text:
Morgan City, Louisiana (CNN) -- Behind each video feed of oil billowing out of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is a robot about the size of a minibus built at an industrial center in this Louisiana oil town.
The robots, which go by the name Millennium, are constructed as if they're on a voyage to another world -- one that's "harsher than space," says Mark Campbell, the manufacturing manager at Oceaneering International's production site.
This may come as a surprise since the oil cam produces images so clear they look like they could have been filmed at the bottom of a neighborhood pool. But keep in mind that these robots -- which hover like confused cuttlefish in front of the busted pipe 24 hours a day -- navigate a world that's 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.
CNN Live: Underwater view of leak site
It's pitch black, just barely above freezing and the pressure under a mile of water is about 10 times as intense as that in an aerosol canister. People would be flattened and killed at such depths.
"We're the eyes," says Campbell, who worked on a professional race-car team and in the aerospace industry before turning his eyes to the deep ocean, which he sees as a much bigger challenge. "There's no other way to see what's going on down there."
The challenges of working in the deep sea -- and our apparent lack of understanding in how to do so -- have been thrust into the national spotlight in recent weeks, as the country debates the merits of drilling for oil in increasingly deeper waters.
President Obama's moratorium on new deepwater oil wells, which a judge overturned and the administration now is appealing, has only stoked the debate.
Administration officials have argued the fact that we know so little about the deep ocean -- and what exactly caused the Deepwater Horizon oil rig to catch fire on April 20 -- means we have no business punching new holes in great depths of the ocean floor for at least six months until we figure out a safer way to do it.
Others say the industry has a sterling 30-year safety record -- the BP oil disaster aside -- and we must search for oil in deeper waters because supplies have been exhausted on land and in shallower waters. As we did in our quest for flight or the race to space, people must forge ahead into new frontiers even if there's some risk, they say.
Perhaps the only thing that is clear is this: The mysteries of the deep still confound all who would go there.
Mysteries of 'inner space'
What we know of the ocean's dark depths is secondhand knowledge.
Technology firms like Oceaneering, oil companies and marine biologists have been trying to understand the deep for decades. But efforts have been relatively limited. Marine biologists say we have explored less than 1 percent of the ocean floor, mostly by using remotely operated vehicles such as the Millennium, or by plunging into the abyss in metal spheres called submersibles.
These efforts have led to some revelations about life in the deep sea -- the first of which was that life actually exists down there. But we still know less about the deep than we do about parts of outer space and the dark side of the moon, scientists say.
People who study the deep refer to it as "inner space," because it's part of a world that's so alien. "With all the rovers and things on the moon," says Lisa Levin, a professor of biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, "I think it's reasonable to say we've seen more of the moon than the deep sea."
Because so little of the ocean floor has been charted, scientists tend to find something new each time they visit.
"Every time we go, we discover something new and astonishing: Fluorescent sharks, new types of bioluminescence, new types of animals -- you name it," says Edie Widder, CEO and senior scientist at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, a nonprofit based in Florida. "It's pretty incredible and beautiful really."
Her favorite discovery, a 6-foot-tall squid, was "so new to science that it couldn't even be classified," and still hasn't been, she says.
About a century ago, scientists assumed that nothing lived at the bottom of the ocean because, at depths greater than a couple hundred feet, no sunlight penetrates the water. Sunlight, of course, is the basis for the food chain on land and in shallow water.
More recently, researchers have been finding increasingly diverse life in the deep, including communities of organisms -- from tubeworms to coral -- that live off spurts of icy methane gas that shoot up through the ocean floor.
"We used to think it was fairly monotonous and homogenous and quiet and muddy and dark -- and it turns out that that's not exactly true," Levin says.
Fish and other deepwater organisms live off "marine snow," the name scientists give to debris that falls from the shallow ocean, where light supports plant growth. When scientists do travel to the deep, in thick metal containers that become so cold that travelers have to bring several layers of clothes, this "snow" glows in the otherwise pitch-black ocean, making it look like they're flying through outer space.
"It's almost like the sky full of stars," says Miriam Kastner, a distinguished professor of Earth sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The unfolding scientific mysteries of the deep are reason enough for some marine biologists to say that we should not be drilling for oil there.
We just don't understand the system well enough, they say.
"We have a tendency to wreck things before we even discover them," Levin says.
Robot proxies
The cold and high-pressure environment of the deep makes learning about the bottom of the ocean -- much less working there -- a challenge.
Oceaneering International, the company that makes the robots that are filming the oil spill and have tried, in vain, to fix BP's leaking pipe, says its technologies for working in the deep are state of the art. But Campbell, the manufacturing manager, is quick to acknowledge that Oceaneering's deepwater ROVs were designed to support drilling operations -- not repair unprecedented blowouts such as the one in the Gulf.
No one anticipated such a catastrophe, he says.
A closer look at how these underwater robots work reveals some of the many difficulties oil companies and scientists face when working in deep waters. Simple tasks -- like tying a rope in a knot or putting together a nut and bolt -- might take an ROV such as the Millennium 30 minutes in deep water, Campbell says.
A human could do similar tasks in seconds. But we can't dive to 5,000 feet. Federal regulations prohibit recreational scuba divers from going below 130 feet. Dive inspectors have been known to go significantly farther, but they have to "decompress" for several days in pressurized chambers after working at depths of several hundred feet, Campbell says. Otherwise, the oxygen would separate from their blood and they could die.
"Pilots" control Oceaneering's camera-toting underwater robots from ships a mile above, on the surface of the water. If the robots were filming the rings of Saturn, they would be able to send back their footage through space via relatively low-power radio frequencies. But because they're at the bottom of the ocean, and the water would garble those signals, the robots are tethered to the boat by miles of "umbilical cord."
The cable somewhat restricts the movements of the robots. And bringing them up to the ship and sending them back down can take hours.
Operators use hypersensitive joysticks to control the Millennium's movements. A metal arm, which looks like it might belong on a Velociraptor, juts out of the front of the Millennium's rectangular body. Different types of mechanical hands can be placed at the end of these arms. One model is good at holding pipes. Another can pinch flat surfaces, which allows it to hold wrenches and other human tools.
Campbell says the robots are versatile, and the operators are "top guns" who, in the case of the BP oil disaster response, each has at least 12 years of piloting experience.
But, again, there are limits to what these robots can do.
One ROV got a saw lodged in the side of the leaking riser pipe in early June, for example, causing BP to rethink its strategy for trying to stop the gushing leak.
Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who has worked with remotely operated vehicles in his research, says the robots can't replicate human dexterity.
"You pass a lot of agonizing hours watching somebody try to do something at the end of a cable a mile long -- down in the deep, dark ocean," he says. "They just need to turn one little bolt and it can take hours, literally, to do something that would take a few seconds to do on the land with human hands."
Things get murkier still when oil companies drill deep below the surface of the ocean floor, since even robots can't go down there to see what's going on.
But some petroleum industry experts maintain the technology for drilling deepwater wells is safe. "It is a challenge. It is a frontier area. I don't want to diminish that," says David Dismukes, associate director of Louisiana State University's Center for Energy Studies. "But to suggest that it is reckless is not entirely accurate."
Over the years, wells have plunged deeper into the Gulf in search of oil. The Deepwater Horizon rig, which started the Gulf oil disaster, was drilling in 5,000 feet of water. A Shell rig called Perdido, which claims to be the deepest in the world, drills for oil more than 8,000 feet below the sea. Both rigs plunge pipes thousands of feet further into the Earth's crust.
Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, says the BP oil disaster shows that the industry knows how to drill in deepwater, but doesn't have the technology to fix problems if something goes awry.
"We're designed to work well in terms of the normal -- if there is a normal -- drilling mode," he says. "But what's shown up is that killing wells in deep water is more complicated than killing them on land or in shallow water.
"We always kill the well, it's just how long is it going to take to do it," he says.
Oceaneering has planned improvements to its ROV designs, and is updating the robots in the Gulf today with new equipment all the time, Campbell says. One prototype lets ROV pilots see the area they're working in with a three-dimensional computer monitor. On 2-D screens, it's difficult to see where the robots are, relative to other deepwater objects, he says.
"It's always better to send a human down if possible because humans see in 3-D -- ROVs see in 2-D," he says. "Sometimes you just can't eliminate the human interface."
The company also is trying to improve the dexterity of the robots' hands.
Each ROV already costs between $3.5 million and $6 million, he says. They weigh about 8,000 pounds on land, or twice as much as a small car. Oceaneering leases the machines to oil companies, including BP, but sends its own crew to drive the complicated robots from boats on the surface of the water.
Walking through Oceaneering's warehouse full of boxy robots on stilts, Campbell says people don't realize how far these machines have to travel to monitor the oil that's gushing into the Gulf every day -- or how well-equipped they must be.
The reality is this: As common as the live video feeds from the bottom of the ocean have become, the robots that get those images might as well be on another planet.


text:
The Piglet,
the Sheep, and the Goat
A Young Pig was shut up in a fold-yard with a Goat and a Sheep.
On one occasion when the shepherd laid hold of him, he grunted
and squeaked and resisted violently. The Sheep and the Goat
complained of his distressing cries, saying, "He often handles
us, and we do not cry out." To this the Pig replied, "Your
handling and mine are very different things. He catches you only
for your wool, or your milk, but he lays hold on me for my very

subset: commoncrawl


text: There is going to be a match at Go between a human professional and a computer (a 3000 node cluster in France). KGS is a free Go server; you can download a java client and watch the game in progress. KGS is www.goKGS.com, and you can get CGoban from http://www.gokgs.com/download.xhtml. Drop me a note if any questions. The human is "8p", meaning 8-dan professional; not quite 3 stones stronger than the bottom 1d pro, who in turn would give me (an amateur 1d) at least 6 stones (probably more). Edward Lasker said that 3 stones handicap at Go is comparable to knight odds at chess (although I think that overstates). Peter The notice from the AGA is: *HUMAN-COMPUTER SHOWDOWN AT CONGRESS*: While computers long ago surpassed humans at chess, the best go programs haven't been able to hold a candle to professional human players. In 1997, Janice Kim -- then a professional 1-dan -- beat Handtalk, then the strongest program, despite giving the program a 25-stone handicap. There has been considerable progress in computer go research since then - do humans still reign supreme? Find out on Thursday, August 7 at 1P, when Kim MyungWan 8P takes on MoGo, the world's strongest computer go program. MoGo will connect remotely from France, where it will be running on a supercomputer boasting over 3,000 processor cores. The game will be broadcast live on KGS. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20080721/f2417ebe/attachment.html>


text: Mhz/Ghz matter. So does IPC (Instructions per clock). Word width determines which architecture you must have to run on. Consider that the IBM Power4 chip runs at 1.3Ghz yet it has the fastest SPECFP2000 of any machine on the list(1169). IBM Power chips have always used substantial on chip parallelism. A 2.2Ghz P4 is 766 for SPECFP2000. Keep in mind that the way to measure how well a processor works is to use your own codes and decide which one does it best for the $$$$ spent. Wes "C.Clary" wrote: > > Hi all, > I really think this Ghz. goobly-gook is way over rated. I think, if you > look more closley at the problem, the key to superior proformance is in the > found in the actual construction or architecture of the processor. The > Itanium, for example only runs at 733 Mghz but it has (on die) 2meg of > cashe on the L-2... The Alpha, in its previous incarnation ran at only 233 > but did 64 bit processing... Quite amazing actually. > > A friend wrote me that: > "Red hat is working closely with Compaq to solidify its OS to the Alpha > architecture"... I don't know for sure, first hand... But it is, of course, > the next logical step, since FreeBSD, already provides a clean UNIX 64 bit > processing code for the Alpha. > Chip > > -----Original Message----- > From: beowulf-admin at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-admin at beowulf.org]On > Behalf Of Craig Tierney > Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 11:13 AM > To: Rob Simac > Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org > Subject: Re: Fastest Intel Processors > > The 2.2 Ghz cpus have just been released. This generation > of cpu is built at 0.13 microns and has twice as big of a > L2 cache (512 KB). These are the single processor versions. > The Xeon (smp) chips should follow shortly (I am guessing). > Go look at the roadmaps at www.theregister.co.uk. They tend to > be accurate. > > I have not heard that there is a problem with the 2.0 Ghz. Is > it a problem with RedHat or the Linux kernel specifically? We > had no problems with the 1.7 Ghz Xeon chips, but they are not the > 2.0 Ghz that you are talking about. > > Craig > > On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 07:03:35AM -0800, Rob Simac wrote: > > What is the fastest Intel processors available to the public? Have > > the 2.0 Ghz been released? I have also heard rumors that the 2.0 Ghz > > has problems running with Red Hat 7.1. Has anyone else heard this? > > > > Ciao, > > Rob. > > > > ====================================================== > > Rob Simac -- Therma-Wave, Inc. -- rsimac at thermawave.com > > <mailto:rsimac at thermawave.com> > > ====================================================== > > "Remember this, foolish mortals, when ye stare headlong into the > > mind-paralyzing void, the inky black nothingness of existence, the > > hellish yawning maw of the abyss -- it's pretty damn dark, so give it a > > few minutes for your eyes to adjust." > > Frank M. Carrano, Branford, Conn. > > (Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest Runner-up) > > -- > Craig Tierney (ctierney at hpti.com) > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf


text:
Paul Ryan was on CNBC this morning, giving a mostly agreeable interview about the poor state of the economy.
Mostly it was pretty standard stuff, but he does repeat one talking about that is a myth that is worth debunking, if only because it's so widespread.
Ryan took issue with the Fed's quantitative easing. Specifically he said:
"At the end of the day, all this easing, is simply, in my opinion trying to bail out bad fiscal policy."
Now there is one reading of this where it might be true. If the Fed had stimulated more aggressively, there might not be as much of a need for Fed easing.
But that's not what Ryan is talking about. When he talks about 'bad fiscal policy' he means large deficits, and so he's saying that the Fed is enabling large deficits by buying US Treasuries.
And on a superficial level, we can see why he thinks that. The US Treasury is issuing a lot of bonds these days, and the Fed has bought quite a lot of bonds, and interest rates are very low. Furthermore, the ECB is buying bonds to reduce borrowing costs of peripheral governments.
But in reality, the Fed doesn't buy bonds for the purpose of enabling spending or reducing borrowing costs.
First of all, let's point out that although government borrowing is near record levels, borrowing costs are actually quite low.
Here's Federal Government Interest Payments as a share of GDP. They're very small. Debt is not creating cost pressure that the Fed needs to solve.
Well, you might think that interest rates are only so low because the Fed has intervened so much to depress rates.
But the data shows this is not what happened.
As this old chart from Jeff Gundlach (via @condoroptions) nicely shows, interest rates on the 10-year bond actually jumped after the start of QE1 and QE2.
But maybe you think that this is just a chart quirk, and that still the reason rates have gone so low is because of the Fed.
But the decline in government rates has been a global phenomenon.
Yields in Mexico, Japan, Australia, the UK, and Canada are all close to all-time low levels for the decade.
The fact of the matter is that what moves rates are inflation expectations, growth, and the desire for safe assets.
Growth has been very poor for the last few years, and the crisis in Europe has created a huge boom in demand for safe, government assets.
That's why rates are so low.
And what Bernanke has tried to do (with limited sucess) is get out of the ZIRP trap, by trying to promote inflation and growth and actually send interest rates higher.
Here's Ryan's interview on CNBC. The stuff about the Fed bailing out the government starts at 5:19.


text:
I'm writing to you from my Training Center in SS2, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.
Forex Trading is getting very POPULAR right now and you are right, Forex is a very good tool and good market to make money whereby the entry cost is very low.
A lot of Trader learn forex through self-learning, some through ebook, book, free seminar, youtube or online article. Most of the courses only teach Technical Analysis (TA) and Candlestick.
Bear in mind, if TA & Candlestick is so good and profitable, why JP Morgan Traders need to commit suicide? (Check from Youtube). Actually TA & Candlestick already an out dated methods which is not suitable in today high volatility market.
I teach forex since 2006 and I also managed some forex fund in overseas market. I found out that 90% of trader lost money or cannot trade with consistency profit.
Here, I would like to introduce my Course Contents which teaches some advance methods like:
I'm looking for serious student who like to make Forex Trading a profitable trade or business and to be trained to become a Fund Manager.
My courses also open to housewife, retiree and IB who like to use this skill to make a monthly income between RM3,000 – RM6,000 by trading at home and they can use scalping method which will cover in Advance 2 years Mentor-Ship Program (3 Days).
Wechat / Whatsapp / Skype with me and I can brief you the course outline and other questions that you might like to ask.
You need not to be in Kuala Lumpur ("KL") to learn whereby I also can provide online course via skype on One 2 One basis as what I'm doing now over to 51 countries (from China to Chile).
Online Course is very easy to learn for housewife and retiree, but if you do like to be in KL for 1 or 3 days, you are most welcome.
How you can learn, Trade and making money all from home:
- Start the mentor-ship program from Home
- Practice Demo Account from Home
- Guide by mentor One 2 One from Home
- Mentor check your Trading Result from Home
- Mentor Guide you Step by Step from Home
- Start trading Live Account after Trading Skill Matured from Home
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- Making Live Money from Home
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- Become Fund Manager and earn Trading Profit Sharing from Home
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- Introduce our Forex Fund (return 5%-10% a month) from home.
- No need to face Office Politic, Jam and Manage all your time from Home.
- Take care your family and kids from home.
Sometime, I also conduct small workshop for online courses from time to time at hotel like:
Grand Paragon
18 Jalan Harimau, 80250 Johor Bahru
Add me in facebook & Skype for forex…
"Lowest pip spread in Forex World"
Andeerson Wong
Head of ASIA Forex Fund Management Team
Master IB in Asia.
Mobile : +6013-3194134.
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Google Talk & Email : firstname.lastname@example.com
Add me in Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/Forexautopilot
Website : https://forexcoursemalaysia.wix.com/forexcourse-malaysia


text:
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
On Monday, an Air France Airbus A380, operating as Air France Flight 007, collided with a Comair Bombardier CRJ-700, operating as Comair flight 553/Delta Connection flight 6293 in Delta Connection livery, on a taxiway at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. The A380 had 520 people onboard, and the smaller plane had 66.
The Comair jet had just arrived from Boston Logan International Airport, and was stopped on the tarmac, awaiting a gate to offload passengers. The A380 was preparing to depart for Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport, and was taxiing along a taxiway when its wingtip struck the tail of the other plane. The impact spun the CRJ around 90 degrees and resulted in some damage to both planes.
A passenger on board the A380 said that "It really felt just like a speedbump or like hitting a pothole—a jolt—but it didn't feel right [it felt] like that shouldn't be happening."
LiveATC.net captured the recording of the flight deck and ground control communications before and after the incident. In the recording, one can hear controllers giving taxi instructions to the Air France plane, then later a controller calling for emergency personnel to the intersection of taxiways Alpha and Mike.
The National Transportation Safety Board plans to investigate the incident, and will study the flight recorders, air traffic control recordings, and data from radar on the ground.


text:
The Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) is treated as whitespace in the default readtable. This allows the Lisp reader to read a Unicode (UCS-2 encoded,
) file regardless of whether the BOM is present.
Some editors including Microsoft Notepad and the LispWorks editor write the BOM when writing a file with Unicode (UCS-2) encoding.


text:
BERLIN — Likely a reflection of the considerable drop off in the number of visitors to the resort area, the Casino at Ocean Downs' revenue numbers for October showed revenues had dropped back to a level not seen since June.
The Maryland State Lottery Agency, which oversees the two existing slots facilities in the state, released the final numbers for October this week, and it appears the revenue figures returned to what will likely be the norm during the offseason in the resort area. After spiking upward during the months of July and August and even September to a large degree, the October overall revenue figure for Ocean Downs returned to just over $3.8 million, just about where it was for the month of June.
In October, the Casino at Ocean Downs generated $3.82 million, representing a considerable decline from September when the facility took in around $4.6 million. The $3.82 million figure for October is more in keeping with the rest of the off-season months since the Casino at Ocean Downs opened last January. In its first month in business, Ocean Downs took in $3 million and the figure steadily increased, albeit by small chunks, throughout last winter and spring.
The Casino at Ocean Downs grossed $3.1 million in February, $3.2 million in March, $3.5 million in April, $3.7 million in May and $3.8 million in June. In July, buoyed by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to Ocean City and other resort areas, the figure spiked up to $5.3 million, then dropped back to $4.6 million in August, a drop blamed on the facility losing a couple of busy weekend nights because of Hurricane Irene. In September, the Casino at Ocean Downs' revenue stayed stable at $4.46 million, but reverted back to the $3 million range for the month of October.
A look at the average daily gross per machine follows a similar pattern. In the peak month of July, the average daily gross per machine came in at $215.46, the highest month thus far. In October, the average daily gross per machine came in at $154.41. In June, when the facility also took in $3.8 million, the average daily gross per machine was $168.35, or about $14 better than October, but the casino has added 50 new machines since June, raising its to 800.
For September, the casino contributed $1.85 million to the Education Trust Fund, the casino's share came in at $1.26 million, and the facility generated $210,614 in local impact grants. With the addition of October, the total amount of local impact grants surpassed $1 million.


text:
Latest Article|September 3, 2020|Free
::Making Grown Men Cry Since 1992
2 min read
Today's Office Excavations post is about a box of phlogs. If you punch this word into Google, you'll get a dozen different definitions. I think, in this case—although there is no explanation accompanying the box—the artist means "photo logs," or something of this ilk.The box, which was under a stack of junk on a bookshelf in my office, is full of black, matte, blank greeting cards, each with a black and white photo glued to the front. Most of the subjects pictured are people, although one is cutlery and dirty plates. Each photo has intriguing composition and exudes a melancholy feel, such as I like my art to have. On the back of every card is an essay relating to the image on the front. The essays are little capsules of narrative poignancy.A sheet inside the box reads "Phlogs: Journey to the heart of the human predicament. Note card series by George Stranahan." (Dirty dishes do get right to the heart of my predicament.) It turns out that George Stranahan is a physicist, philosopher, educator, writer and photographer who lives in Colorado. He is also a brewer. He started the Flying Dog brewpub in Aspen, which expanded to become a brewery in Denver, with his friend and neighbor Hunter S. Thompson!The note cards are an offshoot of the book, Phlogs: Journey to the heart of the human predicament , which is full of photos and essays by Stranahan. He had some help on the bound version from author Nicole Beinstein Strait, who wrote some of the essays.The note cards are really cool and I'm willing to share. If you comment on this blog, I will mail you one at random, and you can regift it or tack it to your wall. (Up to 12 people, because that's how many cards there are.)


text:
There is an elite category of products that exist outside of the march of time – transcending their moment to become timeless icons. In the world of recording, the Neumann U 87 is one such legend. For 50 years this professional studio microphone has been setting standards in the field of audio recording. Now, Neumann celebrates the anniversary of this studio legend with the U 87 Rhodium Edition – a spectacular creation that gives the beautiful U 87 an extra special look to celebrate its timeless achievement.
The U 87 has gained its cherished status thanks to the incredible universality and versatility that has made it a vital part of recording for a half century. Wolfgang Fraissinet, President of Neumann.Berlin, explains that this is why something very special was needed to mark the 50-year anniversary – a rhodium-plated edition of the acclaimed U 87: "This extraordinary combination is the ideal way to celebrate the 50th birthday of the U 87. The exclusivity and beauty of rhodium powerfully expresses the timeless quality of this microphone. The Rhodium Edition truly embodies the high standards of Neumann."
Alongside its technical accomplishments, the mythic status of the U 87 is as much about the fabric of memories and history woven around the microphone itself. Almost all the great names in the music industry have recorded with the U 87. This peerless history influenced the choice of rhodium. Far rarer than gold, it reflects light more than any other metal, which is why it is used for the mirrors of high-performance telescopes that study the farthest reaches of the universe. This transcendent quality sets it above other precious metals.
Exclusive, limited and made to order Neumann is offering the U 87 Rhodium Edition only once, made to order and limited to only 500 units worldwide. Each of the meticulously crafted microphones is individually numbered with a certificate of authenticity hand signed by Wolfgang Fraissinet, President, Neumann.Berlin.
Every U 87 Rhodium Edition is supplied with a Neumann aluminum case and a special Rhodium Edition EA 87 elastic suspension. A pair of black gloves is also included for keeping the limited-edition microphone in pristine condition.
The U 87 Rhodium Edition is exclusively available via select dealers with orders starting from September 2017. To learn more and to enquire as to availability, please visit the special microsite celebrating 50 years of the U 87, which provides an up-to-date list of dealers with available special editions.


text:
We already knew Mitch Hurwitz wanted to do another installment of Arrested Development, and we knew that Netflix was likely to renew the series, but certainty is always appreciated, especially when we still have some many open questions. Certainty is what we got from Mitch Hurwitz, who — when asked Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal if the show would be back — said "Definitely." Then, turning to Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, he said: 'I don't want to get into a whole negotiation right now… but I've got a family to feed.' I can also confirm that Hurwitz does, indeed, have a family; he's married to the lovely actress Mary Jo Keenan, and they have two daughters, May and Phoebe, the portmanteau of which equals "Maebe." What Hurwitz is still waffling about, however, is in what form the series will return. From Chortle: 'I kinda go back and forth between [a movie] and a series. But here's the most important thing, whatever we do, I want to get the cast all together and not do another anthology thing, and that's why I keep thinking about kicking off with a special or a three-part show and then going into a series. Then he asked Sarandos: 'Are you game for that?'. 'Absolutely,' the Netflix boss replied. 'In any form.' Hurwitz also noted that they now have "the right idea" to take the next step, and I given the exchange, it seems that, even if it's a movie, it'll premiere on Netflix (and not in theaters). My only question is how they're going to work around the Arrested Development movie within the movie being Ron Howard's next Da Vinci Code when Ron Howard has already signed on to do the next Da Vinci Code.
Mitch Hurwitz Confirms 'Arrested Development' Will 'Definitely' Return
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text:
Action groups for Emacs
| emacsAgroups (Action Groups) 2.3 for Emacs has been released and is available
for download at
If you like to automate your day to day work-flow you might like Agroups.
Short Overview
Action Groups are groups of action entries that an Emacs user can
create, save, name and access quickly. In a general sense these actions
are any automation that a user can imagine to help with his activities.
The user instantiates these automations as action entries which are a
specific instances of some action from the current collection of
actions. Actions can be as simple as finding a commonly used file in a
buffer, to more complex like executing a previously defined keyboard
macro, to very complex like an unimaginable whopper defined by a user
created Action Template. Action Templates are an extensibility feature
of Action Groups and allows the user to easily create new actions,
Agroups supplies a useful predefined collection of actions created with
Action Templates.
A collection of action entries is called an action group. Typically
the user associates each action group with a concentrated activity such
as a project. Each entry of an action group is associated with a
specific instance of an action. A group itself is actually an entry
associated with a special action called `group' so that a group entry
can be yet another group itself. This implies that groups can have
subgroups and subgroups can have subgroups and so on. This gives the
user structured organizational capabilities.
The Action Groups facility was designed to allow easy and fast
creation of groups and entries to help automate an Emacs user's work.
At the same time it was designed to allow fast execution of the
entries. To this end a user can use the Emacs completion facility to
execute entries or key bindings or a combination of both.
E-Mail from William Paul Vrotney


text:
One night a year, a beacon atop Mount Diablo is lit at sunset and shines all night in memory of Pearl Harbor Day.
Survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor plan to meet this afternoon on top of Mount Diablo to remember what happened on this day in 1941 and to light the beacon on the summit.
Since 1964, the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, whose numbers dwindle every year, has lit the summit beacon, known as the "Eye of Diablo."
According to Ron Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Save Mount Diablo, which co-sponsors the annual event, said the beacon was originally built in 1928 to encourage commercial aviation by aiding night flights.
It was turned off in 1941 after the attacks, but, according to the nonprofit, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz–who was the commander in chief of Pacific forces durinl hundred people are expected to attend the 47th annual ceremony, which begins at 3:45 p.m. with a program that includes retellings of the actual experiences of survivors in attendance, Brown said.
"Frequently we see many families with small children, the parents wanting their children to be able to hear the stories of the veterans and what they went through at Pearl Harbor," he said.
The beacon-lighting ceremony is one of several events taking place today around the Bay Area to commemorate the sacrifice of American soldiers.
Aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier museum, Navy veteran Ed Silveira, an eyewitness to the attack, was scheduled to speak at a special 1 p.m. ceremony.
Silveira, who is now almost 90, was 19 years old when he was aboard the USS San Francisco on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, as the warship waited to dry dock at Pearl Harbor.
The Hornet's resident chaplain John Berger will offer a special service to honor the memory of those whose lives were lost. A wreath-tossing ceremony will follow, according to a publicist for the museum.
The museum is permanently berthed at Pier 3, 707 W. Hornet Ave. in Alameda.
Earlier today also in Alameda, the U.S. Coast Guard hosted seven Pearl Harbor survivors during a 9 a.m. ceremony at Coast Guard Island.
The events involved a ceremonial wreath hanging at 9:55 a.m., marking the start of the surprise military strike conducted by the Japanese navy against the U.S. naval base.
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The amount of information generated by enterprises has greatly increased over the last five years. Because enterprises often keep multiple copies of data for recovery and other purposes, storage capacity growth is a multiple of information growth and it is spiraling out of control, hitting rates of 50% to 100% per year or more for many companies. Growth at this level puts undue pressure on IT organizations, not only to pay for and manage all of this storage, but also to find floor space for it as well as to power and cool it.
In the 2004 time frame, technologies began to emerge that allowed information to be stored with much lower raw storage capacity requirements. These technologies, sometimes referred to as capacity optimized storage (COS), have now become widely available, with end-user surveys indicating strong growth for COS products over the next six to twelve months. Vendors in this space include Data Domain, Diligent Technologies, FalconStor Software, Hifn, NetApp, Quantum, Sepaton, and others.
COS technologies were originally designed for use against secondary storage such as that used primarily for data-protection purposes. Secondary storage has certain characteristics that figured heavily in how COS solutions were built. First and foremost, since there was so much redundancy in the data stored for data-protection purposes, COS solutions heavily leveraged technologies such as data de-duplication and single instancing to achieve their data-reduction results. In addition, since most secondary storage was stored in offline rather than online environments, the capacity optimization process did not have to meet the stringent performance requirements of online application environments. Using COS solutions, it is realistic over time to achieve data reduction ratios against secondary storage of 15:1 or greater.
But COS left out a huge amount of data found in all application environments: primary storage, which is different from secondary storage in two critical respects: 1) Primary storage is used in online, performance-sensitive environments that have stringent response time requirements; and 2) Primary storage has little if any of the redundancy that make technologies like data de-duplication and single instancing so effective against secondary storage. Recently, however, a few vendors have begun shipping capacity optimization solutions specifically for use against primary storage, and the COS market is now splitting into two separate segments: primary storage optimization (PSO) and secondary storage optimization (SSO).
This article discusses the emerging PSO market, reviews the architectures and technologies, and highlights some of the vendor' products in this space.
In discussions with end users, Taneja Group has discovered that many companies have tried COS technologies on primary storage in test environments. There was a burning curiosity to see how effective COS technologies would be against the data sets used by online applications. What end users have discovered, and many COS vendors undoubtedly have proven in their own internal testing, is that while COS technology offers huge benefits in cost and floor space savings against secondary storage, it achieves much lower data-reduction ratios against primary storage. Because of their strong market showing in the SSO market, data de-duplication vendors may have a natural advantage in going after the PSO market, but they will clearly need to develop new technologies to do so effectively.
Because it has very different customer requirements and requires different technologies, PSO is clearly a separate market from SSO. Up to this point, use of the term COS has been synonymous with secondary storage. But with the advent of solutions specifically targeted at primary storage, it is useful to re-define the COS market. One approach to this might define a new, higher-level market called "storage capacity optimization" (SCO), with its two related sub-markets of PSO and SSO. The overall customer requirement in the storage capacity optimization market is to reduce the amount of raw storage capacity required to store a given amount of information. The two sub-markets define the different sets of technologies that are required to achieve that for primary vs. secondary storage.
Vendors tend to fall into two camps with respect to defining SCO approaches: inline and post-processing approaches. Each approach may be implemented using different architectures. Most solutions offload the capacity optimization processing from the application server, performing it either with dedicated resources in a card, appliance, or storage subsystem, but capacity optimization algorithms embedded in operating systems (such as those offered by Microsoft in Windows) and backup software agents (such as the Symantec NetBackup PureDisk Agent) leverage host resources. This latter approach is a form of inline capacity optimization.
The inline group believes that maintaining the lowest possible storage requirements at all times is the most important metric. These vendors' products intercept the data and capacity-optimize it before it is ever written to disk. While this does keep overall storage requirements at their lowest possible levels at all times, it does present a performance challenge. Whatever work must be done to capacity-optimize the data must be done so as not to impact performance in a meaningful way. For applications using secondary storage, the performance bar is low since they are not interactive. For primary storage applications, however, this is much more of an issue. Although performance impacts assert themselves differently for PSO and SSO solutions, vendors must architect their solutions so they do not impact performance or impact it only minimally from an end-user point of view.
The post-processing group believes that the impact on application performance is the key metric. With SSO solutions, these vendors take approaches that will not impact the performance of the initial backup in any way. Post-processing approaches generally write non-optimized data directly to disk and then make a second pass at the data to perform the capacity optimization. Think of this approach as analogous to a trash compactor that can be used on-demand (or on a scheduled basis) to reduce the raw storage capacity required to store any given data set. Policies can be implemented that will perform the capacity optimization when the storage capacity reaches a defined threshold. The downside to this approach is that there must always be enough storage available to initially store each new data set in non-optimized form. (See sidebar.)
Underneath the covers of each approach, vendors offer different methods to actually perform the capacity optimization. Approaches that examine the data at a lower level of granularity (e.g., sub-file level instead of file level) tend to offer higher-capacity optimization ratios, as do approaches that can apply variable-length windows (when doing data comparisons) instead of just fixed-length windows. Format-aware approaches, such as the tape-format-aware algorithms offered by FalconStor, can offer some additional data reduction relative to non-format-aware approaches. Discussion of how these algorithms work is beyond the scope of this article.
One final comment on general SCO approaches concerns scalability. When looking for redundant data, capacity optimization basically breaks data down into smaller components and looks to eliminate redundancy at the building-block level. A data repository is maintained of all the building blocks that the solution has "seen" before, and when it finds another instance of one of these building blocks, it inserts a reference to the instance of that building block that it is retaining in the repository and removes the duplicate object. Solutions that retain the latest instance of a given building block, as opposed to the original instance (which tends to become fragmented over time), tend to offer better read performance. The larger the data repository, the greater the chance that any given building block already resides in it. Regardless of how large any single repository can be, solutions that can cluster repositories together to build a very large logical repository tend to offer better scalability. For many capacity-optimization vendors, the ability to offer clustering forms the basis of their claim to be an enterprise solution.
The first solutions in the PSO space started shipping in 2005 from Storwize. In 2007, NetApp released a product that is now called NetApp De-Duplication for FAS (formerly called Advanced Single Instance Storage, or A-SIS). Although NetApp initially positioned this utility in DataOnTap for use with secondary storage, in 2008, the company began messaging for the primary storage market as well. Also this year, Hifn, an OEM supplier of hardware-accelerated security and enhanced compression solutions that appear "under the covers" in many products from enterprise storage suppliers, added PSO to its existing SSO message.
And Ocarina Networks entered the PSO market with an announcement at this month's Storage Networking World conference.
Interestingly, each of these vendors uses a different architecture. Note that these different approaches characterize what happens to writes to storage. All PSO solutions handle reads of capacity-optimized data at wire speeds.
Inline approaches
Storwize uses an inline approach, with an in-band appliance—the STN Appliance—that offers real-time capacity optimization at wire speeds with no impact on application performance. Targeted for use with IP networks, Storwize's appliance uses patented methods designed specifically for primary storage, based on enhanced Lempel-Ziv algorithms, to achieve data-reduction ratios averaging in the range of 3:1 to 9:1. The STN Appliances maintain caches that can in some instances provide better than native read performance. Multiple appliances can be clustered against a large, back-end data repository to support hundreds of terabytes of storage capacity. Deployment is transparent, and does not require network reconfiguration. As the pioneer in the PSO market, Storwize offered solutions roughly two years before other vendors began to address this space.
Post processing approaches
NetApp and Ocarina Networks offer post-processing approaches to avoid impacting the performance of online applications using primary storage.
NetApp believes that, over the next several years, capacity optimization technologies will migrate into the infrastructure layer and will be available as part of server, storage, and/or operating system platforms. NetApp's De-Duplication for FAS was recently bundled into its DataOnTap software at no additional charge, adding to the overall value of NetApp's storage platforms. Because it resides in a storage server that can support either file- or block-based storage, it can be used against either or both to achieve data reduction ratios of up to 6:1 against primary storage and up to 20:1 against secondary storage.
In NetApp's case, there are two advantages to implementing capacity optimization as an operating system utility. First, it leverages a close integration with NetApp's WAFL file system to incur extremely low overhead. For reliability purposes, WAFL already calculates a unique checksum, called a fingerprint, associated with each block of data. To de-duplicate data, NetApp just uses these fingerprints (which are already calculated anyway) to perform the search for and identification of duplicate blocks as a separate batch process, adding no overhead to ordinary file operations. Second, it can be easily integrated with other DataOnTap features to provide higher-level solutions. For example, integration with NetApp's Thin Provisioning supports an "autosize" feature that will run capacity optimization algorithms as needed to keep a given volume under a size defined by the administrator. Integration with SnapVault and SnapMirror allows capacity optimization to be leveraged by policy to help minimize storage requirements for snapshots or to minimize the amount of data sent across the network for disaster-recovery purposes.
Targeted for use with IP storage, Ocarina Networks is the only vendor to date offering format-aware optimization against primary storage. Although some SSO vendors have claimed that application-specific approaches to capacity optimization are not effective, this tends to be relevant only for inline capacity optimization. Format-aware capacity optimization takes more CPU cycles and does take slightly longer, but does not present performance issues when used by out-of-band approaches.
At least one SSO vendor—FalconStor—is also using a post-processing, format-aware approach. (FalconStor uses a tape-format-aware method in its SIR product.)
Ocarina Networks' format-aware optimization recognizes file types and their contents, de-layers complex compound document types, can optimize already-compressed formats, and can perform de-duplication at the object level. Ocarina's out-of-band appliance, called the Optimizer, selects files by policy after they have been written to storage, identifies each file by type, and then routes it to the appropriate format-aware optimizer.
Ocarina offers format-aware optimizers for a number of common primary storage environments, including Microsoft Office workloads that contain home directories, PDFs, and digital photo sets (GIF, JPEG), and Internet e-mail mixes that include blogs, e-mails, and text messages. Ocarina claims to achieve data reduction ratios approximately 3x better than that achieved with enhanced Lempel-Ziv algorithms, but its products are too new to have end users in production who can support those claims.
Hybrid approaches
With its Express DR line of hardware acceleration cards, Hifn offers its OEM customers the option of deploying either inline or post-processing approaches. Hifn's customers often embed these cards into their virtual tape library (VTL) or backup appliance products, leveraging it as one of several capacity optimization methods that are serially applied against secondary storage. Hifn deploys the same set of proprietary methods, based on its own enhanced Lempel-Ziv compression algorithms, against both primary and secondary storage, but achieves realistic data reduction ratios against primary storage of 2:1 to 4:1. Because Hifn's cards can handle wire speeds of up to 1GBps, they can also be used in inline solutions.
All of these vendors offer or will be offering a predictive tool that can be deployed in an hour or two to provide an estimation of the type of data reduction ratios their PSO solutions can achieve in a particular environment. Since achievable data reduction ratios are very sensitive to the characteristics of different data types, use of such a tool prior to purchase is highly recommended. Storwize and Ocarina Networks offer such tools today, and Hifn plans to offer one later this year. NetApp does not need a separate tool for this, since their capacity optimization functionality ships at no additional charge with their operating system, and it can be enabled at the volume level to test it out against snapshots of primary production data without impacting ordinary file operations at any time.
Capacity optimization offers many of the same benefits for primary storage as it does for secondary storage. PSO reduces raw storage capacity growth in primary storage, lowering not only the spending for new storage capacity, but also lowering costs associated with storage management, floor space, power, and cooling. Note that for many IT shops, the cost-per-terabyte of primary storage is greater than that of secondary storage due to higher performance and reliability requirements. While the data reduction ratios may not be as great with primary storage as with secondary storage, many shops will be enjoying greater savings against each "reclaimed" TB of primary storage.
Because it lowers the overall capacity of primary storage, PSO offers enterprises of all sizes other benefits as well:
- Shortened overall backup-and-restore times since less data must be written to or retrieved from disk for any given data set; and
- In cases where data sets must be shipped across networks, the smaller, capacity-optimized data sets require less bandwidth, thereby reducing network traffic.
Note that PSO can be a complementary technology to SSO. Solutions that use different capacity optimization methods for primary and secondary storage can actually offer additive data reduction advantages. Data reduction ratios with combined use will vary based on the actual solutions used and the workload types. The only way to really understand the benefit PSO, or a combination of PSO and SSO, together will provide is to test it on specific workloads.
Several issues need to be evaluated as PSO technology is considered. First, does it really pose no performance impact in your environment? This is not just a concern for inline approaches. Understand how long it will take a post-processing solution to complete its capacity optimization task. What is the impact (if any) to online application performance during this process? This is less of a concern for out-of-band approaches than in-band approaches, but keep in mind that out-of-band approaches do actually move data back and forth to primary storage during the process.
Although it is not an unfamiliar challenge, another concern with PSO is how to retrieve capacity optimized data in the event of a problem with the PSO solution. For hardware-based solutions, simple redundancy at the appliance or card level can be sufficient to handle any single points of failure. Note that unlike with encryption, there is nothing random about how data is capacity-optimized. The same capacity-optimization methods are predictably used across all models of a certain type in a vendor's product line, so any other similar model could be used to retrieve the data.
A final concern is one shared by both PSO and SSO. Because the technologies basically refer to a single instance of an object that appears multiple times, if for some reason that object gets corrupted, the damage can potentially be much greater than just losing that object in non-capacity-optimized storage. Depending on the data reduction ratio achieved, loss of a single object could potentially affect thousands of instances of that object in each of the files, file systems, or databases where it also appears. The first line of defense against this is that most customers are already using some form of RAID, providing redundancy against single points of failure at the hardware level.
Over and above the hardware RAID approach, vendors offer two additional and optional methods to address this issue: integrated metadata and multiple spindling.
With the integrated metadata approach, a PSO solution effectively implements a virtualization layer that handles the abstraction of a single physical copy of an object to however many redundant copies exist. Each time the virtualization layer creates a reference to an object, metadata is saved along with that object that effectively enables its re-creation in the event the primary instance of it becomes corrupted. In a manner similar to how chkdsk can be used to rebuild an NTFS file system block by block, this metadata can be used to re-create any object (albeit at a relatively slow rate).
The multiple spindling approach ensures no single data element exists only on one spindle in a given logical volume. Think of this as "mirroring" at the object level, ensuring any single data element is always available on at least two spindles. Both of these approaches, while offering improved data reliability, do lower the overall data reduction ratio slightly.
Primary storage is an area ripe for capacity optimization, and enterprises of all sizes have a lot to gain from deploying reliable implementations of this technology over time. The compelling economic payback is achieved not only against your most expensive storage tier, but also the benefits of data reduction then roll through other tiers (nearline, offline). If you are considering deploying both PSO and SSO (which is a smart idea in the long term), choose complementary technologies for each tier to maximize your overall data reduction ratios. SSO has achieved penetration rates of about 20% in the industry—slightly higher in small and medium-sized enterprises—but shows strong purchase intent over the next 6 to 12 months across all segments. As enterprises come to trust SSO, this will help PSO to achieve similar penetration rates more rapidly.
As with any emerging technology, there are questions of performance and reliability. Demand solutions that impose no perceivable performance impacts. Use high-availability approaches such as clustering PSO appliances to help address reliability issues. While there are many reference customers, enterprises have been cautious in their deployment of PSO to date. Decide up-front whether inline or post processing approaches are best-suited to your environment and requirements. Check references and use predictor tools if possible. If a PSO solution cannot offer data reduction ratios of at least 3:1 against your particular workloads, it may not pay to implement it over basic compression technologies that are proven and widely available. Expect to achieve realistic data reduction ratios across varied workloads in the 5:1 range with PSO technology.


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by emptywheel
Mark Halperin has a hysterical op-ed in the NYT today, designed to be a mea culpa for the failures of presidential campaign journalism. Halperin reveals the reason behind the press corps' obsession with horse race politics--they all read Ben Cramer's What It Takes--and then admits that success in a political horse race does not necessarily equip someone to run the country.
For most of my time covering presidential elections, I shared the view that there was a direct correlation between the skills needed to be a great candidate and a great president. The chaotic and demanding requirements of running for president, I felt, were a perfect test for the toughest job in the world.
But now I think I was wrong. The "campaigner equals leader" formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.
Wow, Mark, that's one doozy of an insight. You mean all this horse race campaign journalism is counter-productive to choosing a good president? Who could have imagined that?!?!?!
The reason I say it's hysterical, though, and not just pathetic, is in Halperin's description of how he determined that he had been wrong--his analysis of the two presidents he has covered in the last sixteen years. See, Halperin describes those two presidents as both being great politicians--"wildly talented."
Our two most recent presidents, both of whom I covered while they were governors seeking the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are wildly talented politicians. Both claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs. Both could skillfully serve as the chief strategist for a presidential campaign.
And then he proceeds to describe how the characteristics that made these "wildly talented" politicians made them failed presidents. Of note: he sees them both as failed presidents, Clinton and Bush. Here's how he supports his claim that Clinton's was a failed presidency:
For instance, being all things to all people worked wonderfully well for Bill Clinton the candidate, but when his presidency ran into trouble, this trait was disastrous, particularly in the bumpy early years of his presidency and in the events leading up to his impeachment. The fun-loving campaigner with big appetites and an undisciplined manner squandered a good deal of the majesty and power of the presidency, and undermined his effectiveness as a leader. What much of the country found endearing in a candidate was troubling in a president.
See where I'm going with this? Halperin claims that a guy who presided over tremendous economic growth, some innovative policy solutions (many of which I dislike, but admire for their pragmatism), and real success in foreign policy, had a failed presidency. He claims that a guy whose approval ratings stayed high during a trumped up impeachment "ran into trouble." Halperin clings to the Village's caricature of the Clinton presidency all so he can claim both Clinton and Bush failed. And in the process, he ignores a great deal of hard work and policy wonkiness that, in fact, made Clinton a successful president. Precisely the kind of characteristics you'd want good presidential journalism to cover--a candidate's comfort with the complexity of policy issues that translates into competent governance.
You see, Halperin tries hard to explain away his failures of judgment and discernment as failures of process. But in the process, he only emphasizes those failures of judgment. If Halperin really believes that Clinton and Bush experienced the same level of failure in office; if he remains ignorant of Clinton's considerable discipline (in all matters not involving his penis) and hard work and policy acumen, then he has proved his own failures of basic observation, not a failure to cover the right topics.
With his op-ed, Halperin proves he couldn't identify good governance if it looked him in the face. Sure, he calls for a different kind of campaign journalism. But at the same time, he proves he's not the guy to provide it.
Update: Hahahahaha! A friend sends along this poignant review of What It Takes by Matt Bai.
I remember exactly where I was sitting when I started reading "What It Takes," Richard Ben Cramer's 1,000-page, tiny-print history of the 1988 presidential campaign. It's not a hard thing to remember, because I couldn't sit anywhere else: I had mangled my knee in a touch football game, and all I could do was sit on the couch with my leg strapped into a motion machine. Like a lot of young journalism school graduates then and now, I had come to see political journalism as a lesser form of the craft, populated mostly by the effete and the unindustrious, while the real reporters were out there braving crack corners and foreign wars. "What It Takes" showed me something else entirely.
From the first unforgettable pages, when he described in minute detail the logistics needed to move George Bush, who was then vice president, out of his field box at a Texas Rangers game (accompanied by his hotheaded and ambitious son, George W.), Cramer told his obsessively reported campaign story not just from the inside, but from inside the heads of a half-dozen painfully human and complex candidates: Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart and Joseph Biden. "What It Takes" was the ultimate campaign book. [my emphasis]
Though I wonder. Does Matt Bai fancy that his own reporting tells stories "from inside the heads" of his subjects? Is that why he got my motivations so horribly wrong (not to mention reported the facts inaccurately)? Because he thought he was inside my head but was in fact in his very own little fantasy world?
Update: PhoenixWoman is right. Krugman kicks Halperin's non-observant ass much more effectively than I.


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Includes reports from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, China, Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Soviet Union. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports has been the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence for nearly 70 years. The original mission of the FBIS was to monitor, record, transcribe and translate intercepted radio broadcasts from foreign governments, official news services, and clandestine broadcasts from occupied territories. Translated into English from more than 50 languages — from Arabic to Swahili — these comprehensive media reports from around the globe include news, interviews, speeches and editorial commentary.
Access is restricted to ASU students, faculty, and staff.
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This interview first appeared in The Browser, as part of the FiveBooks series. Previous contributors include Paul Krugman, Woody Allen, and Ruth Reichl. For a daily selection of new article suggestions and FiveBooks interviews, check out The Browser or follow @TheBrowser on Twitter.
The five books that you've chosen to recommend here are all works of literary nonfiction—a hodgepodge of history, reportage, travelogue. Flicking through them I also thought one might apply the term "magic journalism" which was coined for Kapuściński, one of the authors you pick. You've framed them as five unusual histories. I guess the one thing that connects all five books is that none of them quite fit into a genre. Indeed, that's something that your own work could be accused of. What is it about this kind of genre-defying nonfiction that appeals to you?
I guess what I have to start by saying is that I promise you I'm not choosing these books as a thinly veiled hustle for the kind of thing that I'm doing. But I find it really tricky when asked to come up with five books of something to think of a category, whereas as soon as I thought of books that didn't fit into any category, I realized there was a lot that I could come up with. So I guess that's the first thing to say, that there's a lot of this uncategorisable stuff about. So much, in fact, that I think it's now time for a whole category in a bookstore to be devoted to the hitherto uncategorizable.
Then I thought that there were so many things that come to mind in terms of uncategorizable books I had to make it a bit more manageable. So I thought history. Because typically, I guess, you read history books for the content—that sounds an unbelievably stupid comment—and you're drawn to certain works of history rather than others because you're interested in the period. You read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War, or Russia or whatever. Whereas it seemed to me that the thing about these books was that you might be interested in the subject, but it's the way that the subject is dealt with that is the distinguishing feature of each one.
And how did you yourself end up writing this uncategorisable nonfiction?
I guess when I left university I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories. But I did have an urge to create criticism that was more creative, or that wasn't just to one side of and several steps down in importance from the original stuff, fiction. And then I started encountering writers like John Berger and Roland Barthes, who actually made such a thing seem viable.
Let's begin on your book selection with Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which I know to you is one of your great core canon. Will you introduce the book for our readers, and tell us why it's so important to you?
I guess it's good that we're starting with this, because it's a seriously off-putting book. It's close to 1,200 pages—a travelogue-history of Yugoslavia.
But it's quite readable.
It's incredibly readable. But it seems like such an enormous commitment, doesn't it, to read a book in excess of a thousand pages. The opportunity- cost of committing to this book seems so huge when you could have got through six other books. So you have to be absolutely assured of its quality. And then there's the thing of—we were talking about content before—why should you read this book if you're not interested in Yugoslavia?
I know I had no particular interest in Yugoslavia until I was going to Serbia, Belgrade, for a British Council seminar and they mentioned this book that we might read, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as preparation for that. As always happens when I'm going to a place, I didn't read it. I didn't do the homework. And again as happens when I've been to a place, I then became incredibly interested in it. This was, interestingly, during the Milosovic era and one of the wars—although I can't remember which now. Anyway, I came back and wanted to learn much more about this place I'd been to. I started to read this book, because I'd been to the place it was about, and then I started to realise: My God, this is a major, huge literary masterpiece. It's without question Rebecca West's magnum opus.
It's the account of her trips to Yugoslavia in 1936-38, so in the context of Nazism. What are some of the things that she witnesses and considers?
The first thing to say is that she very cleverly stitches together three trips she made, so the book reads as if it's one continuous journey—with this character who's only ever identified as "my husband," The husband is doing and saying all sorts of things but he's just "the husband", and I think it's great to sustain that for 1,100 pages. She meets a whole load of people—some of whom, in Rebecca West's great way, she takes this virulent dislike to.
I should say that nothing particularly dramatic happens to her—she's never caught up in major events in the same way that Kapuściński is—but what is really remarkable, first of all, is that her experiences become an excuse for these huge metaphysical digressions about anything and everything. And also the extraordinary thing is that she's describing events that she's seeing at this particular moment in history, yet the book has this incredibly prophetic quality to it. So all the stuff we're reading that is going on in Bosnia or Serbia, fast forward 60 years and you're seeing the same scenes being enacted. So she's reporting about a particular moment, but also she's tapping deep into some essential and timeless quality of the place.
Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow is more conventionally history in the sense that it looks back, but it's also unconventional in the sense that it's deconstructing [the First World War] into individual experience—he even describes it as "anti-history" in his foreword.
This is a very recent book—it came out towards the end of 2011. He has uncovered and found out about the lives of 20 different people from different parts of the world—some are combatants, one is a doctor, there's this cast of characters—and he narrates the war chronologically through their experiences of particular days. This gives a real sense both of people being at the mercy of history—they're not major actors in what's going on—but they're also completely shaping our view of what's going on. I should say also that each person's experiences are narrated with novelist-like techniques. The prose is very like that which we encounter in fiction. He also quotes a lot from their diaries.
But then quite an interesting thing happens. We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key. But one of the interesting things about this book, and perhaps one of its shortcomings, is that for us the absolutely key day of the First World War is the 1st of July 1916—the first day of the Somme, 60,000 casualties—and in the context of this narrative it never happens, because coincidentally none of the people he's chosen are there. It reconfigures the history of the First World War—it's subtitled An Intimate History—and we're very much at the mercy of these people's experiences, but I think there is this slight problem with it.
It reminds me of those documentaries called things like The Second World War in Colour. Let's take a series like The World at War, where you have the argument and then people will find the footage to illustrate the argument, the narrative. But when you're doing a program like The Second World War in Colour, the nature of the war is determined completely by what colour footage is available. Not surprisingly, therefore, since a lot of the Pacific war is filmed in color by the Americans, that gets rather more emphasis. And some events completely drop out of history, because they're not in color.
He said that he wasn't intending it to be a book about what World War I was, he was intending it to be a book about what World War I was like.
Indeed, that's right. And there's a lot of suspense to it as well, because we know the main narrative of the war—which is basically that Germany loses and Britain wins—but within that big narrative people's individual experiences can often have no relation to it at all.
The book is structured with short chapters, turning the eye of the narrator between these 20 dramatis personae. And as you say, sometimes it feels like a novel in the way it's written—it sort of exemplifies the tense historic present. Is that novelistic quality to it something which you admire?
I admire that aspect to it, but what I also admire is the way in which it's not a novel. We can imagine that if it had been a novel, we're quite familiar with this device where there are maybe six different narrative voices, they're completely dispersed—one person is in Mesopotamia, the other is in the Arctic—and as the novel goes on we know that these disparate characters and different voices are all at some point going to converge. But that convergence never happens. They remain dispersed, disparate, separate people.
It seems to me that it's not only a new way of doing history, it's a new way of giving form to people's lives without relying on the, I find, increasingly weary conventions of novelisation. But in terms of the prose, the visualisation of scenes and the imaginative rendering of documented events, it's very novelistic.
The next book on your list is House of Exiles by Evelyn Juers, which is what she terms a "collective biography," I suppose centering around Heinrich Mann, brother of the writer Thomas Mann. Introduce this book for us please.
This book was a real revelation to me. As you say it is described as a collective biography—subtitled War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles—and I thought it was going to be what it says on the cover, a collective biography of these people. What I didn't realize was it was going to be so novelistic. I just love the conceit of these German avant-garde composers all living quite near each other in Los Angeles.
So that's the end of the book, but the beginning is set in pre-World War II Germany, in the context of Nazism.
Indeed. She sets the scene for all these different people, who are aware of course of the looming threat and they respond to it in different ways. Some jump ship pretty quickly, others keep hanging on, some are more overtly political and involved than others. So it's this array of different voices. I suppose, in a way, it's somewhat like the Peter Englund book. We follow these different people to wherever their fates take them. They end up being dispersed all over Europe, and many of them end up in America and in particular in L.A. That's where Thomas Mann ends up, of course. He leaves Germany but he would always have his desk with him, and his desk represents for him the real soul of Germany.
That's something thematic I was hoping to ask you about. I feel the book is about these events in history, but it's also about the writerly life and the reader's life, and in a sense about escape from history by means of writing and reading.
That's absolutely right. And as a result of reading this book I was reading Thomas Mann's book The Genesis of a Novel, where he tells the story about how he wrote Doctor Faustus. It's really remarkable that he's engaged in this massive act of creative immersion—immersing himself very much in theories of music—and his neighbour in Los Angeles is Theodore Adorno, living around the corner, coming to help Mann with the musical theory bits of his book. At the same time he's listening to the radio and following the course of the Second World War, and being increasingly involved in the discussion of what will become of Germany in the postwar period. So it's this multilayered life that he's leading. And it was this book, House of Exile, which first turned me onto reading Thomas Mann's own account of what he was doing at that time.
As you say, it reads a little like a novel. I notice that on many occasions she begins sentences with "It's easy to imagine that …" And while it's perfectly plausible that a lot of what she writes she might have cobbled together from her various sources—letters, archived materials—there are other sections that one feels are pure imagination. For instance, Heinrich Mann's young wife Nelly Kröger lying in a blue slip in bed with Heinrich listening to birdsong and Puccini outside. How valid is it to introduce these imaginations into a historical account?
This is a big point. I think the key word here is trust, actually. And I never felt that any of the invented or obviously imagined scenes were gratuitous. I never felt they were being done purely for literary effect. I know this is a dangerous thing to do, but I took what she was saying on trust. I felt I could trust the voice of the book. So even these scenes that if you were writing a conventional history you couldn't put in, because there would be insufficient evidence and documentation, the things in them rang true. And let's not forget that I'm not recommending history books here, I'm recommending books that are doing something new.
I suppose there is a point to make that the phrase "experimental fiction" trips very readily off the tongue, and we all know what to look for in experimental fiction.
Including Geoff Dyer.
Yeah. But sometimes experimental fiction isn't very experimental, it's almost a set thing. Whereas what we're seeing here are experiments in history writing. And they seem to me entirely successful experiments.
To continue reading the interview with Geoff Dyer about unusual histories, visit The Browser.
Interview by Alec Ash


text:
Badgers win over Oregon to advance to the Sweet Sixteen
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Ben Brust hit a 3-pointer with 1:07 left and second-seeded Wisconsin overcame seventh-seeded Oregon for a thrilling 85-77 win Saturday night to get into the Sweet 16.
Brust's clutch 3 from the corner gave the Badgers (28-7) the lead for good in a heavyweight fight of an NCAA tournament game.
Traevon Jackson followed with three free throws, but missed one with 21 seconds left to give the Ducks (24-10) one more chance to tie trailing by three.
Oregon gave it to Joseph Young, who had made big shots all night and scored 29 points. But he missed a rushed 3 from the wing, and the Badgers sealed it at the foul line.
An arena filled with Wisconsin fans erupted into a deafening roar.


text:
Keeping the Desktop Dream Alive: Q&A With Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, Part 1
Where is Linux going? For Part 2 of this interview, LinuxInsider continued speaking with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin to discuss Linux in a wider variety of technologies, new programs intended to make it easier for businesses to switch to open source computing, and open source's ability to compete in the consumer mobile space.
LinuxInsider: During your speech at the Open Source Business Conference, you said that one of the reasons Linux is growing is that it saves money. But from your examples — companies that make and sell products such as Samsung, LG and Sony, and your mentioning the ability to monetize product in ever-decreasing time spans — you're talking about manufacturers and high-tech businesses. What about non-high-tech businesses, like medical devices, for instance? Apple is pushing hard there with the iPad.
Jim Zemlin:
In general, Linux has the No. 1 market share in the embedded systems world, whether it's MRI scanners or any other type of high-end medical device.
In terms of medical solutions that require tablet computing, the IT infrastructure in hospitals in most cases can't be described as cutting-edge, and we'll have to first see that type of technology really mature.
What I will say about the medical industry is, if you look at what has created large productivity gains in many segments of the economy, it's things like knowledge sharing, the ability to access your data from anywhere and at any time. In that case, Linux has done pretty darn well because it powers the severs and allows software companies to own their own intellectual property.
Let's take a non-high-tech marketplace like power production — let's use power companies. They're basically setting up smart grid technology to meter people's [electricity] consumption on a 15-minute incremental basis so they can manage power patterns and make sure the grid is allocating energy effectively.
If you're polling 12 million customers' power usage every 15 minutes, you're polling millions of transactions that have to be centralized, stored and analyzed, then have the data pushed out. You have power meters, servers that store and analyze the data, high-performance computers to crunch the data. In all those categories, Linux is either the No. 1 operating system or the fastest-growing operating system.
We've seen Linux do something unheard of in other operating systems in that it moves from one segment to another, and as it does, it dominates those segments. In high-performance computing, Linux went from zero percent market share to over 90 percent in less than 10 years.
LIN: Let's look at what the problems are in the Linux space. One, the need for a universal application and media warehouse that companies can tap when they want to bundle their applications with media, video, carriers and billing. A white-label iTunes App Store, if you like. What would this require? Some kind of template that companies can purchase and adapt to their requirements with a few lines of code, similar to the way Internet entrepreneurs customize generic shopping carts for their websites?
There's a number of things. One is that different firms — carriers or manufacturers or PC makers — want to participate in the app store economy in some way. When you have a closed platform like Microsoft or Apple or any of the proprietary platforms where the app store is controlled by a single entity, the on-ramp and off-ramp for that store will be monetized by that single entity.
Right now, Apple is in a massive way that entity, so what firms are looking it is, how can I have my own app store? And they find that the components that make up an app store — testing apps for compatibility with the device the app will run on, or integrating with a carrier billing system, or setting up the credit card process — are complicated things to do.
A third-party provider could set that up as a service and allow a turnkey approach to creating white-label app stores for all kinds of different devices.
There's an example of this from Intel — it's called "AppUp," and that's a decent example of where you have somewhat of a turnkey app store solution where developers can upload their apps to the AppUp infrastructure that can push out the apps to the white label stores it supports.
That may be better characterized as the app warehouse approach. There's a lot of opportunity there, and I think it's something people should be exploring.
LIN: A second problem is license compliance. The problem isn't a legal one, it's a process issue, you said at OSBC. The Linux Foundation is providing a host of tools and processes to help people comply with licensing requirements. What tools and processes? Are you talking about the Linux Foundation and FossBazaar's Software Package Data Exchange?
Yeah. When you have open source components within a product — let me back up — today if you have a dedicated supply chain, you use a product data management product or some sort of supply chain management product to have data about your bill of materials across your supply chain. You get different components from different suppliers, they're getting integrated into a factory somewhere, and so on and so forth.
Currently there are no tools or standards for passing a bill of materials about software data packages. Software products now are made up of thousands of different components from various projects, and they all come together in an innovative solution.
The ability to track that I wouldn't characterize as a problem, but a learning curve that the industry is going through right now. So the best way to think about it is, there's overwhelming advantage for cost and time to market in using open source, but that comes with the small price that the licensing process is complex across the software supply chain, and the Linux Foundation and FOSS are working to deal with that.
LIN: How about the Open Compliance Program? What's the lowdown on that? SPDX is one of the six elements of the OPC; how far along is the OPC towards completion? After all, if SPDX won't be released until August, it's not likely that OPC is anywhere near completion.
We run the OPC — the standard, SPDX, training that shows people how to comply with OS licenses, tools which allow people to manage their software bill of materials, a set of best practices we have on our websites, and knowledge sharing, which is the FossBazaar facility, and a sixth component …
LIN: Who will enforce OPC? Or is it essentially self-policing because companies don't want to be caught in breach of license?
The enforcement is making sure that people comply with their licenses; this is simply a set of processes, training and tools to deal with the tremendous shift from the old way of proprietary licensing to a new way of using software which is predominantly based on open source.
LIN: At the OSBC you said the Linux Foundation's perspective, and you believe it's also Microsoft's perspective, is we would like to see changes. Where and how does Microsoft come into this picture vis-a-vis the Linux Foundation, given that it's never looked very kindly upon Linux? Or are you referring to the patents Microsoft claims it holds on different processes in Linux?
I think we were speaking around patent reform. I think everyone in the tech industry related specifically to software would like to see a higher bar in terms of quality for patents issued around software because the lack of quality leads to a lot of needless litigation.


text:
Former New York Giant Plaxico Burress pleaded guilty Thursday to a weapons charge and agreed to a two-year prison term for accidentally shooting himself at a Manhattan nightclub.
The ex-wide receiver pleaded guilty to one count of attempted criminal possession of a weapon, a lesser charge than he initially faced. Under a plea agreement, he agreed to a two-year prison sentence and two years of supervised release.
Mr. Burress was indicted earlier this month on two counts of criminal possession of a weapon and one count of reckless endangerment. He faced a minimum sentence of 3 1/2 years if convicted at a trial.
The guilty plea ends months of haggling between Mr. Burress' attorney and the Manhattan district attorney's office. The case went to a grand jury earlier this month after negotiations broke down, apparently because District Attorney Robert Morgenthau was insisting that Mr. Burress serve at least two years in prison.
Assistant District Attorney Mark Dwyer said it is standard policy to request a two-year sentence as part of a plea bargain on such serious charges. Sentencing was set for Sept. 22.
In a Manhattan state Supreme Court room on Thursday, the soft-spoken Mr. Burress, wearing a dark blue suit, first entered a not-guilty plea to the initial charges against him. After attorneys on both sides conferred, Mr. Burress said, "Guilty" to the new attempted weapons possession charge.
His attorney, Benjamin Brafman, said in court that the 31-year-old Mr. Burress was thinking of his family in taking the plea, although he questioned the recommended prison sentence.
"This was not an intentional criminal act," Mr. Brafman said. "In my judgment, a two-year prison sentence is a very severe punishment."
With time off for good behavior the sentence could be reduced to 20 months.
The football star and former teammate Antonio Pierce were at the Latin Quarter nightclub in late November when a gun tucked into Mr. Burress' waistband slipped down his leg and fired, shooting him in the right thigh. The bullet narrowly missed a nightclub security guard who was standing inches away, prosecutors said, lodged in the floor and was recovered by a bartender.
The gun was not licensed in New York or in New Jersey, where Mr. Burress lived, prosecutors said. His license to carry a concealed weapon in the state of Florida had expired in May 2008.
Prosecutors said Mr. Pierce drove Mr. Burress to a hospital, then took the gun to his own home in New Jersey where it was later delivered to Mr. Burress' home.
Mr. Pierce was not indicted. The grand jury also did not indict the nightclub security guard who carried the gun to Mr. Pierce's car or the hospital staff members who failed to notify police that Mr. Burress had been shot.


text: Other | 05. January 2012 | posted by Andrea Haag Usability testing: information scientists take a close look at the DLR web portal With today's contribution I want to fulfil the promise I made in the blog entry I wrote on 12 July 2011 to inform you about the results of the tests on the usability of the German Aerospace Center's (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und- Raumfahrt; DLR) new web portal. The results are very instructive. They provide valuable insights for the optimisation of our website with regard to design, content, function and navigation, as well as the much awaited confirmation that our new web concept is making a positive impression on visitors. The usability test is an important part of the entire redesign project, which was preceded by a user survey involving more than 2600 participants. The test was intended to investigate how the DLR web portal can be oriented towards users, how user-friendliness can be assured and to examine its strengths and weaknesses. The newly designed DLR web portal, which went live in July 2011. The DLR web portal before the redesign in July 2011. To evaluate the screen design, the pages were scrutinised in terms of content, structure and also technically with the help of 11 participants. Such a small number of users cannot, of course, be used for any statistical analysis, but with regard to web usability, this is not necessary in most cases. The aim is to find potential problems and solve them as quickly as possible. What is a usability test? Before discussing the results in greater detail, I would like to briefly explain what a usability test is and how it is carried out. Usability testing is a technique used to analyse and evaluate the quality of products, and is carried out to test the ease of use of an application. Usability tests provide valuable information regarding, for example, the suitability of a product such as the DLR web portal for the desired target group, or whether a product should be optimised in its ease of use. What methods are available? Various methods suitable for usability testing are available. These include, for example, numerous software programmes for creating and evaluating log file analyses, interviews and questionnaires, or elaborate methods such as 'eye tracking', in which the eye activity of a subject is recorded. Interactive procedures record the click and entry behaviour at the keyboard, and the cognitive walk-through method uses relevant tasks to test whether the expectations of users are fulfilled. The most widespread method is what is known as the 'thinking aloud' protocol, in which users comment on their impressions and experiences with a product during the test phase, and this is recorded on video. The usability test of the DLR web portal was carried out by academic staff of the Institute of Information Science at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and AK12 Agentur für Kommunikation und Innovation GmbH on our behalf. The methodology used by the experts was a combination of cognitive walk-through, thinking aloud and interactive procedures. The users were given research tasks; to complete them, the users had to navigate through various areas of the website. During these taskes, the users were studied via observation and the thinking aloud method using questionnaires. The portal testers had basic knowledge of the Internet and web-specific terminology. The testing group was comprised of students, DLR staff members, editors and others in DLR's target group; testers with both a technical and non-technical background were considered. For the purposes of documentation and subsequent analysis of the screen content viewed by the testers, video, sound and the system data (tracking data) of the product run were recorded as well. Besides recording mouse clicks, page visits and URLs, the testers had to explain each step of the navigation paths they followed; conspicuous behaviours and comments were collected and analysed by the experts. www.DLR.de/en is modern and well designed The graphic shows the location of the panorama header, sitemap and terminal. The news skimmer with current reports. Access to the multimedia section; this is where image galleries, videos, publications and animations are stored. As mentioned at the beginning, the general impression of the website was positive among all the testers. The majority liked the dominating image content, as well as the modern graphical design. This led the testers to 'overlook' initial difficulties with the navigation and rate DLR's new 'Web face' positively. The individual results explained: Panorama header According to the survey, the panorama header on the home page gives a modern impression, but the link function associated with it was not, however, noticed; there were also slight complaints about the image quality. Text design and content Ten of 11 testers expressed positive views about the text content. The design and order of the teasers tended to be rated as difficult to read, whereas the brief introduction to articles in the news skimmer was rated very positively. The news skimmer was frequently used alongside the home page or the subject-related start pages to quickly search for news and information. DLR social media channels DLR's social media channels were easily found both on the home page and within article pages and, in general, considered positive. The 'share' function fulfilled expectations and was very quickly made use of by the majority of testers. Sitemap The sitemap at the end of the page was not used or noted, and was not employed as a tool for completing the task. Images and videos The multimedia content offered by the DLR web portal, such as images and videos, is found both in the articles themselves and via the multimedia menu at the terminal. The pages for video and image material can be viewed separately and have been prepared with different appearance and content. The testers complained about the image and video components, as their function did not appear to operate consistently. But the content itself was rated positively: good service, exciting images, fast response to the 'five Ws' in the image captions. The 'five Ws' form the basis for understanding and researching texts. The logical sequence for answering them is: What happened? Who is involved? Where did it happen? When did it happen? Why did it happen? And, how did it happen? Images can be viewed in, among other places, the multimedia section of the DLR web portal. Videos with a download function can be selected from the multimedia menu in the DLR web portal. Carrying out the research tasks they were set proved to range from easy to very easy for the testers in most of the cases. Elements such as the primary navigation in the left column were not used by the testers and, as such, were not rated by them either. The position of the breadcrumb navigation below the content elements appeared unusual to them and remained mostly undiscovered. Conclusion Content on DLR.de/en is fun and has been prepared accordingly. The wording must become more intuitive. Images and multimedia elements represent added value for visitors, but must be designed more uniformly. User guidance, especially secondary navigation such as breadcrumb navigation, is confusing and must be given greater prominence as an orientation guide to make returning to content easier. The header graphics (panorama header) are very attractive but their link function must be highlighted more clearly. The results of the usability test will be implemented as soon as possible to optimise the DLR website and the user interfaces. Here, we would like to thank all testers for participating in the usability test. And we would of course like to thank all visitors who have helped and supported us with suggestions and constructive criticism via the feedback functions of the DLR web portal since it went live in July 2011. Your opinion is important to us Please continue to tell us what you think of the DLR web portal. We welcome all constructive criticism. Giving feedback is possible at any time via the comment function of this blog or the new DLR web portal.