text:
Hello Sydney
We've just held our first Sydney based certification training session for accountants. The feedback was really encouraging with comments like:
"I've been waiting for software like this for 10 years!"
"Accounting could not be made simpler – near no effort required."
In Sydney 15 accountants and consultants are now Xero Certified. CIB Accountants & Advisors will also train staff at each of their branches to bring clients on to Xero.
With a growing presence in Sydney we look forward to working with many more accountants!
4 Comments
Hi Guys
Where can we find a list of trained Sydney accountants so I can book one!
That link isn't working anymore. Is there another list somewhere?
Try this one Andrew:


text:
Dinner Menu
Tempura Shrimp$10.50
lightly battered shrimp served with shichimi aioli and sweet thai chili sauce
Crispy Calamari$10.00
tossed with banana peppers, olives, tomatoes, and basil. garnished with a balsamic vinegar reduction.
Crab Cakes$16.00
fresh super lump crab seasoned with onion and peppers, served with baby fresh greens, topped with spicy remoulade.
served with sliced tomato, olives, and toasted naan.
Tuna Tar Tar$8.50
sashimi tuna tossed with tamarind-soy vinaigrette, toasted coriander, fresh chilies, jicama and cucumber, served with sesame black sticky rice and a crisp wonton.
Pecan Fried Brie$10.00
baby danish brie rolled in ground pecans and fried golden brown, served with granny smith apples, raspberry puree, and toasted naan.
Crisp & Fresh$7.00
shredded nappa cabbage, jicama, apples, asian pear, basil, pecans, and stilton cheese tossed in apple cider vinaigrette.
Mixed Greens$6.00
fresh greens tossed in mustard seed vinaigrette, topped with jicama, golden raisins, shredded carrots, and basil seeds.
Cucumber Salad$5.00
crisp cucumbers dusted with chili and tossed in a sweet and sour vinaigrette.
Rocket Salad$7.00
baby arugula and spinach tossed in honey balsamic vinaigrette with apples, bacon, and grilled onions.
Mad Dog Salad$6.00
baby greens tossed in mustard-raspberry vinaigrette, topped with stilton cheese and candied pecans.
Grilled Pizzas
Pulled Pork Pizza$11.00
bbq pork topped with melted jack cheese and fresh herbs served on grilled pizza dough
Arugula & Spinach$10.00
baby arugula and spinach tossed with black olives and apple vinaigrette placed atop crispy grilled pizza, plum tomatoes and melted feta cheese
Mad Dog Pizza$7.00
our famous grilled tortilla pizza with melted jack and feta cheeses topped with plum tomatoes and fresh herbs
Goat Cheese Pizza$12.00
grilled pizza dough topped with imported goat cheese, caramelized onions and figs, finished with basil and balsamic reduction.
Pub Favorites
Cheese Selections: Cheddar, Jack, Feta - $1, Stilton - $1.5, Bacon - $1
Fish & Chips$12.00
atlantic cod lightly beer battered and served with crispy french fries and traditional accompa atlantic cod lightly beer battered and served with crispy french fries and traditional accompanimentsniments
Shepherd's Pie$12.00
cottage style with seasoned ground beef, carrots, onions, and peas simmered in a guinness demi-glaze topped with redskin mashed potatoes, and jack cheese baked until golden brown
Steak Sandwich$11.00
thinly sliced choice aged strip steak topped with caramelized onions on a toasted bun with lettuce, tomato, and a side of stilton fondue.
Pub Burger$9.00
a half pound angus burger served with the works on a toasted bun.
Chicken Sandwich$10.00
6oz grilled chicken breast topped with feta cheese and served with lettuce and tomato on a toasted bun with cilantro-ginger dipping sauce.
Bangers & Mash$11.00
traditional pork sausage grilled crisp and served over mashed potatoes finished with guiness demi-glaze, caramelized and crispy fried onions
Red Thai Curry Shrimp$16.00
white gulf shrimp sauteed with garlic and ginger, red white gulf shrimp sauteed with garlic and ginger, red curry paste and coconut milk, served with sauteed spinach and black sticky rice.curry paste and coconut milk, served with sauteed spinach and black sticky rice
Lobster Ravioli$20.00
maine lobster maine lobster meat sauteed with portobello mushrooms and spinach simmered in a gorgonzola cream served over al dente butternut squash ravioli.meat sauteed with portobello mushrooms and spinach simmered in a gorgonzola cream sauce served over al dente butternut squash ravioli
Chicken Curry$16.00
slow cooked chicken, onions and red peppers simmered in indian spices, finished with tomatoes and fresh cilantro, served with shredded carrots, spinach, and almond raisin basmati rice.
Chicken Skewers$16.00
cumin lime marinated chicken grilled and served with spicy sweet potato fries, sauteed spinach, and grilled plum tomatoes.
fresh atlantic salmon filet pan seared and served over pesto mashed potatoes and sauteed asparagus, finished with balsamic reduction and roasted tomatoes.
Steaks And Chops
Miso Pork Chop$18.00
12oz grilled pork chop topped with a maple-miso glaze, served with sauteed spinach, sweet potato gratin, demi-glaze, and grilled onions.
New York Strip Steak$22.00
12oz choice-aged new york strip steak grilled and served with boursin mashed potatoes and sauteed asparagus garnished with oven dried tomatoes and stout demi-glaze.
Lamb Chops$18.00
new zealand lamb loin chops flame grilled and served w brown sugar and cinnamon rubbed new zealeand lamb loin chops grilled and served with redskin mashed potatoes, sauteed suger snap peas, carrots and mint chimichurri. ith red bliss mashed, chili eggplant, sugar snap peas and yogurt mint sauce, finished with balsamic glaze
Hanger Steak$20.00
10oz choice-aged hanger steak flame grilled and sliced, served with pesto mashed potatoes, sauteed spinach, and grilled tomatoes, finished with stout demi-glaze and crispy fried onions.
Sweet Potato Fries$4.00
French Fries$3.00
Toasted Naan$3.00
Shichimi Aioli$1.50
Stilton Fondue$2.50
Stout Demi-glaze$1.50
Sweet Thai Chili Sauce$2.00
Cilantro-ginger Sauce$2.00
Black Sticky Rice$2.50
Basmati Rice$2.00
Boursin Mashed Potatoes$3.50
Sweet Potato Fries$3.50
Mashed Potatoes$3.00
Pesto Mashed Potatoes$3.50
Toasted Almond & Golden Raisin Basmati$2.50
Sauteed Asparagus$4.00
Sauteed Spinach$3.00
Sauteed Portabello$3.00
Sugar Snap Peas$3.00
Grilled Tomato$3.00
Shredded Carrots$2.00
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Tampa, FL 33611
About Us
The English have long had a reputation for being staid, unadventurous, and totally lacking in an understanding of food and wine. Of most home-based English people this is true. However, for years, England produced a class that inhabited the Empire and developed a sense of fun, a taste for fine food, and good living. It is to this expatriate sub-culture that Mad Dogs and Englishmen is dedicated.

subset: commoncrawl


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The gravestones have all been photographed and they have all now been uploaded to the Find A Grave website where they are accessible to all.
St Elidyr's Church Crunwere Llanteg
Mentioned in the book of Llan Dav (written between 1120/1140) and in use until declared redundant in the summer of 2009 - a period of approximately 900 years. A tribute to our closed village church.
Tuesday, 7 April 2015
Crunwear/Crunwere Church Gravestones
Posted by Ruth Roberts at 10:29
Monday, 3 November 2014
New steps and moved fencing
This work seems to have been initiated from the church's head office in Cardiff and not locally.
I have nt been able to get there yet to take any pictures.
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
Crunwere Churchyard July 2013
The Oriel family grave is inside that undergrowth somewhere
Going down towards the lower yard
The ivy covered porch
Looking down from the top yard
The lower yard
The lower yard
Embedded tombstone in wall
The overgrown porch
Gate is now unlocked so you have access to the lower and older yard -
if you can get through the grass and weeds.
Graves inside the fence disappearing beneath the grass.
Top field above the newest graves.
Top field again.
Looking down towards the church from the top of the yard.
Looking down towards the church from the top of the yard.
Graves disappearing beneath the vegetation.
Top row of graves - these are the newest ones and even they have a neglected air about them.
Top two rows of graves - grass is as tall as the headstones.
Looking down towards the church from the top of the yard.
Fence disappearing within the grass.
Believe it or not this is the path down to the gate.
Looking towards the porch.
Gravestones inside the fence almost buried under vegetation.
Ivy breaking in through the porch.
Ivy breaking in through the porch.
Old table top tombstone.
Fence and gate to lower yard.
Fence and gate to lower yard.
Looking towards the porch - under that tangle of undergrowth
is a cobbled path - somewhere.
Track back across the field to the lane - the picture does not do it justice.
It is so overgrown a car can hardly make the journey across it.
First impressions of Crunwere Church and graveyard - what a sorry sight.
Posted by Ruth Roberts at 12:39
Labels: Church pictures, new fence
Saturday, 29 September 2012
Some new headstones and other pictures
Church path - there are cobbles under all this grass
The tower
Graves inside the fencing
The tower
Our cobbled path is hiding under all the grass
Tidy old yard - but you cannot get to it for the fence
Tower still standing
Porch disappearing under ivy
Animal tracks in carpark
Old stile with metal bar across the top
Steps up to stile
Grassed over carpark
Posted by Ruth Roberts at 02:38
Labels: Church pictures, New Headstones
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ODT Online
ODT /directory
An Ashburton man who was killed in Christchurch last month
can now be named.
Name suppression was lifted for both Cory James Protos (30)
and the 22-year-old woman accused of murdering him, when she
made a second appearance in the High Court at Christchurch
Zariah Jae Samson entered a not guilty plea to a charge of
murdering Protos, who was understood to have been her
boyfriend for a short time.
Police allege Samson murdered Protos on April 27 at an
address in Conference Street. His body was then moved to a
house in Bryndwr, where it's understood Samson lived.
Judge David Gendall remanded Samson in custody and she will
appear in court again on July 18, although a trial is not
likely to take place until next year.
Protos was the son of former Ashburton chimney sweep Jimmy
Protos and his wife Gail. The couple moved to Western
Australia a number of years ago and it's understood they were
on holiday in Thailand when their son died.
Protos was farewelled at a funeral service in Ashburton on
May 3.
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Invercargill, Southern Rural Life - Otago and
Southland, The Courier - Timaru, Courier Country - Canterbury and
West Coast, Queenstown Times - Queenstown, Mountain Scene -
Queenstown, The Oamaru Mail - Oamaru, The
Greymouth Star - Greymouth, Hokitika Guardian - Hokitika,
West Coast Messenger - West Coast, The Ashburton Courier -
Ashburton, The News - North Canterbury, Extra! schools
publication, Property
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text:
Senior Health Center - Corvallis, OR
- WebMD Physician Directory of Corvallis Geriatrician Doctors
- Related Senior Health Articles
- Corvallis Emergency Contacts
- Nearby Corvallis Hospitals
- Find a Local Pharmacy on RxList - Corvallis
Corvallis Geriatrician Doctors for Senior Health
Type of Physician: Geriatrician
What is a Geriatrician? A subspecialty certification by the Board of Internal Medicine or Family Practice; practitioners have special knowledge of the aging process and special skills in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of illness in the elderly. These specialists care for geriatric patients in the patient's home, the medical office, in nursing homes, and in the hospital. Geriatricians are trained to recognize the unusual presentations of illness and drug interactions, to utilize resources such as community social services, and to assist with special ethical issues in the care of the elderly.
Specialty: Geriatric Medicine
Common Name:
Geriatrician Doctors in Corvallis * results
- 2
Samuel M. Kaye
Mid Valley Internal Medicine Pediatrics
400 Hickory St NW Ste 300
Albany, OR 97321
(541) 812-5700
- 35 years experience
- 1 office location(s)
- 3
Jeffrey G. Baxter
Peacehealth Behavioral Health Services
4010 Aerial Way
Eugene, OR 97402
(541) 242-8300
- 19 years experience
- 1 office location(s)
- 4
Cynthia S. Nocek
West Salem Clinic
1233 Edgewater St NW
Salem, OR 97304
(503) 378-7526
- 32 years experience
- 1 office location(s)
- 5
Margaret N. Njonjo
Peacehealth Behavioral Health Services
4010 Aerial Way
Eugene, OR 97402
(541) 242-8300
- 10 years experience
- 1 office location(s)
- 6
Lynne M. Mumaw
Peacehealth Behavioral Health Services
4010 Aerial Way
Eugene, OR 97402
(541) 242-8300
- 1 office location(s)
- 7
Jennifer L. Lamberg
Peacehealth Behavioral Health Services
4010 Aerial Way
Eugene, OR 97402
(541) 242-8300
- 1 office location(s)
- 8
Christa Danielson
Peacehealth Behavioral Health Services
3377 Riverbend Dr
Springfield, OR 97477
(541) 222-6389
- 1 office location(s)
- 9
James E. Sims
Peacehealth Behavioral Health Services
4010 Aerial Way
Eugene, OR 97402
(541) 242-8300
- 1 office location(s)
- 10
Brian M. Bedolla
Legacy Emanuel Chronic Wound & Outpatient Burn Clinic
1002 N Boones Ferry Rd
Woodburn, OR 97071
(503) 981-9526
- 1 office location(s)
- 11
Kathleen T. Chinn
Peacehealth Behavioral Health Services
4010 Aerial Way
Eugene, OR 97402
(541) 242-8300
- 1 office location(s)
Don't see your city? Use the WebMD Physician Directory to expand your search.
Senior Health (Successful Aging)
What are some common facts about health in seniors?
- As people get older, physiological changes occur in their body as a natural part of aging.
- Physical changes due to aging can occur in almost every organ and can affect...
Other Related Senior Health Articles
Emergency Contact for Corvallis
- In case of Emergency, call 911
Nearby Corvallis Hospitals results
- 1Good Samaritan Regional Med Ctr
3600 NW Samaritan Dr
Corvallis, Oregon 97330
(541) 768-511
- 2Samaritan Albany General Hosp
1046 6th Ave SW
Corvallis, Oregon 97321
(541) 812-400
- 3Samaritan Lebanon Comm Hosp
525 N Santiam Hwy
Corvallis, Oregon 97355
(541) 258-210
- 4West Valley Hospital
525 SE Washington St
Corvallis, Oregon 97338
(503) 623-830
- 5Psychiatric Medicine Center
1127 Oak St SE
Corvallis, Oregon 97301
(503) 561-579
- 6Salem Hospital
890 Oak St SE Bldg B
Corvallis, Oregon 97301
(503) 561-520
- 7Salem Hospital Regional Rehab
2561 Center St NE
Corvallis, Oregon 97301
(503) 561-598
- 8Santiam Memorial Hospital
1401 N 10th Ave
Corvallis, Oregon 97383
(503) 769-217
- 9Oregon State Hospital
2600 Center St NE
Corvallis, Oregon 97301
(503) 945-280
- 10Sacred Heart Med Ctr Rvrbnd
3333 Riverbend Dr
Corvallis, Oregon 97477
(541) 222-730
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You are prohibited from using, downloading, republishing, selling, duplicating, or "scraping" for commercial or any other purpose whatsoever, the Provider Directory or any of the data listings or other information contained therein, in whole or in part, in any medium whatsoever.
The Provider Directory is provided on an "AS-IS" basis. WebMD disclaims all warranties, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for particular purpose. Without limiting the foregoing, WebMD does not warrant or represent that the Provider Directory or any part thereof is accurate or complete. You assume full responsibility for the communications with any Provider you contact through the Provider Directory. WebMD shall in no event be liable to you or to anyone for any decision made or action taken by you in the reliance on information provided in the Provider Directory.
The use of WebMD Provider Directory by any entity or individual to verify the credentials of Providers is prohibited. The database of Provider information which drives WebMD Provider Directory does not contain sufficient information with which to verify Provider credentials under the standards of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) of the Utilization Review Accreditation Committee (URAC).
By using the WebMD Provider Directory, you agree to these Terms and Conditions.


text:
Welcome to the E'Lure Salon and Spa Website
E'Lure Salon and Spa
936 Green Street SE, Suite 500
Conyers, GA 30012
Phone: (770) 388-0339
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
E'Lure Salon and Spa is located at 936 Green Street, Suite 500, Conyers, GA 30012 in the Conyers-Rockdale Chamber of Commerce building near the historic Olde Town Community. The salon features a lavish environment with state of the art equipment designed to render the occupants breathless as they get lost in the E'Lure of a total salon and spa experience.
Need hair care products? Look no further. E'Lure Salon and Spa will provide a range of upkeep and finishing products tailored for your hair care needs. If we don't offer it we will get it.
Each of our licensed stylists have no less than 16 years of experience. Collectively, they have been featured on hair shows, blogs, podcasts, reality t.v. shows.....so you know they are qualified to take care of you.
E'LURE Salon and Spa is now hiring!!!!
We are looking for a few more established Stylists. This is a weekly booth rental salon and the first week's rent is free!
Please Contact us at
(770) 388-0339 or email us @ firstname.lastname@example.com 936 Green Street SE, Suite 500, Conyers, GA 30012.
BRAND NEW EPISODES COMING August 8, 2015
E'Lure Salon and Spa Podcast:
Kay Waldon
Malanya Holloway
Charlotte Allen
Stephanie Scott
LaConya Richardson
Christa Fields
Neicy Hess
Belinda Finch


text:
Find out about property values in Doncaster
WANTED: Looking to be nearer to family - considering area's - Blyth,Everton,Scrooby.
Maximum budget £250,000. Bungalow/Barn conversion preferred with minimum 3 bedrooms.
WANTED: 5 Bedroom House - In Bawtry - Austerfield or Misson
Maximum £800 PCM - Long Term Let Wanted
3 Bedrooms, Likes Misson area, Austerfield
Needs Parking for 6 Birth Motorhome
Upto around £105,000
WANTED: Looking for a 2 bedroom house in Bawtry or surrounding area. They have a small dog and are looking to spend £450pcm. Ready to move in July and looking for a long term let.
WANTED: Need a 2 bedroom property preferably in Green Park (Bawtry) but will consider surrounding areas such as Austerfield and Tickhill. They are ready to move now and have a budget of £650pcm (6 Month)
WANTED: Mr&Mrs M & Black Labrador are in need of a 3-4 bedroom property due to selling their own property.They would like a garden&parking for 2 cars is preferable.Budget is £725pcm to move by the end of June
WANTED: Looking for property to buy in TICKHILL/BAWTRY area. Up to £250,000. 3/4 bedrooms, Garage if possible. Work will be considered.
WANTED: Properties around Walnut Avenue area, Tickhill. Around £180,000.
As part of our application process, fees will become due for referencing, tenancy agreement administration and an inventory check, these will be charged in addition to the Rent and Deposit payable before the tenancy starts.
Please click here for full details before you make any decision about a property or before you decide to view.
Please click here for full details of our Fees.
Sequence (UK) Limited is an Appointed Representative of Connells Limited who is authorised and regulated by The Financial Conduct Authority for advising on mortgages and non-investment insurance contracts (most Buy to Let mortgages are not regulated). Registered in England No: 4268443. Registered Office: Cumbria House, 16-20 Hockliffe Street, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, LU7 1GN. 41 national awards won 2004 - 2012, we are part of the Connells Group.
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text:
Ringed by mountains and capped by a temperature inversion that traps bad air, Los Angeles has had bouts of smog since the turn of the 20th century. An outbreak in 1903 rendered the skies so dark that many people mistook it for a solar eclipse. Angelenos might now be living in a state of perpetual midnight—assuming we could live here at all—were it not for the work of Caltech Professor of Bio-organic Chemistry Arie Jan Haagen-Smit. How he did it is told here largely in his own words, excerpted from Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine between 1950 and 1962. (See "Related Links" for the original articles.)
Old timers, which in California means people who have lived here some 25 years, will remember the invigorating atmosphere of Los Angeles, the wonderful view of the mountains, and the towns surrounded by orange groves. Although there were some badly polluted industrial areas, it was possible to ignore them and live in more pleasant locations, especially the valleys . . . Just 20 years ago, the community was disagreeably surprised when the atmosphere was filled with a foreign substance that produced a strong irritation of the eyes. Fortunately, this was a passing interlude which ended with the closing up of a wartime synthetic rubber plant. (November 1962)
Alas, the "interlude" was an illusion. In the years following World War II, visibility often fell to a few blocks. The watery-eyed citizenry established the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District (LACAPCD) in 1947, the first such body in the nation. The obvious culprits—smoke-belching power plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and the like—were quickly regulated, yet the problem persisted. Worse, this smog was fundamentally different from air pollution elsewhere—the yellow, sulfur-dioxide-laced smog that killed 20 people in the Pennsylvania steel town of Donora in 1948, for example, or London's infamous pitch-black "pea-soupers," where the burning of low-grade, sulfur-rich coal added soot to the SO2. (The Great Smog of 1952 would carry off some 4,000 souls in four days.) By contrast, L.A.'s smog was brown and had an acrid odor all its own.
Haagen-Smit had honed his detective skills isolating and identifying the trace compounds responsible for the flavors of pineapples and fine wines, and in 1948 he began to turn his attention to smog.
Chemically, the most characteristic aspect of smog is its strong oxidizing action . . . The amount of oxidant can readily be determined through a quantitative measurement of iodine liberated from potassium iodide solution, or of the red color formed in the oxidation of phenolphthalin to the well-known acid-base indicator, phenolphthalein. To demonstrate these effects, it is only necessary to bubble a few liters of smog air through the colorless solutions. (December 1954)
His chief suspect was ozone, a highly reactive form of oxygen widely used as a bleach and a disinfectant. It's easy to make—a spark will suffice—and it's responsible for that crisp "blue" odor produced by an overloaded electric motor. But there was a problem:
During severe smog attacks, ozone concentrations of 0.5 ppm [parts per million], twenty times higher than in [clean] country air, have been measured. From such analyses the quantity of ozone present in the [Los Angeles] basin at that time is calculated to be about 500 tons.
Since ozone is subject to a continuous destruction in competition with its formation, we can estimate that several thousand tons of ozone are formed during a smog day. It is obvious that industrial sources or occasional electrical discharges do not release such tremendous quantities of ozone. (December 1954)
If ozone really was to blame, where was it coming from? An extraordinary challenge lay ahead:
The analysis of air contaminants has some special features, due to the minute amounts present in a large volume of air. The state in which these pollutants are present—as gases, liquids and solid particles of greatly different sizes—presents additional difficulties. The small particles of less than one micron diameter do not settle out, but are in a stable suspension and form so-called aerosols.
The analytical chemist has devoted a great deal of effort to devising methods for the collection of this heterogeneous material. Most of these methods are based on the principle that the particles are given enough speed to collide with each other or with collecting surfaces . . . A sample of Los Angeles' air shows numerous oily droplets of a size smaller than 0.5 micron, as well as crystalline deposits of metals and salts . . . When air is passed through a filter paper, the paper takes on a grey appearance, and extraction with organic solvents gives an oily material. (December 1950)
Haagen-Smit suspected that this oily material, a complex brew of organic acids and other partially oxidized hydrocarbons, was smog's secret ingredient. In 1950, he took a one-year leave of absence from Caltech to prove it, working full-time in a specially equipped lab set up for him by the LACAPCD. By the end of the year, he had done so.
Through investigations initiated at Caltech, we know that the main source of this smog is due to the release of two types of material. One is organic material—mostly hydrocarbons from gasoline—and the other is a mixture of oxides of nitrogen. Each one of these emissions by itself would be hardly noticed. However, in the presence of sunlight, a reaction occurs, resulting in products which give rise to the typical smog symptoms. The photochemical oxidation is initiated by the dissociation of NO2 into NO and atomic oxygen. This reactive oxygen attacks organic material, resulting in the formation of ozone and various oxidation products . . . The oxidation reactions are generally accompanied by haze or aerosol formation, and this combination aggravates the nuisance effects of the individual components of the smog complex. (November 1962)
Professor of Plant Physiology Frits Went was also on the case. Went ran Caltech's Earhart Plant Research Laboratory, which he proudly called the "phytotron," by analogy to the various "trons" operated by particle physicists. (Phyton is the Greek word for plant.) "Caltech's plant physiologists happen to believe that the phytotron is as marvellously complicated as any of the highly-touted 'atom-smashing' machines," Went wrote in E&S in 1949. "[It] is the first laboratory in the world in which plants can be grown under every possible climatic condition. Light, temperature, humidity, gas content of the air, wind, rain, and fog—all these factors can be simultaneously and independently controlled. The laboratory can create Sacramento Valley climate in one room and New England climate in another." Most of Los Angeles was still orchards and fields instead of tract houses, and the smog was hurting the produce. Went, the LACAPCD, and the UC Riverside agricultural station tested five particularly sensitive crops in the phytotron, Haagen-Smit wrote.
The smog indicator plants include spinach, sugar beet, endive, alfalfa and oats. The symptoms on the first three species are mainly silvering or bronzing of the underside of the leaf, whereas alfalfa and oats show bleaching effects. Some fifty compounds possibly present in the air were tested on their ability to cause smog damage—without success. However, when the reaction products of ozone with unsaturated hydrocarbons were tried, typical smog damage resulted. (December 1950)
And yet a third set of experiments was under way. Rubber tires were rotting from the smog at an alarming rate, cracking as they flexed while rolling along the road. Charles E. Bradley, a research associate in biology, turned this distressing development into a cheap and effective analytical tool by cutting rubber bands by the boxful into short segments. The segments—folded double, secured with a twist of wire, and set outside—would start to fall apart almost before one could close the window. "During severe smog initial cracking appears in about four minutes, as compared to an hour or more required on smog-free days, or at night," Haagen-Smit wrote in the December 1954 E&S.
The conclusion that airborne gasoline and nitrogen oxides (another chief constituent of automobile exhaust) were to blame for smog was not well received by the oil refineries, who hired their own expert to prove him wrong. Abe Zarem (MS '40, PhD '44), the manager and chairman of physics research for the Stanford Research Institute, opined that stratospheric ozone seeping down through the inversion layer was to blame. But seeing (or smelling) is believing, so Haagen-Smit fought back by giving public lectures in which he would whip up flasks full of artificial smog before the audience's eyes, which would soon be watering—especially if they were seated in the first few rows. By the end of his talk, the smog would fill the hall, and he became known throughout the Southland as Arie Haagen-Smog.
By 1954, he and Frits Went had carried the day.
[Plant] fumigations with the photochemical oxidation products of gasoline and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) was the basis of one of the most convincing arguments for the control of hydrocarbons by the oil industry. (December 1954)
It probably didn't hurt that an outbreak that October closed schools and shuttered factories for most of the month, and that angry voters were wearing gas masks to protest meetings. By then, there were some two million cars on the road in the metropolitan area, spewing a thousand tons of hydrocarbons daily.
Incomplete combustion of gasoline allows unburned and partially burned fuel to escape from the tailpipe. Seepage of gasoline, even in new cars, past piston rings into the crankcase, is responsible for 'blowby' or crankcase vent losses. Evaporation from carburetor and fuel tank are substantial contributions, especially on hot days. (November 1962)
Haagen-Smit was a founding member of California's Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board, established in 1960. One of the board's first projects was testing positive crankcase ventilation (PCV) systems, which sucked the blown-by hydrocarbons out of the crankcase and recirculated them through the engine to be burned on the second pass. PCV systems were mandated on all new cars sold in California as of 1963. The blowby problem was thus easily solved—but, as Haagen-Smit noted in that same article, it was only the second-largest source, representing about 30 percent of the escaping hydrocarbons.
The preferred method of control of the tailpipe hydrocarbon emission is a better combustion in the engine itself. (The automobile industry has predicted the appearance of more efficiently burning engines in 1965. It is not known how efficient these will be, nor has it been revealed whether there will be an increase or decrease of oxides of nitrogen.) Other approaches to the control of the tailpipe gases involve completing the combustion in muffler-type afterburners. One type relies on the ignition of gases with a sparkplug or pilot-burner; the second type passes the gases through a catalyst bed which burns the gases at a lower temperature than is possible with the direct-flame burners. (November 1962)
Installing an afterburner in the muffler has some drawbacks, not the least of which is that the notion of tooling around town with an open flame under the floorboards might give some people the willies. Instead, catalytic converters became required equipment on California cars in 1975.
In 1968, the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board became the California Air Resources Board, with Haagen-Smit as its chair. He was a member of the 1969 President's Task Force on Air Pollution, and the standards he helped those two bodies develop would eventually be adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency, established in 1970—the year that also saw the first celebration of Earth Day. It was also the year when ozone levels in the Los Angeles basin peaked at 0.58 parts per million, nearly five times in excess of the 0.12 parts per million that the EPA would declare to be safe for human health. This reading even exceeded the 0.5 ppm that Haagen-Smit had measured back in 1954, but it was a triumph nonetheless—the number of cars in L.A. had doubled, yet the smog was little worse than it had always been. That was the year we turned the corner, in fact, and our ozone levels have been dropping ever since—despite the continued influx of cars and people to the region.
Haagen-Smit retired from Caltech in 1971 as the skies began to clear, but continued to lead the fight for clean air until his death in 1977—of lung cancer, ironically, after a lifetime of cigarettes. Today, his intellectual heirs, including professors Richard Flagan, Mitchio Okumura, John Seinfeld, and Paul Wennberg, use analytical instruments descended from ones Haagen-Smit would have recognized and computer models sophisticated beyond his wildest dreams to carry the torch—a clean-burning one, of course—forward.
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) named Oscar P. Bruno, professor of applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, as a member of its 2013 Class of Fellows.
Bruno is one of 33 fellows selected by SIAM for "exemplary research as well as outstanding service to the community," according to the organization. "Through their contributions, the 2013 Class of Fellows is helping advance the fields of applied mathematics and computational science," the organization stated in a March 29 press release.
"SIAM is an organization that includes many of the leading applied mathematicians from around the world, so I am honored to have been selected for their 2013 Class of Fellows," Bruno says.
Bruno's research group at Caltech focuses on the development of accurate high-performance numerical partial differential equation solvers applicable to realistic scientific and engineering configurations. His research interests include numerical analysis, multiphysics modeling and simulation, and mathematical physics.
Bruno graduated with a Friedrichs Prize for an outstanding dissertation in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1989. He became an associate professor at Caltech in 1995 and a professor of applied and computational mathematics in 1998. He has served as executive officer of Caltech's Applied and Computational Mathematics department, and he is the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship.
Bruno is a member of the SIAM Council, and he serves on the editorial boards of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics.
Catherine Bingchan Xie, a senior bioengineering major and English minor at Caltech, has been selected to receive a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which will fund her graduate studies at the University of Cambridge for the next academic year. Xie, a Canadian citizen, is one of 51 new international recipients selected from a pool of more than 4,000 applicants based not only on intellectual ability, but also on leadership capacity and a commitment to improving the lives of others.
As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, Xie, 20, will pursue a Master of Philosophy in translational medicine and therapeutics. "The research program and the knowledge that I'm going to gain will provide me with an essential foundation for becoming a physician-scientist, translating research findings in the lab into revolutionary therapies," she says. "I'm really excited to join the Gates Cambridge community and be surrounded by people like me who want to make an impact on other people by taking on important roles and issues in society. I think the energy and enthusiasm of rising toward this common goal will be really invigorating."
Having lived in China, Australia, Canada, and the United States, Xie has been exposed to a variety of cultures—something that she says motivated her to want to become a highly involved leader in a diverse and multicultural society.
As an undergraduate student, Xie has taken full advantage of opportunities to pursue research projects in the laboratory with outstanding scientists. During her freshman year, she began working in the lab of Frances Arnold, the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, engineering ways to improve the thermostability of enzymes used to make biofuels. The summer following her sophomore year, Xie joined the lab of C. Garrison Fathman, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology at the Stanford School of Medicine, to study a novel transcription factor regulator involved in the pathogenesis of Type I diabetes. When she returned to Caltech, she immediately joined the lab of David Baltimore, the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology, where she is currently working. There, her research focuses on microRNAs—tiny snippets of RNA that are only about 20 nucleotides long—and the regulatory role they play in the development of leukemia.
"Catherine is a student with broad interests, an engaging personal style, and great effectiveness," Baltimore says. "She has been a pleasure to have in the laboratory, and I am not surprised that she has won this prestigious scholarship and chosen to broaden her knowledge by focusing on public health issues while she is at Cambridge."
Xie says her ultimate goal in life "is to be able to not only improve our understanding of disease mechanisms, but also to be able to use that understanding to create novel, innovative therapies in order to help people battle their diseases."
Xie's desire to help others was clear during her time at Caltech—she led Caltech Y service trips, during which she and other students helped to rebuild houses for low-income families, assisted in beach and riverbed cleanups, and worked at a homeless shelter. As a freshman, she started the annual Caltech Student Health Fair to make students more aware of the physical, mental, and emotional health resources on campus and throughout the community. She has also served on campus as the vice chair of the Academics and Research Committee and as a member of the Caltech Y Student Executive Committee.
"I'm so excited that Catherine has been chosen to receive this fellowship," says Athena Castro, executive director of the Caltech Y. "I just love her. She's enthusiastic, dedicated, positive, thoughtful, and committed."
In the summer of 2012, Xie broadened her horizons even more when she traveled to Switzerland as a recipient of Caltech's SanPietro Travel Prize. "Catherine demonstrated her ability to adapt quickly and truly engage in another culture on that trip," says Lauren Stolper, director of fellowships advising and study abroad. "She will represent Caltech well as a Gates Cambridge Scholar."
Xie says she is thankful to everyone who has contributed to her experience at Caltech. "My achievements wouldn't have been possible without people giving me opportunities, encouraging me, and providing me with feedback, allowing me to grow as a scientist and as an individual," she says. "Caltech has shown me that intellectual curiosity and passion are vital driving forces behind finding innovative solutions that will have a profound and meaningful impact on solving issues that confront society."
The 51 newly announced international scholars will join 39 new American Gates Cambridge Scholars. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship program was established in 2000 through a donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the University of Cambridge. Xie is the sixth Caltech undergraduate student to receive the fellowship.
The mission: travel to one of Mars's two moons, explore its surface, collect some rocks, and return to Earth in one piece. Now plan it—in five days.
Dozens of students from Caltech and around the world converged on campus during the last week of March to do just that, compete in the Caltech Space Challenge, which pits two teams against each other to design the best manned space mission.
"It was an intense, challenging, and exciting experience," says Melissa Tanner, a fourth-year graduate student in mechanical engineering at Caltech and member of Team Voyager, which faced off against Team Explorer.
The Space Challenge, which was led by aeronautics graduate students Nick Parziale and Jason Rabinovitch, featured lectures and workshops given by expert rocket scientists from Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the aerospace industry. The two 16-member teams were even treated to an appearance by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second human to have walked on the moon. "I think one of the coolest parts of the experience was having world-class mentors," Tanner says.
Most of the week, however, was filled with hard work and little sleep. The students—a mix of undergraduates and graduates—had to plan and consider every aspect of long-term space travel, from choosing a propulsion system to keeping the astronauts healthy and fit. (Both teams emphasized the importance of exercise; Team Voyager proposed mandatory Jazzercise classes.)
Landing on a martian moon is considered a stepping-stone toward the ultimate goal of landing a human on Mars and was one of the recommendations that the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, an independent review commissioned by the White House, made in 2009. A round-trip to one of Mars's moons is much easier than one to Mars, primarily because Mars's gravity is so much stronger than that of its moons. Landing on any planetary body is a difficult and harrowing task—the Curiosity rover famously went through a landing sequence akin to a Rube Goldberg machine and was dubbed the "seven minutes of terror." And, no previous Mars mission—let alone a manned one—has ever landed on the surface and returned to Earth.
The Martian moons—Phobos and Deimos—are like asteroids, with gravity so weak that a spacecraft can approach one of the moons and grab onto its surface. The gravity on Phobos—the larger of the two, yet with a radius of just 11 kilometers (roughly 7 miles)—is so slight that an object dropped from 1 meter above its surface would take more than 18 seconds to "fall."
The Space Challenge's 32 participants came from 21 universities and 11 countries, and were chosen from 175 applicants. They were selected because they brought a particular skill or expertise to their team. For example, Tanner's research at Caltech is in robotics; in particular, she works on the Axel rover, which is a tethered, two-wheeled robot designed to explore cliffs and other extreme terrain on other planets. Because of that expertise, she helped her team determine how its astronauts would explore the surface of a martian moon.
"I think the most rewarding part was meeting all these other people who know so much," says Jay Qi, a first-year mechanical engineering graduate student at Caltech and a member of Team Explorer. "It was really crazy how much I learned just from talking to people."
Although members from the two teams interacted freely—some of the visiting students even roomed with opposing team members—they were careful not to influence each other's designs so as to maintain the spirit of competition, Qi says.
Still, because both teams were faced with the same problems, they often came up with the same solutions. Both teams ended up with similar mission designs, choosing to go to Phobos, for example, because its bigger size offered potentially more interesting scientific discoveries. And both decided to use a multistage spacecraft assembled in low-Earth orbit that would depart for a six-month trip to Phobos in April 2033. Furthermore, in each plan, the spacecraft would separate into two parts: one that remained in orbit around Phobos and a second—equipped with robotic claws to cling onto the moon's surface—that would transport two astronauts to the moon. After exploring Phobos for about a month, the astronauts would return home.
But there were many differences between the two mission plans. For example, while Team Voyager opted to send three astronauts, the Explorer mission wanted to send four. Team Voyager also included a more detailed robotic precursor mission that would visit both Phobos and Deimos, whereas Team Explorer's manned mission itself included exploring robots.
A group of jurors consisting of experts from Caltech, JPL, and the aerospace industry evaluated the two teams based on their final presentations and reports. The competition was close, said lead juror Joe Parrish, deputy manager of the Mars Program Formulation Office at JPL. "It was never immediately obvious which team was going to prevail," he said at the closing banquet held at the Athenaeum. "Both teams did an unbelievable job." The jury went back and forth but finally decided that Team Voyager presented the better proposal, awarding it a bonus to the stipend that each member received to support his or her trip to Pasadena.
Caltech graduate students Prakhar Mehrotra and Jonathan Mihaly came up with the Caltech Space Challenge; the first challenge, held in 2011, was to plan a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid. The two faculty advisors for the program are Guillaume Blanquart, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Joseph Shepherd, the C. L. Kelly Johnson Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering. The program is organized by the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) and supported by Caltech, JPL, the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and corporate and individual sponsors.
PASADENA, Calif.—White blood cells, or leukocytes, are the immune system's warriors. So when an infection or disease attacks the body, the system typically responds by sending more white blood cells into the fray. This means that checking the number of these cells is a relatively easy way to detect and monitor such conditions.
Currently, most white blood cell counts are performed with large-scale equipment in central clinical laboratories. If a physician collects blood samples from a patient in the office—usually requiring a full vial of blood for each test—it can take days to get the results. But now engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with a collaborator from the Jerusalem-based company LeukoDx, have developed a portable device to count white blood cells that needs less than a pinprick's worth of blood and takes just minutes to run.
"The white blood cell counts from our new system closely match the results from tests conducted in hospitals and other central clinical settings," says Yu-Chong Tai, professor of electrical engineering and mechanical engineering at Caltech and the project's principal investigator. "This could make point-of-care testing possible for the first time."
Portable white blood cell counters could improve outpatient monitoring of patients with chronic conditions such as leukemia or other cancers. The counters could be used in combination with telemedicine to bring medical care to remote areas. The devices could even enable astronauts to evaluate their long-term exposure to radiation while they are still in space. The researchers describe the work in the April 7 issue of the journal Lab on a Chip.
There are five subtypes of white blood cells, and each serves a different function, which means it's useful to know the count for all of them. In general, lymphocytes use antibodies to attack certain viruses and bacteria; neutrophils are especially good at combating bacteria; eosinophils target parasites and certain infections; monocytes respond to inflammation and replenish white blood cells within bodily tissue; and basophils, the rarest of the subtypes, attack certain parasites.
"If we can give you a quick white blood cell count right in the doctor's office," says Wendian Shi, a graduate student in Tai's lab and lead author of the new paper, "you can know right away if you're dealing with a viral infection or a bacterial infection, and the doctor can prescribe the right medication."
The prototype device is able to count all five subtypes of white blood cells within a sample. It provides an accurate differential of the four major subtypes—lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, and neutrophils. In addition, it could be used to flag an abnormally high level of the fifth subtype, basophils, which are normally too rare (representing less than one percent of all white blood cells) for accurate detection in clinical tests.
The entire new system fits in a small suitcase (12" x 9" x 5") and could easily be made into a handheld device, the engineers say.
A major development reported in the new paper is the creation of a detection assay that uses three dyes to stain white blood cells so that they emit light, or fluoresce, brightly in response to laser light. Blood samples are treated with this dye assay before measurement in the new device. The first dye binds strongly to the DNA found in the nucleus of white blood cells, making it simple to distinguish between white blood cells and the red blood cells that surround and outnumber them. The other two dyes help differentiate between the subtypes.
The heart of the new device is a 50-micrometer-long transparent channel made out of a silicone material with a cross section of only 32 micrometers by 28 micrometers—small enough to ensure that only one white blood cell at a time can flow through the detection region. The stained blood sample flows through this microfluidic channel to the detection region, where it is illuminated with a laser, causing it to fluoresce. The resulting emission of the sample is then split by a mirror into two beams, representing the green and red fluorescence.
Thanks to the dye assay, the white blood cell subtypes emit characteristic amounts of red and green light. Therefore, by determining the intensity of the emissions for each detected cell, the device can generate highly accurate differential white blood cell counts.
Shi says his ultimate goal is to develop a portable device that can help patients living with chronic diseases at home. "For these patients, who struggle to find a balance between their treatment and their normal quality of life, we would like to offer a device that will help them monitor their conditions at home," he says. "It would be nice to limit the number of trips they need to make to the hospital for testing."
The Lab on a Chip paper is titled "Four-part leukocyte differential count based on sheathless microflow cytometer and fluorescent dye assay." In addition to Tai and Shi, the coauthors on the paper are Luke Guo, a graduate student at MIT who worked on the project as an undergraduate student at Caltech, and Harvey Kasdan of LeukoDx Inc. in Jerusalem, Israel. The work was supported by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute under a NASA contract.
Francis H. Clauser (BS '34, MS '35, PhD '37), the Clark Blanchard Millikan Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, passed away on March 3, 2013, at age 99. Born in the decade following the Wright Brothers' first powered flight, he was a founder of modern aeronautics and helped usher in the Space Age.
Francis was the younger of identical twins born to Celeste and Claude Clauser in Kansas City, Missouri, on May 25, 1913. When Francis and his brother, Milton, were 17, their father died, leaving the boys to support their mother and younger sister, Betty. Fortunately, Celeste "was talented and resourceful," says Clauser's daughter, Caroline Ryan. "She made puppets with papier-mâché heads and elaborate costumes, and she and the boys supported the family by staging marionette shows to the accompaniment of a hand-cranked Victrola." The twins enrolled in Kansas City Junior College, but upon learning of Caltech's constellation of luminaries, they decided to apply as transfer students. When they were accepted, the entire family packed up and moved to Pasadena.
As Caltech undergrads, the twins joined a local magician's society, the Mystic Thirteen. Their act consisted of one brother doing a trick before disappearing behind a screen. The other brother would then emerge in a totally different outfit and perform another trick. They did this faster and faster until the costume changes got impossibly short, at which point the screen would "accidentally" fall to reveal one brother in bright red undershorts.
Upon earning bachelor's degrees in physics, the Clausers entered the aeronautics program run by Theodore von Kármán. Unable to tell the twins apart but well aware of their hijinks, von Kármán made it clear that he expected two separate and distinct dissertations, saying, "Each of you can do one, one of you can do both, or both of you can do both." Thus Milton and Francis produced an experiment-based thesis on "The Effect of Curvature on the Transition from Laminar to the Turbulent Boundary Layer," while Francis and Milton wrote a mathematical treatise on "New Methods of Solving the Equations for the Flow of a Compressible Fluid."
On July 30, 1937, a month after receiving their doctorates, Francis married Catharine McMillan, Caltech's humanities librarian and sister of future chemistry Nobel laureate Edwin McMillan (BS '28, MS '29), in a double ceremony with Milton and his bride, Virginia Randall.
The brothers joined the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, where Francis soon became the director of aerodynamic design research. There he assembled a team that included several future Caltech faculty members and profoundly influenced aviation design by developing mathematical methods for shaping tails, wings, engine nacelles, and air scoops.
When Germany fell to the Allies in 1945, Clauser "was temporarily inducted into the U.S. military as an instant full colonel" as part of Operation Paperclip, says his son, John Clauser. Such high ranks were routinely given to civilian experts sent into the war zone in order to expedite the American effort to collect as many of Germany's best scientists and as much of its key hardware as possible before the Russians did.
Soon after Clauser's return, Henry "Hap" Arnold, the commander of the Army Air Forces, commissioned Clauser's design team to study the feasibility of spaceflight. The 340-page "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship," dated May 2, 1946, concluded that a rocket based on the German V-2 could put a 500-pound payload into orbit for at least 10 days and outlined the military, scientific, and telecommunications uses to which such a satellite might be put. Unfortunately the estimated cost—$150 million over five years—was deemed too high, and the US ceded first rights to the final frontier to Sputnik, launched by the USSR a decade later. The report also noted that "there is good reason to hope that future satellite vehicles will be built to carry human beings," recommending a winged, reusable spacecraft as the best way to return them safely to Earth. This report was the first to be produced by what Arnold dubbed the RAND (for Research and Development) Project; several of the people who wrote it went on to become founding members of the RAND Corporation when it was spun off from Douglas Aircraft in 1948.
Clauser, however, left the company in 1946 to found the aeronautics department at Johns Hopkins University. He chaired the department until 1960, recruiting leaders in the field from many countries to create a world-class research center. The department's facilities included three large wind tunnels, one of which was supersonic and "all of which Clauser personally designed," John says, "so that they exhibited very low residual turbulence in their test sections."
Turbulence and the so-called boundary layer, the thin layer of fluid immediately adjacent to a solid surface, had been particular interests of Clauser's since graduate school. In fact, his first assignment at Douglas had been to figure out why the DC-3, which had just debuted as a transcontinental passenger plane and would remain in military production through World War II, tended to roll onto its back upon stalling. An aerodynamic "stall" occurs when the tilt of a wing's leading edge—the so-called angle of attack—increases to the point where lift is no longer generated. Clauser realized that as one wing fell, the angle of attack at its tip would increase, making it stall more. To break this runaway feedback, he invented the now-standard "washout" wing twist, in which the wing tips are more or less horizontal and the angle of attack increases closer to the fuselage. Any stall thus begins near the fuselage, where the wing's lever action is minimal, while the ailerons out near the wing tips do not stall and the pilot remains in control of the aircraft.
Clauser wrote two seminal papers on the turbulent boundary layer in 1954 and 1956. As emeritus professor of aeronautics Donald Coles (MS '48, PhD '53) explains, "Normally, as you follow the boundary layer across the wing, the velocity profile will be controlled by the pressure variation. Clauser invented what he called 'equilibrium flows' in which he controlled the pressure gradient so that the velocity field didn't change as you went along the flow. The pressure was still rising, but he had a trick for adjusting the rate at which it rose, so that the velocity obeyed a 'similarity law.' It didn't matter where you measured the velocity profile, because it always followed the same curve. And anybody could duplicate his family of flows in their own wind tunnels just by properly shaping the channel."
This gradient generates the wing's lift and begins as a zone of low pressure near the wing's leading edge, extending outward and backward until ambient atmospheric pressure is restored. If not handled properly, it can force the airflow to leave the wing prematurely—as it did in the stall that had plagued the DC-3. The gradient's behavior depends on the interplay between the wing's shape and the boundary layer itself, which in turn is governed by a set of deceptively simple differential equations whose exact solutions often still tax modern supercomputers. Clauser's work was so important because in the days when designs were primarily worked out with slide rules and pad after pad of graph paper, the fewer variables one had to manipulate experimentally, the better.
"Clauser was one of the four founders of the science of boundary layers as it stands today," Coles says. "In a 10-year period, these people put together a consistent, coherent description that is still the place where you start teaching the subject."
Clauser was a member of the 1968 Task Force on Space, chaired by Nobel laureate Charles Townes (PhD '39). Clauser again championed the notion of a winged, reusable space vehicle. This time, the idea got traction and the Space Shuttle was born.
During the Hopkins years, Clauser acquired a reputation for educational innovation, establishing cross-disciplinary courses designed to illuminate basic principles that could later be applied to whatever field a student might choose. He was invited to the newly created University of California campus in Santa Cruz in 1965 to set up the engineering school, and he served variously as the academic vice chancellor, vice chancellor for science and engineering, and professor of applied science.
In 1969, Clauser returned to Caltech to chair the Division of Engineering and Applied Science. He stepped down in 1974 but remained the Clark Millikan Professor of Engineering until his retirement in 1980.
Clauser, having arrived at the dawn of the environmental movement, launched Caltech's interdisciplinary graduate program in environmental engineering science in 1971. The following year he established the Environmental Quality Laboratory, or EQL, as an "action-oriented unit," in his words, along the lines of JPL—"associated with Caltech, carrying on Caltech's high standards but not engaged in teaching." Organized in partnership with JPL, the RAND Corporation, and the Aerospace Corporation, the EQL studied the scientific, engineering, economic, and political aspects of issues such as pollution control, water and energy policy, and sewage disposal.
The interdisciplinary applied physics option was initiated during Clauser's term as well, providing an academic home for the solid-state physicists and electronics engineers who were powering the computer revolution. Clauser also oversaw the construction of the Earle M. Jorgensen Laboratory of Information Science. This building housed not only computer scientists but the Campus Computing Center, which ran the mainframe computers that were becoming important research tools in many disciplines.
In 1973, Clauser established the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholars Program, which he intended to be "as desirable and prestigious as a Guggenheim Fellowship" and which brought up to 30 eminent scientists per year to Caltech. The inaugural group included Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt (BS '57), the only geologist to walk on the moon, and a then-obscure cosmologist named Stephen Hawking.
Upon his brother Milton's death in 1980, Clauser, his wife, and his sister-in-law established the annual Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize, awarded for the thesis judged to have the greatest potential for opening up entirely new lines of research.
A noted raconteur with a prodigious memory, Clauser was a regular at the legendary Round Table at the Caltech faculty club, the Athenaeum. Says Marshall Cohen, professor of astronomy, emeritus, "He was known as 'The Dean of the Round Table' for a couple of reasons: He was the oldest, and he would dominate the discussion. He'd say, 'Let's change the subject—I want to talk about the new style of sailboat.'" Politics, biblical archaeology, and ancient Egypt were other favorite topics, Cohen recalls. "He knew dates. And names. He knew dynasties. A decade ago I mentioned that I was interested in hieroglyphs. He said, 'I can recommend a book for you.' It turns out he and Catharine had taken a course in hieroglyphics back in the 1960s, and he still remembered the name of the textbook."
Clauser's favorite subject was travel. He and Catharine had driven through 117 countries and across every major desert on Earth—usually in a rented Volkswagen Beetle. One such trip went from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, where he eased into the Straits of Magellan until the Bug's front bumper was submerged. Another trip followed the Silk Road through Central Asia.
The Clausers' most-storied trip took them from Tunis to Timbuktu. As recounted in Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine in 1972, the preferred method for crossing the Sahara was in Land Rovers traveling in pairs. The Clausers drove alone in a Renault R4, a vehicle light enough for them to push when it got stuck in the sand. Things went well for the first 1,600 miles or so, until the clutch gave out in central Niger. They hitched a ride to Tahoua, the nearest town, where, as Francis told E&S, they found "a 52nd-hand car dealer who let us have an ancient clutch for $24. Then we rented a set of tools for $10 from a German mechanic and went out and sat by the road for two hours before we caught a 70-mile ride back to our car." The next day, they dismantled the engine in front of an audience of Fulani herdsmen and Tuaregs on camels, only to discover that the new old clutch didn't fit. An examination of the old old clutch revealed that it had packed itself full of sand as they tobogganed through the dunes. They extracted the sand with a paring knife and a safety pin, and drove back to Tahoua, where they resold the new old clutch back to the 52nd-hand dealer for $20.
Catharine died in 1999, but Francis remained in the family home in La Cañada until he lost his right leg to the flesh-eating bacterium Clostridium septicum in 2008. He moved into Villa Gardens to recuperate—on the condition that he not miss lunch at the Round Table. A shuttle would drop him off daily, says Cohen, "but occasionally he'd drive himself home in his electric wheelchair by way of his dentist."
Clauser's publications included papers on nonlinear mechanics, guided missile technology, magnetohydrodynamics, and partial differential equations as well as a book, Plasma Dynamics, compiled in 1960 following a symposium he chaired on what was then a very young field. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the scientific research society Sigma Xi, the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, and Caltech's Gnome Club. He was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 1966, one of the initial class of 23 to be so honored.
Clauser is survived by his sister, Betty Celeste Valois of Denver; his son, Wolf laureate in physics John Francis Clauser (BS '64) of Walnut Creek, California; and his daughter, Caroline Helen Ryan, of New York City. A memorial service will be held at 11:00 a.m. at the Caltech Athenaeum on May 25, the day that would have been his hundredth birthday.
PASADENA, Calif.—Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.
The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers. The amplifiers are so small, in fact, that 76 of the chips—including everything they need to self-heal—could fit on a single penny. In perhaps the most dramatic of their experiments, the team destroyed various parts of their chips by zapping them multiple times with a high-power laser, and then observed as the chips automatically developed a work-around in less than a second.
"It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits," says Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. "We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance."
The team's results appear in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.
Until now, even a single fault has often rendered an integrated-circuit chip completely useless. The Caltech engineers wanted to give integrated-circuit chips a healing ability akin to that of our own immune system—something capable of detecting and quickly responding to any number of possible assaults in order to keep the larger system working optimally. The power amplifier they devised employs a multitude of robust, on-chip sensors that monitor temperature, current, voltage, and power. The information from those sensors feeds into a custom-made application-specific integrated-circuit (ASIC) unit on the same chip, a central processor that acts as the "brain" of the system. The brain analyzes the amplifier's overall performance and determines if it needs to adjust any of the system's actuators—the changeable parts of the chip.
Interestingly, the chip's brain does not operate based on algorithms that know how to respond to every possible scenario. Instead, it draws conclusions based on the aggregate response of the sensors. "You tell the chip the results you want and let it figure out how to produce those results," says Steven Bowers, a graduate student in Hajimiri's lab and lead author of the new paper. "The challenge is that there are more than 100,000 transistors on each chip. We don't know all of the different things that might go wrong, and we don't need to. We have designed the system in a general enough way that it finds the optimum state for all of the actuators in any situation without external intervention."
Looking at 20 different chips, the team found that the amplifiers with the self-healing capability consumed about half as much power as those without, and their overall performance was much more predictable and reproducible. "We have shown that self-healing addresses four very different classes of problems," says Kaushik Dasgupta, another graduate student also working on the project. The classes of problems include static variation that is a product of variation across components; long-term aging problems that arise gradually as repeated use changes the internal properties of the system; and short-term variations that are induced by environmental conditions such as changes in load, temperature, and differences in the supply voltage; and, finally, accidental or deliberate catastrophic destruction of parts of the circuits.
The Caltech team chose to demonstrate this self-healing capability first in a power amplifier for millimeter-wave frequencies. Such high-frequency integrated chips are at the cutting edge of research and are useful for next-generation communications, imaging, sensing, and radar applications. By showing that the self-healing capability works well in such an advanced system, the researchers hope to show that the self-healing approach can be extended to virtually any other electronic system.
"Bringing this type of electronic immune system to integrated-circuit chips opens up a world of possibilities," says Hajimiri. "It is truly a shift in the way we view circuits and their ability to operate independently. They can now both diagnose and fix their own problems without any human intervention, moving one step closer to indestructible circuits."
Along with Hajimiri, Bowers, and Dasgupta, former Caltech postdoctoral scholar Kaushik Sengupta (PhD '12), who is now an assistant professor at Princeton University, is also a coauthor on the paper, "Integrated Self-Healing for mm-Wave Power Amplifiers." A preliminary report of this work won the best paper award at the 2012 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium. The work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
What makes an earthquake go off? Why are earthquakes so difficult to forecast? Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics Nadia Lapusta gives us a close-up look at the moving parts, as it were, at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Admission is free.
Q: What do you do?
A: I study friction as it relates to earthquakes. At a depth of five miles, which is the average depth at which large earthquakes in Southern California occur, the compression on the two sides of the fault is roughly equivalent to a pressure of 1,500 atmospheres. So you can imagine that friction plays an important role. I make computational models that combine our theories about friction with laboratory studies of how materials behave. We try to reproduce what seismologists, geodesists, and geologists see actual earthquakes doing, in order to infer the physical laws that govern them.
Our planet's surface is made up of a bunch of plates that are always moving, and an earthquake happens when the locked boundaries of the plates rapidly catch up with the slow motion of the plates themselves. You get a sudden shearing—a sideways motion that generates the destructive waves that we perceive as shaking.
A number of factors affect this process. If you rub your palms together, you generate heat. An earthquake is a very intensive rubbing of palms, if you will, and so a lot of heat is produced—enough to weaken the rocks and perhaps even melt them.
However, there are pore fluids permeating the rocks—we often get our drinking water from underground aquifers, for example. As these fluids heat up, they expand, which modifies the shearing process. They produce expanding cushions of steam, essentially, which reduce the friction.
The waves generated by the shearing motion put an additional load on the fault ahead of the shear zone, so they actually affect how the shearing progresses. The shear tip sprouts at about three kilometers per second, or 6,700 miles per hour. So an earthquake is a highly dynamic, nonlinear system.
To make things even more interesting, a fault doesn't just sit still for hundreds of years, waiting for the next big earthquake. It's more like a living thing—there are slow slippages between earthquakes that constantly redistribute the forces in the system, and the exact point where an earthquake initiates depends a lot on these slow motions. So we simulate thousands of years of fault history that includes a few occasional, very fast events that last for a few seconds. These calculations are very time-consuming and memory-intense. The Geological and Planetary Sciences Division's supercomputer has several thousand processors, and we routinely use 200 to 400 of them, sometimes for weeks at a time. We would happily use the entire machine, but of course people would yell at us.
Q: How did you get into this line of work?
A: I've loved both mathematics and physics since I was a child. I was born in Ukraine, where my mom was a professor of applied mathematics and my dad was a civil engineer. They used to give me math and physics problems from a very early age. I did my undergraduate studies in applied mathematics in Kiev, and I was thinking of going into materials science. I came to the U.S. for graduate school, and my advisor at Harvard was working on materials failure and on earthquakes, which I found very interesting because it combined math and physics with a problem relevant to society.
My PhD was on frictional sliding and some initial models of earthquakes. Caltech is actually the perfect place to continue that, because it has world-class expertise in all relevant disciplines. I have wonderful colleagues, and the really fun part is working with them. I enjoy interacting with the experimentalists and talking to the people who make field observations or do radar measurements from satellites. They have different perspectives, different terminologies, and different views of the problem, so it's fun to try to explain to them what you mean, and to try to understand what they mean. And the most fun, of course, is when you come to an understanding that leads to new science in the end.
Q: Speaking of societal relevance, what does your work mean for us here in L.A.?
A: Large earthquakes, fortunately, are relatively rare, so we don't have detailed observations of very many of them. Our models, however, allow us to explore scenarios for potentially very damaging earthquakes that we haven't experienced. For example, faults have locked segments and creeping segments. The San Andreas fault has a creeping segment between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the assumption has been that this segment will confine a large earthquake to either the southern or the northern part of the fault. Only one large urban area would be affected. However, our models show that a through-going rupture may be possible. If that happens, both Los Angeles and San Francisco are affected, and you have a much bigger problem on your hands.
Named for the late Caltech professor Earnest C. Watson, who founded the series in 1922, the Watson Lectures present Caltech and JPL researchers describing their work to the public. Many past Watson Lectures are available online at Caltech's iTunes U site.
PASADENA, Calif.—Richard M. Murray and Michael Ortiz of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), an honor considered among the highest professional distinctions an engineer can receive. In total, the academy welcomed 69 new American members and 11 foreign associates this year.
"I am absolutely delighted that the Academy has elected Richard and Michael," says Ares Rosakis, the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics, professor of mechanical engineering, and chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech. "This is not only a recognition of their great contributions and unwavering commitment to engineering research and education, but also a confirmation of the great impact Caltech engineers and applied scientists are having on the field."
Richard Murray, the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering, was cited by the National Academy of Engineering for his "contributions in control theory and networked control systems with applications to aerospace engineering, robotics, and autonomy." His current work focuses on the application of feedback and control to networked systems, especially in the biological realm where he is interested in engineered biological circuits.
"It's a great honor to be elected as a member of the NAE," Murray says. "Caltech's strong support for junior faculty, our ability to recruit outstanding students and postdocs, and the highly collaborative nature of the academic environment have allowed my group to help identify important problem areas and make rapid progress in our research. I am particularly appreciative of all of the encouragement, mentoring, and support that I received as a junior faculty member from the Division of Engineering and Applied Science and my colleagues in mechanical engineering and control and dynamical systems."
Murray earned his BS in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1985, and his MS and PhD, both from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 and 1990. He returned to his alma mater as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in 1991 and was made an associate professor in 1997, a professor in 2000, the Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems in 2006, and the Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering in 2009. He served as the chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science from 2000 until 2005 and as the director of Information Science and Technology from 2006 until 2009. Murray holds many distinctions. Among them, he is a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, holds an honorary doctorate from Lund University, and won the 2006 Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
Michael Ortiz, the Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, was cited for his "contributions to computational mechanics to advance the underpinnings of solid mechanics." He is currently the director of Caltech's Department of Energy/Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program's Center on High-Energy Density Dynamics of Materials. His research focuses on the multiscale modeling of materials in order to design and optimize novel materials.
"This is a wonderful and most pleasant surprise for me, especially given the support from colleagues and peers that it implies," Ortiz says of his election to the academy. "I regard this honor really as a recognition not only of the work done by myself, but also of the work of all my students and collaborators over the years. I am forever indebted to them."
Ortiz earned his BS in civil engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, in 1977, and his MS and PhD in the same field from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978 and 1981. He served on the faculty at Brown University from 1984 until 1995, when he accepted a professorship at Caltech. Ortiz became the Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering in 2004. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics and the International Association for Computational Mechanics, and has won many prizes, including the Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists and the Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics.
The election of Murray and Ortiz brings Caltech's total representation in the NAE to 35 faculty members and 11 trustees. The full class of new members brings the total NAE membership to 2,250 members and 211 foreign associates.


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It's Not British Petroleum, But U.K. Prime Minister Will Have To Address BP
David Cameron is en route to the U.S., for his first visit as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
As The Hill puts it, "Cameron's first visit to the White House as Great Britain's prime minister Tuesday will be shadowed by the problems of BP."
Over the last few days, the prime minister has done everything he can to distance himself from the energy company, which was once known as British Petroleum.
At the White House, chances are he will have to talk about the company's blown-out well and its alleged involvement in the release of one of the men responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
According to the BBC, before he left 10 Downing Street, Cameron "attacked the release of the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, ahead of his first official visit to the US as PM."
Mr Cameron described the Scottish government decision to free Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds last year as "completely wrong."
Last year, the Scottish government released al-Megrahi early, saying he was near-death, battling prostate cancer.
Now, reports indicate he may have been — and indeed may be — in better health than officials thought.
There is also evidence a BP representative may have been involved in negotiations for the release of al-Megrahi.
Today, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Bob Menedez (D-NJ) called for "a full investigation into al-Megrahi's release and whether oil giant BP was involved," the Los Angeles Times reports.
In the letter, the senators express concern about correspondence between the British, Scottish and Libyan governments regarding al-Megrahi's release to Libya and add, " We have also been dismayed to hear from a BP representative that the company actively lobbied the previous government on behalf of the PTA (Prisoner Transfer Agreement), and media reports suggest BP even tried to address the release of this individual."
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PREVIEWS: "Daredevil," "Uncanny X-Men," & More Marvel Comics On Sale August 3, 2016
Comic Books
World of Strange currently sells some pretty rad shirts from a variety of comic artists, including Fred Hembeck, Peter Bagge, Bob Burden and Rick Veitch, and now they've added three new shirts from Steve Bissette (Tyrant, Swamp Thing). You have your choice of the above Tyrant design or two different zombie shirts, and Bissette promises there's a fourth design on the way.
I've got those 3 or 4 issues of Tyrant. Wish that series had continued…
I thought Brat Pack was by Veitch? (That being said, it's too bad there isn't a Doc Blasphemy shirt available. I wore the heck out of my old one.)
Yeah, my mistake … I was thinking of the Teen Angel/New Mutants book he did that was about sidekicks and Brat Pack. My apologies for the error.


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My site used to load pretty quickly (in about 0.9 seconds), but since a few days loading is suddenly really slow.
With almost all of the optimizations of W3C Total Cache and CloudFlare turned on, it takes 6 seconds to load. Every now and then, it drops to about 19 seconds.
According to the page speed test at Pingdom.com, about 90 percent of the time is used by 'waiting for the server'. Hoewer, not every file has this waiting problem: it's mainly waiting for the 'html' at my WordPress-folder.
It looks like CloudFlare and W3C Total Cache are doing their work: almost all files load swiftly. Something, however, is dragging it down. Do you guys have any idea what this could be?
I've already measured plugin loading speed; that seems to be fine. My database is optimized as well.


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Marvel Assembles an Official Title for Third "Avengers" Movie
Comic Books, Film
Showing results 1-2 of 2
Paul Pope spoke with CBR TV about his upcoming Legendary Comics projects, the "PuulpHope" art book and the new edition of "One-Trick Rip-Off," the status of "Battling Boy" and more.
At the Legendary Comics panel, EIC Bob Schreck welcomed Frank Miller to discuss "Holy Terror" while Paul Pope and Matt Wagner also announced new projects for the publisher.
Archives: All | Comic Books | TV/Film | Video Games | Web Comics


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Integrated Development Environments (IDE) Software
Hot topics in Integrated Development Environments (IDE) Softwareavr simulator ide mapserver pawn avr latest project for computer science students ide for avr compiler tcl ide source navigator scilab c and c++ testing tools
Source Navigator NG
Source Navigator NG is based upon RedHat's Source Navigator. Source Navigator is a source code analysis tool. With it, you can edit your source code, display relationships between classes and functions and members, and display call trees.18 weekly downloads
A powerful editor and graphical debugger for code written in Scilab3 weekly downloads
ASED is a Tcl/Tk Editor written in pure Tcl/Tk using the BWidget Toolkit. Features included: multifile editing, syntax-highlighting, command-expansion, undo/redo, autoindent, find/replace, file-browser, help-system6 weekly downloads
avrLab is an IDE (integrated development environment) for AVR microcontroller from ATMEL. It includes an editor with syntax highlighting. avrLab includes support for macro assembler (tavrasm and avra) as well as support for accessing the AVR via uisp.5 weekly downloads
IPAT-S Scenario Scripting Language
IPAT-S is a scenario modeling language. Use it for rapid development of quantitative strategic scenarios for governments, agencies, businesses, etc. using a fast and compact interpreted language. Package includes IPAT Studio development environment.1 weekly downloads
MapServer Workbench
MapServer Workbench is a set of cooperative tools to develop web mapping applications with MapServer. Tools are written in Tcl/Tk, and require the Mapscript scripting interface distributed with MapServer.1 weekly downloads
Open Pawn Project
The Pawn will make it possibly for you to tell the computer exactly what you would like it to do. Fiction. No its reality now. The highly customizable slackware will be the base for Pawn.1 weekly downloads
RB37-Rubidium Perl Editor
Cross Platform Perl Development IDE. Current Alpha is for WIN32 written in Delphi. Initial Plan is too rewrite the IDE in Perl itself.1 weekly downloads
Tcl TextEdit is a simple and powerfull texteditor entierly written in tk/tcl scripting language (no compilation required). It aims to be a programming editor.1 weekly downloads
Tk ScriptIt!
An editor for wish scripts. Includes an interpreter to test scripts without having to save edits. The interpreter provides a console (regardless of OS) to aid in debugging. Written in pure tcl/tk - no extensions required.1 weekly downloads


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Van Horn High School
Graduation 2016
First of all, the Van Horn Administration wants to congratulate the Seniors who will be graduating on May 21st. We wanted to provide a list of reminders to help you plan for this week's upcoming events.
Tuesday, May 17th
- Graduation Practice – Graduates are required to attend the grad practice on Tuesday. You will be served breakfast in the cafeteria and we will load the buses and head over to the Community of Christ Auditorium. You will receive a bundle of 10 grad tickets at grad practice. You do not need your Cap and Gown on Tuesday.
- Decision Day Assembly – We have a variety of activities planned for the Decision Day Assembly. The Assembly is also your chance to see the Senior video.
- Grad Tickets – As stated before, graduates will receive a bundle of 10 tickets at grad practice. If additional tickets are needed, then graduates will have a chance on Tuesday to get additional tickets at the end of the school day. Directions will be given on Tuesday.
Wednesday, May 18th
- Cap and Gown are needed for the events on Wednesday.
- Graduate Walk – We are hoping to establish a new tradition between Van Horn and our feeder elementary schools. Seniors will dress in their caps and gowns and will have a mock graduation walk in the halls of Three Trails, Mallinson and Sugar Creek. Please get your permission slips signed and turned into Ms. Tempel.
- Baccalaureate – We would like to see a strong representation of graduates at this event. Baccalaureate is a religious service with a farewell sermon to the graduating class. This is an optional event. If you are participating, wear your cap and gown and arrive at St. Mark's Catholic Church on Lee's Summit Road at 6:30PM. Seniors will meet at 6:30 to get into position and the ceremony will start at 7PM.
Saturday, May 21st
- Graduation – Graduates will arrive at the Community of Christ Auditorium at 12:45PM. Enter the West Doors (we'll show you during grad practice) and report to the assembly room downstairs. The doors will open at 1:15PM for the public. The public must have a graduation ticket in order to attend the ceremony. The graduation ceremony will start at 2PM.
- Project Grad – Project Grad will be at Paradise Park. Buses will be leaving Van Horn at 8:45PM and will be coming back to Van Horn by 1:30AM. Tickets are $10 for Seniors attending and $10 for any guest. Tickets must be purchased by the end of the school day on Monday, May 16th. Guests must be either a current Junior or an individual from the Class of 2015.
Graduates, congratulations on your accomplishments. I'm looking forward to next week's events. As you transition through these farewell events, take time to reflect on the wonderful memories you made. at Van Horn and also on the great things you will pursue after graduation. Congratulations, I'm proud of you!
Mr. Maglinger
The evening Jamboree will be a continuation of the Daytime Jamboree but with more…..
- Business Partners will join our Academy tables in the cafeteria.
- Global classes will have tables throughout the atrium displaying their information.
- Core class teachers will each have an assigned topic, and will share that information with parents at displays set up for individual conversations/Q&A's
For a complete breakdown and explanation of the Academies please go to the link below.
For information regarding core class enrollment requirements, please watch the video link below.
For information regardingHigh School graduation requirements and college admission requirements, please go to the link below.
During severe weather, school personnel will be monitoring conditions through local news reports and the National Weather Service. Each school is equipped with radios for scanning the National Weather Service. All schools conduct tornado drills with students at least twice a year to ensure they are aware of procedures.
Tornado Warning
- Students and staff will move to designated safe places and proceed into the precautionary duck and cover position.
- Please refrain from coming to school to pick up your child during a tornado warning as staff will be keeping students safe and unable to respond to parent requests.
- Students will not be dismissed from school while the area is under a tornado warning.
- Students will be held at school and buses will not be allowed to transport students until the tornado warning has been lifted and the all clear is given.
Communication Procedures
- Phones may not be answered during a tornado warning, as students and staff will be in the precautionary duck and cover position.
- Parents will be notified via the SchoolMessenger notification system of any changes in transportation, as well as school delays associated with a tornado warning.
- The ISD will share updates via the District website and ISD Facebook and Twitter as soon as information becomes available.
As you progress through your senior year, remember this information.
This new webpage created by our College Advisor, Katie Meyer, has a tremendous amount of information including campus visits, scholarship searches and what you should be doing NOW to prepare for your future.
Apply Missouri - Helping students find the best fit for higher education. Van Horn's goal is to have each senior apply to at least one college before the end of the month of October!
This is Van Horn's third year participating in Apply Missouri! Over the course of the month, there will be activities to help create a college going culture with underclassmen, assist seniors and parents with the college going process, and generate excitement and engagement among students about their future after high school.
For more information - Apply Missouri
The A+ Program is a scholarship program through the Missouri Department of Higher Education. You can find complete information from the Missouri Department of Higher Education at http://dhe.mo.gov/ppc/grants/aplusscholarship.php
For ISD specific information and forms
For a list of 4 year institutions that take A+ check out
A+ Program on our College Center Website
Van Horn High School
Phone: 816.521.5360
Principal: Randy Maglinger
Click HERE for Counseling Center and Enrollment Information.
Click HERE to go to the Library Media website.
- District Website
- Counseling Center
- ISD Sports - Van Horn
- Library Media Center
- Student Information
- Van Horn Alumni Association Website
- Title One District Brochure
- No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 Complaint Procedures
- Title I - Parent Procedure Policy
- A+ FAQs and Forms
- The Academies of the ISD
The students, faculty, and staff of Van Horn High School welcome you to our learning community. Van Horn High School opened its doors in 1955. At the start of the 2008-2009 school year, Van Horn joined the family of the Independence School District. Independence is committed to ensuring that each graduating class of Falcons fulfills the school motto and all "Dare to Be Wise!"
Our Mission
At Van Horn High School we build positive relationships, achieve high academic standards, and develop literacy in order to engage the world.
To see photos and articles from previous years check out
Highlights 2013-2014
Van Horn opened in 1955 and the first class graduated in 1956. It was originally constructed in 1955 on the site of Honeywood, house of former Civil War era Kansas City mayor, Robert T. Van Horn, a prominent newspaper publisher and statesman.
1109 South Arlington Avenue Independence, Missouri 64053
Main Line: 816.521.5360
Fax: 816.521.5610
Attendance Line: 816.521.5429
Main Office Hours
Monday-Friday 7 AM - 3:30 PM
School Hours
Doors Open at 7 AM
Classes 7:20 AM - 2:14 PM
Please remember that a picture ID is required for entry into the building. This policy is in effect in order to protect the safety of our students and staff.


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Bob Lindsay Acura Sales Reviews
- 7500 N Allen Rd
- Peoria, IL 61614 (map)
- Chat with Dealer
Sales Reviews
Older Reviews (over 2 years old)
This dealer does not have any current reviews. The following reviews are over two years old - their ratings are not used to calculate the dealer's current aggregated ratings.
Recommend this dealer? No Purchased a vehicle from this dealer? Yes
Negative buying experience.
Did not disclose defect with vehicle and then refused to resolve the issue with vehicle that they later admitted they knew about all along and had tried to fix previously.
Once sale was made-they claimed it was not their problem.
Trying to be a high end franchise deale...
Read the full review


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you are viewing a single comment's thread.
listen "M", nice moniker, thanks for using language like that on the boards, you've just been reported.now get off your high horse you numpty and walk back the dole centre and look for another dead end job from the end of the world.whats with the beatle skit? are you really that stupid? what should I do, come back with a retort about some world class north east artist...................................................no, sorry there are none. wait,...........who was the good looking bloke who sung "crocodile shoes"?


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[edit] Background
Barry Hatter's adventure starts with the sorcerer's ultimate challenge where you have to earn your spurs racing alongside other wizards in the enchanting Broomstick Grand Prix. It's no fairytale when there's an evil force at work.
So it's a race against time! Use your broomstick skills to recover the flying runaway spell books that have escaped from the Library of Magic! Search high and low and take a shortcut though the narrow castle hallways, picking up crucial time bonuses as you soar at low altitude.
To defeat the evil present you need to aim high coming 1st lets you progress to harder levels, help is at hand as there will be plenty of extra ammunition to collect, but you have to be skilled at the arts of dangerous stunts as you'll need to skim over tree-tops and plunge under low bridges and archways. Besides health and ammunition you'll find the rocket-power super-broom and that will help you thrust into first place leaving a smokescreen behind you to daze and confuse your enemies.
As you progress through the game the evil starts to make its presents known you'll have to use your magical spells to attack evil dragons that have taken over the skies above 'The Wizards Castle'. Aim carefully to destroy each segment of the monsters body before the castle is doomed. Collect extra health pickups as you avoid blasts from the traitorous Imps around the castle roof tops.
Fight for magical supremacy in the thrilling 'Orb Domination' levels and see who is the most skilled with a broomstick! Swipe the orbs from your opponents to claim a breath-taking victory.
Up to 8 magical wizard characters for you choose from. Unlock more complex and challenging levels as your broomstick handling skill progress, then hook up with up to 4 friends in the insanely addictive Multi-player mode.