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Featured Content: Interview with Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT
It's a pleasure to welcome you to our informal conversation with Internet media scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman (http://www.media.mit.edu/people/ethanz) via Skype on August 16, 2012. Ethan is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and a principal research scientist at the MIT Media Lab (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/zuckerman-civic-media.html), located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. Along with Rebecca MacKinnon, he co-founded in 2005 the international blogging community Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org/), an initiative that had caught our interest and which we wanted to hear more about, among other things.
TS: Good morning, and thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us. Basically what we would like to do is have a rather informal conversation, to talk about the history, the idea, the concept behind Globalvoicesonline and how you thought that this might be a viable solution for trying to bring more of the news that is not really reported on a regular basis from various places of the world and other languages. It seems to have started in 2004 at a conference, at the Harvard Law School?
EZ: Right. The history of it is that Rebecca MacKinnon (http://rconversation.blogs.com/about.html) and I were both visiting scholars at the Berkman Center, at Harvard University, which at that point was the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. It's now at Harvard in general. She was just coming off over a decade with CNN. I was wrapping up a non-profit project I'd run called Geekcorps, which was doing technology volunteering in the developing world. We were both very interested in how blogs were making it possible to follow news in parts of the world that we were interested in. She was very closely following North Korea, and was often able to get some news out of North Korea from Chinese language blogs of people who'd been traveling there on business. My interests were pretty broad. I was trying to keep up with news on the African continent, particularly from Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, countries where we'd been doing work as Geekcorps. And so we started developing lists of blogs we were paying attention to, and we realized that much of the debate about what was going on in the blogosphere, most of the conversation, was really about the U.S. tech press, so, when people talked about how blogs were changing the future, people were really talking about how it was changing technology coverage in the U.S.
EZ: And increasingly she and I got frustrated by that, and just wanted to have a more international perspective on those discussions. So we sort of inserted ourselves into this conference that Berkman was having, and sort of said 'look, we're going to have a conversation about blogging in a more international sense, we're going to invite some of the people that we admire, read and admire from all over the world, and bring them together into a room.' And it wasn't really meant to be starting a movement or starting a project, it was really sort of meant as a conversation. But once we had that many people in the room, people very quickly said 'well, look, you know, we have a lot of people working on the same issues here. We need to start finding some ways to work together'. And it very quickly turned into a movement.
TS: How many languages did you start with?
EZ: Well, we really only started with English. One of the things to remember is that this is 2004. Most people blogging were blogging in English, even if they were in countries where English wasn't the primary language spoken. I've written, I've used the example several times, and I'm going to use it in the book that I'm finishing up right now, of my friend Ahmad Humeid who's a Jordanian blogger, who continues to blog in English, as 360east (http://www.360east.com/), and, when I met him, I met him at a gathering of Jordanian bloggers, and I said 'look, you know, you guys all speak Arabic, better than you speak English, why aren't you blogging in Arabic?' And his response at that point was, 'well, you know, no one reads it.' There are so many more English speakers online. Now that's changed. But at that point there were a lot of people writing about their countries in English. So, remember, this is a moment at which probably the most famous blogger in the world is Salam Pax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax), who's Iraqi but writing in English as a way of letting English-speaking readers understand what is going on in Iraq. So we started in English knowing full well that we would be missing some conversations but both in terms of practicality and also in terms of the people that we wanted to reach, that was the language that made sense.
TS: Has this been the case too, with people tweeting as the revolutions began in the Arab world? Were most of those started in English?
EZ: No, look, I mean we're now really talking about ancient history, and in Internet terms that's a very, very long time. So, I would say that it's a very different experience now. I think there's much, much more local language content being produced. I think fewer people are saying 'I insist on writing in English'. I would say particularly around the question of the Arab Spring there was a very, very nice data analysis done that showed prominent Twitter accounts based on whether they were writing in English or Arabic, or both, and unsurprisingly, there's a community of people who are writing mostly in Arabic, there's a community of people who are writing solely in English, and then there's a sort of bridge community between the two. And a notable small number of bridge figures who are straddling the gap between the two. The ones who speak English are going to be the ones who get the international attention. This probably explains why the world's so badly misunderstood the Green Revolution in Iran. It was very, very easy to overestimate the amount of support that revolution had because, you know, there were so many people writing in English, and those accounts in English were being amplified again and again and again. They were not the only accounts. These were not the only relevant accounts but those were the ones that everyone was paying attention to.
TS: It would seem that what we've got here, and what Ethan's referred to, is several different discourse spheres. One group, the group that's blogging in English, has an intent to reach a different audience than those that are often blogging in their own languages or those that are the bridge groups blogging between languages. A lot of the tweets in the Egyptian revolution were for local organizing, for instance. That audience is a local audience. And there would be no call for that to be in English. So I think what we see over the last few years are different audiences, and those audiences because of the Internet technology have become available for us to eavesdrop upon, more easily than we could in the past.
EZ: Right. I do have a very old paper, it's actually in Public Choice, called "Meet the Bridge Bloggers" (http://ethanzuckerman.com/meetthebridgebloggers/ezuckermanbridgeblog122305.html), which looks at this with data from 2005, 2006, so there's pretty good data about this. I'm slightly more skeptical of the idea that much of the Arabic twitting in the Arab Spring was coordination. I think this is where my friend Clay Shirky sometimes gets a bit ahead of himself. Certainly there was some coordination, but there was also a lot of discussion and propaganda and sort of back and forth as well. Because Twitter's a public channel, it's not a great channel in which to actually organize a revolution, and a lot of what we know about what actually happened in the Arab Spring is that people often were using these channels for disinformation as much as for information. There's a classic story of what people refer to as the January Head Fake, which is to say that activists in Egypt used Twitter and Facebook to actually give the authorities the wrong information about when they would be showing up in Tahrir [Square]. I tend to think that actually these tools are mostly powerful because they help you manipulate media.
TS: Which I guess is a form of communication of yet a fourth kind: a different audience, another audience.
EZ: Sure. I actually think that in many cases in activist communication that's the audience they're looking for. I think one of the reasons that you see so much more focus on Arabic media is that Arabic media has become more independent and more influential. Trying to influence Arabic media before the rise of Al Jazeera didn't make any sense. Now it makes an enormous amount of sense.
TS: It's interesting, though, that this idea of Twitter as an organizing tool became one of the media themes. Although, as you're arguing, it's probably not one of the major purposes.
EZ: Well, so, yes. What happens all the time whenever you have a story about rapid political change and technology is that people want to draw a line between the two. I have a piece in Foreign Policy titled "The First Twitter Revolution?." I didn't put the title on it; in fact, the sub-title is much closer to what the article was actually about: ''Not so fast, Internet can take some credit for toppling Tunisia's government but not all of it." (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/14/the_first_twitter_revolution) This was me writing the day after the Tunisian government fell, which we'd been following very, very closely at Global Voices. We have a lot of Tunisian activists within our community, but the case that I make there is that really what happened was yes, it had a coordinating function, but not a secret coordinating function. Social media had the function of letting people document the revolution, and then sharing that information with Al Jazeera and then Jazeera was in fact broadcasting that information and that had a sort of synchronizing effect. Look, people always want to draw the simple, straight line. It allows you to— basically it's a form of nationalism and possibly racism. You know, Arabs couldn't possibly rebel against their dictators; it must have been the magical technology built by white people in the United States. So, you have to be very, very sensitive to it, because it's not an uncomplicated mistake. It's actually a deeply agenda-ed mistake that people make.
TS: You mentioned in the beginning that most of this had started out in English. When, in what year more or less did you notice that began to turn, so that there was more communication in social media in other languages?
EZ: You know; it's different in every country. It really was very different in every country. I think what happens is if you are the first blogger in Jordan, let's say, writing in Arabic doesn't make any sense, because the people who read blogs tend to be the people who write blogs, and you're the first user of it. So all your ties are going to be to people outside of Jordan, and at that point the dominant language is English. At some point when there's a sufficient Jordanian blogger community, then it makes sense either for you to switch, or maybe what happens is if you're comfortable writing in Arabic rather than comfortable writing in English, then it becomes a space in which you can switch into. The tipping point problem. It's not necessarily 50-50; it might be a small percentage, at which point it makes sense to have a flood of people speaking another language in there.
EZ: So I would say that it was different from place to place. For us, we noticed that we were not able to cover the world responsibly in one language, probably as early as 2005 or 2006. What we started doing was, we started bringing on editors. The project starts in 2004. In early 2005, Rebecca and I are editing it by hand. Going through as many blogs as we can and inviting people in. By summer of 2005, we have an intern working on this; by fall 2005 we're hiring editors. And we hire some editors with geographies in mind, which is to say we hire a sub-Saharan African editor, but other editors with a combination of a geography and a linguistic group. So, we know that our Middle East editor needs to speak Arabic, and we end up with someone who's able to read and point to stuff in Arabic. We know that our East Asia editor is going to speak Chinese. And then as we go further and further and further, we start splitting up, having language editors as well as regional editors. So we sort of split the two, and we basically say 'OK, you're responsible for Chinese language wherever it is in the world, and you're responsible for East Asia, so you might be covering Japanese news as well.
EZ: Where things really start changing is when people start producing the website in other languages. And that starts with a project in Chinese that's put together really by volunteers. There's a guy, Portnoy Zheng, who takes advantage of the fact that our site is available under Creative Commons and starts creating a Chinese language version of that in Taiwan. And we think 'this is great', and we actually reach out to Portnoy and say 'that's wonderful, would you like to have some space on our server? We'll make it possible for you to do that formally.'
TS: I'm wondering, for the translation purposes, how do you deal with – because from what I'm able to tell, the content is brought in from different bloggers, and then posted, and then made available to people who would like to translate it into other languages—how do you work the issues of quality?
EZ: Well, let's make sure first that you understand how we got to where we are. So Portnoy starts translating this. He's reading the English site and he is himself translating it into other languages. He starts developing a team, initially of Taiwanese, and then eventually of Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese who are working together to translate the site. We offer him space on our server. We basically say 'look, this is great, join on in, the one rule we sort of ask for is: don't put up any original content, just translate our content'. And the theory behind that is that since it's on our server we have editorial responsibility for it. So if we've read it first, we can feel pretty comfortable that we're not flirting with libel, for instance, based on what we're publishing. And then for the translation, we will assume that the people who are translating and editing the translations know what they're doing. It helped, in fact, that we started with Chinese, which Rebecca speaks fluently, and could review and say 'yes, absolutely, this is good stuff'.
EZ: What changes is we then get many, many more people coming to us and saying 'let's create languages, let's create editions that are in our own language'. And what we basically say after a while is 'look, you need to demonstrate to us that you can pull this off. We'll give you the server space but we'll do it on a trial basis. You have to demonstrate that you're able to do a certain number of translations a month, otherwise, you know, we aren't going to give you the space forever.' And so now we have about 30 of those communities who are doing it. They generally have two things: they have their internal organizing system, they have a mailing list or some way of saying 'you work on this, you work on that'; and then our WordPress system is very good. We've designed a system that basically communicates between all the different blogs that we write, so, when you translate an English language post into Japanese, for instance, the Japanese language edition builds a link back to the English post, and the English post builds a link to the Japanese edition. It's a bunch of tech that we created.
TS: With WordPress?
EZ: We build across; we build on top of WordPress. We've heavily customized it to be able to do this. We run 32 different instances of WordPress. There is an instance of WordPress that is not visible to the general public, which only deals with routing messages. It says: 'A post of this idea on this blog has just been published. Alert the other editions that this is now available for translation', and 'Translation has now been published. Alert this initial post that this is there.' So, we have 31 language editions that slave to this master translation server. It's all been custom-coded by a couple of guys on our staff. Matt Mullenweg of WordPress has worked with us on some of the code, but for the most part it's not incorporated within the mainstream of WordPress development.
EZ: The last thing to understand about all this, before you ask the question about what it means in terms of quality— the final frontier for us was, for many, many years—content had to appear first in English, and our logic behind this was if we didn't do that, we couldn't have editorial control over it. What we ended up realizing over time was that so many more people wanted to publish in their original language, and this was particularly important for our francophone Africans who in many cases could work and trade email in English but really weren't comfortable writing in English. So we then made a decision that we would allow people to write new content, new Global Voices posts, in their own languages, published on the Net language edition and then do our best to get it translated into English from there. Nowadays this means we do have situations where someone writes in French, it gets translated into English and then it gets translated into Spanish.
TS: At this point— this is when you would have partnered up with Lingua? Is that how it worked?
EZ: Well, Lingua was our name; it really was no partnering.
TS: Typically, when, let's say Facebook or Skype has gone to using volunteer translators, there are a couple of different avenues they take to really deal with the issue of quality control. One of them, as in the case of Facebook, is that you have a very large body of very interested user translators and the volume, the large number of translators, helps compensate for quality. Skype went a different route, and they looked for people that had experience, certain motivation, and incentives. In any case there are a number of different techniques that you can use. Do you use the volume route or do you use a sort of gatekeeping-training route, or a mixture of that?
EZ: I think we probably use a different route than either of those. And I would say that the route that we've ended up using has been influential as well. Just in some different ways, and not everybody knows about it. What we've basically said is that we consider translators to be as important as authors. And that's a very, very different route, certainly, than the Facebook route. So if you look at our translations, you'll see that a translation lists -in the same size and same font and with the same photo- the translator, as well as the author of the post. We consider translators as important to our community as the writers. Translators are actually more numerous in our community now than writers. They have the same profile pages. They have the same mailing list access. They have the same privileges. They get invited to our conference in the same way. And so, our feeling on this is, what we want is, a small number of extremely talented, well-respected folks who are able to do this at a very professional level.
EZ: So, the people who do this for us do it out of a combination of motivations. The main motivation is interest in the material and wanting to make sure that it's available in their language. The second interest is sort of professional training; there's a long track record of people working in our community and then going on to highly profitable translation jobs, and then there are probably tertiary reasons, but I think those are sort of first and second. It's not money, because the vast majority of our translators are unpaid. What's interesting is this model of essentially saying 'we're going to celebrate the translators. We're going to make them very visible.' It's a model that we then introduced to our friends at TED, who were experimenting with paid translation for their TED Talks. We ended up saying to them, 'look, just try this out, just start recruiting some folks, and see whether your quality goes up'. Quality went way up. They got much higher quality from honoring their volunteer translators, which they do very much the same way we do. And they ended up deciding not to use professional translators. What they use professionals to do, actually, is transcription, which, it turns out, is hard to get people to do. But they end up using volunteers for all the translation, and it's worked incredibly well for them.
TS: The major difference here, then, between Global Voices and something like Skype or Facebook is that typically in Skype or Facebook you're translating the interface. You're translating pieces, for instance small segments, but the ability to translate content, content that the translator can feel invested in, from a political, social or cultural point of view, probably also makes a huge difference. That is to say, there's a bigger intrinsic motivation to translate — which you can then honor.
EZ: One thing we said to TED was that we think that this model of volunteer translation only works if people can decide what they want to translate. We don't strive to translate every story. We strive to make the stories available, and let people translate what they are compelled to translate. TED has taken that, and they basically never say to a translator: 'OK, now here's a talk, and you're to translate it'. Instead, you get to look at it and say 'well, this looks interesting, I'm going to spend a bunch of time on this.' So, I think that's critically important. I'm not sure that I would recommend our model for translating interfaces; for one thing, interfaces need consistency. We do not use translation memories. We've tried introducing them to our different communities a number of times; our folks do not like them. Almost everyone in our community translates completely freehand. They tend not to use any automated tools. They tend not to use any translation memories. We'd love it if they did. We actually think that those translation memories could be really helpful, rather useful, but that's not what people in our community want to do. I think that would probably give you fairly poor translation for interfaces. But again, it's sort of based around this model that basically works because people are doing what they enjoy.
TS: Although of course as you mentioned, you're losing a lot of important data that could help your process become even better. But you're balancing, I guess, the technology off against the needs and desires of your translator community.
EZ: As a software developer, it pains me every time. I feel like we're wasting effort and, and every time I say 'you really should use a translation memory', they respond by saying 'hell, no, actually this is what works for me and I'm going to do this because this is fun and I enjoy it.'
TS: That may change over time as translators, as that technology trickles down to individual translators. The problem of course is if many of your translators are not professionals, they haven't been introduced to the notion that this is a standard mechanism or standard way to translate. And by professional it doesn't mean that they're not good translators or cannot produce quality translations, but they don't work in a professional environment where's there's a more established workflow.
EZ: So, while I hear you, I think I do disagree with you to a certain extent. I actually think that this model of non-full time, non-professional –in the sense that 'this is my main job'—translators are on the rise. And, my sense is the real shift that's happening is that translation is going from being an extremely expensive activity that you're doing at rates that make it possible to make a living, to an activity that's either being done by volunteers or is being crowdsourced in one fashion or another. I don't think that professional translation will go away, but I do think that it will not necessarily be the dominant force that it is right now. And I think that this sort of assumption that people who are participating in something like Global Voices are going to find their way into the professional translation community is not necessarily a valid one. I think what's actually possible is that this model that we've brought to the table may end up becoming the dominant model over time.
TS: No, it's not arguing that more people would eventually come into the professional translation community. It's more about people adopting technologies, such as translation memories, that are currently restricted to the professional translation community.
EZ: Well, although, Google now has a set of tools that can give you some of those powers, even as an amateur. That's what I'm saying, that we've been surprised that our translators are not particularly excited by them. Even as our translators are getting more and more professional work, they are often saying to us 'well, that isn't a particularly fun way to translate. So we don't want to do that. Maybe I will have to use that in my professional work, but I don't necessarily want to bring it into play for the Global Voices work.'
TS: That's very interesting.
EZ: I don't know. I'm slightly baffled by it. I'm frustrated by it. But it's interesting. It happens again and again. I guess the only place where I'm disagreeing with you is that I have been pushing this very hard in our community for four years and I have had absolutely no progress on that.
TS: There is the question of motivation. It might have to do with your perception of how often you will need to reuse the material, of whether you believe that this is part of a larger process, or perhaps a mix of motivations that make you decide whether to adopt technology that allows reuse.
EZ: Let's talk about some parallel problems. Knowledge management systems are a very popular idea, right? The whole idea is 'wouldn't it be great if we had all our organizational knowledge in the same place, we'd have much better learning from our past experience, and so on and so forth. People have spent amazing amounts of money building them. They don't work because people don't use them. And so that whole field has now sort of disappeared. Now, rather than forcing people to enter stuff into knowledge management, people try to find ways of harnessing informal communication within an office whether it's in the form of blogs or Twitter or something along those lines. You know, my history is as a coder, and I know, generally speaking, that it would be better for me to write reusable functions and document them in such a way that I don't have to write them again. Do I? Occasionally. It's not the easiest thing for any of us to do. I think people use translation memories mostly when they're working in a workplace that says 'this is mandatory, and we're going to work this way'. I'm not convinced that people will voluntarily work that way. Until you get to projects that are at the level of organization, of, say, a well put-together open source project where people start doing things correctly, using GitHub, and so on and so forth.
TS: What would you say, what do you think your biggest challenges are going to be, coming up, say in a 5-10 year window?
EZ: Well, I would say, one of the big things that we are wrestling with is that we are able to translate the posts that we write, but we're not necessarily able to translate the posts that we point to. So, what happens on Global Voices is we're basically saying 'here's what's out there on the Web, it's really exciting, and you should read it'. But in many cases what we're really saying is 'you should read it, oh and by the way, it's in Portuguese, and we know that you can't read it.' So, trying to figure out how we get to the point where we're able to point to and contextualize content that we're not able to translate, is a massive one. One of the places where this probably becomes the most important is video. We're pretty convinced that online discourse is really moving into video, that video is increasingly how people are creating content. We're really dreadful at figuring out how to transcribe it, how to translate it, how to get it out there. We're aware of some tools. Our leading video person works for Amara which is the leading sort of subtitling, translation video platform out there. But it still doesn't mean like we feel like we have our act together on it. On maybe more of the theoretical side of things, I think we're really interested in figuring out how you build relationships between human translators and the machine translation systems like Google. So, we look at something like our English-Malagasy work, and we have probably the largest English-Malagasy parallel corpus out there. But we've yet to be able to find a way that Google is willing to take it from us. So far, Google hasn't really expressed an interest in it. So we're interested in trying to figure out how to make that work better.
TS: To exploit, or in lieu of the word exploit, to leverage the corpus in some way to allow your coverage of Malagasy-English communication to grow.
EZ: Exploit is fine. I mean, I think what we would say is that we understand the need for machine translation, and we want machine translation because what we want in terms of coverage can't happen without it and it's very, very hard to do this at scale without it. So we'd love to see people do a better job of this.
TS: So your translation function in the future, if you could get machine translation to be more a part of your attempt to reach out to these posts that currently are untranslated, means that you might have more post-editing effort on the human side.
EZ: I don't know that we're ever going to use machine translation in the work that we're posting on the site. Because the truth is, our translators, when we say 'hey, why don't you machine translate this and then clean it up?' say 'no thank you, that isn't actually very helpful'. We want machine translation because we want all content on the Internet to be accessible to all people. And our job is working on content diversity on the Internet. Being able to point to content that is in another language and have it be at least modestly readable, would be very, very helpful for us. And right now I don't feel like we're even modestly readable.
TS: That's really interesting. In fact, for some time there had been work going on in different corners of the world on Haitian Creole and suddenly when we had the disaster in Haiti, a lot of that got pulled together, through collaboration from different sources in order to get that content available, make it available in different formats, in different media, in different platforms, so that that it could be used for disaster and humanitarian relief. And you're right to want to proceed like that, especially for these different language pairs and directions, in case something like this would happen; it would be right there available for the public to use.
EZ: Right! And I think that production of these corpora and rapidly turning them into MT systems is incredibly important. So, yes, we're interested in that. We're interested in making sure that that's possible. But again, what I would basically say is, for us, the trickiest thing in all of this is that we're only ever going to be able to translate a very small fraction of the content that's out there. Trying to figure out how we deal with the rest of the content is a very interesting one for us, and particularly content that isn't text but that's video.
TS: Right, it seems that one of the issues here, then, is that the volume of the content is always advancing out ahead of what your capacity is going to be. Even with machine translation. So, you're also going to have to have some way of deciding what to translate.
EZ: Well, that's not a big problem for us. That is what we do. We have professional editors that are sitting there and saying 'OK, we're reading 500 posts today; what are the five that we say 'hey, you really ought to go read this' and then what's the one that we excerpt and translate?' What would be really nice is for the four that we point to, but don't translate, to be able to say 'here, you'll be able to get at least a partial reading of this in machine translation'. That discovery and filtering function is something I feel that we already do quite well. And, I would say that if we wanted to go further, we could then, you know, translate not just one, but then two, three, four, five of the stories there.
TS: But when you say that you read 500, and then you select, well, that 500 is just a small fraction of what you could be processing. Is that of concern?
EZ: I'm not sure that that's true for us. When we're talking about who's blogging about contemporary politics in Ghana, I'm not sure that the supply's as unlimited as you think it is. Remember, our job isn't to deal with everything; our job is to deal with interesting topics, with a potentially international audience coming from different countries.
EZ: So, our job is never going to be to translate everything that's coming out of Madagascar, it's going to be first of all to look at Madagascar, figure out what's potentially interesting to an international audience, and then prioritize how to translate it and contextualize it.
TS: So, you have a smaller pool of really eligible articles, of blog posts, to begin with then.
EZ: Supply is actually the issue.
TS: Interesting. Finally, how do you see, how would you characterize the online, global dialogue in general, today, in terms of multiple languages, multilingualism, or translation on the Web? What is it that you're finding? Is there a bit of this ghettoization that you had spoken of in other pieces that you've done?
EZ: Well, I'm finishing up an 80,000 word book manuscript on that topic. Look, there's an enormous amount of dialogue, worthwhile dialogue, going on around discussion of ideological isolation. For a long time, Cass Sunstein has talked about the 'echo chamber'. Right now you have Eli Pariser talking about the filter bubble. Basically, Sunstein identifies this as being about politics and ideology. If you're on the left, you're only going to listen to the left, and you can filter so that you don't accidentally have to hear the right. He goes further and basically says that not only that, but now the technology companies are doing it whether you like it or not. They're both right, but they're also both a little too narrow. You know, the truth is, we're all terribly parochial, terribly nationalistic, terribly local in our views, unless we're working very, very hard not to be. And, while the Internet makes it conceivable that you could get those much broader views of the world, it doesn't guarantee that you will. And so you actually have to make a very, very conscious effort to do so.
EZ: I actually worry in many cases that the fact that you can see all these different languages, that, you know, you have that sort of experience of seeing an unfamiliar language and then hitting the back button actually gives you this sort of experience of imaginary cosmopolitanism. You sort of can believe that you're actually getting much more diverse information than you are. I do see pretty good evidence that some of the systems that we play with, like Facebook, are probably reinforcing existing local ties at the expense of building new international ties. And if I were to try to sort of engineer around this, which is what I'm trying to do in many cases, I think getting people to look for common grounds around topics is a good way to go. I think helping people see what they're seeing and identify the things that they may not be seeing and then trying to build serendipity systems around that are all potentially helpful. But, in the end, do I see linguistic and ideological isolation continuing? Yes, yes, I do.
TS: Ethan, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. We're sure it will stimulate some interesting discussion! By the way, when is your book due?
EZ: I'm working on it today!
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Cardinals (79-68) at Pirates (67-80)
7:05 PM EST–PNC Park, Pittsburgh
TV: ROOT Sports, FS Midwest
The Bucs look to make it two in a row against the Cards and delay that 81st loss as long as possible. They'll also look to further hinder St. Louis' playoff chances – they sit 4.5 back in the Wild Card and 6.5 back in the division.
Tonight's starters…
Chris Carpenter (9-9, 3.75) vs. Jeff Karstens (9-8, 3.32)
Carpenter just signed a 2-year extension with the Cards ($21M). He's normally very good, but the Pirates have hit him relatively well this season. Let's hope that continues since he'll be a frequent opponent for the next two seasons.
Karstens returns to the rotation after skipping two starts – mostly due to a high innings count and fatigue. Let's hope that was the main root of his problems in August and a major regression isn't taking place.
Also, Pedro Ciriaco is leading off and playing short. Yes!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Closer Look at Zalman F1 SSD0120F1 (120GB)
Besides the F1 series, Zalman's other SSDs are not high-performance products. They are equipped with SATA 3 Gbit/s interface and feature slower controllers from JMicron and Phison. The F1 series, on the contrary, includes fast and modern SSDs based on the second-generation SandForce platform. As opposed to many other makers, Zalman doesn't provide too many models within it. The F1 series is comprised of only three products with storage capacities of 60, 120 and 240 gigabytes. We've got the midrange model for our tests.
The Zalman F1 series comes in a small cardboard box of sober design. The series name seems to refer to Formula 1 racing but we don't see such motifs in the product packaging. Moreover, the series is referred to as just F rather than F1, so we can expect Zalman to produce F2, F3 and other such SSD series in the future.
The product specs you can read from the front panel of the box are just what you can expect from a SandForce-based SSD. We can only note that the peak read and write speeds are very high: 560 and 530 MB/s, respectively. That's very boastful as even OCZ's Vertex 3 has lower performance specs. It's either Zalman knows some technological secret or Zalman's marketing department has no shame. Our tests will show.
Besides the SSD, the box contains a user manual from which you can learn that the manufacturer offers you to download Acronis True Image HD for free. The utility's serial number is on the sticker attached to the SSD.
There is nothing extraordinary about the SSD's design. It's a black metallic brick of the 2.5-inch form factor that lacks any originality. Its appearance is somewhat enlivened by the black glossy sticker with specs, part number and a large fuchsia-colored F series logo.
Well, SSDs are not bought for their looks. It's far more important what's inside that black box.
The PCB we found inside our 120-gigabyte Zalman F1 carries a standard second-generation SandForce SF-2281 controller and 16 chips of NAND flash memory manufactured by Intel. Labeled 29F64G08ACME3, such memory chips were also installed in our sample of Corsair's Force GT 120GB. Thus, the Zalman F1 is a typical SandForce-based SSD with 25nm synchronous MLC flash memory with ONFI 2.2 interface. It uses 2-way interleaving, just like other 120GB SSDs.
Looking at the hardware components, it is difficult to see why the Zalman F1 should be faster than other 120GB SandForce-based SSDs with synchronous flash. It seems to be no different from other products of its class such as the Corsair Force Series GT, Kingston HyperX, OCZ Vertex 3 and ADATA S511.
There is a possibility that Zalman introduced some substantial changes into the firmware, yet we doubt it. The more tests of SSDs with the SF-2281 controller we carry out, the more proof we have that their performance is only influenced by the type of NAND flash employed. Moreover, the Zalman F1's firmware seems to be similar to the reference SandForce 3.3.2 firmware and even has the same version number.
Anyway, the increased read and write speeds are written into the official Zalman F1 120GB specs:
- Controller: SandForce SF-2281
- Interface: SATA 6 Gbit/s
- Flash memory: synchronous 25 nm NAND
- Capacity: 120 gigabytes
- Cache memory: none
- Sequential read speed: 560 MB/s
- Sequential write speed: 530 MB/s
- Random write speed (in 4 KB data blocks): no data.
Like many respectable SSD makers, Zalman provides a 3-year warranty for its products.


text:
World Geography Printable Book (Grades 3-6)
Grade Levels: 3 - 6
View Printable
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Excerpted from
Anthony D. Fredericks
Reinforce and extend any geography curriculum with challenging, reproducible exercises for U.S. and world geography as well as general map and globe skills. Students use their critical thinking skills as they determine relationships, make inferences, and draw conclusions.
Buy This Book
If you need to teach it, we have it covered.
Start your free trial to gain instant access to thousands of expertly curated worksheets, activities, and lessons created by educational publishers and teachers.Start Your Free Trial


text:
Jaipur Founder Receives Ernst & Young Award
Posted on February 25, 2011 by
NK Chaudhary
NORCROSS, Ga.- NK Chaudhary, the founder of Jaipur rugs, was honored with a 2010 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award at an event earlier this month in New Delhi, India. Honorees were recognized in nine categories, and Chaudhary won the award in the Start Up category.
The annual Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards program recognizes entrepreneurial success and is presented in more than 140 cities in more than 50 countries worldwide.
"Our entire team here is elated at this prestigious honor my father has received from such a highly respected organization as Ernst & Young," said Asha Chaudhary, Chaudhary's daughter as well as the president of Jaipur Rugs' U.S. operations. "On a personal level, it's incredibly rewarding for me to see all of his years of hard work, passionate commitment and singular vision recognized by the international business community."
Other Articles By Author
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text:
CRTC announces creation of international network to facilitate cooperation on telemarketing enforcement
OTTAWA-GATINEAU, October 28, 2011 — Today, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) announced that they have brought together 12 enforcement agencies to launch an International Do Not Call Network. The CRTC and ACMA will serve as the network's inaugural co-chairs, and the United States Federal Trade Commission will host the secretariat.
"Enforcement agencies face a common challenge in tracking down individuals and companies who violate telemarketing rules, but operate outside national borders," said Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C., Chairman of the CRTC. "A global problem calls for global solutions. Having a network that fosters collaboration will contribute to more effective cross-border enforcement activities and help reduce unwanted telephone calls to Canadians from foreign telemarketers."
The International Do Not Call Network will facilitate cooperation between agencies that enforce telemarketing rules in their respective countries. Members will meet annually to establish best practices and encourage the development of robust telemarketing laws around the globe. The network will also work to harmonize telemarketing policies between countries to improve enforcement activities across different jurisdictions.
The CRTC is promoting international cooperation to enforce telemarketing rules. As part of its outreach efforts, the CRTC recently struck an agreement with two telemarketers based in Mexico who were selling and promoting vacation packages to Canadians. The telemarketers have agreed to abide by Canadian do-not-call rules and stop making unauthorized telemarketing calls to Canadians. The CRTC worked jointly with Mexico's consumer protection agency, PROFECO, to bring its investigation to a successful conclusion.
Launched in September 2008, the National Do Not Call List (DNCL) helps Canadians reduce the number of unsolicited telemarketing calls and faxes they receive. Companies are not allowed to make unsolicited marketing or sales calls to numbers that have been registered on the list for more than 31 days, with some exceptions. Canadians may register on the National DNCL or file a complaint about a telemarketer by calling 1-866-580-DNCL (3625) or visiting www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca.
The CRTC
The CRTC is an independent public authority that regulates and supervises broadcasting and telecommunications in Canada.
Key facts for consumers
Key facts for telemarketers
- 30 -
Media Relations:
MediaRelations, Tel: 819-997-9403, Fax: 819-997-4245
General Inquiries:
Tel: 819-997-0313, TDD: 819-994-0423, Fax: 819-994-0218
Toll-free # 1-877-249-CRTC (2782)
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Ask a question or make a complaint
These documents are available in alternative format upon request.
Additional information on the International Do Not Call Network
The newly created International Do Not Call Network will meet annually to facilitate cooperation and the exchange of best practices between agencies that enforce telemarketing rules in their respective countries. An inaugural meeting was held in Paris, France, on October 28, 2011, which brought together enforcement agencies from the following countries:
Hong Kong
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States
- Date modified:


text:
Neil Young is divorcing wife Pegi after 36 years of marriage.
The 68-year-old rocker filed a petition to dissolve his marriage to the 61-year-old singer, with whom he has son Ben and daughter Amber, in San Mateo, California on July 29.
A preliminary hearing will reportedly take place on December 12.
A spokesperson for the former couple, above, who tied the knot in 1978 and first met when Pegi was a waitress at a diner near Neil's ranch, declined to comment.
Pegi, who was the inspiration for some of Neil's most romantic hits, including Once an Angel and Unknown Legend, began working as his back-up singer after making her debut with him at the Oscars in 1994.
They last performed together at their annual Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View, California, in October.


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Due to the lockout, HBO's Hard Knocks had to resort to a Hard Knocks: Decade of Champs highlight show. One team had to fill a vacant hole.
The Eagles became that team… the Birds signed everybody. The names Asomugha, Babin, Jenkins, Brown, Young and Smith quickly became entrenched in every Eagle fan's head. They traded Kevin Kolb to Arizona for a second-round pick and Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie.
And then came the Vick six-year $100-million contract extension…the plot thickened…Is Michael Vick worth that much? Some have already proclaimed it an asinine offer, I'll let the plot unfold and make my own decision when the season's over.
My concerns aren't at quarterback, it's the offensive line that protects the quarterback. The right tackle position has become a hot potato, a fourth-round rookie is starting at center, and a 26-year-old fireman will man the right guard position (he won't start this week).
Last year's offensive line coach has become the defensive coordinator.
A rookie fourth-round draft choice starts at middle linebacker.
Two seventh-round draft picks (2010 and 2009 respectively) start.
The Eagles are stacking up, yet rebuilding. The hope is that all of the rookies will be able to step up. Of course, Michael Vick, the new trio of cornerbacks, the Jim Washburn-led defensive line, and the lethal receiving core have to make the inexperienced guys' jobs easier.
All of these questions are just an introduction to the story of the 2011 Eagles.


text:
Why make a trip into the cold to buy valentines for your kid's class, when you can print it out at home…for FREE!
Get the Valentines Day Printable here!
I used sandwich sized zip lock bags and filled them with these super cute conversation hearts.
Cut the square out, fold it in half, staple it to the bags, fill out the back, and you're all set!


text:
The Finest Golf and Practice Facility In The South of England
3rd, 10th & 17th December
Click here for more info……..
Chichester Golf Club offers the finest, friendliest, golf and practice facility in the South of England. Ideally situated for easy access, just two miles south of Chichester and close to the A27, Portsmouth and the A3. With its two 18-hole championship courses,driving range, 9-hole short course and 18 hole Jungle Paradise Adventure Golf course there is something to suit everyone from the seasoned veteran, to the aspiring young golfer in your family!
Our two parkland courses the Tower course with generous fairways and large greens makes a good score possible while the Cathedral course offers a much sterner test with ample ponds and streams to challenge every shot.
Watch this fly-over of the 5th Hole on the Cathedral Course
The depth of our golf facilities, excellent food, spacious clubhouse and value makes us the perfect choice for club membership. It also makes us a big favourite with visiting societies. We offer excellent food, freshly prepared by our in house chefs so you can be assured of quality dining – whether it is a sandwich or a full meal.
At our state of the art practice and teaching facilities all our coaches are equipped with Apple iPads which allow versatile and effective video analysis. Facilities include a teaching studio, academy hole, short course and driving range. We use only the best quality two-piece balls in our 26 bay, covered, flood-lit, driving range which has a good selection of targets and distance markers to enhance the quality of your practice.
Our par 3, short course is perfect for all the family whether you are a beginner or experienced golfer, child or a player with a handicap needing to brush up on your short game. With nine holes ranging from 85 and 115 yards you'll love this friendly fun course.
When it comes to fun for all ages nothing beats the brand new 18-hole Jungle Paradise Adventure Golf Course. Work your way across desert islands, around lagoons, through caves and over waterfalls. Along the way look out for the crashed plane, the gorilla and tiger hiding in the jungle and mind the spraying elephant! You'll even have to travel by raft to complete your journey so come along and enjoy a great day out in Jungle Paradise.
The adventure golf course is also the perfect place to treat your Explorer to a birthday party with fellow adventurers including a jungle feast!
The Clubhouse, a converted Sussex farmhouse rich in history offers charming and comfortable surroundings with full facilities to cater for wedding receptions, meetings and celebrations of all kinds. The Cathedral Suite with its stunning views over the golf course and the countryside beyond, can cater for up to 60 people. The room is fully equipped with the latest Audio Visual equipment and is included in the price making it excellent value for money.
Most important of all we pride ourselves on our friendly staff who provide the very highest standards of customer service and like to say "YES!" to make each and every visit, more enjoyable for you! You'll also enjoy the same family friendly experience at our two other Maple Leaf managed properties Hill Barn and Horton Park.
To book or enquire click here: Tee Times, Membership, Meetings, Children's Birthday Parties, Weddings & Events.


text:
Two injured in 3-vehicle crash
Deputies: Driver cited for inattentive driving
Two people were injured when three vehicles collided on a Green County highway Thursday afternoon, according to the Green County Sheriff's Office.
Deputies said the crash occurred at 5:45 p.m. in the W1700 block of State Highway 11/81 in the town of Spring Grove when a motorist didn't notice two vehicles ahead of him slowing for a vehicle turning into a driveway.
The driver of the first vehicle, George S. Ferger, 81, of Clinton, and his three passengers reported seat belt use and no injuries.
The driver of the second vehicle, Stephanie J. Kelly, 39, of South Beloit, Ill., was taken to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. Deputies said she was wearing a seat belt, and both Kelly and Ferger slowed for the turning vehicle.
Deputies said the driver of the third vehicle, Kyle Williams, 20, of Brodhead, didn't notice the vehicles slowing and was unable to avoid a collision with Kelly's vehicle, which was forced into Ferger's vehicle.
Williams was taken to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries and was cited on suspicion of inattentive driving, according to deputies.
Copyright 2013 by Channel 3000. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


text:
About rottentomatoes : Just so you know, I made this account before I knew about the site. I do watch a lot of movies though.
Feel free to message me.
About rottentomatoes : Just so you know, I made this account before I knew about the site. I do watch a lot of movies though.
rottentomatoes's FML badges
Who's the fairest of them all?
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It's nice of you to help us sort out the submissions, using FML's moderate feature.
You have looked through 5 pages of the website. That's a start.
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Today, my girlfriend gave me a speech on me "not being manly enough". I started crying. FML
by Anonymous / 09/17/2011 at 4:17am / South Africa (Gauteng) / Love
Today, I caught my pregnant wife trying to suck milk from her breasts. FML
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Today, my mom admitted that she always makes me put away the dishes because my obsessive compulsive tendencies force me to arrange the glasses and silverware by size, just the way she likes them. FML
by Awesome. / 09/14/2011 at 10:35pm / United States (Michigan) / Miscellaneous
Today, I went to the DMV for my second attempt to get my license. I did everything perfectly, stayed at the speed limit, did my three-point turn flawlessly, and parked nicely. The lady failed me because I wasn't using the stick shift right. My car doesn't have a stick shift. FML
by dmvfail / 09/14/2011 at 8:13pm / United States (North Carolina) / Transportation
Today, I went to my gyn to see what a painful lump is under my armpit. Turns out it's breast tissue, and yes, it will fill up with milk when I'm pregnant. I essentially have three boobs. FML
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Today, I paid a repair man $65 to come to my house and fix my washer. He walked in, looked at the washer, bent over and removed a large steel bolt with a bright red tag sticking out the side saying "Remove before use." He then looked at me and said "all fixed." FML
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Today, my boyfriend cheated on me. But he justified it by saying she was a ginger. FML
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Today, the girl I've been dating, and starting to fall in love with, walked out of the bathroom claiming we were going to be parents. I jumped off of the couch in disbelief, yelling, "Really?" She replied, "Really. I just gave birth to a huge dump baby." FML
by CaseyFpC85 / 09/11/2011 at 11:13am / United States (Florida) / Miscellaneous


text:
Tess Allenby
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Tess Allenby was a female human in Starfleet in the 24th century.
Alleby served as an enginner as the Starfleet Academy Flight Range on Mimas prior to graduation, where she focused on servicing trainer craft used by the academy. (ST video game: Starship Creator)
In 2365, she graduated Starfleet Academy in the 90th percentile. Allenby was an ensign assigned to the USS Enterprise-D, serving as a shuttle pilot and backup conn officer. During her time on the Enterprise, she was part of a small social group which dubbed itself the "corner office". (TNG episodes: "Final Mission", "The Loss")
- The Starship Creator software contradicts this by stating that Allenby was assigned to the Enterprise in 2367 as a flight control officer. in the Command division
Tess Allenby earned a fourth level pilot certificate with highest honors in 2367. (ST video game: Starship Creator)
Allenby formed a strong animosity toward Wesley Crusher, who she perceived as blocking her own advancement on the ship, given his status as "acting ensign" and his regular assignments to bridge duty. (SCE eBook: Many Splendors) By 2367, with Crusher's acceptance to Starfleet Academy, Allenby was assigned as alpha shift conn officer. (TNG episodes: "Final Mission", "The Loss")
Not long afterwards, she accepted a transfer to the USS Lexington. (SCE eBook: Many Splendors)
- The Starship Creator software imples that Allenby stated on the Enterprise through its destruction and went to work aboard the successor Enterprise immediately.
In 2371 she transferred to the USS Enterprise. Two years later she participated in the Battle of Sector 001. (ST video game: Starship Creator)
Allenby's interests included computer science, ice hockey and Vulcan music. (ST video game: Starship Creator)
|USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) flight control personnel
|Allenby • Anaya • Brooks • Calan • Clancy • W. Crusher • Dern • Farmer • Felton • Foch • Gates • Gawelski • Gibson • Graham • Halloran • Haskell • Jae • Karp • La Forge • Lavelle • Lin • McKnight • Monroe • O'Brien • Reel • Ro • Rager • Solis • Torres • Vasquez • Wallace • Worf • Wright
|see also: engineering personnel • medical personnel • operations personnel • security & tactical personnel • sciences personnel • senior staff • unnamed
|USS Lexington personnel
|USS Lexington (NCC-1709)
|J. Baila • Berriman • P. Coss • D.W. Davidson • Garth of Izar • Ito • T. Ivari • L. Kelso • R. Leslie • W.C. Perinal • M. Rousseau • W. Samuels • D. Sinclair • L. Sterling • C. Stuart • N. Uhura • D. Watley • R. Wesley
|USS Lexington (NCC-14427)
|Declan Keogh • Manojlovich • Rosita Pérez
|USS Lexington (NCC-61832)
|T. Allenby • H. Anderson • Antonacci • Audrey • G. Ben Zoma • Bowdren • T. Cadwallader • S. Carson • Cavanaugh • J. Cox • Eberling • Fornnel • Gaines • F. Galloway • Griscom • Halprin • Hasegawa • G. Jenson • P. Joseph • Kumagai • Leff • E. Lense • R. Mithra • Moytulix • Pridemore • Rodgers • Soriano • J. Turner • Twistekey • Man-Fai Wan • Wilhoite
|USS Lexington (Steamrunner-class)
|A. Jago
|USS Enterprise-E miscellaneous personnel
|Tess Allenby • Armstrong • Joel Azaria • B-4 • Batson • Crain • Dennings • Dyson • Ezell • Hsu • Johanssen • Kaplan • Kawasaki • Kelock • Kuchuk • La Monica • Lopez • Lynch • Malak • Martinez • Molinero • Nelson • Nguyen • Nybakken • Petschauer • Adrienne Soranno • Sovok • Truke • Wahl
|see also: engineering personnel • medical & counseling personnel • operations personnel • pilots & flight control personnel • security & tactical personnel • sciences personnel • senior staff • unnamed
External linkEdit
- Tess Allenby article at Memory Alpha, the wiki for canon Star Trek.


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Musician Eliane Correa reflects on the fading revolution
Fifty years ago this month the world came close to nuclear Armageddon. Paul Anderson looks back at the Cuban missile crisis and anti-nuclear campaigning since
Stephen Wilkinson asks what transforming Cuba's economy will mean. Below, Sandra Lewis responds
Helen Yaffe explores impact of Che Guevara as an economist and politician
Cuba's not my idea of socialism, says Dave Osler in his retort to Diana Raby
Diana Raby responds to Dave Osler
Dave Osler responds to Diana Raby and says it's unforgivable to utilise the slogans of Seattle in describing Cuba
Diana Raby argues that those who deny the legitimacy of the Cuban system will never understand why, after 50 years, the revolution is still an ongoing reality
As the US runs roughshod over international law, Harold Pinter demands justice for Cuba.
Red Pepper · 44-48 Shepherdess Walk, London N1 7JP · +44 (0)20 7324 5068 · office[at]redpepper.org.uk
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For subscriptions enquiries please email firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
Reviewed By melvin r (Barberton, OH) —12/1/2016 10:30 AM
Brakes work perfect great stopping power no fading from high heat very pleased with the product will buy again.
Reviewed By don k (NAPERVILLE, IL) Reviewed for a 2009 Scion xB —11/27/2016 6:00 AM
My 2nd set! I replaced all 4 wheels back around 60k, now have 103k on my Scion xB. I was amazed with how much pad was still left on the pads I was replacing--at least another 15k I would say. I also replaced all rotors but went with smooth (rather than slotted and drilled) this time do to cost factor. I probably didn't need to replace the rotors either but better safe than sorry. Just did the break in for the new pads and they are great. I do a good deal of mountain driving too, and Harley tow.


text:
Economics Departments, Institutes and Research Centers in the World
Institutul Naţional de Cercetare Ştiinţifică în Domeniul Muncii şi Protecţiei Sociale (INCSMPS)Translation: National Scientific Institute for Labour and Social Protection
Location: Bucureşti, Romania
Homepage: http://www.incsmps.ro/
Handle: RePEc:edi:incsmro
Areas or Functions: Labor and Demographic Economics
Additional details:
People who have registered with RePEc and have claimed to be affiliated with this institution:Find all publications of all authors listed below conveniently compiled on IDEAS. Authors with publications are listed below with . We have lost contact with authors marked with ?, and they do not count towards the ranking of this institution.
This listing is provided to you by EDIRC at the Economic Research Department, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Please send additions and corrections to Christian Zimmermann.


text:
Lawmakers review DOT immigrant license policy
A legislative committee is hearing arguments on an Iowa Department of Transportation policy that prohibits driver's licenses for certain young immigrants allowed by a new federal rule to live here.
The Administrative Rules Review Committee is considering Wednesday the DOT rule which doesn't allow driver's licenses or identification cards to be issued to immigrants brought into the U.S. as children by parents who were not legal residents.
President Barack Obama has enacted a policy that lets these immigrants seek a renewable, two-year reprieve from deportation if they meet specific age, residency and education requirements.
The Iowa DOT says the policy doesn't make the immigrants legal citizens so it can't issue licenses.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups are fighting the DOT saying licenses should be granted.
Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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North Shelby Baptist Church makes braille hymnals available to churches, individualscomment (0)
April 2, 2009
By Emily Flack
Our 21st-century technology has done a phenomenal thing with storage space reduction. Take, for example, the newest evolution in music — the MP3 player. The 4-by-2.5-inch device can hold up to 30,000 songs.
So as we invent smaller everythings and bid adieu to oversized anythings, why is it that some Baptist churches will now be purchasing multivolume hymnals, each about 8 inches thick?
It's all because of David Hyche, a member of North Shelby Baptist Church, Birmingham, and his desire to make Braille Baptist Hymnals for all in need.
It began with blind 7-year-old twin sisters who stirred something within Hyche as he would watch them singing to their heart's content on Sunday mornings at the Shelby Baptist Association church.
Unfortunately their singing was limited to the songs they had memorized.
"I would sit by them a lot of times in church, and they would flip through a regular hymnal and just feel the pages, but they didn't know any of the words," he said.
And his 4-year-old daughter Rachel, who is also blind, will be in this predicament soon — as soon as she learns to read.
So Hyche knew there was only one thing to do: he set out to find a way to get braille hymnals.
"God gave the Hyche family a vision with the gift of Rachel, who had been placed into their lives, and they took it as opportunity to help not only her but other families with visually impaired children," said Pastor Allan Murphy.
Providing resources for the visually impaired and their families is not a new thing for Hyche. Soon after he and his wife, Kim, adopted Rachel four years ago, he formed a support group called Alabama Association for Parents of Children with Visual Impairments (AAPVI).
Hyche is also on the board of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind in Talladega and North Shelby Baptist's Vision Impairment (VI) Ministry and takes a braille correspondence class.
But putting together a braille hymnal is a huge undertaking. Thankfully John Hemphill — president and director of Helping Hands Braille Ministries (HHBM), a nonprofit ministry in Michigan that translates Bibles and other Christian literature into braille — was delighted to help.
Each hymn is printed by HHBM and then inserted into a three-ring binder with 100 hymns per binder and an alphabetical index. Hemphill employs blind adults to proofread the hymnals, a dedicated process.
Braille hymnals are massive in comparison to regular hymnals and take six binders to equal a condensed version. Each Sunday, the sighted can pull and distribute the scheduled songs from the binders.
Hyche was already working with Hemphill to make the hymnals when tragedy struck North Shelby — the accidental death of Sam Ferguson, an 8-year-old boy at the church.
Sam's parents, in agreement with the VI Ministry, decided to use money donated in his memory to fund Christian materials for AAPVI, particularly the making of the Braille Baptist Hymnals. A personal message from them is inscribed in the front of each hymnal.
Dana Barber, who was born sighted but went legally blind at age 24 from retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive genetic eye condition, said she is excited to have the opportunity to read along.
"I can still sing along for the most part," said Barber, who attends First Baptist Church, Vincent, and acquired a hymnal from North Shelby.
But if the song is something unfamiliar, then she is not able to participate. "I'm looking forward to having music in a format that I can handle."
And that's in large part thanks to a man Murphy calls "a precious part of the church."
"He has helped open up hearts so that no one will be left out," he said of Hyche. "All special-needs people need to be included. Everyone is precious to God and to us."
Hyche desires to see the "unbelievably neglected" ministry to the visually impaired built up in all churches to reach the unchurched and those who already attend.
The Braille Baptist Hymnals are now available to churches and individuals, and financial assistance is also available. For more information, call North Shelby at 205-995-9056.


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I've been fascinated by the work of Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Follies. They simply know more about what brings on severe financial crises and what we can realistically expect from a recovery than anyone else. Recently Republican economists have been arguing that the recovery from the current crisis is historically mild, thus blaming the Obama administration. Reinhardt and Rogoff answered once here, and Paul Krugman answers here.
But that hasn't stopped the Republican story from spreading so Reinhart and Rogoff have answered again in This time is different, again? The US five years after the onset of subprime. They write that: "According to our (2009) metrics, the aftermath of the US financial crisis has been quite typical of post-war systemic financial crises around the globe. If one really wants to focus just on US systemic financial crises, then the recent recovery looks positively brisk."
How has the US done compared to previous systemic financial US crises? "On the whole, however, the conclusion would have to be that in the five years since the onset of the financial crisis the US has performed better in terms of output per capita and unemployment than in the previous crises, even if one excludes the Great Depression."
How has the US performed against other developed countries that have suffered systemic financial crises in 2007-2008? "Although tracking worse than the countries that did not have systemic financial crises, the US output performance is, in fact, among the best of those that did."
How about unemployment rates in the US following 2007-2008 debacle versus prior systemic crises? "The 2007 crisis is associated with significantly lower unemployment rates than both the Depression of the 1930s and the depression of the 1890s."
As to policy they write: "Of course this does not mean policy is irrelevant. Quite the contrary, in the heat of the recent financial crises, there was almost certainly a palpable risk of a Second Great Depression. However, although it is clear that the challenges in recovering from a financial crises (sic) are daunting, an early recognition of the likely depth and duration of the problem would certainly have been helpful. It would have been helpful in assessing various options and their attendant risks. It is not our intention here to closely analyses policy responses that, frankly, may take years of analysis to sort out."
The Obama administration obviously overpromised on the likelihood of a strong recovery in light of Reinhart and Rogoff's analysis. But the current Republican campaign violates much of what Reinhart and Rogoff show to be true about systemic financial crises and the fact that on their measures the US has outperformed both its own economic performance in past crises and the performance of many other developed nations in this crisis.
Which brings me back to the point I often raise as my frustration with political campaigns mounts: how can we deal with our problems when we don't realistically acknowledge them?


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Dolly Parton Raps On Queen Latifah's New Talk Show – And It's Terrible [Video]
While I am not much of a country music fan these days, back in the day I used to love the twang of artists like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and the undeniable Ms. Dolly Parton. Dolly brought us such great tunes as "9 to 5″ and "Jolene", and even has her own tourist attraction, "Dollywood". But, somewhere along the way, Ms. Parton decided that she needed to freshen up her image. And I guess she decided that a good way to do that was to sport a blonde afro while rapping on Queen Latifah's new talk show. I'm not kidding.
Things you will hear when Dolly raps: referencing "duck dookie", calling herself a "white-trash princess", references to Honey Boo-Boo and something she calls the "redneck mafia". It's kind of painful.
Subscribe to Channel 95.7 on
I feel uncomfortable FOR her.
Let's cleanse our palates by watching her sing her hit "Jolene", shall we?
Subscribe to Channel 95.7 on


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Church of England
When a Letter of Congratulations Contains a Warning. . .
The Metropolitan of Volokolamsk, Chairman of the Department of External Church Relations for the Russian Orthodox Church, and a permanent member of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow, Bishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk, has written a letter of congratulations to Right Reverend Justin Welby, Bishop of Durham and nominee as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Consider its contents:
Dear Brother and Lord Bishop,
I would like to extend to you wholehearted congratulations on your election as Head of one of the oldest episcopal chairs founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury in the 7th century.
You have been entrusted with the spiritual guidance of the entire Anglican Communion, a unique union of like-minded people, which, however diverse the forms of its existence in the world may be, needs one 'steward of God' (Tit. 1:7) the guardian of the faith and witness to the Truth (cf. Jn. 18:37).
The Russian Orthodox Church and the Churches of the Anglican Communion are bonded by age-old friendly relations initiated in the 15th century. For centuries, our Churches would preserve good and truly brotherly relations encouraged both by frequent mutual visits and established theological dialogue and certainly by a spirit of respect and love which used to accompany the meetings of our hierarchs, clergy and ordinary believers.
Regrettably, the late 20th century and the beginning of the third millennium have brought tangible difficulties in relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Churches of the Anglican Communion. The introduction female priesthood and now episcopate, the blessing of same-sex 'unions' and 'marriages', the ordination of homosexuals as pastors and bishops – all these innovations are seen by the Orthodox as deviations from the tradition of the Early Church, which increasingly estrange Anglicanism from the Orthodox Church and contribute to a further division of Christendom as a whole.
We hope that the voice of the Orthodox Church will be heard by the Church of England and Churches of the Anglican Communion, and good fraternal relationships between us will revive.
I wish you God's help in your important work.
"May the God of love and peace be with you" (2 Cor. 13:11).
+Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk
"Congratulations" might not be the best word to describe the entire contents of Bishop Hilarion's letter.
"Innovations," "deviations," "increasingly estrange," "further contribute to a further division of Christendom," and "good fraternal relationships between us will revive" sound more like a "warning" to the new Archbishop of Canterbury: His denomination is falling off a moral cliff.
Bishop Hilarion doesn't mince his words when it comes to the orthodox Christian faith, does he?
Imagine what the National Catholic Reporter would have to say if the USCCB or a U.S. metropolitan archbishop sent the new Archbishop of Canterbury a similar letter of congratulations!
The Episcopal Church?
Cardinal's Mahony or O'Malley's Archdioceses?
If you guessed any of these you're pretty darn close!
(Hat Tip: Creative Minority Report)
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu, Have Mercy on Me
Today is the feast day of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, canonized by Pope Paul VI on October 25, 1970. These very brave men and women were martyred for the True Faith in England and Wales between 1535 and 1679, and they are representative of hundreds of Catholics in these countries who went to their death rather than to renounce their Catholicism.
John Pridmore, a reformed gangster from England, talks elquently about Saint Margaret Clitherow in the above video, and her life is typical of these brave champions of Christ.


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The Style Gallery is a great new way for you to view, love, and share outfit photos. It's meant to showcase
all the expressive, creative, and inspirational personalities of our community!
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Your love affair with this heart-printed dress began as soon as you zipped its wool-blend fabric onto your frame! Taking a step back to admire this black-and-white frock in the mirror, you can't help but fall for its striking, white cuffs and collar, banded waist, and softly pleated skirt. Style this fully lined frock alongside cherry-red heels and a quilted clutch for a lovely look that's sure to be adored by everyone you encounter!
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Of all possible consumer choices, perhaps none yields as pronounced a sex difference as the soliciting of a prostitute. Numerous countries have historically been known for their sex tourism. These include Thailand, the Netherlands (Amsterdam in particular), Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Not surprisingly, in the great majority of cases, the patrons of such services are men although there have been a few studies that have explored the reverse trend (typically middle-aged women paying for the services of young men; see here). That said I am unaware of a single culture that has ever been documented where women are more likely than men to seek the services of a prostitute. Incidentally, those who might be tempted to argue that the sex trade is a means for the evil patriarchy to exploit women will have to explain why male prostitutes cater their services almost exclusively to male customers. This universal sexual dimorphism is driven by innate biological differences regarding the desire to engage in unencumbered short-term mating. "Arbitrary and sexist socialized gender roles" have nothing to do with it.
How great is the sex difference? In a recent study, Morten Hesse and Sébastien Tutenges gauged this difference in the context of purchasing sex services whilst on vacation. One thousand one hundred and twenty-five young Danish tourists (55.9% male and 44.1% female) were surveyed (anonymously) at a Bulgarian airport at the end of their holidays. They were asked whether they had visited a strip club or brothel, and whether they had paid to have sex, while vacationing at a Bulgarian resort.
Here are the key results, as reported in Table 1 of their article.
While on holidays:
Men Women
Visited a strip club or brothel 48.2% 8.4%
Paid for sex 12.5% 0.0%
When at home:
Men Women
Visited a strip club or brothel 57.9% 17.9%
Paid for sex 13.7% 0.4%
Not surprisingly, women rarely if ever seek the services of a prostitute (and certainly not within this demographic group). Social constructivists will continue to engage in endless forms of contorted reasoning to explain away such a robust sex difference. However, they will have to explain why in the history of mankind (recall that prostitution is supposedly the "oldest profession"), not a single culture has been found where women constitute the majority of consumers in the sex trade.
Source for Image:


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(NBC) It's been a big year for Seth Meyers. After more than a decade at "Saturday Night Live" he stepped into the role as host of "Late Night" back in February.
This Monday night, he'll be the host of the Emmy Awards on NBC.
It's a gig that's making him nervous.
"The most nerve-wracking part is how many of my colleagues are there. You just want to perform well in front of people that you know and are going to see around afterwards," Meyers says.
Copyright 2016 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


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Bishop Irinej visits Oakland, New Zealand17. Новембар 2011 - 10:59
With Mercy of God, His Grace Bishop Irinej of the Metropolitanate of Australia and New Zealand also this year visited Oakland on the occasion of the celebration of the church slava of Holy King Milutin.
St. George celebrated on Banovo Brdo17. Новембар 2011 - 9:21
His Holiness Irinej, Serbian Patriarch served yesterday, when our Holy Church celebrated the Restoration of the church of St. George, the Divine Liturgy in the church devoted to Holy Great Martyr George on Banovo Brdo.
Slava of the Clinical Centre of Serbia16. Новембар 2011 - 13:22
With the blessing of His Holiness Irinej, Serbian Patriarch, His Grace Bishop Atanasije of Hvosno served yesterday, on the feast day of St. Cosmas and Damian, the Holy Hierarchal Liturgy in the chapel of St. Unmercenaries at the Clinical Center of Serbia.
Members of Inter-religious councils to Diocese of Zahumlje-Herzegovina16. Новембар 2011 - 9:53
On Saturday, November 12, 2011 about 10 am in the Diocese of HL in Mostar was visited by members of the Inter-religious council of the group of the young "All Together" from Sarajevo, led by Bozan Katava, councillor in the IRC. The occasion of the arrival of this group is marking the day of the violance against children. The guests from Sarajevo were welcomed by representatives of the CC Mostar.
Two-year commemoration to Patriarch Pavle of blessed repose15. Новембар 2011 - 11:27
On the occasion of the anniversary of the death of Serbian Patriarch Pavle, His Holiness Irinej, Serbian Patriarch, in the presence of Their Graces Bishops Vasilije of Srem, Pahomije of Vranje, Jovan of Sumadija, Joanikije of Budimlje-Niksic and vicar Andrej of Remesiana, served the Holy Hierarchal Liturgy and the memorial service in the Belgrade's Cathedral Church.


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Images by Randy Harris
For F/W10, Louis Vuitton's menswear studio director Paul Helbers was inspired by the Vienna Wiener Werkstätte, an early 20th Century artistic movement involving Schiele, Moser and Klimt that was committed to uniting all facets of human life into one comprehensive work of art. Additionally, the group placed a great value on exquisite craftsmanship, individuality and beauty.
Accordingly, Helbers' impeccably constructed collection centered around layering in a sharp, traditional way that recalled Austrian tailoring, where one can add or subtract a piece to transition from formal to casual. And by adding equestrian touches and utilizing a refined palette, which ranged from brown to horn to raven blue, the designer succeeded in presenting the perfect wardrobe for artists in a business world.
Click "Read More" for additional images.
Right: Helbers with Marc Jacobs


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In an 8,900-word State of the State speech stretching more than an hour on Tuesday, Gov. John Kasich was mostly on the money with his facts and figures.But there were a couple of stumbles, as a close look at his address shows.
"For 25 years, this state wanted mom and dad to have the resources to stay in their own homes if they were able and not be forced into a nursing home — where they could stay in their own homes, where they could be more independent, more healthy, more independent at a much lower cost. For 25 years, this was, this effort was made to fix this. We did it, didn't we? We got it done. And now mom and dad can stay in their own homes, and they can be healthier and more independent. We won that battle."
Kasich gave more of a nod to history than he normally does, but he overstated his impact on the shift in the number of seniors receiving late-life care in nursing homes. Dating back to 2007, those figures have steadily declined while those for home and community-based care have risen dramatically.
According to data provided by Kasich's Office of Health Transformation, the number of Medicaid recipients in home or community-based settings jumped by about 20,000 people from 2006 through 2010 — the same year those patients outnumbered the ones in nursing homes. Additionally, the annual growth of seniors enrolled in Ohio's decades-old Passport program — which provides services to low-income elderly people so they can stay in their homes — during Kasich's first two years in office doesn't deviate from an upward trend that started in 2003.
But Kasich's first budget did provide an additional $55.6 million in Passport spending in 2012 and 2013, while cutting state aid to nursing homes by about $340 million. Also, nursing homes had 3,000 fewer residents in 2012 than in 2011, while home and community-based care recipients jumped by about 6,000 people that year.
"Our plan provides a total of $1.2 billion in new funds over the next two years. That means that by the end of the next budget cycle, Ohio will actually be providing our K-12 system more in state aid than they received at the height of the one-time federal stimulus money in 2011. That is an unbelievable amount of money according to anybody's calculation."
Kasich is using an accounting method here that greatly inflates a funding increase. He is not the first governor to try it, and critics have used the same math against him to inflate his cuts in the current budget.
Ohio passes a two-year budget, but it is essentially two one-year budgets, each of which must be balanced at the end of each fiscal year (June 30). Kasich's figures show that all general-revenue funding and lottery money for schools will increase by $465 million in 2014, and then by $306 million more in 2015. By traditional accounting, that is a $771 million increase — a number that is listed on initial documents outlining his education plan.
To get a $1.2 billion increase, Kasich calls it a $465 million increase in 2014, and a $771 million increase in 2015. While this can technically be called the total new money the state will spend over two years, it essentially double-counts the increase in 2014. School districts, which also budget annually, generally do not count it this way.
Kasich is correct that in 2015 his education budget will provide slightly more money than Gov. Ted Strickland's did in 2011 using federal stimulus money. But is it an "unbelievable" increase over four years?
Excluding state property-tax reimbursements — state money that benefits taxpayers by softening the blow of school levies — Kasich's plan provides $8.58 billion for schools in 2015, compared with $8.53 billion in 2011.
That's an increase of less than 0.6 percent over four years.


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Let's call the centre of the smaller circle O, the point where the small circle touches the semi circle on the horizontal A, the other point which touches the semicircle B and the centre of the semicircle X.
Angle AXB = 116 degrees.
Angle OAX = angle OBX = 90 degrees.
Find angle BOA.
Once found, use the formula for the length of arc AB, that is
Assuming that you are talking about this arc AB.
A segment is an area. (Circular segment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)


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Apartments, Rentals & Leases In Saratoga Springs NY & Surrounding Area
Make the move to Saratoga, NY! Find apartments in Saratoga Springs or just nearby. Contact the businesses listed here. Is this your first-time on your own? Check out these tips on what to buy for your apartment in the Saratoga area.


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Cheats and Walkthroughs(94)
Japan gets all the cool gaming stuff. The North American version of Dissidia: Final Fantasy is just shipping and Japanese gamers will be getting their second version of the game in a few months. Called Dissidia Final Fantasy: Universal Tuning, this version of the game will have all the American improvements and a few more surprises. OneLastContinue reported:
"Announced via this week's issue of Shonen Jump magazine, Dissidia: Universal Tuning is Japan's version of the US version of Dissidia, featuring English voice acting, all of the balance tweaks and upgrades added to the English version, as well as the Arcade mode and rebalanced difficulty. While nothing further is set in stone as of yet, the Final Mix versions of producer Tetsuya Nomura's games often include a trailer for the next game in the series as unlockable bonus content."
The good news for importers is that save files for the original version will be compatible with Universal Tuning. I've been playing the hell out of Dissidia -- even after my review posted -- and can't seem to put it down. If the new version has enough tweaks and a few Nomura goodies, I might have to import it.
While I'm on the topic, are any of you picking up Dissidia this week? If you read Japanese, are you just going to hold out for Universal Tuning?


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AP Photo
When Tom Izzo walked into his postgame press conference on Thursday night, he had a long list of positives.
It's easy to understand considering No. 7 Michigan State had just knocked off No. 15 Wisconsin, 69-55, at Breslin Center.
The win moved Michigan State (21-5, 10-3) back into a tie for first place in the Big Ten with Ohio State and dropped Wisconsin two games behind the leaders. It was also the sixth time this season the Spartans have beaten a ranked team, the most in Division I.
But the list of positives from this victory was long, and Izzo couldn't have been happier.


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The lifeblood of any MMO is the ability of the developers to give players game play experiences that keep them coming back, chief among them, a living, breathing storyline. We take a look at how ArenaNet can and should do this in Guild Wars 2. Read on!
I love the way the world actually has a story, and that you can see that story unfold. The use of Dynamic Events allows you to help change this world. And it's not just happening because an NPC said it did, you actually saw the event take place. Stories like this are spread out throughout the world. ArenaNet is now taking the next step by having one huge story take place in Tryia: they call it The Living Story.
Read more of David North's Guild Wars 2: The Neverending Story.
Imagine being so immersed in a game, you can feel yourself becoming one with your character.


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Cheats and Walkthroughs(57)
Cheats and Walkthroughs(63)
Cheats and Walkthroughs
Cheats and Walkthroughs(3)
Updated @ 12:02 p.m. PST: Electronic Arts has responded to the Reuters report...but didn't say much.
Electronic Arts is remaining silent, but it's becoming more and more obvious a sequel to Dead Space is coming sometime next year. Dead Space 2's existence has been mentioned several times on developer Linkedin profiles and a news report today filed by Reuters about Halloween and video games casually mentions Dead Space 2 is in development for a 2010 release.
"Electronic Arts has a pair of horror offerings for gamers. The publisher recently shipped 'Dead Space: Extraction' for Wii, which is a prequel to last fall's Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC hit. 'Dead Space 2' is in development for next year."
I contacted EA for details, but don't expect much more than a "no comment," if they even decide to acknowledge this. I'll update this story if the company comes back with anything.


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National Distribution
Origin: Native
Regularity: Regularly occurring
Currently: Present
Confidence: Confident
United States
Origin: Native
Regularity: Regularly occurring
Currently: Present
Confidence: Confident
Molecular Biology and Genetics
Molecular Biology
Barcode data: Cornus suecica
Statistics of barcoding coverage: Cornus suecica
Public Records: 5
Specimens with Barcodes: 7
Species With Barcodes: 1
Statistics of barcoding coverage: Chamaepericlymenum suecicum
Public Records: 0
Specimens with Barcodes: 3
Species With Barcodes: 1
Conservation Status
National NatureServe Conservation Status
Rounded National Status Rank: N4 - Apparently Secure
United States
Rounded National Status Rank: N4 - Apparently Secure
NatureServe Conservation Status
Rounded Global Status Rank: G5 - Secure
Cornus suecica
Cornus suecica (dwarf cornel or bunchberry) is a species of flowering plant in the genus Cornus (dogwoods), native to cool temperate and subarctic regions of Europe and Asia, and also locally in extreme northeastern and northwestern North America.
These plants are herbaceous perennials growing to 20 cm tall, with few pairs of sessile cauline leaves in opposite pairs, 2–4 cm long and 1–3 cm broad, with 3-5 veins from the base.[2] The flowers are small, dark purple, produced in a tight umbel that is surrounded by four conspicuous white petal-like bracts 1-1.5 cm long. The fruit is a red berry.
Habitat & Range[edit]
Cornus suecica is a plant of heaths, moorland and mountains, often growing beneath taller species such as heather (Calluna vulgaris).[3][2] Its range is nearly circumboreal, but it is absent from the continental centres of Asia and North America.[1] In North America, the species is found in Alaska (U.S.) and British Columbia (Canada), and also eastern Canada (Labrador, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Quebec), as well as Greenland, but not in the intervening region.[4][1]
Where Cornus canadensis, a forest species, and Cornus suecica, a heath or bog species, grow near each other in their overlapping ranges in Alaska, Labrador, and Greenland, they can hybridize by cross-pollination, producing plants with intermediate characteristics.[5]
- ^ a b Cornus suecica, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service PLANTS Profile, 9 September 2013
- ^ a b Stace, C.A. (2010). New flora of the British isles (Third ed.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. p. 510. ISBN 9780521707725.
- ^ Blamey, M.; Fitter, R.; Fitter, A (2003). Wild flowers of Britain and Ireland: The Complete Guide to the British and Irish Flora. London: A & C Black. p. 168. ISBN 978-1408179505.
- ^ "BONAP distribution maps for North American species of Cornus". Retrieved 17 May 2011.
- ^ Neiland, Bonita J. 1971. The forest-bog complex of southeast Alaska. Vegetatio. 22: 1-64.
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Geosciences Directorate Has Highest Growth Rate in NSF Budget Request
18 May 2009 -- Under President Obamas budget request for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Geosciences Directorate would have the highest growth rate among NSFs research directorates in FY 2010. The growth rate of NSFs Geosciences Directorate has not been in the top tier in recent years. In newly released data, the Presidents FY 2010 budget request for NSFs Geosciences Directorate is $909 million, an increase of $102 million or 12.6 percent above the FY 2009 current plan.
Within NSFs Geosciences Directorate, the Presidents FY 2010 budget request for the Earth Sciences is $187 million, an increase of $16 million or 9.3 percent above the FY 2009 current plan. The budget request for Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences is $269 million, an increase of $25 million or 10.0 percent. The budget request for Ocean Sciences is $359 million, an increase of $29 million or 8.7 percent. The budget request for Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research is $94 million, an increase of $33 million or 53.5 percent.
Under the Presidents FY 2010 budget request, the growth rates for selected NSF research directorates are 6.9 percent for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, 9.9 percent for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 11.8 percent for Biological Sciences, and 12.6 percent for Geosciences.
As previously announced, the Presidents FY 2010 budget request for the National Science Foundation is $7.045 billion, an increase of $555 million or 8.5 percent above the FY 2009 current plan. The FY 2010 budget request for NSFs Research and Related Activities is $5.733 billion, an increase of $550 million or 10.6 percent. The FY 2010 budget request for NSFs Education and Human Resources account is $858 million, an increase of $13 million or 1.5 percent. The FY 2010 budget request for NSFs Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction account is $117 million, a decrease of $35 million or 22.8 percent.
NSF received $3.0 billion in economic stimulus funds, but these one-time funds are not included in the base budget for NSFs FY 2009 current plan. Additional information about NSFs FY 2010 budget request is available at www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2010/.
Craig M. Schiffries
Director for Geoscience Policy
Geological Society of America
1200 New York Avenue NW - Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20005
Tel: 202-669-0466
Fax: 303-357-1074
Read GSA's Congressional testimony in support of the NSF budget increase


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Rick Tramonto, a Chicago-based fine-dining chef, is working as a brand ambassador for Wendy's to promote the fast-food chain's new line of salads. Tramonto, who founded Tru restaurant with pastry chef Gale Gand in 1999, recently presented the salads to media at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. He assembled Wendy's new Apple Pecan Chicken, Baja, BLT Cobb and Spicy Chicken Caesar salads while expressing support of the chain's use of fresh ingredients. Tramonto ...
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