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Social Innovation Reigns at This New York City Incubator To get a sense of what it's like starting a socially-conscious startup, we reached out to three founders based at New York City's Center for Social Innovation.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
At a sprawling 24,000 square feet, the Center for Social Innovation in New York City is an oasis for socially-conscious entrepreneurs. Though less than a year old, the niche co-working space houses 130 nonprofit and for-profit startups ranging from Toilet Hackers, a startup focused on providing sanitation around the world, to 100cameras, which teaches photography to marginalized children.
"It's a community that truly works," says CSI's events coordinator Andrew Karp. "From washing dishes together to collaborating across sectors, the community animation and shared pursuit of innovation is inspiring."
The Center for Social Innovation is dotted with couches and private alcoves for phone calls or meetings, amid rows of shared desks. The space blares the communal message in quotes like "Embrace chaos" and "Be bold" painted onto pillars scattered throughout. One wall features a floor-to-ceiling chalk-drawn mural, detailing the faces of the 130 founders. Green and blue plastic chairs sit around a long table near the common room, lit by two ornate chandeliers. In need of a stress-reliever? Take a ride on the scooters parked in a corner, or make yourself a cup of tea in the well-stocked kitchen.
To get access to these amenities, you will have to pay a one-time $125 set-up fee and each month pony up $125 for a desk or $1,200 for a private office.
Related: Social Entrepreneurship Tips from Annie's, Patagonia and Fund Good Jobs
We caught up with three entrepreneurs from the Center for Social Innovation to see what it was like starting a socially-conscious business. Here are their edited responses:
Joan Palmeri
Founder, New American Nurse Project (NANP)
The New American Nurse Project helps immigrant nurses and healthcare workers gain employment in the US through workshops and training sessions. Palmeri, who has experience in the nonprofit, education and health sectors, has worked on behalf of the criminal justice population in New York City and helped develop English as a Second Language courses for immigrant communities. Along with a team of five instructors, she now works to educate 165 nurses through NANP's Facebook page -- its primary teaching method.
Q: What drew you to this industry?
A: I was an English teacher who was hired to work in a program for international nurses at Philips Beth Israel School of Nursing. When it ended, I was just getting phone calls and tutoring people one-to-one. So I knew there was a need.
Q: What resources have helped you the most in starting up?
A: Online learning management systems. I said, we're going to meet virtually. The nurses are already on Facebook, so it was just like, alright, start a group.
Related: Wannabe Social Entrepreneur? How to Navigate the Growing World of Impact Accelerators
Q: What has been your biggest startup challenge?
A: The population we're serving doesn't seem to have the time and money. We're at the point now where we need to expand, and unless we get some capital, we can't hire anybody. We're becoming an eligible training provider and creating a loan fund [which has helped]. We're solving the time situation by doing virtual training.
Sang Lee
Founder, Return on Change
Return on Change is an online-funding platform that connects socially-innovative startups with potential investors. It was implemented so founders can focus on their ideas instead of getting bogged down raising capital. It relies on crowd-investing, allowing founders access to a group of investors instead of just one. Startups create a profile on the website, which other users can view.
What makes Return on Change different is its voting process. If users like what they see, they can vote to move the startup to the funding stage. The company then connects the group-approved startups to the pool of accredited investors, helping raise the needed capital.
Q: What drew you to this industry?
A: I was an investment banker in power-energy banking. I was involved in a lot of clean-energy investments, albeit for the wrong reasons probably. I actually wanted to use my skills to help businesses raise money. Now I teach classes [on] the financial points you need to think about and storytelling -- how do you relate impact to investors? There needs to be a comprehensive story behind it.
Q: What resources have helped you the most in starting up?
A: I was lucky to come from the banking sector. It's helpful to have friends who are angels, or if they're not, you can force them to become angels.
Q: Best advice for fellow entrepreneurs looking to get started in this industry?
A: They have to have a clear value of their mission. What was the reason you created this startup? Who did you want to help, or what problem did you want to fix? I think a lot of people lose grasp of that.
Ben Drucker
Founder, Valet.io
Twenty-year-old Ben Drucker decided to leave the prestigious Columbia University to build his startup Valet.io, a mobile app that helps nonprofits, schools and politicians raise money. During benefit events, guests can pledge money directly from their phones (instead of worrying about sign-up forms). The company raised $5,000 in 60 seconds for then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker's U.S. Senate campaign -- a turning point for Valet.io. "Conversations moved on from that," said Drucker. "You need your champion." Valet.io is currently working with half a dozen clients per month.
Related: For Social Entrepreneurs, What Comes First: Business or Mission?
Q: What drew you to this industry?
A: I've done web development for a while, and I've done volunteer work with a couple of nonprofits, I saw how heavily they had been taken advantage of. We'd watch them get pitched software for hundreds, thousands of dollars, [programs] I knew I could have built overnight.
Q: What resources have helped you the most in starting up?
A: We spent some time through personal connections with recognizable names. Once that was out of the way [we could answer] the questions, "Who did you work with? How did this work for them?"
Q: Best advice for fellow entrepreneurs looking to get started in this industry?
A: Find somebody with a problem and build something for them. Better to have somebody doubt whether the scale or the market is big enough and have a customer base of one, than have in theory a billion-dollar idea with no customers.


text: John Hearns wrote: > 2009/6/5 Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca>: >> I'm not sure - is there some clear indication that one level of storage is >> not good enough? I hope I pointed this out before, but Dedup is all about reducing the need for the less expensive 'tier'. Tiered storage has some merits, especially in the 'infinite size' storage realm. Take some things offline, leave things you need online until they go dormant. Define dormant on your own terms. > That is well worthy of a debate. Tiered makes sense in the sense of HSMs. Not so much (for HPC ... and increasingly for business). > > As the list knows, I am a fan of HSMs - for the very good reason of > having good experience with them. > > There are still arguments made that 'front line tier = fast > SCSI/fibrechannel disk' 'second line and lwoer tier = SATA' and the > sales > types say SATA is slower and less reliable. These arguments are still being made by many folks with vested interests in the expensive FC solutions. This is where Dedup plays. Reduce the need for the second tier, and you will get less pressure to drop your prices. The added benefit is that backups should take less time, DR can take less time. And fewer of those meddling smaller storage vendors with big and honking fast disks need be around their turf ... > Mark, you make the very good point that the world is changing (or > indeed has changed) and you should be looking at an infinitely > expandable disk based setup - just add more disks into the slot, more > JBODs, whatever. Yeah, change happens. Those who resist inevitable change will be on the dustheap in short order, if their business model/requirements don't adapt. The worlds largest data repository doesn't do dedup, or use 'tiered' storage. Rather they embrace duplication (n-plication actually), and 'flat' single tiers. There is a reason for this, and it is driven by cost and performance. > Actually, as a complete aside here I have been lookign at Virtual Tape > Libraries. One of the Spectralogic models actually eats SATA drives > just liek they are tapes - I had read about this unit. Will have to speak with them at some point :) > > I'm now going to counter your argument - let's say we have an > expensive parallel filestore such as Panasas. Or maybe Lustre. > So your researchers work on a new project, and need new storage. But > they have old projects lying around. > They argue they might revisit them, they might need this data, someone > might take on a PhD student to trawl through it, Yeah ... when I started in my studies, I reworked older calcs, and revisited 1-5 year old data. Having easy access to this data is important. Access should be transparent. Don't mind waiting a short while (seconds) for the initial access, but subsequent needs to be fast. > or you are in the movie business and your movie has premiered yet > there is a directors cut scheduled for next year... That is one of the markets we are looking at. > OK, so you can add more Panasas. Cue salesman buying in a large bucket > of glee to rub his hands in. > I agree may argument holds less water with Lustre. Look at it this way ... what is the cost/benefit to the movie-company to buy/build expensive storage and build tiers, as compared to much less expensve replicated/HSMed storage? I think the writing is clearly on the wall on this. Lots of the folks in this industry will disagree, but follow what the customers are actually doing. Joe ps: [commmercial content] We have a stake in this stuff, so standard bias disclaimers apply to my post. See today's InsideHPC for more ... http://insidehpc.com [/commercial content] -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics, email: landman at scalableinformatics.com web : http://scalableinformatics.com http://scalableinformatics.com/jackrabbit phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121 fax : +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615

subset: commoncrawl


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Marquette men's basketball to be honored at Miller Park
MILWAUKEE (WITI) -- The Marquette University men's basketball team will be honored on the field before the Milwaukee Brewers vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game on Monday, April 29 at Miller Park.
Marquette head coach Buzz Williams will throw out the ceremonial first pitch prior to the game and members of the team will join Williams on the field for a pre-game recognition.
The on-field recognition will begin at approximately 7:00 p.m. (game time is 7:10 p.m.).
The Golden Eagles were the regular season BIG EAST co-champions and advanced to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament last month. The team finished with an overall record of 26-9 and currently has the second longest home winning streak in the nation at 25 games.
Tickets for Monday's game are available at the Miller Park Box Office, Brewers.com or by calling 414-902-4000.


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DOCTOR WHO Season 10 Episode 7 : The Pyramid at the End of the World
An 'ancient' pyramid appears overnight. Every clock in the world begins counting down to the Earth's destruction. Three opposing armies lie ready to annihilate each other. An alien race stands ready to offer humanity a deal that could save them, but enslave them. It is a terrifying race against time to save the world. Will the Doctor be forced to accept their help?
Episode Guide
Season 01
Season 02
Season 03
Season 04
Season 05
Season 06
Season 07
Season 08
Season 09
Season 10
Season 11
Season 12


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Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?
October 23, 2010 by Linda
Filed under Parenting From Balance©
I wanted to share this article, because it describes a program that is so in line with what we practice at Riviera PlaySchool in Redondo Beach that I got excited when I found it! Tools of the Mind, like Riviera PlaySchool, values the power of play in the development of executive function, and also values the power of respect! The article is below.
September 27, 2009
By PAUL TOUGH
"Come on, Abigail."
"No, wait!" Abigail said. "I'm not finished!" She was bent low over her clipboard, a stubby pencil in her hand, slowly scratching out the letters in the book's title, one by one: T H E. . . .
"Abigail, we're waiting!" Jocelyn said, staring forcefully at her classmate. Henry, sitting next to her, sighed dramatically.
"I'm going as fast as I can!" Abigail said, looking harried. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and plowed ahead: V E R Y. . . .
The three children were seated at their classroom's listening center, where their assignment was to leaf through a book together while listening on headphones to a CD with the voice of a teacher reading it aloud. The book in question was lying on the table in front of Jocelyn, and every few seconds, Abigail would jump up and lean over Jocelyn to peer at the cover, checking what came next in the title. Then she would dive back to the paper on her clipboard, and her pencil would carefully shape yet another letter: H U N. . . .
Henry fiddled with the CD player. Like Abigail and Jocelyn, he was a kindergarten student in Red Bank, a small town near the New Jersey shore. The students at the elementary school came mostly from working-class and low-income families, and, like the town itself, the student population was increasingly Hispanic. Jocelyn, with flowing dark hair, was the child of immigrants from Mexico; Henry was Hispanic with a spiky haircut; Abigail was white and blond.
"Abby!" Henry said. "Come on!" He and Jocelyn had long ago finished writing the title of the book on their lesson plans. They already had their headphones on. The only thing standing between them and the story was the pencil clutched in their classmate's hand.
"O.K., we're starting," Jocelyn announced. But they didn't start. For all their impatience, they knew the rule of the listening center: You don't start listening to the story until everyone is ready.
"Oh, man," Henry said. He grabbed his face and lowered his head to the desk with a clunk.
"Let's begin!" Jocelyn said.
"I'm almost done!" Abigail was hopping up and down now. "Don't press it!" She bounced from foot to foot, still writing: P I L. . . .
"I'm pressing it!" Henry said. His finger hovered over the play button on the CD player . . . but it did not fall, not until Abigail etched out her last few letters and put on her headphones. Only then, finally, could the three of them turn the pages together and listen to "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."
When the CD finished, each child took a piece of paper and drew three pictures to illustrate what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the book. Then they captioned each one, first drawing a series of horizontal lines under the pictures, one for each word, and then writing out each word, or an approximation thereof: For "butterfly," Abigail wrote "btrfli." Their language skills were pretty impressive for kindergarten students. But for the teachers and child psychologists running the program in which they were enrolled, those skills were considered secondary — not irrelevant, but not as important as the skills the children displayed before the story started, when all three were wrestling with themselves, fighting to overcome their impulses — in Abby's case, the temptation to give up on writing out the whole title and just submit to the pleas of her friends; for Jocelyn and Henry, the urge to rip the pencil out of Abby's hand and start the CD already.
Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function. Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cognitive psychologists have come to believe that executive function, and specifically the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most vexing questions in education today.
The ability of young children to control their emotional and cognitive impulses, it turns out, is a remarkably strong indicator of both short-term and long-term success, academic and otherwise. In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests. The problem is that just as we're coming to understand the importance of self-regulation skills, those skills appear to be in short supply among young American children. In one recent national survey, 46 percent of kindergarten teachers said that at least half the kids in their classes had problems following directions. In another study, Head Start teachers reported that more than a quarter of their students exhibited serious self-control-related negative behaviors, like kicking or threatening other students, at least once a week. Walter Gilliam, a professor at Yale's child-study center, estimates that each year, across the country, more than 5,000 children are expelled from pre-K programs because teachers feel unable to control them.
There is a popular belief that executive-function skills are fixed early on, a function of genes and parenting, and that other than medication, there's not much that teachers and professionals can do to affect children's impulsive behavior. In fact, though, there is growing evidence that the opposite is true, that executive-function skills are relatively malleable — quite possibly more malleable than I.Q., which is notoriously hard to increase over a sustained period. In laboratory studies, research psychologists have found that with executive function, practice helps; when children or adults repeatedly perform basic exercises in cognitive self-regulation, they get better at it. But when researchers try to take those experiments out of the lab and into the classroom, their success rate is much lower. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003 with 40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.
"We did everything right," she told me: led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a control group at the same school. "We looked at teacher ratings of self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late to class more," Duckworth explained. "We got zero effect on everything." Despite that failure, Duckworth says she is convinced that it is possible to boost executive function among children — she just thinks it will require a more complex and thoroughgoing program than the one that she and her colleagues employed. "It's not impossible," she concludes, "but it's damn hard."
Which is why Abigail, Henry and Jocelyn are potentially so important. They and their classmates are enrolled in Tools of the Mind, a relatively new program dedicated to improving the self-regulation abilities of young children, starting as early as age 3. Tools of the Mind is based on the teachings of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who died of tuberculosis in 1934, at age 38, and whose educational theories and methods were, until recently, little known in the United States. Over the past 15 years, Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova, scholars of child development based in Denver, have turned Vygotsky's philosophy into a full-time curriculum for prekindergarten and kindergarten students, complete with training manuals and coaches and professional-development classes for teachers. Tools of the Mind has grown steadily — though its expansion has sped up in the past few years — and it now is being used to teach 18,000 prekindergarten and kindergarten students in 12 states around the country. Leong and Bodrova say they believe they have found the answer to the problem that has bedeviled Duckworth and other psychologists for so long. Their program, they say, can reliably teach self-regulation skills to pretty much any child — poor or rich; typical achievers as well as many of those who are considered to have special needs. (They make the claim that many kids given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. would not need Ritalin if they were enrolled in Tools of the Mind.) And if Leong and Bodrova are right, those improved self-regulation skills will lead not only to fewer classroom meltdowns and expulsions in prekindergarten and kindergarten; they will also lead to better reading and math scores later on.
At the heart of the Tools of the Mind methodology is a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call "mature dramatic play": complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.
Over the last decade or so, the central debate in the field of early-childhood education has been between one group that favors what you might call a preacademic approach to prekindergarten and kindergarten and another group that contends that the point of school in those early years is not to prepare for academic study; it is to allow children to explore the world, learn social skills and have free, unconstrained fun. The preacademic camp began to dominate the debate in the late 1990s, drawing on some emerging research that showed that children's abilities at the beginning of kindergarten were powerful predictors of later success. If a child reached his 5th birthday well behind his peers in measures of cognitive ability, this research showed, he would most likely never catch up. The good news in the research was that if you exposed struggling children to certain intensive reading and math interventions in prekindergarten and kindergarten, when their minds were still at their most pliable, you could significantly reduce or even eliminate that lag. And so the answer, to many scholars and policy makers, was clear: there was no time to waste in those early years on Play-Doh and fingerpainting, not when kids, and especially disadvantaged kids, could be making such rapid advances in the critical cognitive skills they needed.
More recently, though, a backlash has been growing against the preacademic approach among educators and child psychologists who argue that it misses the whole point of early-childhood education. "Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress," warned a report released in March by a research group called the Alliance for Childhood, which is advised by some of the country's most esteemed progressive-education scholars. There is now too much testing and too little free time, the report argues, and kids are being forced to try to read before they are ready. The solution, according to the report's authors, is a return to ample doses of "unstructured play" in kindergarten. If kids are allowed to develop at their own paces, they will be happier and healthier and less stressed out. And there will still be plenty of time later on to learn how to read.
On the surface, Bodrova and Leong would seem to belong to the second camp. They say, after all, that play should have a central place in early-childhood classrooms. And they do find fault with the academic approach, arguing that in practice, many of the early-childhood academic initiatives that have been introduced in the No Child Left Behind era have failed to produce any significant improvement in academic skills. At the same time, they don't agree that the solution is unstructured free play. The romantic idea that children are born with flowering imaginations and a natural instinct for make-believe is simply wrong, they say. Especially these days, they contend, when children spend more time in front of screens and less time in unsupervised play, kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.
Bodrova and Leong began working together with early-childhood teachers in 1992, soon after Bodrova immigrated from Russia to be a visiting professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where Leong was a professor of child development. When they visited local classrooms, they were struck by how out of control things often seemed. It was a period when preschool and kindergarten teachers were taught to "follow the child's lead," to let children guide the learning process with their own interests and unfettered imaginations. In practice, Bodrova and Leong observed, classrooms were often chaotic free-for-alls.
Bodrova and Leong had both studied Vygotsky, and they discussed whether some of his methods might help improve the climate of these classrooms. For Vygotsky, the real purpose of early-childhood education was not to learn content, like the letters of the alphabet or the names of shapes and colors and animals. The point was to learn how to think. When children enter preschool, Vygotsky wrote, they are "slaves to their environment," unable to control their reactions or direct their interests, responding to whatever shiny objects are put in front of them. Accordingly, the most important goal of prekindergarten is to teach children how to master their thoughts. And the best way for children to do that, Vygotsky believed, especially at this early age, is to employ various tools, tricks and habits that train the mind to work at a higher level. So Tools of the Mind students learn to use "private speech" — to talk to themselves as they do a difficult task (like, say, forming the letter W), to help themselves remember what step comes next (down, up, down, up). They use "mediators": physical objects that remind them how to do a particular task, like CD-size cards, one with a pair of lips and one with an ear, that signify whose turn it is to read aloud in Buddy Reading and whose turn it is to listen. But more than anything, they use play.
Most of Vygotsky's counterparts in the field of child psychology, including influential figures like Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori, held that imaginary play was an immature form of expression, a preliminary stage of development. But Vygotsky maintained that at 4 or 5, a child's ability to play creatively with other children was in fact a better gauge of her future academic success than any other indicator, including her vocabulary, her counting skills or her knowledge of the alphabet. Dramatic play, he said, was the training ground where children learned to regulate themselves, to conquer their own unruly minds. In the United States, we often associate play with freedom, but to Vygotsky, dramatic play was actually the arena where children's actions were most tightly restricted. When a young boy is acting out the role of a daddy making breakfast, he is limited by all the rules of daddy-ness. Some of those limitations come from his playmates: if he starts acting like a baby (or a policeman or a dinosaur) in the middle of making breakfast, the other children will be sure to steer him back to the eggs and bacon. But even beyond that explicit peer pressure, Vygotsky would say, the child is guided by the basic principles of play. Make-believe isn't as stimulating and satisfying — it simply isn't as much fun — if you don't stick to your role. And when children follow the rules of make-believe and push one another to follow those rules, he said, they develop important habits of self-control.
Bodrova and Leong drew on research conducted by some of Vygotsky's followers that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can control their impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations. In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played "grocery store" and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time, though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many words. Bodrova and Leong say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind classrooms: when their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only does their level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills.
In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried to improve children's self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism, reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The message to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn't control their impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers, was to train children by praising them for their positive self-control ("Look at how well Cindy is sitting!") and criticizing them for their lapses. And in most American prekindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some form, is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those "external reinforcement systems" create "other-directed regulation" — good behavior done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of others, to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a kind of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting. Children learn only how to be obedient, how to follow orders, not how to understand and regulate their own impulses. The ultimate goal of Tools of the Mind is not emotional or physical self-regulation; it is cognitive self-regulation — not the ability to avoid grabbing a toy from the kid next to you (though that's an important first step), but the much more subtle ability to avoid falling for a deceptively attractive wrong answer on a test or to concentrate on an arduous mental task. And those abilities are more difficult to affect by other-directed regulation. Because the abilities are more abstract, they are less likely to be elicited by rewards. Kids are rarely able to organize their thoughts better in order to get an ice-cream cone.
As a result, many practices that most prekindergarten teachers consider essential are more or less banned from Tools of the Mind classrooms. There are no gold stars, no telling the class that they are all going to have to wait until Jimmy is quiet; even timeouts are discouraged. When there is a conflict — when, say, Billy grabs a toy from Jamal — the Tools of the Mind teacher's first questions are supposed to be: What was it in the classroom that made it hard for Billy to control himself? And what mediators could help him do better next time? The teacher does remind Billy that there is a rule and he broke it, but she doesn't make a big deal out of the incident. "We pretty much try not to use this whole concept of misbehavior," Bodrova told me. "These kids are not born criminals. Even if they do something that is completely out of bounds, they do it because they can't stop themselves."
There are not yet firm experimental data that prove that Tools of the Mind works. But two early studies that began in the late 1990s in Denver showed some promising results: After a year in the program, students did significantly better than a similar group on basic measures of literacy ability. And more recent studies, including one overseen by Adele Diamond, a professor at the University of British Columbia who is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of cognitive self-control, have shown that Tools students consistently score higher on tests requiring executive function. Angela Duckworth told me that when she read Diamond's report, which was published in Science in 2007, "I got very excited." Her failed 2003 study had persuaded her that the usual approach to self-control in early-childhood education, a brief intervention here or there, wouldn't work. But Tools of the Mind was clearly a different strategy. "It's an immersion approach," she said. "It's not that these kids are pulled out and they do self-control for half an hour a day. Everything is about self-regulation, every single moment. Everything about the culture that the classroom creates reinforces that."
It's one of the reasons that visiting a Tools of the Mind classroom can cause moments of cognitive dissonance. While there's a lot of dressing up and playing with blocks, plenty of messing around with sand tables and Legos and jigsaw puzzles, there are also a few activities that seem not just grown-up but protocorporate, borrowed directly from the modern office. Every morning, before embarking on the day's make-believe play, each child takes a colored marker and a printed form called a play plan and draws or writes his declaration of intent for that day's play: "I am going to drive the choo-choo train"; "I am going to make a sand castle"; "I am going to take the dollies to the beach." At the beginning of prekindergarten, children are coached on dramatic play — called Make-Believe Play Practice — with the teacher leading the children, step by step, through the mechanics of pretending. (The training manual describes how a teacher might coach a child to feed a baby doll: "I'm pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?") In kindergarten, every student carries around a clipboard with the day's activities on it — that's what Abigail was writing on at the listening center — and each Friday, every child has a 5- or 10-minute "learning conference" with his teacher, a mini-performance review in which the children discuss what they accomplished in the last week, where they fell short and what skills they want to work on in the week to come. All of these practices, along with plenty of others that fill the day, are designed to reinforce habits of self-control.
This comprehensiveness creates an extra level of complication for researchers examining Tools of the Mind. There are now four separate large-scale long-term experimental studies under way across the country. But even if the researchers do find, in a few years, that the program has long-term effects on executive function and school performance, they still won't know exactly which techniques in the Tools of the Mind package are the most useful, or whether they all need to be employed in concert in order to have an effect. Stephanie M. Carlson, a professor of child psychology at the University of Minnesota who studies executive function, told me she is impressed with what she has seen so far of Tools of the Mind. But, she pointed out, "it's a really heavy-hitting approach, and there are a lot of different techniques used during the course of the day. What we don't know is what the secret ingredient is." It might be all the dramatic play, but it also might be the literacy practice, or the learning conferences, or something else entirely.
In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. "We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do," she explained. "Maybe it's an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn't mean it can't be fun."
Paul Tough is an editor of the magazine and the author of "Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America," which is out in paperback this month.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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Windows 2000 introduced Encrypting File System (EFS) and Offline Files. EFS lets users encrypt files and folders on NTFS partitions. Offline Files lets users access files offline when their connection to the file server is interrupted. In Windows XP Professional, Microsoft has joined these technologies to enable administrators to encrypt offline files for added security. Let's take a look at how you can use this new capability to encrypt the offline file cache folder.
EFS lets users employ a combination of asymmetric and symmetric key cryptography to encrypt files. When a user first encrypts a particular file, Windows determines whether a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate server, such as Microsoft's Certificate Services provides, is available. If so, the PKI server will give the user a new EFS digital certificate with a 2-year life. If Windows can't detect a PKI server capable of distributing EFS certificates, Windows will generate a self-signed EFS certificate for the user with a life of 100 years.
When a user selects a file for encryption, Windows creates a random symmetric key (called the File Encryption Key--FEK) and associates it with the file. Windows uses the FEK to encrypt the file and generates only one unique FEK per file, no matter how many users encrypt the file. Windows uses an individual user's EFS asymmetric public key to encrypt the FEK. If a user is designated as a data recovery agent (DRA), Windows encrypts a copy of the FEK with the DRA's EFS public key. In fact, in XP Pro and later OSs, an EFS-protected file can be encrypted by many users at once (the theoretical limit is in the hundreds of users). For each user who encrypts a file, Windows encrypts a copy of the FEK with the user's EFS public key. Each encrypting user's EFS private key can decrypt the FEK (which decrypts the protected file) and is stored in the user's profile. Each EFS private key is protected by a master key that Windows generates with the user's password. EFS encryption is solid, well-tested encryption. (For a more comprehensive description of EFS, see "Take a Closer Look at EFS," September 2005, InstantDoc ID 47175.)
Offline Files 101
The Offline Files feature uses shared folders (or Web pages) with client and server support. Each share on a client computer must be configured to allow Offline Files, although the server settings are often enabled by default. Client machines must also be enabled for Offline File support for each participating share. When a user's computer connects to a share that's been enabled to support Offline Files, the files are downloaded to an offline cache location on the client computer. The user can work with the offline files, and when he or she reconnects to the server, the files are synchronized with the server, and the latest version in either location updates the other version. File synchronization can occur only when the client computer goes offline, during logoff and logon, or on a predetermined schedule.
Using EFS and Offline Files
In XP Pro and later OSs, users can specify all their locally stored offline files to be encrypted for added security. To take advantage of this capability, users must have enabled Offline Files on the client but aren't required to have encrypted individual files previously. When a user enables encryption of the offline folder cache on a particular client machine, Windows encrypts the cache with a special EFS machine digital certificate. Unfortunately, that machine key will encrypt the personal offline files of all users on the client. Obviously, this method is more vulnerable to compromise than are encryption schemes that employ per-user keys. Microsoft has stated that it will change this capability in future Windows versions.
To encrypt the Offline Files database on a local XP Pro computer:
The Windows client-side caching extension, cscui.dll, will now automatically encrypt offline files as they are stored in the local Offline Files database. Requirements for encrypting files include the following:
Group Policy and Offline Folder Caching
As with most other aspects of the Windows experience, you can control offline folder caching with Group Policy. Many Group Policy settings affect Offline Files. For an overview of these settings, see the Microsoft Windows XP Resource Kit Documentation article "Group Policy Settings that Affect Offline Files, available at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prde_ffs_phvy.asp. However, only one Group Policy setting affects Offline Files and EFS: Encrypt the Offline Files cache. If this policy is enabled, the entire Offline Files cache will be encrypted on an XP Pro or later client machine. You can't select individual files to encrypt when using this policy--all files stored in the cache are encrypted.
Caveats to Keep in Mind
EFS protects only files that are stored on a disk. When an authorized user opens EFS files, Windows decrypts them. When the decrypted files are copied over the network (again by the authorized user) the data is moved in plain text. Microsoft recommends the use of IP Security (IPsec), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), or another network-communication encryption protocol to protect data in transit. For reasons that are unknown to me, Microsoft prevents the simultaneous use of offline folders and files and Remote Desktop. You must disable one to use the other. Finally, as with any remote synchronization technology, at times synchronization can fail or interrupt normal operations. For example, if you're in a hurry and don't let the entire synchronization process complete before taking your computer offline, you may be prevented from accessing your offline files until you reconnect and complete a successful synchronization. But these cautions aside, the combination of Windows' EFS and Offline Files features provides a viable option for securing offline files.


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Fast Frame Add On
Fast Frames is a hoop less embroidery frame. Stick on backing is placed on the underside. The adhesive backing is exposed in the open sew space of the frame. Press the area to be sewn firmly down on the backing (using the notches as line up points for alignment). Any area that will lay down flat in the sew field you can sew. Use it for sweat band area of caps, back, sides, bill, bucket caps, collar tips, cuffs of sleeves, dog collars, gym bag center flaps, etc. Sport knits do not get stretched out of shape. The stick on backing holds it in place. This is a much faster cost effective way of sewing hard to sew items. Don't worry you won't waste a lot of backing. When you tear the item away you just place a patch on the hole from the underside and press the next item in place to sew.


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Stroller Is My Fitness
March 21, 2014 by Lena Leave a Comment
My name is Lena Filatova and I'm a mother of a 6 year old son. Stroller Walking has become my sport and the way of life for almost four years: I've walked with the baby stroller more than 5000 miles, as well as developed Strollnetics and promoted Fitness Rollerblading for Moms. In fact, I haven't invented anything, I just rethink the way a mom can do more sport and have more freedom staying with her child.


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We're two of those poor HBO-less saps who have to wait until the following Wednesday to get the free podcast of the previous Friday night's episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher." And so we only just discovered his final "New Rule" from last week: "Republicans have to stop thinking up intricate, psychological explanations for why liberals don't like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann. Let me save you all some time. Are you ready? Because they're crazy people." Now, Bill Maher is not exactly what we'd call a feminist icon, and he's pretty selective about which sexism he shuns — he's definitely not down with the systemic misogyny of religions like Islam which allow women to be stoned for exposing an ankle and which consider rape not a crime but a punishment, but he loves to talk about stereotypical dumb blondes with big tits and nagging sexless ball-and-chain wives. It's tough, because otherwise his political views are very compelling. So when he delivers a smart, spot-on New Rule like last week's — in which he explains how Palin and Bachmann aren't dumb because they have boobs but because they are boobs, and how inherently sexist the Bible is — we can forgive him the pig that he his.
• This post is a part of Sundance Channel's Naked Love Blog
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Story #10
February 22, 1998 – Nagano, Japan
Although the Czech Republic could not have won gold at the 1998 Olympics without goalie Dominik Hasek, it was Petr Svoboda of the Czech Republic who was the final hero of the tournament, the first Olympics which included full participation of NHL players. Hasek had led the team to the gold-medal game by stopping all five Canadian players in a semi-finals shootout win, but it was Svoboda who scored the lone goal in the final game of the Olympics against Russia.The goal came midway through the third period of a scoreless game, and it came on a surprisingly unspectacular play. With a faceoff deep in the Russian end, Czech centre Pavel Patera won the draw from Sergei Fedorov. Martin Prochazka got the puck at the top of the circle and moved it further back to Svoboda at the point, and his hard quick shot beat goalie Mikhail Shtalenkov for the game's only goal. Amazingly, this was Svoboda's first appearance with the national team at the senior level, even though, at 32 years of age, he was the second-oldest player on the team. This was his only goal of the Olympics.As soon as the puck went in, many fans at the Big Hat arena in Nagano celebrated, but tens of thousands more joined in from long distance. A giant TV screen had been erected in Old Town Square in the centre of Prague, and they waved flags, hugged each other, and cheered with pride as the goal was scored. At the end of the game, history had been made. The Czechs had defeated the two most successful hockey nations in the sport's history—Canada and Russia—to win its first gold in 78 years of Olympic hockey.
After the medal ceremony, Hasek said: "When I saw the flag go up, I saw my whole career flash before my eyes from the first time my parents took me to a hockey game until now." The team flew to Prague the next day for a celebratory parade, and estimates of more than a million people in the national capital speak to the win not just as a sporting moment of Czech history but a cultural one as well.Perhaps, however, the single most important aspect about the win was the makeup of the team. The Czechs used only ten NHLers. The other players came from the Czech Extraliga. The message was clear. European leagues were of very high quality, and, if coached properly, could beat the best from any country on a given day. The 1998 Olympics weren't the success many had thought they'd be for Canada and the United States—neither country won a medal—but for European fans and for those who wanted only the best players to participate in the Olympics the message was clear—this is the way of the future.
As part of the IIHF's 100th anniversary celebrations, www.IIHF.com is featuring the 100 top international hockey stories from the past century (1908-2008). Starting now and continuing through the 2008 IIHF World Championships in Canada, we will bring you approximately three stories a week counting down from Number 100 to Number 11.
The Final Top 10 Countdown will be one of the highlights of the IIHF's Centennial Gala Evening in Quebec City on May 17, the day prior to the Gold Medal Game of the 2008 World Championship.
These are the criteria for inclusion on this list: First, the story has to have had a considerable influence on international hockey. Second, it has to have had either a major immediate impact or a long-lasting significance on the game. Third, although it doesn't necessarily have to be about top players, the story does have to pertain to the highest level of play, notably Olympics, World Championships, and the like. The story can be about a single moment — a goal, a great save, a referee's call — or about an historic event of longer duration — a game, series, tournament, or rule change.
Click here for the 100 Top Stories


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Online Kiobel symposium: The Alien Tort Statute as a species of extraterritorial U.S. law
on Jul 16, 2012 at 1:50 pm
The following contribution to our symposium on Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum is written by Julian Ku, a Professor of Law at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. He is the author, with John Yoo, of Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order (Oxford University Press 2012). [Lyle published an introduction to the issues in Kiobel last week.]
For years, the Alien Tort Statute has been hailed as the preeminent vehicle for incorporating, developing, and expanding norms of international law in the United States. Scholars like Harold Koh and Anne Marie Slaughter saluted the way that the Alien Tort Statute enabled the U.S. to demonstrate its commitment to upholding and enforcing international law norms. But what is striking about the Supreme Court's pending decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, however, is how it has forced defenders of the ATS to rely on domestic law rather than international law to flesh out and resolve key legal questions arising in ATS cases. This has transformed the ATS into just another domestic law tort mechanism, albeit one that purports to regulate activity outside the United States and within the sovereign jurisdiction of other countries.
While early ATS cases like the seminal decision in Filartiga v. Peña -Irala sought to hold individuals accountable for human rights abuses, such cases also were valorized for demonstrating the importance and power of international law. Indeed, as very few ATS cases amounted to enforceable judgments or significant settlements, the ATS seemed a largely symbolic tool. The ATS fascinated academics, especially international law professors, but it seemed to have little practical significance. But because the ATS had little practical impact, many of the key questions about how it would be applied remained unexplored and uncertain.
That began to change in the 1990s when ATS plaintiffs began targeting multinational corporations. For the first time, ATS plaintiffs targeted defendants who had assets to satisfy judgments, but who also were willing to engage in protracted litigation to defend those assets. Corporate defendants raised numerous defenses that prevented ATS plaintiffs from reaching the merits of most of their cases. Even after the Supreme Court resolved the first main challenge to the ATS in its 2004 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, corporate defendants had other defenses that courts had not yet explored.
Most litigants and scholars focused on the question of the proper standard for proving aiding and abetting liability in ATS cases, but the Second Circuit's decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum opened up a new legal front in the ongoing ATS wars. By holding that the ATS did not permit lawsuits against corporate entities, the Second Circuit placed the question of corporations and international law front and center.
The Second Circuit's holding in Kiobel surprised many observers. After all, it was decided in 2010, nearly twenty years after the first major ATS lawsuits against corporations had been filed. Moreover, the corporate liability argument adopted in Kiobel had not been seriously considered, or even argued, in many of the early ATS cases. The argument seemed outlandish and, to many defendants, not even worth making. Indeed, in the Kiobel case itself, defendants Royal Dutch Petroleum did not even raise the corporate liability argument before the panel that decided the case. The Second Circuit panel in Kiobel, led by Judge Jose Cabranes, raised the corporate liability sua sponte.
The Kiobel court's holding also forced a curious reversal in the arguments made by ATS plaintiffs. Because the statute states that it only grants jurisdiction over actions brought by aliens for violations of customary international law or treaties, much of the task of interpreting the ATS has turned on trying to determine the substantive content of international law. The Supreme Court raised the stakes on this question in Sosa by requiring federal courts to limit ATS actions to only those international law claims that were "specific, universal, and obligatory."
But this standard posed a serious, or nearly impossible, obstacle for claims against corporations because international law provides almost no guidance on suing or otherwise holding corporations liable. While some scholars attempted to build an argument that international law does indeed support corporate liability under the Sosa standard, most courts reacting to Kiobel simply held that the question was actually governed by domestic U.S. law. ATS plaintiffs began arguing that domestic federal law, and not international law, should govern key questions, including that of whether a corporation could be sued under the ATS.
There are good reasons for this shift. There are embarrassingly few precedents for holding corporations directly liable for violations of international law. And those that do exist provide little if no guidance on a variety of issues that will arise when suing corporations: such as standards for piercing the corporate veil, holding parents liable for subsidiaries, or even questions of successor liability. There are strong reasons to think that if the question of corporate liability is governed by customary international law, the Kiobel court was correct to dismiss the case because it can draw on no well-established principles of international law to resolve such questions.
But if the petitioners in Kiobel succeed in shifting the Court away from customary international law, they intensify the other largely overlooked problem with ATS lawsuits. As the Court's decision to seek reargument indicates, ATS lawsuits may apply substantive norms of international law that bear wide acceptance, but they also result in the application of U.S. law to matters outside the territory of the United States and usually within the sovereign jurisdiction of another country.
This is especially true if the Court is applying domestic norms of corporate law to resolve questions such as parent-subsidiary liability and veil piercing, which will inevitably arise in future ATS litigation against corporations. Imagine a court in the United States attempting to apply norms of U.S. law to pierce the corporate veil of a business incorporated under the law of a foreign country. This is certainly not impossible, but it is likely to result in the application of U.S. law to the corporate law issues of a foreign corporation acting in a foreign jurisdiction.
Perhaps recognizing the impossibility of drawing upon international law for these questions, the Kiobel petitioners have retreated to a transitory tort theory of the ATS, which treats ATS claims as simply another variety of domestic common law tort. This theory has a variety of problems, but what is striking about this argument is how it no longer makes grand claims about the ATS's importance as a mechanism for developing international law. It reduces the ATS to little more than a garden-variety state common law tort claim that happens to occur in federal court.
It is likely that the Court will avoid addressing the corporate liability question in its final decision in Kiobel and instead hold that the ATS's extraterritorial scope is limited to claims with a substantial nexus to the U.S. If so, it may never resolve the corporate liability question. But it was the corporate liability question that has forced ATS defenders to recast the ATS as a domestic law.
Thus, the Kiobel litigation has thus confirmed that the ATS is not a free-floating universalist tool for enforcing international law norms on behalf of the international community. It is a law of the United States, which authorizes courts to apply domestic American law to activities with some substantial connection to the United States. As a domestic statute, it is, and should be, subject to the same kinds of limitations that are imposed on other domestic statutes. This new, more modest ATS is perhaps less interesting and attractive to international law scholars and advocates. But it is far more likely to survive as a meaningful tool for extraterritorial corporate regulation.


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This article is more than 1 year old
Small biz told to sort TV licences for PCs
Online or on the box
UK businesses are being warned that they need a TV licence if staff watch live TV broadcasts whether they do so on a TV or via their computers.
TV Licensing is reminding firms that they need a licence if machines are plugged in - someone watching live broadcasts via a mobile or laptop is covered by their own home licence as long as they don't plug the machine into a power socket. Once it's plugged in it is considered "installed", and therefore becomes the responsibility of the company.
Staff are free to watch catch-up services like the BBC's iPlayer or Channel 4's 4OD without paying the annual tax.
Rumours that telly licensing's famous detector vans contain nothing more than a man, his sandwiches and a Thermos are strongly disputed on its website.
This claims the vans contain extra-specially strong secret technology. The site claims: "Some aspects of the equipment have been developed in such secrecy that engineers working on specific detection methods work in isolation - so not even they know how the other detection methods work." So now you know... and we thought they just matched a UK household database with their payment database.
Anyone selling a TV is also required by law to inform the authority of the address of anyone buying or renting a telly.
A spokesman for TV Licensing said it was unable to give figures on businesses caught without licences because it does not keep separate records.
TV Licensing caught 214,000 people without licences in the first six months of 2009 - 5,000 more than in the same period of 2008.
Of course the other way to deal with this thorny issue is to refuse access to anyone claiming to be from TV Licensing. But if we all did that then there'd be no money for CBeebies. ®


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The terms "Geolocal Limited", "Geolocal Ltd", "Geolocal", "jelloo", "we", "us", "our" and "ours" when used in this Privacy Policy mean Geolocal Limited. The terms "you", "your" and "yours" when used in this Privacy Policy mean any user of this website. The term "Personal Data" refers to personally identifiable information about you, such as your name, job title, email or mailing address.
We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors whilst providing the highest possible quality of service. We will only use the information that we collect about you lawfully in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act 1998. If you have any questions concerning your personal information or regarding our practices, please contact us via [email protected].
We collect information from details you give us when you use our website and from any email messages you may send to us. When you use this website to register to receive additional information or support from us, we ask you for contact information like your name, job title, company details, telephone number and email address. If, at any time, you wish to opt out of receiving information from Geolocal via email, please send us an email under [email protected].
We also use software tools to collect information automatically about your visit to our website. The information obtained in this way, which includes demographic data and browsing patterns, is only used in aggregate form and, as such, cannot be used to identify you personally. Such aggregate information helps us to audit usage of our website and improve the service provided.
In order to collect the anonymous data described above, we may use temporary "cookies" that collect the domain name of the user and the date and time you visited this website. Cookies by themselves cannot be used to discover the identity of the user. A cookie is a small piece of information which is sent to your browser and stored on your computer's hard drive. Cookies do not damage your computer. You can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie and this enables you to decide if you want to accept it or not.
We process your personal data only for specific and limited purposes. We ask only for data that is adequate, relevant and not excessive for those purposes. When we ask you for personal data, we tell you the purposes for which we will process that data. Some of these purposes include:
We do not share, sell or distribute your personal data with unrelated third parties, except under the following limited circumstances:
We keep your personal data only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes for which it was collected or to comply with any applicable legal or ethical reporting or document retention requirements. In order to prevent unauthorized access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online. Our servers and our databases are protected by industry standard security technology, such as industry standard firewalls and password protection. The employees who have access to personal data have been trained to handle such data properly and in accordance with our security protocols and strict standards of confidentiality. Although we cannot guarantee against any loss, misuse, unauthorized disclosure, alteration or destruction of data, we try to prevent such unfortunate occurrences.
We will disclose to you the personal data we hold about you upon receipt of your written request to the email address given above. We will also correct, amend or delete any personal data that is inaccurate and notify any third party recipients of the necessary changes.
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Brands - Arylic
Arylic is founded by groups of expert people with different skills from home audio and lifestyle new technology products. With more than 10 years of experience designing the product behind the scenes, we made the decision to make some products of our own team with our specialty, to make them good, value for money, good quality, maintain and update.
Arylic S50 Pro+ Multi-Room Wireless Bluetooth/WiFi/Ethernet Network Streamer
Special Price $299.00
Regular Price: $359.00
Save 17 %


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What is a harp? Harps are what we call those flexible U-shaped metal wires that connect the lamp base to the lamp shade. Most harps have a small metal cap on each end to prevent the harp from slipping off the socket. A harp gives the added bonus of protecting the bulb from accidental breakage.
Often people buy a new harp when fitting a new lampshade. If you buy a shade EXACTLY like your old one, you should not need a new harp. Luckily, most harps are interchangeable, so if your new shade does not fit perfectly at first, switching the harp is easy and can usually get you a perfect fit.
If you need a different size harp, first remove the finial and you should see a number stamped into the top plate of your harp. This number indicates the height (in inches) of your current harp. Now you have a reference point and you can measure how much higher or shorter your new harp should be. Another way to raise the shade is to get a "shade-riser", which we carry in 1″ or 2″ models.
How to find the perfect harp size every time? – You will know that you have the perfect harp height when you look across the bottom of the shade and the socket is almost visible. If your harp is too tall, you will see the socket. If the harp is too short, you will have to reach up too far to turn on the light.
The LampsUSA Harp Fitting Formula is
Harp Height = [Shade Height] – [Drop] – [1/2″] So, Take the total shade height and subtract the "drop" (to find the "drop", measure from the top of the shade down to the center of the spider. Most shades have drops of ½" – 1″. But some tall shades have drops of 3-4″ so since this will really affect your harp size, be sure to measure this before ordering.) Then Subtract ½" (to make sure the socket is not exposed.)
This nickel lamp harp has a Silver tone, is 6″ high, and fits lampshades around 7″-8″ tall.
Heavy Duty Construction
Finial not included.
Accepts standard 1/4-27 threaded finials
Center Opening in saddle: 3/8″


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Source Information
About Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, RMS Titanic Graves, 1912
This database contains images of headstones marking the graves in Fairview Cemetery for victims of the Titanic sinking.
Historical Background
Immediately after the Titanic disaster, the White Star Line chartered ships to search for and retrieve the bodies at the site of the disaster. The ships returned to the port at Halifax, Nova Scotia, with just over 200 victims of the sinking. More than 100 others had been buried at sea. While some of the bodies were later transported home according to relatives' wishes, 121 of the victims were buried at Fairview Lawn, a local cemetery in Halifax.
Fairview Cemetery is home to the largest collection of Titanic graves in the world. This collection contains images for most of the headstones for Titanic victims.
Information on the headstones varies. Some of the bodies could not be identified, and in these instances, the headstones list only a date (April 15, 1912) and a marker number. This number refers to a list made as bodies were recovered. Each was assigned a number, and some were never positively identified. Others include a name and sometimes more detailed inscriptions. Some will have a date and number with a name added in white on the side. These were names of victims that were later confirmed. This collection does not include images from two nearby cemeteries with a smaller number of Titanic graves: Mount Olivet and Baron de Hirsch.


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Visitor Information
The VVV (Netherlands Board of Tourism) has several offices around Amsterdam and in Holland. Each VVV within Holland has information principally on its own region.
VVV—Netherlands Board of Tourism. Stationsplein 10, Amsterdam, 1012 AB. www.holland.com. Open daily 9--6.
Online Travel Tools
For a guide to what's happening in Holland, the official site for the Netherlands Board of Tourism is www.holland.com. The official Amsterdam site is www.iamsterdam.com, which also offers extensive event listings. More information is found at www.visitamsterdam.nl. Other general sites are www.amsterdamhotspots.nl and www.amsterdam.info. For rail information and schedules, go to www.ns.nl.
One of the most informative English-language websites about the Netherlands is at www.expatica.com. At www.dutchnews.nl you'll find a daily digest in English of the top domestic news stories in the Netherlands. The A-mag www.iamsterdam.com/en/visiting/plan-your-trip/products/a-mag is a free magazine affiliated with I amsterdam, which offers cultural listings, shopping tips and information about Amsterdam; look for it in newsagents and cafés. For a fun site where you can learn a bit of Dutch, go to www.learndutch.org.
Virtually all cities and towns have individual tourism websites; see the Essentials listings near the beginning of many of our town write-ups.


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Hi Bellas,
Happy Thursday! Today I wanted to bring you a look that's super easy to rock - Neutral Eyes and a Pop of color on the lips. This is one of my go to looks when I don't have a lot of time or energy, but I want a cute look. All you need are some neutral shadows and a bright lippy. Check it out!
On my eyes, I am just using browns - mixing shimmer on the lid with matte on the crease and brow bone to give some balance. I also popped a nude liner in my waterline to make my eyes look bigger. I'm wearing a pair of cheap lashes - the kind that come ten to a box.
On my lips I'm wearing Maybelline Vivids Vivid Rose lipstick and a Colorsensationnal Pink Pop lipgloss on top for moisture.
The good thing about this look is that you can wear it with any lipcolor - red, purple, pink...or be adventurous and try blue or green. The sky's the limit! Remember, it's just makeup, so have fun!


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The grand piano has left the building
Everybody has a Tendulkar story. Everybody has a hole inside them now that he has gone
Siddhartha Vaidyanathan
The show is over. The final episode has ended. The music has faded. The credits have rolled. Done with the presentation. Done with the speech to trump all farewell speeches. Now all we have are the memories. All we have are the stories.
It's a weird feeling, this. My mind goes back to the day in 1990, when Doordarshan aired the final episode of Mahabharat. For the previous two years, large parts of the country dutifully stopped functioning at 9am every Sunday. Those without television sets walked or cycled to the houses of friends and relatives. Grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, kids and dogs clustered in living rooms and, for 45 minutes, were rapt in attention. Everything else took a back seat.
Mahabharat is merely an example. Because those were the days when everyone in India watched the same shows. Everyone watched the same ads. Hum Log, Fauji, Vikram aur Betaal, "Washing Powder Nirma", "Vicco Turmeric (nahi cosmetic)", "I'm a Complan Boy"… You could sing the first line of an ad jingle and someone listening would complete it for you, word for word, expression for expression, note for note, tun-tun-ta-tuns included.
It's in this milieu that Tendulkar emerged, bursting into living rooms with that 18-ball 53 in Peshawar. Almost everyone I know remembers that innings but what's fascinating is that so many people remember exactly where they were and what they were doing that evening. The editor of this website remembers the brand of the black-and-white TV at his friend's house, the colour of the mat beside the TV, the flower vase alongside, the chair he was sitting on. A friend of mine remembers the t-shirt he was wearing that day, a t-shirt he has held on to for all these years.
The timing of Tendulkar's entry is crucial. It was an age when most of India had one TV channel, when most homes bought one newspaper, and when vast numbers watched Chitrahaar on Wednesday nights, because, honestly, there was little else to do. He forced his way into a pop-culture scene that was wallowing in Ram Lakhan, Chandni and Maine Pyar Kiya. Frankly, it was a time ripe for alternatives, a time for compelling diversions.
And what a terrific diversion he was: a one-man entertainment package, high art for the masses, technical perfection meshed with popcorn-bursting verve. He was blockbuster one day, avant garde the next. Here he was - still head, high elbow - grafting to save Test matches. And there he was - youthful and restless - charging down the pitch and launching the ball into the crowd. Everything about him - his precocious talent, his role in the team, the circumstances around his selection - everything seemed predestined.
"I wouldn't call it an accident," said CLR James of WG Grace's colossal effect on English cricket and society. "I don't think a thing like that is an accident. It is clear that he filled a certain need, and that a certain man fills a certain need… Would you call Shakespeare an accident? Or Balzac an accident? Or Michelangelo an accident? Something is required and they do it."
Inevitably he was a conversational centerpiece. Everyone has a Tendulkar story. I recently met a man who was convinced he had introduced Tendulkar to his favourite band, Dire Straits. The story ran thus: He had grown up in Mumbai and had gifted an audio cassette to one of Tendulkar's neighbours at Sahitya Sahwas housing colony, who in turn claimed to have lent a young Tendulkar the tape. There were no ifs and buts in this narration, only a dead-cert confidence.
Look into the blogosphere or social media (or simply trawl through the comments on stories on this website) and you will read many such tales. Some fans have written about the day they met him, or the day they could have met him, or the day they were too stunned to ask for his autograph, or the time they spotted him at a restaurant, or shared a flight with him. Some of these stories are borrowed from friends, or friends who knew friends who knew someone who… There is no stopping this anecdote avalanche. Even the great novelists might not have spent so much time mulling over their protagonists as much as many Indians have, over the last 24 years, chewed over Tendulkar.
Two anecdotes jump out of personal memory.
The first is from 2008. India were playing Australia in a Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Tendulkar was surgically taking the bowling apart. In the audience were Neil Harvey, Arthur Morris and Steve Waugh. So was the Australian prime minister. A nonagenarian, who said he had seen Bradman bat "at this very ground", had one question on his lips when he arrived: "Is he still there?" The adulation and cheers showered on Tendulkar that day were befitting an Australian hero.
My most vivid image from that game is of raucous schoolkids singing and chanting in the Monty Noble stand. Their exasperated teacher tried to hush them up. "Nobody chants when Sachin is on strike," she said, wanting to restore a semblance of order. The kids quieted for a few seconds. Then one of the boys began a chant: "No-body cha-aants when Sa-aachin strikes. No-body cha-aants when Sa-aachin strikes." The rest of the kids took it up. Soon large parts of the stand joined in. The teacher gave up. She stood no chance.
The second instance is from The Oval in 2006. A charity match between a Pakistan XI and an International XI. Returning from a shoulder injury, Tendulkar had blitzed a 26-ball 50 and added 72 golden runs with Brian Lara. After the match, journalists and fans milled around the dressing-room area. Mohammad Yousuf, Shoaib Malik, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Chris Cairns walked out. All were hounded for quotes, autographs and photographs.
Then out walked Tendulkar, kitbag in one hand, a bat in another, and made his way down an aisle of stairs. Instantly everyone took a step back, as if to clear his path. Nobody even attempted to get close. The clamour turned into a hush. And Tendulkar calmly walked on.
I thought of that on Thursday, when the West Indian players and the two umpires provided a guard of honour as he walked in to bat. I thought of that on Friday, when he made his way back to the pavilion after his final Test innings, alone, unmolested, just him on a vast expanse of green. And then again on Saturday, at the end of the match, when his team-mates saluted him with a mobile guard of honour, all the way from the centre to the boundary rope, watching him wipe tears from his eyes. Everyone stepped aside. Everyone cleared his path. And Tendulkar moved on.
He leaves behind an immense emptiness. The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said that every time he completed a novel he felt like a house that was emptied of its grand piano. And so it is with Indian cricket. After 24 years of dedicated service, after an emotion-drenched Test in Mumbai, the grand piano has left the building.
Siddhartha Vaidyanathan is a writer based in the USA


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My manager Josh talks about his Roomba a lot. His family owns two — one for each floor of their house — and he swears it has helped to avert arguments with his wife because they no longer have to vacuum. Despite the fact that I live in a studio and basically have no excuse not to clean the place myself, my old Dirt Devil died just before the holidays and I decided to replace it with the Roomba. I figured if I could get back an hour of free time each week, it would be well worth the cost.
I bought the Roomba 560 (the top-of-the-line model) about six weeks ago and it's been nothing short of a dream. When my friends come over and see him sitting in the corner (yes, I refer to Roomba as a "he"), they look at me quizzically and no doubt think I've reached the pinacle of laziness. While that may be true, I've found that Roomba gathers way more dirt and debris in my apartment that I ever did with a manual vacuum. In fact, he's capable of sucking up far more than the eye can see. After each session, I dump out a ridiculous amount of garbage — feeling both clean and appreciative, and ashamed of having been living in such filth. This is life in a New York City apartment.
So what's so great about the Roomba? Honestly, he's better than your average husband. More useful and a lot less expensive. Here it is, all laid out for you:
1- He can be trained. After a few passes around the apartment, he learns the layout and cleans more efficiently each time.
2- He cleans all my nooks and crannies. Roomba fits perfectly under the dishwasher so I don't have to get down on my hands and knees.
3- He pays attention to detail. When he finds a particularly dirty spot, he focuses on getting it clean before moving on.
4- He's flexible and never complains. He automatically adjusts from my parquet floor to my raised area rug, to the ceramic kitchen tile to the tessellated tiling in the bathroom, even sucks the lint out of my high loop chenille bath mat (he moves it around a bit, but I don't mind).
5- He doesn't get tired. Roomba cleans my entire apartment — living room/bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, hallway — all on one charge.
6- He has no trouble expressing his feelings. He sings a happy song when he starts the job and a triumphant "game over" song once he's done. If something goes wrong (like when he locks himself in the bathroom, for instance) he makes a two-tone "uh oh" sound. He knows you're disappointed, but because he regrets his mistakes you just can't get mad at him.
7- He never has to stop to ask for directions. When there's an obstacle in his way, he finds a way around it. When he detects a wall, he doesn't keep bumping into it just because he's stubborn. And when he's finished the job, Roomba finds his way back to his docking station, no dilly dallying.
8- He doesn't mind being a stay-at-home dad. He cleans the house while I'm at work — at the exact time I tell him to before I leave in the morning.
9- He wants to be dominated — that's why he comes with a completely open interface, allowing the patient programmer to have unlimited remote control of this special guy.
If you don't have one, you really don't know what you're missing. He's great around the house and a ton of fun to watch. Do yourself a favor and go pick one up after work. You'll thank me.
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Skip to Content Skip to Main Navigation Skip to Footer Skip to Search
You Are Here: Jülich Aachen Research Alliance
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As part of their concept for the Excellence initiative, RWTH Aachen and the Forschungszentrum Jülich have forged a unique bond – the Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance (JARA). It fosters a close collaboration between the two institutions and serves the coordination of their strategic development. For example, several professors at the Physics Department are also institute directors at the Forschungszentrum Jülich.
read more...zu: JARA


text:
Hong Kong Phooey #1 Super Guy! In the 1970s a Kung Fu craze was sweeping the nation and Hong Kong Phooey was Hanna-Barberas contribution to it. Hong Kong Phooey was a mild-mannered janitor named Penrod Pooch that worked in a police station with sergeant Flint and Rosemary the telephone operator. Hong Kong would literally jump at the call for help and emerge from a filing cabinet in full crime fighting gear. Phooey would get to the crime scene in the Phooeymobile, an ever-adapting car that could change into a boat, a plane, a telephone booth or whatever it needed to be. Hong Kong would solve the crime and capture the bad guy thanks to his striped sidekick spot the cat. The show remained on air for only 16 episodes.
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Report Duplicate TV Show


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What's on the table now in 'fiscal cliff' talks
A look at the latest offers as Obama, Boehner negotiate to avert the year-end 'fiscal cliff'
An update on the latest offers on the table in negotiations to avert a year-end avalanche of federal tax increases and spending cuts known as the "fiscal cliff":
House Speaker John Boehner would allow income tax rates to rise for people making more than $1 million per year and would hold rates where they are for everyone making less. The top rate on income exceeding $1 million would go from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.
President Barack Obama would freeze income tax rates for taxpayers making $400,000 or less and raise them for people making more.
The two sides are moving closer together. Previously, the Republican House leader opposed allowing any tax rates to go up; Obama wanted higher taxes for individual income above $200,000, or $250,000 for couples.
Obama has dropped his proposal to extend a temporary cut in Social Security payroll taxes paid by 163 million workers. Republicans want that tax to go back up.
Raising the payroll tax by 2 percentage points to its old level would cost a worker making $50,000 a year another $1,000 — or a little more than $19 per week — during 2013.
Obama is offering to reduce cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients. Republicans have been seeking this as a key to long-term deficit reduction. But many congressional Democrats oppose it.
Government pensions and veterans' benefits would also get smaller cost-of-living increases.
In addition, taxpayers, especially low- and middle-income families, would pay more because of changes in the way that tax brackets are adjusted for inflation.
Obama continues to reject Republicans' plan to raise the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67. Boehner now says raising the eligibility age is not essential to a deal.
Obama wants to limit cuts in Medicare and other health care programs to about $400 billion over 10 years; Republicans want to overhaul Medicare to save even more money.
Obama wants a deal that would raise the amount the government is allowed to borrow to cover the next two years, to avoid another debt showdown with Congress until after the 2014 midterm elections.
Previously, Obama had demanded permanent authority to increase the debt ceiling without congressional approval. Republicans want Congress to be part of the decision-making process so they can demand budget-cutting in exchange for additional borrowing.
Obama and Boehner both propose raising taxes on dividends and capital gains from 15 percent to 20 percent.
Both sides would reduce the number of deductions and exemptions that wealthy taxpayers can claim.
Obama would also let estate taxes revert to a 45 percent rate, after the first $3.5 million of an estate is exempted. Boehner backs a plan for a 35 percent rate and $5 million exemption.


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Anheuser-Busch, MingleNow Partner Up for Here's to Beer
Beer takes the internet dive with Here's to Beer, an Anheuser-Busch/MingleNow collabo intended to bring beer's social merits to social networking.
Here's to Beer includes blurbs on which celebrities you'd have a pint with, as well as some beer trivia and brewing history. We thought it was a fairly coherent idea but upon mentioning it to a twenty-something beer aficionado he scoffed, "Beer trivia and brewing history? All you need to know is Anheuser-Busch makes shit beers."
For A-B and MingleNow's sake, we hope that doesn't speak for the whole demographic. Actually, that's a lie. Bud's fine for drinking in secret at home when you're all depressed about your life, but we can't remember the last time we ordered one on tap.


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This is my kiddos and my lunch today! I uses calrose rice instead of glutinous rice. So happy to see they enjoy this rice dish and my boy even had 2nd servings! :D
Ingredient (makes 4 parcels, 6-8 servings)
- 2.5 cups calrose rice
- 30gm dried shrimps
- 20gm dried shitake mushrooms
- 200gm pork fillet, thinly sliced (marinated lightly with 1 tsp sesame oil, 1 tsp light soy sauce, 1 tsp cornflour, 1/2 tsp pepper)
- 120gm cooked bamboo shoots, thinly sliced
- 2 tbsp oil
- 1.5 cup water
- 1 tbsp chinese wine
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 2.5 tbsp light soy sauce
- 1/2 tsp thick dark soy sauce
- 1 tbsp abalone sauce
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 pieces lotus leaf (softened with hot water & rinsed well)
- Wash and rinse calrose rice well. Add appropriately amount of water and cook till done. Cool down slightly.
- Soak dried shrimps and mushroom till softend. Reserved the liquid. Slice mushroom thinly.
- Heat oil in wok, add dried shrimps and mushroom and stir fry till fragrant for about 2mins.
- Add marinated pork fillet and stir fry for another min. Add in bamboo shoot and mix well.
- Add in reserved liquid (top up water to 1.5 cup) and seasoning and bring to boil. Lower heat and cook till gravy is reduced half. Turn off heat and cool down slightly.
- Add in cooked rice and mix evenly, ensure that all rice is well coated with gravy.
- Cut lotus leaf into halves. Divide rice mixture into 4 portions and place onto lotus leaves, wrap up tightly and tie up the parcel (see pics above).
- Steamed the rice parcel over preheated steamer on high heat for 10mins until heated through. Serve!


text: 5" x 8" Weatherproof PA Speaker (SPC15RP) Our 5 x 8 inch white ABS PA speaker is completely weatherproof. It features stainless steel hardware and an adjustable ABS plastic base that pivots 90 degrees. It offers a frequency response of 200 to 15,000 Hz with a 15 watt nom/30 watt maximum power rating. It features a 105 dB sensitivity and an 8 ohm impedance.


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The Goodyear Fortera SL Edition is a High Performance All Season tyre designed to be fitted to SUV and 4x4s.
Unfortunately we don't yet have any tyre reviews of the Goodyear Fortera SL Edition but people are searching for information on it.
Please help millions of other drivers make an informed tyre choice and pick the correct tyres for their car by submitting your review of the Fortera SL Edition.


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Elise Dunn '12 traveled with two professors and nine other students to New York City last week for a two-hour discussion with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly session. Below is Dunn's first-person reflection on the experience.
What would it be like to be in the diplomatic seat with a leader like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran - a personable, well-educated leader who is also a notorious human rights violator and has, at times, represented a threat to American national interests? This was the dilemma that history professor Marc Forster, government professor Tristan Borer, nine other international relations and Middle Eastern studies majors and students in Connecticut College's Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA) and I faced last week when we represented Connecticut College at a scholarly interview and meeting with President Ahmadinejad. We were invited to a dinner and question and answer session in New York City along with students and academics from 12 other colleges and universities from across the country, including Harvard, Princeton, Fordham, Columbia, Bard and Hofstra.
This evening was most assuredly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one of several such opportunities I have had at Connecticut College. In the past three years, I have had the opportunity to travel to the UN and meet with the consulates from Mexico and Iran with the rest of my CISLA class, study abroad for five months in Argentina, complete a College-funded internship at a corporate transparency NGO in Mexico City for three months and travel to Bolivia to conduct research with a class on democracy in Latin America.
As undergraduate students studying international relations and government, my classmates and I delve deeply into theoretical questions in our classes on topics ranging from game theory and US foreign policy during the Cold War to cultural explanations for human rights issues like female genital mutilation and apartheid. We come to have confidence in our skills, and our learning is enriched by the many speakers who come to campus and challenge us to move beyond the theoretical level.
Our meeting with President Ahmadinejad last week, like so many of the non-traditional learning opportunities here at Conn, gave me the chance to not only apply knowledge from my research, but also to grapple with the same ethical dilemmas and ask the same questions diplomats face every day. But why were we there? Why was he there? At one point before the trip, I began to doubt that I should even go. Would my presence at this event somehow signal approval of this man or his policies? What does it mean to me and who I represent to decide to take part?
The event itself was to be a delicious Iranian dinner followed by an interview session where each delegation would have their turn to ask the president one question. The dinner was a spectacular buffet of traditional Iranian food served after we each received a decorative ornamental plate and one of three books on the topics of training and education in Islam, knowledge and Islam or human rights and Islam. We understood that these gifts and delicious food were part of the diplomatic process and prepared ourselves to look beyond the guise of political propaganda that we were about to enter during the question and answer session. In reality, the disguise we had least expected surprised us all in the form of the personable man sitting in the president's chair. He wore no tie; he was relaxed and even, well, charming.
We knew ahead of time that our delegation would be allowed to ask one question. Naturally, as CISLA students and international relations majors, we struggled amongst ourselves to find the perfect question. It needed to be a question that was not only thought provoking and relevant, but also one that would require the president to respond with an answer that went beyond the practiced rhetoric of mainstream media interviews. With the help of professors and peers here at Conn, we came up with a set of questions and selected the question after a democratic vote (naturally).
The setup of the interview was an intimate function hall with about 15 round tables for the delegations. The Conn group sat at one table (this was too bad - I had hoped to have more contact with the other attendees). Our table was positioned well enough for us to watch the president answer each question. He answered each question in Persian, while we listened to his skilled interpreter through individual headphones.
Manuel Jimenez '12 asked our question at the dinner that night. Carefully, he addressed President Ahmadinejad:
"The United States is scheduled to withdraw a large number of troops from Iraq this winter. Since Iran is heavily investing in Iraq, there is much discussion about Iran's role in this country. How do you view Iraq's political development? Do you see Iran as central to the process of state building in Iraq, or more as mentors for example? What are you hopes for Iraq's future?"
The president responded by emphasizing the long-lasting relations and interconnectedness of the two countries, while also emphasizing the importance of Iraqi self-determination during the process of state building.
Despite our preparation and analysis, we were all surprised when his answers to the other questions were just as rational and reasonable. (None of the delegations challenged his stance on Israel or directly addressed his human rights record.) On numerous occasions, he even made playful jabs and witty comments on current events. But he carefully brought each answer to focus on his goals of improving understanding and greater participation in decisions on world affairs, and he repeatedly emphasized the importance of a common love for humanity and truth in negotiations.
In his closing remarks, the president said that he and his country seek nothing more than total involvement and participation in decisions in world affairs by all states. He added that his personal goal is to replace weapons with books, pens and paper.
Naturally, many contradictions within the policies of the president come to mind. We were left wondering how much of what he said was political rhetoric targeted to a scholarly audience and how much truly reflected his values, goals and perspective.
Regardless of the degree to which our delegation was part of a bigger propaganda campaign for Ahmadinejad, I can confidently say that all of us came out of the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan that evening with a greater appreciation of the power of personal experience. Varying perspectives in the global order may at times appear to be irrational or illegitimate positions from our Western-centered perspectives. But policies can sometimes be at least partially rationalized when you consider the perspectives of countries in very different positions from our own, like Iran. What became painfully clear to me from this experience was the complexity of diplomatic relations, especially when they concern a culture so different from our own.
Heightening our awareness of this complexity: the very next day, a drastically different Ahmadinejad gave an angry and rambling 30-minute speech at the UN.