perhaps there are some DVCS workflows that would be useful here?)
Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day is another fascinating article. It describes a project that has 4.4 hours of automated tests, including an hour of tests that involve running Internet Explorer instances an simulating a user clicking and typing. By running them across dozens of servers, they can run all the tests in 9 minutes. What's more, they have so much faith in these tests that their code is automatically deployed to live when the tests pass. This happens 50 times a day on average. Brilliant!
Concluding by backtracking
Although I've dismissed the benefit of having lots of unit tests in the types of projects I've recently been working on, what if your environment or project isn't the same as mine?
Consider the strength of interfaces and the separation of developers in your project.
Are you writing a library or framework that people may use in ways you don't expect? Do you have a lot of "generic" code that has strong interface boundaries? What is the impact if a bug is found? If all your development is within one team, as soon as you discover a bug in one section of the code it's easy enough to write a functional test and fix it. That doesn't hold though if the developers that discover the bug and need the fix will have little or no hope of writing it.
In some cases it is useful to test code in isolation and mock out its dependencies – because you actually don't know what these will be at runtime. In a lot of "business" code though, while people may claim some code is generic it isn't really. Or if it is, it's a case of premature indirection (not abstraction!) being the root of all evil.
Another dimension to consider is the rate of change of requirements documents.
If requirements are fuzzy and constantly changing, then what's the point of testing all sorts of weird edge cases? The desired behaviour won't be well-defined in any case! With changing requirements, functional tests are very useful to keep track of how the application is supposed to (and does) behave at the current point in time.
I would go so far in certain circumstances to say that good testers should be able to themselves write automated functional tests, based of higher-level requirements, using a domain-specific-language (DSL) written by the developers. This provides a precise language with which business analysts, testers and developers can communicate. Imagine receiving a bug report with a test case that you can immediately reproduce instead of having to guess at! With enough skill, a large set of functional tests would act in concert with higher-level requirements documents to produce a system that has well-documented behaviour. Unfortunately the "certain circumstances" I'm talking about is "Tim's dream world". In the real world, you need to have a least the first big set of tests written by a decent developer who has good taste.
To conclude, delete most of your unit tests and replace them with just 10 functional tests for a start. Forget about code coverage metrics, and let me know how it goes!
(If you liked this post, you may also be interested in It's not done yet, where I talk about some of the issues around getting the kinds of applications I typically work on into a live environment.)
39 Comments to Benefits of automated functional testing (was: Why unit testing is a waste of time)
Your post is correct.
Unfortunately, it is also thouroughly out of vogue.
At my current job, if I tried to replace any unit tests with automated functional tests I would be immediately murdered. There would be no reasoning. Just murdering.
[...] Tim's Treaties On Sloths By ine8181 Tim writes [...] they are [...]
I think that unit testing has been around for long enough that it must be fashionable now to criticise it.
Of course I'm not insinuating that this blog post tries to be a fashion leader instead of a well-thought out technical blog post.
Mr Internets: Well, you can change your organization, or you can change your organization.
You make some interesting points, and in certain cases I agree with you.
On paper, unit tests are really amazing. On paper, they would do what your integration tests do, but faster, and they would isolate the very 'unit', as it were, that was failing, and probably why. On paper you can refactor with confidence, knowing that all your requirements are covered by a tests that will point to you the exact point of failure. On paper you can add or modify functionality due to changing requirements by changing tests then coding till they all pass.
On paper.
If wishes were horses then we'd all be eating steak. Or something.
The point is, this ideal is far, *far* from reality. The amount of work required to code to a standard that makes your code unit testable and then actually write the unit tests ranges from improbable to impossible.
Unit tests are an inefficient way to increase confidence in your code. They are that 5% that takes the *other* 95% of the time.
In my short career I've seen one, and only one use of unit tests. Incidentally, it's happening right now.
At work we are doing some major refactoring to an existing code base. How major? No more hibernate, no more database, hello completely different way of dealing with data.
It's kind of a big deal. And I honestly can't imagine how we would deal with this situation without unit tests. Requirements are thin on the ground, the code is not well written, understanding of the code base is low. Without unit tests… well, make a few changes and before you know it you're ankle-deep in shit and can't smell death any more[1].
But when are you in that situation, really? How many times are you in the situation where you have a major change to perform on bad, unfamiliar code with little requirements but *stellar* unit tests. Not never. But not often.
One could make the observation that, if people have the discipline to write unit tests they probably have the discipline to write good code. But I won't go there, as I've rambled long enough.
In conclusion, unit tests are great in a fairy-tale land that no one lives in, or in a few improbable scenarios that don't come up often enough to care. Unit tests are developers jacking off over a concept. An ideal that has a decidedly minor place in reality.
Rant complete.
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/79513/Ladies-arent-the-only-ones-crazy-for-cats#2467924 (credit where credit's due)
> The amount of work required to code to a standard that makes your code unit testable and then actually write the unit tests ranges from improbable to impossible.
> In my short career I've seen one, and only one use of unit tests. Incidentally, it's happening right now.
Well, that certainly increases your credibility.
"The point is, this ideal is far, *far* from reality. The amount of work required to code to a standard that makes your code unit testable and then actually write the unit tests ranges from improbable to impossible."
You're right; bad code cannot be unit tested. But test driven code naturally is. So test drive your code (spec your code? 'test' is such a wrong notion) and make sure it has quality.
I've been writing code of that standard every day for years, and I expect the same standard from anyone working with me.
Putting my money where my mouth is: http://github.com/kaiwren/wrest
I disagree. I think it's a balance kind of thing. Too many mocked unit tests, and you're writing trivial unit tests. Too many integration tests, and you won't be able to pinpoint bugs because you just get weird action-at-a-distance bugs with no way to pinpoint the culprit.
I agree with alot of what you say here. A point that keeps coming back to me is that 99% of the time when you have a unit test failure, you go fix the unit test. That tells me i'm doing something wrong….
But, IMO, the value of a unit test is to help force (or at least prod) people into writing code that is decoupled and easy to manage. Perhaps we should write unit tests, and then throw them out when your done
Full disclosure: You will take TDD out of my cold, dead hands, buddy.
I have worked on both types of systems: those without or with less than 50% coverage and those with tests over 50% covered. I'll take the latter any day of the year. Of course either system is significantly worse if the tests were written after the code was written. Test First, man.
Certainly there are mountains of tests out there that are poorly written by people who where simply checking a box on a list of things they are supposed to do when they write code. This is not the fault of TDD, though. And when I look closely at the kind of testing you're doing, I'll notice that the practice of completely isolating the unit by mocking out all of its dependencies is one of the easiest patterns in unit testing to get wrong. The reason for this is that it's too easy to "bake in" to the test deep, questionable assumptions about your architecture. So maybe your problem is that you're just doing it wrong. Might I suggest at your next job (because this one is not long for this world, sorry to say), you begin by writing the tests first and you mock or fake at the logical or physical system boundary instead of directly up against the unit in question.
So, in summary, I think you might be saying "unit tests are bad" because you have crappy unit tests.
I think you're neglecting one of the big benefits of TDD: When you write the tests first, you write code that can be tested and refactored. generally, when you don't – not so much.
Of course, it's also true that if you're writing tests that seem trivial and look a lot like the code under test, you could be testing at a granularity that's too fine, but that doesn't mean you should dump unit testing altogether.
My 2c.
Interesting rant, Tim (et al.). Sadly, from my perspective, it sounds like something written by the typical developer who just knows something's no good because he's never heard anyone say anything nice about it. I can only say that you must not be in a test-driven environment, and you've probably never had your job saved by one of those useless unit tests. I am, and I have.
When done properly, the unit test allows you to wrap your head around the piece you're coding — to test-drive the concept, as it were — and then verify your mileage. If you happen to be working in an environment where you can guarantee that no other change will break your current code, then unit testing is a waste of time. But, my projects have always included plenty of code overlap and special ingredient mixing to make me sweat just thinking about what the other developers are doing. Unit testing has been critical and effective.
Of course unit testing can be taken to the extreme and become overburdening and wasteful.
I suggest that you practice test-first development (even if nobody else is), where you write the test to prove whatever requirements you are coding to, then code to make your test work. Divide your unit tests into logical pieces so you can run only the ones you're certain you want to verify (an not the whole package) — this also prevents you from having to re-create mock objects redundantly, as you can group elements that use the same objects and test them as a group. Then integrate fearlessly once your tests pass. Mocking data and objects is tiresome and error-prone if you have to do it manually each time you run your tests, so it is best to take care of your mocks initially.
The BEST thing about unit testing is that, when properly set up and executed, you can be ASSURED that your new/changed code is playing nicely with the other kids in the playground every time, and if it isn't you will know it.
As you've stated, unit testing is no substitute for integration, regression, and end-to-end functional testing, but that's not its purpose. It's purpose is to verify and guarantee that each object that you write behaves EXACTLY as you have defined it in the scenarios under which it is placed. If the business rules change, so must the unit tests and the functional code. It's as simple as that.
When I first started writing unit tests (and hating every day because of it), they made me angry because they reminded me how much of an idiot I was to be making such stupid mistakes. It wasn't long before I began to rely on those annoying tests, soon learning how to streamline their processing without sacrificing quality. Prior to integrating our code, our little team would run our tests, update our code from the server, and rerun the tests (several times each day) on our personal dev boxes prior to check-in, then we would re-run the tests in the dev environment. It took time (thus we learned how to streamline), but we rarely had any unexpected problems. Further testing would find bugs, but those were generally due to a developer's lack of understanding the larger picture and thus not coding for the proper exceptions. Those changes were relatively easy, quick and thus inexpensive to fix.
Since that first experience, I've worked at a number of organizations, some where the majority of developers and management sounded much like you do, and others where the goal or mantra was to do unit testing along with everything else. I can say I have learned to have greater faith in the quality of product coming from the unit testing developers than the others. By far.
I wrote a blog about a year ago that takes the opposite point of view. I think that when people ding unit tests in preference to functional tests they are missing something. Often they have a view of how unit testing contributes to quality but it isn't quite right:
Yes, in theory 90% of unit tests could be deleted because they dont test the "real" logic of the application. But the real problem is not unit test coverage but rather the people.
Most programmers just arent that good and cant identify what code should actually be tested. They also become lazy and neglect testing in the long run.
So IMHO code coverage becomes a management decision (part of the reason many hear are frustrated by it). Code coverage makes very little sense to the technically enlightened, but it does make a lot of sense when you are a manager who has to introduce policy that caters to the lowest common denominator.
If you are coding with a team of aces (changes are your not) then ignore code coverage. If you are like me and you are coding in a team thats abilities span the full range then code coverage becomes a necessary evil. I have tried turning off code coverage checking before and it was a disaster! The sub par coder (and the ones that just dont care) introduced all sorts of regressions into the system that ultimately made us less productive. For me the proof is where the rubber hits the road, we turned off code coverage and things got worse.
Of course the better option is always going to be to hire good coders, but we all know that that doesnt always happen…
just learn to read…half the time the dev's I work with are more interested in playing WOW than in READING the code. Good God man your suppose to know how to program not play freaking video games all day.
Hey Tim,
Grats on triggering response from the TDD inquisition which is still very much alive. Always the same weak argumentation: you don't understand it, you are incompetent, you aren't doing it right. Followed by some chest pounding and heroic tales how they solve testing code with more code.
With 100% code coverage you can still be doing the WRONG thing 'bug' free. TDD is not testing.
Your post would have been a very good read without doing the versus TDD thing!
If TDD is not testing then what is @Tungano?
Its very easy to just say your wrong, but to actually provide a suggestion….
Suggest something @Tungano
No testing????
Quote from wikipedia:
"Note that test-driven development is a software design method, not merely a method of testing."
Read into some of the argumentation around BDD. Various blog posts have take the position that TDD is about design, how it funnels developers into creating quality code and not about testing.
I am not saying TDD holds no value, I think it does. Comparing functional tests to TDD based unit testing is somewhat comparing apples to oranges though.
I think you have the wrong idea about what TDD is. When you're doing TDD right, you should be able to throw away the tests when you're done and still have gotten value from the process. The tests themselves are just an artifact – a waste product, as it were. The desired output is good code; it just so happens that TDD also produces tests.
There's nothing that constrains TDD to unit testing. You can apply TDD to functional testing as well.
Recently I have come to appreciate 4 things from tests.
A lot of time we get caught up in how we achieve these. It sounds like you are progressing with TDD to the point where you are starting to see the advantages of BDD. It's sounds like to went a bit too far to straight functional testing. I would guess you will soon settle a bit closer to BDD.
I screen captured a bit of the 4 stages here, in regards to testing gui's.
I Agree. Unit tests are kind of useless for enterprise java software. TDD zealots here are probably using Ruby )
So 'enterprise java software' == 'poorly factored, horrible code'?
I beg to disagree – I've worked on 'enterprise' java, C# and Ruby projects with well factored codebases and good coverage.
If you have bad code, you can't spec/test it. Stop blaming unit tests and start blaming the people who don't do their jobs right.
A huge benefit of unit testing the tests themselves is the functional decomposition of the code which increases readability and reusability. By forcing my staff to write unit tests they write more and smaller functions with a more defined purpose.
I have a question for the TDD advocates. David speaks of requirements and business cases. That sounds completely foreign to my work, where a typical case would be something like, "Here's two dozen files and a half-assed description of the file format. Please make sense of the geometric data in them."
How the heck to you test first with something like that? Until I do a lot of experimenting, I usually have only a rough idea what the right answer is. What sense does it make to write tests first if you don't know what the answer is ahead of time?
(Mind you, I do my best to do lots of automated functional tests, and unit tests where it seems to make sense. But except for when I'm writing mathematical support routines for my own code, I rarely write the tests first.)
[...] people complain that writing unit tests is a burden that they just don't have time for. In fact, I came across a post today that said just that. I think that this is a myth that is generally driven by poorly designed [...]
Well done sir, I agree and applaud your wisdom.
The main point of TDD in my book is to drive the design of the code. As one of the earlier commenters said, tested code is well designed code that is easy to refactor, etc. The 'tests' are strictly a side benefit. I agree with the folks who say that we should rename TDD (Test Driven DESIGN) to DBE (Design By Example)
[...] recently read a blog article, Benefits of automated functional testing, which included a section arguing that unit testing was not as important as functional testing. I [...]
I know a couple of guys who think exactly like you. Their code works completely fine. But, you'd rather commit suicide than maintain that code. It's B.S.
That's where UT helps. Its cool to have a different opinion. Probably your work involves mundane stuff that is quite straightforward and does not require UT that much. Functional tests suffice in that case. But when you're talking about complex systems involving complex arithmetic and algorithms, proper UT can alone save you.
I'm also sometimes of the opinion that you need not unit test each and every method. There are critical methods in your code that DEMAND unit testing. A method which is at least 10 lines long totally demands a unit test. And that's when you can be sure that you unit is working completely fine and you've set a well defined contract with the method.
Chanced upon this site and was truly envious.
I work in an entirely different field and grew
up in the pre computer age. You guys may disagree strongly sometimes, but what fantastic professional development you are making the opportunity of. Fight on and grow!
[...] is the perfect place to address flammable jugs of kerosene such as Tim Sutherland taking a dump on unit testing. The Software Developers (K)ollaborative blogger launches: The stem of the problem is that most [...]
Thanks for stating the obvious… my comrade just did the same and makes a GREAT analogy of why testing is important. http://app.arat.us/blog/?p=159
I happen to be on a project where we're building an api at the moment, and we have a weird holy-grail situation – automated functional/acceptance tests that are FAST. You're right to call out speed as the problem.
It's "weird" in that, from feature to feature, I'm not sure to what degree I ought to drive out code using just the functional tests. They're so fast they feel like unit tests. You pay some price for only testing this way though: people expect Foo class to have a matching FooTest.
So I've been working on Schnauzer (not very actively, I'm ashamed to say). Were it to get to completion (there are some problems in webkit around Ajax posts, also I have no time), it would be (it *is*) a blazing fast, REAL (i.e. real Safari) end-to-end web functional testing api in ruby, with no traffic going over any wires.
I'm convinced it (or things like it) would change how we think about these testing problems in ways I can't predict right now. I'd love to get schnauzer working in full, maybe with webrat integration, with a simple api that other implementations (Chrome, FF) could conform to. Sigh.
I find there's a low-level of unity testing that's very beneficial, and then I combine that with fast, clear functional tests. You run into problems every so often…but the trick is to find the right black boxes, to sense what classes and components are cohesive…if something isn't clearly cohesive I find the tests that get written act as "casts" – code that gets in the way – rather than the really valuable feedback mechanisms that raise the project's level of agility.
[...] Benefits of automated functional testing – "In the last few years of writing "enterprise" software in Java I've created and maintained thousands of unit tests, often working on projects that require 80% or better code coverage. Lots of little automated tests, each mocking out dependencies in order to isolate just one unit of code, ensuring minimal defects and allowing us to confidently refactor code without breaking everything. Ha! I've concluded that we'd be better off deleting 90% of these tests and saving a lot of time and money in the process." [...]
[...] Benefits of automated functional testing (was: Why unit testing is a waste of time) » SDK (tags: testing programming development functional unit article tdd) [...]


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20 Soyuz 7K-OK spacecraft were purchased in the initial development batch, and Soyuz 13 will mark the flight of the 20th. Analysis is under way and it is expected the commanders will have a full report and recommendation by April 15 on how to use manned spacecraft for military purposes.
After the presentation General Gudkov agrees with the personnel plans for the Gagarin Centre, including appointment of Beregovoi as cosmonaut chief.


text: The features for these heels include a clear upper in a slip on design, peep toe, cherry printed platform and heels, smooth lining, and cushioned footbed. Approximately 6 inch heels and 1 3/4 inch platforms. Style: shoes-heels-plsr-motif-601chclearblack Brand: Pleaser Shoes NOTE: This item is an Expanded Assortment*. Please allow 3-4 business days for item to leave the warehouse. NOTE: This item is exluded from discounts and promotions, if eligable may be subject to a restocking. See our store policy.


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Home of the Kappa, an imaginary creature that lives in water, featured in many fascinating folk tales of the country.
Tono is a garden city laid in a basin that is surrounded by the Kitakami Range in the central part of Iwate. The three notable mountains of the Kitakami Range are Mt. Hayachine-san, Mt. Rokkoushi-san and Mt. Ishigami-san. Together they are called Tono's Three Mountains. The center of Tono is situated near the upper reaches of the Sarugaishi-gawa River, which is a tributary of the Kitakami-gawa River, at the western end of the Tono Basin. Tono has been well-known for horse breeding for many centuries and has prospered as a trading point between the inland and the coast.
Tono is the land of old folk tales. There are a number of folk tales in Tono that have been told from generation to generation. The most loved tale of the locals is that of the Kappa, an imaginary, peculiar looking creature with a mischievous character that lives in water and has a dish on its head. You will see statues of Kappa all over the town including the one in front of Tono Station and another in the pond of the square near the railway station. Tono's old folk tales, including Kappa stories and old customs, are introduced at Tono Mukashi-banashi Mura (Old Tales Village) and the Tono City Museum.
The most exciting event of Tono is the Tono-matsuri Festival, which is held in early autumn every year. During the festival, local performing arts such as Kagura (Japanese ancient sacred music) and the Rice Planting Dance are performed. Yabusame (Japanese horseback archery) is also a very popular performance that attracts large crowds of people every year.
From Tokyo:[Rail]Three hours 15 minutes by the JR Tohoku Shinkansen Line from Tokyo Station to Shin-Hanamaki Station. Forty-five minutes by the JR Kamaishi Line Express Train from Shin-Hanamaki Station to Tono Station.


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The 56th Grammy Awards are taking place on January 26 live from The Staples Center. The show is being hosted by LL Cool J.
Jay Z tops the nominations with nine; Kendrick Lamar, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Justin Timberlake, and Pharrell Williams each garner seven nods; Drake and mastering engineer Bob Ludwig are up for five awards.
The nominations for the Best New Artist included:
James Blake
Kendrick Lamar
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Kacey Musgaves
Ed Sheeran
The winner was Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. They were on hand and thanked their fans for being there before there was no media. They also thanks their management. They added that they made their album without a record label.
Check back to this page as I am live reporting on the scene.


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View on the map. Visit the website: www.exploreum.com
A great place for kids. It had a megaladon exhibit and a lot of hands on science experiments. The prices were reasonable.
We've removed comments because of lovely spammers. You can still add them and when we re-enable them your comment will appear.
There are too many nerdy spots to show you (Over 1000!) in the current map view.
Try Zooming in to see more detail.


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The Nominations
My favorite holiday in Los Angeles is on the 24th of February this year. The Oscars will be held at the Dolby Theater. … Continue Reading
My favorite holiday in Los Angeles is on the 24th of February this year. The Oscars will be held at the Dolby Theater. … Continue Reading
This video is not to be f***in missed. … Continue Reading
Ryan Nelson is a designer who works for screenwriter John August. Ryan and his wife Amy produced a short that I just found on the John August blog that, according to August, played at Slamdance last year. It is the epitome of working with you've got available to you like a sailboat and a blowup sex doll. Oh, and a Panasonic AF100, a friend who can act well, and a good idea. Directed by Dee Austin Robertson, it's a fabulous short and well worth nine minutes of your day. Eric Goes West makes it into the PCN Screening Room.
Maybe you, like me, have a tendency to get stressed by all the top-ten lists that emerge at the end of the year. The lists are usually filled with books you must read, dishes you must try, restaurants you must visit, movies you must see. Rather than inciting enthusiasm for the possibility of adventure or entertainment, the lists often impart feelings of regret for all that that you could have experienced, but didn't. Soon anxiety replaces your sense of loss because somewhere between number seven and three you decided you must pack it all in before the list writer deems you unworthy. If you've read all the way to number two you eventually toss the whole thing aside. "Fuck the list." … Continue Reading
Since Sarah started the day with a writing piece, I thought I'd keep the pen rolling.
Chris Terrio, the writer of one of my top three favorite movies of the year, talks about the toughest scene to write in Argo. Surprisingly it wasn't one of the action sequences. It was a scene with a room full of men. … Continue Reading
Tommy Edison is blind. His is an avid Instagram user. Below is a video that shows how he does it. His feed is blindfilmcritic.
This is PhotoCine News. The definitive blog about the collision between filmmaking and photography. It was started in 2010 by Michael Britt and Lou Lesko the same people who created the PhotoCine Expo.
PCN had a fantastic run for about three and half years. Now it remains as an archive for the internet though the generosity of BlinkBid Software. The industry standard software for bidding, producing, and invoicing photography and motion gigs.
Have a fabulous day.


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America's BEST frozen food service
Becoming #1 in frozen food service potatoes and
appetizers by:
Being the business partner of choice for our
Being the employer of choice where we value employee
engagement, diversity, safety and continuous
Being the partner of choice for our suppliers.
Being the investment option of choice for our
Being socially responsible in the communities where
we live and work.
We commit to implement strategic programs designed
to connect with diverse communities so that we are
positioned to attract, retain, and develop
employees, suppliers and other business partners;
abiding by the principal that all these
relationships are based on mutual respect and
McCain Foods USA is an active member
of the following organizations:


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Solo show by Robb Conover opening May 14th... 7 - 10 pm
Robb is all about finding what is fun and real in life and applying it to his art. He is also known to do everything he can to promote other artists. As he's been known to say 'Art is not about ego, it's about discovery and sharing that journey with others'.


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EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC ACX review -
Product Showcase
Product Showcase
If we rotate the card and look at the backside we can see two SLI connectors, so in theory four cards in quad-SLI GPU mode are supported. Quad SLI however is difficult and often a maze of driver problems, Nvidia has never really recommended and actively supported quad-SLI. But for a handful of benchmarks and sheer e-peen, it will work OK'ish. We really recommend to go with a maximum of 2 maybe three cards.
If we zoom in a bit we can see one RAM IC from Samsung. This is high density GDDR5 memory, Nvidia tucked 3 GB of graphics memory on this card (24 pieces of 32M ×16 GDDR5 SDRAM). 3GB we feel is a sweet spot for high-end anno 2013.
For the GeForce GTX 780 launch we'll have multiple articles ranging from single GPU to 2-way SLI. We'll also look at performance based on high-end yet more moderate processors and then on the X79 platform with an overclocked Core i7 3960X running at 4600 MHz. EVGA didn't just pay attention to cooling the GPU, but also the surrounding components that make up the card.
So overall you are going to witness some pretty interesting stuff in the upcoming days. The ACX Cooler features a reinforcement baseplate that helps maintain a straight PCB (printed circuit board), which helps lower mosfet temperatures by 7 percent and memory temperatures by 15 percent. That's it for this photoshoot though. We need to tell you a tale or two about the GPU and the architecture.
In this review we test the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti SC SuperClocked ACX review, armed with that 450W cooler and our FLIR camera we'll see if it really is good cooling. Oh and hey, SC means a factory o...
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Classified review
We review the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Classified, this graphics card is equipped with NVIDIA's second to best flagship GPU. Combined with an all custom PCB design and a lot of tweaking features this product will be enticing for a lot of you guys.
EVGA GeForce GTX 760 SC ACX review
In this article we review the EVGA GeForce GTX 760 SC ACX edition, this particular model comes with a dual-slot two fan ACX cooling solution. That boils down to a more silent product versus and great cooling performance. EVA offers the card factory overclocked at some pretty impressive clock frequencies. Join us in this review and let's see if the 269 USD ACX model will be worth it for you.
EVGA GeForce GTX 770 SC review
In this review we peek at the EVGA GeForce GTX 770 SC (SuperClocked) edition. This model graphics card comes with a factory overclock and the new ACX cooler. Overall the card is sitting in-between the GeForce GTX 680 and GeForce GTX 780 , with its 1111 MHz core clock frequency. We take the latest games and do some FCAT testing as well.


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You Rock!!
Steven Barger
You Rock!!
I just wanted to say "Bravo" for you site and your sentiment. The shitheads are taking over and it is SO refreshing to find others who can think for themselves. The cold steel of reason can slice through the rotting corpse of superstition any day, but I imagine humans will continue to "have faith" to deflect their fears, control their peers, and keep at bay the fact that the world may not be cruel or evil or good, but just indifferent.
Keep up the good work!
steven barger
Material by Cliff Walker (including unsigned editorial commentary) is copyright ©1995-2006 by Cliff Walker. Each submission is copyrighted by its writer, who retains control of the work except that by submitting it to Positive Atheism, permission has been granted to use the material or an edited version: (1) on the Positive Atheism web site; (2) in Positive Atheism Magazine; (3) in subsequent works controlled by Cliff Walker or Positive Atheism Magazine (including published or posted compilations). Excerpts not exceeding 500 words are allowed provided the proper copyright notice is affixed. Other use requires permission; Positive Atheism will work to protect the rights of all who submit their writings to us.


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Ok, this is a simple question I am sure but I'm a novice when it comes to batch scripting and programming so I hope I can find the answers I seek here.
Machine Specifications
OS - Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition Service Pack 2
CPU - Dual Core Xeon 2.67GHz
The situation
I have a server with a hard drive that I use for storing phone call recordings, it only has 350GB of space and is completely full so my recordings are no longer being stored until I clear it. These recordings have been piling up since 2011, so manually copying the files is nearly impossible since I don't have that much RAM and windows always times out and goes to not responding when I try.
What I need to do
I need a script that will take the files from before a certain date (IE. before 1/1/2013) and move them to a share on my NAS unit at \192.168.x.x\Recordings and once they are finished being copied to that share to delete the original files from the hard drive to free up that space.
I'm sure this is easy and probably a stupid question to ask here but I really need to get this done as it is crucial for our customers/employees.
Thank you in advance for helpful answers!!! Very much appreciated!


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If you've been having trouble getting your mortgage processed due to the high volume of loan business, we'd like to hear from you.
We're looking for signs that the mortgage industry is suffering from the stress of record numbers of applications. You can help if:
- Your rate lock has expired;
- You cannot get through to your lender / processor, or they've been exceedingly slow in responding to your requests;
- You've come across "high call volume" delays resulting in a one-or-more- day return-call waiting period;
- Other slowdowns in your mortgage settlement process.
We're hoping to help identify how much of a problem this is or is becoming. Your responses will be confidential, and our standard privacy policy applies.
However, if you would like to be considered for an interview by reporters writing articles about this topic, please fill in the optional phone and e- mail slots below and check the "OK for media" box below them.
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See a list of previous VoxPop questions.


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GamePolitics has learned that a New Mexico judge today dismissed Jack Thompson's wrongful death suit against Take Two Interactive and Sony.
The case, filed in 2006 by Thompson and a New Mexico attorney, claimed that Grand Theft Auto Vice City played a role in 14-year-old Cody Posey's 2004 murder of his father, stepmother and stepsister.
In disposing of the case, Judge Huling ruled that the Court did not have jurisdiction over Take Two and Sony, since neither corporation has offices in New Mexico. Judge Huling also ruled that New Mexico laws did not support Thompson's wrongful death claim in the case.
Thompson and his co-counsel have 30 days to filed an appeal. The controversial is pictured at left holding a September, 2006 press conference to announce the lawsuit.
UPDATE: GamePolitics has received this comment from Take Two regarding yesterday's dismissal of the New Mexico GTA Vice City wrongful death suit:
We are pleased that the Court took decisive and appropriate action to dismiss a case that Take-Two has always known had no basis in law or in fact.
Thompson was asked, but did not provide a comment on the case.


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Skydiving.com now has a network skydiving location serving Whick and Breathitt County in Kentucky. Call Skydiving.com at 1-800-617-7948 for details, free information and specials on skydiving in Whick, KY today!
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Relationship expert gives advice for moving on
Published: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 at 1:23 p.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 at 1:23 p.m.
The following summarized tips are provided by Pepper Schwartz, relationship expert, on www.AARP.org.
PURGE THE GUILT: Your partner would want you to be happy again.
TELL YOUR STORY (BUT CAREFULLY): More than merely a widow or widower, you are a person with opinions, hobbies, preferences, accomplishments, social values, political views and a unique way of looking at the world. As you think about how to present your authentic self, be selective about which of those attributes you share right away and which are best kept private until you get to know a new person better. In particular, avoid over-reminiscing about your old life; it may make your new acquaintance feel excluded.
DEFINE YOUR DESIRES: Take some time to think about the type of new bond you'd like to establish.
TAKE STOCK AND RETOOL YOUR APPEARANCE: If you've become a bit, er, casual in the weight, wardrobe or grooming departments, now's the time to ratchet up your game. Visit a salon or barbershop and ask how you could best update your hairstyle. Seek out a clothing consultant or personal shopper — someone who can advise you on a flattering look and help you pick out items to achieve it. (Some higher-end department stores offer this service free of charge.) Or ask a close friend to be brutally honest about what your ideal makeover would include.
MAKE A CONNECTION: Certain shortcuts to meeting people are time-tested. The simplest is to ask friends if they know someone you'd enjoy meeting. Don't be embarrassed — it's a good beginning. Actively encourage them to think of you as a single, eligible person.
ONLINE DATING: Most well-known dating sites have a large contingent of "seekers" in their 50s, 60s and 70s (and some in their 80s and even 90s), and several reputable sites are completely free.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.


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- Location:
- Carlsbad, CA
- Party Albums:
- 5
Elf on the Shelf North Pole Breakfast (16 photos)
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Do you have an Elf on the Shelf? We have two now...Icicle who watches over Glenn and Snowy who keeps an eye on Megan. This year we hosted a North Pole Breakfast the day after Thanksgiving to kick this Christmas season off right!
Our elves came with lots of fun stuff this year...their own North Pole, gingerbread houses (which I am sure they will hide in eventually), goodies, wish lists, Emergency Elf Dust, candy cane placecard holders, books, countdown to Christmas...boy, those elves were sure busy. Did I ever mention I'm actually a vampire and never sleep?!
I found mini lunch boxes at Dollar Tree and filled them with special elf food to share: Elf Pillows, Snowballs, and Reindeer Poop. Each packet has an original poem (won't find them anywhere else!) on the back of the candy topper.
I anticipate a little elf handling with my 19 month old so I came up with the perfect magical solution...Emergency Elf Dust! This is another original poem you won't find anywhere else. The tiny little vials actually held saffron. I knew I kept those cute little things for a reason!
The little North Pole in the background was made out of a solar light, styrofoam circle, & "snow" blanket from the Dollar Tree. I glued gold spray painted flat dowels to the pole and attached the sign with gold ribbon. I saw this on Apartment Therapy and knew I had to do one myself.
I also bought a bunch of Santa hats last month at the Dollar Tree...super inexpensive and easy window valance!
I attempted cookie cutter pancakes but need a little more practice. Oh well, at least they tasted good!
Elf on the Shelf printables will be available in my store (www.partiesinstyle.com) next week. Please feel free to email me with questions: email@example.com.