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5 Manchester, MI Hot Tub and Spa Dealers
Having a hot tub or spa at your own Manchester, MI home can provide more benefits than you may think. Ask any hot tub dealer in Manchester, MI and they will tell you about the numerous ways spas can enhance your life, including physically, emotionally and socially. If you've been contemplating adding a spa to your home, visit a local Manchester hot tub store today to learn more about which options are right for your location and needs. More
- Click to callAnn Arbor, MI, 48106
- Click to callAnn Arbor, MI, 48103
- Click to callAnn Arbor, MI, 48108
- Click to callAnn Arbor, MI, 48108
- Click to callSouth Lyon, MI, 48178
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What should I know before I visit hot tub stores near me?
It's important that you do some research before visiting a local Manchester spa and hot tub dealer. While they can give you lots of information about features and financing, you should have an idea of where you would like to position your spa and what its main function will be. Do you plan to use it mostly for relaxation or socialization? How many people will be using it? All of these things will help the hot tub dealer pick the best models for you. Decide who will be responsible for daily maintenance in your household and if the extra energy costs are something you're actually willing to incur. Also, know that most hot tub stores in Manchester, MI let you do test soaks, also known as a "wet test", where you can throw on your suit and take each model for a spin in the showroom so you know exactly how they feel before purchasing. Don't be shy — just think of it as test driving a car!
Questions to ask a Manchester hot tub dealer:
- What sort of maintenance is involved? How much time will it take?
- What are my financing options?
- How long has the manufacturer been in business?
- How long has the hot tub dealer been in business?
- What does the warranty entail?
- What happens if something breaks?
- How soon can it be delivered and installed?
- Are there any specific water or zoning requirements for my local area?
Find spa and hot tub dealers in Manchester, MI on Houzz. Narrow your search in the Professionals section of the website to hot tub and spa dealers in Manchester, MI. You may also look through photos to find hot tub designs you like, and ask about the details of the spa, including the manufacturer and where it was was purchased.
Find hot tub and spa dealers near me on HouzzBefore you hire a hot tub and spa dealer in Manchester, Michigan, shop through our network of over 5 local hot tub and spa dealers. Read through customer reviews, check out their past projects and then request a quote from the best hot tub and spa dealers near you.
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- 4:50
All I think About
Fena Gitu
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Friday, April 24, 2009
Digression and reviews
I've made several posts in the past about things that I preferred in book reviews. However, I never really addressed the issue of digressions as much, in part because I saw that as a stylistic issue more than a substantive one. Over the past 17 years, ever since I started my collegiate studies, I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of reviews that run the gamut from Amazon fluff pieces from the likes of Harriet Klausner to 20+ page academic journal reviews. For each type of review, there were positive and negative traits alike, but on the whole, I found that when the reviewer was informed and had something to add, digressions can add to the work as a whole.
I myself sometimes will digress in a review. Sometimes there is a personal issue that I will interject in order to cast the book(s) being reviewed in a different light than if I had strictly focused just what was between the covers. A good many really good reviews will take the work at hand and contrast it with a larger whole. For example, Jorge Luis Borges is almost as well known in Argentina for his literary criticisms as he is for his short fiction and if one were to read a review of Borges, one would see that very often he would take one or two thematic elements from a story and he would pull them out from the text and then play around with them a bit, exploring what their implications could be before weighing in on this thoughts on the book.
Other times, a work can be so derivative and lacking in substance that a skilled reviewer, rather than just baldly stating that the work in question is deficient in X, Y, or Z, s/he will discuss the work in a larger framework, perhaps (this is especially true for non-fiction, particularly historical works) examining it from another writer's point of view. If I were to write a review of Daniel Goldhagen's works, I probably would have to digress a bit to cover just what other, more meticulous historians such as Christopher Browning, had to say on an issue before declaiming Goldhagen for some rather shoddy use of historical evidence in regards to the Einsatzgruppen and the beginning stages of the Holocaust. Sometimes, just stepping back and letting others speak for you can strengthen what you have to say when you want to explore just why a book did or didn't work for you.
But this still avoids the point. A point that the Guardian article could have made to bolster its arguments is that a review essentially is an essay that strives to communicate a specific point or points. I could load all sorts of invective into a bit of writing, but if my review doesn't read like a well-written essay, I would have failed to communicate the necessary points. While certainly essays need something of substance to sustain them and to help deliver maximum impact on a reader, a good review can incorpate digressions to strengthen the flow of the review essay and to make the whole something worth reading rather than a tedious writing exercise that bores the writer almost as much as it will bore the potential readers. So why not digress, if it adds to the telling of a story about a story a reader may or may not want to learn more about?
6 comments:
Sorry for the OT, but it seems feedburner is broken.
I don't get any updates via feedreader...
- Elena said...
I think you hit the crux of the issue (at least what it would be for me) in qualifying "as long as it adds something." I can see cases where a digression would really be useful and meaningful--even a personal anecdote to explain why something hit the reviewer in a particularly good or bad way that is influencing their opinion of the whole work in a direction someone without that experience may not go--but I think it's a fine line between what really adds and what is self-indulgent rambling on the part of the reviewer. unfortunately with blogging, rambling is sometimes encouraged or perceived as encouraged because when done well it is witty and interesting. but too often it is not done well...
- Harry Markov said...
My opinion on the matter mirrors Elena's and it all boils down to one fine line, which is hard not to cross, especially when it comes to reviewing. This is probably the reason I try to avoid digression. I get the vibe that I am not doing it right and it wouldn't benefit the review itself. As with all things complex, subtelty and moderation are needed to make digression work for the reviewer. I would love to see how a novel, short story or whatever affects the reviewer as an additional benefit of the reading experience, but it's not for everybody.
- Terry Weyna said...
I think it sort of depends on where your review is appearing. On my blog, I add personal bits and pieces because I'm trying to give my reviewers a bit of information about who I am and establish a real "voice." In this way, regular readers can get to know me and my tastes, and therefore get a better idea of whether what I read and like is something that they will like when they read it. I want it to be more personal and experiential than a review or a review/essay I might post elsewhere.
My reviews for SF Signal, on the other hand, are straightforward reviews with as little injection of the personal as I can manage. I will digress when I consider it necessary, as, for instance, to compare to another book (something I know you don't necessarily approve of, Larry, but which I consider a positive addition to a review almost always, if used properly).
In academic papers, such as for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, the only personal interjections come in comments I might add spontaneously as I give the paper based on what I've heard elsewhere in the conference.
I don't consider myself an expert on reviewing, but I do write the kind of reviews I like to read, so I rather hope for the best.
I don't mind digressions as long as they are entertaining or informative.
Check out some of the reviews at Teleport City, a website dedicated to exploring and reviewing movies. Part of the fun of the reviews there are the lengthy digressions, and introductions that may only be tenuously related to the subject at hand.
For example, there is the review for "Manos, the Hands of Fate," which contains this beautifully vivid paragraph:
'I also said it had a kindred spirit in the film Manos: The Hands of Fate, and it was right then and there, when I wrote that sentence, that I knew my own hands of fate were guiding me slowly but inevitably toward grappling with a review of Manos.
It's a fitting name for the movie, because my fate seems intrinsically intertwined with Manos. If any movie was my long lost evil twin brother, it would be Manos. I know that one day, billions of years from now, as the earth boils and dies, Manos and I are fated to stand atop a craggy cliff as a tumultuous sea of lava crashes below us and volcanoes spew fire and dinosaurs into the sky. There we stand, face to face, battered, bloody, aware of the fact that we are both doomed, yet never the less unable to extract ourselves from the eternal combat into which we have been and always shall be locked. I have seen the road lain before me, and I know that it leads to Manos: The Hands of Fate just as surely as its road leads to me. My ties to Manos are sundry, and even I did not realize most of them existed until I started peeling back the layers of the onion, each one confronting me with a revelation more unspeakable than the last, until one day I found myself actually standing on the very grounds that served as the location for the film, at which time I fell to my knees, cried out to the heavens, and went stark raving mad.'
Does any of that actually add much to the review? Maybe not, but it still damn fun to read.
And then there is my all time favorite digression that took place during the "Night of the Lepus," review:
'Back when I was in college, I took a script writing class as part of the film studies program I was dabbling in to augment my journalism degree and equip me with the proper intellectual background and tools I would eventually apply to writing about films like Gymkata. The class was lorded over by an unkempt, white-bearded hobo of a man in a rawhide vest. What his qualifications were to work as a professor at a major American university, I do not know. I do know that, for a while, he was homeless and slept on a surplus Army cot in his office. Odd, at least until you take into account that this was a department where Harry Crewes was also a professor and could occasionally be found passed out in the elevator with no pants on and an empty bottle of booze lying next to him.
This cat teaching my class had never had a script made into a film, or even purchased with the potential that it might one day become a film, and his primary function in class, aside from brandishing Syd Field's The Screenplay, was telling us the same story over and over about helping his grandmother roll big fat joints on the front porch of their one-room backwoods shack in Georgia (sort of how I think I've told the same story about this professor in like half a dozen reviews at this point). I half expected during any given class session to be interrupted by a mousy guy in a tweed jacket and wire-rimmed glasses walking in and, shocked, screaming, "Who are you? What are you doing in my classroom???" to the wild-eyed Bohemian madman, who himself would promptly grab his checkered hobo bundle tied to a long stick, and chirp "Fare thee well, my good man!" in a gravel voice as he tipped his ragged hobo fedora at us and hopped out of the window and onto a passing box car.
Of course, I also half expected to go to this guy's office and find the tweed jacket professor tied up in a closet, shouting, "He's insane! I've been tied up in here since the beginning of the semester! For God's sake, man, call the police!" And if I ever saw that, I would simply back out slowly, close the door behind me, and head down the hall to Harry Crewes' office to see if there was anything left to drink in there.'
Once again, the preceding paragraphs didn't have much to do with the actual movie, but I think that I, the reader, would be much the poorer if I hadn't had a chance to read it.
I think it depends what the review is for. If it's a straightfoward "should I buy this book?" review of something just published, directless is commendable.
But when people review a book that has been out a while, that has been reviewed many times, what's the point of directness? It seems to me the reviewer should ideally add something new in what the say that couldn't be got from any other review. In that case, digressions, and unusual or contrived perspectives or evaluations, are commendable. They can make people see things in new ways.


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|Written by
| Adam Anders
Peer Astrom
Piero Umilani
|Cee Lo's Magic Moment
| adamanders music
Masterplan Music
Edward B. Marks Music Company
Mad Muppet Melodies
"All I Need is Love," from Cee Lo Green's Christmas album Cee Lo's Magic Moment, is an original song performed by Green and the Muppets. The track samples the song "Mah Na Mah Na" performed by the Snowths and includes original vocals by Cee Lo Green, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Pepe the King Prawn, and Animal. The track concludes with a comment from Statler and Waldorf.
The Muppets performed the song with Green in his live Las Vegas show on October 10, 2012,[1] which was televised on November 30. They also performed the song on Good Morning America on November 27 and on Christmas in Rockefeller Center on November 28. In the former appearance, Lo-Co stood in for Cee Lo.
An online preview of the track was released on theboombox.com on October 22, 2012.[2]
Music Video
The music video for the song was recorded October 11–13, 2012[3] and debuted on YouTube on November 26, 2012. In the video, Cee Lo's car breaks down in front of a house where the Muppets are having a Christmas party. He joins them and performs the song with them, while Walter uses his phone to record Santa Claus' (portrayed by Craig Robinson) arrival. Also appearing is Lo-Co, a Muppet caricature of Cee Lo.
Human Cast
Muppet Characters (in order of appearance)
- Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Animal, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Walter, Rowlf the Dog, The Snowths, Lew Zealand, Sam the Eagle, The Swedish Chef, Turkey, chicken, Scooter, Beauregard, Big Mean Carl, Monkeys, Sheep, Penguin, Lo-Co, Pepe the King Prawn, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Beaker, Zoot, Statler and Waldorf
Muppet Performers
- Bill Barretta, Dave Goelz, Eric Jacobson, Peter Linz, David Rudman, Matt Vogel, Steve Whitmire, Alice Dinnean, Bruce Lanoil
Additional Credits
- Directed by: Marc Klasfeld
- Executive Producer: Nicole Acacio
- Muppets Studio: Debbie McClellan, Tracy Gilbert
- The Muppet Workshop: Jane Gootnick (supervisor), Scott Johnson, Alex "Jurgen" Ferguson
- Special Thanks To: Jim Lewis and PuppetHeap


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Today I traveled to Raleigh, NC to check out Jay Shaffer's Tiny House Workshop, which is designed to teach people how to build their own Tiny Home. When I walked into the meeting room, I knew we would have a good number of people, but I didn't expect to have over 50 people here!
After doing introductions, we jumped into building codes and zoning, talking about several options when it comes to legal issues. The message to drive home here was, it depends. It depends on your local entity, on the person you talk to and their mood. Overall, we discussed many options.
We also had two groups talk about their Tiny Houses that they are actually building, a group down in Charleston and another couple building their own house. This was a really neat aspect to see the houses they were creating, it also gave some great outside viewpoints on the design and building process.
We are now into the actual construction of the house. We talked about trailers, framing, sheeting and many many other details. I will report about tomorrow's


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Aldridge, Blazers top Pelicans to clinch playoffs
Trail Blazers 100, Pelicans 94
LaMarcus Aldridge had 25 points and 18 rebounds and the Portland Trail Blazers clinched their first playoff appearance in three seasons with a 100-94 win over the New Orleans Pelicans on Sunday night.
Wesley Matthews added 21 points, Damian Lillard 20 and Nicolas Batum had 16 points and 12 rebounds for Portland (50-28). The Blazers are in fifth place in the Western Conference with four games remaining.
Reserve Anthony Morrow had 17 for New Orleans and Anthony Davis had 15 points on 6-of-18 shooting.
Memphis' loss to San Antonio earlier in the evening cleared the way for Portland to clinch. It appeared the Trail Blazers might fumble the chance when New Orleans took a 10-point second quarter lead. But the Blazers blew past the Pelicans with a 25-6 third quarter run and never trailed again.


text: These are the 30 richest UK celebrities under 30 - and how much they're worth Heat magazine has compiled its annual rich list, named the Heat Rich List 2019, which features the wealthiest British celebrities aged 30 and under. These are the top 30 earners and how much they're worth. 1. Ed Sheeran Age: 28. Estimated worth of 170million. Shutterstock other Buy a Photo 2. Daniel Radcliffe Age: 30. Estimated worth of 90million. Shutterstock other Buy a Photo 3. Harry Styles Age: 25. Estimated worth of 64million. Shutterstock other Buy a Photo 4. Emma Watson Age: 29. Estimated worth of 57million. Shutterstock other Buy a Photo View more Page 1 of 8


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Episode 174: Co-hosts B.L. Ochman and David Erickson discussed Super Bowl LI commercials, including Ford's future of transportation spot, the sexy Mr. Clean, the Coen Brothers and Peter Fonda's Mercedes collaboration, Audi's girl power ad, Budweiser's origin story, and 84 Lumber's pro-immigration piece; Comcast's paid protesters; New York City subway users erasing Nazis; freaky fake news; Facebook Live's filter bubble; Twitter's new safety features; YouTube Live; Facebook's computer vision; LinkedIn's ProFinder badges; Oculus Rift's Best Buy fail; Circuit Cubes; …and much, much more.
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21 November 2012 at 2.49pm | 1 Comment
Composers have often written roles with particular singers in mind. Mozart wrote the stratospherically high part of Die Zauberflöte's Queen of the Night for his sister-in-law Josepha Hofer; Rossini wrote many virtuosic high mezzo-soprano roles such as Elena in La donna del lago for his mistress (later wife) Isabella Colbran; and Britten's great tenor roles were all inspired by the unique voice of his partner Peter Pears.
We thought we'd take a look at some examples of recent Royal Opera commissions with roles written for specific singers:
Harrison Birtwistle - Gawain and The Minotaur
The roles of Green Knight (Gawain) and Minotaur (The Minotaur) were created for John Tomlinson.
Harrison Birtwistle and John Tomlinson first worked together when Tomlinson recorded the role of the Doctor in Birtwistle's Punch and Judy in 1979. When The Royal Opera commissioned Birtwistle to write Gawain, which premiered 12 years later, Birtwistle wrote the role of the majestic Green Knight specifically for Tomlinson. He modelled the character's vocal range on that of Wotan in Wagner's Ring Cycle, the role in which Tomlinson had made his Bayreuth Festival debut to great acclaim in 1988.
When Birtwistle was commissioned to write a second work for The Royal Opera, he chose the Greek myth of the Minotaur. From the start he envisaged the central role of the half-man, half-bull as being sung by Tomlinson, telling his publisher Boosey and Hawkes that "imagining John Tomlinson on stage in the lead role was integral to the whole project". David Harsent, Birtwistle's librettist, agreed, noting that he had Tomlinson's voice in mind when he wrote the libretto. Birtwistle based the vocal range and style of the Minotaur on another great Tomlinson Wagner role, Hagen in Götterdämmerung (which Tomlinson has sung many times for The Royal Opera). John Tomlinson was thrilled with the role of the Minotaur, telling MusicWeb that "the music was superb… it was perfect for me. There was a wonderful use of my bass voice with those haunting monologues and then the dramatic stuff in the public scenes".
Thomas Adès - The Tempest
The role of Prospero was created for Simon Keenlyside, and the role of Ariel for Cyndia Sieden.
Thomas Adès in his first Royal Opera commission created the central role of Prospero for British baritone Simon Keenlyside. Adès envisaged Prospero as a young, vigorous man rather than an elderly magician, and chose Keenlyside not only for his vocal gifts but also for his skill as a physical actor. Adès also wrote the spectacularly high and virtuosic role of the spirit Ariel for the American coloratura soprano Cyndia Sieden. The part is one of the hardest written for soprano: it ranges higher than the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte, and the singer has to sing 17 high Es in the first few minutes of her first scene. Not surprisingly, Sieden is one of the few singers who can perform the role of Ariel (her singing at the world premiere of The Tempest was described as 'almost out of this world' by the Guardian. She has sung the part in four different productions of the opera.
Other singers in the world premiere cast of The Tempest may have influenced Adès's writing. For example, Adès's first Caliban was the British lyric tenor Ian Bostridge, whose particular vocal quality suits Adès's concept of the role, more wistful and lyrical than Shakespeare's original.
Mark-Anthony Turnage - Anna Nicole
The role of Anna Nicole was created for Eva-Maria Westbroek, and the role of the Lawyer Stern for Gerald Finley.
Eva-Maria Westbroek was recruited for the role of Playboy model Anna Nicole by the director Richard Jones, who'd worked with her on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for The Royal Opera in 2006 and been very impressed by her vocal and dramatic skills. When Jones was booked to direct Anna Nicole, he immediately thought of Westbroek for the title role. As she told Musical Criticism: "I was in a record shop in London… and bumped into Richard! He said, 'we want you for this opera written by Turnage.'" Westbroek went on to work extensively with composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and his librettist Richard Thomas as they created the opera. Westbroek enjoyed the challenges of the role (including some flamboyant coloratura for Anna Nicole's drug-fuelled rage in Act II) and later told the Independent: "this creative experience was one of the most exciting things I've ever been part of." Turnage stressed the importance of both Westbroek and Gerald Finley (who played Anna's lover, Lawyer Stern) in his compositional process, telling Boosey and Hawkes "I had the voices of Eva-Maria Westbroek and Gerald Finley in my head from the start".
The Minotaur returns to The Royal Opera from 17 - 28 January 2013. Tickets are still available.


text:
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By Noah Shachtman July 21, 2011 | 4:00 am |
The Pentagon's top researchers have rushed a classified and controversial intelligence program into Afghanistan. Known as "Nexus 7," and previously undisclosed as a war-zone surveillance effort, it ties together everything from spy radars to fruit prices in order to glean clues about Afghan instability.
The program has been pushed hard by the leadership of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They see Nexus 7 as both a breakthrough data-analysis tool and an opportunity to move beyond its traditional, long-range research role and into a more active wartime mission.
But those efforts are drawing fire from some frontline intel operators who see Nexus 7 as little more than a glorified grad-school project, wasting tens of millions on duplicative technology that has nothing to do with stopping the Taliban.
"There are no models and there are no algorithms," says one person familiar with the program, echoing numerous others who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the program publicly. Just "200 lines of buggy Python code to do what imagery analysts do every day."
During a decade of war, American forces have gathered exabytes of information on its enemies in Afghanistan. Nexus 7 aims to tap that data to find out more about the U.S.' alleged friends: the people of Afghanistan, and how they interact with their government and with one another.
Not that you'd be able to figure that out, examining the one public reference to Nexus 7. Tucked away in the Pentagon's gargantuan budget (.pdf), it makes the program sound like an obscure computer-science project, using "cluster analysis" to find "social networks." There's no reference to its operational utility.
On the military's classified network, however, Darpa technologists pitch Nexus 7 as far-reaching and revolutionary, culling "hundreds of existing data sources from multiple Agencies and Services" to produce "population-centric, cultural intelligence."
They boast of Nexus 7's ties to special operations and to America's most secretive surveillance groups, and its sophisticated tools to "perform automated cross-correlation and analysis of massive, sparse datasets — recomputing stability indicators within minutes of new data updates."
In practice, that means Nexus 7 culls the vast U.S. spy apparatus to figure out which communities in Afghanistan are falling apart and which are stabilizing; which are loyal to the government in Kabul and which are falling under the influence of the militants.
A small Nexus 7 team is currently working in Afghanistan with military-intelligence officers, while a much larger group in Virginia with a "large-scale processing capacity" handles the bulk of the data crunching, Darpa spokesman Eric Mazzacone confirmed in e-mails with Danger Room. "Data in the hands of some of the best computer scientists working side by side with operators provides useful insights in ways that might not have otherwise been realized."
That sometimes means turning traditional intelligence work on its head. Instead of using all those eyes in the sky and reports from the ground to hunt for the proverbial needle in the haystack –- the lone insurgent in a large group of people –- Nexus 7 sometimes examines the makeup of the entire haystack. Of everyone.
"Let's take that God's-eye view," says one person familiar with the program. "Instead of tracking a car, why not track all cars?"
The most senior officers in the military have all been briefed on the program, as has incoming CIA director David Petraeus. And whether it succeeds or fails, the project raises questions about the role of the government's most-celebrated technologists and the direction of the war effort in Afghanistan.
Should the United States even bother with a "population-centric" counterinsurgency there, or just target militants? Should Darpa focus on those wartime efforts, or stay focused on the long-term research that has helped the agency reshape the world again and again?
But the most eye-opening aspect of Nexus 7 might not be the questions it raises, or its grand ambition, or its secret nature, or the controversy it has generated. It's the fact that a program this weighty started with a quirky contest to find a bunch of red balloons.
Nexus 7 has many intellectual godfathers. One is David Kilcullen, the retired Australian Lieutenant Colonel who became a rock star in national security circles as a guru of counterinsurgency, which he described as a "competition … to win the hearts, minds and acquiescence of the population." (.pdf) The reputation only grew, after he became a top advisor to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq.
As his career moved on, Kilcullen became increasingly focused on numbers. In a traditional battle, it's easy to measure territory gained on enemies killed. But how do you gauge something as squishy as a town's loyalty? How do you tell if those allegiances are getting stronger or weaker over time?
The military spent hundreds of millions of dollars on everything from war-zone polling to computer modeling to figure that out. None of it seemed to work. But Kilcullen had a few ideas.
How do you gauge something as squishy as a town's loyalty? The military spent hundreds of millions to figure that out. None of it seemed to work.
The best troops could do, Kilcullen concluded, was to collect indirect metrics: the price of goods in the local market, or the hassles of getting the products there. They're decent surrogates for "general popular confidence and security," he wrote. "In particular, exotic vegetables — those grown outside a particular district that have to be transported further at greater risk in order to be sold in that district — can be a useful telltale marker." (.pdf)
A second Nexus 7 godfather is Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn. Until recently, Flynn was the head of U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan.
But he didn't always think too highly of the apparatus he ran. In report publicly released in December 2009 , Flynn excoriated his fellow intelligence professionals for being "only marginally relevant to the overall strategy."
They were so focused on old-school metrics like body counts, he complained, they hadn't bothered to learn the first thing about Afghanistan's people. Rudimentary questions about Afghanistan's social and cultural fabric had gone largely unasked and unanswered.
But Flynn also offered the intelligence community a way out. The U.S. military had in its databases a "vast and underappreciated body of information," he wrote. Tapped right, that information could form "a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency."
Assembling data on how a society functions is a passion of Alex "Sandy" Pentland, the bushy-bearded MIT Media Lab professor and evangelist for a new type of information-gathering dubbed "reality mining."
With GPS-enabled cellphones and advanced surveillance cameras now everywhere, it's possible to track almost everyone in a given area at once. That's not creepy, in Pentland's world. It's wonderful. Because all that information can tell you exactly where a town is working and where it's broken, where the traffic piles up and where it flows free.
Public actions, when added up, could serve as one of Kilcullen's indirect metrics.
"People leave behind digital traces. If you aggregate those traces in the right way, you can see where incomes are dropping, where people feel scared, where the babies are dying," he tells Danger Room. "With technology comes transparency. And with transparency comes an ability to see when things work, and when they go off the rails."
At first, Pentland used reality mining to grok workplace interactions at Bank of America and find cabs in New York City. But over time, more of his attention turned to places like Afghanistan. Maybe war zones could use some reality mining, too. He began pitching military officials on his notion of "computational counterinsurgency."
He found a willing audience at Darpa.
Pentland became something of a hero to the agency in December 2009, just a few days before Flynn released his controversial paper. Darpa had launched an attention-grabbing contest, to find 10 red balloons placed around the country.
On the surface, the challenge seemed simple enough. But tracking down all of the 8-foot-wide spheres was considered by some U.S. intelligence professionals to be "impossible by conventional intelligence-gathering methods."
Under the supervision of Pentland (pictured, left) and his graduate student Galen Pickard (center), a team from MIT recruited 4,400 people online for the balloon hunt. Together, they tracked down all 10 in just eight hours and 52 minutes.
Regina Dugan, the new director at Darpa, had bet big on crowdsourcing — the idea that smart ideas and big tasks could be accomplished by opening them up to large groups. Thanks to Pentland's team, Dugan's bet appeared to be a good one. He gave Dugan her first major, public win.
Dugan was looking to do more than turn heads with a quirky contest, however. To her, the Defense Department's leading research shop had been stuck at quirky for too long — pursuing pet projects that didn't seem to have much battlefield relevance.
'Darpa is not the place of dreamlike musings.' For an agency known for its shape-shifting robots, that was a revolutionary statement.
Darpa, of course, had a long history of big, risky ideas that paid off indirectly and way, way down the road: stealth technology, GPS, the internet itself. No other government agency was tasked with thinking that wild and that far into the future.
Darpa, in effect, supplied the seed corn for American ingenuity.
Under Dugan's predecessor, Tony Tether, Darpa program managers were encouraged to chase their interests in fields like artificial intelligence and quantum computing; the military implications would be figured out later.
To Dugan, that was unacceptable during wartime. Darpa had to be visionary, of course. But the agency had drifted too far into the clouds.
"There is a time and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at Darpa," she told a Congressional panel last March (.pdf). "Darpa is not the place of dreamlike musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and hopes. Darpa is a place of doing."
For an agency that spent millions of dollars on shape-shifting robots and mind-controlled limbs, it was something of a revolutionary statement.
A trip to Afghanistan, a few months after the contest, only reinforced that view, Dugan added. The officers there "did not believe Darpa was in the fight with them."
Maybe Pentland and his MIT crew could help. Military intelligence specialists, still reeling from Flynn's scathing report, were looking for new ways to refocus on the people and society of Afghanistan. Over the years, the military had refined their tools into a lethally effective machine for hunting individuals.
But tracking people in the aggregate — that was still beyond it. Pentland's "reality mining" concept seemed to have a chance of fixing that. By plumbing the depths of the military's intelligence databases — and correlating that with people's movements — they could assemble some indicators of whether a particular region was recovering from war, or going to hell.
"State of the art in ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] has produced massive amounts of data that is difficult to process using conventional approaches," as Mazzacone, the Darpa spokesman, puts it. "The DoD [Department of Defense] invests billions of dollars in ISR. Having a better means of analyzing that sensor data has the potential to save lives, increase mission success and save money."
In the spring of 2010, plans quickly took shape for a 90-day pilot project to see if Afghanistan could be reality mined. Galen Pickard, the red-balloon alumnus and Pentland disciple, would help write code to scour various military datasets, and fuse the information together.
David Kilcullen, who had advocated society-centric metrics for so long, would put together a team counterinsurgency experts and social scientists to figure out what the data all meant. Employees from Kilcullen's new consultancy — Caerus Associates, named after the personification of opportunity in Greek myth — started schooling the geeks in counterinsurgency and the lay of the Afghan land.
A few days before Kilcullen's wedding to Pentagon policy official Janine Davidson (a wedding attended by Petraeus, among others) that pilot project launched.
Hopes soared. Then, just as quickly, they came hurtling back down to the ground.
In Nexus 7, the geeks saw a chance to use their skills to do something a lot more important than find balloons. Kilcullen's crew hoped to find those slippery counterinsurgency metrics that had eluded the military for so long. Maybe they'd even be able to prove empirically whether all that stuff they preached about winning hearts and minds was really true.
"It's a big opportunity to test COIN [counterinsurgency] theory with as much data as you ever wanted," one source familiar with the program says.
Step one was to dive into SIGACTS, the military database that contained accounts of nearly every firefight American troops fought. (The information later formed the bedrock of WikiLeaks' "war logs.")
Drizzled between the gun battles were occasional accounts of villages stabilized and town elders met. But, written as random notes, the accounts were hard to insert into a database. There was nothing consistent, nothing you could plot as a trend over time.
"These were intelligence reports, not measurable data," the source says. "The population-centric information wasn't to be found there."
'One assumed there was some secret mound of data to be exploited. But it's just not true.'
So the team widened their search, without much luck. The most reliable data they could find was weekly fruit prices from Jalalabad, a city in northeastern Afghanistan. At least those could be measured over time.
"One assumed there was some secret mound of data to be exploited. But it's just not true," the source adds.
At the end of the summer, the 90 days for the pilot project were up. It was time to demonstrate to Dugan — and the rest of the military — what Nexus 7 could do. In a conference room on the seventh floor of Darpa's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, the team made a series of presentations, to show what they could do.
On the surface, there wasn't much to it: just a graph of violence in the Jalalabad region, and a plot of those fruit prices. When the level of violence was stable — reliably low, or reliably high — so were those prices. Fruit sellers knew what to expect. But when there were sudden swings in the number of attacks, the prices shot up.
Therefore, the Nexus 7 team said, you could use the fruit as an indirect indicator of instability.
The reaction was less than rapturous.
"Right from the start, I'm like: Oh. My. God," one of the people who attended a Nexus 7 presentation tells Danger Room. "A high school kid could do that."
Afterward, Dugan presented the pilot as a triumph — a "big breakthrough" that impressed a bevy of four-star generals.
Privately, she was underwhelmed. Dugan was looking for projects that could save troops' lives, and maybe even bend the direction of the war. By that standard, fruit-price swings seemed pretty inconsequential.
But the presenters maintained an aura of confidence. Oh, this is just a test. Give us more data sources, they said, and we'll make better connections. We've got the hardware: a cloud computing platform that would soak up all kinds of classified and open source intelligence data. We've got the software: these social science PhDs and counterinsurgency veterans, who can figure out how to apply that data to rebuild Afghanistan.
"They led us to believe they had access to all this data, and they could share with us. They said they had a working intel center in Kabul, and were briefing Petraeus all the time," one meeting attendee says.
He — and many of the others — were skeptical. But they figured they'd take a risk, and give the Darpa team some data to play with. Maybe they'd come up with something cool. After all, "these guys are geniuses; they invented the internet, right?"
A team from the National Security Agency — the super-secret eavesdropping service — offered to give so-called "minimized summaries" of phone-call records to the Nexus 7 team in return for data about Afghanistan's many redevelopment projects.
The summaries wouldn't tell the Nexus 7 team who was calling whom, or what the contents of the conversations were. (Darpa wasn't authorized to handle that kind of raw intelligence data, anyway.) But it could give a sense of the ebb and flow of communications — another input to be reality mined.
Despite the misgivings, the program was authorized. On Sept. 16, a $6.1 million contract was signed, effective immediately. Nexus 7 was heading to Afghanistan.
This wasn't the first time Darpa had gone to war.
In 1961, with the situation in Vietnam already slipping, the Advanced Research Projects Agency ("Arpa," the "D" came later) launched its wide-ranging Project Agile. As Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger recounts, the array of research efforts produced everything from the M-16 rifle to now-infamous defoliant Agent Orange to "a jet belt designed to propel individual soldiers on the battlefield."
In the weeks after 9/11, Darpa launched a series of efforts designed to help intelligence analysts comb disparate databases for terror threats. The best-known of those efforts was called "Total Information Awareness," or TIA. And it aimed to collect as much information from as many people as possible — e-mails, credit card statements, even veterinarian bills — in order to find a signature of terrorist behavior.
Congress freaked out over TIA's potential to be an all-seeing eye. Darpa was forced to drop it and several related efforts from its public portfolio.
After a single, incomplete test, Nexus 7 was shipping out for war.
But Darpa-backed gadgets did become staples of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The agency's handheld Phraselator translation gadgets gave troops a rudimentary way to communicate in a foreign tongue. Its Boomerang gunshot detector uncovered enemy snipers. Its Command Post of the Future (CPOF) allowed officers to collaboratively plan attacks, and instantly spot every friendly vehicle on the battlefield. CPOF became the de facto standard for mission planners everywhere. Most recently, Darpa pushed out to the field a wide-area, high-def laser-ranging system that collected 3-D map data 10 times quicker than its predecessors.
All of these efforts were the product of years of testing and evaluation. CPOF got its start in 1999, four years before it was first taken to Iraq. Phraselator inventor Lee Morin was winning military awards for his translation tech in 1994. The laser-ranging system was five years in the making.
Nexus 7 was on an entirely different timetable. Dugan was determined to have Darpa make a difference in the war effort — not after years of development, but now. After a single 90-day test, Nexus 7 was shipping out for deployment.
The program's geeks and social scientists loved it, of course. It was a way to turbocharge their research, and make an immediate impact. Why bother holing Nexus 7 up at a stateside test bed, one person familiar with Nexus 7 asks, "when you can give it to a company in Afghanistan and get 1,000 times the number of observations? It's not like these are weapons. If it doesn't work, the worst that happens is it doesn't work."
That devil-may-care attitude didn't extend to Kabul, where Nexus 7 almost immediately set off a series of bureaucratic knife fights in the command center of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.
Darpa is breathlessly credited with inventing the internet. Dugan calls the agency her "elite army of futuristic technogeeks." But it's not like Darpa program managers are writing code or planting electrodes in telekinetic monkeys in the basement of the agency's HQ. Darpa acts less like an army and more like a bank — of ideas, and of cash.
A program manager ordinarily puts out a "Broad Agency Announcement," or BAA, outlining her new science or technology goals. Academics and defense contractors submit research proposals to meet those targets. The winners get Darpa cash, and carry out the needed experiments in their university or corporate labs. The telekinetic monkeys, for instance, are at Duke University.
Dugan rarely gets involved with an individual project or a particular researcher. Quite the opposite. Some program managers, who used to spend hours briefing the director on their projects, now say their annual audiences with Dugan last no more than 60 seconds.
Nexus 7 was the outlier. No BAA was ever issued for this program, which is supposed to cost $30 million in the next fiscal year. About 20 employees of Caerus Associates, Potomac Fusion, along with Data Tactics Corporation and other firms work directly in Darpa's headquarters, not in some outside facility.
In theory, these contractors report to Nexus 7 program manager Randy Garrett; in practice, Dugan is the one holding the reins.
"She spent an inordinate amount of time on it," says one Darpa staffer. "In all-hands meetings, she'd tout it as one of the three or four projects that's changing the world."
'There's no such thing as Nexus 7 data. There's no Nexus 7 analytics. No computing. No cloud; just five dudes with laptops.'
In the fall, Dugan dispatched red-balloon alum Galen Pickard (pictured) to Kabul, joining fellow graduate student Chris White. Neither was familiar with working in a military setting, and it showed.
They'd plant themselves in the Joint Intelligence Operations Center (JIOC) in Kabul without introducing themselves to the officers in charge. This is a facility packed with top-secret information; strangers weren't exactly welcome. They'd bring their personal, unclassified laptops into this secure location, where every piece of hardware was supposed to be vetted and approved.
This was, at minimum, a serious violation of information-handling rules — the kind of transgression that allowed Private First Class Bradley Manning to smuggle hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks.
The grad students also were less than collegial with others trying to steer the vast U.S. intelligence enterprise toward learning more about Afghan society. Nexus 7 was one of several attempts to do so. But when officers and contractors working on these other projects would try to share information with the grad students, they wouldn't say a word about what they were doing.
The pros couldn't decide if the amateurs were being needlessly squirrelly — or completely clueless.
"This guy doesn't know anything," one complained, after a meeting with White. "You couldn't pin him down on anything. Couldn't define a goal. Couldn't say what cooperation means, what data sharing means. He artfully weaseled his way out of everything."
Friendly observers chalked the reticence up to a kind of post-traumatic stress — trauma, as in the beating Darpa took during the "Total Information Awareness" days. Agency insiders knew that big data-mining programs could be spun in a very unkind way. "There's an irrational sensitivity built up like an aurora around this program," one Darpa-watcher says.
Nerves were even further frayed when Dugan came to Kabul. In a meeting with Petraeus, she talked about how good her new intelligence-crunching efforts were — and how screwed-up his spy shop was. Petraeus, who had spent the better part of the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, didn't appreciate a war-zone dilettante telling him how to do his job.
But Petraeus wasn't one to pass up a new, potentially useful intelligence tool — especially not one backed by Kilcullen, his old confidant. White and Pickard were given access to the log files from overhead surveillance radars.
This "GMTI" information (short for Ground Moving Target Indicator) was useful in showing where vehicles moved over time. The military had used the data for years to track the travels of potential foes (.pdf). For the Nexus 7 team, it was ore to be reality mined.
Instead of tracking a single vehicle, they looked at all of them, in aggregate. They watched out for "low-pressure centers" that seemed to suck cars in; maybe it was an indicator of a thriving local market. They saw what roads the locals avoided (a possible indication of Taliban checkpoints nearby) and what paths they used instead.
The data was inconsistent — the drones and other aircraft carrying the radars didn't consistently fly over the same places at regular intervals. The exact lessons that could be extracted from the GMTIs weren't always clear. But a fuzzy picture, the Nexus 7 team figured, was better than no picture at all.
Perhaps it was professional jealousy. Perhaps it was a lack of understanding of the program — the Cro-Magnons not getting what the Homo Sapiens were up to. Perhaps it was the entitled way that the Nexus 7 grad students seemed to carry themselves. Perhaps it was the security slip-ups. Perhaps it was simply intelligence bureaucrats protecting their turf.
Or maybe the Nexus 7 work was just that bad. For whatever reason, intelligence specialists in Afghanistan were openly complaining about the effort by February. Tracking GMTI movements over time — that was old hat.
"But when Darpa briefs the [PowerPoint] slides, though, it suddenly has something to do with 'networks of networks' and stability, governance, blah, blah, blah," says one person in Kabul familiar with the project. "There are no models and there are no algorithms. It's just GMTI and slides."
'There are no models and there are no algorithms. It's just radar tracks and slides.'
The view was far from universal. Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the most tech-savvy of America's senior officers, was impressed with Nexus 7, warts and all. And he liked that Darpa wasn't content to let the war drag on without them.
"One of the strengths Darpa brings to operations is an ability to meld huge pools of data in new ways and use it to map terrain in great detail, track patterns of life, and improve our understanding of the warfighting environment," Cartwright said in an e-mail to Danger Room.
Both in Washington and in Kabul, the Nexus 7 team went looking for ways to make that big data pool even bigger. They asked for financial tallies, reconstruction reports, even phone records.
As the winter grew on, they got more aggressive, saying that military agencies and spy services "owed" Darpa information. More often than not, they were turned away, supposedly because the Nexus 7 team didn't have the proper clearances or the officially accredited systems to hold the data.
There were also heated debates about whether Darpa is even authorized to be involved with this processing of raw intelligence. Executive Order 12333 is quite explicit that phone taps, for example, are to be left up to the NSA, which is "the Functional Manager for signals intelligence … control[ling] signals intelligence collection and processing activities, including … the direct support of military commanders."
Eventually, some intelligence personnel would complain to Petraeus' brain trust about the requests.
"I told them: There's no such thing as Nexus 7 data; we already have all that," a source familiar with program says.
For now, Nexus 7 is continuing to roll along. On its website, Kilcullen's firm touts its "mash-up [of] high-capacity data processing with cutting edge social-science analytical methodologies to enable enhanced remote observation and extended situational awareness, monitoring and evaluation, and decision-making capability."
(Caerus Associates declined to comment for this story. But, full disclosure: Kilcullen's company employs several friends of this blog. His wife was my predecessor as a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution's 21st Century Defense Initiative.)
In her public speeches, Dugan (pictured) proudly discusses her "90-day Skunkworks activity that brought together some of the country's best computer and social scientists, counterinsurgency experts, economists and analysts; advanced training tools; and organically developed capabilities that harness crowd sourcing and social networking technologies."
Troops are starting to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nexus 7 is being positioned to take their place.
"I have watched young men and women, some as young as 27, go toe to toe with four-star generals," she adds. "Because it mattered, and because it had become deeply personal to them. They decided they could make a difference, so they got in the fight. It is their way of serving [their] country."
If there's been any blowback from the controversies surrounding Nexus 7 — or surrounding Dugan's questionable business dealings with her family firm — they don't appear to have affected her standing with the President. The two recently appeared together in Pittsburgh, to promote Darpa's manufacturing initiatives.
Meanwhile, the Nexus 7 team seems to be positioning itself for the long term — even as the war's strategy moves away from counterinsurgency, and toward a campaign of taking out individual militants. Troops are starting, ever-so-slowly, to withdraw from Afghanistan.
So, Nexus 7's backers argue that a bit of reality mining might be able to take their place. Nexus 7 relies "principally [on] remote collection," according to its secret website. "Consequentially, analysis can be performed in areas without Coalition presence. 'Observer effects' are minimized and stability indicators are scalable into geographic areas where we historically or currently have no physical presence."
"The visionaries have begun to get it," Pentland tells me. "If you get transparency, you don't need boots on the ground."
Photos: USAF, Army, Darpa, Flickr/Todd Huffman, Wikimedia, Facebook, Flickr/ExpertInfantry, Flickr/CSUFNewsPhotos
Noah Shachtman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and the editor of this little blog right here.
Follow @dangerroom on Twitter.
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text: My name is Alex, I program for about 8 years already... programming is my hobby and never was a job, so I am in no way a professional, despite the term. I have came to Java about 7 months ago through Processing which interested me much. What else to say... ah, yes, sure, my favorite programming topic is game programming


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Holi: Give Your Family a Call During This Hindu Spring Festival
Keep-In-Touch with Your Friends and Family During Holi. Friends and family are one of the most important parts of everyone's life and Holi is a time to celebrate ...View More
"Since 1999, our calling cards have helped over 1 million people save on international phone calls."
Learn about why using calling cards and prepaid phone cards to make long distance phone calls is the smart thing to do. CallingCards.com will save you up to 95% on international long distance calls and help you stay connected with your friends and family.
Phone cards, or calling cards, are a prepaid method of making a long distance (domestic or international) call. ...continue
There are many reasons why you should use calling cards. Here are a few: ...continue
Each calling card has an toll-free 800 number, or local access number(s), provided for your access. ...continue
Pinless dialing is a free service that allows you to use your calling card without entering your pin number. ...continue
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We have created the glossary below to help you fully understand your calling card and all associated terms. ...continue
Explore the latest exciting articles from CallingCards.com. Learn about how to keep in touch with your family and friends during the holidays, vacations, and traveling adventures from around the world.
Keep-In-Touch with Your Friends and Family During Holi. Friends and family are one of the most important parts of everyone's life and Holi is a time to celebrate ...View More
A romantic getaway is a great way to enjoy your Valentine's Day together. The following are some ideas for amazing worldwide destinations couples can enjoy together.View More
This year we are celebrating the Year of the Rat on January 25, 2020. People born in the Year of the Rat are considered charming, creative, and hard-working.View More
See the best destinations around the world to enjoy the firework displays during the New Year celebration, like New York City, Sidney, Hong Kong and many more.View More
Christmas celebrations around the world reflect the local traditions and culture. The festivities from one country to the next can vary quite dramatically.View More
The following are some of the Thanksgiving and harvest festivals from around the world along with their methods for giving thanks like Canada, China, Germany and more.View More


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Veterinary Care: Specialty Hospitals in Sugar Land and Oak Ridge
Animal Speciality hospitals have Board Certified Specialists in many treatment areas including Radiology, Internal Medicine, Oncology, Orthopedics, Opthamalogy and more. Search here for one of the many Speciality Hospitals in Greater Houston to find the best healthcare for your pet.
Sugar Land Veterinary Specialists and Emergency Care
in Veterinary Care: Specialty Hospitals, Veterinary Care: Emergency Hospitals
Sugar Land Veterinary Specialists is a multi-disciplinary veterinary hospital which offers the highest quality veterinary care to your pets 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
1515 Lake Pointe Parkway
Sugar Land, Texas 77478
Review this
Fax: 281-491-7803


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text: Sliding Wardrobe Alaska 150cm – €349.00 Posted on 18 lutego, 2020 by admin Sliding Wardrobes with mirror on the front in the small size…. Trendy combinations of colors and functionality of the furniture will allow you to adjust the wardrobe to many interiors. The wardrobe has a sliding front which guarantees comfortable use of the furniture. The sliding door system used will facilitate household members' daily use. Perfectly suited to the bedroom, hallway. In the middle is divided into two parts equipped with shelves and a clothes rail. Height 200 cm Width 150 cm Depth 62 cm ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Delivery 2-4 weeks……The furniture is brand new, packed in the original packaging. Flat packed for self-assembly. Assembly service available on request – €80.00. The set includes a clear assembly instruction and all necessary elements Available in 2 combinations of colors White Matt Oak Sonoma white oak sonoma Wardrobe inside Alaska 150cm Alaska 100cm Alaska 150cm If you have any questions or wish to order one please fill out the order form below and we will get back to you with all details…. Name of the wardrobe Size in "CM" Color Your name Email address Delivery address Your contact number Eircode Additional information


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Here's an amazing series of pictures of Steve Jobs playing around with OS X's Photo Booth back in 2005. They're absolutely lovely, showing off a side of Jobs that so few of us knew. Good to see, on a day like this.
The pictures were taken in the office of Mike Matas, the creator of Delicious Library and former Apple employee (he's now at Facebook). Thank you for everything Steve and rest in peace. Check out the full photo reel here. [Mike Matas/Facebook]
You can keep up with Casey Chan, the author of this post, on Twitter or Facebook.


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The Best Classic Canadian Butter Tarts. There's a reason why we have a national obsession with these sweet, buttery, caramel-y tarts. I've sampled them in many places across the country and this thick pastry version is my favourite. Don't do the raisin debate, just leave them out if they are not your thing. Everyone should be able to enjoy them as they like them.
UPDATE MARCH 2019! The Best Canadian Butter Tarts is our newest recipe video!
Butter tarts are one of my all time favourite sweet treats and have been for many years. I don't often make them because, to be absolutely frank, I would not rest until I had eaten all of them!
Canadians love their butter tarts and I have had some fine examples in other parts of the country. I think the nod goes to Quebec for the best I've had though.
I can't tell you the numbers of these I've eaten over the years, driving along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River and stopping into little bakeries along the way to sample the local versions of this perfect little pastry. Here is my favorite version.
There is a great deal of debate about whether the filling should be firm or slightly runny. Most butter tart aficionados I know across Canada comedown on the runny side of the debate.
If you prefer the filling firmer, add an additional egg to the mix, and modify the corn syrup and brown sugar amounts as found in the NOTE added to this recipe. You may also want to bake them for just a few minutes longer.
Butter Tarts Update.
UPDATE May22, 2016: There is a considerable debate and sometimes geographical differences in what the preferred consistency of the centre of a butter tart should be. In a recent poll 60% of people said they preferred a runny centre as opposed to a firmer set one.
The argument for a firmer set centre is that it's less messy and easier to eat on the go. As with any recipe, I believe you should have them however you like them.
To that end, I've updated the NOTE in this recipe to include instructions to tweak the recipe for a set but still soft and delicious centre. I wouldn't turn down either one to be honest.
Please note that the photos of the set butter tarts below are made without raisins by request of my son…but lets not start another debate about that! Just get on with making them how you like.
NEW! Loaded Butter Tarts Recipe here. Classic butter tarts loaded with nuts, raisins, chocolate and coconut. Ultimately decadent!
For another Canadian tart treat check out my copycat version of Tim Horton's classic Strawberry TimTart.
Like this Classic Canadian Butter Tarts recipe?
You'll find hundreds of other sweet ideas in our Cakes & Pies Category and even more in our Desserts Category.
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Rock Recipes a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Our product recommendations are almost exclusively for those we currently use or have used in the past.
The Best Classic Canadian Butter Tarts
The Best Classic Canadian Butter Tarts - there's a reason why we have a national obsession with these sweet, buttery, caramel-y tarts. I've sampled them in many places across the country and this thick pastry version is my favorite. Don't do the raisin debate, just leave them out if they are not your thing. Everyone should be able to enjoy them as they like them.
For the Pastry
- 2 ¼ cups flour, pastry flour is best to use but all-purpose will do
- 1 tbsp brown sugar
- ½ tsp salt
- 1/2 cup shortening, Very cold and cut in cubes
- 1/2 cup butter, Very cold and cut in cubes
- 6 tbsp ice water, approximately, enough to bring the dough together
For the Filling
- 1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup corn syrup
- 1/4 cup butter, melted
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp salt
- ½ cup raisins, substituting, pecans, walnuts or chocolate chips also make good variations
To prepare the pastry
- Pulse the cold butter and shortening into the flour sugar and salt using a food processor until the shortening or butter is reduced to pea sized pieces.
- Sprinkle the water over the surface and toss with a fork until the water is just incorporated into the dough. Do not over work the dough; handle it only enough so that the dough stays together.
- Form the dough into two rounds about an inch thick.
- Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest in the fridge for about a half hour.
- Roll out on lightly floured surface. Cut into rounds with 4 inch cutter. Fit into muffin cups. Chill in the fridge or freezer while you prepare the filling. Cold pastry heading into a hot oven will always be flakier.
To make the filling
- Combine all filling ingredients except raisins.
- Mix well.
- Sprinkle raisins in a single layer in the bottom of the pastry lined muffin cups.
- Fill 2/3 full with syrup mixture.
- Bake on bottom shelf of oven at 425 degrees F for 12 to 15 minutes.
- Cool completely on a wire rack and remove tarts from from pans.
There is considerable debate about whether the filling in a butter tart should be runny or firm. Preferences vary, especially geographically but if you want a firmer, less runny filling simply add an additional egg, increase the brown sugar to 3/4 cup and decrease the corn syrup to 1/4 cup.
The nutritional information provided is automatically calculated by third party software and is meant as a guideline only. Exact accuracy is not guaranteed. For recipes where all ingredients may not be used entirely, such as those with coatings on meats, or with sauces or dressings for example, calorie & nutritional values per serving will likely be somewhat lower than indicated.
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Rock Recipes a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Our product recommendations are almost exclusively for those we currently use or have used in the past.
Nutrition Information
Serving Sizelarge butter tart
Amount Per Serving Calories 529Total Fat 28gSaturated Fat 14gTrans Fat 0gUnsaturated Fat 12gCholesterol 54mgSodium 358mgCarbohydrates 65gFiber 2gSugar 26gProtein 6g


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In Pokemon Gold and Silver, the ability to have custom made Pokeballs fashioned was introduced. Crystal goes a step further and allows you to have multiple balls crafted at once. After rescuing the Azalea Town Slowpokes, Kurt will reward you with a Quick Ball and the offer to make you more specialty Pokeballs if you bring him Apricorns. Below is a list of what can be made, what Apricorns are needed, and where to find them.
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$9.89 $10.99
You are looking at a 100% cotton fabric which is 36" by 44" wide. Designed by Springs Creative Products. The perfect cotton for all your sewing needs including clothing and quilting. We operate in a smoke free environment. All fabric purchased is shipped within 24-72 hours of payment unless noted by a rare away message on our listings or a holiday delay. Should you have any questions or concerns with your order, please let us know.
Washing Instructions
-Machine wash cold.
-Non-chlorine bleach.
-Tumble dry low.
-Iron as needed.
- 1/4 yards (9" x 44")
- 1/3 yards (12" x 44")
- 1/2 yards (18" x 44")
- 1 yards (36" x 44")
- 1.5 yards (54" x 44")
- 2 yards (72" x 44")
Note: Want more than 2 yards? That's easy! Simply order whatever quantity you'd like by using the options available. So, for example if you want 6 yards, simply choose the "2 yard option" and change quantity to "3". (2yds x qty 3 = 6 yards!) We will always cut in one continuous cut when possible. If it is a requirement for it to be in one cut, simply enter a note when ordering. We always read our notes and will contact you if we have any questions.)
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1 business day
I'll do my best to meet these shipping estimates, but can't guarantee them. Actual delivery time will depend on the shipping method you choose.
Buyers are responsible for any customs and import taxes that may apply. I'm not responsible for delays due to customs.
But please contact me if you have any problems with your order.
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All items that are "in stock" in our shop will ship within 1 business day The exception to this answer would be holiday/vacations (this will appear on my store's announcement) or "Pre-Order" items. Please check the listing for any "pre-order" items as that will have the "ship on or before" date. This can be found in the title and also in the actual listing.
Yes, orders will be in one continuous cut unless it states otherwise in the listing (example "end of bolts", " 1 yard cut" or "remnant pieces". etc). If you do order several yards of the same item and if a continuous cut cannot be made, we will notify you. You'll be able to either approve the order or we will simply cancel/refund the item for you.
No, we do not accept returns. All sales are final.
I usually process orders very quickly, usually within a matter of hours of receiving the order. Once, it's been processed, postage paid and in the mail, we're unable to change your address.
You choose the item you want to select. In the drop down choose the size desired and then adjust the quantity. It will be cut as one continuous piece if possible. Please note listings that state "single cut yard only" or "remnant" pieces are excluded.
The shipping prices have been perfected based on previous sales. So, short answer: No. I do suppose if you ended ordering a lot of 1/4 yd items, the shipping can get out of control. If that's the case, message me prior to buying and we can discuss shipping.
Canada orders will be charged a flat rate of $15 for shipping on the first item and $2.50 per item thereafter. If shipping is substantial higher, I'll contact the buyer and inform them of the proper shipping. If we don't agree on shipping, then the order will be canceled and refunded.
Pre-Order items usually are brand new fabric that has yet been released by the manufacture. That means it's not in stores yet. I have a whole section dedicated to pre-order items only. It's pretty straight forward and properly listed and stated. Please check the listing carefully as to when the "ship date" is.
Yes, on full bolt purchases of the same item (these are special orders). I offer higher discounts if you buy the whole genre of in stock fabrics.
I only allow 72 hours cancellation after placing the preorder item. After that I have a strict no cancellation/refund policy. All listings are properly stated if it's a pre order, backorder, reorder items and it explains that and gives an expected ship date. Please keep in mind that I only sell fabric and do not manufacture it and I am not responsible for delays in production. I will allow a cancellation/refund on a case by case basis if it is delayed beyond 30 days from the listed date on the listing.
Nov 4, 2019
Super cute fabric. Fast shipping. Happy with my purchase and will order again in the future.


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From the time I began reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries some 60 years ago as a teenager, I was fascinated by how Wolfe and his irrepressible sidekick and chronicler, Archie Goodwin, happened to join forces. We don't know the answer in Mr. Stout's compelling mysteries because when Wolfe and Goodwin appear in their first novel, "Fer-de-Lance" (1934), there is no back story and little detail about their previous lives.
This fascination with the beginnings of the partnership continued when I became privileged to be the family-approved continuator of the Wolfe series after Mr. Stout's death in 1975. During the 1980s and '90s, I was author of seven Nero Wolfe mysteries for Bantam Books but never delved into the origins of the team. Still, I remained intrigued by the possibility of some day writing about how Archie came to meet Nero.
I became further enthused about the idea in 2009 with the publication of longtime mystery novelist Joe Gores' "Spade & Archer," a prequel to Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon." Mr. Gores, who died in 2011, had captured the essence of Hammett's characters and the noir flavor of his writing and his settings.
That sealed the deal for me, and I began to form what was to become "Archie Meets Nero Wolfe." In developing the story, I made use of what few clues Mr. Stout had sprinkled around in his tales, including a brief reference to the kidnapping of a wealthy hotelier's son. That kidnapping became a central focus of my book, along with young Archie Goodwin's coming of age as a detective in the Manhattan of 1930.
Approved by Mr. Stout's estate, "Archie Meets Nero Wolfe" will be released this fall, both in print and as an e-book, by Mysterious Press and its longtime head, Otto Penzler. Mysterious Press also will be re-releasing my seven earlier Wolfe novels as e-books. For me, working with Mr. Penzler seems fitting, because it was at his Mysterious Bookshop in New York that I had the launch of my first Nero Wolfe novel, "Murder in E Minor," 28 years ago.