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The World's Greatest Sinner
Character actor and cult hero Timothy Carey wrote, produced, and directed this one-of-a-kind parade of the unusual, in which Carey stars as Clarence Hilliard, a seemingly content insurance salesman who undergoes a remarkable transformation. Hilliard, bored with his job and certain fate has bigger things in store for him, begins telling customers that insurance is pointless, which leads to him being fired. Hilliard then declares that "There's only one God, and that's Man," and with the help of his loyal gardener, Alonzo (Gil Barreto), forms the Eternal Man party and throws his hat into the political arena. To attract attention to his crusade, Hilliard learns to play guitar (well, sort of), hires a rock & roll band, and stages frenetic shows in which he throws himself about with a frantic abandon like a cross between Gene Vincent and James Brown. Hilliard drops the name "Clarence" and proclaims himself "God," and begins attracting a fanatical legion of followers. A mysterious political kingmaker offers his services to Hilliard, and "God" soon finds himself a serious contender for the office of President of the United States. Growing crazed with his own power, Hilliard tells his followers that they are "super human beings" (one who does not live up to Hilliard's high standards is forced to commit suicide), seduces both 70-year-old grandmothers and 14-year-old groupies, and tells potential voters that if elected, he can make all people millionaires and bring eternal life to those who follow him. Hilliard's long-neglected wife and children are taken aback by Clarence's transformation, urging him to turn his back on his blasphemous crusade and return to the Catholic faith of his earlier days. Facing a crisis of conscience, Hilliard challenges the Supreme Being to prove its existence. Shot on a shoestring budget over a period of four years, The World's Greatest Sinner is, if anything, even more bizarre than a recounting of its plot would lead you to expect, and has inspired a surprisingly large fan following considering the fact the film never received a nationwide release (Carey chose to distribute it himself). Frank Zappa, who was 22 when the film was released, composed the musical score and wrote the title song ("As a sinner he's a winner/ Honey, he's no beginner"); noted voice-over artist Paul Frees narrates; and Ray Dennis Steckler (who later developed a cult following of his own for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies) was one of the cameramen. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
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The Mermaids of Tiburon
Alluring but mysterious females come to rescue of a man on a mission in this beautifully photographed underwater adventure. Dr. Samuel Jamison (George Rowe) is a marine biologist on the staff at an aquatic theme park who one day receives a visit from an elderly gentleman named Ernst Steinhauer (John Mylong). Steinhauer shows Jamison some remarkable specimens of "flame pearls," rare jewels of the sea that change color in a prismatic fashion, which he discovered during a recent visit to the island of Tiburon; he wants to know more about them and invites Jamison to his home to discuss his find. However, when Jamison pays Steinhauer a visit, he finds the place ransacked, the pearls gone and old man missing. Jamison charters a boat to Tiburon in search of the pearls, but he's not the only one who knows about the treasure; Milo (Timothy Carey), a vicious gangster, stole Steinhauer's maps and killed the old man, and is now sailing to Tiburon to claim the valuables. Jamison discovers the pearls are being guarded by a handful of beautiful mermaids who are determined to see that the treasure doesn't fall into the wrong hands. The original version of The Mermaids of Tiburon featured noted pin-up model Diane Webber as the queen of the mermaids, complete with a fishy tail; when the movie failed to do much business, director John Lamb added new footage in which the queen is joined by a bevy of other underwater beauties, who mysteriously have legs but also swim topless through the ocean depths. The nudie version of Mermaids of Tiburon was also distributed under the title The Aqua Sex. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
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George Rowe
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Joe Kidd
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In John Sturges'sAmericanized version of Sergio Leone's Man-With-No-Name films, Clint Eastwood is Joe Kidd, a cryptic stranger who arrives in the New Mexican town of Sinola, where Mexican bandito/revolutionary Luis Chama (John Saxon) has organized a peasant revolt against the local landowners, who are throwing the poor off land that rightfully belongs to them. When a posse -- financed by wealthy landowner Frank Harlan (Robert Duvall) -- is formed to capture Luis, Kidd is invited to join but prefers to remain neutral. Harlan keeps badgering Kidd to join up, and Kidd finally relents when he finds that Luis's band has raided his own ranch and one of his ranch hands has been injured. The bloodthirsty posse rounds up five Mexicans hostages and threaten to kill them unless Luis surrenders to them. One of the hostages is the attractive Stella Garcia (Helen Sanchez), and Kidd falls in love with her. Harlan notices this and throws Kidd in jail to prevent him from helping Stella and the Mexicans. Kidd decides the position himself as the voice of reason in this nest of disorder. He escapes and saves the Mexican hostages, determined to capture Luis himself and see that he gets a fair trial. But when Kidd captures Luis and delivers him to Sheriff Mitchell (Gregory Walcott), Harlan is in town waiting for him. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi
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Al Pacino stars as Tony Montana, an exiled Cuban criminal who goes to work for Miami drug lord Robert Loggia. Montana rises to the top of Florida's crime chain, appropriating Loggia's cokehead mistress (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the process. Howard Hawks' "X Marks the Spot" motif in depicting the story line's many murders is dispensed with in the 1983 Scarface; instead, we are inundated with blood by the bucketful, especially in the now-infamous buzz saw scene. One carry-over from the original Scarface is Tony Montana's incestuous yearnings for his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). The screenplay for the 1983 Scarface was written by Oliver Stone. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
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Summary (Masterplots, Fourth Edition)
In 1974, Adrienne Rich received the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck. In a statement written with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, who also were nominated, she rejected the award as an individual but accepted it on behalf of women, dedicating the occasion "to the struggle for self-determination of all women." This vision of herself as writing for and in the presence of women has guided her work. Feminism provides Rich with the framework for her vision of transformation for herself and for other women.
Her seventh book of poetry, the collection is, in part, a clarification of her identity as a member of the women's movement of the previous decade. Receiving critical acclaim from the onset of her career, including being chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first collection, A Change of World (1951), Rich has sought a position in the male-dominated literary world. In the late 1960's and early 1970's she became politically active in antiwar protests and the feminist movement. Rich saw her poetic power and political ideology merge, creating a powerful poetic vision that informs Diving into the Wreck. Rich, one of America's foremost poets, has explored, analyzed, and depicted her own physical, psychic, and intellectual rebirth in her prose and poetry. Although her later works, including her prose text Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) and her poetry...
(The entire section is 1497 words.)
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Source: Masterplots, Fourth Edition, ©2010 Salem Press, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.


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Discover amazing films from around the world.
Browse some of our genres below to find movies you'll love. Want to dive deeper? Try our Explore films page.
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In 1968, two hippies hiking near Mt. Shasta in Northern California stumbled across an unlikely property for sale: an abandoned goldmine and surrounding land, 300 acres for $22,000. Fueled by contributions from the Doors, the Monkees, Frank Zappa and others, they bought the property and named it...Subscribe to to watch now -
The Architecture of Doom
Featuring never-before-seen film footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM captures the inner workings of the Third Reich and illuminates the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture. From Nazi party rallies to the final days inside...Subscribe to to watch now -
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
Featuring never-before-seen archival footage of Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with colleagues and confidants including John Waters, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Sonic Youth, Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra and David...Subscribe to to watch now -
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
Based on two works by the playwright Jean Anouilh, YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET opens with a who's-who of French acting royalty (including Mathieu Amalric, Michel Piccoli and frequent Resnais muse Sabine Azema) being summoned to the reading of a late playwright's last will and...Subscribe to to watch now
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The Camden 28
Summer, 1971. Protests against the Vietnam war are spreading across America. In Camden, New Jersey, a group of 28 activists (mostly conscientious objectors from the Catholic left) plan to break into a local draft board office and destroy records, striking a blow against the system. But little do...Subscribe to to watch now -
In 1968, two hippies hiking near Mt. Shasta in Northern California stumbled across an unlikely property for sale: an abandoned goldmine and surrounding land, 300 acres for $22,000. Fueled by contributions from the Doors, the Monkees, Frank Zappa and others, they bought the property and named it...Subscribe to to watch now -
From the moment David Brower first laid eyes on the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, he fought to preserve the American wilderness for future generations. The story of a true American legend, MONUMENTAL documents the life of this outdoorsman, filmmaker and environmental crusader, whose fiery...Subscribe to to watch now -
Living in Emergency
Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Pakistan. Just a few of the world's humanitarian and political crises in the past years. Whether the result of war or nature, these disasters devastate populations and cripple health systems. Despite the immense dangers and difficulties of...Subscribe to to watch now
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Best friends Woodrow and Aiden spend all of their free time building MAD MAX-inspired flamethrowers and muscle cars in preparation for a global apocalypse. But when Woodrow meets a charismatic young woman and falls hard in love, he and Aiden quickly integrate into a new group of friends, setting...Subscribe to to watch now -
My Kingdom
A story of honor, love and revenge set against the backdrop of the Chinese opera during its heyday in 1920s Shanghai, MY KINGDOM centers on two sworn brothers and their quest to regain their master's honor. After years spent training in martial arts, Guan Yilong (Wu Chun, 14 BLADES) and Meng...Subscribe to to watch now -
After a brutal raid on a Hatton Garden diamond merchant, a man lies dead and the finger of guilt points straight towards Janine Heining (Janine Gray), an employee who's conveniently gone missing. But Janine is innocent; she is suffering from amnesia after being struck during the hold-up. And the...Subscribe to to watch now -
Onechanbara: Vortex
The time is the near future, and the world is about to come to an end. An organization, in an attempt to discover a potion of immortality, has instead created zombies who roam the earth. Sugito, the mad scientist who created the zombie legions is now dead, and the two sisters,...Subscribe to to watch now
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Torremolinos 73
Spain, circa 1973. Alfredo is a struggling door to door encyclopedia salesman. Meanwhile his wife Carmen is obsessed with becoming a mother. Alfredo's boss gives Alfredo a choice: make 'educational' sex films at home for a Scandinavian distributor, or get fired. Alfredo chooses the former, and it...Subscribe to to watch now -
Go for Zucker
First-class pool shark and all-around hustler Jaeckie Zucker is up to his ears in debt, again. He faces jail, divorce and general ruin. When word comes that his mother has died, leaving an inheritance, it's a stroke of luck. But according to his mother's will, before he can cash in Zucker must...Subscribe to to watch now -
Welcome to ABSURDISTAN, a small village in the high desert mountains, just on the outskirts of reality, where magical visions and bizarre events fuse together. The village is facing a water shortage, but the men are too lazy to fix a rickety pipeline and the women are getting fed up with their...Subscribe to to watch now -
Film Geek
The award-winning, critically acclaimed comedy FILM GEEK is about one movie nerd's quest to get a life. When Scotty Pelk (Melik Malkasian) is fired from his video store job for annoying the customers, he hits rock bottom. But then he meets Niko (Tyler Gannon), a sexy free spirit who just might...Subscribe to to watch now
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You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
Based on two works by the playwright Jean Anouilh, YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET opens with a who's-who of French acting royalty (including Mathieu Amalric, Michel Piccoli and frequent Resnais muse Sabine Azema) being summoned to the reading of a late playwright's last will and...Subscribe to to watch now -
The Isle
The erotic arthouse thriller that caused a sensation at the Sundance, Toronto, and Venice Film Festivals, THE ISLE tells the tale of a beautiful woman who lives on an eerie, remote lake selling food to fisherman by day, and her body by night. The woman becomes obsessed with a former police...Subscribe to to watch now -
In this epic story of love and treason, screen legend Max von Sydow (THE EXORCIST, MINORITY REPORT, HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, THE SEVENTH SEAL) gives a career-crowning performance as Knut Hamsun, Norway's controversial Nobel Laureate. Hamsun is his country's most beloved writer. But with the shadow...Subscribe to to watch now -
Merci pour le chocolat
MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT is vintage Chabrol: intricate plots wend their way through the elegant homes of several well-heeled French-Swiss, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Isabelle Huppert stars as Mika, the oh-so-perfect head of a company that manufactures Swiss chocolate; Jacques...Subscribe to to watch now
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SpeedBoston Dating Coupons and Deals
Dating can be like assembling the silver monkey in Legends of the Hidden Temple, a challenge requiring wits, luck, and passing knowledge of primate anatomy. Skip the confusing steps of pickup artistry with this Groupon. Choose from Three Options $21 for admission to one speed-dating event (up to a $49 value) $59 for admission to three speed-dating events (up to a $147 value) $239 for a Simplify Me matchmaking package (a $479 value) Speed-dating events host up to 36 people for an evening of mingling. See the event schedule for dates, times, and locations. With the Simplify Me package, customers ...
The Fine Print
Limit 1 per option per person, additional as gifts • Valid for men and women ages 22-42 • Reservations are required and subject to availability • Merchant cancellation/re-scheduling policy of 24 hours applies; voucher subject to forfeiture • One event (Option A) must be used in a single visit • Three events (Option B) may be shared or used over multiple visits; may be redeemed by three people on one event or by one person on three events • Times and locations vary for speed dating events; visit speedbostondating.com/ for upcoming schedule • For speed dating events, women should arrive 30 minutes early; men should arrive 15 minutes early • Matchmaking package (Option C) may be used over multiple visits but must be used by same customer; cannot be shared • Excludes special events • Visit speedbostondating.com/matchmaking.html for matchmaking information
Your pockets are overflowing with business cards, but you're looking for more than another power lunch. If you're searching for connections that are a little more personal, put those networking skills to the test with today's deal from SpeedBoston Dating: • $19 ($49 value) for one ticket to any dating event • $57 ($147 value) for three tickets to any dating events • $239 ($479 value) for a Simplify Me dating package Dating's Never Been so Fun -- or Stress-Free Forget name tags and loud whistles; this company takes a simpler approach: Ladies sit at tables while men move about the room every six to seven minutes. Women can opt for a complimentary makeover, and everyone will enjoy gourmet appetizers -- all in a romantic atmosphere that's perfect for 22- to 42-year-olds. Alternatively, delve deeper with the Simplify Me package, which includes includes two pre-arranged date nights with different people, based on your mutual likes, dislikes, and aspirations. Since 2007, these matchmaking mavens have been featured on more than a dozen national TV programs and have been championing the relaxed yet sophisticated UK style of speed dating. Want more? Check out SpeedUSA Group on Facebook.
Speed dating at a SpeedBoston Dating event has the ladies stay seated and the gents change partners as both sides spend just six to seven minutes together identifying that like-at-first-sight chemistry -- or not. If both of you check the "yes" column, SpeedBoston Dating will connect you the next day. If not, no harm, no foul -- and no hurt feelings. Or, if you'd rather let SpeedBoston Dating do the leg work for you, you can also sign up for a Simplify Me Matchmaking Package. They pre-screen you and your potential matches for similar interests and attitudes -- all you need to do is show up for dinner at the location of your choice. $21 ($42 value) for one admission to any dating event $59 ($126 value) for three admissions to any dating event -- bring two friends or use them all yourself! $239 ($479 value) for Simplify Me Matchmaking Package New dates and venues are constantly being added, and are posted 8 weeks in advance. If your first choice isn't available, SpeedBoston Dating will happily place you in the next available event


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Hybrid Learning Model
Connect directly with leaders in the complementary healthcare field for training in mind-body medicine, integrative nutrition, and integrative mental health. Our low residency, evidence-based, integrative medicine programs are designed for licensed professionals who wish to expand the treatment modalities they can offer their patients. Our doctoral degree program in mind-body medicine also offers specializations in healthcare systems (including informatics), healthcare systems, and healthcare practice.
A majority of coursework is conducted online and at a distance: all courses include weekly web-based activity and monthly video conferences for students and faculty.
Each semester includes two eight week terms. At the beginning of each semester students must attend at least one Residential Conference (offered in San Francisco and/or Washington DC) in order to work in-person with faculty and fellow students, and receive hands-on training.
Our degree programs have at their core in-person seminars offered by The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. Both the MS and the PhD require three such seminars, which are built into the School's courses (MBM 5600, 5605, and 5610). The seminars serve as the core for the residential conferences in those terms and are conducted wherever The Center for Mind-Body Medicine seminar is scheduled. An additional seminar is included as an elective course on treating cancer.
Our programs are designed for professionals in a variety of career fields who wish to enhance and expand their skills or pursue research in health and wellness. With this transformative education, students in the program will learn how to:
- Work to transform healthcare through humanistically informed research, practice, and education
- Acquire knowledge and skills to transform healthcare practice and healthcare delivery
- Develop an approach emphasizing higher levels of health and wellness
- Acquire an understanding of the human energy field, its function as a bridge between mind and body, and its role in health and disease
- Display innovation and creativity in the use of methods moving beyond disciplinary and paradigmatic boundaries
- Develop a sensitivity and acceptance for multiple perspectives based on healthcare disciplines racial, ethnic, and cultural groups
- Acquire an understanding and mastery of research in healthcare, especially research that supports improvement and nurtures change in health care.


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Health officers hold their fire on coal port review
Fraser Health's chief medical health officer won't yet say if he thinks an environmental impact assessment of a planned new coal export terminal in Surrey ordered last week by Port Metro Vancouver will be sufficient to answer health concerns.
Dr. Paul Van Buynder said he and counterpart Dr. Patricia Daly at the Vancouver Coastal health authority are pleased the port is now talking to them about risks from coal dust and trains.
But he said they're reserving judgment as to whether the newly announced review goes far enough until they can learn more about it.
"If this doesn't meet our needs, we will be saying so in due course," Van Buynder said Tuesday.
The health officers had been calling for months for a comprehensive health impact assessment of the coal transfer facility proposed by Fraser Surrey Docks, which would bring an extra coal train per day through South Surrey and White Rock, and send barges laden with coal to Texada Island.
Van Buynder said he wants more information on the scope of the review, which Fraser Surrey Docks has commissioned consulting firm SNC Lavalin to lead.
Fraser Surrey officials said last week the review could be complete by the end of September, prompting coal activists to ridicule the two-week timeline as obviously inadequate.
Van Buynder said he and Daly were surprised to learn that some studies had already been commissioned for the review without their knowledge.
"We were somewhat surprised about the extent of the activity that we were unaware of," he said, adding that makes it difficult for the moment to judge if the time frame is too short.
"If the bulk of the work has already happened, maybe they're correct. If they're just about to start, it's never going to happen."
Van Buynder had previously estimated a proper health impact assessment might delay construction by six to 12 months.
He also reiterated a previous statement that he could use his legal powers under the Public Health Act to compel the proponent to mitigate health risks to residents from coal dust, if he's not ultimately satisfied with the steps taken by the port.
"It is a scenario that we continue to hold in reserve," Van Buynder said.
The port also last week ordered new measures to guard against the escape of coal, including the re-spraying of trainloads with a dust-control agent and eliminating provisions for a contingency coal storage pile.
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It is never too late to go on an adventure…
August was American Adventures Month – an opportunity to have an adventure, take time off and travel leisurely. And although August is closing out doesn't mean we have to formally say "good-bye" to an awareness month with such a universally tantalizing philosophy. As a company, while it is important to promote a hard-working mindset, the hardest worker can be weak if overloaded. By promoting adventure, you promote healthier employees and growth of the mind and body.
For Labor Day, pretend it is August and head to the beach. Take out a promotional sand pail or even a promotional kite and see how far your imagination can go. Or see where 99,999 steps can get you on a promotional pedometer. Better yet, travel far by car – and leave behind your promotional cell phone accessories for a promotional camera.
For more information on American Adventures Month, visit the official website here.


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Also check MUSE's website for news on the band, videos, and updated touring information, which includes some changes to the US Tour dates. muse.mu
Visit Steve's official website HackettSongs.com for latest news on Steve and check out the photo and video galleries, where you can see Steve's Sustainer-equipped guitars in action.
Check out PRONG's official website for tour dates.
"Like" the Fernandes official page for the daily inside scoop on artists, products, giveaways, worldwide promotions, fan interactions and much more!


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French ConnectionAcid Chevron Shirt
French Connection Sheer Blouse with Chevron Stitching Pattern
From their latest collection, this French Connection sheer blouse fuses a beautiful chevron stitch pattern with a rich fabric for a luxurious finish that's perfect for dinner dates and evenings with friends.
Intricate, the stitching detail is eye-catching and lends this luxe piece instant chic appeal, whilst the sheer fabric creates an elegant tone contrast for a boudoir style. The structured cut, a traditional French Connection style, is smart and gives this shirt its tailored appearance. Finished with concealed buttons, to keep the focus on the stitching, this top transforms the classic into something utterly sublime.
For a strong evening wear statement, coordinate this beautiful blouse with the French Connection Judy Jegs shorts (3J9LV) and a pair of black court shoes. A top with a sweetheart neckline beneath will show off your décollage, creating a stunning contrast of tones.
Useful info:
- Blouse by French Connection
- Sheer fabric
- Chevron stitch pattern
- Concealed buttons to front
- Weekly Price
- From £0.90 per week
- Price
- £69.00
- In Stock
- Next day delivery available
- Availability
- Available
French ConnectionWater Flower Drape Top
French Connection Top with Water Flower Print
This top by French Connection is a lightweight, staple separate that will easily carry you from this season into the next and will complement your casual-chic off-duty looks.
The water flower print adds a delicate splash of eye-catching colour to this piece for a feminine finish. Featuring a double tier peplum, this top is given an incredibly beautiful shape that will flatter your curves and the three-quarter sleeves keep the style elegant.
This piece looks charming when worn with the French Connection indigo jeggings (3J9M3) and a pair of court shoes.
Useful info:
- top by French Connection
- Water flower print
- Double tier peplum
- Three-quarter sleeves
- Weekly Price
- From £1.05 per week
- Price
- £80.00
- Low stock, selling fast
- Availability
- Low stock selling fast
French ConnectionPebble Petal Shirt
French Connection Lightweight Printed Petal Shirt
In a lightweight fabric this French Connection blouse is the perfect pick for the season ahead.
This top features a stunning vintage inspired print and the longer sleeves make it the perfect transitional piece. This shirt has a contrast black panel and the buttons to the front add a touch of detail.
Wear this printed piece with skinny jeans and court shoes. Add a camisole with a subtle lace trim.
Useful info:
- Printed blouse by French Connection
- Lightweight; contrast black panel at bottom
- Long sleeves; button detail to the front
- Weekly Price
- From £0.90 per week
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- £69.00
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Latest Info and News
- Result For July 13, 2013
- Result For July 07, 2013
- Result For July 06, 2013
- Result For June 29, 2013
- Result For June 22, 2013
What's New?!
GCS will enter an exciting new phase of its 39th consecutive years of racing this April.
Long time stock car racer #4 Dennis Rogers will hang up the helmet and take the reins of the famous speedway in the next exciting chapter of GCS history this April.
Dennis has acquired the business and leased the property from the Cooper family becoming only the third operator in the tracks storied history.
When asked what changes there will be, Dennis answered that his intent was to follow the successful formula developed by the Coopers and looked to keep both classes, rules, sanctions, and operation dates the same as they have been for the past few years in an effort to ease financial burdens that so often accompany rules changes.
With a first race planned for early April and play days to take place several weeks preceding the opening, North Texas and Southern Oklahoma racers will soon be back at it trying to tame the slick high banks of Grayson County Speedway!
More details will be released shortly including banquet and registration dates.
Get'em ready!
Trucks! Have one? Come and race it!!!
Have you ever wanted to race? But you didn't have a car to take to the track! Have a truck sitting around? Now's your chance! We have adopted a new class of rules for Novice Stock. Check it out!
See you in April!
Grayson County Speedway is a 1/4 mile semi-banked dirt oval track IMCA sanctioned track.
We encourage a family atmosphere and provide alcohol and non-alcohol seating.
Track info line…. Call for latest event info and inclement weather info:
Every Saturday Night Apr-Sept!
Gates Open at 6:00
Racing Starts at 8:00
Students and Seniors………………………..$10.00
Children Counter Height and below……….$5.00
Children 2 and under…………………………..Free
Pit Pass……………………………………….$25.00
*Prices may change due to Special Events *


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2010s spending
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Deficit: The amount by which the government's total budget outlays exceeds its total receipts for a fiscal year. US Senate Budget Committee
This year, FY 2014, the federal government in its budget estimated that the deficit will be $744 billion.
Although the federal deficit is the amount each year by which federal outlays in the federal budget exceed federal receipts, the gross federal debt increases each year by substantially more than the amount of the deficit each year. That is because a substantial amount of federal borrowing is not counted in the budget. See here.
* Federal Deficit is budgeted.
† Some people have emailed to insist
that the FY 2009 deficit should be assigned to Obama. Sorta.
The federal debt increases each year by more than the deficit. For FY 2013 the federal budget estimates that the federal debt will increase by about $1 trillion. That's about $250 billion more than the official "deficit." See Federal Debt.
But there's more. There is the increase in debt from the "agency debt" of government-sponsored enterprises. And there is the implied deficit from unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare. See chart of latest Long-term Budget Outlook from the Congressional Budget Office.
Now you are ready to explore. Click here for the basics on the national debt and deficits. Click here for a look at overall government spending; click here for a look at the federal budget by function. And there is no better place to get up to speed than Spending 101's online course on Federal Debt.
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Recent US Federal Deficits
in billionsClick chart for briefing on Federal Deficit. For numbers and more click here. | in Percent GDPClick chart for briefing on Federal Deficit. For numbers and more click here. |
The two charts show above show recent and budgeted deficits for the US federal government. On the left is a chart of the deficit in current dollars. On the right is a chart of the deficit as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Find DEFICIT stats and history.
Get WELFARE stats and history.
US BUDGET overview and pie chart.
Find NATIONAL DEBT today and history.
See FEDERAL BUDGET breakdown and estimated vs. actual.
MILITARY SPENDING details, budget and history.
See BAR CHARTS of spending, debt.
See PIE CHARTS of total spending, federal spending.
Check STATE spending: CA NY TX FL and compare.
Take a COURSE at Spending 101.
Make your own CUSTOM CHART.
Spending data is from official government sources.
Federal data since 1962 comes from the presidents budget.
All other spending data comes from the US Census Bureau.
Gross Domestic Product data comes from measuringworth.com.
Detailed table of spending data sources here.
Federal spending data begins in 1792.
State and local spending data begins in 1890.
Take a course in government spending:
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Sources for 2009:
GDP: See GDP Update Delay
Federal: Fed. Budget: Hist. Tables 3.2, 5.1, 7.1
State and Local: State and Local Gov. Finances
Sources for 2018:
GDP: Fed. Budget: Hist. Table 10.1
Federal: Fed. Budget: Hist. Tables 3.2, 5.1, 7.1
State and Local: State and Local Gov. Finances
Guesstimated by projecting the latest change in reported spending forward to future years
> data sources for other years
> data update schedule.
Federal Finances FY13 Outcomes | |||
Budget billions | CBO billions | Treasury billions | |
Receipts | $2,712 | $2,774 | $2,774 |
Outlays | $3,685 | $3,454 | $3,454 |
Deficit | $973 | $680 | $680 |
First, Fannie Mae made a onetime payment to the Treasury of around $50 billion resulting from a revaluation of certain tax assets that significantly increased its net worth. Second, because both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were profitable in 2013, the companies were required to make quarterly payments to the Treasury in amounts related to the increase in their net worth.
CBO's Budget Actuals Delayed
CBO is usually first to report federal government outlays and receipts at end of fiscal year. Delayed by shutdown.
FY 2014 Budget due for release April 10, 2013
Obama budget would cut entitlements in exchange for tax increases.
Obama budget delayed until April
Sources say April 8, 2013.
> archive
State FY13 Tax Update
On September 24, 2013 usgovernmentspending.com updated FY2013 state revenue with quarterly tax data...
GDP Update Delay
On July 31, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) revised its GDP methodology. The published ...
CBO Long-Term Budget Outlook Updated
On September 17, 2013, the Congressional Budget Office released its annual Long Term Budget Outloo...
> blog
us numbers us budget custom chart deficit/gdp spend/gdp debt/gdp us gdp us real gdp state gdp breakdown federal state local 2009 2010 2011 california texas
presented by Christopher Chantrill
Data Sources


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Nice fish UH!
Nice fish UH!
Umpqua Hunter (10-13-2013)
Trent, you and Travis should definitely come up and do it! Travis and I almost made it happen this year. Anytime between July 15 and October 15 it should be good chinook fishing somewhere on the southern Oregon coast. Chinooks average 16 to 22 pounds. We got two over 30 pounds this year and had a huge 40+ pound fish to the boat before the hooks pulled.
Grand Slam #1005
Ikeepitcold (10-13-2013)
Do you make as far down as the Chetco ?
That is an awesom fish UH. I think the biggest I've boated was only about 16-18lbs. But then again I've only been out a couple times. They are a blast to fish for though. Congrats!
Nothin better than a fresh ocean salmon! Yum. I got kinda hooked on them this year too for a while.
I caught a few out of my kayak. kayak salmon.jpg


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Not Recommended! - SeriouslyPros: "Documented" Feature set was exactly what I was looking for. Cons: Slow, memory leaks, buggy, unreliable, little support, retail price is ridiculous for what you get. Other Thoughts: Owned for almost 1 year. Bought for external USB drive support. Did you find this review helpful? |
Not worth your time. Junk Product Junk SupportPros: IPv6 but if the router never works what does that matter. Cons: Disconnects Wireless Other Thoughts: Piece of Junk. Do not buy this router even if it is free. I got this on Auction Wizard Site for 19.99 since Comcast would offer IPv6. Upgraded the firmware and worked fine. Started having the wireless drop and never work until restarted. That was like 10 min time between restarts. Updated to newest beta firmware, now IPv6 does not work. Just such a BAD product I don't see how they could sell it and smile. Called support got an RMA but now want to charge me 12 dollars for the CD that came with the router and 5 dollars for the quick installation guide. Really? I don't need you to send this JUNK back to me. Religious Icon I am going to trash this router since RMAing it requires me to pay them for JUNK I don't want in the first place. DO NOT BUY UNLESS YOU LIKE STUFF THAT DOES NOT WORK! I cannot even believe that Newegg sells this for such a high price. If you want one for free come check my trash can. Apparently you cannot say Dog backwards in reviews really? Did you find this review helpful? |
TerriblePros: None. It started dropping connections from day 1. Network would randomly disappear. Cons: This router is a con. I started having issued with dropped connections, disappearing network, timeouts, etc right away. I wish I could give it zero eggs. Tried software and firmware updates, also tried every configuration I could and nothing worked. A search of forums revealed dozens of people with the same problem and no solutions. Drops all connections, phone, computer, printer, etc. I even had trouble with the wired connections (though not near as many as the wireless). What were you thinking D-Link? If I was the only one with the problems I'd say defective item but the forums are littered with the exact same situation. Shame on you. Other Thoughts: Stick with Asus, Linksys or Netgear. Did you find this review helpful? |
Decent *cheap* routerPros: It was free from Newegg when I purchased my Motorola SB6141 Modem a few months ago. Cons: Not very fast and doesn't have good range. Did you find this review helpful? |
TerriblePros: Nothing special Cons: Well, Ive used this router over the pass 1 year from the start it has been nothing but trouble, My advice is DO not buy this router. Ive had issues with the network disappearing, timing out, randomly DCing from the internet. Ive researched every problem and most people just get fed up and buy a new router, and i feel the same way. Ive reconfigured and reset the darn thing trying to find a stable way to run it. But still, its a piece of ****and i just want everyone to know they should never even consider buying this router. Other Thoughts: When i get a new router, i plan on taking this piece of **** router out back and shooting it, burning it and smashing it. Because it deserves it and more. Its worst then a cheating girl, because at least they putout. this thing just lays there and expects you to make it work... Did you find this review helpful? |
Router is defective, D-Link support is worsePros: None. The router or it's replacement has never functioned properly for long enough for me to discover any of it's good points. Cons: This router was purchased as a backup, so I did not get a chance to use it until 7 months or so after I purchased it. When I did use it, it quickly became apparent that it was defective: the router would regularly lock up and refuse to serve new webpages, despite the fact that I could still ping these sites from the administration console. Other Thoughts: I have used a D-Link router for years with no issues. I purchased this router expecting the save high level of quality. I was deeply saddened by the experience I had with this router, and with the abysmal support I received from D-Link. Did you find this review helpful? |
Firmware 1.02 makes this usablePros: -Setup process is fairly painless Cons: -Slow throughput Other Thoughts: I struggled with this router for on previous versions of the firmware (1.00 and 1.01). Connections would drop, latency would be horrible, certain clients would not get routed properly. I then decided to update to the BETA 1.02 firmware, and all issues went away (even though the 1.02 firmware does not advertise as solving non-security related issues). Did you find this review helpful? |
it disconnects all the timePros: works some times. Cons: it disconnects often from the internet. Did you find this review helpful? |
Great Router!Pros: Amazing Router, super fast, wireless and wired. Cons: None Did you find this review helpful? |
Good for a DoorstopPros: Worked fine for a couple of months. Setup wasn't difficult. Cons: Drops device connection every few minutes. On every device on the network. Also waited until after the return period to completely cr*p out. Other Thoughts: I tried all the suggestions others have posted in reviews and I'm very thankful for those that have helped. Updating the firmware, setting static IP addresses for devices, and all the other changes made no difference in the end. RMA for a replacement wasn't worth the trouble. Did you find this review helpful? |


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23 September 2013 by James Hayes
banks and other financial institutions are not only duplicating their own infrastructures when it would be more cost-effective to share resources, but also that operating over fully-shared platforms would make collaboration (such as account moves) easier, and also help to detect fraudsters and other nefarious agents who may be moving money between accounts for criminal purposes, dodgily applying for multiple loans, or engaged in money laundering. The concept is sometimes dubbed 'bundled infrastructure'.
Friday's FT report reckons that bank supremoes are concerned about the fact that IT expenditure has been rising at a time when banks face greater deficits on their reserves as a result of regulatory changes and falling revenues. The traditional model of IT deployment has changed in recent years, and banks no longer need to pursue a 'build it, own it' approach to provisioning their computer system requirements. It quotes 'a top executive at a large European bank' as saying that banks should stop allowing their IT departments to "build empires".
The executive adds: "Why do we need to spend billions on data centres and IT infrastructure? Most of us make things that are extremely duplicative."
When you get 'top executives' opining about IT strategy it's wise to wonder if they have taken the trouble to enquire if there may be reasons, indeed benefits, as to why respective banks have preferred to go it alone and retain largely enclosed, proprietary front- and back-office computer systems in an a age when other verticals are (supposedly) embracing the joys of cloud computing and outsourcing.
One area where it's been mooted that third-parties could be more involved is in data analysis. But allowing an external partner access to primary banking data entails a high degree of high risk. It throws up major issues around ensuring data protection and data integrity. No system is perfect, but enforcing governance on internal processes and personnel is bound to be as effectively as it gets; gaining the same guarantees from a third-party, for who ultimately the level is risk is profoundly lower, is not.
Then there is the question of information security: collapsing disparate IT systems would theoretically effectively remove physical barriers that exist when large systems belonging to respective parties are virtualised. Of course, in theory becomes of the massive interconnectedness that exists within the financial sector it is in theory possible for a hacker to exploit.
But the difference is that to do so they will have to come up against additional layers of physical security in the shape of firewalls, router security, and intercommunications checks - all of which would be obviated in a full-converged banking IT scenario.
IT departments across all commercial sectors have been under pressure to make budgetary savings in terms of capital expenditure and operational costs for many years, and the best IT practitioners do not like to work with technology that is not delivering optimal performance to the business - whether that's because it is over- or under-funded.
GF1 crowd-funding is go!
9 September 2013 by James Hayes
an opportunity to have their own name given to a character in what's turned out to be the great man's last project before he died last December of Alzheimer's disease.
Titled Gemini Force One (GF1), the project is planned as starting a series of books aimed at younger readers based on concepts and stories were originally written by Anderson starting some five years ago. They tell the story of a secret organisation involved in rescues and disaster averting, including terrorist attacks.
To get the project completed Anderson's son Jamie has assigned author MG Harris to complete the first book in accordance with his father's instructions. The eventual aim for GF1 is for the books to be adapted into a new film or TV series.
The campaign, which opened yesterday, aims to raise £24,350 over 30 days - a fairly modest target for a Gerry Anderson project - Anderson once reckoned that each episode of Thunderbirds (ATV, 1965-1966) cost the equivalent of £1m to make (by 2005 values). There are some tasty rewards on offer for backers:
- A donor willing to stump-up £5,000 can have their name used as one of the main characters in a GF1 book.
- A set of five limited edition collectors postcards; four of which feature behind the scenes production photographs and screen tests - all from Gerry Anderson's personal archive.
- A limited number of reproductions of Gerry Anderson's business cards from AP Films, and its short-lived predecessor Pentagon Films, are also on offer.
Other backers will receive rewards such as signed editions, visits to Pinewood Studios (used as a locations for Anderson creations such as UFO and Space: 1999), and personal dedications in the books.
Anyone wishing to be Fully Advised and Briefed on how to make a donation should browse to:
Overcoming orbital hazards...
22 February 2013 by James Hayes
Specialised radiation-hardened components can allow conventional satellites to operate for years without problems; but they are expensive, which adds significantly to the overall cost of development. A further expense comes from the need to ensure that circuits have back-ups if one is unfortunate enough to be damaged by radiation.
Many of the circuits that function happily at ground level are much more likely to fail, sometimes irreversibly, when flung into orbit and exposed to the harmful phenomena there to be found. Dealing with these damaging emanations have posed major challenges for satellite engineers.
One approach to ameliorating the effects of radiation is to use triple modular redundancy (TMR). Three sets of electronic circuits are used for each function, and vote on the output to weed out errors caused by stray alpha particles that may flip a control or memory bit.
This is expensive to do across the board; but as Chris Edwards reports in the current issue of E&T, Cubesats such as UKube-1 project - developed, built and tested for the UK Space Agency by Clyde Space of Glasgow - employ limited amounts of TMR to ensure critical subsystems, such as the Mission Interface Computer (MIC), can function after a failure.
Radiation may also have its practical uses up there. An EADS Astrium experiment to fly aboard UKube-1 will use the properties of radiation strikes to create random numbers for cryptographic applications. It is difficult to generate random numbers with sufficiently high entropy to defeat codebreakers. Spaceborne random number generators may provide an answer.'
Read more on this topic - 'The future of the satellite is cubed: meet the Jack-in-the-box that can carry your experiment into orbit on a realistic budget'
Big Data's 'bypass' dilemma
21 November 2012 by James Hayes
factory sensors, trading systems, and call detail records compiled by telecoms companies; a big multinational enterprise soon faces its own 'Big Data Andes' range to conquer.
One often overlooked area of Big Data management that developers are under increasing pressure to minimise is data trafficking. Because the processing of large data sets is often performed in a different location to where the information itself resides, it first has to be transmitted over a network connection. Bandwidth fluctuation can affect both application availability and performance - especially true in environments where privacy and data sovereignty concerns demand that sensitive data does not leave on-premise servers, and where many users at multiple sites collaborate to submit, process, or analyse big data sets or reports.
And where information cannot be readily fed into the various different Big Data system elements because the sheer volume of information involved swamps one or more of them, further bottlenecks on the ingress or processing side can bring the flow to a halt. It's a scenario that will be familiar to any old school network manager from the 1990s, a decade when data traffic volumes first started to outstrip infrastructural capacity in open-build premises LAN backbones.
Back in those days it was a matter of introducing bigger, more capacious intelligent hubs and using network management tools to better segregate traffic flows before evaluating the necessity to build-out more cabling infrastructure, preferably fibre-based.
Nowadays most organisations will probably not want to spend more ICT budget on installing supplementary premises cabling just for the periodical Big Data 'shunts' - building a sort of 'Big Data bypass', as it were - especially at a time when strategists are claiming that the compelling appeal of IP-based networking is that you can constrain costs by running multiple traffic stream types over the same hardwired infrastructure.
But this additional physical demand incursion is another factor in the Big Data challenge, and one that has particular poignancy for organisations who, for whatever reason, are not allowed to outsource their data centre operations.
Meanwhile, anyone with an interest in Big Data should attend the 'Big Data - Turning Big Challenges into Big Opportunities' Seminar, taking place on Wednesday 5 December at the Lion Court Conference Centre (just off Holbern) in central London (WC1V 6NY). This case-study driven seminar day - chaired by yours truly - will equip delegates with insider know-how as to how to implement big data strategies, and furnish you with contacts from across the big data industry to support your work going forward. Full details at
In short: the device divide
18 September 2012 by James Hayes
Jonathan Hunt, business development director at desktop and virtualisation firm Point to Point, about 'bring your own device' (BYOD), an ideology that could be transitioning from wishful thinking to market orthodoxy.
Generally-speaking, BYOD is a business policy of allowing/encouraging employees bringing personally- owned mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones to their place of work, and use them to access company resources including email, intranet, and company applications, alongside their personal data and applications. That the BYOD ethos can also have 'disruptive' impact on enterprise digital communications should not be overlooked.
Yet BYOD might also uncover pointers toward changes in the way people need to use information technology in mobile-connected working environments. The lowering price-tag of sophisticated mobile devices, plus the growing ubiquity of free, reliable public Wi-Fi connectivity, are also highly influential factors in encouraging the phenomenon. People no longer have to rely on their employer to meet the cost of a baseline-specification system that costs thousands. Corporate equipment refresh cycle lags sometimes meant that office workers had more sophisticated PCs at home than they did at work; but even so, some predict that BYOD will cause a bunch of operational issues that many boardrooms will find discomforting.
Such concerns will have to be allayed if pro-BYOD sloganising about capital expenditure reductions and staff training budget savings, as well as how staff are more likely to take care of devices containing sensitive data if the device is a personal possession rather than belonging to an employer, is to be taken seriously.
More productive staff might mean higher salary bills, and budget saved on buying new PCs over standard product refresh cycles is likely to be offset by a requirement to invest in new BYOD management tools - a growing market sector.
Although BYOD is partly about decentralisation and the freeing-up of choice, it still has to be managed under a policy-based regime. This presents fresh challenges for ICT policy makers. BYOD advocates could yet find that newfound flexibility comes with quite stringent obligations and even a renewed requirement to stick to agreed guidelines, such as acceptable usage policies - employers will be concerned about corporate data sharing a hard disk with potentially inappropriate personal content, say. There is also the possibility that career penalties will apply even when individuals are careless with hardware that belongs to them, and they are liable for replacements should it get lost during work hours.
But the BYOD ethos is pervasive enough to cause IT strategists to consider if it might usefully inform new thinking about future developments in enterprise IT planning. For instance, if fewer enterprise staff are working from hardwired computers, are 'traditional' local-area network infrastructure still needed as much? One scenario along these lines is in smart buildings where more of the available Ethernet communications capacity might be deemed by premises technology managers as better used by other applications as there is less fixed-device information systems data running over it, and more of what remains can be transferred onto internal Wi-Fi connections, where procedures allow.
BYOD could also prompt changes in conventional enterprise voice communications. Email and text messaging are increasingly the primary media for business communications, making the necessity to pick-up first time less necessary. Voice messaging is not commonly regarded as efficient a business tool as it used to be.
A related factor at play here is the fact that VPNs allied to cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) and data as a service (DaaS) options - possibly bundled as virtual private clouds (VPCs) - should mean that less, if any, sensitive employer data will actually be stored on any portable devices. It is also important to bear in mind that the BYOD phenomenon can been seen to some extent as part of a general trend toward 'thin client' style endpoint devices - both fixed and mobile - where very little actual enterprise data actually held on the device itself.
Another factor on the security side is the fact that BYOD-minded organisations are realising the necessity of new approaches to overall risk-assessment that include classifying their data and applying an IT-scale value to it, so that each user data access privileges are better aligned. This seems another factor in support of BYOD, but one that could entail cost implications in a business environment where enterprises are generating data at such rates that the monitoring and classification is a full-time tasks which would require additional IS staff, tools, and the support of third-party services.
A extended version of this 'The Device Divide' post appears in the October 2012 issue of 'E&T' magazine.
Turing's legacy: the celebratory videos
30 May 2012 by James Hayes
Organised by the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, 'Turing and his Times' featured a talk by computer historian Professor Simon Lavington on 'Turing and his Contemporaries', a simulation of the Pilot ACE computer by TNMOC trustee Kevin Murrell, and the first formal public showing of a video commissioned by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of the recollections of two of Alan Turing's colleagues.
The three-part videoconsists of:
Part 1 Introduction and NPL video featuring two of Turing's colleagues: Part 2 Prof Simon Lavington talks about Turing's ideas post-1945.
Part 3 Kevin Murrell demonstrates a simulation of the Pilot ACE followed by a Q&A session (includes an unexpected appearance from an audience member who had programmed the Pilot ACE computer!
'Turing and his Times' was the second of three Turing-themed events linking three of the top computing museums in the world. At The Computer History Museum in California on 7 March, historian George Dyson (author of 'Turing's Cathedral') was in conservation with Museum President and CEO John Hollar about the influence of Alan Turing on John von Neumann (and vice-versa) as the digital universe was taking its present form. A video of that encounter is also available.
And in Germany, on 26 May, the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, Germany, hosts an event featuring two short lectures: Professor Dr Horst Zuse talking about his father Konrad Zuse and his computers, Professor Dr Paul Rojas comparing Turing and Zuse, plus videos of their Turing exhibition and the Heinz Nixdorf Museum's working mechanical Turing machine.
And there's information about the forthcoming Alan Turing Centenary Conference - and other Turing content - in this recent E&T news update - 'Turing conference promises unique meeting of minds'.
Strowger redux: Exchange and smart
17 May 2012 by James Hayes
beginning tomorrow, Friday 18 May) will know that even a relatively straightforward mechanism as the Strowger system system - prototyped using pins and collar boxes, legend has it - soon developed into a highly sophisticated piece of electromechanical apparatus.
Interested students of telecommunications history should check-out this 8.5 minute 1951 instructional film, made available online courtesy of the AT&T Tech Channel - 'The Step-By-Step Switch'.
As the accompanying web text explains, the purpose of this film was to show Bell employees how calls were automatically switched through an SxS office, and gives a general appreciation of the importance, complexity, and cost of switching equipment in an average 1950s telephone office. The path of a call is shown as it runs through a demonstration unit. "Careful adherance to Bell System maintenance practices" is stressed.
Avoncroft Museum celebrates Strowger automatic exchange centenary
14 May 2012 by James Hayes
make the correct connections between caller 'end device' and receiver 'end devices'.
American Strowger first conceived his invention in 1888, and patented the automatic telephone exchange three years later. Some reports suggest that he constructed an initial model of his invention from a round collar box and some straight pins.
The centenary will be marked in a three-day celebration beginning on Friday 18 May at the Avoncroft Museum, home of the National Telephone Kiosk Collection. Avoncroft Museum (near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire) is a 15-acre open-air site of historic buildings. The Kiosk Collection opened in 1994, with the support of BT's Connected Earth heritage initiative, and contains examples of all BT kiosks down the decades. The Museum is open from 10.30am to 5.00pm during the Strowger Centenary Event (18-20 May 2012). More details at http://www.avoncroft.org.uk.
Mr Strowger, BTW, was not a technologist by trade, but a funeral director from Kansas City. Legend has it that Strowger's undertaking business was losing custom to a rival whose telephone-operator wife was intercepting and redirecting callers to Strowger to her hubby's parlour.
Alas Strowger himself didn't live long enough to see his brainchild flourish: he died in 1902, a decade before the opening of the Epsom exchange. He was survived by his widow Susan: after her death in 1921, an obituary claimed that she had been sitting on additional 'revolutionary' Strowger designs, but 'had refused to make them public while she was alive because only others would profit from her husband's designs'.
Data de-duplication makes poor fist as mass-media entertainment
27 April 2012 by James Hayes
Host Mitzi Meyers' subject this time was Steffi, a 36-year-old biochemist and part-time webmeistress from a Berlin suburb who obsessively retains all her PC log files: she has millions of such sets going back to her time at university, including all of those from various websites she has administered over the last 15 years. Unlike her fellow data hoarder Günther featured in Tuesday's show (see Buzzsore's 25 April 2012 post), Steffi has the wherewithal to migrate her data onto successively more up-to-date storage media, and has reached the stage where she keeps RAID devices under the floorboards of her small terraced haus.
Also unlike Günther, Steffi remained for most of the programme in staunch denial that she had any kind of problem - "It is not so much that I want to keep all my data, it is just that I do not want to delete any of it," she explained tearfully into the camera. To help Steffi come to terms with her data-doting psychosis Mitzi took her to a data de-duplication consultant in Stuttgart who helped take the first painful steps on the road to recovery: excising all the third and fourth copies of files alone slimmed-down her data sets by several gigabytes, and alles war gut for Steffi; but not for your blogger, who channel-hopped to a Spanish TV documentary about a tribe of Intellectual Pygmies who, a bearded anthropologist explained, worship Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 programme 'In Our Time', which they listen to every week on an ancient crystal set that was salvaged from a crashed biplane sometime in the 1940s.
Service robots are go
26 April 2012 by James Hayes
trundled around the smooth-floor circuit bordering the company's stand.
This year Bluebotics has been joined by more service robot makers, and there is clear evidence that this technology is moving from clever novelty to commercially-viable application.
Take for instance the showcased products from German firm MetraLabs, its SCITOS G6 Transporter and its SCITOS G3 home-care model. The former resembles an item of cafeteria furniture most people are familiar with: the open-stack cabinet for leaving your tray and used tableware, etc., in. G6 is a robotised version of this eatery staple, programmed to autonomously take the dirties back to the kitchen when all its slots become filled, then return empty to its designated post.
MetraLabs has stuck a bug-eyed little 'head' on the top of the unit, and at first I thought, "Oh, not another daft attempt to make a robot look like a toy human"; but it actually has a practical purpose: it prevents people from overloading the unit by placing items on its top, and also provides a branding opportunity for restaurant chains or their suppliers.
SCITOS G3 is designed to support persons in home environments,nursing homes, and even hospitals. It trundles about displaying an interactive touch screen that can be used for, say, displaying medication schedules. Future possibilities include integrating this with mobile phone-based telehealthcare apps, or even full M2M functionality.
One other point about the mobile service robots at Hannover Messe worth noting: unlike last year, when they were kept corralled within the confines of each exhibitors' stand, this week they have been allowed to wander - autonomously in some cases - around the aisles, so that visitors can inspect them up close, touch and prod them, put their arms round them and have their photograph taken, etc.
This mularkey will in due course present something of an issue for exhibition organisers, one suspects, when their clients want to use mobile robots to distribute marketing collateral (flyers, freebies) to visitor throngs. And how belong before the dreaded health & safety issue crops up, with the first legal action for an injury caused by somebody colliding with an autonomous service robot?
You can't help wondering how many of the past's key breakthrough innovations would have been stymied by H&S if it had been around at the time. Just think of Stephenson's Rocket, for instance ("Sorry Mr S., we can't have the crew setting off in an open-top plate without protective headgear and safety harnesses"); mind you, a bit of 19th century H&S might have saved William Huskisson MP from being knocked down and killed by the steamy locomotive at the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in September 1830, thus becoming the first victim of a train accident.
Oddball data hoarders get own reality telly outing
25 April 2012 by James Hayes
'ordinary' (but bonkers) people who cannot face-up to discarding redundant computer data. During the course of each episode they are coaxed into junking stuff that they have been hanging-on to for years, sometimes decades, because they they have a pathological inability to get rid of it.
Hosted by genial self-styled self-help guru & lifestyle enabler Mitzi Meyers, the show at first confronts its subjects with the extent of their obsessive retentiveness, with lots of hand-held camera tours of the extent of the problem, dramatic zoom-ins and soundtrack chord changes.
Yesterday evening's Über-Daten-Hamsterers! featured 48-year-old Günther, a freelance governance officer from Frankfurt, who has kept copies (and copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies - you get the point) of every file he has ever created since he first started using a PC in the late 1980s. The spare room of Günther's family flat was stacked with storage media - 5.25 inch disks and 3.5 inch diskettes, tape cartridge and external hard disc drives - I even spotted an old Syquest unit among the chaos.
Mitzi pulled out some discs at random and made Günther view their contents: acknowledgement letters, old invoices, drafts of letters to travel agencies regarding forgotten package holidays, and thousands of photo files of family pets long since deceased and disposed-of. There was gigabytes of downloaded PDFs containing information that Günther still believes "may come in handy at some day".
When confronted by stern but understanding Mitzi into accepting that he has a problem, and that this problem is having repercussions on the psychological well-being of his family (the youngest child has to sleep in the garage because Günther refuses to remove his hoard of ancient, rotting data from the spare bedroom), he broke down in tears and agreed to tackle his problem. Mitzi gave him a big hug, and told him soothingly that "es ist OKAY"...
After the commercial break a crew of burly blokes wearing protective clothing arrived in a rather cool-looking Mercedes truck, and spent the morning chucking the bags and boxes of old disks etc. into waste disposal crates. The disgusting archive was covered in dust and grime, and several cockroaches came scurrying out as stacks of lockable plastic storage cases of disks were disinterred.
Poor old Günther was led away sobbing to stay with some IT clinicians while the spare room was gutted and redecorated by another burly crew of 'fresh-start décor counsellors'. The show ended with Günther being led back into the room blindfolded to find a surprise party held in his honour. Everyone was having a lovely time until Günther's wife discovered a secret hoard of novelty USB memory sticks that he'd been hiding at the back of the cutlery drawer.
Ja, you can bet that I'll be one of the many millions of German viewers who'll be tuning into the next heart-rending episode of Deutschland's Schlechteste Super Daten-Hamsterers!
Cisco gets tough for life on the factory floor
- a sector not normally associated with its heartland mainstream business computing; but Cisco has big plans not only for the smart technology that's coming into factories and assembly lines around the world, but also for the next-generation of technologists who'll be tasked with making it all work - and in manufacturing that means manufacturing engineers, rather than conventional ICT techies who provide CCNP rankers.
In respect to the first, Cisco 'reinforced its commitment to the industrialisation of the Internet' with the launch at Hannover of the Cisco IE 2000 industrial switch series. This class of devices is designed specifically for the build-out of intelligent networks for industrial automation that link the plant floor to enterprise networks.
This glib phrase belies the fact that managing datacommunications within manufacturing plants or assembly lines is not only hugely different to running business applications in offices, but it also requires competent personnel who can work the kit, and integrate it with strong-arm robotics and big metal that stamps and molds and hisses. To this end company has revealed that it is "looking at the possibility of Cisco training and certification for manufacturing professionals", according the Maciej Kranz, VP/GM of Cisco's newly-established Connected Industries Business Unit, speaking exclusively to E&T.
Cisco regards manufacturing - smart manufacturing, more specifically - as a major new potential market for its solutions, and that potential seems so evident that it is surprising that some of its erstwhile competitors haven't grasped the possible benefits of strutting their stuff in front of procurers visiting the world's biggest industrial fair.
An important driver of change here are sensors, Kranz points out: "The growth of sensor-based data is just unprecedented," he says. "They are now being installed in many industrial environments where they haven't been before, or certainly not in such a sophisticated way. Oil rigs, for instance, fitted with sensors for various applications, generate terabytes of data. And as that data builds-up organisations need to traffic it and analyse it. In some ways this is not so much different from the datacommunications that Cisco has been doing for years - the same issues like security and resilience still apply, of course - except that the units have to be much more robust." Kranz's unit's engineers have been busy finding ways to make Cisco kit ready (think ruggedised routers) for these tough environments.
"Barriers between the IT and OT [operational technology] worlds are just breaking down," Kranz avers, as the latter increasing calls for "levels of sophistication that have up till now been the preserve of enterprise IT".
The time has only just become right for Cisco's move. Up until quite recently industrial computing platforms had to have very high levels of reliability and robustness because they were so often operating alongside safety critical systems. Another point not to be overlooked is Cisco's reputation for the build-quality of its existing product lines, and the fact that as a company that has been closely involved in the manufacture of product hardware for over 20 years, it's had plenty of experience of life on the factory floor.
Face-to-face with China's greening?
23 April 2012 by James Hayes
which are leveraging the attention around the event to publicise their respective agendas; but the extent to which Chinese showings at the event could also serve as counterpoints to criticisms of the country's ecological reputation should not be overlooked.
The presence of no less a personage than Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who opened the event yesterday (Sunday) with German chancellor Angela Merkel, was a high-profile coup for Hannover Messe, to be sure, but one that also brought added impetus to his government's critics. This blogger wasn't present, but Yahoo News reports that a crowd of some 200 demonstrated outside during the ceremony.
At Kröpcke, the Stadtbahn station closest to the hotel where Wen Jiabao met with various civic dignitaries, Amnesty International has taken out a series of large advertisements on the Messe-bound platforms, highlighting 'Human rights made in China'. And as delegates and exhibitors in their thousands step-off the trains at Messe-Nord station they are greeted by at least two bannered protest groups camped outside the entrance distributing flyers.
At the same time it's worth noting that while the partnership with Hannover Messe 2012 is principally about generating commercial/cultural opportunities, it is also couched in the context of change: China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, for instance, has announced plans to increase R&D investment for 'enabling technologies for eco-friendly vehicles' geared toward a commitment toward the production of mass-market electric vehicles.
Of course anyone cognisant of declarations of environmental protection will be aware that promises and deliverables in this thorny area are prone to disparities the world over. But it's reasonable also to recognise also that Chinese exhibitors are not in Hannover without bona fide 'green' technology on their stands (no pejoratives meant by those inverted commas, BTW - no technology is ever 100 per cent environmentally clean).
Even legitimate criticisms of China's environmental record should not discount the possibility that the sustainable technologies being showcased at Hannover Messe are aiming to find solutions to the problems - both in the People's Republic and anywhere else in the world where sustainability abuse is evident. High-attendance and open events like Hannover Messe provide visitors an opportunity now to examine the technological claims at close quarters.
Looking to the future of man-machine interfaces
6 March 2012 by James Hayes
In the enterprise space eye tracking interfaces will change the nature of how we work, but may also change the ways in which we contrive to avoid it - for short 'allowable' periods, that is. A consideration of the history of our relationship with typewriting is instructive here. In the old days professional typists rarely hammered away at their keyboards for recreational purposes, or because they were drafting a message to their social network confreres. Back then, productivity was pretty easy to gauge: it started and stopped when typing was heard and not heard.
PCs changed all that: now who can actually tell why you're tapping away at that computer: is it really work, or is it 'non-work-related'? Are you applying yourself diligently to the 'agreed' employment tasks you've been set - or catching-up on advances in latest personal social media tools? Even when an inquisitive manager looms Blakey*-like behind you you just toggle the work spreadsheet to full-screen to effect a decoying manouver.
Such subterfuge at least gives the impression of busyness, and most bosses are happy to overlook cyber-skivers so long as the work of the day gets done (it's not fair: if an employee decided to simply sit gazing into space in lieu of cyber-skiving they'd be down to HR on a fizzer pronto).
Enter eye tracking: using image sensors and image processing to convey commands and instructions to the computer using movements of the operator's eyes. Technology being showcased at CeBIT this week by one of the market leaders, Swedish firm Tobii aims to take eye tracking beyond niche use, and put it to broader use, and that includes finding ways to converge it with conventional applications such as process control and even surgery.
It is in the area of standard office applications that eye tracking perhaps faces its biggest challenges, especially when it comes to monitoring individuals' productivity. When gaze interfaces come in manager will know even less about when their staff are really engaged in: responding to a sales inquiry or watching YouTube?
And what will be the implications for the hard-won human skill of multi-tasking? I'm drafting this blog entry in the CeBIT press centre while concurrently engaged in glancing at emails, search engine results, and my netbook's remaining power, while also acknowledging a passing hack who I haven't seen in donkeys, and glaring at the fatuous blogger who is loudly recording his podcast at the desk next to me instead of doing it in an empty room (one that's about 10km away, ideally). Will, come the era of eye tracking, such visual flittery be recalled with the same nostalgia as the typewriter generation now look back on the mixed aroma of new ribbons, carbon copies, and Tipp-Ex paper?
*That's Blakey the lurking Inspector of TV's On the Buses, BTW, not the Jazz drummer.
40-year-old satellite brought back to 'life'
6 September 2011 by James Hayes
BBC News reports that group of scientists and engineers is working to revive a UK satellite that's been in orbit since 1971.
Prospero was the first UK satellite to be sent up on a UK launch vehicle - a Black Arrow rocket; it would also be the last.
Having now discovered the codes to contact the satellite, engineers say that they still have to build equipment to 'talk' to the satellite, and then must win approval from the broadcast regulator Ofcom to use Prospero's radio frequencies - these days being used by other satellite operators.
Applying the splinternet
22 July 2011 by James Hayes
cloud computing, which Ananthaswamy (perversely) refers to as "one of the biggest Internet innovations of the past few years", whereas as anyone involved with public-facing ICT likes to remind the laity, is in fact a long-established model that's been adroitly redressed by commercial imperatives.
Ananthaswamy further adds that "Some companies have moved their entire IT departments into the cloud... [But] the cloud could generate exactly the single points of failure that the internet's robust architecture was supposed to prevent": this again is somewhat wide of the mark in that unless it is being missold and/or done on the cheap, the whole point of cloud is that it should not constitute a single point of failure - all the key data sets should be virtualised around the Web in various locations. Multiple points of failure - well, that's a different matter...
Will cloud tale wag data centre doggedness?
6 May 2011 by James Hayes
Some commentators suspect that the two entities have already become inextricable linked - but are we heading toward a case of tail wagging dog, where cloud diktats lure data centre science off in a wayward 'direction of travel'?
In seeking an answer to that question it is important, some aver, not to over-estimate the nebulous nature of the cloud construct.
Colt's executive vice president of infrastructure services unit Mark Leonard's view is that cloud computing is actually "an IT operating model - it is having an impact on data centre design," he says, although any perceived associations between cloud and consumer confidence should not be over-rated, Leonard adds: with the fundamental abstraction of cloud services from the underlying infrastructure, it is "more likely to weaken any perceived linkage between cloud service and data centre - especially in the consumer context".
It's a fair point: cloud computing in its essentials is not much more than an operating model (not unlike the OSI's multi-coloured Seven Layer Model, say) with a fluffy name that at the same time lends itself too-readily to marketing. There's where the OSI missed a trick - had it've been more marketing savvy, could the 1990s have now been known as the era of 'Rainbow Computing'?
Could Amazon cloud burst bring a silver lining for data center revenues?
The line-up featured a sextet of stalwarts and fund managers from the banking and capital markets world; money men less interested in hot aisles than hot investments. While acknowledging that the business models deployed by data centre operators varied, and that only a small proportion of such players are publicly-quoted companies, how do investors see data centres as money-making propositions?
The panel's take on technological advances was predicated on one concern: will this improve the value of my data centres sector stock, or it devalue my holdings? Sounds dullish, but actually the capitalists provided some refreshing insight on talked-up trends.
One point that brought forth consensus was that, no matter how healthy prospects appeared - demand on the up, existing data centres being expanded, innovations appearing to address energy consumption, IT efficiency, cooling and ventilation, etc - it only takes one mass-market scare story to create a worrying wobble (although chances of a dot-com bubble 2.0 are minimal). We're talking 'bout the recent Sony and Amazon mishaps, of course. Global CTO at Devonshire Investors Frank Lukas highlighted the fact that reports of the Amazon outage had given impression that they occurred as a result of data centre problems: "In fact, as we know, it wasn't a facilities-based outage, [but] the knee-jerk reaction was that it was facilities-based," he said. "In fact it was the software that broke"; but popular perception among so-called 'technoramuses' is that service failures are caused by hardware failures, rather than soft system errors.
This was not good news for data centre operators, but added Jonathan Atkin, MD of RBC Capital Markets, the adverse publicity may have its positive side: "It might cause customers to spend more with their data centre service provider, and pay for extra resilience" - something which in 2011's penny-pinching economic climate, many have shied away from, he believes.
Agreement came from Jules Delahaije, CEO of Linxdatacenter: "These type of disasters help a lot. They challenge any notion that you can do these things on the cheap." They also help displace business away from the big, mega-centralised data center operators to the more decentralised players who can provide help to smaller customers when hiccups occur.
So according to the financial observers, Amazon's cloud burst may have a silver lining after all...
All quiet on the questing front?
5 May 2011 by James Hayes
It's a minor conspiracy theory, but one that has excited some debate at the first day of the Data Centres Europe 2011 conference, both in the open plenary debates and among the networking break coffee congregations.
More pessimistic opiners have gone so far as to suggest that any further such mishaps involving 'cloud' will cause the technology to have to change its name in an effort distance itself from lasting negative associations, and then pursue a 'new life' under a different market identity. Others are not so sure that the 'cloud computing' term was ever properly suitable as a generic label.
"Cloud computing used to be called 'utility computing'," says Gregor Petri, who enjoys the job title of 'Advisor, Lean IT & Cloud Computing' at CA Technologies, speaking at a midday panel debate billed as 'Which cloud to follow?'.
Making utility computing sexier and more mass-market-friendly, by renaming it 'cloud', was an agreeable side effect of the reinvention, to be sure; but if the moniker becomes synonymous with risk, then the industry would have to consider another name change. "That's why they [the IT sector at large] is not talking about it [the Sony breach]," he suggests; besides which the IT industry has never been entirely comfortable with 'cloud computing' as a generic technology descriptor, adds Petri: "Cloud is not an acronym - and the IT industry lives by acronyms".
So what should cloud computing be rechristened as? Your suggestions invited below, please...
Decoupling needs to become de rigueur for data centres
In his impressive early morning keynote Aaron Davis, chief marketing officer at Schneider Electric, told delegates that the biggest challenge facing the data centre industry is perhaps the need to break the link between its role in underpinning national economies, from the fact that this imperative is shackling its ability to control its own costs and its reputation for effective carbon management.
The global data centres sector famously consumes as much energy as the airlines business; but whereas people understand why airlines are culpable because they travel and/or see airplanes roaring overhead, most purchasers on online products and services have no clue as to the massive amounts of power-ravenous IT that enable the e-economy to thrive.
The extant data centres industry model allies economic growth with energy consumption, Davis points out; the snag is that because consumers are at several removes from the vendors of the actual Internet products and services that they consume - data centres are not able to scale up their prices in line with their escalating costs. The result: more and more financial costs and legislative pressures on data centres that cannot be passed on to end-users.
Because this model cannot now be reversed, to survive "the data centre industry has to decouple economic growth from issues of energy consumption," Davis believes: "And the data centre industry is the only body that can do this". Not only can do, but must do, Davis adds, because if it has only a five-to fifteen year window to reduce consumption in a self-regulated way before governments will be forced into greater legislation to mitigate the effects of global warming, and find ways to tax for 10 per cent of GDP that will be required to fund building seawalls on an industrial scale.
Davis called for greater investment in a new generation of data centre professionals qualified in energy efficiency skills to and beyond degree level.
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I just found out I have a change in plans, I'm going to be away thursday/early friday. Would you be good to play tomorrow (wednesday) instead? If not, what about friday night or some time on the weekend?
Thank you :) It's ok to play today. I have to go to the doctor around 7~8pm but otherwise, I'm free today.


text:
Milwaukee Solvay Coke & Gas Site
Site Information
- Milwaukee, WI (Milwaukee County)
- This site is not on the NPL; it is a Superfund Alternative Site (SAS)
- SAS Fact Sheet
- CERCLIS listing
- Alias(es): N/A
- Photos
Contact Information
Community Involvement Coordinator
Susan Pastor (email@example.com)
312-353-1325 or 800-621-8431, ext. 31325
Remedial Project Manager
Nefertiti DiCosmo
312-886-6148 or 800-621-8431, ext. 66148
Assistant Regional Counsel
Craig Melodia (email@example.com)
312-353-8870 or 800-621-8431, ext. 38870
Wisconsin DNR State Project Manager
Margaret Brunette
(where to view written records)
Bay View Library
2566 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.
Milwaukee, WI
The Solvay Coke & Gas site is located in Milwaukee, Wis. It covers about 46 acres in a primarily industrial and commercial area north of the Kinnickinnic River and west of the Lincoln Memorial Harbor. The site is bordered to the north by East Greenfield Avenue, to the northeast by railroad tracks and a coal storage area, to the east and south by the Kinnickinnic River, and to the west by more railroad tracks.
Various industrial activities occurred on different lots on the property maybe as early as 1866. A manufactured coke and gas facility located on the northern portion was operated by various entities until around 1983. Wisconsin Wrecking operated a scrap and salvage operation on the northern portion until January 2003. Most of the major coke and gas manufacturing buildings on the northern half of the site were demolished in 2003 when EPA oversaw a hazardous waste removal.
This is what was removed and shipped off site for proper disposal:
- asbestos-containing material in many of the structures, on piping inside and outside the structures and loose asbestos-containing material located on the ground
- coal tar from the manufactured gas plant operations in tanks, piping, on the ground, and in an open pit area
- numerous above-ground storage tanks and associated piping containing coal tar and other residues
- other hazardous substances located throughout the site such as drums of naphthalene crystals and oil in old electrical transformers.
Site Updates || Technical Documents || Legal Agreements
You will need the free Adobe Reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA's PDF page to learn more.
Site Updates
April 2013
EPA continues to oversee the site's investigation. Over the winter, the companies determined to be responsible for the contamination collected ground water, sediment, and soil samples. When enough information about the site is gathered, they will use it to create a document called a remedial investigation report. When the report is deemed "final" in spring 2014, it will be available to the public.
All of the work is being paid for by:
· American Natural Resources Co.
· Cliffs Mining Co., East Greenfield.
· Investors, LLC, Maxus Energy Corp.
· Wisconsin Electric Power Co.
· Wisconsin Gas LLC (d/b/a We Energies)
In other matters, the city of Milwaukee demolished one of the buildings on the property along East Greenfield Avenue in early April. The demolition is not related to EPA's Superfund work.
Previous Fieldwork
Various types of field work, such as soil, sediment and monitoring well sampling, were done in 2008 and 2009 to get a general idea of the environmental problems at the site.
Other work included a test trench investigation to verify the presence, size, and reliability of underground structures which appear to be concrete building foundations; evaluate conditions in and around these underground structures; collect samples of affected soil below the ground's surface; and collect samples of buried waste.
Stockpile sampling was also necessary because the previous property owners demolished many buildings on site in the mid-1980s and stored scrap material in the stockpiles. They were sampled to determine if the material must be deposed of in a licensed landfill or if it can be reused on site as fill material.
Scientific technology called direct sensing used a tool called a membrane interface probe to evaluate the contamination and study underground rock layers. "Vertical contamination" can be found by heating affected soil and ground water with a very hot element on the probe's tip. Gases are transported through the air and passed through a series of tubes and detectors to find organic contaminants (chemicals that evaporate into the air).
Technical Documents
- Health Concerns related to asbestos (PDF) (6pp., 257K) April 2008
- Final Community Involvement Plan (PDF) (22pp, 777K) April 2008
- ATSDR's Solvay Coke Health Consultation January 2003


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Students from Wausau West High School left the classroom for some learning down on the farm. FFA members taught 4th graders a thing or two about where their food comes from Wednesday at their annual "Food For America" event.
The day on the farm teaches kids the importance of agriculture by getting them involved. Fourth graders got their hands dirty, learning farm skills like how to milk a cow, groom a horse and stay safe around farm equipment.
"A lot of kids today don't understand where their food comes from. It's more than just showing up at the store. This gives elementary school kids a chance to have interactive, fun, hands-on lessons where they're able to learn about these different things that impact your lives every day," Joe Staszak, Wausau East and West Agriculture Teacher, told NewsChannel 7.
The kids weren't the only ones learning. The student "Teachers for a Day" took away some important life lessons too.
"I've learned responsibility. Like I've had to prepare everything and make sure everything is okay. I have a big leader position right now, making sure everyone is in their place and responsible for what they need to be," Student FFA Advisor for Wausau West High School, Jennica Blaubach said about her role in the day's events.
Students had to prepare five minute lessons for each of the ten interactive learning stations set up across the farm. FFA Advisor Joe Staszak said Wednesday's event is not only a great opportunity for students to practice public speaking, but also for them to explore their different interests.
Wednesday marked day two of the "Food For America" program . On Monday students from Wausau East's FFA program hosted fourth graders from their area.
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