text:
(December 1997)
Hello everyone, Is it possible to have a firewall to protect the private network from the dial-in users ? We have an internal LAN allowing some users to dial-in to our interanet (using Windows NT RAS) and thinking to have a firewall to protect our LAN. Does firewalls work with modems as external interfaces instead of the normal ethernet interfacs ? If yes, how it will be done ? I appreciate any help. Thanks all & regards, Mr. Hamoud Otaibi.


text:
The Naked and Famous Announce Second Auckland Show
The Naked and Famous Announce Second Auckland Show
Saturday 17 May – The Powerstation Auckland
The Naked And Famous have sold-out their homecoming show in Auckland and announce a second night at the Powerstation, on Saturday 17th May.
The group made their mainstage debut at California's legendary Coachella festival, playing to a massive crowd on late Sunday afternoon.
Yahoo Music was amongst the early reviews in for the show, saying The Naked And Famous "charmed the audience with their anthemic electro-rock".
The Naked And Famous were also featured in Vanity Fair's coverage of the celebrity packed backstage: http://vnty.fr/1iWv4a8
Fans around the world viewed Coachella's live stream to great response and Alisa Xayalith paused the crowd at one moment to capture an Instagram shot of the memorable show.
TNAF return to Coachella next weekend before returning downunder to headline Australia's Groovin The Moo festival later this month.
Be sure not to miss the second night of the band's return to New Zealand shores.
Presale tickets on sale Thursday
17th April from www.ticketmaster.co.nz
Sign up for presale tickets at www.powerstation.net.nz
General tickets on sale Friday 18th April at 9am.
For all show & ticketing info go to www.powerstation.net.nz

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The NCAA has said on Wednesday that it is now investigating the relationship that the Ponzi scheme artist and the University of Miami had for five months and if the allegations are true they will show that some real change is necessary in the way college sports are handled. Odds
The president of the NCAA Mark Emmert has said on Wednesday in a recent radio interview that "We were well aware of it and weren't surprised by the sensational media coverage. We've been on top of it for a while, gathering information and collecting data," "Mike and Mike in the Morning."
According to Emmert the typical investigations can take up to seven months for it to complete. The former booster Nevin Shapiro who was serving a 20 year sentence in federal prison has claimed that he treated players to nightclubs, gifts, cars and sex parities. He said that he was providing these players with improper benefits… there were as many as 72 football players from the University in between 2002 and 2010 whom he had given benefits to. Scores
In a recent statement Emmert said "If the assertions are true, the alleged conduct at the University of Miami is an illustration of the need for serious and fundamental change in many critical aspects of college sports,"
The NCAA source has told ESPN's Pat Forde that all the penalties are now on the table which includes the death penalty which means that they could shutdown the University's football program for a year. Back in 2003 Miami's baseball team was also put on probation but the schools that have repeated violators are eligible for the death penalty according to the source. The death penalty has been issued one other time by the NCAA in football to SMU back in 1987. Las Vegas odds
Al Goldon the first year Miami coach has said "I would caution you not to jump to that," "That's a big jump."
Golden said "Everybody is practicing," "If it is determined somebody broke rules, then certainly they'll be first dealt with. … As we get ready for Maryland, hopefully we'll swiftly learn if errors were made. If there are guys that are going to have to sit out games, we'll adjust our practice accordingly.
He added "We were ready for a lot of things in preseason camp, this was not one of them," "We'll manage it."


text:
4 Min Read
PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - An alternate title for this clear-eyed, gut-wrenching documentary might be "The Tillman Cover-up," since it focuses on the Army's misrepresentation of facts surrounding the 2004 combat death of Corporal Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.
Growing dissatisfaction with current military campaigns could draw on a significant cross-section of viewers for a theatrical release of this first-rate film, which will also make a resonant evergreen title on TV and DVD.
Born in 1976, Patrick Tillman was an all-around athlete from the San Jose, CA area recruited as a linebacker for Arizona State University's football team who went on to play for the NFL's Arizona Cardinals. Not long after starting his very promising career, Tillman left behind professional sports following the September 11 attacks to enlist with the Army Rangers. Although he never publicly discussed his personal motivations, in 2002 he began a three-year tour of duty, along with his brother Kevin. His first posting to Iraq convinced Tillman that the war that he'd volunteered to fight was terribly misguided. His second tour took Tillman to Afghanistan and the front lines of confrontation with Taliban insurgents.
In April 2004, the Army reported that Tillman had been killed in action after saving dozens of comrades from an enemy ambush, an act of bravery that earned him a posthumous Silver Star. Astoundingly, almost nothing about this inspiring account was true, as his family first found out five weeks later following another official announcement. In fact, an investigation had revealed that Tillman was killed by friendly fire as members of his unit shot indiscriminately at him and a couple of other soldiers separated from their unit and believed to be guerrillas.
As Pat's mother Dannie Tillman sifted through thousands of pages of documents from the inquiry, it became clear that although her son's death was accidental, the Army's decision to falsify the record and portray Tillman as a hero who saved other soldiers was a calculated attempt at modern mythmaking. The misrepresentation was only undone by Dannie's painstaking investigation of the heavily redacted official record and Patrick Tillman Sr.'s accusations of fraud regarding the Defense Department's inadequate explanations.
Capably narrated by Josh Brolin, Amir Bar-Lev's penetrating and vital documentary goes beyond tracking the Tillman family's investigation into Pat's death to question the motives of commanding officers and higher-ups, including the top Bush administration Gulf War generals of the time, as well as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. News clips, archival footage and interviews with Tillman family members provide perspective on Pat's life and unfortunate death, along with testimony from fellow soldiers and Stan Goff, a retired special-ops expert who reveals the military's techniques for managing public perceptions.
Bar-Lev astutely examines not only the combat record, but also many Americans' penchant for military glorification -- as well as the media's complicity -- that makes the public susceptible to officially sanctioned propaganda. Even after all the lies were unmasked, not a single active duty solider or Bush administration official was held responsible in Tillman's death.
Fighting an unpopular war, the Army seized the opportunity to manufacture a contemporary hero, never imagining that the truth was far more important to Tillman's family than the mythos. Their brave struggle -- and Bar-Lev's insightful documentary -- are a sobering reminder that civilian vigilance is never misplaced.


text:
GHD's Quality Management System was first certified to ISO 9001
in February 1993. Since that time it has evolved and improved as
GHD has grown and expanded. What began as a state specific Quality
Assurance System within Australia has grown into a global Quality
Management System which is supported in GHD offices in Asia, the
Middle East, North and South America, Europe and the Pacific
Lloyds Register Quality Assurance (LRQA), has been part of GHD's
journey since the beginning and provides independent auditing of
GHD's Quality Management System. GHD's maturity in quality
management is illustrated by award of a three year certification
GHD operates an integrated approach to project planning, setup,
management and review via our project management database which
incorporates project management cycles, risk management, knowledge
management and is also used to address the requirements of the GHD
Quality Management and Internally certified Health Safety and
Environment Management System at project level.
The GHD library is a collection of relevant resources.


text:
Genealogist Says Madonna and Lady Gaga Are Related
Child told the Boston Globe that the outlandish pop divas are "ninth cousins once removed." He explains, "When I saw that Lady Gaga had French Canadian ancestry I thought there might be something there."
But that's not all! Child says that Madonna's ex is related to the latest addition of the Royal family. The genealogist claims that British filmmaker Guy Ritchie is fourth cousins with Prince William's new wife Kate Middleton, which may explain why Madonna's ex was present at Westminster Abbey for the April 29th wedding!
The genealogist has a substantial amount of credibility. He's currently working on family trees for 2012 presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, but has yet to start on Donald Trump's family line.
Gaga and Madonna shared the limelight this year when Gaga's song "Born This Way" was thought to have sounded very similar to Madonna's track "Express Yourself." Since then, Gaga has come out with her song "Judas" and it's video, her track"Edge of Glory," and on Monday, May 16, she will be releasing her "Hair" tune.


text:
Why so many men?
Lesbian Webcam Models chat with others about Live Webcam Lesbian Modeling.
3 posts ‹ Page 1 of 1
Why so many men?
I am a lesbian and have a partner that I usually do my webcamming with. I always wonder why we have more male clients that want to see two women having sex together. I would prefer to perform for other lesbians. The thought that we are pleasing men is more of a turn-off than a turn-on!
- Fanny
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text:
New Lights on Empire State Building
They've retired the old lights and raised the bar on the illumination of New York's Empire State Building.
The new LED lights were switched on this week, accompanied by Alicia Keys song "Empire State of Mind."
The Associated Press reports that the LED lights have about 16 million color possibilities and they can "ripple, sparkle, sweep and strobe." The AP reports that Anthony Malkin of the family that owns the building says the building is being renovated at a cost of over a half billion dollars.
The old lights, by the way, are stored on the 72nd floor of the 81-year-old building.
The building has its own Facebook page, and you can see the grand unveiling of the new lights there, just in time for the holidays!


text:
On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 6:09 PM, rhubbell <Rhubbell(at)ihubbell(dot)com> wrote: > On Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:16:17 +0000 > Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote: > >> >> I'm putting together a talk on "PostgreSQL Pet Peeves" for discussion at >> FOSDEM 2009 this year. I have a pretty good idea what some them are of course, > > I'll ask again. You say "I have a pretty good idea what some them are of course" > > "of course" because you've heard them all? Or because you've suffered from them > your self? Both? Probably because he's been hacking on and supporting Postgres through these lists for many years. It's easy for those of us that have been regular participants for years and exchange email with the same people over and over to forget that people are joining these lists all the time and don't necessarily know what we all do. -- Dave Page EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
Next: From: Merlin Moncure Date: 2009-01-30 18:56:56 Subject: Re: Pet Peeves? Previous: From: Scott Ribe Date: 2009-01-30 18:39:51 Subject: Re: Pet Peeves?


text:
JACKSON-L ArchivesArchiver > JACKSON > 2006-04 > 1143929665
From: kim hendrix <>
Subject: Re: [JACKSON] Jackson Headstones
Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 14:14:25 -0800 (PST)
In-Reply-To: <0a8201c655d8$722e9470$8ff6b146@TOM>
HI, will be looking forward to your email! the Cemeteries Project is a different site than the Tombstone Project that Rootsweb has. But your more than welcome to share with my Cemeteries Project and any other sites you desire!
Thankyou in advance! :)
Excalibur131 <> wrote:
Hi Kim,
The quick answer is "Sure." I don't know why I didn't think about the Cemeteries Project before. Maybe its one of those age things where the left half isn't keeping up with the right half or something like that. At 63 I allow myself plenty of opportunity to have things slip my mind. HA HA HA HA
I'll contact you privately about details and thank you for reminding me about the Cemeteries Project so nicely. :-)
Royalty to Rogues
----- Original Message -----
From: kim hendrix
To: ;
Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2006 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [JACKSON] Jackson Headstones
Hi, Would you be interested in also submitting to my Cemeteries Project website as well? here's the home page of my site: http://www.rootsweb.com/~flcemet2/welcome.htm
we are in the process of getting every headstone in every cemetery in every county in every state online. any and all help is greatly appreciated, even if it is just a few photos..........
I've just posted some Jackson headstones from south central Virginia on http://www.l-dunaway.net/. Look in the Cemeteries section of the site.
Royalty to Rogues
Cemetery Headstone Photo Web Sites for ALL States:
Best Place to find a headstone in any state across America.
Volunteers Greatly Needed & Greatly Appreciated!!!
Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates starting at 1¢/min.
This thread:
|Re: [JACKSON] Jackson Headstones by kim hendrix <>


text:
FROM CNN's Jack Cafferty:
[Revised and updated]
The party might be over - the Tea Party that is.
The movement that took the country - and Washington - by storm two years ago appears to be fading.
In the early days of the Obama Administration, the Tea Party seemed to spring up almost overnight nationwide.
With thousands of dissatisfied Americans attending town hall meetings and protesting an outsized federal government, higher taxes, skyrocketing federal spending and Obamacare.
In the 2010 mid-term elections, candidates connected to the Tea Party helped the Republicans wrestle back control of the House of Representatives. They were a force to be reckoned with.
But fast forward two years and what's left?
For starters, the Republican Party has nominated Mitt Romney. Not exactly a right wing zealot.
Politico reports that a meeting of the Republican National Command showed just how little has actually changed within the GOP.
Few Tea Party activists have won slots on the Republican Party's governing committee, even though some have won county chairmanships or state positions.
And, although the Republican establishment sympathizes with the Tea Party's ideas and wants to channel their energy, they see the movement as just one more constituency in the Republican coalition.
Some Republicans describe the Tea Party activists as inexperienced, and the movement as not as well organized as 2010.
Nonetheless, even if the Tea Party is losing power, it's still seen as a boost for Republicans. One state party chairman says the Tea Party has "put a spring in the step of the old lumbering elephant."
Here's my question to you: Is the Tea Party over?
Visit The Cafferty File


text:
Altho I have always had fairly white teeth, my front 2 being crooked always irritated me, but it didnt happen til my late 20s when my wisdom teeth forced themselves in, so thinking I was too old for braces I just put up with it.
About 6 months ago a Living Social deal came up that promised a savings of $2000 on invisalign - so I bought it, went for the consult and was consequently so blown away by the promised results and the quick time I could achieve it in that I decided to go ahead - even tho I am now 52.. no its never too late!!!
Onto my second tray of only 13 needed - so am very stoked with the whole thing!!
There is really no pain or discomfort for me, the only thing being the brushing and flossing thing, but it stops you from overeating too, as I really couldnt be bothered sometimes to go thru the whole process if Im not really hungry.. so am slimming a little too!
I decided to do just my top teeth and then Ill do my bottom teeth after Im done. I really wanted to avoid the lisp etc as I have a job which requires a lot of customer contact (at the Airport - Passport please-) As it turned out, the day I got them in I didnt tell my husband and he didnt notice! I told him the next day and he was really surprised. Even people at work who have had them in the past didnt pick up on it til I told them!... (note to self- dont tell anyone...)
The photo actually seems worse then they actually look - I think the flash accentuates the plastic more than it is in real life.. I am VERY happy with the way they look and the results I am hoping for... Have already noticed when I am flossing a difference in the gaps between some teeth..
All up I only paid $3000 (AUD)


text:
If you saw the Singapore Airlines jet in the video above over head, you'd probably just think it was a low-flying plane. But you'd be wrong: it's actually a massive, epically realistic RC plane.
The video was posted to YouTube last month and depicts a flight from a replica Airbus A380-800. If you just want to see the plane take off, skip to about 2:15, though I recommend watching the first few seconds of the video as well; it proves that, yes, the plane really is just a model.
The video was posted by RCHeliJet, who also is on Twitter.


text:
Jalani Ghulam, 44, of Commercial Street in Brierfield, Lancashire, is charged with possession of an offensive weapon and possession of a prohibited article.
He is due to appear at Trafford magistrates on Tuesday.
Customs officials found a stun gun, five flick knives and six knuckle dusters in a suitcase on Saturday.
Most Popular Now | 56,514 people are reading stories on the site right now.";


text:
It only takes a minute to get started. Fill out our uncomplicated sign up form and login to the site.
This step is elective but will dramatically multiply your chances of getting interest from other over 50s members on the site. Write a little something about yourself, your hobbies and upload a nice photo of yourself.
Utilise our website's advanced search to find over 50s members who meet your requirements. Or just scan through listings and find singles that you find attractive.
Located someone who interests you? Send a letter to them or just a wink and see what develops from there. With a little luck you'll be on your way to true love.
It's quick and simple


text:
Teacher gifts on St. Nicholas DayDecember 5th, 2014
Tonight's the night! Children around the world will be putting their shoes outside their doors, and St. Nicholas will be stopping by with chocolates and a little toy. We're so excited to see what St. Nicholas brings our little guy.
But first, Baby Niklas thought he'd pass on the kind deeds like his patron saint. It's become somewhat of a tradition at our house.


text:
Online Exam System – VB Project
Online exam project is a vb based project being launched to fulfill needs or both institutes and students. With this vb project institutes can register and conduct exam online. Students can give there examination and see their results by using this project. This is an attempt to replace the existing manual system of conducting collage exams.
Modules of VB project online exam
01 – User Module
02 – Class Master
03 – Subject Master
04 – State Master
05 – City Master
06 – Student Registration
07 – New Question Master
08 – Modify Question
09 – Paper Setup
10 – Online Examination Module with proper
11 – count down
12 – Certificate
13 – Reports
Project abstract of online examination system – vb project
This is a desktop application in vb that establishes a network between the institutes and the students. Institutes enter the questions they want in the exam. These questions are displayed as a test on the computer to the eligible students. Students solve these questions and give answers , these answers are recorded and evaluated by the system. This system also generates scorecard. Students can print their exam certificate.
Scope of online exam system – vb project
This project is for conducting online examination. This project allows institutes to conduct online examination by giving a unique id to each student.The institute provides questions .Institute also enters the list of eligible students. All institutes can edit there information later or as required. It can also be used by any organization for conducting online exam of their employees.
Feasibility study
This activity involves the analysis of the problem and collection of the relevant information relating to the product. The main aim of the feasibility study is to determine whether it would be technically and financially feasible to develop the product.
Requirement analysis
The goal of this phase is to find out the exact requirements of the customer and prepare SRS.
Design of project
In this phase of Online exam project project we transform the requirement specification into a structure that can be implementation in some programming language
To view online demo video of this project leave a comment below with your Email id, we will send you link of online demo video of this project
Details of Purchasing Online Exam Project
Project Code : 05
Project Code : Desktop
Technology : VB 6.0 , SQL Server,Crystal Report
Project Cost : Rs.(INR) 1500/-
>>Click Here to Buy This Project<<
Documentation,Live Project,SynopsisReadymade Project, Academic Projects in Visual Basic, VB.NET, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server Source Code for final year student, project of BE, BSC-IT, BCA, MCA, MBA.Project Synopsis, Flow Chart, DFD, Requirement,
Academic Project DOEACC IGNOU SMU Live Project in Asp.NET,VB.NET, C#,Visual Basic Readymade Project BTech BCA MCA MBA Bsc-IT MS BIT ADIT


text: You have a responsibility to yourself and your co-workers to take action when faced with sexual harassment in the workplace. This eLearning course describes policies that ensure a harassment-free workplace. Topics include Definitions, Gray Areas, Taking Action, and Consequences. After completing this compliance course, you will be able to identify appropriate and inappropriate behavior as defined by the law and company policy.


text:
Without fanfare, pomp or circumstance — well, we did serve birthday cake and punch to the 100-plus kids that showed up that day for our various programs — the Boys and Girls Club of Lodi turned 50 early this month.
In retrospect, 50 years of serving the youths of Lodi — day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out — has been a significant, demanding and worthwhile achievement. It was an achievement that could only be accomplished by an entire community that embraced the mission of the club: To enable all young people, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens.
For those of you who can not recall Lodi 50 years ago, what was it like? Smaller, more homogeneous, family-oriented and surely far less complicated than today. Our beginnings were humble in nature with limited offerings; nevertheless, a few community-driven leaders had the vision and garnered enough local support to formalize an official Boys and Girls Club Charter in 1962. Their mission, like ours today, was to offer a viable alternative for all young people to achieve their full potential as productive members of our community.
Fifty years after receiving our charter, what does the club look like today? Our volunteer board of directors has successfully overseen the design and implementation of collaborative programs with the Lodi Police Department, emphasizing gang intervention; Lodi Unified School District, focusing on basic tutoring and homework assistance; and local businesses that stress career, character and leadership development. All programs are designed to help our local youths receive the greatest opportunity to reach their incredible human potential, so that Lodi will remain a place we can all enthusiastically and with great pride call home.
Our challenges are many but our opportunities for success are even greater. We offer a safe, clean environment to support our five core programs: education and career; character and leadership; health and life skills; the arts; and sports, fitness and recreation.
Although these efforts are driven by volunteers and local financial support, our kids themselves, through our community citizenship component, can be found throughout your neighborhoods performing community service projects such as graffiti removal and trash pickup, and supporting other Lodi-wide community activities on a daily basis.
For example, we just completed our annual Thanksgiving dinner, providing a traditional Thanksgiving meal to approximately 200 families in need. All meals were served by current or former Boys and Girls Club members. One former member peeled enough potatoes so we could serve homemade mashed potatoes to all, including seconds!
If you see our white van with the distinctive blue logo in your neighborhood, you can be sure that close by there are local kids making Lodi just a little bit better of a place to call home.
Probably our greatest contribution to Lodi is the fact that all of our kids showed up ready for school today, so our dedicated teachers and other professionals within the education field can provide them the essential tools they need to continue to reach their full academic and personal potential. I suspect that our visionary founding community leaders would be well-pleased with this fact, and that this essential goal crossed their minds 50 years ago.
If you have never made a contribution to the club and are interested in learning more about volunteering or supporting us financially, call Eddie Cotton, vice president of operation, or me at 209-334-2697.
To celebrate our 50th anniversary, we are currently holding a Maui Jet-Away Raffle. For each $50 donated, you will receive one raffle ticket, or six tickets for $250. It's our anniversary but your vacation. Funds raised by this event, as well as all other contributions, are used to directly support to our five core programs.
In closing, I would like to give a big shout out (not my choice of language, but I too must adapt) to the many hundreds of dedicated volunteers who have so freely given of their time and talents to our mission. Additionally, I would like to thank the many individuals and local business — too numerous to list separately — that have made contributions, both financially and otherwise, to the Lodi Boys and Girls Club over the past 50 years. The combination of these two selfless acts, time and financial support, allows us to continue to fulfill our mission.
It's business as usual here at the club, and our business is making Lodi the best community it can be by providing critical services and opportunities to the youths of Lodi, especially those who need us the most.
As we enter our 51st year of service, the Boys and Girls Club of Lodi needs the continued support of the community so we can continue to fulfill our mission to best serve our local youth. Any support, regardless of size, is sincerely appreciated as well as needed. On behalf of the board of directors and the children we serve we would like to wish you a happy and safe holiday season. Thank you, Lodi.


text:
On Aug 7, 2004, at 5:13 PM, Gianny Damour wrote:
> On 7/08/2004 4:22 AM, David Jencks wrote:
>> The assembly module doesn't conform to the maven standard action of
>> producing an artifact, and its results are not in the module itself.
>> Furthermore it doesn't produce an easily installable geronimo
>> instance.
>> I'd like to suggest that the assembly module should produce a zip
>> file of what it builds, currently into
>> target/geronimo-${pom.currentVersion}, and install it in the local
>> repo as a zip artifact.
>> Then we can extend the geronimo-maven plugin with a little bit of
>> jelly script to unpack this zip into the target of the module using
>> the plugin. This will make it easy to get back to pristine geronimo
>> installations.
> I think that it would be awesome. +1.
> As far as I understand, assembly is the way to build a Geronimo server
> from nothing: people can only download this module and let maven pulls
> the various artifacts and install a full server. Personally, I see
> this module as an installation procedure via maven.
> So, I do have another question: Is it possible to put the assembly
> module somewhere else than nested inside modules? Perhaps that it
> could be nested inside an installer project?
I think you might be confusing my ideas for the assembly module (which
would be modified to build and install into the maven repo a zip file)
and the geronimo plugin (which would get a goal to pull the zip file
and unpack it into a standard or configurable location).
So, a typical integration test runner might look like this:
All of this except the "new-geronimo" is being used in the openejb
itests: however there some configuration problems are preventing any
tests from actually passing.
We might want to include a way to run the bootstrapper in the maven
plugin so people can more easily generate custom minimal bootable
I'd also like to find a way of starting geronimo from maven in-vm. So
far everything I've tried has resulted in classloader hell. Perhaps
starting by constructing a minimal classloader and loading everything
from it rather than what maven gives us is the way to go.
david jencks
> Thanks,
> Gianny


text:
- Trending Now: More Trending:
- admiral's mast calumny kakistocracy bona fide surrogate mother
Definition of Schwann cell
: a myelin-secreting glial cell that spirally wraps around an axon of the peripheral nervous system to form the myelin sheath
Origin and Etymology of schwann cell
Theodor Schwann †1882 German naturalist
First Known Use: circa 1909See Words from the same year
Medical Dictionary
Medical Definition of Schwann cell
: a myelin-secreting glial cell that spirally wraps around an axon of the peripheral nervous system to form the myelin sheath
Biographical Note for schwann cell
Schwann \ˈshvän\play ,
Theodor Ambrose Hubert (1810–1882), German anatomist and physiologist. Schwann is regarded as the founder of modern histology. He is best known for his conception of the structure and function of cells: he defined the cell as the basic unit of human anatomy. Investigating the digestive processes in 1836, he isolated a substance responsible for digestion in the stomach. He named this first enzyme prepared from animal tissue pepsin. Schwann is also regarded as a founder of the germ theory of putrefaction and fermentation. He was the first to investigate the laws of muscular contraction by physical and mathematical methods and to demonstrate that the tension of a contracting muscle varies with its length. In 1838 he published his description of the myelin sheath covering peripheral axons. He also formulated a basic principle of embryology by observing that the egg is a single cell that eventually develops into a complete organism.
Learn More about schwann cell
Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about Schwann cell
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up Schwann cell? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).


text:
The 'Hurt' singer announces in a Twitter post that she is engaged to her boyfriend Matt Rutler, sharing a photo of her diamond sparkler.
Christina Aguilera had good news to share on Valentine's Day. The singer took to Twitter on Friday, February 14 to announce her engagement to her film producer boyfriend Matt Rutler. "He asked and I said...," she wrote, adding a photo of her big sparkler with the background of a tropical scenery.
"They're very much in love and are really excited to take this next step!" a source close to the couple told PEOPLE. The "Hurt" singer met Rutler on the set of 2010's film "Burlesque".
Aguilera previously was married to Jordan Bratman. They parted ways in October 2010 after five years of marriage. The divorce was finalized in February 2011 and the two shared custody of their 6-year-old son Max Bratman.
"He's the love of my life, and I adore him," she said of her little boy on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in November 2010. "He's such a character, and he's so happy and at the end of the day, that's what's most important."
Prior to the exciting announcement, the coach on "The Voice" wished her fans a sweet Valentine's Day. "Happy Valentine's Day to all my fans! Hope it is Unforgettable!" she wrote.
He asked and I said������¯��¿��½�����¯�����¿�����½������¯��¿��½���������¢������¯��¿��½���������¯������¯��¿��½���������¿������¯��¿��½���������½������¯��¿��½�����¯�����¿�����½������¯��¿��½���������¦������¯��¿��½�����¯�����¿�����½������¯��¿��½���������¢������¯��¿��½���������¯������¯��¿��½���������¿������¯��¿��½���������½������¯��¿��½�����¯�����¿�����½������¯��¿��½���������¦ pic.twitter.com/XWZVZOjDX1— Christina Aguilera (@xtina) February 15, 2014


text:
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Copy of Leonardo da Vinci "A Última Ceia"
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Carlos Bernardoon 26 January 2013
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Transcript of Copy of Leonardo da Vinci "A Última Ceia"
A iconografia de "A Última Ceia" de Leonardo da Vinci Carlos Bernardo 1452 Nasce em Vinci 1464 Oficina de Andrea del Verrochio 1482 Milão 1500 Florença Cesare Borgia Mona Lisa 1513 Roma 1519 Cloux Leonardo da VinciFull transcript


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Our corporate watchdog, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, has told the Government that it is operating with one hand tied behind its back in the investigation and prosecution of stockmarket-related misconduct, including insider trading, market-rigging and making misleading statements.
The implication is that if penalties were more onerous and ASIC's investigative powers were boosted, then it would have a better conviction rate.
Some may believe that ASIC's recent spate of high-profile court losses against the likes of AWB's chief executive, Andrew Lindberg, One.Tel and Fortescue may have had a different outcome if ASIC's powers were boosted.
Make no mistake: the fact that the Government has listened and given ASIC what it has asked for is not necessarily a problem. Increased penalties can't hurt, nor can new rules making it easier for ASIC to get search warrants. Allowing ASIC to tap phones could be useful but can be argued against in terms of civil liberties - but let's put that in the too-hard basket for now.
It's just that it is questionable that these measures will address the real issues that make catching those that break these laws any easier.
Let's unpack the Government's proposals one at a time.
The first is the move to deter these various examples of market misconduct by increasing penalties, be it fines for civil breaches or jail time for criminal convictions.
I would argue that fines or the length of incarceration is not the prime deterrent for the would-be perpetrators of such behaviour. Surely the likelihood of getting caught or convicted and the damage to reputation would weigh far heavier.
In a public relations sense, throwing the book at those convicted of market-related misconduct works for the Government and for ASIC, but the deterrent effect of these changes is probably marginal at best.
The second part of the proposed changes is allowing ASIC to engage in phone-tapping. In theory, this move, which brings ASIC's investigative powers in line with other regulators, is fair enough. In reality, the move might not be especially useful in catching the crooks.
Insider trading, for example, is often a one-off situation. Once the regulator has information that aberrant trading has occurred, the law has already been broken.
Insider trading has traditionally relied on circumstantial evidence. ASIC can obtain phone records and can present the court with the fact that calls between parties have been made at certain times, but cannot provide any information on the content of the calls.
Thus phone-tapping sounds like a pretty good investigative tool.
But if phone taps are set up after the information has been passed, they are of little use. The behaviour is not ongoing or systemic. Thus a tap may not catch anything useful.
(Phone taps work better on drug dealers or parties engaged in cartels.)
Additionally, manning phones around the clock is an expensive and resource-consuming exercise.
I wonder whether the minister responsible for yesterday's announcement, Chris Bowen, will provide the money to ASIC to pay the guys sitting there with the headsets 24 hours a day.
The third element of the government reform is to enhance ASIC's ability to gain search warrants. It has this power already, so long as it takes along the Federal Police.
Gaining the power to raid without notice of a search and without the police probably cuts out time and paperwork (and the need to drag along a bunch of uninterested coppers), but it surely can't make much of a difference to overall conviction rates.
We all agree that conviction rates for these types of market-based offences - particularly the high-profile offence of insider trading - are alarmingly low. They represent a fraction of the number of referrals made by the Australian Stock Exchange to ASIC about unusual trading behaviour.
It is understandable that ASIC is frustrated by the law and by its lack of convictions.
But these can be serious crimes, and prosecuting them must be accompanied with an onus of proof that aligns with a felony that deserves a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
And legislators can't reduce the onus of proof simply because there is no smoking gun and the corporate cops find the case hard to prove. That's not the way the system works.
Damien Richard, who heads the corporate law division of Malleson Stephen Jacques, calls it a tidying-up exercise rather than a fundamental change in the law.
He, along with other corporate lawyers, would not argue that the changes are necessarily wrong but, understandably, question how effective they will be.
Of course, one will never meet a regulator that doesn't want more powers, so ASIC will be very grateful for all the help it can get.
But - as much as I hate to say it - for the would-be criminal, the odds of being caught and going to jail for getting a sweet insider stock tip are far less than pinching the candel-abra and jewels from a house in Double Bay.


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Arkansas is a land of mountains and valleys, thick forests and fertile plains.
Arkansas shares it's southern border with Louisiana, it's northern border with Missouri, it's eastern border with Tennessee and Mississippi, and it's western border with Texas and Oklahoma. Northwest Arkansas is part of the Ozark Plateau including the Boston Mountains, and Southern Arkansas hosts the Ouachita Mountains. The southern and eastern parts of Arkansas are called the Lowlands, sharing most of it's eastern border with the Mississippi River. Arkansas is also home to 52 state park and seven national parks.
Between it's generally mild climate, inexpensive cost of living and natural attractions, Arkansas is a beautiful place to retire.
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1. Kurtley Beale and Adam Ashley-Cooper may be too good for the Wallabies to ignore. The final was so breathless it took repeat viewings for some of the quality to really stand out. And Beale was at the heart of it. He threw three excellent passes - one wide one to Bernard Foley was a beauty - in the build-up to Ashley-Cooper's first try. His was the first kick that sailed over Nemani Nadolo's head. His was the short ball that put Michael Hooper into a gap outside Richie McCaw. And his was the final ball to Ashley-Cooper for the No.13's second try. In essence he answered the one lingering criticism often said about his play - he looks for room for himself rather than others. It was a complete performance, with only a few handling errors in contact to displease the hard markers. Beale and Ashley-Cooper are Australia's pre-eminent centre pairing. Incumbents Matt Toomua and Tevita Kuridrani have done little wrong, but form spoke loudly on Saturday night.
2. Bernard Foley's full range is starting to show. The restarts, the goalkicking, the ability to take on the line - what was perhaps an ability to do a number of things well last year has turned into the ability to do all things well, and under pressure. The clever little half-break in the 63rd minute, stepping this way and that through heavy traffic, was instrumental in creating the space on the outside for Ashley-Cooper. A few weeks back All Blacks coach Steven Hansen was asked to assess the coming threat of the Wallabies. He mentioned two players by name. One was Israel Folau and the other was Foley.
3. Benn Robinson, take a bow. What would the Wallabies' front-row stocks look like if the squad had been announced after the final and not before? Robinson troubled Owen Franks at scrum time in the first half and carried with real vigour as the Waratahs established a pace the Crusaders couldn't match. For all Pek Cowan's qualities, it is hard to recall many games when set-piece work has been as convincing as Robinson at his best. And with James Slipper looking like a different beast this year, and Scott Sio growing all the time, there is a bit of depth emerging on that side of the scrum.
4. Richie McCaw has lost half a yard, and it's likely not coming back. McCaw has made mugs of everyone who has tried to identify the time line of his decline. But, like a broken clock, even flawed judgments will be right sooner or later. Crusaders assistant coach Dave Hewett, in a pre-game interview with a New Zealand television station, conceded McCaw has lost some pace. And from the All Blacks' end-of-season tour in 2013, he has not had the influence on games he has enjoyed in the past. Perhaps we are looking for it more now the end is much closer than the start, but there have been a number of missed tackles this year, against Tevita Li, Malakai Fekitoa and Marland Yarde. And in the 59th minute Hooper burst outside McCaw from a Beale short pass, all dynamism and pace. And that is the beauty of youth. It can be respectful of legends but not in awe. In Hooper v McCaw, Bledisloe has found another wonderful plotline.
5. Craig Joubert confirms why he is among the best. Yes, the final penalty will be debated, but there is no lingering sense of injustice. Joubert handed out penalties both ways. He rewarded the Crusaders' scrum dominance when Wyatt Crockett started to get some joy out of Sekope Kepu and pinged the Waratahs for offside to present the Crusaders with the lead with only minutes remaining. The Crusaders struggled to slow the Waratahs' ball all evening - the Tahs' ball retention was simply outstanding and has set the bar for others next year - and even when the lineout started to wobble, it was the one thing the Waratahs could go back to to build pressure. Accordingly, the McCaw decision was one Joubert would have given in the 5th minute as well the 79th. He adjudicated the same way regardless of time on the clock - and players cannot ask for more than that.
Australian Super Rugby team of the season
1. James Slipper (Reds)
2. Tatafu Polota-Nau (Waratahs)
3. Sekope Kepu (Waratahs)
4. Jacques Potgieter (Waratahs)
5. Sam Carter (Brumbies)
6. Scott Fardy (Brumbies)
7. Michael Hooper (Waratahs)
8. Wycliff Palu (Waratahs)
9. Nick Phipps (Waratahs)
10. Bernard Foley (Waratahs)
11. Nick Cummins (Western Force)
12. Kurtley Beale (Waratahs)
13. Adam Ashley-Cooper (Waratahs)
14. Henry Speight (Brumbies)
15. Israel Folau (Waratahs)


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When independent parties develop database schemas for the same domain, they will almost always be quite different from each other. These differences are referred to as semantic heterogeneity, which also appears in the presence of multiple XML documents, Web services, and ontologies—or more broadly, whenever there is more than one way to structure a body of data. The presence of semi-structured data exacerbates semantic heterogeneity, because semi-structured schemas are much more flexible to start with. For multiple data systems to cooperate with each other, they must understand each other's schemas. Without such understanding, the multitude of data sources amounts to a digital version of the Tower of Babel.
This article begins by reviewing several common scenarios in which resolving semantic heterogeneity is crucial for building data-sharing applications. We then explain why resolving semantic heterogeneity is difficult and review some recent research and commercial progress in addressing the problem. Finally, we point out the key problems and opportunities in this area.
Enterprise information integration. Enterprises today are increasingly facing data management challenges that involve accessing and analyzing data residing in multiple sources, such as database systems, legacy systems, ERP systems, and XML files and feeds. For example, for an enterprise to obtain a "single view of customer," it must tap into multiple databases. Similarly, to present a unified external view of its data, either to cooperate with a third party or to create an external facing Web site, the enterprise must access multiple sources. As the electronic marketplace becomes more prevalent, these challenges are becoming bottlenecks in many organizations.
There are many reasons why data in enterprises resides in multiple sources in what appears to be a haphazard fashion. First, many data systems were developed independently for targeted business needs, but when the business needs changed, data needed to be shared between different parts of the organization. Second, enterprises acquire many data sources as a result of mergers and acquisitions.
Over the years, there have been multiple approaches to addressing EII (enterprise information integration) challenges. Until the late 1990s, the two leading approaches were data warehousing and building custom solutions. Data warehousing solutions had the disadvantage of accessing stale data in many cases and not being able to work across enterprise boundaries. Custom code solutions are expensive, hard to maintain, and typically not extensible.
In the late '90s, several companies offered solutions that queried multiple data sources in realtime. In fact, the term EII typically refers to these solutions. While the users of these systems still see a single schema (whether relational or XML), queries are translated on the fly to appropriate queries over the individual data sources, and results are combined appropriately from partial results obtained from the sources. Consequently, answers returned to the user are always based on fresh data. Interestingly, several of these companies built their products on XML platforms, because the flexibility of XML (and more generally of semi-structured data) made it more appropriate for data integration applications. A recent article surveys some of the challenges faced by this industry.1 More recent research has proposed peer-to-peer architectures for sharing data with rich structure and semantics.2
In any of these data-sharing architectures, reconciling semantic heterogeneity is key. No matter whether the query is issued on the fly, data is loaded into a warehouse, or data is shared through Web services or in a peer-to-peer fashion, the semantic differences between data sources need to be reconciled. Typically, these differences are reconciled by semantic mappings. These are expressions that specify how to translate data from one data source into another in a way that preserves the semantics of the data, or alternatively, reformulate a query posed on one source into a query on another source. Semantic mappings can be specified in a variety of mechanisms, including SQL queries, XQuery expressions, XSLT scripts, or Java code.
In practice, the key issue is the amount of effort it takes to specify a semantic mapping. In a typical data integration scenario, more than half of the effort (and sometimes up to 80 percent) is spent on creating the mappings, and the process is labor-intensive and error-prone. Today, most EII products come with some tools for specifying these mappings, but the tools are completely manual—an expert needs to specify the exact mapping between the two schemas.
Querying and indexing the deep Web. The deep Web refers to Web content that resides in databases and is accessible behind forms. Search engines typically do not index deep Web content because the crawlers that these engines employ cannot go past the forms. In a sense, the form can be seen as a (typically small) schema, and unless the crawler can understand the meaning of the fields in the form, it gets stuck there.
The amount and value of content on the deep Web are spectacular. By some estimates, there are one to two orders of magnitude more content on the deep Web than the surface Web. Examples of such content range from classified ads in thousands of newspapers around the world, to data in government databases, product databases, university repositories, and more.
Here, too, the challenge stems from the very wide variety in the way Web site designers model aspects of a given domain. Therefore, it is impossible for designers of Web crawlers to assume certain standard form field names and structures as they crawl. Even in a simple domain such as searching for used cars, the heterogeneity in forms is amazing. Of course, the main challenge comes from the scale of the problem. For example, the Web site at www.everyclassified.com, the first site to aggregate content from thousands of form-based sources, includes more than 5,000 semantic mappings of Web forms in the common categories of classified ads. Later in the article, we will describe the ideas that made this Web site possible.
It is important to emphasize that accessing the deep Web is even more of a challenge for the content providers than it is for the search engines. The content providers thrive on getting users' attention. In the early days of the WWW, any good database would be immediately known (e.g., IMDb for movies). The number of such databases today, however, is vast (estimated in the hundreds of thousands), and people do not know about them. Instead, people's searches start from the search box of their favorite engine, and these engines do a poor job of indexing deep Web content. Hence, if I create an excellent database of Middle Eastern recipes and put it on the Web behind a form, it may remain invisible. Ironically, I'm better off creating a set of Web pages with my recipe contents than creating an easily searchable database. Finally, it should be noted that enterprise search faces a somewhat similar problem: many of the interesting data sources within an enterprise are in databases, and even providing simple keyword search over this content is challenging.
Merchant catalog mapping. An example of semantic heterogeneity occurs in aggregating product catalogs. Consider an online retailer such as Amazon.com. Such a retailer accepts feeds of products from thousands of merchants, each trying to sell its goods online. To aggregate the vast number of feeds, online retailers prescribe a schema: a hierarchy of products and their associated properties. To sell their products online, the merchants need to send a feed that adheres to the prescribed schema. On the back end, however, the data at the merchant is stored in the local schema, which is likely quite different from the one prescribed by the retailer (and typically covers a small fragment of that schema). Hence, the problem is creating mappings between thousands of merchants and a growing number of recognized online retailers (roughly 10 of them in the United States at this time).
An interesting point to note about this scenario is that there is not necessarily a single correct semantic mapping from the merchant's schema to that of the retailer. Instead, because there are subtle differences between product categories, and products can often be mapped to several categories, there are multiple mappings that may make sense—and the best one is the one that ultimately sells more products.
Schema versus data heterogeneity. Heterogeneity occurs not only in the schema, but also in the actual data values themselves. For example, there may be multiple ways of referring to the same product. Hence, even though you are told that a particular field in a merchant's data maps to ProductName, that may not be enough to resolve multiple references to a single product. As other common examples, there are often multiple ways of referring to companies (e.g., IBM vs. International Business Machines), people's names (which are often incomplete), and addresses. To fully integrate data from multiple sources, one needs to handle both semantic-level and data-level heterogeneity. Typically, different products have addressed these two parts of the problem in isolation. As one example, several of the products for "global spend analysis" have focused on data-level heterogeneity. This article focuses mostly on schema heterogeneity.
Schema heterogeneity and semi-structured data. The problem of semantic heterogeneity is exacerbated when we deal with semi-structured data, for several reasons. First, the applications involving semi-structured data are typically ones that involve sharing data among multiple parties; hence semantic heterogeneity is part of the problem from the start. Second, schemas for semi-structured data are much more flexible, so we are more likely to see variations in the schema. Finally, the main advantage of semi-structured data is that attributes can be added to the data at will (or even simply derived from inspecting the data itself), and once that flexibility is in place, the number of additional attributes we see is significant, and understanding their exact meaning becomes crucial. On the flip side, in many applications involving semi-structured data, it is enough to reconcile only a specific set of attributes, while we can still manipulate and display any other attribute. Specifically, we need only to reconcile those attributes that are going to be used for equating data across multiple sources.
The problem of reconciling schema heterogeneity has been a subject of research for decades, but solutions are few. The fundamental reason that makes semantic heterogeneity so hard is that the data sets were developed independently, and therefore varying structures were used to represent the same or overlapping concepts. In many cases, we are trying to integrate data systems that were developed for slightly (or vastly) different business needs. Hence, even if they model overlapping domains, they will model them in different ways. Differing structures are a byproduct of human nature—people think differently from one another even when faced with the same modeling goal. As a simple illustration, one of the assignments I give in my senior-level database course is to design an inventory schema based on a one-page English description of what it should cover. Invariably, the schemas I get from my students are vastly different.3
From a practical perspective, one of the reasons that schema heterogeneity is difficult and time-consuming is that it requires both domain and technical expertise: you need people who understand the business meaning of each of the schemas being reconciled and people skilled in writing transformations (e.g., SQL or XQuery experts).
While schema heterogeneity is challenging for humans, it is drastically more challenging for programs. A program is given only the two schemas to reconcile, but those schemas are merely symbols. They do not capture the entire meaning or intent of the schemas—those are only in the minds of the designers.
Figure 1 illustrates some of the challenges in resolving semantic heterogeneity. The figure shows a typical manual schema-matching tool in which the designer needs to draw lines between the matching attributes of the two schemas. As can be seen in the example, there are several kinds of semantic discrepancies between schemas: 1. The same schema element in the two schemas is given different names (e.g., IssueDate and OrderIssueDate); 2. Attributes in the schemas are grouped into table structures (or XML nesting) in different ways (e.g., consider the subtrees of the BuyerParty element in the two schemas); and 3. One schema may cover aspects of the domain that are not covered by the other (e.g., the left schema does not have anything like OrderSummary in the right schema).
When reconciling heterogeneity from thousands of Web forms, there are additional sources of heterogeneity. Some forms are already specialized for a particular domain (used cars, jobs), whereas in others the user needs to select a category before entering additional attributes. In some cases the location is already implicit in the form (e.g., using some hidden fields), while in others the user needs to select a city and state or zip.
Some argue that the way to resolve semantic heterogeneity is through standard schemas. Experience has shown, however, that standards have limited success and only in domains where the incentives to agree on standards are very strong. Even then, as the online retailer example illustrated, while data providers may share their data using a standard, their own data systems still employ their original schemas (and the cost of changing those systems is prohibitive). Hence, semantic heterogeneity needs to be resolved at the step where the data provider exposes its data to its counterparts.
As one thinks about resolving schema heterogeneity, it is important to note several common instances of the problem, which may shed light on the specific problem at hand:
Resolving schema heterogeneity is inherently a heuristic, human-assisted process. Unless there are very strong constraints on how the two schemas you are reconciling are different from each other, one should not hope for a completely automated solution. The goal is to reduce the time it takes human experts to create a mapping between a pair of schemas, and enable them to focus on the hardest and most ambiguous parts of the mapping. For example, the tools that enabled building the Web site at www.everyclassified.com required that we be able to map the fields of the Web form to our own schema in one minute, on average.
As would be expected, people have tried building semi-automated schema-matching systems by employing a variety of heuristics.4 The process of reconciling semantic heterogeneity typically involves two steps. In the first, called schema matching, we find correspondences between pairs (or larger sets) of elements of the two schemas that refer to the same concepts or objects in the real world. In the second step, we build on these correspondences to create the actual schema mapping expressions. The Clio Project at IBM Almaden is a prime example of work on building the mapping expressions.5
The following classes of heuristics have been used for schema matching:
One of the fundamental reasons that the schema-matching solutions described here are brittle is that they exploit only evidence that is present in the two schemas being matched, ignoring past experience. These schemas often lack sufficient evidence to discover matches. Looking more closely at schema-matching tasks, however, it is evident that these tasks are often repetitive. Specifically, we often find that we repeatedly map schemas in the same domain into a common mediated schema. For example, creating the engine at www.everyclassified.com involved mapping thousands of Web forms in the same domain into a common schema, the one exposed to the users by the engine itself. Human experts, after seeing many schemas in a particular domain, are able to map schemas much faster because they have seen many variations on how concepts in the domain are represented in schemas.
The challenge, therefore, is to endow the schema matcher with the same capabilities: leverage past experience. For example, once the system has been given several mappings in the domain of used cars, it should be able to predict mappings for schemas it has not seen before. As it sees more schemas in a particular domain, its predictions should become more accurate, and it should be more robust in the presence of variations.
This idea was explored for the past few years in several academic research settings9,10,11,12,13 and has recently been applied commercially for the first time by Transformic Inc., the creators of www.everyclassified.com. The research projects considered the use of machine learning as a mechanism for enabling a schema matcher to leverage previous experience. In machine learning, the system is provided a set of training examples and uses them to learn models of the domain of interest. In this context, the training examples are schema mappings that are manually constructed by domain experts and given to the system. The models of the domain enable the system to look at a new schema and predict a schema map. For example, the system can learn that the attribute concerning house descriptions typically involves a long text and includes frequent occurrences of superlatives. Furthermore, the system can learn variations on the ways people name this field in practice.
Another application of this idea is searching for Web services, namely locating Web services (or operations within them) that are relevant to a particular need. Simple keyword search does not suffice because keywords (or parameter names) do not capture the underlying semantics of the Web service. The Woogle Search Engine14 (available at www.cs.washington.edu/woogle) is based on analyzing a large collection of Web services and clustering parameter names into semantically meaningful concepts. These concepts are used to predict when two Web service operations have similar functionality.
What can you learn from the past? The paradigm of learning from past experience of performing schema-matching tasks is only in its infancy. It is interesting to take a step back and consider what one can learn from the past in this context.
We assume the past is given to us as a collection of schemas in a particular domain, mappings between pairs of schemas in that collection, and to the extent possible, data instances. The schemas can come from anywhere and can involve closely related domains, not necessarily modeling the same data. In many cases, such schemas can be obtained from the Web or resources such as xml.org. In others, they may be available throughout an enterprise. Such a collection of schemas is often referred to as a corpus, in analogy to the use of corpora of documents underlying information retrieval (IR) and Web-search engines. Of course, while the corpora in IR involve collections of words, here we are managing semantically richer elements, such as schemas and their instances.
The goal of analyzing a corpus of schemas and mappings is to provide hints about deeper domain concepts and at a finer granularity. Looking a bit closer at the approach, the following are examples of what we can learn from a corpus.
Domain concepts and their representational variations. As a first step, we can analyze a corpus to identify the main concepts in the domain. For example, in a corpus of book inventory schemas, we may identify the concepts of book and warehouse and a cluster of price-related elements. Even more importantly, we will discover variations on how these concepts are represented. The variations may differ on naming of schema elements, grouping attributes into tables, or the granularity of modeling a particular concept. Knowledge of these variations will be leveraged when we match two schemas in the domain.
Relationships between concepts. Given a set of concepts, we can discover relationships between them, and the ways in which these relationships are manifested in the representation. For example, we can find that the Books table typically includes an ISBN column and a foreign key into an Availability table, but that ISBN never appears in a Warehouse table. These relationships are useful to prune candidate schema matches that appear less likely. They can also be used to build a system that provides advice in designing new schemas.
Domain constraints. We can leverage a corpus to find integrity constraints on the domain and its representations. For example, we can observe that ISBN is a foreign key into multiple tables involving books, and hence possibly an identifier for books, or discover likely data types for certain fields (e.g., address, price). Constraints may have to do with ordering of attributes. For example, in a corpus of Web forms about cars for sale, we may discover that the make attribute is always placed before the model and price attributes, but occurs after the new/used attribute. Typically, constraints we discover in this way are soft constraints, in the sense that they are sometimes violated, but can still be taken as rules of thumb about the domain. Therefore, they are extremely useful in resolving ambiguous situations, such as selecting among several candidate schema matches.
The need for flexible data-sharing systems, within and across enterprises, is only in its infancy. The tools we have today lag far behind customer needs. The problem is only exacerbated by the fact that much more of the data we need to manage is semi-structured and is often the result of trying to extract structure from unstructured data. Hence, we need to manage data where the values, attributes names, and semantics are often uncertain.
Going forward, there are two major challenge areas: dealing with drastically larger schemas and dealing with vastly more complex data-sharing environments. In both of these areas, we may have to change the way we think.
Larger schemas and schema search. The techniques described in this article deal with small to medium-size schemas (including up to hundreds of elements). To their credit, these techniques gracefully handle large numbers of such schemas. It is well known that many real-world schemas have thousands of schema elements (tables and attributes), the SAP schemas being a prime example. The challenge of creating schema mappings is considerably harder here: you cannot even view the entire schema on a screen or multiple screens.
Two principles need to guide the work on mapping larger schemas. The first is that the schema-matching tools need to incorporate advanced information visualization methods.15 Much of the challenge in designing schema mappings for large-scale schemas is ensuring that the attention of the designers is constantly directed to the right place, that they can view hypothetical mappings and remove them easily, and that they can see effectively how one fragment of the mapping may affect other fragments. The system should also be able to explain why certain match predictions are being made.
The second principle requires changing the way we think of schema matching. Specifically, I am proposing a schema search engine. The engine contains a set of indexes on the elements of a particular schema (or set of schemas). The engine takes as input schema elements (e.g., table name, attribute, XML tag), schema fragments, or combinations of schema fragments and data instances. The engine returns a ranked list of schema elements in the indexed schema that are candidate matches. The interface should be as simple as we see today in search engines. The justification for such a tool is that much of the work in schema mapping is simply finding where in a huge schema there are relevant fragments to the part of the schema that is currently under consideration, or alternatively, finding a relevant schema in a large collection of schemas. Hence, instead of focusing on tools that solve the entire problem but are inherently brittle, build robust tools that bring the users closer to their needs. The Woogle Web-service search engine previously described is an example of such an engine, searching over Web service operations rather than schemas and their fragments.
Managing dataspaces. A much greater challenge facing the data management community is to raise the abstraction level at which data is managed. Today, we have powerful systems for managing data at the level of a single database system (whether relational, XML, or in some other model). The data management challenges we face, however, are at a much higher level: we need to manage a dataspace, rather than a database.
A dataspace consists of a set of participants and a set of relationships. Participants are individual data sources: relational databases, XML repositories, text databases, Web services, data-stream systems, sensor deployments, or any other element that stores or delivers data. Some participants may be transparent, with a full language for posing queries; a prime example is a traditional relational DBMS. Other participants may be opaque—offering limited interfaces for posing queries (usually supported by specific programs); examples are Web services, stored procedures, and other software packages. In addition, some participants may have no structure to their data (e.g., text) or only some structure (e.g., code collections). Examples of dataspaces include: an enterprise, the desktop, a library, large scientific projects, a smart home, or a battlefield.
A dataspace should be able to model any kind of relationship between two (or more) participants. In the extreme case, a relationship is a full schema mapping that enables arbitrary data exchange and query reformulation among participants. In other cases, the relationship can express simple dependencies, where the details are not known precisely (e.g., one participant is an evolved version of another). The relationships can have a temporal aspect (e.g., how frequently data is exchanged), or have one that is a mirror or backup of the other.
The key distinguishing feature of dataspace management is that integrations should evolve over time and as needed, but data should be accessible in some form from the very start. This means that simple queries (e.g., keyword queries) should always be supported on every participant in the dataspace without any effort. As the owners of the dataspace want to create more tight integration between sources and support more complex queries across participants, they can create more detailed semantic mappings as necessary. In addition, the management of dataspaces should consider the entire lifecycle of data, including its acquisition, curation, query and update, evolution, and analysis. The initial ideas on managing dataspaces16 are only starting to intrigue the research community. Practitioners have so far embraced the idea with enthusiasm.
The ideas espoused in this paper have benefited from discussions with and hard work by my colleagues and students. In particular, I'd like to thank Phil Bernstein, Anhai Doan, Luna Dong, Dana Florescu, Zack Ives, and Jayant Madhavan. The vision of dataspaces is the brainchild of discussions with Mike Franklin, Dave Maier, and Jennifer Widom.
ALON HALEVY is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1993. His research interests are in data integration, semantic heterogeneity, personal information management, management of XML data, Web-site management, peer-data management systems, and the intersection between database and AI technologies. He was a co-developer of XML-QL, which later contributed to the development of the XQuery standard for querying XML data. In 1999, Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the enterprise information integration space. In 2004, he founded Transformic Inc., a company that creates search engines for the deep Web.
Originally published in Queue vol. 3, no. 8—
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Andrew McCallum - Information Extraction
Distilling structured data from unstructured text
Natalya Noy - Order from Chaos
There is probably little argument that the past decade has brought the "big bang" in the amount of online information available for processing by humans and machines. Two of the trends that it spurred (among many others) are: first, there has been a move to more flexible and fluid (semi-structured) models than the traditional centralized relational databases that stored most of the electronic data before; second, today there is simply too much information available to be processed by humans, and we really need help from machines.
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen - XML
XML, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium in 1998, is a method of marking up a document or character stream to identify structural or other units within the data. XML makes several contributions to solving the problem of semi-structured data, the term database theorists use to denote data that exhibits any of the following characteristics:
Adam Bosworth - Learning from the Web
In the past decade we have seen a revolution in computing that transcends anything seen to date in terms of scope and reach, but also in terms of how we think about what makes up "good" and "bad" computing. The Web taught us several unintuitive lessons:
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Morris GravesFolded Wings—Memory—& the Moon Weeping
about 1942
ink wash and gouache
29 3/8 x 23 3/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Michael and Caryl Marsh
As a master of contemplative, spiritual expression, Graves used natural forms to symbolize his state of mind and inner vision. His image of a bird with folded wings and the moon seems to emerge from his transcendent imagination, the artist's "inner eye," rather than from direct observation. The transparent, abstract forms suggest an image engraved in the face of a rock, worn away by time and weather, at once fading and accumulating new meaning.


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|$7.50 Almay Liquid Eyeliner Pen
Honestly, I haven't had the best of luck with eyeliner pens in the past, so I was skeptical about this one.
I'm so glad I wasn't disappointed! This pen is SO easy to use. You can easily create winged liner or cat eyes with this and it is water resistant so there is no need to worry about it fading throughout the day. Almay claims it lasts 16 hours.
I'd definitely recommend the black pen: it has a high quality, pigmented shade. The brown on the other hand is not very pigmented. I have not tried black brown so I cannot give you my opinion on that shade.
Bottom line: this liner is easy to use and rivals brands four times it's price! Definitely give it a try.
Money Saving Tip:
If you have a CVS card and are in the beauty club, then there was a coupon this week for $5.00 off Almay products when you buy two. It's very easy to save money at CVS if you have patience. When I bought these liners (and some other stuff) I only paid $9 for over $40 of stuff because I saved my extra bucks and saved up my beauty coupons. When you get a CVS card, you are not automatically signed up for beauty savings. To get more of those coupons, sign up at the register! And if you want even more savings, give them your e-mail at the register and they will send you an extra coupon every week or so. It's an amazingly easy way to save money if your a drugstore beauty junkie like me!
What's your favorite eyeliner and why? Tell me below!
♥ Danielle


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Study quantifies effects of safe water and sanitation
Dirty water and sewage have long been known to be health threats, but an upcoming United Nations report shows just how devastating their toll is on mothers and young children.
In a study of 193 countries to be released Thursday, Canadian-based researchers say they've been able to quantify — for the first time — how safe water and public sanitation efforts affect health when factoring out other variables such as a nation's wealth, fertility or location.
"The fact we can see a linear relationship…was a surprising finding," says co-author June J. Cheng of Ontario-based McMaster University, which co-teamed with the United Nations University, the U.N.'s academic arm. The study, published in the British journal Environmental Health, analyzed data from 2008 to 2010, the most recent available.
The study found that countries ranking in the bottom fourth — for access to safe water — had 4.7 more deaths per 1,000 children under five years old compared to those in the top fourth. The bottom quartile — for access to adequate sanitation — had 6.6 more deaths per 1,000 children under five years old compared to the top quartile.
The United States ranks in the second-highest quartile for safe water and the top quartile for sanitation. Many less developed countries in Africa and South Asia, including India, score at the bottom for sanitation but show greater variation in their rankings for drinking water.
The odds of a mother dying within a year of giving birth jump 42% from the top quartile to each lower tier if she doesn't have safe water, and increase 48% for each quartile if she lacks adequate sanitation, according to the study.
"That's probably an underestimate," says co-author Susan Watt. She says mothers and babies often die in poor countries without their deaths being recorded because "they literally do not count."
Watt says that while public health has emphasized improvements in prenatal care, "this data suggest we might have more impact if we focus on water and sanitation."
Luke MacDonald, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Global Water Program, says the report "helps to quantify the mortality" due to lack of sanitation and safe water but doesn't provide a "full picture" of how they affect health.
He says dirty water and sewage also cause illness and lost productivity.
Research by the World Health Organization estimates that almost 10% of global diseases could be prevented by improving water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Yet at the world's current pace, prior U.N. studies say that by 2015, 2.7 billion people will still lack basic sanitation and 672 million won't have safe water
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Monks Use Internet to Sell Bread
Imagine this, you're a monk whose community is "wholly ordered to contemplation," you don't listen to the radio, you don't watch television, and yet you sell bread in your high-tech internet store! I'm not 100% sure how this works out with the monks' way of life, but in a few weeks, their bread will be available online. For more than the last 50 years, the monks at the Abbey of Genesee (in upstate New York) have been baking thousands of loaves each week and selling them to the local supermarkets. Has anyone tried their bread? I hear it's popular in the region and is wonderfully tasty. I guess I'll have to order a loaf when the store opens up.
Source: CBS 4


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Hey peeps -

For anyone and everyone that came out, or invited people to come out to the Elixir fundraiser that me and Jason ran this evening, I have to give you a giant round of e-plause. The resident bartender at the bar told me that he had never seen so many people pack into Elixir for a guest bartender night, and even had to call in extra help over the course of the evening because of the number of people that attended (we were having a wicked hard time washing glassware). We got several new inquiries into Noisebridge, so hopefully we'll have some more people vising. I'm hoping we made a ton of tips (although I don't know the exact number as of yet...NB should be getting our check in 6-8 weeks on whatever we were able to raise). I'm pretty sure we destroyed the $310 limit for 50% tips and got to keep 100% of a substanital number of dollars. There were 5 pint glasses full of cash at the end of the night, and they were not even close to all ones...I picked up at least 3 $20s as tips.

So anyways, thanks a lot for everyone who helped to promote this event, and thanks a bunch for everyone who came out. I will have to say that I will never give a bartender shit for taking forever to make a drink because it is f'ing difficult to keep track of all that shit from the business side of the bar. I had a blast, and I hope all of you did too.

Sean


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The chopper banked a hard left over McDonald Pass and headed down the Continental Divide. Vic Andersen, chief of the state's Mine Waste Cleanup Bureau, pointed out the Luttrell Pit of the Basin Creek Mine, sitting virtually on top of the Divide, at more than 7,000 feet. "We have 150 abandoned mine sites in the Helena municipal water supply," said Andersen through the chopper's headset. "What do you think about using that pit as a repository to get the mine waste out of the drainage?" As someone who drinks Helena's water on a daily basis, I thought the idea of getting the arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium and other assorted mining leftovers out of my water supply sounded like a helluva good idea.
Now, a handful of years later, Andersen's vision is becoming reality. Amazingly, in a state where miners and environmentalists have long waged war while politicians tap dance around the issues, Andersen's idea seems to have achieved the impossible and been accepted by all sides.
Take Jim Jensen for instance. As the author of the successful initiative to ban new cyanide heap-leach mines in Montana, the Montana Environmental Information Center's (MEIC) executive director is the environmentalist miners most like to hate. Jensen says putting mining waste on the Continental Divide intuitively seems like a bad idea, since the toxics would be sitting above everything else. But when you consider the circumstances and specific geology of the Luttrell Pit, the idea makes sense. Enviros and miners agree that one of the reasons Basin Creek's mining operation shut down is because it was plagued by the presence of clay — which stuck to the gold particles and made it almost impossible to leach them from the crushed rock. Now, that same clay, and the geology that produced it, makes the pit plan a workable idea.
Jensen's not the only one who thinks the plan is working. Pegasus Gold, the defunct company that operated the mine, has a bunch of creditors that would like to recoup some of the $100 million the company owed them when it declared bankruptcy in 1998. The bankruptcy court's order to salvage the property is now producing revenue for the unsecured creditors by renting the mine's heavy equipment to various federal, state and local government agencies trying to clean up the area's abandoned mines. While there's not much chance that creditors will recoup their losses, using the equipment and the old pit is generating revenue that otherwise wouldn't be there.
The plan solved some significant problems for the plethora of government agencies involved, too. Getting two National Forests, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Land Management, the state's Department of Environmental Quality, three counties and one municipal government to agree on anything is just about impossible — let alone on what to do with an estimated 1.5 million cubic yards of toxics-contaminated soils. The Luttrell Pit, thanks to its clayey soils, provided the nexus around which a viable solution took shape as the interminable agency "turf" battles were laid aside. As a testament to the potential for this being a miracle, it was also done in something less than the usual geologic time at which government moves.
Of course, this kind of dream sequence simply doesn't happen very often. In most cases, like Butte's Berkeley Pit, the Anaconda Smelter, or the Milltown Dam, a full twenty years or more have passed since they were designated as some of the nation's first Superfund sites. They have received significant attention and hundreds of millions have been spent on reclamation efforts. But for all that, the smelter and pit look about the same as they did when the smoke stopped and the trucks quit running. The Milltown Dam still squats on the Clark Fork and millions of tons of metals-contaminated soils continue to drain their deadly leachate toward Missoula's drinking water aquifer. And, even though the Lutrell Pit plan seems to be working, there are recent indications that the reclamation of the Basin Creek leach pads have been less than successful.
The Luttrell Pit plan, while perhaps more the exception than the rule, is nonetheless worthy of our attention. As MEIC's Jim Jensen says, "This is something that worked, and the people involved all need to be congratulated. They deserve credit when they do it right." Jensen is right on. There are lessons in working together we could all learn from this. We could, for instance, do the same thing for Milltown Dam. It is absolutely technically possible to safely dredge and transport the deadly sludge to a sealed, capped pit and treat any liquids that leach out. The operative word is "possible." All we have to do is get a bunch of government agencies, politicians, and officials to agree and it can be done. It is also just as possible that somehow the archaic, useless dam will be left in place as a rotting plug for the poison-filled reservoir.
Granted, having an open pit mine on top of the Continental Divide was no great idea in the first place. But given the situation, and the proliferation of mining wastes now scattered liberally throughout the surrounding drainages, it makes sense to clean up, consolidate, and manage those wastes. The Latrell Pit plan, Vic Andersen's vision of years ago, may just show what happens when the magic works. The reticence to remove the Milltown Dam, on the other hand, shows what happens when it doesn't.
When not lobbying the Montana Legislature, George Ochenski is rattling the cage of the political establishment as a political analyst for the Missoula Independent.


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Home is where the heart is. No one knows that better than residents of Mari de Villa, the Town & Country retirement community that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. "Our focus is on providing residents with the best care in an elegant, gracious environment," says president Fred Wiesehan, who lives on the grounds with his wife, Mary Kay, vice president of the community. "Our residents know we're available 24/7, 365 days a year. Founder and CEO Georgana Linneman, Mary Kay, our staff and I share a steadfast determination and commitment to foster human dignity with love and quality care."
When it opened in 1960, Mari de Villa had only 26 rooms. Today, the community rests on 25 acres, five times its original size, and serves independent seniors with multiple options, including condo-style units ranging from 1,000 to 3,000-plus square feet. It also allows for 'aging in place' with various levels of assisted living and skilled nursing care. "We mold our amenities, programs and services to the changing needs of our residents," Wiesehan says. "They and their families take comfort in knowing they can transition from level to level as they age, surrounded by friends."
And residents appreciate that kind of dedication. "I'm completely independent here, but help is just a phone call away if I need it," says 81-year-old Joe Evans, who has lived at Mari de Villa two years. "When someone gets ill or has a problem, Fred or Mary Kay is always there, even if it's 2 in the morning. This is a family affair, not a cold, corporate place." Evans, a widower, enjoys the lively company of other residents. "Groups of us go to the Fox or the symphony, and I also started a dining group, the Dutch Treat Club, that gets together once a month," he says. When not out on the town, he likes to barbecue on his gas grill and tend his garden with help from his grandkids. "Living here is a blast!" he says.
Betty Fabick, 79, enjoys Mari de Villa's beautiful grounds and warm, sociable atmosphere. "There are no crabby people here," she says. She fell in love with her 2,700-square-foot, three-bedroom villa four years ago, but felt the kitchen was too small. "So they expanded it for me! What's not to like about a place that bends over backward for you?" She also likes the community's array of options. "You can cook for yourself, enjoy delicious meals at the Villa Estates Club, have meals delivered to you, or a combination of all three," she says. "There's a wonderful Sunday brunch, and fried chicken on Sunday nights. Fred and Mary Kay are fabulous, so friendly and compassionate. I'm thrilled to be here."
So is 83-year-old Betty Haake, who moved in nine months ago. "It felt like a good fit right from the start," she recalls. "In fact, I had put down a deposit at another retirement center, but after seeing Mari de Villa, I got my money back. The high standard of care and the friendliness of the staff and other residents persuaded me. Everyone is so welcoming." Haake cooks for herself or dines out with friends most of the time, but never misses Wednesday night's dress-up dinner and piano music at the Villa Estates Club. "The waiters wear tuxes!" she beams. She's also a fan of the water aerobics classes. "There are lots of perks to living here," she says, "but the best thing of all has been meeting so many wonderful people."
On the Cover: Mari de Villa recently celebrated its 50th anniversary of providing high-quality care to older adults. Located at 13900 Clayton Road in Town & Country, the retirement community offers a wide range of options for seniors, from independent living villas to assisted living and skilled care services. For more information, call 636-227-5347 or visit maridevilla.com. Cover design by Erica Fisher • Cover photos by Jason Mueller


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Housing starts jump 12.1% in December
Updated 7:48 pm, Thursday, January 17, 2013
Number of the day
12.1 percent
That's how much housing starts jumped in December from the previous month, topping forecasts and capping the best year for the home construction industry since 2008. Housing starts climbed to an annual rate of 954,000, the Commerce Department said Thursday, beating an estimated increase of 890,000. The real estate market is rebounding from the worst slump since the Great Depression, helped by record low interest rates and declining unemployment.
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"That really is where the risk is. The buyer who wants to come in, they want a vehicle now."
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Jeff Schuster, an analyst at LMC Automotive in Troy, Mich., on the potentially short supply of new-model cars. Automakers plan to introduce 61 new or redesigned models this year, 50 percent more than any year since 2006, and parts makers may not be able to keep up. Suppliers laid off thousands of workers and closed factories during the industry's collapse, and the survivors are stretched thin after three years of U.S. vehicle-sales increases.
Heads up
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer confidence index for January will be released this morning, and economists in a poll expect a reading of 75, bouncing back from the previous month's 72.9. The index, based on a survey of consumer attitudes, fell in December to its lowest level since July, perhaps reflecting the skittish mood during the "fiscal cliff" debate in Washington.