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If on Sunday, November 7th, you watch the New York City Marathon, chances are that one of the first things you'll see is a pack of emaciated-looking men hurtling down the street at a little over twelve miles an hour, or about four minutes and fifty-five seconds a mile. To the onlooker, they will be an incomprehensible blur: a stampede of sharp-elbowed, highly focussed gazelles, so economical in their motion that they hardly seem to be touching the ground at all.
Somewhere in the middle of this pack will be a slight, pale runner from Michigan whose race bib reads "Ritz." As the underdog, Ritz—whose full name is Dathan Ritzenhein—will attract less attention than the race favorites: Meb Keflezighi, who last year became the first American to win the race in a quarter century, and Haile Gebrselassie, an Ethiopian marathon legend and the world record holder in the event. This is fine with Ritzenhein, whose New York "début," as marathoners say, came in 2006, when he was twenty-three years old and so hot a prospect that, according to Running Times, race organizers paid him about two hundred thousand dollars. (Ritzenhein's agent disputes this figure.) A National Collegiate Champion in cross country, Ritzenhein arrived in New York amid predictions that he would be the next great American marathoner. For the first twenty miles, he seemed primed to fulfill that promise, staying on the heels of the leaders. But, as the race entered the Bronx, he started to lag. By the time the runners reached the homestretch, in Central Park, Ritzenhein was practically crawling. He finished eleventh.
Afterward, Ritzenhein blamed his inexperience for the disappointing performance. Over the next three years, however, little changed. In the 2008 Olympic marathon, Ritzenhein finished ninth, plagued by calf pains that forced him to stop mid-race to stretch. The following April, he finished in eleventh place in London, with a time, 2:10, that put him almost five minutes behind the winner. "London was really the last straw," he said recently. "I thought, I've put so much into this. Do I really want to be just mediocre?"
Two months later, Ritzenhein left his coach of five years, Brad Hudson, to join a group of runners coached by Alberto Salazar, an enigmatic ex-racer regarded by many as the best American marathoner ever. For the past eight years, Salazar has been paid by Nike to lead a group of up to a dozen runners, who train together on the campus of the company, in Beaverton, Oregon—and who, Nike hopes, will win races wearing swoosh-adorned clothing. At first, Salazar had limited success. But in recent years he has acquired a certain mystique for his ability to cajole fragile runners into peak performance. Salazar has been widely credited with resuscitating the career of Alan Webb, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy miler, and with guiding the ascent of two female American record holders, Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley.
For Ritzenhein, initiation into Salazar's group proceeded roughly. As a coach, Salazar had become obsessed with optimizing his runners' form, and Ritzenhein did not escape that scrutiny. During the athletes' regular track workouts, Salazar criticized both the cant of Ritzenhein's pelvis and his nearly horizontal forearm carriage, which he argued was wasting energy. He also criticized him for his tendency to run with his thumbs pointing up, rather than curled over in a fist. (According to Salazar, this strained the forearm, and thus, through a long chain of physiological connections, the leg muscles.) Though the objections puzzled Ritzenhein, he didn't question them. "Alberto told me, 'It's imperative that you believe completely in what we're going to do,' " he recalled, " 'because it will be completely different from anything you've been taught.' "
Salazar's tinkering was controversial. Among élite coaches and competitors, tampering with an athlete's natural running style is recognized as a risky enterprise. Many top distance runners have idiosyncratic form, and adjusting even a minor detail of a racer's alignment can trigger a cascade of changes: subtle shifts in knee or foot position that can make the runner vulnerable to injury. This was particularly true for Ritzenhein, who was prone to developing stress fractures in the metatarsal bones of his feet. "When you run a hundred miles a week, your body finds natural positions that work," the élite Australian runner Craig Mottram points out. "It's flirting with disaster to mess with that."
After three months of training with Salazar, however, Ritzenhein went on a tear. At a five-thousand-metre race in Zurich that summer, he set a new American record. Six weeks later, he travelled to Birmingham, England, for the World Half-Marathon Championships, where he blew through the 13.1-mile course in sixty minutes, finishing in third place.
The performances spurred Salazar to attempt an even more radical overhaul of Ritzenhein's stride the following fall. "I told Dathan, 'To compete against the best, you've got to fix this,' " Salazar said in September. " 'But there's a risk. We may injure you.' Dathan said, 'I'm willing to take that risk.' And so we started changing his form."
When Salazar began running competitively, in the late seventies, he was known as a "sitter": he kept his hips so low that at times it looked as if he were straddling a desk chair. At six feet one, Salazar was also tall for a distance runner, with a gangly stride that initially led some competitors to discount him. Kirk Pfrangle, a racer with the Greater Boston Track Club, who first observed Salazar at a high-school track meet, recalls being baffled by his awkward mechanics. "It was like all the body parts were working in opposition to each other," Pfrangle remembered. "And yet he was running incredibly fast."
Pfrangle introduced himself after the meet, and invited Salazar to join the Track Club's workouts. It was an unusual gesture. Salazar, who was born in Cuba and grew up in a suburb of Boston, was a promising teen-ager. But the Track Club was a bastion of élite runners, including the four-time Boston Marathon winner Bill Rodgers. Despite this, Salazar seemed unintimidated, often pushing himself painfully through the club's workouts. "He was definitely Mr. Persistence," Rodgers recalled.
After high school, Salazar enrolled at the University of Oregon and joined its cross-country and track teams, both of which were top-ranked. Salazar had always been competitive, and at Oregon he began exploring tools for enhancing performance, including an unwieldy scuba-type mouthpiece that used chemical crystals to absorb oxygen, supposedly mimicking the effects of training at altitude. To help his muscles recover from workouts, Salazar experimented with dimethyl sulfoxide, a lotion that horse trainers use to reduce inflammation in thoroughbred racehorses. A runner who knew Salazar at the time recalls that the lotion was absorbed quickly through the pores of the skin and then entered the bloodstream. "You'd rub it on, and then you'd get this real garlicky taste in your mouth," he explained. "That's how you knew it was working." Eccentric as the technologies were, Salazar was meticulous in evaluating them: constantly monitoring the effect on his performance.
In college, Salazar did well but not spectacularly. In 1978, as a sophomore, he finished sixth in the ten-thousand-metre race at the N.C.A.A. Championships. Later that summer, Salazar, after struggling to keep pace with Rodgers, collapsed with heatstroke when he crossed the finish line at the Falmouth Road Race, in Cape Cod. He likely survived only because the race doctor had him lie in a plastic kiddie pool filled with ice water.
Though Salazar finished tenth, he nevertheless believed that he had passed a mental milestone. "After that race, I really felt, All right. I'm getting tough now," he recalled. He intensified his training and, not long afterward, announced that he was going to prepare for the 1980 Olympics, in Moscow, by working out at altitude in Kenya's Rift Valley.
Salazar got a room at a hunting lodge near Thomson's Falls, not far from where an élite Kenyan team trained, but he spent much of his time running alone, pushing himself on remote, exhausting runs through the countryside. Rudy Chapa, who had been Salazar's teammate at Oregon, remembers the trip as isolating. "He was living in this hotel by himself, with no one to talk to," Chapa said. "He would just lie there and read the same newspaper article over and over again." When the U.S. announced plans to boycott the Olympics, Salazar returned to the University of Oregon. Rather than slow down, though, he redoubled his training. During a layover at LaGuardia Airport, on the way home, he did an eleven-mile run around Queens. Examining his running logs for the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he calculated that he took off an average of less than one day a year.
Salazar's effort transformed him from a respectable collegiate racer into one of the best in the country. He won the first marathon he entered, in New York City in 1980. The next year, he won New York again, finishing in 2:08:13 and setting a new course record. The following spring, he outsprinted Dick Beardsley by two seconds in the Boston Marathon—a gruelling victory that came to be known as "the Duel in the Sun." Racing Beardsley up Commonwealth Avenue in a fog of motorcycle exhaust, Salazar, toweringly rangy in red shorts and a white singlet, looked at once indomitable and haggard. For most of the race, he had drunk no water, worrying that the extra weight would slow him down, and his face was crusted with the white salt of crystallized sweat. After the finish line, he collapsed again, as he had at Falmouth. This time, his core temperature fell to eighty-eight degrees. To revive him, paramedics had to administer six quarts of intravenous saline.
Though Salazar went on to win the New York City Marathon a third time, in 1982, he soon began to struggle. He lost a marathon for the first time in the spring of 1983, in Rotterdam, after pulling a muscle in his groin. The following year, he developed patellar tendinitis in his knee and then a torn hamstring. From there, his performance plummeted. After qualifying for the 1984 Olympic marathon, in Los Angeles, Salazar spent weeks training in Houston, in an effort to mimic the heat of L.A., only to finish fifteenth. His Olympic teammate Pete Pfitzinger speculates that the training in Houston left Salazar exhausted. "If he'd been satisfied to be fifth in L.A., he could have trained moderately and gotten it," Pfitzinger says. "But Alberto never wanted to be fifth in anything."
At home in Eugene after the Olympics, Salazar began to feel increasingly sluggish. Fighting to restore his speed, he invested in a series of elaborate medical tools, including an ultrasound machine to ease his tendinitis and a coffinlike hyperbaric chamber that he believed would saturate his muscles with oxygen. He also relied on a Finnish masseur, who sometimes lived in an apartment above the garage. None of these strategies worked, and for the next decade Salazar all but abandoned running. He invested in and managed a restaurant in Eugene, then sold his share to take a job in the sports-marketing department at Nike, which had sponsored him during his racing days. Though marathoners often run fastest in their early thirties, Salazar's collapse was early and abrupt. He had peaked at twenty-four and was finished at twenty-six.
Looking back, Salazar blames his form for his decline. "The way I ran, it wasn't sustainable," he said. "The attitude at the time was: if you were gifted with perfect form, great. If you weren't, you were just kind of stuck." While a runner with an awkward stride might win a few races, Salazar argues now, he's ultimately doomed to break down: "The knee injury, the hamstring injury—in hindsight, these were the things that killed me."
The Nike campus, situated ten miles outside Portland, has the leafy neatness of a modern Japanese garden. Pleasant stands of bamboo and birch flank an artificial lake, around which cluster large white buildings named after prominent Nike athletes (Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Alberto Salazar). The grounds feel both private and pristine. Even the forested two-mile running trail that encircles the property is elegant: impeccably overlaid with pale-gold wood chips, like a cross-country course staged by Pottery Barn.
Despite his injuries, Salazar still runs, and when we met one morning early this fall he arrived in a turquoise Livestrong T-shirt and old gray shorts. With his long legs and short hair, he retains an intimidating lankiness, though he moves stiffly, with a lock-jointed gait like the canter of an elderly racehorse.
After jogging around a field five or six times, he stretched briefly on the grass, then launched into an aggressive round of sit-ups and push-ups. "I'm sorry, but I have to get this done," he said apologetically during a particularly energetic set of crunches. In person, Salazar is unexpectedly warm, with a face that is both rounder and more kindly than photographs of him suggest. When I told him after the run that his form looked good, he flushed with pleasure.
Now fifty-two, Salazar has been married for almost thirty years, and has three grown children, Tony, Alex, and Maria, all of whom have had successful collegiate sports careers. Even before Tony, the eldest, reached junior high, Salazar hired a personal trainer to accompany the family on vacations, and he paid the same attention to their training as he had once paid to his own. Tony, a former University of Oregon wide receiver, who now works as a weight-room coach at Nike, recalls, "He used to wake me up at three in the morning with a protein shake. Back then, I was trying to gain weight for football, and sleep was the longest period that I'd go without eating. He'd go downstairs, turn on the blender, and then bring the drink to me in bed."
Though Salazar mentored a handful of athletes in the mid-nineties, he didn't begin coaching formally until 2001. That April, Salazar and Tom Clarke, a former competitive racer who was then the president of Nike, met to watch the Boston Marathon on TV in the company's cafeteria. As the top American crossed the finish line in sixth place, the men exchanged a baleful glance. "All the television announcers started gushing over how great that was," Salazar recalled, "and Tom and I just looked at each other. It was, like, Wow. We've sunk so low that sixth place is considered an accomplishment."
In Salazar's view, American athletes were failing because they couldn't match the training of the East African runners, who had dominated the marathon since his own retirement. From 1984 until Keflezighi's victory last year, no American man had won in either Boston or New York, and in many of those years no American had finished in the top ten. And it wasn't just that the Africans were faster: American runners were getting slower. In the twenty years since the Duel in the Sun, only one American had managed to run in any marathon as fast as Beardsley and Salazar had that day in Boston. Today, thirteen of the twenty-five fastest marathon times on record are held by Kenyans, and nine by Ethiopians—including the current world record, of 2:03:59, set by Gebrselassie in 2008.
Salazar believed that to offset the advantages held by the East African runners, many of whom grew up in high-altitude areas like the Rift Valley and began running long distances in childhood, American runners needed to harness the advantages provided by money and technology—both of which Clarke could provide. That fall, Salazar and Clarke launched a training program dubbed the Oregon Project.
At first, Salazar's scheme was bizarrely complex. Among other things, he arranged for the design of a sealed house near the Nike campus in which athletes would sleep in rooms with varied amounts of oxygen. He also used an obscure computer program from Russia that claimed to measure an athlete's fatigue level using electrodes that tracked variations in heart rate and in a runner's "omega brain waves." The venture proved to be, at best, a modest success. The runners Salazar managed to recruit for his experimental project were, by his own estimate, "B-plus" competitors, and the OmegaWave system was unpopular with many of the athletes, who didn't fully take to the thin air and close quarters of the altitude house, either.
In late 2005, Salazar began overhauling the Oregon Project. He recruited A-list racers, including Kara Goucher, while the members of the original team gradually left. He also abandoned the OmegaWave system and began to shift his emphasis from technology to form. The transformation was startling. Within a short time, the Oregon Project runners began producing standout performances, including a third-place finish by Goucher in the 2009 Boston Marathon. That fall, the U.S.A. Track and Field Association named Salazar Coach of the Year. Josh Rohatinsky, who trained with Salazar from 2007 to 2009, notes that "any new concept that attracts Alberto, he goes at it one million per cent. That's what makes him good, but it can also be his downfall."
Salazar's interest in form began in 2006. Watching a race on TV, he was struck by something distinctive in the stride of an Ethiopian racer named Kenenisa Bekele, the world record holder in both the five thousand metres and the ten thousand metres. Scrutinizing Bekele's body on the screen, Salazar noticed that he didn't arc his back leg up slowly between strides but instead retracted it sharply, like a piston. "While all these other runners had long, trailing legs, his foot was coming right up to his butt," Salazar recalled. "I thought, Is that just coincidence? Or could that perhaps be part of why he's so good?"
Salazar called the retired sprinter Michael Johnson, a four-time Olympic gold medalist who now heads the Michael Johnson Performance Center, in Dallas. "I told him, 'Hey, Michael, I'm watching this race . . . ' And when he heard what I was saying he laughed. He said, 'Alberto, that's Sprint 101 biomechanics!' "
According to Johnson, sprinters retract their trailing leg quickly for two reasons: it generates power, and it means that the foot has a shorter distance to travel before it arrives back in position for another stride. Salazar said, "One thing sprinters say is: Go to the ground. Don't wait for the ground to come to you." By "going to the butt," he believes, Bekele can take more strides per minute—which gives him greater speed.
To capture this advantage, Salazar commissioned Lance Walker, the Michael Johnson Center's director of performance, to measure the exact angles of Bekele's arms and legs at different points in his stride, using videos of races that he found online. Initially, Walker was reluctant. An expert in sprint mechanics, he knew nothing about long-distance form, and sprinters and distance runners had been thought to have little in common. While sprinters needed mammoth muscles and explosive power, marathoners needed efficiency and endurance. Watching the videos, however, he discovered that Bekele's form closely resembled that of a top sprinter. "The more tape we broke down," he recalled, "the more it became clear: he was harnessing the same advantages as a sprinter."
Walker also began to notice some uncanny similarities among the very best runners. The fastest finishers had a higher thigh drive, for one thing; at its apex, their femur bone was almost parallel to the ground, like the front legs of a bounding deer. They also slapped the ground so quickly with their forefoot that the contact seemed almost incidental. According to Walker, the short slap transfers force more efficiently, shooting it from the ground forward into the pelvis, rather than allowing it to dissipate in the flex of the foot. The effect, Walker says, is like "a pogo stick with a stiff spring." He explained, "You want the chain of force to travel from the ground through the body with minimal energy loss. That's what it means to run efficiently."
Because an efficient runner requires less muscle to propel himself, he can also be lighter—an advantage, since carrying extra weight takes energy. "If you look at the best guys, they're just bone and tendon and skin," Walker said. "When you're that efficient, you don't need so much to power you."
Not long after Ritzenhein's breakout season, in 2009, Salazar asked Walker to compare footage of Ritzenhein with footage of Bekele. Since high school, Ritzenhein had been a heel striker; even when he was running at speed, his heel struck the ground before the ball of his foot did. Salazar wanted him to run more on his forefoot and also to strike the pavement more sharply—"like you're clawing at the ground," Ritzenhein described it—to maximize the energy pushing him forward. "Dathan can't be a heel striker and expect to run as fast as the best forefoot runners," Salazar said. "I told him, 'Realistically, if we don't change your biomechanics, I don't think I can get you there.' "
Seated in a cluttered conference room at Nike one day this summer, Salazar opened his laptop and pulled up a video of Ritzenhein running circuits around a track, and put it in slow motion. Comparing the video to one of Bekele, Salazar explained, had revealed several flaws in Ritzenhein's form, including a problem with his elbow drive: the amount of thrust produced by the rearward pump of his upper arms. While Ritzenhein typically throws his elbows back at around a sixty-degree angle when he's running hard, Bekele throws his back at almost seventy degrees—generating a correspondingly more powerful push. The comparison also identified a problematic gap between Ritzenhein's knees at the moment when his front foot struck the ground. Freezing the frame, Salazar targeted a wedge-shaped space between Ritzenhein's thighs. That gap reflected both Ritzenhein's tendency to heel-strike and the sluggish recovery of his trailing leg. "It's only in slow motion that you can see it, but that's braking him," Salazar said, leaning in to peer intently at Ritzenhein's shorts. "There's a little hiccup. He's reaching too far forward with that heel."
Salazar believes that a runner striking even slightly in front of his body will experience a momentary hesitation while the hamstring labors to pull his torso forward over the grounded foot. "It's like having a square wheel on your car," Salazar said. "Each time it comes around, there's a moment where the car will lurch."
Switching to a video of Bekele, Salazar grew animated. "If you look at Bekele and you look at Gebrselassie—and Gebrselassie is the first one we saw this with—he's not sitting," he said, stabbing a finger at the runner's pelvis. "His hips are directly under his body, which is directly above his foot. So all that force is going up through his legs and hips into his upper body, to propel him forward. There's nothing being lost there."
Ritzenhein began his transformation last fall, but the switch proved calamitous. Already prone to injury, he developed sesamoiditis in his left foot, a painful inflammation in two small bones near the big toe. To relieve the pressure, Salazar dug a hole in the insole of Ritzenhein's shoe, which he buttressed with duct tape. The modification relieved the sesamoiditis, but it also caused a stress fracture by transferring more strain onto the third metatarsal.
Though Ritzenhein's foot healed, the damage thwarted his training, forcing him to pull out of the World Cross Country Championships in March, 2010. A few months afterward, the record he set in Zurich was broken by Bernard Lagat—at a race in Oslo that Ritzenhein missed because of injury.
"It just kind of kept going," Ritzenhein said grimly when we spoke last summer. "Alberto said, 'I'm sorry. We blew it.' Frankly, it was a bit of a disaster."
Ritzenhein, who is now twenty-seven, has close-cropped light-brown hair and a narrow face. At five feet eight and a hundred and twenty pounds, his body doesn't appear gaunt so much as taut, with legs that resemble those of a twelve-year-old girl: hairless, concave, knob-kneed, and so smoothly tan that they appear to be molded out of a soft, flesh-colored plastic. A small, multicolored tattoo of the Olympic rings decorates one calf.
Following the stress fracture last fall, Salazar took Ritzenhein to see Gordon Valiant, Nike's house expert in biomechanics. Valiant put him on a sixty-metre test track outfitted with a force plate and had him run barefoot. Sensors in the force plate recorded the amount of force exerted on each part of the foot during impact: his so-called "loading pattern." That pattern revealed a spike under Ritzenhein's third metatarsal. To compensate for that, Valiant engineered a thin orthotic embedded with a small oval of ultra-soft foam to support the injured bone, which Ritzenhein has been using since mid-July, when he returned to high-mileage training. Salazar also instructed Ritzenhein to replace his sharp forefoot strike with a less aggressive landing on the midfoot, and he reduced the number of miles that Ritzenhein ran, compensating for the lost distance with long sessions of aqua jogging, plus workouts on Nike's altered-gravity treadmill, a pressurized pod that allows athletes to run with artificially lowered body weight.
So far, the modifications seem to be working. Ritzenhein typically works out twice a day, and one hot, muggy morning in late August his schedule began with a ten-mile run on grass at an easy pace of six minutes a mile, followed by a set of customized plyometrics, twenty minutes of aqua jogging, and an hour of weights. "From the start, Alberto told me that he's going to screw up sometimes," Ritzenhein said as he stood on the sidelines of a fastidiously trimmed field. "But he also said that he's going to know he screwed up, and fix it. Having faith that he knows what he's doing—that's the most important thing."
From the sidelines, at least, the recovery appeared complete. Taking laps around the grassy field, Ritzenhein looked less like a preteen girl than like a creature that would be at home on the veldt: a sleek human oryx. His quads are rock-hard but very small, and his shoulders and torso appear to be made out of hammered white leather. His expression, insofar as he had one, reflected concentration. The only exception came when Ritzenhein's wife, Kalin, arrived with their newborn son, Jude, and three-year-old daughter, Addison, who staggered onto the field. Ritzenhein beamed. "Hi, Addy!" he called, then ran past her. Beyond that, Ritzenhein scarcely seemed to change position over each circuit. Occasionally, he scratched his thigh. Once, he wiped sweat from his brow. The run appeared eerily smooth: a model of prey-animal efficiency.
Maintaining this new form has been a challenge. "I have to think about it all the time now," Ritzenhein said. "My upper body especially. I'll be running around the field and Alberto will say, 'Get your thumbs down! You have your thumbs up!' "
After running, Ritzenhein stretched briefly on the sidelines, then began a complex series of exercises designed by Lance Walker. In order for a runner's elbow thrust to work, Ritzenhein explained, his core has to be strong enough for the momentum to be transferred through the oblique muscles of the abdomen into the pelvis. This day, he began by hopping forward, kicking one leg out, then bowing gracefully to tap the toe of his shoe. He followed that with a more military maneuver, scuffing rapidly across the grass, then abruptly stopping and jackknifing one leg at the knee, pulling the heel sharply toward his buttock.
Ritzenhein later admitted that one of the most crushing aspects of his injury last fall was that it had happened under Salazar's tutelage. "When I came to Alberto, I thought I was done being hurt," Ritzenhein said. "But this is the longest cycle of injuries that I've ever had: probably by double, or even triple."
Ritzenhein has been unable to practice his race tactics for more than a year—a disadvantage that became evident during a half marathon in England in mid-September. Salazar had estimated his ideal finish at sixty-one minutes, but the lead group went out faster than that pace. Ritzenhein tried to hold on, only to fade at Mile 8, nearly crippled by shooting pains in his calves. He finished in 62:35, substantially slower than Salazar's estimate. Talking to reporters afterward, he conceded, "I guess I'm not as fit as I thought I was."
Since then, Ritzenhein has been training hard. He spent two weeks running at altitude in New Mexico, often covering between eighteen and twenty-six miles a day. He has also continued to monitor small details of his form, particularly his upper body. Victory in New York is a realistic goal, he believes. "I think I'm fit enough that I could win." Even so, he acknowledges, the process is a gamble. "It's a hard thing changing something when you don't know what the outcome is going to be," he said. "It's uncharted territory for me now."
Not everyone is so optimistic. Gabe Jennings, who competed in the fifteen-hundred-metre race at the 2000 Olympics, thinks that Ritzenhein may be too old to adopt a new running style. Jennings, who was himself disabled by an Achilles-tendon injury at the age of twenty-eight, after a coach attempted to modify his natural stride, said, "It's very rare to switch approaches at this age and have it be successful," adding, "If Alberto pulls this off with Dathan, it'll be very impressive."
As Salazar sees it, though, Ritzenhein needs to have perfect biomechanics if he is to have a chance at finishing ahead of Gebrselassie and Keflezighi, both of whom train relentlessly and seem to run effortlessly. That fact, he says, is one that Ritzenhein accepts. "When you start changing an athlete's form, there's always a risk," Salazar said, with a shrug. "Dathan knows that. And he's willing to take that risk, because he doesn't want to be the guy that's just trying to get a bronze medal. Not this time. This time, he wants to be the winner." ♦


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Date: 13-Oct-2011 - 15-Oct-2011
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contact Person: Katja Jasinskaja
Meeting Email: jasinskaja(at)zas.gwz-berlin.de
Web Site: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/workshop_tprag.html
Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Semantics;
Call Deadline: 15-Jun-2011
Meeting Description:
The last decade witnessed a surge of new research in pragmatics and several new theoretical frameworks emerged: different variants of game theoretic and optimality theoretic approaches, non-Gricean approaches to implicatures, and multi-dimensional approaches to meaning. At the same time, research in other frameworks such as Neo-Gricean pragmatics, speech act-theory, theories of vagueness and presupposition theory has progressed rapidly as well. In many areas, an influx of researchers with training in formal semantics has brought formal precision to pragmatic theories. This has led to new empirical predictions, but also sometimes shifted or blurred the semantics-pragmatics boundary. After a decade of diversification, it is time to bring the different approaches together and compare their results and methodologies.
It is the aim of this conference to provide a forum for research on theoretical pragmatics. Pragmatics is understood in a wide sense, including not only classical topics like Gricean pragmatics, speech act and presupposition theory, but also e.g. theoretical models of socio-linguistics, language evolution, and language change. In order to foster the interaction between experimental and theoretical approaches, we explicitly encourage presentations of theoretical models which have a basis in experimental studies, or allow for experimentally testable predictions.
Invited speakers:
Reviewing Board:
The conference is organized and sponsored by the ZAS programme area 6 Interfaces between sentence semantics and discourse strategies, the DfG project Implicatures and Discourse Structure (IDis), and the Emmy-Noether research group Interpretation of Quantifiers.
Important Dates:

subset: commoncrawl


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Actually it is defense in depth even though they are all contained on one appliance or device. Think about the layers in a bullet proof vest. They each work in tandem to prevent damage to the person wearing it. However just one type of layer by itself would likely not be enough protection against certain firearms.
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Martyr Theodula of Anazarbus, and the Martyrs Helladius, Macarius and Evagrius, in Cilicia - Troparion & Kontakion
Troparion — Tone 4
Your holy martyr Theodula, O Lord, / Through her sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from You, our God. / For having Your strength, she laid low her adversaries, / And shattered the powerless boldness of demons. / Through her intercessions, save our souls!


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timeforcake: Is your logo or graphic an original?
Setting the scene: Late spring/early summer 2012. We here at the TimeForCake Web strategy team are cranking through an early stage of planning, designing and building a new, fully custom website for a national scholarly organization. One of the responsibilities the client was given for this particular stage is to provide us with the organization's logo. Now rewind five months.Back when the client was still just a prospect and I was exploring exactly what type of help the organization would benefit from, we'd had a discussion regarding the possibility of developing a new logo and brand identity for them. The discussion was rather short, however, as the organization didn't wish to invest what we'd charge to do an outstanding job. They mentioned they'd prefer to source the work internally and save some money. That was that.Fast forward back to late spring/early summer 2012. My contact at the organization sends me an email gleefully sharing that the new logo is just about ready! I remember looking forward to checking my email later in the week to see what the new symbol representing this national organization would look like.And I oh-so-clearly remember the morning the new logo showed up in my inbox.Ohhhhh dear. We had a problem.The logo was an impossibly shiny (think Apple-glossy) globe covered with glowing details and components that were meant to represent global interconnectivity. Though clich, the concept itself wasn't the issue. The issue was that the graphic was so overprocessed, overdone and generic that my brain's built-in stock image radar started to simultaneously explode and implode. (Yes, I know that imploding and exploding at the same time defines the laws of physics, but I'm pretty certain it happened in my brain that morning.)How could I tell the logo wasn't custom? The same way the experienced chef can tell the unwrapped Snickers bar placed in front of him was most likely mass-created at a commercial factory and not handcrafted in a small home kitchen.This was no custom logo. This was a stock image pulled from a stock image website that had been minimally tweaked (think color change). And a stock image that has been tweaked or updated is not a custom logo, folks. It's illegal.So here we have a national organization saying they were going to use this shiny, generic globe as its logo. Ethically I knew I couldn't move forward without having a serious call with my connection at the organization.Tune in next week to find out what happened next and how you can prevent unnecessary legal issues with your logo and graphics…Erin Pheil is the owner of timeforcake creative media – the Web Design & Strategy company voted #1 in Best of Summit. Visit the timeforcake website at http://www.timeforcake.com or email Erin at email@example.com.
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Most general managers and head coaches from the 32 NFL teams addressed the media last weekend at the NFL Combine, to discuss not only their thoughts on this year's NFL Draft prospects, but also about their team's plans heading into free agency, which begins March 13.
Here are 24 notes from around the league, many of which pertain to the Dolphins:
1. Peyton Manning will continue to be the Dolphins No. 1 priority until his situation is resolved. And many insiders, including John Clayton and Chris Mortensen, are warming to the idea that the Dolphins are the favorite to land him if he is cut. Donovan McNabb said Monday on D.C. radio that "I don't see Peyton ending up in Washington." Jets head coach Rex Ryan and Arizona GM Rod Graves both refused to shoot down speculation that their teams will be in the hunt. Kansas City and Seattle will pursue, but seem unlikely, given that they often play games in inclement weather (though Seattle does have over $25 million in salary cap space). Cleveland probably won't pursue because it appears to be in the driver's seat for Robert Griffin III, though the St. Louis Post-Dispatch considers the Redskins "the early front-runner" for RG3. Minnesota, which plays in a dome and has Christian Ponder penciled in as the starter, is a Wild Card.
2. Dolphins fans should be most worried about the Cardinals in the competition to sign Manning. They also have good weather, a talented receiver (Larry Fitzgerald) and play in a dome. And if they cut Kevin Kolb before March 17, they can avoid paying him a $7 million roster bonus, and move on after paying him $12 million for one year (plus giving up a second-round pick and CB Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie). Cutting bait with Kolb and then winning a bidding war for Manning seems out of character for Cardinals owner Bill Bidwell, but you can't count it out.
3. One factor that could work in Miami's favor: The Dolphins play at Indianapolis in 2012. A couple of Colts beat writers said the ultra-competitive Manning will embrace the opportunity to "stick it up their a**" if he is cut.
4. One team that won't be in the Manning hunt: Tennessee. Titans fans were the first to erect Peyton Manning billboards, but head coach Mike Munchak said Jake Locker and Matt Hasselbeck will compete for the starting job during minicamps.
5. If the Dolphins can't get Peyton, they probably won't have much competition for Matt Flynn. The only other teams who likely will be interested – Washington, which runs a West Coast Offense, and Seattle, whose GM (John Schneider) helped draft Flynn. But neither the Redskins or Seahawks want to break the bank for Flynn, either.
6. Packers GM Ted Thompson declined to say whether his team will use the franchise tag on Flynn so as to trade him, but ESPNMilwaukee.com reported that the Packers will not do so. Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy said Flynn "is ready to be an NFL starter. … He's very consistent, the same guy every day. I'm talking about emotionally, mentally and physically. He can make all the throws, does a very good job of running the system. The same game plan that we had in for Aaron Rodgers, we went with the some one with his opportunities. I think he's very savvy in the pocket, and people underestimate his athletic ability."
7. It's no secret that the Rams want to trade the No. 2 pick to a team who wants RG3. New coach Jeff Fisher said that the Rams will "listen to whoever's willing to talk. … We have a lot of options, and we're going to be prepared to do whatever." Yes, the Dolphins have contacted the Rams. So have several other teams. The Dolphins view RG3 as a contingency plan in case they can't get Manning or Flynn, because Cleveland appears to be in the driver's seat, with the fourth and 22nd picks in this year's draft (St. Louis could still get the player it wants (Justin Blackmon is the favorite) with the fourth pick, but probably not with the Dolphins' eighth pick). The Dolphins would have to trade away nearly their entire stock of 2012 draft picks plus next year's first-rounder to best the Browns' offer, and that's not in Jeff Ireland's DNA. Washington might be crazy enough to pull off a Herschel Walker-type trade, but not Miami. Fisher said the idea of trading Sam Bradford and taking RG3 "wouldn't be an option."
8. The Chiefs are hot on the QB trail, as well. They interviewed RG3 at the Combine (as well as almost every QB prospect), and Romeo Crennel said the team would be "crazy not to consider" Peyton, a comment which won't be construed as tampering. Crennel's support of Matt Cassel is tepid, at best, saying "until we get another quarterback on the team, Cassel is the guy." Ouch. Kyle Orton and Chad Henne will be two options to sign if the Chiefs don't get Manning, Flynn or RG3, but Crennel said he learned an important lesson from his time as head coach in Cleveland: "Try to avoid a quarterback controversy, for one. That's the key." Cassel's days in Kansas City may be numbered.
9. Another team that won't be in the quarterback hunt – San Francisco, which potentially would have been an attractive landing spot for Manning. "We're very confident in Alex (Smith)," GM Trent Baalke said of his quarterback, who is an unrestricted free agent. "Our confidence in his has not wavered at all."
10. Speaking of QBs, expect the Broncos to give Tim Tebow the starting job to start the season, but with no guarantees about keeping his job. "I was really happy with his progress," John Elway said. "But we also want to see strides in Tim and his ability to get better at throwing the football downfield from the pocket. We just feel that's something we have to do to get better as an offense." Expect the Broncos to prepare for the future by taking a quarterback with their second- or third-round draft pick. Denver also could be a landing spot for Henne as Tebow's backup.
11. As of Saturday, 30 of the 32 NFL teams requested to roll over their unused 2011 salary cap space to 2012. The Dolphins were one of those teams, giving Ireland an additional $9.05 million to play with this year.
12. Ireland believes the three most important positions on the football field are: Quarterback, pass rusher and cornerback. Coincidentally, the Dolphins need help at all three positions. Their success in free agency with Manning or Flynn will ultimately determine their draft strategy, but assuming they land one of those guys, expect the Dolphins to pick an elite cornerback or pass rusher in round 1, draft the other position in round 2, and draft a quarterback to sit and develop behind Manning/Flynn in rounds 3-4. The Dolphins, knowing that the Manning or Flynn era could be short-lived, believe in the "double-down" concept this year at quarterback.
13. Why is cornerback a need for Miami? For one, the Dolphins simply need a body, as nickel corner Will Allen is a free agent, and second-year vet Jimmy Wilson may not be ready to handle the third cornerback role. Two, Sean Smith is entering his contract year, and his future with the team has not been determined. Three, Smith has the skillset to potentially be an excellent free safety, which is also a position of need for the Dolphins. Pahokee's Janoris Jenkins, an elite talent who has had off-field issues, would be a steal if the Dolphins could get him in the second round.
14. The Lions and Panthers are very much in the market for cornerbacks, and the Chiefs still hope to bring back coveted free agent Brandon Carr, though the Cowboys are reportedly the front-runner to land him. The 49ers will do "everything it can" to retain CB Carlos Rogers, Baalke said. Cortland Finnegan to the Lions, where he will reunite with former Titans DC Jim Schwartz, makes too much sense.
15. Teams that are looking for outside pass rushers, in addition to the Dolphins: Seahawks, Falcons, Bills, Titans, Chiefs, Panthers, Jets, Texans.
16. The Dolphins will likely have to find an elite pass rusher in the draft, as "those guys usually don't get to the free agent market," Titans GM Ruston Webster said. Houston's Mario Williams will be too expensive (his franchise tag number is close to $22 million) and Houston GM Rick Smith said "we're working hard to figure out a way" to bring him back. Detroit GM Martin Mayhew said "it's hard to let a guy like Cliff Avril go," and will likely use the franchise tag on him. The Colts will find a way to keep Robert Mathis, and could use the tag on him, as well. Graves said the Cardinals wants to get a long-term deal done with Calais Campbell "sooner rather than later." Falcons DE John Abraham said he wants $12 million per year, which would price him out of Miami, and Jaguars DE Jeremy Mincey has received interest from five teams, but the Dolphins aren't one.
17. The Vikings are praying that the Rams somehow keep the No. 2 pick and use it on Blackmon or LT Matt Kalil. Minnesota GM Rick Spielman will "definitely" try to trade out of the No. 3 pick, but assuming the Rams pull off a deal, the Vikings will stick at No. 3, and Kalil is likely the pick.
18. Speaking of the Vikings, coach Leslie Frazier said RB Adrian Peterson, who tore his ACL in Week 16, wants to start running by the end of this week but the team will likely keep him off the field for a couple more weeks. "He feels like he's ahead of schedule, but we do have to temper his emotions at times," Frazier said. And Percy Harvin's migraine problem, which forced him to miss games at the University of Florida and during his first two NFL seasons, seems to have subsided. "We had no episodes during the course of the season, which was a first," Frazier said. "That really contributed to him having such an outstanding all-around season."
19. Other running back news: Raiders coach Dennis Allen said Darren McFadden, who missed the last nine games of the season with a Lisfranc fracture in his foot, "will be ready to go whenever we get ready to kick off the season." Schneider said the Seahawks have had "great discussions" with Marshawn Lynch and Pete Carroll said the team has "big plans for him being with us." Houston may have to use the franchise tag on Arian Foster. Falcons coach Mike Smith said Michael Turner, who has cracked 300 carries in all three of his healthy seasons in Atlanta, will be on a "pitch count" this year. And Chiefs GM Scott Pioli said Jamaal Charles, who tore his ACL in September, "should be ready. We got to see him last week, and everybody feels pretty confident he will be fine."
20. Wide receiver news: The Patriots are expected to use the franchise tag on Wes Welker, which isn't surprising. What is surprising is that the Steelers, who entered the offseason $20 million over the salary cap, believe they can bring back Mike Wallace, who is a restricted free agent. Even with the first-round tender, it is expected that a team picking in the back of the first round (Patriots, Ravens) would forfeit the pick in order to sign one of the league's best vertical threats. Steelers GM Kevin Colbert said "there's always a franchise (tag) possibility," which would require the Steelers to clear out even more salary cap room, but "we're going to do everything we can to make sure Mike Wallace remains a Pittsburgh Steeler. I think that's Mike's belief as well." The Chiefs "would definitely like to have Dwayne Bowe back," Crennel said, and could use the franchise tag. The Bills, however, seem resigned to losing Stevie Johnson. "We hope it works out, but it's business," coach Chan Gailey said.
21. Jeff Fisher, who chose the Rams over the Dolphins, on Miami's outlook: "I think they've got a chance to be outstanding. You watch the way that team played all year and overcame some things. They've got an outstanding young roster. And Jeff's (Ireland) a very, very talented evaluator. They'll compete in that division." He also poo-poo'd the idea that he chose St. Louis over Miami because the Dolphins don't have a good quarterback situation. "Matt Moore's a good football player," Fisher said. "You can win with him. So the perception that there's a tremendous need at that position I think is generated from the outside."
22. Giants GM Jerry Reese won't take credit for "discovering" Victor Cruz, the former practice squad player who broke out for 82 catches, 1,536 yards and nine touchdowns this year. "We had him (rated) just like everyone else – undrafted local free agent," Reese said. "If he wasn't a local free agent, obviously we wouldn't have brought him in. You get lucky like that sometimes in scouting."
23. Jets coach Rex Ryan said it was a "huge mistake" to make a Super Bowl guarantee at last year's Combine. "I really thought it would be a thing that would actually motivate our team," he said. "But in hindsight I think it put undue pressure on our team, and we kind of lost focus."
24. These aren't Al Davis' Raiders, anymore. Said Allen, the new head coach: "We're not going to take guys just because they run real fast. Because that doesn't co-relate to being a good football player." The Raiders under Davis selected the Combine's fastest players in each of the past three years: (DeMarcus Van Dyke, Jacoby Ford, Darrius Heyward-Bey).


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For help, you can always call us at (800) 875-7060
People are talking about the work we do.Find out what they're saying.
"American Somalis are doing what they can to raise money, help" Al Jazeera - July 2011
"In U.S., Somalis Rally to Send Help" Washington Post - July 27, 2011
"Somalis in America Strive to Help Those Back Home" National Public Radio - July 28, 2011
"Grassroots fundraising efforts underway among Somali community" Voice of America - July 2011
"Before U2 Show, Bono Weighs in on Famine" Chris Riemenschneider, Star Tribune - July 24, 2011 "Somalis Waste Away As Insurgents Block Escape from Famine" Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times - August 1, 2011
"Pakistani Aid Effort Hurt by Scale, Terrain, Instability" PBS NewsHour - August 23, 2010
"On the ground in Pakistan after devastating floods" All Things Considered, Minnesota Public Radio - August 3, 2010
"Haiti Rescue and Relief Effort Underway" Midday, Minnesota Public Radio - January 14, 2010
"UN Reports Progress Preventing Spread of HIV to Newborns"Tom Crann, Minnesota Public Radio - December 1, 2009
"Small Town to Sudan"Katy Zillmer, Oakdale - Lake Elmo Review - October 7, 2009
"Refugee Organization Gets New Chief"Audio Interview with Tom Crann, Minnesota Public Radio - May 18, 2009
"Agency's New President Has a Global View of Relief Work"Gail Rosenblum, Minneapolis Star Tribune - May 18, 2009
"The Power of Normal People" - by Ben AffleckL'Uomo Vogue - November, 2008
"Hugh Parmer Named Research Fellow at the Humphrey Institute"UMN News, Minneapolis/St. Paul - September 5, 2008
"Through Their Eyes - Victims of gender-based violence fight back with video."UTNE Reader - May/June 2008
"Refugees Given Video Cameras to Record Conditions"WCCO TV, Minneapolis/St. Paul - February 18, 2008
"Aid Worker Fights Sexual Violence in Liberia With Video Cameras"MinnPOST.com, Minneapolis/St. Paul - January 23, 2008
"MN Professor Biking Across Africa"WCCO TV, Minneapolis/St. Paul - January 8, 2008
"Area Charities Recognized for Efficiency"Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal - December 11, 2007
"USAID Supports Efforts to Reduce Violence Against Refugee and Displaced Women"USAID, Washington D.C. - October 25, 2007 "How Video Cameras Could Bring Societal Change"Roseanne Pereira, Minnesota Public Radio - October 12, 2007
"American Refugee Committee Launches Video Project"Tim Harlow, Star Tribune - October 4, 2007
"Home: Displaced in Darfur and Chad"Joni Danzl, NEED Magazine - Issue 3, 2007
"SUDAN: AIDS education not reaching booming Yei fast enough"IRIN - August 28, 2007
"Star power brings attention to Africa"Danna Harman, The Christian Science Monitor - August 22, 2007
"Dispatches from Darfur"Andrea Grazzini Walstrom, Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine - Sept. 2007
"Your Situation Touches Us": Connecting Kids with the World's Refugees, by Therese Gales, Citizens for Global Solutions - June Communique - June 13, 2007 ARC is "Best Charity in the Twin Cities"City Pages - April 27, 2007
"Life Experiences of Refugee Men and Women"Carol Pavlish, College of St. Catherine - 2007
"Through Our Eyes: Participatory Video in West Africa"Moloney, Konie, Goodsmith, Forced Migration Review


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Common Core Timeline
- June 2008—The Hunt Institute for Educational Leadership, which had received a $2.2 million grant from the Gates Foundation the previous month to promote the adoption of national standards among governors, hosts a conference with the National Governors Association (NGA) to explore strategies to make the United States a global leader in education.1
- 2008—NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officials (CCSSO) begin accepting grants from private organizations to write Common Core.2
- December 2008—NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve provide the Obama Administration with Benchmarking for Success outlining the state adoption of a common core of internationally benchmarked standards and assuring that state textbooks, curricula, and assessments are aligned to these standards as two of the top five priorities.
- February 17, 2009—The American Recovery and Restoration Act authorizes the Race to the Top program (RTTT), and Secretary Duncan announces that $5 billion have been allotted for education incentives.
- March 7, 2009—The RTTT program is announced. Applying states had to demonstrate their willingness and readiness to adopt common "college- and career-ready" standards. (This was listed as an "absolute priority" on the RTTT score sheet.)
- June 1, 2009—The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative is launched, and 48 states sign a memorandum committing to the development of standards.
- September 2009—The first draft of CCSS is released by NGA and CCSSO.
- January 19, 2010—The deadline for Phase I of RTTT.
- March 2010—The second draft of CCSS is released.
- April 14, 2010—Stage II applications for RTTT funding requiring states to commit to adopt "a common set of K–12 standards by August 2, 2010" are due.
- June 2, 2010—The final Common Core State Standards are published.
- August 2, 2010—RTTT Stage II application revision deadline. Revisions must demonstrate each state's implementation efforts. Thirty-one states (and the District of Columbia) have already adopted the Common Core.
- December 31, 2010—Ten more states have adopted the Common Core, and five more will join by the end of 2011.
- 2013–14—TARGET: All participating states will have fully implemented the Common Core into their curricula.
- 2014–15—TARGET: States in consortia will administer new assessments.
1 Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins, "Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America," A Pioneer Institute White Paper no. 87 (May 2012): 3.


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GREENWOOD, S.C. – Having come into the weekend without a Peach Belt Conference (PBC) Tournament win since 2008, the Georgia College baseball team (33-17) rattled off four straight victories to blitz the 2013 field and pick up the first PBC Tournament Championship in school history.
The Bobcats earn the PBC's automatic bid to the NCAA Southeast Regional Tournament later this week. No. 7-seed Georgia College beat No. 8-seed University of Montevallo (34-20) 3-2 in Sunday's title game.
Georgia College put runs up first, grabbing a pair in the third inning. Catcher Steve Hazel (Kentwood, Mich.) led off the inning with a walk, eventually coming in on a wild pitch for the 1-0 lead. Leftfielder Jake Sandlin (Evans, Ga.) also walked, and made it 2-0 crossing the plate on an error off the bat of Daniel Bick (Alpharetta, Ga.).
UM cut the lead in half in the fourth, a solo home run by Jackson Slaid for a 2-1 Bobcat advantage. Georgia College got its insurance run in the sixth, as third baseman Jeremy Donaldson (Winder, Ga.) ripped a clutch two-out single to left center to plate designated hitter Cody Maas (Alpharetta, Ga.), who also walked.
Montevallo got another run in the eighth on a wild pitch, but would get no closer.
Righty starter Matt LaMothe (Troy, Mich.) had not gone the distance in a Bobcat uniform in his two seasons prior to this week, but threw his second complete game of the tournament Sunday. LaMothe threw 136 pitches scattering four hits and three walks for just the two runs, fanning five. He improves to 8-4 on the season.
Bick was the only multi-hit performer in the pitchers' duel, going 2-for-4 with a pair of singles, as the Bobcats plated three runs on just three hits.
LaMothe was named PBC Tournament MVP, throwing two complete game wins. Sandlin joins him with a six-RBI contest against UNC Pembroke and nine total RBI over the four games. Righty starter Justin Blue (Mulberry, Fla.) also took a spot on the team, throwing a complete-game shutout over Francis Marion University Thursday.
The Bobcats will look forward to the NCAA Regional selection show tonight at 10 p.m. on NCAA.com.
The Georgia College Department of Athletics, two-time winners of the PBC Commissioner's Cup, sponsors 11 varsity athletic programs at the NCAA Division II level. As a Division II program, Bobcat Athletics prides itself on balancing the life of the student-athlete, evidenced by the teams' multiple appearances in post-season competition as well as documented academic success and community-service involvement. Sign up at www.twitter.com/BobcatSports and www.facebook.com/gcbobcats for up-to-the-minute reports, and visit www.GCBobcats.com for more information, and to nominate your favorite former Bobcats and Colonials to the GC Athletics Hall of Fame.


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Today: Facebook adds a "third pillar" to its social network, a search function that could spell trouble for other tech companies. Also: Apple (AAPL) closes lower than $500 for the first time since February, but indexes stay afloat.
Facebook offers new search function, which could affect other tech firms
After a week of anticipation, Facebook on Tuesday announced the "third pillar" of the world's leading social network, a search function entering beta mode that will allow users to easily search information posted by friends and to the public.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives announced the new offering at the company's Menlo Park headquarters in front of assembled media, which had been invited a week earlier, helping send Facebook shares to heights unseen since the summer. Investors seemed disappointed by the announcement, but not resoundingly so — Facebook shares dropped 2.7 percent, but stayed above the $30 level it surpassed in the excitement about the event.
"Graph Search," as Facebook calls it, offers the chance to find interests, photos and places that are popular with a user's friends. Zuckerberg was adamant that all the information one could find though the search function was already visible to them, in an attempt to allay privacy concerns, but also admitted that the service is not monetized yet, so will have no material effect on its revenues. Most users will not get an immediate crack at the search function, either, because it is still being tested; users can sign up for the beta-testing waiting list here.
What the offering will do, if it is successful, is keep Facebook users on the social network's site longer, giving it more opportunities to advertise on users' News Feeds and Timelines, the other two "pillars" of Facebook. While some users may find the offering creepy, it offers a wealth of possibilities for users that could accomplish the company's goal of more hours of their time.
Those hours will come away from other companies, however, and Facebook's announcement Tuesday could affect many other important tech companies.
Google (GOOG) — Graph Search will not search the Web, which keeps Facebook from direct search competition with the biggest bully in the sector. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land points out, the new offering is completely different from Google; for a personal touch, The Wall Street Journal's Tom Gara says that your friends are not as smart as the Internet. However, Google has tried to integrate social results in its search with weak results, so Facebook could eventually find a way to accomplish a goal the search leader has not. Also, as Gartner analyst Brian Blau told the Mercury News, "in the future, you know Facebook will figure out how to monetize this," which would make them a bigger competitor to Google for search-related advertising. The company's stock price jumped around wildly during the Facebook event, but ended up almost flat, with a 0.2 percent increase.
Microsoft — While Graph Search will not search the Web, Facebook did announce a partner in the effort: Microsoft's Bing will perform Web searches on queries that cannot be answered by Facebook's offering, giving a boost to the Google competitor. Microsoft invested in Facebook long before it became the world's largest social network, and this type of partnership is the result; Bing also offers some Facebook functionality on its search site. Microsoft stock gained 1.2 percent on the day, thanks to a steady climb after Facebook's announcement.
Yelp and Foursquare — These two tech companies could be the most affected by Facebook's offering, as it allows people to directly find places in distinct areas that their friends have recommended. Yelp and Foursquare "could be threatened," Altimeter Group analyst Rebecca Lieb said Tuesday because Yelp and Foursquare rely on those types of queries for their own products, and are already facing tough competition from the likes of Google and others"They're looking at this with some interest and trepidation because Facebook really is the 900-pound gorilla in the social networking space," she said. The one saving grace for those two companies: Facebook is focusing on desktop Graph Search first, ceding them the powerful mobile audience that Yelp and Foursquare have focused on for years. Long-term doubts exist, though: Yelp shares plummeted 6.2 percent Tuesday, and one analyst predicted Foursquare will fail in 2013 before Tuesday's announcement.
LinkedIn — The new search function adds better ability to network professionally, the domain of Mountain View social network LinkedIn. While LinkedIn has more than 200 million users, Facebook has more than a billion, so a search for, say, "Friends of friends who work at Yahoo (YHOO)" could theoretically be much more productive on the larger social network. Similarly, Facebook could challenge dating sites such as OKCupid or Match.com, which thrive on users' ability to search profiles of single people with specific interests. With Graph Search, searches such as "Single women who like James Bond movies" could pull users away from those sites and keep them on Facebook. LinkedIn took a big dip after Tuesday's announcement but recovered before the close, ending with a 0.3 percent gain.
Apple stock reaches a new low as analysts debate iPhone demand
Apple's fall reached a new low Tuesday, as the stock closed lower than $500 for the first time in nearly a year after reports Monday suggested that demand for the company's iPhone was weaker than expected.
Apple fell more than 3 percent for the second consecutive day, declining 3.2 percent Tuesday to close at $485.92, its lowest closing price since Feb. 8. The company's stock price — which was already in bear market territory after declining more than 20 percent from its peak reached on the day the iPhone 5 launched in the United States — has now fallen an additional 6.6 percent since The Wall Street Journal and Nikkei reported Monday morning that Apple had cut component orders for the iPhone due to weak demand.
Many analysts still doubt the report, and said so loudly. Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu issued a report that said, "As far as we can tell, iPhone 5 demand remains robust," and Baird analyst William Power said "most demand indicators remain favorable." Others suggested that Apple has improved their production to the point that fewer components are needed or that Apple is changing screen technology for the next generation of its smartphone, which brings in the majority of Apple's profits.
Still, there are analysts who agree with the report. Nomura analysts reported Tuesday that their checks showed "weaker-than-expected sales of the iPhone 5," leading the group to cut their price target on the stock from $660 to $530 and reduce estimates for iPhone sales in the holiday-shopping quarter, as well as the current quarter and full year.
Apple could prove volatile on Wall Street for at least another week, as the sales totals for the holiday quarter will remain a mystery until the company releases its earnings report on Jan. 23.
Tech stocks have a bad day, but retail stocks save other indexes
Surprisingly, Wall Street was again able to mostly weather a large drop in the world's most valuable company, as only the tech-heavy Nasdaq declined on the day among the three major U.S. stock indexes, and it dropped just 0.2 percent. The SV150 index of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies was not as fortunate, declining 1.1 percent on the day.
Retail stocks helped the other indexes advance, as the Standard & Poor's 500 and Dow Jones industrial average moved slightly higher after a report showed that holiday sales were better than the dire reports issued earlier, though still not as strong as hoped before the shopping season began.
Among tech companies, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Netflix (NFLX) couldn't keep their momentum rolling, as the two companies dropped 2.5 percent and 1.7 percent respectively. On the positive side, Symantec gained 4.7 percent after Morgan Stanley increased its rating and price target for the Mountain View company, while two of Silicon Valley's newest public companies, Splunk and Palo Alto Networks, gained 6.9 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively.
Silicon Valley tech stocks
Up: Splunk, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, Jive, Tesla, AMD, Electronic Arts (ERTS), Juniper, SunPower (SPWRA), NetApp, VMware, Yahoo, Intuit (INTU), LinkedIn, Google
Down: Yelp, SolarCity, Apple, Facebook, HP, Netflix, eBay (EBAY), Zynga, Oracle (ORCL), Intel (INTC), Gilead, Workday
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 6.72, or 0.22 percent, to 3,110.78
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Up 27.57, or 0.2 percent, to 13,534.89
And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Up 1.66, or 0.11 percent, to 1,472.34
Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/mercbizbreak.


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Thank you for your interest in Felt Bicycles, unfortunately we do not have any openings at this time.


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Again at CES this year ION was showing some really cool new products for older kids, parents or both. Their booth location this year definitely improved, and judging by that it seems like they are a company on the right track in the post iOS / Android world.
The Party Rocker is their attempt at making a party in box. A great solution for amateur DJs, it connects to your device via Bluetooth (or AUX IN) and also has a microphone input for karaoke or MCs. It also has a glass dome on top that projects light in sync with the music you're playing. The Party Rocker sounded great on the show floor and seemed like the sort of thing a college student would love. It will be available in the Spring of 2013 and will retail for $149. (It's smaller cousin the Road Rocker is available now for $99.99).
Maybe the coolest thing I saw at ION was the iDJ 2 Go Plus. For anyone who has played with DJ apps on the iPad (especially the amazing DJay from Algoriddim) it can be a little clunky to operate just using the screen. The iDJ 2 Go Plus puts every control the app requires into a real switch, knob or button and should make rocking any party incredibly easier. The "Plus" means that it has an Apple Lightning connector and should be available in the Spring for a MSRP of $99. Seriously, wedding DJs have never had it easier.
While this isn't a "Party Product" per se (at least any party I'm comfortable talking about in this blog...) the Sound Splash Bluetooth Splash Proof speaker seems like a great idea. Not only does it let you listen to Bluetooth audio off of your phone, it also lets you take a phone call while you're still in the shower. I wasn't able to hear the speaker quality at the show, but if I can get my hands on one I'll write a complete review later.


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Are you a social media guru? Are you on Facebook 24/7 connecting with everyone humanly possible? Have you leveraged Twitter for all that it is worth? If so, then the following list of 101 T-Shirts for Social Media Gurus, Facebook Fanatics and Twitter Addicts may be of interest to you. At the very least, it will help you prepare your wardrobe for the next über geeky social media or tech heavy conference, because we all know that wherever the geeks go, so do the geeky T-Shirts.
I'd love to hear which one of these are your favorites and whether or not you own any of these tees! And if you know of a Social Media related shirt not on this list then please tell me about it. Leave a comment below in the comments section and let me know!
If you enjoyed this post then please, please, please, tell you're friends about it! A simple Tweet or post on your Facebook page will help to get the word out, and a link back on your blog would be greatly appreciated!
If you stumbled on this blog via Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere then welcome! Please feel free to peruse the site and if you like what you see then I'd recommend adding Co-Tee TV as a friend on Facebook so that you can stay up-to-date on future posts!
1. You Like This by NerdyShirts, $19.95.
2. I'm The Mayor of Your Mom on FourSquare by Rizzo Tees, $16.
3. Dislike by Busted Tees, $16.99.
4. Nice To Tweet You by ShirtCity, $19.95.
5. The Coupons by Chop Shop, $20.
6. I Like Wikipedia by Headline Shirts, $15.
7. d @skywalker by Cathie Tranent (RedBubble), $23.94.
8. I'm Not A Blogger I Just Tweet A Lot by Twitter Tees by Threadless, $18.
9. #ThisShirt by Busted Tees, $10.
10. Digg & Reddit & Stumbleupon & Del.icio.us by NerdyShirts, $19.95.
11. Poke by ShirtCity, $19.95.
12. Tweet by Glennz Tees, $19.95.
13. Facebook Friends by Busted Tees, $20.
14. Tumburglr by Meme Engine (Skreened), $25.99.
15. Props To My Tweeps by Rizzo Tees, $16.
16. Fail Birds by Jimiyo (RedBubble), $21.55.
17. Share by ATShirtBlog (Skreened), $24.99.
18. Internet Is My Only Friend by Topatoco, $18.50.
19. Nice Tweets by Wire & Twine, $18.
20. Cultbook by Nerdyshirts, $19.95.
21. Not On Facebook by ShirtCity, $19.95.
22. World Domination by FAILShirt (Skreened), $23.99.
23. FaceFeed by Meme Engine (Skreened), $24.99.
24. Social Media Venn Diagram by Depair, Inc., $15.95.
25. Unfollow by Social Media Addicts Association, £15.90.
26. Had Sex With Your Girlfriend: Facebook Status Update by ShirtCity, $22.95.
27. YouTwittFace by CafePress, $22.
28. Create Web Concept by Bytelove, €22.00.
29. No One Cares About Your Stupid Farm by TweetTees (MySoti), $20.25.
30. Yes, I'm On MySpace by NerdyShirts, $19.95.
31. Nice To Tweet You by ShirtCity, $22.95.
32. Fail Whale by ThinkGeek, $15.99.
33. Friends Don't Let Friends Drive and Tweet by Rizzo Tees, $16.
34. Verified by Meme Engine (Skreened), $24.99.
35. Verification: Unverified by Meme Engine (Skreened), $24.99.
36. Facebook: Where Everybody Knows Your Name by Busted Tees, $20.
37. Facetime by Wire & Twine, $18.
38. I'm With @stupid by Twitter Tees by Threadless, $18.
39. Beta by Bytelove, €22.00.
40. Geocities & Friendster & MySpace & Facebook by NerdyShirts, $19.97.
41. I'd Tweet That by ShirtCity, $22.95.
42. Veni Vedi Tweetci by Rizzo Tees, $16.
43. Twitter by Despair, Inc., $15.95.
44. Blog This T-Shirt by ATShirtBlog (Skreened), $24.99.
45. MySpace Tombstone by Loiter Apparel, $18.
46. Eat. Sleep. Tweet. by ShirtCity, $19.95.
47. Tweet No Evil by Ink Fruit, $10.
48. Jesus Followers by Busted Tees, $10.
49. Chat Roulette Next Button by Tattooed Tees, $15.
50. Skynet by Busted Tees, $20.
51. You Looked Better On Facebook by ShirtCity, $22.95.
52. YouTube MySpace and I'll Google Your Yahoo by T-Shirt Hell, $22.
53. Tagged by jjgiffin (Zazzle), $27.95.
54. Say Tweet Again by Headline Shirts, $19.
55. Social Networking Killed MySocial Life by CafePress, $20.
56. I'm Huge On Twitter by ShirtCity, $19.95.
57. You Autocomplete Me by Twitter Tees by Threadless, $18.
58. Social Networking by ccollins101 (MySoti), $14.78.
59. Your Blog Is Pre-Posterous by Meme Engine (Skreened), $24.99.
60. I Won't Sit Down To Eat Until I Check In by Trackpad (CafePress), $24.
61. Facebook Makes My Job Better by ShirtCity, $19.95.
62. Blogburner by Rizzo Tees, $16.
63. Googling Myself by BustedTees, $10.
64. I've Poked You On Facebook by Regal Clothing, £17.50.
65. Add As Friend by Dos Chicos Tees, $14.
66. Follower by ShirtCity, $19.95.
67. Feed Me by Bytelove, €22.00.
68. Let's Go Back To MySpace And You Can Twitter All Over My Facebook by Twitter Tees by Threadless, $18.
69. This is Your Brain on Facebook – Facebook Anatomy by AntiqueImages (Zazzle), $25.05.
70. Fail Whaling by Despair, Inc., $15.95.
71. Sometimes When I'm Alone I Google Myself by ShirtCity, $19.95.
72. FailVille by Joaopsilveira (MySoti), $17.39.
73. Social Media by Meme Engine (Skreened), $24.99.
74. Someone is Reading My Shirt by SnorgTees, $15.16.
75. Fuck Google Ask Me by ShirtCity, $19.95.
76. A Blog Shirt by ATShirtBlog (Skreened), $24.99.
77. Socialmediaed by seriousfun (Zazzle), $22.95.
78. Reallife by Headline Shirts, $19.
79. How Do I Block You In Real Life by T-Shirt Hell, $19.
80. YouNoob by James Lillis, $24.94.
81. Google Is Watching You by ShirtCity, $22.95.
82. Kim Jong-il by Headline Shirts, $15.
83. Digg Front Page Whore by niffx (Zazzle), $22.95.
84. I'm Tweeting This by Regal Clothing, £17.50.
85. Making Idiots Famous Since 2005 by Jayson Gaskell, $21.95.
86. Yes I'm On Google Maps by ShirtCity, $19.95.
87. Sex With Your Girlfriend by T-Shirt Hell $19.
88. A Tweet Shirt by ATShirtBlog (Skreened), $24.99.
89. Follow Me by Bytelove, €22.00.
90. Facebookaholic by ShirtCity, $19.95.
91. To Like Or Not To Like by Skreened, $18.99.
92. I Don't Need 140 Characters To Say Fuck You by T-Shirt Hell, $22.
93. Life Would Be Easier If You Could Mark People As SPAM by Twitter Tees by Threadless, $18.
94. No One Reads Your Stupid Tweets by TweetTees (MySoti), $20.25.
95. I Facebooked Your Mom by Jerkass Clothing, $19.
96. Your Blog Sucks by Headline Shirts, $9.
97. More People Have Read This Shirt Than Your Blog by ShirtCity, $19.95.
98. Map Marker Death by Busted Tees, $20.
99. #don't #be #that #guy by workatplay (Zazzle), $27.95.
100. My Social Networking Skills Are Unstoppable by Label Me Happy (CafePress), $20.
101. 1 Random Thing by Despair, Inc., $15.95.
Wheww, you made it to the end of the list! If you enjoyed this post then please, please, please, tell you're friends about it! A simple Tweet or post on your Facebook page will help to get the word out, and a link back on your blog would be greatly appreciated!


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Speeches and Testimonies2019 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | Show more years
Since 1982, NFA has been the industry-wide self-regulatory organization for the U.S. futures industry, and in 2002 it extended its regulatory programs to include retail over-the-counter forex contracts. NFA is first and foremost a customer protection organization, and we take our mission very seriously.
Congress is currently expending significant time and resources to deal with systemic risk and to create greater transparency in the OTC derivatives markets. Those are important economic issues, and we support Congress' efforts to address them. Understandably, most of the debate centers around instruments offered to and traded by large, sophisticated institutions. However, there is a burgeoning OTC derivatives market aimed at unsophisticated retail customers, who are being victimized in a completely unregulated environment.
For years, retail customers that invested in futures had all of the regulatory protections of the Commodity Exchange Act. Their trades were executed on transparent exchanges and cleared by centralized clearing organizations, their brokers had to meet the fitness standards set forth in the Act, and their brokers were regulated by the CFTC and NFA. Today, for too many customers, none of those protections apply. A number of bad court decisions have created loopholes a mile wide, and retail customers are on their own in unregulated, non-transparent OTC futures-type markets.
The main problem stems from a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision in a forex fraud case brought by the CFTC. In the Zelener case, the District court found that retail customers had, in fact, been defrauded but that the CFTC had no jurisdiction because the contracts at issue were not futures, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed that decision. The "rolling spot" contracts in Zelener were marketed to retail customers for purposes of speculation; they were sold on margin; they were routinely rolled over and over and held for long periods of time; and they were regularly offset so that delivery rarely, if ever, occurred. In Zelener, though, the Seventh Circuit ignored these characteristics and based its decision on the terms of the written contract between the dealer and its customers. Because the written contract in Zelener did not include a guaranteed right of offset, the Seventh Circuit ruled that the contracts at issue were not futures. As a result, the CFTC was unable to stop the fraud.
Zelener created the distinct possibility that, through clever draftsmanship, completely unregulated firms and individuals could sell retail customers forex contracts that looked like futures, acted like futures, and were sold like futures and could do so outside the CFTC's jurisdiction. For a short period of time, Zelener was just a single case addressing this issue. Since 2004, however, various Courts have continued to follow the Seventh Circuit's approach in Zelener, which caused the CFTC to lose enforcement cases relating to forex fraud.
A year ago, Congress closed the loophole for forex contracts. Unfortunately, the rationale of the Zelener decision is not limited to foreign currency products. Customers trading other commodities-such as gold and silver-are still stuck in an unregulated mine field. It's time to restore regulatory protections to all retail customers.
Back in 2007, NFA predicted that if Congress plugged the Zelener loophole for forex but left it open for other products, the fraudsters would simply move to Zelener-type contracts in other commodities. That's just what has happened. We cannot give you exact numbers, of course, because these firms are not registered. Nobody knows how widespread the fraud is, but we are aware of dozens of firms that offer Zelener contracts in metals or energy. Recently, we received a call from a man who had lost over $600,000, substantially all of his savings, investing with one of these firms. We have seen a sharp increase in customer complaints and mounting customer losses involving these products since Congress closed the loophole for forex.
NFA and the exchanges have previously proposed a fix that would close the Zelener loophole for these non-forex products. Our proposal codifies the approach the Ninth Circuit took in CFTC v. Co-Petro, which was the accepted and workable state of the law until Zelener. In particular, our approach would create a statutory presumption that leveraged or margined transactions offered to retail customers are futures contracts unless delivery is made within seven days or the retail customer has a commercial use for the commodity. This presumption is flexible and could be overcome by showing that delivery actually occurred or that the transactions were not primarily marketed to retail customers or were not marketed to those customers as a way to speculate on price movements in the underlying commodity.
This statutory presumption would not affect the interbank currency market dominated by institutional players, nor would it affect regulated instruments like securities and banking products. It would also not apply to those retail forex contracts that are already covered (or exempt) under Section 2(c). It would, however, effectively prohibit leveraged non-forex OTC contracts with retail customers when those contracts are used for price speculation and do not result in delivery.
I should note that NFA's proposal does not invalidate the 1985 interpretive letter issued by the CFTC's Office of General Counsel, which Monex International and similar entities rely on when selling gold and silver to their customers. That letter responded to a factual situation where the dealer purchased the physical metals from an unaffiliated bank for the full purchase price and left the metals in the bank's vault. The dealer then turned around and sold the gold or silver to a customer, who financed the purchase by borrowing money from the bank. Within two to seven days the dealer received the full purchase price and the customer received title to the metals. In these circumstances the metals were actually delivered within seven days, so the transactions would not be futures contracts under NFA's proposal.
In conclusion, while NFA supports Congress' efforts to deal with systemic risk and create greater transparency in the OTC markets, Congress should not lose sight of the very real threat to retail customers participating in another segment of these markets. This Committee can play a leading role in protecting customers from the unregulated boiler rooms that are currently taking advantage of the Zelener loophole for metals and energy products. We look forward to further reviewing our proposal with Committee members and staff and working with you in this important endeavor.


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2010 All-Star Game lineups
81st MIDSUMMER CLASSIC
at 8 p.m. ET, Angel Stadium
1. Hanley Ramirez, SS, Marlins
2. Martin, Prado, 2B, Braves
3. Albert Pujols, 1B, Cardinals
4. Ryan Howard, DH, Phillies
5. David Wright, 3B, Mets
6. Ryan Braun, LF, Brewers
7. Andre Ethier, CF, Dodgers
8. Corey Hart, RF, Brewers
9. Yadier Molina, C, Cardinals
Pitching: Ubaldo Jimenez, RHP, Rockies
1. Ichiro Suzuki, RF, Mariners
2. Derek Jeter, SS, Yankees
3. Miguel Cabrera, 1B, Tigers
4. Josh Hamilton, CF, Rangers
5. Vladimir Guerrero, DH, Rangers
6. Evan Longoria, 3B, Rays
7. Joe Mauer, C, Twins
8. Robinson Cano, 2B, Yankees
9. Carl Crawford, LF, Rays
Pitching: David Price, LHP, Rays
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2 Comments
RIP George Steinbrenner. I just want to say that there are not any other owners/managers like how this guy was. Doing whatever it took to win a ball game and declaring to the public about how disappointed he was in losing one. That is by far my biggest disappointment in the Toronto organization. I have listened to multiple speeches and countless post game remarks and I have yet to encounter either Ted, J.P, Alex, or Cito say that they want to make this into a winning club. I have only heard Alex say that he hopes to be "competitive" in a few years. Nothing about winning. And Cito has no fire and is so laid back whether it be a loss or win. Something Steinbrenner fired his manager for.
I am sorry to say but the recent trade by AA in my opinion is a huge and terrible mistake. First off, we have more than enough depth at pitching and it doesn't seem like jo-jo reyes will be able to compete in our rotation at all.
I am ok with trading Gonzalez, its ok we got escobar, he is young and can hit for average from the previous two years and is pretty solid defensively I think but why give up TIM COLLINS AND TYLER PASTORNICKY, I personally think Tim Collins could have been our closer for the future or atleast a solid bullpen guy. They are both only 21 years old, and collins has I believe a 16 strikeouts / 9 innings ratio for the past 2 seasons. his ERA has never been above 3.00 in the past 3 years. Too add on top of that Pastronicky, sure he wasn't having the best season but he had some speed and I think he could some potential.
We not only gave up the best player but the best prospect in the deal to get in my opinon one decent player. I dont understand why this trade took place and I am sure we could have gotten escobar for much less.


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Principal: Ms. Shawntay White
Address: 103 Calhoun Street
City & Zipcode: Charleston, SC 29401
Phone: (843) 724-7750
Fax: (843) 724-1493
Website: buist.ccsdschools.com
Email: email@example.com
Grades: K - 8th
Type of School: Countywide Magnet (International Baccalaureate)
Enrollment: 482
Hours of Operation: 8:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Buist Academy for Advanced Studies aims to challenge students in a rigorous environment which emphasizes achievement, encourages academic excellence, and promotes respect for individual differences. Together with Charleston County School District, the International Baccalaureate Organization, and community partners, Buist Academy equips students with the knowledge, skills, and attributes necessary to take action in their local and global community.
2018-2019 SIC Report
CCSD Fall 2018 Data Dashboard
Department of Education 2018 Report Card Data (Elementary)
CCSD Fall 2017 Data Dashboard
Department of Education 2017 Report Card Data (Elementary)
CCSD Fall 2016 Data Dashboard
Department of Education 2016 Report Card Data (Elementary)
Department of Education 2016 Report Card Data (Middle)


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This post is written by guest blogger Yasmin Moll. Yasmin shares an update from Cairo, Egypt. Her first blog post appeared on February 8, 2011. Thank you Yasmin!
After 30 years of autocratic rule, Mubarak stepped down today. The announcement came around 6 pm Cairo time. I had just finished giving an interview to a documentary filmmaker where I expressed great fear that Mubarak will continue to defy the demands of millions of Egyptians and cling to power. I have never been so happy to be so wrong.
Today is not just Egypt's day—today is for all people living under despotic regimes and yearning to be free, especially in the Middle East. First the Tunisians and now the Egyptians have shown them that what just a little over a month ago seemed impossible is possible.
Indeed, February 11, 2011 will go down in history not so much as the day Mubarak's rule crumbled, but as the day the will of ordinary citizens triumphed. And contrary to the expectations of many, they triumphed not through violent upheaval, but through peaceful protest.
Tomorrow Egyptians will face some tough question marks about the future. But tonight we celebrate.


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Summit County Arts & Entertainment Briefs
The Backstage Theatre in Breckenridge is soliciting headshots and resumes for its summer 2013 shows, "Avenue Q," "Charlotte's Web" and "The 39 Steps." All positions are paid. Performances take place at the Breckenridge Theatre and rehearsals are conducted in Denver. Lodging is available for cast members traveling outside of Summit County. Send headshots and resumes to email@example.com. Video auditions also will be accepted. Some roles in "Avenue Q" are already cast, but all other roles are open. Call (970) 453-0199 for more info, or visit http://www.backstagetheatre.org.
There's still time to get in on Dillon's third annual holiday decorating contest, which runs through Jan. 6. Residential winners receive prize packages; the total value of last year's prizes was $1,100 split between the top three winners. Business winners get to display a trophy and take home a cash prize. New this year, all participants need to register their residences or businesses for the competition by emailing firstname.lastname@example.com (it is okay to register another person's house) and voting is online at http://www.dillondba.org. Voters can cast one vote per day until the end of the contest. All properties must be within Dillon town limits to participate.
Frisco's Winter Vacation Sensation takes place during Summit School District's breaks. The program features field trips, art projects, games and outdoor play. Upcoming dates are Jan. 2-4; Jan. 7; Feb. 25 to March 1 and April 15-19. It's $40/day for Frisco residents, ages 5-12, and $45 per day for nonresidents. The camp runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with drop-off from 8-8:45 a.m. and pick-up from 4:30-5 p.m. at the community center on 3rd Avenue in downtown Frisco. There is no early drop-off or late pick-up option. Register at http://www.friscorecreation.com or in person at the Frisco Day Lodge. This is a state-licensed program. Space is limited and pre-registration is required.
Time is running out to see "Becoming Van Gogh," an in-depth exploration of Vincent Van Gogh's unconventional path to becoming a world-renowned artist. The exhibit, which examines critical steps in the largely self-taught artist's evolution, includes more than 70 paintings and drawings by Van Gogh and is on view at the Denver Art Museum through Jan. 20. Timed and dated tickets are required; go to http://www.vangoghdenver.com or call (720) 865-5120. Extended holiday hours are until 9 p.m. most nights, New Year's Eve and Day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and until midnight January 18-20.
The Summit Reads planning committee chose the "The Blue Revolution," by Cynthia Barnett, for this spring's Summit Reads community project. The book exposes truths about the U.S. water crisis – how Americans use more water than any other culture in the world and how our daily habits and attitudes jeopardize the world's water supply – and is particularly relevant in light of the dwindling Dillon Reservoir. The first step is to read the book, which will be available at Summit County Libraries and The Next Page Bookstore in Frisco. Those interested in hosting an event or leading a discussion on the book this spring should contact Jen Miller at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Start a dialogue, stay on topic and be civil.
If you don't follow the rules, your comment may be deleted.


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Distances are calculated in a straight line and may not reflect actual travel distance.
This is a new build property
Keble Court is Anchor's new retirement development with apartments exclusively for those of state pensionable age and over in Church Crookham, Fleet. Here are some of the benefits it will offer:
• 72 luxurious one and two bedroom apartments
• Café, hair salon, treatment room and owners lounge
• Beautifully manicured gardens with mature trees
• High quality kitchens
• Convenient to the towns of Fleet and Farnham
• Easy access to local shops and cafés
• Mainline stations at Fleet
• Dedicated on-site manager ensuring peace of mind
• Care and support packages available
• 24-hour emergency call system.
For more information please call Hamptons Estate Agents on 0808 252 0309 or email us at email@example.com (Calls are free from a landline.)
Anchor is England's largest not-for-profit provider of housing and care for the over 55's. They provide services to over 38,000 older people. A passion at Anchor is giving older people a choice of great places and ways to live. They do this by treating colleagues and customers as individuals and by building meaningful, long-term relationships based on happiness, openness and respect.
With over 45 years experience of developing great housing choices and offer up to 30,000 retirement properties for rent and sale. If you want to make a fresh start, one of our properties could be just right for your next move.
Additional Information
Our on-site Marketing Suite is open 7 Days a week between 10am to 5pm, so please feel free to pop-in and our on-site representatives would be pleased to see you. Alternatively, please contact Hamptons Fleet on 01252 360590.
LUXORIOUS one and two bedroom apartments
owners lounge
hair salon
treatment room
landscaped grounds
high quality kitchens
dedicated on-site manager
show apartments open 7 days a week
Contact branch for relevant Energy Performance Certificate