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The "summer" 2010 Professional Outreach Project has officially come to a close. We've presented to our Advisory Committee and the DHSS Garden Project Team Steering Committee, and incorporated their edits and advice. At the end, we've produced a full color layout plan plus supporting documents that detail the design process, stakeholder input, and recommendations for individual garden areas and elements.
Posing with the POP Advisory Committee who provided invaluable assistance along the way: Program Director Robert Lyons, UD Landscape Design Professor Jules Bruck, DE Center for Horticulture Community Gardens Manager Ann Mattingly, and DHSS Garden Project Manager Faith Kuehn. (Longwood Gardens Domestic and International Studies Coordinator Brian Trader also joined us for the presentation, and jovially agreed to take this picture!)
The culmination of our POP experience was a unique opportunity to share our conceptual plan with stakeholders and supporters during the DHSS Therapy & Community Gardens Reception and Project Review, held on October 28 at the Department of Health and Social Services' Holloway Campus. In addition to familiar faces that we've collaborated with along the way, we were also joined by the Rita Landgraf, Secretary of the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services; Ed Kee, Secretary of the Delaware Department of Agriculture; and Delaware's First Lady, Carla Markell.
James chats with Horticulture Therapist Paula Swearingen of Barclay Friends and Secretary Rita Landgraf of the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services.
The flyer for the event was emboldened with the phrase "Planting Hope, Harvesting Recover," reflecting the vision for the new therapeutic and community garden. The Fellows feel honored to have the opportunity to participate in the larger effort to develop the garden, working with a variety of public agencies and non-profit organizations who will take the garden to the next level.
Raakel speaking to DHSS Garden Project Team member Ray Majewski, Therapy and Rehabilitation Services Director at the Delaware Psychiatric Center.
Faith Kuehn, the Plant Industries Administrator at the Delaware Department of Agriculture and manager for the project, has been a true inspiration and a pleasure to work with. Her enthusiasm for the project, organizational skills, and penchant for bringing people together has proffered an amazing experience for us, and has indeed planted hope—and the seeds—for a garden that will harvest recovery. Many thanks to her and all of the generous souls who gave their time, energy, and creativity to making our Professional Outreach Project a success.
Faith and I took time to celebrate with some (virgin) strawberry daiquiris!
To download the conceptual plan and other written documentation, visit the Publications page of the LGP website at http://ag.udel.edu/longwoodgrad/publications.html.
The National Association for Mental Illness (NAMI) will be accepting donations on behalf of DHSS to make the garden a reality. To find out more, visit http://www.namide.org; indicate "Holloway Campus garden in the donation form.

subset: commoncrawl


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Current image sharing is carried out by manual transportation of CDs by patients or organization-coordinated sharing networks. The former places a significant burden on patients and providers. The latter faces challenges to patient privacy.
To allow healthcare providers efficient access to medical imaging data acquired at other unaffiliated healthcare facilities while ensuring strong protection of patient privacy and minimizing burden on patients, providers, and the information technology infrastructure.
An image sharing framework is described that involves patients as an integral part of, and with full control of, the image sharing process. Central to this framework is the Patient Controlled Access-key REgistry (PCARE) which manages the access keys issued by image source facilities. When digitally signed by patients, the access keys are used by any requesting facility to retrieve the associated imaging data from the source facility. A centralized patient portal, called a PCARE patient control portal, allows patients to manage all the access keys in PCARE.
A prototype of the PCARE framework has been developed by extending open-source technology. The results for feasibility, performance, and user assessments are encouraging and demonstrate the benefits of patient-controlled image sharing.
The PCARE framework is effective in many important clinical cases of image sharing and can be used to integrate organization-coordinated sharing networks. The same framework can also be used to realize a longitudinal virtual electronic health record.
The PCARE framework allows prior imaging data to be shared among unaffiliated healthcare facilities while protecting patient privacy with minimal burden on patients, providers, and infrastructure. A prototype has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach.
The ability to share patient medical records across providers of different organizations and locations has tremendous benefits for patients and the healthcare system.1–3 Medical imaging is an important category of medical data with unique characteristics. It is among the most expensive and fastest growing procedures owing to continued improvement of imaging technologies. Its growing volume of data is significantly larger than that of other clinical data. It is widely expected that sharing medical imaging data across healthcare enterprises will improve the quality of care and reduce healthcare cost.4
Since 2005, regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and health information exchanges (HIEs) have been established to enable sharing of essential medical information. To date, the majority of RHIOs/HIEs are sharing only summary medical data. Recent studies show the considerable benefits of health information sharing.5–7 To further enable data sharing across RHIOs/HIEs, a National Health Information Network (NHIN) is being developed and is undergoing regional testing.8
Besides the established RHIOs/HIEs, healthcare facilities currently rely on patients to manually transport medical imaging data to other facilities using physical media such as CDs and DVDs. Typically, a patient goes to the source imaging facility, requests a copy of the imaging data, signs the necessary paperwork for consent and other agreements, receives a copy of the imaging data on CDs or DVDs, and then carries these media to the new facility at the next appointment. The new facility retrieves and views the imaging data, and may keep part or all of the imaging data for future reference. Experience in the past few years has shown that this manual process is burdensome and prone to error for both patients and providers.4 For example, the source imaging facility may copy a wrong study to CDs or the patients may misplace their CDs. The requesting provider may not be able to load the CDs or may link the outside study to a wrong patient record after it is imported. On the other hand, this manual process has the advantage that the consent and regulatory procedures are well established. Patients are in full control of the sharing process and can protect their privacy. Furthermore, the sharing facilities do not need prior agreements to exchange data: it is the patient who binds the facilities together by identity matching, consent, and other regulatory requirements.
In this paper, we describe an image sharing framework that fully leverages patient participation to overcome some of the drawbacks in existing HIE approaches.
Methods for data sharing can be categorized according to who coordinates the sharing: organization-coordinated versus patient-coordinated; and according to the way in which data are organized: centralized versus distributed data storage.
In the organization-coordinated sharing approach, healthcare organizations form a sharing network with pre-negotiated policies and methods. Users of the sharing network can access patient data from any participating organization at any time as long as they follow the network's access policies. Patients provide broad consent but are, thereafter, not involved in the sharing process. In contrast, the patient-coordinated approach does not require sharing organizations to have direct relationships. It is the patient who coordinates the transfer of data from the source institutions to the destination institution and, in doing so, is able to directly control who has access to what data and, thus, can more carefully protect his or her privacy.
For data storage, most sharing approaches adopt the centralized data strategy, which replicates patient data from all participating institutions to a central data repository. Data sharing is achieved by accessing the central data repository without the involvement of source institutions. In the distributed data strategy, the source institutions maintain the original datasets without such replication. Data sharing is achieved by querying and requesting data directly from each source institution at the time it is needed. In order to enhance the performance of this strategy, a central repository of metadata that indicates the location, type, and other characteristics of the patient data is usually maintained so that the record locator services can efficiently identify all the source institutions with the desired datasets.
For non-imaging data, most approaches use an organization-coordinated and centralized data strategy.9–11 McMurry et al 12 proposed a distributed architecture for data sharing in NHIN. They listed five important factors for distributed information architecture: (1) distributed storage; (2) institutional autonomy; (3) oversight and transparency; (4) access control based on investigator needs and institutional policies; and (5) self-scaling architecture.
In recent years, patient-coordinated data sharing has been investigated with the advent of patient health record (PHR) systems.13 14 Patients may enter data manually or authorize healthcare organizations to submit data electronically to the PHR. For PHRs that connect multiple institutions, once the data are collected, patients may give their physicians access to their data during future visits.
Both organization- and patient-coordinated methods for general medical data sharing also apply to imaging data. However, the distributed storage strategy is preferred owing to the large amount of imaging data. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise technical framework defines the cross-enterprise document sharing for imaging integration profile15 for organization-coordinated, distributed image sharing. Grid-based architecture has also been proposed for distributed image sharing.16 17
More recently, centralized storage strategies have been adopted for organization-coordinated and patient-coordinated image sharing by some exchanges using cloud-based technologies.18 These approaches are mostly ad hoc and transient: a provider uploads an image to the cloud, sends the universal resource locator (URL) to the other provider, then the other provider uses the URL to view or download the image. Owing to the large size of the imaging data, they are usually deleted from the cloud after a limited time (eg, 1 month).
The cloud-based approach has also been proposed to enable patient-coordinated image sharing using PHRs. Mendelson described a recent effort by the Radiological Society of North America to enable image sharing using a cloud-based PHR.19
For organization-coordinated sharing, the biggest challenges are how to protect patient privacy, ensure patient safety, and comply with federal and state laws and institutional policies.1 2 5 20–26 The current design of RHIO/HIE and NHIN has recently provoked criticism and debate among patient advocates and privacy communities.25–28 Related to these issues are institutional trust and liability concerns.22 29 Additionally, linking patient records from multiple institutions, the Master Patient Index (MPI) problem, is also a major challenge.23
Patient-coordinated sharing can theoretically overcome many of the patient privacy and safety challenges facing the organization-coordinated approaches.30 However, it also faces a number of significant challenges, especially for the sharing of imaging data using existing PHR models. These challenges include the burdens on patients, providers, and infrastructure.
Our framework aims to provide an image sharing network that is scalable nationwide and is effective in protecting patient privacy and safety. The overall design is based on five fundamental principles that address drawbacks in existing solutions:
As shown in figure 1, the proposed image sharing framework is logically composed of a Patient Controlled Access-key REgistry (PCARE) master server and a network of PCARE facility servers, one at each participating facility (note that each server may require multiple physical or virtual servers). In the following sections, we will describe the major components of the master and facility servers.
A core component of the master server is PCARE (see figure 2A). This is the critical design feature that sets our framework apart from existing patient-coordinated sharing frameworks such as PHRs. Instead of dealing with actual clinical data as in a PHR, PCARE is a collection of access keys or secure tokens that uniquely represent clinical datasets. These unique access keys are generated by a healthcare imaging facility upon patient authorization to provide a secure electronic conduit to the actual dataset.
Each access key is a token that can be used to redeem the corresponding dataset. It contains a limited and specified number of attributes, such as the patient's name, date of birth, and the patient's unique identifier at that facility (commonly referred to as a "medical record number"), in addition to metadata describing the dataset. The access key and accompanying patient metadata are encrypted and digitally signed so that only the patient and this facility can decrypt and authenticate the content. Furthermore, each access key also contains URLs that specify links to the facility that issued the key. These facility-specific URLs provide the links to services where the actual clinical data, in this case medical imaging data, can be obtained. To ensure strong security, the facility must update the access key periodically or whenever relevant information changes—for example, when a facility's URLs change. For finer control of access, multiple access keys may be generated for each patient to allow access to different parts of a patient's health record.
Another critical component of the PCARE master server is the MPI. As discussed previously, the MPI links together patient identities that may be different at different healthcare facilities. In organization-coordinated sharing networks, MPI is established by comparing demographic information in existing records. In the proposed framework, we fully leverage patient participation in their healthcare process by enabling patients to establish the linkage between their local identity and the PCARE identity as a part of their normal registration or check-in process. The MPI created through such physical verification processes eliminates major sources of error in conventional MPI linkage systems.
The third major component of the master server is the patient control portal. We note the difference between a patient control portal and a patient access portal. Most patient portals, including PHRs, are access portals as they give patients direct access to their health data. However, we believe that access to the actual data is not necessary for patients to control their privacy in a data-sharing network. The access keys in PCARE provide metadata information about the type of studies that are sufficient for patients to make their sharing decisions. Therefore, our patient portal is called a patient control portal to emphasize that in the portal patients are admitted to access keys rather than actual health data, and that patients control the exchange of health data rather than view or manipulate the actual content of health data.
In addition to access keys, each PCARE account in the patient control portal maintains an audit log of how and when the keys are used for health data exchange. The audit history is important for meeting security and privacy requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and other local regulations. It also provides useful information enabling patients to manage their own care. For example, the patient will know who has permission to access their information and which facilities and providers have actually exchanged information and when.
The facility directory contains a list of all facilities in the sharing network, including information about the facility server in each participating institution. The access control module is responsible for authenticating and authorizing access to all the components in the master server. The security/logging module is responsible for securing communication channels between the servers and logging activities by various server components as well as users.
The facility server is the gateway for each participating institution. Each facility server corresponds to one node in the PCARE network that represents one institution.
As shown in figure 2B, access key management is a core component of the facility server. It is responsible for generating, submitting, updating, and verifying access keys based on data received from the local facility's electronic health record (EHR) system, radiology information system (RIS), and/or picture archiving and communications system (PACS) and from the master server.
To the local facility PACS or image viewers, this cache serves as the image source that contains images from external sites. One important function that this component performs is the translation of patient identifying information from the source imaging facility to the local imaging facility. It is also the image consumer that receives images from the local facility and extracts image metadata for access key generation. To all other external facilities, it serves as the gateway to the images stored at this local facility. After the access keys are obtained and verified, this component handles the retrieval of imaging data from the local facility and the transmission of those data to the image cache of the requesting facility server.
Reports for imaging studies are often stored separately from the images themselves at local facilities. The former in an EHR or RIS while the latter is a PACS. With the recent meaningful use requirements of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, most healthcare facilities have implemented patient portals as either a part of the EHR system or as an independent component to provide clinical data, including imaging results, to patients. The local patient portal/EHR integration component establishes integration with IT systems of the local facilities for two main data elements: patient imaging reports and patient identities in local EHR and/or patient portal.
This component may be an independent module of the facility server or part of the EHR/patient portal integration. The purpose of this component is to enable registration staff to provide linkage between a patient's local identity and the PCARE identity via the standard registration process. This linkage is used to maintain the MPI in the master server.
Access control and security/logging ensure safety of patient information and compliance of policies and regulations at the facility server level. The design of these components should enable patients to handle authentication and authorization in various ways that minimize patient burden, including verbal requests, phone, fax, access card, and online mechanisms. The security/logging component ensures that data transfers among all services within and across all facilities are authorized and secure. Additionally, this module allows local facilities to define business rules that enforce specific exchange policies for certain user, data, and facility types.
We have implemented a prototype of the proposed PCARE framework by adopting and extending existing open-source technologies and by developing core components for access key management and patient control mechanisms. Most components are written in the Java language and are integrated using web services-based application programming interfaces.
The data structure and algorithms for access key management are central to the success of this framework. In this implementation, the access keys are implemented as tokens, in the spirit of the tokens used in the security assertion markup language standards.31 As shown in figure 3A, the basic design of a token contains important attributes, such as ID, type, and recipient facilities, and a link to parent tokens.
This token data structure provides sufficient flexibility to enable complex use cases of patient control and data exchange needs. This implementation uses three types of tokens:
Access tokens record parameters for patient authorization: who can or cannot access what data elements during what time period and under what conditions. A chain of access tokens provides the entire history and details of a patient's authorization decisions.
Resource tokens capture metadata related to their corresponding imaging data. A chain of tokens can further capture the update history of the imaging data.
Request tokens refer to access tokens and provide all the information that is needed by the source imaging facility to verify patient authorization and extract the specific datasets for exchange.
Samples of these tokens are illustrated in figure 3B–E. Here, the access token in (figure 3B) is created for future imaging data to be acquired at a facility while the access token in (figure 3D) is created for existing imaging data to be exchanged. Also note that the access token in (figure 3B) has a scope of "visit ID", illustrating the possibility of applying this token to only those imaging data that are acquired during a specific visit. The request token in (figure 3E) refers to one access token (ID: 1). It can also refer to multiple access tokens.
To minimize patient burden, we have developed a card-based user interface for easy authorization of data sharing by patients in most clinical situations. Credit cards, bank cards, insurance cards, and various other cards permeate everyday lives and the PCARE card is similar to a credit card. It stores identifying information that allows a patient to initiate image sharing control at a participating facility by swiping the card. A prototype user interface is shown in figure 4A. Here a laptop acts in place of a touch screen automatic teller machine style kiosk that allows either the patient or a facility staff to control image sharing.
Once the identity is established, the patient is given simple choices to control image sharing. As shown in figure 4B,C, the prototype implementation first asks the patient to decide how to manage images at the current facility and prior images stored at all other facilities. After confirming the selections, the patient can print the consent statement for future reference, as shown in figure 4D. At the same time, the PCARE facility server immediately begins the process of requesting and transferring the authorized images from other facilities to the current facility for sharing with local physicians. This consent statement also enables the PCARE facility server to generate tokens for the authorized local studies and forward them to the PCARE master server for future sharing.
The PCARE prototype has been implemented at Wake Forest Medical Center (WFMC), Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA to assess the feasibility and performance of patient-controlled image sharing. The feasibility study involved one PCARE master server and one PCARE facility server deployed at WFMC and another PCARE facility server deployed at Lexington Memorial Hospital (LMH), a small community hospital in Lexington, North Carolina, USA. For maximum security, all servers were situated between the first and second firewalls inside the demilitarized zone with a small number of dedicated ports opened for network communications. Communication between the servers was over the internet but secured with the transport layer security protocol. The feasibility test was conducted over a 1-week period to ensure that, given patient permission, (1) tokens were successfully generated at local facility servers and submitted to the PCARE master server; and (2) images were successfully transferred between the two hospitals that independently maintained their own design of firewalls and security policies.
Next, a performance test was conducted to study the type of imaging studies that can be effectively exchanged between the two hospitals using their existing network infrastructure. Imaging studies of various modalities and sizes were exchanged over the PCARE network, and their transfer times were logged. As expected, the transfer times rose linearly with the size of the datasets and were limited by the available internet bandwidth.
A second performance test was conducted to exchange imaging studies between WFMC and a "simulated cloud hospital" (SCH). The PCARE facility server for SCH was deployed in a virtual machine in a commercial internet cloud hosting provider located in Newark, New Jersey, USA. Communication between WFMC and SCH was secured with a virtual private network connection.
Figure 5 illustrates the image transfer rate for both performance tests (WFMC-LMH in red and WFMC-SCH in blue). Notice that, even with the existing infrastructure of a small community hospital, the PCARE network can transfer more than 500 MB of imaging data (ie, more than 1000 CT images) in <10 min, which is a reasonable waiting time for typical clinical situations. Hospitals with a more modern infrastructure (SCH) will be able to transfer twice as much data during the same waiting period.
Conceptually, the proposed framework is a network of networks, similar to the designs of proposed NHIN32 but with a fundamental difference: while NHIN uses only organization-coordinated sharing, our framework adopts patient-coordinated sharing at the higher levels while allowing the lower levels to be either independent facilities (figure 1A,C) or organization-coordinated sharing networks (figure 1B,D). We believe this hybrid sharing strategy achieves the best balance between physician workflow efficiency and patient privacy protection. By facilitating explicit patient consent and authorization for each specific sharing of imaging data across organization, network, or even state boundaries, this framework dramatically simplifies the problem of reconciling differing regulations, policies, and laws governing data sharing.2 22 33
Image sharing can be viewed as an access control mechanism for outside images. From this perspective, the key difference between our framework and existing access control frameworks is that we treat the problem of accessing outside data as uniquely different from accessing data within an enterprise. The conventional policy-based and role-based access control mechanisms work well within an enterprise or HIE.34 However, they become increasingly complex and difficult to reconcile as data from multiple independent organizations are accessed.22 Our framework uses different mechanisms to tackle these two different access problems which (1) require direct patient authorization to move data across enterprises; and (2) rely on conventional policy-based access control to access data within the enterprise. In essence, our framework automates the manual, patient-coordinated data exchange process that has worked successfully in practice.
The proposed framework does not deal with physicians' concerns or reservations about using outside images. Addressing these concerns will require standardization of image acquisition, quality assurance, and image interpretation protocols. It will also require mature legal, regulatory, and financial frameworks for cross-enterprise data sharing.
We also note that the consent languages used in the prototype implementation are for feasibility testing only. In a commercial implementation, the messages displayed and printed for patients should comply with, and adapt to, federal and state laws and institutional policies. For example, an informed consent form must be presented to, and signed by, patients before they are enrolled into the PCARE network.
Beyond image sharing, the PCARE framework can be used to implement federated and virtual shared EHR systems35 36 with strong protection of patient privacy. A conceptual difference between PCARE and the virtual shared EHR system proposed by Bergmann, et al 35 is in the handling of patient consent. As described previously, the PCARE framework distinguishes data access across and within enterprises, and accordingly adopts a two-level consent mechanism: consent for sharing data between two organizations versus consent for accessing data within an organization. This strategy is critical for managing the complexity of legal and policy differences across enterprises and local governments.
A comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of the PCARE framework requires further development of the proposed framework and a full implementation in a clinical setting. Both efforts are underway.
The PCARE framework enables the sharing of prior imaging data among unaffiliated healthcare facilities while protecting patient privacy and data confidentiality. The design of the PCARE network focuses on minimizing burden on patients, providers, and infrastructure, and on maximizing both patient and institutional control over the sharing process. A prototype of the PCARE framework has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach.
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions. This work also benefitted from discussions with Drs Thomas Arcury, Ha Nguyen, Annette Johnson, Joanne Sandberg, and Wenke Hwang.
Contributors: YG and JJC were responsible for all aspects of this work, including conceptualization, design, and data analysis and interpretation. DKA and BU performed design, implementation, testing, and data acquisition. HDG focused on data acquisition, analysis, and interpretation. All authors participated in the writing and editing of the manuscript.
Funding: This work was supported by the NIH/NIBIB grant 5 RC2 EB011406.
Competing interests: None.
Ethics approval: Ethics approval was provided by Wake Forest institutional review board.
Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
PubMed Central Canada is a service of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) working in partnership with the National Research Council's national science library in cooperation with the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine(NCBI/NLM). It includes content provided to the PubMed Central International archive by participating publishers.


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In Search of the Novel:Teacher-TalkNovel
Teacher-TalkNovel is the email discussion list for In Search of the Novel. Participants of the workshop series, content guides, and Channel staff will participate in this discussion list throughout the initial broadcast of the workshop series.
Use this space as an area to share and pose questions about the workshop series, get to know your colleagues, as well as ask questions about technical and access issues.
To sign up for this list, please enter your email address here. You will receive a confirmation email shortly after submitting your address.
To post a question, you can send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com or post it below. Be sure to sign up before posting a question.
From: Hunter, Margie (firstname.lastname@example.com)
Date: Wed Nov 28 2001 - 13:25:42 EST
- Previous message: Barry Carroll: "[Teacher-TalkNovel] Today is the deadline to enroll for Fall semester credit"
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Thinking back to a posting from October, I think that
students get the most out of a novel when they can
apply what they have learned to their own lives. On one of the
tapes a class was discussing Great Expectations. One student
commented that while the novel was difficult and too long,
many of the same situations encountered in the
novel are ones we often face in everyday life. He added that
by reading the novel he gained insight that may help him in
similar situations. I think it is up to us, as teachers, to
lead them to discover these parallels in their reading.
Teacher-TalkNovel mailing list
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Light The Night for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
|Planning Time
|3-4 Weeks
|Group Size
|2 - 1,000+
|Staff #
|1 - 5+
|Event Date
|Spring and Late November
Activity Overview
Participating affiliate groups can form teams and sign up to participate in a nearby Light The Night walk location. Your team and team members fundraise between now and then, aiming for at least $100 per participant. By participating in the walk itself, you can show everyone that secular students are here and making a difference. Find out when your local walk is at lightthenight.org.
Planning Timeframe
Most of the actual Light The Night Walks take place between September and late November. Since this event spans two semesters, you'll want to do planning in stages. We've been thinking about it in terms of Spring activities and Fall activities.
Spring Activities
This semester (or Winter and Spring quarters) is the time to get people on board and get your plans in place for a great event!
- Build your teams and get registered
- Hold at least one fundraising event (using our tools or your own ideas) and publicize your LTN online fundraising webpage
Fall Activities
Depending on when your nearby Light The Night walk lands, you'll have more or less time during the Fall for extra activities before the walk itself. Here are some things you'll probably want to do.
- Get incoming students signed up
- Hold another fundraiser event & continue promoting your online fundraising webpage
- Participate in your nearby Light The Night walk!
Coordinating/Cooperating Organizations
Once you register your team through the Light The Night website, a local representative will get in touch with your group to assist you with organization, fundraising and more. We have a dedicated representative from The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society working with us to help support our affiliates, so don't hesitate to contact us with any questions you have - we'll put you in touch!
You might reach out to other campus groups to either join your team or to hold competitive fundraising efforts. You can also reach out to off-campus groups for cooperation or competition. You can check out the Foundation Beyond Belief's website for this project, or the project's page on The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society webiste. And lots of other freethought organizations are involved (check out the text box over to the right!), so you'll have lots of allies to work with!
Hosting a Light The Night Speaker:
When you register your team, a Light The Night representative from your local The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society chapter will get in touch with you. One of the things they're willing to do is come talk to your campus group - for free! This is a great meeting topic and a great event to invite students who aren't part of your group.
The Light The Night representative will be able to speak to your group about the details of your local walk, share ideas on fundraisers, talk about the research The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is doing and the services they provide, and much more. It's a great way to get members of your group excited and involved, and can even get non-members participating in your group.
While the details of each Light The Night speaking event will be different, we recommend using our Speaker Event Planning Checklist to make sure you're putting on an awesome event!
Fundraising Details and Basic Fundraiser Walkthrough
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's goal is to have every walker raise at least $100. At that mark, you get your "fabulous collectible t-shirt" as well as the opportunity to carry a "champion" lighted balloon during the walk. (Hey, that's where the Light The Night walk name comes from!) If you don't make the goal, no big deal - you'll still be able to participate in the walk and have a great time!
The simplest format for a fundraiser is just a big, visible table. A few weeks before the event, your group can hang flyers and posters letting people know the fundraiser is coming up. Then, on the big day, get a table on the quad or in your student union, and ask for donations. Use fundraising thermometers to show how close to your goal you are!
If your group has a good place to display them, you might participate in the paper balloon sale fundraiser. You've seen them before - supporters give you a few bucks in order to put their name on a paper balloon that's then prominently and proudly displayed somewhere. If your group has an office or can secure a wall in the student union, this is a great fundraiser. Your local Light The Night representative can get you the supplies for free, or you can contact us and we'll send you a kit.
Want something more exciting? Check out our other activity packets for fundraising: Atheists Read Religious Texts for Charity, Soul Auctions, Stone a Heathen or Send an Atheist to Church. For bigger events, you might host a Flying Spaghetti Monster Dinner or hold a Benefit Concert.
Don't forget about the power of individual fundraising. You can fundraise from parents, siblings, professors, people on your dormitory floor, off-campus supporters and many more. Ask your favorite blogger to do a plug for your group's team page. Get creative, ask your Light The Night representative for ideas, and show the world what secular students can do!
However you raise the funds, you should send in all your donations to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society as soon as possible after the event. You don't want to sit on a big pile of cash longer than you have to (or risk having it lost or accidentally spent on other projects), so keep in touch with your LTN rep and get those funds sent in! Every time you send in funds, you can work with the representative to determine how to allocate the funds raised between team members.
One of our best resources to find out what works and what doesn't is you - our student leaders! If you've employed a strategy that worked well, let us know about it so other groups can also use that idea. If you've learned a lesson of caution about something we suggest, point out the pitfalls. You can email us at firstname.lastname@example.com!


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The #1 New York Times bestseller answers: What if one simple change could save you from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer?
For decades, that question has fascinated a small circle of impassioned doctors and researchers—and now, their life-changing research is making headlines in the hit documentary Forks Over Knives. Their answer? Eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet—it could save your life.
It may overturn most of the diet advice you've heard—but the experts behind Forks Over Knives aren't afraid to make waves. In his book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn explained that eating meat, dairy, and oils injures the lining of our blood vessels, causing heart disease, heart attack, or stroke. In The China Study, Dr. Colin Campbell revealed how cancer and other diseases skyrocket when eating meat and dairy is the norm—and plummet when a traditional plant-based diet persists. And more and more experts are adding their voices to the cause: There is nothing else you can do for your health that can match the benefits of a plant-based diet.
Now, as Forks Over Knives is introducing more people than ever before to the plant-based way to health, this accessible guide provides the information you need to adopt and maintain a plant-based diet. Features include:
REVIEW SNAPSHOT®by PowerReviews
Best Uses
Reviewed by 4 customers
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Comments about Forks Over Knives:
See the movie - then get this book and get your life on track in a serious fashion. Have never felt this good and alive!
Best Uses
Comments about Forks Over Knives:
Great recipe ideas for those wishing to improve their health...points one in the right direction for making their own recipes. Pity the product info is only applicable to the USA.
Best Uses
Comments about Forks Over Knives:
I found this book inspirational. It has encouraged me to try different foods which has helped reduce my blood pressure and BGL as I am Type 2 diabetic this is very important.
Best Uses
Comments about Forks Over Knives:
This book allows me to make many of the changes necessary to improve my health. I realise after my husband died only months ago that I am the last remaining grandparent and I need to be here for them.I have diabetes and have had Thyroid Cancer and the list grows it's up to me.
-A great resource for folks toying with the idea of transitioning to vegetarianism.- --Carolyn Scott-Hamilton, in VegNews -[A]n invaluable reference for anyone who still doesn't believe that the Standard American Diet (SAD) is in fact the cause for a majority of our personal, global and moral devastation. Highly recommended.---This Dish is Veg
Audience: General
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 214
Published: 28th June 2011
Publisher: Experiment LLC, The
Country of Publication: US
Dimensions (cm): 21.6 x 16.1 x 1.4
Weight (kg): 0.29


text:
Current Newswire:
Linux Gazette: Creating A Linux Certification Program, Part 7Oct 31, 1999, 00:00 (1 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Dan York)
"One year ago, in the October 1998 Linux Gazette, there appeared a brief article laying out the reasons why I felt a professional certification program would benefit Linux. It concluded with several questions and asked how I could join in the discussion:
"If you agree that a certification program can be beneficial for the growth of Linux, how do we as a community go about addressing the points I made above about creating a certification program? Do we create another mailing-list or newsgroup? (Does such a group or list already exist? If so, I have so far failed to find it.) Do we meet at a conference? ...
...I don't necessarily have the answers - but I would like to participate in the discussion. If someone can suggest the appropriate forum in which this discussion should take place (or is currently taking place!), please let me know."
"I had absolutely no idea that this article would lead down the paths that it did! Looking back, I think my reasons still stand, but certainly my own thinking has evolved on how a program is structured as we all have discussed and strategized. It's been an interesting journey! And one I never would have anticipated..."
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text:
William H. Karchmer Spring High School Moot Court Competition
Friday, April 8, 2011
American University Washington College of Law, Room 603
4801 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC
Each spring, the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project hosts a citywide moot court competition for the students in local Marshall-Brennan classes. Students prepare and compete in their classrooms; the winners from each class are invited to compete against each other for a day-long oral argument contest held either at the Washington College of Law or at one of the local courts.
Presented by the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project
For further information, please contact:
Office of Special Events & Continuing Legal Education
American University Washington College of Law
Phone: 202.274.4075; Fax: 202.274.4079; or email@example.com


text:
EBBY Nelson-Addy has left Worcester City to join Brackley Town.
The former Aston Villa midfielder made the move yesterday and is in the Saints team to face Chorley in the Vanarama Conference North this afternoon.
Nelson-Addy, who had a summer trial at Woking, has played the last three games for City, including the 0-0 draw against his new employers on Bank Holiday Monday.


text:
1983 Volkswagen Vanagon Campmobile Tires
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text:
Nobody that I can tell is saying we are dead set to beat the Celtics. I'm just saying that it is wrong to write our team off as done even if we beat the Celtics.
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Nobody that I can tell is saying we are dead set to beat the Celtics. I'm just saying that it is wrong to write our team off as done even if we beat the Celtics.
And the series very well might be tied tonight
Don't ask Marvin Harrison what he did during the bye week. "Batman never told where the Bat Cave is," he explained.
Possible - but unlikely. If the Pacers maintain their focus, play defense like they've been the last two games and treat every possession like it's special, they outmatch the Celtics nearly as much as they did last season - or they do if they don't run into more injury trouble.Originally Posted by Suaveness
Boston's one of those teams with a lot of talent and athleticism but they just don't play a game that's successful in the playoffs.
The poster formerly known as Rimfire
I'm right with you UB.Originally Posted by Unclebuck
Last year I fell into the trap of those "16 15 ... 1" placards at games, counting down how many more wins we needed for a title. Not this year. All we need to worry about is winning the next game. Period. And if we win or lose, it starts all over.
All we need to worry about is winning the next game.
Come to the Dark Side -- There's cookies!
I think the most important thing for the Pacers to do is to go out and absoultely dominate the Celtics from the beginning. The Celtics aren't unlike many teams that we have fielded during the past few years. They have many young, athletic, and up and coming players. They have a ton of young, raw talent, and that makes them dangerous.
The one thing that you don't want to give a group like this is confidence. That would be like giving oxygen to a flame that is only flickering right now. Young guys tend to be more volatile, so Indiana has to go out with the cold determination and dexterity of an assasin. We need to squash the spirits of the Celtics, particularly the young guys, if we can. If we come out overconfident, and kid ourselves into thinking we can run with these guys, then we are in trouble.
The Pacers seem to play their best basketball when their collective backs are against the wall, and it is them vs. the world. They relish that underdog position, and I suppose I do too.
If they expect to seriously get out of this round, and if they want to make a run at the championship, then they need to be able to keep the heat on even when they are dominating the opposition. That is one of the things that the Chicago Bull's teams always seemed to have, that we didn't. I am sure the team was following Jordan's lead, but it seemed like they were relentless at dominating a team without ever letting up. We always seemed to follow periods of greatness with mental lapses - ultimately letting teams "on the ropes" back in the game.
One of the things that I loved about our game on Thursday night is that we kept the pedal to the metal. Anytime the Celtics started to make a run we countered with key plays or with key substitutions from the coaching staff. I never felt like we let up, and we didn't get away from our game. That is one of the benefits of having a veteran team.
In my opinion, this is the most critical game in the series. The Pacers have a huge edge in this game because they are at home, and because Antoine is out. These are games that champions can't and don't lose.
I think the key tonight will be how Anthony Johnson and Reggie Miller handle the intense defensive pressure that I look for the Celtics to apply. I disagree with Doc River's assessment on his team's defensive pressure on the ball. I think the Celts have done a great job in this area. Our guards struggled alot getting the ball past half-court, and we lost valuable time on the shot clock in the process. We need to really protect the ball tonight. Their pressure could easily lead to turnovers, fast breaks, and easy baskets. That is exactly what we don't need.
Reggie is a smart player, and he will adapt to more physical defense by using his trademark flopping skills. My only concern is that he will start obsessing over officiating and not getting calls. When he does that, he takes himself out of the game, and his demeanor rubs off on Jax and O'neal. The officials are probably going to call this game tightly, so the team that keeps its cool, and is aggressive on offense will have an advantage.
When you're playing against a stacked deck, compete even harder. Show the world how much you'll fight for the winners circle. If you do, someday the cellophane will crackle off a fresh pack, one that belongs to you, and the cards will be stacked in your favor.
-Pat Riley
2012 PD ABA Fantasy Keeper League Champion, sports.ws
2011 PD ABA Fantasy Keeper League Champion, sports.ws
2006 PD ABA Fantasy League runner up, sports.ws
2012 PD ABA Fantasy Keeper League Champion, sports.ws
2011 PD ABA Fantasy Keeper League Champion, sports.ws
2006 PD ABA Fantasy League runner up, sports.ws
All I have to say is, driving home from the game, all I could think about was how pissed I am at this thread.
Come to the Dark Side -- There's cookies!
You, Never? Did the Kenosha Kid?
I was thinking about it during the game tonight.
I've been watching NBA playoff series for many years now and it always amazes me when fans start looking ahead. I expect many will now say the Pacers cannot win this series. But if the Pacers win game #5, everyone will say that the Pacers will win in game #6. No one knows what is going to happen.
There are so many twists and turns in a playoff series that people just need to think of each game as a completely separate series.
These two teams are even, so there are going to be wild swings from game to game. Blowouts both ways.
Don't be surprised if Pacers win game 5, lose game 6, and win game 7.
This is what happens when fans look ahead. We were cheering like rookies.
Thanks for starting this thread JINXY
I like how all of the jinx threads are started by people who aren't pacers fans...
Don't ask Marvin Harrison what he did during the bye week. "Batman never told where the Bat Cave is," he explained.
Yeah - I was thinking about this thread last night too. Though I don't take it back - the Pacers didn't lose last night because of what players they did or didn't put on the floor.Originally Posted by Suaveness
It was more like someone sprinkle queludes (sp?) in the gatorade.
The poster formerly known as Rimfire
Meth is the big thing right now Rim.Originally Posted by DisplacedKnick
The poster formerly known as Rimfire
So true, so trueOriginally Posted by DisplacedKnick
I don't normally bump threads but I read the first post in this one and felt a moment of pride.
The poster formerly known as Rimfire
it's still so early. i would feel a lot better with a game 4 win.
"It's a league game, Smokey"
Though that's already pre-determined based on the Law of Prime Numbers.
The poster formerly known as Rimfire
Deservedly so!Originally Posted by DisplacedKnick


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As a child in Steinbach, Man., Erich Vogt stared up at the vast prairie sky, watching as a large flock of Canada geese flew overhead in perfect V-formation, and was struck with wonder. That sense of wonder lasted throughout his long, storied career as one of Canada's most eminent nuclear scientists, driving him to associate with anyone who could nourish it, from famous scientists involved in the Manhattan Project to an aging Albert Einstein, to the thousands of first-year physics students he taught over more than four decades at the University of British Columbia. ("Before they got jaded," he would explain.)
Yet Dr. Vogt made his greatest mark as co-founder of the remarkable laboratory at UBC known as TRIUMF, which catapulted Canada into the front ranks of nuclear research. Forty years later, TRIUMF and its celebrated cyclotron continue to thrive, branching into areas never dreamed of back in those heady days when visionaries such as Dr. Vogt conceived of establishing the facility, the likes of which had never been contemplated in Canada.
Its reach extended as far as the landmark discovery of the Higgs boson particle at the famous CERN laboratory in Switzerland in 2012. As many as 75 Canadian physicists from universities across the country, using TRIUMF as their chief base, were part of the international team involved in the breakthrough.
Their participation in this form of international collaboration was due largely to Dr. Vogt's pivotal 13 years as director. During this time, ending in 1994, he pushed, prodded and promoted TRIUMF relentlessly, overseeing its expansion from a brilliant but basic research facility to a global player.
"He was responsible for getting us on the world map of physics," says Ewart Blackmore, senior research scientist at TRIUMF. "He made it a truly international laboratory, where outside scientists loved to come, and the major laboratories of the world took notice of our technical and research successes." A study several years ago placed Canada among the top six countries for particle and nuclear research, thanks primarily to TRIUMF.
Dr. Vogt, who died Feb. 19 from heart complications, was there from the start. It was an audacious project, centred on an immense cyclotron that remains largest on the planet, even today. Such an enterprise, costing close to $80-million even then, would almost certainly never be built in this age of often suffocating bureaucratic scrutiny, restraint and escalating price tags. Experts estimate a similar construction would now cost more than a billion dollars. But times were simpler then. Infused with the success of Expo 67, Canada was searching for further ways to attract global attention. The federal Liberal government was open to such bold missions. Said then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau at TRIUMF's official opening: "I don't know what a cyclotron is, but I'm sure glad Canada has one now."
Cyclotrons such as the one at TRIUMF accelerate hydrogen ions to form intense beams of protons that can be directed at targets. The resulting particle beam is powerful enough to "smash" atoms, providing vital material for nuclear research and, more recently, practical applications such as feeding the growing demand for medical isotopes.
The lab's focus has also shifted to astrophysics, examining the mysteries of stars and how they came to be.
Located in a three-storey underground bunker, the TRIUMF cyclotron is the cornerstone of Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics, headquarters for more than 400 scientists, engineers and staff.
It is still Ottawa's largest single investment in science.
Few could have foreseen all this 50 years ago when a small group of scientists decided it was time for a Canadian accelerator to tap into the hot new field of nuclear physics.
While John Warren, head of nuclear physics at UBC, Californian Reg Richardson and a few others concentrated on design and construction, Dr. Vogt was theoretician and chief booster, successfully driving the quest for funds.
"He was the most focused on making the case to the public, the brashest and most ambitious," says Tim Meyer, head of strategic planning and communications at TRIUMF. "It would never have happened without him."
The first successful beam was produced Dec. 15, 1974, to cheers and champagne. "It was a great moment," Dr. Blackmore says. "We knew then the thing would work." They had no idea just how well it would work. While other accelerators have fallen by the wayside, TRIUMF's cyclotron has proved astonishingly adaptable, displaying a flexibility that has enabled its conversion into myriad uses unforeseen in 1974. "For more than three decades, this cyclotron has remained at the cutting edge of science," Mr. Meyer says.Report Typo/Error
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text:
Welcome to Cranberry Lake Association
Cranberry Lake offers family fun fishing clean water all year long!
Cranberry Lake is the most upstream lake of the Lower Eagle River Chain of Lakes with nearly 15 miles of shoreline. It has a surface area of 929 acres with a maximum depth of 23 feet, and is fed and drained by the Eagle River.
Cranberry Lake is unique on the Chain in that it spans two counties – Vilas and Oneida. There are 201 property owners in Vilas County and 68 property owners in Oneida County.
Formed in 2007, Cranberry Lake Association was established by property owners to help preserve and protect Cranberry Lake and surroundings, and to enhance the water quality, fishery, boating safety, and aesthetic values of Cranberry Lake, as a public recreational facility for current and future generations. Cranberry Lake Association is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and all dues and donations are tax deductible to the extent provided by law.
We welcome you to our website, and encourage you to join the Cranberry Lake Association family. Membership is open to any individual, family, business, or organization that subscribes to the purpose of the Association.
Mission Statement
Cranberry Lake Association will not function as a regulatory, legal, or law enforcement enterprising body.
To educate and inform property owners and the public about issues that may affect the quality of the life on and surrounding Cranberry Lake.
To provide a collective voice that will represent the best interests of the members regarding issues that affect the area.
To create a sense of community among members of the Association.
To provide a leadership body to whom members can direct questions, concerns or suggestions regarding Cranberry Lake.
To work cooperatively as a community for the purpose of improving or protecting the health of the lake and any impact on its users.


text:
|From: Carl Eastlund (cce at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 12 19:59:25 EDT 2008
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 7:47 PM, Henk Boom <lunarc.lists at gmail.com> wrote: > The following works: > > --- > #lang scheme/base > > (require (for-syntax scheme/base > (for-syntax scheme/base))) > (provide test) > > (define-syntax (test stx) > (define-syntax (foo stx) > #`#,2) > #`#,(foo stx)) > --- > > I have two questions. First, is nesting for-syntax clauses the right > way to be able to write these sorts of macros? Secondly, is there a > way to define the 'foo' macro globally for the module? I'm prohibited > from including it in a begin-for-syntax clause. If you split your program up into separate modules, you can define the foo macro in one, and require it for syntax in the other, and you will then have a transformer-time macro available in the entirety of the second module. -- Carl Eastlund
|Posted on the users mailing list.


text:
KDDI Corp developed a microSD card featuring a wireless LAN function and exhibited it at Wireless Japan 2009, which is taking place from July 22 to 24, 2009, at Tokyo Big Sight.
The microSD card measures 11 x 16 x 0.7mm. When equipped in a mobile phone, it enables a faster Internet connection.
KDDI showcased two types of the card, which are manufactured by Mitsumi Electric Co Ltd and Renesas Technology Corp, respectively. Both of them are mounted with a wireless LAN IC compliant with IEEE802.11b/g, a transceiving antenna, passive components and so on.
As a wireless LAN IC, Mitsumi Electric employs Atheros Communications Inc's "AR6002," whose RF transceiver circuit and baseband processing circuit are integrated, while Renesas Technology uses its "KS3021" RF transceiver IC and "KS7010" baseband processing IC.
The KS3021 and KS7010 seem to be products of Key Stream Corp, which handed over its wireless LAN chip unit to Renesas Technology and liquidated in April 2009.
For both of the types, the area of the antenna is about one third that of the microSD card, KDDI said. The release date of the product is yet to be determined.


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Bad customer service experience with Kobo
View Single Post
Posts: 3,085
Karma: 722357
Join Date: Feb 2010
Device: PRS-505
Originally Posted by
I'm sorry, what was your title at Kobo?
I disagree with your contention that Kobo should give you a free $50, so I must work there? By that logic, a fair percentage of the population of MobileRead works for Kobo. This leads me to the natural question ...
where's my employee discount?
Why would I have checked to see if it went through when it plainly told me it didn't and to repeat the process??
Because it's a website. Websites glitch. It would be nice if online credit transactions worked as smoothly as in-person cash transactions, but they don't. Acting as though they do just because we want it that way doesn't change that. Knowing this, I make a practice of ensuring that everything I buy 1) really was bought, and 2) was only bought once. In the time I've been buying things online, I've had failures in both ways. Maybe everything
work perfectly every time, but it doesn't, and acting on hope and assumptions instead of facts only hurts me. Taking the time to check ensures that I don't run into future problems.
Did you even read where I said I kept checking my email for over 15 minutes??
You have an account, yes? Did you check that account? I make a practice of doing exactly that for that exact reason. I buy a lot of things online (these days, it's a heck of a lot cheaper than burning the gas to go to somewhere you can buy them in person). And I always make sure I'm getting what I think I'm getting, and paying what I think I'm paying, because I know how easy it is for one or the other not to be true. I'm not saying that's the way that it
be, but that's the way that it
, and I pick my battles. Trying to insist to the world at large that all websites should always function perfectly is a battle I would never win.
And why would I have wanted to let my mom know I was only spending $50 instead of $100??
There is no secret to how much a gift certificate is worth!
She knows that you were spending $50 instead of $100. She also knows you were spending $50 instead of $500, or $5000, or any other amount. Where's the great secret in how much you were and weren't spending? "Kobo's website glitched and sent you two emails" has several advantages, not the least of which is that it's true. "Kobo's website glitched and charged me twice" would also be true.
As a general rule, when people buy me bookstore gift certificates, they buy me one for the amount they intend, not two for half that amount. If someone wants to buy me a $100 gift certificate, they'll
buy me a $100 gift certificate
. I would find nothing whatsoever unusual if I got two $50 ones and was told that one of them was sent in error; I'd find it far more unusual if one of them
If your mother doesn't understand this, or doesn't accept this, or insists that she should get $100 even though you only paid for $50 ... well, I begin to see where you learned "Kobo owes me free money" from.
You hit the nail on the head when you said "Kobo's website glitched". BINGO!! Whatever happened to customer service and taking ownership over glitches and mistakes??
From what you posted, it looks like they did. It looks like they tried to make it right -- they gave you a refund for the gift certificate that was issued in error. That's customer service. When you got all unreasonable on them, they even gave you a code for a free book -- which you promptly used, not to get a book that you wanted by way of apology, but to "stick it to them" because you wanted to hurt them (and all their other customers) because they didn't give you free money.
Handing out free money just because someone demands it is not customer service; it's business suicide.
Let's look at it another way: let's say your post was, instead, one thanking Kobo for giving you a free $50. Let's further say that I thought this was a good idea, and immediately went to the Kobo site, bought a gift certificate for $50, and clicked the button twice, or took a look at the page code and generated a spurious second click, so they sold me two gift certificates at once. I then demanded that Kobo refund my money for one of them, but honor both of them. Should they?
If they should, what happens when everyone from MobileRead, all 100k+ of us, does the same? That's five million dollars worth of free money.
And if they shouldn't, how can they tell the difference between us?
When you talk to "Shannon", which I'm sure you will as you must work there, you can let her know my "easy" gift giving experience that they advertise was anything but.
And there you go again ... everyone who disagrees with you must work for Kobo, because anyone who doesn't would agree that you deserve to get $100 but only be charged for $50. You're really starting to look childish.
Also, you're wrong. I don't work for Kobo. I've never bought a reader from Kobo (if you'll look to the left, you'll note that I own a Sony PRS-505). I've never bought a book from Kobo (if you'll look down, you'll note that I'm very hostile to the whole concept of DRM). I've never bought a gift certificate from Kobo (the only people I buy those for prefer to read paper books). I don't think I've ever even been to the Kobo website.
You're making too many assumptions. You're assuming that everyone who doesn't work for Kobo would agree that you have a right to pay them $50 for $100 worth of merchandise. You're assuming that everyone believes every detail of your story, without needing to hear Kobo's side (which I'm beginning to imagine, having worked retail) and will therefore support you. And most of all, you're assuming that I'm as unknown to the people reading this as someone who just registered, and I have no well-known positions about anything. That's why I'm chuckling right now, by the way. Assuming that I work for Kobo is kind of like assuming that Steve Jobs works for Microsoft. My hostility to restrictive online bookstores and their DRM-locked ebooks is well known. There are probably people laughing about how you managed to get Worldwalker to say that an ebookstore wasn't wrong about something.
No, I don't work for Kobo. And I don't usually think they're right about things. That might serve as an indicator of just how strongly I feel about the facts presented in this case: this time, I
think Kobo did the right thing. And I think the person who wanted to pay $50 and get $100 is, in fact, wrong.
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text:
4 Day Cruise to Catalina Island and Ensenada: Golden Princess Cruise Review by lorihelms
Overall Member Rating
4 Day Cruise to Catalina Island and Ensenada
Destination: USA
Embarkation: Los Angeles
This was easy. We drove to the port at San Pedro, parked our car and walked about 100 yards to the building entrance. We arrived around 11am, checked in with no lines, were given a boarding card (group 10) and were on the ship by 12:30 (sitting in the waiting area until our number was called). We were able to stash our bags in our cabin and grab lunch in the buffet with no line or wait. Those More that arrived later had longer lines, but that was the only time we saw large queues.
The ship was a little more tired than some of the newer boats we've been on, but it was by no means shabby. Little things like missing screws in our bathroom door plate or small smudges on carpets were noticed, but not big issues. We had an inside cabin and while it was small, it was functional. The staff we met was pleasant, and we enjoyed talking with members of the staff in the martini bar. If you ever thought you work hard, talk to the crew on the ship and ask them about their work! You'll feel like a slacker.
Always plentiful, and ranged from ok to great. We had good luck at the Crown Grill for steaks and seafood($25 pp surcharge) and ate most of our other meals at the buffet as we didn't want to dress up (aka ditch the jeans/shorts) for dinner. The food was pretty standard issue buffet food, but we particularly liked their German night and carving stations. The desserts at the International Café on deck 5 seemed to be a bit more elevated as well. The grill and pizza were fine too. Overall I think Princess did a good job (though we felt like the food selection in the buffet was less appealing than on prior trips). Not a bad selection, but they used to serve the dishes from the main dining rooms in the buffet as well, and that doesn't seem to happen anymore.
We enjoyed catching up on movies like Superman - Man of Steel, Ironman 3, and Now You See Me. The comic, Carlos Oscar was excellent. We also enjoyed watching some of the cruise directors games for guests and a very "Cirque du Soleil" couple who showcased their strength and balance. We played bocce, did some mini-golf putting and played Scrabble and Ping Pong. We didn't check out the dance shows or other entertainment options. Sessions on arthritis or Smartphones weren't appealing to us (yet!) but we were admittedly younger than most other passengers and entertained ourselves, read books, had cocktails, etc.
The ship stopped at Catalina Island and also Ensenada. We stayed on the boat in Ensenada but enjoyed Catalina. The water is a beautiful blue, the waves were calm, and you could see brightly colored tropical fish just by standing near the water. My husband did a great bike tour (booked independently) with Randy Lewis of bikecatalina.com but I think next time we might do some kayaking or snorkeling. I poked around the shops but didn't buy anything as I'm not a big consumer of t-shirts, shot glasses and other typical tourist items. The ship tendering process was quick and painless and we enjoyed watching some sea lions "racing" our tender just below the water line. We waited no longer than 3-5 minutes to/from the ship.
This was also quite simple. We had to be out of our cabin by 8:30am, but couldn't disembark until 10:45, so we just got breakfast in the buffet and hung out by the pool until they announced they were ready for us. By that time, there were only a few hundred people on the ship, so lines at customs were quick and painless. Less
Published 10/27/13
Cabin review:
Read Cruise Critic's Golden Princess Review >>
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text:
DEVELOPERS planning to build in flood risk areas could be hit by extra levies in the future, a firm of solicitors has warned.
House builders have rejected government moves to make them create ponds to catch rainwater run-off at their developments.
And in the absence of a national agreement, councils could act unilaterally to make developers pay, according to Dorset law firm Coles Miller.
The Flood Act 2010 forces developers to make provision for rainwater runoff so it can seep into the ground. But housebuilders are reluctant to sacrifice land on their sites.
They prefer the idea of underground tanks but the government has been told natural drainage is cheaper.
The resulting four-year impasse could lead to councils billing the owners of new homes for maintenance schemes relating to flooding.
Planning consultant James Cain, of Coles Miller's Bournemouth office, said that in the absence of a national agreement, councils could seek to bill developers.
"The most likely mechanism for this would be the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL)," said Mr Cain, a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI).
"There is deadlock at a national level over how to reduce the impact of flooding but in the meantime Britain has suffered its worst storms in 40 years.
"Authorities across the UK are facing a huge clean-up bill and there is already significant pressure on their budgets.
"Our concern is that – in the absence of a national agreement – the authorities might use the Community Infrastructure Levy as a means of mitigating the cost of flood prevention measures.
"The sooner the house builders and the government reach a full agreement the better. This climate change issue is not going to go away."
He recommended developers should seek specialist advice.


text: We were blown away when we heard we won the gold Stevie Award for Women in Business, for our Babesta Beat magazine and Mimi & the Magic Forest fashionable children's story and video. Huge high fives to our amazing team: Chandra Sweet, Katrina Tang, Michel Onofrio, Laura Castellano, Taavi Lindma, Aslan Cattaui and all the amazing kids who took part in it! We are so proud!!!


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On her 80th birthday on Dec. 29, Donna Wolcott of Kent was treated to a party in her honor at the Fairways of Twin Lakes.
The hosts were her children. There were 21 well-wishers in attendance, including her sister, Laura Wiles, of Concord.
All four of her children came home for the party: Susan Shega of Cave Creek, Ariz.; David Wolcott of Seminole, Fla.; and Dan Wolcott and Tom Wolcott, both of Kent.
Donna was born in 1932. She married Bill Wolcott on June 4, 1954, and was widowed upon his death in April 2007.
She retired from the Ohio State University Cooperative Extension office in 1984. She owned and operated the Fashion Exchange consignment boutique in downtown Kent with Vi Ink for a number of years.
Donna has six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
She attends the Ravenna Assembly of God Church and is a member of the Red Hat Society and Oak Branch Garden Club.


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Last Friday, Jorina Baars handed Cris Cyborg the first loss of her young Muay Thai career (Full replay HERE), in what is being touted as the greatest women's MMA fight ever. While that is usually a pretty disappointing moment in a fighter's career, Cyborg has found a silver lining in that cloud. As always, she still has Ronda Rousey on her mind and told MMAFighting.com that making this last weight cut was surprisingly easy—and that's a good sign for a potential match-up with the UFC Women's bantamweight champ.
"I normally walk around at 160. This is the first time I made 145 with no sauna and no [problems]," Cyborg told MMAFighting.com. "First time. My diet changed, my training has changed, and you know, for the first time I was scared, because always before my fights I suffer so bad.
"But I did very good work, trained hard. I did everything healthy."
Despite the fact that no one seemed to be overly excited about her entering the UFC anytime soon, she seems to still be making all of the appropriate moves to eliminate any doubts and excuses.
"I'm ready for anybody," she said. "I never say no."
By Kenya Owens


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RYANAIR has offered fellow low-cost airline Flybe €100 million (£85.8m) in cash to take some routes off its hands if the Irish carrier succeeds in its bid for Aer Lingus.
Flybe said yesterday that it had reached an agreement, which still needs board and shareholder approval, that would see it take on "a number of aircraft and operating routes as part of a package of concessions Ryanair has submitted to the European Commission".
The firm added: "The agreement provides for a new company to be incorporated into which the relevant business assets, including cash of €100m, and liabilities would be transferred and which Flybe would then acquire."
Ryanair, headed by chief executive Michael O'Leary, launched its latest €694m offer for Aer Lingus in June, having seen two previous approaches fail. The airline has proposed an "unprecedented" package of measures to get the green light from regulators. Among them are a promise to cede 43 routes to Flybe and three Heathrow routes to British Airways, sources said.
Espirito Santo analyst Gerald Khoo said Ryanair's efforts meant the European Commission was coming under increasing pressure to justify why the deal should be blocked.
He added: "We understand the remedies package involves many other airlines committing to compete on routes where a combined Ryanair-Aer Lingus would otherwise have a monopoly. Nothing would happen unless both the EC cleared the deal and Ryanair were to succeed in securing the support of sufficient Aer Lingus shareholders."


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Agartala, May 10: The Tripura government today formally decided to appeal to the Supreme Court against Tripura High Courts judgment on Wednesday terminating jobs of 10,323 government school teachers after December 31 this year.
Chief minister Manik Sarkar said this today after a two-hour cabinet meeting.
A division bench of Tripura High Court, comprising Chief Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Swapan Chandra Das, also asked the state government to arrange a fresh recruitment process by December 2014 and frame a new employment policy within two months.
The government has today decided to file a special leave petition before the Supreme Court challenging the high court order, Sarkar told reporters after the meeting. State advocate-general Bijan Chandra Das and law secretary Datamohan Jamatia briefed the cabinet about the judgment.
The court, after hearing the state government and the complainants, on Wednesday passed the order on a batch of 58 petitions filed by those who failed to secure government teachers jobs.
The government recruited 1,100 post-graduate, 4,617 graduate in 2010 and 4,606 under-graduate teachers in December last year.
Chief minister and education and law minister have held a series of meetings with the officials and legal experts in the past three days to study the scope of filing a petition in the apex court against the high court judgment, a top law department official said on condition of anonymity.
The main Opposition parties, including the Congress, BJP and the Trinamul Congress, welcomed the courts verdict and sought fresh recruitment process. They also demanded the chief ministers resignation. The minister for school education, Tapan Chakraborty, said the government would stand by the teachers whose jobs have been put at stake.
The CPM has urged the high court to review its judgment on humanitarian grounds. The court judgment cancelling jobs of 10,323 school teachers is unprecedented, unfortunate and inhuman. It has snatched the livelihood of 50,000 families, CPM state secretary Bijan Dhar said.
The high courts order has also sparked clashes between workers and supporters of the Congress and the CPM.
On Thursday, hundreds of CPM cadres and supporters laid siege to Congress Bhavan in Belonia, headquarters of South Tripura district, and shouted slogans protesting leader of the Opposition Sudip Roy Barmans letter to the Union HRD ministry opposing recruitment of teachers and welcoming the high court order.
In another incident yesterday, the residence of Phani Bhusan Debbarma, 38, the block Congress president of Simna under Mohanpur subdivision, was set ablaze around 3pm by unidentified persons. I was not at home during the incident. My wife did not see anyone setting the house on fire, but I am convinced that CPM workers and supporters are behind this. Since news on the order spread, some people have spread rumours that the Congress had moved the petition, he said. Debbarma said cash and valuables worth Rs 20 lakh had been destroyed in the blaze.
CPM secretary Haripada Das, however, denied involvement of party workers in the incident at Simna, but he asserted they would protest the dismissal order. The partys youth wing, the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), has already decided to hit the streets over the issue, blaming the Opposition for its hand in the order.


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Video: Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford would love to play Finnick Odair
Once again, we're listening from an actor who would love to play Finnick in Catching Fire! We first heard Zac Efron, then Grant Gustin, and now is the turn of Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford, who also appears in What To Expect When You're Expecting, the film co-starred by Elizabeth Banks.
Watch ClvverTV interviewing Chace about it in the video above!


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Hello everyone,
Just fired up my Hyfire II today. So far so good, but have a question.
My convection blower motors are running pretty hot. I have them ducted to cold air return via 7" pipe, sealed tight to the intake. Is this normal?
Thanks again for your help .
If this has already been answered somewhere, I apologize. I didn't find it anywhere.


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Six Months Later
[Sorry, the video for this story has expired, but you can still read the transcript below. ]
- Online NewsHour Special Report: The Response: American After the Attacks
- March 11, 2002: Text: President Bush on the six-month anniversary of 9/11.
- March 7, 2002: Kenneth Feinberg on the federal government's victims' compensation plan
- Feb. 6, 2002: A debate between Feinberg and a representative from the victims' families.
- Jan. 17, 2002: The head of aviation security on how air travel will change
- Dec. 11, 2002: Text: President Bush marks the three month anniversary.
- Dec. 5, 2001: The challenges of administering funds to victims and their families.
GWEN IFILL: And so the question of the day is: How has the United States changed in the six months since the attacks?
For answers and opinions, we turn to Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International; Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist with the Miami Herald; Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School; Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School; and Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Defense Consortium.
GWEN IFILL: Fareed Zakaria, we just heard Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, say that since 9/11, it has changed the way we think about our own vulnerability. Take off on that. What does that mean to you?
FAREED ZAKARIA: Well, I think it's…what it means is that the most powerful nation in the world that spends more on its defenses than the next ten countries put together was still able to be attacked by 19 men using civilian planes, and I think that is the fundamental new reality we face, which is an ongoing struggle between the forces of order, if you will, and the forces of disorder, because what we can do to deal with the threat of terrorism is limited by this one problem – that every day it gets easier and easier for small groups, indeed individuals, with access to technology that is now often 40 or 50 years old to cause devastating problems. Many of these groups that we are battling are tiny – whether they're in Yemen or Indonesia or Afghanistan – but they have the means to inflict extraordinary damage.
And I think while these trends have been growing over the last 20 or 30 years, if you look back now, you can see that, 9/11 was the kind of wake-up call that made us realize that we're in a world where very small people can cause very big damage.
GWEN IFILL: Dr. Poussaint, how does an American deal with this kind of heightened vulnerability, this idea that all of a sudden America can be under attack in the way that Fareed Zakaria was just describing?
DR. ALVIN POUSSAINT: Well, I think what happened after 9/11 and just after it happened and it continues now is people have a heightened sense of fear and anxiety. Even though some of the acute serious tension has receded a bit, I think people still feel an undercurrent of tension when they go to an airport and they see stepped-up security, when they hear about the war in Afghanistan against al-Qaida, the loss of American troops. There's a new tension in the country that will probably be here for a long time.
And the intense media coverage both of 9/11 and the war and terrorism around the world is keeping this at a really high, tense level I think for everyone. And I think that makes everyone more ready to accept, in fact, the war against terrorism and whatever that might mean in a given situation. But I think for some individuals, particularly those who lost loved ones during 9/11, that all of this attention on the media and tuning in to it and watching it is causing more anxiety and fear and perhaps making some of them regress or it's a setback for them rekindling all of the same types of awful emotions, particularly if some of them are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
So I think that some people, not just those who lost loved ones, but all around the country perhaps should not keep their TV sets on and listen and watch too much of this, and particularly children should probably not watch too much of it, because of the anxiety and fear that it produces and just ongoing kinds of tension.
GWEN IFILL: Leonard Pitts, you have traveled around the country since 9/11. Is this an anxiety, which is an East Coast phenomenon or is this something which truly has taken root with people around the country?
LEONARD PITTS: I tend to believe wherever you go in the country we understand we're all in this thing together, you know, it is a vast continent. It is a vast country, but I think that at a time like this and in a wake of events like this, there is almost no East or West or North or South in this country. It is all one people. We all understand ourselves to be in this together. I think it's, you know, someone said in the immediate after math of September 11 that we are all New Yorkers now and we are all Washingtonians now. I think that pretty much sums up not just the aftermath, the immediate aftermath of September 11, but even where we stand now.
I began this day in Oklahoma City, where I spent the weekend on some business. And I was told by several people there, you know, that they felt an especial closeness to what's going on on the East Coast because of what they themselves went through in 1995. I was told by one gentlemen that they almost wished that as a community that they could take New York and hug New York and talk to New York and tell it what it will face coming up, what's down the road in terms of this process of grieving and of incorporating this event.
GWEN IFILL: Karen Narasaki, after September 11, this kind of unity that Leonard Pitts describes seems to suffuse everything. Is that something which you see has continued, or is there a chance that that will crumble under regular everyday pressures?
KAREN NARASAKI: Well, I actually that the picture of unity was a bit more mixed. Certainly for immigrant communities I think it helped forge an even greater bond that immigrants have felt and love for this country. They lost loved ones. Loved ones were hurt and they feared for the safety of their families and communities. Yet at the same time the government started to adopt a number of policies that were sending the message this we don't trust you as immigrants, that we're going to target you as immigrants and created a new wave of fear. In addition to that, as you're aware, there was a wave of violence that struck both Arab Americans, Muslims, Indian Americans, Pakistanis and other South Asian Americans.
We just issued a report, for example, that almost 250 South Asians were attacked in the three months following the bombing. And so immigrant communities are struggling because they want to belong to this country. They love this country. But they're wondering whether this country is really going to accept them as full Americans deserving of all the constitutional protections that other Americans enjoy.
GWEN IFILL: Were those isolated incidents, or do you think it's a sign that the country has grown worse not better since 9/11?
KAREN NARASAKI: Well, what I like about this country is we're very optimistic as a people. The question is whether the fear is going to overtake that. Luckily a lot of the incidents, the intensity of the incidents was really in the first three weeks after 9/11, but we're still seeing a lot more incidents than we would normally see in all of our communities, and we're beginning to hear reports of employment discrimination and housing discrimination and hotels and restaurants also discriminating. And we're very concerned about that.
GWEN IFILL: Professor Elshtain, how are you seeing it from your point of view, is this six months perhaps too soon to even begin to gauge how America has changed?
JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: Well, it's a little early but I don't think it's too early. I think in fact we were obliged in the wake of 9/11 to recognize that we were a "we", not just competing individuals, not just groups that had distinct identities, but there is something that can reasonably called an American identity. And we were then I think obliged to reflect on what that is and about the universal principles embedded in the American idea of itself, of a polity that does welcome people and accept them into citizenship, whatever their race, whatever their ethnic background, whatever their language, whatever their religious creed.
And that that sense of who we are is something that we need to cherish, and something that very much distinguishes us from those who mean to harm us, who repudiate any such idea, who, in fact, loath that idea – that idea of an openness and an inclusiveness of citizenship, and who mean to harm us because they see that idea as itself one that must be extirpated.
So I think that sense of representing something as Americans, something that's worthy and something that is, indeed, at base, noble, is new and a new experience for many young Americans. It's something that they hadn't been called upon to feel about.
GWEN IFILL: Let me ask you something about that because right after 9/11 there were many reports of this great surge of people going back to church, reclaiming their spirituality. The most recent polls show people going away from that. Are we just going to go back to normalcy, whatever that means anymore?
JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: Well, I think that the movement of people into their churches, into their houses of worship is very understandable in a time of such trauma. The fact that attendance at church, synagogue, mosque is back to normal levels isn't all that surprising, but it doesn't mean that people are unchanged by their experience of the last six months.
I think that if we look at the response to lots of the polls that have been done and the sense of civic-spiritedness, of civic purpose, the notion that I am obliged to help my neighbors, to get involved, even the whole idea of what it means to be a citizen, which was a word that had almost fallen into complete disuse as just archaic, now we have young people, those of us who are college professors have had this experience, of students coming in and saying suddenly it meant something to be a citizen and they never thought they'd hear themselves talking like that.
And they wanted to think about that some more and to reflect on it and to reflect on the fact that many of the goods that we cherish, the simple good of civic peace, of what it means to get up in the morning, to be able to go to work, to have the reasonable expectation that you'll be able to see your children that night, that these are goods we can't take for granted and that from time to time they may have to be defended.
GWEN IFILL: Fareed Zakaria, the global look at this. The United States has changed -instead of being accused of being totally self-involved, now it's accused of perhaps going back there, having reached out and then reached back. What is different globally in America's relationship with allies and enemies abroad?
FAREED ZAKARIA: Gwen, you know what, the biggest change that's happened with 9/11, with regard to international relations is the massive mobilization of American power. American power in the 1990s was somewhat latent. You know, we were the most powerful country in the world, but we didn't do very much with it. And we mostly used that wealth to insulate ourselves from the troubles of the world. We didn't want to get involved in a number of trouble spots around the world.
9/11 meant we took all this latent power – economic but also political, military and in some senses even moral and ideological – and we mobilized it. And now you see this enormous gap between America and the rest of the world. And this has been the source of the trouble. I don't think so much specific American policies, but the fact that the world sees that the Europeans see, for example, that they are really impotent compared with American might, that we can do the entire Afghan operation without NATO, even though NATO had invoked the self-defense clause for the first time in its history. When we deal with countries in Southeast Asia, they know that we could send our troops in and deal with their terrorist better than their military can. And this is going to be the great drama I think of the next 20 years.
It tends to be cast particularly by some elites in morality terms, you know, that we're being bad and unilateralist and the Europeans are somehow virtuous. I think the reality is this is simply a massive imbalance of power. If we stay mobilized and stay focused, as I think we will, this might even grow. This may just be the beginning of a kind of new era of American hegemony.
GWEN IFILL: Leonard Pitts, you wrote a column shortly after, in fact the very day after the election, after the attacks which zipped around the Internet, in which you talked about your anger about what happened. Are you still as angry?
LEONARD PITTS: You can't maintain that level of anger, I think, for six months without burning yourself out. But I am still as resolved, and moreover, I'm still as certain, I guess, of the resolve of this country that this will not go unpunished and these deaths will not go unavenged. I think what happened on September 11 for a lot of people is it was the first time we understood ourselves to be Americans, you know, and the first time that that word carried any weight or meant anything. I think for the long period of time before September 11 we were just sort of over here on our side of the world, and we were just sort of oblivious in many ways to the fact of that.
And now all of a sudden we have to face the reality that being American means something. It means something to those people who abhor what we stand for. It also means something to those people who look up to and idealize what we stand for. And I think what happened on September 11th, one, is that we were pulled into the realization that this means something, and two, we were pulled into the understanding that what this means is not free and that every once in a while you are called upon to make a sacrifice of money and treasure and blood to defend it.
GWEN IFILL: Dr. Poussaint, sadly we're almost out of time so I'm going to have to ask you to be brief, but I am curious about whether you think that the United States of America has changed permanently as a result of this.
DR. ALVIN POUSSAINT: I think they've changed. I don't know if it's permanent if you're talking about a sense of unity and a new patriotism. Is that superficial or will Americans really come together in real ways and deal with the divisiveness between racial groups, ethnic groups, the socioeconomic problems we have. Right now all of those domestic issues are on the back burner, which many people clash and struggle over now and haven't probably changed their basic opinions since 9/11.
GWEN IFILL: Karen Narasaki, same question to you. How permanent or real is the change that we've been talking about?
KAREN NARASAKI: I think some of the changes are real and permanent. One of the changes, I hope, is permanent is the interest that Americans now have in what's going on in other countries and thinking about what are the United States' obligations and responsibilities in working with peoples from around the world. It's a shrinking globe.
And one of the things I think will come out of it is America will realize that we have a vast resource in the fact that we have so many immigrants from so many parts of the world who could help us understand better what our relationships need to be going on into the future.
GWEN IFILL: Well, this is going to be an ongoing conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all very much.