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Thinking that maybe my main character may be quirked, I went back to Povar and created a new toon. Logged it in, no response from the Collector. Normally it says:
Setting up session: Client port 65492, Server port 1413. SKey is 0x0dac4068.
Processing player inventory.
Processing player inventory.
But for Povar, it does not. I even tried another account. I can log onto characters on other servers and the collector finds them but not if the character is on Povar.

subset: commoncrawl


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Vieira: Pogba ahead of me at same age
Patrick Vieira believes that Juventus prodigy Paul Pogba is more advanced as a player than the former Arsenal great was at the same age.
• Pogba 'flattered' by PSG link
Pogba, 21, moved to Turin in 2012 after failing to break into the Manchester United first team. Since then he has made good on the potential that made him one of Europe's most sought-after talents when he was a young player at Le Havre's youth academy.
Pogba has already established himself in the France national team, and his dynamic midfield displays for Les Bleus have seen parallels drawn between himself and Vieira, who was part of France's 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000-winning squads.
Vieira, a three-time Premier League champion with Arsenal who left the Londoners in 2005 to join Juve, said Pogba is a more complete player than he was at the same stage of his career, which coincided with his early years in England.
"He's more technical and more at ease with the ball than I was at the same age," Vieira told beIN SPORTS. "It's easier for him to go forward. I was more concerned with defensive duties. He's more attack-minded, and takes part more in the team's play."
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On December 21, 2013—the summer or winter solstice, depending on your hemisphere—the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite acquired this natural-color image. Off the Pacific coast of Peru, a rainbow-like optical effect known as a "glory" added a splash of color amidst the gray and white fluff of marine stratocumulus clouds.
For viewers on or near Earth's surface, glories are occasionally visible as concentric rings of color in thin clouds or in fog. They appear in the opposite direction from the Sun as light is scattered backwards (diffraction) through airborne water droplets toward the viewer. The ring is centered around a point or shadow.
A similar phenomenon is sometimes visible from space, though a quick look at Earth Observatory's image archives shows that space-viewed glories are not necessarily circular. To acquire images like the one above, the MODIS instrument scans the Earth in swaths perpendicular to the path of the satellite. The swaths are horizontal cross sections through the rings of the glory, so it appears instead as two elongated bands of color that run parallel to the path of the satellite.
The clouds in this image "are a pretty good example of 'closed cell' marine stratocumulus," writes Joe Munchak, an atmospheric scientist based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "These are typified by large regions of weak ascending air (forming the clouds) surrounded by narrow regions of descending air—the thin lines of clear air or thinner clouds surrounding the cells."
Further Reading
- Atmospheric Optics About Glories. Accessed December 31, 2013.
- Comstock, K.K., Yuter, S.E., Wood, R., and Bretherton, C.S. (2007) The Three-Dimensional Structure and Kinematics of Drizzling Stratocumulus. Monthly Weather Review, 135, 3767–3784.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. Caption by Michael Carlowicz.
- Instrument(s):
- Terra - MODIS


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Ahead of its formal media debut at the Paris Motor Show on September 30, Mercedes has released more photos of its most emotionally styled sedan, the CLS. The public days follow on October 2 – 17.
While abandoning some of the flowing and rounded look of the original, the new flagship is trying to straddle the opposing fences of automotive design – curves versus angles.
Auto design has been in this cycle for decades, if not forever. Round it off, then square it off or combine the two – repeat.
The four-door coupe, of course, maintains its signature frame-less side glass and longitudinal accent lines that soar from front to rear, in an unacknowledged tribute to Detroit stylists who perfected the four-coupe coupe look in the 1950s, the Golden Age of American automobiles.
And there is nothing new under the German sun either, starting with the Benz 's recently exaggerated or over-sized tri-star on the grille, the long nose that sweeps back into a reclined windshield followed by the a low roof that recedes into a truncated trunk lid.
But the CLS is not about practicality, of course – rear head or trunk room are secondary to the look, one that was so successful that is being pursued by virtually all automakers in their current or future portfolios, from the Buick LaCrosse to various Jaguars, to Hyundai's Sonata and the Volkswagen CC, to name but a few. Cadillac stands alone in pursuing purer angles.
The interior of the new CLS has been upgraded, too, in a distinct departure with classic design, it echoes the current and widely copied German clichés by eschewing wood in the signature show car in favor of carbon fiber panels and cold Teutonic tones and chrome cues that could also be used on modern bathroom fixtures or Braun and Bosch appliances. On reflection, they in fact already are.
However, the latest interior shot released today shows lighter tones and wood accents as well in at least one version – a good thing in my view because the higher beltline will produce a cave-like effect inside.


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The Queen and Prince Dauntless (Maddie Nelson and Michael Cahow) in a scene from the South Tama High School Drama Department presentation of Once Upon a Mattress. The musical takes the stage under the direction of Chris McFate on Nov. 7, 8 and 9 at 7:30 p.m. in the Little Theatre.
Article Photos
News-Herald/John Speer


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Inside Slant
Inside Slant
Saints cornerback Fred Thomas will be a man on a mission when the team reports for training camp on July 28 and begins practice one day later.
Actually, the 10-year veteran has been on a mission since the end of the 2004 season, a nightmare of a year in which nagging injuries cost him the starting job he had held for 3 1/2 seasons.
Thomas is determined to show the starting spot is still his after being relegated to the nickel and dime alignments following the team's acquisition of Mike McKenzie in a trade with the Green Bay Packers last October.
But Thomas isn't blaming anything on McKenzie, who came in and led the team with five interceptions in just 11 games and solidified a secondary that showed great improvement during a four-game winning streak to close out the season.
"I feel like I shortchanged this team and my teammates last year," Thomas said. "It's one of those seasons that you have to bounce back from. One of those years you want to show isn't typical for you."
Thomas started only seven games last year and had 52 tackles and no interceptions after registering a career-high 99 tackles and a team-high four interceptions in starting 14 games in 2003.
Foot and ankle injuries and personal problems that he would not elaborate on combined to wreck his 2004 season, Thomas said, and he's worked hard this spring and summer to make sure it doesn't happen again.
"Anybody who knows me knows that was not what you should expect from me," he said.
It all started when he injured his right foot in the team's second exhibition game at Green Bay. The injury to his toes, ball of the foot and ankle hindered him all year although he didn't make excuses.
"There were certain times I was limping during games," Thomas said. "I play on my toes, so it hurt me when I set or cut. I tried to compensate for it, but sometimes it put me in bad positions."
He's still not 100 percent, but Thomas continued his rehab day after day this spring and he said he didn't miss a single workout on the field during the team's strength and conditioning work and coaching sessions.
"Being a 10-year veteran, you'd think I don't have to prove anything," Thomas said. "But I know that's not the case. I know I have to prove everything all over again this year.
"I think this year, you'll see a very, very improved Fred Thomas," he added. "I'm sure of that."
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According to the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. With the death rate in Kentucky agriculture two to three times higher than the national average it is easily understood why farm safety awareness is important.
Ag Awareness Day at LaRue County High School offers a chance for 8th graders to learn farm safety and general agricultural awareness from FFA students.
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Robot controls a person's arm using electrodes
November 17, 2011
A robot that can control both its own arm and a person's arm to manipulate objects in a collaborative manner has been developed by Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics (LIRMM) researchers, IEEE Spectrum Automation reports.
The robot controls the human limb by sending small electrical currents to electrodes taped to the person's forearm and biceps, which allows the robot to command the elbow and hand to move. In the experiment, the person holds a ball, and the robot holds a hoop; the robot, a small humanoid, has to coordinate the movement of both human and robot arms to successfully drop the ball through the hoop.
The researchers say their goal is to develop robotic technologies that can help people suffering from paralysis and other disabilities to regain some of their motor skills.


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Soy Allergy Alert: Wegmans Mini Muffins
Wegmans is recalling 4,327 units of Wegmans brand APPLE CINNAMON Mini Muffins, Net Wt. 14 oz., because the product contains undeclared soy. People who have an allergy to soy run the risk of serious or life-threatening allergic reaction if they consume this product.
The Mini Muffins were distributed to 82 Wegmans stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts, and sold between September 7, 2013 and September 19, 2013.
The Mini Muffins were sold in a plastic clamshell container with the UPC 77890 18951. All date codes up to and including "Best if used by 9/24/13" are being recalled.
There have been no injuries or illnesses reported to date.
The recall was initiated by Wegmans Food Markets following their own routine ingredient/label review process where it was discovered that soy was not declared on the label.
Consumers who purchased the product can return it to the service desk at their Wegmans store for a full refund. Consumers with questions may contact Wegmans Consumer Affairs Department at 1-855-934-3663, Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm ET.
Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. is an 82-store supermarket chain with stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts. The family-owned company, founded in 1916, is recognized as an industry leader and innovator. Wegmans has been named one of the '100 Best Companies to Work For' by FORTUNE magazine for sixteen consecutive years. In 2013, Wegmans ranked #5 on the list.


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A distinguished professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Champaign, Robert McChesney has been a largely under-recognized writer (outside of specialists in the area), educator and activist about the dangers of corporation consolidation controlling the media and stifling democracy.
Not confined to the ivory tower, McChesney was a co-founder of the vitally important FreePress.net. He also had hosted a radio program for many years discussing media democracy.
McChesney has been an unrelenting and enlightened critic of the nefarious influence of corporate profits on a press that enhances democracy. In the excerpt from his newest book, "Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy," McChesney warns of the looming danger of a corporate controlled and censored Internet.
In this "Digital Disconnect" excerpt, provided courtesy of McChesney and The New Press, he writes of the growing corrupting influence of advertising on the net. It goes a long way in providing compelling background for why Truthout and BuzzFlash do not accept advertising of any sort.
Support Truthout's mission. "Digital Disconnect" is yours with a minimum donation to Truthout of $32.50 (which includes shipping and handling) or a monthly donation of $15. Click here.
Our Master's Voice—Loud and Clear?
In 1934 journalist and ex-adman James Rorty's seminal work, Our Master's Voice: Advertising, was published. This was a historical moment when advertising was relatively unpopular and more than a little controversial. Reformers were marshaling widespread antipathy to broadcast advertising in their campaign to establish a large nonprofit and noncommercial sector in American radio. Radio inventor Lee DeForest so detested broadcast advertising and its "moronic fare" that in the early 1930s he attempted to invent a device that would automatically mute radio advertisements and then return the volume to audible levels when the programming resumed. The consumer movement, as Inger L. Stole has chronicled, organized campaigns for federal laws that would provide rigorous regulation of advertising so that it would provide accurate and useful information to consumers, not propaganda to confuse them. Rorty's jeremiad against his former profession ultimately came down to one crucial point: advertising was the voice of corporations and the wealthy who owned them; its ultimate effect was to spawn a culture that cemented their power. In particular, its role as paying the piper gave the masters control over the very media system a free people required to address corporate power.
This radical critique of advertising and the attendant political movements receded from public view in the postwar decades, but advertising remained largely suspect, fodder for comedy due to its insincerity, absurdity, and asininity, as piles of Mad magazines or parodies on Saturday Night Live attest. Meanwhile, considerable scholarship examined the dubious contribution of advertising to the content of American entertainment and journalism. When the Internet emerged, the notion that it would be a distinctly noncommercial space was uncontroversial and widely embraced. I was there and I can tell you that in the early 1990s no one was bellyaching about a lack of advertising on the Internet, or a shortage of advertising anywhere else for that matter.
But the notion of a commercial-free Internet was quickly challenged in the 1990s on two fronts. First, major advertising corporations, Rorty's "masters," were alarmed by the idea that they could not effectively market their products to prospective consumers online. Procter & Gamble CEO Edwin Artzt had the "chilling thought," as Joseph Turow chronicles in his superb book The Daily You, "that emerging technologies were giving people the opportunity to escape from advertising's grasp altogether." By the mid-1990s, Artzt had made this a central concern, and he implored major advertisers to respond to the threat of the Internet in the same way advertising had conquered previous media: "Let's grab all this new technology in our teeth once again and turn it into a bonanza for advertising."
One way to make the Internet more ad-friendly would be to support the creation of technical standards for cookies, small files secretly downloaded to users' computers that would make it possible to track Internet users surreptitiously and create profiles of their activities so as to segment them for marketing. Websites could then "quietly determine the number of separate individuals entering various parts of their domains and clicking on their ads. The counterculture types at the Internet Society's Internet Engineering Task Force had an adverse reaction, offering a proposal that cookies "should be shut off unless someone decides they're willing to accept them." This standards battle became the first policy fight over advertising. As one ad industry executive said, "What concerns us is the tone of the proposal, which is that advertising is not good for us, so we want to avoid it." Netscape and Microsoft bowed to the commercial pressures in designing their Web browsers. Though scholars, activists, and Internet purists expressed alarm about invasions of privacy, in one fell swoop, the nature and logic of the Internet had been turned on its head—though it would not be fully apparent for at least a decade.
But this still did not solve the problem. Most of the corporate advertising done online in the late 1990s was ineffectual. One expert termed the clickthrough rates on Internet ads as "miserable," less than one half of one percent. Maybe the idealists were right and the Internet simply was not going to be a sales medium because users could not be held hostage.
The second factor behind the drive to make advertising effective online was the need to have a source of revenue for online content and services. The idea of converting the computers into vending machines and having a pay-per-view system was unrealistic for the foreseeable future. On the one hand, the Internet founders would never approve such a radical change in the system, nor would the public, as it had already tasted the openness of the Web. On the other hand, if websites tried to sell access to their content, usage tracking quickly established that most Internet users would ignore those sites and move on to the infinite world of free content. A handful of prominent brands like the Wall Street Journal or ESPN might make a go of it, but for everyone else, fuhgetaboutit. As all the other alternatives stepped backward, advertising was left as the only answer to the question of how the commercial Internet could be funded. The emergence of widespread broadband early in the 2000s helped the cause a lot; now advertising could use compelling audiovisual messages as on television. Tools for surreptitious monitoring, like cookies, were augmented and dramatically improved. But the problem remained: how to get people to pay attention to and respond to the commercials; all hands were summoned to the task. "The best minds of my generation," an early Facebook employee told The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, "are thinking about how to make people click ads."
The great development in recent years has been the emergence of advertising that targets people based upon detailed information gleaned surreptitiously from their Internet activities. "What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone," Eli Pariser wrote in 2011, "is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data." U.S. Internet advertising totaled $40 billion in 2012—topping the total amount going to all print media for the first time—and was expected to increase to as much as $60 billion in 2014 and then $80 billion annually by 2016. Borrell Associates estimates that ads placed on mobile apps will increase from $1.25 billion in 2011 to $21.2 billion in 2016. (The United States accounts for just under one half of global Internet advertising.) Internet advertising is on an explosive trajectory to gobble up an ever increasing portion of all advertising expenditures for the foreseeable future, and television advertising, to the extent it remains distinct, is becoming much more like Internet advertising.
Nothing exemplifies this emergence of advertising on the Internet more than the meteoric rise of Google. Google search advertising accounts for one half of all U.S. Internet advertising revenues—the other type of online advertising is called display advertising—and Google generated $36 billion in global ad revenue in 2011. It has taken the logic of commercial broadcasting—"If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold"—and elevated it to unimagined heights. Or, as Bruce Schneier puts it, "Google has great customer service. Problem is, you're not the customer." With scores of distinct Internet services collecting data on people online, Google can target advertising as no other firm has ever been able to do.
Except for Facebook. Beyond the hubbub surrounding its dramatic 2012 IPO, with its equally dramatic ascension and decline, something extraordinaryis occurring with social media. Facebook is "more than the world's largest social network, it is a fast-churning data machine that captures and processes every click and interaction on its platform." By 2011 Facebook became the first website with a trillion page views in a month. More than half of its more than one billion users check it every day; in America half of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds check it within minutes of waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. Americans spend, on average, 20 percent of their online time exclusively on Facebook. In a single day, 300 million photographs are uploaded; on the weekend, the figure jumps to 750 million. "Facebook will have more traffic than anyone else, and they'll have more data than anyone else," one investment analyst observed in 2012. "So, unless they are impervious to learning how to monetize that data, they should be the most valuable property on the Internet, eventually." Corporate America is excited to burrow its way into this mother lode of data. "We're going to get a ton of new ideas," Frito-Lay's North American chief marketing officer stated. "Facebook is unilaterally redefining the social contract," Lori Andrews writes, "making the private now public and the public now private."
The digital advertising industry goes far beyond Google and Facebook. Turow documents how Madison Avenue ad agencies have been reconfigured so that media buying, once the somewhat perfunctory function of locating media to place ads, has become arguably the most important part of the operation. Moreover, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL have each established advertising networks to place advertising on websites. This Big Four accounted for 28 percent of online display ad revenue in 2008.
Gathering as much information as possible on Internet users and knowing where to reach them online is the key to securing ad dollars. Turow calls it "one of history's most massive efforts in stealth marketing." Our era has come to be "epitomized by Big Data," a report in The Guardian states. "Personal data is the oil of the information age," writes a New York Times reporter. "Every day most if not all Americans who use the Internet," Turow notes, "are being quietly peeked at, poked, analyzed, and tagged as they move through the online world."The online advertising industry, says Jeff Chester, has turned the Internet into "a digital data vacuum cleaner on steroids."
And it's not just Google or Facebook or the ISP cartel tracking people. "Your smooth new iPhone knows exactly where you go, whom you call, what you read," Pariser writes. "With its built-in microphone, gyroscope, and GPS, it can tell whether you're walking or in a car or at a party." Two investigative reporters for ProPublica concluded their examination of smartphones by writing, "Let's stop calling them phones. They are trackers." A 2010 Wall Street Journal investigation of 101 smartphone apps for Apple iPhone and Android found that 56 of these apps "transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness; 47 transmitted the phone's location in some way," and 5 sent "age, gender and other personal details to outsiders." On the Internet, the Wall Street Journal concluded, businesses know immense amounts about individuals, who remain "anonymous in name only."
In fact, it is more accurate to say that the Internet is swarming with mostly anonymous and unaccountable companies tracking anything that moves. The Wall Street Journal examination determined that the top fifty websites in the United States installed, on average, sixty-four pieces of tracking technology on the computers of visitors. In 2012 The Atlantic's Madrigal investigated who exactly was monitoring his online activities over a thirty-six-hour period. He discovered there were 105 companies that were tracking him and collecting data. Many of the companies were collecting the data to sell to other companies. "Right now," he concluded, "a huge chunk of what you've ever looked at on the Internet is sitting in databases all across the world." What individual anonymity that remains is little consolation to Madrigal. "The results of this process are ineluctable. Left to their own devices, ad tracking firms will eventually be able to connect your various data selves. And then they will break down the name wall, if they are allowed to." A month after Microsoft purchased Skype in 2011, Microsoft patented a "legal intercept" technology that could "silently copy" every communication done on VOiP services like Skype. Microsoft refuses to say whether the technology is integrated into Skype's architecture.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger regards this as nothing less than a "redistribution of information power from the powerless to the powerful." The greatest fear of Schneier's—arguably the leading global expert on computer security—is not cyberterrorism, cybercrime, identity theft, WikiLeaks, or illegal downloads of music and Hollywood films. According to the New York Times, it is "ubiquitous surveillance" conducted by "private companies and government agencies advancing their own interests, whether for surveillance or commerce." "You need to know one simple truth," investigative journalist David Rosen wrote after a detailed examination of the subject: "You have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications. Nothing you do online, via a wireline telephone or over a wireless device is outside the reach of government security agencies and private corporations." "Given enough data, intelligence and power," one technology journalist said, "corporations and governments can connect dots in ways that only previously existed in science fiction." Need it be added that this was invariably dystopian science fiction?
This may be the great Achilles' heel of the Internet under capitalism: the money comes from surreptitiously violating any known understanding of privacy. The business model for Google and Facebook, and to a certain extent for all Internet firms, as Jaron Lanier put it, requires "a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable." As the New York Times's Keller puts it, the challenge these firms face is "how to sell us on without creeping us out." This is not an issue the Internet giants are keen to open up for public discussion or debate, and for good reason. When Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) held a privacy hearing in 2010, she was astounded to learn how the Internet actually functioned. "I understand that advertising supports the Internet, but I am a little spooked out," she said. "This is creepy." An industry consultant acknowledged that as marketers pushed ever further into the data, there was an "ick factor."
Polling data confirms widespread antipathy to online attacks on privacy. A 2008 survey by Consumer Reports found that "93 percent thought Internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information, and 72 percent wanted the right to opt out of online tracking." A 2009 study by Princeton Survey Research Associates found that 69 percent thought the United States should adopt a law "giving people the right to learn everything a website knows about them." A 2012 survey of U.S. smartphone users found 94 percent consider online privacy an important issue and 55 percent say it is something they think of often. Sixty-two percent of respondents were aware they were being tracked by advertisers—though not necessarily aware of the extent of the tracking—but only 1 percent "liked" being surreptitiously pursued. Turow has conducted a series of surveys over the past seven years and generated similar results. He found that "unlike what many have suggested, attitudes toward privacy expressed by American young adults (age eighteen to twenty-four) are not nearly so different from older adults." In short, young people immersed in smartphones and social media want their privacy too. If the will of people were honored, Internet advertising as it has evolved might be effectively ended. The Internet giants "sell this extremely creepy intrusion as a great boon to your life because they can tailor services to your needs," a legal expert in privacy and computer crime told the New York Times in 2012. "But do most people want to give that much away? No."
The system appears safe from political challenge, however, and the polling data offers a good part of the answer there too. Surveys reveal spectacular ignorance by most Americans about what is actually occurring to them and their data online. Turow calls the ignorance level "distressing" and notes that it is worse among younger people and that it has not improved with increased exposure to the Internet. Only a small number of people are aware, for example, that over half of the roughly 84 data categories Facebook collects about its users are not available for them to see. One source estimates that only 29 percent of the information Facebook possesses on any given user is available through the site's tools. Nor is there any right under U.S. law to ask a company to hand over the information it holds on you. When a person follows the online protocol to opt out and thinks she has stopped data tracking, she has stopped getting targeted ads from only the one specific company. Data tracking continues unabated and there is no way to stop being tracked online. In part, these misconceptions are due to the lack of media coverage or political interest in the matter. In part they are due to the official "privacy statements" of firms like Google and Facebook, which are worthless. A 2008 study by Carnegie-Mellon researchers concluded that these privacy statements are "hard to read, read infrequently, and do not support rational decision making." "Legal and technology researchers," the New York Times reported in 2012, "estimate that it would take about a month for Internet users to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit in a year."
By 2010–12, online privacy had become a political issue throughout Europe, and the FTC had gotten into the game. It has probably done the best it can in unsupportive political terrain, issuing critical reports on online privacy in December 2010 and March 2012, and reaching a settlement with Facebook in November 2011, after accusing the company of making claims about how it used its data that were "unfair and deceptive, and violated federal law." In August 2012 the FTC fined Google $22 million in a privacy case, but there was no indication this would lead to any substantive change in Google's operations. As a writer for Slate put it, the fine amounted to "approximately 0 percent of revenues." As part of the settlement, Google did not have to admit to any wrongdoing. There is little evidence at this writing that the FTC or Congress will get much more aggressive, in large part because of the political power of the Internet giants, which desperately need to expand their data collection to make profits. Even under the glare of attention in Europe in 2012, and knowing it would generate criticism, Google instituted a new privacy policy by which it consolidates all the data from sixty different Google activities into a single database. Twitter acknowledged in 2012 that its future was dependent upon addressing the concerns of advertisers and that this was not an optional course.
The Internet giants apparently reckon that their political muscle, combined with the importance of the Internet to the economy, makes their datatracking systems untouchable. One investors' report states that "government regulations and consumer pushback" over privacy are a, perhaps the, core threat to Internet advertising. As The Economist put it, at this point anything that handcuffed Internet advertising "would severely disrupt the internet economy." In February 2012, the Obama administration said that privacy standards were important, but they had to allow "electronic commerce to grow."
In Washington, industry self-regulation is the preferred foundation for any solution to the privacy issue, and the FTC acknowledges the centrality of "strong and enforceable self-regulatory initiatives." Smarter figures in the Internet community know this is a problem that needs to be addressed to assuage growing public concerns. "Privacy is a source of tremendous tension and anxiety in big data," a Microsoft executive acknowledged. "Technologists need to re‑engage with regulators." Microsoft went so far as to make the FTC's favored "Do Not Track" the default option in its Internet Explorer 10 in 2012. This works like the Do Not Call registry. This will not stop tracking, but it might limit some targeted advertising, although the system seems to be largely voluntary and difficult to enforce. It is a public relations victory, though, almost certainly sufficient for politicians to go back to sleep on the matter. The Atlantic's Madrigal, after going through a maze of these corporate self-regulatory privacy schemes, came to regard them as self-serving time wasters. If Congress does eventually adopt formal online privacy protections, it will do so only in a manner that will get a sign-off from Google, Microsoft, Apple, and the other giants, according to the New York Times.
We should also expect world-class public relations campaigns extolling all the rights consumers have online, how strong the privacy standards are, and how wonderful the Internet is, thanks to advertising. It is not going to be an easy campaign. As The Economist puts it: "Everyone hates digital ads." A report on digital commerce by Forrester Research led to this conclusion: "Consumers aren't saying, 'Oh, I really want to be able to connect with companies and brands.' " Some liberals and progressives will trumpet corporate self-regulation as well, for a variety of reasons. Jeff Jarvis, for example, argues that we should not "become too obsessed with privacy." A key reason is that Jarvis admits he is an "apologist of advertising"—even though "most advertising sucks"—because "advertising is the most visible means of support for journalism and media" online. But this attitude raises a question: is advertising generating sufficiently useful online content to justify the price people are paying?
The commercial media system online is nascent in some respects and will not crystallize for many years, so there are unforeseeable twists and turns ahead. But the preliminary indications are that the relationship of advertising to content production is going to be rather different online than it was for twentieth-century media, and that Jarvis's defense is unlikely to apply. Recall from chapter 3 that during most of the twentieth century, the relationship of advertising to media was ambiguous. On the one hand, it did provide the funds that subsidized much of the media on recognized terms. "The social contract between advertisers and publishers used to be that publications gathered particular types of people into something called an audience," Madrigal writes, "then advertisers purchased ads in that publication to reach that audience." The same was true for broadcasters. Advertisers were, in effect, forced to bankroll media content if they wanted to reach their target audience. Because the media firms had leverage in the oligopolistic marketplace, they "often saw value in maintaining credibility with audiences, advocacy groups, and government regulators by adopting policies and principles that sometimes conflicted with the advertisers' direct interest in getting the most for their money."
However, one should not exaggerate how much integrity and commitment to public service these media firms had in their relationships with advertisers. It is probably more accurate to say that they had enough leverage to pursue sufficiently credible editorial policies that protected their longterm profitability by not succumbing to short-term commercial pressures or opportunities. Moreover, as has been amply demonstrated in the literature, advertising had a powerful direct and indirect effect on the nature of media content in the predigital era, often for the worse. It was hardly a form of support that came without strings attached.
The balance of power began shifting with the emergence of cable and then satellite television systems, with their plethora of channels. Although most of the channels were owned by the same handful of conglomerates, each of the channels still was competing for advertising dollars, so there was a lot more "supply," and advertisers now had more options. When digital video recorders came along, advertisers became concerned that their ads were going to be skipped over by empowered viewers. Marketers began to demand and get "product placement" in programs. The media conglomerates were eager to make money, so there was no apparent period of moral angst as they weighed their options. "Branded" entertainment became more common. This meant "embedding products in the plots of television shows and movies, making it difficult to ignore them."
The Internet supercharges this tendency, as there are countless websites chasing after a finite pool of ad dollars. "If publishers of all sorts—print, electronic, digital—want to survive on advertising," ad agency executive Rishad Tobaccowala explained to Turow, "they will have to adapt to their advertising masters' new demands." Media firms are aggressively pursuing advertisers to get programming along these lines, and it is now so common online that it is barely noticed any longer. "Rather than doing advertising and P.R. only," a corporate brand manager working on Web entertainment stated in 2012, "we are part of the cultural conversation. When you encounter the brand through entertainment content, the conversation at the water cooler is very different." The chief creative officer at BBDO North America said, "Hollywood and advertising agencies have tried to work together before, but this time has been a positive transmogrification to something really different, and the walls came down, and now there's this."
In short, the balance of power has shifted, giving advertisers much greater explicit influence over media content. "The new system is forcing many media firms to sell their soul for ad money," Turow states. This on its own is an astonishing development that, according to most scholarship, portends grave consequences for the quality and nature of journalism and entertainment media.
But that is hardly the worst of it. The Internet has not simply made media outlets more desperate to please advertisers; it has made them increasingly irrelevant. "Marketers haven't ever wanted to underwrite the content industry," Tobaccowala told Turow. "They've been forced." Those days are over. "Advertisers are increasingly indifferent to the context in which messages appear" online, "at least compared with other media," the Pivotal Research Group reported in 2012. Online media—or "publishers" in the emerging vernacular—no longer sell many of the ads appearing on their websites. "Up to 80% of interactive ads are sold and resold through third parties," one industry source reports, "and advertisers don't always know where their ads have run." Turow notes that the evidence suggests that in an environment where advertisers purchase ads in real time (meaning they appear almost immediately), reaching untold numbers of target demographic members, they are mostly indifferent to the quality of the surrounding content on any of the thousands of places their ads might instantly appear. The system allows advertisers to "buy" desired individuals "automatically, and in real time, on whatever page they've landed." As Madrigal puts it, "Now you can buy the audience without the publication." Media in the traditional sense are almost unnecessary.
In 2003 digital publishers "received most of every dollar advertisers spent on their sites," Pariser reports. In "2010, they only received $.20." The missing 80 percent was going to ad networks and people who handle data. For publishers who want to attract ads, it is becoming more important to have quality detailed data on their Web clientele that can be packaged and sold by third party wholesalers than it is to have quality content, or any content at all. Smart or targeted advertising is the term for what is emerging, and it is quickly becoming the basis for much of Internet advertising. For that reason, retail websites like Target.com are now becoming major advertising sites because they have so much traffic and collect such extensive data. "Content is no longer king," The Economist proclaims. "Information about users is what really matters." Turow concludes, "The emerging trajectory suggests that apart from a relatively few elite-oriented publishers (New York Times, Atlantic, and the like), the pressure to bring personalization synced to marketing goals will be difficult for companies to avoid if they want to survive." This should not really be a surprise; advertisers always supported media for opportunistic reasons, because they had no better options. Now they have better options, and consequently much of the media can get thrown overboard.
The profit motive pushes this process into new and dangerous frontiers quickly. Increasingly, research—"persuasion profiling"—determines what types of sales pitches are most effective with each individual, and ads are tailored accordingly. Moreover, researchers are now working on "sentiment analysis," to see what mood a person is in at a particular moment and what products and sales pitches would be most effective. Advertisers are at work developing emotional analysis software so webcams can monitor how one's face responds to what is on the screen. "One way to persuade internet users to grant access to their images," The Economist notes, "would be to offer them discounts or subscriptions to websites." Pariser chronicles a range of developments on the horizon, including making machines more "human." Such machines-cum-humans can then establish "relationships" with actual people and get even more information from them.
Nielsen research reveals that people put far more stock in peer recommendations and crowd-powered ratings than they do in traditional advertising, so considerable effort is going into making covert sales pitches. Commercializing friendship is a killer app. Facebook is ideal for this. "On Facebook, you take friends into account," an ad executive explained to Turow. "So-andso liked this; you will too. People find that creepy in the beginning, but . . . they slowly get used to it." A 2011 Duke University survey of corporate marketing officers found that they expected to allocate no less than 18 percent of their advertising budgets to social media within five years.
The problems faced by traditional media do not mean that advertisers and the emerging system are entirely agnostic about content. Preliminary research suggests that the content of a website does influence the success of an ad. The issue is whether the effect is enough to justify any subsidy of the media content by the advertiser. Sometimes advertisers simply "cut out the middleman" and produce the content themselves in a manner that has the sole objective of selling the product. The logic of the system is that it personalizes content for individuals, and the content is selected based on what is considered most likely to assist the sale. Pariser's Filter Bubble documented how the Internet is quickly becoming a personalized experience wherein people get different results on Google searches for identical queries, based on their history. They are soon to get different websites on the screen than other people who enter the same URL. These developments are driven in toto by advertising and commercialism. Indeed, with the appearance of "content farms," an industry has emerged that produces content on demand to provide access to desired consumers for advertisers. Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt notes that individual targeting "will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."
All of this has a long way to go, but some things are already crystal clear: the notion in the 1990s that the Internet would empower individuals and make them masters of their digital fate has been turned on its head. The idea that people would join together in a shared global commonwealth is a distant memory. "The way the Internet has gone sour," Lanier laments, "is truly perverse." While "in many cases this provides for happier, healthier lives," Pariser concludes, "it also provides for the commercialization of everything—even of our sensory apparatus itself." And much as Rorty framed the matter in 1934, Turow concludes that the evidence points in one direction: "The centrality of corporate power is a direct reality at the very heart of the digital age." In 1935, New Republic editor Bruce Bliven characterized himself as among those "who find advertising so obnoxious that they wish the radio had never been invented." One wonders if the Internet will produce its modern Blivenites—or if, as with broadcasting, people will come to accept its degradation as the natural way of the world and barely recognize, let alone question, what is taking place.
Support Truthout's mission. "Digital Disconnect" is yours with a minimum donation to Truthout of $32.50 (which includes shipping and handling) or a monthly donation of $15. Click here.
Copyright (2012) by Robert W. McChesney. This excerpt originally appeared in "Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy," published by the New Press and reprinted here with permission.


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Vermont Catamounts (0-2, 0-0 America East) at
Dartmouth Big Green (0-1, 0-0 Ivy League)
Tuesday, Feb. 26 - 3 p.m.
Hanover, N.H. - Scully-Fahey Field (1,600)
Home Opener
The Dartmouth men's lacrosse team opened the season at home for the second time in three years on Saturday against No. 10 Colgate. The road team won for the fourth straight match up between the teams as the Raiders topped the Big Green, 13-10. The loss snapped a two-game home winning streak for the Big Green, who were 3-3 at home in 2012. Dartmouth has now lost four straight home openers, with its last win coming against Hartford (10-6) on Feb. 23, 2008.
Recent Success
The Green and White are in search of their fourth straight win against the Catamounts. The last time Vermont defeated Dartmouth was March 3, 2009 in Burlington. In Hanover, the team from the Upper Valley is 12-0 all-time against Vermont. The first victory came on April 11, 1988 and the most recent came on April 19, 2011.
Oh Captain My Captain
Leading the way for the team from the Upper Valley this season will be their four captains. Seniors Chris Costabile, Nikki Dysenchuk and Pat Flynn are joined by junior Patrick Resch as the team's selected leaders. Flynn enters his second season as a captain for Dartmouth leading the team defensively.
Forcing the Issue
Dartmouth ranked seventh in the country and second in the Ivy League last season causing 9.00 turnovers per game. In the opener, the Big Green forced eight turnovers. Phil Hession caused a team-high three and Flynn caused two.
Youth on the Roster
Dartmouth has 13 freshmen on the roster to begin its 2013 campaign. The newcomers make up nearly 31% of the squad. The youth movement is a trend for the Big Green as they also have 10 sophomores on the team. The underclassmen outnumber the upperclassmen 23-19, and total 57.1% of their lineup.
Quality Debuts
The class of 2016 had a big impact in the first game of the year combining to score four goals and add three assists. Cam Lee scored a pair of goals, while Billy Heidt and KC Beard each scored once. Beard also had a team-high two assists.
Scouting the Catamounts
Vermont enters the game on a two-game losing streak to begin the season. The Catamounts opened the season with a 13-7 loss at home against Cogate and followed that with a 13-5 defeat at Providence. Offensively, Graham Horvath and Drew Philie have scored 10 of the team's 12 goals this season, while A.J. Masson leads the team with four assists. In net, Dan DiStefano has made 22 saves. DiStefano has a goals-against average of 13.25 and a save percentage of .458.
The Help
The class of 2016 aren't the only fresh faces on the sidelines for Dartmouth, as Towers added two new assistants in the offseason. Tim McIntee joins the staff after coaching at Manhattan for the past 15 years. McIntee is a 1989 graduate of LIU, where he received national recognition as a three-time All-American. Michael Bocklet will serve as the team's offensive coordinator. Bocklet comes to Hanover after spending the last three seasons as an assistant coach at SUNY Cortland. Bocklet is a 2007 graduate of Fairfield and he earned All-New England honors twice at attack.
Preseason Honors
After a quality junior campaign, Nikki Dysenchuk was named to the 2013 All New England Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association (NEILA) preseason team as a midfielder. The Darien, Conn., native was the lone Dartmouth player on the team and one of six midfielders selected.
Between the Pipes
Senior Bernie Susskind played well in his first start of the year making 12 saves. Susskind is the only netminder on the roster who's seen collegiate action, appearing in two games last season and making seven saves.
Returning Firepower
Three of the team's top four goal scorers from last season return for the Big Green in 2013. Costabile led the team with 20 goals, while Brendan Rotanz added 18 and Dysenchuk tallied 14. The trio accounted for 52 of the Dartmouth's 123 (42.28%) goals a year ago.
What's on Tap
Following the game with the Catamounts, the Big Green travel to Dallas, Texas to compete in the 2013 Patriot Cup. Dartmouth will take on Georgetown inside SMU Stadium.


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Home a total loss in morning fire
A house on the 200 block of Bois D Arc was a total loss after a fire engulfed the home this morning, according to Roscoe Fire Chief Gary Armstrong.The alarm came in to the station around 2:25 a.m. on Wednesday morning and the Roscoe Fire Department sent two fire trucks to the scene. The Sweetwater Fire Department assisted, sending one fire truck to the scene. According to Armstrong, the house was fully involved when firefighters arrived.The two people in the house got out of the house safely, but some pets living in the home did not survive.The blaze is still under investigation by Roscoe Police Chief Felix Pantoja, but Armstrong says that the fire seems to have been caused by an electrical malfunction in the ceiling.


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Thursday, March 10, 2011
Family Tree Magazine Top 40 Genealogy Blogs
Thanks to my readers who voted for me! No one was more surprised than me when I found out that Nutfield Genealogy made the Top 40!
There are thousands of interesting history and genealogy blogs out there, and some of my favorites are also on this list. If you like Nutfield Genealogy you will like some of the other blogs on the list, so check out the Family Tree Magazine website at this link:
The other New England Genealogy blogs who also made it to the "Top 40":
Lucie Consentino's "Acadian and French Canadian Ancestral Home" http://acadian-ancestral-home.blogspot.com/
Midge Frazel's "Granite in my Blood" http://granite-in-my-blood.blogspot.com/
Cynthia Shenette's "Heritage Zen" http://heritagezen.blogspot.com/
Bill West's "West in New England" http://westinnewengland.blogspot.com/
For the best resource for finding a genealogy blog, try the "GeneaBloggers" website at http://www.geneabloggers.com/
and use their search engine or topic listings. There are genealogy blogs on every subject, geographic area, ethnic group, or religion. Something for everyone! Enjoy!
Copyright 2010, Heather Wilkinson Rojo
12 comments:
Congrats again!ReplyDelete
Congratulations, so well deserved!ReplyDelete
Well deserved, Heather!ReplyDelete
Congratulations! I love reading your blog.ReplyDelete
Congratulations, Heather.ReplyDelete
Congratulations on the FT Top 40!! You have a wonderful blog!ReplyDelete
Nutfield Genealogy is a great blog - congratulations, Heather!ReplyDelete
Add my name to the list of bloggers extending congratulations!ReplyDelete
- Chelsea PirkerMarch 12, 2011 at 8:43 AM
Nice Job Heather!ReplyDelete
Congrats!! It's well deserved. :)ReplyDelete
Congratulations Heather!ReplyDelete
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KKCO) -- Many household items can be lethal for your pet, and taking simple precautions may wind up saving your animal's life.
Pet parent April Lewis-Gies felt an array of emotions when her dog ingested a bottle of medication.
"It was actually too low on the shelf, and I never even thought that he would even pay any attention to it, but he actually got a hold of the entire bottle," said Lewis-Gies.
April's dog was taking Rimadyl, an anti-inflammatory, commonly prescribed for dogs with arthritis.
According to Dr. Frank Coons of Tiara Rado Animal Hospital, a pet poison we often see-- but don't think about-- is medication.
"We see quite a few dogs who get into the owners [medicine]...everything from birth control pills to thyroid medication," explained Coons.
With the unusual temperature drop in spring, it is important to be mindful about anti-freeze. Just a small amount can be lethal for your animal.
"If you are changing your anti-freeze out and it drips on your floor, it doesn't take very much, and dogs actually like the taste of it," said Coons.
If your pet does get into something they shouldn't, you must do one thing immediately..
"They should call the veterinarian. There are some toxins that you really want them to be forced to vomit, others you really don't want them to," said Coons.
April's dog was lucky. His life was saved, but she hopes people are able to learn from her mistakes.
"[Medications] really need to be stored in a different place, higher spot, where they are unable to get to them," said Lewis-Gies.
Tiara Rado Animal Hospital says if you bring in your pet for ingesting a medication, it's important to bring the bottle in with you so your vet knows what the animal ate.


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Monarchs Fall 2-1 in Double Overtime to No. 3 Demon Deacons
By ODU Athletics
Aug. 31, 2007
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- The Old Dominion men's soccer team stretched one of the top teams in the nation to double overtime on Friday night, before falling 2-1 to the No. 3 Demon Deacons of Wake Forest University (1-0). It was the first game of the 2007 season for ODU (0-1) as they are playing in the Carolina Nike Classic on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill. Sophomore Ambane Emmanuel (Yaounde, Cameroon) knocked home a goal in the first half for the Monarchs off an assist by junior newcomer Daniel Haywood (Spaldwick, England).
The Deacons got out in front in the first half off a touch into the back of the net by Corben Bone at the 25:52 mark. His goal was assisted by Lyle Adams and Zack Schilawski.
Just eight minutes later, Emmanuel connected with the upper right pocket off the dish from Haywood. The goal at 33:51 was the sophomore's fourth goal as a Monarch and first of the season.
The match was scoreless for the rest of the first, the entire second half and the first overtime. Freshman T.J. Beaulieu was handed the first yellow card of his career in the 60th minute. It wasn't until the 107th minute, just 3:45 remaining on the clock that the third ranked Deacons would finish off the Monarchs.
Bone took a shot on ODU star goalkeeper Evan Newton and he made his sixth save of the match. He couldn't corral it however, and Evan Brown came in with a shot off the rebound for the game-winner. Newton allowed two goals and saved six in 106:15 minutes of play.
The Wake Forest goalkeeper, Brian Edwards, collected two saves while allowing just the one goal.
The Monarchs took seven shots, three coming off the foot of Emmanuel. Wake Forest took 13 shots including eight on goal.
ODU returns to the pitch on Sunday as part of the finale to the Carolina Nike Classic as they face off against No. 16 North Carolina.


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BOSTON — There was nothing out of the ordinary at the Bruins' morning skate today except for the absence of Nathan Horton's ever-present smile.
The Bruins, of course, will be without the forward's services due to a severe concussion starting with tonight's Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final at the TD Garden against Vancouver.
Mark Recchi took the option not skate as he's done more often than not, while rookie Jordan Caron took the morning skate in an effort to stay sharp in case more injury befalls the Bruins. Head coach Claude Julien said after the skate that Caron would also skate in the warm-up tonight.


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Now Darwinists fighting with each other
'Molecular data and fossil record can give conflicting views of evolutionary past'
While creationists are known for their fundamental disagreements with evolutionists, adherents of Darwin's theory have their own sharp disagreements among each other.
One division that heating up is over whether or not placental mammals lived with dinosaurs, notes a report at Creation.com, a coalition of ministries across several countries that provides "real-world answers to the most-asked questions in the vital area of creation/evolution."
A report in Nature News by senior reporter Ewen Callaway was cited.
Creation.com said evolutionary researchers are now arguing, on the basis of new genetic evidence, that placental mammals originated much earlier than previously thought, meaning before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Writing for Creation.com, David Catchpoole said the evidence has stirred up a debate between "evolutionists who hold that fossils are 'the ultimate timekeeper of life's history,' versus the modern wave of evolutionists who contend they can glean more reliable dates and other 'evolutionary detail' from analyzing proteins and DNA."
The development comes as Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, prepares to debate Bill Nye, who made a career on television as the "Science Guy."
The debate, scheduled Feb. 4 at the 900-seat Legacy Hall at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., near Cincinnati, will be about the "battle of world views, secular humanism and the Christian world view," Ham told WND in an interview.
"I think it's all come together at this time … and is seen by a lot of people not just as evolution vs. creation, but really more a battle of secular philosophy vs. conservative Christianity."
Sign up now to watch the Ken Ham-Bill Nye debate!
He said the battle is playing out in many ways today – in textbooks that promote evolution, in the banning of anything "Christian" in public Christmas displays, in what children can say in schools and in what local governments can allow on public land.
Much is at stake, Ham said.
"I don't look on it as just defending my position," he said. "It's more showing that Christians can be bold in standing up, saying there is a God, the Bible is God's word, morality comes from the Bible."
Catchpoole said there are discrepancies aplenty among evolutionists.
"It's notable that those who argue that fossils should take precedence over molecular data are particularly strident about the identity and the dating of those fossils, i.e., they say that there are no certain placental fossils pre-dating the demise of the dinosaurs," he wrote.
"However, their stridency on this matter is increasingly being exposed as unfounded, given the mounting evidence of mammalian fossils in 'dinosaur rock' – and one might reasonably expect at least a proportion of the total found to date to have been placental. Fossils of no less than 432 mammal species in Mesozoic rock have been identified by evolutionists, and this included nearly 100 complete mammal skeletons," said Catchpoole.
He noted even Nature News admits as much, stating, "Molecular data and the fossil record can give conflicting views of the evolutionary past."
Catchpoole reported that the disputes revolve around time and assumptions scientists make.
"While the paleontologists might well proclaim that fossils are the 'ultimate timekeeper,' the geneticists know, or should know, the problems that time poses for the evolutionary paradigm. Far from being the 'hero,' there hasn't been enough time, and adding more time does not make the impossible possible. In fact, the more time you have, the worse it gets for evolution."
Catchpoole said the "contradictions are not resolved when evolutionists seek to 'harmonize' their findings by re-dating evidence to suit."
That such interpretations of the evidence are contradictory is no surprise, however, he said.
"Christians who are familiar with the principle that the definitive timing of past events cannot be ascertained by scrutinizing evidence in the present, but rather depends upon knowing reliable eyewitness testimony," he said.
"We have a reliable testimony that says that placental mammals and dinosaurs were indeed on this planet at the same time (Genesis 1:20-31). In fact, placental mammals were already plying the air (bats) and the sea (dugongs, dolphins, whales) the day before the dinosaurs (along with man – Job 40:15) were created," wrote Catchpoole.


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Kindle Owners' Lending Library Coming to the UK, Germany and France
"Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that the Kindle Owners' Lending Library is coming to the UK, Germany and France later this month, bringing Kindle owners with a Prime membership over 200,000 books to borrow for free as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. Independent authors and publishers using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) who enroll their books in KDP Select can be included in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library in the UK, Germany and France, as well as the US. With the new lending libraries launching this month, the KDP Select fund has been increased by $100,000 to $700,000 in October, with a larger increase anticipated in November. Authors will earn money every time their book is borrowed from any of the lending libraries – in September, authors earned $2.29 per borrow, which is more than many KDP books earn per sale."
via Press Release


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ARX (Algorithmic Research), a provider of digital signature solutions, has released the SharePoint digital signatures trial, a free 30-day trial in which organizations using SharePoint can test and verify digital signatures within a personalized SharePoint sandbox environment.
The CoSign digital signatures for SharePoint free trial enables browser-based signing of PDF files located directly in SharePoint Document Libraries, as well as the ability for users to digitally sign SharePoint List Items.
"CoSign is the only digital signature solution that integrates seamlessly with SharePoint, and it offers a very powerful tool for SharePoint users who are seeking to automate their business processes," said Gadi Aharoni, CEO, ARX.
The release of the digital signatures with SharePoint trial comes alongside a recent version update of ARX's CoSign solution. The update offers digital signing support for SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 in addition to CoSign's existing support for SharePoint 2007 and Microsoft Office XP/2007. Further, the new release supports fully integrated workflow solutions such as Nintex Workflow and others that have a SharePoint foundation.


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I've spotted the new KIA K9 . It's a nice copy of BMW so I was interested in the logotype:
I thought – this car deserves another logo. Here's the 5 minute sketch:
Here are some other K9 logos from different companies:
Personally I like the red one with the circle although it reads 9K, not K9.
Incoming search terms:
- kia k9
- k9 logo
- k9 kia
- KIA K9 logo
- new kia logo
- k9 logos
- kia logos
- fancy car logos
- kia symbol
- k9 symbols


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I know plenty of women who aren't vacuous, so your theory falters under scrutiny...
Quote from: Cargést on September 24, 2011, 02:03:30 PMI know plenty of women who aren't vacuous, so your theory falters under scrutiny...are they goodlooking?are they remote from a culture that turns them into airheadedly cheerful romance fanatics?
NAWALT! - Not All Women Are Like That!
On a serious note, what is responsible for this mass failure among women?? I odn't know what the fuck happened. This is a forum of realists who would not deny (socio)biology being responsible for inferiority, if that was the case. is it the fact that most television they are encouraged to consume has to do with drama and lies while most male television (while YES watching sports is stupid) atleast incorporates strategy?If it's not the vacuum theory, offer something else.
NAWALT! - Not All Women Are Like That!SpearheadInMalaFide
If you are looking for women to fill a void, that isn't happening.


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AWTA. Forget comparing averages, the current lots hits fewer tons and there are fewer players who are capable of going past 1000+ in a season. The current back-ups just don't score as many runs as the back-up we saw in the 90's/00's, it's really that simple.
Siddons is a great example; in any other time, he'd have played 50+ Tests and would have been a massive boost whenever Australia went to India. Imagine if he was 25 now.


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Editor's note: Elizabeth Mitchell is the author of the new book, "Liberty's Torch." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- The birthday girl every Fourth of July is the Statue of Liberty, the image on party napkins, on parade floats and the backdrop for fireworks displays in New York Harbor. She is the ultimate American symbol, a gift from France to the United States, it is said, implying that she was a gift given government to government. The truth is, she could more correctly be called a gift from one artist to the world.
In an era when we have given up the desire to astound each other simply to please or provoke wonder, this an important distinction.
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi dreamed up this colossus back in the late 1800s. A middle-tier statue maker, he took his plan to Egypt and pitched a colossal robed slave holding up a torch to stand at the mouth of the Suez Canal. When that deal failed, Bartholdi brushed off the design and brought it to America, all on his own dime. He went door to door, office to office, presenting the vision and meeting with rejection.
But with the well wishes of a few staunch supporters, he kept driving onward, winning other commissions to pay the bills and building Liberty piece by piece in Paris, paying for each section as soon as he could drum up donations. He sought out all of his engineering collaborators on his own. He dreamed up entertainments to raise monies through ticket sales.
And it was he who yanked the massive French flag from her face at her unveiling in 1886. He threw himself into the arms of a friend and wept.
Liberty remains. Bartholdi is essentially unknown. You say the name Bartholdi, and even savvy New Yorkers look blank.
Bartholdi could foresee that future. When he visited Liberty just before leaving America that year, he acknowledged, "She is going away from me." He had lost the sense that she was his, a feeling he had possessed when climbing over her copper structure in Paris. She would be given to future generations.
Bartholdi created one of the most powerful trademarks in history and is largely unknown. I suppose few people know the name Jim Schindler either, the man who designed McDonald's Golden Arches -- and that was pretty powerful, too. But still it seems a bit amazing Bartholdi should go largely unrecognized for his work of art.
We might not feel constantly awestruck that a work 305 feet tall -- taller than the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, whose legend lasted millennia -- mingles with us. But Liberty, barring emergency closures for events such as Superstorm Sandy, attracts about 3.8 million tourists a year. Every year, she flutters the hearts of people hiking to her head, as surely as she fluttered the hearts of immigrants arriving in the New World. Her power remains.
She is an echo of an era when people sought to produce wonder and ecstasy in their fellow citizens purely for the sake of creating a fabulous artifact of human possibility, even if their personal fame might vanish before the work did.
Astounding and delighting one another was the vogue. Eiffel made his tower, just after he designed the scaffold for Liberty's interior. Thomas Edison proposed a colossal phonograph inside Liberty to make her "talk." Inventors brought their products of genius to kaleidoscopic World's Fairs to enchant viewers as much as serve merchant interests.
"When I discover a subject grand enough, I will honor that subject by building the tallest statue in the world," Bartholdi said in his 20s, 30 years before he unveiled his statue.
It is hard to imagine anyone nowadays either demonstrating the patience to wait for an idea to strike or pursuing the goal of honoring a subject ... a concept. Ideas are now considered important only if they are flypaper for money, not precious, heaven-sent gifts. Good ones are catchy or addictive. Few people try to invent something that will make the consumer say, "Look what humankind has achieved!" Our popular entertainments titillate or intoxicate.
I worry we have lost our sense of the importance of sharing our talents for the common good, partly because there is so much economic pressure put on the middle class, with stagnating wages and rising costs for housing, food and more . The middle class, in my historical research, seems the group from which big ideas have long sprung. And we compound the pressure by stealing the work of our inventors and artists, leaving them no means to actually survive.
We weigh down our potential visionaries and inventors with college debt. When they begin to produce, say, music, we take it from them and pay fractions of pennies to listen to it, even as we pay stockbrokers at the lowest end $7 to $10 to make a trade.
We underpay or don't pay for a journalist's writing. We require so little public art or decorative art that those artists of ours who don't rise into the filament-thin clique of superstars only survive by working at many other jobs. Anyone not connected to a company is required to double pay Social Security taxes as well as burdensome health insurance premiums (even with Obamacare).
So there is no time for tinkering or deep pondering unless you work for Google or Tesla or SpaceX. Putting our geniuses under the corporate umbrella means we craft amazing inventions, but before we can gloat that mankind has achieved something great for mankind, we monetize the hell out of the invention, putting it out of reach for most or, in the case of, say, medical inventions actually turning those great discoveries into financial burdens
Now I know that Bartholdi created his work for more than altruistic purposes. His ego fueled him.
Showing his own anxiety, he got the Statue of Liberty copyrighted with the hope that he could earn income from the commercial use he knew was coming (he was savvy to what he considered the less appealing part of America). When he could never collect, he groused at his financially tight existence.
But because he had received cheerleading in his youth from his mother, who encouraged his pursuit of grander visions, he could at least rest easy that he got to see the work complete and knew it would survive him.
Nowadays, if we love our kids, dare we encourage them to create something vast and important that might last centuries?
Unless their creation was a money magnet, encouraging such an undertaking would almost be like condemning them to potential extinction. In Bartholdi's day, you could try something big and if it didn't work out, you would have your disappointment, but you could still pay the doctor in barter. You could suffer setbacks and failures and know that you would at least get by.
It's interesting to me that in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the artist Kara Walker has installed a giant sugar Sphinx in an abandoned sugar factory that is soon to be turned into pricey condominiums. I'm sure the real estate agents love it as a lure for those future condo sales. Regardless, the lines stretch down the block every day, every hour, for weeks now and visitors speak to reporters who ask about their intense emotional and intellectual reactions to this massive otherworldly sculpture.
People flock to see this colossal Sphinx. They come because it's a happening but they also come, I believe, because they are so starved for the work of a person trying to impress them and to amaze them without a corporate entity intervening to make a bundle on it.
They wait on noisy Kent Avenue for a fleeting taste of this rarity, for a sign we might still have space for human invention ... that we can all share in what humanity can achieve.
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Submission + - Software lets scientists program new life forms (foxnews.com)
Velcroman1 writes: Biochemical engineers can now download a piece of software and with a few simple clicks, assemble the DNA for new life forms through their laptops. "With the proper computer tools, biologists can write their own genetic code — and then turn that code into life," said biochemist Omri Amirav-Drory, who founded Genome Compiler Corp., the company that sells the software. He demonstrated for FoxNews.com at a Starbucks early one morning by manipulating a bacteria's genes on his MacBook. The synthetic biology app is still in beta; on Jan. 15, the company added an undo feature and support for new DNA file formats. Building creatures is increasingly like word processing, it would seem. But such is the strange reality in the age of cheap genome sequencing, DNA synthesizing and "bioinformatics."


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ABINGTON — "You have to know who to target," Rob Marin says. He's standing in front of a mirror in a wood-paneled, double-wide trailer behind Barrett's Haunted Mansion, affixing blobs of latex onto his face. The fluorescent lighting glints off the sepia of his contact lenses as he carefully presses what looks like regurgitated deli meat onto the ridge of his brow.
It's a Sunday in late September near the start of the season. In the seven weeks that Barrett's is open, more than 20,000 people will pass through — a fraction of the New Englanders who will visit more than 30 haunted houses all over the region. According to the Haunted House Association, New England has the highest density of haunted houses in the country. While some like Count Orlok's Nightmare Gallery in Salem are open year-round, most, like Barrett's, are seasonal.
The season starts early for Barrett's proprietor Mary Barrett Costello and her staff. They change the floor plan of the mansion — a carefully dilapidated two-story Victorian behind the Abington Ale House — every year, following an annual March trek to the Hauntshow industry event in St. Louis for inspiration. This year's haunt contains 13 rooms partitioned by heavy fabric. Highlights include a haunted carnival, replete with acid bath dunk tank, a zombie room, and a corridor lined with eight Leatherfaces from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
Marin isn't working inside the house tonight. Instead, he'll frighten people waiting in line. In two hours, he'll emerge as a zombie, but for now, he and a handful of makeup-savvy staff are applying it early so they can help fix up the rest of the ghouls — "characters," in Barrett's lingo — in time for the crowds.
This is Marin's ninth year as a Barrett's character. Like a handful of other employees, he also works as a professional makeup artist and set designer on horror films. Accordingly, he has amassed a trove of special-effects makeup that he stores in a large metal container resembling an oversize tackle box. It's open in front of him, revealing rows of tiny plastic tubs with labels reading "Fleet Street Blood" and "Tattoo Classic."
Over time, Marin has come to classify scares into three general categories. "There's a science behind it," he explains. The scare you want, he says, involves a scream. Less desirable scares result in nervous laughter. But one should avoid the third kind at all costs.
"There's some people whose normal reaction is to hit you," Marin says.
Seasoned pros like him can read people's faces and avoid the hitters. For the first year on the job, characters learn the ropes by being confined in the house, sticking to the same room, the same role, for whole shifts at a time. This year, newbies might spend the night chasing customers through a dark room with a flashlight or gnawing on a bloody corpse as terrified customers race through their tableaux trying to escape.
Outside is different. Entertaining multitudes demands stamina and a certain improvisational flair. Outside characters, known as rovers, have learned to sneak up behind customers. While they don't grab them — Barrett's prohibits touching — they eavesdrop on chattering groups and call their names.
Klown 1, one of Barrett's most prominent rovers, relies on a small metal bell, shaped like a clown. When he rings it, it sounds like an off-key xylophone. He has discovered that ringing it with increasing urgency as he emerges from the fog makes people jump.
Known for his blood-spattered, double-breasted, polka-dot clown suit, half fluorescent yellow, half the color of a traffic cone, Klown 1 has developed something of a following, evidenced by his Facebook page. Dave, the man who plays him, won't allow his last name to appear for reasons of privacy, even though for years now a local teacher named Mr. L allegedly has successfully perpetuated the rumor that he himself is the Klown.
Ninety minutes before showtime, Dave stands in a black T-shirt and motley pants, eating a wrap from the sub shop down the street. In between bites, he fusses with the tuft of cotton that sticks out from the hollow of his cheek. He daubs the center with makeup the color of fresh blood, adding whorls of scab-
colored makeup to the perimeter. Eventually, he will pierce it with an oversize safety pin.
"I've been doing this look for the last seven or eight years," Dave says. "It changes a little bit every year." He added red contacts to his costume six years ago, a mouthful of rotting plastic teeth two years later. His latest enhancement, dirty blotches on his clown suit, came earlier this year when he played a zombie in a charity fun run.
Dave loves his job, but he hates instant video. "Cellphone cameras have become the bane of this industry," he says. The bigger a character's following, the more likely he is to be besieged by people who want to capture him.
"We all have our little cliques of people who come to see us every night," says Amy, the woman sitting next to him. She's dressed in a black pirate's vest laced over a long-sleeved purple T-shirt and rolled-up harem pants. She is also married to Dave. They have worked as characters together for more than a decade.
"We have a life outside of this," Amy insists, laughing. All the characters do. She works as a chemist for a medical device company, Dave as a graphic designer for an engineering firm. Barrett's gives them a creative outlet, a chance to dress up and scare the wits out of children. Dave and Amy also have two of those, the older of whom has seen them in full regalia. "We have a cute picture where she's dressed up like a witch and she's touching his [clown] nose," says Amy, whose character is called Anarchae.
An hour before showtime, the volunteers stream in. Two dozen people from the Scituate Animal Shelter will get made up and turned loose in the house in exchange for a cash donation. Outside the makeup trailer, things are more peaceful. Two black-clad men wearing baseball hats and yellow safety vests check the sound system.
"Cue the fog machine," squeaks a
walkie-talkie. Fog begins to roll across the small lagoon near the parking lot, across a makeshift graveyard on a little hill, through the corn stalk maze leading up to the house.
The first customers arrive. Amy, who has put on 3-foot stilts, leaps down the steps and lopes across the grass to scare people near the ticket booth. She hovers over a group of junior high girls, raking her long metal rings along the air near their heads and hissing.
"You're tall!" a girl says to her, defiantly.
Inside the house, Ralph Allen, Barrett Costello's right-hand man, moves from room to room, briefing the volunteers on fire safety, emergency exits, and how best to scare people. Four volunteer zombies crowd around Allen in a blacklit room with two cells, one of which holds a mangled corpse; the other, Brad Orner.
"Should we make noises?" Orner asks.
"You can do whatever you want," Allen says.
Just before 7, the first customers to enter the house that night — two preteens with hooded sweatshirts and long brown hair — emerge dazed from the cornfields. They approach the porch, where Klown 1 is blocking the doorway, enumerating the house rules.
"Here we go!" he says. The girls link arms and walk inside.Eugenia Williamson, a writer and editor living in Somerville, can be reached at


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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 3rd Jan 2013 23:42 UTC
So, Gingerbread has finally dropped below 50% of devices accessing Google Play. Ice Cream Sandwich has almost hit the 30%, and after six months, Jelly Bean (4.1 and 4.2) almost hit the 10%. Google's page listing these numbers is like a trainwreck in slowmotion.
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RE: why upgrade?
by Moochman on Fri 4th Jan 2013 14:40 UTC in reply to "why upgrade?"
If Joe publics email, web, phone, calendar, etc all work fine... what's the reason to upgrade, other than genuine bug fixes?
How about better user experience? Faster, more fluid performance? Support for brand-new apps that use brand-new features of the OS? ICS was a *huge* step forward in terms of the UI and in terms of developer API support in a number of areas (the new GUI widgets alone are worth switching platforms for developers).
Sometimes an upgrade is a downgrade... it arrived broken (things didn't work), unstable (things crashed/force closed) and slower (ui slower).
You're just proving that Android handset manufacturers are incompetent, not that upgrades are bad.
Is the problem really for developers - not end users. Can developers really not develop apps/websites sufficiently agnostic of the client.... client dependencies are sooo 1990s...
Um, asking users to buy a new device in order to upgrade their OS is sooo 1990s.... Everyone on every other platform *other* than Android has today come to expect free/cheap and easy upgrades *without* purchasing new hardware.


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My tower has had it. I need to replace the tower with something simple to tide me over while I save up for something better.
If anyone local to me ( Ellesmere Port, Chester, Wirral area) has an old tower they were planning on putting out to pasture (or putting in a skip) that they think I can use, and have for free (yes I can just about scrape up some petrol money to come and get it) it would be appreciated.


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ESTHERVILLE - Funeral services for Lucile May, 97, of Estherville will be 1:30 p.m. Saturday, May 11, 2013, at Henry-Olson Funeral Chapel in Estherville. Visitation will be one hour prior to the service at the funeral home only on Saturday. Interment will be at East Side Cemetery in Estherville.
She died Thursday, April 9, 2013, at the Good Samaritan Society in Estherville.


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Lindberg "Bap" Lorraine Jr. and incumbent Priscilla Mounic won seats on the Golden Meadow Town Council on Saturday.
Lindberg "Bap" Lorraine Jr. and incumbent Priscilla Mounic won seats on the Golden Meadow Town Council on Saturday.
Sharon Robichaux Guidry won the Division B seat on Lockport's Town Council.
The winners will take office after Jan. 1. Results are complete but unofficial.
The runoff in Golden Meadow consisted of four candidates vying for two seats. Mounic received 307 votes or 34 percent of the total. Lorraine received 284 votes or 31 percent. Both have no party affiliation.
Troy Dufrene received 173 votes or 19 percent, and council incumbent Mike Billiot received 148 votes or 16 percent. Both are Democrats.
Saturday's turnout in Golden Meadow was 62 percent with 912 of 1,462 registered voters casting ballots.
November council elections in Golden Meadow saw incumbents Jody Cheramie and David Adams and newcomer Willis Toups emerge with victories without need for a runoff.
Guidry received 268 votes, or 54 percent over Ralph Sapia, who got 46 percent support with 229 votes.
Turnout for the race was 32 percent with 497 votes cast out of the 1,530 voters registered in the town.


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|Riverside Park. 3:20 PM. Photo: JH.
|Tuesday, October 4, 2011. Cool and rainy, yesterday in New York. Temperatures dipping to the high 40s late at night. With that chill and the damp streets, the feeling at night always reminds me of film noir. The time that when you're out, you think about going home and getting warm. And dry.
Roger Webster died yesterday morning at 6. He had been ill with cancer for several months although he'd kept it from most of us and just lived his life, did his work, saw his friends. His illness which for quite awhile seemed to be in remission, got to the point where he had to be hospitalized. That was several weeks ago. At first we thought he would be home soon. Then the news changed.
He had a large and eclectic group of friends, probably because he seemed to have the natural ability to accept people on their terms. He could easily find their foibles fascinating, and could brush aside their shortcomings. He was generous that way, although I think he thought it was the better way to look at things.
In his earlier years he'd been an actor (when he left his birth name behind and became Roger Webster), and artist, and landscape gardener. I'm sure he worked at all kinds of odd jobs, whatever needed to be done to pay the rent. He'd live in L.A. as well as New York, and probably elsewhere. Everywhere he went he met interesting people, and they'd meet a man who liked them for who they were. That was part of what was interesting about Roger. That's quite a talent in breakneck city life, and rarely achieved honestly.
Roger was honest. He also loved religions. They may have had something to do with his almost divine patience, but that's just a hunch. I know he was searching for the Answers, and that the process was always enough for him – like a mountain-climber scaling a new and challenging peak.
His funeral will be held at the Greek Orthodox Church but he loved the Roman Catholics too, and the Jewish religion. Every Tuesday night he went to Kabalah classes. He had none of the bias or prejudice that often go with these organized religions, but rather loved what they stood for and ignored the rest.
|Jason Grant and Roger Webster.
|He was kind of like an angel, and I say that seriously.
In his early 20s, he met Couri Hay, worked with him when Couri had a column in the National Enquirer in the 1970s and 80s, and got involved in the public relations business and New York. It fit him well. You've seen his picture on these pages many times. In the past few years, after he left Couri, he went out on his own. With the assistance of his friend Jason Grant, he handled a lot of active accounts including Doubles, The Central Park Conservancy, the American Cancer Society and many others.
But all of that seems incidental whenever I think of Roger. I first met him about eighteen years ago when he was working for Couri Hay. He was a cut-above most because he was always gentleman in his behavior toward everybody, and it wasn't a businesslike act; that's who he was. And he knew what he was doing.
|Roger with just some of his many friends and admirers.
|I intended to write this Diary but my problem has been What To Say. Because as well as I knew him -- and he was easy to feel close to, or confide in -- I knew very little about his childhood, and his early family life. These matters, to me, are always key elements in knowing somebody.
I knew that he grew up in Minnesota and that he had siblings. I suspected just from the nature of his personality, that his family life was difficult. He never talked about it, and I never asked. Because he was honest by nature, I'm sure he would have answered any question, yet there was a sense that he'd separated himself from that. Such is often a natural road to survival.
Difficult family lives is nothing new, and even commonplace for many of us. It's often a matter of degree. Although I learned only a few days ago, for example, that Roger's father had been a POW in the Second World War and that he had been marked emotionally forever after. I don't recall Roger ever talking about his father or his mother. Or his family But I have learned that he was close to his parents, both of whom passed away a number of years ago, and left him a small inhertiance.
He also, it should be said, enjoyed his life. He loved traveling. In his long relationship with Couri Hay, he traveled all over the world. He and Jason had been to Europe two or three times in the last year. His last trip early in summer was to Paris, to show his sister around. Then he took the Orient Express to Istanbul. There's not a doubt in my mind that he was in his own kind of heaven tasting the wines, testing the waters, wherever he went.
Roger had a zest for life. That's probably what drew him out of Minnesota into the big world. He loved all of it, right up to the last few weeks. He was 65 last June, looking good, especially for a man his age. Many of us knew about his prostate condition but it didn't seem to affect him in any way. He worked a full schedule on a busy calendar. He wrote. He dined and went to parties and theatre and exhibitions. If there were a birthday he always brought a thoughtful present. Because of all that everyone was surprised that he should suddenly be in hospital. Even more surprising that he lost ground so fast.
I was wondering what he was thinking, how his mind was processing this last few moments of his active life. I wouldn't have asked him although I would have wanted to. I knew from his ability to tolerate that he was working at it. Until he suddenly slipped away from us. Roger was a great man, a good man, and a great loss to all of us. All of us.
Comments? Contact DPC here.


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The former defensive lineman has grown into an anchor on the offensive side
Tyler Shatley's competitiveness and versatility has few limits no matter if it's smashing opponents as a member of Clemson's offensive line or downing bowling pins.
The starting guard and his teammates have been known to make the occasional trek to the local alley where former Dorman star Brandon Thomas quickly saw Shatley means business no matter the endeavor.
"He was kind of intimidating," Thomas said. "We're sitting down and I'm putting on my rental shoes and then he pulls out a bag and pulls out his (own) shoes and ball. He shines up his ball and sits it down and just waits on everybody. It's like, OK, I see you, OK."
Thomas did opt to defend his own skills in adding, "His game is pretty nice, he's got a little drop-spin thing he does, but my game is pretty nice, too. I'm up there with him."
The two have become Clemson's best and most reliable offensive lineman, although Thomas has long played that position and last year was named All-ACC first-team at left tackle. Shatley, a second-year starter, took a much more varied route to his current stature where his name has been popping up on NFL Draft radars since the offseason.
"I don't know if I'm amazed by all of this, but I'm very glad it's happening," Shatley said. "I always kind of had the dream to go to the NFL — I think we all do — but you never realize how much work it is until you get here. That part is amazing to think about all the work I had to do just to get to where I am and it's an awesome blessing just to have this chance."
The 6-foot-3, 295-pounder has always forged his own opportunities and has never shied away from a challenge. He was the 2009 N.C. Amateur Athlete of the Year as a standout fullback (also averaging 40.7 yards per punt) in addition to wrestling and track and field. As a redshirt college freshman he earned the Vickery Hall Award for his classroom work and last season was an Academic All-ACC selection and a Strength and Conditioning All-American. He graduated in May with a civil engineering degree.
As his body progressed, college fullback wasn't an option and he moved to defensive line. He played in all 12 games in 2010 (127 snaps) and then started twice among his 14 games in 2011 when he greatly increased his snaps to 317 and posted 30 tackles.
Finally settling in at defensive line and expecting to be a starter as a junior, the coaches suddenly decided his athleticism could better help the team on an offensive front eager for depth.
"When they first mentioned moving me to offensive line I was kind of skeptical because I'd been working three years on defense and kind of finally worked my way up to a starting position," Shatley said. "But I thought about it and talked about it with my parents and other coaches and prayed about it and it felt right."
That Shatley has been able to excel no matter what role he plays hasn't been a surprise to coach Dabo Swinney.
"We just thought he was a tough football player who was going to make our team better and didn't really know what he was," said Swinney after Shatley played linebacker and fullback in high school. "We started him out at defensive tackle and he was really good for us. He could be a big factor there now, but as we grew our (defensive) depth we had some freedom to be able to move him and he made us so much better (on offense).
"He was a little hesitant at first because that was the one position he hadn't played. He played just about everything else. But he's a natural at it. You move him somewhere he makes you better. Last year he was kind of the new kid on the block. Even though we looked at him like a leader he had a lot to prove and a lot to figure out and now he's very sure of himself and much more confident in his role."
Shatley has started 17 consecutive games offensively and earned a reputation as one of Clemson's strongest and grittiest players. Even he laughs when thinking about arriving on campus after having rushing for 2,000 yards and 31 touchdowns his final two high school seasons.
"I do think about it sometimes, especially how I used to carry the ball and it's just funny to look at these guys here and how much faster they are and it's hard to believe I used to do that. But it's been a fun adventure learning all these positions."


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Blogito ergo sum! Actually, as N.T. Wright averred, "'Amor, ergo sum:' I am loved, therefore I am." Among other things, I am a Roman Catholic deacon. This is a public cyberspace in which I seek to foster Christian discipleship in the late modern milieu in the diakonia of koinonia and in the recognition that "the Eucharist is the only place of resistance to annihilation of the human subject."
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Random thought for a snowy morning
Yes, these are things I think about, which explains why I have a hard time replacing door knobs and other practical chores.
2 comments:
Deacon Scott -ReplyDelete
You have a most interesting and amazing mind. This post is humorous, but I am not sure if it supposed to be.
PS: Do you watch "This Old House" ?
God bless!
Thanks, Brian. I am not sure what I intended by posting that tidbit. Oddly, I felt compelled to do so. So, it can be taken any way.ReplyDelete
I don't watch "This Old House," but I am sure my lovely wishes that I would


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RENO, Nev. The Student Advisory Board, a group of 28 student leaders from 14 high schools, introduced its new anti-bullying campaign, Mind the Gap, to the Washoe County Board of Trustees Tuesday.
The goal of the campaign is to close the gap created by physical appearances by recognizing and celebrating the diversity.
The idea of 'Mind the Gap' came to the students from a sign in London subways.
"They have [Mind the Gap] on the floor, and it's kind of be careful with that gap from where the subway is and where you're suppose to be standing," Maria Toca-Ruiz, a senior at Galena High School said.
The students are now using the saying to warn people of the gap caused by diversity, and they're trying to close it with this campaign.
The students say most of the bullying they see is caused by people's differences. But they also say bullying has taken on a new form, thanks to social media.
"I think that kids have become really good at hiding it," Madi Eckert, a junior at Reno High School and the one who thought of the slogan 'Mind the Gap", said.
"It's a lot easier to get away with it online rather than doing it face to face in school."
As part of the campaign, the students are filming a video about what bullying and accepting diversity means to them. They are planning to show the video in all 14 high schools in Washoe County.