text:
That's right and this is actually the first time that the bulk of the editors have actually gotten together again, we all know each other and trade emails every now and then, but to actually be together, and they put us on the stage together and we had kind of a group discussion about where we are at and where we are going and so forth. It was kind of funny because it was a lot of collective remembering. We didn't take a lot of movies or a lot of notes and so forth it was "Well yes, I think we were really trying to do this", but there was this magical moment when those four values just got written on the board, and kind of in counter point this over that and we just looked at it and said "Oh, that is such a perfect expression of what we collectively believe, even though we are all very different people".
3. It was interesting hearing the recollection of how that inspiration came about.
Yes, and everybody is a little vague on it but when it was on the board it was like "Wow, that is so good, that is so much what we want to say". And of course a lot of people have read it. In the last year and a half it has been translated to almost forty languages that has been a real effort and it turns out to be very difficult to translate. The words have a lot of meaning but you sort of read yourself in those meanings and so what we've done to do the translation is we asked every translator to find the Agile community within their country and kind of work it out together. A lot of people have found that it kind of makes, you know that it's a project, that the Agile community come dirty, really pull something together and then we get a lot of reach.
Yes, it was on the date, we are here in Salt Lake and of course it was kind of invitational workshop ten years ago where people who were the proponents of a specific methodology that had the - at that time it was called lightweight methodology got together and talked about it, we say that lightweight has actually a negative connotation, kind of not really very strong. So we crafted that manifesto and then we said well but what are we going to call it? We are not going to call it the lightweight manifesto. We picked the word Agile and the rest is history.
5. So the names are really important.
Names are important. And of course I was a fan of extreme programming, which is actually a pretty comprehensive prescription for how to develop software. And Agile was kind of an umbrella term that allowed extreme programing at one end of the spectrum and really much simpler things at the other end of the spectrum. And there are a few extreme programing proponents that felt that it was a real step back to broaden the tent but I think in terms of having impact on the world that it's better to be a little less dogmatic and a lot of the principles of extreme programming have found their home where they are welcomed.
You know I think that what Agile really brought to software, is an ability for practitioners to actually watch each other work, to agree upon what their goals are, and then just gain experience. There are plenty of people, you know for as long as there have been computers, there have been plenty of people who produced high quality work, they know what they are doing because they've done it a long time, they've had access to a computer they try a lot of things, what we wanted to do is make it easy for people to have that kind of sense of exploration, the ability to try things, if something is not going well to back up and try something else without undo pressure, from schedule. In other words to say if we want good there has to be time to do good. And we need to make the relationship with what the customer is expecting and what we are doing, line up.
I think a lot of bad software is written simply because developers thought that was what they were supposed to do. And somebody who doesn't know software isn't going to tell you to do otherwise because they don't know software. So it was really kind of software developers stand up for what they know has to work. And that has worked well. There has been a little drift from that actually, as it becomes more popular and more people are drafted in as coaches and so forth and we get people who aren't software developers, reading the books and understanding the practices and managing and facilitating those practices. Without actually having an empathy with what it is to design software. And it's not as strong as it was.
But there is always people who will be devoted to software and the perfection at it and I think that's what's bond the craftsmanship movement that says "Gee, not only do we need Agile to manage a schedule, we need individuals to take responsibility for the quality of their code". I'm not saying that it wasn't like that but I think that that's recognized now as an important part of software development and career development.
But it isn't completely the document model, it's something new, and finding out how to use that well and especially on the new platforms, on pads and stuff like that, it's pretty exciting, there is a tremendous amount of potential there, the computers keep getting faster but finding the right way to approach that kind of problem. I think Test Driven Development will always be a part of it. I think learning from each other, and of course I'm a fan of Pair Programming, because there is so much to learn if you try to do it alone, it's just overwhelming, but to learn by doing with others, you read one chapter, I read another chapter we see if we can put them together and get something to work.
8. We are better collectively than we are alone.
Absolutely and it makes the learning fun instead of drudgery.
9. Sure, when you get stuck you have someone to help you get unstuck.
Yes. Well the other thing sometimes when you get stuck you just look at this and say "I'm stuck" and your partner says "Well, I'm stuck too". And you say "Thank goodness, I thought it was just me" just being stuck and knowing that it's ok to be stuck. It's oh, now we have to think about how to get unstuck. That's amazingly empowering. I don't think any developer really wanted to work alone, but they got a reputation as being loners that was unjustified because they did so much in their head. What we've done is, computers are powerful enough that you can do it on the screen. And when it's on the screen we can have a conversation.
So I think this needs to be like that and the finger pointing becomes the nouns, because the nouns are so complicated, if we tried to pronounce the nouns, some path expression or something, it's just too much to say, but this needs to be there in the sentence, and you know what I mean, because you put it here and now it needs to be there, and we can have a conversation about something as complicated as code. It never seemed to have worked on a whiteboard by the way, because you draw the boxes and you listen to me and you say "Oh yes, but here is what I am thinking" and you erase my drawing and draw your boxes and arrows in there and so we are really not communicating at all.
I am lucky I've recently taken a one year appointment with Nike in their sustainable business and innovation group as their open data fellow. So I am very interested in what data, to make data as mobile as, well, originally code. We were all about making code move around in an organization, understanding code and what work for code, I kind of brought those concepts into documents with wiki. Wiki was modeled after what were doing in code. Agile code, wiki documents and now I am working to see if I can do the same thing with data. If you think about it the last real advance in humans using data is a spreadsheet. Most of my career has been focused on the kind of modeling that Alan Kay dreamed that we would do, with objects and SmallTalk. Truth be told, people don't build SmallTalk programs, and make important decisions in their lives based on those models, but they do build models and spreadsheets and make very important decisions based on what those spreadsheets say.
So that's a modeling environment that an average person can do, maybe not an average person, but a lot of people can do and then make very important decisions so I think it's possible in an open data environment where the variety of data, the flow of data is much higher than you can really sustain with a spreadsheet and make that. Well I think it's going to fuel, in an outcomes-oriented perspective, and everything that we do in our economic world, a world of ever diminishing resources, and how we decide to live in it.
You know I think that again Agile is an umbrella term, and so it certainly was created to cast over those things, we didn't have, we had people who understood Lean, at the workshop that drafted the manifesto, but I think Lean wasn't seen as an important movement in software at that time. As it's become more and more of interest, it turns out that in the conversation last night was that there is actually a wide variety of Leans. And people have borrowed some things from Lean and kind of made a softer Lean that isn't really consistent with what the I don't want to say the true, but let's say maybe the most productive Lean that's been applied in the most progressive manufacturing. And even both of those sort of fit under the umbrella.
Now it's a real mistake as I was just saying to try to find the perfect methodology for all situations, which really want to do is understand what any practice what it really brings to the situation. And this is something that we kind of got early on with extreme programming, we felt that people were programming in a foolish way. And when we looked at any one thing they were doing there was good reason why they were doing it. But the whole was foolish and so what we did is we had to change like a dozen things at the same time. And we changed a dozen things, we sort of re-jiggered what influences what and why, the industry has sort of stabilized in this idea of way too much planning. Fortune telling, we call it, trying to tell the future and then trying to make that future happen, and when it wasn't happening just working harder, delaying schedules, whatever, and it was foolish, and instead what we should do is say "Well what is, and what are we going to do tomorrow?"
12. So optimization was not really part of the extreme plan.
Optimization, well a lot of people want to know how can I get more software more cheaply, or how can we avoid these disasters where months go by and nothing happens. I sort of feel that the formulation of most Agile methods are a little plodding, you are coming in, you do the same amount of work every day, but you don't have days go by where nothing gets done. Like the tortoise and the hair, and the tortoise wins the race, because the tortoise doesn't get stuck. I just hate it when I am programing and I just stand there looking at the screen and I don't know the next thing to do. I always want to know whatever situation I am in "Ah, I am in this situation, I'd better do this". What I like to do is program the computer to tell me what it wants to do. And test-driven is really a simple approach for that, you write a test and the test passes, you are allowed to go forward. The computer is telling you what it wants to do.
There are a couple of principles that fueled our creation of practices. One of the principles is that when you get to know a person you become motivated at many different levels. If you are looking at a document, and it's got somebody's name on it and you are going to read the document and guess what that document means. But when you get to know a person, then you understand what would write that person, and it might be only a small part of what that document is, especially if you get a habit of delivering and you find out what they like and how delivery changes their minds. So this idea of being closer to more people, as many people as you can. The other thing is don't be afraid to move in small steps. It's more important that you move in steps, regularly and then be opened to where you'll be then. I know that for all manner of reasons we've produce a lot of software in the last few decades that is no fun to work on.
But if you say what is the business need and what can we do, and if we know what we don't know and we make a plan for that the next week, and then just work away out and don't apologies for what's there, don't promise things you don't know you can do, in earnest, chip away at it. Just know more tomorrow than you know today, and that can be about the code what you have to work with or what the real needs are. And that is the basis of anything Agile, and that can be applied anywhere. Now there's a lot of people who are doing that and kind of offering up techniques that work better in some situations than others. The one I like is if you don't have any tests just try writing some tests, test your way into the code, don't look for high levels of coverage but if you see something then write a test to see if that seems to be true. And then you grow that out until you have control over code, that you might not have control of otherwise. But maybe you are in a situation where a little more daring, maybe your plodding isn't going to solve the problem, and then you just have to be daredevils, and of you have to be daredevils, well then be good at it.
It's a crucial be you're trading off the future for the present when you do that. I am actually proud of having coined the term "technical debt." And a lot of people say debt that is bad, you don't want any technical debt but I actually think as anybody who has ever taken some venture money knows that you take some debt to go faster. And if you want to go fast you take some debt. But the misunderstanding was that people thought that you never have to pay it back. You are going to debt you have to pay it back or you go out of business. It's called bankruptcy and there have been plenty of bankrupt projects so kind of managing, understanding the choices you are making and don't be afraid to make some daring choices, but know the consequences of what you've done. And I think that the other thing is that computers are awfully powerful. If you stop for a moment to say here is what I am doing day in and day out, can I step aside from what I am doing? And write a program that helps me do what I am doing? One thing that I like to do is write programs that read my programs.
Well, not just to do something, like one thing I found very valuable to look at a huge program I just read every file and squeeze it to one line. The easy way to do that is to do everything except for some critical punctuation: like the curly brackets, the pluses, the assignment operators, semi colons, and you see a string of that, one per line and you can look through a large code base and see patterns. Now, you see some crazy "Oh, look at this one has all semi colons, I wonder what's' going on there", then you go look at that file "Oh, I see what's going on there". But it's sort of a signature, so you wrote a program that takes something that is too big to look at and makes it possible to look at from a thousand feet. And then you have to learn "Oh, I see these patterns, what kind of code is in these different patterns". So it's making the computer help you, it's not test driven development, but it's something else like that, it's putting using the computer to help you do your job. And we are all programmers, so let's program.
I would say that if I look at my life that the kinds of skills that I really perfected would be straight ahead development skills. I also have found a way to turn a lot of problems into development problems, and then use my skills as development to do something that fits in the organization in a way that the organization wasn't expecting. I like to tell people that the shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn't necessarily go through meeting expectations. Now if you are a salesman and you are only being measured by sales volume, it probably does, before you can sell ten million, you have to sell eight million. But in something as complex and as multidimensional as product design, there is a lot of ways to approach it and sometimes if you just step back and say "This way is just a slug, I wonder if there is a shortcut going around this way", and like I say the computer is really powerful, how can you have that computer help you in a way that most people wouldn't think that they are allowed to program.
16. Is this the kind of thought process that brought the wiki?
Oh, absolutely. It's funny I did make what can be called a prototype, sort of a mini wiki that I did in HyperCard a few years before I made the wiki, and I was in a research organization and HyperCard had just come out and I thought "Well this is really a weird program" it's a drawing editor and a database and a programming language. It's just this hodgepodge of stuff and I had the liberty, I took the time to just play with it and try to figure out what I want it to be. And then I thought well I want it to be what I would call a ragged database, it's not rows and columns but it's really a database. And I thought "What can I put in that database that is sort of ragged?" I had a pet theory at the time that engineers are really conservative and they wouldn't do anything on a project unless they've seen it work somewhere else before.
And it's that seeing it with their own eyes that gave the confidence to put something in there. So I thought I work at a technical company - Techtronix at that time - and I thought well, let's see if I can build a database of all the ideas that have ever moved from project to project in Techtronix. Well, I don't even know how to do that but I said I will start; I'll start with the people around me. So I made a thing where you could write down a project and mention who is on it and what ideas were in it, and where they went for their next project and I just made a web of people, projects.
17. Kind of Kanban-like, isn't it?
Except it was historical. It's like what were you doing before you did this and how did you get the idea to do this? So you got it from over there. But I made it so you can do this top down editing, so you can refer to a project with a hyperlink, when there wasn't a card there and that's not the way HyperCard wanted to work but I found a way to get it to be able to refer to pages that didn't exist. And then people would just sit down and start reading, and then pretty soon they would say "Well that's not how that project worked". Because there were a lot of senior people around me who knew a lot more about my company than I did, they'd say "That was really for this reason", and I say "Go ahead, type it in". And then they type it in and they type something else in and something else in and I couldn't believe my desk.
Because they were pouring their hearts out, writing this history of ideas. When we started looking at patterns, substitute patterns for ideas and we said "What we really want to find out is what works, let's not just take any ideas, let's just take the ideas that are shown to work over and over, we need a database, and the web was new", and I said I wanted to make something that had that right about things that are on the edge of your ability to understand, be able to talk about things out there, that don't exist yet and that's become the red link for something, that's the link that's incomplete. If you think about it what it really does is how can we make a database useful when the database is incomplete? Well that's exactly the same as how can we make a computer program useful when the computer program is incomplete.
In fact, when I grab the data and edit it, you can say "Oh, that's an improvement" and grab it back so that it's an environment for passing things around. And again I have to look at computer programing for advice. Just as what we are talking about with Agile, that the computer programing methodology came before the wiki methodology, well the best sharing that I know of right now is on github. Github has a good merging model, your work and you can fork my work, improve it and I can bring what you've done back into mine. And that federation is the key to casual collaboration so to be able to do the same thing. Now if you are looking we can share a document, and I can check out the document and whatever and I can watch you while I'm editing, and have one document, the definitive document, but I think the breakthrough is to say "No, there doesn't have to be a definitive document, there is your version of the document and my version of the document, your version of the document", that is all versions and then we read all of them.
Now to make that work you have to have one way to say "Oh, how is this document different than this document?" and the way I do that is by keeping enough history, so if you move a paragraph up to here I know it's a move. I don't see it as a delete, you've just moved it and kind of watch each other. So I think it will be used a lot for anything you read, you just make a new version of the document that's kind of the cliff notes, the part that you care about and it's kind of like underlining except that you just make a new document.
And then when you read my cliff notes, you'll make your own cliff notes so there will be cliff notes of cliff notes, of cliff notes. And maybe they will get bigger maybe they will get smaller, but that ideas will move through that environment. If you think about it it's like me talking about the engineer, who wouldn't do something unless it has seen it work before. So it's this how do people know things. I've just been trying to accelerate it.
18. How is this going to manifest itself? Is this something you are working on privately now?
Of course I am doing it on github, you know it's up there, I call it - I was actually in a workshop called "The Indi Web Camp." It was for people who created a lot of content independently. And it said don't create it on other people's site, make it your own site, and manage your own content. They had a simple rule: if you are not paying rent, you don't own your server. The service provider should be working for you not for somebody else. And I think that's a good model, and so I was at this camp, and it was two days and in day one I said "You know I think we ought to try to make the smallest federated wiki." Federated means that we each have our own pages, and I sort of thought it would be a day project and we just knocked it out the next day and it turns out we - most people had something else to do and I didn't get the crowds around it that I thought I would, but we got started and it's been about a month of development now and it's up on github.
Of course because I like to write programs to teach me things, there is very little editing capability but the first editing command I put in was move. So that I could move things around and the first record I kept was journaling the moves and you can see that right in the page, what is the history of the page right on the page. And so I just sit and move paragraphs around. And the cool thing now is to have two different pages, and grab a paragraph here and drag it over here. And that's how you make the cliff notes, I read your pages and grab paragraphs.
19. Something we can use it in InfoQ I guess.
Perhaps, it's possible, I'm reinventing publishing. I hope to reinvent data publishing. Data publishing is - data is one of those things you say: "Well I am glad to have the data but I don't even know what's there". And there is no way to know what's there" and I think "Well, if that data is embedded, in a conversation, and if that conversation is like the wiki which is like everything else I do, which is all about coming to grips with understanding something." I start with programing automatically difficult, and I look through words and I am trying to generalize that to data. And I think it's promising, I wouldn't say I've done it, but I do know that I have to be dramatically more powerful than a spreadsheet, where people just use spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are marvelous in the fact that somebody could build a model on a spreadsheet to make important decisions. I want them to build a model in a wiki, and make important decisions.
Well, hang in there for once, I've devoted my life to programming, I think programming is one of the most powerful ways you can exercise your mind. And I think that that power has led people to be afraid of programmers and there is a lot of "We don't know what you are doing" basically controlling programmers but in my life I found that I can do a day job and serve whoever is paying my salary in a way that respects their goals, and still have energy left at the end of the day and do things just to please me. Or to please people who know me. And I would say that of Agile, is a pretty marvelous set of values, I say open source is a different but pretty marvelous set of values and both of them are based on understanding code. So I say don't hesitate to learn more about code, don't hesitate to do it in an Agile way, do a test driven, maybe work with friends, but don't hesitate to open it up.
And the open source community is pretty amazing, github makes it easier than ever and whatever comes after github be sure it is going to be better than that. But I think that it's easy to be overwhelmed you say "Gosh I just learnt this and now it's that", but I tell you, you put two days into studying something and you are already half way to expert. Stuff is coming out that fast, take the time and there is great blog posts on stuff and learn something new every week.
21. I like to say that we are in a constant state of learning.
Yes, absolutely and when you don't know it, and you are reading something and you say "Oh, my Gosh I am so overloaded", well then just read it until you can't read anymore and then read it again tomorrow and then try writing a program. I stayed up all night, not all, I was up for an hour in the middle of the night I woke up and I was kind of awake so I had my pad, called up Coffee Script and I read Coffee Script.
22. You are doing Coffee Script?
But not it's not in one machine for one person, it's on the whole world for the whole world. And that's night and day but the ability to do reasonable complicated things in have it code-up nicely to look clean, to have it fit on the screen to be able to read it and understand it. And I am excited to go down the stairs because like I said there is a lot more to Coffee Script than I even knew and I learned it last night and I am going to go apply it and in another week I will be an expert. And you can do it too.
23. Ward thank you for taking the time with InfoQ we really appreciate it.
I appreciate your attention and to you audience hang in there and learn something new.


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"Addressing climate change implies completely transforming our way of life, the way we work, the way we travel, shifting our model of development to a fairer, more sustainable model to ensure our survival," according to the Secretary-General of the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Hamadoun Touré upon release of Report promoting use of broadband in information and communication technology (ICT) can help the world transition to a low carbon-economy and address the causes and effects of climate change, "We need to put at stake all the resources available to us, and mobilize the political will to turn discussions and negotiations into agreements and actions."
The Report, entitled 'The Broadband Bridge: Linking ICT with Climate Action,' aims to raise awareness of the pivotal role information and communication technology, particularly broadband networks, can play in helping creating a low-carbon economy. It also highlights the importance of public private partnerships in accelerating change. See Blog for Video:"UN Backed Hackathon to Support Green Economy".
The Report was product of the Broadband Commission Working Group on Climate Change – chaired by the President and Chief Executive Officer of the technology company Ericsson, Hans Vestberg, and including members representing industry, international bodies and non-governmental organizations. The Report presents 10 recommendations for policymakers and leaders to hasten and strengthen the power of ICT and broadband to accelerate global progress towards a low-carbon economy, including adopting long-term national broadband plans. Connectivity also may apply to range from websites for making money to more efficien means of communication/distributing information.
These recommendations include convergence in ICT strategies to align them with other sectors, such as energy, health, education and climate; clear regulatory rules to create a framework of investment certainty; cross-ministry collaboration and integrated decision-making to link climate and digital goals, and the use of government procurement to send the right market signals. The report also calls for partnerships; harmonized metrics and common standards and knowledge sharing.
See more at our Popular Video Blogs & Current News Event Articles at Ecology-Diplomat Channel - http://diplomaticallyincorrect.org/c/ecology-diplomat
By Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey – Follow @MuhamedSacirbey
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Twitter – Follow us at DiplomaticallyX
REPORT from ITU: The Broadband Bridge: Linking ICT with Climate Action(also Link - http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2012/16.aspx
Broadband can help transition the world towards a low carbon-economy and address the causes and effects of climate change, according to a new report just released by the Broadband Commission for Digital Development.
The Broadband Bridge: Linking ICT with Climate Action is the result of work conducted by the Broadband Commission Working Group on Climate Change, chaired by Hans Vestberg, President and CEO of Ericsson and comprising several members of the Commission, representing industry, international organizations, and NGOs.
The report aims to raise awareness of the pivotal role information and communication technology (ICT), and particularly broadband networks, can play in helping creating a low carbon economy of the future, and highlights the importance of public private partnerships in accelerating change. It is based on interviews, case studies and supporting material from more than 20 leaders and experts in the field.
"Addressing climate change implies completely transforming our way of life, the way we work, the way we travel, shifting our model of development to a fairer, more sustainable model to ensure our survival. We need to put at stake all the resources available to us, and mobilize the political will to turn discussions and negotiations into agreements and actions," said ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré.
Building on the agreements achieved at the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP-17), the report emphasizes the kind of transformative solutions that are enabled by broadband. It provides practical examples of how broadband can contribute to reducing greenhouse gasses (GHGs), mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change, and promoting resource efficiency, while at the same time building more prosperous and inclusive societies.
"The understanding of the benefits that broadband can bring is at a global tipping point. Its role in GDP growth, in enabling the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and offsetting the effects of climate change is just now starting to be understood, because finally the deployment is there and the benefits can be realized. In today's economic climate, societies need to develop, and with a solutions-driven approach to climate change, we can accelerate a new type of green growth while supporting global sustainable development goals," said Hans Vestberg.
Last year UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stressed the importance of harnessing ICTs to improve the lives of people worldwide. In a message to the fourth meeting of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development in Geneva in October 2011, he said: "It is clear to me that information and communication technologies are transforming our world. Today, there is no part of modern life that is not affected by ICTs. With well over five billion mobile cellular subscriptions, and more than two billion people online, our challenge is to leverage the enormous power of technology to make the world a better place."
In the lead-up to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June, the report presents ten recommendations from the Broadband Commission for policymakers and global leaders to hasten and strengthen the power of ICT and broadband to accelerate global progress towards a low-carbon economy:
- Lead with vision: adopt a long-term National Broadband Plan/Strategy based on universal affordability and accessibility, open markets and innovation, and consciously connect this to your climate goals.
- Bring convergence: Bring convergence to ICT policy formulation so that it aligns with other policy areas such as energy, health, education and climate in order to maximize impact.
- Ensure regulatory certainty: Ensure clear regulatory rules and regulations on climate and broadband to create a framework of investment certainty.
- Be an example: drive cross-ministry collaboration and integrated decision-making to align climate and digital goals, and use government procurement to send the right market signals.
- Foster flexibility: identify and remove the regulatory and policy barriers currently hindering research and investment in 21st century ICT-based broadband-enabled infrastructure and low carbon solutions.
- Provide incentives: encourage uptake of low-carbon solutions and support market change by rewarding or incentivizing desired consumer behaviours. Spur innovation among individuals, companies and sectors.
- Build the market: fund and facilitate scalable pilots to demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of broadband as an enabler of low-carbon solutions and build a strong business case to attract private investment.
- Form partnerships: cultivate connectivity and 'co-creativity' across public, private and non-governmental sectors and industries to help develop a collaborative mindset, shared goals and a common language, and to help break down silos.
- Measure and standardize: develop harmonized metrics and measurements and common standards for calculating both the environmental impacts of ICTs and the positive contribution technology can make to other sectors – from individual products to systems, and from individual households to the city and/or national levels.
- Share knowledge and raise awareness: actively disseminate project findings, share best practice and learn from mistakes to identify success factors and facilitate leapfrogging, especially among less developed markets. Communicate the opportunities and synergies that can be achieved through an integrated, trans-sector approach to digital development infrastructure and low carbon solutions.
The 5th meeting of the Broadband Commission is taking place today, Monday 2 April, in Ohrid, Macedonia, hosted by the Macedonian Ministry of Information Society and Administration.
Download the full version of the new report at: www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/Climate/BD-bbcomm-climate.pdf
Download a 1-page 'highlights' document at: www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/Climate/Broadband-bridgefinal-lowresNowm.pdf
Watch a video interview with Dr Hamadoun Touré and Climate Change Working Group Chairman Hans Vestberg at: bit.ly/HjMe3i.
For more information on the Broadband Commission, visit: www.broadbandcommission.org
Follow the Broadband Commission on Facebook: www.facebook.com/broadbandcommission
Follow the Broadband Commission on Twitter: www.itu.int/twitter
For more information please contact:
At ITU: | At Ericsson: |
Sarah Parkes
Chief, Media Relations and Public Information, ITU
+41 22 730 6135 | |
+41 79 599 1439 | |
email@example.com |

subset: commoncrawl


text:
About Wifi Camera
The Wifi Camera is a camera that takes "pictures" of spaces illuminated by wifi in much the same way that a traditional camera takes pictures of spaces illuminated by visible light.
The camera reveals the electromagnetic space of our devices and the shadows that we create within such spaces, in particular our wifi networks which are increasingly found in our daily lives, in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the developed world.
With the camera we can take real time "photos" of wifi (and we're working towards having video too). These show how our physical structures are illuminated by this particular electromagnetic phenomenon and we are even able to see the shadows that our bodies cast within such "hertzian" spaces.
Radio waves at wifi's wavelength behave similar to light in that they are reflected off almost all solid objects to varying degrees, just as when we see colors we see the light from a light source being reflected off an object into our eyes. And, just as with light, some materials are opaque and some materials are more or less transparent.
We do this basically by pointing a wifi antenna (or several antennas) and measuring the signal strength throughout a view - the faster we can do this, the faster we can create full-screen images.
The latest version of the wifi camera is able to create images much more quickly because it has more pixels and we have a custom built board for analysing the wifi spectrum (around 2.4GHz). The result of all this is that we can even 'see' the illumination cast by mobile phones and microwave ovens!
Latest news: February 2010
You can see wifi camera at Transmediale 2010 Futurity Now! Exhibit. And we got a spectacular location too.
January 2009
We just finished the first Panoramic Wifi Camera for ICC/Tokyo in December 2008. See the video below, or proceed this way for much more information
New poster - 2008
See the poster in detail below
New video - 2008
Single Pixel Wifi Camera and animated visualizations in the video below


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Twitter quitters dog IPO
By Alexei Oreskovic
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Retired schoolteacher Donald Hovasse signed up for Twitter about a year ago at the urging of his daughter. He lost interest after trying the service a few times and finding lots of celebrities but few of his friends using the online social network.
"I didn't really get the point of it at all," said the Las Vegas resident. "Most of them were people I wasn't interested in hearing what they had to say anyway." He said, however, that he does check Facebook every day to see what his friends are up to.
Hovasse's experience highlights a risk for investors as Twitter Inc marches towards this year's most anticipated initial public offering in the United States, expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in mid-November.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 36 percent of 1,067 people who have joined Twitter say they do not use it, and 7 percent say they have shut their account. The online survey, conducted October 11 to 18, has a credibility interval, a measure of its accuracy, of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
In comparison, only 7 percent of 2,449 Facebook members report not using the online social network, and 5 percent say they have shut down their account. The results have a credibility interval of 2.3 percent.
People who have given up on Twitter cite a variety of reasons, from lack of friends on the service to difficulty understanding how to use it. Twitter declined to comment for this story, saying it is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO.
Twitter's attrition rate highlights a challenge that has dogged the online messaging site over the years: while it has managed to enlist many high-profile and avid users, from the Pope to President Barack Obama, Twitter has yet to go truly mainstream in the way Facebook has.
Convincing ordinary people to think of Twitter as an indispensable part of their lives is key to the company's ability to attract advertisers and generate a profit.
Twitter reported it had 232 million "active" users - people who access the service at least once a month - at the end of September, up 6.1 percent from the end of June. Twitter's quarter-over-quarter growth in active users has not exceeded 11 percent since June 2012.
When Facebook was a similar size, its active users were increasing by more than 20 percent every quarter, and it was not until the social network neared the half-a-billion member mark that its user growth decelerated to 12 percent.
"Twitter is a great service, it's still got growth in front of it. But in my opinion, I would say the opportunities are less than that of Facebook, and it has to be valued appropriately," said Dan Niles, chief investment officer of tech-focused hedge fund firm AlphaOne Capital Partners.
"The data would seem to imply that the ultimate revenue potential for this company is less than for Facebook," Niles said, referring to Twitter's number of active users.
Twitter's revenue in the third quarter more than doubled from the year before to $168.6 million, while its net loss tripled to $64.6 million. Analysts expect Facebook, which is due to report its third-quarter results later this month, to bring in $1.9 billion in quarterly revenue.
Twitter aims to become the "fabric of every communication in the world" and to eventually reach every person on the planet, Chief Executive Dick Costolo has said. Still, Twitter acknowledged in its IPO prospectus that "new users may initially find our product confusing."
The company prides itself on staying true to its roots: it lets people send 140-character messages and does not pack in scads of extraneous functions. Since its inception, Twitter has resisted overtly manipulating how people use its platform, instead preferring conventions to be formed organically.
As a result, new users often find it initially difficult to grasp how discussions ebb and flow, complaining that features such as the "hashtags" that group Tweets by topic, abbreviations for basic functions (for instance, RT for retweet) and shortened Web links, are geared towards a technologically-savvy crowd.
"The average person that's coming on here, they're still baffled by it," said Larry Cornett, a former executive at Yahoo Inc and designer at Apple Inc, who now runs product strategy and design consulting firm Brilliant Forge.
"If they want the mass adoption and that daily engagement, they have to make it really easy for people to consume."
According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, 38 percent of 2,217 people who do not use Twitter said they did not find it that interesting or useful. Thirteen percent said they do not understand what to use Twitter for. The results have a credibility interval of 2.4 percent.
Twitter has taken steps to help new members. In December 2011, it introduced a new "Discover" section to highlight the most popular discussion topics based on a person's location and interests.
The company also simplified some features and rolled out new tools that embed photos and videos directly in a person's tweet stream, making for a richer and easier-to-use experience.
These changes may mean that Twitter's retention rate for the past several months is better than its overall retention rate, which includes people who joined years ago, say analysts.
Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, said Twitter's current user base is already big enough to be valuable to advertisers. Investors need to get more comfortable with the idea that Twitter is not for everyone, he said.
"The practical matter is that this is a niche medium," he said. "Their appeal, they will never be as broad as Facebook."
(Editing by Edwin Chan and Tiffany Wu)


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Unisex Water Shoes ZB244-Naked orange
$43.99 $43.99
Product Description:
- Material: 92% polyester+8% spandex
- Foot safety and comfortable: comfortable and thick foam arch-support insert inside of them, flexible and thick enough to protect your feet from stepping on rock and stone.
- Anti-slip out-sole :Excellent workmanship to prevent the seams around the toes fray and split within a short time.
- Quick dry with drainage holes : Unique and top-quality sole.
- Occasion: Water park, Swim pool, hang out, aqua therapy,waterfall hikes, etc.
Delivery time : 7-15 work days
Your shipping confirmation will be received only when your items are fulfilled. Please fill in your both account email and order number in order to monitor order status.
Tips for shipping
A) We are doing our best to make the promised time, please understand our warehouse are working only on business days, so please remember to enjoy the sunshine even there's a day or two difference in the ETA.
B)Your order can be tracked in details once it is fulfilled. Thanks for your patience.
C) Should you have any question, please reach out to our service center: firstname.lastname@example.com
1)We offer a 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. Please note that products must be returned in the original packaging and shipped within 30 days of delivery.
2) If you need to initiate a return, please contact us via firstname.lastname@example.com . We're here to help you, 24/7!
Learn more about Our Return Policy.


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Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more.
THIS RFQ HAS BEEN REVISED AS FOLLOWS: SECTION 1.03 COUNTY REPRESENTATIVE CONTAINED AN INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS. THE CORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS IS: firstname.lastname@example.com PLEASE NOTE THIS REVISED RFQ HAS ALSO BEEN UPLOADED TO OUR WEBSITE. PLEASE DIRECT ANY QUESTIONS TO KENDALL J. COLLINS, COUNTY SOLICITOR AT firstname.lastname@example.com
Notice is hereby given that the Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington, New Jersey, that pursuant to N.J.S.A. 19:44A-20.4 et seq., it is issuing Requests for Qualification (RFQs) on behalf of itself and Rowan College at Burlington County, the Burlington County Bridge Commission, the Burlington County Institute of Technology/ Special Services School and the Burlington County Library Commission (hereinafter "Shared Services Entities") requesting responses from qualified professionals for the purpose of creating a pool(s) for use by the Shared Services Entities within calendar years 2019-2021 for the following services:
1. Appraisal Services
2. Architectural Services
3. Energy Consultant Services
4. Engineering and Related Services
5. Professional Planners Services
6. Radio Communication Consultant Services
7. Title Company Services
NOTE: It is the intention of the County and the Shared Service Entities that the pool(s) of professionals to be created by virtue of this RFQ(s) shall supersede any pools created by the Shared Services Entities for the designated professionals that are presently in effect.
Specifications as to required experience, knowledge and relevant qualifications are contained in the RFQ(s).
Copies of the Requests for Qualifications forms are available on the Burlington County website http://www.co.burlington.nj.us/904/RFP-RFQ-Listing or, upon request, at the Burlington County Solicitor's Office, 49 Rancocas Road, P.O. Box 6000, Mount Holly, New Jersey 08060. All interested qualified candidates are encouraged to download the RFQs from the website. Questions regarding the RFQs should be directed in writing to Kendall J. Collins, County Solicitor (email@example.com).
Responses must be submitted to the Burlington County Solicitor's Office, 49 Rancocas Road, P.O. Box 6000, Mount Holly, New Jersey 08060 on or before the date of the RFQ opening November 29, 2018 at 3:00 PM. Any responses received after said opening, whether by mail or otherwise will be returned unopened. No responses will be accepted after the above referenced date. Qualifications must be submitted in sealed envelopes with the name of the applicable RFQ clearly marked on the outside of the envelope. Responses may not be e-mailed, faxed or transmitted over the telephone.
It is recommended that each response be hand delivered to the Solicitor's Office. The County assumes no responsibility for delays in any form of carrier, mail or delivery service causing the proposal to be received at the Solicitor's Office later than the above-referenced scheduled opening. Nothing herein is intended to exclude any responsible qualified professionals or in any way restrain or restrict competition. All responsible qualified professionals are encouraged to submit proposals.
The Board of Chosen Freeholders reserves the right to accept or reject any or all responses submitted in the best interest of the County and the Shared Services Entities and the Board further reserves the right to waive any defect or informality in any proposal should it be in the best interest of the County and/or the Shared Services Entities.
Responders to the RFQs are required to comply with the requirements of N.J.S.A. 10:5-31 et seq. and N.J.A.C. 17:27 and submit a Conflict of Interest Certification.
The Requests for Qualifications do not constitute a bid(s) and is intended solely to obtain competitive responses from which the County may create a pool of eligible contractors to perform services as needed by the Shared Services Entities. It is the County's intent that no statutory, regulatory, or common law bidding requirement apply to the Requests for Qualifications. The County and the Shared Services Entities intend to award any contracts for services pursuant to all applicable statute(s) and or regulation(s).


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Alhamdulillah, by the grace of Allah and the dedication of our teachers, we are able to start the Sunday Islamic school. Currently, the focus of the Islamic school is on three areas:
- Quran Studies which includes memorization, Tajweed, and tafseer.
- Islamic Studies which includes the Seerah, Islamic Beliefs & Manners and Islamic history
- Arabic Language Learning


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JAMESTOWN – Eighty degrees and sunny one minute, 30 degrees and snowing the next; it has been a wild and wooly spring! Despite the changeable weather, in just a few weeks, Chautauqua Striders will begin its track season in earnest. Late May, June, and July are packed with events and activities designed for every track and field enthusiast from the casual runner to the experienced and seriously competitive athlete.
On Friday, June 1, Chautauqua Striders will again host the Hershey Track & Field Games at Strider Field, beginning at 6:00 pm. This program was conceived over thirty years ago to, "promote youth physical fitness and provide fun, learning experiences for children nine to fourteen years old." (Copies of birth certificates will be required to verify age; nine to ten year olds born in 2002-2003.) Competing athletes will be grouped by age and gender so abilities will be well matched. While there are a few other rules and regulations, this meet is designed to be fair and fun for everyone.
Chautauqua Striders is excited to announce that for the first time a Hershey's Track & Field Games will also be held in Dunkirk, New York, on May 30, beginning at 4:30 pm, at Dunkirk High School. Those entering either of these meets will be able to compete in up to three events, including the 50, 100, 200, and 400 meter dashes; 800 and 1600 meter run; standing long jump, softball throw, and 4×100 meter relay. The top two finishers in each contest will receive ribbons and advance to the New York West State meet at Ilion High School, on June 16. There is NO cost for either competition! Please contact David Reinhardt of Chautauqua Striders at 488-2203 ext. 230 or www.chautauqua-striders.org or Andrew Burnside of Dunkirk City Schools Track at 863-5062 or email@example.com for more details about these exciting competitions.
Chautauqua Striders is also an annual participant in The National Day of Running. This year, it is scheduled for Wednesday June 6, and is designed to promote running as an "incredibly healthy, easy, and accessible form of exercise." Track and field organizations in major cities, such as New York, Boston, and Chicago, along with USA Track & Field (USATF) and Running USA, are promoting the sport by hosting a variety of activities, including appearances by well-known athletes, individual running events, group runs, and clinics. For more information, visit www.chautauqua-striders.org.
June 11- July 17, Summer Track & Field Development makes its return to Strider Field. Designed for nearly everyone, the primary focus of the program is placed on children and youth 13 and under and its purpose is, "to encourage and promote participation and competition in the sport of track and field." Parents of young athletes will be given an introduction to the sport while their children will be afforded the opportunity to choose events in which they would like to compete, such as sprinting, hurdling, running, jumping, vaulting, or shot-putting, to name a few. Older athletes will have the chance to learn new techniques and sharpen their basic skills, enabling them to "graduate" to Chautauqua Striders Track & Field Club.
Competitive divisions are determined by year of birth; practices take place on Monday nights beginning at 6:00 pm and development meets are held at Strider Field on Tuesday evenings, beginning at 6:00 pm. The pre-registration fee for this six-week program, prior to June 4, is $35.00 and includes event instruction, meet participation, t-shirts, and program awards. Limited registration will also be available on Monday, June 11, at Strider Field from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm; the cost will be $40.00 after June 4. David Reinhardt is available at 488-2203 ext. 230 to answer questions or additional registration forms and more information can be found at www.chautauqua-striders.org. No child will be denied the opportunity to compete as scholarships and discounts can be arranged based on financial need. (Online registration for individuals or families is also available through www.active.com, however, a $3.95 processing fee will be added to the basic cost.)
Chautauqua Striders is always looking for ways to tie education and athletics together. Along those lines, it supports and participates in USATF's "Read for Speed" program, designed specifically to encourage students to read. Research has shown summer reading improves preparation for the upcoming school year. Therefore, students will be encouraged to read during the summer and will receive special recognition during the Development Program's awards banquet for the number of books they have completed.
The 2012 Summer Track & Field Club begins its schedule of events at 5:30 pm on June 4, at Strider Field. Chautauqua Striders is currently accepting registration forms for athletes, ages 13-18, who would like to join this outstanding and nationally recognized track club. (Those competing for their high school teams are encouraged to register in advance; forms are located on Chautauqua Striders' website along with practice and competition schedules.)
As a member of the USATF, Chautauqua Striders hosts and participates in many events throughout the United States. One of the most exciting is the USATF Niagara Junior Olympics, being held this year at Hilton High School on Sunday, June 24. Details, entry fees, and registration forms can be found at www.usatf-niagara.org. This premier competition draws 300 – 400 young athletes from across New York State, including Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Binghamton. The top six qualifiers in each event will move on to the USATF Region 2 meet at the University of Delaware, July 5-9. From there, the top three finishers in each Region 2 event will have qualified to compete at the USATF National Championships at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, July 23-29.
Chautauqua Striders strongly supports a healthy lifestyle for everyone and is proud to sponsor these exciting track and field events. Promoting physical well-being, providing support for athletes of all ages, and allowing for family-centered activities are just some of the reasons to consider making time for fun and fitness during the spring and summer months. Be active; get involved; enjoy life!


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Journey to the Centre of the Milky Way Short Fulldome Planetarium Show
What lies at the heart of our galaxy? For twenty years, ESO's Very Large Telescope and the Keck telescopes have observed the centre of the Galaxy, looking at the motion of more than a hundred stars and identifying the position of an otherwise invisible object — the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Embark on a Journey to the Centre of the Milky Way and during seven minutes travel faster than light, from the driest place on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile right to the centre of our own galaxy, where a black hole is consuming anything that strays into its path. 84 million stars will appear in front of your eyes, each hiding mysteries waiting to be solved. Are there planets around them, perhaps with moons? Do they have water? Could they harbour life?
Journey to the Centre of the Milky Way is the first fulldome planetarium mini-show produced in-house by ESO for its Planetarium and Visitor Centre, the ESO Supernova, due to open in spring 2018. Available for free in 4k resolution, the mini-show can be downloaded and used by any planetarium in the world. More free fulldome clips are here.
The Movie poster is here.
A flattened version of this movie is available here.
Note: for important advice regarding downloading and unzipping please read here.
Directed by: Lars Lindberg Christensen
Art Direction, Production Design: Luis Calçada
Producer: Luis Calçada
Written by: Georgia Bladon & Lars Lindberg Christensen
Editing: Luis Calçada
Narration: Sara Mendes da Costa
Russian version:
- 'DrMichael' and Live!Universe (www.nebulacast.com)
- Mono version
German version:
- Sebastian Thiele (Planetarium Cottbus)
Spanish version:
- Translation: Andressa Barbosa Catarinacho
- Sound supervision and Audio post processing: Alejandro Posada
- Consultants: Carlos Molina & Claudia Aguirre
- Recorded at Planetarium of Medellín (Medellín, Colombia)
- Mono version
Korean version:
- Production and project management : METASPACE, Seoul, South Korea
- Translation : Kang-hwan Lee (Seodaemun Museum of Natural History), Seoul, South Korea
- Science editors : Kang-hwan Lee (Seodaemun Museum of Natural History), Seoul, South Korea
- Narrator : Gyeong-a Jo (Korea Broadcasiting System), Seoul, South Korea
- Record producer and sound engineer : Ee-ra Sim (Hwang Geum Media), Seoul, South Korea
Romanian version:
- Produced by Radu Anghel
Turkish version:
- Production: İstanbul University Science Faculty E.C.A. Planetarium
- Recorded at: İstanbul University Science Faculty E.C.A. Planetarium
- Translation: Mirkan Yusuf Kalkan
- Redaction: Sinan Aliş
- Narration: A. Talat Saygaç
- Audio Mix & Recording: F. Korhan Yelkenci
- Consultant: Sinan Aliş
- Editing & Post-production: F. Korhan Yelkenci
Soundtrack & Sound Effects: Michael Stearns Sacred Site (michaelstearns.com)
3D animations, footage and photos: Luis Calçada, Martin Kornmesser, Gas cloud simulation: ESO/S. Gillessen/MPE/Marc Schartmann, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), VISTA/J. Emerson, Digitized Sky Survey 2, N. Risinger (skysurvey.org), Stéphane Guisard (eso.org/~sguisard), Serge Brunier & B.Tafreshi (twanight.org)
Software: Domeview, Fulldome Plugin and WFCam4D (http://software.multimeios.pt)
Executive producer: Lars Lindberg Christensen.
- ESO's free fulldome clips and shows (4k and 8k)
- ESO's free 3D models
- ESO's free fulldome stills
- ESO's free 360 degree panoramas
- Free Fulldome clips at ESA/Hubble (4k and 8k)
If you don't want to miss any of our Fulldome videos, we recommend you subscribe to our Fulldome RSS feeds:
Over de video
Id: | eso-jcmw |
Publicatiedatum: | 26 november 2014 12:00 |
Gerelateerde mededelingen: | ann14088 |
Duur: | 06 m 38 s |
Frame rate: | 30 fps |
Over het object
Naam: | Milky Way Galactic Centre, Paranal, Very Large Telescope |
Categorie: | Fulldome |


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Leaving on a jet plane for the long holiday weekend? The Wall Street Journal suggests a few tips to overcome the stress of delayed flights, including a suggestion to cool your heels in the first class lounge.
Photo by joiseyshowaa.
Many airlines have changed their policies and fees on bag checking, security, and other protocols since 2008. Even if you're up to date, your fellow passengers may not be, and there's always the chance your flight won't leave on time, regardless. If you're facing down a delayed or missed flight, the Journal suggests a few tactics, including one that makes waiting out a serious delay a bit more palatable:
Use kiosks. Some airlines allow rebooking at kiosks, in addition to buying upgrades or better seating.
Know your rights. If a flight is canceled for an airline problem, such as a mechanical breakdown or crew-scheduling problem, the airline is responsible for your hotel and meals if you get stranded. If it's a weather problem, you're on your own. If you are involuntarily bumped from a flight, you are entitled to cash compensation, not airline vouchers. If the airline loses your bag, it has to provide reasonable temporary replacements for toiletries and clothing.
Use airline lounges or clubs if you run into trouble. Buy a day pass and escape the masses. Also, the staffers in clubs are usually the airline's most experienced agents and often the most helpful. It can be worth the cost of a day pass just to get someone to help you rebook.
Ever bought yourself a pass into the sky-high-roller's club? Tell us what it's like, and share your other air travel tips, in the comments.
How to Survive Thanksgiving Travel [WSJ.com via The Simple Dollar]


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The selection of Representative
as the Republican vice-presidential candidate provides with something he has been eagerly looking for — a bigger target.A race that has revolved, at least in part, around each month's mediocre jobs report and Mr. Obama's persistent failure to move unemployment below 8 percent will now allow Democrats new lines of attack — starting with the assertion that Republicans are intent on dismantling
— while setting off a larger debate about the role of government in the economy and society.For Mr. Obama, that seems more promising territory, a chance to press the offensive against his challengers rather than just defend his record. Instead of a referendum on his own performance, the president has an opening to turn the election into a referendum on the vision that Mr. Ryan has advanced and
has adopted.That strategy may put Mr. Obama, a self-declared agent of hope and change four years ago, in the awkward position of seeming to be the defender of a status quo that is not working, or at least not working well enough. He risks having Republicans seize the mantle of reform that he used so skillfully in 2008 by contrasting his stay-the-course incumbent's message with the youthful Mr. Ryan's energetic willingness to tear up the old order and reinvent it for troubled times.
After months of Mr. Obama hammering Mr. Romney's prescriptions for the country as too radical, Mr. Ryan's addition to the ticket will sharpen what already had been shaping up as the starkest contrast over domestic policy in any presidential race in a generation. The president and his liberal allies wasted little time on Saturday rolling out their attacks on Mr. Ryan as an avatar of extremism who would cut health care for old people to finance tax cuts for the rich.
"The architect of the radical Republican House budget," declared Jim Messina, the president's campaign manager. "Catering to the Tea Party and the far right," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader. "Puts millionaires ahead of Medicare and the middle class," asserted Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who leads the Democratic minority in the House.
Within an hour or so of Mr. Romney's announcement, the Obama campaign posted a Web video labeling the Republican ticket the "Go Back Team," a reference to policies of the past. Fund-raising appeals with targeted messages went out in swing states, like one in Ohio saying that Mr. Ryan "followed in the footsteps of his mentor," John Kasich, the state's governor, with "a radical, ideological budget." Liberal interest groups, labor unions and women's organizations began rolling out their own long-planned attacks.
The president's political strategists were focusing on Florida, already a swing state but now perhaps ground zero for attacks on Mr. Ryan's plans to restructure Medicare, while monitoring Wisconsin to see if the Republicans tried to invest in Mr. Ryan's home state. Congressional election strategists were mapping out plans to force every Republican candidate for the House and Senate to own or disown Mr. Ryan's budget plan.
"This is the perfect choice for us to finish our frame of Romney," said Eddie Vale, a spokesman for Workers' Voice, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. " ." "What Romney and Bain did to working families and companies is what Romney and Ryan would do to all Americans."
Bill Burton, one of the founders of Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super PAC, said his group had always planned to devote the fall to tying Mr. Romney to Mr. Ryan's budget plan, but had worried that it might not stick.
"From the beginning when we polled, we found that the Ryan plan was the most toxic political document ever, but the problem was you couldn't convince voters that any politician would actually support it," Mr. Burton said. "Now this actually makes the job easier."
Stanley B. Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said that surveys showed attacks on the Ryan plan moved voters dramatically, adding that Mr. Romney could no longer dance around it. "There is no longer a nuance to that debate," he said. "There are a lot of white, working-class voters, particularly older ones, who will walk away now, even if tempted earlier by the slow economy."
Mr. Obama has long suffered from a sizable generation gap. In 2008, he did poorest among those 60 and older, winning the votes of 47 percent of them compared with 66 percent of voters under 30. With polls showing younger voters less enthusiastic and less likely to turn out this year, Mr. Obama's campaign has struggled to win over seniors, who are much more reliable voters.
John Rother, president and chief executive of the National Coalition on Health Care, an advocacy group, said older voters drifted even further away from Mr. Obama during the 2010 midterm elections after Republicans attacked the Medicare cuts incorporated into his broader health care program.
"Now, Democrats can run practically the same ad accusing Ryan of proposing a plan that would 'gut Medicare' and shift costs to seniors," Mr. Rother said.
The Romney camp said Democrats were fooling themselves. "The race is now framed exactly as we want it," said Kevin Madden, a senior Romney adviser. "Voters are going to judge our current struggling economy and President Obama's lack of leadership on that issue very harshly, and then look at a Romney-Ryan ticket as an opportunity to take the country in a bold new direction towards a better future."
The looming clash reflects an intriguing evolution from just two years ago, when Mr. Obama expressed a grudging admiration for Mr. Ryan, another young politician with big ideas. Asked in the fall of 2010 which Republicans he could envision working with in the next Congress, Mr. Obama mentioned only one who would still be around, Mr. Ryan.
He said Mr. Ryan was "absolutely sincere about wanting to reduce the deficit," though he quarreled with his approach. "I give him credit for at least being willing to put out there some tough choices," Mr. Obama said, "although, as I said, even there, the numbers don't quite match up the way they should."
What Mr. Obama found appealing, the notion of a man of ideas willing to make tough choices, is what he now will need to devalue him. While Democrats openly crowed that Mr. Ryan was the choice they had hoped for because of the sharp contrast, they acknowledged he is a young, attractive, well-spoken politician who explains his plan better than his fellow Republicans do. If he makes the issue the
that has risen so much under Mr. Obama, rather than his solution for it, Mr. Ryan could pose a serious challenge to the president.In other words, to put the bull's-eye on Mr. Ryan's back, Mr. Obama will first have to get it off his own.
This story, "Paul Ryan Pick Gives Obama a Chance to Change the Subject," originally appears at the New York Times News Service.


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I arrived in Athens on Christmas Day in the afternoon. As we strolled through the muted streets of Exarcheia, the Athenian neighborhood considered by residents and authorities alike to be the heart of Greek resistance, my friend and guide, Mo, lamented the unusual calm blanketing the city.
He said he was worried I would not experience the "real" Athens. Then he quickly amended himself: his principal concern was to bring across that there is no "real" Athens; events of the last four years have caused both onlookers and participants to fetishize the Greek experience in distinctly unhelpful ways. "It's complicated" was an oft-heard refrain throughout my visit.
The relative lack of traffic notwithstanding, it appeared that my timing was in fact quite good. I seemed to have caught Athens in a much-needed moment of quiet reflection. Exarcheians, normally reticent, were willing to talk to an outsider like me, if perhaps only for the chance to work through their issues—and they are many—with someone relatively neutral.
There are various reasons Exarcheians keep quiet around new faces. I was told, for example, that there are problems with "anarcho-tourism." Athens has become a magnet for people from around the world who feel themselves ideologically aligned to this movement they've read about on the Internet, and who then show up "in solidarity" and take up space at a squat but don't contribute much or, worse, disseminate romanticized or otherwise inaccurate information about the community.
I was also told that the level of violence—fascist vs. immigrant and anarchist vs. fascist, sure, but also among anarchists themselves (radical vs. 'reformist,' apolitical vs. anyone)—has reached a point where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can get you a bottle across the mouth, at least.
I personally saw no indication of this, but it was Christmas after all. Most interesting to me was that Exarcheian reticence was expressly not a result of police infiltration or suspicion thereof. I found it a refreshing say-what-you're-gonna-say and do-what-you're-gonna-do and to-hell-with-it atmosphere. Movement paranoiacs in other countries might benefit from this.
We entered VOX, a squatted cafe on Exarcheia Square established to raise money for paying fines and legal fees for movement arrestees and political prisoners. Again Mo was shaking his head: "You're seeing everything upside down," he laughed and gestured toward groups of grinning patrons dancing ecstatically and shouting for the music to be turned up. "It's usually a more relaxed scene in here." He told me that the eight people arrested in the Dec. 20 police raid on the Villa Amalias squat had been released the day before; what we were witnessing now were the last gasps of a "Christmas Eve" party at which there were other reasons to celebrate.
As daylight faded and the last of the previous night's revelers filtered out, the place started filling up with people returning from holiday family visits. "Even anarchists have mothers…even anarchists relax sometimes," said a smiling man named Gus, who joined us. His Christmas had been difficult, he said. He described the recurring argument he had with his parents (with whom he now lives, despite having an advanced degree and years of work experience abroad) and the generational divide.
"To my parents, the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement, the social democratic parliamentary party) are heroes. My parents remember the military dictatorship, when any kind of dissent, 'everything left,' was against the law. There was torture, disappearances. On the one hand they say, 'You guys have nothing to complain about right now, you don't know what it was like,' and on the other hand they say, 'How can you call the [establishment] left bad names? They saved us.'"
"They" refers to the uprising at Athens Polytechnic in November 1973, when students barricaded themselves into the university for four days and broadcast demands for democracy and civil rights over an improvised radio transmitter, only to be confronted by tanks and troops—with the resulting chaos leaving anywhere between 24 and 40 people dead. It was the beginning of the end for the junta, which imploded in 1974, and many participants in the uprising later had successful careers in politics, especially in the PASOK.
Of course the PASOK as a ruling party is arguably responsible for creating the Greek bubble of the last decade, and for popping it (or re-popping it, anyway, with revelations in 2010 about the shocking degree of debt the government had been hiding). The PASOK has since repeatedly agreed to the ever-stricter austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund, European Union and European Central Bank — the "Troika" — in exchange for billions of euros in bailouts.
Even so, the grinding inequalities built into the neo-liberal Greek "miracle" of the early 2000s were unlikely to affect middle-class PASOK supporters like Gus's mom, and even the crash of 2008 could be blamed on outside forces. That the December revolt that year had a relatively young face, and that its momentum and the support it received from society eventually dwindled can be attributed at least in part to this "generation gap."
It can also be attributed to the relatively discrete nature of the event that sparked the revolt in the first place: the murder by police of Alexandros (Alexis) Grigoropoulos, 15, on Dec. 6, 2008, in Exarcheia.
The killing clearly had broad implications, otherwise it would not have resulted in weeks of nearly continuous rioting and occupations; nor would the unrest have spread out of Exarcheia into greater Athens and ultimately to all of Greece, with solidarity demonstrations occurring in at least 30 other countries as well.
We visited the site of Alexis's murder nearly every day during my visit, and his name was still on everyone's lips. "We are all Alexis" is a doctrine deeply felt in Exarcheia; his death made frighteningly clear the vulnerability that struggling citizens feel in the shadow of increasing state violence. Nonetheless it was one incident, and the social-antagonist actions and organizing that it spawned quickly fell back behind prevailing economic, political and social concerns, to justify and sustain itself.
Building a "revolutionary infrastructure"
But sustain itself it did—in certain ways, anyway. The intensity of rebellious activity eventually dropped off and "order was restored." But one of the lasting results of December 2008 was the entrenchment of Exarcheia, long a hotbed of antagonist political activity, as an autonomous bulwark against state power—in real physical and geographical terms.
Long and narrow, wedged between the upper-class neighborhood of Kolonaki (which spreads south to the city center at Syntagma where the Parliament building stands) and the transitional, touristy but largely migrant neighborhood of Omonoia (where racist attacks by the Golden Dawn and other neo-fascist groups occur with shocking regularity), Exarcheia exists now as an entire zone of the city where police and others of the wrong political persuasion just don't go.
This creates new problems, of course, with the police encouraging drug dealers and users to do their business in Exarcheia, where they'll be left alone. The community itself has come up with its own creative methods of dealing with this, in one instance setting up a table, manned 24/7, in Exarcheia Square from which dealers and junkies were informed with a megaphone that they are known, being observed, and unwelcome.
During the December revolt it was exceedingly important for there to be established nodes of activity, physical spaces where people could assemble, counter-inform, argue, and plan; or simply seek refuge, eat, drink, and catch their breath. Some of these were temporarily established outside of Exarcheia during the revolt for expedient or symbolic reasons; for example, the occupation of the Opera House, or the Law School at the University of Athens.
Others were set up and maintained within Exarcheia during and after the revolt as symbols of reclaimed space, territory won through struggle; Navarinou Park was dug out of an empty concrete lot next to the site of Alexis's shooting, and residents have had to repel city bulldozers to protect it.
But many existed long before December and became prominent because of their location on the geographical fringe of Exarcheia abutting "hostile" neighborhoods: the campus of Athens Polytechnic, no longer functioning traditionally, is one of these; it has long been a primary gathering place both in "emergencies" and for regular assemblies. The emptiness and quiet of the small campus, especially considering its history, is haunting. It is a wonderful place to read and think and recharge, and it makes perfect sense that it occupies the significant symbolic and practical role it does in the community.
The significance of Villa Amalias, another of the long-established "nodes," makes sense too. It is Athens' second-oldest squat, located at a key spot a few blocks into Omonoia, and is recognized as a central base for antifascist organizing and counter-information. This was the next place that Mo took me, after we had finished our coffee and taken leave of the Christmas-refugees at VOX. But we couldn't go inside.
"Seriously, last week when they raided this place, I thought, "Oh no, Ed's coming to visit and Athens will be burning. Burning," he said. Army green-clad riot police were stationed along the street and a giant navy-blue armored transporter was parked blocking the entrance. Authorities had come five days prior, responding to an "anonymous complaint," and arrested eight people—afterwards searching the place from top to bottom (they found empty beer bottles, which they classified as bomb-making materials, along with helmets, gasmasks, and other items useful in the defense against police violence).
Then they sealed the building off and placed it under guard. This perplexed the squatters, since they hadn't officially been evicted. In the following days the neighborhood registered its protest by surrounding the guarded Villa with a chain of "witnesses," operating in shifts to sustain the vigil uninterrupted.
Considering Villa Amalias' place in the movement, the docility of the response surprised and impressed Mo. "The raid was a provocation. They were expecting us to explode and ruin Christmas. But we know that they know that the minute they leave, Amalias will be squatted again, so there's nothing to get too excited about. It's a really good thing. This kind of restraint and long-view political thinking is something sort of new."
Given the events of last week it is unclear whether the Exarcheians' more circumspect approach did much to protect them or serve their immediate ends.


text:
In Street Kings, Keanu Reeves' cop Tom Ludlow insults a Korean perp by telling him, "You've got eyes like apostrophes." Yep, there's no mistaking the nutty patois of crime novelist James Ellroy. Ellroy's original story—with his screenplay rewritten by Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss—involves an internal affairs investigation targeting Ludlow. It's familiar territory for director David Ayer, who wrote and directed Training Day: another odyssey of corruption and belated justice, seen through the eyes of world-weary flatfeet and the hero's naïve rookie partner (this time, Chris Evans' Det. Paul Diskant).
A lone wolf in the LAPD's Special Vice Unit, Ludlow's a dark soul who lets his personal sense of justice justify his means to the end of wiping up L.A. scum. He carries the scars of his wife's death under unresolved circumstances, a useful backstory to help us sympathize with a corrupt cop not above drinking on the job (not to mention while driving), beatings with the Yellow Pages, and the cold-blooded murder of street thugs. The moral gray area comes from Ludlow's tantalizing efficiency. Concerned at Ludlow's talk of dropping out, his handler calls him "the tip of the fucking spear. Who's going to hold back the animals?"
The tortured Ludlow finds himself out in the cold when he's framed for a cop killing, leaving him to wonder whom, if anyone, he can trust: his longtime protector Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker)? His new partner Diskant? Internal Affairs Captain James Biggs (Hugh Laurie)? Ludlow's investigation leads him into perp chases and gunfights until he eventually arrives at a climactic, hammy Lincoln-Douglas-style debate between the opposing values of self-interest and the greater good.
The unshakeable feeling that we've seen this picture before or something very much like it (Training Day and Dark Blue leap immediately to mind, as well as the Ellroy catalogue) loosens the film's grip, and truth be told, Ayer seems a lot more interested in squibs, blood spatter, and atmospheric photography than sharpening up the plot. Perhaps Reeves is the best choice to deadpan the more old-hat lines, like "What happened to just locking up bad people?" and "You hate me but you need me"—he comes off better than an overripe Whitaker and a misused Laurie. Street Kings is competent but fatally lacking in the element of surprise.
Fox's Blu-Ray special edition of Street Kings (complete with digital copy) pulls out all the stops in making a case for the film's research and craft. It helps that the film looks and sounds impeccable: no distracting digital artifacts--just a rock-solid picture and powerful rat-a-tat sound. A screen-specific commentary by David Ayer finds the director never at a loss for words as he explains the appeal of the material to him, the casting, the locations, the filmmaking approach and photography, and tidbits about LA and the LAPD.
Under Surveillance: Inside the World of Street Kings is a Blu-Ray-exclusive picture-in-picture option allowing relevant interviews to pop up during playback. Fox chooses wisely to make all of these segments available from the Special Features menu, as well—I wish all the studios would follow suit with their PiP tracks. Interviews with Ayer, DJ Muggs of Soul Assassins/Cypress Hill, LAPD Historical Society executive director Glynn Martin, author Barbara Raymond, technical advisor Jaime FitzSimons, Cle "Bone" Sloan, allow the track to focus on three major areas: the filmmaking, the shared world of L.A. and the LAPD, and the film's music.
One can "Play All" (36:48) or select any one: "The Music of Street Kings," "Detective Dress Code," "Training Keanu Reeves," "The Media and the Police," "The Mystique of the LAPD," "Researching Street Kings," "Internal Affairs," "Scoring Street Kings," "The History of Gangs in LA," "LAPD Helicopters," "Casting Forest Whitaker," "Disciplinary Action for Police Officers," "The History of the LAPD's Uniforms," "The History of Internal Affairs," "The Evolution of Crime," "The Arrest Procedure," "Early Warning System," "The History of Corruption in the LAPD," "Gang Life in LA," "The Continuum of Force," "Street Life in LA," "LAPD's First Female Officer," "Styles of Hip Hop," "Casting Cedric 'The Entertainer' Kyles," "Chris Evans' Gun Training," "The Gray Area," "The History of LA SWAT," "LAPD vs. Gang Organization," "Common and his Character," "The Coates & Fremont Shootout Scene," "The Coates & Fremont Shootout Scene Part 2," "The Future of Hip Hop," "Police Ethics," "Becoming a Police Officer," The Essence of Street Kings," and "Lightning Strikes in LA."
"Street Rules: Rolling with David Ayer and Jaime FitzSimons" (17:28) finds FitzSimons riding along with Ayer as they tour LA neighborhoods and LAPD hotspots while discussing the city and its police department. "L.A. Bête Noir: Writing Street Kings" (4:49) sounds like a feature that would include Ellroy, but alas, he ain't particpating. Instead, Ayer, Foster, Moss, Wimmer, and Stoff discuss the script.
"Street Cred" (3:51) quickly surveys Common, Cedric the Entertainer, Sloan, Ayer about the film's supposed gritty authenticity. "HBO First Look—City of Fallen Angels: Making Street Kings" (12:01) is a standard EPK-style making-of with Forest Whitaker, Keanu Reeves, Chris Evans, Hugh Laurie Ayer, FitzSimons, LAPD technical advisor Brian Davis, Common, and Daryl F. Gates adding their thoughts.
Ayer offers optional commentary on 15 Deleted Scenes (12:20 with "Play All" option), while ten Alternate Takes (29:05) speak for themselves. The Vignettes (7:51 with "Play All" option) section houses four behind-the-scenes featurettes with B-roll and interviews: "Crash Course," "Heirs to the Throne," "Inside Vice Special Unit," and "Training Days." Talking heads include stunt coordinator R.A. Rondell, Ayer, Common, Cedric, Sloan, Whitaker, Reeves, Jay Mohr, Amaury Nolasco, and FitzSimons.
A Behind-the-Scenes section (3:59 with "Play All") includes four more self-explanatory clips, "In Training," "Car Rig," "Squibs," and "On Set." You also get "Theatrical Trailer A" (1:20) and "Theatrical Trailer B" (1:45), as well as Blu-Ray previews for Behind Enemy Lines 3, Stargate: Continuum, and What Happens in Vegas.
Review gear: |
Panasonic Viera TC-P55VT30 55" Plasma 1080p 3D HDTV
Oppo BDP-93 Universal Network 3D Blu-ray Disc Player
Denon AVR2112CI Integrated Network A/V Surround Receiver
Pioneer SP-BS41-LR Bookshelf Speaker (2)
Pioneer SP-C21 Center Speaker
Pioneer SW-8 Subwoofer