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LEBANON, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mascoma Corporation, a renewable fuels company, announced today that it has entered into definitive agreements with Valero Energy Corporation, the nation's largest independent oil refiner and a leading ethanol producer, to develop and operate a first-of-its-kind 20 million gallon per year commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facility in Kinross, Michigan. The cost to construct, commission and start-up this facility is expected to be approximately $232 million, based on current external engineering estimates, and includes certain up-front infrastructure costs that will enable the expansion of the facility to 40 million gallons per year. These costs are fully funded, with Valero providing the majority of the financing, and the remainder from awards by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the State of Michigan. Construction of the Kinross facility is anticipated to start in the next three to six months and is expected to be completed by year-end 2013.
The Kinross facility will use Mascoma's proprietary consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) technology platform, which has been developed by Mascoma over the past five years, to convert hardwood pulpwood into ethanol. Hardwood pulpwood is a selectively harvested, naturally regenerated feedstock and is an underutilized, abundant resource in the surrounding area.
"Valero's substantial financial commitment to the Kinross facility demonstrates Mascoma's technology leadership, as well as our ability to attract the significant investment that has posed a key challenge to advanced biofuels production in this country," stated Bill Brady, President and CEO of Mascoma. "Our partnership with Valero to develop and operate the Kinross cellulosic ethanol facility, and facilities beyond Kinross, is a major step forward in our goal to provide a low-cost, more sustainable alternative to petroleum-based products."
- Frontier Renewable Resources, LLC, a subsidiary of Mascoma, and Diamond Alternative Energy, LLC, a subsidiary of Valero, have formed a joint venture, Kinross Cellulosic Ethanol LLC, to develop and operate a hardwood cellulosic ethanol facility in Kinross, Michigan.
- Mascoma and Valero will finalize certain ancillary agreements relating to the Kinross facility, including construction, feedstock supply and ethanol off-take marketing.
- Mascoma will contribute the proceeds from its DOE cooperative agreement award and its State of Michigan grant to the joint venture, while Valero will provide additional financing required to develop the Kinross facility.
- Valero will provide project management to build and will operate the Kinross facility, and will hold a majority interest in the joint venture. Mascoma, through its subsidiary Frontier, will hold a minority interest. Valero will market the ethanol produced at the Kinross facility.
- Mascoma will receive royalties for a certain time period based on ethanol yield milestones.
- Valero will have the option to expand the Kinross facility's capacity to up to 80 million gallons per year.
- Mascoma and Valero have developed a framework agreement for partnering on additional cellulosic ethanol facilities beyond Kinross.
"This partnership provides an exciting opportunity to combine Mascoma's innovative CBP technology platform and expertise with Valero's project management, operating, distribution and marketing capabilities," stated George Stutzmann, Vice President of Alternative Energy of Valero. "We view this first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facility in Kinross and our partnership with Mascoma as an important foundation for potential expansion beyond Kinross."
About Valero
Valero Energy Corporation, through its subsidiaries, is an international manufacturer and marketer of transportation fuels, other petrochemical products and power. Valero subsidiaries employ approximately 22,000 people, and assets include 16 petroleum refineries with a combined throughput capacity of approximately 3 million barrels per day, 10 ethanol plants with a combined production capacity of 1.2 billion gallons per year, and a 50-megawatt wind farm. Approximately 6,800 retail and branded wholesale outlets carry the Valero, Diamond Shamrock, Shamrock and Beacon brands in the United States and the Caribbean; Ultramar in Canada; and Texaco in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Valero is a Fortune 500 company based in San Antonio. Please visit www.valero.com for more information.
About Mascoma
Mascoma Corporation is a renewable fuels company that has developed innovative technology for the low-cost conversion of abundant biomass. Using its proprietary consolidated bioprocessing, or CBP, technology platform, Mascoma has developed genetically-modified yeasts and other microorganisms to reduce costs and improve yields in the production of renewable fuels and chemicals. Mascoma's first commercial application of its CBP technology is its Mascoma Grain Technology, or MGT™, yeast product, which is a "drop-in" substitute for existing yeasts designed to improve the economics of corn-based ethanol production. Mascoma is pursuing other commercial applications of its CBP technology and is working with collaborators to develop and construct commercial scale facilities to convert hardwood pulpwood to cellulosic ethanol.


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Kingston, ON – A Queen's University research team has found that a painful pelvic affliction associated with adult men occurs as frequently in adolescent boys. Chronic prostatitis or chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS) is a urogenital disease associated with persistent and life-altering pelvic and genital pain.
This is the first study to estimate the prevalence of CP-like symptoms in adolescent males, and to show the negative impact that pain, urinary symptoms, and depression have on boys' quality of life. The study is published in the British Journal of Urology.
"Boys are suffering in a medical silence, where physicians and even specialists remain unaware of the occurrence and strong negative developmental impact of these disease symptoms," says lead researcher Dean Tripp, professor of Psychology and Urology at Queen's. "These terrible symptoms of pain are interfering with the developmental trajectory of adolescent boys. Social relationships and academic performance are two of my major concerns," he adds.
"It is prevalent, debilitating, and it costs society a lot in direct and indirect ways," says Urology professor Curtis Nickel, who co-authored the study. "CP/CPPS is the black sheep of the urologic diseases," he says. "It used to be prostate cancer, and before that it was ED. We have always been aware that adult men are suffering and are reluctant to seek medical help. Now we know adolescents are, too."
The researchers hope that a better understanding of the prevalence of CP/CPPS will lead to better treatment and diagnosis of the disease. Since treatment is difficult, and most patients can't be cured if they have CP/CPPS for 10 years or longer, the researchers believe that early diagnosis is the key to management
The study looks not only at the prevalence of CP/CPPS in teenage boys, but also at the psychological impact associated with the symptoms. "In older men, CP-like symptoms are so devastating they are compared to the negative life impact of Crohn's disease, diabetes or heart attack," notes Dr. Tripp. "Our initial research indicates that these CP-like symptoms are having a significant negative quality of life impact in young boys. We must not tolerate inaction on this matter," he adds.

subset: commoncrawl


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September 4, 2012
McDonald's will open its first ever vegetarian restaurant near the Golden Temple in Amritsar. They plan on opening a secondary location at Katra near the Vaishno Devi shrine.
September 4, 2012
McDonald's will open its first ever vegetarian restaurant near the Golden Temple in Amritsar. They plan on opening a secondary location at Katra near the Vaishno Devi shrine.
US fast food giant McDonald's, famed for its beef-based Big Mac burgers, on Tuesday said it will open its first ever vegetarian-only restaurant in the world in India next year.
The world's second-biggest restaurant chain after Subway already tailors its menus to suit local tastes — which in India means no beef to avoid offending Hindus and no pork to cater for Muslim requirements.
It will open its first vegetarian outlet in the middle of next year near the Golden Temple in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in northern India, where religious authorities forbid consumption of meat at the shrine.
"It will be the first time we have opened a vegetarian restaurant in the world," a spokesman for McDonald's in northern India, Rajesh Kumar Maini, told AFP.
After the opening in Amritsar, the US chain plans to launch another vegetarian outlet at Katra near the Vaishno Devi cave shrine in Indian Kashmir — a revered Hindu pilgrimage site that draws hundreds of thousands of worshippers a year.
It sees the potential for many more vegetarian restaurants across the country.
McDonald's in India already has a menu that is 50 percent vegetarian.
Its McAloo Tikki burger at 28 rupees or 50 cents — which uses a spicy fried potato-based patty — is the top seller, accounting for a quarter of total sales.
Among the chicken-only meat offerings, the Maharaja Mac is also a favorite.
Currently India, with its population of 1.2 billion, is still a "very small market for McDonald's", said Maini.
"We have just 271 restaurants in India and across the world we have nearly 33,000," Maini said.
The chain serves half a million customers a day in India, out of 50 million people it serves daily in over 100 countries.
"When you look at the potential of the country, it's one of the top priority countries and we're laying the groundwork for capturing the market," said Maini.
"We plan to nearly double the number of outlets to 500 plus within the next three years," he said.
McDonald's realized soon after it entered the country that it had to rework its international menu to Indian tastes.
"The reasons were very compelling — cow slaughter is not allowed because of religious reasons and we couldn't do pork either," Maini explained.
Hindus, who account for 80 percent of India's population, regard cows as sacred. For Muslims, the consumption of pork is prohibited in the Koran.
"It was the whole idea of going local and creating flavors that would create acceptance for us," Maini said. "We had to look at the whole market innovatively and we realized only chicken-based and vegetarian food would work."
McDonald's is not alone in "Indianizing" its offerings. Domino's Pizza, another leading fast food chain in India, has created pizzas with extra spicy toppings.
But growing consumption of food high in fat is spurring concern that India is importing the Western disease of obesity, creating a ticking public health timebomb.
Courtesy: nydaily


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Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have just released their latest book, The Making of Global Capitalism. Gindin is the former Research Director of the Canadian Autoworkers Union and Packer Visiting Chair in Social Justice at York University, and Panitch is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University. The two have worked together on many books and publications. Aaron Leonard recently sat down with them in New York City to discuss their work. The interview will be presented here in three parts over the coming days.
Part I: "An American Proposal"
Aaron Leonard: Let's start by dialing back, before this global capitalism was in place. Your book recounts something called, "An American Proposal," a joint statement from the editors of Fortune, Time and Life published in the midst of World War II (1942). In it they lay out the aims of a post World War II world, "to organize the economic resources of the world so as to make possible a return to the system of free enterprise in every country." This is rather shocking in its brazen capitalist class-consciousness — what did it portend?
Sam Gindin: You have to understand that in the context of a developing awareness within the American state — and the development of corresponding capacities — that to preserve and strengthen American capital it was essential to keep the world more open to capitalism more generally. If that wasn't achieved and other parts of the globe closed themselves off to capitalism, the threat was reviving the kind of problems faced with Germany in the interwar period — countries that can't get access to resources and markets turn to o autarky, with profound implications for the U.S. itself.
Leo Panitch: I think the historical context is important as well. Roosevelt's second New Deal ended in 1937-38 and there was a truce with business in which it was made clear that a very soft and weak Keynesian would be adopted and there would be no more major reforms for trade unions and for labor. Indeed some of what looked like the more radical elements of the Wagner Act had already been constrained by the Supreme Court and by the Labor Relations Board. A deal was done with capital. Then as the war approached the State Department was encouraging the Council on Foreign Relations and businessmen on Wall Street to form a roundtable, which they did in 1939 under the auspices of Fortune. They were working very closely and though it sounds like capitalists coming together and then telling the American state what to do, it was as much an interaction between corporate lawyers and officials inside the American state who were doing this thinking together.
Dean Acheson, who went on to be Secretary of State and wrote the great book Present at the Creation, gives a speech to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1939 that says pretty much the same thing: that it's going to be up the U.S., if the war is won, to remake the postwar world using the capacities that were developed with the New Deal — in a sense internationalize those capacities — so as to construct a world which is open to free enterprise. They do what wasn't done after World War I, including forgiving loans, the refusal of which was one of the things that generated the economic crisis of the thirties.
AL: While the business of the U.S. building this global empire was going on, there were two major states, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China that stood outside that paradigm. What impact on global capitalism did the absence of such a significant amount of the productive forces — people, technology, machines, raw materials etc. — have?
LP: At one level, you can say that these were arenas closed to capital accumulation. The American state was extremely worried about that in terms of the Soviet Union and they were very surprised to have lost China by 1949. But it wasn't only a matter of these being places that American capital could not enter, though it has of course always been very important to the American state to be able to open markets for American multinationals and banks. And yes, important portions of the world's resources, especially in the case of the Soviet Union, were not available to American capital.
But beyond this those resources were critical to Europe and Japan as they were remade as capitalist societies. The United States guarantees access, above all in the Middle East, to oil as part of rebuilding of Japan and Germany and Britain and France. A lot of people tend to think of American military interventions, or CIA interventions, in terms of 'what they're trying to do is secure oil for the United States.' No. On the contrary they're playing the role of the global state in the absence of an international global state. They are guaranteeing, to those countries they are rebuilding as capitalist states, access to resources that they otherwise would have had from Eastern Europe and that portion of Soviet Asia that is now closed to them.
SG: The other dimension is that the Soviet Union and China were examples of staying out of capitalism that spurred on liberation movements abroad. They also were supportive of economic nationalism on the part of Third World states, which by the late 1960s undertook a growing number of expropriations of foreign capital, but these numbers faded through the later 70s as the liberation movements were defeated and as Third World countries got more integrated into capitalism.
LP: What was attractive to many Third World countries was that aspect of the Soviet Union which was motivated by 'socialism in one country' which was essentially Russian nationalist. Of course the national bourgeoisies in Third World countries were very much holding onto private property, but nevertheless they, to some extent, emulated the space that communist governments had ostensibly carved out for themselves.
AL: The period in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was a troubled and critical one. The depths of the crisis were such that, as you note, there was a TIME magazine cover of 1975, asking, "Can capitalism survive?" For all the complex mix of things going on, your conclusion is that it was indicative of "neither decline nor moderation but restructuring." What do you mean by that?
LP: I do think the context for that was not so much Vietnam. It was rather these increased expropriations from nationalist regimes. In 1974 the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted for a charter of economic rights of states, which included the provision that they could expropriate foreign capital, even without compensation. To some extent, Wall Street discounted this as rhetoric because they knew that while Saudis had taken over the operations of foreign oil companies they paid them for this, and they were investing their surpluses on Wall Street. But the wording of the UN economic rights charter still did sound very shocking. And this rather militant sounding economic nationalism abroad came was all the more frightening in that it coincided with a lot of labour militancy at home.
The inflation of the 1970s stemmed from the inability to quell that militancy in the advanced capitalist countries. To top it all off, the breakdown of Bretton Woods, itself a product of such inflationary tendencies, had created consequent uncertainty about the impact on trade, just as Japan and Germany had become major exporters to the U.S., and as the United States was by this point starting to import a lot of capital from these countries as well. In other words, there were a whole number of things coming together at the time TIME magazine asked whether capitalism could survive. Things looked quite frightening — but if the U.S. initially responded shock and horror, it soon took more practical steps that Sam calls restructuring.
SG: The restructuring was mainly about coping with the profit squeeze of the 1970s that was produced by many of the above factors. Mainstream economists, describing the period from the 1980s through the 1990s refer to it as a period of moderation. Basically after '83, apart from the brief recession at the turn of the 1990s was the longest period of uninterrupted U.S. growth in the postwar era. Yet at the time both the left and the right saw this period as one of U.S. decline, arguing first that Japan and then that Europe were going to replace the U.S. as the dominant capitalist force in the face of was a 'hollowing out' of American economic strength. We've argued that it wasn't hollowing out, it was restructuring.
In fact American capital came through that period very successfully. That doesn't mean working people did well. It was obviously a period of great inequality and insecurity, with stagnating wages, etc. But for the corporations, the period included a major restructuring of workplaces, new technologies, changes in the relative importance of specific industries, and dramatic shifts between manufacturing and services, consumer services like retail, and business services like engineering, consulting, accountancy, legal become very important at home and internationally. There were also regional shifts in economic activity (Detroit vs. the American South) and major geographic shifts such as the integration of Eastern Europe and then China. This has to be seen as a major period in which American capital, having defeated labour, was left with more autonomy to do what it felt needed to be done to revive capital and restructured, establishing the material base for the revival of the American empire.
AL: How did the collapse of the Soviet Union fit into all that?
LP: Even before that, it seemed in the seventies, as the crisis was accelerating, a political left was emerging inside the major working class-affiliated political parties that had a chance of getting elected, and when TIME said, "Can capitalism survive?" they were also thinking about the bubbling up of radicalism inside those government parties. What was being argued by the left in these parties was that the welfare state reforms that had previously been won were now coming under enormous pressure and would be lost unless workers could go beyond them, to take the decisions about what is invested and where it is invested away from capital. You were hearing this from the forces behind Tony Benn in Britain, Rudolph Meidner in Sweden, from the German unions calling for investment planning, from those forces on the left in France that eventually got Mitterrand's Socialist Party elected in France in conjunction with the Communists on the most left-wing program in the postwar period. And even in the U.S., the left in the Democratic Party was very strong in the mid-1970s.
Yet all this was turned around. By the late 1970s, the Democrats under Carter eviscerated the left wing of the Democratic Party. The Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill, which was calling for economic planning to secure full employment again, was turned into an empty piece of legislation. The unions by the late seventies either were giving concessions to the auto companies like Chrysler in exchange for a bailout, or they were more explicitly aligning themselves with a need for competitiveness. The union militancy was broken in Britain even before Thatcher by the Labour government, and the German Socials Democrats eviscerated the left in the unions, as did their Swedish counterparts. And once Mitterrand had to choose between either imposing capital controls and interrupting the capitalist process of European integration, or giving up his radical program — he famously did the U-turn.
Moreover, if you look at what happened to Third World economic nationalism Wall Street was right, the rhetoric of these nationalist bourgeoisies needed to be very heavily discounted. Even in the face of the debt crisis of the 1980s they came on board with the IMF and American Treasury in introducing the kind of structural adjustment program that would invigorate their markets, make them competitive, restrain their internal balance of class forces. As Larry Summers said, the main affect of NAFTA was to insure that Mexico would follow market oriented policies and be favourable to the United States instead of following socialist policies and be unfavourable to the United States, very explicitly. That was a process begun in the 1980s carried through in the 1990s.
This was much more important than the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's not to say that the Soviet collapse didn't have an effect in terms of a sphere becoming open to capital accumulation and demoralizing those portions of the left which thought a different world was all tied up with this very disappointing and undemocratic authoritarian example. I think one tends to enormously over-blow the significance of that collapse in fact, given that the important things inside the capitalist world had already largely taken place by then.
SG: The main periodization isn't before the Berlin Wall falls and after. Even going back to 1948 and the common understanding of the Marshall Plan as revolving around the external Soviet threat, we argue rather that you have to understand it more in terms of what was happening inside European countries and the internal threat from the left and the American concern, apart from the Soviet Union, of how to keep a world open to the making of global capitalism. One of the things that does happen with the collapse of the Soviet Union is that Third World countries trying to find some space vis-à-vis the American state have lost the leverage coming from the kind of support they would have from the Soviet Union. But a lot of that had been broken already.
AL: It puts the whole concept of containment into a whole different light…
SG: Yes, in a very different light. Its much more of a political economy explanation than one based on the cold war explanations.
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by Staff Writers Washington (AFP) May 30, 2012 Astronomers around the world will be using advanced telescopes to watch Venus cross in front of the Sun on June 5 and 6 in the hopes of finding clues in the hunt for other planets where life may exist. By studying the atmosphere of a well-known planet in this once-in-a-lifetime event, scientists say they will learn more about how to decipher the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system as they cross in front of their own stars. "There are many, many of these events that are observed for distant stars. The thing is that stars are just points of light because we are so far away, so you can't actually see what is going on," Alan MacRobert, astronomer and editor of Sky and Telescope magazine, told AFP. However the transit of Venus, an event that will not happen again for another 105 years, or until 2117, offers a chance to practice decoding the atmosphere of a planet based on the impression it leaves on its star's light. "The idea is some of that starlight skims through the atmosphere of the planet and the atmosphere leaves its imprint on that tiny, tiny little bit of a star's light," MacRobert said. "If you can separate that from the rest of the star's light -- analyzing the light before, during and after the transit and looking for the difference -- you can actually tell something about the planet's atmosphere," he added. "And this is absolutely at the cutting edge of present day technology." The beginning of the transit will be visible in North America, Central America and the northern part of South America on the evening of June 5, as long as the skies stay clear. The end will not be seen in these regions due to sunset. All of the transit will be visible in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Europe, the Middle East and South Asia will get to see the end stages of the eclipse as they go into sunrise on June 6. However, due to the risk of blindness or painful, permanent eye damage, people should not look directly at the Sun without a proper solar filter to try and observe the tiny black dot crossing its surface. Global astronomers are keenly searching the universe for hints of a rocky planet like Earth in the Goldilocks zone -- not too hot and not too cold -- with the right atmosphere and the existence of water to support life. Experts believe the galaxy is teeming with billions of rocky planets that might be able to support life. Most have not yet been discovered by Earthlings, and are located so far away that they would be impossible to reach with modern technology. The latest catalog released by NASA's Kepler space telescope team in March showed a total of 2,321 planet candidates transiting 1,790 stars. Ten of the 46 planet candidates found in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist are close to the size of Earth, according to NASA. But in most cases, scientists lack details about these planets' atmospheres. Even though Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is far too hot to be habitable and has a dense, C02 thick atmosphere, watching it transit the Sun is a valuable exercise for science. "The fact that Venus is not in a habitable zone does not really matter," said Rick Feinberg of the American Astronomical Society. "It gives us an opportunity to study in very great detail something we are observing very much further away and gives us more confidence in our ability to interpret the signals we are getting." Feinberg added that the best times for scientists to watch the transit are the first and last 20 minutes, when sunlight filters through the Venus's atmosphere as it forms a fine shell around the planet. The US National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, will use telescopes in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Hawaii, Australia and India to monitor the transit and collect data. "This one will help us calibrate in several different instruments, and hunt for extrasolar planets with atmospheres," said Frank Hill, director of the NSO's Integrated Synoptic Program. In the 18th and 19th centuries, astronomers used transits to measure the distance of the Earth to the Sun, he added. "We have that number nailed down now, but transits are still useful." FURTHER INFORMATION: - http://venustransit.nso.edu - www.transit-of-venus.org.uk - http://venustransit.nasa.gov/transitofvenus/ - http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/transit12.html - http://blogs.esa.int/venustransit/ SAFETY FIRST: Proper solar filters are a must for viewing the transit, to avoid damage to the eyes.
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Since 1999, 20 years after its founding, EMC has bought more than a dozen companies to expand its reach in the data protection arena. Customers applaud EMC's buying prowess, saying the acquired technologies have helped their businesses save time and money in their disaster recovery efforts.
Before 2003, Clarendon Hills, Ill.-based Mid America Bank, with 82 retail branches in Illinois and Wisconsin, used tapes to back up core financial systems and rented a co-location facility in an undisclosed Pennsylvania location in case of a disaster.
Cutting recovery time to a few hours—not days, the expected downtime in the Pennsylvania facility—was a top disaster recovery priority, says Paul Stonchus, first vice president for data center management.
In 2003, the bank built a disaster recovery site with EMC's Symmetrix DMX networked storage boxes, storage arrays that hold disks and provide half a terabyte of cache memory, into a branch 15 miles from the primary data center in suburban Chicago. The setup included EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software tools, which copy vital applications like loan tracking, report imaging and transaction interfaces for automated teller machines from one facility to another.
Stonchus and his team have tested the system five times since implementation by shutting down the primary data center and activating the backup site. Each time, EMC's products met the bank's goals of restoring critical functions within five hours.
EMC was also the right medicine for El Camino Hospital, a 395-bed facility, when it moved to a new location in Mountain View, Calif., in 2004. At the same time, chief technology officer Joe Wagner and his team started planning to back up its new data center at a site off the hospital's campus.
The hospital installed a storage-area network on EMC's Clariion boxes to improve data availability and linked the new data center to a secondary site using SnapView, a replication tool that works with the Clariion product line. Wagner says EMC impressed him as a partner that planned for the short and long term, and was impressed with EMC's reputation for technical support.
After implementing the EMC products, Wagner says uptime rose from 99% to 99.5% and helped yield more than $5 million in cost savings.
Chris Carter, director of enterprise technology services with PPL Corp., a $6.2 billion energy company in Allentown, Pa., uses Symmetrix boxes and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility replication tools to copy between two undisclosed data centers.
Like Wagner, Carter says he was impressed with EMC's sales and support staff, who work with PPL as if they expect to be long-term partners.
But if EMC has stumbled anywhere, Carter says, it's been in fitting all the products it has acquired under one roof. For example, EMC combined proprietary and acquired tools from its purchases of software firms Softworks and Terascape in 2000 to form the ControlCenter suite, which Carter uses to manage the storage replication environment; that mixture of technologies, he says, caused some overlapping of management records and performance results on the user interface.
Carter, however, quickly adds that newer versions of the product have corrected the problem.
In a statement, Jonathan Siegal, a senior manager with EMC's storage management software group, didn't directly address Carter's problem; he said only that customer experiences have improved "dramatically" in the last few years.
Still, Carter says the vendor's storage products have performed year after year—PPL, according to Carter, has never lost any critical data with EMC: "[EMC] does what it says it does, in my opinion, better than anyone on the market."
* Fiscal year ends dec. 31; fytd reflects first six months.


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Adult stick practice (ages 14 and up) will take place September 7, 2021 through March 16, 2022. Practice hours will be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. Additional hours will be available Monday through Thursday from 3:30 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. through November 24, 2021. Admission is $10 with free entry for goalies. Helmet and gloves are required and full equipment is recommended.
Find more information at www.concordnh.gov/skating.
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Discounts are amounts that may be deducted from tax payments. Those who hold Virginia fuels tax licenses, file their returns and pay their fuels tax on time may receive a discount on the taxes.
In addition to the discounts, suppliers may receive credit for uncollected taxes from licensed distributors and importers.
What are the discounts?
- Percentage Discount: Suppliers who sell fuel from the terminal rack may take a discount of .005 percent from their tax payments for motor fuel sold directly to users and unlicensed distributors.
- Administrative Discount: Suppliers and alternative fuel providers who file returns with payments timely may take a .001 percent discount on their payments. This discount cannot exceed $5,000 per month.
- One-percent Discount: A licensed distributor who purchases fuel at the terminal rack and pays to the supplier the tax due by the date the supplier is required to remit the tax to the Commonwealth may take this discount on the amount of taxes paid to their suppliers. Licensed importers who receive motor fuel from a permissive or an elective supplier at the terminal rack may also take this discount.
When are discounts not allowed?
Discounts are not allowed when:
- Transactions are below the rack, or
- A supplier sells tax paid fuel which they received a discount on when they purchased the fuel, or
- A supplier fails to file their return and pay the tax on time to DMV, or
- A licensed distributor or importer fails to pay the tax on time to the supplier, or
- A provider of alternative fuel fails to pay the tax on time to DMV, or
- A licensed retailer or bulk user of alternative fuel who chooses to defer the tax payments fails to pay on time to the alternative fuel provider.


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June/July 1997
Rediscovering A Forgotten Symbol Of Freethought
By Annie Laurie Gaylor
With their intriguing little faces, pansies have always been one of my favorite flowers. So I was delighted to hear, sometime in my teens, that the pansy once had been adopted as a symbol of freethought, since "pansy" comes from "pensee," the French word for "thought."
I even worked the flowers into a portrait of Bertrand Russell that I painted for a high school art assignment, a painting which somehow found its way from my parents' attic into the Elizabeth H. Elliott Library at Freethought Hall, Madison. Imagine my disappointment when a freethought scholar, seeing the painting, informed me that the story of the pansy as an emblem of freethought was bogus. Of course, freethinkers are free--we can adopt whatever symbols we like--but I felt a sense of loss that this history might be false.
So I was particularly delighted, when doing research into freethought history for my anthology of women freethinkers, Women Without Superstition, to happen upon verification of the pansy's freethought status.
In reading a biography, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner: The Story of Her Life, of this noted British freethought writer and editor, I came across a reference to the 1920 International Freethought Congress. Arthur Bonner recorded how elated his wife Hypatia was to find the streets of Prague full of hundreds of persons wearing the Congress badge and the pansy, a symbol of freethought. That was confirmation enough for me to choose the pansy as the cover illustration for the dust jacket of Women Without Superstition.
In March, I was invited to speak at the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, which put on a lovely exhibit this spring, "Challenging Religious Dogma: A History of Free Thought." The librarians there treated me like a queen and helped me find some rare materials. Somehow the symbolism of the pansy came up in conversation with one of the exhibit's knowledgeable creators, Julie Herrada, Assistant Curator of the Labadie Collection. She immediately recalled seeing the pansy on the back of an old brochure of the American Secular Union which was encased in glass as part of the display.
"Could I see it?" I asked, practically salivating with anticipation.
Julie obligingly fetched the keys and took the yellowing brochure, more than a century old, from its wall case and turned it over to me. (There is something thrilling about being able to examine something that is part of a "Don't Touch" historic display.)
The undated pamphlet had a flag on the front. The pansy was on the back, with the words: "The 'Pansy' Symbol of Freedom of Thought (From the French word 'pens�e' meaning 'thought.')"
On the inside back cover was a long explanation of the history under the title "The Pansy Badge":
"There is . . . need of a badge which shall express at first glance, without complexity of detail, that basic principle of freedom of thought for which Liberals of all isms are contending. This need seems to have been met by the Freethinkers of France, Belgium, Spain and Sweden, who have adopted the pansy as their badge (French pensee, meaning thought). We join with them in recommending this flower as a simple and inexpensive badge of Freethought.
"Let every patriot who is a Freethinker in this sense, adopt the pansy as his badge, to be worn at all times, as a silent and unobtrusive testimony of his principles. In this way we shall recognize our brethren in the cause, and the enthusiasm will spread; until, before long, the uplifted standard of the pansy, beneath the sheltering folds of the United States flag, shall everywhere thrill men's hearts as the symbol of religious liberty and freedom of conscience."
I would estimate that the pamphlet dated from the late 1880's to early 1890's, based on the fact that the American Secular Union was originally known as the National Liberal League, becoming the ASU in 1885, and that the brochure contained an introduction by Ida C. Craddock, Corresponding Secretary, who was very active in freethought in the early 1890's.
(Craddock is not one of the 50 women whose writings are featured in my anthology, but she is included in my section of additional biographies of some 40 other women. She became more interested in mysticism and in marriage reform than in freethought in the following decade, which brought her to the attention of Anthony Comstock. Tragically, she slit her wrists in 1902 rather than serve a second prison sentence under Comstock, thus becoming one of at least 15 people Comstock bragged he had driven to suicide. Freethought historian George Macdonald recorded, "She and Comstock were the Beauty and the Beast.")
So it seems likely that the pansy was introduced to American freethinkers through the ASU circa 1890. I haven't traced the history of the freethought pansy beyond this. But the erudite Edward Weber, Curator at Labadie, reminded me of one of the pansy's more famous literary passages, the desperate soliloquy by Ophelia, in which she utters the famous line: "And there is pansies, that's for thoughts."
What better symbol of freethought than this humble but beautiful flower-with-a-face, symbolizing not just "thought" but our natural--our only--world.
So this summer, why not plant a pansy in your garden for freethought? (Remember, they do "sulk" terribly in hot weather.)
P.S. And if you're looking for more gardening projects with freethought significance, try the sun-loving perennial Shasta Daisy, cultivated by the great freethought botanist Luther Burbank, who considered children "human plants," believing that "with the highest and healthiest and best environments possible," all children could "be the Shasta Daisies of the human family."
By the way, when we told our own "human plant," 7-year-old Sabrina, that pansy means "thought," she exclaimed: "My middle name is 'pansy'!" Her middle name, "Delata," means "thought" in Delaware, the language of her father's ancestral tribe.


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It might be a big World Cup day, but in the stock market, it was "World Slump" day.
Here are the key talking points:
1. Bad day for stocks: All three major U.S. indexes retreated with the Nasdaq losing 1.35%. This was the 30th trading day so far this year that the Nasdaq has moved more than 1% up or down.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 118 points (0.7%) and the S&P 500 sunk 0.7%. There was a lot of excitement about the Dow cresting over 17,000 last week, but it finished the day a notch above 16,900.
Meanwhile volatility is creeping back into the market. CNNMoney's Fear and Greed Index, which tracks seven indicators of market sentiment, has moved from "extreme greed" into "greed."
Some of the pessimism could simply have been investors realizing their gains after the recent stock market rally. But there are deeper concerns about company valuations and whether the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates sooner rather than later.
2. Tech takes beating: Tuesday's sell-off was most pronounced in the tech world, where some of the big so-called momentum stocks pulled back. CNNMoney's Tech 30 Index ended down 2.1%, with Twitter (TWTR) as its most unfortunate victim. Shares of the microblogging service tanked over 7% Tuesday.
"$TWTR is done. Take the money and run very fast," said MickeTrader on StockTwits.
Linkedin (LNKD),Facebook (FB), Netflix (NFLX), and Amazon (AMZN) also lost big.
3. Earnings season is here! Alcoa (AA) unofficially kicked off earnings season Tuesday when it released its second quarter results after the bell. So far, so good. The aluminum producer rose in after hour trading after it beat analyst estimates.
Related: Corporate profits: Can they keep going and going?
With the S&P 500 index already up 6% this year, investors will be looking closely to see whether corporate profits can support stocks and to what extent markets have been relying on cheap money from the Federal Reserve to push indexes to new records.
Second quarter earnings are expected to grow 4.9% compared to the same period last year, though that estimate is down from the 6.8% prediction at the start of the quarter, according to data from FactSet.
Related: Fear & Greed Index in greed
4. Other movers: More drama at American Apparel: Shares of American Apparel (APP) plunged after the struggling company warned it received a notice of default from a lender related to last month's ouster of founder and CEO Dov Charney.
However, American Apparel disputed that default claim and is exploring ways to tap its revolving credit facility to repay the lender. The New York Post reported American Apparel has reached a preliminary deal to transfer control of the board to a hedge fund aligned with Charney.
Also on the fashion front, Guess (GES) rallied -- up almost 4% -- after the retailer was upgraded by analysts at Piper Jaffray, who pointed to strength in the company's European business.
5. No help from overseas: European markets were weaker, with airline and banking stocks under pressure. Air France KLM (AFLYY)cut its earnings forecast due to overcapacity on routes to North America and Asia. In that vein, Delta Air Lines (DAL) dipped again. The stock is down over 9% in the past week after the company released revenue figures that showed weakness on certain overseas routes.
Some bank stocks took a hit from a New York Times report saying Germany's Commerzbank (CRZBF) and Deutsche Bank (DB) are next in line for punishment by U.S. authorities. Sentiment was also soured by weaker than expected German export data for May.
Asian markets ended mixed.
South Korean-based Samsung warned that revenue and profit will fall in the second quarter as the company struggles to find new smartphone buyers in an already saturated market. The electronics maker warned that operating profit could fall to 7 trillion won ($6.9 billion) -- a 26% decline from the previous year.
CNNMoney reporter Matt Egan contributed to this report.


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One of the biggest mysteries about diabetes is why specialized cells in the pancreas stop secreting insulin, which the body needs in order to store glucose from food. A team from the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) Research Institute has identified a protein that inhibits insulin production in mice -- work that offers a new way of understanding, and perhaps of one day treating, both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.
A study to be published in the journal Cell Metabolism describes how a research group led by Dr. Robert Screaton, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Apoptotic Signaling at the University of Ottawa, used sophisticated genetic engineering to remove or 'knock out' the Lkb1 gene from beta cells of laboratory mice. The result was an increase in both the size and number of beta cells, as well as greater amounts of insulin stored and released by the cells.
Importantly, the improved beta cell function lasted for at least five months, even in mice fed a high-fat diet designed to mimic the high caloric intake associated with Metabolic Syndrome and Type 2 diabetes in humans.
"We were surprised by the impressive accumulation of Lkb1 in beta cells of diabetic mice, which suggested that Lkb1 might contribute to their impaired function. After removal of the Lkb1 gene, the beta cells grow larger, proliferate more, and secrete more insulin. It's a one-stop shop for the much needed insulin", said Dr. Screaton.
"The knockout mice on a high-fat diet have lower blood glucose. If this observation is confirmed in humans, it may give us another clue into the development of Type 2 diabetes, and perhaps new treatment options".
"Type 1 and 2 diabetes, already common diseases, are showing disturbingly steady growth in incidence. The two conditions are among Canada's, and indeed the globe's, greatest health challenges," said Dr. Alex MacKenzie, CEO of the CHEO Research Institute and a physician who treats children with diabetes at CHEO. "The findings of Dr. Screaton's team introduce a novel and unanticipated potential therapeutic avenue for this costly and serious condition. It is some of the most important work to come out of our institute."
Contributors to the study were lead author Accalia Fu, Andy Ng, and Dr. Chantal Depatie of the CHEO Research Institute; Dr. Gen-Sheng Wang, Dr. Fraser Scott, Ying He, and Dr. Rhian Touyz of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute; Nadeeja Wijesekara and Dr. Michael Wheeler of the University of Toronto; and Dr. Nabeel Bardeesy of Harvard University.
The work was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Cite This Page:


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Beauty tips, do these 12 things to keep your skin glowing in monsoon
Don't forget to gently exfoliate your skin after the end of the day.
It is important that you continue your skincare routine, even in the monsoons. Use a soap-free cleanser, exfoliate regularly and do not skip the toner, say experts. Ms Preeti Seth, Nutritionist and Cosmetologist and the founder of PACHOULI WELLNESS CLINIC, have listed the must-follow steps for the rainy season:
* Limit washing your face 2-3 times a day with a soap-free cleanser. This will help maintain a clean, healthy skin without stripping your skin off its essentials oil.
* Exfoliating the skin is necessary to get rid of the dead layers on your skin. Get a regular skin exfoliation treatment like microdermabrasion or mild chemical peel to reduce the risk of falling prey to infection.
* Always go for a minimal make-up and products from the organic front. Let your pores breathe. Apply a lip balm that can moisturize the lips, keep one handy so that you can use it anytime.
* Don't skip the toner. In summer, we tend to sweat a lot and this can cause our skin pores to open up. Use a toner after cleansing to help shrink these pores. Invest in an alcohol-free toner with antioxidant ingredients like green tea and glycolic acid that help tighten enlarged pores, to control blemishes and acne, while removing dead cells.
* Choosing the right sunscreen for the right complexion and skin type is extremely important. Use nothing below SPF 30. Put where your skin gets exposed to the sun for a long period of time, apply evenly and generously on the face before sun exposure. Re-apply frequently, especially after swimming or drying yourself with a towel. Apply every 2-3 hours for optimum protection.
* Seal the moisture with a mask. Control oiliness in the skin caused by humidity, with a once-a-week clay mask that naturally absorbs oil. Look for one with tea tree or green tea extracts and gentle exfoliation to prevent breakouts by removing dead cells and impurities from the pores.
* Contrary to what most people believe, moisturising is as important in summer as it is in winter. Exposure to the sun and pollution strips off the natural oils of your skin, causing it to tan and age early. So you need a light, non-greasy day cream that has a minimum of SPF30, and mild natural ingredients such as grape seed and sea
buckthorn that aid cell repair and regeneration.
* Take extra care of sensitive areas: The skin on our lips and around our eyes is thinner than that on the rest of the face, so they need extra attention during the summer. The heat can make the eyes burn and lips, chapped. Make sure you splash your eyes regularly, and keep your lips protected with lip balm.
* If you can't do without kajal, invest in an ophthalmologically approved, waterproof kajal pencil, free from parabens, mineral oil or paraffin. Also, remove all make-up before retiring for the night, and soothe your eyes with rosewater-dipped cotton balls.
* Take Vitamin C to boost your immune system as that can help fight infections. * Dust yourself with antifungal powder on clean dry skin to stay away from unwanted infections.
* Use gentle products and maintain a good, simple routine using sunscreen regularly and incorporating chemical peels or exfoliants, so your skin will transition smoothly.


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You can clear the list of bonded wireless sources by pressing the logo button six times to "Clear all".
This will clear the list of bonded wireless sources and you can start all over by bonding your wireless sources again.
Note. After performing a "Clear all" the speaker will search for and auto-bond to the first active transmitter.
Press the logo button twice to add additional transmitters.


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Several of the 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls have laid out economic platforms that would include huge cuts in the corporate tax rate. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) called for lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, while former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) went a step further, calling for a cut to 15 percent.
In an interview published today by the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — who is toying with a presidential run herself — decided to one-up both Romney and Pawlenty, calling for a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 9 percent. Adding insult to injury, Bachmann wants to pair that huge tax cut with giant tax reductions for the rich, as well as a tax increase on the working poor:
"In my perfect world," she explains, "we'd take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we're the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax." […]
Her main goal is to get tax rates down with a broad-based income tax that everyone pays and that "gets rid of all the deductions." A system in which 47% of Americans don't pay any tax is ruinous for a democracy, she says, "because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something."
Let's take these one at a time. First, cutting the corporate tax rate to 9 percent — a reduction about two and a half times larger than that called for in the radical House Republican budget — would cost more than $2 trillion over ten years. (The Tax Policy Center estimated that a 10 point reduction in the corporate tax rate would cost about $915 billion.)
Second, zeroing out the capital gains tax and the estate tax would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, as about 68 percent of capital gains taxes are paid by the richest one percent of the country, and fewer than the richest one quarter of one percent pay the estate tax.
Finally, Bachmann implies that she would raise taxes on those Americans who earn too little to have any income tax liability. (It's simply not true that they pay nothing, as Bachmann seems to believe, since those who have no income tax liability still pay payroll taxes and any state and local taxes.)
The reason so much of the income tax liability has become concentrated at the top of the income scale is because over the last few decades income inequality has skyrocketed. The richest one percent of the country currently earn nearly one quarter of the income, and therefore pay the lion's share of the income tax. Bachmann would raise taxes on those who have seen their incomes stagnate or even drop over the last ten years, even as she cuts taxes on the ultra-wealthy.


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• scrump •
Pronunciation: skrêmp • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, transitive
Meaning: No, this word is not the past tense of scrimp (though see the Word History) nor the short form of scrumptious (that's scrummy), but a British slang term for filching apples or other fruit from someone else's orchard or garden. Words are seldom so specific in their meaning.
Notes: Today's Good Word is rarely heard outside the UK, yet remains fair game in any English-speaking region. Someone who scrumps is a scrumper, and I would feel comfortable saying that what they bring home from their scrumping is scrumpage. (Others might not.) Wrinkled apples that drop from the tree are squeezed for their juice in parts of England to produce scrumpy, a rather potent apple cider, I gather from our experienced British readers. Because of its association with wrinkles and similarity to crumple and rumple, today's word produced a verb, scrumple "crush, wrinkle".
In Play: This verb is traditionally used in reference to stolen apples, rarely even to other types of fruit: "Research to date has failed to explain why scrumped apples taste better than those bought at market." However, it is safe to expand the reference to anything grown in an orchard or garden: "My garden this year? Between the rodents, birds and scrumping children, I doubt it will return the cost of the seeds."
Word History: Today's Good Word originally referred to a shriveled apple or other fruit via the adjective scrimp "meager, scanty", but may have been used metaphorically to refer to anything with wrinkles. It is probably related to German schrumpfen "to shrink", formerly schrimpfen, suggesting a relationship with English shrimp, though no hard evidence connects them. There is also an ancient use of scram in the sense of "shriveled", as in a scram hand that might be related. So, there are a lot of potential words that might have sired today's Good Word but none are stepping forward. (We are happy that Michael Short stepped forward and suggested this word, which he was surprised to hear in England.)
P.S. - Register for the Daily Good Word E-Mail! - You can get our daily Good Word sent directly to you via e-mail in either HTML or Text format. Go to our Registration Page to sign up today!


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- $146,350 is the median salary for cloud computing professionals in 2018
- There are 50,248 cloud computing positions available in the U.S. today available from 3,701 employers and 101,913 open positions worldwide today
- Oracle, Deloitte and Amazon have the highest number of open cloud computing jobs today
- Java, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), software development, DevOps, Docker and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are the most in-demand skills
- Washington DC, Arlington-Alexandria, VA, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL, are the top five cities where cloud computing jobs are today and will be in 2019
Demand for cloud computing expertise continues to increase exponentially and will accelerate in 2019. To better understand the current and future direction of cloud computing hiring trends, I utilised Gartner TalentNeuron. Gartner TalentNeuron is an online talent market intelligence portal with real-time labor market insights, including custom role analytics and executive-ready dashboards and presentations. Gartner TalentNeuron also supports a range of strategic initiatives covering talent, location, and competitive intelligence.
Gartner TalentNeuron maintains a database of more than one billion unique job listings and is collecting hiring trend data from more than 150 countries across six continents, resulting in 143GB of raw data being acquired daily. In response to many readers' requests for recommendations on where to find a job in cloud computing, I contacted Gartner to gain access to TalentNeuron.
Key takeaways include the following:
$146,350 is the median salary for cloud computing professionals in 2018
Cloud computing salaries have soared in the last two years, with 2016's median salary being $124,300, a jump of $22,050. The following graphic shows the distribution of salaries for 50,248 cloud computing jobs currently available in the U.S. alone. Please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading.
The Hiring Scale is 78 for jobs that require cloud computing skill sets, with the average job post staying open 46 days
The higher the Hiring Scale score, the more difficult it is for employers to find the right applicants for open positions. Nationally an average job posting for an IT professional with cloud computing expertise is open 46 days. Please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading.
Washington, DC – Arlington-Alexandria, VA leads the top twenty metro areas that have the most open positions for cloud computing professionals today
Mapping the distribution of job volume, salary range, candidate supply, posting period and hiring scale by Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) or states and counties are supported by Gartner TalentNeuron. The following graphic is showing the distribution of talent or candidate supply. These are the markets with the highest supply of talent with cloud computing skills.
Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), Deloitte and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) have the highest number of open cloud computing jobs today
IBM, VMware, Capital One, Microsoft, KPMG, Salesforce, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), U.S. Bank, and Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon Corporation, SAP, Capgemini, Google, Leidos and Nutanix all have over 100 open cloud computing positions today.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their Cyber Security & Cloud use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.


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Model IGN2729M250C is an internally impedance-matched, gallium-nitride (GaN) high-electron-mobility-transistor (HEMT) device suitable for S-band radar applications from 2.7 to 2.9 GHz. It delivers at least 250 W output power when operating with a 300-μs pulse and 10% pulse duty cycle, with typically 10-dB gain across the frequency range, with an average output-power rating of 25 W. The transistor is specified for Class-AB bias conditions. In addition, for applications from 2.7 to 3.1 GHz, the firm recently introduced their model IGN2731M200 GaN-on-silicon-carbide transistors with rating of 200 W output power for 300-μs pulses at a 44% duty cycle. The depletion-mode device is also internally impedance matched and specified for use under Class AB bias conditions. It is supplied in a compact housing measuring 1.070 x 0.400 in. (27.18 x 10.16 mm).
Integra Technologies, Inc., 321 Coral Circle, El Segundo, CA 90245; (310) 606-0855, FAX: (310) 606-0865.
This file type includes high resolution graphics and schematics when applicable.


text: Community Voices aims to encourage broad discussion on many topics of community interest. It's kind of a cross between Letters to the Editor and op-eds. This is your space to talk about important issues or interesting people who are making a difference in our world. Column lengths should be no more than 800 words and we need a current photo of the author and a bio. We welcome video commentary and other multimedia formats. Send to email@example.com. The opinions and information expressed in Community Voices are solely those of the authors and not Civil Beat.


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There are two city park locations commonly reserved for small wedding parties: Falls Park's Old Mill Garden and River Lodge, and the Rock Quarry Garden, located on the north edge of Cleveland Park.
Just downstream of the falls, Old Mill Garden is a beautiful location for an intimate gathering. The site can accommodate a maximum of 100 people. The Old Mill Garden and River Lodge is available for 4 or 8 hour rentals.For more information about a Falls Park weddingDownload Old Mill Garden Wedding Packet (PDF)
Located in Cleveland Park and nestled in the heart of Greenville is a wonderful secluded retreat, The Rock Quarry Garden. Long used as a photography and wedding site, the garden combines rock, water and beautifully maintained flora. The Rock Quarry Garden is available for 4 or 8 hour rentals.For more information about a Rock Quarry Garden weddingDownload Rock Quarry Garden Wedding Packet (PDF)


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Do You Wanna Go Faster?
As a kid at my local county fair, I used to ride a roller coaster that rumbled around a circular track as songs like Foreigner's Urgent blasted through a set of giant speakers. Every few times around the track, the guy running the ride would pause the music long enough to bellow out one loud question:
Do you wanna go faster?
It didn't really matter how you answered. The ride got faster. I could hear that roller coaster guy's voice echoing in my head in the minutes following the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.
I happened to be online as the story broke. I felt an urgent need for data. I opened about six tabs in my browser and started to hit the refresh button. Most news outlets had a breaking news alert about the shooting, but little else. I searched Twitter to increase the pace of the incoming data. Much of the data was repetitive, but it came in fast.
Within minutes, the tweets shifted from what happened to a deeper analysis of what it means. There were links to Sarah Palin's website and attacks on what some consider to be the increasing volume of politically-motivated hate speech. Seconds later, those tweets were rebutted by others. The crime scene had barely been roped-off and already, much of the news gathering had been eclipsed by the news analysis.
Do you wanna go faster?
I did. I left my Twitter search window open as I returned to refreshing web pages. Give me something new. I need, I need. Boom. NPR reports that Giffords is dead. That news swept through the Twitterverse and on the Facebook page I now had open. I headed over the New York Times homepage. Nothing new. It still featured a stale blurb about conflicting reports on Giffords' health. Below to the blurb, I saw the phrase: Updated 4 minutes ago.
I refreshed a few more times and wondered to myself, "What have these people been wasting their time on for the last four minutes? Where is the news?"
Do you wanna go faster?
NPR did. But as it turned out, Giffords was not dead. She was in surgery. The false news of her death spread so quickly that it made it all the way to her family members who sat in the hospital waiting room. They had to confirm with doctors that Giffords was still alive.
The story moved so fast that it passed the reality.
So did the analysis and the thousands of Tweets by those who were certain about the larger context of what the events on the ground meant long before they had even a handful of details.
I thought about tweeting a condolence. I could possibly chime in on the debate regarding hate speech and Sarah Palin's role in all of this. Or maybe I'd offer a contrarian view about the pace at which each of us seems to achieve a level of certainty on any given topic. I've got to tweet something, right? This is what we do. Read, react, repeat. Sure, I had only known who Gabrielle Giffords was for about twenty minutes, but why should having no background on a topic and knowing almost none of the details about an event prevent me from serving up a concrete viewpoint?
It took everything I had not to Tweet.
Do you wanna go faster?
You can bet NPR wishes they hadn't gone that fast.
Already all of us at NPR News have been reminded of the challenges and professional responsibilities of reporting on fast-breaking news at a time and in an environment where information and misinformation move at light speed.
Even though NPR is not a brand I necessarily associate with fast-breaking news, I can understand any editor feeling an increased demand to get new material up right away.
But what about me? When did I turn into a human breaking-news outlet who has to keep up with the second-by-second details of a story and then add my own updates and analysis to the realtime mix? How can thousands of my fellow human news machines have served up 140 character analyses before law enforcement officials on the ground even had a chance to put together a preliminary outline of what exactly happened?
Are you really sure you wanna go faster?
Just like that old county fair roller coaster, it probably doesn't matter what you answer. The speed is increasing. The pressure to keep up and immediately chime in will only grow more urgent. The challenge to maintain a reasonable level of factual accuracy will grow more daunting. And actually taking the time to gather and reflect on information before adding an opinion to the discussion will require more restraint.
But maybe I'm too late with this message. The whole story is old news by now.


text: "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> writes: > On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >> By the way, you can now design daemons to handle tens of thousands of >> simultaneous connections with clean event driven design on a modern >> multiprocessor with plenty of memory. This is way off topic, though. > > Not on a cluster list. Well, it actually kind of is. Typically, a box in an HPC cluster is running stuff that's compute bound and who's primary job isn't serving vast numbers of teeny high latency requests. That's much more what a web server does. However... > I've written forking daemons (which is why I should have known, or > remembered, about the four-tuple thing:-) because they are an essential > component of IPCs in a network-based cluster or cluster distributed > apps. One is best off *not* forking, actually. There's a good site on concurrency management for high performance servers. It is a bit old now but covers the topic well: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html Myself, I'm a believer in event driven code. One thread, one core. All other concurrency management should be handled by events, not by multiple threads. Thread context switching is very very expensive, and threads are very expensive. Doing event driven programming wins overwhelmingly in such contexts. It is hard to impossible, on a modern machine, to handle tens of thousands of connections with forking or threads, but it is easy with events. I'm a fan of Niels Provos' "libevent" for such purposes. There are a lot of other libraries that plug in to it well, too. -- Perry E. Metzger perry at piermont.com


text: Buckingham Elementary School recently honored its "Students of The Month" for February. Students and parents had pizza that was donated by Boomers Restaurant. Above are first grade winners Jessenia Almazon, Lukas Aulinsks, Blaine Warren, Kyle Sysko and Lauren Barret. Other winners were second, Nicholas Wyatt, Olivia Barton, Anthony Balsoma and Zoie Williams; third graders Roland Hutchinson, Jenna Morlock, Billy Thompson, Travis Tull and Daniel Tyndall; and fourth graders Mattie Waterman, Alisa Purnell, Cassidy Fisher and Ajee Finney.


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Bill Gates Supports Gay Marriage With $100K Gift
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has waded into the same-sex marriage debate in Washington State with a $100,000 contribution to help defeat a referendum that would ban same-sex marriage.
Gates, along with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, both made the same six-figure contribution said Zach Silk, campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, the group leading the charge for gay activists.
"It's going to make a tremendous difference," Silk told The Associated Press. "It's very important for us to have the broad support from business leaders and companies themselves."
In addition to Microsoft, other noted Washington State based companies such as Starbucks and Nike have also made sizable contributions.
The ballot initiative known as Referendum 74 seeks to overturn a law passed earlier this year by legislators and signed by Gov. Chris Gregoire legalizing same-sex marriage. Opponents of the measure, led by Pastor Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church, gathered twice the number of required signatures in order to get the referendum before the voters.
However, this is not the first time a Microsoft officer or executive has donated a sizable contribution to support homosexual rights and according to Hutcheson, the homosexual community has a tremendous amount of influence on the company.
Ric Weiland was one of Microsoft's first five employees and was instrumental in helping Bill Gates and Paul Allen launch Microsoft in the company's early years.
A quiet and unassuming man, friends often said he was uncomfortable with the amount of personal wealth he made as a result of his work at Microsoft. But after suffering with depression for many years, Weiland, who was gay, committed suicide in 2006 and left $65 million to several gay rights organizations.
Yet in spite of the contribution of Gates and other wealthy residents, Hutcherson expects supporters of traditional marriage to prevail at the ballot box in November.
"My warning to the folks supporting Referendum 74 is they have picked a fight like they've never seen before," Hutcherson told The Christian Post. "The fight to protect marriage is not about money, it's about motivating Christians to get out and vote."
And this isn't the first time Hutcheson has taken on the executives at Microsoft over the same-sex marriage issue. When company lawyers testified in front of a Washington State legislative committee in support of gay marriage, Hutcherson met with Microsoft and warned the company that if they continued, he would start a campaign to encourage his congregation – many of whom are employees of Microsoft – and other Christians to sell the company's stock.
Hutcherson admits that Washington State, known for its liberal leanings, is not the ideal place to wage a fight for same-sex marriage but also realizes that money alone cannot overpower the will of God.
"No doubt, it's a politically correct state out here," noted Hutcherson. "It's an important election because homosexuals are desperate for a victory after 32 consecutive losses. However, if we can win and bring the total up to 33 states, it will give Christians an even greater voice in Congress."
"Microsoft does exert a tremendous amount of influence out here so it is important that Christians mobilize for this election."


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From Iraq, a tragic reminder to prosecute the war criminals
27 May 2013
The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr Teaching Hospital in Basra, Dr. Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. "Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."
Along the corridor, Dr. Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuroplastoma. "Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same."
Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf War battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warhog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare."
Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer programme of the World Health organisation (WHO) in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq Sanctions Committee]." He told me, "We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics."
Recently, Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers."
Today, a WHO report, the result on a landmark study conducted jointly with the Iraqi Ministry of Health has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains "damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains "top secret". The report says that birth defects have risen to a "crisis" right across Iraqi society where DU and other toxic heavy metals were by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire families.
Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess".
The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.
Their "mess" is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost both parents. "This means a horrific 14 per cent of Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.
In her book 'Dispatches from the Dark Side', Gareth Peirce, Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, "human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently... in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.'" The very concept of war was mutated to "our values versus theirs". And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiques reveal no dissent".
For Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantanamo was "the best way to meet our counter terrorism objective". These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?
Follow John Pilger on twitter @pilgerwebsite


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Cushions :: at last! These have been a while in the making :: designing the fabric, printing it and putting it all together over the last few months has been a lovely journey. It was great to finally launch these at the Bowerbird Design Market in Adelaide a few weeks ago to very enthusiastic customers. They almost sold out, so I have been printing and sewing again to release these online.
The Hexiburst design evolved from one of my #52weeksofprintmaking pieces (which is happening on my instagram account :: you can find me over there as @yardagedesign). The cushion is reversible, with an invisible zipper, with my Waves design on the back in a two colour print. Waves started as a background to the ever popular Girt by Sea tea towel, but is now out on its own!
Handprinted cushion covers online in the Yardage Design shop right now :: sustainable cushions inserts (made from recycled plastic bottles) also available.
Have a great week!


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Unbelievably friendly and warm staff who gladly gave expert travel advice and recommendations that only a Roman would normally be privy to.
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I LOVE this website and will gladly recommend it to anyone headed this way. Nothing disappointed us!
- Mary-Iris Taylor
I have been using Cross-Pollinate for about 10 years now. The service is consistently great and I can always find just the kind of apartment we like, at the right price.
- Hirani Himona
A really great idea - with a network of hand picked little rooms/guesthouses. If only we could have this in more city destinations!
- Zoe Buck
I love Cross-Pollinate and every time we go to a new city I look to see whether they have some accommodations over there.
- Arantza Aldea
The two places I have stayed at from Cross-Pollinate have been among the best across Europe. Highly recommended.
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Thanks a lot to Cross-Pollinate for the opportunity to experience a city as an insider! We really enjoyed our stay in Rome and Venice and look forward to more.
- Tatiana Marchenko
Cross-Pollinate was very helpful when the owner of the B&B wanted to charge us for the baby under 2 y o. It would have been difficult without them since the owners did not speak any english.
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This was our only stay with a C-P apartment and we were very pleased with the entire process. Will look to use them again on our next Europe trip!
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Great web site and quick response from the team a CP made the whole experience easy and hassle free. I have already recommended CP to quite of few of my airline industry colleagues and I'm sure they will make use of their excellent service.
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Cross-Pollinate was extremely helpful! They found us a place to stay in our price range when many other places of business couldn't help us.
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Vilarisi is the four story hotel with touches of Balinese architecture, a mix of modern ethnic interior and exterior design. The lobby and restaurant are decorated with a blend of traditional Balinese and Javanese style completed with beautiful stone carvings and paintings. The hotel offers clean and well maintained rooms with friendly staff will make your stay at Vilarisi Hotel more enjoyable and comfortable.
Located in the heart of Legian along a quiet street where The spectacular view to the beach, mountains and Legian surrounding can be seen from the rooftop garden. Famous Kuta Beach, Art Market, Shopping Centre and night life are all nearby within minutes by walk or car.
D'Talya Spa on the rooftop garden offers a wide selections of Traditional Treatment for your holiday need. The restaurant serves Local, Asia and Western dishes. Utilizing local seafood and other produces you can enjoy delicious variety of fusion western and eastern dishes. Vilarisi hotel is very ideal for travelers on a budget.


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The pace of innovation in the New York area is very impressive right now. Some of the top entrepenuers in the country are building and scaling companies in the NY ecosystem - Ron Conway, yesterday in an email to me (published with his permission)
With the announcement of Roger Ehrenberg's new fund – IA Venture Strategies – NYC now has another top-tier seed fund. I've had the pleasure of investing with Roger a number of times. He's not only a great investor but also a huge help to the companies he invests in. It's great that he's going to be even more active and I hope to work with him a lot more in the future.
The NYC tech scene is exploding. There are tons of interesting startups. I'm an investor in a bunch and started one (Hunch) so won't even try to enumerate them as any list will be extremely biased (other people have tried). I will say that one interesting thing happening is the types of startups are diversifying beyond media (HuffPo, Gawker) to more "California-style" startups (Foursquare, Boxee, Hunch).
In terms of investors, NYC now has a number of seed investors / micro-VCs: IA Capital Partners, Betaworks, and Founder Collective (FC – which I am part of – has made 7 seed investments in NYC since we started last year). The god of seed investing, Ron Conway, who I quote up top, has recently decided to become extremely active in NYC. One of the nice things about having small funds is we don't need to invest millions of dollar per round so we all frequently invest together.
NYC also has mid sized funds like Union Square (in my opinion and a lot of people in the industry they have surpassed Sequoia as the best VC in the country). We also have First Round, who very smartly hired the excellent Charlie ("Chris") O'Donnell as their NYC guy.
Then we have the big VCs who have also been increasing their activity in NYC. Locally, we have Bessemer (Skype, LinkedIn, Yelp) and RRE. Boston firms that are very active and positive influences here include: Polaris (Dog Patch Labs), Spark, Matrix, General Catalyst, and Flybridge. Finally, some excellent California firms like True Ventures have made NYC their second home.
The one thing we really need to complete the ecosystem is a couple of runaway succesesses. As California has seen with Paypal, Google, Facebook etc, the big successes spawn all sorts of interesting new startups when employees leave and start new companies. They also set an example for younger entrepreneurs who, say, start a social networking site at Harvard and then decide to move.


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District 10P.O. Box 429Indiana, PA 15701724-357-2800Local PADOT (PENNDOT) officeButler maintenance garage: 724-284-8800 PennDOT District 10
Cranberry's government operations are financed by a combination of user fees and taxes on real estate, business revenues, individual earned income, property transactions, and local employment. The Township uses both contractors and elected tax collectors to collect recurring tax payments. Butler County's Recorder of Deeds collects real estate transfer taxes at the time a property is sold. Real Estate Property.
The Board of Supervisors meet on a twice monthly basis (first and last Thursdays of the month at 6:30 pm. in Council Chambers to conduct business on behalf of the Township. All meetings of the Board are open to the public with an opportunity at each meeting for public comment.
Cranberry Township is Butler County's largest municipality Meet the Board of Supervisors


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Monaco's royal family has criticized a feature film about the late Princess Grace, saying it presents a glamorized and inaccurate view of her life.
Prince Albert and his sisters, Princess Stephanie and Princess Caroline, issued a statement saying the film about their mother — the former Grace Kelly — contained major historical inaccuracies and "purely fictional scenes."
The royals rebuffed a report in Paris Match magazine claiming the palace supported the film, "Grace of Monaco."
The movie stars Nicole Kidman as the Hollywood icon, who married Monaco's Prince Rainier II in 1956. The princess died in 1982, aged 52.
The statement said the family had "absolutely no association" with the film. It said the filmmakers had ignored the palace's requests for changes to the script.


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Gold "Could Be Forming Base to Test Resistance", China Imports Record Volume of Gold Bullion from Hong Kong
Gold Bullion climbed above $1680 per ounce Tuesday morning in London, trading close to last week's high, as stocks, commodities and the Euro also gained and US Treasuries fell, following better-than-expected services sector data from Europe.
Silver meantime touched $32 an ounce for the first time this week.
"We will remain short term bearish [on gold] while resistance [around $1696 per ounce] caps," says Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at Commerzbank.
"Should this resistance zone unexpectedly be overcome, however, our medium term bullish forecast will be reinstated with the 1750 region then being targeted."
"The January 4 low at $1625 is pivotal," add technical analysts at Scotia Mocatta,"and there should be good support there...the consolidation since that date may indicate gold is forming a base."
Sentiment towards gold among western households grew less bullish last month, according to data published by BullionVault Tuesday.
The Gold Investor Index, which tracks buying and selling on the world's largest physical gold market for private investors online, fell to 54.9 in January, down from a 12-month high of 58.3 a month earlier and its lowest reading since September. A figure above 50 indicates more net buyers than net sellers over the month.
Weekly data published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last Friday meantime show the speculative net long position of gold futures traders, a closely-watched measure of futures market sentiment, fell to levels not reported since August during the week ended last Tuesday, indicating reduced bullishness among traders.
Over in India, traditionally the world's biggest source of private gold demand, the government's "anti-gold" stance means Indian gold demand "is going to face a difficult year", according to Philip Klapwijk, global head of metal analytics at precious metals consultancy Thomson Reuters GFMS.
"Comparing demand last year with 2011, we see this rather strange phenomenon that India was the standout for the country where demand collapsed the most," Klapwijk told a conference in Cape Town Monday.
"In other parts of the world, they shrugged off the 6% increase in gold prices rather well and in other parts we saw growth in jewelry demand."
Gold bullion imports to China through Hong Kong nearly doubled in 2012, hitting a record 834.5 tonnes, the island's Census & Statistics Department said today.
Now the world's largest gold consumer as well as the number one mining producing nation, however, China also trebled its exports of gold through Hong Kong, the data show.
Gold bullion imports net of exports rose 56.0% to 523.6 tonnes on BullionVault's maths.
China's central bank meantime injected a record 450 billion Yuan ($72 billion) into the country's money markets Tuesday ahead of next week's Lunar New Year holiday.
Bank of Japan governor Masaaki Shirakawa announced Tuesday that he will step down three weeks earlier than scheduled, and will now leave his post on March 19.
At its most recent policy meeting, the BOJ doubled its inflation target from 1% to 2% and announced it will launch open ended quantitative easing once the current round of QE ends next year.
The BOJ's move was largely expected, having been called for by prime minister Shinzo Abe following his election victory in December, and was described as "threatening an end to central bank autonomy" by the head of Germany's Bundesbank Jens Weidmann.
"[Shirakawa's] resignation will likely push forward the timing of bold monetary easing action [by the BOJ," reckons Akito Fukunaga, chief rates strategist at RBS Securities Japan in Tokyo.
"Shirakawa has probably judged that it's better for the BOJ to start with a new top three who have similar views."
In Europe, the services sectors of Germany, Spain and the Eurozone as a whole all saw better-than-expected improvements in conditions last month, according to monthly purchasing managers' index data published this morning, although the PMIs for Spain and the Eurozone remained below 50, indicating sector contraction.
Italy's services PMI by contrast was lower than the consensus forecast among analysts, and down on the month earlier, indicating a sharper rate of contraction during the month.
In the UK, January's services PMI was 51.5, up from 48.9 a month earlier.
"A huge sigh of relief accompanies these numbers, as a return to growth of the service sector in January greatly reduces the likelihood of the UK falling back into a 'triple-dip' recession," says Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, which produces the PMI.
Both the Euro and Sterling rallied against the Dollar this morning, although Sterling reversed most of the move by lunchtime. Both currencies remain below where they started the month.
Buying Gold?...


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