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Shouldering Risks:
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The Culture of Control
SHOULDERING RISKS their designers have foreseen, bullet trains, jumbo jets, manned space capsules and stations, nuclear power plants, offshore oil rigs, and supertankers deliver services, goods, and knowledge we have come to rely on. Heroic in their ambitions, in the amazing materials making them possible, and in the immense amounts of money and the millions of people mobilized to design and operate them, these technologies maintain uncanny control over gravity, friction, and temperature to defeat known dangers. Their size, reach, beauty, and raw energies awe us. When accidents take or threaten lives and destroy or degrade ecologies, awe turns to anxiety, horror, grief, and mistrust. Wary of that possibility, designers devise worst-case scenarios and try to preclude them. Although that reduces the odds of accidents, the outcomes of any one are likely to be major--hence, "high consequence" or "high hazard" technologies, as they label themselves.
Shouldering risks no one has foreseen is left to those standing watch on the bridge between designers' intentions and how they are being realized. Even with wide safety margins and detailed operating procedures, missteps, missing resources, miscommunications, or mistakes have to be found and put right before they can turn into a tragic flaw. More often than we hear about, and most of the time, those responsible for handling risks--boards of directors, engineers, executives, managers, operators, regulators--defuse worrisome situations, prevent surprises, and keep any that appear from becoming more serious.
Even so, short of an accident, missteps can have "high consequences" for public trust and for productivity. Testifying in October 2003 to their inability to stave off eight "severe incidents" in "just the last few years," presidents and other executives of nuclear utilities in Hungary, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, and the United States told an audience of about four hundred "how their organizations descended unperceived into a situation where both plant staff and management failed to see disaster lurking." After "the degradation in safety was revealed," repairs and lost revenue cost "hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars." At this biennial meeting of the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), whose theme was "transparency and openness," the audience "sat spellbound as their peers described, with the bitter benefit of hindsight, how this could happen, even to organizations that were once seen as industry stars," Nucleonics Week reported. Formed in 1989 as a global response to the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, WANO provides members with peer assessments and technical assistance. "The world nuclear power industry is in danger, threatened by the negligence and complacency" of those companies that "had not heeded earlier signs and, in many cases, are still suffering the financial, social, and political consequences," WANO executives cautioned at this Berlin meeting.1
The reasons for these incidents, utility executives and WANO peer reviews said, were "negligence in cultivating a safety culture due to severe pressure to reduce costs following the deregulation of the power market"; not "paying attention to detail"; taking "safety culture for granted"; "overconfidence"; "production bias"; ignoring "significant operating experience"; engineers' "arrogance and complacency"; safety plans without "follow-through." WANO's chairman Hajimu Maeda "warned that even if the public understands that nuclear energy has advantages, 'that is not the same as public acceptance.' "2
"Transparency and openness" are certainly remarkable and welcome in an industry not known for plain public speaking. Those reasons nevertheless recite a litany I have been hearing since 1990 when, as a member of a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as a total outsider to this industry, I began to study the kinds of knowledge and ways of thinking its experts bring to bear in reducing operating risks.3 By 1996, I had been invited into eleven nuclear power stations and a few utility headquarters in the United States and abroad, and to national and international industry conferences and technical workshops. I also had joined two teams of experts on invited peer visits at two plants abroad, under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA). From men and women who are chemists, control room operators, design and system engineers, electricians and electrical engineers, executives, health physicists, human resource managers, line and middle managers, maintenance supervisors, occupational safety specialists, outage managers, risk analysts, station managers, and others, I heard what "operating safely" means to them and saw how they try to improve the ways they do that.4 More recently, at three other U.S. nuclear power stations I revisited four events occurring a few months earlier with those involved in them and in analyzing them. Of the many kinds of feedback that control relies on, experts' self-studies crystallize their understandings of how and why control is lost, recovered, and maintained.
Although not classified as "severe incidents," the reasons for these events not only echo that litany, but they also reveal a pattern long a concern of the nuclear power industry, its regulators, and the public. After analyzing an event designated "significant" for somehow threatening reactor safety margins, experts' best intentions to prevent repetition or further trouble go unrealized too often for comfort, theirs and ours. Standard practice is for an internal team to drill down to a "root cause," elaborate on "contributory causes," and, through reverse engineering from the unwanted outcome back through its inputs, develop recommendations to prevent recurrence. Annually, at plants in the United States and Canada experts make from two hundred to ten thousand self-reports of problematic conditions, ranging from housekeeping flaws to significant events, and of those, some thirty to fifty come under an internal review team's scrutiny.5 With this high volume of self-reports and self-analysis, the industry expects to ward off surprises and preclude repeats.
But not all event analyses turn out to have been sufficiently thorough, nor are all recommendations effective or carried out. In thirty-seven events involving safety-critical systems at U.S. nuclear power plants between 1992 and 1997, not only had previous errors not been identified earlier, but failures to correct already known problems came to light. These gaps were four times more numerous than errors involved in the event itself, according to a study the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) published in 2001.6 In those same events, previously recommended changes not carried out contributed to 41 percent of them, and in about 20 percent, utility and plant managers had not responded to industry notices of equipment defects nor to recommended revisions in operating practices.7 The longer problematic conditions persist, the less predictable and controllable system interactions become. Risk estimates that calculate the probabilities of equipment malfunctions do not also calculate the probabilities that these self-defeating patterns will be present.
The chance discovery in 2002 of long festering erosion on the head of the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio (one of the incidents discussed at that WANO meeting) revealed those same patterns. According to after-the-fact scenarios of the damage this could have triggered, the NRC and the International Atomic Energy Agency calculated that its severity would match that of the accident at Three Mile Island (1979). These patterns appear in other risky technologies, as for example, in the space shuttle program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In its inquiry into the 2003 loss of the Columbia shuttle and its crew, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board found issues in NASA's work systems and analytic processes similar to those contributing to the 1986 Challenger accident.8
At the same time as the nuclear power industry has made fundamental improvements in reducing operational risks, those self-defeating patterns persist and the reasons for serious trouble remain the same, across national borders. That is what Shouldering Risks tries to explain, by asking a back-to-basics question: What kind of problem is it to reduce the risks of operating a nuclear power plant? Early in my field studies, a station manager in the United States introduced me to about forty managers and supervisors at their "plan of the day" meeting. Unexpectedly, he added, "The reason I've welcomed her is that as a cultural anthropologist, she sees the things we take for granted around here in a different way. She might help us to do the same, so we can get even better at what we do." Despite the strengths of this industry's culture of control, I conclude, "getting better" is possible but not as a matter only of doing the same things better. To lessen the number of events occurring at all and to increase the frequency of sound analyses and effective recommendations--the most fruitful ways to prevent "severe incidents"--it is a more fundamental matter of reconsidering this industry's culture of control.
Like any culture, it is an intricate system of claims about how to understand the world and act in it. In this high hazard world, technologists' explicit claims pivot around the dynamics of control theory, meshed with productivity concepts such as optimization and efficiency, to produce protective bywords such as command and control, defense in depth, feedback, margins of safety, procedures, rules, system reliability, training. These technically correct claims before the fact cannot be the end of it, however. When the switch is turned to On and risks appear in real time, it becomes apparent that technologists do not--cannot--incorporate into their control calculations the contextual dynamics that inevitably accompany operations. That neglect is intentional, inspired by the goal of designing self-consistent, workable systems according to analyses and simulations that assure the lowest possible probability of an accident--workable, that is, under eventualities designers have imagined. A peopled technology operating in the world is, they claim, a source of variability and instability to be minimized by maximizing automation, standardization, and training. Once operating, when control is threatened or lost, however, assumptions underpinning those technical claims come to notice: assumptions about the relationships of humans to machines, models to reality, ambiguity to certainty, rationality to experience, facts to values. Those assumptions and the practices they support, Shouldering Risks proposes, are sources of persisting troubles and patterns.
To realize this industry's original promises--to mute the divisive and deadly politics of oil and to squelch the harmful consequences of burning wood and coal--remains a goal of many here and abroad. For others, the risks of operations and of those throughout the fuel cycle outweigh those promised benefits. In any case, promises to shoulder the risks of nuclear power production cannot be confused with the ways they are being kept, here and now and for the lifetimes of current plants and of those being built. That fact is not lost on the thousands of scientists, engineers, and industrialists worldwide searching for technical improvements to make good on them. At one U.S. station, however, an engineer sighed in frustration, "We're technical people, but most of our problems are cultural." To keep cultural promises--to turn "safety culture" into more than a catchphrase--far fewer analytic resources are at hand or called upon. Until up and running, risky technologies are sheltered from the influences of competition and downsizing, missing documentation and trend analyses, legal culpability and regulatory penalties. In designers' thinking there is little room for such worldly matters; they surface as those frustrating "cultural problems" for owners, operators, and regulators.
For real-time operations, the concepts and methods of the physical and engineering sciences lack sufficient scope. When machinery develops flaws, people make mistakes, or unexpected situations arise and going by the book becomes irrelevant, maintaining control depends, at the least, on situational intelligence, foresight, and, above all, on the interpretation of signals of many kinds. But relatively little engineering thought or other intellectual capital has been invested in analyzing the contextual dimensions of risk handling and risk reduction, compared to that invested in estimating risk probabilities. That neglect is one consequence of a hierarchy of credibility at the center of this culture of control, which esteems evidence deemed measurable and discounts that which is not. As pervasive as that hierarchy is across many domains of practice, it can work against realizing the very aims of this and other high hazard technologies. Noting "sharp limitations in the current state of knowledge about how risk is handled in human organizations," a British study group in The Royal Society calls for a more "robust knowledge base" for designing the "social and administrative" changes often recommended "in the aftermath of major accidents." The "research map is a bit like the population map of Australia, with almost everything clustered round the edges and hardly anything in the central conceptual areas."9 Shouldering Risks tries to fill in some of that vast space.
* * * * *
At the book's center are three chapters in which those responsible for daily operations at three plants discuss four events. At Arrow Station, a complicated repair of a critical component in containment displays a panoply of control dynamics. Station managers considered this event to be so serious that they put three review teams to work, each with somewhat different aims. At Bowie Station, each of two unrelated events, brought on by seemingly simple mistakes of experienced people, display some of the industry's demographic dynamics and its ambivalence toward the costs and benefits of outages for repair and refueling. At Charles Station, what turned out to be an ominously dangerous situation, found by chance, reveals the practical consequences of distinguishing "nuclear" and "nonnuclear" "sides" of plant design and operation.
These chapters sustain three perspectives on the events: reports of event review teams that analyzed each for the record; verbatim insights and observations of about ninety experts' excerpted from my transcripts of our taped discussions; and my queries, observations, and reflections on this and other kinds of evidence. Those, and my ordering of that evidence, represent my "different way" of seeing: concern with experts' ideas, concepts, knowledge, language; with their ways of thinking expressed in everyday practices; and with their understandings of their working relationships. Taking off from experts' reports and from their insights are excursions into wellsprings of the issues and themes they bring up, not to second-guess their analyses but to accumulate historical, technical, and conceptual sources of unrecognized elements in this culture of control. My excursions travel into the research of others and draw on my archive of other experts' observations and experiences as reported at workshops, technical meetings, and peer reviews, as well as on my discussions at other nuclear power stations (chiefly Overton Station, whose operations I had previously observed through its different operational phases). Maintaining the integrity of each perspective extends the spirit of my station visits: a collaborative critique toward understanding. As an Arrow Station expert said, heatedly objecting to a team report that compared its event with one more serious, "Events never die, they live on to be misinterpreted in the future!" Or reinterpreted along different lines, as I do in my reflections and as readers will through their own frames of reference.
To set the stage, chapter 1, "Complexities in Control," begins with brief highlights of the industry's last twenty-some years. In the United States, that history culminated in 2000 in the NRC's revised reactor oversight process, which reemphasizes industry self-regulation. Oversight and self-analysis both depend on two pervasive but often unremarked elements of any station's culture of control. One I call the tradeoff quandary, an ever-present negotiation among priorities, resources, and risks, technical and financial. In the customary course of operations, managers and experts face the quandary frequently, but when repairs or an unacceptable condition might force the reactor off line, the stakes become more apparent. A second element is each station's multiplicity of specialists and the continuing influence of the industry's naval origins. Risk handling continuously raises the question of how well or poorly distributed, integrated, and credible specialists' varieties of knowledge and interpretation are. The chapter ends with a description of the industry's approach to event analysis and improvement initiatives and an overview of my research strategy. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 then revisit the events.
The last two chapters respond to that motivating question, "What kind of problem is it to reduce the risks of operating a nuclear power plant?" Both offer several concepts for characterizing the ways of thinking and kinds of knowledge that risk handling depends on. In chapter 5, "Logics of Control," I examine the interplay of the calculated logics that estimate risk, the real-time logics of handling risks, and the policy logics that the tradeoff quandary uses and produces. A seemingly inevitable parade of self-contradictions, practical dilemmas, and paradoxes depends on and seeds those policy logics, such as the blame and penalties that can stifle information about trouble; the need for narrow specialties at the same time as systemic awareness is expected; the testing and repair that can introduce new risks; standardization and routinization that diminishes flexibility and adaptation. Not recognizing or not considering how to approach this infrastructure of conundrums itself can precipitate risk escalating conditions. That lived partnership of calculated, real-time, and policy logics comes clear in an unusually detailed study by cognitive scientists of control room operators' actual work practices. I find there a general model of risk reduction, whose animating principle is as much in force as is the principle of command and control: the principle of doubt shadowed by discovery. Calculated logics and policy logics, based almost exclusively on that principle of executive control, carry the most weight, however. The one principle can readily accompany the other, but that hierarchy of measurable and unmeasurable or, as we say, hard and soft knowledge, puts a thumb on that scale. Adding heft are several constructs guiding the NRC's oversight process.
That knowledge hierarchy pervades today's culture of control. Chapter 6, "Intellectual Capital for Regulation and Self-Regulation," proposes that crediting "hard," "objective," and "quantitative" knowledge and discounting "soft," "experiential," and "qualitative" knowledge have two consequences for reducing risk. One is to limit the scope of evidence event reviews consider: that can stymie effective recommendations for technical and nontechnical improvements alike. Another is to impoverish theories of risk estimation and risk handling in complex industrial systems generally. A mode of thinking about parts, components, and assemblies transferred from engineering design and testing methods into operations I call the parts template, together with the project template, another mode transferred from the construction phase into operating, can obscure interdependencies among parts and among specialists' different kinds of knowledge. Those modes of thinking foster understandings of reactor technology as being little more than the sum of its parts, rather than as a peopled technology using and producing invaluable technical and contextual knowledge about its condition. The persistence of those patterns of ineffective or unimplemented changes owes much to that misapprehension.
The crux of reactor control is configuration control: keeping track of expectable interactions within a complicated, often opaque system and responding promptly to those not expected. Close coordination among many specialists' perspectives and knowledge is key. But, the three event chapters show, often vexed relationships among the kinds of knowledge and ways of thinking of specialists in design and in operations, in maintenance and in operations, in support services and everything else can impede exchanges. That compartmentalization has a prominent and negative place in this culture of control, affecting the adequacy of information and analysis. Again, constructs guiding the NRC's oversight process can exacerbate that, as can the generally low status of "maintenance" relative to other specialties. Although that status is a staple of the industrial world, in this as in other high hazard technologies, the analytic and practical contributions of maintenance specialists are as vital as any of those of others, as serious events and accidents keep telling us. To fleets of aging reactors that expertise is increasingly indispensable.
Shouldering Risks ends with a thought experiment for reimagining a culture of control grounded in an expanded system of claims: it does little more than acknowledge the depth and breadth of the culture of control already demanded by the inner work of operating at least risk.10 The ultimate goal is to create conditions more likely to increase the frequency of effective and implemented CORRECTIVE ACTIONS and decrease the frequency of events. The conditions would maximize specialists' exchange and analysis of information. That depends on maximizing the communicative, observational, and interpretive competencies on which configuration control depends. This is the kind of problem it is to reduce the risks of operating a nuclear power plant, this experiment proposes.
That problem is entirely cultural and entirely pragmatic: the tradeoff quandary centers on evaluating the significance of evidence bearing on "nuclear safety," a term with the specific meaning of maintaining the capacity to shut down the reactor without releasing radiation at levels harmful to employees and to the public. An officially designated "significance determination process" judges daily the extent to which any operating condition or activity affects that capacity. To acknowledge that process as a prime element of the culture of control, this thought experiment entwines an axis of meanings with the axis of functions along which experts' activities are now arrayed. That acknowledges equally the observational and interpretive work that safe shutdown requires and that the principle of doubt and discovery demands.
To imagine cultures of control focused as much on knowledge and meanings as on departments and parts recasts the kinds of work and competencies risk reduction requires. That suggests other criteria for conceptualizing work systems, for the contents of technical and engineering education, and, no less, for the architecture of working arrangements and relationships. Worldwide, questions about competencies are timely: even now nuclear-related industries are short of specialists, including executives and managers.11 Any next generation of nuclear power technology will confront that problem, as will another option also on the far horizon: new initiatives in the basic science of burning plasma offer the prospect of fusion energy technology, another hazardous source of ozone-friendly energy that some experts say may be possible by mid-century.
Shouldering Risks moves from an immersion in experts' insights to excursions into wellsprings of this industry's culture of control. To enter into this world at this level of specificity, is, I believe, a necessary step for reimagining its culture of control, and perhaps those of other risky technologies. That said, some readers may want to begin with chapter 1, choose one of the event chapters, and after reading chapters 5 and 6, return to the other two. The event in chapter 2 is apparently the most complicated, the two events in chapter 3, apparently the least, and in chapter 4, an event centers on the process of evaluating the significance of trouble.
* * * * *
Although nuclear power production is one among other industries in the high hazard category, its complexities and the public ambivalence surrounding it obviously set this technology apart. Around the world as of March 2004, 439 nuclear power plants were operating and being upgraded, 30 were being built, and 34 were planned or on order. After fifty years of the "atoms for peace" program, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower advocated after the Second World War, nuclear power plants are for the first time new, middle-aged, and old. Some present familiar risks, some that are new; some operate in relatively stable social, financial, and political environments, some in those less so. The world has long passed the point of debating only whether nuclear power plants should be built at all or built where proposed. With 439 operating plants, whether one favors this energy option or not, their safe operation is obviously in the world's best interests, as is safely decommissioning those beyond repair or otherwise shut down, and, not least, securely protecting the fuel cycle and disposing of its waste.
Operating commercial reactors 2004
United States 103, France 59, Japan 53, Russia 30, United Kingdom 27, South Korea 18, Germany 18, Canada 17, India 14, Ukraine 13, Sweden 11, Spain 9, China 9, Belgium 7; Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Taiwan, each 6. Between 1 and 5: Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland.
Under construction
India 8; Russia 6; Japan 3; China, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, each 2; Canada, Iran, North Korea, United States, each 1.12
Planned or on order
Japan 13; South Korea 8; China 4; Canada 2; Argentina, Brazil, Finland, India, North Korea, Pakistan, each 1.13
Over the nearly twenty years since the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, the United States's 103 operating plants have come to meet about 20 per cent of the national demand for energy. Since 1991, the average capacity factor (actual output compared to potential output) hasincreased 40 per cent; as of 2002 it rose to 91 per cent.14 At the same time, the industry has been experiencing new kinds of financial risks as many states deregulate electricity markets. The NRC's revised regulatory regime, still being refined, is taking hold as utilities and stations continue to reduce staffing and budgets, experience mergers, and rely increasingly on contractors. All that has been accompanied by a shift to separating ownership of generating operations from that of electricity distribution. These changes come at a time when developing a "new generation" of commercial reactors remains high on the industry's agenda.
As "indebted to Descartes and Newton" as we are "for fine examples of well-formulated theory" on which science and engineering depend, says Stephen Toulmin, philosopher of science at the University of Southern California, "humanity also needs people with a sense of how theory touches practice at points, and in ways, that we feel on our pulses."15 For the many concerned with those touching points in this and other high hazard enterprises as they are today and being planned for tomorrow--executives and operators, legislators and investors, designers and scholars, shareholders and policy analysts, and for us as citizens--our task is to reimagine their cultures of control.
* * * * *
Consider Shouldering Risks an attempt at preventive maintenance: replacing an invisible cultural apparatus manufacturing a neglect of the world in which heroic technologies come to life. Once we dismantle and inspect that cultural machinery and prepare to reassemble it, we might begin to imagine how its design and operational arrangements would change with different claims relying on different assumptions. That would allow us to evaluate their consequences not only for reducing operational risks, but also for reconsidering the premises of the many institutions--educational, financial, governmental, legal--bringing high hazard technologies to fruition.
From inscriptions, relics, ruins, and scrolls we infer much about the claims of societies that built the ambitious artifacts of the past--amphitheaters, canals, churches, pyramids, ships, temples, tunnels. We are in a position today to know these things for ourselves, and to choose. This book is meant to help us think through how things could stand, what could be otherwise in a future in which high hazard technologies are vulnerable not only to what has already been foreseen but to what has become much harder to foresee at all.
Heroic technologies not only express the maturity of industrialization after its first 150 years. They also test that maturity. How can scientific, engineering, and financial sophistications bringing us so many marvels also become wiser in the ways of the world?
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Two Morrison County elementary schools have just earned an important state award. Brenda Cassellius, Minnesota commissioner of education, released information this week showing that Lindbergh Elementary in the Little Falls Community Schools District and Royalton Elementary in the Royalton Public School District are among the state's top 15 percent of the 853 Minnesota public schools receiving federal funds to help students from low-income families.
These awards were part of a Minnesota Department of Education announcement showing that many of Minnesota's schools are making progress on statewide tests.
Jill Griffith-McRaith is principal at Lindbergh Elementary. She told me that about 53 percent of the students are from families with low income. She said she gave credit to the teachers and staff.
"When I took over five years ago, we looked at reading and math. We put several things in place, including Reading Corps, 120 minutes of uninterrupted time on reading and 60 minutes on math and a once per month Saturday 'Reading Adventures' program," she said.
Asked whether the school now "teaches to the tests," Griffith-McRaith responded, "No. We focus on what's best for students and on good instruction."
Meanwhile, Royalton Elementary School serves about 484 students, about 32 percent from low-income families. Phil Gurbada, principal at the school, responded via email: "At Royalton Elementary student achievement is our top goal. We believe that every student and family deserve a positive and successful experience at our school.
"To support student achievement, we carefully assess and monitor the progress of each student and provide the support and resources so they can succeed.
"We promote a team approach with staff, parents and students in which everyone participates and has ownership of school goals.
We have a growth-oriented philosophy and believe, with the appropriate support, all the students can make significant learning progress. We don't blame or retain students; we find ways to help them. The student and parents at all grade levels participate in setting individual learning goals."
Gurbada emphasized: "At our school, student achievement has a broad meaning and includes social skills, character development and good behavior. The fine arts and technology integration are both a major focus at our school and support our goals of creativity and innovation. This year we added Spanish instruction in the primary grades so the students can learn a foreign language and acquire a more global perspective. We have a comprehensive school with updated learning materials where all subjects are important."
Terry Moffatt, academic director at Davinci Academy, a charter school in Blaine that also received a MDE award, agreed with Gurbada that it's not necessary to "test to the test." She described the school's Core Knowledge Curriculum where, for example, students read, write, cook and do art projects about Egypt or the Middle Ages. These projects "help students see the value of basic skills in understanding ideas that interest them."
These are among the 131 schools statewide that were given the "Reward School" designation.
The commissioner also praised 27 schools whose scores previously landed them at the bottom but have now made enough progress to have their low-performing designation removed.
Cassellius told me in a phone call that she "hopes to make much more use of the state's most effective district and charter public schools."
This might be, for example, via summer workshops with other schools. That's a very good idea.
Progress is possible. These schools are helping show how it can be done.
Joe Nathan, formerly a public school teacher and administrator, directs the Center for School Change. Reactions welcome, [email protected].

subset: commoncrawl


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Mike Isabella, Top Chef contestant, to open D.C. restaurants
For months, Mike Isabella has been dodging answering questions concerning the rumors he was opening a restaurant in downtown D.C. Tuesday, it was confirmed and not just about one restaurant opening, according to the Washington Post. Isabella will be opening up two restaurants right next door to each other.
The location of the restaurants will be on the corner of 14th and W streets NW.{ }
The main attraction will be Kapnos, the 150-seat Greek restaurant. Alongside of it will be G, a 45-seat location serving soups and sandwiches by day and a tasting menu by night. Expectantly, it will be open by 2013, according to the Washington Post. The other restaurant, G, will highlight classic Italian dishes.
Read the full story here.


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Obama Nearing Decision On Syria
{!hitembed ID="hitembed_1″ width="416″ height="234″ align="none" !}
In the aftermath of a reported chemical weapons attack in Syria, President Obama said he was nearing a decision on direct U.S. military involvement. The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government had been labeled a "red line" by the Obama Administration that, if crossed, would prompt a military response. Obama also claimed that the Syrian civil war was connected to America's "core national interests."
Asked about claims by anti-regime activists in Syria that Bashar al-Assad's government used chemical weapons in an attack that was said to have killed more than 1,300 people, Obama responded that officials are "right now gathering information" and that "what we've seen indicates that this is clearly a big event of grave concern."…
He quickly followed up with a warning, however, that "core national interests" of the U.S. are now involved in Syria's civil war, "both in terms of us making sure that weapons of mass destruction are not proliferating, as well as needing to protect our allies, our bases in the region."
A highly debatable point especially given that the Syrian rebels are deeply tied to Al Qaeda which the U.S. government is still at war with. Arguably, a victory for the Syrian rebels would give Al Qaeda greater influence and resources in the region. If we are going to talk about national interests, let's talk about national interests.
Protecting U.S. bases is also an interesting justification but would quickly lead to awkward questions such as "why does the U.S. have all these bases?" Nor would it inspire confidence that Obama was actually looking to roll back military forces in the region.
For their part, the American people want nothing to do with the civil war in Syria. In fact, they even opposed arming the rebels. Congressional support is also less than robust and was split on arming rebels – direct military action would likely be even more controversial. So if President Obama plans on escalating already unpopular U.S. involvement in the Syrian Civil War on the side of Al Qaeda, he better make a very compelling argument or there will be a serious backlash.


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Since is seams WHMCS support is NOT in my time zone PST, since they only reply in the middle of the night. I figured I'd post in here to hopefully get a quicker reply. Ticket #FRW-619249
Upgrade error...
Http error log...Code:Script WHMCS\Installer\Composer\Hooks\ComposerInstallerHook::postUpdateCmd handling the post-update-cmd event terminated with an exception
Anyone else getting this issue? Or have any insight?Code:PHP Fatal error: Class 'Illuminate\\Container\\Container' not found in /home/dir/public_html/whmcs/vendor/whmcs/whmcs/vendor/whmcs/whmcs-foundation/lib/Container.php on line 0
Everything I try gives the same fatal error.


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Compilation on Fedora 10 x86_64
Submitted by Sharjith Naramp... on 3 February, 2009 - 04:55
Has anyone been successful in building an running occ6.3 on FC10 64 bit. I could build Opencascade successfully but my application crashes even before starting. Same works well on Ubuntu 32 bit.
Permalink Submitted by Mark on 4 February, 2009 - 19:01
The first thing to do when you have a crash is to run the program with gdb: $ gdb myprogname
When gdb loads, press 'r' and hit enter. When the program crashes, type 'bt' and hit enter.
Also, are you compiling your app with -D_OCC64 and -m64?


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|February 12th, 2008
This cd-r contains one brand new, 15-minute demo mix track (which will re-appear on the new full-length in 2008) and comes packaged in a DVD case.
This release is ULTRA limited, there were only 8 copies made. Each copy comes with a different full-color photograph/cover, 2-panel black and white insert, a sqaure of gold leaf (approx 2x2 in.) and are each hand-numbered.


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Dar'ya (ID: 73743)
Date of birth:May 15, 1987
Height:5' 6" (170 cm)
Weight:132 lb (60 kg)
Hair color:blonde
Eyes color:aqua
Marital status:single
English language:Middle Level
Others foreign languages:No
Seeks partner:27 - 50 years old
Total photos:10
Bikini photos:2
Hobbies and interests:
I am very active and like to dance and do sports. I like to run, jog and play tennis. I also like read interesting books as well and I watch movies sometimes. I do not watch TV much because I think that it takes a lot of time from us. I think that it is necessary to watch useful programs and some movies, but not too much. I like to cook and I always look for new recipes. I like to try new dishes and to let my relatives taste them. I like to spend time in the nature where I can breathe the fresh air and rest from all the work.
About me:
I am a cheerful and kind person. I like to spend time with my friends and family, however I am searching for my only beloved man. My life will only be complete when I meet him. I am a loving and open-minded person. I am always willing to learn new things. I also love my close people very much and I cannot imagine my life without them. I am family-oriented and I think that family is the biggest gift anyone has in his or her life.
Looking For Men Type:
I am looking for a kind and intelligent man. I would like him to be honest, reliable and attentive. I hope that he will take care of me. I would like us to be a loving and caring couple and to help each other in all life situations. I hope that we will have many common interests and many things to discuss. I would like our love to last for a lifetime. I hope that we will have a happy future full of joy, adventures and just quiet happy moments.
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text:
Decent paying freelance work is a challenge to find these days, but it's even harder when your work is not top notch. In order to earn a profit from your passion you need to have mastered the basics of photography including: composition, exposure, lighting and focus. In addition, it helps if you are proficient in photo editing and printing.
If you are just starting out, it's a good idea to secure internships with established photographers. If you went to school for photography, then finding real world applications for the lessons you learned in the classroom is a must. What's more, if you have the opportunity to work with a reputable pro, he or she can be a great asset to you as you market your talent. Look to your mentor for recommendations and other advice.
Once you have completed your internship you can focus on finding freelance work. There are many opportunities for freelance photographers, but the jobs may not be best suited for your style of shooting. Your best bet is to look to past clients for additional work or surf the net. The World Wide Web is a great resource for freelancers. Start by looking on reputable sites, such as Freelance Switch and Creative Jobs Central, both have sections that list freelance work opportunities. In addition, Guru.com and iFreelance post a litany of freelance gigs. The bonus with Guru.com is that you can also post your profile for potential employers to see.
If you are looking for specific jobs, then it's best to stick with referrals inside your particular niche. For example, if you are looking to make it as a professional fashion photographer, then inquire about freelance opportunities at studios and magazines. However, before you decide whether you want to work on a project-by-project basis or you are more comfortable having a stable job, it's wise to try each out and then decide what suits you best.
Related Articles:
Telling A Story With Your Shots


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Police say missing autistic teen has been found
Published Sunday, April 25, 2010 9:28PM EDT
Toronto Police say a missing autistic teen who went missing from a home in Scarborough Saturday has been found.
Police made the announcement on their Traffic Services Twitter page, but did not have details.
Kevin Kwok, is a 17-year-old Chinese male, was last spotted on Saturday around 9 p.m. at a home near Sheppard Avenue East and Kennedy Road in the city's east end.
Police said he was wearing an orange Adidas t-shirt and black shorts at the time of his disappearance.
The teen requires medication, and because of his condition, he operates at the level of a seven-year-old.


text:
Entries from February 2011
18 February 2011 - Anger towards Climate Change activism
1 February 2011 - Does Britain support Mubarak or not?
24 February 2011 - Hidden reasons behind the PM's Middle East tour
3 February 2011 - Prejudice against the Muslim Brotherhood
1 February 2011 - An anti-Mubarak protester interviewed
Lots of Attention on the Iranian Navy
Graham Bell, 22 February 2011
Today, the 22nd February, the BBC has given quite a lot of attention to the movement of Iranian warships through the Suez Canal. As scores of protesters are being killed by brutal regimes in Libya, Morocco and Bahrain, big news has been made about the seemingly insignificant passage of two Iranian...
Framing the Debate on Cameron's Multiculturalism speech
Louise Brooks, 11 February 2011
During a speech in Munich last week, David Cameron initiated a strident attack on what he described as "state multiculturalism". The Prime Minister linked existing policy to an increased risk of terrorism, signalling an apparent change in policy towards ethnic minority integration. Much of the media followed Cameron's lead, focussing on the...
Project Merlin: What They're not Telling you
Derek Suede, 11 February 2011
On the 9th February 2011, the conservatives announced that they will increase the bank levy from Ł1.7bn to Ł2.5bn, an increase of Ł800m. This is surely a step in the right direction and sounds like a clampdown on the banks at last. On its news website the BBC has posted a...
The Reporting of the Anti-Mubarak Protests
Graham Bell, 4 February 2011
The events in Egypt and Tunisia have put UK news organisations in a bit of a tight situation. Until now, it has been easy to hide the western ally leaders around Africa and the Middle East from mainstream western news. Western governments have, as the BBC lightly put it "turned a...
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Discussion in 'Android Devices' started by betafan, May 25, 2012.
Should be getting mine in oct/november
You and me both. Hopefully our market stays on track (that has been rumored).
Me too!
There's an area on my way to work that has always been good for speed, but today I got my best results ever on 3g there.
beaumont texas....supposedly it's slow because they're upgrading towers in our area
3g, 72kbps download
3g, 115kpbs upload
never heard of uploading being faster but....o well that's what speedtest says
Here's my latest after turning LTE off!
2012-06-27 13.36.26 by samurai big ed, on Flickr
Somers Point, new jersey 08244
Doesn't anyone have LTE speeds yet? I thought a few locations have been rolled out already.
So I called a sprint yesterday to ask when my towers will be upgraded... I was told July 30..I guess we will find out!
P_Dub, please see the post above for the official Sprint News Release. I am waiting for Sunday!
I had a glimpse of LTE in Wichita, KS today. I noticed it on and only lasted a few minutes. I was able to download speed test and run it before it went away.
Not Verizon fast, but still respectable. Hopefully the speeds will improve as the network is built out and officially activated!
Some people in KC are getting around 20-24mbps with LTE.
This was taken in Oakbrook, Ill., which is a western 'burb of Chicago. 3G speeds have slowed down a bit within the last week and a half for some reason. Was averaging 1.00-1.5MBPS pretty regularly, even in the office.
Read a couple of articles on ons4gru.com that in regards to Chicago, Sprint's strategy was to start outside Chicago proper and work their way in. So most of the Chicagoland area (burb's, NW Indiana, etc.) should have LTE by October and Chicago will be the last to get it by years end.
Supposedly areas in NW Indiana are actually up and running with LTE but it's never been confirmed.
I hit a few LTE spots in Plano, TX today. Will add pics in a bit.
Was great while in a given area, but the signal doesn't seem to broadcast far from the tower. maybe a 3 block radius
still checking it out. I could travel say east...and get it. Same road traveling west...3g only. it was weird.
Honolulu has been absolutely dreadful on 3G lately. Certain places I can literally be sitting under a tower and get almost no data throughput.
Nothing here at home yet, did it get pushed back? I thought the roll out was supposed to be city wide which is why it took so long to accomplish.
I am only getting average of 12 mbps down and 6 mbps up.
Not at all...this is a soft launch. What area are you in? Dallas for example was switched on this week yes, but scheduled completion is not until November
only? lol
What exactly is everyone classifying as "verizon fast"
verizon and att both have an average LTE speed of 8-12 Mbps...sure there will be peaks of faster speeds, especially closer to the tower, but don't set expectations on that.
In the limited testing I did yesterday I got speeds anywhere from 3.5-25Mbps dload ...dependent on how far I was from the tower.
It was exactly what I expected speed wise...I was hoping signal would carry further from the tower though.
I'm in San Antonio and according to what I have read from Sprint the first cities (which includes S.A.) would be fully live on 7/15 with the other cities starting to be active in November. This was supposedly being done to guaranty we did not have the fiasco that was the wimax rollout where some parts of town still don't have it to this day.
Where did you read that...I have seen nothing that claimed full capacity on roll out date
the specific page I had was on the inside sprint now site I believe and has since been pulled
I will keep looking for it tho
here it is
so going by that..the "launch" markets should be at 40-50% completion as of today..and 100% by the date listed
this site is pretty insane
Thanks "Other Ed", when was Austin added, it never appeared on any of the lists before.


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Furcraea hexapetala
English common name: cuban hemp
Spanish common name: cabuya, penco blanco
Local name: cabuya, penco blanco
Taxonomic comments: Syn.: Furcraea cubensis. In Jørgensen & León-Yánez (1999) as Agave hexapetala Jacq. and Furcraea cubensis (Jacq.) Vent.
Name status: Accepted name; taxon occurs in Galapagos.
Description: The cuban hemp is a shrub similar in appearance to the pineapple plant, composed of thorny, long, tough leaves. A spike of flowers that can measure up to 6 m in height eventually develops in the center.
The sisal is like the pineapple, composed of thorny, long, tough leaves. In the center there is a spike of flowers that can measure up to 6 m in height. It blossoms and bears fruit only once at 10 years of age and then dies. The seeds are dispersed by wind. The species also produces a large number of bulbs on the stem that sprout into new plants when they make contact with the ground, a form of vegetative reproduction.
Last updated: 21 Jan 2014
Taxon introduced for agricultural or domestic use; naturalized in the wild.
Galapagos island groups: Floreana, Isabela, San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, Isabela, Floreana, originally from Tropical America.
Please be aware that this distribution map is automatically generated from database records (CDF and external specimens, literature records, and observations) and may not accurately reflect the currently-known distribution for all species.


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Wolf/Wolfgang -- This name is AWESOME. How COOL would it be to be named WOLFGANG? Extremely.
Valor -- Eh.
Zephyr -- O_o looks like a girl's name to me.
Truett -- Interesting.
Wiley -- Don't like this one.
Cypress -- Cool.
Lelan -- Ok
Zen -- hehe. This is awesome.
Roan -- Also cool.
Theron -- Love this!
Harbor -- Eh.
Claude -- This name is severely underrated.
River -- Cool.
I like Wolfgang, Theron, and Claude.


text: Just to be clear, the subject matter of this video is not in the least bit interesting. It's a paparazzi video, so Christian Serratos could clearly care less about what they are saying to her. But all this is not to say the video isn't worth watching. Once you see the dress Serratos has on, you will understand.


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text:
From the "7-Up Stinks Studios," here we go...
Braves stay consistent
Want a picture of consistency? Your Atlanta Braves are the third team to 50 wins in the majors - Philadelphia and the New York Yankees are the others. The Braves are 25-18 at home and on the road.
Everything with this club has centered on pitching, and other than Freddie Freeman's two-homer night, the Braves' stellar pitching was again the overwhelming theme.
A day after learning he was officially named an All-Star, Tommy Hanson turned in another all-star effort. Hanson, who has 10 wins and a 2.52 ERA to rank among the league leaders in each category, allowed five base runners in seven innings. He turned it over to the Braves 1-2 knockout punch of Jonny Venters and Craig Kimbrel, who have been outstanding collectively and individually.
So too has Freeman, who may be the only thing that stands between Kimbrel and a Rookie of the Year slam dunk. In a rare appearance in the cleanup spot, Freeman hit his 10 homer in the first and his 11th in the eighth. Freeman's average is up to .272, which on this Braves' team is considered Silver Slugger material. In fact, the pitching has been so good, that no Brave in Monday's starting lineup other than Freeman and Brian McCann had an average better than .250.
That's not only great pitching - that's consistently great pitching.
Junior speaks his mind - and the truth
Even though his winless streak continues to grow, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has returned to being among the threats every week. That's a great thing for NASCAR, which has to smiling now that Junior - easily the sport's most popular driver - is among the contenders weekly and among the contenders to be in the Chase for the Championship.
It's not a great thing for NASCAR, though, when Junior drops the hammer on the current disaster that is restrictor plate racing. But it's the right thing. This weekend's race at Daytona was the latest restrictor-plate race that turned into a two-man bobsled run that made NASCAR a team sport.
Uh, guys, they don't have No. 1 and No. 1B spots on Victory Lane. And Junior, who may have felt different if he had not finished 19th Saturday, was quick to point out the frustration Saturday night.
"I am really ticked off. It was a foolish ... race. I don't know what to tell you," he told reports after race-winner David Ragan used teammate Matt Kenseth's help to survive the late-race fireworks. "I don't like this kind of racing and you know it."
"I'd rather have control of my own destiny and be able to go out there and race and just do my own work and worry about my own self," Earnhardt said on Thursday. "Been growing up all these years racin' for No. 1, lookin' out for No. 1, doing my job. This is what I need to do, I need to do this to get up through the pack. This is how my car drives. Now you are doing it so different. Your thought process and everything you think about during the race is nothing near that."
Amen, Junior. If we thought we were tired of hearing about "fuel strategy," well, the two-team tango that has replaced racing at NASCAR's fastest - and arguably most entertaining and prestigious - tracks must be addressed sooner rather than later.
Hot dogs and labor issues
Somewhere on the list between fireworks and taking naps on the list of Fourth of July traditions is the Nathan's hot dog eating contest. We're not saying it's a sport, mind you, but of the things that were shown on ESPN over the weekend, what have you heard more of than Joey Chestnut eating 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
Yes, 62. Yes, they were full-sized hot dogs. And yes, the competitors dunk them in water to help them go down easier. Wow.
The only thing that may be crazier was how former six-time champ Takeru Kobayashi spent his July 4th. Kobayashi, who is the most recognized name in professional eating (it's hard to believe we just typed that sentence), has not been competing in these events because he refuses to sign an exclusive contract with Major League Eating (no, we did not make that up). Instead of entering or attending Nathan's contest, Kobayashi was across town eating lunch - which he told the Wall Street Journal consisted of 69 hot dogs. Say what?
OK, three things about that. First, eating as many hot dogs as possible for a shot at $10,000 is gross; doing it for lunch is sick. Second, there are labor issues across the entire sports world if the best competitive eaters are not going toe-to-toe. Third, 62 hot dogs is about 60 too many. Let's just move along.
This and that
- Experts say that the Auburn trees may not be doomed after all. Auburn University horticulturist Gary Keever told the Associated Press that it's unknown whether the trees, which are brown and yellow, will survive or not. Harvey Updyke Jr., the 62-year-old Alabama fan with a son named Bear and a daughter named Crimson Tyde, was indicted on charges including criminal mischief and desecration of a venerated object. If the trees live to those charges change to "Attempted" criminal mischief and "attempted desecration of a venerated object?
- Washington Nationals super-prospect Bryce Harper was promoted to Double-A (sadly, the Nationals' Double-A affiliate, the Harrisburg Senators, is not in the Southern League with the Lookouts). Nationals officials say that Harper will not be promoted to the majors this year.
- Derek Jeter was 0-for-4 in his return and you would have thought he spit on the Statue of Liberty. Guys, let it go. Is Jeter, who returned from a DL-stint for a calf injury, as good as he was five years ago? Of course not. But dude is 37, and the only baseball players that were better at 37 than 32 were using some, ahem, help. At least we can pretty safely assume Jeter, who is hitting some 60 points lower than his career average, is not following the Barry Bonds-prescribed method of forever young-ness.
Today's question
Including Tommy Hanson, who got the biggest snub from the all-star selection process? We'll have our answers around 2 p.m.


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They tried to steal his soul.
Creeping in,
In the middle of the night.
Waiting for the crack
Between the dreams
When he was neither here
Nor there.
When he was spinning in
His mind,
Crying out in his sleep.
When he no longer remembered
His name.
They tried to steal it then.
When he was not remembering.
But just at the moment
When they might have snatched it.
Just when his mind was lost and hungry,
Just when he cried out helplessly,
I reached over
And touched his hand.
And the evil spirits
Were once more
Cast adrift


text:
By Stefanie Kilnapp
The Lutheran West baseball team's successful season came to an abrupt ending last Wednesday, losing a tough sectional championship game to Clearview, 8-2.
"I knew they were going to come out and play good," Longhorns head coach Trey Lamb said. "They're not technically our rivals, but the kids, technically, don't like each other that well. So you know they're going to come out tough."
The Longhorns' season isn't anything to shake a stick at. They won 10 games for the first time in four years; they had above a .500 record for the first time in three years; and Coach Lamb added, "It was the most competitive season we've had in a long, long time here, with one of the best nucleus of players we've seen in a long time."
That could be an understatement with their first baseman hitting a .470 and the shortstop with about .420.
"I have three or four guys in the top 25 in Ohio for hitting, so it's really hard to pick a most valuable player," Lamb admitted. "We're lucky we have two No. 1 pitchers. I don't have an ace, and I have two kids I can throw anytime I want – it's Greg Kunze and Aaron Geye – they're the two I can just call on whenever I need."
Their talent isn't the only thing their coach appreciates them for. The players bring a lot to the team, including courtesy.
"One thing I really preach is respecting the game and the teams you're playing against," Lamb said. "We've had almost zero incidents, for the four years I've been head coach, with the umpires or other teams.
"The team kind of turned into its own coach, which makes my job a lot easier. It's awesome when you have senior or junior leaderships and those are the moments I get really proud of. C.J. Griffin, he's my shortstop, shortstops are the backbone of your team, and he took that role and went strong with it; it was very nice."
Lutheran West had almost won the Patriot Athletic Conference, but a team glitch took it away from them.
"We were leading in the conference going into the start of last week and we lost three games in a row to lose it to three teams we had already beaten, but we ran into those teams and they were just playing really well and we went into a slump," Lamb lamented.
Ending the season with a 14-8 record brought some proud moments in the season as well.
"We had one really good come-from-behind win. We were down by four, I believe, going into the fifth or sixth (inning) against Brookside, and we came back and won it," Lamb recalled. "That was right in the middle of one of our hot streaks where we continued on."
The whole season could be described as a (pleasant) surprise, as most fans didn't know how talented and winning this team would be this season.
"Overall, like I said, we came from pretty much nowhere, so no one knew where we were going to be except our team, we actually believed," Lamb said. "We 'snuck up' on people and surprised them."
This team was closer than most. They came together more than willingly and followed on their own track, which was deemed victorious.
"Our players know to play your game, and hopefully it comes off the way that it should with a 'W,'" Lamb concluded. "They're very respectful players, and they teach me that, too, so it's a well-rounded team."


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text:
The UK eCommerce Awards for Excellence have spent the last eight years seeking out and awarding exceptional and innovative solutions in the eCommerce industry. The eighth annual awards event occured on September 28, 2016 at the London Marriot Hotel in Grosvenor Square, and drew about 500 online merchants and retailers, agencies, and industry leaders from the United Kingdom and beyond.
Robin Carlsson, Vaimo UK's Country Manager, Stephen Hill, eCommerce Strategist at Vaimo UK, and Maurizio Stella, Sales Manager at Vaimo UK attended the event, as two of our clients were finalists: Brown Forman's Jack Daniel's UK, was a finalist in "Industry" in the two subcategories of "Best General eCommerce" and "Best Grocery eCommerce." Read more about our eCommerce solution for Jack Daniel's here. Guthy Renker's Proactiv, was a finalist under the Industry subcategory of "Best Health & Beauty eCommerce."
We are proud to announce that Brown-Forman's Jack Daniel's UK won the "Best Grocery eCommerce" Award. The full list of winners can be found here.


text: A cheesy little home made movie, that is! :rofl1: I feel like I need to explain, ha ha. I was laid off a while ago and needed a hobby to keep myself sane. Since the boys broke my DSLR, photos were out of the question, so I picked up the video camera and started a movie. It was a great excuse for NBC0 and I to teach the boys some new tricks. Anyhow, enjoy! I apologize in advance for the bad storyline and corny sound effects. <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/opTVl3E-p8s&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/opTVl3E-p8s&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>


text:
I need help with the following problem: recently we've started moving one of our very old products from VS6 to VS2010. One issue appears: in the old project there are bunches of "unnamed" (don't know how to call it correctly: there is an entry in the .rc-file,
but there isn't corresponding entry in the .h-file). Looks like the "old" studio generated IDs for such entries automatically. But VS2010 won't does so.
In general – it's continuation of this:
thread (I'm having the same error message).
And what I need – some tool, which can (re)generate all missing IDs. Doing so manually – really not a good solution because of a great number of resources impacted…
Best regards...
According to your description, it seems to be hard for us to find out the cause of your issue. So could you please provide more detail about your issue? Or can you provide a sample to us?
In addition, this link you have provide has been some issue. So that we cannot open the correct page.
Best Regards,
Rob Pan [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us
could use Excel.
Open resource.h in Excel. You should specify that the space
character will be column separator. Then just refill column with ID's using "Fill Series" feature. Save resource.h
Enjoy :)
Microsoft is conducting an online survey to understand your opinion of the Msdn Web site. If you choose to participate, the online survey will be presented to you when you leave the Msdn Web site.
Would you like to participate?


text:
ESL Job Feed is the most eclectic and broad source of ESL jobs and teaching positions available worldwide.?ESL Job Feed publishes links to ESL Job postings from a variety of sources including TESall, Total ESL, Yahoo!/Monster, Guardian Jobs, Chronicle of Higher Education, craigslist, TESOL Org, TEFL and many more. From conversation schools for beginners to university positions for teaching veterans,?ESL Job Feed is your source for English teaching positions worldwide.
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text:
Can Online Radio Stations Ever Replace Indie 103.1?
A "Glitterati" dancer at Smash Appeal, Saturday's Moheak fundraising fete
Lina Lecaro
Still miss Indie 103.1 FM? Feel like Jonesy's KROQ show just doesn't quite capture the droll magic -or the wonderfully wacky playlists- of yore? The spirit of Indie lives on the web station Indie1031.com and we dig it (particularly Bob Forrest's Wednesday set, and Sunday's entire line-up featuring Nativ Wayne, Full Metal Jackie and Suicide Girls).
But now it looks like the rebel soul -and many of the OG DJs- of the beloved radio station have taken siege of the net as well via Moheak.com. Which one's better? It's a close call.
Moheak was created by Indie's best known DJ, TK (the luggishly sweet, oft-hawked jock who held down mornings and afternoons daily -and more- when Indie was on the air) and some of the indie team has joined him: Paul V. ("Neon Noise" and "Mash-up of the Day") now broadcasts Thursdays and all weekend (Fri and Sat), Darren Revell revives Big Sonic Heaven and is also the Music Director, and Dave Navarro, who moved his "Dark Matter" show from Indie online to Moheak a few months ago.
Most exciting are the new hosts Moheak has scored since its inception: Keith Morris and his "Totally Psyched" show, an all vinyl pshychedelic thrash fest and the inimitable Angelo Moore of Fishbone, whose "Angelo Show" is as unpredictable as you might expect. We've thought that Moore would make a great radio personality since his poetic ramblings and spazztastic rants on the rogue LA radio experiment from over a decade ago called Pirate Cat Radio 87.9, now based in San Francisco!
Upcoming Events
Paul Weller
TicketsTue., Oct. 24, 7:00pm
TicketsTue., Oct. 24, 7:00pm
Home Free
TicketsTue., Oct. 24, 7:30pm
Jacnique Nina
TicketsTue., Oct. 24, 8:30pm
TicketsTue., Oct. 24, 9:00pm
Other spinners will be familiar to nightlife and music heads: journalist/blogger/WCS contributor Kevin Bronson, who presents a sonic companion to his "Buzz Bands" blog, DJ Casper VonDJ (club and bar beatsmith around town), Marko DeSantis (from the band Sugarcult), and Lawrence Gjurgevich (host of long-running dance party, Club Underground at the Echo Fridays).
"We're all doing this for the love of the music. No one is getting paid," said V., Saturday night at Smash Appeal, a dance party he threw to help raise funds and attention for Moheak (see above photo). "Every person who has airtime is bringing some great music to the global community."
Good music's all "good," but what we can get that on Pandora. What we like about Moheak is the free-form, random-feeling mix of '80's new wave, indie du jour and electro dance grooves. It's what made the terrestrial version of Indie so cool in the early days. Moheak is really rockin this way, but then again, so still, is Indie.
Here's some random samplings of what both stations played this Monday morning while we wrote this blog post.
Moheak: Elvis Costello, The Like, Adam Ant, Datarock, Broken Bells, Depeche Mode, Simian Mobile Disco, Interpol, Missing Persons, Joy Division, Crystal Method, Hockey, Bjork.
Indie1031: T-Rex, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Duran Duran, Harrper Blynn, Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello, Ra Ra Riot, The Melvins, The Pixies, Echo & the Bunnymen.
The verdict? Tie. Great tunes to write by on both. Grudge-holders will probably prefer the totally DIY Moheak (Indie is still run by the Spanish station that killed it off the FM dial two years ago), but either way we say Monday morning music rules! We ♥ the internet.
See more pics from Smash Appeal in our Nightranger slideshow coming this week.
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La Grande Odyssée Savoie Mont Blanc will be crossing the Alps Jan. 8-19.
This race, in its seventh year, challenges 33 of the planet's best mushers and close to 400 professional athlete huskies. It is the world's most technical dog sled race.
During the race, they will run 1000 kilometres together and climb 25,000 metres of ascending slopes. This detail sets La Grande Odysée apart from races like the Iditarod or the Yukon Quest, which run over fairly flat land.
La Grande Odyssée Savoie Mont Blanc lasts two weeks and is divided into 10 phases. From Jan. 8-11, the teams cover Les Portes du Soleil, going from Avoriaz to Champéry. The Haute Savoy-Savoy liaison follows Jan. 12-14. It runs through the Espace Diamant and Megève. Finally, the Haute Maurienne Vanoise leg takes the teams from Val Cenis Vanoise the villages of Haute Maurienne Vanoise. On its way, it passes through the Plateau de Petit Mont Cenis, Bonneval, Aussois, and several other village-stations.
Dog sledding is one of the world's oldest means of transportation, having existed for more than 5000 years. The sport, which uses only human and animal energy, is in complete harmony with the natural environment. It also represents the complicity between man and animal; the musher's survival depends on the close relationship he builds with his huskies.
During these two weeks, more than 50 side activities such as dog sledding initiations, giant tartiflette dishes, trapper villages, and themed exhibits will take place in the ski resorts.
Spectators can watch the event from various points along the race's itinerary that are accessible by skiing (Alpine or Nordic) and by snowshoeing. Large screens will also be set up in the resorts so that guests may follow the race on TV.


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Cyber Alert: Portrait of an Ex-Hacker
It's April, and more than 1,600 corporate techies crowd into a ballroom in San Francisco's Moscone Center. The room buzzes with excitement as the star attraction, convicted computer hacker Kevin D. Mitnick, saunters onto the stage. He's on a panel of security gurus and legal experts ready to talk about whether companies should hire ex-hackers to safeguard their computer networks.
It's an explosive subject in the industry, and sparks fly as Mitnick takes on other panelists, including Ira Winkler, chief security strategist at Hewlett-Packard Co. After Winkler warns against hiring convicted ex-hackers, Mitnick mocks him, claiming Winkler himself once hired ex-con hackers to work at a consulting company he owned, a charge Winkler denies. "I know them personally," Mitnick says acidly. "I had traded [break-in secrets] with them."
The world's most notorious hacker is back in circulation. Known by his handle, "Condor," Mitnick spent 15 years marauding through the computers of the world's largest tech corporations, conning his victims into letting him into their systems. He served more than five years in jail. Only when his probation ended in January was he able to get back on the Internet and start a consulting company, Defensive Thinking LLC, which helps clients to prevent hackers from snagging credit-card numbers, medical records, and trade secrets.
His timing is impeccable. Hacking has reached epidemic proportions because of the explosive growth of the Internet. While Mitnick says he hacked for the sheer thrill of the break-in, never stealing money or destroying property, many of today's computer criminals have far more destructive goals in mind. The recent SQL Slammer "worm" shut down 13,000 Bank of America (BAC ) automated teller machines and slowed worldwide Internet traffic to a crawl. And intelligence experts fear terrorists could use the Net or other computer technology to attack the U.S. The Homeland Security Dept. is concerned that al Qaeda or another group could launch cyber and physical attacks simultaneously, attempting to disable safety systems at nuclear plants or air traffic control systems. "[The prospect of such an attack] is a tremendous threat," says Sallie McDonald, deputy chief of the information and warning division of Homeland Security.
Faced with such threats, companies and government agencies have been pouring cash into their defenses. The amount of money spent on computer security is expected to hit $13.5 billion this year, according to market researcher Forrester Research (FORR ) Inc., twice the total in 2000. The forecast for 2006: $20 billion.
Just spending money on the latest security software isn't enough, though. Corporations and governments are especially vulnerable if they ignore the human side of hacking. In security consultant parlance, it's called "social engineering" -- and it's Mitnick's specialty. Hackers use it to dupe their victims into coughing up passwords and other sensitive information. In nearly all his attacks, Mitnick broke through the toughest network firewalls with persistence, a telephone, and a string of lies. His message to corporations: "There is no patch for stupidity."
His own crimes show that the best key to any locked system is neither a computer nor a modem. It's a gullible human being. Mitnick once pulled a fast one on Motorola (MOT ) Inc. by posing as an employee and calling a Motorola engineer to persuade her to send him the core software for one of the company's new phones.
Mitnick's story is a journey inside the slippery mind of a hacker. It's Catch Me If You Can for the computer realm. A tour of Mitnick's psyche provides a clearer understanding of the dark forces that thrive in the digital world. His criminal career, say experts, is a point-by-point primer on what spawns hackers, how they think and operate, and how difficult it is for them to mend their ways. It's an alert to parents and educators to steer potential "Condors" in the right direction -- before normal teenage rebellion turns into something poisonous. And it's a warning to government and corporate leaders to arm themselves against hackers and cyberterrorists.
These days, operating from the 17th floor of a fashionable West Los Angeles high-rise, the 39-year-old Mitnick strives to present himself as a reformed, mature tech consultant. His Defensive Thinking has attracted nine clients, whom he declines to identify. He has lined up more than 25 speaking gigs at seminars and private companies, each paying $5,000 to $20,000. And he has become something of a celebrity, publishing a book called The Art of Deception and making a cameo on television's Alias as a CIA agent.
Still, many corporations don't trust him. Not only is he a convicted con man but he's also world famous for it. "Do you hire the bank robber to guard your money? I don't think so," says Linda McCarthy, an executive security adviser at antivirus software maker Symantec (SYMC ) Corp. The same fame that Mitnick relies on for marketing collides head-on with his credibility. Unless Mitnick can resolve this conflict, his consulting business may not thrive. And if his speaking engagements peter out once the novelty wears off, he might be tempted to fall back on his old ways. He denies it will happen. "I just won't fall back. It's not an option," he says.
Mitnick is out to prove to the world that he really has changed. He gave BusinessWeek access to his new life through a series of interviews and referrals to his family and friends. And he recounted the long, strange trip of his hacking career, the prison stints, the years on the run, and his attempts to come to terms with himself and society.
As an overweight, nerdy teen in Van Nuys, Calif., Mitnick was desperate for a place to belong and a way to succeed. The hacker's life gave him what he needed. He was the only child of Shelly Jaffe, a waitress who dragged him through four divorces and countless failed romances, mostly with men who gave little thought to keeping her bright but hyperactive son on the straight and narrow path. His father, Alan, a record promoter, was rarely around.
Left to his own devices, Mitnick escaped by learning magic. But card tricks soon bored him, so he sought out the hacker crowd in high school. Their high jinks -- stealing computer passwords and cracking phone lines so they could make free calls -- seemed like magic, but on a grander scale. "It was about the intrigue, the adventure, the pursuit of knowledge," says Mitnick. "I wanted to be in that clique." Recalls Ronen Rahaman, a friend of Mitnick's in high school: "Some guys wanted to do varsity football. Kevin wanted to do varsity hacking."
Mitnick was driven by the need to prove himself. Hackers are typically wallflowers, shunned by the in-crowd, so they look for ways to show off their smarts. "They show their power by screwing over the system," says Dr. Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University. Mitnick shocked his friends with his audacity. At 16, he phoned a Digital Equipment (HPQ ) Corp. system manager. Pretending to be the lead developer of a new DEC product, he snookered him into handing over a password. Once inside, he didn't steal anything. Breaking in was reward enough.
Computer crime can be addictive, and Mitnick knows it all too well. In his mid-20s, he hacked into DEC again, got arrested, and was convicted of felony computer fraud. He served a year in prison -- including eight months in solitary confinement. Yet after his release, he couldn't resist the draw of the flickering computer screen, the challenge of that next great hack. "It's like being sober and having a guy show up at your place with a line of coke," Mitnick says. "He's enticing you. 'Come on...it's just one time...it won't hurt."'
When the FBI started investigating his renewed hacking, he fled -- leading to two wild years on the lam. As he ran from city to city, he took on phony identities and supported his hacking habit by working odd jobs -- from systems administrator for a law firm to help desk analyst in Seattle. He was so convincing as Mr. Ordinary that his co-workers never suspected that after hours he was breaking into some of the best-protected computer systems in the world. He dodged the cops by monitoring police scanners to spy on the very people who were tracking him.
Even while on the run, Mitnick kept hacking obsessively. How wily was he? Shawn Nunley remembers Mitnick's incursions well. In February, 1994, Nunley was a systems administrator at software maker Novell (NOVL ) Inc. Late one night, he got a phone call at home from Mitnick, who introduced himself as a Novell employee named Gabe Nault. He said he was on vacation and needed to connect to the network to work on a project. Having never met Nault, Nunley called Nault's voice mail to make sure the voice on it matched the one that had woken him in the middle of the night.
Mitnick was a step ahead of Nunley. The hacker had called a Novell network techie and convinced him to reset Nault's voice mail password. Then Mitnick left his own voice on the recording. "It seemed plausible. I gave him an account," says Nunley, now director of technology development at NetScaler Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif. Mitnick proceeded to steal a copy of the secret code for Novell's most important software product, NetWare. He just looked at the code, never using it for anything else.
Finally, though, Mitnick screwed up. On Christmas Eve, 1994, he hacked into the computer of Tsutomu Shimomura, a highly respected security expert at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Bad move. Shimomura was incensed. He teamed up with the FBI and tracked Mitnick for two months, until they ran him to ground, surprising him in a Raleigh (N.C.) apartment, surrounded by telephone gear and fake driver's licenses.
It was during his second jail stay that Mitnick says he decided to mend his ways. He was denied access to anything his guards thought he might be able to use to hack from his cell -- even a portable radio. "I was treated like Hannibal Lecter," he says. "It was absolutely the worst." So he channeled his energy into helping his lawyer fight his case. "Kevin's desire to hack came from a need to be successful at something," says his aunt, Chickie Leventhal, a bail bondswoman. "He just redirected that to his defense." He had been charged with 48 counts of computer, wire, and cell-phone fraud in 1995. By the time he pleaded guilty to seven of the charges in 1999, he had already served most of his five-year sentence.
Mitnick spent his probation trying to craft a normal, law-abiding life. He wrote the book. And even though he was not allowed to go on the Internet, he looked over other people's shoulders when they surfed the Net -- like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, fascinated with how much the cyberworld had changed during his long absence. He also has forged family bonds. He now lives in suburban Thousand Oaks, Calif., with his girlfriend, Darci Wood, and her 7-year-old daughter.
In his office in West Los Angeles, he's the picture of meticulous organization. He carries his BlackBerry handheld organizer wherever he goes, so he's sure to be on time for every appointment. "He's learning to channel his obsessiveness into something other than being obnoxious," says Don Wilson, a former boyfriend of Mitnick's mother and one of Mitnick's closest friends. "There's a sense of urgency to turn his life around."
The cops doubt that Mitnick is truly reformed, though. FBI agent Kenneth G. McGuire III, his relentless pursuer for years, worries that Mitnick is simply putting on an act -- and that he won't be able to resist getting into trouble again. "He showed no remorse," says McGuire, whose office building is visible from the lobby of Mitnick's office. "He was laughing as he took the keys to the kingdom. He has no history to make him trustworthy."
Indeed, Mitnick is still furious at those who convicted him. When asked how people will be persuaded to trust him now, he launches into a fiery diatribe, raising his voice and slapping a conference room table in his office. He angrily denies prosecutors' assertions that he caused $5 million to $10 million in damage, and he insists he didn't deserve to be thrown in prison for five years. "The judge bought into the myth of Kevin Mitnick, as if I was the Osama bin Mitnick of the Internet," he says. "They wanted to create a cyberbogeyman." He rages on for 40 minutes, listing all of the computer crimes ascribed to him that he didn't commit and attacking the government, the press, and the prison system for treating him unfairly.
Then he abruptly calms down, becomes sheepish. It's like the transformation of Mr. Hyde back into Dr. Jekyll. After he left prison and met some of his victims, he says, he realized the gravity of what he had done. He has apologized to several of them. "What I did was absolutely wrong. Unfortunately, I can't go back in time and fix it," he says. "There's nothing I can do but just live my life differently."
Mitnick acknowledges that it's a struggle to resist the urge to hack. One day, he says, he signed on to AOL Instant Messenger and was bombarded by greetings from teenage fans who had heard him reveal his screen name on a radio program. One, with the screen name Spikey 551, confessed that, at 14, he tried to hack into America Online and steal passwords. "I got caught in the first 10 minutes," Spikey lamented. Mitnick says he dashed out a quick reply. "Stay out of trouble," he advised. "You don't want to end up like me."
And corporations don't want to end up like Mitnick's victims. They are well advised to heed his warnings and plug the holes in their security systems caused by employees' gullibility. While he claims he has traded in his black hat for a white one, a whole new generation of con men is out there in cyberspace trying to one-up the master.
By Arlene Weintraub in Los Angeles, with Jim Kerstetter in San Francisco


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Located on the bleached, white sandy beach of the Gulf of Mexico in the northern Panhandle of Florida is one of the most beautiful resorts in the U.S. called the Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort. With 2,400 acres of meticulously well-kept grounds littered with loblolly pine and live oak, the Sandestin is recognized as the largest private resort in the country, and from February 26th through the 28th, it provided residence for 325 deer researchers, biologists, and managers from throughout the Southeast attending the 35th annual meeting of the Southeast Deer Study Group.
Hosted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, representatives from 17 states shared their latest findings and concerns relating to the number one big-game animal in North America—the whitetail deer. Hosted by a different state wildlife agency each year, one of the host state's responsibilities is to come up with a theme for the meeting. This year's theme was 'Predators – and whether they are changing the dynamics of managing deer in the Southeast'.
Researcher Michael J. Chamberlain kicked off the meeting by emphasizing the fact that deer have historically been subject to predation from large carnivores such as cougar, black bear, and red wolves. However, land use practices and at times public sentiment has altered these predator communities. More importantly, the rapid expansion of coyotes into the Southeast has changed the predation pressures on whitetails as well as other species.
Coyotes have also hybridized with other canids, and today coyotes inhabiting the Southeast are larger than their western counterparts, exhibiting a social system that is poorly understood. These intruders not only impact whitetails, but other predator species in a variety of habitats, a characteristic Chamberlain referred to as behavior plasticity. In other words, the coyote is an extremely adaptable animal, enabling it to live right alongside of man.
John C. Kilgo of the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station spoke about the impact mushrooming deer populations have had across the Eastern U.S., but also stated that coyotes in some areas have begun to affect deer populations, which is a concern for both managers and sportsmen.
The coyotes' rapid expansion throughout the Southeast has generated much concern and interest in their control; however Dr. Steve Demarais of Mississippi State University and I presented our thoughts on the wily coyote, alluding to the fact that it would be prudent to investigate the benefits this predator could represent. With deer numbers increasing throughout much of their range and a consistent drop in hunter recruitment, the coyote could possibly represent an important natural population control mechanism in the future.
Although coyotes can thrive on a diversity of food sources, everything from mast to insects, they will kill deer. The much published impact coyotes have on fawn survival leads some individuals to believe that the only good coyote is a dead one. But even when predator control is warranted, suppressing this adaptable animal is not only expensive and time consuming, it is often unsuccessful as there is evidence that reproduction of this species responds somehow to control measures by an increase in progeny.
The traditional antler scoring competition allowed all members of the group an opportunity to score one of Florida's fine whitetails, while a number of trophy Florida whitetails were uniquely displayed, demonstrating the caliber of deer the sunshine state produces.
As a member of the deer committee (Southeastern section of The Wildlife Society), one of my responsibilities along with five other committee members is to judge student presentations. This year 23 of 37 papers were presented by graduate students, and what stood out most was the fact that they are not only increasing in number, but in quality of their presentations as well. It's comforting to know that the future of wildlife management is in good hands.
At the closing banquet on Tuesday evening, the top student presentations were recognized. This year's first place winner was University of Georgia graduate student Bradley S. Cohen, whose research was focused on the sensitivity of whitetail deer to ultraviolet and infrared light. Not only were his findings that deer view the world much differently than humans as they are more sensitive to detecting the blue and green wave length. Cohen's sophisticated research methods, and more importantly presentation, stood out above the others.
The highlight of the annual meeting is the awarding of the prestigious Deer Management Career Achievement Award. This award is presented to an individual who has contributed significantly to whitetail deer management in the Southeastern U. S. For me, this will be one meeting I will never forget as I was recognized as this year's recipient, and was privileged to enjoy it with my wife Jan and close friends, former award winners Harry Jacobson and David Samuel.


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Albee-Inspired MR. LANDING TAKES A FALL Begins 9/12 at The Flea
Slightly Altered States Theater Company presents the World Premiere of MR. LANDING TAKES A FALL, an absurdist comedy by Sari Caine, directed by Sherri Eden Barber. Inspired by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the play was a PlayPenn 2013 semi-finalist and short-listed for both the 24/7 (UK) and the Ronald Duncan Award (UK). Previews begin September 12 at The Flea Theater with opening slated for Monday, September 22.
In MR. LANDING TAKES A FALL, a woman secretly decides to put her family's longtime home up for sale. When a young couple stumbles into the house, a darkly comic dystopian journey begins. What does Home really mean, and how do you live with the ones you love -- or leave them?
MR. LANDING TAKES A FALL stars Sari Caine and David Rigo with a production team that includes Alison McBryde (casting), Derek Wright (lights), Clifton Chadwick (set), and Mark Van Hare (sound design and composition). Additional casting and production team members will be announced shortly.
Sari Caine is a NYC bred playwright and actress. Her plays, which include The Chess Lesson, The Thing About Dan, Rabbit on the Landing, The Cafe Plays, Endicott, and Christmas Island, have been produced at IRT, Jimmy's No. 43, Roy Arias Theater, and The Strawberry Festival. She is an Artistic Associate with Purple Rep Theater Company. As an actress she has appeared in TV's Orange is the New Black, Mr Destiny, The Crucible Off-Broadway, Hey You Lightman, Picasso at the Lapin-Agile, The Children's Hour with Kate Burton, A Change Of Address with Allison Janney, and shows at Circle in the Square, EST, York Theater, St. Clements, La Mama, and Arclight.
Sherri Eden Barber is a New York-based theatre director. Recent directing credits include: Herman Kline?s Midlife Crisis with Adam Lefevre (The Beckett), Inadmissible (Canal Park Playhouse), Latrell: Live Tonight! (Joe?s Pub), Love, Yourself (New York Theatre Workshop/IHI Gala), Tapefaces (Ars Nova), Dance Lessons (Theatre Row, winner of the Samuel French Short Play Festival), Empire of the Trees (Abingdon Theatre), Only You Can Prevent Wildfires (Culture Project), and How To Quit Smoking and Baptism (Atlantic). She has developed new work with The Orchard Project, New York Theatre Workshop, Harlem Stage, Classic Theatre of Harlem, Primary Stages, The Flea, Culture Project, The 24 Hour Play Company, and The Old Vic. Sherri is a Drama League Directing Fellow and recipient of the US/UK Exchange Award. She was awarded the SDCF Directing Observership and was an Ockrent Directing Fellowship nominee. She received her MFA in Directing from The New School for Drama.
Slightly Altered States is a not-for-profit theater company made up of actors, writers, and improvisers. The company devoted to darkly funny, slightly absurd material that deals truthfully with the extraordinary in everyday circumstances. Since its inception in 2011 under Artistic Director Sari Caine and Managing Director David Rigo, Slightly Altered States has been the recipients of residencies at IRT, Space on Ryder Farm, Jimmy's No. 43, and Manhattan Theater Source. For more information, visit www.slightlyaltered.org.
The Flea Theater, under Artistic Director Jim Simpson and Producing Director Carol Ostrow, is one of New York's leading off-off-Broadway companies. Winner of a Special Drama Desk Award for outstanding achievement, Obie Awards and an Otto for political theater, The Flea has presented over 100 plays and numerous dance and live music performances since its inception in 1996. Past productions include the premieres by Steven Banks, Thomas Bradshaw, Bathsheba Doran, Will Eno, Karen Finley, Amy Freed, Sean Graney, A.R. Gurney, Hamish Linklater, Anne Nelson, Qui Nguyen, Adam Rapp, Roger Rosenblatt, Elizabeth Swados, and Mac Wellman. Recent successes include Drama Desk winner The Mysteries; Drama Desk nominees She Kills Monsters, These Seven Sicknesses and Restoration Comedy; and eight world premieres by A.R. Gurney including the WSJ Best New Play of 2013, Family Furniture.
MR. LANDING TAKES A FALL runs September 12 - October 4 on the following schedule: Wednesdays, Fridays & Saturdays at 7pm and Sundays at 3pm with additional performances Sept. 22, 30 and Oct. 2 at 7pm. (Please note: Sept. 13 is at 3pm and there is no performance Sept 14.) The Flea Theater is located at 41 White Street between Church and Broadway, three blocks south of Canal, close to the A/C/E, N/R/Q, 6, J/M/Z and 1 subway lines. Tickets are $18, available by calling 212-352-3101 or online at www.theflea.org.


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Should she get $2.7 million?
A North Florida woman who says the state Department of Education discriminated against her because she's a Christian would get $2.7 million in relief from the state under a bill filed by Sen. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge.
Posey filed the bill in August on behalf of Karen "Kay" Stripling, an evangelical Christian who alleged in a lawsuit filed in June that she and her company, Read & Lead, were targeted by DOE officials in 2003 and 2004 during a "witch hunt" of faith-based providers – a witch hunt that led to an FBI investigation and the threat of a federal indictment (see St. Petersburg Times story here and Gradebook post here.) According to the bill language, DOE offered to pay Stripling $163,000.
Posey's bill was referred to the Senate rules committee in September. Stripling's lawsuit was served Oct. 23. An FBI spokesman told The Gradebook in July that matters referenced in Stripling's suit are now the subject of a wider investigation. He said Monday night that the investigation is ongoing.
- Ron Matus, state education reporter


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I am a librarian in
the San Francisco Bay Area Bend, Oregon. My mind on books is a reading blog that I hope will provide a guide to books on consciousness, the mind, cognitive psychology, and related topics, with occasional forays afield.
I use Amazon Affiliate links to provide information on books and receive a small referral fee for items purchased through those links, but there is no extra cost to the buyer. "My Mind on Books is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com and amazon.co.uk."
5/9/11 – "Retired" to beautiful Bend, Oregon!