text:
RUDY ADRIAN Desert Realms (Lotuspike)
JOHAN AGEBJÖRN Mossebo (Lotuspike)
DARSHAN AMBIENT From Pale Hands to Weary Skies (Lotuspike)
CRAIG PADILLA Below the Mountain (Spotted Peccary)
Here indeed are an eclectic bunch from the Spotted Peccary family of labels, of which Lotuspike is now a "member". No monstrously dramatic changes have taken place because of this "merger", except perhaps to broaden Spotted Peccary's outreach; if anything, the label is now poised, along with Hypnos, to become a central operation along the loci of ambient/atmospheric music.
New Zealander Rudy Adrian has quietly amassed a respectable back catalog over the years, mostly for the Netherlands EM label Groove Unlimited, caressing a wide range of styles, from the aforementioned ambience of his earlier Lotuspike release Moonwater to the more rhythmically buoyant, sequencer-intensive calculations found on Kinetic Flow and Starfields. Many an electronic musician has found inspiration in landscape, going as far back as Eno with his benchmark On Land (amongst numerous others). Desert Realms apparently stoked Adrian's muse from his touring in 2002 of Utah's otherworldly terrain, a land of stark, epoch-scored vistas, incorporeal climes and steep grades. Tracks such as the opening "Saguaro Silhoutte", with its wordless chants and upwardly spiralling drones, and the shifting dusky synth reverie of "Fading Light" are well-wrought, impressionist fantasies that manage to succeed independent of their earthen analogs. Being a longtime enthusiast of Adrian's work, there's little doubt that he's a composer and synthesist of significant charge, yet, as satisfying as Desert Realms is, I'm not convinced that the grand landscapes he seeks to evoke are mirrored in the final constructs. Regardless, there's some quality work here: "Subterranean River" benefits from a blur of bells and shimmery percussive accents smeared into a widening maw of synth; "Of Clouds and Mountains" feels like water vapor coalescing gently in a chilly morning sunrise, similar to Thom Brennan's opalescent tone poems; "Rocks Under Midnight" likewise allows delicately rubbed electronics to vibrate and pulse throughout its many diaphanous layers. Conceptual illustrations aside, Adrian remains a composer of no small measure—coaxed from a minimal array of soundmakers, Desert Realms is a laudable work of abject beauty.
Who is Johan Agebjörn and where has he been all this time? Though probably a new name to most, his bio on Discogs.com (and his website) shows him treading in quite divergent streams, creating piano-based compositions in addition to Italo-disco under his Sally Shapiro alias. All over the stylistic map it might be, but Mossebo blew me back—totally engaging, lithe in execution and elegantly produced, its luxurious ear candy handily updates the early 90s heyday of Euro ambient techno. Agebjörn's influences run a wide gamut: he himself notes the ballast of Autechre on "Ambient Computer Dance" (the Incunabula era), and Lisa Barra's wordless (and sometimes wordful) vocals recall that other Lisa-nicked chanteuse, Gerrard. (Elements of Erik Wøllo and Candice Pacheco pop up as well.) Barra's baleful coos and energized whispers play all kinds of acrobatic games across Agebjörn's rhythm tracks, trading their hypertexts with arctic synths, the odd piano, and even themselves, Agebjörn admitting a fondness for vocoders and chopped-up voice edits. All due respect given to the Delerium boys and any Enigma worshippers/wannabes out there, but here's sultry techno-trance done right. The opening "Dulciter Somni" makes a good argument against such ultra-polished digital faux "world" music, Agebjörn setting up a fairly simple drum machine riff over which Barra swoops and swoons amongst pink-purplish electronic flotsam. One of Mossebo's particularly notable graces is that its richly-detailed fabric comfits a largely uncluttered music: Agebjörn no doubt clings to the less-is-more school and milks that credo for all its worth. Thus "The Sound of Snowflakes Touching the Ground" appears quite enamored of its pristine subzero minimalism, pitter-pattering beats skating below Barra's cries as if on a thin icepatch, and the two-part "Siberian Train" actually feels more epic than it is, Agebjörn's locomotive programming and delineated synths reminiscent of Tangerine Dream's classic "Madrigal Meridian", or even a distantly-engineered cousin to their own "Love On A Real Train." In any case, Mossebo is like some brilliant bolt out of the blue, unexpected, surprising, ever-rejuvenating—built for the future, Johan?
Michael Allison, aka Darshan Ambient, considers From Pale Hands to Weary Skies his best work yet, and, despite a career that's still in its infancy, with creative moxie to burn, a convincing argument could be made that his assessment might well be true. Conceived while Allison was in the throes of a life-threatening illness, he subsequently mined the final result during his lengthy convalescence, and once your ears have drunk deep of this remarkable offering, you'd reckon that his near-death experience virtually electroshocked both his muse and psyche. It certainly shows in the energized spirit of the music; much of this new recording marries a more overt rhythmic sensibility to the usual Darshan Ambient post-Eno template, but Allison's music has always been about more than pat categorical metaphors. Erected with nimble hand and equally imaginative finesse, his is a voice unique in worldwide "ambient" music due to his gift for melody and an emotional instrumental range that never sacrifices vibrancy for passive new-age sentimentality. "The Furniture of Time" leads thing off in fine fashion, Allison playing an absolutely charming piano motif atop squeaking electronics and a tousled rhythmic counterpoint of tablas and ticktock soft-synth beats, assuming one of those naggingly insistent melodies that stick in your head forever. The pealing twangs of "The Look of Amber" suggest the contemplative ideals of Patrick O'Hearn in their late afternoon simplicity, all lower-key chords and alabaster moods. "Palace of the Windowed Rocks," with its fleet percussive line, electronics that snap to and fro like weathered rubberbands (replete with irising space whispers) and subtle piano phrasing, is one of the more sumptuous pieces of melancholic ambience to come down the pike this year. Allison's getting better all the time—physically and artistically—his sonic alter ego proffering the perfect sonic balm for all concerned.
And now for something completely (relatively speaking) different. Craig Padilla's name deserves more than just a passing nod amongst post-Berlin school aficionados. He's released some superb space music and sequencer-driven works over the years, both solo and in collaboration with fellow sonic auteur Skip Murphy, and, more importantly, swept aside the usual Teutonic affectations in an effort to spin off from those hoary, 35-plus year old battleaxes. Yes, the vocabulary's recognizable, but the syntax has been tweaked: the music on Below the Mountain (the inspiration of which comes again from landscape, specifically Padilla's home around Mt. Shasta in Northern California) suggests rugged earthly embraces except that its palette harkens more towards the quantum mechanics of interstellar pioneers Tangerine Dream and Schulze. All irrelevant anyway—beguiling moments await within. Immediately appealing and subtly clever, the opening "Current" benefits from a little elfin countenance of a synth figure that invigorates the ever-shifting expanses made by well-oiled, well-tendered yet soft machines. Like a boomerang, "Woven Planet" tugs at your memory cards as it recalls the classic moments of TD's Ricochet, gurgling sequencers rippling under bulging updrafts of graysky electronics. Padilla is able to achieve a near perfect balance of sci-fi futurism and landscape veneer: the ten minutes of "Windspell" see a return to slow tempo sequencer and chugging, Exit-like cymbal acrobatics as Padilla folds his mosaic of rhythms into thick clouds of majestic, undulating chords, 70s déjà vu all over again but brushed over with 00s gloss. The closing 22-plus minutes of "Alturas" is the real barnstormer, however, Padilla coaxing various skeins of star-twinkle, metallic dewdrops, blossoming backdrift, and, ultimately, a corkscrewing, hypnotizing sequencer pattern whose complex tangles burrow right into your cochlea. Padilla's scored some major hits in the past, but this particular slice of systems music's a real humdinger; it simultaneously fades back and radiates. DARREN BERGSTEIN • www.lotuspike.com / www.spottedpeccary.com
BVDUB Return to Tonglu (Quietus)
CIVYIU KKLIU & ILYA MONOSOV Cartolina Postale (Winds Measure)
BYRON METCALF / MARK SEELIG / STEVE ROACH Nada Terma (Projekt)
DAVID PARSONS Earthlight (Celestial Harmonies)
MIRKO UHLIG The Nightmiller (Mystery Sea)
Latest in a brilliant run of submersive aquifer 'tronix from Brock Van Wey, going by the name Bvdub. Drawing a line straight through minimal techno regimes first internationalized by the early Kompakt sides of Reinhard and Wolfgang Voigt (specifically his releases as Gas), drawing in Chain Reaction notables such as Porter Ricks and early Monolake, connecting spacier Detroit imperatives, and finally culminating in a subgenre popularized by other similarly-inclined producers (Quantec, Deepchord, Koss, folks on the Echocord label), Bvdub continues to refine his sound to the point where he's rapidly becoming a benchmark for this slowly expanding microgenre. There's a lot of this kind of stuff engulfing our precious aural canals at the moment, which could be a detrimental thing to our psyches if the music wasn't so wholly compelling. Of course, you have to meet it halfway or the molasses-thick minimal repetitiveness, minor key chromality, and dense weeds of reverb might get on your nerves. What separates Bvdub's take on this strand of boom-tschak oceanic electrogauze is twofold: a general segregation from basic foursquare rhythms and a sound design suggesting natures personal rather than forestral. A true son of the loop da loop era, Bvdub is our best foggy bottom sculptor, chipping away at Detroit's rusting corpus, exposing a mellifluous core few realized existed, working with a virtual paucity of sounds that achieve their grandeur by sheer act of repetitive will. It doesn't hurt that this is a noise exquisitely lush, plush, and limned with hush. The title track, with its puffing beats, wheezing cymbals, and velveteen ambience, plays like an Autobahn for the isolationist set, soft, wet, weepy, and low. Desolate synths shudder in the moist air, refracting and echoing endlessly on their cloudburst flights, as on the closing "It's Too Late," Bvdub slow dancing with tears in his eyes. Do we gleam infinite melancholia here? Utter despair? Errant euphoria? It's a combination of all three, a music that revels in its own emotional ambiguity. Go on—immerse thyself. DARREN BERGSTEIN • www.quietus-recordings.com
Concerning Cartolina Postale, quite apart from the message and its content that comes scrawled like grafitti on the back a postcard, the handwriting and style of a letter is often just as effective, if not more so, in conveying a certain human presence. The metal plate scrape and toothpicks that play a music box like bony fingers speak well to this: an elephant has a better chance of squirming through the eye of a needle than one does of alighting upon any inkling of a message here; the material is far too diffuse. There is a certain style at play, however, and thus some modicum of presence. Specifically, it's one that asserts itself through an interruption of the vagaries of time and any notion of totality. This isn't achieved positively but negatively: during its twenty-three minutes, the album is largely devoid of structure; it doesn't establish an atmosphere; and there is little, if any, trace of intent. What's left is a gradual drift of sonic dust through which single notes on music box gleam intermittently like tiny lights. As with a postcard, it's the fingerprint of a particular time and place; and like every fingerprint its a radical singularity. Only in this case, admittedly, it seems more about secrecy than identity. A devilish little postcard, this is. MAX SCHAEFER • www.windsmeasurerecordings.net
Percussionist Metcalf marks the end of a trilogy of sorts with Nada Terma, squaring the circle that began with his previous collaborations with fellow aural tribesmen Roach and Seelig on 2003's Wachuma's Wave and 2004's Mantram. On this seventy-three minute excursion into the wild frontier of elder music and ancestral shamanism, Metcalf's manifesto becomes wholly recognizable once the recording gathers steam, his percussive arsenal a baker's dozen of frame, udu and earth drums, further augmented by the softer accents provided by tapping on clay pots and seed pods. Multi-instrumentalist Seelig surrounds Metcalf's war-drumming in a cushion of bansuri flutes and plucked dilruba in addition to building some rich harmonic overtones thanks to his own vibrato of a voice. Roach, of course, wraps the whole affair in so many of his typically vivid, color-enhanced tones and myriad, swirling atmospheres it situates the listener right at the center of some ancient, mysterious retreat. Subtly altering moods predominate: what can feel like a powerfully earthshaking music one moment slowly shifts gears into climes both seductive and spiritual. But don't get the idea that this is some exercise in well-dressed new age tedium—Roach's heavenly noises time and again provide the foundation for Metcalf's rock-solid beatstorms, particularly during the first indomitable half hour, the physicality of the drummer's extraordinarily propulsive thunderstrikes practically a force of nature. Roach and Seelig have no choice but to keep pace by superimposing their own distinctive sonic flavors onto the febrile stew; naturally, the desert shaman's kaleidoscopic textures reincarnate all sorts of primordial demons, through which feint Seelig's piercing winds and arcing strings. The lengthy journey the album makes across its expansive running time does it justice—this is true trance music, relentless, hypnotic and very alive. DARREN BERGSTEIN • www.projekt.com
A seriously underrated talent that has embraced the same respect and awe for immense landscape and mystic realms as comrade-in-arms Steve Roach, composer/synthesist Parsons has for well over two decades realized a singular body of work that has embraced both an ambient ethos and the intricate, meditative harmonics of North Indian classical music. Parsons likens his work to the alap, the elongated introduction to Indian ragas, and in many ways such a description perfectly encapsulates the methodology of ambient music in the most literal sense, removed from yet reflecting Eno's dictum of "music that can be simultaneously listened to and ignored." Definitions often need upgrading, however: Parsons' music is about as ignorable as the mountain vistas he often titles his epic pieces after. Abundant with prodigious chords, tones stretched thinner and thinner at such altitudes they beg for oxygen, and inveighed by the magnetic tensions brought on by otherworldly forces at play, Earthlight is evocative in the most fantastical sense. The record's glacial pace mimics the breathless pulse of tectonic plates shirking millennia, but monodimensional drone this isn't. A pronounced mystic quality informs all of Parsons' music, and the strange regions he traverses on this superb excursion are no different—space music of a spherical nature, austere yet finely-wrought and patterned, buoyed by a surfeit of mysterious textures and alien cadences, the album is wonderfully disorienting, suggesting rugged confines as well as farflung artifices. The title track irises open to reveal a multitude of erupting, heavenly electronic lightbeams soon to be pierced by an eldritch motif of misty mountain modulars and cushioned bells. "Altai Himalaya" harkens back to Parsons' eponymous classic Himalaya, aerated blasts of synth drifting in the wake of stratospheric jetstreams. Both "Beyond the Light" and "Corona" reveal a composer who's come a long way since the simple two-chord notations of Tibetan Plateau: vari-hued pigments of electronics flow silkily into and out of one another like kaleidoscopic oils, buffed by tablaesque sequencers, pealing intrasolar radiowaves and, in the case of "Corona", truculent synths howling into the deep night. The penultimate twenty minutes that is "Bathing Light" seems to end too abruptly even at that considerable length, but taking into account the buzzsaw cut of its synths, its baleful atmosphere and incessant rhythmic momentum, it portends something of a new direction for Parsons, who once noted that his music was "about bathing in the sound." Surely a most inviting proposition, for on Earthlight, the water's mighty warm indeed. DARREN BERGSTEIN • www.harmonies.com
In The Night Miller, there seems to be all the infinity of Mirko Uhlig's own absence—that is to say, it's a pure hole into which drains all of his past penchants for machines of esoteric purpose vainly struggling to jar or achieve autonomous operation. This is also to indicate that Uhlig's new resistance is a kind of non-resistance; a sensitivity to the elements, to their contours, density, dynamics, and timbre. He appears equally open to their symbolic import: to the way these sparsely textured atmospheres enable creation, time, infinity and multiple discrete universes to merge in a satori flash. As a CD, it lasts all of 36 minutes and spans some three tracks. It begins as a beatific luminescence that breathes air and ripples out into an imagined distance, evoking a weight of being behind every act. Uhlig's melodies develop slowly and the oneiric structures betray an undercurrent of stealthy depths. It's these depths that run into the albums second work, "Wooden Waiting", where an intense focus upon the fine detail of the unfolding electronic fields spreads over the immense richness of acoustic detail. Such slow-burning episodes of beautiful, elegant, emotionally affecting passages of ambience finds in the albums final piece an effective counterpoint, as grainy, hissing loops shake up and then paralyze the tracks motion. The move creates a dim space into which single guitar notes and rasping massed melodic lines withdraw, leaving the dawning sensation that all is evaporating in impenetrable darkness. Neither especially active or passive, The Nightmiller nevertheless manages just enough permutation and variation of a limited set of materials. As a result, the sounds and spaces between them often float. Those acquainted with the vicelike brutality and recalcitrantly challenging Uhlig may find his wholehearted adoption of this elegiac tone difficult to fathom, just as those who begin here will find it hard to believe he's ever done anything else. MAX SCHAEFER • www.mysterysea.net
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Chile Ends 'Safeguard' Exam on US Pork Imports
US & CHILE - In a big victory for America's pork producers, Chile has determined that no action should be taken to limit pork imports, including those from the United States, after concluding an investigation on whether they were harming domestic pork producers.The South American country initiated a "safeguard" investigation in May on all imported frozen pork, including imports from the United States. Under international trade rules, safeguard measures are temporary emergency actions, such as duty increases, against imported products that have caused or threaten to cause serious injury to the importing country's domestic industry. The Chilean Pork Producers Association alleged that pork imports caused losses to its producers and called for a 14.3 per cent additional duty on imported pork.
The National Pork Producers Council claimed the charges of harm were unfounded and pleaded the US pork industry's case against safeguard measures. It pointed out that while US pork exports to Chile have grown over the past eight years, they remain small and stable in relation to pork consumption and production in that country. In fact, although Chilean pork producers continue to account for more than 95 per cent of domestic consumption, they also have significantly increased their sales in export markets.
After a 90-day investigation to determine whether safeguard measures should be imposed and at what rate, a Chilean commission decided such measures weren't warranted.
"America's pork producers are pleased that Chile has found that US pork exports to that country are not harming Chilean pork producers," said NPPC President Randy Spronk, a pork producer from Edgerton, Minnesota. "NPPC believed that the charges of harm were unsupported and led the defense of the US pork industry against any safeguard action."
Chile has become an important market for US pork since the implementation of the US-Chile Free Trade Agreement in 2005. Last year, Chile was the 12th most valuable export destination for US pork products, totaling almost 17,000 metric tons valued at more than $42 million.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The rush to install wind capacity comes ahead of the expiration of the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) on 31 December.
The 12GW would account for 45% of total additions of the electricity plants in America in 2012.
It would also exceed capacity additions from any other single fuel source, including natural gas, which comprised the leading new fuel source in 2010 and 2011.
This month is especially busy. As of 30 November, a little over 6GW had been completed in 2012. Another 6GW was expected to be added in December, said EIA.


text:
One of the games that I have shared with colleagues and many other folks at conferences and professional development events is The Nightjar featuring Benedict Cumberbatch. I was hugely drawn to this due to the narrative driven and engaging context of the storyline but mainly because it was a game that was driven by what I could hear... Have a look at the trailer:
The idea of a game that is driven by sound and the players reliance only on what they hear makes one immediately think of accessibility for visually impaired gamers but it also made me think of how such an experience could introduce sighted game players to an experience that required that they use this sense alone in order to escape the clutches of the alien and safely make it to the Nightjar's escape pod. What opportunities there are again to get players to look at writing their own text driven games, and how they could possibly be brought to life via Garageband or Audacity. Just even switching the direction from left to right audio (panning) could be the spark to light that creative use of tech to impact on the desire to create and enhance the texts they create and how they can write for a digital audience.
This morning a BBC Click feature alerted me to the fact that Papa Sangre II has been released. One of my jobs for today is to download this and to see if I can escape the Garden of Death!
With an enhanced 3D stereoscopic engine it seems that this audio driven game experience is one that is getting better and better.
The creativity that is being shown by games developers is really quite breathtaking at times...what a wonderful context this world is, if appropriately used, to help situate learning and learners in purposeful, relevant and motivating challenges. Now, if I had any influence or way in which I could help drive transformative change within our education system I would have it that games design companies and creative digital people from our brilliant universities would have representatives on local and national bodies to not only help raise awareness of what is out there but to raise the bar of aspiration and expectation of what we can expect from our young people. Alas, maybe I'll have greater luck escaping from Papa Sangre's Garden of Death... #everoptimistic


text:
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Friday, September 12, 2014
Kicking Zumba Fundraiser
We had a great time and raised a generous amount of money at our Mantone Family fundraiser last Sunday, 9/7. Both parents are battling cancer and they have 12 year old twin girls, one with special needs. Thank you to Heatherly Law and her Zumba team for making the event a success.
Hanko Ryu Martial Arts
Trumbull Trumbull
Sunday, August 17, 2014
A Day at the Beach Weapons Style with Hanko Ryu Martial Arts
We trained in Twin Brooks Park on Saturday. The sand made for a tough workout but loads of fun. This is Traditional Okinawan kobudo. And you thought my only weapon was my tongue..... Join us at Hanko Ryu Martial Arts, in Trumbull CT to start training in Karate, Kickboxing and/or Kobudo. Osu!
Sai |
Nunchaku |
Sai with the guys! |
Sai |
Sai kata |
Blocking |
Gedan (low) block |
Nunchaku, Tonquia, Bo, and Sai |
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Tuesday, July 08, 2014
Training every week with Lisa and Maria at Hanko Ryu Martial Arts is a joy. Maria and I tested last month. Lisa tests soon for her next black belt kyu. Osu!
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Karate Girl Street Fight: Why Women Should Train
This video shows actual technique we learn in the dojo in traditional Karate - in "bunkai" or application. It's choreographed, of course, but conveys the message that Karate is about self-defense and having an arsenal of ideas to fall back on in case of emergency. Few of us will ever be in a street fight with 5 or more attackers. But any of us can face an attack coming out of the grocery store, the mall or even in our own homes. Get your daughters into a dojo. Join yourself. I was 47 when I first put on a gi. You don't have to be fit or thin to start - you just have to have a desire to work hard, learn and practice at your own pace and level.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)


text:
The 1989 Basel Convention was one of the first legal instruments to directly target the management of hazardous wastes at the international level. The original focus of the Convention was to control the transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal. Under the convention, any transboundary movement of waste is only permitted if the movement itself as well as the disposal of the concerned waste is environmentally sound. Environmentally Sound Management (ESM) is a central focus of the Convention, and is addressed primarily through an integrated lifecycle approach that aims to control hazardous wastes from generation through to storage, transport, treatment, reuse, recycling, recovery and final disposal.
The Basel Convention does stipulate that all hazardous wastes should be managed in an environmentally sound manner. However, POPs are only directly influenced by the Convention through the controls on transboundary transportation, where a number of POPs are specifically identified, including the 12 that form the focus of the Stockholm Convention. The Basel Convention entered into force in 1992, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) administers the secretariat.


text:
Featured News - Current News - Archived News - News Categories
Singer performs June 27 at Seneca Niagara Casino
Preview by Joshua Maloni
Scott Stapp doesn't hold back on his solo album, "Proof of Life." He readily admits his past substance abuse could've prematurely taken his life.
In "Slow Suicide," the album's rousing rock anthem, Stapp sings, "'It's no secret. ... I can't pretend/I can't forget. What I've done. ... Everyday I live with the consequences. I let it beat me/let it kick me/let it throw me to the floor."
Yet, he also sings, "Those days are over. I'm moving forward. It can't hurt me. Now I believe." And, "I can't let this life pass me by."
"Proof of Life" is Stapp's evidence, his testimony, that better days - and better actions - await him.
On "Dying to Live," Stapp sings, "What I thought was all of my life story/turns out it was only just one page. It's a new beginning. I have got so much left to say."
In a recent phone interview, Stapp said, "Things are going great.
"It's been an interesting journey. And I think, just being human, it has its struggles and its dark times, as well as its times of light and happiness. It's awesome to be coming out of a dark period in my life and starting to live in the light, and in this new change and new season in my life."
"Proof of Life" follows Stapp's 2012 memoir, "Sinner's Creed," which, likewise, served as a means to clear the air and inspire others to beat addiction.
"You know, I think there have been times when it's been very challenging (to share)," Stapp said. But when he would offer half-truths or "candy-coat" what was happening in his life, "I found that wasn't working for me."
"It was important for me as a human being, and what I do, and who I am, to be authentic. To be real," Stapp said. "And I found that, as I began to do that, it affected every area of my life, and helped me be free to be who I am.
"Also it's helped in giving my life more of a purpose than just rock 'n' roll music. That purpose is to share my experiences - the good, the bad and the ugly - and seeing that it connects with others.
"In sharing that, not only does it connect, but it's given strength, and other people have been helped by that. So that makes me feel like I'm doing more than just playing in a rock band."
Talking about his past, and meeting fans who've experienced their own struggles, "it also keeps me accountable," Stapp said. "It adds another level of thought process before I may go down a road. It's also a level of responsibility.
"I'm far from perfect, and I'm far from having arrived. I just try to live my life 24 hours at a time."
"I'm real and authentic about the fact that I'm human, and I'm sure I'll make more mistakes," he said. "But that's just life. That's what we all do."
Stapp, of course, rose to fame at the turn of the century with his Grammy-winning band, Creed, and their mega-hit songs "My Own Prison," "What's This Life For," "Torn," "One," "Higher," "With Arms Wide Open" and "My Sacrifice."
While fame and fortune were welcome, Stapp said the spotlight amplified his own inner struggles.
"Success, sometimes, can just magnify our core issues, and our core struggles, and our core frailties," he said. "I think that, in coming up in the business, you know, at least for me, I was very passionate, and dedicated, and worked really, really hard - which is a requirement to make it in this business.
"And then, you know, when you get there, you're still that same person, except everything you do is magnified on a stage and kind of surreal and not real. Whatever things in your life that were out of balance and not right just get magnified, in my opinion, times 100."
When Stapp was at death's door, it was his Christian faith that brought him back to life.
"In every way possible it has (helped me)," he said. "I think I experienced years in my early 20s and all the way up into my early 30s where I still had remnants of doubt. I would still ask questions about certain things.
"All that has been wrapped up. Through this process that I went through at this period in my life, the doubt was removed. My faith and my beliefs are firm - they're strong. There's no question, because I've seen it manifest in my life. I've lived it. There's no questioning or denying that."
Today, at the age of 40, Stapp is touring in support of "Proof of Life," a rock album that boldly declares he is bigger than his past.
"This album symbolizes so much to me personally," he said. "It's like the ending of a period - a long period in my life - and the beginning of a new one. It really symbolizes that transition and the start of the next chapter in my life. And so, yeah, it definitely, definitely felt good. ... It's kind of like taking a step forward. It was a definite sense of accomplishment and also just relief."
Stapp will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, June 27, at Seneca Niagara Casino's Bear's Den Showroom. Tickets, starting at $45, are available at the venue and through Ticketmaster.
"It's an anthemic rock sound, and it's also very much a journey of emotions and moods and feelings and experiences with peaks and with valleys," Stapp said of his live show. "It's interactive. It pulls on the heart and soul of the band, and those in the audience - however they want to tap in.
"It's rock 'n' roll. ... It's just a rock 'n' roll where its themes are a little deeper - not only deeper into the emotional realm and the psyche of being human, but also into the spiritual, and everything in between. It's different from the rock that proceeded it because (of) the themes and the peaks and valleys of where the emotions go. It runs the gamut of the human experience. It's not just stuck in anger, or sex and drugs. It's the full spectrum of being human, in all of our senses, as well as our spirit."
Stapp works hard to present a live show fans won't soon forget.
"One thing that's always been very, very important to me is being an entertainer and being in the now within each song, and connecting with that material with passion - with feeling - and then letting the music overtake me and almost possess me with the vibes. And bringing every bit of energy and feeling that I can to every song and performance, and connecting that with the audience," he said. "In terms of sonically, it's got everything that you could want in a rock show. It's got power, emotion, the electric guitars, the big drums, the technical expertise ... the mood, the vibe, but also a performance.
"It's not just, you know, you see a band that's just standing there kind of banging their head. It's an experience. It's a performance. It's a show in every sense of the word, with drama definitely involved in that.
"It's definitely unique in that regard. And it's powerful. I think that everyone who comes will be able to see, feel that. I'm excited to bring that there."
•Follow Joshua Maloni on Twitter @joshuamaloni


text: With my background in Industrial design engineering I'm working on library and cultural innovation. Mainly for DOK, the library concept center, and other libraries in the Netherlands. Essential part in my work involves funding for libraries. At the moment I'm project manager for the project of DOK for 'Images of the Future'. This is the biggest digitization project ever in the Netherlands, in which almost all dutch radio and tv programs are being digitized. I'm a member of the Shanachies (together with Jaap van de Geer and Erik Boekesteijn). With the Shanachies I'm the soundman and photographer.


text:
A few weeks ago, I was browsing non-fiction titles on the Kindle and came across Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture". I guess I'd been avoiding it for a while as it sounded like it could get pretty morose or preachy real quick. But then I read in the summary that he had a Ph.D. in computer science and taught virtual reality at Carnegie Mellon. These are serious nerd credentials, so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded it and didn't put it down until I was finished.
In its totality, it carried a specific message to a very specific audience. Amongst all the stories, pictures of his family, doctor interactions and discussion of his dreams and his illness, Randy said very clearly to all computer science engineers: The key to innovation is that teams beat individuals.
Randy knew that learning to play in the sandbox with others—especially really smart people with different skill sets—drives innovation faster than someone trying to figure it out on their own, no matter how smart they are. But Randy also knew this wasn't easy because many great engineers have serious deficiencies when it comes to working well with others. He knew because he was one of these people. He was a top engineer and had firsthand experience in both working through his interpersonal issues and working successfully in a team environment.
I've had the privilege of spending my entire career in technology surrounded by wicked smart engineers. I've always been drawn to their raw intelligence, Spock-like rationality, sincere honesty, dry humor and quirkiness. With the immense popularity of the sitcom, "The Big Bang Theory", I suppose I'm not alone in my appreciation of them. That said, as a CEO, I've observed that many of the very best technical minds often have a hard time overcoming major Achilles' heels associated with working in a team or leading others. Specifically, and stereotypically, they often:
I was stunned to find every one of these observations called out specifically by Randy in his lecture. As a non-engineer, I've had mixed results in my attempts to reach and coach engineers through these issues so I was thrilled to see so many great points explained by Randy in his unique, nerd-to-nerd style. Although I encourage everyone (especially engineers) to see or read "The Last Lecture" (video here), the best tribute I can give to him is to include a few of Randy's insightful excerpts below for people trying to overcome the aforementioned limitations:
Like countless American nerds born in 1960, I spent part of my childhood dreaming of being Captain James T. Kirk… I seriously believe that I became a better teacher and colleague by watching Kirk run the Enterprise. Kirk was not the smartest guy on the ship. Mr. Spock, his first officer, was the always-logical intellect on board. Dr. McCoy had all the medical knowledge available to mankind in the 2260s. Scotty was the chief engineer, who had the technical know-how to keep the ship running… So what was Kirk's skill set? Why did he get to run the Enterprise?
The answer: there is this skill set called "leadership". I learned so much by watching this guy in action. He was the distilled essence of the dynamic manager, a guy who knew how to delegate, had the passion to inspire, and looked good in what he wore to work. He never professed to have skills greater than his subordinates. He acknowledged that they knew what they were doing in their domains. But he established the vision, the tone. He was in charge of morale.
Andy Van Dam, the school's [Brown University] legendary computer science professor, made me his teaching assistant. One day Andy took me for a walk. He put his arm around my shoulders and said, "Randy, it's a shame that people perceive you as being so arrogant, because it's going to limit what you're going to accomplish in life." Looking back, his wording was so perfect. He was actually saying, "Randy, you're being a jerk." But he said it in a way that made me open to his criticisms, to listening to my hero telling me something I needed to hear. There is an old expression, "a Dutch uncle", which refers to a person who gives you honest feedback. Few people bother doing that nowadays…
Delegate. As a professor, I learned early on that I could trust bright, nineteen-year-old students with the keys to my kingdom, and most of the time they were responsible and impressive.
I've tried hard to come up with mechanical ways to get people to listen to feedback. I was constantly helping my students develop their own feedback loops. It was not easy. Getting people to welcome feedback was the hardest thing I ever had to do as an educator. (It hasn't been easy in my personal life, either). When I taught my class at Carnegie Mellon, we'd do peer feedback every two weeks…which gave specific suggestions for improvement, such as "Let other people finish their sentences when they're talking." I told one student, "Out of fifty students in the class, your peers ranked you dead last. You are number fifty. You have a serious issue. They say you're not listening. You're hard to get along with. It's not going well." The student was shocked. (They're always shocked). He had had all of these rationalizations, and now here I was, giving him the hard data. And then I told him the truth about myself… "I'm a recovering jerk."
Over the years, improving group dynamics became a bit of an obsession for me. I'd give out a one-page handout I'd written titled, "Tips for Working Successfully in a Group." We'd go over it, line by line. Some students found my tips beneath them. They rolled their eyes. But the most self-aware students embraced my advice. Among my tips: Meet people properly, find things you have in common, try for the optimal meeting conditions, let everyone talk, check egos at the door, praise each other and phrase alternatives as questions.
There are many, many other great quotes in the book. In retrospect, the phenomenon that Randy describes is not limited to the field of engineering. It exists in any environment (but most apparent in team sports) where high performing individuals are pursuing a shared goal with teammates.
For instance, it took years of coaching (and losing) to get extraordinary professional basketball players Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Michael Jordan to exhibit the necessary teamwork to win their first championships. In "The Book of Basketball", the author, Bill Simmons, describes Michael Jordan's struggle:
For years and years, Jordan couldn't rein himself in. He cared about winning, but only on his terms—he also wanted to win scoring titles, drop 50 whenever he pleased and treat his teammates like the biggest bully in the prison block—which led Phil Jackson to adopt the triangle offense in a last-ditch effort to prevent Jordan from hogging the ball…
I believe building a technology company is essentially a team sport. And every wildly successful company I know is built around a core group of ridiculously smart engineering rock stars (you can read my post on hiring them here). When they can be successfully coached into working as part of a team, magic happens.
Thank you, Randy Pausch, for communicating this critical message so clearly.


text:
I had a chance to review the results of an interesting new global study of chief marketing officers (CMOs) by IBM, and I want to comment on some of its findings.
I had a chance to review the results of an interesting new global study of chief marketing officers (CMOs) by IBM, and I want to comment on some of its findings. Adding to the pressures facing the CMO today are new challenges in brand promotion and the growing impact of consumer sentiment expressed in several channels, including social media. The research found these to be the top two concerns in marketing and that 65 percent of organizations are not prepared to deal with them. My investigations lead me to agree with these findings.
Most of all, CMOs in 71 percent of organizations are unprepared for the current data explosion. Our own benchmark research on business analytics reached a similar conclusion, showing that organizations are still spending the majority of their time in preparing data instead of analyzing it. In a keynote at the recent IBM Information On-Demand conference, Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group, talked about "enterprise amnesia" and how companies are getting dumber, not smarter, with the proliferation of data. Our research over the last decade leads me to a more subtle view on this issue; in general organizations are taking steps forward in their management and use of information, but they are doing so inconsistently. We certainly find room for improvement in organizations worldwide.
As a long-time research analyst I have to admit I was pleased to see that IBM's CMO study identified market research as the most important source in 82 percent of organizations for influencing strategy decisions, followed by corporate strategy (81%), competitive benchmarking (80%) and customer analytics (74%). For a decade we have been doing market research on issues, buyers and technology to provide benchmarks that organizations can use to compare their efforts to those of their peers and industry. For example, our benchmark on marketing analytics found that only 21 percent of organizations are innovative in the use of analytics; the bulk of marketing organizations still rely on spreadsheets – and not coincidentally, more than half are not satisfied with their analytic processes.
In addition our recent research on customer analytics shows that dedicated technology can help companies generate and understand the right information in this critical area. Our research found that 89 percent of organizations want their analytic processes to be simpler and that critical metrics include customer satisfaction and external metrics – areas where the right tool can resolve issues. The CMO research found that 80 percent of organizations will use technology to deal with the ever larger volumes of data produced by social media, customer analytics, CRM and mobile applications. Our research into big data similarly found exploding volumes of data and the need for new applications for analytics and insights. Looking ahead, CMOs in the IBM study said the most important measures of marketing success will be ROI on marketing spend, the customer experience and conversion rates for new customers.
This research by IBM provides significant validation of our firm's independent and objective voice. I do not often comment on market research done by other firms since it is hard to validate their methodology and quality review. One indicator of whether quality controls are applied to market research is if the final report does not specify how many qualified respondents and organizations are included in the research compared to all those who participated. IBM interviewed marketing executives personally, so I doubt this is an issue here. Its survey provides some findings that any CMO should reflect upon. My own research relevant to CMOs covers other areas not addressed here, including demand generation, digital automation of inbound and outbound promotion of brands, and promotion of products and services across the Internet. Considering that IBM acquired Unica as I assessed to address some of this area, I was surprised not to see much on this marketing area of focus in the research, along with aspects of managing customer feedback across multiple channels including live and digital ones.
Despite these gaps, the IBM research has some thought-provoking data points on the pressures consumers and customers are exerting on CMOs. More than ever they must consider how to keep the public engaged and be timely in their organization's actions to promote brands, increase awareness and create opportunities for their company's products and services across multiple channels, including social media, as the volumes of data keep steadily increasing. All this – and the new methods for accessing information and giving feedback via smartphones and tablets – will keep CMOs on their toes for years to come.
Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer
Filed under: Business Analytics, Business Mobility, Business Performance Management (BPM), Cloud Computing, Customer Performance Management (CPM), Operational Performance Management (OPM), Sales Performance Management (SPM), Social Media Tagged: Big Data, Business Technology, Chief Marketing Officer, Customer Analytics, Demand Generation, Market Research, Social Media


text:
Denver, CO, October 14, 2008 –- Enspiria Solutions, a provider of consulting and systems integration services to the utility, cable and government sectors, announced that Gene Kindrachuk, an information technology and integration expert with 25 years of industry experience, and Diane Causey, a project manager with expertise in GIS and related technologies, have joined the Enspiria Solutions team.
"Despite the challenging economic times, the demand for our consulting and systems integration services continues to grow and we've responded to that need by hiring additional industry experts to join our team," said Chip Scott, President of Enspiria Solutions. "We are excited about the capabilities that Gene and Diane add to Enspiria's existing world-class organization, further enhancing our ability to provide real solutions to complex business problems while returning tangible benefits, managing risk for our clients, and exceeding their expectations."
As Principal Consultant, Kindrachuk brings to Enspiria a diverse portfolio of system design, development, integration, and implementation expertise with emphasis in work management, asset management and geographic information systems. Kindrachuk's most recent engagements include developing detailed functional requirements and supporting vendor selection for a work management/mobile workforce system in addition to supporting a utility initiative to develop a GIS connectivity implementation strategy and business case to integrate the client's GIS with a range of other utility systems.
Kindrachuk began his career in Edmonton, Canada, with Edmonton Telephones and then moved to the City of Edmonton where he was the GIS Project Manager. As a Solutions Architect at Convergent Group/SchlumbergerSema, Kindrachuk led a variety of consulting and systems integration projects providing data modeling and systems application architecture analysis and design expertise to a wide range of utilities throughout the United States and Canada. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Alberta.
As Project Manager, Causey brings management expertise in planning and implementation, business and systems analysis, quality control, and process improvement.
Causey most recently held positions at QAD, Inc. as Consulting Operations Analyst, and at Home Buyers Warranty as IT Project Coordinator and System Analyst. Throughout her career, Causey has developed management expertise with a focus on GIS and related technology applications for utilities and public sector organizations. Causey's background includes management positions with Convergent Group, Logica, and GE, and technical sales with Synercom Technology. She holds a Bachelor of Environmental Studies from the University of Waterloo.
About Enspiria® Solutions
Enspiria® Solutions provides a comprehensive range of consulting and implementation solutions aimed at improving the integration of operational, asset performance, customer service, and energy efficiency systems for the utility, government and cable sectors. Enspiria's goal is to help its clients ensure maximum return on their business and IT investments by effectively aligning proven business processes with sound technologies.
Enspiria Solutions is headquartered in Denver, Colorado and has regional offices throughout the United States and in Canada. Convergent Group Corporation and Enspiria Solutions Ltd. (Canada) are subsidiaries of Enspiria Solutions. For more information, please visit: www.enspiria.com.
Cindy Menon
Enspiria® Solutions
Phone: 303-520-2513


text:
Johns Hopkins engineers have devised innovative computer software that can sift through hundreds of genetic mutations and highlight the DNA changes that are most likely to promote cancer. The goal is to provide critical help to researchers who are poring over numerous newly discovered gene mutations, many of which are harmless or have no connection to cancer. According to its inventors, the new software will enable these scientists to focus more of their attention on the mutations most likely to trigger tumors.
A description of the method and details of a test using it on brain cancer DNA were published in the Aug. 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research.
The new process focuses on missense mutations, meaning protein sequences that each possess a single tiny variation from the normal pattern. A small percentage of these genetic errors can reduce the activity of proteins that usually suppress tumors or hyperactivate proteins that make it easier for tumors to grow, thereby allowing cancer to develop and spread. But finding these genetic offenders can be difficult.
"It's very expensive and time-consuming to test a huge number of gene mutations, trying to find the few that have a solid link to cancer," says Rachel Karchin, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering who supervised the development of the computational sorting approach. "Our new screening system should dramatically speed up efforts to identify genetic cancer risk factors and help find new targets for cancer-fighting medications."
The new computational method is called CHASM, short for Cancer-specific High-throughput Annotation of Somatic Mutations.
Developing this system required a partnership of researchers from diverse disciplines. Karchin and doctoral student Hannah Carter drew on their skills as members of the university's Institute for Computational Medicine, which uses powerful information management and computing technologies to address important health problems, and collaborated with leading Johns Hopkins cancer and biostatistics experts from the university's School of Medicine, its Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.
The team first narrowed the field of about 600 potential brain cancer culprits using a computational method that would sort these mutations into "drivers" and "passengers." Driver mutations are those that initiate or promote the growth of tumors. Passenger mutations are those that are present when a tumor forms but appear to play no role in its formation or growth. In other words, the passenger mutations are only along for the ride.
To prepare for the sorting, the researchers used a machine-learning technique in which about 50 characteristics or properties associated with cancer-causing mutations were given numerical values and programmed into the system. Karchin and Carter then employed a math technique called a Random Forest classifier to help separate and rank the drivers and the passengers. In this step, 500 computational "decision trees" considered each mutation to decide whether it possessed the key characteristics associated with promoting cancer. Eventually, each "tree" cast a vote: Was the gene a driver or a passenger?
"It's a little like the children's game of 'Guess Who,' where you ask a series of yes or no questions to eliminate certain people until you narrow it down to a few remaining suspects," says Carter, who earned her undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Louisville and served as lead author of the Cancer Research paper. "In this case, the decision trees asked questions to figure out which mutations were most likely to be implicated in cancer."
The election results — such as how many driver votes a mutation received — were used to produce a ranking. The genetic errors that collected the most driver votes wound up at the top of the list. The ones with the most passenger votes were placed near the bottom. With a list like this in hand, the software developers say, cancer researchers can direct more of their time and energy to the mutations at the top of the rankings.
Karchin and Carter plan to post their system on the Web and will allow researchers worldwide to use it freely to prioritize their studies. Because different genetic characteristics are associated with different types of cancers, they say the method can easily be adapted to rank the mutations that may be linked to different forms of the disease, such as breast cancer or lung cancer.
In addition to Karchin and Carter, the Johns Hopkins co-authors of the Cancer Research paper were Sining Chen, Leyla Isik, Svitlana Tyekucheva, Victor E. Velculescu, Kenneth W. Kinzler and Bert Vogelstein.
Funding for the research was provided by the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research and the National Institutes of Health.
No entries found


text:
Delta Stewardship Council Adopts Plan Amidst Massive Opposition
By Dan Bacher | May 18, 2013 | In spite of overwhelming opposition from environmentalists, fishermen, family farmers, elected offici...
By Dan Bacher | May 18, 2013 |
spite of overwhelming opposition from environmentalists, fishermen,
family farmers, elected officials and the majority of Californians, the
Delta Stewardship Council (DSC) on Thursday, May 16 unanimously adopted
what it described as a "comprehensive management plan" for the Delta.
Council also certified the final Programmatic Environmental Impact
Report (PEIR), despite opposition to the report from every single person
who spoke during the public comment period, ranging from Delta farmers
to a representative of the Metropolitan Water District. In addition, the
Council adopted regulations that will implement the policies of the
Delta Plan.
law told us to develop a legally enforceable Delta Plan that will guide
state and local agency actions on water use and the Delta environment,"
said Delta Stewardship Council Chair Phil Isenberg, who previously
served as Chair of the privately funded Marine Life Protection Act
(MLPA) Initiative Blue Ribbon Task Force to create so-called "marine
protected areas" on the Central Coast, as well as Chair of Arnold
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, which recommended
the construction of a peripheral canal or tunnels.
Wendy Stokes, Chair of Restore the Delta, speaking at the protest at the Delta Stewardship Council meeting in West Sacramento on May 16. Photo by Dan Bacher. |
will now be able to focus on implementing the policies and
recommendations that will help achieve the State's coequal goals of
providing a more reliable water supply for California and protecting,
restoring, and enhancing the Delta ecosystem while protecting the unique
values of the Delta as an evolving place," Isenberg claimed.
press release from the DSC revealed how the Delta Plan is intimately
tied to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan to build the peripheral tunnels.
Delta Plan is California's plan for the Delta and is intended to be a
single enforceable blueprint that requires and encourages sustainable
actions now, and lays a strong foundation for future projects and
programs that will improve statewide water supply reliability, provide a
vibrant and healthy ecosystem, and preserve, protect and enhance the
rural, agricultural and recreational characteristics of the Delta. The
Plan will eventually include the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) when
the BDCP is completed and successfully permitted," the release stated.
advocates, who held a protest featuring the "Death of the Delta" coffin
at the Radisson Hotel in West Sacramento before the meeting, disagreed
strongly with Isenberg's contention that the plan would protect, restore
and enhancing the Delta ecosystem "while protecting the unique values
of the Delta as an evolving place." They said the flawed plan would
"drain the Delta and doom salmon and other Pacific fisheries."
Delta plan perpetuates unsustainable status quo
Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection
Alliance, began his presentation at both the rally and in the public
comment period at the meeting by stating, "Good morning, welcome to the
resumption of California's water wars."
Delta Plan fails to comply with the law, and perpetuates an
unsustainable status quo that enriches a few powerful water brokers at
the expense of reliable water supplies and healthy fisheries," said
Jennings. "It is a classic shell game to benefit special interests and,
if implemented, would represent a death sentence for one of the world's
great estuaries."
Council has squandered a marvelous and unique opportunity," emphasized
Jennings. "Because the Council failed to identify and analyze the root
causes of California's water crisis – over-appropriation, unreasonable
use, failure to balance the public trust – the Delta Plan and EIR
largely recommends that agencies should continue to do the same things
that created the crisis in the first place. The Plan and EIR ignore
history and are predicated on an artificial reality. They're little more
than omelets of half-truth and distortion to justify predetermined
to the failed Cal-Fed process designed to meet the "co-equal goals" of
water supply and ecosystem restoration, Jennings said, "Instead of
vision, we have a warmed over CalFed Lite!"
of perpetuating the destructive water export policies, the Delta Plan
should be focused on developing regional water solutions that reduce
reliance on the Delta," said Wendy Stokes, a Delta farmer and chair of
Restore the Delta. "The Delta Stewardship Council has abandoned the path
of sustainable water policies to help endorse the Peripheral Tunnels.
Agriculture will not be able to afford this expensive water. The
majority of the $60 billion cost will be paid by the families of
Southern California through their higher water bills."
Water "reliability" – code for more water
stated purpose of the Delta Plan is to provide water 'reliability' for
Southern California users. 'Reliability,' in this case, is code for more
water," said Nick Di Croce, co-facilitator of the California
Environmental Water Caucus, and board member of the California Water
Impact Network. "The delta cannot be saved, and its ecological crisis
cannot be addressed, by taking out more water. The real crisis for the
delta is that state and federal agencies have committed to deliver five
times more water than is available; these unrealistic commitments need
to be revised."
City Councilmember Kathy Miller, representing the Delta Coalition,
blasted the Delta Stewardship Council and the Brown Administration for
failing to conduct an analysis to determine how much water is available
for export.
this water availability analysis is done, there is no way to know how
much water is available for export," she said. "The Delta Plan
nevertheless endorses building huge Peripheral Tunnels. This places the
cart before the horse."
also criticized the Council for not addressing the dire economic
impacts of the tunnels on the city of Stockton, a community where the
population of people living in poverty has risen 56 percent in the past
decade. "We need an open hand, not a closed fist," she said. "We need
policies that enhance jobs creation and capital investment."
The Delta plan's true purpose: get around biological opinions
tunnel opponents said the true purpose of the Delta Plan is to get
around the court "biological opinions" that restrict water exports in
order to protect Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley
steelhead, Delta smelt, green sturgeon and the southern resident
population of killer whales (orcas), which forage on Sacramento River
Chinook salmon, from extinction.
courts have found that water exporters have threatened the very
survival of several fish species. Now, instead of reducing water
exports, the Delta Plan endorses simply moving the point of export to a
different spot in the Delta," said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive
director of Restore the Delta.
scientists have found that the removal of more Delta flows through the
Peripheral Tunnels would hasten the extinction of Sacramento River
winter Chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt and other fish
species. "Yet, that is what the Delta Plan endorses," said Jennings.
concluded, "We have urged the Council to analyze and incorporate the
findings of the legislatively mandated flow reports by the Water Board
and Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Delta Protection
Commission's Economic Sustainability Plan. Following an extensive
proceeding involving agencies, academia and non-governmental
organizations, the Water Board concluded that a substantial increase in
Delta outflow and a return to a more natural hydrograph were necessary
to protect public trust resources. The Delta Plan EIR didn't even
consider that report as a major source of information."
Pool, Secretary of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, criticized the
failure of the plan to address the recovery needs of Central Valley
salmon cannot be restored with only habitat changes in the Delta," said
Pool. "There is a large body of science including the state and federal
agencies that recognize that only a combination of both upriver habitat
and Delta actions can restore the salmon populations. Delta operations,
specifically the pumps in the South Delta, with their strong impact on
upstream water movements and reservoir operations, severely impact the
survival of juvenile salmon above the Delta. The Delta Plan fails to
address these issues."
Salad Bowl Science
Suard, owner of Snug Harbor Resorts in Walnut Grove on the Delta,
summed up the lack of credible science in the Delta Plan and the EIR
when she described it as "Salad Bowl Science," where the plan officials
"pick and choose" the science to justify their pre-determined goals.
"Don't pass this plan," Suard urged the Council. "It will destroy the Delta and everything in it."
her written comments to the Council, Carolee Krieger, President of the
California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), shredded the Final Delta Plan.
find the Final Delta Plan utterly deficient," said Krieger. "It is
nothing more than a continuation of the policy that has destroyed the
largest estuary on the west coast of the continental United States and
instigated the state's water wars. As such, it is not a solution to our
water crisis, but a disastrous adherence to the status quo."
speaks to special interests, not the public interest," she stated. "It
has been an unconscionable waste of taxpayer money, in that it
sedulously avoids any course of action that would lead to the pragmatic
and equitable distribution of our water while simultaneously protecting
the Delta."
The pleas of Suard, Krieger and everybody who spoke against the plan and EIR's adoption fell on deaf ears.
was the case in the parallel Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA)
Initiative, Delta Vision and Bay Delta Conservation Plan "collaborative"
processes, the goal was to present a façade of an open and transparent
process where the "input" of the "stakeholders" was considered when the
outcome of the process, the privatization of the public trust, was
predetermined by state officials and corporate interests.
Council refused to conduct necessary analyses:
the Delta, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, the
Environmental Water Caucus and the Delta Coalition said they had
implored the Council to undertake a series of necessary analyses because
the responsible agencies have refused to conduct them. These include:
A water availability analysis essential for addressing over
appropriation and separating real water from paper water and the legal
rights to it.
• A benefit/cost analysis indispensable for maximizing the use of limited resources for the greatest good for all Californians.
A public trust analysis crucial for ensuring that the common property
rights of all Californian's are protected and balanced against those of
special interests.
• A beneficial use assessment addressing the extent that consumptive water is wasted and unreasonably used.
For more information about the campaign to stop the peripheral tunnels, go to: http://www.restorethedelta.org


text:
Anna Baltzer, who I have mentioned on Israellycool before, is not your typical BDSHole, for the sole reason that she's aesthetically pleasing.
And while she looks good in makeup, important parts of her bio are apparently made up.
Lee Kaplan explains (while acknowledging her physical beauty in the first sentence):
Anna Baltzer, a pretty lady who heads the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (USCEIO) in Washington, DC., has developed a platform for herself going about the world lecturing as a Jew who once supported the State of Israel, but who had an epiphany and discovered that Israel and "Zionists" were exploiting and abusing the Palestinian people. The USCEIO is, in fact, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) renamed for the purpose of lobbying Congress in Washington. It was created by Huwaida Arraf, one of the co-founders of the ISM who also serves on the group's steering committee.
Placing Anna Baltzer as the titular head of the Campaign was intended to convince both Jews and non-Jews that opposition to Israel's existence is fine because even Jews such as her believe in the necessity of destroying the Jewish state, especially through boycotts and divestment. Anna Baltzer is a modern day Tokyo Rose for the ISM against Israel: she speaks at anti-Israel events and promotes boycott and divestment campaigns against Israel, in support of terrorist groups such as Hamas in its plans to destroy Israel any way it can. She has participated or helped at demonstations staged by Code Pink, Global Exchange, the Gaza Flotilla, Viva Palestina and other anti-Israel groups that make up the ISM.
USCEIO has been frantically sending out fundraising email blasts and announcing on its website that Ms. Baltzer will appear in a debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be presented by the distinguished Oxford Union in England on January 31st. According to the Oxford Union's website, "The Union is the world's most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. It has been established for 189 years, aiming to promote debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe."
The Oxford Union has delivered these debates by distinguished academic, religious and national leaders from ex-President Ronald Reagan to the Dali Lama. The purpose of the debates is the furtherance of education and knowledge. The subject of this debate will be: "This House Believes That Israel is a Force for Good in the Middle East."
The announcement of the three debaters for the anti-Israel point of view, however, disturbingly advertises propagandists and fabulists such as Ilan Pappe, Ghada Karmi and most importantly, Anna Baltzer, who is billed on the Oxford Union's website as head of the USCEIO and who will apparently speak in opposition to Israel's right to exist.
Ilan Pappe has already been proven to be bankrupt as a scholar after it was proven in court he was involved in fabricating a phony massacre by Israeli forces of the Arab village of Tantura in 1948. In a defamation and libel lawsuit brought by veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade in Israel, Pappe's PhD student under his advice admitted on the witness stand that he fabricated the entire massacre with his supervisor's knowledge and that he was paid $6,000 by the PLO to do so.
The other speaker alongside Anna Baltzer will be Ghada Kharmi, a Palestinian academic at the University of Exeter, Britain, and the author of Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine. Her writings are merely polemics devoid of any history or facts with which to back them up. She claims, incredibly, for example, that Israel has never made a peace offer to the Palestinians, along with standard slanderous Palestinian propaganda and claims that masquerade as facts — such as that Israel violates "international law" by the building of settlements, which are completely legal per UN Resolution 242, and the stopping of the Gaza Flotillas that was completely legal by international maritime law. Karmi encourages war by proxy, such as writing in support of the British boycott of Israeli academics and Israeli universities.
What is Karmi's intellectual solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she also claims is the reason for al Qaeda? She says Israel must become one state called Palestine; must withdraw to the 1949 borders; must give the Palestinians half of Jerusalem, and then allow seven million Palestinians to move inside Israel, creating a flood of Muslims that would demographically overwhelm the current Jewish population there. As for terrorism, she glosses over it as the desperate actions of some extremists who are fighting "colonialism." Her writings hardly reflect anything in the way of solid research or intellectual balance.
Stephen Stotsky of CAMERA.org has written an excellent exposé of Baltzer's lies about Israel. However, new information has arisen about Baltzer's background and history as a Jew.
In her Wikipedia entry and various speeches she has presented, mostly to Christian churches, Ms. Baltzer has claimed she comes from a Jewish family in which her grandparents were Holocaust survivors; that she was a Fulbright Scholar from Columbia University, and that at first she was pro-Israel. After touring with Fulbright in 2003 in Turkey, she alleges she visited "Palestine," Syria and Iran and met "friends" who "educated" her on the suffering of the Palestinians at Israeli hands, so that today she is a dedicated anti-Zionist. She included a cry at the end of an interview recorded in Ireland in 2010 on an anti-Israel radio station that it is her hope "Inshallah, to one day bring down Zionism" — meaning to end the Jewish state.
More recently, Anna Baltzer, back in the United States, lent her name and prestige to an attempt by the Students for Justice in Palestine at UC San Diego to prompt the entire student body association there to boycott and divest from Israel. The appearance, presumably intended to be a springboard to spread the boycott and divestment to other campuses, failed. While the event was being debated at UC SAN Diego, Anna Baltzer made a video, which appeared on You Tube, in support of boycotts and divestments from Israel, and directed to the anti-Israel campaign at the UC Campus. In this video, she claimed that she went on a Birthright tour — a program that provides free trips to Israel for Jewish college students and recent graduates — in the year 2000 as an enthusiastic pro-Zionist Jewish girl. She claims that after finishing the tour, she researched the suffering of the Palestinians and became a supporter of the anti-Israel movement.
There is just one problem with this scenario: According to my research, Anna Baltzer never went on a Birthright tour of Israel in the year 2000 or any other time. Inquiries to the New York and Israel offices to ascertain if she went with Birthright, revealed absolutely no record of any Anna Baltzer attending the program ever, let alone in year 2000. In short, it seems that Anna Baltzer lied about her participation in Birthright to convey the false impression that she was once a loyal Jew who supported the Jewish homeland but had discovered the justification for Palestinians' goals to overthrow Israel.
Further, after researching Ms. Baltzer's claims of being a Fulbright Scholar from Columbia in 2003, it has been determined from both Columbia's and the Fulbright websites, as well as Fulbright officials, that Anna Baltzer was never a Fulbright scholar either. A list of Fulbright Scholars at the Fulbright website contains the names of all Fulbright scholars from the United States and abroad from the late 90's to the present. Ms. Baltzer's name is nowhere to be found.
Anna Baltzer's claims about her personal and academic background should come as no surprise: it has gained her entrée to speaking engagements at colleges across the US and abroad where she spreads lies against Israel. At her presentation at St. Joseph the Worker's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California in 2007, Anna Baltzer recounted a tale of a pregnant Palestinian mother who, in an emergency, was taken by ambulance, but forbidden to pass a checkpoint manned by Israeli soldiers, who had told her that her ambulance could not pass through the checkpoint until 7 am, although she had arrived in an a Code 3 state at 6:30 am. Baltzer claimed — drawing gasps from the audience — that due to this delay, the woman miscarried twin fetuses. In an implicit comparison of Israeli soldiers to Nazis, she alleged the IDF soldiers kept telling the poor woman that they "were just following orders" — a veiled reference to the Nazis' excuses, at the Nuremberg trials after the World War II, for their role in the death camps. There was no mention that the checkpoints had been erected in the first place to stop what had been incessant terrorist attacks and suicide bombings.
When asked the name of the woman who had miscarried, the location of the checkpoint, the time of day, the names of reliable witnesses and the outcome of any military investigation of such cruelty, she said that she did not know, that she had not been there. She even said she was surprised to hear that the Israeli army would have received a formal complaint if such an event had actually occurred. Pressed still further about the authenticity of her tale, in a book she was selling that supposedly contained her personal eyewitness accounts of Israeli atrocities against Arabs, Baltzer admitted she did not know the details because the story had been told to her second hand by Lamis Deek, a well-known Arab propagandist from the ISM. In the 2010 radio interview in Ireland, however, Anna Baltzer changed the story and said, after recounting the same tale, that she interviewed the poor Arab woman who had lost the two babies — again with no names, dates or places.
The ISM with which Baltzer works regularly uses the imagery of Holocaust survivors who see the need to end the Jewish state. Hedy Epstein, in her eighties, is paraded around by the ISM at their boycott and divestment events in California colleges. Epstein also appeared on the ISM Flotilla Boats to Gaza, and has always been presented as a "Holocaust survivor" who is against Israel. Research has shown that as a child Ms. Epstein spent the war in the safety of England, and was never in a concentration camp or even on the European continent. Rather, in her youth, Ms. Epstein was party to several pro-Soviet communist movements, whose Stalinist leanings were anti-Zionist, and she even supported Pol Pot's regime of mass murder.
Using the same "Holocaust survivor" imagery, Baltzer claims she is the descendant of Holocaust survivors who instilled in her a need to support Palestinian aims against Israeli persecution. After researching her grandparents through the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel, as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, to see if her family were actually in concentration camps, nothing could be found. This, too, appears to be a fabrication by Baltzer, or at best an embellishment, like Hedy Epstein's, of being a Holocaust survivor.
The Oxford Union's President was distressed to learn these facts about Ms. Baltzer's academic fraud and said she would share such information with the faculty advisers with the possible outcome of her being removed from the debate.
An educational debate, especially at a university as august as Oxford, should feature academics or speakers who are genuine, not imposters or fakes planted to distort facts and slander and demonize a fellow democracy. Anna Baltzer seems to be neither a Fulbright scholar, not a descendant of Holocaust survivors nor an alumna of the Birthright program. She appears to be just a fraud and a fabulist. So why is Oxford having her speak?
So far, Baltzer has not responded on Twitter to these allegations.
Update: Elder of Ziyon notes:
I am told that Baltzer changed her name; she did receive the Fulbright under the name Anna J. Piller. See this article that says her real name is Baltzer and that a 2006 lecture of hers was under the name Piller.


text:
I have first domain name registered with some domain name registrar, for which I don't have web hosting account, only dns hosting.
I have second domain name registered with godaddy, with web hosting account.
I want to redirect the first domain name to the second one so that when the user types the first domain name, what is displayed is the contents of the second domain name, but URL displays first domain name. So for example if I type "firstdomain.com/smth/index.html" it will show me contents of "seconddomain.com/smth/index.html", but URL bar will show "firstdomain.com/smth/index.html".
I tried to do this by setting CNAME on the first domain like this "firstdomain.com -> seconddomain.com", but it seems that it is impossible to set a CNAME record that starts with the first domain name, and points to the second. You can only set up CNAME records that start with subdomains of the first domain. So I can make "www.firstname.com -> seconddomain.com" but not "firstdomain.com -> seconddomain.com". How can I solve this problem?
And after I set up the CNAME for the first domain, what do I need to change in my godaddy account so that everything works as intended? Do I need to change something in the dns records for the second domain as well?


text:
The all-new Volvo V40 - Safety & Support:
The most IntelliSafe car in the segment
Adding several new high-tech features to a full deck of safety and support systems from larger models makes the all-new Volvo V40 the most intelligent and safe car in the segment.
New features in all V40 versions, including the Cross Country and R-Design variants, comprise a world-first Pedestrian Airbag Technology, Lane Keeping Aid with haptic auto steering, an ingenious Park Assist Pilot, automatic Road Sign Information, Active High Beam and a Cross Traffic Alert radar system at the rear.
The all-new V40 also features the groundbreaking Pedestrian Detection with full auto brake - as well as the City Safety further developed low-speed collision avoidance system which now operates at speeds up to 50 km/h.
Park Assist Pilot - making parallel parking easy
A study by global research institute TNS reveals that one-third of European drivers have problems with parallel parking. In a similar study by UK insurer elephant.co.uk, around two-thirds of interviewed drivers stated that they felt uncomfortable in parallel parking situations.
The new Park Assist Pilot makes parallel parking easy and precise by taking over and operating the steering wheel while the driver handles the gearbox and controls the car's speed.
The parking manoeuvre is based on front, rear and side-facing ultrasonic sensors.
When the driver activates the Park Assist Pilot the sensors start to scan the side of the car. When a parking slot measuring a minimum of 1.2 times the car's length is detected, the driver is notified by an audible signal and advised to stop via a message in the instrument cluster.
The display guides the driver step by step via texts and animations in the instrument cluster until the car is correctly parked. Although the driver initially engages reverse gear and continues to control the speed of the car, steering is taken over by the Park Assist Pilot. When parking is completed the driver is notified by an audible signal and a text message.
The all-new Volvo V40 can also be equipped with a rear park assist camera and park assist sensors front and rear.
Lane Keeping Aid - active help to stay on course
Studies show that many accidents take place in uncritical traffic situations and good weather conditions due to driver distraction, drowsiness or illness. Approximately 30 percent of all accidents in Volvo Cars' statistical accident database are accidents with an initial road departure. About 75 percent of these occur on roads with speed limits of 70 km/h or more.
The new Lane Keeping Aid in the V40 helps the driver stay in the intended lane. This feature applies extra steering torque to the steering column when the car gets close to a lane marking and is about to leave the lane. The system is active at speeds between 65 km/h and 200 km/h.
The forward-looking camera monitors the left and right lane markings. Lane Keeping Aid registers the car's progress between the lane markings and takes action if the driver shows signs of unintentionally drifting out of the lane.
As a first step Lane Keeping Aid applies gentle steering wheel torque to help the driver steer back onto the intended course. If the car leaves the lane, the technology generates a distinctive warning through a haptic vibration in the steering wheel.
Enhanced Blind Spot Information System - for better visibility
The V40 is the first Volvo to offer the enhanced Blind Sport Information System (BLIS), which is radar-based. The technology can now also monitor and alert the driver to rapidly approaching vehicles up to 70 m behind the car. Of course it still informs the driver about vehicles in the blind spots on both sides of the car.
BLIS helps the driver avoid potentially dangerous lane-changing manoeuvres.
The enhanced BLIS is based on radar sensors located in the rear corners of the car, behind the bumper cover. The radars continuously scan the area behind and alongside the vehicle.
Warnings are displayed in LED indicators located in each A-pillar. A steadily glowing LED indicates when the radars cover a vehicle in the zone. The second warning level - LED flashing - occurs if the driver uses the turn indicator when the first alert is active.
Cross Traffic Alert - covering your back
Cross Traffic Alert uses the radar sensors at the rear end of the car to alert the driver to crossing traffic from the sides when reversing out of a parking space. This is especially helpful in tight and crowded areas where the side view might be limited due to infrastructure, vegetation or other parked cars.
The function warns of traffic up to 30 metres from the car. Smaller objects like bicycles and pedestrians may also be detected, but not always and only at a shorter distance. The alert, which remains active as long as the target is present in the zone, is delivered to the driver as an audible signal and a warning in the centre screen.
Road Sign Information - an extra "eye" on the traffic environment
High speed is a contributory cause behind a significant part of all fatal road accidents. European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO) studies show that speed is a contributing factor in 30 percent of all fatal accidents. A Swedish Road Administration research shows that between 100 and 150 lives would be able to be saved on Sweden's roads every year if drivers kept to the speed limits.
Road Sign Information supports the driver by displaying road signs in the instrument display. The forward-looking camera can detect speed limit signs as well as "no overtaking" signs. The road sign icon is shown until another sign is detected.
Road Sign Information can be combined with the Speed Alert function, which provides the driver with a visual warning in the speedometer if the speed limit is exceeded.
Active High Beam - more relaxed driving in the dark
The new Active High Beam technology in the Volvo V40 helps the driver utilise high beam more efficiently. It also offers automatic switching between high and low beam at the right moment.
The technology uses a forward facing camera together with sophisticated image processing to offer the driver the best possible visibility at night.
The camera monitors other vehicles and their headlamps and tail lamps. Advanced image processing software analyses this data and provides information about the position and direction of other vehicles. The calculation serves as the basis for automatic switching between low and high beam.
The all-new V40 can be equipped with Active Bending Lights - swivelling headlamps that follow the sweeps and bends of the road.
Visibility in poor conditions is also enhanced with the option of an electrically heated windscreen and a rain sensor, which automatically starts and regulates the wipers when it rains.
Adaptive Cruise Control & Distance Alert - keeping the distance
The all-new Volvo V40 can be equipped with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), which promotes comfortable driving by using radar to automatically maintain a set time gap to the car in front.
The driver sets the desired maximum speed and chooses a time interval to the vehicle in front. When the radar sensor detects a slower vehicle, the car's speed is automatically adapted to match the vehicle in front.
The Queue Assist function on cars with automatic gearbox maintains the set gap all the way down to standstill, making this comfort-enhancing system extremely useful even in slow-moving queues with repeated starting and stopping.
Distance Alert is a feature that helps the driver keep a safe distance to the vehicle in front. He or she chooses between five different time gaps via buttons on the steering wheel. The selected gap is shown in the speedometer display. A light in the head-up display informs the driver if the gap to the car in front becomes too short.
Pedestrian Detection - unique in this class
Pedestrian accidents occur every day in our increasingly intensive traffic environments. In Europe, 14 percent of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians. The corresponding figure for the USA is 12 percent and in China the proportion is over 25 percent.
Pedestrian Detection with full auto brake is a technology that can detect if a pedestrian steps out into the road in front of the car. If the driver does not respond in time, the car can warn and automatically activate the brakes. No other car in this class features a similar technology.
Pedestrian Detection with full auto brake consists of a radar unit integrated into the car's grille, a camera fitted in front of the interior rear-view mirror, and a central control unit. The radar's task is to detect a pedestrian or vehicle in front of the car and to determine the distance to it. The camera determines what type of object it is.
Thanks to the dual-mode radar's wide field of vision, pedestrians about to step into the roadway can also be detected early on. The innovative technology is programmed to trace a pedestrian's pattern of movement and also to calculate whether he or she is likely to step into the road in front of the car. The system can detect pedestrians who are 80 cm tall or taller.
In an emergency situation the driver first receives an audible warning combined with a flashing light in the windscreen's head-up display. If the driver does not react to the warning and a collision is imminent, full braking power is automatically applied.
Pedestrian Detection with full auto brake can avoid a collision with a pedestrian at speeds up to 35 km/h if the driver does not react in time. At higher speeds, the focus is on reducing the car's speed as much as possible prior to impact.
Statistics reveal that the car's speed has considerable importance for the outcome of the collision. A lower speed of impact means that the risk of serious injury is significantly reduced.
Pedestrian Airbag Technology - a world first
In order to mitigate the consequences if a collision with a pedestrian is unavoidable, the Volvo V40 features newly developed Pedestrian Airbag Technology, a world first. It works like this:
Sensors in the front bumper register the physical contact between the car and the pedestrian. The rear end of the bonnet is released and at the same time elevated by the deploying airbag.
The inflated airbag covers the area under the raised bonnet plus approximately one third of the windscreen area and the lower part of the A-pillar.
The raised bonnet and airbag will help reduce the severity of pedestrian injuries.
Collision Warning and auto brake - with full braking power
Up to 90 percent of all road accidents are caused by distraction. Half of all drivers hitting another vehicle from behind do not brake at all prior to the collision.
Pedestrian Detection with Full Auto Brake is a further development of the Collision Warning with Auto Brake technology already introduced by Volvo Car Corporation. The all-new V40 can also detect, alert and automatically brake if the car risks colliding with another vehicle in front.
The aim of the initial warning is to alert the driver so that he or she can brake or avoid the danger. If the driver does not react in time to the warning, the car automatically activates full braking power.
With automatic braking, the collision can be avoided if the speed difference between the two vehicles is up to 35 km/h.
Collision Warning and auto brake was considered the best auto braking system in the world in a test by German organisation ADAC in 2011. In the all-new V40, auto brake performance at higher speeds has been improved compared to previous versions.
City Safety - now active up to 50 km/h
Rear-end impacts are common in dense city traffic and when driving in traffic queues. About 75 percent of these collisions occur at speeds below 30 km/h and in 50 percent of cases, the driver has not braked at all prior to the collision.
In 2011, the benefits of the City Safety technology were documented in another IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) report quoting a reduction of the collision frequency by up to 22 percent.
Insurance claims involving the Volvo XC60 show that City Safety reduces the cost of personal injury claims by 51 percent - while vehicle repair costs were lowered by more than 20 percent.
The all-new V40 is the first Volvo that features an upgraded City Safety system. This system is now active at speeds up to 50 km/h (previously 30 km/h).
City Safety keeps an eye on traffic in front with the help of a laser sensor that is integrated into the top of the windscreen at the height of the rear-view mirror.
The car automatically brakes if the driver fails to react in time when the vehicle in front slows down or stops - or if the car is approaching a stationary vehicle too fast.
The collision can be avoided if the relative speed difference between the two vehicles is below 15 km/h. If the speed difference is between 15 and 50 km/h, the speed of impact is reduced to minimise the effects of the collision.
A study by Swedish insurance company Volvia shows that Volvo cars equipped with City Safety are involved in approximately 20 percent fewer rear-end accidents than cars without auto brake.
Driver Alert Control - detecting and warning tired drivers
Studies by German insurance organisation GDV show that one out of four accidents on the Autobahn is caused by driver fatigue. Swedish Road Administration accident data indicate that tired drivers are causing up to 30 percent of all accidents.
Driver Alert Control is designed to detect and warn tired drivers. The system can also cover other situations where the driver is distracted.
Driver Alert Control consists of a camera, a number of sensors and a control unit. The camera continuously measures the distance between the car and the road lane markings. The sensors register the car's movements. The control unit stores the information and calculates whether the driver risks losing control of the vehicle.
If the risk is assessed as high, the driver is alerted via an audible signal. A text message appears in the car's information display, displaying a coffee cup symbol to advise him or her to take a break.
Full set of crash safety features - including new knee airbag
The all-new Volvo V40 also features world-class crash safety including a safety cage with effective deformation zones and various grades of high-strength steel.
Safety belt pre-tensioners are standard in the front and outer rear seats and the front seats are equipped with whiplash protection (WHIPS) to help prevent neck injuries. Both the driver and front seat passenger seat have dual stage airbags. There are also side airbags integrated in the front seat backrests.
The driver's side is also fitted with a new knee airbag. It is installed in the dashboard above the pedals and deployed together with the other airbags in the event of a frontal collision.
The Roll Over Protection System includes a robust body structure, seat pre-tensioners and Inflatable Curtains. The Inflatable Curtains cover both sides, from the A-pillar to the C-pillar, and deploy in frontal offset, side or rollover accident situations.
A closing velocity sensor collects information and interprets pre-crash data in order to prepare the restraint systems - belts and airbags - for the expected crash violence in low and mid-severe frontal accidents.
ISOFIX attachments are standard and Volvo Car Corporation offers thoroughly tested child seats that cover ages from newborn up to 10 years.
Personal Car Communicator
The V40 is available with a Personal Car Communicator remote that enables keyless drive. The remote can both transmit and receive signals, providing the driver with locking and alarm information. The positions of the driver's seat and the door mirrors are stored in the memory when the car is locked.
Thomas Broberg, Senior Safety Advisor Volvo Car Corporation:
"The all-new V40, the most compact car in our V-range, has class-leading safety. It is also packed with more intelligent support systems than any previous Volvo. Yet another important step toward our vision that nobody should die or suffer serious injuries in a new Volvo car by the year 2020."
"Volvo is leading the development of spearhead technology that helps the driver avoid collisions. All the features are designed around the driver, helping him or her to stay alert and well informed to avoid collisions and dangerous situations. The all-new V40 is the first car in our model range with technology that actively helps the driver steer clear of danger."
"The safety systems are intelligent and work together to make driving more pleasant and safe. They are designed to warn about threats. If necessary, they can also step in and intervene in critical situations. And, in some situations where the collision is unavoidable, there are safety features to help mitigate the consequences. However, this does not mean that these sophisticated systems take over the driving. Their main task is to assist the driver, thereby making the driving experience more comfortable and less complicated."