XY. Perhaps the General Counsel for OXY is concerned that a government bid may become mired in litigation. The questions above might all be the foundation for more than one party filing suit to block Wyoming from getting the land. Can OXY or Wyoming withstand a challenge over statutory and constitutional issues? Can OXY risk their business over the time that might be spent in court versus selling it to someone other than Wyoming, who could close the deal faster? OXY does not have to be transparent, but does Wyoming Executive Branch Elected Officials have to be transparent?
As always Mr. Graham does a good job covering the news, or in this case, lack thereof.
We should be paying attention to the Occidental side of the poker table.
The company is entertaining a serious bid to sell itself lock, stock and 55 gallon barrel to Pertamina, the state owned oil company from Indonesia that also has assets in Africa and the Middle East. Other investors are interested in swooping up Oxy. That would include its huge debt… Occidental very foolishly overextended itself and bought Anadarko Petroleum last year ( formerly big in Wyoming) for $ 32 billion and is struggling to pay the debt service, let alone principal, even though Warren Buffet significantly increased his ownership in Oxy in February before the global oil stock crash. Buffet should have waited a few months and bought stock at the lowball price. And here we are.
Yes, Occidental is shopping itself around, and the stakes are high. I personally do not believe the State of Wyoming can afford to invest in fossil fuels and fossil mineral rights or surface land of questionable intinsic attributes. The transaction favors the Seller ( motivation ) not the buyer ( desparation ). It’s a huge gamble.
Conducting a needs assessment.
Weighing the costs and benefits of those options to make a decision.
Contracting and implementation.
By following these steps, learning leaders will be better positioned to purchase the learning technology that best suits their organization’s needs.
The second phase of the learning technology life cycle involves sustaining and supporting the technology through regular maintenance, updates and appropriate integrations, and reviewing and executing security measures as needed. Although this process requires an extensive time commitment, it’s worth the investment, as it ensures an organization’s learning technologies continue to function at their highest capacity.
Archiving records: Learning leaders should create a copy of records contained within the technology they’re retiring. This step is especially critical for compliance, safety and regulatory courses or programs, as the loss of records could pose legal, monetary and/or safety risks.
Mapping Impact: Learning leaders should outline the impact a technology’s retirement will have on its current users and administrators by determining who is using the system and how they’re using it.
Making a Plan: After mapping impact, learning leaders can determine how to retire a learning technology and/or transition to a new one. Creating a concrete plan helps minimize rework and wasted efforts, creating an efficient retirement process.
Executing Your Plan: Deploying a retirement plan and executing the technology replacement completes the learning technology life cycle.
Managing learning technologies throughout the lifecycle can be complex. needs assessment can help you explore your role in managing learning technologies.
Depends, do you want an exact 5 ft cube of flawless marble, or just any old big rock? For the latter, just as much as it would cost for a bunch of dudes to move it from where they got it to the buyer, plus some extra for profit. Though that might be a bit of an endeavor as a 5 ft sphere of rock is gonna weigh somewhere in the ballpark of 10,000 lbs, and an exact cube roughly twice that, so you'd need a specialized crew with a crane and a reinforced wagon pulled by a large team of oxen. And if we are talking about some fancy marble, then cost of material is actually going to matter as well.New Products from Casio
The brand-new CT–X line of portable keyboards boasts AiX (Acoustic & Intelligent multi-Expression), Casio’s next generation sound source, which is eight times more powerful than Casio‘s current portables.
Some features from the new series include: 600 tones, 195 rhythms and a new System Delay DSP in the CT-X700; while the CT-X3000 and CT-X5000 are equipped with 800 tones, 235 rhythms, 64 note polyphony, tone editing and a phrase recorder with four pads. The new series offers a re-designed chassis, in addition to enhanced speaker systems.
Casio’s latest portable keyboards are outfitted with Casio’s Step-up Lesson System which enable beginners to learn built-in songs, phase-by-phase, at their own individual pace. The CT-X700 (MSRP: $259.99), CT-X800 (MSRP$: 299.99), CT-X3000 (MSRP: $419.99), and CT-X5000 (MSRP: $799.99) keyboards will be available at select music dealers nationwide in early 2018.
Casio’s new Celviano AP-470 digital piano boasts a redesigned cabinet with all of the controls located on the side panel. The cabinet includes a top panel that can be manually raised and lowered. The lid’s position not only physically affects the sound coming from the speakers, but also works in conjunction with the “Lid Position” setting to accurately duplicate the characteristics of the adjustable lid on an acoustic grand piano. This new model is also equipped with an 88-key Tri-Sensor Scaled Hammer Action Keyboard with simulated ebony and ivory textured keys to reproduce the touch feeling of an acoustic piano while the scaled weighted action keyboard provides the depth and integrity of an acoustic piano. The AP-470 also offers 22 tones including a New York Grand Piano, a Key Mechanical Noise Simulation, new String Resonance System from, and an upgraded 40-watt speaker system. The AP-470 (MSRP: $1,499) will all be available at select music dealers nationwide in early 2018.Part of the fun of fiction is escaping the constraints of normality. Although readers value consistency and authenticity in the worlds we construct, we have to be careful not to allow these concerns to squelch our creativity. This week’s guest blogger Caroline Fardig offers advice on walking that tightrope, drawn from her experience as an author of both cozy and forensic procedural mysteries.
Believability—How Much Can We Stretch Reality and Get Away With It?
My agent, Ethan Ellenberg, once told me that if you can get the reader sucked into a good story, it’s okay for believability to take a backseat. I agree wholeheartedly, and in my writing I’m always stretching the limits of what “real” people would actually do in a given situation. That said, you can’t exactly introduce a family of sparkly, angsty vampires into your psychological thriller and expect your readers to go along with it. Yes, writing fiction gives us certain liberties, but you still have to play by the rules of your genre.
In any genre, you want to create characters who come to life for your readers. They should have faults as well as redeeming qualities, and you can exaggerate those traits, but only up to a certain point. For example, maybe your main character is a curmudgeonly, hard-nosed cop, never passing a chance to offer up a gruff comment or a fiery retort. You can play that to the hilt. However, he has to have a softer side; otherwise, he won’t seem real (or likeable).
Humans are complex, and characters with layers to their personalities are much more lifelike than one-dimensional caricatures, and thus believable. If your character seems dependable and real, you can stretch the boundaries of what they are able to do, like when the fate of the world hangs in the balance and only one person has the power to save it.
With mysteries, it depends on your specific genre as to how much of a stickler you need to be for accurate investigational procedure and forensics. In cozies, you’re never going to have a decomposing body lying in a pool of bodily waste with blowflies circling it. It’s just not done.
On the flip side, in a more hard-boiled detective novel, you’re not going to find dead Aunt Martha posed peacefully in her favorite chair and still smelling like roses after being dead for a day or two.
Case in point, in my upcoming humorous cozy, Mug Shot, the heroine lands herself in jail for a minor infraction. She’s thrown in the drunk tank, which is co-ed, and hilarity ensues. Do men and women ever get locked up together in the same cell in real life? Not likely. But when I asked my friend Rick Reed (a detective-turned-author and yearly Killer Nashville presenter) if he thought it was too unbelievable, he said I should go for it.
 Would I do the same thing in the forensic procedural I’m currently writing? Heck, no!
In fact, I am so intent that my grittier mystery series is believable, I’ve taken two criminology classes at my local college. My forensics professor also works as a firearms and tool mark specialist for the Indiana State Police Crime Lab, so for one of the class sessions, we got to tour the local lab facility and speak with all of the criminologists on staff. Both classes had a lot of guest speakers, so I was able to make connections with law enforcement officials who have been more than willing to answer my