text: OverviewBack to top Alba Botanica - Even Advanced CC Cream Tinted Mineral Perfector Light to Medium 15 SPF - 1.7 oz. Item# :133782UPC# :724742003296 Brand:Alba Botanica Size/Form:1.70 oz. Ship Weight:0.15 Alba Botanica Even Advanced CC Cream Tinted Mineral Perfector Light to Medium SPF 15 - 1.7 oz. (50g) Alba Botanica Even Advanced CC Cream Tinted Mineral Perfector Light to Medium SPF 15 is correction perfection. For a picture-perfect complexion, discover Alba Botanica's 6-in-1, multi-miracle Color Correcting Even Advanced CC Cream Tinted Mineral Perfector Light to Medium SPF 15. Instantly, Alba Botanica Even Advanced CC Cream Tinted Mineral Perfector Light to Medium SPF 15 delivers tone correcting advanced skin care and almost undetectable light coverage. Feather light mineral makeup blends flawlessly to give skin a smooth, even, air brushed finish. Meanwhile Alba Botanica's antioxidant-rich Marine Complex of algae extracts and vitamin C replenish and moisturize while helping break up areas of discoloration. All that, and it won't clog your pores. What more could a girl want? About Alba Botanica Alba Botanica makes natural, 100% vegetarian personal care products that do beautiful for you and your friends: people, animals + earth. This means they DON'T use parabens, sulfates, or phthalates. Mission The Alba Botanica mission is to Do Beautiful. Alba Botanica offers natural, 100% vegetarian personal care products that do beautiful for you, your friends and the animals and Earth you love. Alba Botanica offers a full range of products packed with potent natural, botanical ingredients that are formulated to nourish the individualized needs of your skin and hair. With their products, the way that they make them, and how they treat others, Alba Botanica wants to inspire and uplift women from head to soul. They're one seriously nourished team that can do beautiful together! Because the Alba Botanica brand is committed to the health and happiness of all furry friends, they never test their products, or the ingredients that go into them, on animals. Alba Botanica recognizes the need to be good stewards of all natural resources. So they try to do beautiful by reducing their environmental impact in everything they do as a business, from the field to the final product. Alba Botanica hopes that you join their do beautiful campaign. Together you can help to preserve and heal the planet, now and for future generations. Products Alba Botanica products contain natural, organic and cruelty-free ingredient alternatives which are 100% vegetarian. They passionately strive to deliver the finest possible formulations for the ultimate efficacy and benefits to your skin and hair. They make maximum use of ingredients from the wonderful Earth's plant sources…from rich vegetable and nut oils to pure plant waxes to herbal extracts and pure essential oils. Alba Botanica products contain no meat or by-products of animal killing. They also reject all cruelly obtained animal ingredients, even if an animal is not killed. Alba Botanica limits their use of animal products to ingredients that are naturally created by and have no future use to the animal such as beeswax. Alba Botanica products are formulated without: parabens, phthalates, artificial colors, propylene glycol, aluminum, mineral oil, petrolatum, oxybenzone, PABA, nano-particles, DEA, MEA or TEA, PEGs and PEG derivatives, ethoxylated ingredients associated with 1,4 dioxane and formaldehyde donors. Doing Beautiful Alba Botanica is humbled by a profound respect for all beings. That is why Alba Botanica and all of their ingredients suppliers proudly stand against animal testing of any kind. The evidence of their commitment to this philosophy is the little Leaping Bunny on their packaging. This logo is an internationally recognized symbol for cruelty-free cosmetics, personal care and household products. And Alba Botanica holds their partnership with and commitment to the Leaping Bunny Program very dear. Alba Botanica admires their legacy. In 1996, eight national animal protection groups banded together to form The Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics (CCIC). This organization created and administers the Leaping Bunny Program, a cruelty-free standard for companies producing cosmetic, personal care, and household products. The Leaping Bunny Program provides the best assurance that no new animal testing is used in any phase of product development by the company, its laboratories, or suppliers. When you buy Alba Botanica products you are showing your love of animals. Alba Botanica thanks you for supporting a non-harming way of life.


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Chief Minister of Kerala Oommen Chandy has expressed displeasure over the move that denied granting of classical status to Malayalam language. Chandy's statement comes following the stand taken by the language panel of Kendra Sahitya Akademi. The panel had decided against the granting of 'classical status' to Malayalam, stating that it is a 'younger' language in comparison with Tamil and other southern tongues. Addressing the state assembly, the Chief Minister said that Kerala would fight for it as it is the state's right.
"Granting classical status to Malayalam language is not charity given by anybody and government will continue to take up the issue with the Centre," he said while replying to a report on the matter. Minister for Culture and Rural Development KC Joseph also affirmed the matter, saying that denial of the classical status for Malayalam language has no justification.
"Malayalam language is 1500 years old and was as old as the other languages that have been given classical status in South India," said Joseph. The requirement for classical tag for Kerala has been pressed for quite some time, with the language being excluded from the stamp, in the entire South Indian scenario.
The decision taken by the Sahitya Academy has been resented by luminaries of the Malayalam literary world as well. But a recent meeting of a sub-panel of Sahitya Academy held at Hyderabad, headed by an eminent linguist rejected the claim. He argued that the status would be conferred on languages that have an antiquity of over 1500-2000 years. old.
The LDF government that ruled kerala, prior to the current UDF government had also put in their efforts seeking the elevation of Malayalam to a higher rank. A comprehensive report was set up by a panel of scholars, where the antiquity and tradition of the language was highlighted.
Short URL: http://indiawires.com/?p=11843

subset: commoncrawl


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So … About Fashion's Night Out?
As much as we hate that we want to know, we want to know: how did your Fashion's Night Out turn out? Did you hit any great deals? See anything amazing? Score any free drinks? I skipped the whole thing and went to a TV on the Radio/Broken Social Scene show where I was within spitting distance of Scarlett Johansson (and yes, she is every bit as gorgeous and winsome as you'd hate her to be). So tell us your FNO victories and horror stories in the comments!


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If the Romney's can't win legally, they'll take over Ohio's electronic voting machines through investments, a direct conflict of interest in a contentious state in this election.
The new owners of Ohio's voting machines under the brand name HART Intercivic is none other than Tagg Romney the son of one of the candidates Mitt Romney. In recent weeks Tagg has taken a more "active role in his father's campaign management" but when you look further, he also has a major problem with that role.
Tagg Romney Invested in Ohio Electronic Voting Machines
Current Status: Blessed (1)
Seeded on Sat Oct 20, 2012 9:13 AM
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Here's me starting some basic snooping on the technical side of what the NSA does when it attempts to monitor everyone in the world. How can it do that? Read on if you want to geek out.
… On June 9, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the last few years the National Security Agency has been relying on a software program "with the quirky name Hadoop" to help it make sense of its enormous collections of data. Named after a toy elephant that belonged to the child of one of the original developers of the program, "Hadoop," reported the Journal, is a crucial part of "a computing and software revolution … a piece of free software that lets users distribute big-data projects across hundreds or thousands of computers."
"Revolution" is probably the most overused word in the chronicle of Internet history, but if anything, the Wall Street Journal undersold the real story. Hadoop's importance to how we live our lives today is hard to overstate. By making it economically feasible to extract meaning from the massive streams of data that increasingly define our online existence, Hadoop effectively enabled the surveillance state.
And not just in the narrowest, Big Brother, government-is-watching-everyone-all-the-time sense of that term. Hadoop is equally critical toprivate sector corporate surveillance. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix — just about every big player that gathers the trillions of data "events" generated by our everyday online actions employs Hadoop as a part of their arsenal of Big Data-crunching tools. Hadoop is everywhere — as one programmer told me, "it's taken over the world."
The Journal's description of Hadoop as "a piece of free software" barely scratches the surface of the significance of this particular batch of code. In the past half-decade Hadoop has emerged as one of the triumphs of the non-proprietary, open-source software programming methodology that previously gave us the Apache Web server, the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser. Hadoop belongs to nobody. Anyone can copy it, modify, extend it as they please. Funny, that: A software program developed collaboratively by programmers who believe that their code should be shared in as open and transparent a process as possible has resulted in the creation of tools that everyone from the NSA to Facebook uses to annihilate any semblance of individual privacy. But what's even more ironic, and fascinating, is the sight of intelligence agencies like the NSA and CIA joining in and becoming integral players in the world of open source big data software. The NSA doesn't just use Hadoop. NSA programmers have improved and extended Hadoop and donated their changes and additions back to the larger community. The CIA actively invests in start-ups that are commercializing Hadoop and other open source projects.
They're all in it together. The spooks and the social media titans and the online commerce goliaths are collaborating to improve data-crunching software tools that enable the tracking of our behavior in fantastically intimate ways that simply weren't possible as recently as four or five years ago. It's a new military industrial open source Big Data complex. The gift economy has delivered us the surveillance state.
Hadoop's earliest roots go back to 2002, when Doug Cutting, then the search director at the Internet Archive, and Michael Cafarella, a graduate student at the University of Washington, started working on an open-source search engine called "Nutch." But the project did not get serious traction until Cutting joined Yahoo and began to merge his work into Yahoo's larger strategic goal of improving its search engine technology so as to better compete with Google. Significantly, Yahoo executives decided not to make the project proprietary. In 2006, they blessed the formation of Hadoop, an open-source project managed under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. (For a much more detailed look at the history of Hadoop, please read this four-part history of Hadoop at GigaOm.)
Hadoop is basically a nifty hack. The definition, per Wikipedia, is surprisingly simple: "It supports the running of applications on large clusters of commodity hardware." Bottom line, Hadoop provides a means for distributing both the storage and processing of an enormous amount of data over lots and lots of relatively inexpensive computers. Hadoop turned out to be cheap, fast and scalable — meaning it could expand smoothly in capacity as the flows of data it was crunching burgeoned in size, simply though plugging in extra computers to the network. Hadoop was also fundamentally modular — different parts of it could be easily replaced by custom designed chunks of software, making it seamlessly adaptable to the individual circumstances of different corporations — or government agencies.
Hadoop's debut was timely, addressing not only the problems Yahoo faced in managing the enormous amounts of data produced by its users, but also those that the entire Internet industry was simultaneously struggling to cope with. Basically, the Internet had become a victim of its own success. The enormous flows of data generated by users of the likes of Facebook and Twitter far overwhelmed the ability of those companies to make sense of it. There was too much coming in too fast. Hadoop helped companies cope with the tsunami — it was, in the words of Jeff Hammerbacher, an early employee of Facebook, "our tool for exploiting the unreasonable effectiveness of data."
Before Hadoop, you were at the mercy of your data. After Hadoop, you were in charge. You could figure out all kinds of interesting things. You could recognize patterns in the data and start to make inferences about what might happen if you made tweaks to your product. What did users do when the interface was adjusted like this? What kinds of ads made them more likely to pull out their credit cards? What did that batch of millions of Verizon calls reveal about the formation of a potential terrorist cell? Facebook wouldn't be able to exploit the insights of its so-called social graphwithout tools like Hadoop.
"Hadoop has become the de facto standard tool for cost-effectively processing Big Data," says Raymie Stata, who served as chief technology officer at Yahoo before eventually starting his own Hadoop-focused start-up, Altiscale. And the significance of being able to cheaply process Big Data, to accurately "measure" what your users are doing, he added, is a "big deal." …
When Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and others bet big on Hadoop, they also knew that HDFS and MapReduce were limited in their ability to deal with expressive queries through a language like SQL. This is how Hive, Pig, and Sqoop were ultimately hatched. Given that so much data on earth is managed through SQL, many companies and projects are offering ways to address the compatibility of Hadoop and SQL. Pivotal HD's HAWQ is one example—a parallel SQL-compliant query engine that has shown to be 10 to 100s of times faster than other Hadoop query engines in the market today—and it was built to support petabyte data sets.
… Who Uses Hadoop?
A wide variety of companies and organizations use Hadoop for both research and production. Users are encouraged to add themselves to the Hadoop PoweredBy wiki page. …
… Where did Hadoop come from?
Mike Olson: The underlyingtechnology was invented by Google back in their earlier days so they could usefully index all the rich textural and structural information they were collecting, and then present meaningful and actionable results to users. There was nothing on the market that would let them do that, so they built their own platform. Google's innovations were incorporated into Nutch, an open source project, and Hadoop was later spun-off from that. Yahoo has played a key role developing Hadoop for enterprise applications.
What problems can Hadoop solve?
Mike Olson: The Hadoop platform was designed to solve problems where you have a lot of data — perhaps a mixture of complex and structured data — and it doesn't fit nicely into tables. It's for situations where you want to run analytics that are deep and computationally extensive, like clustering and targeting. That's exactly what Google was doing when it was indexing the web and examining user behavior to improve performance algorithms.
Hadoop applies to a bunch of markets. In finance, if you want to do accurate portfolio evaluation and risk analysis, you can build sophisticated models that are hard to jam into a database engine. But Hadoop can handle it. In online retail, if you want to deliver better search answers to your customers so they're more likely to buy the thing you show them, that sort of problem is well addressed by the platform Google built. Those are just a few examples. …
It's fair to say that a current Hadoop adopter must be more sophisticated than a relational database adopter. There are not that many "shrink wrapped" applications today that you can get right out of the box and run on your Hadoop processor. It's similar to the early '80s when Ingres and IBM were selling their database engines and people often had to write applications locally to operate on the data. That said, you can develop applications in a lot of different languages that run on the Hadoop framework. The developer tools and interfaces are pretty simple. Some of our partners — Informatica is a good example — have ported their tools so that they're able to talk to data stored in a Hadoop cluster using Hadoop APIs. There are specialist vendors that are up and coming, and there are also a couple of general process query tools: a version of SQL that lets you interact with data stored on a Hadoop cluster, and Pig, a language …
Hadoop is an open-source software framework for running large batch-oriented information analytics jobs across clusters of commodity servers. Inspired by work at Google and Yahoo!, Hadoop exposes the MapReduce programming paradigm and can also be used with open-source tools from Apache including Hbase, Pig and Hive. Unstructured data stored in Hadoop is distributed and stored multiple times across the Hadoop machine cluster to optimize both performance and reliability.
http://www.greenplum.com/industry-buzz/hadoop… Every day, people send 150 billion new email messages. The number of mobile devices already exceeds the world's population and is growing. With every keystroke and click, we are creating new data at a blistering pace.
This brave new world is a potential treasure trove for data scientists and analysts who can comb through massive amounts of data for new insights, research breakthroughs, undetected fraud or other yet-to-be-discovered purposes. But it also presents a problem for traditional relational databases and analytics tools, which were not built to handle the data being created. Another challenge is the mixed sources and formats, which include XML, log files, objects, text, binary and more.
"We have a lot of data in structured databases, traditional relational databases now, but we have data coming in from so many sources that trying to categorize that, classify it and get it entered into a traditional database is beyond the scope of our capabilities," said Jack Collins, director of the Advanced Biomedical Computing Center at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. "Computer technology is growing rapidly, but the number of [full-time equivalent positions] that we have to work with this is not growing. We have to find a different way."
Enter Apache Hadoop, an open-source, distributed programming framework that relies on parallel processing to store and analyze tremendous amounts of structured and unstructured data. Although Hadoop is far from the only big-data tool, it is one that has generated remarkable buzz and excitement in recent years. And it offers a possible solution for IT leaders who are realizing that they will soon be buried in more data than they can efficiently manage and use.
"In the last 10 years, this is one of the most important developments because it's really transforming the way we work, our business processes and the way we think about data," said Ed Granstedt, a vice president at predictive analytics firm GoldBot Consulting. "This change is coming, and if government leaders don't understand how to use this change, they're going to get left behind or pushed aside."
Why it matters
Hadoop is more than just a faster, cheaper database and analytics tool. In some cases, the Hadoop framework lets users query datasets in previously unimaginable ways.


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Birth-control advocate and liberal media darling Sandra Fluke made it through Tuesday's state Senate primary to November's general election, but wasn't the top vote-getter.
Fluke, who came in to the race with the highest name recognition of any of the five candidates running for California's 26th Senate District, was bested by Ben Allen, a member of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District board, who edged out Fluke with 21.9 percent of the vote to Fluke's 19.4 percent.
Allen was not particularly well-known when he entered the race, despite having a strong base in a populous area of the district. He was helped considerably by wealthy businessman (and former Republican) Bill Bloomfield, who donated about $600,000 on the race.
Fluke and Allen will compete again in the November general election without a Republican opponent.
Correction: This post has been updated to correct that there is no runoff for the party nomination. In California, the two candidates with the most votes, regardless of party, advance to the general election in November.


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A fortunate few can afford to keep a pro guitarist on a retainer to answer a late-night call to lay down a sweet 12-string track to spice up a ballad or a slamming metal groove for an ad soundtrack. B... Click To Read More About This Product
A fortunate few can afford to keep a pro guitarist on a retainer to answer a late-night call to lay down a sweet 12-string track to spice up a ballad or a slamming metal groove for an ad soundtrack. But everyone else can fall back on Virtual Guitarist 2. The perfect rhythm guitarist, it plays both acoustic and electric guitar, offering the right riff for almost every style of music. Steinberg's virtual guitarist can play in any key, master even the most challenging chords, automatically play in time with your song's tempo, and even sync up to the drum's groove, if you wish.
New Features
Virtual Guitarist 2 composition software offers all the content of Virtual Guitarist and Virtual Guitarist Electric Edition, plus 32 brand-new styles. The new Part Editor lets you create entirely new guitar licks, riffs and grooves at will. The enhanced version also ships with a battery of new stomp box effects, amp models and workflow refinements.
More styles & sounds
32 brand-new styles recorded by world-class guitarists, plus 56 styles originally featured in Virtual Guitarist and Electric Edition. A 6.8 GB archive of high-end recordings covers just about every musical style.
New Part Editor
The new Part Editor lets you revise and revamp every phrase rendered by Virtual Guitarist 2. And every slice can be moved, deleted, muted and transposed at will.
GrooveMatch technology
Courtesy of the new GrooveMatch technology, you can modify Virtual Guitarist parts to match existing MIDI grooves. Incoming MIDI data are analyzed and the part's slices are automatically adapted.
New stomp box effects
The new virtual stomp box FX turn Virtual Guitarist 2 into a nifty effects rack for crafting professional-class sounds. The FX arsenal holds all the classic guitar effects - wah-wah, compressor, fuzz, tremolo, chorus, flanger, phaser, reverb and delay. Guitar-centric EQs are also available.
Amp, speaker & microphone type
For added sound-shaping power, Virtual Guitarist 2 now offers three different types of amps and four speaker models, as well as two microphones and two mic positioning options.
MIDI Learn
All crucial editing knobs are now endowed with a practical MIDI learn function. In a matter of seconds, you can assign every sound parameter of Virtual Guitarist 2 software to your external MIDI controller.
Enhanced compatibility
Supporting for all standard plug-in formats such as VST, DXi, AU and Rewire, Virtual Guitarist 2 now readily integrates into every professional host application. The standalone version now also supports multiple outputs.
What is Virtual Guitarist?
Virtual Guitarist is a VST instrument with the capacity to render a variety of rhythm guitar styles. In this case, a style entails not only a specific playing technique, but also the type of guitar, amp, phrasing and effect. You can easily determine via MIDI the desired key and chord. As soon as you do, Virtual Guitarist starts accompanying your song - without making mistakes, but always with perfect timing. You are free to modify the sound, phrasing and other playing parameters on the fly and in real time. With all these options at your fingertips, you can conjure the perfect guitar tracks to suit your taste and the song.
How does Virtual Guitarist 2 work?
Rather than synthesizing sounds that emulate guitars, Virtual Guitarist 2 music software taps real guitar tracks recorded by professional studio guitarists. This is why Virtual Guitarist 2 sounds so animated and authentic rather than static and artificial. It's realism is uncanny, almost as if a flesh-and-blood guitarist is playing your song. Nonetheless, Virtual Guitarist 2 is nearly as versatile as a synthesizer. Instead of fixed loops, it works with slices enabling every attack to be triggered and edited any way you wish.
Audio quality and sound library
All sounds archived in the 6.8-GB library were recorded with premium equipment and post-processed by pro audio engineers to attain remarkably warm, transparent and punchy tones. A battery of excellent electric and acoustic guitars were employed for the recordings, among them genuine classics and valuable custom models. Every one of the 88 styles comprises up to 14 parts played with different techniques and recorded in 12 different keys. And that puts at your fingertips a vast selection of riffs, licks, grooves and fills covering almost every conceivable style of music.
The Part Editor
The Part Editor presents a view of the phrase's structure and enables radical manipulations. Its waveforms serve to visualize the individual attacks, indicating pitch along the vertical axis and time along the horizontal axis. Dragging a slice to the left or right changes its timing within the bar. The decay, pitch and volume of every slice may also be edited. Other options include deleting, muting and totally rearranging the slices that make up a part to create entirely new phrases. And the updated Part Editor lets you revise and revamp every phrase rendered by Virtual Guitarist 2. Every slice can be moved, deleted, muted and transposed at will.
Groove settings
Every phrase's micro-timing can be edited in the Part Editor's Groove area. You can select various swing values and adapt the part to suit any MIDI groove. For example, you could impose a drum groove directly on a rhythm guitar. To this end, Virtual Guitarist 2 analyzes MIDI data and automatically adapts the timing to match this incoming data (GrooveMatch).
The Effect section
The Effect section of Virtual Guitarist 2 offers every sound-sculpting tool required to shape professional guitar tones. Virtual stomp box effects such as a wah-wah, compressor, fuzz, tremolo, chorus, flanger, phaser, reverb and delay are on board. The amp section offers a selection of solid-state, tube and rectifier amps. As an added benefit, these FX section may be employed not only for Virtual Guitarist 2, but also as an independent plug-in for other instruments and host application tracks. Guitar-centric EQs are also available.
The Output section
In a real studio you can set up different speaker combinations. This section offers the same option of selecting various speaker configurations to shape guitar sounds. Virtual Guitarist 2 features four different speakers providing the combinations and sounds favored by the majority of guitarists. You can elect to record these speakers using dynamic or capacitor microphones, positioning them directly in front of the speaker membrane (on axis) or at its edge (off axis).
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This coming Friday is the Argenta Art Walk. Every 3rd Friday of the month Argenta hosts an art walk with dozens of local artists diplaying their work for sale. The Baker House B&B is located in the heart of the Art Walk along Main Street. Come stay with us and enjoy some great art during Art Walk or just visit one of the several galleries along Main Street.
Clean Eating Cottage Cheese Pancakes were a hit this morning at the Baker House! We love it when we get to share recipes with guests too. Don't foget to like our Facebook page – Baker House Bed & Breakfast.
Summer is the traditional busy season for us at the Baker House B&B. Over the next two months we have half our rooms already reserved. So make sure you make your reservations as soon as possible to get the room and date you want. You can use the reservation link above to make your reservation now online.
The THEA Art Street Festival was held today on Main Street in front of the Baker House B&B. Dozens of artists were about in tents with their unique works and there were several tents where kids and adults alike could paint, sculpt and throw pottery on a wheel. This is just one of the many street festivals held annually in the Argenta Arts District and the Baker House is located in the center of the Arts Disrict. Come visit, stay and enjoy the wonderful arts in Argenta
Please join us at the Thea Foundation this Saturday, April 28, for the first annual Thea Arts Festival, 10am to 6pm in the Argenta Arts District. The Baker House B&B is centrally located in the heart of the Argenta Arts District. Enjoy great ART, MUSIC, FOOD, and HANDS-ON ARTS ACTIVITIES for all ages. Check out the web site link listed above for quick links showing the list of presenting artists, music, artist demonstration, and dance schedules, and more!
Verizon Arena welcomes WWE Raw World Tour live Saturday, July 21st at 7:30PM! Tickets are on sale Friday, May 18th at 10AM. Come see all of your favorite WWE Superstars live! Buy your WWE tickets and make your reservations at the Baker House B&B ASAP before we sell out like we do for most Verizon Arena events
The Baker House B&B has set a new record for reservations and bookings. The actual number of night stays in March and reservation nights for Aoril and May total over 200. Nearly 100 rooms were occupied in March. The Baker House is THE place to stay in downtown Little Rock and our guests prove it by their continued repeat stays. Make your reservations early to get the suite and night you want.
The Arkansas Literary Festival is this weekend with several events scheduled in Argenta within blocks of the Baker House. We still have several rooms available for Friday and Saturday nights. Make your reservations soon, and enjoy a relaxed, walking Literary Festival and all of the events without worrying about parking or traffic
Once again the Baker House has sold out for a major concert at the Verizon Arena. This time it is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakiers on April 21st. Our guests will be enjoying dinner at one of the many restaurants located within two blocks of the Baker House and then walking the four blocks to the Arena for the concert. Make your reservations now for your next concertt
This from one of our guests this week who after one stay booked over 20 additional nights stay between now and the end of June "Just wanted to let you guys know how much I enjoyed my stay this week! The house is perfect for my weeks in Little Rock. While Im not keen on being away from home, staying at the Baker House certainly makes itmuch more enjoyable and I look forward to my stay next week!"


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My questions:
1. Got any favorite cartoons and/or animes? Care to share? (looking for something to watch)
House of five leafs, i dunno why i like it but its catchy xD
2. How about comics and/or mangas?
Saint for rent(web comic) and Horimiya manga.
3. Do you bake/cook? Google some recipes & pick one you'd like to try out sometime! (I wanna try baking a Key lime pie)
hahha that key lime i found, i would to find out what it tastes like xD
4. Potato?
5. Like monsters? (I do) If you turned into one, what kinda monster would you be? (I can't make up my mind)
ID be a hot man with great horns and wings and have an long tail XD and be like all white.
6. Potato.
7. Okay I give up this is harder than it looks.
XD hahha
My Questions:
1.Ur favourite make up color?
2.The weirdest thing on youtube?
3.The best song ever?
4.Ur favourite deviantart artist at the moment?
5.The clothes that u really want?
6.What are u wearing right now? ovo(not creepy at all)
7.Ur favourite movie?
8.Any new song u like at the moment?
9.Have you seen this:www.youtube.com/watch?v=YECk2I and what do you think. xD
10.if u were an animal what animal would u be?
i tag ChewDew


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A.L. Kennedy isn't one to get hung up on ornamentation. Even, say, titles. All the Rage is the Scotland-born, London-based author's sixth collection of short stories – she's also penned six novels and three works of non-fiction – and it's full of generic names like Late in Life, These Small Pieces, and This Man. You get the sense these are placeholders, scribbled at the top of the page so that Kennedy can get to her real work that much quicker. But don't let these utilitarian titles fool you: Kennedy is one of the most consistently dazzling writers of prose going today, and All the Rage is so dynamic and alive that it might skitter right off your coffee table.
Billed as a collection of stories about love, All the Rage feels, to me, more like the author's latest series of dispatches from the human psyche's rawest and most chaotic corners. Kennedy has covered this territory before, and she seems at home here; love and its absence just so happen to be the active ingredients this time around. These are men and women in committed relationships, sussing out new ones, sleeping with the hired help, waking up in the hospital, singing off-key in church, running from troubled pasts, and always thinking, thinking, thinking.
Kennedy's stories usually begin in one character's head, and they always hit the ground running. She began her 2012 novel The Blue Book thusly: "But here this is, the book you're reading. Obviously." That streak continues in All the Rage. A Thing Unheard-of opens with "The thing is, you know they'll be thinking much the same." In Run Catch Run, it's "It couldn't last. Not this. There was no way it ever would have. Never mind." Where other writers are intimidated by the blank page in front of them, you get the sense Kennedy can't attack it fast enough, filling line after line after line with her protagonists' inner turmoil.
Once they've gotten going, her stories don't slow down, either. Kennedy's insistence on galloping internal monologues often means that it takes her protagonists a page or two to circle back to what's really on their minds. Baby Blue, for instance, begins with a woman bemoaning waking up far from home with jet lag, the "wrong sun" behind the curtains and her skin smelling "frightened and of catering in confinement." A lesser writer would have saved this kind of description for the main event, but Kennedy barrels right along, her narrator finally admitting that this is actually a story about the time she wandered into a sex shop by mistake and was then coerced into buying a vibrator by two salespeople who are both aggressively perky and aggressively Canadian. Then it transforms into something else entirely, and these late-stage metamorphoses, too, are not uncommon (see also: the kaleidoscopic title story, set – partly – in a train station). Kennedy is all too aware that stories are an inherently messy medium. Sometimes we forget the punch line. Sometimes we get distracted by what we see out of the corner of our eye. To trim off these loose ends, Kennedy argues, is to excise much of a story's honesty.
It's remarkable that Kennedy has maintained such an output of literary fiction over the past twenty years, as her resume also includes radio plays, live theatre, Dr. Who e-books, and stand-up comedy. But she leaves her stamp wherever she goes, and audiences everywhere are the better for it.
In The Practice of Mercy, Kennedy offers a particularly brilliant analysis of where her fiction sits in the larger literary landscape – one that's disguised as a description of hotel breakfasts. "These days," her narrator thinks, surveying the buffet, "hotels practically everywhere had the same eggs, sausages, bacon, hash browns, French toast, the customary Anglo-American harbingers of obesity and doom." Dorothy, however, "continued to long for regional variations and mistakes – dishes of weird broth, unpardonable chicken sausages, potatoes to which sad accidents must have happened, strange grains and badly transfigured eggs."
In this moment, the reader feels an instinctive affection for Dorothy. And it's only heightened when she imagines approaching a server with this query: "Excuse me, do these taste bizarre, or have a disturbing texture, in which case I'll take several?" In a way, readers browsing their local bookstores for All the Rage will be asking much the same question.
Michael Hingston is the books columnist for the Edmonton Journal. His novel The Dilettantes was released last fall.Report Typo/Error
Follow us on Twitter: @GlobeBooks


text: We found a great bit of "support" for Cleavage Day from Axe. These super sexy cups give guys the opportunity to admire and hold some steaming cleavage – feel the full AXE effect when you place your hand around one of these nice, warm cups. They're not just good for boys, though – if you forgot to dress accordingly today ladies, just keep one of these in your hand.


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Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Director Benh Zeitlin's debut feature is set in a fictional Louisiana community called "the Bathtub", an area south of the levee, cut off from the rest of the world both geographically and socially. But rather than feel disconnected, the Bathtub's inhabitants feel far closer to the earth and to each other than the rest of the US – "the dry world" – can claim.
To the eyes of outsiders and adults the area looks desperate, barely hanging on with houses and boats made from whatever junk has drifted past on its way to the sea. But we don't see this from the POV of someone mature and removed, we experience it through the eyes of Hushpuppy, a six-year-old girl who views the place as something altogether more magical. Played by Quvenzhané Wallis (a local newcomer, like most of the cast), her charming and highly naturalistic performance is up for an Oscar, and she rightfully dominates the film. In her world she's preparing herself for the inevitable end of civilisation, holding her family together. She's trying to get her father to take his medicine, looking for her missing mother and plagued by dreams of huge prehistoric beasts. The Blu-ray also includes Zeitlin's previous effort, Glory At Sea, a short film set in the aftermath of the New Orleans flood that makes for an excellent companion piece to the main feature.
Blu-ray & DVD, StudioCanal
C'était Un Rendezvous
Claude Lelouch's classic 1976 nine-minute, high-speed drive around the Paris streets.
DVD, Spirit Level
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
Third time is the charm for this Dreamworks CGI franchise as they actually decided to make a good one.
Blu-ray & DVD, Paramount
Chilling Russian noir dealing with issues of family and loyalty, which has an excellent Philip Glass score.
Blu-ray & DVD, New Wave Films
Ethan Hawke stars as a writer investigating multiple spooky murders in this surprise box office hit.
Blu-ray & DVD, Momentum


text:
Early Screening of Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Cirrhotic Patients: a Prospective Study
The recruitment status of this study is unknown. The completion date has passed and the status has not been verified in more than two years.
Verified April 2013 by Jung-Fa,Tsai, Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital.
Recruitment status was: Recruiting
Recruitment status was: Recruiting
Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital
Information provided by (Responsible Party):
Jung-Fa,Tsai, Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
First received: February 26, 2008
Last updated: April 17, 2013
Last verified: April 2013
- Full Text View
- Tabular View
- No Study Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
No Study Results Posted on ClinicalTrials.gov for this Study
|Study Status:
|This study is currently recruiting participants.
|Estimated Study Completion Date:
|December 2013
|Estimated Primary Completion Date:
|December 2013 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)


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Bulgaria accuses Hezbollah of a deadly airport attack last year. European Union and Africa consider international force for Mali. I'm Ray Kouguell reporting from Washington.
The Bulgarian government says Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing of a tourist bus near a Black Sea port city last year, in which five Israelis, one Bulgarian were killed. VOA's Al Pessin reports.
Bulgaria's Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov made the announcement Tuesday in Sofia. The minister said genetic material led investigators to conclude two Hezbollah operatives were among the three men responsible for the attack. But investigators found no direct link to Hezbollah's backers in Iran or to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
On July 12 of last year, a bomb exploded on a bus carrying an Israeli youth group at an airport near Burgas. In addition to those killed, 32 Israelis were wounded, most of them children. Another man was also killed and he was believed to be a suicide bomber. Al Pessin, VOA news, London.
President Obama plans to make his first presidential visit to Israel and will also go to the West Bank and Jordan. The White House says the topics of discussion will be wide-ranging. They will include Syria and Iran.
Israel media reports Mr Obama would arrive march 20. But the White House is not confirming any date just yet.
The UN says the humanitarian crisis in Syria is now at "catastrophic" proportion and is dramatically expanding its aid operation to reach one million more people. The World Food Program plans to feed one and three-quarter million people this month, then up to two million in March and two and a half million by April.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in Cairo, where he will be attending a summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation which begins today.
On Tuesday, Egypt's top Muslim cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb told the visiting Iranian leader that his Shiite-led government must refrain from interfering in the affairs of Gulf Arab states and must give full rights to Sunnis living in Iran.
Chadian soldiers have begun securing the Malian city of Kidal, which was last major stronghold of Islamist militants in the country. Representatives of European and African nations meeting in Brussels Tuesday discussed the possibility of creating an international force to help stabilize Mali. Lisa Bryant has details.
Officials meeting in Brussels said that any decision on turning a West African military mission to stabilize Mali into an international one must be approved by the United Nations and the Malian government.
But Kadre Desire Ouedraogo, who heads the Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS Commission, suggested it was a viable option.
At a news conference, Ouedraogo said the problems in Mali are not just a question of national or regional security, but of international security. He said the international community must make sure northern Mali should not be used as a sanctuary for terrorists and narcotraffickers.
Lisa Bryant for VOA news, Paris.
South African police have arrested 19 suspected members of the M23 rebel group that launched a rebellion in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year. Authorities say the arrests were made Tuesday in South Africa's northern Limpopo province. South African police say they believe the suspects were trying to overthrow the DRC government.
US Attorney General Eric Holder has explained the Obama administration's rationale behind legally allowing the government to kill US citizens abroad. Mr Holder says the targeted suspects must pose an imminent threat of violent attack on the United States.
He spoke about it after a confidential Justice Department memo on the government's use of drone strikes against al-Qaeda suspects was leaked.
President Obama is urging Congress to delay automatic spending cuts set for March 1. Speaking at the White House, he called for lawmakers to quickly pass a package of limited spending cuts and tax reforms until they can come up with what he calls a "smarter solution" to the nation's debt problems.
"Deep, indiscriminate cuts to things like education and training, energy and national security will cost us jobs and it will slow down our recovery. It's not the right thing to do for the economy. It's not the right thing for folks who are out there still looking for work. And the good news is this doesn't have to happen."
President Obama said he is cautioning against sweeping reductions. The $1.2-trillion package of automatic cuts to domestic and defense programs is known as "sequester."


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Catholic Men's Fellowship Pittsburgh
April 6, 2013
For registration information, click here.
Catholic men gathering April 6
"Be Not Afraid": The choice is yours
Pittsburgh Catholic Staff Report
It's time for men in the Diocese of Pittsburgh to make a choice: continue to make excuses or "Be Not Afraid?"
As Jim Zern, chairman of this year's Gathering of Catholic Men, wrote in a recent promotional e-mail, the excuses often go something like "It's just not for me."
"Men of Pittsburgh, it is time to extend yourselves out of your comfort zone and not think about what is or isn't for you," he said.
Perhaps it has to do with "listening to some thought-provoking talks that could potentially resonate inside of you and, in turn, make you a better man."
"If you feel the gathering just isn't for you, then maybe it is indeed for those you love. Extend yourself, step out of your comfort zone, attend the Gathering of Catholic Men on April 6 and, most of all, come because you care about those special people in your life," Zern said.
The hours are counting down for men to descend upon Duquesne University's A.J. Palumbo Center for the eighth annual gathering.
The all-day event will feature dynamic Catholic speakers centered on the theme of "Be Not Afraid."
The lineup includes author George Weigel, former Methodist minister Allen Hunt, clinical psychologist and author Ray Guarendi, and lay evangelist Mark Nehrbas, along with Bishop David Zubik and Father Joe Freedy, diocesan director of priestly vocations.
The day will begin when doors open at 8 a.m. and the program starts at 9. Besides the speakers, there will a Eucharistic holy hour, uplifting music and opportunities for the sacrament of penance. The day will close with a 4 p.m. Mass led by Bishop Zubik.
Tickets to the gathering are $40 in advance, $45 at the door; advance students $10. Another option is a Power of Three group ticket ($99 for three). Clergy will be admitted for free. A boxed lunch will be provided.
Fathers are encouraged to bring their sons to the gathering, and Catholic Men's Fellowship of Pittsburgh has created a special Fathers and Sons ticket ($45 for two, or $22.50 per person).
Tickets can be purchased on the CMF website (www.cmfpitt.org), from parish CMF members or by check through the mail (Catholic Men's Fellowship of Pittsburgh, P.O. Box 13235, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15243).
A 24-hour phone line (412-403-4831) is available to field questions and offer ticket information.
'Living a free and full life'
By WILLIAM CONE
Father Joe Freedy, director of priestly vocations for the diocese, is set to speak Saturday, April 6, at the Gathering of Catholic Men at Duquesne University's A.J. Palumbo Center. He recently answered questions about the eighth annual event.
Could you tell us a bit about your talk coming up at the Gathering of Catholic Men?
First of all, I want to say how humbled I am to have been asked to speak at the gathering. I spoke at it three years ago and have attended each year since then, and it's always an incredibly inspiring day to be a part of and to participate in.
The theme I've been given for my talk for this year could be summed up as "Freedom in Christ." The main point is that Jesus came so that we might have "life to the full," as he says in John 10:10.
One of the reasons we're not living life to the full, living in that freedom that Christ came to give us, is because of the many fears that hold us back —that hold us, in a sense, captive. Because of those fears (about our inadequacy, our worth, our masculinity) we often go through life trying to prove ourselves to ourselves and to everyone else around us. When we live that way, we end up driving ourselves deeper into slavery. 1 John 4:18 says that "perfect love casts out all fear"; I hope in my talk to speak about how receiving that perfect love is the key to living a full and free life.
Why do you think there is a need for ministry to Catholic men?
There is a need for ministry to every Catholic, not just to Catholic men. However, in a society that seems to view religion for the most part as being something that is more for women, particular outreach to men is crucial so that the fire of the Gospel is not lost to them. The Gospel is attractive to men when Christ is encountered as the radically challenging, controversial, passionate God-man that he truly is.
From your perspective, what have been the effects of the annual gathering among our local men?
I've seen incredible fruit born in our diocese because of the gathering; guys' lives have been changed and their hearts set on fire through the CMF ministry. They've been connected with one another and found that they aren't alone on the journey, that this diocese is filled with men just like them trying to grow stronger in their faith and become better sons, brothers, husbands and fathers.
What one aspect of the gathering stands out for its life-changing impact?
One aspect of the gathering that stands out for me every year is the passionate, authentic way that the speakers proclaim the Gospel. Their stories and teachings have inspired conversion in me, and I look forward to that again this year.
Another aspect is the brotherhood that takes place. What an encouragement it is to look around and see thousands of men desiring to grow deeper in their faith by encountering Christ. And, of course, as a priest the long lines for confession and the closing Mass with Bishop Zubik are powerful to witness.
The weekend of the Gathering of Catholic Men is definitely one of the highlights of my year.
Watch a promotional video featuring Father Freedy at the Catholic Men's Fellowship of Pittsburgh website (www.cmfpitt.org).
Advance tickets to the gathering are $40, available through parish Captains for Christ, online at www.cmfpitt.org, or by calling the information and ticket hotline at 412-403-4831.
Tickets at the door will be $45, advance student tickets (ages 13-21) are $10, group Power of Three tickets, $99.
Be not afraid
By BRAD TUPI
On Saturday, April 6, Catholic Men's Fellowship of Pittsburgh hopes to convene 3,000 men for the eighth annual Gathering of Catholic Men at Duquesne University's A.J. Palumbo Center. This year's theme is "Be Not Afraid."
Why did Jesus so often address the apostles with the words "Peace be with you" and "Do not be afraid?" Because he understood the fears that trouble our hearts. Some of us fear that we cannot withstand the temptations of the secular culture around us, that we lack the strength to put Jesus first in our lives. Others are afraid that we are not instilling the love of Jesus and his church in our children.
Some of us are filled with pain at the loss or sickness of a loved one, and we fear that God does not hear our prayers for comfort. Others are afraid to confess sins committed long ago and relegated ever since to the dark recesses of our hearts.
Some of us are fearful to seek reconciliation with someone who has hurt us, so we hold a grudge. We are afraid that person will reject our peacemaking effort and make us feel weak and foolish. Others of us have discarded "organized religion" in our lives, only to realize that we need divine help to face our mortality.
We all are afraid of the judgment that we know will come someday. All of us are afraid we are not big enough, tough enough, handsome enough, smart enough, rich enough.
The gathering is a day-long dose of peace that calms our fears. Surrounded by other men who face the same doubts, we gain strength. Kneeling before the monstrance containing the body of Jesus Christ, we sense the Savior's love washing over us. Kneeling in confession, we feel the healing power of forgiveness. Inspired by eloquent Catholic speakers, we understand the power of our church to transform the world. Worshipping in song, we join the angels in praise of the Father. And celebrating Mass with Bishop Zubik, we hear Jesus whisper to us, "Do this in memory of me," and realize that we are joined with 2,000 years of his followers.
Those who have attended the gathering experience an intangible bond because we have all had the same fears, and we have all found the same relief in Jesus. We each leave our bag of troubles outside the door and find it easier to carry when we depart, eight hours later. We feel a bond because we are all struggling to put God first in our lives while being surrounded by a culture that rejects his laws. We feel a bond because the Holy Spirit works the room during the gathering, bringing love to every open heart.
Brother, if you have not attended the gathering before, be not afraid. If you have not attended Mass in 20 years, do not worry. If you are afraid you won't know anybody, relax. You will be welcomed.
Doors open for the eighth annual Gathering of Catholic Men at 8 a.m. The program begins at 9, and the day comes to a fitting close with 4 p.m. Mass. For details and online registration, see www.cmfpitt.org. Solid Catholics, fallen-away Catholics, non-Catholics, men of no faith at all: Join us. All are welcome. Come and explore God's place in your life. Be not afraid!
Tupi, an attorney and member of St. Louise de Marillac in Upper St. Clair, is vice president of Catholic Men's Fellowship of Pittsburgh.
Men's gathering offers answers to big questions
Speakers will address the "Be Not Afraid" theme April 6
By William Cone
Does God really answer prayers? Are we alone in this world? Why is it important to be Catholic?
Men looking for answers to these and other questions, big and small, are encouraged to attend the eighth annual Gathering of Catholic Men on Saturday, April 6, at Duquesne University's A.J. Palumbo Center. The doors will open at 8 a.m. with the program starting at 9.
A roster of dynamic, faithful Catholic speakers is scheduled to present messages centered on the event's theme, "Be Not Afraid."
The lineup of enthusiastic speakers includes:
-- Theologian George Weigel, author of "Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II" and many other books;
-- Former Methodist minister Allen Hunt, author of "Confessions of a Mega-Church Pastor: How I Discovered the Hidden Treasures of the Catholic Church";
-- Clinical psychologist Ray Guarendi, an author, public speaker and nationally syndicated radio host; and
-- Lay evangelist Mark Nehrbas, a popular presenter and director of development at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
They will join Bishop David Zubik and Father Joe Freedy, diocesan director of vocations, during the day, which will also feature a Eucharistic holy hour, uplifting music and opportunities for the sacrament of penance. The day will close with a 4 p.m. Mass with Bishop Zubik.
Tickets to the gathering are $40 in advance (through March 22), $45 at the door; advance students $10; father-son tickets $45 ($22.50 each). Clergy will be admitted for free. A boxed lunch will be provided.
The CMF website (www.cmfpitt.org) has been completely updated, and tickets can be purchased at the site. They also can be purchased from parish CMF members or by check through the mail (Catholic Men's Fellowship of Pittsburgh, P.O. Box 13235, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15243).
CMF of Pittsburgh, organizer of the gathering, has upgraded its outreach to attract more men to reach a goal of 3,000.
"This year's theme, 'Be Not Afraid,' reaches out to Catholics, fallen-away Catholics, Christians of all denominations and all men, including those who may have no faith at all but have an interest in learning if God has a place in their lives," said Bob Sill of St. Thomas More Parish in Bethel Park.
CMF held boot camps in all four vicariates of the diocese in January to build excitement, talk about the upcoming event and discuss the future.
Men in the diocese have been enlisted as "Captains for Christ" to spread the word about CMF's mission of conversion, formation and evangelization.
"If it's a battle we are waging against Satan and his work, we need an army of Captains for Christ to take back this country in the name of Christ," Sill said.
One of the main promotional tools this year is the use of more than 120,000 Be Not Afraid wallet cards that are being handed out throughout the area. The cards contain the theme, an invitation to attend the gathering and contact information.
Organizers also are utilizing a concept modeled after the Trinity called the "power of three," urging men to invite two others and receive a discounted ticket price ($33 each).
"There is also an outreach to all youth ministries in the diocese -- CCD, high schools, colleges and universities -- all are invited to become Captains for Christ to promote and to attend the event," he said.
One of Bishop Zubik's goals is reaching out to Catholic men who have, for whatever reason, stopped practicing their faith. He has directed all parish Captains for Christ to submit names of men who will receive free tickets in a personal appeal from the bishop.
A 24-hour phone line (412-403-4831) has been established to field questions and offer ticket information.
Most importantly, men are invited to pray a St. Joseph novena for the success of the 2013 gathering. The novena prayers are on the CMF website.
No matter their level of familiarity with the Catholic faith, those attending the gathering will be among friends and eager to have their big questions answered.