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Shopping for the best auto loans? Whether you are looking for the best car loan rates for a new or used vehicle,
or you want to refinance an auto loan, we can help. Today's auto loan rates are displayed in our helpful car loan calculator.
Get the lowest rate when you compare rates from multiple lenders, even if your credit isn't perfect.
With a lower interest rate,
you'll save money and pay off your car loan faster. It pays to shop for the best car loan rate! *
The single most important thing you can do to save money on an auto loan is to shop for the best auto loan rate before you set foot
in a dealership. By knowing what kind of rate you qualify for before you try to buy a vehicle, you accomplish three things:
- You'll know what kind of car payment you can qualify for
- You can focus your negotiations with the dealer on the vehicle price rather than on the financing
- You won't end up getting stuck in a higher cost loan than you can qualify for
As you shop around for financing on a new or used vehicle, keep in mind the following factors that will affect your payment:
Length of loan:
Many buyers are opting for car loans that are five years or longer. Experian notes that in the last quarter of 2012,
the average car loan length was 65 months. That's almost five and a half years! The advantage of a longer car loan
is that your payments will be lower. The disadvantage is that you may be "upside down," – you owe more than the vehicle
is worth – for a longer period of time.
A larger down payment will reduce the amount you borrow and may make it easier to qualify for a better car loan rate.
If you haven't saved much for a down payment, you may be able to sell your current vehicle and use that money toward the
down payment, or trade in your current vehicle to reduce the price of the car or truck you are buying. But if you are short
on cash, don't panic. Not all lenders will require a down payment.
Credit score:
Your credit score will be used to help determine the interest rate you'll pay. But just because you have less than perfect credit,
that doesn't mean you can't get a decent rate. The credit score that an auto lender uses may be somewhat different than the score
you see if you get your own credit so don't get too hung on up the number.
Refinance Auto Loans
Is your current auto loan rate higher than the rates you see in the loan rate comparison table above? If so, you may want to refinance
your car loan. If you can get a lower rate, you'll save money and you may be able to pay off your loan faster, too. Another option is
to extend your loan term to make your payments more affordable. It's easy. Just choose refinance from the options above and apply to
see if you qualify for an auto loan refinance.
Bad Credit Auto Loans
If you have credit problems and need to buy a car or truck, you may be tempted to just use a Buy Here Pay Here (BHPH) car dealer that
advertises it makes bad credit car loans. With one of these arrangements, the dealership arranges the financing and usually you make
your payments to the dealer rather than a third-party lender like a bank or credit union.
Before you go this route, make sure you try to get preapproved for a car loan online or with a local financial institution. If you can
get financing elsewhere then you'll have more freedom to shop for the best deal on your car from a variety of sources, rather than
limiting yourself to the cars available at that dealership. And when you do find a car or truck you like, you'll be able to try to get
the price down, rather than taking whatever they offer you.
Keep in mind that even if you are offered a high-rate auto loan online or through your bank or credit union, you can always ask the dealer
to beat that rate – after you have negotiated the price for the vehicle you want.
Protect Your Credit When Auto Loan Shopping
Every time a lender checks your credit or requests your credit score, that fact will be noted on one or more of your credit reports as an
"inquiry." Your credit score can drop as a result. The good news is that most credit scoring models will ignore recent auto-related inquiries,
and will count multiple inquiries from auto loan applications in a short period of time as one. To protect your credit, it's best to shop for
an auto loan in a focused period of time: two weeks or less is best to be safe.
You can check your credit score for free using Credit.com's free Credit Report Card. Requesting your own credit score through this service will
not affect your credit score.
Car Title Loans
If you are desperate to borrow money but you have bad credit, you may be tempted to get a car title loan. These loans require you to pledge
your vehicle as collateral for the loan. They are not legal in all states, but where they are, they usually lend up to 25% of the value of
the car or truck you own free and clear.
Watch out! Interest rates on auto title loans are very high; often 25% per month – or about 300% per year – according to the Center for
Responsible Lending. According to the CRL report, the average car-title borrower renews a loan eight times, paying $2,142 in interest for
$951 of credit. If possible, you should try instead to get a personal loan or, if you can't, see whether a non-profit credit counseling
agency can help you find another solution to your financial difficulties.
-APR = Annual Percentage Rate. Rates based on credit worthiness and are subject to change without notice. Your actual rate and monthly payment may vary. Must be 18 years of age or older to apply. Loans subject to credit approval and could be subject to credit union membership.
* IMPORTANT NOTE FROM CREDIT.COM: Credit.com is not a lender. The above offers are provided by third-parties from whom Credit.com receives compensation. Credit.com will not call you about any loan application resulting from the above offers, and will not ask you over the phone, via email or otherwise for financial information or other sensitive personal data.
REMEMBER never to share any financial information or other sensitive personal data over the phone or via email without independently confirming the identity of the company calling first!
† Advertiser Disclosure: The offers that appear on this site are from third party advertisers from whom Credit.com receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). It is this compensation that enables Credit.com to provide you with services like free access to your credit scores at no charge. Credit.com strives to provide a wide array of offers for our members, but our offers do not represent all financial services companies or products.


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Television Viewing and Consumer Behavior: The Effect of Personality Traits and Demographic Variables on Children's Consumer Socialization.
The central purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between television viewing habits of children and their consumer behavior, however this study also focuses on possible factors influencing television viewing. A total of 50 questionnaires were distributed to school going children between the ages of 10-12, personality measurements were taken through a semantic test. The aspects of children's consumer socialization included in this study are how much television children watch, what they watch and their purchasing behavior. The children's gender and family income are considered as influences on their television viewing and consumer socialization. Results of the study indicated that family income and personality traits had a significant effect on the Childs consumer socialization; it also identified relationship between other demographic factors and consumer socialization. Shown by a p value in the chi-square table as p<0.1.This research was originally conducted in Malaysia and it will be interesting to see its results in Pakistan, secondly with the growing influence of television viewing in our everyday lives and also the identification of children as a vital part of the consumer population this study carries importance both in the field of psychology and marketing.
Full Text:
PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.5296/jsr.v4i2.3795
Copyright (c) 2013 Zeenat Ismail, Jehangir Kaleem
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Journal of Sociological Research ISSN 1948-5468
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Due to the complexity of human machine, neuromarketing heavily relies on careful analysis of very complicated data sets from various sources to create reliable results.
Software removes all the standard tasks natural to neuromarketing and creates easier interfaces that offer computer aid for the tasks require human touch. Neurolize also automates the search for more reliable results. Data driven, machine learning trained analysis algorithms based on academic literature helps you conduct neuromarketing experiments regardless of your experience in neuroscience.
Neurolize reduces workload for human talent, saves time and reduces costs to make neuromarketing more affordable and accessible.
Analyzed data automatically turned into visual reports which can be exported.
Record data from multiple devices in sync
Design experiments step by step to easily study complicated problems
Don't deal with multiple software products and manage all automatically
Save time, increase capacity and reduce workload for human talent
Data collected through the software can be exported for your own analysis


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HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (AP) - A grieving Canadian mother said her daughter hanged herself after she never recovered from an alleged rape by four teenage boys that left her deeply depressed and bullied in her community.
Ms Leah Parsons said on Tuesday she took her 17-year-old daughter, Rehtaeh, off life-support on Sunday after she hanged herself last week. She said one boy took a photo of the alleged assault in 2011, and her daughter was subjected to bullying after it went viral.
Ms Parsons is dissatisfied that police concluded there were no grounds to charge the four boys after a year-long investigation.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cpl. Scott MacRae said the investigation was completed in consultation with prosecutors and said there was insufficient evidence to proceed with charges.
Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry said he has no plans to review the case because he has no reason to doubt the integrity of the police investigation. Mr Landry said he has yet to hear of any formal complaint from Ms Parsons about the police investigation, though he added she was open to file one.
"In regards to the issue of second-guessing the police at every case, no, I'm not going to do that," Mr Landry said.
A Facebook page has been set up in tribute to Rehtaeh's life, featuring dozens of photos of the smiling, bespectacled brunette, often with a dog by her side.
Hundreds of comments were posted on the page demanding someone be held accountable for Rehtaeh's death.
"What is wrong with our society when a girl/woman is victimized and SHE is shunned!!" said one post.
Another user said young people must be protected from bullying to prevent similar tragedies.
"Clearly the justice system failed her, society failed her, the school system failed her, the mental health system failed her," said another.


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Anseong, Republic of Korea
Anseong is a community located south of Seoul that has grown continuously with consolidations of former smaller enclaves. The population is around 300,000. Notable for its expert brass production and quality arts and crafts production, Anseong calls itself the "City of Masters." In addition to the visual arts, the city stakes a claim in performance art as well. In 2012, Anseong proudly hosted a prominent international folk dancing event that is only held every four years.
Following several successful adult exchange visits, Korean students came to the US in summer of 2013 and the initial Brea student group visited in summer of 2014.


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Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has shown promise as a way to monitor the movement and even the condition of all sorts of objects.
The advantage of using of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data is that, unlike barcode systems, where the tag must be within the line of sight of a reader, RFID tags can be embedded with a tracked object. This can give organizations more flexibility in how they track and identify inventory.
The potential benefits of RFID technology include increased supply chain visibility, improved inventory management, better prevention against product loss and theft and improved food and drug safety.
RFID 'starter kit' is low-cost entry to asset management
But RFID has not taken off as people once thought it would. For many prospective RFID users, there has been hesitation due to fear of the unknown.
Risky business
"All technology deployments involve risks, and new technologies involve even more risks risks that the project might fail, the technology might not work, the vendor might not survive, etc.," says Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal.
"The biggest reason more companies are not using RFID is simply because they perceive it as risky. Companies naturally wait for a technology to mature and be proven to deliver value by others," he says.
But that's not the only thing holding up RFID deployments. Roberti points out that RFID is fairly complex to deploy. "Each facility is different and radio waves might behave differently in each facility," he says. "Few companies sell integrated solutions, meaning a company might need to buy tags from one company, readers from another and software from a third company. Moreover, you might need to write a custom interface to your existing back-end software, or even customize that software to handle serial numbers."
John Devlin, a practice director at ABI Research in London who covers RFID, smart cards, security and other technology areas, agrees that the lack of vendors that sell complete solutions has had an impact on adoption of the technology, and while the RFID market has been growing in the U.S., a boom hasn't happened in part because of the fragmented market.
"There are not two or three solutions that can serve every [customer need], so you've got a lot of small vendors and systems integrators with specialty knowledge," Devlin says. "I think that in a way it provides a natural barrier to rapid uptake" of the technology.
RFID has succeeded in industries such as retail, Devlin says, because the technology has proven itself in meeting specific business cases for retailers, such as tagging some of the more expensive goods in stores to avoid theft, keeping tabs on inventories and even managing distribution networks. Retailers can see fully commercial systems and the returns that early adopters are achieving, he says.
Some retailers, such as companies that sell apparel, footwear and jewelry, "have been tagging for two or three years and we're seeing volumes [of tags] increasing now," Devlin says. "It seems to have proven the return on investment." He points out, however, that even in the retail industry RFID adoption has not grown at the rate people were expecting.
Integration headaches
Many companies that have considered implementing RFID, including retailers, did not realize how much integration work was needed or how long the integration would take, Devlin says. "Within a large chains of stores you are not going to have the same IT infrastructure" among all the stores, he says. "And if you're going to put RFID in place it has to be uniform across" all the stores.
One reason why expectations have been high for the technology is that some RFID product companies have attracted venture capital groups of investors, who have talked up the market, Devlin says. "It's maybe partly out of hope, partly out of expectation or maybe some hype," he says.
But as many companies and industries continue to go through a learning process with RFID there will be more clarity in terms of how the systems work and how much they cost, and a better understanding of the business cases and expectations of what RFID systems can deliver, Devlin says.
Roberti thinks what needs to happen from a technology, cost and standards standpoint in order for RFID to gain some significant traction in the U.S. depends on which sector you are talking about.
Healthcare, for instance, needs to determine a standard for real-time location systems, which use tags and readers to determine the specific location of an object or person within a particular facility such as a hospital.
"Other industries, such as apparel retail, have essentially agreed that EPC Gen 2 [EPCglobal UHF Class 1 Generation 2] is the technology to use," Roberti says. EPC Gen 2 is an international standard being developed by EPCGlobal an organization created to achieve worldwide adoption and standardization of Electronic Product Code (EPC) technology.
"In general, I would say that software solutions need to mature to the point where they solve specific business problems or deliver clear improvements," Roberti says. "Then, early adopters must prove the solutions deliver business value."
RFID "needs to continue to evolve in terms of performance and prices," and end-users need to be educated about the technology, Devlin says. He predicts a coming "boom" in the use of RFID in retail that will have a positive impact on use of the technology in other industries such as transportation and logistics, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, aerospace and oil and gas utilities.
But it is apparel merchandizing that seems like the best fit for RFID today. "Retail apparel has a major problem no other technology can solve economically namely inventory inaccuracy," Roberti says. "Studies show inventory accuracy is about 65%. That leads to lost sales because the store thinks it has an item on the shelf when it isn't there."
RFID can cost-effectively get inventory accuracy up to 98% or 99%, Roberti says. In addition, "there is agreement on the type of RFID to use, UHF Gen 2," he says. "And the ROI is pretty clear. Sales go up when you have 99% inventory accuracy."
Aerospace is another sector with challenges that RFID can solve. "Every part on a plane has to have a unique [identity] and must be tracked throughout its history," Roberti says. "Some parts need to be removed from planes for regular maintenance and everything that happens to the part must be recorded."
RFID will allow the parts history to be stored on a chip built into or put onto every part, Roberti says. "This means that someone working on a plane on the tarmac could read a tag and know everything about a part," he says. "Airbus and Boeing are both pushing for this solution, so it looks like it will gain some traction."
Companies that have implemented the technology in various industries report a variety of benefits.
Mission accomplished
Mission Foods Corp., an Irving, Texas, supplier of food products, since 2009 has been relying on RFID to track reusable plastic trays that it uses to transport packaged food products within its warehouse and out to customers.
Prior to implementing the system, each year the company was losing thousands of the plastic trays to theft and misplacement, at a cost of about $3.5 million.
"By using RFID to track our containers we have seen a significant reduction of our use of corrugated boxes and the reduction on purchasing plastic trays as well," says Eduardo Valdes, vice president of MIS at Mission Foods. "We continue to use plastic boxes that are 3 years old and have [traveled] a few thousand miles."
The company also plans to use RFID to track pallets, racks and other assets that go in and out of its warehouse.
Another company, TekEase (formerly Dr. Know PC Medic), a Peoria, Ill., company that provides on-site technology service and repair to residential clients and small to midsize businesses, uses RFID to track tools and other assets on its vans.
The company, which will soon launch a national franchise, in 2010 began using a fleet of vehicles that came with a built-in RFID system that could be used for managing tools, inventory and equipment used in servicing clients.
TekEase tags all its important or expensive tools, equipment and other inventory. Prior to implementing the RFID system, tool requirements for specific jobs were kept on lists with checkboxes, and technicians would need to look at each required tool and verify that he had it. The process had to be repeated at the end of each service trip, in order to verify that nothing was left behind at a job site.
With the system in place, before a technician goes on a job, he opens an application on an in-dash computer in the vehicle and selects the appropriate job type. The system automatically reads the tags of all tagged items in the vehicle and looks for the tags associated with the particular job type.
If any tags or items are missing, the system lists missing items, and the technician knows to look elsewhere for the items before leaving for the job visit.
Walmart's RFID plans: It's the privacy, stupid
When a job is complete, the technician loads the tools in the truck and uses the RFID system to make sure all the tools are in the vehicle.
"The key benefits we have realized [are] the ability to manage and better secure valuable assets, improvement of productivity and ultimately increased revenues," says Corbett Speciale, president of TekEase.
"RFID readers continue to improve and while there will always be some limits, the benefits already far outweigh those," Speciale says. RFID "will continue to big part of TekEase future," he says.
When will RFID likely reach critical mass in the U.S? "I would guess that within two or three years we will see retail apparel reach critical mass and switch to RFID," Roberti says. "That will lead to wider adoption in other sectors because it will show that the technology works and is mature. Also, the technology will be more visible because you will see people taking inventory of 1,000 items in 30 seconds. Right now, almost no CEOs have ever seen the power of RFID technology."
Bob Violino (Twitter: @BobViolino) is a freelance writer covering a variety of technology and business topics.
Read more about anti-malware in Network World's Anti-malware section.


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Make off-site backups or you will lose your data
Backup Pains
Who needs attackers when you have system administrators? Learn why copying your data doesn't mean you've backed it up.
As I write this column, I cannot help but reflect on the irony of just having wiped out a month's worth of data. In the spirit of this article, I was fiddling around with backups on my web server, and I managed to accidentally delete most of /var/ and all of the /home/ directory. This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't kept the daily backups in /home/backups/. Oops.
Backing Up Doesn't Always Mean You Have Backups
If your data isn't available, or the systems to process and serve it aren't available, you have a problem. In the case of my web server, the missing /var/ and /home/ render it pretty much useless. It serves 404s and that's pretty much it. To make sure data is available, you need to back it up. Seems simple right? In reality most of us (myself included) get it wrong, and although we go through the motions of making a backup, what we're really doing is just copying the data somewhere else that is equally vulnerable to loss.
In my case, I made a classic mistake of storing my backups on the same system that the data being backed up is on, and to make things worse, I actually kept it in a commonly accessed directory. Not that this would have mattered. Because the server only has one hard drive, I am only a single disk failure away from complete data loss no matter how much I back my data up locally on the server. Even if I were to install a second hard drive in the machine, it's still all too easy for a single event (bad drive controller, attacker wiping the system, fire, flood, power supply going bonkers, theft, etc.) to wipe out more than one hard drive.
What Are Real Backups?
Three main elements go into making real backups. Number one: You have to ensure that the data was actually backed up. I have seen far too many systems that write the data to a CD, DVD, or tape improperly, which results in nonrecoverable data. Ideally, you need to test out every backup you make, but if this isn't practical, you at least need to make occasional spot checks to ensure the data can be recovered.
Number two: You need to have off-site backups that are as close to read-only as you can get. This doesn't necessarily mean they have to be in a different physical location (although this is always a good idea), but they have to at least be separate enough that a single failure or event such as formatting a disk array or losing a server won't wipe out both the live data and the backups. A perfect example of this in action (besides, of course, my recent faux pas) is the website AVSIM Online, which lost 13 years of data to a single attack [1]. According to reports, AVSIM Online had two servers that copied their data off each other in an effort to back each other up. As I have said before, many of us are only copying data when we do backups and not making actual backups. In this case, an attacker broke into both servers, since they were basically identical, and deleted all the live data and the copies held on both servers. AVSIM Online lost their website, email, file library, forums, and more in one fell swoop and most likely will never get the data back. In my case, I was lucky. I only deleted a month's worth of logfiles and collected data, so all I have to do is wait a month for new data to be collected – good thing this wasn't someone's financial records.
Number three: You need to make sure you aren't deleting files out of the backup or zeroing the file contents unless you are beyond 100% certain you will never need that file again. For this reason, RAID isn't a backup solution. Even if you have multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration so that the loss of a single or even multiple drives will notcause data loss, you can still lose data through deletion (rm, mkfs, etc.) or zeroing or altering of files (cat foo > bar).
Principles of Security
The three principles of security are: Availability, Integrity, and Confidentiality (also referred to as the AIC triad). In a nutshell, you have to keep the stuff you need to work working, you need to ensure that your data hasn't been changed by an attacker, and you need to keep your private stuff confidential.
Get Off the System
Fortunately almost every mature backup program supports getting data from a client and storing it somewhere else – often on a dedicated server, disk array, tape, DVD, and so on. Some excellent options exist for Linux: Amanda [2], which ships with almost every distribution, as well as BackupPC [3] and Bacula [4], both covered in Linux Pro Magazine [5] [6]. Although I won't cover the details here, suffice it to say they are very powerful, have lots of knobs to adjust, and definitely back up your data if you set them up right. The quick and dirty option is rsync (yum install rsync, apt-get install rsync, etc.) [7].
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text:
The House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to restore full cost of living increases to pension benefits for younger military retirees, responding eagerly to election-year pressure from veterans groups.
The Senate debated a similar bill as lawmakers hastened to reverse course on the most controversial cut contained in budget legislation approved less than two months ago.
Approval of the measure was never in doubt in the House, where the final vote was 326-90.
Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., said the bill would "protect the promises that this nation has made to our veterans." He called on Congress to "care for those who have borne the battle and to send that message to all who can hear it."
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., argued that overturning last year's relatively modest change in pensions would eventually cause military readiness to erode as the Pentagon struggles to adjust to budget restrictions.
"We've got to make some hard choices. This bill doesn't do it. It punts in every conceivable way," he said.
Under the bill in the Republican-controlled House, a cut in cost of living increases for military retirees under age 62 would be eliminated before it is scheduled to take effect 2015. The $7 billion cost of the measure would be more than offset by extending pre-existing cuts in Medicare and other government programs for an additional year, through 2024.
The change to cost of living benefits was part of a budget bill that Congress approved late last year, and several lawmakers in both parties said at the time they would attempt to reverse it quickly in the new year.
At issue was retirement income for veterans with at least 20 years of military service. The Pentagon's figures show nearly two million retirees receive pensions at an annual cost to the government of $4.5 billion a year. Of them, about 840,000 are under 62 and would be affected by the legislation that passed in December to hold annual cost of living benefits one percentage point below the rate of inflation beginning next year.
Critics of the change said that would mean a reduction of nearly $72,000 in benefits over a lifetime for a sergeant first class who retires at age 42.
The legislation in the Democratic-controlled Senate also would restore the full cost of living increase, but would push federal deficits higher because it lacks reductions elsewhere in the budget.
Republicans sought to change that with a proposal by New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte to require social security numbers for any children whose parents seek a low-income tax credit. She told reporters the result would be to increase federal revenues by $20 billion over a decade while simultaneously cracking down on fraud.
Democratic opposition to her proposal left its fate uncertain, and it was unclear when the overall legislation would come to a vote.
Election year politics was involved in the measure in both houses. Senate Democrats in difficult re-election races signed on as leading sponsors of the legislation, including Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Mark Begich of Alaska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.
In the House, some Republicans were relieved that the measure was coming to a vote as a stand-alone bill, rather than as part of a measure to raise the debt limit as the GOP leadership initially proposed.
Several officials said Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, who is running for the Senate, had spoken out against combining the two in a closed-door meeting of the rank and file on Monday night. They said the congressman noted that the proposed strategy meant lawmakers who wanted to oppose an unpopular debt limit increase would also be voting against the politically popular pension change at the same time.
The officials who described his remarks did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to disclose details of a closed-door meeting.
Cotton's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


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home | metro silicon valley index | movies | current reviews | feature
The big day: Donor David Packard (center) and big-name pols like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid turned out for the preservation ceremony at the Library of Congress.
Cinema Saver
David Packard of Stanford Theatre gives millions to national film-preservation effort
By Richard von Busack
TWO HOURS southwest of Washington, D.C., across the Bull Run and the Rappahannock lies the town of Culpeper, Va. At the edge of an outer ring of Wal-Marts and Taco Bells, there's a sign boasting that Culpeper is one of America's Top 10 small towns.
Like many ideal small towns, Culpeper is more of a well-off suburb built into the shell of a dead small town. Yoga studios and a bakery operate out of buildings that still have old painted feed and seed advertisements fading on their brick walls—very little glitz, really, for a town that has just become the movie-restoration capital of the world.
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This is a national story, involving a huge donation to the public of some $150 million. James Billington, Librarian of Congress, told me it was the likely the single greatest financial donation made by a private citizen to his government.
And it is a local story, in that the donor is Los Altos' David Packard and the Packard Humanities Institute, known in Bay Area and South Bay for his contributions to many charities and for his part in restoring the Stanford and California theaters.
The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper is better known as the Packard Campus now. "He never asked to have the Packard name on it," Billington says, but "obviously, it has to be named after him. It's insulting not to do it."
At the end of July, the 11-year process of getting Culpeper financed and built was over, except for a legal dispute with one of the contractors. ("We'll let the nice jury decide," Packard says.)
In Washington, there was a ceremony at the main Library of Congress building. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi spoke, and music was provided by a baritone named Thomas Hampson, who sang two Mozart pieces and a Jerome Kern number.
By phone, Packard sums up what happened at Culpeper in a few words: "What we did was vastly expand the ambitiousness of what was going to be a $20 million underground building."
As for having this name on it: "I feel somewhat uncomfortable about it. It's not our family's principle to name things after ourselves."
Following the long effort to get the facility built, Packard's attention has turned now to a new project, a storage facility for the UCLA archives in Southern California's Santa Clarita. This will be another monumental facility to protect the actual stuff dreams are made of, the physical components of cinema.
The new center sits just outside of Culpeper. Not much is visible of the 45-acre campus from the highway. A semicircle of buildings with three stepped rows of windows gathers around a reflecting pool. The slope of the hillside bristles with deer-proof tubes containing some 9,000 saplings. It looks like a new winery—not inconceivable, that. Virginians have been growing grapes since Jefferson's time.
Dug deep into the side of Mount Pony, the Culpeper facility will be the front line for preserving much of the babble of electronic and electromagnetic art we've created during the past century.
In addition to film stock and audio tape, even digital recordings are in danger of decay. In a recent Variety article, reporter David S. Cohen calls digital decay "a time bomb. Data DVDs and CDs disintegrate or become obsolete, and there's no way to store those megabytes without constant recopying."
The digital archivist Milt Shefter comments in the same article that "the technological issues here are not going to be solved by the entertainment industry. It's going to take big business, big science and maybe big government." At Culpeper, the Library of Congress will be working to slow the irrevocable decay that is consuming all media.
Capitol Ideas
Before touring the campus, I visited the Library of Congress, a complex of three buildings on the Capitol end of the National Mall. One is the 100-year-old landmark Thomas Jefferson Building, named after the man whose book collection started the library.
Tour buses clog the National Archives, thanks to the popularity of a bad Nicolas Cage movie. Far fewer come to visit the astonishing Jefferson Building, an Italian Renaissance–themed, stained-glass-lined temple to the book, wrought with both Gilded Age largesse and bohemian élan. Legions of allegorical statues and mosaics represent all the Western virtues, as well as some angels that one wouldn't expect to fly in a government building of 2007: the spirit of Muslim genius and the Muse of Erotica.
"Not until I stand before the judgment of God do I expect to see this building transcended," said one witness to the Jefferson building's opening.
No one will ever blaspheme about the second Library of Congress building, the Adams building from FDR's era. "It's just a big box with a lot of books in it," jokes Billington.
Built in the 1970s, the third building, the Madison Building is just as coldly functional: a six-story concrete mass. On the top northeast corner is the office of the Librarian of Congress, a modest suite of small offices hung with prints of past exhibits in the Library's museum.
Billington's office has a balcony with a granite planter, in which orange tulips were blooming. The office wasn't expensive, but the view was: his office is on the level with the figure of Columbia on the Capitol Dome, and he has perhaps the best view in Washington of the national mall rolling out toward the Potomac.
Billington is in his 70s, a Princeton scholar whose book The Axe and the Icon is a still valuable study of the conflict between spiritual and material aspects in Russian life.
"I was a movie addict when I was a kid," Billington confesses. "I feel quite comfortable discussing movies of the 1930s and 1940s."
The Library's involvement with film began in Edison's day. And the primal film from that era has a twofold importance: as an example of art on the way up and as a historical record. "Edison's films are the only film record of what America was," Billington explains.
Congressional acts in 1865 and 1879 established the Library of Congress as the copyright depository. The Library of Congress holds an almost 100-year backlog of films in various extinct formats, including 22 mm and 2-inch videotape.
To copyright images in those early days, film studios once sent photos of every individual frame of a film. Now that the celluloid for some of these films is long gone, the photos were rebuilt like flipbooks into moving images that can be watched on the Library of Congress' website.
The Library was once said to contain 200,000 films. That number is certainly too low. Years ago, the Library opened a temporary restoration facility for nitrate film at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio; its 145,000 cans of nitrate films were just shipped to Culpeper.
Nitrate film, a format used until the 1950s, is inflammable when badly stored. "Can't have it on Capitol Hill," Billington tells me.
He believes that the Library of Congress never gets the credit it deserves for film preservation. "In the early days, there was very good work done through UCLA, the Museum of Modern Art, Eastman House and the University of Wisconsin. Today, we at the library do 75 percent of the restoration and get 2 percent of the credit."
One way the Library of Congress is preserving film is by tending a national film registry, which adds 25 films a year to the vaults.
"The LoC has a statutory duty to create a national film registry of artistic cultural and historic merit, and public participation is meant to be part of it. I lobbied very strenuously for the registry. We have a small budget that enables us to do the detective work. We depend on the goodwill of studios, and they've been pretty cooperative. It keeps us looking for different kinds of films."
The 2005 list included San Jose's David Tatsuno's Topaz Memories, a film Billington spotted at an Asian-American film festival in Los Angeles.
Just like any other kind of history, cinema history is not made by great men, and Tatsuno's home movie of the Topaz internment camp in the Utah desert would have lasting significance: it's as rare as the only other home movie on the registry, the Zapruder film of the John F. Kennedy assassination. But Billington says that more 8 mm film needs to be sought out.
"When I was a boy in Philadelphia, I saw home movies of Mussolini's march on Rome. If we could find that sort of thing, it would have tremendous historical interest. The larger named films, the ones that make the AFI top-100 list, are in less trouble than the ones that get neglected."
Blazing Controversies
Billington is head of a library that has had its share of controversy and troubles. Burned deliberately by the British in 1814 and immolated in a few other fires during the 1800s, the Library also faced the question of whether a reference library serving the Senate ought to contain literature. One senator of the 1800s complained about the Library of Congress containing works by "Voltaire and other foreign atheists."
Would the adult content of something like Blazing Saddles—added to the registry this year—create any kind of controversy? Billington said no, though the arts endowment cutting had affected the Library in the 1990s: "The NEA got themselves in trouble when artists were smearing themselves with chocolate and so forth. Poor Jane Alexander—she's a friend of mine—she had to go explain it all to the Bible Belt. But there's a huge public demand for some of these films."
Film preservation is a much vaster subject than it was even 20 years ago. Like many other problems, there's a large ratio of talk to a smaller percentage of action. Colorization for television was the first inkling that the old films might have some value to the studio; or as Billington put it, "at the very least, that the air conditioning ought to be turned up a little higher in the vaults."
But then a 1993 study carried out by the Library of Congress's National Film Preservation Board outlined how much wider the problem of decaying film was than it first seemed.
"The decay of nitrate film is slow and steady," Billington commented, "but what we've discovered is that safety film also decays. It takes longer, but then it plummets. Heat, humidity and light are the main enemies. I'm reluctant to make generalizations, but it's clear that the conditions of storage were even more important than they appeared. Which is why we've worked on the precisely calibrated conditions of storage at Culpeper."
Packard Power
For more than two decades, David Packard has been an important figure in film restoration. Billington had known Packard's father David Packard Sr., but he says he never met the younger Packard at Princeton. Billington traveled to the Stanford Theater for the Palo Alto theater's formal dedication.
"I was just getting into film preservation, and David may have brought up the subject. At first we'd been looking for seven or 10 years seeking some kind of site for the vaults. The first site we identified for a possible facility was after the end of the Cold War. It was some kind of outpost for intercepting atomic attack. What happened was that there was some rare bird that had been seen nesting on the site—a shrike. We were petitioned by third-grade students not to drive the bird out of its habitat, so that was two years of work, gone.
"After that, we talked to Congress, and they bought the Culpeper property from the Federal Reserve of Virginia. The Mount Pony site was deserted when we got it. It was an underground storage facility, designed to hold paper money in case of a nuclear war. Very useful in a nuclear war, certainly—radioactive paper rectangles with bearded men on one side and Masonic symbols on the other."
Congress agreed to put up some of the funds for a new film-preservation site. Congress came up with $60 million, and the Packard Humanities fund came up with the rest.
"We're preserving an important part of our national patrimony," Billington says. "I'm not sure David himself realizes himself what an act of national service this has been. Culpeper will serve us well into the future. It's astonishing really. It gives me great personal pleasure to think that anyone can have an opportunity to access these films, an important part of our national patrimony."
From Pickford to 'Death Kiss'
To get an idea of the vastness of the Library of Congress' collection, I stopped by Gregory Lukow's office in the Madison Building. Lukow is the chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound division. A tall Californian, he came to D.C. from UCLA's archives and from the American Film Institute.
"We have early American cinema from the first several decades, the Kleine collection," Lukow explains. "Kleine was a distributor who collaborated with a lot of the early production companies. Mary Pickford donated her personal archives, all the films she had gathered together going back to the days of Griffith and Biograph."
The Library runs an eclectic small theater in the Madison Building named after Pickford. It programs everything from an extensive Shakespeare on film festival to a 1974 grindhouser from Greece called Death Kiss.
Films were brought into the Library for copyrighting since the beginning of cinema, but the archiving began very seriously from 1942 on. "Part of that," Lukow says, "was because librarian Archibald MacLeish had a more enlightened perspective on the issue. The world film-archival movement had really begun in the 1930s. Iris Berry at the New York Museum of Art had the finest American film archive, and cooperation began between the British Film Institute, and the Cinémathèque Française."
The International Federation of Film Archives began just before World War II, in 1938. Currently FIAF has 120 members, having just added member's archives in Singapore and Brazil.
"The Library," Lukow continues, "had entered into an agreement with MOMA to acquire some of the more prestige titles to bring into the Library's collections. And I think Mr. MacLeish just took that to the next conclusion that we have to get back into this game at the Library of Congress."
"In the early 1990s," he adds, "the Library was looking for off-site storage space. Everything but audio visual was being stored Fort Meade near Maryland, Culpeper ended up satisfying everything but audio-visual needs." Lukow's predecessor, David Francis, approached David Packard with the idea of a larger facility.
"What we're building in Culpeper," says Lukow, "is really unprecedented globally. There's new system for preservation literally invented for Culpeper. A robotic video-reformatting machine for example—the operator loads it in the morning with Beta tape, and the material is copied onto into digital files. We have two film processors at Wright-Patterson. In Culpeper, we have six with the capacity for eight. We'll also be able to do color film for the first time; we've had to farm out color restoration before. Culpeper is more than just a storage space. It's where all the operations that we do here can really enter the 21st century."
Another function of Culpeper will be the MIC Initiative, short for the Moving Image Collection. (San Jose's Geoff Alexander, local film archivist and founder of the Academic Film Archive of North America, describes it in detail on his website: www.afana.org.) Simply, MIC is a multipart archiving and access plan. It will include the Union Catalogue, which will be the most complete of all film catalogues, submitted by the film archives of the world.
The ultimate master list won't be limited to feature films; nonfiction movies, such as Rick Prelinger's famous collection of 50,000 government and industrial shorts will be on the list as well. According to Lukow, in the fall there will be a transfer of computer servers to Culpeper, and this will increase MIC's ability to take on information. "Geoff is a real proselytizer for MIC, so I know he's waiting for this," Lukow says.
An enormous river of media flows through the Library of Congress. Lukow counts some 100,000 sound recordings per year, not including the wave of feature films, CNN and other television broadcasts. About 30,000 feature films come through annually, not counting the bequests to the library from collectors.
Sometimes there's an incident such as what occurred in Dawson City in Canada. Dawson was the end of the line for many silent films. The local library kept them and, in time, they were scrapped to use as landfill to shore up a swimming pool converted into a skating rink. The cold preserved them, and when the cache was unearthed, it included a lost Harold Lloyd comedy and the only surviving movie of Lillian Russell.
The Vinegar Syndrome
Film comes in from all quarters, along with television broadcasts, more than a century's worth of radio broadcasts and cassette tapes. Since 1972, the Library has been keeping copyright copies of music from symphony recordings to garage bands.
But when I got to Culpeper, it was mostly empty. The tour guide was Mike Mashon, the curator of the Moving Image Section, a friendly Louisianan who came into archiving after an excursion into microbiology. Most of the facility won't be open to the public, except for study rooms and a small but finely furnished theater with glass torchiers and an organ. This theater, a sort of petite version of the Stanford Theatre, will be showing films for free two or three nights a week.
Culpeper is a long trek from D.C., but it's thought that students from the nearby University of Virginia and other locals will be coming into the screenings. When making the decision, the Packard Humanities figured that public access to the collection was as important as preservation.
In an open letter to the town of Culpepper, Packard complained of "the relentless lobbying by special interests for copyright extensions." And he insists a prime purpose of the Culpeper facility is, like the Stanford Theatre, a place for public communion with the movies of the past.
Inside the endless corridors, workman were scraping tape off the walls and lifting paper tarps off the cubicles, touching up the paint. Millions of stills, press kits and lobby cards had still not arrived as yet.
At the loading dock, as prints of films arrive at the facility, they will be taken to a cleaning room. This is to make sure that no molds are carried in; workers use a sniff test to decide if acetic acid—the vinegar syndrome—is corroding the films inside the canisters.
Mashon showed me some new film arrivals, two prints of Idiocracy. Near the door is an archival master of Gone With the Wind; Mashon confessed he positioned that near the door for the visitors. But even before the mass of films had arrived from the other storage facilities, it was easy to see the promiscuity of the collection.
At one checkpoint, where he gathered a ring of keys, Mashon found a colleague chuckling over a newly arrived 35 mm copy of Mitchell, subject of a memorable roasting on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Happily, posterity will be able to witness the famous Joe Don Baker massage scene.
Vaults of three different temperatures are spaced out through the depths of the facility, including separate temperature-controlled rooms for the tape collection. Years of Meet the Press and all the original kinescopes of the Ed Sullivan show are there, a new donation. Here is every episode of that nexus of performers from antique vaudevillians to the young Richard Pryor.
Nitrate Warning
Behind three-hour fire doors lie the nitrate vaults. There's a certain sexiness to nitrate films, said Mashon, because people think they're like nitroglycerine. "At Wright-Pat, they like to do a parlor trick where they burn nitrate film in an ashtray. Working with nitrate is not The Wages of Fear," Mashon observed, referring to the French suspense classic about hauling decaying explosives in trucks. "We have to respect nitrate film but not fear it."
The nitrate vaults are equipped with a nontoxic gas fire extinguisher that smothers the fire, with a back-up wet pipe system if that fails. "With safety film we fear water more than fire. But with nitrate, we fear fire more than water."
One of the Culpepper projection rooms has side-by-side nitrate and safety film projectors, so that the two can be visually compared. If you've seen nitrate film projected—the Stanford Theatre is one of the few places where it's visible—it has a crispness, darkness and richness of color that is lost in copying.
Underneath our feet were miles of cable, which will send digital info in backup to a separate backup in Manassas, Va. One of the ideas at Culpeper is to pipe different varieties of electronic media sent back to D.C. for public access. Broadcast quality files will be files to be sent back to the Jefferson Building, and these same files will be backed up to the tune of 3 to 5 petabytes a year.
The third floor of the Culpeper facility is, Mashon said, "something like the world's largest TiVo," with 100 DVRs taping the television shows and satellite.
The networks previously submitted copies of their broadcasts, but those aren't always complete. The Super Bowl broadcasts, for instance, deleted the commercials. And as seen in the Obama/Hillary parody of Ridley Scott's "1984" Apple commercial, what happens during the commercials during the Superbowl can be more socially significant than what goes on in the gridiron.
"We've never done right by tape," Mosher said. "No one ever talks about the romance of video."
Listening studios have been created for music aficionados, with, perfect audio deadness of the wooden baffles; hold a conversation in them, and the sentences drop off into a dull thud. Nearby was a studio where the Library would be transferring the of wax cylinders and other early recordings. The Library holds some of the oldest recordings ever made, artifacts such as wax cylinders of Indians songs from the 1890s, and the sounds of the last foghorns on the Great Lakes.
Into a wide spot toward the heart of an atrium, windows recessed into the roof let in some daylight from the outside. "Here's something I like," Mosher said. "David Packard found out that the interior here didn't get natural light and so he insisted on getting it in. That's nice. He didn't have to do it, and he did it."
Through other corridors, we stepped over chemical canals from gravity-fed bins to do the developing and printing; tanks will catch silver nitrate for recycling. It wasn't James Bond villain big; it was about the size of a small light-industrial-park factory. Still, it was larger than any facility I'd seen on studio tours, and looking over the printers and the darkroom is where it was really easy to understand the scope of the facility.
Ask most people in the cinema industry, and they insist that film is on its way out, and digital recording is where the future lies. As in any format change, this tremendous shift raises the question of what will be left behind. At Culpeper, the past of film will be safer than it has been for years. Similarly, Packard's gift to the cinema won't truly be realized until the future.
"This," Mashon said with a wave around him, "is designed to be the last place to be able to restore films. We hope we're never the last, but this is how we planned it."
Send a letter to the editor about this story.


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Thousands of articles have been written about the so-called Russian hack of the US election. The term "Russian hack" suggests the Russkies actually found a way to subvert the results of voting machines.
But of course, no convincing evidence has been presented to support such a charge. In fact, when you drill down a few inches below the surface, you find this charge instead: Russia hacked into email accounts and scooped up Hillary, DNC, and Podesta emails, and passed them to WikiLeaks, who then published them.
No chain of evidence supporting this claim has been presented to the public, either. But even assuming the assertion is true, an important factor is intentionally being ignored: THE CONTENT OF THOSE LEAKED EMAILS.
In other words, if making all this content publicly available cost Hillary the election, and if no one is seriously questioning the authenticity of the emails, then THE TRUTH undermined Hillary. However, no major media outlet is reporting the story from that angle.
After all, how would this headline look? TRUE CONTENT OF LEAKED EMAILS SINKS HILLARY CLINTON. Or this? HILLARY COULDN'T REFUTE CONTENT OF LEAKED EMAILS AND SO SHE LOST THE ELECTION.
Those headlines would attract millions of clicks. Why weren't they printed? Big news outlets didn't want readers to think about the story from that perspective.
Why not? Why was the heavy emphasis put on the hacking of the emails? To obscure the importance of their content: for example, DNC collusion to obstruct and undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
"Let's make the story all about WHO we claim stole the emails, rather than WHAT THE EMAILS CONTAINED."
When a tape surfaced in which Trump spoke about women who were eager to have sex with famous men, did major media make the story all about who had the tape and who released it to the press? No.
Perhaps you remember this 2009 email-hack controversy. Wikipedia sums it up: "The Climatic Research Unit email controversy (also known as "Climategate") began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files, the Climatic Research Unit documents, to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change."
One of the most revealing elements in the email exchanges: an obvious attempt to sideline scientific critics of global warming. But major media quickly began to reframe the story. It was all about illegal hacking, and investigations were launched to determine the criminal. The contents of the emails were brushed off as "proprietary work product" and "misleading" because "context was missing."
The case of Edward Snowden was somewhat different. There the media felt compelled to expose the CONTENT of the NSA documents Snowden stole. They also gave considerable space to Snowden himself. To some degree, this was a fait accompli, because The Guardian newspaper was committed, from the beginning, to publishing NSA documents and an analysis of their meaning—so other media outlets followed suit.
Big news media decide whether to focus on the WHO or the WHAT, in each case. "Should we give primary coverage to the leaker or what he leaked?"
But that is not a choice you are making. It's a choice being made for you.
Government agencies and spokespeople leak news to the press all the time. In these instances, of course, the press doesn't turn around and launch a probe aimed at exposing the WHO and discovering WHY a particular tidbit was passed along for publication. Newspapers and television news departments simply run with the stories.
"Okay, Bob. Here's a little gem for you. The White House and the Congress are cooperating on this one. In the next few days, a piece of legislation is going to be inserted into a current bill in the House. It'll establish a working group to combat 'fake news' operations that confuse the public…"
Does Bob, the reporter, bite the hand that feeds him? Does he write a story accusing his source of trying to knock out independent news competitors who contradict official reality? Of course not. Bob plays along.
Sometimes, both the WHO and the WHAT are censored. Such was the case with CDC whistleblower, William Thompson, who confessed publicly, in August of 2014, that he and colleagues at the CDC committed fraud in a 2004 study of the MMR vaccine, by covering up the vaccine's connection to autism. Thompson admitted the study was cooked. The mainstream press put a chokehold on the story. Aside from scattered references, and official denials, the story faded quickly. The leaker and what he was leaking remained in the shadows. Independent news outlets (such as this one) kept the story percolating.
You can find examples of government actors spying on Trump—in these instances, the press decides to focus on the WHAT, the content gained from spying; and downplays the WHO, the people who green-lighted the surveillance.
There is no logic in the mainstream approach to leaks and leakers. The WHO and WHAT are decided on the basis of serving official interests and agendas—and repressing the public interest.
The NSA, with its gargantuan reach into the lives of the population (including government officials), has enough content to keep the press busy for the next 50 years reporting leaks; but the NSA decides when, and for what reasons, to hold back what it knows. Or to leak bits and pieces through cut-outs.
A seasoned reporter, who obtains a leak from a trusted source, doesn't ask pressing questions about exactly who the source is fronting for.
The leaks-game is played over and over, and the rules of the game are shifted, depending on unrevealed agendas. Who do we want to expose this time? Who do we want to come out looking like a winner? Who are our friends at the CIA supporting?
Editors are there to keep reporters in line and correct oversights. Not in so many words, an editor would let a reporter know: "You picked the wrong source this time, Bob. Your guy is telling a story we don't want to promote. Find a different source with a better take, in line with our agenda to attack (fill in a name)."
That's what the editor means. But he might simply say: "Bob, that source of yours…I don't trust him anymore. I've been hearing odd things about him. Don't use him for this piece." The reporter gets the message.
This technique of casual ad hominem criticism and rumor even extends to the realm of science. In 1987, a prestigious molecular biologist, Peter Duesberg, "leaked" what many virologists privately knew: the evidence for HIV as the cause of AIDS was full of gaping holes. Duesberg published a paper in the journal, Cancer Research, exposing the con.
Overnight, a whisper-campaign against Duesberg spread through the research community. "We always knew Duesberg was an odd duck. He likes publicity. He hates authority. He runs his mouth off. He doesn't care about evidence. He'll take a contrary position just to stand out."
The game of leaks, sources, and fake news takes many shapes.
Welcome to mainstream news.
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos (Click for details).
Contributed by Jon Rappoport of No More Fake News.


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Last night was the Grand Opening of Jado Sushi in Harlem and it was an enjoyable night and a great crowd. It has actually already been open for two weeks now but the Grand Opening makes it official.
This early evening cocktail party included a variety of delicious Hors d'oeuvres and selected sushi along with wine and prosecco. They have an extensive wine menu here at Jadu Sushi which comes to no surprise as Nobu Otsu also owns The Winery just up the street.
At one point it felt like the who's who of Harlem. Melba Wlison, owner of Melbas, Londel Davis, owner of Londel's Supper Club and The L Lounge, Lia Sanfilippo, one of the owners of The Five and Diamond, Henock Kejela, owner of Zoma, Ernesto Gonzalez, one of the owners of Harlem Food Bar and Clarence Cooper the general manager for over 30 years (now retired) at Sylvia's, were just a few of the guests showing their support and welcoming Jado Sushi to the neighborhood. It was also nice to meet bloggers I had never met before for the first time and people in the Harlem media.
With good company, mellow jazz music playing, great wine and delicious appetizers you cannot go wrong. Stop by and check out Jado Sushi for yourself. With their full menu now available you have even more to choose from.
Welcome Jado Sushi and congratulations. If the crowds are any indication diners have been waiting for a sushi restaurant like this to come to the neighborhood and are happy that you are here.
*Click here to see their location and our Review of Jado Sushi.


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Don't Take Health for Granted
Disease has many ways of impacting the livestock sector. Movement restrictions are hugely problematic and previously poorly calves can carry disease into other herds.This stark warning appears in a beeftalk article which, along with the grim message that death is never far away, outlines the threat to food safety disease can pose to livestock farming.
Producers have become keenly aware that traceback, the article continues, which primarily is a function of health, sanitation and food safety, is critical to understanding the need to maintain fully effective health regulations versus introducing new animal health risks, even when such restrictions may limit marketing options.
Finishing a Thanksgiving Day meal is a treat and enjoyed by many but, unfortunately, not by all. The goal remains to somehow assure that everyone has access to safe and affordable food. The world would be a happier place if that were the case. While we reach out to better feed our neighbors, we also need assurance that the progress we have made in feeding our neighbors remains intact.
Like it or not, the world of living things always is precariously close to death. The relationship between predator and prey is never very far away. Although we generally prefer the movies with lions and wolves chasing wildebeests and deer, the tiny predators also always are at work.
Viruses, bacteria and numerous other microorganisms or subparticles also are part of the predator and prey relationship. Unlike the larger predators that can be somewhat easily seen and managed, the smaller predators can avoid detection by the naked eye. Their arrival often is a surprise and may come when least expected, especially because the movement of cattle and beef is complex.
"Like it or not, the world of living things always is precariously close to death."
As producers seek an unencumbered market environment, that very environment also can function as a very efficient conduit for the many diseases that may affect cattle because buyers from around the world have the opportunity to bid on calves. We have the struggle between a totally free an unencumbered market versus a market that has biological barriers in place that potentially inhibit the free movement of cattle.
Producers want to maximize business options and maintain the flexibility to market their stock by utilizing methods that effectively capture value for the producer and enhance that value to all links
within the beef industry.
The challenge is that, as the calf goes, so goes all that the calf as been exposed to. In other words, cattle have the potential to carry diseases they have been exposed to and could spread these diseases to susceptible herds. That may not be a big deal if the disease is a strain of the common cold, but that is certainly not true for all diseases.
Producers have become keenly aware that traceback, which primarily is a function of health, sanitation and food safety, is critical to understanding the need to maintain fully effective health regulations versus introducing new animal health risks, even when such restrictions may limit marketing options.
The tracking of animals that cross borders is considered essential for the preservation and well?being of the industry. The introduction of a highly pathogenic disease, such as foot and mouth disease, would affect millions of animals and have a devastating impact on markets and producers.
In addition to potential national disasters, other significant disease challenges exist. Examples include tuberculosis (Mycobacterium bovis) and Johne's disease (Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis), which are chronic untreatable diseases affecting cattle, or anthrax (Bacillus anthracis), a disease that produces spores that may infect a premises and threaten cattle for years, if not decades.


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Welcome back, College of Nursing students and faculty!
New for fall 2009…
Expanded office hours in Driscoll 313
Nursing librarian Barbara Quintiliano
and new life sciences librarian Robin Bowles
have teamed up to staff the librarian's office almost all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our hours in Driscoll 313 are listed below. Stop in and say Hi!
10am to 1pm Barbara
1pm to 4pm Robin
10am to 12pm Robin
12pm to 4pm Barbara
For an uninterrupted research consultation, we recommend that you make an appointment by phone: X96231 (610-519-6231) or email
Of course, we're also available by appointment at Falvey:
Barbara Quintiliano – x95207 (610-519-5207)
Robin Bowles – x98129 (610-519-8129)
Tips and skills classes in Driscoll
Barbara and Robin will periodically offer short sessions on RefWorks, EndNote, PubMed, journal alert services, and other useful resources. Watch for announcements on the blog as well as on the Driscoll announcements screen.
Announcing the APA 6th edition
Keep in style with these APA 6th ed. resources:
- –Learn the basics from APA's tutorial.
- –APA even has its own blog! Post questions and read more about APA style.
- –RefWorks has already updated its software. Access RefWorks at the library homepage. Under "Databases, A-Z " choose RefWorks.
- –EndNote promises a revised output style soon. Download the latest EndNote software (for an on-campus computer) from http://library.villanova.edu/Help/FAQs/EndNote
To install EndNote on an off-campus computer, come to the Falvey front desk and borrow a CD to take home for 3 days.
New Resources
Why trust Wikipedia? Sage specialized encyclopedias can provide the authoritative overview and background information you need. Topics covered include multicultural psychology, qualitative research, counseling, global health, death & dying, and so much more. Give Sage a try!
Featured new acquisition
Being Present: A Nurse's Resource for End-of-Life Communication, by Marjorie Schaeffer and Linda Norlander. Published by Sigma Theta Tau International, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-1-930538-82-5.
Available at Falvey: RT 87 .T45S33 2009.
Also online.
A valuable guide for nurses who strive to serve and comfort dying patients and their families. Each chapter includes reflections, evidence-based practice resources, stories from nurses in the field, ethical issues and questions for further discussion.
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Within months after leaving her post as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton sent through her private server an email to state officials and diplomats that referenced a nuclear energy deal with the United Arab Emirates, NBC News reported. The email was heavily redacted to secure information that has been classified in the years since it was sent in May 2013.
A spokesperson for the State Department, John Kirby, explained that while the email was not classified when it was sent, "our FOIA process is focused on whether information needs to be protected today, not on whether an email was classified at the time it was sent."
In the email, sent out to various high-level officials and staff, including top aide Huma Abedin, Clinton referenced a 2009 pact between the U.S. and UAE: "remember how after US signed 123 deal (with) UAE and we were in Abu Dhabi," the email reads.
The National Republican Committee filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents Clinton sent in years directly following her tenure as secretary of state. More than 800 pages of emails have been provided so far.


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(WASHINGTON, DC) – The Minister of the Interior and General Supervisor of the Saudi National Campaign to Support Brothers in Syria, Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, today ordered the first relief convoy of assistance to be delivered to displaced Syrians in Jordan. The convoy consisted of 43 truckloads carrying foodstuffs and in-kind items contributed by the people of Saudi Arabia.
On July 21, 2012, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz ordered the immediate establishment of the national campaign, giving Saudi citizens and residents a channel to offer their support to the Syrian people as they continue to suffer the cruelty of the Syrian regime. The campaign raised nearly $125 million for the people of Syria. In addition, large quantities of in-kind donations, including foodstuffs, medicines, medical appliances, clothes, tents and blankets have been collected.
Relief convoys will continue to transport to neighboring countries housing displaced Syrians. The campaign continues to accept cash donations through its account at the National Commercial Bank. In-kind donations are accepted at central warehouses in Riyadh and Jeddah.


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Before Ayelet Tsabari penned her debut short story collection, The Best Place On Earth, the thought of writing a book about Israel left her feeling—to use her words—"scared shitless." Her homeland was just too loaded, too political. Any story she might write would be bound to raise someone's hackles—or, at the very least, to raise some tough questions: Why are her stories populated by Mizrahim (Arab Jews) and not Ashkenazim (Eastern European Jews)? Why is she willing to narrate from the perspective of a Filipina caregiver and not, say, a Palestinian? Is it even legitimate for an Israeli fiction writer to write stories that don't mention Palestinians? Since its publication in March, The Best Place On Earth has raised all these questions and more.
At its heart, this is a book about Israel's minorities and misfits. An Israeli of Yemeni descent, Tsabari is not interested in writing, shall we say, your bubbe's fiction. She's interested in cataloguing the experiences of the Mizrahi community—a population rarely represented in Israeli literature, never mind Jewish Canadian literature. In her stories, you won't find matzo ball soup, Yiddish, or the Holocaust. Instead, you'll find fenugreek, Arabic, and tales of forced conversion to Islam at the hands of Yemeni authorities. You'll also see the effects of longstanding discrimination against Mizrahim, and of some Israelis' refusal to even recognize "Arab Jew" as a category.
Tsabari, who identifies as an Arab Jew and finds the term "romantic and wonderfully controversial," tackles Israeli resistance to it in her story "Say It Again, Say Something Else." When teenage narrator Lily tells her friend that "my grandparents came from Yemen, so we are Arabs in a way, Arab Jews," her friend immediately dismisses the category with a laugh. "No, that's impossible," she says. "You're either an Arab or a Jew."
In another story, "Brit Milah," Tsabari uses the character of Ofra to explore the problem of internalized discrimination. Like many young Mizrahim who are taught to see their own heritage as inferior to that of Ashkenazim, Ofra progressively sheds the markers of her Arab identity. To her elderly mother Reuma—who still clings proudly to Arab traditions—this is as perplexing as it is painful:
It wasn't just Reuma she had rejected: she despised anything Yemeni, even her curls, which she began straightening every morning. She even changed the way she spoke; as a little kid, she spoke like her parents, with guttural hets and ayins. Reuma lost her daughter over and over again; first she became Ashkenazi, then Canadian.
The effects of internalized discrimination reach their clearest articulation in Uri, the sensitive young protagonist of "The Poets in the Kitchen Window." In his dreams, Uri is "taller and braver and Ashkenazi, his skin lighter, his eyes blue," but in reality he is a Yemeni boy—an identity he thinks is incompatible with what he really wants to be: a writer. Despite his family's encouragement, he puts away his writerly aspirations because he doesn't believe someone like him can be a poet:
The poetry they taught at school, the books he found in the school library, were mostly written by old Ashkenazi men. He had never heard of a Yemeni or Iraqi poet, or any Mizrahi poet for that matter.
It's precisely this underrepresentation, and its negative effects on the psyches of Uri's real-world counterparts, that The Best Place On Earth comes to rectify. And this is what makes the book so politically powerful: By insisting on writing the stories of Mizrahim, Tsabari not only gives this marginalized community permission to be writers; she also gives them permission, simply, to be. It seems clear that, had books like this existed earlier, many would-be Mizrahi writers (including this writer) would have felt emboldened to pick up the pen at a much younger age. They might even have embraced their guttural hets and ayins, and learned to love their dark curls instead of feeling the need to straighten them.
Given how central the issue of underrepresentation is to Tsabari's project, you might well ask why she declines to represent another one of Israel's marginalized communities: Palestinians. And it's true that, reading these stories—all of which depict minorities so skillfully, with such a light and accurate touch—you can't help wishing the author had tried her hand at this one, too. But as any fiction writer will tell you, demanding that an author include certain types of characters in her stories is likely to backfire; if they don't flow naturally from the author's interests and experiences, they're apt to come off the page all wrong. Tsabari, taking heat for this, has written:
To those who questioned the underrepresentation of Palestinians in my book, I explained that it was indicative of how segregated these two communities are within Israel. Palestinians were not in my schools, my places of work, my circle of friends. In fact, I didn't make Palestinian friends until after I moved to Canada.
This explanation is eminently reasonable. It's also, in a certain sense, beside the point. Because, even though Tsabari doesn't actually write about Palestinian characters, her fiction manages to implicitly critique Israel's treatment of its minorities—a critique that definitely extends to Palestinians—in a subtle, non-didactic way.
Take the story "Invisible," which does a brilliant job of this by showing that there is an ineluctable link between mistreating one minority and mistreating another. Drawing parallels between the immigrant experiences of a Mizrahi grandmother and her Filipina caregiver in Israel, Tsabari suggests that a society that discriminates against the former will almost inevitably discriminate against the latter. Discrimination against Mizrahim is merely symptomatic of a broader system that fails to treat all of its minorities with the full dignity they deserve. Tsabari does not spell out this critique or explicitly link it to Palestinians, but for the careful reader, she doesn't need to.


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Mr. T is now a curling fan
The self-proclaimed "Professional pitier of fools," Mr. T is an Olympic fan, tweeting out his respect specifically for curling.
Mr. T tweeted "I am really Pumped watching the Winter Olympics. I am watching events I never thought I would watch before, like curling. You heard me, curling Fool!" – and – "Curling is kind of different, but it's Exciting. It's not as easy as it looks. It takes some skills that's for sure. I like it!"
Sunday he hit Twitter again expressing his pride for the Olympians, and congratulations for Red Gerard on winning the first gold medal for the United States, "Congratulations to Red Gerard on winning the first gold medal for the US. We have so much talent on this years Olympic team. Wow!"
Mr. T even jested that after he learned how hard our athletes train, he now feels out of shape and lazy.
Mr. T on Twitter https://twitter.com/MrT.


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Preorder e-books from Google Play
Learn how to preorder titles from your favorite authors on the Google Play Books store.
Popular Web sites that sell e-books like Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow you to preorder titles with your credit card. Google Play Books now offers the ability to do the same, from the Web or your Android device.
To allow preordering of titles, you'll need to make sure you have a payment option available in Google Play, like Google Wallet or carrier billing.
Step 1: Open Google Play Books in your Web browser or on your Android device. When using an Android device, just open the Google Play Store and tap on Books.
Step 2: Search for the title you want to preorder. If you're not quite sure of the title, Google has been nice enough to include a New and Coming Soon tile on the front page of the Books section in the Play Store.
Step 3: Press the preorder button and choose which account you'd like to pay from, then click Accept & preorder.
Note: Your credit card will not be charged until the book is available for reading.
All e-books you preorder will be shown on the My Orders page and you'll also receive an e-mail receipt for your purchases.


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An "electronic tattoo" the size of a postage stamp and the thickness of a human hair can be used to monitor laboring women and seizure-prone infants, because it provides a non-invasive way to track the electrical rhythms on the surface of the body, according to Todd Coleman of the University of California, San Diego.
Another apparatus, developed by Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University Medical Center and colleagues, allows rats to "feel" infared light by stimulating the tactile center in their brains.
Devices like these could have remarkable benefits, but they may also lead to ethical, legal and social quandaries that should be discussed as the technology progresses, researchers said at the AAAS Annual Meeting.
Speakers in the session on brain-machine interfaces, organized by AAAS' Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) program, suggested that the most extreme examples—of cyborgs or people endowed with superhuman abilities courtesy of machines—are far from becoming reality. But neuroscience applications, in particular, are moving along much faster than other technologies like genetic engineering in the quest to build a better human.
Martha Farah, who directs the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, warned that the technologies may bring other worries in the near term: Will only the rich and connected be able to take advantage of the devices and the health or performance enhancements that they bring? Will the devices be so good at transmitting brainwaves that our private thoughts are compromised? Will hackers be able to control our thoughts through these new interfaces?
Many of these technologies, beginning with cochlear implants for the deaf and including Coleman's tattoos, got their start as a way to correct health deficits or perform critical clinical functions. But Farah said that this was the same notion at first behind plastic surgery and drugs for hyperactivity, both of which are now used widely by people without obvious health issues. "In the near term, there will be questions of how modest these disabilities should be before considering these invasive interventions."
Brent Waters, an associate professor of Christian social ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, said that most religious people would not object to the therapeutic applications of these devices. He said more people would be concerned if brain-machine interfaces became ubiquitous in the search for human perfection, since "these quests have usually ended up inhumane regimes."
Nicolelis reassured the AAAS audience, however, that a non-invasive patch like the Coleman tattoo could never be powerful enough to download and broadcast all the contents of a person's brain. "That's not how the brain works. It is not computable like that."


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Trader Joe's is a chain of grocery stores spread across the United States specializing in gourmet, natural, and hard-to-find foods. They started out in 1958 as a chain of convenience stores. Then in the 1960's, as the beatnik and hippie cultures started taking off, the company redefined itself into what you see now.
And like many other retailers, Trader Joe's offers its own brand of beef jerky. However as suspected, they don't make their own. In this case, it's private labeled through Idaho-based Intermountain Naturals, the sister company to the Golden Valley Natural brand of beef jerky.
Intermountain Naturals caters to the health-conscious consumer, making beef jerky using only natural ingredients, as well as a line of organic beef jerky.
Trader Joe's claims their brand of jerky contains no preservatives, no MSG, no artificial ingredients, is minimally processed (I'm not sure what that means), and the beef contains no added hormones and no antibiotics.
Beef, sugar, water, soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, salt, flavorings, paprika, natural smoke flavoring.
Some sweetness is the first taste to hit my tongue, followed by some smokiness. I can sense the soy sauce flavoring to a small degree, along with a slight bit of salt, and finally just a hint of natural meat flavors.
Being that this is their original variety, I didn't expect to get a lot of taste, and sure enough I wasn't disappointed. Throughout the chew, the flavor that seems to last is the sugar, and then followed by a slight saltiness. That soy sauce taste doesn't really last long.
There's almost no taste of the natural meat flavors. If I was blindfolded and asked to decide between beef or turkey, it would be difficult. There's just a slight bit of that unique beef flavor. And as far as freshness, it still seems to have a fresh taste, despite containing no preservatives.
As for saltiness, it's not salty. I can taste it, but it's light. This is about my preference level for beef jerky.
I can see a few flecks of black pepper, but there's no taste of it.
Overall, this jerky is largely tasteless, if not for the sugar, a bit of smokiness, and light saltiness. I suppose it fits the bill as an original variety, but it's rather boring.
Meat Consistency
These appear to be real cuts of meat, sliced into average to thick thickness, and in medium sized pieces.
This qualifies as a "soft and tender" variety, being very easy to tear apart, and very easy chew. It even gets mushy when chewing, but not that bad. But I would not classify this as semi-moist, it's still largely a dry jerky.
I didn't notice any chewy tendon, membrane, or gristle. I did find small amounts of fat on a couple of pieces which actually gave it a more beefy taste.
Overall, this has a great meat consistency as a soft and tender variety.
Product Value
I paid $4.99 for this 4oz bag at a Trader Joe's in Temecula, CA. That works out to a price of $1.25 per oz, putting this on the lower-end of average.
On a general beef jerky standpoint, I think you're getting a so-so value. It doesn't really satisfy on taste, but it does offer a great meat consistency. If you're a casual beef jerky eater, you might think it's good.
For folks who insist on eating only all natural ingredients, this is actually a good value, because for one, a $1.25 per oz is a good price when compared to all other beef jerky brands, and you're getting what you want in an all-natural ingredient product. If having a tasty beef jerky is not important to you, it's an even better value.
I'm giving this a fair rating.
About the only thing going for this jerky is it's great meat consistency. Otherwise, it's pretty dull on flavor, and it offers very little natural meat flavor.
I can understand that an original variety of beef jerky would be plain on taste, but there are so many other brands that have tasty original varieties that I can't warrant a higher rating. I can't really say that this has a snack factor either; while I continue to eat more throughout this review, I'm not enthusiastic about eating it.
But let's consider that Trader Joe's is pushing this beef jerky for its health benefits as an all-natural ingredient product. And that's a way of saying that healthy foods don't necessarily taste good, which is something the child in all of us has been saying for our entire lives.
Rating: Fair
Where to buy:
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Trader Joe's Beef Jerky - Original
7 comments:
- AnonymousMarch 11, 2009 at 7:11 PM
Interesting review!
I actually really love Trader Joe's Beef Jerky, although my favorite flavor is the Teriyaki one, which is actually practically the same thing with a bit more flavor to it. You're right, the best thing about it is the wonderful consistency, but personally I'm very satisfied with the taste as well; in my opinion this is great jerky.
But then again, I'm not a professional jerky-eater, just a meat-lover who gets jerky whenever he can.
Thanks! - AnonymousJanuary 1, 2010 at 7:22 PM
I just tried Trader Joes Buffalow Jerkey Sweet and spicey. Best Jerkey I have ever had Five stars for me
ReplyDelete - AnonymousJanuary 8, 2010 at 6:05 PM
I also just tried Trader Joe's Buffalo Jerky Sweet and Spicy, and I can't get enough! I am online now looking to see where I can get more, and if there are different flavors.
ReplyDelete - AnonymousJanuary 17, 2012 at 7:21 PM
I just tried this, and it was terrible. It tastes very bland, and I find the texture too chewy. After half the bag, I couldn't keep eating because I was disgusted with it. I bought it while I was in Trader Joe's because it was cheap, but it's not worth it.
ReplyDelete - AnonymousNovember 4, 2016 at 1:43 PM
Can you buy it online and have it shipped to a UK address. BTW I'm in the UK, my dad recently went to U.S and ate his jerkey when he returned, now he's annoyed trying to get a replacement:)


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Question No. 1:
How many estimated percentage of my weight that I lift while doing elevated push ups with my feet on my unstable bed about 60cm from the floor (so I also keep my balance work here) ?
I can do it 10 reps, after I usually do 60 - 100 reps classic push ups and 10 deep push ups.
My weight is 76kg. It can vary from 73 - 76kg, I'll continue my "strict" diet lifestyle again in September 2011.
Related Weight thread for Classic Push ups
This is the pic I stole from baseops, I believe for my case, my feet is 15-20cm higher than that.
Question No. 2:
I can only do 2 reps of not perfect hand stand push ups so far, I'm not 180 degree upside down, maybe about 20 - 30 degree to be completely upside down. Is it true that I lift my total body weight (76kg) while doing it ?
I really feel something GOOD on my shoulders' muscle for both of these kinds of push ups. Specially for hand stand push ups, about 2 - 5 minutes after that workout, I kinda feel refresher. I wonder if that happened because my blood flowing to my head?


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Abercrombie Jewelry
We Cultivate A Unique Collection Of Jewelry
Abercrombie Jewelry was founded in Austin, Texas out of a passion for striking gems and antiques. As a family-owned jewelry business building a relationship with the community of Austin for over three decades, our mission has always been to cultivate a unique collection of jewelry ranging from estate and vintage to new and custom made. We also offer jewelry and watch repair, jewelry, watches, precious metal buying, custom designs, and verbal appraises.
Allandale, Angus Valley, Bannockburn, Barton Hills, Blackland, Bouldin Creek, Bryker Woods, Canyon Creek West, Central Austin, Cherry Creek, Cherrywood, Chimney Hill, Clarksville, Cooper's Hill, Copperfield


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I am a fairly new developer. Professionally I have programed in C# for two years as an intern and 6 months as a junior developer. A friend of my family needs help with a project that is written in VB.net. I have never used VB.net, so I am a little worried there.
But, the real question comes in the fact that once I looked at the documents for the project I have a feeling that nothing really good will come from it. I have a feeling that it will cause more stress then I would like to have in my life currently.
How do experienced developers make the decision of whether to take the project or just let it go? What are some good metrics to make the decision easier?
This actually seems like a very large ERP that he would like me to work on and I don't believe that he knows anything about programming so I don't think the fact that I am very junior has even crossed his mind.


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Flat | Semi-Detached | Detached | Terraced | |
Homes sold in the last 12 months | 57 | 79 | 106 | 135 |
Average house prices | £176,439 | £317,791 | £497,380 | £296,313 |
An affluent Suffolk market town with an incredibly rich history, Bury St Edmunds offers a unique blend of medieval architecture and classy Georgian squares. A magnificent cathedral, and its glorious Abbey gardens, provide a stunning visual backdrop to the area.
At the same time, you'll find excellent retail therapy in the form of the Arc shopping centre, not to mention the lively twice-weekly award-winning market.
Property in Bury St Edmunds offers the chance to give your family a 3-D history lesson! In the town's historic heart, west of the cathedral, streets like Angel Lane and Guildhall Street still follow a Norman grid plan, packed with Tudor, Georgian and Victorian town houses and terraces.
Road links are provided by the M11 and the A14, otherwise you need to get used to lots of winding country lanes. Ipswich and Cambridge are at either end of the A14, around 30-40 minutes away.
There are hourly trains to Cambridge, taking 45 minutes, and once or twice an hour to Ipswich, with the journey taking no more than 40 minutes. The train journey to London takes just a couple of hours.
Local schools are excellent in this part of the world. A three-tier system is in place with upper, middle and lower schools. Several of the town's nine primaries have been rated "good" by Ofsted, with a couple ranked "good with some outstanding features."
All four of Bury's middle schools are ranked at least "good", while the main secondaries range from "good" to "outstanding."
St Mary's is one of the country's biggest parish churches, while the Norman Tower dates from 1120 and the Moyse's Hall Museum has been in the market place since 1180 and is a former prison and police station.
Check out other museums, too, including the Greene King Brewery Museum, (the town is known for brewing and malting), and the local art gallery. The Theatre Royal is England's only surviving Regency theatre.
The low crime rate and historic town centre, as well as the attractive surrounding Suffolk countryside, all combine to make Bury a very pleasant place to live. Better still, a strong local economy means there's little unemployment.
So if you're after a traditional setting, with a gentle pace of life, give this town serious consideration.
Source acknowledgement: House price data produced by Land Registry
This material was last updated on 14 February 2024. It covers the period from 01 January 1995 to 28 December 2023. and contains property transactions which have been registered during that period.
Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right . This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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To say the market for first-person shooters is a tad over-saturated would just be pointing out the obvious. Unlike so many other genres, just having a competent product doesn't cut it. With so many great titles on the market these days, it takes something truly special to separate your game from the rest of the grey and brown bulletfests on shelves. Enter the latest Xitol Softworks and the latest game to vie for your trigger-squeezing attentions, Zone: The Battleground.
While not much is known about the game itself at this point, Xitol Softworks is an interesting story. The fledgling developer started their journey into the world back in 2007 as a community of modders. Since then they've moved on from messing with the innards of Halo: Combat Evolved by becoming an officially registered company and using the Unreal SDK to work on a project of their own.
Zone: The Battleground marks the studio's first effort since its incorporation last November and is announced for release on PC and Mac before the end of the year. Until then, the team is currently looking for artists and modelers and soliciting community input for the project. I'm wishing these guys the best and hoping they create something interesting and unique — the last thing the world needs is another banal, by the numbers shooter.