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Baseball's data-mining methods are starting a similar revolution in research
Frederick M. Cohan
The Moneyball story, in book and film, champions a data-mining revolution that changed professional baseball. On the surface, Moneyball is about Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, who found a way to lead his cash-strapped club to success against teams with much bigger payrolls. Beane used data to challenge what everyone else managing baseball "knew" to be true from intuition, experience and training. He pioneered methods to identify outstanding players he could afford because they were undervalued by the traditional statistics used by the baseball elite.
This film was marketed as a sports movie. When I saw it, I knew right away what Moneyball is really about: the thrill and triumph of data mining. It's an instructive tale of how existing data can be examined for meaning in ways that were never intended or imagined when they were originally collected. Beane and his colleagues challenged the time-honored trinity of batting average, home runs and runs batted in (RBIs) as the essence of the offensive value of a player, replacing these statistics with newer measures based on the same data. They worked off theories developed by baseball writer and historian Bill James, who posited in the 1970s that the traditional stats were really imperfect measurements. James's approach didn't just replace one intuition with another. He let the game decide which stats did the best job of predicting offensive output.
This approach is not easy. Trying to directly predict the number of games won would confound the skill of a team's offense with its pitching and fielding. James figured that one could test each offensive stat by trying to predict the total number of runs produced by each team over the course of a season, thus eliminating any effects of defense. It turned out that on-base percentage and slugging percentage were far superior to any individual offensive statistics used up to that point. James and others similarly devised statistics for pitching and fielding that were more independent of context.
Beane's use of the new statistics is appealing because it defeated the wisdom and training of other industry experts. His approach is summed up in one of the best scenes from the Moneyball film. Armed with his new data-mining methods, Beane challenges other talent evaluators about a player they all deem "good." A scout counters him, praising the player's swing. Beane's reply: "If he's such a good hitter, why doesn't he hit good?"
In other words, expert intuition aside, the data don't lie.
As I see it, the baseball revolution produced an "idiot's guide" to creating a team roster—a handbook based on things one can learn not through decades of experience and intuition but by applying general quantitative methods. It's the same kind of approach we should employ more in the sciences. Mountains of data and a capacity for analyzing them have also become available to science in the past few years. Data are now poised to trump the intuition of experts and the "facts" that scientists have championed over the years.
For instance, consider my own field, biology. Every biologist "knows" what a species is—a group of organisms that can successfully produce viable and fertile offspring. Biologists have long believed that species defined this way represent the fundamental units of ecology and evolution.
In the case of evolutionary microbiology (my specialty), it is particularly important to be able to recognize all the fundamental units of ecology among closely related bacteria. We especially need to distinguish those that are dangerous from those that are not and those that are helpful from those that are not. Indeed, we would like to identify all the bacterial populations that play distinct ecological roles in their communities.
As in baseball, the discovery of bacterial diversity has experienced a transition from relying on the subjective judgment of experts to objective and universal statistical methods. Originally, discovery and demarcation of bacterial species required a lot of expertise with a particular group of organisms, involving difficult measures of metabolic and chemical differences. To make the taxonomy more accessible, decades ago the field complemented this arduous approach with a kind of idiot's guide, where anyone could use widely available molecular techniques to identify species—for example, a certain level of overall DNA sequence similarity.
One popular universal criterion (among others) is to identify species as groups of organisms that are at least 99 percent similar in a particular universal gene. The problem is that—like the case of baseball where batting average, RBIs and home runs were used to supplement expert knowledge—nobody in microbiology tested whether the new molecular techniques actually came closer to solving the problem of recognizing the most closely related species.
Unfortunately, microbiology's current DNA-based idiot's guide, as well as the expert-driven metabolic criteria that preceded it, has yielded species with unhelpfully broad dimensions. For example, Escherichia coli contains strains that live in our guts peaceably, as well as various pathogens that attack the gut lining and others that attack the urinary tract. Moreover, established fecal-contamination detection kits that are designed to identify E. coli in the environment are now known to register a positive result with E. coli relatives that normally spend their lives in freshwater ponds, with little capacity for harming humans. And E. coli is not alone—there is a Yugoslavia of diversity within the typical recognized species: Much like the veneer of a unified country that hid a great diversity of ethnicities and religions, E. coli (and most recognized species) contains an enormous level of ecological and genomic diversity obscured under the banner of a single species name.
We can fix this confusion the same way that baseball improved its data analysis: by letting the game—or in our case, nature—decide which stats best predict what we most want to know. In microbiology the trick is to let the bacteria tell us what DNA sequence approach most accurately identifies the bacteria that are significantly different in their habitats and ways of making a living. Two teams, including Martin Polz's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and my group at Wesleyan and Montana State Universities, have developed computer algorithms for identifying groups of bacteria specialized to different habitat types within an officially recognized species. These algorithms reject the expert-based criteria for how much diversity should be placed within a species. Instead, they analyze the dynamics of bacterial evolution to let the organisms themselves tell us the DNA sequence criterion that best demarcates ecologically distinct populations for a particular group of bacteria.
Another opportunity for discovery in biology through data mining stems from the new Human Microbiome Project. Here, DNA sequences are collected from various bacteria-laden human habitats, such as the gut, mouth, skin and genitals, with samples taken from individuals of different age, sex, health, weight and diet.
For example, Dusko Ehrlich of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research and his colleagues recently analyzed the bacterial genes purified from the feces of 39 humans from six European countries, amounting to about 100 million bases of bacterial DNA per person. They attempted to identify bacterial biochemical functions associated with age and body mass. Their intuition suggested various guesses for the identity of these genes, which were largely supported, but data-driven methods identified genes that gave much stronger relationships. One important data-driven discovery indicated a negative relation between obesity and the microbes' capacity for harvesting energy.
Ongoing massive sequencing projects in human, marine and soil environments allow us to characterize the diversification of bacteria: to discover the most newly divergent bacterial species, to characterize them as specialized to different habitats and to identify the biochemical functions most important in each habitat. However, the approach depends critically on how well we describe the habitats we sample.
Beyond the field of microbiology, data- mining revolutions are extending across the natural and social sciences (although meteorology and economics, with decades-long access to mountains of data, are still the granddaddies of this approach). In the social sciences, it is particularly interesting to see how data mining has recently helped linguists analyze how words are actually used in writing and speech—for example, as seen in the challenge of producing a dictionary. Traditionally, analysis of language use has involved assessment of written texts, usually from a canon of books accepted by experts as exemplars of "proper" usage, a step that required an army of volunteers who sent in quotations to the dictionary editors. Then the appointed set of language experts made subjective decisions about new usage—what is acceptable, what is vulgar and what is vile. A data revolution in linguistics is freeing us from needing the army of volunteers, as well as from the opinions of the learned experts. Language analysis is heading toward a data-driven idiot's guide that can decide on acceptable usage based on what is actually accepted in writing and in speech.
Various corpora of written and spoken language have emerged online, and these allow extensive analysis of how and where words are used. Entire uploaded texts can be searched and analyzed. The largest is the Oxford Corpus, launched in 2006 and covering texts from the entire Anglosphere. The U.S.-centered Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) features a user-friendly website (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). These corpora, when searched, give a 10-word neighborhood around each use of the word, which yields much information. For instance, a searcher can see whether the word is used in the singular or plural form, as well as words that are frequently co- located with it and so on. In Damp Squid, Jeremy Butterfield describes how these corpora can yield a picture of English (or potentially any language) as it is actually used, as validated by the entire community of writers and speakers.
One way that corpus-based analysis bucks expert opinion is in deciding when an evolutionary change in usage has become acceptable simply by the criterion of being frequently accepted. For example, the word "criteria," on entering the English language from Greek, maintained its original meaning as the plural of "criterion." Cringe though we may, our own experiences plus analysis of the Oxford Corpus show that use of "criteria" as the singular is catching up on its use as the plural. The corpus also allows us to note changes in old expressions that still hold meaning for us, but only if we change the words a little. Shakespeare's "in one fell swoop" is still a popular phrase four centuries later, but only through changing the obsolete adjective "fell" to one that sounds similar and holds a similar meaning, which is "foul." Despite the resistance of experts, the language is de facto evolving, and the corpus allows us to validate these changes.
As useful as the idiot's guide approach has been across fields, gleaning meaning from old data serves up severe challenges. Difficulties can arise because at the time events happened, the data recorders did not anticipate that the information would be analyzed in ways not yet imagined. In cases stretching across baseball, biology and language, important items were not reported or, in some cases, observed at all. There is a twin problem to using past data, which is a communitarian challenge—appreciating that data are often used in ways unimagined at the time of collection, how can we make the data we record today more usable and valuable in the future?
As baseball and the sciences have taken an interest in mining old data for new insights, it has turned out that the old data sets are often sufficiently complete for us to discover new "laws" of baseball or science. Yet in far too many cases, fresh scrutiny of old data reveals painful omissions proving that science has missed an opportunity.
In retrospect, I am amazed at how little interest baseball and biology have shown for the future use of data. In baseball, the traditional play-by-play record of games was all that was reliably available until 1988, when the pitch-by-pitch record became the standard. The new record turned out to be important in many ways—for example, in managing a pitcher's productivity, health and longevity.
Until recently, biology was equally shortsighted in its data collection; this has created a problem for biologists who would like to analyze other scientists' published data. For example, Cathy Lozupone and Rob Knight at the University of Colorado figured out from analyses of others' data that the most difficult evolutionary transition in the history of bacteria has been from saline to non- saline environments and vice versa. However, because the original researchers did not record the actual salinity levels, Lozupone and Knight could not pinpoint the precise concentration of salinity that has been most difficult to cross.
Previous standards of data collection in biology were typically limited to what might be interesting for the experiment at hand or perhaps for some future experiment in the same lab. Today, biologists are increasingly expected to anticipate likely uses by others of the data we gather and are taking pains to do so, but this forethought is not easy.
I recently met with Hilmar Lapp, a database expert at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), and discussed how researchers could avoid omitting important elements of data. He said that it is too much to expect, in the case of biology, for one researcher to think to include all the observations worthy of recording for posterity; he suggests what is needed is a "crowd intelligence." Accordingly, NESCent and other organizations have sponsored working groups to pool ideas and propose standards and directions of biological data collection in novel areas of inquiry—that is, to foster crowd intelligence. For example, the Genome Sequencing Consortium recently established standards for recording environmental data when genes and genomes are sampled; earlier action might have avoided the debacle of the missing salinity data Lozupone and Knight encountered.
In some cases, we do not have data on old events, not because of a lack of imagination but because the appropriate technology was not available at the time. In the case of baseball, the new, high-tech Advanced Value Metrics (AVM) system automatically describes each hit ball by its trajectory, velocity and point of hitting the ground. The AVM description of a hit allows analysis of how frequently a fielder can catch a ball that usually ends up being a double. But no one could analyze the skill of fielders at this level prior to the advent of this technology.
Until recently in biology, a lack of microbiological technology limited plant ecologists' understanding of the factors allowing a particular plant species to grow. Plant ecologists discovered only recently that the success of many plant species in nature is determined by helpful and harmful microbes that live in the soil. Therefore, decades of studies trying to understand the successes and failures of plants came up short because they failed to collect data on soil microbes.
In linguistics, the lack of technology for audio recording has hindered an analysis of spoken English usage over time. You might think that dialog written in novels and stories would be a good substitute for actual sound recordings; these pages are frequently as good a record as we will get. However, it is discouraging that a corpus-based analysis of word usage in speech versus fiction by lexicographer and author Orin Hargraves has shown that certain clichéd phrases, which appear to mimic spoken language, are actually used far more frequently in literature than in real life. For example, hardly anyone really says "he bolted upright" or "she drew her breath," but these forms are found with surprisingly high frequency in literature. Consequently, an unbiased, corpus-based account of spoken English usage begins with abundant voice recording in the 20th century.
Analyses of huge data sets allow us to move beyond our previous understanding, which was based on much less data than we have available to us today. There is so much possibility for a data-driven explosion of understanding of games, creatures and words by explorers today and in the future. We owe these future explorers the best and most complete record of life today that we can offer.
The Moneyball film opens with wisdom from Mickey Mantle: "It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life." Surely the same is true for many in the natural and social sciences, pondering the areas they have been studying all their careers.
You can find this online at http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/science-needs-more-moneyball/1
© 2016 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society


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UN.GIFT Publications
Training Manual to fight trafficking in chidren Textbook 1
2010-02-09 10:37:00.0
Download right click "save as"
This training manual - developed by ILO and UNICEF under the UN Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking - seeks to aid governments, workers, employers, international, and non-governmental organizations that combat trafficking in children for labour, sexual and other exploitation. This is the first textbook that covers definitions of and approaches to child trafficking, and aims to outline the main concepts involved so that there is clarity and common understanding. More information about human trafficking on the website of ILO.

subset: commoncrawl


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Boger (long o sound; not booger) is my last name thank you very much. It does not mean ho and I regularly take showers every day.
Boger is my last name!
by Brianna December 28, 2004
Member of the Barack Obama Group who encourages average people to settle for less and ask for even less. Especially refers to those who have taken over the discussion forum affectionately known as Woodchuck Underground.
The BOG'ers are driving people away from the Left almost as fast as the President's pseudo-left policies.
by cornholio2 August 19, 2010
Boger is the name given to what was believed to be the first golgothan shit demon. Currently, the term boger is used to define all that is wretched and nausiating. In order for one to become a boger, proper hygiene must be completely ignored to the extent that having to tolerate the smell of oneself causes a permanent look of euphoria. Intelligence is a huge factor in defining what is a boger as well. For the boger is, along with the gideon, one of the least cerebral beings known to man. With that being said, it can easily be understood that the word boger is one of the worst insults that can be given in today's culture.
"Goddammit, you freakin' boger, take a damned bath! And brush your teeth, too. Better yet, just shoot yourself!"
by garrison August 03, 2004
The Urban Dictionary Mug
One side has the word, one side has the definition. Microwave and dishwasher safe. Lotsa space for your liquids.Buy the mug
Kate "What is this strange taste on your dick?"
Mark "That would be my boger".
Kate "What's a boger?"
Mark "That would be my mucous member, my phlem fallus, my snotty man snake, my sputum schlong"
Kate "wretch"
Mark "That would be my boger".
Kate "What's a boger?"
Mark "That would be my mucous member, my phlem fallus, my snotty man snake, my sputum schlong"
Kate "wretch"
by indiana80 April 06, 2011


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Msgr. Stephen Berg appointed bishop of Pueblo
PUEBLO, Colo. - Pope Francis has appointed Monsignor Stephen Berg as bishop of Pueblo.
The Catholic Church said Wednesday Berg will replace Bishop Fernando Isern, who retired in June because of poor health.
Berg was formerly the Diocesan Administrator of the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth. He will take over his Colorado position on Feb. 27.
He is the second Fort Worth Catholic priest in two months to be named a bishop by Pope Francis. In November, Rev. Msgr. Michael F. Olson., a priest of the Diocese of Fort Worth and most recently the rector of Irving-based Holy Trinity Seminary, was named bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth.


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I recently received several Brushy Mountain 5-Frame Deep Nuc Boxes ... and I'm not happy about the dimensions.
The inside width is 7 3/4" - way too wide for 5 frames and almost wide enough for a sixth frame. This also means that the outside width is 9 1/4 instead of 9" - so my telescoping covers are either a very tight fit or else they don't fit.
The height is 9 3/8 - not the usual 9 5/8" deep height - so the standard wooden frame is within a sixteenth of the bottom of the box. No bee space at the bottom and barely an eight of an inch at the top.
No complaints about the quality of the wood or the box joints. If you want the standard height and width in wooden 5-frame nuc, I'd recommend the Rossman box.


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JDS / Julien De Smedt Architects have just signed the contract to execute their first French project for the city of Lille. The project that houses a youth hostel, a kindergarten and offices is the result of an invited competition that JDS won in collaboration with EGIS, Agence Franck Boutté Consultants, and SL2EC. — bustler.net
Click here for JDS Architects' Archinect Firm Profile. View full entry
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SUBMIT NEWS: submit in 60 seconds!


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School construction in Mexico
UTSA Mexico Center to highlight south-of-border ties
By Alison Beshur
Public Affairs Specialist
(Feb. 22, 2006)--UTSA's recently opened Mexico Center has begun creating avenues for bilingual and bicultural expression. A series of brown-bag lunch lectures, highlighting the university's ties with Mexico, began today.
The purpose of the UTSA Mexico Center, an umbrella institute for bi-national learning, is to connect existing Mexico-related expertise at UTSA through cross-disciplinary collaboration on research, projects and service activities. Additionally, the center will promote a better understanding of Mexico and its relationship with the United States by engaging students, faculty and staff.
Today's headlines
- La Prensa Foundation is newest member of UTSA Lone Star Society
- UTSA alumna Jordan Kaufmann wins $50K for new stent-graft start-up
- UTSA begins new way-finding sign installation this summer at Main Campus
- USA Today: UTSA long jumper Tyler Williamson rescues three-year-old boy
Article tools
The center, which will partner with Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and other Mexico-related organizations, provides a forum for communication among policy makers, scholars, business representatives and professionals from both countries.
In the first lunch-time session Feb. 22 at the UTSA Downtown Campus, Sue Ann Pemberton-Haugh discussed the UTSA College of Architecture's participation in the construction of an adobe boarding school in Norogachi, Chihuahua, Mexico.
"The brown bag lunch discussions are one way of letting people know about the involvement of UTSA students and faculty with Mexico," said Harriett Romo, UTSA associate professor of sociology and director of the Mexico Center. "Although the UTSA Mexico Center is new, we already have a number of exciting projects underway."
Romo said the Mexico Center serves as a starting point to develop the framework for a Global Institute at UTSA that eventually will include other nations.
The architecture project in Mexico includes a study and construction of passive solar earthen architecture, study and documentation of a Spanish Colonial mission church and research on indigenous architecture.
During the past two summers, graduate and upper-level undergraduate students at UTSA's College of Architecture have learned how to adapt ancient earth-architecture of the region's indigenous people to modern buildings.
Pemberton-Haugh said the experience is important to student learning, because it removes students from what is familiar and requires them to be resourceful to implement their design education.
"They cannot `Google' for information," Pemberton-Haugh said. "Students have to learn by their own observation which way the wind blows, where the sun rises and sets and what impact that has on their design ... they learn a lot about themselves and beyond themselves."
This summer, Pemberton-Haugh will go back to Norogachi with another group of students to continue working on the project.
When complete, the building complex will include a dormitory to accommodate 25 boys from nearby communities, a dormitory for 25 girls, a kitchen and dining area, a library and a research facility.
In May, the Mexico Center will centralize its administrative offices in the Monterey Building at UTSA's Downtown Campus. Initially, it will include offices for the UTSA architecture and liberal and fine arts colleges, the extended services and extended education programs, the UTSA Institute for Economic Development and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
As the center develops, more programs and colleges will be added. For example, UTSA's Institute for Economic Development is working with the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (UAG) to stimulate small business development in Mexico.
Additional brown-bag lunch lectures highlighting other projects included in the new initiative will follow on March 29, April 26 and May 31.
For more information, contact Laura Perez at (210) 458-2692.


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Large studio near the Siagne
מספר אנשים מקסימלי2
חדרי שינה1
גודל31 מטר רבוע
Floor No.(with elevator)
- מטבח
- עישון מותר
- מעלית בבניין
- מרפסת/ טרסה
- מכונת כביסה / מייבש
- טלויזיה
- מותר להביא חיות מחמד
- מדיח כלים
Accommodation summary
|Allée des Mimosas, 06210 Mandelieu-la-Napoule, צרפת
|סוג נכס
|פרטי הזיהוי של מקום הלינה
|Acceptance rate
|Response time
|A few hours
|Calendar updated
|More than half a year ago
Living room with sofa bed (possibility of adding a cot), kitchen, bathroom, storage space, nice terrace
Small dog allowed
Sheets and towels not included: 15 €
Electricity charges included
Easy parking. On the marina, harbor of Mandelieu, able to park his boat.
5 minutes from shops, beaches, golf, the multiple lane road.
כללי הביתDeposit of 500 €
Sheets and towels not included: 15 € / week
Electricity charges included
|Monthly rate for up to 2 guests
|Check-in before
|עזיבה לפני
|מדיניות ביטולים
חוות דעת על מקומות לינה אחרים שמציע/ה מארח/ת זה/זו
I really enjoyed my stay at Thierry and Corine's studio. It's great location, very central and walking distance to everything. It's big enough for one person so I was rather happy with the size of the room, but it is small. It was getting quite hot but I had no problem sleeping at night with the windows open and it wasn't noisy at all, despite the fact I was staying during football championship. The room had everything it needed, except make sure you ask about internet as I forgot and not sure if the place has it. Value for money and I would definitely stay there again. Thank you Corine and Thierry for being great hosts!
The flat has great position, very close to the beach and also to the centre. If you do not plan to spend a lot of time in the room, I can highly recommend this place.
The host cancelled the booking, this review is automated.
Nice is a wonderful place to visit! You can spend some time to relax on the beach, or experience the beautiful environment. In the evening there is a lot to see on the boulevard, like musicians or painters. In Nice you also have some nice places to drink something and meet other people. Just a small detail: Nice is very expensive.
The Room is very close to the sea, boulevard and you also have a supermarket in the street. The Room is small, but clean and when your are travelling on your own and spend most of the time outside, it is perfect. Personally I didn't find the room to warm, but I have to get used to the sounds, it was noisy.
Corine and Thierry were very kind. They waited for me till late in the evening and showed me the room and gave me some advice about Nice. This place is very much to recommend!
I can highly recommend this house! If you prefer to live in a quiet area this kind of acommodation should be perfect for you. You need to go there by car, as it is not reachable with public transport.
The way up there in the hills is also not very easy, narrow roads...but it's totally worth it. A nice and spacious house awaits you.
The closest bus stop in Nice is only five minutes away.
Corine and Thierry are very nice and helpful people. I will definitely come back when I'm in Nice again :-)
The host cancelled the booking, this review is automated.
We spent three nights in the room. Corine and Thierry are very kind and the room is very close to the sea and this is undoubtedly a great advantage. However the room is impossible to live for more than one person because it's too little. What's more, it is very uncomfortable because of the ceiling that prevents from walking within the room. And it is situated at the fifth floor, which means that is very hot in the summer and there is no fresh air.
Very good location in a wonderful city.
The appartment is quite smart, not very big ;)
Noisy in summer nights and hot, but very dear. You can expect more for the price you pay for it.
Totally recommended.
For those who are very familiar and close to each other we can strongly recommend Corine et Thierry's apartment.
The apartment is very small and situated without aclimatisation in the top of the building, therefore it gets hot over the day (Thierry helped us out with a fan!). In other belongings the equipment of the apartment is modern and pleasant.
Unfortunately we had not enough space to store our bags well. But that has been the only little problem we had to deal with.
Nevertheless the incredible central location (!!!), the kindness and helpfulness of Thierry & Corine as well as the attractive price brought us a wonderful week in Nice.
Thanks and best wishes
|My hosts , Corine and Thierry, were most helpful and friendly and "gentils". The location of the studio was absolutely perfect - across the street practically from the beaches and promenade and within walking distance of many things and around the corner of bus stops. However- it is on a busy street and garbage collection is every night between midnight and 01h30 and VERY noisy. It gets full aftenoon sun which makes it very hot in midsummer so that you have to sleep with open windows. Also, it is very very tiny and once the sofa bed is pulled out, there is hardly room to move about or to stand upright. Definitely for one person only!
- הבטחת איכות מקומות הלינה
- כל מארח מאושר טלפונית
- תשלום מאובטח


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From an electronic library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers.
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text:
Travis Barker sustained critical burns and injuries in a plane crash that took the lives of four people nearly five years ago, and the drummer can't bring himself to fly again - even if it means missing an overseas tour with his band.
The 37-year-old musician has announced he will not be present for the Blink-182 tour Down Under as he doesn't have a way to get there without flying.
PLAY IT NOW: Travis Barker: I Feel 'Blessed' To Be Able To Complete My New Solo Album
"I'm sorry to announce I won't be joining Blink-182 on this Australian tour," Travis wrote in a post on his Facebook page late Saturday night. "I still haven't gotten over the horrific events that took place the last time I flew when my plane crashed and 4 people were killed, two being my best friends."
Travis' drum duties will be temporarily taken over by a stand in for the Australian tour.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Top 10 Reality Romances Gone Wrong!
"I gave the band my blessing to take another drummer if they still wanted to do the tour without me," he wrote.
The father of two said he had looked into traveling to the country by ship, but that it hadn't panned out.
"I hope to come to Australia again some day perhaps by ship if need be. Unfortunately, there wasn't a boat that worked with the schedule this time around," he wrote. "Once again I'm sorry to all the fans."
VIEW THE PHOTOS: DJ AM & Travis Barker
As previously reported on AccessHollywood.com, Travis and the late Adam Goldstein (DJ AM) were the sole survivors of a small plane crash that took the lives of the plane's two pilots, along with Travis' security guard and an assistant in September 2008.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Rock Star Style
Copyright 2013 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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At Review Centre we provide you with consumer reviews of collectables so that you can compare all the top brands of collectable toy. Go to our toy forums to discuss toy collecting.
Onsite you will find reviews of all the best collectable toys and collectable die cast toys. Whether cars, animals or Who Characters they are all here waiting for your reviews.
Once you have made your purchases, write some collectables reviews of the action figures you like so that your experience can be of help to other consumers in choosing the best arts collectables.
Category: Collectable Toys
From 2 reviews
Category: Collectable Toys


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Australia 1900 – United States of America 1982
United States from 1919
Autumn rain girl
c 1935
image 23.5 (h) x 26.9 (w) cm
Bruehl regularly supplied work for magazines other than those owned by Condé Nast. This included doing the covers for the women's magazine, Pictorial Review, from 1933 until the demise of the magazine in 1939. Pictorial Review was one of the most popular and widely-read magazines of the thirties, attracting large advertising revenue. One series, which featured in the magazine's twelve issues of 1938, showed young children participating in seasonal activities, all by Bruehl and of course shot in the studio. They have a curious self-contained seriousness, rather than the clichéd sentimentality found in most of the child photography at the time. The covers were intended to be framed as wall pictures and were extremely popular with the magazine's millions of readers.


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I have a full time job, a baby, a toddler, an oblivious husband and a lifelong, lackadaisical approach to cleaning. Though I may scoff at friends, I would not-so-secretly hire a cleaner if our disposable income ever allowed. I have two curious sons, who will grow into two smelly teenagers, so I am having to learn to embrace the cleaner side of life, to make it no longer incidental but intentionally. I have been scouring the internet for easy tips and cheap remedies, and picking the closets of friends for gadgets and gizmos that can help me maximize on my cleanliness while minimizing the time I spend to achieve it.
Unlike previous generations, the 21st century mom has a whole host of options to keeping house. We can use tried and tested methods, such as a book on fifty different ways of cleaning with vinegar, or we can use the latest technology. I am finding that a combination of the two works best in my life, and as in everything, I keep my options open.
And you can too, as one of the products I'm reviewing will be given to one lucky commenter on this post! Keep reading for instructions and details!
Continue Reading "Giveaway Included: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gadgets" »


text:
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Just a reminder for those anglers who love red snapper and its relatives:
The 2013 recreational red snapper season in Gulf of Mexico state waters will close to harvest on Monday, July 15. The last day the season will be open is Sunday, July 14.
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How to Build Stairs—A DIY Guide
How To Build Stairs a Step-by-Step Guide to Constructing Staircases
How to build stairs? There are two different classes of stairs. The first class is a mill-made stair, which is usually fabricated in a mill shop and shipped to the job site as a kit, ready for assembly and installation. The second class, a carpenter-built stair, is just that — a stair built on site by a carpenter. This type of fabrication is less expensive and allows the stair to be covered with carpet. A carpenter-built stair can be dressed up with a hardwood or paint-grade skirt board. And simple wall-mounted railing is a popular option to complete either type of stair.
When building a stair, functionality is the most important consideration. Extreme accuracy must be used for a safe design. Before beginning construction, you should consult not only the national building-code requirements, but also the local building-code requirements. Some municipalities have stricter codes than others, and checking first will eliminate the need to rebuild later.
After determining the correct code requirements for your stair, consider the stair's design aspects. Remember, the construction materials that you use will dictate the outcome of your finished product, and quality materials will produce a quality job. Do not mistakenly think that because the material will be covered with carpet and no one will see it, the quality of construction materials doesn't matter; it does. When you use a lower grade of material that contains knots and voids, the stair may encounter cracking at a later date. Most lumberyards carry stock used specifically for the construction of stairs.
Layouts and Calculations
After you have determined the proper codes to follow for your municipality, you are ready to begin the layout and calculations of your stair. Grab a pencil and commit your plans to paper, sketching a rough blueprint of your staircase.
For the purpose of this example, this project will be a straight stair. The building code that we are implementing for this project is BOCA 96 for residential use. This code states that you may have a maximum riser height of 7 3/4 inches and tread run of no less than 10 inches.
Arke stairs has spiral and modular stair kits for the do-it-yourselfer.
First determine the size of your stairwell, making sure to allow for the proper headroom to accommodate the stairs. Headroom is very important; you need to be able to ascend and descend the stair safely. Many a stair has been torn out due to incorrect calculation of this item before the stair is built and installed. There is nothing worse than having some common stair-building sense knocked into you by bumping your head. For this example the nosing will be a standard 1 1/4 inch, the tread run will be 10 inches each, and the headroom will be 6 feet, 8 inches.
Assuming the distance from one finished floor to the other (total rise) measures 118 inches, find out the number of risers needed by dividing the total finish rise by 7.5. The resulting number equals the number of risers. Then divide that number into the total finish rise.
Example:Total rise 118"/ 7.5 = 15.73 — round up the total number of risers to 16
Total rise 118"/16 risers = 7 3/8" each rise
Knowing the number of risers tells you the number of treads — 15 (the sixteenth riser will be positioned approaching the upper floor with no tread on top). The run of the stair will then be 15 treads at 10 inches per tread, or 150 inches of total run. To determine the actual total length of the stair, you must add the nosing of the bottom step and the thickness of the top riser.
Example: Total tread run 150" + 1 1/4" nosing + 3/4" top riser = 152" total stair length
Next, calculate the length of the stairwell, or the width of the upper floor's vertical shaft in which the stairs are located. This is a two-step calculation.
First, account for the required headroom and the upper-floor construction, including floor-joist height, floor thickness and drywall thickness. For the purpose of our example we will calculate the upper-floor construction to be a total thickness of 12 1/2 inches. This figure (12 1/2 inches) added to the desired headroom height of 80 inches will total 92 1/2 inches. Take this dimension and divide it by the riser height.
Example: 92 1/2" / 7 3/8" = 12.542
The answer you get (12.542) is the number of treads needed in the clear opening to make headroom. This would mean that you now have 2.45 treads that are located under the header. By multiplying 12.542 (number of treads in clear opening) by 10 inches (tread depth dimension) and adding 1 1/4 inch for the nosing and 3/4 inch for the top riser, you will achieve the stairwell length needed for the proper headroom. The result for our example is 127 7/16 inches for stairwell length. Most stairs that are located between two walls have a finished width of 36 inches. To accommodate this finished width you will need to make your rough opening 37 inches.
The end result of our layout procedure is: 10" run, 7 3/8" rise, 127 7/16" stair well length, 37" stair well width, 36" stair finish width.


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Opti-Firm Renewal Complex
Richly restorative night cream with proven skin firming and tightening effects. Restores essential moisture and leaves skin radiant, refreshed and younger looking. 0.85 oz jar.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires that MSDS/SDS be available to employees for potentially harmful substances handled in the workplace under the Hazard Communication regulation.
Material Safety Data Sheet / Safety Data Sheet


text: You guys are making me feel bad, I shouldn't be at the computer reading this but in the shop making chips fly. Conversion parts sets are comming along fine, at some point we'll post a signup list. I will NOT take any funds till the parts sets are ready to ship so don't even ask. One guy, who will go unnamed, has been calling and emailing and wining for two weeks now. But all kidding aside, still looking to have parts sets, a build tutorial and very detailed instructions by Christmas - New Years time frame with sideplates from Halo Mfg by early Feburary. Start saving your pocket change now cause you're gonna need it. What makes us different from the rest of the higher life forms is our ability to accessorize and the Vickers has lots of 'em. It's a real cool gun, nobody will be sorry they did one. Lon


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How to keep rivers and streams flowing
With streams and rivers drying up because of over-usage, Rob Harmon talks about a clever market mechanism to bring back the water. Farmers and beer companies find their fates intertwined in the century-old tale of Prickly Pear Creek.
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Alcoa is recognized for long term sustainability goals and transparent reporting of our progress. In Alcoa communities around the world, this commitment to sustainability at the highest levels promotes and protects our social license to operate. Extending this corporate commitment beyond the scope of our operations are employee volunteers, who provide tens of thousands of community service hours every year.
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text: Yeah its slow and I've been reading a lot about reaching .500 here and on the news sites and other venues. So I'd like to toss out my thoughts (so I can make room for other thoughts) on what hasn't been in the overall discussion about next season. Rodney Stuckey: He hasn't been as lost in the shuffle as much as Maxiell has been but I believe he is THE factor to making .500 or not. He was written off last year as the same ol' tantalizing star who keeps plummeting back to earth. Watching last season, he had several injuries that affected his play. Did he super-collide too much? Certainly; and that's not a result of a groin pull either. But the whole reason I got into writing this section is to talk about Stuckey's stop and pop development. That is a bad-ass weapon. He has the quickness to get to the hoop, only anyone with even a casual interest in the NBA will figure out what he's going to do. Mix it up with a drive - pull up and its all kinds of goodness. He can pass like a point guard which is why Dumars mistook him for a real PG. This would assume a decent mid range game since bricking your pull up J puts us back in the plummet back to earth re-run. And it scambles defenses because WTF? Stuckey didn't go to the basket? Where the F* am I supposed to go now on defense? I'll just let Villanueva grab that rebound. wait did Chuck just grab a board? How did it hit the floor before he bothered to get it? What am I doing? Oh well, run it back. Jason Maxiell: Ok maternity ward administrators, its ok to stop carding visitors at the door because Jason is on a diet. What we took for baby eating was merely the surprise in a king cake. Most of the attention has been on CV and Daye playing the stretch 4 (in Daye's case its a stretch that he can play the 4. ba-da-boom! I'm here all week outside the comedy club out back by the recycling bins folks) with an occasional article on Monroe sliding over to the 4 spot as well. Really clogging up the position is Maxiell. This guy is ineffective with less than 20+ minutes a game so he's not someone you can throw in there to eat an occasional baby. He has to play, get in a rhythm and then start hoovering up little children because he averages more highlights than rebounds. The problem with this is that we do not have a clear cut hierarchy and unless Daye is replaced by bizarro-Daye and that lack of consistency has hamstrung this team big time. Add to that Jerebko and its a massive clustercuss that needs to be sorted out. I think Maxiell's expiring is more valuable than Daye's rookie salary but who knows really. Jonas J and the Enigmatic Maybes: The team is in an awkward position where Jonas (and arguably Daye and Singler) would be better off if Prince was traded but the team (arguably as well) would be worse off. My casual internet fan radar picks up Tay's defensive lapses, his ball stopping backdown into 3 defenders and a general lack of overall effectiveness. But I'm just a casual but obsessed fan with a proclivity to vomit walls of text. Still, Jerebko, Singler, Daye, Middleton and Maggette are all weeds growing in the cracks of Tayshaun's concrete jungle of veteran leadership. The point is, we've collected an overabundance of sub-reserve calibre talent and have become over-enamoured with them. Maybe its time for Gores to establish a catch and release program so Dumars can hook all the fringe talent he wants and has to let them go in some form or another - maybe for bragging rights or fan angst. Most teams have 7-8 guys and the rest. We have 4 guys and the rest. I like those guys at the end of the talent pool a lot but theres too much of it. I can't decide if I want Middleton to beat out Daye for 2 minutes of garbage time every 5 games or if I want to stick with my boy Daye who may or may not step out of bounds before launching an airball. Maybe I want to champion Maggette who has the skillset to do more than wear a suit. The travesty in all this is Ben Wallace is on the outs unless Dumars swings a trade. Maybe Joe can get 2 more 2nd rounders and draft another pair of small forwards. Man its a long way to November.


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Their father meant nothing particularly serious when he named his sons, African-American like himself, Lincoln and Booth — in fact, Booth tells his little brother, the names were kind of a joke. But playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has a charged opposition in mind, in Topdog/Underdog, in which these brothers pose and play against each other, dueling for position in both their fraternal order and the success-story America that might as well be a foreign country to them. Bari Robinson, as Lincoln, and J.H. Smith III, as Booth, make volatile electricity of the brothers' warmth and their war, in the Dramatic Repertory Company's excellent production, under the direction of Keith Powell Beyland.
Since being thrown out by his wife, downtrodden Lincoln has lately been crashing at his younger brother's cold-water pad, in exchange for much of Lincoln's weekly earnings from the arcade, where the work involves, as Booth puts it, "dressing up like some crackerass white man, some dead president" — President Lincoln, in fact — " and letting people shoot at you." Previously, Lincoln had raked in cash as a gifted street impresario of the card hustle three-card monte, but swore off it after a partner was killed. Booth, meanwhile, rising against the fall of his older brother, has been fantasizing about and practicing Lincoln's old hustling patter, hoping to take it to the streets himself.
Smith and Robinson conjure a fraught and believably ambivalent fraternal rapport, and the difference in energy and outlook between their brothers is superbly dynamic. Booth buzzes with giddy, hopeful nerves, flashing a wide grin, bouncing on the cot; in a particularly delicious scene, he gleefully strips out of impressively numerous layers of boosted clothes. In contrast, Robinson's Lincoln slumps in boxers, his frock coat costume, and haphazard residuals of his occupational whiteface makeup, with slumped shoulders and tired eyes, his gaping jaw slack with skepticism, disdain, and futility.
But as Robinson's Lincoln gets drunker, his vacant mouth starts to hold the curl of a smirk, and the big brotherly confidence returns. In his boozy nostalgia for hustling, Lincoln's speech slips into a seductive, rhythmic cadence that sounds a lot like what we've heard of Booth's own attempts at the card con, but more so: We see both where Booth got it and why he would be at once so bemused, frustrated, and liberated by Lincoln losing it — and why Booth would falter uneasily as Lincoln starts to get it back. His big bro was a legend, and when Lincoln's drawn again to deal the cards (lit altar-white, in Michaela Wirth's beautiful design), Robinson's hands and voice are utterly bewitching.
Parks's contribution to the timeless brotherly-rivalry genre is arresting, and her conceit for addressing systemic American racism and poverty is brazen. "People like they historical shit in a certain way," Parks has Lincoln say of the clientele at work. "They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming."
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Honduras' Top Court to Hear Case Against Military
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) -- Honduras' Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a request by the chief prosecutor to charge the country's top military commanders with abuse of power for sending President Manuel Zelaya into exile.
The court said in a statement that it has asked the six members of the Joint Chief of Staff to attend a hearing Thursday. Supreme Court President Jorge Rivera will hear the case before deciding how to proceed, the statement said.
The prosecutor's case doesn't question Zelaya's ouster itself, only whether the military went too far in flying the ousted leader to Costa Rica after he was arrested by armed soldiers in a dispute over a constitutional referendum.
It is unlikely the court will charge the officers. The high court has repeatedly ruled or advised against reinstating Zelaya as president. It has also said he faces charges of treason and abuse of power, in large part for disobeying the court's orders to drop his plan for the referendum on changing the constitution.
In addition, President-elect Porfirio Lobo, who won the Nov. 29 election to succeed Zelaya, has said he supports granting amnesty both to Zelaya and to all of those involved in the coup.
Last week, Honduras' chief prosecutor, Luis Alberto Rubi, asked the Supreme Court to issue arrest warrants charging the top military commanders with abuse of power for sending Zelaya out of the country -- but not for removing him from office in the June 28 coup. The charge carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison.
Those named by the prosecutor include the head of the armed forces, Gen. Romeo Vasquez, and five other top-ranking military officers, including the air force chief, Gen. Javier Prince, and the navy commander, Gen. Juan Pablo Rodriguez.
Zelaya, who has taken refuge in the Brazilian Embassy since sneaking back into Honduras on Sept. 21, said that approving an amnesty would be another way ''to deceive the world, which condemns my ouster.''
''Whose idea was it to present this initiative (for an amnesty)?'' Zelaya asked in an interview with Radio Globo. ''It didn't come from the international community, like Lobo claims. That is not true.''
Honduran lawmakers were scheduled to discuss the amnesty Tuesday.


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Fervent, dedicated, passionate, ignorant, dangerous, mindless sheep asshole. The worst possible combination of asshole and fascist. Typically used when fascist is not strong enough to convey the blight and darkness this person casts upon the earth and everyone they come in contact with. Rhymes with fascist.
<Insert any politician from any party here> is a total asscist.
by cwicket October 01, 2005


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Hacking Contest by OffSec
We are happy to announce the first of our Public Hacking contests, labeled "How strong is Your Fu?". The challenge will last for two days, and may go on longer, depending on how long our machines survive. The reward ? The winner of the contest will be able to choose ONE of our Online courses, free of charge. This could be either PWB, WiFu or CTP (30 day labs where relevant).
More here.


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The rise of the internet and social media has marked the beginning of a significant shift in the traditional auto dealer, Original Equipment Manufacturer ("OEM"), and captive finance lender profit models. Now that consumers have shifted their research online and new car pricing became far more transparent, new car margins have continued to be under attack, creating a need to search for alternative ways to maintain profitability. This has led to finance and insurance products ("F&I") being viewed as a more key building block in total profit.
The report reviews various opportunities and trends throughout the market, including:
The report "Innovating for future growth: Automotive assurance products' strategy" is only an introduction of our products and services. We can help our clients give stakeholders more active and direct reasonability in planning, innovation, operations, and delivery. PwC's has a broad experience assisting assurance units to strengthen their business models, including:


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Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing" from the Greek words steganos (στεγανός) meaning "covered or protected", and graphei (γραφή) meaning "writing". The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.
And now that we have saw the definition of this word, let's take a look at three open source programs for Linux that you can use to play with this concept: Steghide and Outguess and one closed source Steg


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Town Square
PAUSD girds for lawsuits in two cases, signals possible wider scope
Original post made by Curious, Fairmeadow, on May 23, 2013
Board of Education president Dana Tom is refusing to provide details under a state law that allows secrecy when discussing facts that are not yet known to potential plaintiffs. The use of this Brown Act provision, intended to allow the board to assess litigation exposure without setting off new lawsuits, raises the prospect of other cases not yet disclosed.
PAUSD is currently the subject of five complaints by parents to the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The first resulted in a finding that the district violated federal law in failing to protect a disabled child from harassment. Another case resulted in a settlement agreement between OCR and the district over 504 procedures. Three complaints of race and disability discrimination are still pending.
PAUSD is also conducting an investigation under Title IX of possible sexual harassment and discrimination at Paly, following the publication of an article on "rape culture" in a student magazine.
Tom's two previous attempts to schedule closed sessions on the OCR matters both ran afoul of the Brown Act, the state's open meetings law. The first was cancelled "on advice of counsel." The second was cancelled after a story in Palo Alto Online pointed out that the agenda lacked a required disclosure of the facts to be discussed.
Tom has so far declined to discuss the civil rights violations at a regular meeting of the Board of Education, despite public commitments to do so. The most recent such promise was at the May 7 school board meeting.
Comments (37)
a resident of Gunn High School
on May 23, 2013 at 7:35 am
PAUSD is getting a good dose of long-accumulated karma. Many graduates of the system are glad to see this finally happen, and they feel vindicated.
a resident of Evergreen Park
on May 23, 2013 at 9:15 am
This story misses a few points. Barb Mitchell is the school board VP and also decides the agenda with Dana Tom. The two of them published an editorial criticizing OCR so they definitely see eye to eye on this. Barb particularly has a strong libertarian streak and just doesn't think the federal or state government should get involved in the schools even for civil rights.
Also it's possible that Tom and Mitchell are writing the agenda this way to avoid saying what they want to talk about, but when they get in the room they will talk about the existing OCR cases. There are no minutes for closed meetings. The parents in the existing cases know what happened to their kids so there is no actual basis for this Brown Act exemption, but as I said there is no real enforcement once the doors are closed.
The real point is that we shouldn't have to play cat and mouse with our own school board, but there you go.
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on May 23, 2013 at 11:21 am
You - "signals possible wider scope...raises the prospect of other cases not yet disclosed." Or not. Couldn't they just be discussing facts that relate to the few OCR cases already underway?
You - "The first [closed board meeting] was cancelled "on advice of counsel." Is there something suspect about that? Maybe the district's attorney needed more information before charging the board for a meeting.
You - "The second was cancelled after a story in Palo Alto Online pointed out that the agenda lacked a required disclosure of the facts to be discussed." Ditto. Doesn't the law say that facts need not be disclosed?
a resident of Fairmeadow
on May 23, 2013 at 12:47 pm
@just saying. Thanks for your interest in this story and your feedback. Let me address your questions.
"Couldn't they just be discussing facts that relate to the few OCR cases already underway?". The agenda specifically says that they are discussing "facts and circumstances" that are not known to potential plaintiffs. In the existing OCR cases, the potential plaintiffs already know what happened to their children. It's possible that there are as yet unknown facts (about the actions of district staff that if known would produce more liability) but it seems more likely to me that these are new situations where the parents haven't yet complained. But without more information we can't be sure, which is why I wrote about the possibility rather than the certainty. Readers can judge based on the facts we have.
"Is there something suspect about [cancelling the meeting on advice of counsel]? Maybe the district's attorney needed more information before charging the board for a meeting." Dana Tom didn't say that the lawyer needed more time to prepare, and the meeting notice was insufficient under the Brown Act. For me that is quite clear but again readers can decide.
"[About the second cancelled meeting], doesn't the law say that facts need not be disclosed?" No, the law says the facts have to be disclosed unless the agenda cites the section of the Brown Act that this one does.
Thanks again for the feedback!
a resident of Southgate
on May 23, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Keep up the good work, Curious. Very informative.
a resident of Adobe-Meadow
on May 23, 2013 at 4:55 pm
"For me that is quite clear"
Says it all.
a resident of Barron Park
on May 23, 2013 at 5:35 pm
"For me that is quite clear"
The spin cycle continues. I'm sure the Fox News reporters feel the same way about their slant on the news. Interesting that someone makes such an effort to spin the story.
a resident of College Terrace
on May 23, 2013 at 5:51 pm
Nice work, Curious. People are getting worried.
It's a good idea to dig into the closed meetings. Coupled with the lack of any public discussion, it raises the question of why Tom and Mitchell are so anxious to avoid public scrutiny. One answer: people go to school board members for help. The family in the first case apparently went to board meetings repeatedly to complain. Board members should have made sure that the right procedures were followed, but didn't bother. No wonder Townsend told the Weekly she didn't want any public investigations.
However, the most interesting closed meeting is one that you missed, the one that actually happened. On February 26, Laurie Reynolds, the district's attorney, met with the board in closed session about the litigation risk from the first case. A few hours later, she gave a public presentation that the Weekly described as "spin," "misleading," and "obfuscation." She made a bunch of inaccurate statements about the investigation, about the law, and about OCR's procedures, all calculated to show that the OCR investigation and finding was no big deal.
The Weekly said that she "misled the board". But the board didn't seem to care. Reynolds asked Skelly if she should answer questions from the press about the variance between her statements and reality. Skelly told her no, and copied the board members.
Why didn't the board care? Maybe Reynolds didn't actually mislead the board (her client) after all. Maybe she told them exactly what she was going to say in that earlier closed session. That would make Reynolds a lawyer who asked permission and took direction, rather than one who put her professional reputation on the line by misleading her client.
Keep digging, Curious.
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on May 23, 2013 at 7:33 pm
I cut and paste from our school newsletter:
Every spring, the Palo Alto School District conducts a Superintendent Survey to hear what the community has to say about how the school district is doing. Please take the time to complete the survey. Your opinions matter. Please complete the survey by Tuesday, June 4.
Web Link
a resident of Community Center
on May 23, 2013 at 8:05 pm
Did you get this from an Elementary or Middle school newsletter?
I have not seen it on the Paly newsletter.
a resident of Green Acres
on May 23, 2013 at 8:45 pm
How is it that the board is only discussing two cases now? Didn't they give notice for 4 cases the last two times they failed in giving the public proper notice about these agenda items? Did they suddenly decide they are free and clear of exposure in two of the cases? What is the scoop?
a resident of South of Midtown
on May 23, 2013 at 9:11 pm
I did a Google search for stories by Curious. The notice for the closed session that was cancelled last week was for 4 cases. The story is here: Web Link.
The previous cancelled one was for two cases. That story is here: Web Link.
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on May 24, 2013 at 7:12 am
Curious: "The second [closed board meeting] … agenda lacked a required disclosure of the facts to be discussed… the law says the facts have to be disclosed unless the agenda cites the section of the Brown Act that this [third closed board meeting] does."
I don't see a "must-disclose-facts"-unless-Brown-Act-section-is-mentioned rule.
If there is litigation (which is what that second agenda item said), all that must be done is ID the litigation - by title or in another way - and only if that would not jeopardize the board's position. In that agenda post, the Board IDed the claims by number. Anyway, it doesn't matter since there was no closed session so no Brown Act to invoke.
If litigation is just anticipated (which is what this week's agenda item says), facts not known to the plaintiffs need NOT be shared. (Brown Act: "(e)(1) Facts ... which the local agency believes are not yet known to a potential plaintiff or plaintiffs... need not be disclosed."). As you say, "it's possible that there are as yet unknown facts" so no problems with this one either.
Regardless, the Brown Act says that privacy laws must be honored. Given that cases relate to students, sure seems that there's not much the board could share even if it wanted to. The Board is REQUIRED NOT TO SHARE, which is the opposite of your claim that the board "is REFUSING to provide details under a state law that ALLOWS secrecy."
Now do you agree that the board did not run "afoul of the Brown Act?"
a resident of Fairmeadow
on May 24, 2013 at 7:43 am
@just saying
Thanks again for your feedback. My responses:
"I don't see a "must-disclose-facts"-unless-Brown-Act-section-is-mentioned rule." See the Brown Act, at 54956.9(e)(2), where it says that explicitly. The section that today's agenda item is referring to is 54956.9(e)(1).
"If there is litigation (which is what that second agenda item said), all that must be done is ID the litigation - by title or in another way." There is no announced litigation involving any of these OCR claims. The second cancelled closed session referred to OCR complaint numbers, which aren't litigation.
I agree there is no problem with having a closed session if it is discussing facts not known to plaintiffs that carry a significant risk of litigation. Since the plaintiffs in the existing cases know what happened to their children, that raises the possibility of other cases not yet known. (It also raises the possibility that there is other misconduct by district staff not yet known to plaintiffs in existing cases, so that is another possibility).
As to privacy, it is certainly possible to describe facts without mentioning identifying information (such as the school where the child is attending).
In summary, I think it is exactly right to say that the board's previous attempts to schedule closed meetings ran "afoul of the Brown Act", since they were not properly noticed under the Brown Act. Had they held those meetings, they would have been violating the Brown Act. But as you point out, they cancelled them instead.
Thanks again for your careful reading and comments!
a resident of Duveneck/St. Francis
on May 24, 2013 at 8:54 am
Thanks for shining a light on this. Your reports are really helping me follow the OCR issue.
a resident of Crescent Park
on May 24, 2013 at 9:07 am
Bullying = wrong
Suing PAUSD = wrong, or at least a horribly wasteful, corrosive means to an end
Wrong + Wrong = ?
If my child ever bullies anyone in or out of school, please, parent, come to me and I promise to deal with it quickly & decisively. Likewise, if anyone bullies my kid, I'll deal with it myself just as quickly & decisively.
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on May 24, 2013 at 10:28 am
PAUSD's agenda for the 2nd session mentioned existing litigation, so was under Brown Act (d)(1) ("Litigation, to which the local agency is a party, has been initiated formally.")
Paragraph (e), which you mention, does NOT kick in if (d)(1) is the reason for the meeting, which was the case there. (Just because you don't know about litigation does NOT mean that there is none.)
Brown Act: " (e)For purposes of paragraphs (2) and (3) of subdivision (d) [does NOT mention (d)(1)] . . ."
Paragraph (e) does kick in for this 3rd meeting which is under (d)(2) (anticipated litigation), but (e)(1) says there is no need to disclose something the plaintiffs don't know.
Hard to believe that the plaintiffs know all the facts. How could they? Have they deposed folks and engaged in extensive discovery? If so, wouldn't they be in litigation which brings you back to (d)(1) - no disclosure needed?
You said if it relates to this case it must be about misconduct. Not necessarily. It could be about what was done correctly.
You say it must be about new cases. Not necessarily either. Again, it could simply be about things the current plaintiffs don't know - a non-conspiracy theory, easy and likely explanation.
Ergo, since (e)(2) is not at play here, there is no "must-disclose-facts"-unless-Brown-Act-section-is-mentioned rule."
a resident of Fairmeadow
on May 24, 2013 at 1:08 pm
@just saying.
You should reread my previous comment. The agenda for the 2nd session mentioned the existing litigation exception, but didn't mention existing litigation (it instead mentioned OCR complaints).
The "unknown facts" have to be facts that if known to the plaintiff would result in increased litigation risk for the district. Meeting in secret to discuss "what was done correctly" doesn't fall under this exemption.
I didn't say it "must be about new cases." Please reread my first response to you: "It's possible that there are as yet unknown facts (about the actions of district staff that if known would produce more liability) but it seems more likely to me that these are new situations where the parents haven't yet complained. But without more information we can't be sure, which is why I wrote about the possibility rather than the certainty. Readers can judge based on the facts we have."
But of course you are free to reach whatever conclusions you like, since you are also a reader -- for which I thank you!
a resident of Crescent Park
on May 24, 2013 at 8:29 pm
Chris Zaharias is missing the key point: the job of the school district is to protect the right of children to receive a public education free of discrimination on the basis of their race, gender, ethnicity, or disability. If PAUSD fails to do that, despite repeated pleas from parents, the right thing is not to take the law into their own hands (whatever that would actually mean). It's to seek help from the federal government. Don't criticize parents who are driven to that point.
a resident of Stanford
on May 24, 2013 at 10:37 pm
@Chris Z: I agree with "Not the wild west". Apparently Chris Z. has never experienced the angst of having their precious child experience a living hell every day with no help in stopping the bullies. Until you have walked in the other parent's moccasins I would recommend not criticizing those parents who have been forced to take the only remedy that might effect a change. I am personally glad that the family of the student whose developmentally disabled child was repeatedly bullied (unbelievably to the point of being punched in the face or so the news has stated)approached the Office For Civil Rights to help them get a resolution for their student's situation.
@Fred: The real spin artists are the superintendent, his legal staff and the board (spinning by failure to even address the issues). Supt. Skelly was trying to have 150K of your money (assuming that you are a PA Taxpayer) go towards hiring a PROFESSIONAL spin artist to try and do damage control. Talk about Fox News! Thank God that the public has spoken about how they feel about this position. I was appalled myself when I heard about this. Also, I don't know whether the attorney came up with her BS with or without help from Kevin and company.
@Chris Z:
Bullying = DEAD WRONG EVERY TIME
Suing PAUSD = RIGHT especially if it leads to a student getting help where it should have been offered immediately. RIGHT and at best a very good use of a process that will prevent further law suits if the district would just pay attention, straighten up and FLY RIGHT. The corrosion factor has come at the hands of the people at the Churchill office. Let's face it!
WRONG=RIGHT if you do the math correctly.
Dr. Skelly and Board (I know you are probably reading this) please do the math yourself and start helping our students until too many more skeletons come out of the closet. We can't afford you anymore Dr. Skelly. I respectfully ask you to please resign.
Wrong + Wrong = ?
a resident of another community
on May 24, 2013 at 11:55 pm
village fool is a registered user.
@Curious - Thank you! Please, continue. Details are crucial. The details you provided as to the ongoing/current issues had me address Ken Dauber, extending my open address to form a Shadow board in the hopes of investigating past events/details. I have posted the following:
Dear Mr. Dauber - I have addressed you more than two months ago calling to form a PAUSD Shadow board. Seemed to me, then, that investigation was not about to happen.
"Villager" wrote above that - "Scandals like this one have a rhythm. Typically there is the revelation, the outrage, the demands for dismissals. If there is a prompt fact-finding, it can defuse community suspicion and anger. Delay creates the appearance of cover-up whether it is the reality or not..." It was only the info related to the second (or third? or forth?) OCR investigation, and other inputs such as those provided by "Curious", that kept these issues on the public agenda. I am more convinced than prior that such investigation needs to be totally independent.
The latest info as to the closed board sessions dealing with litigation had me wonder - Who are the board member serving? Info about the first OCR case revealed that the parents tried to contact the board members, seeking help. Seems that a closed session could be about a case where board members were contacted by community parents who ended addressing the OCR. I am wondering, simply - on what side are the board members? Closed session makes it clear that the board sides with the district officials - anyways, always. Should concerned parents try to contact the board members regarding concerns they have, knowing that the board always sides with the district officials? Conflict of interest? Seems to me that a transparent environment, where best practices are the law, would have spared those issues, and have the kids better served. That was the initial reason of my address, above. Seems to me that institutional by-standing, atmosphere where fear of retaliation seems to be affecting actions, was not established in one day, or one year. Seems to me that no correction, or healing can start prior to understanding what went wrong, why. Seems to me that the Ohlone event presented community members trust. I have suggested the Shadow board as a symbolic statement, and hopefully a way to start to investigate until any other formal procedure may take place. Possibly there are other ways. Hopefully there is a way to look seriously, continuously into issues, without having the OCR giving painful reminders. Link: Web Link
a resident of Green Acres
on May 25, 2013 at 8:39 am
"Dear Mr. Dauber - I have addressed you more than two months ago calling to form a PAUSD Shadow board. "
I agree with Village Fool. Ken needs to formalize his and his group's opposition to PAUSD board and staff.
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on May 25, 2013 at 10:18 am
"gop" 's comment is a perfect example of the problem we are facing. Faced with requests for transparency from Dauber, the Weekly, others online and at board meetings; strong negative reaction to hiring a spin doctor; federal findings and investigations, etc. -- what is the reaction of PAUSD insiders?
Circle the wagons, draw the blinds, hunker down, mutter darkly about the "opposition". Skelly has handed the board a shovel, and rather than handing it back, they are hard at work digging a hole.
a resident of Embarcadero Oaks/Leland
on May 25, 2013 at 10:40 am
"Wll Played" comments are a perfect example of what is wrong. it's easier to be destructive and take pot-shots from the side and couch it in terms like "requests for transparency".
Just like the GOP, failed candidates take delight in being obstructive instead of working with the district. They just want to see the office fail regardless who they hurt. What is wrong with "Fool's" request to formalize this opposition?
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on May 25, 2013 at 11:23 am
@gop. Actually, by "requests for transparency" I actually mean requests for transparency. That seems warranted. PAUSD is a public agency. The superintendent concealed a federal investigation and finding of noncompliance with federal law. The report, when the press finally dug it out, indicates that several senior district staff, including Skelly, Charles Young, Holly Wade, a principal, an assistant principal and maybe others, didn't follow either district procedures or federal or state law. Why? What happened? How many other kids and parents have been treated this way?
According to gop, nobody is allowed to ask those questions without being "obstructive" -- a great Orwellian turn of phrase, since Skelly and the school board have obstructed any information from reaching the public. Now district insiders are bleating about reasonable inquiries into the public's business, or sending out embarrassingly maudlin declarations to every parent in the district that they have trouble getting out of bed in the morning.
But feel free to draw up enemies lists and fulminate against nattering nabobs of negativism and the press. You've got some historical precedents you can draw on for inspiration.
a resident of Green Acres
on May 25, 2013 at 1:50 pm
"Wll Played" wants you to think they are being reasonable by a single request. Building up his strawman, he fails to mention the years of "requests" (read demands) that the group has placed on the district. This is the latest in a long, long, long stream of never ending "requests".
Stop messing about and formalize your opposition. About time you put out your agenda and stood behind it [portion removed by Palo Alto Online staff.] Follow "fools" advice.
a resident of Downtown North
on May 25, 2013 at 2:32 pm
Wow, maudlin indeed. Somehow we have really ended up with the "B" team.
a resident of Duveneck/St. Francis
on May 25, 2013 at 3:14 pm
The power of the small minority and its excesses seemed to have invite unexpected visitors into our neighborhood this week. No doubt they will find SOMETHING wrong.
Again, the PAUSD will be paying for these excesses for years to come.
a resident of Midtown
on May 25, 2013 at 3:23 pm
The We Can Do Better agenda has always been public. Here it is (from a flyer distributed at the parent education meeting that we cosponsored with the CAC, PASS and SEAN):
We are a group of parents and community members committed to schools in Palo Alto that support the social and emotional well-being of our community's children. We strongly believe that learning and health go hand-in-hand.
Over the last several years, we have:
Worked to reduce unnecessary academic stress in PAUSD schools, by advocating for the school-based components of our community's Project Safety Net plan.
Worked to move finals before winter break to guarantee our students a work free break.
Initiated a major district effort to improve the quality of counseling for students at Gunn High School, and served on the Gunn committee to plan the change.
Advocated for and served on the PAUSD committee that set time limits on homework, for the first time.
Demonstrated with data that less affluent and minority students are not as well served in PAUSD as in other districts, and supported college readiness for all students.
Worked for transparency and accountability in the governance of our district.
Our goals for now and the coming year are to:
Ensure that PAUSD addresses the issues raised by the OCR findings and investigations publicly and transparently.
Bring counseling reform at Gunn to a successful conclusion.
Reduce stress from test and project scheduling.
Continue to advocate for the Project Safety Net plan.
Work for online homework access for all students and parents.
Monitor implementation of homework time limits and other reforms we supported.
Continue to press for a more transparent and accountable school board.
a resident of another community
on May 25, 2013 at 3:36 pm
@retired teacher: you wrote - "The power of the small minority and its excesses seemed to have invite unexpected visitors into our neighborhood this week..."
I am sorry. I did not understand. Who were the unexpected visitors this week? What is "our neighborhood"? Who is "our"?
Can you please, educate me? Also - you identify yourself as a retired teacher. Would you kindly share what did you teach? where?
a resident of Duveneck/St. Francis
on May 25, 2013 at 3:41 pm
[Post removed by Palo Alto Online staff.]
a resident of Duveneck/St. Francis
on May 25, 2013 at 5:16 pm
I just heard from the staff there were visitors. If the staff are lying, that's not my problem. Good people should be able to disagree with others without being vilified, regardless of where they are coming from or their "name."
a resident of Duveneck/St. Francis
on May 25, 2013 at 5:26 pm
[Post removed by Palo Alto Online staff.]
a resident of another community
on May 25, 2013 at 5:58 pm
village fool is a registered user.
Woops, I just missed. I learned this thread was just locked. I had to log in when I tried to submit the following:
@Retired Teacher - I totally agree with your "Good people..."
I am sorry. I still do not understand. I asked above about visitors? neighborhood? our? Could you please educate at least as to "our"?
@Let me help - Thank you for stepping in! May I just ask not to use adjectives to describe other postings? This thread was started by "Curious" - most of "Curious" informative threads were locked, and made available only to those sign in. I am not really sure about the reasons. Possibly some adjectives were not approved? Just guessing, I do not know.
My Open Address to Ken Dauber - Web Link - was also maid available only to those who are signed in. That proved to stop the conversation. Fear of retaliation was mentioned many times.
@Curious - Thank you for digging in! please, continue. Systemic issues..
a resident of another community
on May 25, 2013 at 8:42 pm
village fool is a registered user.
I did not realize when I posted my most recent comment, above that "Let me help" posing were removed, completely. I commented, above about one adjective. The issue of locked threads was discussed many times.
While I totally agree that the one who pays the bills, maintain this board has the say - I do not understand. Especially when posting anomalously. I think that anyone who posts anonymously, needs to be able to take some other anonymous opinions, criticism and adjectives. Personally, I would be interested in all - except for personal info about individuals. I think it is in the best interest of all to know what is out there. I just re-read my Open Address thread - many comments were removed. I can not understand the reason of stopping the discussion here, on my open address thread, and many others.
a resident of JLS Middle School
on May 27, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Jls mom of 2 is a registered user.
[Post removed by Palo Alto Online staff.]
a resident of another community
on May 27, 2013 at 10:43 pm
village fool is a registered user.
@Curious - you wrote in a parallel thread you started today: "I am a citizen who believes that a better informed community is a good thing and I want to contribute to that. I am certainly not an attorney, as I have said. I leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions based on the facts I and others present. I welcome your comments and your participation in this effort!..."
Thank you again, for taking the time to inform us!
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Cherries and Berries
By Laura Stec | 3 comments | 1,482 views
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength . . .
By Chandrama Anderson | 2 comments | 923 views
Meeting Other New Parents
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One more week to vote!
Don't forget to cast your ballot online. Voting ends May 29th. Stay tuned for the results in the July 21st issue of the Palo Alto Weekly.


text:
Locals hit the slopes for Bridger Bowl opening day
BOZEMAN, Mont. - "This is my 18th winter skiing at Bridger and I've never seen an opening day as good as this one."
By mid-morning John Grossenbacher was already exhausted.
"I went up to the Bridger Lift and skied a couple runs. By that time, my legs had about had it so, I said this is about enough for today, for the first time," says Grossenbacher.
Meanwhile, Adam Rothman was just clicking into his skis.
"I was thinking there would be a long line here and a busy day at Bridger Bowl," says Rothman.
But by 11am, the line of powder hounds, who turned out to get the first tracks of the season, was gone.
"It's great, what more could you want for a first day," says Rothman.
There's no place else Rothman would rather be.
"I have a lot of good memories and lots of fun that I've had here and so, it's an important place for me," says Rothman.
Yet, Casey Riccatone is still forming his first impressions. He's never been to Bridger Bowl before.
"I like the snow so far, back in Colorado, there's nothing. They opened up way too soon and the snow's bad but out here, it's perfect already," says Riccatone.
Riccatone may be new to the mountain but even Bridger Bowl regulars are pleasantly surprised with opening day.
"It's early season conditions. Does it feel like it?" I asked.
"It doesn't. Well, compared to last year, it feels like midway, half-way through the season. It's actually pretty nice out," says Bozeman resident Anne Anderson. She says she skis daily.
Folks with Bridger Bowl say they're pleased with opening day 2012 as far as turnout, especially for an early season Friday. They say when it comes to conditions, timing is everything.
"Took a walk in the snow last night and got excited about that and was really looking forward to a good day today, which it's turned out to be," says Bridger Bowl Marketing Director Doug Wales.
I wanted to see what conditions were like for myself so, I hopped on the lift to take a couple of runs. The snow was soft and the only rocks I found were on ungroomed slopes. With five inches of fresh snow and a base of 24 inches, the coverage was good and the skiing was great.
Folks with Bridger Bowl say even though they have good snow, it's important to remember early season conditions still exist and to take proper precautions.


text:
Doll Flower Table & Chairs
- Overview
Playing with her dolls becomes even more fun with furniture that's sized just for them. Our wooden table and chairs are designed to resemble our scalloped kid-sized Flower Accent Table.
- Table: 10" diameter, 7.5" high
- Chair (2): 4.75" wide x 5" deep x 9" high
- Fits dolls up to 18" long.
- Crafted of wood and hand finished in our White and Simply White paint.
- Dimensions & Care
- Dust with a soft, dry cloth.
- Shipping & Return Info
Standard UPS can deliver most in-stock items within 4-5 business days.
Next Day Delivery and Processing
We can arrange for next day delivery to most destinations within the contiguous 48 states, for an extra charge of $17.50 per address. If we receive your order by 6pm PT Monday through Friday, you'll receive your order the next business day; orders placed on Friday after 6pm PT through Sunday will arrive on Tuesday. Note: Next Day Delivery service is not available for some oversized items, Premium In-Home White Glove Delivery, out of stock items, personalized items or for items shipped directly from the manufacturer.
Select oversized items have an additional delivery and processing surcharge; this charge is listed below the item price.
View the complete Shipping and Delivery Information page.
At Pottery Barn Kids, we take great pride in the quality and craftsmanship of our products. Attention to design, materials, safety and construction is our priority. We carefully inspect your order prior to shipment; upon receipt, please inspect your purchase and notify us of any damage. We will arrange for a prompt replacement. If, within 7 days for Quick Ship upholstery and 30 days for all other products, you are dissatisfied for any reason, you may return your purchase for a refund of the merchandise value.
If your return for Merchandise Credit Cards is greater than $10,000, we will issue $10,000 in Merchandise Credit Cards to you that day, and then mail additional Merchandise Credit Card(s) for the amount in excess of $10,000 to you.
For returns of items purchased from your Pottery Barn Kids registry, we will gladly provide a refund or exchange for the merchandise within 90 days of your event or within 90 days of purchase, whichever date is later.
Delivery fees are non-refundable and prior purchases are not eligible for a price adjustment. The following items are non-eligible for returns or exchanges:
- Personalized/Monogrammed items
- Mattresses
- Gift cards
- Special-order items (including made-to-order upholstery and custom order rugs)
- Final Sale items (identified by a price ending in $.97 or $.99)
- Items damaged through normal wear and tear.
Questions? See our full Returns Policy.


text:
Central Studio with Garden + Parking
Size33 m²
Floor No.0
- Family/child friendly
- Kitchen
- Parking available
- Balcony/terrace
- Disabled access
- Internet/WiFi
Accommodation summary
|Grellstraße, 10409 Berlin, Germany
|Property type
|Property ID
|Acceptance rate
|Response time
|A few hours
|Calendar updated
Enter the newly furnished studio to find the main living area which holds a comfortable queen size bed, a stylish sofa which can be converted into a double bed, and a wardrobe.
The kitchen is equipped with necessary cooking appliances including an oven, toaster and coffee machine. Sit at a breakfast bar with 4 stools to enjoy breakfast. A shower cabin, towel heater and hair dryer are placed in the bathroom.
Bustling Alexanderplatz Square is a 10-minute tram journey away. Visit Museum Island and the stunning Berliner Dom Cathedral by taking the tram for 15 minutes. The Brandenburg Gate is 20 minutes away by train, while Checkpoint Charlie can be reached in 25.
Pop to one of the nearby food establishments to sample the symbolic berlin dish of 'currywurst'.
House rulesCITY TAX
Since the 1st of January 2014 all private Berlin visitors have to pay the so called City Tax. This 5% tax has to be paid on top of the price you pay on airbnb and will be collected during the check in.
For more information please refer to the federal state of Berlin website.
A deposit of 200 EUR has to paid in cash at check in. If nothing has been damaged in the apartment, the deposit will be refunded at the latest two days after check out via bank transfer.
If check in takes place after 9 p.m. there will also be an extra late check in fee of 20 EUR which is payable in cash upon arrival.
Kids under the age of 3, who sleep in the bed with their parents, are allowed to stay for free!
Partying is prohibited in the apartment. Smoking is banned anywhere in the building. Do not make noise / play loud music after 10 pm or between noon and 2 pm. Please also try to be quiet when returning home late. The apartment may only be used by the named guests. The usage by a third party or any other additional occupancy is not permitted.
Bed linen and 1 hand towel + 1 bath towel per person are included. Extra towels cost extra and need to be ordered 1 week prior to your arrival.
|Price for > 2 guests
|17 NZ$ per guest/night extra
|Check-in after
|Check-in before
|On arrangement
|Check-out before
|Cancellation Policy
Reviews of this property
Very nice appartment with everything you need! Close to supermarket and public transport and in a nice area.
Kasia & Alan are very nice hosts and help you around!
The apartment is very clean, bright and friendly, it was to our satisfaction. Especially good is the location, with excellent transport links.
Das Appartement ist sehr sauber,hell und freundlich eingerichtet ,es war zu unserer Zufriedenheit. Besonders gut ist die Lage mit hervorragender Verkehrsanbindung.
A nice little appartment with a very friendly host. It is centrally located in Prenzlauer Berg - one of the nicest areas in Berlin. Go for it if you are a couple or a family with up to two children.
We had a good time in Berlin. The apartment was very nice and was fully furnished. Around the corner directly to a traffic connections. Happy at the next visit berlin again.
Wir hatten eine gute zeit in Berlin. Die Wohnung war sehr schön und war komplett eingerichtet. Um die Ecke direkt eine verkehrsanbindung. Gerne beim nächsten berlinbesuch wieder.
There were three in the apartment and it was all very nice. The ground-level exit to the backyard with a garden, we enjoyed the great summer weather. Transport links were also very simple and ideal for the four days. THANKS to Alan and Kasia
Wir waren zu dritt in dem Appartment und es war alles sehr schön. Den ebenerdigen Ausgang in den Hinterhof mit Garten haben wir beim sommerlichem Wetter sehr genossen. Auch die Verkehrsanbindung war sehr einfach und für die vier Tage optimal. DANKE an Alan und Kasia
Excellent stay in this apartment very functional and well located. We recommend! Lovely flat, well situated. Hope to come back soon!
Excellent séjour dans cet appart très fonctionnel et bien situé. On recommande !
Lovely flat, well situated. Hope to come back soon!
we had a great stay in Berlin. The apartment was as described, well equipped and clean. Great central location for scampi. and parking are plentiful! thank you - happy again :)
wir hatten eine super aufenthalt in berlin. das apartment war wie beschrieben, gut ausgestattet und sauber. super zentral gelegen zur sbahn. und parkplätze sind ausreichend vorhanden! vielen dank - gerne wieder :)
Apartment very simpa great location very clean and beautiful garden.
Appartement très simpa super bien situé très propre et magnifique jardin.
- Quality assured accommodation
- Every host is verified by telephone
- Secure payment via SSL encryption


text:
Mathematics Learning Objectives
At Mount Union, students majoring in mathematics develop the ability to think critically and use mathematical reasoning in everyday life. Students will be introduced to a number of interesting and useful ideas in preparation for a number of career opportunities in business, government and industry.
Teaching is also an option mathematics graduates have for a career field. Students spend time working in local secondary and middle school mathematics classes.
Math majors have the option to concentrate in statistics taking classes such as elementary statistics, mathematical statistics I and II, and advanced quantitative tools for business and economics. This concentration helps students prepare for careers in actuarial work and as executives in major business firms. Students are able to take a wide variety of classes. Those students who would like to continue their education in graduate school, have opportunities to take many electives to prepare them.
Students can join organizations such as Pi Mu Epsilon honorary and the Mathematics Club.
Experiential learning options that will allow students to put classroom knowledge into practice include cooperative education programs, field trips, mathematical and statistics conferences, specialized courses, seminars, guest lecturers, and classroom speakers.
Mathematics Learning Objectives
- Students will demonstrate their knowledge of key theories, concepts, and methods of inquiry in mathematics.
- Students will demonstrate their ability to solve problems in mathematics using appropriate technology, translating problems from one form to another, using various problem-solving strategies.
- Students will demonstrate their ability to think critically about mathematics by applying key theories, concepts, and methods of inquiry in mathematics to novel problems, to other disciplines, and to situations that require understanding rather than rote memory.
- Students will demonstrate the ability to effectively communicate mathematics orally and in writing.


text:
To replace another as a third wheel. Usually done against the will of the original third wheeler. The logical extension of the cock block to third wheeling.
I was going to go with Ryan and Molly to the movies but they went with Josh instead. I can't believe Josh would wheel steal me like that.
by dontrush July 14, 2011