text:
Influence of Outliers on Correlation
This material is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project
This activity begins with an instructor demonstration followed by a student out-of-class assignment. Students will observe their instructor create a scatterplot and observe how the correlation coefficient changes when outlier points are added. Students are then given a follow up assignment, which guides them through the applet. In addition, the assignment provides insight about outliers and their effect on correlation. This activity will show exactly how outliers numerically change the correlation coefficient value and to what degree.
Learning Goals
- Identify points that would be considered outliers on a scatterplot.
- Given a scatterplot with an outlier marked, determine if the correlation will increase, decrease or leave the correlation unchanged.
- Students should be able to construct a scatterplot with low correlation coefficient and then add an outlier that will increase it.
- Students should be able to construct a scatterplot with high correlation coefficient and then add an outlier that will decrease it.
Context for Use
This visualization activity is used for an introductory college statistics course. Students will be asked to complete an assignment out of class that will help them gain intuition about the influence of outliers and how they affect correlation.
Prerequisites for this activity:
Prerequisites for this activity:
- Students would have been taught about the correlation coefficient and seen several examples that match the correlation coefficient with the scatterplot.
- Students will have discussed outliers in a one variable setting.
Description and Teaching Materials
This activity is intended to be assigned for out of class use. It can be part of a regular homework assignment or as a laboratory assignment. In this assignment students use the applet to construct specific correlations. They then move points to examine their influence on the correlation. Students summarize the main point of the exercise by answering a multiple choice question. Then the students examine a question about real data that illustrates the concept.
- Correlation and Regression Applet
- Out-of-class assignment for students. Assignment (Microsoft Word 36kB Oct27 06)
Teaching Notes and Tips
Students should be encouraged to use this applet on their own to gain hands on knowledge on how correlation changes as outliers are moved around and/or removed. A step-by-step process for the students to follow is included in the follow up activity provided.
Use the applet is fairly straightforward and outlined here, or can be read on the webpage.
Use the applet is fairly straightforward and outlined here, or can be read on the webpage.
- When the "Add Data" button is selected, click anywhere on the plot area to add a point to the scatterplot. A point may be dragged anywhere on the plot area just by clicking and holding the left mouse button then moving the mouse. To erase a single point just drag the desired point to the trash icon.
- When enough points are placed note the correlation value in upper right portion of the applet. Also you may include the least squares regression line by clicking the "Show Least Squares Line" box. You may also show the x and y means by clicking the "Show mean X and mean Y" box.
- When "Draw line" button is selected, click-drag-release on the plot to draw a line. Drag the end-points of the line to change its slope and drag the center point of the line to move it up or down.
- The blue/green bar above the plot area gives the sum of squares for your drawn line. The smallest sums of squares possible is represent by the blue portion of the bar, so if your line matches that of the least squares regression line all that will be seen is blue, otherwise a green portion will appear representing an increased sums of squares for your drawn line.
- Finally if you wish to start over with new points, simply double click the trash icon.
Students can be assessed with a question on a future quiz which asks, "Which of two correlation coefficients will change the most by removing their respective outliers." Then during an upcoming regression lecture, an example of a regression will be done that has an outlier. During this discussion, the class will take a vote as to how the correlation will change as well as the regression line equation.


text:
Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more.
Information is available on the READY Frederick County website www.FrederickCountyMD.gov/READY to assist you in formulating your plan. To further assist you, links are also available to the READY.gov federal website and the American Red Cross - Frederick County Chapter. During an emergency, the County's web site and local TV/radio stations will provide emergency information.
You also want to be prepared to "shelter in place" for 3 days. (For example, a big snow storm.) To shelter comfortably, you will want to have the basics: 1 gallon of water per person per day, food and manual can opener, a week's supply of prescription medication, battery powered radio with extra batteries, extra batteries for hearing aids or other assistance devices, flashlight with extra batteries, a list of contacts with family members, friends, doctors, and first aid supplies. Any items you normally use that you would need for 3 days should an emergency occur should also be included. If you have a pet, you will need 3 days supply of food and water for each pet. Should you have to evacuate, these supplies should go with you. More extensive lists and information can be found on websites dealing with preparedness, such as www.ready.gov.
It is also a very good idea to have a "go bag" ready in case you have to evacuate either your home or work place. This small bag could include those personal items you would need if you had to leave without any notice as well as copies of financial records, pet's veterinarian records, extra keys for house and car, cash, spare glasses or other special needs items, such as medications, batteries for assistance devices and copies of family documents.
Show All Answers
Ask your supervisor for the company's emergency plan and make sure you understand fully what their plans and policies are. You may also want to plan and practice an evacuation if the company does not routinely offer drills.
If you need assistance, make sure you coordinate with your supervisor and plan with co-workers in advance so they can provide assistance.
If you have hearing loss, you may also want to consider purchasing a close captioned battery operated TV in case of power outage.
For Frederick County Schools please visit www.FCPS.org
A variety of public and private entities notify local cable news and radio stations.
930 WFMD AMWFRE 99.9 FM WAFY KEY 103.1 FM NBC 25 WHAG - TVCable Channel 19 - Frederick County GovernmentCable Channel 18 - Frederick County Public SchoolsCable Channel 99 - Some of Frederick County's Municipalities, call your town office for more information
These exercises imagine incident-based scenarios that are most likely to occur and the County's proposed response to the situation, based on available resources. The learning experiences gained from these exercises allow emergency managers to act as facilitators to emergency responders by providing support, expertise, and avenues to obtain resources that may be required to manage a particular incident.
Being aware and staying informed is key to reducing threats to life or property during a disaster. The Division of Emergency Management's role is to support public safety agencies, continuity of government operations, and to provide reliable and timely information to the public during an emergency. The Emergency Operations Plan provides guidance across County departments, agencies and response organizations by describing an overall emergency response system.
The County offers emergency notifications through a variety of different methods such as text, television, website and radio.
During an emergency, the County's resources may be scarce. That is why we encourage all residents to plan in advance, with neighbors, friends and family so if you should need assistance, you have people you can call on.
At times, travel restrictions are part of a State of Emergency. This is typically done to allow snowplows to clear the roads. At other times government offices may be closed. A State of Emergency permits government officials to recommend specific actions that citizens should take to insure the safety of their families and homes during the emergency. Each emergency is different, and different factors will impact the decisions made by State officials in response to the incident.
They include:
Prohibited parking on roads and streets designated as snow emergency routes and the use of snow tires/chains (most cars now use all weather tires, so changing to "snow" tires is unnecessary).
Once an emergency is in effect, all requirements are in effect until lifted. A Snow Emergency Plan is put into effect by county. Certain exceptions can occur while a snow emergency plan is in effect. A specific route(s) can be lifted and the remainders of the roads in the county still remain under the Snow Emergency Plan. For the most up to date information, it is advised to call the local MSP barrack for the county. In Frederick County, contact the Maryland State Police B Barrack at 301-600-4151. List of Maryland State Police Barracks
WatchA watch is used when conditions are favorable for dangerous weather to occur. The weather is not currently occurring.
WarningA warning means dangerous weather is happening in a certain region or is extremely likely to happen soon.
Weather watches typically come many hours before warnings. For example, a winter storm watch is usually declared for an area from 12 to 36 hours prior to a storm, while a warning indicates that a storm has been observed nearby and is about to hit the area.
AdvisoryAnother type of weather alert is an advisory. An advisory is similar to a warning except that the weather conditions are not as severe.
Although dealing with any disaster in the County will be paramount, the continuity of operations of the County Government must be maintained. Our emergency support functions, which include all County agencies, have established contingency plans to maintain operations to the entire County, even those who may not be affected by disaster.
Frederick County generally does not open warming or cooling centers unless extreme circumstances warrant them, such as the 2010 February Blizzard. If you are in need of a location to warm up/cool down, public libraries and other public buildings are an excellent resource.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
ileen Fyfe's study of how the evangelical Religious Tract Society produced books about science with a proper "Christian tone" (100) for the working classes stands as a model of the way skillful scholarly investigation of an apparently specialized subject of little general interest can illuminate a wide range of apparently unrelated major topics. Like Ruskin, Carlyle, and the other Victorian sages, Fyfe shows that, properly understood, a phenomenon of seemingly minor importance can provide a window into the mind and soul of an entire age. In the course of explaining how an organization originally founded to produce and distribute those tracts so often mocked in Victorian novels came to play an important role in creating works of mass readership, Fyfe manages to challenge conventional approaches to the history of science as well as telling us much about the rise of a mass reading audience and key developments in Victorian publishing, advertising, book distribution, and the very meanings of "popular" and "popularize."
Much work on the reception of science in the nineteenth century has focused on the destructive effects that specific scientific theories had upon the faith of individual believers. For those evangelicals, like Ruskin, who were raised to believe in the literal truth of the biblical narrative, geology's demonstration that world had existed for millions (and not thousands) of years had a devastating effect because it made them question everything they'd been taught. Nonetheless, Fyfe makes the interesting point that "evangelicals in the mid-nineteenth century were not usually concerned about the specific scientific discoveries themselves; rather, they were worried about what they regarded as the distorting manner in which those discoveries were represented to a wider reading public" (4). The key point here, perhaps, is the phrase "mid-nineteenth century," for the Evangelicals who wished to provide the working classes with books that popularized science with a proper Christian tone founded this series well before the appearance of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
By concentrating on both the broad mass readership of texts that popularized science and those who wrote them, Fyfe challenges usual academic studies of the history of scientific ideas and their reception. As she herself emphasizes, she approaches "the science-religion debates from a fresh angle, by examining the public understanding of science as opposed to that articulated by experts through their published papers. Science and Salvation is not concerned with eminent men of science, nor even with particularly well-known clergymen. I seek a wider scope by attempting to gauge attitudes to the sciences and faith as held by laypeople" (4). In essence, Fyfe has done much to redefine the "Victorian" in Victorian Science, reminding us what we often remind undergraduates — that the descriptive term "Victorian" is more a question than an answer. Fyfe's valuable answer to the question what Victorian means in relation to Victorian science is that we cannot understand ideas and attitudes towards science in the age of Victoria by concentrating solely upon elite scientists and authors.
In order to understand the goals of those who worked so hard and successfully to create works that popularized science in a proper way, one must recognize the identity of what the Religious Tract Society conceived as their opposition — the kind of authors, work, and publishers from which they wished to protect the working and lower middle classes. Upper- and middle-class evangelicals found themselves deeply troubled by the flood of inexpensive reading material available to the working classes, for
by the 1840s and 1850s, it had become clear that cheap literature was not necessarily educational or wholesome, but might as easily be erroneous, immoral, or downright corrupting. For evangelicals, this was not good news. They regarded the printing press as a divine gift for spreading the word of God. It was due to the press that "the word of the Lord has had free course and been glorified. The darkness, superstition, and despotism of the middle ages can never return." The apparent multitudes of secular, immoral, and corrupting publications were a prostitution of that gift. During the 1840s and 1850s, therefore, evangelicals had to decide how to respond to these changes and to rethink their own publishing programmes in response to the new competition.
Although Fyfe does not point it out, evangelicals were not the only religious group who worried about the flood of newly affordable books addressed to the working classes. Writing as a Roman Catholic, John Henry Newman, so often cited as an exponent of liberal education, fiercely attacked the abundance of cheap books with the kind of language we associate today with jeremiads about the pernicious effects of television, video games, and the internet.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most dangerous threats, according to evangelicals, were not, as one might think, atheistic writers, such as Tom Paine, who were often the targets of religious tracts. They were instead, not authors and texts that used science to attack the credibility of scripture and otherwise use science to oppose religious but rather those who never mentioned religion at all — those, in other words, who took a secular approach, one that assumed science and religion existed in separate spheres. As Fyfe points out, "Works that omitted all mention of God were almost as dangerous as the atheistic ones that openly attacked belief in God and gloried in religious infidelity. Secular works were less overtly shocking to believers, but they had the insidious potential to convince their readers that the sciences could be adequately and completely understood without reference to religion" (4).
The Religious Tract Society's solution required providing the working classes with books possessed had what Thomas Arnold had called a "Christian tone" (100), which "did not mean that only religious subjects should be addressed. Arnold himself particularly recommended history and biography as subjects that would do more good than 'any direct comments on scripture, or essays on Evidences'" (102). The proper Christian tone required in popularizing science produced works very different from the evangelical tracts so mocked by Thackeray, Dickens and Rossetti. In other words, here readers encountered no tales of young boys and girls who disobeyed their parents or failed to observe the sabbath and therefore found themselves amid the flames of hell. Although Religious Tract Society books obviously did not emphasize disparities between contemporary science and the Bible, they also rarely brought in the scriptures at all, and when they did so it was generally to point out that a topic under discussion — say, a particular animal — appeared in the biblical narrative. Nonetheless, to have that necessary Christian tone a Religious Tract Society volume, Fyfe explains, "had to include a statement of the Atonement, which almost always appeared at the end of the book, where it did not obstruct the flow of the narrative" (117). It would of course require an entirely different study, but one would like to know how these works in fact influenced their intended audience. We have some anecdotes from the "saved," but one would like to know how many skeptics closely read the discussions of science but scoffed at the usual religious coda or simply skipped over it.
The Growth of a Working-Class Audience: Political, Economic, and Technological Factors
Fyfe's chapter entitled "The Techniques of Evangelical Publishing" skillfully explains the complex factors that permitted the rather sudden development of a mass readership. According to her, "The existence of a 'mass audience' was just beginning to be recognised in the 1840s, and it was frequently perceived as a crowd of different sorts of people rather than as the homogeneous mass that we tend to think of today" (6). During the first decades of the nineteenth century publishers, such as Murray and Constable, were uncertain about "both the size of the potential market and the price tag that the market could take. A few years later the success of the penny weekly magazines demonstrated to the entire book trade that an enormous reading audience definitely did exist — if the price was pennies rather than shillings" (48). An old adage relating British money to the Victorian class system held that items for the upper classes cost pounds and guineas, those for the middling classes shillings, and those for the lowest classes . . . pennies. If they hoped to reach a mass audience, publishers had to find a way to produce books that they could then sell for pennies.
Before books could be sold for pennies, a series of economic, political, and technological changes had to take place. First, publishers had to demonstrate to themselves that lowering book prices produced larger audiences, though at first these audiences did not include the working-class readers.
The book series of the 1840s were successful in a way that their predecessors in the 1820s simply had not been. By using reprints, it was possible to break even at a price of five or six shillings, and publishers like Chambers, Knight, and Routledge showed that it could be done at even lower prices. There are several reasons why this had become possible. One was that the "taxes on knowledge" had begun to be repealed in 1833, although the process was not complete until 1861. Attitudes toward cheap publishing were also changing. Particularly after 1848, there was much less fear of working-class unrest and potential revolt than there had been in the years before the 1832 Reform Act. Despite being the year of European revolutions, the British Parliament's rejection (for the third time) of the People's Charter, a petition demanding extensive electoral reforms, had passed off quietly in April 1848. [53]
These political developments convinced the Religious Tract Society that educating the lower classes by providing them with adequate cheap books was not only not safe but necessary.
"Important as the political changes were," Fyfe points out, "the most obvious cause of the transformation in cheap publishing was the introduction of mechanisation and steam power" (53). The crucial technologies appeared early in the century, but book publishers, who did not yet have a mass audience, saw no reason to take advantage of them. Newspapers and periodicals, which had to produce large numbers of copies as quickly and cheaply as possible, did, The Times being the pioneer when it purchased German-invented steam printing presses in 1814. By the time the Religious Tract Society and commercial publishers decided that a potentially large audience existed in the poorer classes, printers had accumulated a lot of experience with the newer printing technologies, which included the practice of stereotyping — casting a metal plate based on an impression from hand-set type — which permitted both quick reuse of the type for other pages and multiple copies of the metal plates for even faster printing of multiple copies (162).
Literary Accessibility, Advertising, and Distribution
Creating the new large audience that could and would purchase this flood of new books obviously involved more than just producing book in numbers larger than ever before. First, one had to rethink what one meant by "popular" and "popularize." Unlike today, the word popular "was not a description the reception of a work (for example, a book was popular because everyone read it and liked it), but a statement about the intended audience envisaged by writers and publishers. . . . A 'popular' work was one that was intended for 'the people,' which by the middle of the nineteenth century increasingly included the working classes" (56). By the 1840s publishers realized that reducing the purchase price of books was not enough:
Publishers who were committed to reaching the working classes were also focusing on literary accessibility, making sure that the language used was as clear and simple as possible. These changes are reflected in the changing meanings of the verb "to popularize," which came to mean "to make abstruse and technical subjects generally accessible" rather than simply "to make available to the populace." [56]
In addition to lowering the pieces of books and making them more stylistically accessible, publishers also had to develop new ways of advertising and distributing them. Advertising as we know it today came into being. "In the 1840s, the style of advertising was beginning to change. Advertisements ceased to be simple announcements of new titles and began to try to sell their products, using display fonts, pictures, and enticing slogans and promises" (166). In other words, the Religious Tract Society and other publishers who competed for the quickly increasing mass audience played a part in creating the kind of modern advertising that Thomas Carlyle so mocked in Past and Present. Publishers also had find a way to get their books into the hands of working-class readers, who rarely entered bookstores, and one way involved various alternative outlets, including itinerant hawkers, who "sought out working-class readers directly, at their homes or meeting places, and made their living on the difference between the trade and retail prices of their publications. . . . Five hawkers employed by the Town Missionary and Scripture Readers Society . . . [in 1849] had sold no fewer than sixty thousand RTS publications and twenty-four thousand Bibles" (172). Furthermore,
Although it was generally asserted that the working classes did not frequent bookshops, the reports of city missionaries and investigative journalists were revealing the existence of alternative bookselling outlets. New, remaindered, and secondhand books were sold from barrows and stalls, and even from small shops in the working-class districts. Henry Mayhew reported that there were around a thousand individuals employed in sale of stationery and literature on the streets of London. Of these, he found forty selling tracts and pamphlets, twenty with book stalls, and fifty running book barrows. [174]
Minor Quibbles and Qualifications
A reviewer I read decades ago (probably in the TLS) held that since no book is perfect, reviewers can only give two out of three hurrahs. Indeed, even this book so marked by carefully stated claims, clear argument, and abundant credit to its predecessors, occasionally stumbles, as in the following paragraph in which a little toying with fashionability leads to a bit of uncharacteristic silliness:
For organisations such as the Religious Tract Society, a major problem with the flood of cheap publications lay in disciplining readers. When works were read in the middle-class home, in the parish library, or in the Sunday school, there were systems of authority to ensure that readers interpreted the works "correctly" — as well as the censorship that would have kept out many of the potentially corrupting works in the first place. Such systems of authority could control only a small proportion of the mass audience, and beyond them, different methods of disciplining readers were needed. This was why it was necessary to develop a Christian variant of the new genre of popular science publishing, in which the "Christian tone" of the narration could attempt to control readers' interpretations. [264; emphasis added]
There's a world of difference, I'd say, between disciplining readers and making an attempt to control readers' interpretations. Ever since Michel Foucault's book, the English title of which is Discipline and Punish, academics have overused and misused this idea of discipline. Foucault argued that as Western civilization became supposedly more civilized, it stopping using for social control obvious displays of physical force, such as hideous public torture (which incidentally fascinated Foucault a great deal) and found other means of internalizing the power of state and society. Of course, Foucault was simply repackaging ideas found in histories of western thought for the past century or more. Ever since E. R. Dodds's The Greeks and the Irrational, students of literature, philosophy, and culture have pointed out the way civilizations, beginning with classical Greece, moved from shame to guilt cultures, thus internalizing political and moral ideologies. Foucault's contribution, if it was that, was to imply that the change, particularly in the early modern era, was in some way inevitably bad and oppressive. Foucault, who has had an enormous influence on cultural studies, made many important points about the ways our social constructions of authorship work. Following Derrida and Sartre, he brilliantly showed how power never consists solely of a simple binary opposition between the powerful and the powerless. But a lot of this talk about disciplining members of society, here readers, is simply silly, and in the context of Fyfe's argument absurdly overstated.
As it turns out, while I was writing this review I was also reading Stephen Brook's Vanished Empire, which tells of his travels to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. There he encountered real discipline: he learned of clergymen, writers, and other dissidents from the Stalin years who'd suffered torture, imprisonment, and death for the most minor (or imagined) disagreements with authority; during the late 1980s, a period of much less violent oppression, he met people who had lost their positions as clergymen, academics, and civil servants (and most of their incomes) and survived by working as window washers and furnace stokers. One can legitimately talk about social control and discipline in their cases, but in relation to the readers of Religious Tract Society books. . . ? However much the evangelical leaders and authors of the Religious Tract Society would have liked to take a headmaster's cane and thump all those who read in ways with which they disagreed, the closest they could ever come to "discipline" involved a few specific rhetorical strategies. As Fyfe herself admits, although the Religious Tract Society approach "could not function as effectively as a teacher's supervision, it limited the range of interpretations open to the reader, by making it more difficult to read an infidel message against the Christian tone" [264]. As much as culture concerns power, the entire cultural enterprise on which Religious Tract Society expended so much hope, faith, and devotion involved, if anything, a hopeful gesture, not an act of discipline.
I admit it — I'm being more than a little grumpy here, disappointed as I am that a fine scholar like Fyfe finds it necessary to make such a silly gesture at fashionablity. I wouldn't write like such a curmudgeon, I suppose, had she not otherwise written such a fine book.
Fyfe, Aileen. Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Brook, Stephen. Vanished Empire. Vienna, Budapest, Prague: Three Capital Cities of the Habsburg Empire as Seen Today. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
Last modified 25 May 2005


text:
PC Gamer Squelches Diablo 3 Rumor
"We're officially squelching the Diablo rumor," the magazine clarified to Voodoo Extreme. "We've got two big announcements coming in our August issue, but neither is from Blizzard."
The floodgates opened after PC Gamer teased it had a cover story "so huge we had to go to [CENSORED] to get it," with many speculating that the "[CENSORED]" could be substituted with "hell," a possible Diablo reference.
The speculation was then reinforced by fansite Blizzplanet, which noted that this year's Blizzard Worldwide Invitational takes place on June 29, the eighth anniversary of Diablo II's release. At last year's Invitational, Blizzard unveiled StarCraft II.
"We definitely appreciate that the community has a lot of interest in seeing the Diablo series continue, and we certainly share that desire," Blizzard told Shacknews yesterday. "For now, though, our focus remains on StarCraft II and Wrath of the Lich King."


text:
Stormwater Plaza Partnership with Portland Community College
Aug 1, 2012 at 8:57 AM 2 Comments
Environmental Services and Portland Community College (PCC) have combined green stormwater management with an interpretive exhibit and public art in the Central Eastside Industrial District. A new rain garden at PCC's CLIMB Center for Advancement at SE Water Avenue and SE Clay Street collects stormwater runoff from the center's roof and the adjacent street.
Roof runoff cascades over concrete and steel slabs into the rain garden and street runoff flows into the facility under a steel sidewalk grate. An interpretive kiosk, covered by a green roof that absorbs rain, describes how the rain garden captures and filters stormwater to keep runoff out of the sewer system.
Benches near the kiosk are made from wood salvaged from several 100-year-old warehouses when a portion of the industrial district was redeveloped. The site features a six-foot steel sculpture by Portland artist Linda Wysong titled "Eye River" that was inspired by the six-inch steel spikes, known as log dogs, once used to build log rafts.
The rain garden project is part of the SE Clay Green Street Project, which will extend for 12 blocks between SE Clay and SE Water Avenue and will link outlying neighborhoods to the Central Eastside Industrial District (CEID) and the Willamette River.
2 Comments
Kristan Burkert
This water feature is lovely; it is incredible what a downspout can become with creative inspiration. The whole garden is a great improvement over its unmemorable previous appearance. The interpretive info in the kiosk is really interesting and other creative stormwater management work across Water Ave make this is great destination if you want some inspiration.
purushothaman paul
Submit Article
Holidaysbookmarks is one of the best social bookmarking site.
Please review our Code of Conduct rules before posting a comment to this site.
Report Abuse (Please include the specific topic and comment for the fastest response/resolution.)


text:
Advertisement |
The French Alps are those parts of the Alps mountain range which lie in France. They are within the regions of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and Rhône-Alpes.
The specific subranges of the Alps that are at least partly in France include (from south to north):
Mont Blanc is the highest point of the Alps and is on the French-Italian border, so it's called Monte Bianco in Italy


text:
New research by Queensland University of Technology is helping scientists better understand how bone cells work and may one day lead to the development of technology that can speed up the time it takes to heal fractured and broken bones. Recent graduate Dr Gwynne Hannay has built a gadget capable of promoting bone cell formation in the laboratory. Dr Hannay said his device replicated the mechanical and electrical stimulants which occurred naturally in the body to repair fractured and broken bones. "This device is about trying to grow bone tissue in the same environment our body grows bones. I have taken bone cells and put them in the physical environment they would experience in the body, and then varied the stimulants to extract a beneficial environment for tissue growth," he said.
Dr Hannay's research has advanced the understanding of how bone cells can be stimulated to heal factures and has for the first time combined the artificial reproduction of both mechanical and electrical stimulants."Previous research has looked at both of these stimulants individually, but not together, neglecting the fact that both are occurring in normal healthy bone during fracture healing" He said by combining the two stimulants, a synergistic effect was produced. "That means when you apply both the mechanical and electrical stimulants together a result greater than the sum of the two stimulants applied individually is achieved. It creates a greater output," he said. Dr Hannay said that unfortunately when bones fractured or broke, especially in older people, the healing process could stall.
"We find bones can get half way through the healing process but won't heal properly and with an aging population this is a growing problem for orthopaedic surgeons to accommodate and one that is not easily solved with current methodologies," he said. "In the future we might be able to make a device utilising these combined stimulants that could be attached to the body and help heal the bone." Additionally, normal fractures that would otherwise heal successfully could be accelerated with the use of these stimulants. Dr Hannay said normal fractures in young, healthy people took approximately six to eight weeks to heal. "It might be possible to significantly reduce the healing time. That would be the goal."
Science Daily
December 19, 2006
Original web page at Science Daily


text:
in columbus, ohio
call toll free
on orders over $50*
call us with questions
Really great quality and a ton of hair.
Email Address*
First Name
By submitting this form, you are granting: Mad River Outfitters, 813 Bethel Rd., Columbus, Ohio, 43214, United States, http://www.madriveroutfitters.com permission to email you. You may unsubscribe via the link found at the bottom of every email. (See our Email Privacy Policy for details.) Emails are serviced by Constant Contact.


text:
Nissan has been full of little surprises in the utility-vehicle realm lately—the Rogue, the Cube, the Juke—and here's another, although the word "little" doesn't apply in the case of the NV cargo van. Not when the subject vehicle stands 105 inches tall, with a cargo hold capable of swallowing a couple of basketball teams—or maybe three or four juvenile giraffes—standing at full height.
The surprises here are multiple: first, that Nissan chose to play in this game at all. The full-size-van market amounts to about 300,000 units in most years (although it dipped sharply in 2008 and '09), and it's dominated by Ford (about 50 percent) and General Motors (around 45 percent). The Sprinter, which has been sold here wearing Mercedes-Benz, Dodge, and Freightliner badges, has hitherto been the only tall van in this segment and accounts for the other five percent. So, it's a relatively small market that is 95-percent owned by domestic makes whose loyal customers are hard to seduce. Apparently, Nissan took that as a challenge.
Another surprise is that Nissan chose to create a dedicated chassis for its new van. Aside from one crossmember, the NV's fully boxed ladder frame—it looks as if it could have been sectioned out of New York's 59th Street Bridge—shares nothing with the Titan pickup. That's a lot of investment for what figures to be a small slice of a modest market, although we do expect Nissan to utilize this frame for a heavy-duty Titan or the next generation of the regular-strength pickup.
Pickup Power
Although the underpinnings are new, the powertrains are familiar, as both are from the Nissan pickup inventory. The base van with the high or standard roof is propelled by a 4.0-liter V-6 (261 hp, 281 lb-ft of torque) from the mid-size Frontier. The optional engine is the Titan's 5.6-liter V-8 (317 hp, 385 lb-ft), which is standard in the top-spec 3500 and powered the example tested here. Both engines transmit power to the rear wheels via a five-speed automatic transmission. There is no four-wheel-drive option.
At the test track, this powertrain plus a 6220-pound curb weight added up to a 0-to-60-mph time of 8.4 seconds—not exactly thrilling, but much quicker than the 11.6 seconds recorded by the last Sprinter we tested. The NV also trumped the Sprinter's passing times: 4.2 and 5.9 seconds to accelerate from 30 mph to 50 and 50 to 70, respectively, compared with 5.7 and 9.0 seconds. There didn't seem to be much degradation when we hooked up some 4500 pounds of trailer and race car and loaded a few hundred pounds of spares inside, either.
Engine performance, then, is pretty good for a vehicle in this size and weight class, and fuel economy is about what you'd expect. The EPA doesn't require mpg ratings for vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) above 8500 pounds, and the NV tested here carries a 9100-pound GVWR. We logged 11 mpg during the van's two-week stay—not impressive, but that did include almost 400 miles of towing to and from GingerMan Raceway in western Michigan.
Deliberate Dynamics
This van's dynamics also are what you'd expect. The suspension manages that towering aspect ratio surprisingly well, but this isn't the kind of rig you take to your weekend autocross. The steering is slow—4.0 turns lock-to-lock—and transient responses tend toward ponderous.
On the other hand, although the 192 feet the NV needed to stop from 70 mph might be two more than the Sprinter needed, that figure is actually as good as the average three-row kid hauler's and well ahead of the NV's workhorse brethren in the heavy-duty-truck class. The brakes are discs all around, and ABS is standard equipment. The Nissan's ride quality is surprisingly smooth for a big van with spring rates selected for heavy loads, and the NV is quiet at highway speeds, considering its cargo-space acoustics rival those of a railroad depot. The optional sound system is respectable for a vehicle of this type, and there's an iPod jack, as well as a USB port.
Nissan chose not to include a provision for wireless internet connectivity like the Ford Transit Connect does. On the other hand, the cavernous center console will swallow a laptop, files, and all sorts of other stuff that might be useful to a commercial-van driver.
Priced to Sell
Base prices for a standard-roof NV range from $25,570 for the base V-6 1500 model to $30,770 for the 3500 HD SV, giving Nissan's standard vans pricing parity with domestic equivalents. Although the NV lacks a diesel option, as well as the range of body sizes offered by the Sprinter line, it does come to market with a price schedule that undercuts its high-roof competition by a significant margin. Our test unit—a well-equipped 2500 HD SV high-roof model, had a base price of $31,470. Optional equipment included the $950 Technology package (nav system with traffic alerts, rearview camera, Bluetooth, USB and auxiliary audio inputs, XM radio); the $460 Towing package (Class IV hitch, extendable heated side mirrors, trailer-brake controller prewiring, front tow hooks, HD battery); and a $390 airbag package (seat-mounted side airbags, roof-mounted curtain air bags).
The as-tested total came to $33,270, more than $3000 cheaper than the most basic Sprinter's price of entry. Base prices for the Mercedes van soar to more than $43,000 for a long-wheelbase version. Nissan's product planners seem to have fixed their marketing crosshairs directly on the big Benz, but is that target large enough to ensure success? We can't say. What we can say is that those who do opt for the NV will be very pleased with Nissan's latest non sequitur.


text:
Homer Simpson
From the second the movie came out, people have told me that I look Jennifer Grey from Dirty Dancing. You know, "Baby." It happens all the time. In reality, my cousin Michelle is the one who really looks like Jennifer Grey. Like exactly.
But I can see why people think I look like this incarnation of Jennifer Grey. We've both got the mouse blonde-brown hair and the curls that were hot in the 1980s — and if mousse hadn't been invented, I would still be stuck with all that frizz. Mousse has been very, very good to me. When it gets humid enough, I probably do look like the 1980s Jennifer Grey, but I don't want to have to keep doing this.
The other person people tell me I look like is Sarah Jessica Parker (after her mole was removed). I don't mind having people tell me I look like SJP because I think she is stunning. In fact, most women I know think SJP is stunning. It's men who complain that SJP is decidedly un-hot. I once heard someone say SJP's face looks like a horse's. Well, I love horses, and if my features are equine, I'm good with it.
To be true, I don't really think I look so much like SJP in real life as I behave like her character, Carrie Bradshaw, in Sex in the City. You know, I dress really funky; I collect fabulously expensive shoes, and let's not forget, I live alone in my tiny, expensive New York apartment without a husband or son.
Except that I live in the suburbs in Western, New York. You know, with my husband and son. Oh, and I hate to shop and I have maybe seven pairs of shoes.
Still, I get the SJP thing a lot.
I recently saw Ironic Mom (aka: Leanne Shirtliffe) was playing around with a fun app that shows you your celebrity doppelgangers, and I decided to try it.
Here are the results:
Astoundingly, SJP did come up. Along with a lot of other very attractive women, so I am not complaining. But apparently, I look much more like The United States Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham Clinton than anyone else (74% match) — a woman who is 20 years older than I am.
That said, I think Hil looks smokin' in that picture.
I was surprised, however, to see that I also came up looking like Howard Dean and composer Phillip Glass (look at that man's nose, people!).
Those kind of hurt a little.
So, like Leanne, I decided to try the experiment again using a different picture. This time, I selected a photo of my curly haired self, since I am usually a curly girly and because I am that vain.
Here are the results:
I would call this my "I wish" list. Omigosh! I wish I looked like Penelope Cruz. If I did, I'm thinking I would be much more famous. And Nicky Hilton? I don't think I have one character trait in common with Nicky Hilton, so that one leaves me with a big question mark over my head.
Holly Hunter is probably a pretty good doppelganger on the day-to-day. In this picture anyway. She looks like she just finished walking with a friend on a really humid morning or, perhaps, went swimming and let her hair air dry. Yeah, that sounds like me.
And, I suppose, if I have to be a guy, Howie Dorough (eldest singer of the Backstreet Boys) or pop singer Zac Hanson aren't the worst boys to look like. I mean, at least they're kinda pretty.
I wanted to run this app all day long using different pictures of myself, but I had other stuff to do. And, of course, what is the point? No one will ever tell me I look like Katie Couric, and I don't think anyone under 35 even knows the name Samantha Fox! Oh and as far as Amy Weber goes, yeah right!
My identity was confirmed at the grocery store last night, when a stranger stopped me in the frozen food section and said, "Wow, you look just like the girl from Dirty Dancing! You know, Jennifer Grey. Before she got her nose job!"
And — as Homer Simpson might say — that brings us back to doh!
What celebrity do people claim you look like? Do you think they are right? Or do you think they are crazy?


text:
Purple, please: Roland Garros 14th seed Gael Monfils booked a spot in the fourth round by taking out Belgian Steve Darcis in straight sets. He'll go up against David Ferrer — the Spaniard we predict will go all the way to the semis. Yep, that means a potential win over Roger Federer. (Draw: RG Men's Singles)
With the Nike men toning down their attire, Gael and K-Swiss have stepped up by using purple and showing off the Frenchman's guns this spring. The color always reminds us of Serena's clay dress from 2007. More info: K-Swiss Fading Stripe Series.
More: A few more on-court pics of Gael going up against Bjorn Phau and Steve Darcis after the cut…
(photos by Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images)


text:
Thank you for your patience
I wanted to update everyone that the Xbox LIVE Cloud Saved Games feature is back online. The Xbox Operations team has been working around the clock to get the issues resolved. I also wanted to pass along the below note from Alex Garden and let you know what we're doing for those that were affected by the issue.
We want to thank all of our Xbox LIVE members impacted by the Cloud Saved Games service issue for your patience and understanding. It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone's game saves. Whether you couldn't access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologize for the delay and inconvenience. We will be automatically applying a one-month extension to the Xbox LIVE Gold memberships of everyone who was impacted. We can assure you we'll also be doing a thorough post mortem to help prevent this from happening again.
As always, I welcome your feedback. Game on!
Alex Garden
Email: Alex dot Garden at Microsoft dot com
General Manager, Xbox LIVE
BTW: You don't need to call support for your free month. We know exactly who was affected and we'll handle all of this on our end.
I wanted to share an update for members affected by the Xbox LIVE Cloud Saved Games service issue at the end of the year and thank you for your patience as we've worked through the logistics of applying a free month of Xbox LIVE Gold to eligible accounts. As mentioned previously, we know who was impacted and have started applying the free one-month extension. This only includes member accounts that attempted to access cloud saved games between 12/28/12 and 12/30/12 and received an error message. This is a rollout and we expect to be finished by the end of the month. When we've completed this work, we will send a LIVE message to everyone who was impacted. There is no need to contact customer support. Again, we want to thank all of our Xbox LIVE members impacted by this service issue for your patience and understanding
Final Update:
Good news all, we've completed deployment of the free month of Xbox LIVE Gold for our members affected by the Cloud Saved Games service issue between 12/28/12 and 12/30/12. At this time, any other questions should be directed to a special forum on this topic. As a reminder, don't call support if you have questions as you'll be redirected to this forum. Thanks again to everyone for your patience as we worked through the service issue itself and the deployment of the free month.
(Posted: 31, January 2013)


text:
When Catherine D'Amico, CFO of Monro Muffler, sought relief from volatile commodity prices, she found it in the form of tires — some $8 million worth.
The automotive-services firm upped its total inventory by 11% between March and December of 2010, to almost $100 million. Two-thirds of that increase was devoted to tires, which can fluctuate in price depending on oil and rubber prices.
Many CFOs are in similar circumstances, taking whatever steps they can to ensure that rising commodity prices don't undermine a fragile recovery. D'Amico says that the inventory buildup, along with temporary price guarantees from vendors, will help her company keep prices in check. "It's still a tight economy," she says. "If we're not competitive, people can go somewhere else, or they can defer [car repairs]."
Since last summer, prices for oil, steel, wheat, cotton, and other raw materials have risen, for reasons ranging from increased demand to extreme weather conditions to political instability. Last month, the Thomson Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index, which tracks the prices of 19 commodities, hit its highest level since September 2008.
Such jumps are challenging for CFOs in many industries, despite their best efforts to hedge, negotiate with vendors, and keep costs low. "If you've already gone through an aggressive [cost-cutting] program to raise margins, there are questions as to how much fat is left to cut," says Mark Sadeghian, a Fitch Ratings analyst.
Commodity price spikes will almost certainly affect companies that aren't direct purchasers of such materials. For example, when consumers get hit with higher gasoline prices and experience other pass-through costs, such as those influencing food prices, "they consume less, and that means a lot of companies may need to readjust their internal forecasts and plan for lower growth," says Sadeghian.
Indeed, some CFOs have already changed their public predictions. During a recent call with investors, Procter & Gamble CFO Jon Moeller said the impact of commodity costs was double what the company expected at the beginning of the year, creating an "earnings headwind" of about $1 billion after tax. To compensate, P&G plans to raise prices on some products, substitute cheaper materials in others, and work on reducing its selling, general, and administrative costs.
Another solution to the price pressure: redirect consumers to less-expensive products. For example, Darden Restaurants makes quick changes to its advertising when certain foods are suffering from sudden price hikes. "We can influence what consumers are craving, and their reason for coming in to the restaurant," says CFO Brad Richmond.
Other industries have less control over their customers' behavior. Hawaiian Airlines, for example, is at the mercy of its "leisure-oriented" consumers, says Peter Ingram, CFO of the airline's parent company. "What we are able to charge has very little to do with the cost of producing our product," he says, and much more with ticket demand and seat availability.
In fact, Ingram doesn't mind the high price of oil per se. What really bothers him, he says, is the overall level of uncertainty: "Volatility, to me, is even more of a problem than the high level of cost."


text:
Story highlights
List includes colleges and universities from 27 states and Washington, D.C.
Education Department: "We hope this increased transparency will spur community dialogue"
Rape is a longstanding issue on campuses, but activists are now casting it as a cultural problem
Any federally funded school not complying with Title IX risks losing funding
Federal investigators are checking whether 55 colleges and universities illegally handled sexual violence and harassment complaints, the U.S. Department of Education said Thursday.
Such investigations have long been known, but this is the first time that the department has released a list of all probes currently under way.
The list includes colleges and universities in 27 states and in the District of Columbia.
"We are making this list available in an effort to bring more transparency to our enforcement work and to foster better public awareness of civil rights," said Catherine E. Lhamon, the department's assistant secretary for civil rights.
"We hope this increased transparency will spur community dialogue about this important issue. I also want to make it clear that a college or university's appearance on this list and being the subject of a Title IX investigation in no way indicates at this stage that the college or university is violating or has violated the law."
Five schools promptly responded to CNN's request for response. The University of California, Berkeley said it will cooperate with the investigation and added that its chancellor had sent out a letter to campus saying sexual assault would not be tolerated.
"Much has been done to strengthen the campus' handling of these issues, but we understand that there is always room for improvement," the university statement said.
Washington State University, meanwhile, said it was notified in January 2013 that a federal complaint had been filed and volunteered to work with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights to improve its policies. In February, the university said, federal representatives visited Pullman and engaged in student focus groups as well as student and employee interviews.
"There has been no finding of any wrongdoing on the part of WSU. We are still waiting to hear from OCR regarding participation in the voluntary resolution process," a university statement said, adding that there's no tolerance for sexual harassment, assault or misconduct on its campus.
The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater said it could not comment on specifics because of the ongoing investigation but said it, too, took sexual violence seriously and provides all victims with resources and assistance. The University of Chicago said it had "made every effort to comply with the spirit and letter of this inquiry" and is committed to ensuring that its programs and work environment are discrimination free.
The University of Colorado Boulder said it wasn't surprised by its inclusion as it knew of the probe in July, and it has since hired a law firm to conduct an external review of its policies. It also expects to a name a specially designated Title IX director by the end of the summer.
The investigations center on Title IX, under which a school must ensure that students are not denied or limited in the ability to participate in or benefit from its educational programs or activities on the basis of sex.
The list, which reflects open investigations as of Thursday, does not disclose any details about the cases, other than when the investigation was opened. The list will be updated regularly and available to the public upon request.
In February, CNN profiled student and faculty activists from six schools in a report on how sexual violence complaints to the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights had almost tripled since 2009. Thursday's numbers come on the heels of a marked year-to-year increase in complaints the department received, from 17 in 2012 to 30 in 2013.
Five of those six students' universities were included in Thursday's report: the University of Texas-Pan American; Vanderbilt University; the University of California, Berkeley; Occidental College; and Emory University.
In the story, Joanna Espinosa, a student at UTPA who has since graduated, told CNN she would not have come forward without the help of a nationwide network that has been a driving force in bringing attention to the way schools handle sexual misconduct reports. President Barack Obama recently called the nationwide, student-led movement a catalyst for a federal task force to protect college students from sexual violence on campus.
Rape is a longstanding issue on college campuses, but the latest movement, led by student activists, survivors and faculty, recasts sexual violence as a cultural problem on campuses nationwide – not just a series of isolated incidents. Students are taking matters into their own hands, filing complaints en masse and speaking out publicly.
They've flocked to advocacy groups such as End Rape on Campus and Know Your IX, which sprang from grassroots activism around university handling – or mishandling – of sexual violence.
Leslie Gomez, a Pennsylvania attorney and former prosecutor who has worked as a sexual assault policy consultant for Occidental College, Grinnell College and other schools, told CNN that from one campus to the next, the concerns are mostly the same: lack of clarity, students being mistreated, complex procedures and insufficient training among those leading the processes.
After she grew displeased with how campus and local authorities handled her case, Espinosa reached out to End Rape on Campus, and a member of the group helped her file a complaint with the federal Office of Civil Rights.
"I'm not sure I would've come forward if all these people hadn't done it before me," Espinosa said. "I needed the validation. I needed someone to confirm, 'You're right. You're not blowing things out of proportion.' … It was a relief to hear someone tell me, 'You have a case, and they shouldn't treat you this way.' "
In Thursday's announcement, the Department of Education said releasing its list "advances a key goal of President Obama's White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault to bring more transparency to the federal government's enforcement activities around this issue."
The department also released new guidance this week outlining federally funded schools' responsibilities to address sexual violence and other forms of discrimination. All schools – from K-12 to universities – must comply with Title IX or risk losing funding and Justice Department action.
"Under federal law, sexual violence refers to physical sexual acts perpetrated against a person's will or where a person is incapable of giving consent – including rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, sexual abuse and sexual coercion," the statement said.
CNN's Amanda Watts and Carma Hassan contributed to this story.


text:
Parkour is a Clojure library for writing Hadoop MapReduce programs. The most recent release of Parkour1 includes new features designed to integrate Parkour and Hadoop with the typical REPL-based Clojure workflow. Parkour can now lend a Clojure REPL most of the interactive Hadoop features of the Pig or Hive shells, but backed by the full power of the Clojure programming language.
This post will walk through setting up a Clojure REPL connected to a live Hadoop cluster (running via Amazon's EMR) and interactively developing a MapReduce program to run on the cluster.
We need a problem to solve with MapReduce. Treading new data-analysis ground isn't the goal here, so for this post we're just going to write a Parkour version of a program to identify decade-wise trending terms in the Google Books n-grams corpus. To make things a bit interesting, we will make an attempt at improving on the original algorithm to include terms which first appear in a given decade.
This post assumes you either already have fully-configured access to a local Hadoop cluster or know how to launch a cluster on Amazon EMR.
If launching a cluster on EMR, you'll need to run your REPL process such that the local system Hadoop version matches the EMR cluster Hadoop version and has network access to the cluster services. The easiest way to do this is to run everything on the EMR cluster master node. This is less convenient for actual development than other approaches (e.g. configuring Hadoop to use SOCKS), but involves less setup, and so is what we'll assume for this post.
Parkour supports the current stable (plus EMR-supported) versions of both Hadoop 1 and Hadoop 2. For this post's EMR cluster we'll be using Amazon Hadoop 2.2.0, but Amazon Hadoop 1.0.2 should work just as well.
Create a project
First, install Leiningen2 and create a new project:
$ lein new app trending-terms Generating a project called trending-terms based on the 'app' template.
Then update the project file to include Parkour and our version of Hadoop:
(defproject trending-terms "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT" :description "Decade-wise trending terms in the Google Books n-grams corpus." :url "http://github.com/llasram/trending-terms" :license {:name "Eclipse Public License" :url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"} :global-vars {*warn-on-reflection* true} :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.5.1"] [com.damballa/parkour "0.5.4"] [org.apache.avro/avro "1.7.5"] [org.apache.avro/avro-mapred "1.7.5" :classifier "hadoop2"] [transduce/transduce "0.1.1"]] :exclusions [org.apache.hadoop/hadoop-core org.apache.hadoop/hadoop-common org.apache.hadoop/hadoop-hdfs org.slf4j/slf4j-api org.slf4j/slf4j-log4j12 log4j org.apache.avro/avro org.apache.avro/avro-mapred org.apache.avro/avro-ipc] :profiles {:provided {:dependencies [[org.apache.hadoop/hadoop-client "2.2.0"] [org.apache.hadoop/hadoop-common "2.2.0"] [org.slf4j/slf4j-api "1.6.1"] [org.slf4j/slf4j-log4j12 "1.6.1"] [log4j "1.2.17"]]} :test {:resource-paths ["test-resources"]} :aot {:aot :all, :compile-path "target/aot/classes"} :uberjar [:aot] :jobjar [:aot]})
There's currently some incidental complexity to the project file (the
and logging-related dependencies), but just roll with it for now.
Launch a REPL
In order to launch a cluster-connected REPL, we'll want to use the
lein-hadoop-cluster Leiningen plugin. We'll also want the Alembic library for
some of Parkour's REPL support functionality. We could add these directly to
the project file, but they're pretty orthogonal to any given individual project,
so we'll just add them to the :user
profile in our ~/.lein/profiles.clj
{:user {:plugins [[lein-hadoop-cluster "0.1.2"]] :dependencies [[alembic "0.2.1"]]}}
With those changes made, we can actually launch the REPL from within the project directory:
$ lein hadoop-repl
Then (optionally, but suggested) connect to the REPL process from our editor.
Examine the data
Let's get started writing code, in src/trending_terms/core.clj
. First, the
namespace preliminaries:
(ns trending-terms.core (:require [clojure.string :as str] [clojure.core.reducers :as r] [transduce.reducers :as tr] [abracad.avro :as avro] [parkour (conf :as conf) (fs :as fs) (mapreduce :as mr) , (graph :as pg) (reducers :as pr)] [parkour.io (seqf :as seqf) (avro :as mra) (dux :as dux) , (sample :as sample)]))
Then we can define some functions to access the n-gram corpus:
(def ngram-base-url "Base URL for Google Books n-gram dataset." "s3://datasets.elasticmapreduce/ngrams/books/20090715") (defn ngram-url "URL for Google Books `n`-gram dataset." [n] (fs/uri ngram-base-url "eng-us-all" (str n "gram") "data")) (defn ngram-dseq "Distributed sequence for Google Books `n`-grams." [n] (seqf/dseq (ngram-url n)))
With these functions in hand, we can start exploring the data:
trending-terms.core> (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (r/take 2) (into [])) [[1 "#\t1584\t6\t6\t1"] [2 "#\t1596\t1\t1\t1"]] trending-terms.core> (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (sample/dseq) (r/take 2) (into [])) [[265721405 "APPROPRIATE\t1999\t492\t470\t325"] [265721406 "APPROPRIATE\t2000\t793\t723\t375"]] trending-terms.core> (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (sample/dseq {:seed 2}) (r/take 2) (into [])) [[141968715 "poseen\t2007\t10\t10\t8"] [141968716 "poseen\t2008\t13\t13\t10"]]
The cluster-connected REPL gives us direct live access to the actual data we
want to analyze. The sample/dseq
function allows us to select small samples
from that data, random within the limits of what Hadoop allows to be efficient.
Write a function
With direct access to the raw records our jobs get from Hadoop, we can easily begin writing functions to operate on those records:
(defn parse-record "Parse text-line 1-gram record `rec` into ((gram, decade), n) tuple." [rec] (let [[gram year n] (str/split rec #"\t") gram (str/lower-case gram) year (Long/parseLong year) n (Long/parseLong n) decade (-> year (quot 10) (* 10))] [[gram decade] n])) (defn select-record? "True iff argument record should be included in analysis." [[[gram year]]] (and (<= 1890 year) (re-matches #"^[a-z+'-]+$" gram)))
And doing some quick REPL-testing:
trending-terms.core> (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (sample/dseq {:seed 1}) (r/map second) (r/map parse-record) (r/take 2) (into [])) [[["appropriate" 1990] 492] [["appropriate" 2000] 793]] trending-terms.core> (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (r/map second) (r/map parse-record) (r/filter select-record?) (r/take 2) (into [])) [[["a+" 1890] 1] [["a+" 1890] 2]]
We can glue these functions together into the first map task function we'll need for our jobs:
(defn normalized-m "Parse, normalize, and filter 1-gram records." {::mr/source-as :vals, ::mr/sink-as :keyvals} [records] (->> records (r/map parse-record) (r/filter select-record?) (pr/reduce-by first (pr/mjuxt pr/arg1 +) [nil 0])))
Because Parkour task functions are just functions, we can test that in the REPL as well:
trending-terms.core> (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (sample/dseq {:seed 1}) (r/map second) normalized-m (r/take 3) (into [])) [[["appropriate" 1990] 492] [["appropriate" 2000] 7242] [["appropriated" 1890] 59]]
As we develop the functions composing our program, we can iterate rapidly by immediately seeing the effect of calling our in-development functions on real data.
Write some jobs
Writing the rest of the jobs is a simple matter of programming. We'll largely follow the original Hive version, but we will attempt to add the ability for entirely new terms to trend by applying Laplace smoothing to the occurrence counts.
Parkour allows us to optimize the entire process down to just two jobs (and no reduce-side joins). This is something which is equally possible via the base Java Hadoop interfaces, but which you'd rarely bother to do, because it'd be too fiddly in the raw APIs and completely impossible in most higher-level frameworks. In Clojure with Parkour however, it's relatively straightforward.
But! – today's main, REPL-based excitement comes after. So, without further commentary, the rest of the code:
(defn nth0-p "Partitioning function for first item of key tuple." ^long [k v ^long n] (-> k (nth 0) hash (mod n))) (defn normalized-r "Collect: tuples of 1-gram and occurrence counts by decade; total 1-gram occurrence counts by decade; and counter of total number of 1-grams." {::mr/source-as :keyvalgroups, ::mr/sink-as (dux/named-keyvals :totals)} [input] (let [nwords (.getCounter mr/*context* "normalized" "nwords") fnil+ (fnil + 0)] (->> input (r/map (fn [[[gram decade] ns]] [gram [decade (reduce + 0 ns)]])) (pr/reduce-by first (pr/mjuxt pr/arg1 conj) [nil {}]) (reduce (fn [totals [gram counts]] (dux/write mr/*context* :counts gram (seq counts)) (merge-with + totals counts)) {}) (seq)))) (defn normalized-j "Run job accumulating maps of decade-wise raw occurrence counts per 1-gram and map of total decade-wise Laplace-smoothed occurrence counts." [conf workdir ngrams] (let [counts-path (fs/path workdir "counts") totals-path (fs/path workdir "totals") pkey-as (avro/tuple-schema ['string 'long]) counts-as {:type 'array, :items (avro/tuple-schema ['long 'long])} [counts totals] , (-> (pg/input ngrams) (pg/map #'normalized-m) (pg/partition (mra/shuffle pkey-as 'long) #'nth0-p) (pg/reduce #'normalized-r) (pg/output :counts (mra/dsink ['string counts-as] counts-path) :totals (mra/dsink ['long 'long] totals-path)) (pg/execute conf "normalized")) gramsc (-> (mr/counters-map totals) (get-in ["normalized" "nwords"]) double) fnil+ (fnil + gramsc) totals (reduce (fn [m [d n]] (update-in m [d] fnil+ n)) {} totals)] [counts totals])) (defn trending-m "Transform decade-wise 1-gram occurrence counts into negated ratios of occurrence frequencies in adjacent decades." {::mr/source-as :keyvals, ::mr/sink-as :keyvals} [totals input] (r/mapcat (fn [[gram counts]] (let [counts (into {} counts) ratios (reduce-kv (fn [m dy nd] (let [ng (inc (counts dy 0))] (assoc m dy (/ ng nd)))) {} totals)] (->> (seq ratios) (r/map (fn [[dy r]] (let [r' (ratios (- dy 10))] (if (and r' (< 0.000001 r)) [[dy (- (/ r r'))] gram])))) (r/remove nil?)))) input)) (defn trending-r "Select top `n` 1-grams per decade by negated occurrence frequency ratios." {::mr/source-as :keyvalgroups, ::mr/sink-as :keyvals} [n input] (r/map (fn [[[decade] grams]] [decade (into [] (r/take n grams))]) input)) (defn trending-j "Run job selecting trending terms per decade." [conf workdir topn counts totals] (let [ratio-as (avro/tuple-schema ['long 'double]) ratio+g-as (avro/grouping-schema 1 ratio-as) grams-array {:type 'array, :items 'string} trending-path (fs/path workdir "trending") [trending] , (-> (pg/input counts) (pg/map #'trending-m totals) (pg/partition (mra/shuffle ratio-as 'string ratio+g-as) #'nth0-p) (pg/reduce #'trending-r topn) (pg/output (mra/dsink ['long grams-array] trending-path)) (pg/execute conf "trending"))] (into (sorted-map) trending))) (defn trending-terms "Calculate the top `topn` trending 1-grams per decade from Google Books 1-gram corpus dseq `ngrams`. Writes job outputs under `workdir` and configure jobs using Hadoop configuration `conf`. Returns map of initial decade years to vectors of trending terms." [conf workdir topn ngrams] (let [[counts totals] (normalized-j conf workdir ngrams)] (trending-j conf workdir topn counts totals)))
Once we start writing our job, we can use Parkour's "mixed mode" job execution to iterate. Mixed mode allows us to run the job in the REPL process, but on the same live sampled data we were examining before:
trending-terms.core> (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (sample/dseq {:seed 1, :splits 20}) (trending-terms (conf/local-mr!) "file:tmp/tt/0" 5)) {1900 ["deglet" "warroad" "delicado" "erostrato" "warad"], 1910 ["esbly" "wallonie" "wallstein" "dehmel's" "dellion"], 1920 ["ernestino" "walska" "wandis" "wandke" "watasenia"], 1930 ["delacorte" "phytosociological" "priuatly" "delber" "escapism"], 1940 ["phthalates" "phylic" "espiner" "degrease" "wallonie"], 1950 ["demokos" "wanotan" "ersine" "dekatron" "physicalistically"], 1960 ["warain" "propeking" "warschaw" "demecarium" "pikiran"], 1970 ["prioritize" "walshok" "waterboard" "demogrants" "delisted"], 1980 ["warsl" "watasi" "proarrhythmic" "walonick" "procurved"], 1990 ["wanglie" "procedores" "printlnc" "dejanews" "eslamboli"], 2000 ["wardriving" "erlestoke" "deleterole" "deleteq" "erius"]}
This is the moral equivalent of Pig's ILLUSTRATE
command. Parkour lacks the
rigid execution model which allows Pig's ILLUSTRATE
to e.g. synthesize data for
joins, but the simplicity of the approach means any combination of "remote" jobs
and local processing just works, without surprises.
As with sampling input for individual functions, mixed mode job execution supports rapid development iteration on real data.
Write a test
REPL iteration gets results quickly, but once code works, a real test allows us to have confidence that it will continue to work, and the results are what we actually expect. So let's write a test for our job graph:
(ns trending-terms.core-test (:require [clojure.test :refer :all] [trending-terms.core :as tt] [parkour (fs :as fs) (conf :as conf)] [parkour.io (dsink :as dsink) (seqf :as seqf)] [parkour.test-helpers :as th]) (:import [org.apache.hadoop.io Text LongWritable])) (def n1grams-records ;; omitted from blog post for clarity ) (deftest test-basic (th/with-config (let [workdir (doto "tmp/work/basic" fs/path-delete) inpath (fs/path workdir "ngrams") ngrams (dsink/with-dseq (seqf/dsink [LongWritable Text] inpath) n1grams-records) trending (tt/trending-terms (th/config) workdir ngrams 1)] (is (= {1950 ["legal"], 1960 ["assembly"], 1970 ["astoria"], 2000 ["prostate"]} trending)))))
The Parkour th/config
function and th/with-config
macro allow us to run code
using a purely local-mode Hadoop configuration, even in a process where the
default configuration points to a live cluster. Just like we were able to
REPL-test jobs using mixed mode, we can now run our actual tests in-REPL in full
local mode:
trending-terms.core-test> (run-tests) Testing trending-terms.core-test Ran 1 tests containing 1 assertions. 0 failures, 0 errors. {:type :summary, :pass 1, :test 1, :error 0, :fail 0}
Launch a job
Once our program is developed and tested, it's time to run it on the full dataset. Normally this would involve leaving the REPL to build a job JAR and deploy it somehow, but Parkour allows us to do this directly from the REPL too:
trending-terms.core> (require '[parkour.repl :refer [launch!]]) trending-terms.core> (def *results (future (->> (ngram-dseq 1) (launch! {"mapred.reduce.tasks" 8} trending-terms "tt/0" 5)))) #<Var@3a23a4ec: #<Future@55f5a074: :pending>> trending-terms.core> (realized? *results) false
(We run the jobs in a future to place it in a background thread, and thus not tie up the REPL while the jobs are running.)
Parkour uses hugoduncan's Alembic library to load and interact with a full in-process (but isolated) instance of Leiningen. Using this Leiningen instance, Parkour just builds your job JAR and assembles your dependencies exactly as specified by your Leiningen project file.
Once the job finishes, time for some results:
trending-terms.core> (realized? *results) true trending-terms.core> @*results {1900 ["strether" "fluidextract" "thutmose" "adrenalin" "lekythoi"], 1910 ["orthotype" "britling" "salvarsan" "pacifist" "boches"], 1920 ["liliom" "bacteriophage" "prohack" "vanzetti" "erlend"], 1930 ["vridar" "samghin" "mulan" "nazis" "goebbels"], 1940 ["psia" "plutonium" "luftwaffe" "darlan" "beachhead"], 1950 ["lopatkin" "rooscvelt" "fluoridation" "jacy" "desegregation"], 1960 ["vietcong" "synanon" "tshombe" "lumumba" "psychedelic"], 1970 ["mdhr" "sexist" "sexism" "biofeedback" "counterculture"], 1980 ["affit" "autocad" "dbase" "neob" "garion"], 1990 ["activex" "photoshop" "javascript" "netscape" "toolbars"], 2000 ["cengage" "eventargs" "itunes" "podcast" "wsdl"]}
How trendy! It looks like our smoothing function has added more noise from rare terms3, but the basics are there for the tweaking.
The complete example trending-terms project is on Github, if you want to give a try at experimenting with it (in a live REPL!) yourself.
Parting thoughts
Thanks to rfarrjr for awesome discussion around these features, and to ztellman and ahobson for prompting their value and for specific suggestions. I was honestly skeptical at first that this sort of REPL integration could be made useful, from past experience trying to make a live-cluster Cascalog REPL work. But now that these features exist, I'm not sure how I wrote MapReduce programs without them.
So head over to the Parkour project and get started!
1 Version 0.5.4, at the time of writing.
2 On the EMR Hadoop cluster master node.
3 Especially OCR errors.


text:
John Barber (w) • Andrew Griffith (a) • Andrew Griffith, Casey Coller (c)
ON THE PROWL! It's "no more mister nice guy," as CYBERTRON burns and one AUTOBOT is all that stand between order and anarchy. Meet the new PROWL—deadlier than ever, colder then any other AUTOBOT, and ready to end the DECEPTICON threat—forever.
FC • 32 pages • $3.99
*Variant cover:
Variant Marcelo Matere cover!
Bullet points:
• Cybertron hangs in the balance!
• Will the Autobots go too far?


text:
• millefleurs •
Pronunciation: meel-flur, meel-flêr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. A pattern of many different colorful flowers, leaves and vines. 2. A perfume distilled from several different kinds of flowers.
Notes: Some US dictionaries prefer a singular spelling, millefleur, but we prefer adding the S since in French the word means "a thousand flowers". English uses French millefeuille "a thousand leaves" to name a confection made of whipped cream and jam between thin leaves of puff pastry. Since it is a noun, it pluralizes normally: millefeuilles. The Italian counterpart of millefleurs is millefiori, the name of a clear glass paperweight embedded with glass rods of different sizes and colors cut cross-section to look like a multicolored flower arrangement.
In Play: Not only is the millefleurs pattern visually striking, it can be very practical: "Well, Maude Lynn Dresser loves millefleurs dresses because the food she drops on them is hard to see." Just be careful where you use this design: "The dinner was wonderful except that I felt the millefleurs pattern on the dinner plates inappropriate for the dead plants and animals lying on them."
Word History: Today's Good Word comes from a French prepositional phrase de mille fleurs "of a thousand flowers". Mille is the French version of Latin mille "thousand", the source of English mile (from mille passuum "a thousand double paces"). Fleur and flower share the same source, Latin flos, floris "flower, blossom". The Latin [f] sound came from an earlier [bh] in the Proto-Indo-European stem bhel-, bhle- "bloom, blossom". You guessed it: the old Germanic languages added the suffixes -s and -m and passed the resulting words down to English as blossom and bloom. (And now a mille mercis and a thousand thanks to Chris Berry for suggesting today's colorful Good Word.)
P.S. - Register for the Daily Good Word E-Mail! - You can get our daily Good Word sent directly to you via e-mail in either HTML or Text format. Go to our Registration Page to sign up today!


text:
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
My Secret Sauce Revealed!
But every now and again, when the stars align, we cook spaghetti together. We have a secret sauce recipe that's been perfected over the years. It's a pinch of this, a pinch of that. We never measure, so the recipe I'm sharing with you is based on my best guess. The sauce is adapted from a cookbook I bought back in college (that was almost 10 years ago!!! Jesus Christ) called Vegetarian Comfort Food.
Last night, we made Paul and Bianca's Special Spaghetti with Sauteed Mushrooms and Cheatballs:
Paul didn't eat the cheatballs (Yves Veggie Meatballs), but I did, and they were DEELICIOUS! But I don't usually add fake meat. I just happened to have some in the fridge that needed usin'. The mushrooms, however, are a must. And they have to prepared separately from the sauce if you ask us.
Here's the recipe for the sauce and mushrooms separately. It's enough to top a pound of pasta.
Bianca's Not-So-Secret Spaghetti Sauce
2 Tbsp. olive oil
7 cloves minced garlic
1 minced habanero pepper (optional)
3 28-oz. cans whole, peeled tomatoes
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. dried basil
1 tsp. maple syrup
1 splash red wine
Salt & pepper to taste
Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the garlic (and habanero, if using) and cook and stir for 1 minute. Use your hands to break up the tomatoes from the can, and add them to the saucepan.
If the sauce seems too dry, add a little liquid from a can of the tomatoes. You won't need all of the tomato liquid though. Just a splash from one can is plenty. Stir in the dried herbs and maple syrup and simmer for 15 minutes.
Add the splash of red wine (a couple of tablespoons) and the salt and pepper, and cook for 5 minutes more. Remove from heat.
Paul's Magic Mushrooms
2 Tbsp. Earth Balance
1 8-oz. package whole mushrooms, sliced
Seasoning salt, to taste
Paprika, to taste
Cayenne, to taste
Soy sauce, to taste
Sriracha, to taste
Melt the Earth Balance in a large skillet and add the mushrooms. Saute until the mushrooms begin to release their juices (haha, that sounds dirty!). Season to taste and continue to cook until mushrooms are tender and slightly browned.
Top pasta with tomato sauce and then mushroom. Eat. Enjoy.
10 comments:
- T said...
I made spaghetti last night, and I'm always amazed at how difficult it is to the get the sauce just right. Definitely agree with all the garlic!
- October 19, 2011 at 3:17 AM
- JL goes Vegan said...
Oh, yay, thanks for sharing this! You know, I just don't eat spaghetti enough. Why is that? I must!
- October 19, 2011 at 5:28 AM
- JohnP said...
This sounds perfect!
- October 19, 2011 at 7:02 AM
- Get Skinny, Go Vegan. said...
That looks great!!!! My hubby was a carnivore, and without me saying anything......he is now a raging green vegan!!!! It happens!!!! P**y moves mountains!
- October 19, 2011 at 10:17 AM
- Allysia said...
Paul's Magic Mushrooms....LOL! And if any food could bring people together, spaghetti is it. It's one of the only (sometimes) vegan comfort foods that a lot of us grow up eating I think.
- October 19, 2011 at 10:38 AM
- jessy said...
dan and i are totally gonna make your sauce, Bianca! i love that you guys add habanero to your sauce - we do the same. it's sooo yummy. totally gonna make Paul's mushrooms, too! ooh, i cannot wait!
- October 19, 2011 at 1:58 PM
- mikaila said...
Adding a bit of sweetener to tomato sauces is always a good idea. I usually do brown sugar, but I bet maple tastes even better!
- October 20, 2011 at 10:01 AM
My husband and I ate separately until we lived together - then he ate whatever I made, and now he likes fake meat! This sauce looks delish - I love the idea of adding maple syrup and habaneros - sweet and spicy always sound delish!
- October 21, 2011 at 1:50 PM
- MeloMeals said...
YUM YUM YUM.. habanero is spaghetti sauce. I think I love you.
- October 22, 2011 at 8:17 AM
- tender b. said...
Good call on the habenero.
- October 23, 2011 at 7:05 PM


text:
Pasquetta Barbecue 2009
Fellow Ivan from Italy is missing the Easter Monday tradition. Il lunedì dell'Angelo or Pasquetta in Italy is a festivity day that generally is passed with relatives or friends with a traditional trip or scampagnata (Landpartie), with a picnic on the grass and open air activities.
Jay offered: "I live at Seeschlacht, near the very tip of the Donauinsel (which you can access from my house), so if you guys want to come out to our house, we can have a super grill here, and enjoy the lake and river while we're at it .."
Please note: organized as BYO - Bring your own (food/drink)!
When / Where
- Easter Monday, April 13rd, 2009, starting 11 am
- Strasse Süd 23, Seeschlacht
- Seeschlacht @ Google Maps
How to get there?
- You can catch the train to either Strebersdorf or Langenzersdorf and easily walk to the lake.
- Public Transport (It's outside of Vienna, so watch out to buy a ticket if you only have one for "Zone 100" (like me)) Philip: not true, Strebersdorf is in zone 100, only Langenzersdorf requires an additional zone.
- Car
- Walk
I will come
- Ivan
- Max
- nomike
- (1 << Marius) | (1 << kyrah ) // BBQ FTW! Bring your swimming gear folks! \m/
- Philip ~~o/~~
- Natano
- User:c3o
- Steffi
- wizard23
- ...?
- ...
Things to organize
There are a few things we need to organize. Here's a list of who organizes what:
HINT: Billa Praterstern opening hours 6:00 - 21:00 (Mon.-Sun., incl. Easter Monday)! -- courtesy Nomike Research Ltd.
(So maybe we should stop there on the way to JAY's and collectively rob the store or something...)
- Ketchup, Mustard, Sauces, Herb-Butter, etc. nomike
- Coal
- Bread
- Potatos
- Vegetables
- Salad
- Beverages
- Beer
- ...


text:
Comet Elenin has been getting a lot of press in recent months — and now it seems almost certain to be a total bust.
Meanwhile, people in the know have been following a comet that has never been hyped much, but seems almost certain to be a fine, though not spectacular performer for many months to come.
We're talking about Comet Garradd (C/2009 P1). In early September it was already a fine sight through telescopes of all sizes, shining high in the evening sky at 7th magnitude. It has a bright head, a sharp starlike nucleus, and a tail that's stubby but well defined. And it's forecast to shine near its 6th-magnitude best all the way from October to mid-March. Not since Hale-Bopp has any comet remained so bright for so long.
Comet Garradd passes through the Coathanger asterism on the evening of Friday, September 2nd, then crosses the northwest corner of Sagitta, and soon enters Hercules, where it will remain until February. That means it's high in the west after nightfall in October, lower but still in good view in November, and near the west-northwest horizon at the end of twilight around Christmas. But by then it's already up higher in the east before the first light of dawn; the best viewing tips from evening to morning on December 16th.
As the comet climbs high in the early-morning sky of January and February, it will pass the Keystone of Hercules, skim ½° by the globular cluster M92 on the morning of February 3rd (mark your calendar), then sail northward past the head of Draco. It should stay bright all the way into spring as it returns to the evening sky.
Why is it changing so slowly? Comet Garradd is unusually large and distant as 6th-magnitude comets go. It never comes closer to the Sun than Mars's average distance; at perihelion on December 23rd it's 1.55 astronomical units from the Sun. Nor does the comet ever come near Earth; it's about 2 a.u. from us all through October and November, and when closest next March 5th it will still be 1.27 a.u. away. Too bad! Garradd might have qualified for "Great Comet" status if had been on a trajectory to pass close to the Sun and if Earth weren't on the wrong side of its orbit at the time.
Astronomer Gordon J. Garradd discovered the comet at 17th magnitude on August 13, 2009, at Australia's Siding Spring Observatory while hunting for — ironically — near-Earth objects.


text:
Booting up Arab access to Israeli high-tech jobs
| Nazareth, Israel
Israel touted its flourishing high-tech industry to US President Obama during his recent visit, showing off innovations in search and rescue, robotics, and alternative energy that the president deemed "inspiring."
President Obama was also introduced to Saeed Kharouf, an Arab engineer at the Haifa plant of high-tech powerhouse Intel, who told him he wanted to one day become the company's president.
But presidential visits and photo ops aside, diversity is not a strong suit of Israeli high tech. Only 1.4 percent of Israel's 85,000 high-tech workers – who collectively command the highest salaries in the country – are Arab, even though Arabs make up 20 percent of the population.
An effort to break down the industry's barriers to Arabs is under way. Tsofen, an ambitious Jewish-Arab nonprofit organization based here in the heart of the Galilee, is working to increase the minority group's representation in the high-tech industry by providing Arab job applicants with skills, coaching, and connections.
At stake is the ability of Israel's Arab minority to overcome chronic poverty and to achieve equality with Israeli Jews, Tsofen's directors say. Fifty-three percent of Israeli Arabs are below the poverty line, three times the percentage of Jews, according to the Adva Center, a Tel Aviv social affairs think tank.
''It is a known fact that high tech is the engine of growth of the Israeli economy,'' says Tsofen executive director Smadar Nehab. ''We want it to be the engine of growth of the Arab economy in Israel.''
Israeli Arabs have faced economic and political marginalization for decades and remain excluded from ruling government coalitions by both right and left. The sense of being shunned is palpable among young people hoping to break in to high tech.
"Jews who graduated with me have work, while Arabs who studied with me couldn't find work in the field and are doing other jobs," says Bashir Atallah, who graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University last June and is at Tsofen enhancing his skills. "The truth is that there is discrimination."
A high-tech leap forward
It is in Tsofen's modest offices, located among car-repair shops in the drab Nazareth Industrial Zone, that the Israeli Arab high-tech leap forward has been conceived and is being waged.
Tsofen has its sights set not only on increasing the number of Arabs in existing companies in greater Tel Aviv but on creating a ''critical mass'' of Arab high-tech specialists to be based in Nazareth and other Arab cities and thereby transform entire communities, Ms. Nehab says. It puts a lot of effort into helping Arabs navigate the cultural code of the high-tech firms when they submit résumés and come in for interviews.
"'We teach how to be interviewed, how to respond to the personal questions about your points of weakness and strength. If they don't interview by the book, they won't be taken," spokeswoman Makbula Nassar says.
Both companies and the government have made changes for the better since the group began its work four years ago. The number of Arabs with jobs in high tech has grown from 350 to 1,200 in that period, according to Ms. Nassar. Eighty percent of graduates of Tsofen's three-month course find work and 100 more jobs have been created by the opening – with government support – of a branch in Nazareth of Amdocs, a leading Israeli high-tech company. Most of the branch's workers are Tsofen graduates.
"There are a lot of companies with zero Arabs, but there are also companies with an open approach that want diversity. We have found genuine partners who do want to broaden," Nassar says.
The Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor has provided one-sixth of Tsofen's budget in each of the past three years, signaling that the government wants to encourage Arab representation in high tech, Nassar says. President Shimon Peres's office has also launched a program, known as Maantech, that works together with Tsofen to promote Arab representation in the industry.
Learning to 'show off'
Lina Choshha, a young Circassian Muslim recently hired by Galil Software, a Nazareth-based company that recruits through Tsofen and has a prayer room for its mostly Muslim staff, says she hopes to reach a leadership position in the field ''so I can use my connections to help others."
Ms. Choshha, a graduate of the Technion Institute in Haifa – Israel's equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – with a degree in industrial engineering and management, now works in customer support for cellphones. She initially struggled during the job search.
"I had interviews before Tsofen, and they didn't go well. I wasn't showing a real assertiveness in the interviews. In our culture, we are educated to be modest and not show off. In the Tsofen interviews, we learned to show off, but in an intelligent way."
Galil CEO Dror Gonen says the company's work with leading firms Nice, Radware, Allot, and Amdocs is helping show that ''having Arabs in the industry is helping the industry as much as the Arabs.''
Israeli Jewish observers of the high-tech scene prefer to use the word ''homogeneity'' in describing the demographic state of the industry. Amir Teig, high-tech editor for the economic newspaper The Marker, stresses that much of the problem stems from the ''friend brings a friend'' method of hiring, in which team leaders choose people they know from the army, high school, or university. This, he says, cuts out both Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Nehab, the Tsofen director, says the government needs to do more to promote change, starting with hiring Arabs for its own IT systems, which she says have few, if any, Arab employees.
In response to this statement, government spokesman Mark Regev says that the government has an "affirmative action" policy on hiring and "actively supports efforts to encourage greater Arab participation in the high-tech workforce. This is a national interest.''