text:
Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) - Members of the Ramapough Native American tribe have filed a $50 million lawsuit against the makers of a recent Hollywood movie they say depicts their people in a negative light.
The federal suit was filed Monday in New Jersey against the writers and producers of "Out of the Furnace." The suit claims the film makes false representations about the people who live in the Ramapo Mountains along the New York-New Jersey border about 25 miles west of New York City.
It claims that unsavory characters in the film have last names that are common among the Ramapough and that it perpetuates negative and unfounded stereotypes.
Relativity Media, which released the film this month, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. But a representative told other news outlets that the company couldn't comment because it hadn't seen or had time to review the suit.
The movie stars Christian Bale as a man trying to find his missing brother, who has gotten involved with a bare-knuckle fighting ring in the mountains of New Jersey.
The movie's villain, played by Woody Harrelson, has the last name DeGroat, which is common among the Ramapough. Tribal members identify as descendants of the Lenape or Lunaape Nation, with some Dutch and other European ancestry in their heritage. Most of the 17 plaintiffs in the suit have the DeGroat last name.
Harrelson's character is the leader of a gang of "inbreds," according to the suit, who are depicted as lawless, drug-addicted, poor and violent, and live in the "mountains of New Jersey."
The film also uses the term "Jackson Whites," a historically derogatory term for the Ramapough, and refers to "the inbred mountain folk of Jersey," according to the suit.
The plaintiffs, who are mostly from New Jersey and New York, with one from Tennessee, seek punitive and compensatory damages and allege defamation, mental anguish and emotional distress. They say the use of the names along with the geographic location "make for a ready association between these plaintiffs and the movie."
Ramapough Chief Dwaine Perry, who is not party to the suit, held a news conference when the movie was released to denounce it as a "hate crime."
The Ramapough do not have federal recognition but identify themselves as an American ethnic group recognized as a tribe by New York and New Jersey.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)


text:
- Eiderstedt (1)
- Jordan (1)
- Nordseeküste (1)
- Obere Jordantal (1)
- Palynologie (1)
- Paläoklima (1)
- Pleistozän (1)
- Quartär (1)
- Quartät (1)
- Quaternary (1)
In this dissertation, a multi-proxy study, which included palaeoecological, lithological, geochemical and geochronological methods, was carried out to investigate climatic and environmental changes and their interaction during the Quaternary in formerly glaciated and non-glaciated areas. The information obtained will be used to provide a better understanding of the regional stratigraphic framework and to establish broader regional terrestrial correlations within the global marine isotope stage (MIS) framework. This study was conducted on two key drillings, the Garding-2 research drill core in the German North Sea coastal area of Schleswig-Holstein and the GBY#2 archaeological core at the Gesher Benot Ya´aqov (GBY) site, in the Upper Jordan Valley in Israel. The results of this study are presented in three papers. Papers I and II focus on the study of the Garding-2 core, while the multi-proxy study of the GBY#2 core is presented in Paper III. The results of a variety of analyses conducted on the 240 m long Garding-2 sequence show interglacial-glacial cycles that are mainly controlled by variations in temperature. This sequence is composed of mainly fluvial-shallow marine sediments intercalated by muddy-peaty deposits. Based on the palynological and lithological findings, the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition was observed at 182.87 m. It is overlain by Praetiglian and the subsequent sediments of the Waalian and Bavelian Complexes. The boundary of either the second or third Cromerian Interglacial with younger sediments, which still belong to MIS 19, is marked by the last occurrence of Tsuga at 119.50 m and the development of mixed-deciduous forests. The palynologically equivalent sediments of the Bilshausen Interglacial were found below two Elsterian till layers, at 89.00 m-82.00 m. These sediments showed high and increased percentages of Pinus and Picea and scattered occurrences of Abies and Carpinus, which are similar to the features of the beginning of the Bilshausen or Rhume interglacial (Müller, 1992). An unconformity occurred at 80.29 m, at the bottom of late Holsteinian deposits, characterised by the occurrences of Fagus and Pterocarya, with low percentages of Abies and Carpinus and the absence of Buxus. These deposits are succeeded by sediments of the Fuhne cold period that shows higher percentages of NAP and occurrences of Ericales, Helianthemum and Selaginella selaginoides, which are unconformably overlain by Drenthian till at 73.00 m-71.00 m. A single peaty sample at 69.25 m with Pinus-Picea-Abies assemblage is correlated with the late Eemian Interglacial. This deposit is overlain by Weichselian glaciofluvial sediments. Middle-late Holocene sediments occurred from 20 m upwards, following a hiatus, which was caused by the Early Holocene transgression. A subsequent thin layer of marine Atlantic sediments is unconformably overlain by marine-tidal flat deposits up to 11.00 m. The first occurrence of Fagus (at 15.97 m) and Carpinus (at 15.03 m), which was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL)-dated to 3130 +/- 260 BP (at 16.22 m, Zhang et al., 2014), gives evidence for a Subboreal age for these deposits. Sandy sediments of the early Subatlantic, which were deposited between 11.00 m and the top of the Garding-2 sequence, indicate that local salt marshes, dunes and tidal flat vegetation expanded during this period. Due to regional features and the peculiarities of the local coastal environment, the expansions of Fagus and Carpinus, which are characteristic for the Subboreal-Subatlantic transition at about 2700 BP in northern Germany, are not clearly reflected in the Garding-2 pollen diagram. In the Mediterranean area, a 50 m long core of GBY#2, was drilled at the Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya´akov. The GBY#2 core provides a long Early-Middle Pleistocene geological, environmental and climatological record, which also enriches the knowledge of hominin-habitat relationships documented at the margins of the Hula Palaeo-lake. The sediment sequence of GBY#2 is under- and overlain by two basalt flows that are 40Ar/39Ar dated: two samples at the bottom of the core dated to 1195 +/- 67 ka (at 48.30 m) and 1137 +/- 69 ka (at 45.30 m), and another one at the top dated to 659 +/- 85 ka (at 14.90 m). With the additional chronological identification of the Matuyama Brunhes Boundary (MBB) and the correlation with the GBY excavation sites, the sedimentary sequence of GBY#2 provides the climatic history during the late part of the mid-Pleistocene transition (MPT, 1.2 Ma-0.5 Ma). Multi-proxy analyses including those of pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs, macro botanical remains, molluscs, ostracods, fish, amphibians and micromammals provide evidence for lake and lake-margin environments during MIS 20 and MIS 19. During MIS 20, relatively cool semi-moist conditions were followed by a pronounced dry phase. During the subsequent MIS 19, warm and moist interglacial conditions were characterised by Quercus-Pistacia woodlands in this area. The depositional environment changed from an open water lake during MIS 20 to a lake margin environment in MIS 19. This finding is at odds with changing climate conditions from relatively dry to moist. This discrepancy could be explained by the prograding pattern of the lake shore due to the infilling of the basin, which resulted in shallower water. Climatic changes during the Late Tertiary and the Quaternary in the high latitude regions in northwest Europe and during the Early-Middle Pleistocene in the mid latitude regions of the Middle East follow the patterns of global climatic changes, which are mainly controlled by orbital obliquity (+/-41 ka cycle) during the Early Pleistocene and by orbital eccentricity (+/-100 ka cycle) during the MPT (1.2 Ma-0.5 Ma) and the younger periods of the Quaternary. The results of this study also provide reliable evidence for long distance correlation of stratigraphic and climatic events of the Quaternary, which extends knowledge of regional and global impact of climatic fluctuations on the environment.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Evangelicals to 'Country Club' GOPers: Social Issues Aren't Problem, You Are
Leading evangelicals are pushing back hard against charges that social issues are weakening the GOP brand, asserting that the nation is rejecting the rich GOP "country club" image more than retreating on moral issues.
Over the past several decades, the Republican Party has primarily been formed along two major philosophical lines. The first are conservatives who not only want government to live within its means, but care deeply about social issues such as abortion and traditional marriage. The second group is more moderate in its views. Often referred to as "country-club" Republicans, they are mainly business types who care more about fiscal issues and try to avoid social issues at all costs.
Of course there are many that fall in between the two groups, and the distance between the two seems to grow farther by the day.
Bob Vander Plaats heads up The Family Leader, a pro-family group in Iowa that plays a key role in screening presidential wannabes when they come calling on the Hawkeye State.
"The moderates have had their candidate in 2008 and they had their candidate in 2012. And they got crushed in both elections," Vander Plaats told The Washington Post. "Now they tell us we have to keep moderating. If we do that, we will win?"
Yet somehow the moderates look to their socially conscious brethren and blame them for the abortion gaffes of Senate candidates Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri and Indiana's Richard Mourdock.
"We've got to move away from the divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage," said Bill Watkins, a businessman in Tennessee. "We're getting nowhere with the majority of Americans and besides, this fiscal mess we have found ourselves mired in is going to be our downfall if we don't address it soon."
And lest we forget, the Tea Party members fall into both camps but may tend to take an even harder stance on fiscal issues.
Pam Wohlschlegel is the Florida State Coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots and describes herself as a fiscally conservative socially moderate. She is a Christian and Hispanic.
"Most tea partiers do not want to touch social issues," Wohlschlegel told The Christian Post. "It's not a topic we embrace because that is not what brought us together. When we get on social issues we allow liberals to define us. They turn a religious freedom issue into an issue by saying Republicans don't like contraceptives. We should have been more forthright by saying that contraceptives weren't the issue. Instead, it was about chemical abortions."
What is often described as the other "elephant in the room" is the question of why Republicans lost so much of the Hispanic vote and how they must adjust their strategy by confronting the issue of immigration.
The "gather them up and ship them back home, build a thirty-foot fence and keep them away" contingency may find themselves on the losing end of national elections if they maintain such a hardline approach. Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly is one example of a conservative leader who subscribes to this strategy.
But Wohlschlegel thinks Republicans are off base on that issue as well.
"Immigration is not something the Tea Party is focused on addressing," she said. "Personally, I feel there must be some element of compromise if we want to move forward. First, we have to close the borders before we look at some elements of amnesty. Rubio had good ideas but may have gone a bit far. "
"But more importantly, we need to go to the Latino with our understanding of what it takes to get this economy on track. We need to explain that Obama policies have hurt them and not help them. Romney did not point out that Obama never delivered on promises to Blacks and Hispanics. Other than giving them free cell phone and holding barbecues for them, he did nothing to help them."
Nonetheless, evangelicals are sending a strong warning shot over the GOP bow that if social issues are abandoned in the party platform and in stump speeches, millions of voters will look elsewhere.
Penny Nance leads the conservative group Concerned Women for America and argues that social issues are fiscal issues. She sends a strong message in a recent column for The Christian Post titled "Caution to Republican Party: Drop Our Plank, Lose Our Vote."
"Little of the messaging from the Left centered on the national argument of whether or not people of faith should be forced to pay for other women's abortions. And it certainly didn't examine whether or not an unborn baby is a life and deserves legal rights. No, instead, Sandra Fluke was trotted out as the ideal American woman, who can afford $40K per year for Georgetown Law but can't afford $9 per month at Wal-Mart to pay for her own birth control pills. Especially painful was the boundless attention Democrats gave abortion advocates at their convention. It was telling, given the scant attention at the Republican convention to pro-life advocates. I am not sure the word 'abortion' was even uttered in Tampa, except at the platform meetings."
As if she wasn't clear enough in what conservative women were looking for in a party and a national campaign, she summed up her column my pulling no punches.
"And finally, we will leave you if you betray us. Yes, I said it – and I mean it. Life is not negotiable. The unborn are not political pawns. Abortion is a human rights issue, and we will stand down no more than the abolitionist would have conceded his just cause. If the establishment works to favor pro-abortion candidates, then about 51 percent of their voters who identify as either Catholic or Evangelical will simply stay home or find another party."


text:
Many programs needs folder names that starts with a dot, like .emacs.d
, .gimp-2.2
, .jedit
etc. How do I create such a folder?
When using the Windows Explorer in Windows 2000 (and other versions), I get an error message saying "You have to enter a filename". The only solution I have come up with, is to open a command prompt (Start > Run > "CMD" > OK) and enter mkdir .mydir
Why have Microsoft this error message in the Explorer, but not in the command shell? Is there any registry hack out there to fix this, so that I am able to enter the folder name directly in the Explorer?


text:
This excerpt from our upcoming book, The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide, highlights student reflection as a tool for assessing the learning of English-language learners. However, we've found these principles and practical strategies to be effective with ALL our students.
Assessment: Key Principles
Assessment can be frustrating for teachers—especially implementing the mandated assessments that were created without teachers' input. We know how it feels to bombard students with multiple assessments that aren't directly connected to their learning and don't yield timely or valuable information on their progress. Before we dive into self-reflection strategies, we want to share some general principles that have helped us to assess ELLs (and all students) in equitable, effective, and meaningful ways:
Be data-informed, not data-driven. When schools are data-informed, assessment data helps them to make thoughtful decisions that directly benefit students.
When schools are data-driven, they may make decisions that do not help students. For example, a data-driven school might assign students who are "borderline" between algebra and a higher level of math to algebra, so that they do well on the algebra state test. English teachers might focus a lot of energy on teaching a strand that is heavily represented in tests, even if it will not help the student become a lifelong reader.
In other words, the data-driven school may tend to focus on its institutional self-interest—not what's best for the students. However, in schools that are data-informed, test results are just one more piece of information that can be helpful in shaping instruction. Data-informed teachers will use assessment data to reflect on their practice, identify adjustments, and seek out the resources and knowledge necessary to make those changes.
Assess knowledge and language separately. Many ELLs may not be able to fully demonstrate what they know and what they can do because of their limited levels of proficiency in English. It is not effective to measure a student's content knowledge by using an assessment that requires language beyond his or her level of proficiency. For example, asking beginning-level students to demonstrate their knowledge of a plant's life cycle by writing an essay is more a test of their English skills than of their content knowledge.
Researchers have recommended that teachers implement test modifications for their ELLs, such as simplifying test questions or allowing the use of bilingual dictionaries. This can help "to prevent language limitations from unnecessarily sacrificing ELLs' test performance."
Assess students according to their current proficiency level. It's important to get to know your students, identify their academic strengths and challenges, and know their current levels of English proficiency in speaking, reading, and writing. Having this information allows teachers to instruct and assess students according to their current level of English proficiency—not by the results of the last standardized test they took.
Involve students in assessment. Involving students in the assessment process can be powerful, resulting in increased motivation and learning. When students are asked to evaluate their own progress, they feel more ownership of the learning process and are better able to identify specific learning goals for themselves. Research by Gavin Brown and Gerrit Hirschfeld suggests that "when students are expected to evaluate themselves and when they view their input in the learning progress as meaningful, their self-assessment can be very helpful, if not integral, to their learning."
Student Reflection
Robert Marzano, an education researcher, calls reflection "the final step in a comprehensive approach to actively processing information." We believe student reflections can be useful formative assessments.
We recommend including a short (five to seven minutes or so) reflection activity, usually a "think-write-pair-share," at the end of class two or three times a week. Depending on the English level of the class, teachers may want to provide sentence starters that students can use as they answer the questions.
It's useful to collect these in a folder or notebook for monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly review. We've identified five different types of brief reflection activities and recommend that teachers mix up these strategies:
Summarize. A wealth of research documents the effectiveness of having students summarize their learning. Consider using one of these summarizing prompts:
• What are two things you learned today?
• What is the most interesting thing you learned today?
• What do you know now that you didn't know before today?
• What will you tell your parents tonight if they ask what you learned?
• Draw something that represents the most important thing you learned today or that summarizes the day. Please write a short description.
Self-assess. Marzano recommends students share how well they think they did in class and what they believe they could have done better. By asking students to review what they did that helped them learn (and what they did that was not particularly effective), teachers can assist students in developing a stronger sense of self-efficacy. Here are a few more questions students can answer:
• What did you do that helped you the most today to learn English?
• What did you do to help yourself understand something when you were not clear?
• What, if anything, do you think you need more help in understanding?
• What, if anything, are you having difficulty doing?
Assess the class and teacher. Asking students to share their perspectives on class activities and the teacher's style can provide great insights. This activity is best done anonymously to ensure candid responses. Questions can include:
• What was your favorite class activity today, and why did you like it?
• What was your least favorite class activity today, and why was it your least favorite?
• Was the pace of this class too slow, too fast, or just right?
Establish relevance. Some studies have shown that higher achievement is linked to activities that highlight relevance, such as asking students to write a few sentences explaining how they can specifically apply what they learned to their lives. In an ESL class, for example, students might write, "I will be able to ask someone for directions" or "I can fill out a job application," and in addition to refreshing their memory, they might feel more encouraged to actually do these things.
Demonstrate higher-order thinking. A Taxonomy of Student Reflection was developed by educator Peter Pappas. In it, he applies the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to critical reflection. He recommends looking at student self-reflection through this lens, with higher-order questions appearing at the top:
• Creating: What should I do next?
• Evaluating: How well did I do?
• Analyzing: Do I see any patterns in what I did?
• Understanding: What was important about it?
• Remembering: What did I do?
Some of these questions obviously also connect to the previous reflection ideas. After students become more experienced in self-reflection, and as their English levels advance, teachers may want to start framing the reflection questions in the context of this taxonomy. In this way, students will become more aware of the strategy behind self-reflection, and learn more about the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy, which they will encounter throughout their academic career.
Obviously, student self-reflection is just one of many assessment strategies that can be used with students. However, we would suggest that—done right—it is "first among equals."


text: The U.S. government is getting its bill for the damage a Navy minesweeper did to a Philippine coral reef, and it's less than expected. Philippine officials say the USS Guardian damaged 2,346 square meters (25,252 square feet) of Tubbataha Reef after it ran aground January 17. That's down from the original estimate of about 4,000 square meters (43,000 square feet). And that means, under Philippine law, the United States owes $1.5 million in fines, the Tubbataha Protected Area Management Board said in a posting on the Tubbahata Reefs Natural Park website Monday. The fines are based on the amount of reef that has been damaged, the state-run Philippine News Agency reported. The Tubbahata board said the revised damage estimate was made by a team of U.S. Navy and Philippine marine biologists from Wednesday to Friday. The original survey was conducted January 27 while the warship was still on the reef. The Guardian was completely removed on March 30, when the ship's stern, the last of four sections into which its 224-foot-long hull had been cut, was lifted from the reef by a massive seagoing crane. "Using aerial imaging, the grounding zone was originally outlined using the ship's length as the basis for computing the total damaged area. This image was later observed to be obliquely angled thus artificially expanding the area plotted on mapping software," the statement on the park's website said. The cost of the salvage operation to remove the ship from the reef was $45 million, Stars and Stripes reported Monday, citing a U.S. 7th Fleet spokesman. An investigation into the grounding is ongoing, but last week the Navy relieved the commanding officer and three members of the minesweeper's crew of their duties based on initial results of the probe, a Navy statement said. "The initial investigation findings clearly indicate that the CO, Lt. Cmdr. Mark A. Rice; the executive officer (XO)/navigator, Lt. Daniel Tyler; the assistant navigator; and the officer of the deck at the time of the grounding did not adhere to standard U.S. Navy navigation procedures," the Navy statement said. "The U.S. Navy has the highest accountability standards, and all four Sailors were relieved by Rear Adm. Jeffrey Harley due to their role in the grounding and a loss of confidence." Tubbahata Reef is a UNESCO World Heritage site that is home to about 500 species of fish and 350 species of coral as well as whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles and breeding seabirds. READ MORE: Minesweeper lifted from Philippine reef READ MORE: Bow cut from U.S. ship, lifted from Philippine reef READ MORE: U.S. Navy commander apologizes for ship stuck in reef off Philippines


text:
Who sues kids for cyberbullying? A Houston lawyer does when his daughter becomes the target of a nasty video posted on Facebook, according to a lawsuit filed this week in Harris County.
Last month, three Kingwood students who attend Riverwood Middle School filmed themselves offering unkind words about a classmate, then uploaded the video to the social networking site, the civil complaint says.
The targeted child's father, Jason Medley, provided the video to school officials, then sent cease-and-desist demands to the three girls and their parents. The letters said he would sue if the youngsters didn't stop all communication with his daughter and if their families did not donate at least $5,000 each to the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, an Oregon nonprofit.
Receiving no response by his early June deadline, one of Medley's colleagues filed a defamation of character lawsuit on Tuesday against the three girls, accusing them of making defamatory and false statements that "impute sexual impropriety and misconduct" on his daughter. The complaint also alleged that the video includes threats to physically harm the girl and seeks a permanent injunction to prevent the three from further contacting her.
Medley declined to be interviewed for this report. The Chronicle is not naming any of the children involved.
Riverwood officials confirmed the incident, Humble ISD spokeswoman Karen Collier said in an email.
'A Very Novel Approach'
The recording was not done on school property and did not involve a district website. The Chronicle was unable to obtain a copy of the video, which has been removed from Facebook.
When reached by phone, the mother of one of the girls said that the three told their principal "they were sorry and didn't mean any of it." Another girl's father declined to comment, and efforts to reach the parents of a third girl were unsuccessful.
Without commenting specifically about this case, Collier said that school officials who become aware of activity that could be cyberbullying—even occurrences off campus—would contact parents of the students involved to discuss the incident and an administrator would talk with each child.
"If a child was concerned about his or her safety—or if the parents were concerned—that child and those he/she were concerned about would be shadowed while at school for as long as necessary," Collier said, adding that parents also could contact law enforcement, who can decide whether charges are appropriate.
It is unclear whether Medley reported the video to Houston police or other authorities with jurisdiction in Kingwood.
This case appears to be the first this year among about three dozen defamation of character lawsuits filed in Harris County to include children as defendants. At least three others involve information disseminated on the Web.
Nancy Willard, founder and executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, thinks Medley's lawsuit is "a very novel approach" and had no idea that the Kingwood dad suggested a sizable donation to her nonprofit as an alternative resolution.
"I think this father is trying to be a parent that the other girls do not apparently have," said Willard, a former special education teacher and education technology consultant. "Think of the lesson he is teaching his own daughter: You do not have to put up with someone hurting you. You can calmly and strongly say 'stop,' and I have your back."
Fighting Cyberbullying
Though cyberbullying is overblown as "epidemic," Willard said, research shows that roughly 1 in 4 young people report having hurtful information sent to them or posted about them and that half of those children said they dealt with the situation fairly easily. She has fought online harassment for more than a decade for reasons that include being bullied and called "Weirdo Willard" in junior high.
"We're never going to stop all of this, but we really have to focus on increasing the skills of teenagers in being able to respond effectively as well as increasing our skills as adults in helping them respond," said Willard, who is also an attorney. "What you do online can cause harm. The emergence of these legal consequences is a way to say 'Hey, wait a minute. There is a line here and you are crossing that line or have crossed that line big time and you need to be held accountable.' "


text: Video Games are boring when they are too easy and frustrating when they are too hard. While most singleplayer games allow players to adjust basic difficulty (easy, medium, hard, insane), their overall level of challenge is often static in the face of individual player input. This lack of flexibility can lead to mismatches between player ability and overall game difficulty. In this paper, we explore the computational and design requirements for a dynamic difficulty adjustment system. We present a probabilistic method (drawn predominantly from Inventory Theory) for representing and reasoning about uncertainty in games. We describe the implementation of these techniques, and discuss how the resulting system can be applied to create flexible interactive experiences that adjust on the fly.


text:
As part of our fabulous contest with Dailymotion, they are skinning a few of their sites to promote the the contest and Give One Get One program.
So-far Dailymotion has skins up in the following countries:
http://www.dailymotion.com/br Brazil
http://www.dailymotion.com/pl Poland
http://www.dailymotion.com/nl Netherlands
I am really impressed browsing around DM. They have videos and portals for more languages/countries than I realized.


text:
Scale Modelers Supply Premium Fluro Red 30ml
Scale Modelers Supply Premium Fluro Red 30ml is backordered and will ship as soon as it is back in stock.
Couldn't load pickup availability
Drop Shipping
Drop Shipping
All items except for paint racks can be drop shipped direct to your customer. For a daily stock email please reach out to your sales manager.
Delivery and Shipping
Delivery and Shipping
Hobby Flex Dist. Ships with USPS and UPS. Rates are calculated at checkout if your order does not meet the dealer direct free freight minimum. *Drop ship orders do not qualify for free freight*.
Fast Shipping
Our team will pick and pack your order for shipment same or next day! We strive to get our dealers their orders as fast as possible.
Scale Modelers Supply Premium Fluro Red 30ml
Payment & Security
Payment methods
Your payment information is processed securely. We do not store credit card details nor have access to your credit card information.


text:
1-hour Skirt in Amy Butler Twilight Peony |
Also, here are a few other FO's from participants who gave me permission to use their photos!
LaurainATL |
Dimsumknitter |
Wearablesheep |
Mmhiscox- sorry I missed your pic yesterday! :) |
Thank you ladies for allowing us to showcase your beautiful sweaters! Readers, feel free to check out their Ravelry pages which I linked to in the photo captions for all of the info on their sweaters. Thanks so much to everyone who participated and to Cecily Glowik MacDonald and Brett Bara for participating in guest blogs for their designs! If you had fun participating in the KAL/SAL, let us know by leaving a comment, and tell us what we should do for the next one!
Happy knitting and sewing everyone!


text:
Advanced Search
The preview release of the Windows Azure Services Platform kicks off Microsoft's cloud-computing era, which promises to dramatically change the computing strategies of IT shops.
The surprises didn't stop there. Ozzie also unveiled the Azure Services Platform for developers, which can be used to extend local apps with services as well as build Windows cloud-based systems.
The first public preview of the platform as a service, made available to PDC attendees, consists of .NET Services, SQL Services and Live Services for access control, service bus integration, federated identity, data storage and synchronization with devices and Microsoft's Live family of applications. These tools and services can be used "a la carte," according to Microsoft, for building and testing services-enabled applications designed to scale up or out as needed on developers' desktops in Visual Studio 2008.
If the winds of sweeping change hadn't sunk in with the 8,000-plus Windows and .NET developers in attendance, the peek at Office 14 and Microsoft's plans for Web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications made it clear that the Software plus Services era had landed in Redmond.
After its failed bid to take over Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft -- no quitter -- was left with just its own organically grown products and services to face off against its Internet nemesis, Google Inc., which launched its cloud stack, Google Apps Engine, in April. Microsoft would also have to fight the cloud computing war on a second front against Amazon.com Inc., the online retailer that successfully expanded into hosted Web services in 2006.
Just Getting Started "This is one of those markets where I don't feel like we're late to market at all," says Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Microsoft Server and Tools Business. "The market has clearly not moved to these cloud-based services, and we still sell more Windows servers every day than people wind up using in all these cloud-based services put together in a year."
While the on-premises market clearly pays the bills at Microsoft, the new Azure Services Platform represents a transformation of the company's strategy that will likely affect every product line -- in short order. "We definitely expect the major services to come online in 2009, and certainly by 2010 we will be seeing all of these things become production quality," Muglia says.
A nascent market, promises of lower costs, Internet engineering efficiencies and much greater agility -- opportunities to scale cloud-based apps up or out as needed without worrying about implementing or managing infrastructure -- are all piquing companies' interest in cloud computing. The money IT shops can save on on-premises hardware, software deployment, patching, maintaining and updating could serve to accelerate some firms' push toward a cloud-computing strategy.
"I think the current economic situation could actually speed IT shops' move toward some of the Azure services because, in general, the benefit of these services is you're saving a lot of up-front costs," says Matt Rosoff, lead analyst, online services strategy for Directions on Microsoft.
The hot-button issues for many organizations that still need to be resolved for IT to even consider cloud computing are security, high availability and the business and legal implications of offsite data storage. Many companies would prefer to run their own internal clouds, but that misses the point of the Internet engineering efficiencies offered by massively scaled applications.
"Most companies are just not ready to give up control of mission-critical applications like ERP to the cloud," says Sharon Ward, ERP solutions strategy director at Green Beacon Solutions LLC, who heads her company's Dynamics AX business. "They're still experimenting with CRM, but when it comes to entrusting a company's sensitive financial information, it's not something they're comfortable with.
"And the thought of not being able to process shipping transactions or generate invoices because of a problem beyond their own control gives most executives the shivers," she says. "As more and more companies begin to experience success with SaaS [Software as a Service], we'll see them begin to entrust even ERP to their outsourcers, but there's very little demand as of yet."
Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open Exchange Inc., a vendor of e-mail and collaboration applications, says he has no doubts that cloud platforms and services-based applications will transform the industry. "Cloud computing will change the way we use computers and the Internet, much in the way open source software did and Microsoft did back in the 1980s. It's a significant development," he says.
While he admits to a bias toward open source, Laguna says he doesn't like what he sees so far from Microsoft's Windows Azure and its accompanying services. Redmond's offerings are too Windows-focused and will not gain broad appeal until the company takes a more open approach, he explains, adding that Microsoft's programming model is too tied to the aging client-server model and not linked enough to the Internet model.
"The best approach we've seen so far is Amazon's because a lot of their cloud technologies and services are based on open source components, but they allow you to use all the tools you're familiar with to build Internet-based apps," Laguna says.
Amazon.com describes its Electric Compute Cloud (EC2) -- which became available in October, just four days before Microsoft's Windows Azure launch -- as loosely coupled and "platform-agnostic." EC2 supports the leading Linux distributions from Red Hat Inc., Canonical's Ubuntu, Sun Microsystems's OpenSolaris and -- in another surprise days before at PDC -- Windows Server 2003 (in beta). Users can host their apps on Web servers, Apache HTTP or IIS/ASP.NET, use Java App Server, JBOSS Enterprise App Platform or Ruby on Rails development environments. They can also store data in a variety of RDBMSes, including Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL Server Standard 2005, Microsoft SQL Server Express or MySQL Enterprise. The company also offers its own
SimpleDB database and Simple Storage Service in the cloud.
Yet Microsoft's installed base of enterprise accounts, which have bought billions of dollars of desktop and infrastructure products, may work in the company's favor, Rosoff says. "If you're an IT buyer, you're going to trust the enterprise software vendor you're already working with over a company whose online business is being an online retailer, or, in the case of Google, a company whose business is selling ads," he says.
Owning the Cloud Windows Azure -- a word for that shade of blue many associate with the sky -- is Microsoft's operating system for what Ozzie calls "an entirely new tier of computing ... catalyzed by a trend toward the externalization of IT."
Developers can build cloud apps on their local desktops using the Azure APIs and services with Visual Studio ASP.NET Web and Cloud Service project templates. They can test their applications offline in a cloud simulation environment enabled by the Windows Azure SDK.
When the app is ready for deployment, developers select a "publish" option to package the app -- code, prescriptive architecture and configuration settings -- and access the Windows Azure Development Portal. "Our goal with Azure and Visual Studio is to take and infuse an application model into something that the average developer can build," Muglia notes.
Microsoft then runs the service for a fee on its Windows Azure platform hardware infrastructure, which provides "automated service management."
"Windows Azure is our lowest-level foundation for building and deploying a high-scale service," Ozzie said at PDC, "providing core capabilities such as virtualized computation; scalable storage in the form of blobs, tables and streams; and perhaps most importantly, an automated services-management system -- a fabric controller that handles provisioning, geo-distribution and the entire lifecycle of a cloud-based service."
How will the role of traditional IT change in an Azure-services scenario? Merely outsourcing Windows Server or SQL Server in the cloud doesn't fundamentally change the cost of your operations, asserts Muglia. Services platforms are architected so that they don't need human intervention to keep running. "If you re-engineer the software so that it's self-maintaining, then those costs can be dramatically reduced and we can save IT a boatload of money. This is really what this is about in the long run," Muglia says.
Microsoft's architectural approach to Windows Azure is also markedly different than the one taken in building the server and desktop versions of Windows. Azure is purposely more streamlined, with a smaller code base and much faster, says Al Gillen, VP of system software for analyst firm IDC.
"When Microsoft builds an OS, they think about the millions of combinations of hardware devices and software they must support," he says. "But with the Azure Services Platform, they said, 'We have these two or three storage platforms, period; the hypervisor will have this set of attributes, end of discussion.'"
Application by Application It's also important to understand what Microsoft is not doing with Azure, asserts Gillen. "They are not offering a general-purpose Windows cloud where once you're done managing Windows servers, you can take all your apps and data and put them on an Azure Services Platform," he explains. "There really isn't an ability to do a direct migration from your in-house environment out to this services platform."
But what corporate and third-party developers can do is merge the Azure Services Platform together with applications being built internally, he says.
Gillen doesn't expect many apologies coming from Microsoft about not supporting open source, or even some open standards at this point in Azure's dev cycle. The first community technology preview of the platform supports .NET-managed code only. At PDC, Microsoft announced its plans to support native code, Ruby, Python, PHP and the Eclipse development environment.
For now, Microsoft is pursuing the right strategy, Gillen says, by giving its large base of loyal ISVs an environment they can consume and use almost immediately.
"For an average IT shop with Visual Studio skills, to consume the Azure Services Platform is actually not rocket science for them," Gillen says. "It's smart on Microsoft's part to make it easy for this huge group of [Visual Studio] developers and turn them into developers that can write for the Web tomorrow."
Use Cases Building a Web service is one thing; deciding when and how to use Web services to support a growing population of desktop and mobile device users may present the larger challenge.
"The reality is a Web services platform like Azure is as broad in its target as Windows or Windows server is, so it really ultimately targets everybody," Muglia says. "The kind of questions you have to ask in some sense is, 'Where are you targeting first?' We really are going after a couple of major audiences in the early days."
Early adopters targeted by Microsoft include Web start-ups, hobbyists who can get something up and running quickly and enterprises with unique business problems, such as those that need to connect with a variety of suppliers and customers. Azure technologies such as the "Internet" services bus and federated identity technologies (code-named "Geneva") planned for .NET Services can be adapted to address these types of issues, Muglia says.
Microsoft's pricing model will also be a deciding factor for many developers and IT shops, says Rockford Lhotka, principal technology evangelist for Magenic Technologies Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. "My primary thought is: I'll get more excited about Azure once they give us some inkling of the pricing -- does it apply to me and my employer, or only to my biggest customers?" Lhotka says. "That's going to temper how enthusiastic I am. Why learn it if I never get to use it?"
Muglia says customers will have three pricing models. Some of the services, such as Live ID, will be advertising-funded. Others will use a per-user charge similar to the SharePoint and CRM model. The third pricing model will be utility-based or subscription-oriented, with per-usage fees for some services. "The specifics of that we're still working through, and we'll announce those sometime next year," Muglia says.
Redmond: The general perception is that Microsoft is lagging behind some competitors in delivering a cloud strategy. What can you do to fast-track the adoption of Windows Azure among developers? Muglia: First, the idea we're behind is an amazing concept given how early everything is. The market has clearly not moved to these cloud-based services. The market is still very much an on-premises market, but we will move very quickly with Windows Azure. Because it's a services platform, it enables us to bring things out on a more regular release cycle than when we have to work with our customers to get them to install and deploy something.
Developers using Azure are optimistic about it, but they have questions about the target audience. Who do you see adopting it first? The reality is a Web services platform like Azure is as broad in its target as Windows or Windows Server is. It ultimately targets everybody. But we'll focus on a couple of audiences initially. We're definitely going after Web start-ups and hobbyist sorts of developers -- those people that think they can put something together quickly, get it running and see what the product can do. We're also going after some people who need to solve very substantive problems that major businesses have today, particularly those working with a wide variety of different suppliers or customers, and that need to connect across to multiple organizations.
Is there overlap with Azure's Platform Services and your existing service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative? Well, there's a lot of consistency between the two is the way I would put it. At PDC, I talked about services platforms being the fifth-generation application platform. The first was the monolithic application platform, then client-server, Web, Web services or SOA, and then [cloud] services. What we see is a lot of evolution between the SOA platform and services platform. So Azure, in the context of the SOA applications people have built, as they modify them to take advantage of the scale-out characteristics of Azure they can reuse a great deal of the work they've done.
How do you see the role of IT departments changing as they increasingly adopt cloud computing? The biggest characteristic that the services platform movement will have [in IT departments] is the reduction in people and time spent to maintain IT applications. The vast majority of IT dollars don't go into capital, don't go into software purchases, don't even go into software development. The vast majority of IT dollars get spent running their operations. The reason services platforms are different is [that] they're architected to not need that sort of human intervention to keep them running. You can outsource those costs to India for now and save a few bucks, but you won't save that much in the long run because costs worldwide are equalizing to some extent.
Will it be mandatory that IT shops house Azure in Microsoft data centers? We're hosting them in Microsoft data centers, but also we will take some of the concepts we're building in Windows Azure and build them back into Windows Server and our packaged products. So, the same benefits begin to accrue to IT as they run their businesses inside their own data centers or our partners' data centers. The same concepts that Azure will bring to the way applications are built and the services orientation to writing applications will exist in Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center and all of our products over time.
A criticism of Azure is that Microsoft's approach is too Windows-centric. First, remember Windows is the most broadly used platform on the planet, and we can run a wide variety of different applications and application-programming models. We've talked about support for PHP and a whole set of different environments in the Azure platform. So I think we will be very open.
VMware claims it can accommodate many workloads and environments. Some analysts say they have a more flexible approach than Microsoft. Clearly I don't agree. The products we ship today -- whether it's Hyper-V or System Center -- support Linux and a wide variety of different environments. We have a great deal of heterogeneous support in our existing products. In fact, we manage VMware; they don't manage Hyper-V. Our approach to heterogeneity has been quite open and broad in ways that VMware hasn't been willing to embrace. The other point that's important to emphasize is [that] you can't solve the problems relating to reducing the cost of ownership and the labor that goes into an IT operation with just the virtualization layer. VMware has a hammer, and so everything looks like a nail. Those technologies are implemented at the application layer, and VMware has no assets in that space.
Is the challenge for developers going to be how to build services, or is it more about what services to build? Everything will have to mature from a software and services perspective, and from the perspective of a developer understanding how to build these applications. There are only several instantiations of scale-out services applications on the planet that can reduce the cost of operations in these massive applications. The problem is [that] the talent to build them is very limited. Our goal with Azure and Visual Studio together is to infuse an application model with something the average developer can use to build exploitive applications.
How can developers use Windows Azure to extend the online versions of products such as SharePoint, CRM and Exchange? The question is: How will Microsoft extend our existing applications by building them into the Azure framework and enable them to be used? We can open up the developer experience and make it easier for them to write Web parts to extend the hosted version of SharePoint, for instance, and connect it back to their online business systems they have on premises. A perfect example is where companies can sign up for SharePoint-based portals in the cloud and our ability to provide the full dev environment. Although without Azure, our ability to do so is somewhat limited.
Will the SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services that were announced at PDC be part of the Azure Services Platform? Think of those as extensions of the platform. SharePoint is a great example of this, where it's both an end-user-based application and it's part of the underlying application platform. Likewise for CRM. As you work on customer relationship management and you want to expose your business processes associated with that, that application does that. You can think of the Azure platform as providing a set of services that customers can use as they use hosted versions of CRM and SharePoint, and potentially for on-premises versions of those products, even integrating them together. They're user-facing parts of the platform that have an important connection back into business services.
Has the community technology preview been opened to a broader audience since PDC? It has, and we will keep opening it up more broadly. Different services, by the way, will be opening up at different speeds. For example, we're opening up our identity services, the database services, the workflow services a bit faster than we're opening up our compute-based services, although those, too, are opening up quickly.
You have a range of different competitors for Azure, most notably Amazon. Some observers are impressed with what the online retailer has done. We have to give Amazon credit. [Amazon's founder, Chairman and CEO] Jeff Bezos' team has done a very good job of pioneering many aspects of these services. They have some assets that they've built for their commerce-based applications they use internally. I view Amazon as a company we compete with but who we very much treat as a customer. We also see opportunities to partner with them. Their model is different than many others, but my view is there are many hosting partners that we enable with Windows, and Amazon is a great partner in that context.
People are very curious about what pricing model Microsoft will use. You'll see three pricing models. Some services will be free [and] advertising funded. You will see a utility-based or subscription-oriented pricing model attached to per-usage fees for some services. The specifics of that we're still working through, and we'll announce those sometime next year. You'll also see per-user charges for some services that are more user-focused, like you see with SharePoint and CRM. Those have a monthly user fee attached to them. The ones you'll see us filling in over time are the detailed usage-based or utility-based services. Chances are that's the way we'll do Windows Azure and our database services. The specifics will be announced next year.
-E.S. and K.R.
Get off of My Cloud In addition to questions about pricing, Microsoft's platform hosting model -- which demands that users run Windows Azure services out of Redmond's mammoth data centers -- may do little to entice corporate IT shops to try out Windows Azure. And it may further alienate its Web hosting partners.
Microsoft started competing with its Web hosting partners earlier this year, and it has already had a damaging impact on sales of Microsoft's products, Laguna notes, particularly its Exchange online franchise.
"They sold maybe 1.5 million accounts worldwide the past couple of years. That's nothing. When you think there are 1.6 billion hosted e-mail accounts out there and 450 million on-premises Exchange accounts, 1.5 million is a very poor performance," Laguna says.
However, other industry observers say that Microsoft will eventually give its traditional Web hosting partners a piece of the Azure action. "When the Azure Services Platform matures to a certain level, will Microsoft sell subscriptions to hosting partners? I don't think they'll have any choice. Once it reaches a certain level of maturity, the partners can support it themselves," IDC's Gillen says.
Microsoft sees Google as its primary competitor, and views Amazon as a competitor, customer and potential partner. "[Amazon.com is] now hosting Windows, and we're thrilled about that and I want to work with them to broaden their usage of Windows as much as possible," Muglia says.
In the Middle "One of the problems with the cloud strategy being put forward by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others is that they likely will be incompatible. It will be the whole California motel approach to the cloud again," says Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware Inc. "Our whole strategy actually is to not own the cloud going forward, but instead to enable interoperation between clouds and between corporations' internal infrastructures in the cloud."
VMware's secret sauce for getting internal and external clouds to interact smoothly centers on its vApp technology, something it has also applied to its virtualization products.
"Virtualization by itself can't solve every problem," Muglia says. "It's an incredibly important foundational technology. And of course we use virtualization [Hyper-V] as a part of Azure, but it isn't sufficient because the issues associated with the costs of running an application are actually implemented at the application layer. VMware has no assets in that space, so they can't even talk about the kinds of foundational changes that I'm building for IT. They can't even talk about that."
An issue that puts Google at somewhat of a competitive disadvantage, Laguna believes, is that the company's business model so far has depended, in part, on owning its clients' data. Google's App Engine is less flexible than Amazon's platform in that it requires a stack similar to the one used by the search powerhouse -- Python app servers, Bigtable data storage and the Google File System.
"Right now, we're looking at VMware and Amazon because they're open enough for our stuff to work well with theirs, so we're not depending on Microsoft or Google. The open version will prevail, and that isn't where Microsoft is right now," Laguna says.
Gillen, too, says he likes the approach VMware is taking with its cloud strategy because it will likely be less disruptive to IT shops by giving them a clear path from their existing infrastructure to the cloud.
"Microsoft is going at this from a different point of view [than VMware], where they're looking at next-generation applications to be built off their cloud as opposed to taking apps and just hosting them in the cloud. Frankly, though, customers will need both," Gillen says.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with other government partners, issued a new alert this week about the compromise of some Ivanti virtual private network (VPN) technologies.
Microsoft announced a lot of Copilot generative artificial intelligence news this week.
Health insurance provider UnitedHealth Group has confirmed that it and its network of partners have been attacked by a high-profile hacker group.
Users of Microsoft Surface Hub 2S videoconferencing devices can now switch to the Teams Rooms on Windows operating system at no extra cost, Microsoft announced this week.
Microsoft on Wednesday gave notice that it'll encourage more Windows users to carry out free upgrades to Windows 11 version 23H2, "starting with the April 2024 security update" release.
Subscribe on YouTube
More Summits
More Webcasts
More Tech Library


text:
Markets Fail to Budge; Telecom Sector Crumbles
FOX Business: Capitalism Lives Here
The markets sputtered again Thursday as traders digested a slew of corporate news. However, several large telecommunications names came under intense selling pressure.
Today's Markets
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 9.5 points, or 0.07%, to 13973, the S&P 500 rose 1.1 points, or 0.07%, to 1521 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.8 points, or 0.06% to 3199.
Several big telecom names were under heavy pressure throughout the trading day. Chief among them was CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL), which plunged 20% after surprising Wall Street by cutting its dividend and hiking its share buyback. Windstream (NYSE:WIN) and Frontier Communications (NYSE:FTR) fell sharply as well. Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T (NYSE:T), both higher-profile companies in the space, fell by a slimmer margin.
Looking at the Dow, Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) posted the worst performance, sinking more than 2% despite posting better-than-expected quarterly earnings.
News Deluge
There were no lack of headlines Thursday in what had previously been a fairly quiet week for Wall Street.
The pace of mergers and acquisitions has heated up substantially recently, with numerous big deals being announced in recent weeks. Ahead of the opening bell, H.J. Heinz (NYSE:HNZ) said it will be acquired by Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital for $72.50 a share -- a 20% premium to the food company's closing price on Wednesday. The deal, valued at $28 billion, is the biggest ever in the food industry, according to the two companies.
U.S. Airways (NYSE:LCC) and bankrupt American Airlines parent AMR also took the wraps off a tie-up that will create the world's biggest airline, valued at $11 billion.
Meanwhile, on the earnings front, Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) unveiled quarterly results that topped expectations on the top and bottom lines.
There was also a better-than-expected report on the labor market. The Labor Department said new claims for U.S. unemployment benefits fell to 341,000 last week from an upwardly revised 368,000 the week prior. Claims were expected to fall to 360,000 from an initially reported 366,000.
Oil futures drifted higher. The benchmark contract traded in New York rose 30 cents, or 0.31%, to $97.31 a barrel. Wholesale New York Harbor gasoline soared 2.7% to $3.117 a gallon. In metals, gold fell $9.60, or 0.58%, to $1,636 a troy ounce.
Foreign Markets
The Euro Stoxx 50 fell 0.81% to 2635, the English FTSE 100 dipped 0.5% to 6327 and the German DAX slumped 1.1% to 7631.
In Asia, the Japanese Nikkei 225 gained 0.5% to 11307 and the Chinese Hang Seng climbed 0.85% to 23413.


text:
Read below to find out who took home Fight Night bonuses at UFC® on FUEL TV: Munoz vs. Weidman...
Six fighters joined UFC® President Dana White at the UFC® on FUEL TV post-fight press conference: Chris Weidman, James Te Huna, TJ Dillashaw, Alex Caceres, Aaron Simpson and Francis Carmont.
Weidman earned Knockout of the Night for his second-round stoppage of Mark Munoz. After scoring a takedown early in the first round, Weidman controlled much the action and attempted several submissions. In the second frame, Weidman landed a vicious elbow that sent Munoz crashing to the mat. With the win, Weidman improved to 9-0.
Fight of the Night went to Te Huna and Joey Beltran, who engaged in an exciting three-round brawl. Te Huna landed the more significant strikes, and earned the decision on all three judges' scorecards.
Caceres was awarded Submission of the Night for his second-round tapout of Damacio Page. After attempting several triangles in the first round, "Bruce Leeroy" was finally able to secure the choke in the second.
All bonused fighters received $40,000 for their performances.


text:
Bjorn : This is sort of what I pictured myself doing. I knew I wanted to make art, be an artist. I always loved music, but never thought I would play in a band. That was/is a huge bonus.
BC: I studied sculpture at Rhode Island school of design. As far as music goes, I have no formal training, which I am always grateful for.
BC: I would say that since starting Black Dice in 97', the work in my studio has always paralleled the band. It was really the only outlet I had or making things after leaving school. Making record covers, t-shirts, and flyers really legitimized working two dimensionally for me. It wasn't something I focused on in school. Most of the work I've made has related to sound or related ideas, in one way or another. For me working collaboratively with Eric and Aaron for so long, their voices always seem to resonate when I'm working independently. That said, I do try to make sure our band artwork feels like Black Dice artwork. We've really tried to cultivate a very unique, identifiable aesthetic for the band.
BC: The main influence is just mundane pop culture. Crappy television, pop radio, advertisements. I don't go out to see very much these days. I like Paul Laffoley, Archigram, Jeff Davis, and Devo album art.
BC: My studio is a decent size, but covered with shit. At this point, you can't see the floor. There's plastic and paper everywhere. I listen to the classic rock station. Actually now its CBS fm, since they're back on the air. There is no real formula for a good day for me. I like it when I get surprised by something I'm working on. Surprised in a good way. That isn't happening right now, but hopefully later today.
BC: Most of the titles are conceived rather quickly, and with the primary purpose of making sense to me. Usually there's the word "changer" or "potential" in the title as well. I like to think of a lot of the collages as sort of static animations, caught in flux. Sometimes they are imagined sequences depicted.
BC: I've got a show at Jack Hanley's NYC space in the spring. Black Dice is touring in Europe in March. Maybe some other places as well this spring. Pretty much the normal pace right now, which is great.
BC: My new apartment, hermaphrodite, lima. I'm still reflecting on it all.
BC: Sorry, it's too early for that much creativity. I am working on an idea for a mechanical sculpture that is kind of an invention, but it's too early to put that idea out there. Sorry.
< Prev | Next > |


text:
"How to Survive in Enemy Territory," Liahona, Oct. 2012, 34–37
How to Survive in Enemy Territory
From a seminary centennial broadcast address given on January 22, 2012.
We celebrate 100 years of seminary in the Church. I hold on to a thread that goes back to the early days when the resources for this program were very scarce.
From those humble beginnings, we now have 375,008 students in seminary classes in 143 countries with over 38,000 volunteer and full-time teachers worldwide. We invest much in our youth. We know of your worth and your potential.
Wisdom Will Help You Combat the Enemy
I speak as one who has seen the past and would prepare you for the future.
You are growing up in enemy territory. When you become mature spiritually, you will understand how the adversary has infiltrated the world around you. He is in homes, entertainment, the media, language—everything around you. In most cases, his presence is undetected.
I want to tell you that which will be of most worth and most desirable. The scriptures say, "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom," and I would add, "with all [your] getting get [going!]" (Proverbs 4:7). I do not have time to waste and neither do you. So listen up!
The moment I decided to be a teacher is very clear in my mind. During World War II, I was in my early 20s and a pilot in the Air Force. I was stationed on the little island of Ie Shima. This island, a small, lonely one about as big as a postage stamp, is just off the northern tip of Okinawa.
One lonely summer evening, I sat on a cliff to watch the sun go down. I was pondering what I would do with my life after the war, if I was fortunate enough to survive. What did I want to be? It was on that night that I decided I wanted to be a teacher. I reasoned that teachers are always learning. Learning is a basic purpose of life.
I first taught seminary in 1949 in Brigham City. I had been a student in that seminary in my high school days.
There were three courses originally taught in seminary: Old Testament, New Testament, and Church History. It was my privilege to add an early-morning class on the Book of Mormon. I had returned from the war with a testimony of the Book of Mormon and an understanding of how the gift of the Holy Ghost operates.
The Gift of the Holy Ghost Will Protect You in Enemy Territory
You have been taught all of your lives about the gift of the Holy Ghost, but teaching can only go so far. You can and, in fact, you must go the rest of the way alone to discover within yourself how the Holy Ghost can be a guiding and protective influence.
For young men and young women, the process is the same. Discovering how the Holy Ghost operates in your life is the quest of a lifetime. Once you have made that discovery for yourself, you can live in enemy territory and will not be deceived or destroyed. No member of this Church—and that means each of you—will ever make a serious mistake without first being warned by the promptings of the Holy Ghost.
Sometimes when you have made a mistake, you may have said afterward, "I knew I should not have done that. It did not feel right," or perhaps, "I knew I should have done that. I just did not have the courage to act!" Those impressions are the Holy Ghost attempting to direct you toward good or warning you away from harm.
There are certain things that you must not do if the lines of communication are to remain open. You cannot lie or cheat or steal or act immorally and have those channels remain free from disruption. Do not go where the environment resists spiritual communication.
You must learn to seek the power and direction that is available to you, and then follow that course no matter what.
First on your "to do" list, put the word prayer. Most of the time, your prayers will be silent. You can think a prayer.
You can always have a direct line of communication with your Father in Heaven. Do not allow the adversary to convince you that no one is listening on the other end. Your prayers are always heard. You are never alone!
Take care of your body. Be clean. "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16).
Read carefully the promises found in section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants. The Word of Wisdom does not promise perfect health but that the spiritual receptors within you might be strengthened.
Stay away from tattoos and similar things which deface your body. Your body was created in God's image.
Prophetic Counsel Teaches What Is True
I want to speak now in the pattern of straight talk about another matter.
We know that gender was set in the premortal world.1 "The spirit and the body are the soul of man" (D&C 88:15). This matter of gender is of great concern to the Brethren, as are all matters of morality.
A few of you may have felt or been told that you were born with troubling feelings and that you are not guilty if you act on those temptations. Doctrinally we know that if that were true, your agency would have been erased, and that cannot happen. You always have a choice to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost and live a morally pure and chaste life, one filled with virtue.
President Gordon B. Hinckley announced the following in general conference: "People inquire about our position on those who consider themselves … gays and lesbians. My response is that we love them as sons and daughters of God. They may have certain inclinations which are powerful and which may be difficult to control. Most people have [temptations] of one kind or another at various times. If they do not act upon these inclinations, then they can go forward as do all other members of the Church. If they violate the law of chastity and the moral standards of the Church, then they are subject to the discipline of the Church, just as others are.
"We want to help … strengthen them, to assist them with their problems and to help them with their difficulties. But we cannot stand idle if they indulge in immoral activity, if they try to uphold and defend and live in a so-called same-sex marriage situation. To permit such would be to make light of the very serious and sacred foundation of God-sanctioned marriage and its very purpose, the rearing of families."2
President Hinckley was speaking for the Church.
Use Your Agency to Keep or Regain Safe Ground
The first gift that Adam and Eve received was agency: "Thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee" (Moses 3:17).
You have that same agency. Use it wisely to deny acting on any impure impulse or unholy temptation that may come into your mind. Just do not go there, and if you are already there, come back out of it. "Deny yourselves of all ungodliness" (Moroni 10:32).
Do not tamper with the life-giving powers in your body alone or with members of either gender. That is the standard of the Church, and it will not change. As you mature, there is a temptation to experiment or explore immoral activities. Do not do that!
The key word is discipline—self-discipline. The word discipline comes from the word disciple or follower. Be a disciple-follower of the Savior, and you will be safe.
One or two of you may be thinking, "I am already guilty of this or that serious mistake. It is too late for me." It is never too late.
You have been taught at home and in seminary about the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The Atonement is like an eraser. It can wipe away guilt and the effect of whatever it is that is causing you to feel guilty.
Guilt is spiritual pain. Do not suffer from chronic pain. Get rid of it. Be done with it. Repent and, if necessary, repent again and again and again and again until you—not the enemy—are in charge of you.
Lasting Peace Comes by Repenting Often
Life turns out to be a succession of trials and errors. Add "repent often" to your list of things to do. This will bring you lasting peace that cannot be purchased at any earthly price. Understanding the Atonement may be the one most important truth that you can learn in your youth.
If you are associating with others who drag you down instead of building you up, stop and change company. You may be alone and lonely at times. The important question may be asked then, "When you are alone, are you in good company?"
Unwinding a habit that you have allowed to entangle you can be difficult. But the power is in you. Do not despair. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that "all beings who have bodies have power over those who have not."3 You can resist temptation!
It is not likely that you will ever have a personal encounter with the adversary; he does not show himself that way. But even if he came personally to you to test and tempt you, you have an advantage. You can assert your agency, and he will have to leave you alone.
Take Advantage of the Blessings of Seminary
You are not ordinary. You are very special. You are exceptional. How do I know that? I know that because you were born at a time and in a place where the gospel of Jesus Christ can come into your life through the teachings and activities of your home and of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is, as the Lord Himself has said, "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth" (D&C 1:30).
There are other things we could add to the list, but you know what you should and should not be doing in your life. You know right and wrong and do not need to be commanded in all things.
Do not squander these years of seminary instruction. Take advantage of the great blessing you have to learn the doctrines of the Church and the teachings of the prophets. Learn that which is of most worth. It will bless you and your posterity for many generations to come.
Not many years will pass until you are married and have children, a marriage that should be sealed in the temple. Our prayer is that you will find yourself, in due time, safely settled in a family ward or branch.
Go Forward with Hope and Faith
Do not fear the future. Go forward with hope and faith. Remember that supernal gift of the Holy Ghost. Learn to be taught by it. Learn to seek it. Learn to live by it. Learn to pray always in the name of Jesus Christ (see 3 Nephi 18:19–20). The Spirit of the Lord will attend you, and you will be blessed.
We have deep and profound faith in you.
I bear my testimony to you—a witness that came to me in my youth. And you are no different from anyone else than I am. You have as much right to that testimony and witness as anyone. It will come to you if you earn it. I invoke the blessings of the Lord upon you—the blessings of that witness to be in your life, to guide you as you make a happy future.


text:
On My Nightstand:
Fathermucker by Greg Olear. So far, a big disappointment. I was looking forward to reading this one but now I'm not even sure I'll finish it. Mostly because I despise books that make reference to pop culture. I don't want to read about Facebook or Dora or anything like that. I just don't.
Want to Read:
I have a fast-growing stack of books I intend to read as soon as I give up on Fathermucker. Piling up on various counters and bookshelves around here are:
- Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women by Carolyn James
- Inheritance: Book 4 of The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
- Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption by Katie Davis
- When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity by O. M. Bakke
- When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor...and Yourself by Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert
T.V. Show Worth Watching:
Once Upon a Time. You must watch this. From the beginning. Oh wow. I have not loved a show this much since the prematurely-ended piece of brilliance that was Firefly.
As an added bonus to an already incredible show, I saw part of it being filmed this summer. There's just something childishly awesome about being able to say, "that right there! I saw that exact scene being filmed!!!"
In My Kitchen:
Tonight we ate Rosemary Chicken. It was even more amazing than it looks, and that's saying a lot. Oh my. My mouth is already watering at the thought of the few potatoes and mushrooms I tucked away in the fridge for tomorrow's lunch.
Since I don't yet have a cast iron skillet (Christmas present, anyone??), I skipped the browning step. Instead, after the potatoes had boiled for a few minutes, I piled it all in a glass baking dish, poured the marinade on top, and baked it all for 45 minutes in the 450F oven. It could not have turned out any better. This will definitely become a new favourite in our frequent dinner rotation.
Next week will be the Christmas baking marathon, including white-chocolate-topped gingerbread cookies and white-chocolate cherry shortbread. Yum. Should be an interesting change to last year's spicy gingerbread cookies and lemon thumbprint cookies.
In My Ears:
While I usually listen to The Civil Wars and Rosewood's Diary, the end of November has brought with it my beloved Christmas music. Lots of old family favourites (including, yes, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, and Alabama) coupled with some newer favourites (Sufjan Stevens, Josh Groban, Sixpence None the Richer, and Weezer) and supplemented with various random Christmas songs I've stumbled upon over the years.
Items of Note:
- Twelve Causes for Christmas @ Joy in this Journey: "We are going to be the change we want to see, telling the stories of multiple organizations working on the same cause on the same day. We will highlight all the ways they work together where we can."
- A Quiet Advent @ Introverted Church: "Tomorrow I will post an article of mine that will kick off the series, and then each Sunday I will write a reflection on the Advent theme of the week. During the week we will hear from guest bloggers who are reflecting on Advent and what it would mean to celebrate this season in a quiet way. The Savior is coming, and let's meet him, even amidst the clamor of the cultural celebration, in the quiet of our hearts."
- Resources for the Season @ Internet Monk: "This afternoon I thought I would pass along some links that might be of help to you or to someone you care about during this Advent and Christmas season. Some provide daily readings, prayers, and other personal devotional materials. Other sites give ideas for creative ways of loving Christ and our neighbors during the holiday season."
Pinterest Finds:
Ah, Pinterest, how I love thee.
I cannot wait to make this cinnamon roll cake. I'm thinking breakfast treat. Maybe even tomorrow morning - happy first of December!
Let it go. I need this reminder as the demands of the Christmas season begin piling on.
Loving this Occupy Christmas idea, courtesy of Kristen at Rage Against the Minivan.
What I'm Looking Forward to in December:
Need it be said? With the Advent season in full swing and Christmas on its way, there is much to look forward to. In less than two weeks, we fly halfway across the country to spend a week with my parents and sisters. A few days after we arrive back home, we hop in the car for the 11 hour drive up to my in-laws' home for another week-long visit. Arriving back home in the new year, I anticipate spending January holed up in my house, recovering from all the Christmas excitement. Even still, I will seek to hold to last Advent's ideals: keeping Advent focused, simple, and intentional.
And with that, I bid good-bye to November and welcome December in all its celebratory glory.


text:
Scientists Compute Expansion of the Compound Catalog
Principal Investigator:
Jadran Vrabec
Thermodynamik und Energietechnik, Universität Paderborn (Germany)
Local Project ID:
HPC Platform used:
Hermit of HLRS
Date published:
Chemical processes help create everything from plastic containers to antifreeze to fertilizers. Many products and materials humanity uses daily come from a field only around 100 years old. Through those hundred years, chemical companies pushing the boundaries of science have often had to play a dangerous game of trial and error while experimenting with compounds.
In some cases, companies find a new synthetic waterproof material or liquid coolant, but many of the associated experiments have also ended with hazardous situations and noxious clouds. Researchers using the University of Stuttgart's HLRS (High Performance Computing Center) supercomputing resources aim to help not only make the fundamentals of chemical processes safer and more predictable, but also as energy efficient as possible.
"We have many compounds that are important to our daily lives, and we only have a small fraction of experimental data," says Dr. Jadran Vrabec, professor of thermodynamics and energy technology at the University of Paderborn. Vrabec works with academia and industry to determine the behavior of various pure compounds and mixtures. Researchers have problems creating experiments to define compound behavior, as many are too costly, time consuming, or dangerous. "We only have a profound understanding of about 50–60 pure compounds, and when you start mixing things, the number of options just gets out of hand," Vrabec says.
In addition to options, the results of mixing and separating chemical compounds can get out of hand without precision. Explosions are just one of the many risks for the chemical industry. Due to these risks, many companies stick to decades-old methods for producing compounds and are hesitant to try and modernize the process for fear of creating a volatile situation. As a result, many of these processes are less efficient than they could be. The Haber-Bosch Process, for example, synthesizes ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen to help create the world's fertilizer supply. Its production eats away one percent of the world's entire energy supply per year alone. Thermal separation processes in general are estimated to consume five percent of the entire world's energy supply per year.
By using supercomputers, Vrabec and his colleagues gain insight into how altering chemical process conditions may improve energy efficiency, reduce the amount of unwanted side-product material, or how changing the actual physical process may improve separating compounds. "You want substances A and B to produce C, but you never completely get C, as you will always have some sort of mixture," says Vrabec. Understanding the phase behavior, or the detailed properties of compounds in various states, is essential to for the chemical industry to make serious strides in efficiency.
These simulations employ supercomputer Hermit installed at HLRS, one of the three member centers of the German Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. Hermit is a Cray XE6 capable of more than one petaflop, or one thousand trillion calculations per second, of computing power. Hermit has 113,664 processing cores housed in 3552 dual-socket nodes with AMD Interlagos processors.
Predicting properties
Supercomputers are only as good as the algorithms used on them for simulations. To take advantage of a petaflop machine like Hermit, researchers must develop codes capable of using large amounts of the many processing cores available. As supercomputing technology gets faster, the demand on scalable algorithms and codes only grows. Many of these codes are developed in academia, only to be further developed and used by industry as commercial technology improves.
The ms2 code, one of the premier codes for thermodynamic simulations, was developed by Vrabec and his colleagues to serve this purpose. Scientists can use the code in small-scale simulation on personal computers, but it is also capable of using modern supercomputers such as HLRS's Hermit to solve major problems facing the chemical industry. The code tackles one of the most difficult problems for researchers to solve with experiments—the phase behavior and the thermodynamic behavior of fluids in general. Vrabec explains that for any compound there are liquid and gaseous phases, and during chemical processes, knowing their properties is essential for safety and efficiency. "Take water as an example," says Vrabec. "If you choose to boil water at a different pressure, the temperature will also change." This process is exponentially more complicated with mixtures, and for large-scale chemical production, a comprehensive experimental approach is far too costly.
Computing-intensive research often requires collaboration from scientists from various institutions and organizations. For example, Vrabec and his collaborators work with German chemical conglomerate BASF SE to help simulate some of the many chemicals the company produces. Like many German chemical industry companies, BASF has a long track record of plant safety, but improving efficiency drives the company's collaboration in simulation-based research. One of the team's primary goals was to define the compound ethylene oxide's interactions with water, and to more precisely predict its properties at the vapor-liquid equilibrium. At room temperature, ethylene oxide is a flammable, carcinogenic substance that has mutagenic properties, making computation an essential tool for researchers to better understand the substance and streamline production. Despite ethylene oxide's volatile properties, the compound serves as a building block for drug manufacturing, antifreeze, polyester, detergents, and various polymers.
In 1960, the chemical compound hydrazine and its derivatives, a family of compounds used as propellants for satellites and rockets, but also has applications in plastic manufacturing and pesticide production, were the cause of a disaster in the Soviet Union. An explosion killed 74 people and fatally exposed 48 more to toxic chemicals. Swiss-based company Lonza Ltd has been safely conducting industrial-scale chemical processes with hydrazine and its derivatives for several decades, but to improve safety and efficiency in their hydrazine production, the company has employed supercomputing to help understand hydrazine's properties in greater detail. Lonza and Vrabec's research team were able to match simulation data with the limited amount of experimental data available, ultimately expanding knowledge of the compound's properties in various states.
Research collaborations on German supercomputing resources do not end at German or European borders, though. Due to the relatively small group of researchers studying thermodynamics computationally, international collaboration is a key aspect of moving the field forward. Vrabec works with an international consortium of researchers at National Taiwan University, the University of Kaiserslautern, and Cleveland State University in mapping the properties of gaseous cyclohexane, which, in combination with its derivatives cyclohexanol and cyclohexanone, is used in nylon production. Separating compounds that are so closely related proves difficult, and as a result, scientists working on this compound are moving closer themselves. Vrabec is hosting post-doctoral research from Taiwan University to improve the predictive method for cyclohexane and its derivatives. If you want more information about this research, contact Jadran Vrabec at email@example.com or Dr. Heinz Pöhlmann at firstname.lastname@example.com.
(Author: Eric Gedenk)
HLRS Project ID: MMHBF
July 2013


text:
Press Releases
To Accelerate Partnerships with Startups for Greater Collaborative Creation
1 November 2019
Daikin Industries, Ltd. has recently set aside 100 million US dollars for use in investments targeting startup companies worldwide over a five-year period until 2024. In addition, Daikin will establish the Technology and Innovation Center CVC Office to promote collaboration with startup companies as a means to accelerate open innovation integrating technologies and knowledge from both inside and outside the company.
Leveraging the business foundation of its global operations, Daikin is working in collaboration with local startup companies in places that include Silicon Valley in the United States and Shenzhen in China. In Japan, the company promotes partnerships with startup companies, including startup companies associated with the University of Tokyo based on an industry-academia co-creation agreement concluded with the university.
This allocation will enable each division and department in the company to make decisions faster and invest with greater flexibility in startup companies. In cooperating with global startup companies that practice fast-paced management and have advanced technologies, innovative ideas, and a spirit to challenge, Daikin aims to quickly verify hypotheses and create new products, services, and business models.
The role of the new Technology and Innovation Center CVC Office involves activities relating to corporate venture capital, including searching for startup companies that are candidates for investment, executing and monitoring investments, and acting as a bridge between the startup companies and internal company divisions and departments.
Achieving further growth in the midst of the significant changes rapidly occurring in industrial structure due to digital technology innovations such as AI and IoT requires companies to accelerate technology and product development, transform business structures, and create new business models. To this end, Daikin engages in collaborative creation with outside entities and creates new value by actively incorporating outside technologies and knowledge while identifying what it should develop in-house as proprietary knowledge. For the future, the company intends to accelerate open innovation initiatives and use this investment allocation to build strong relationships with new outside partners.
Visit the Contacts page for inquiries concerning the information described above.
Find out more in your region.