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The Lagos State Government on Monday said over $735.8million (about N264billion) worth of finished goods have so far been exported from the Lekki Free Zone project in the last three years.
Commissioner for Commerce and Cooperatives, Mrs Olayinka Oladunjoye who disclosed this at the annual Ministerial Press Briefing to mark the third anniversary of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode's administration held at the Bagauda Kaltho Press Centre in Alausa, said the government was totally committed to the development of businesses in the Zone, adding that measures were taken to ensure that the goods meet international standard before they are exported out of the country.
She said the Nigeria Customs, Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA) and other supporting agencies coordinated the exporting process of the goods in conjunction with the Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON), saying that it was a testament to the fact that the Zone was living up to expectation.
She said the Lekki Free Zone, among other things, was conceptualized to develop an offshore economic growth zone, attract foreign investments, promote export, create job opportunities, transfer technology, minimise capital flight and establish a one stop business haven and currently has 22 Free Zone Enterprises (FZEs) and 18 manufacturing enterprises in operation.
Oladunjoye also disclosed that to date, the Joint Venture with the Chinese Consortium has a total equity investment of $180.4million and has received Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) totalling $140.2million out of the $200million FDI expected from the Consortium.
Besides, she said 125 investors have registered, while 59 investors have their Lease Agreements, adding that 726 Nigerians have been employed by the FZEs and N376.5million spent on executing 14 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects for host communities.
She listed other achievements in the Lekki Free Zone to include $500million FDI from FZEs in operation, while a Customs Processing Centre (CPC) for Nigeria Customs Service was established to improve the ease of doing business and eliminate bottlenecks.
The Commissioner said the Government has opened its doors to investors willing to partner the State in the provision of inter-modal transportation infrastructure within the Lekki Free Zone axis, with emphasis on road and rail system to accommodate the massive investments coming into the corridor and solve the attendant traffic challenges.
She said with the emerging industrial revolution within the Epe-Ibeju-Lekki corridor of the State especially the Lekki Free Zone, the Lekki Deep Seaport, the Dangote Refinery and Fertilizer Plants, Lagos was fast becoming the preferred investment destination across the globe.
But she said the State Government was not unmindful of the fact that an integrated transportation system was critical to the success of the emerging business activities zone when all the ongoing businesses come on stream.
"However we are not unmindful of the fact that one of the critical success factors, that is, an integrated transportation infrastructure, must be catered for along with these various investors' endeavours within the corridor for us to harness the full values that these projects will bring on board when they all fully come on stream," she said.
She said plans are already in top gear to provide a holistic inter-modal transportation network comprising rail, road and water transportation systems so as to mitigate future challenges especially traffic congestion in view of the envisaged estimated 6,650 daily trucks movement within the corridor when all the ongoing businesses take off fully.
"I said in my report that we do not want to have another Apapa on our hands. This government is responsive and it's a government that is futuristic.
"In realization of the enormity of the required funding vis-à-vis the compelling need for transportation infrastructure, notably road and rail within the Lekki Free Zone corridor, the State Government has encouraged investors to express interest in of the planned axial roads that would take vehicular traffic away from the adjoining towns of the area and to Ogun State and there are other roads that we are working on," Oladunjoye said.
The Commissioner assured that the State Government would do everything possible to fast-track the necessary procurement process for the selection of the concessionaire to enable construction work begin on the road before the end of the year.
On the Lekki Deep Sea Port, the Commissioner said that work has already commenced after the ground breaking ceremony performed by the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, revealing that the Port which would be the deepest seaport in Sub-Saharan Africa will create over 170,000 direct jobs in the State while the first ship is expected to berth before the end of the first quarter in 2020 when the construction would be completed.
Speaking further, Oladunjoye said the State Government has concluded plans to activate the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with the Kano State Government after the Lagos-Kano Summit to set up a leather hub in Lagos.
"Recently I was at the Leather Fair and I saw the extent of the value chain of leather and was really impressed. Part of the fall out of the Lagos-Kano Summit is for us to leverage on our strengths and comparative advantage. Kano is the hub for Leather and our plan is to have a leather hub, a shoe factory here in Lagos," she said.


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NOTE: The route is subject to change due to weather and operational constraints. Follow @nycaviation on Twitter for route updates.
Enroute to its new home at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, Space Shuttle Enterprise is tentatively scheduled to fly to New York on Friday, April 27, between 10:30am and 11:30am, riding piggyback on a Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.
This once-in-a-lifetime flight will be visible to millions of people as the Shuttle/Carrier combo fly over much of the New York City area at low altitude (1000-3000 ft) before landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The five boroughs will see the most action, but areas as far north as Tarrytown and Nyack, NY, and as far east as Westbury, NY, will get some shuttle love as well.
On the map above, the blue line represents an approximation of the planned path, green thumbtacks mark the best spots to spot the action, and the white diamonds mark key landmarks on the path.
Based on an FAA flight itinerary we've obtained, here are 17 spots in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, New Jersey and Westchester where we think you're most likely to get a good view.
Please note that this route is subject to change due to weather and traffic conditions, and some of these spots might not get a flyby at all. The two things we can guarantee are that 1.) the Hudson River corridor will see the most action and 2.) the plane will land on JFK's Runway 31L.
Follow @NYCAviation on Twitter for the latest information about the flight path and schedule.
Also follow the Space Shuttle Enterprise Arrival thread on the NYCAviation Forum to find out where spotters will be
On Twitter or Instagram? Tag your shuttle photos with #shuttlespottingnyc and we'll retweet and/or publish the best ones!
Good luck spotting the shuttle!
1. Anywhere on the Hudson River: Pretty much any place with a view of the Hudson in the 30 mile stretch between Jersey City and Tarrytown — including the entire west side of Manhattan — will offer a great view as the Shuttle Carrier flies a lap up and down the river at altitudes between 1500 and 3000 ft.
2. Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum: Regular admission fees apply, but you can watch the Hudson River flyby from the flight deck.
3. Randalls Island: The north end of the island should offer a decent glimpse of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft enroute to its LaGuardia Airport flyby.
1. World's Fair Marina, Flushing: From the east side of the Marina, a head-on low altitude view of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft on its LaGuardia Airport Runway 13 fly over.
2. World's Fair Marina Pedestrian Bridge, Flushing: This bridge over the Grand Central Parkway, near the western end of the marina, will provide an elevated, side-on view of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft during and after its LaGuardia Airport Runway 13 fly over.
3. Fort Tilden, Rockaway Point: Distant view of the Shuttle Carrier as it flies east just off shore over the Atlantic enroute to its JFK flyby.
4. Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, North End: This spot should offer a stunning view of the Shuttle Carrier after its JFK Airport flyby.
1. Brooklyn Heights Promenade: Will offer a distant but clear view as the Shuttle Carrier flies past the Statue of Liberty at around 1500 ft.
2. Shore Parkway Promenade: In the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, this area should get at least two viewings of the Shuttle Carrier as it flies north over New York Harbor and south again.
3. Coney Island: Distant sightings possible as Enterprise begins its flight up the Harbor, or possibly after it flies south and east for its JFK flyby.
The Bronx
1. Riverdale Park: View the Shuttle Carrier over the Hudson, with the beautiful Palisades in the background.
Staten Island
1. Fort Wadsworth: In the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, this park will offer a good view as the Shuttle begins its flight over New York Harbor and up the Hudson, and again when it flies south and east for its JFK flyby.
Long Island
1. Inwood Park, Inwood: This is probably the closest publicly accessible view of the flyby and the landing on Runway 31L.
2. Eisenhower Park, Westbury: The Shuttle Carrier will approach from the west and/or north as it overflies the New York TRACON radar facility near the intersection of Stewart Ave and Merrick Ave.
New Jersey
1. Liberty State Park, Jersey City: Especially good views of the Statue of Liberty flyby.
2. Palisades Interstate Park: From the cliffs, an elevated view of the Shuttle Carrier flying up and down the Hudson.
1. Pierson Park, Tarrytown: Should offer a pretty good view of the Shuttle Carrier making a U-turn near the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Places NOT to go
1. Inside JFK Airport: There is an event to celebrate the arrival, but it's invite-only. If you're flying that day, great, maybe you'll get a glimpse from the terminal. If you have a favorite, legally-accessible spot somewhere else on airport grounds, go for it. But security will be tight. If you don't know where you're going, don't bother trying to wander around the airport to find a good viewing location, because you'll probably miss the landing, get harassed by security or both.
The Route
- As it first approaches the area, the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) flies up the Hudson River past the west side of Manhattan at 1,500 feet, and then climbs to 3,000 after it passes the George Washington Bridge.
- SCA will then make a left-handed U-turn when it reaches the Tappan Zee Bridge to fly down the Hudson, descending back to 1,500 ft when it reaches the Alpine radio tower near the New York/New Jersey border.
- SCA continues past Manhattan down to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.
- Once it passes south of the Verrazano, the next part of SCA's itinerary depends on which runways are in use at Newark Airport…
If Newark is landing and departing to the south (Runways 22L and 22R) (most likely scenario):
- SCA flies eastbound just off the south shore of Brooklyn and Queens at 1,500 feet, and then turns around to the left to fly a low pass of JFK's Runway 31L at 1,000 ft.
- From there, SCA flies west toward the Statue of Liberty, which flies by at around 1,500 ft.
- SCA continues west and flies over Newark's Runway 29 at 1,000 ft.
- A climbing right turn to 2,000 ft takes SCA north over Teterboro Airport (technically not a flyby)
- Then it's to the east for a 1,000 ft flyby over LaGuardia's Runway 13.
- Back up to 2,000 ft and to the east for about 20 miles for a flyover of the FAA's New York TRACON radar facility in Westbury.
- A right turn to the south and landing on JFK's Runway 31L.
If Newark Airport is landing and departing to the north (Runways 4L and 4R):
- SCA makes a right turn after the Verrazano and flies over Newark's Runway 4R at 1,000 ft
- Climbing to 2,000 ft while continuing north, flies over Teterboro (not a flyby)
- Makes a right turn and fly eastbound to LaGuardia, for a Runway 13 flyby at 1,000 ft
- Back up to 2,000 ft and to the east for about 20 miles for a flyover of the FAA's New York TRACON radar facility in Westbury.
- Right turn and landing on JFK's Runway 31L.
Radio Frequencies
- New York Approach (CAMRN): 127.400 | Listen on LiveATC.net: Flash player or MP3 player
- JFK Airport Tower: 123.900 | Listen on LiveATC.net: Flash player or MP3 player
- Newark Airport Tower: 118.300 | Listen on LiveATC.net: Flash player or MP3 player
- Teterboro Airport Tower: 119.500
- LaGuardia Airport Tower: 118.700 | Listen on LiveATC.net: Flash player or MP3 player
- Pluto 95: Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft with Enterprise.
- Pluto 90: NASA C-9 jet (military version of DC-9) will fly 30 mins ahead of the SCA for weather reconnaissance, will land at JFK without flying the SCA's path over the city.
- Pluto 98 and Pluto 99: NASA T-38 jets (small fighter trainers) will stage at Stewart or Farmingdale before joining SCA on its flight over NYC.
Weather Notes
If any of the weather components is forecast for anywhere on the route from Dulles to New York, the event will be postponed:
- Ceiling: lower than 3,000 ft
- Visibility: less than 5 miles
- Crosswind: greater than 20 kts

subset: commoncrawl


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Natalie Grant Bio
Natalie Grant Homepage | Natalie Grant Facebook |
Natalie Grant Twitter | Natalie Grant MySpace |
The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage virtually guarantees repeat success in the music industry once a hit formula is found, yet from time to time, an artist steps out of their comfort zone and breaks the mold, discontent to pursue the predictable. Enter Natalie Grant. A powerhouse vocalist, heart-gripping songwriter and charismatic performer, she's eager to push boundariesâ "sonically, lyrically and otherwiseâ "and she more than proves her intentions with Relentless, her seventh album and first studio recording in nearly three years.
It would've been easy for Natalie, GMA's reigning Female Vocalist of the Year for four consecutive years, to rest on her laurels and make another Awaken. Her 2005 breakthrough recording, Awaken helped Natalie become Christian music's top selling Adult Contemporary female solo artist in 2005, 2006 and 2008, gave her a formidable foothold at mainstream radio and media, and made her a household name in Christian music. But this time around, she was determined to keep people guessing.
Like Awaken, Relentless showcases a deep dimension of lyrical honesty and vulnerabilityâ "a hallmark of Natalie's music these daysâ "yet sonically, she embraces her more progressive rock/pop side, replete with live horns, grittier guitar licks and the distinct R&B flair of her voice that's often been toned down in the past.
"This time, I wanted to take it old school with lots of live instrumentation," she says. "I love how horns have made a resurgence in pop music, and I wanted Relentless to be more raw and edgyâ "more authentic and less pristine."
Vocally, Natalie was also determined to push herself. The new richness and robustness that shines through in tracks like the soulful "I Will Not Be Moved" and the country-tinged hit single "In Better Hands" even surprised her a little.
"Sometimes I think people assume that women are supposed to always sing the introspective, soft songsâ "which they do beautifullyâ "but I wanted moments where I could be bold and strong and show there's a powerful, passionate message that a woman could deliver. That's what I set out to do on Relentless."
With expectations running high after the overwhelming success of Awaken, Natalie was also intentional about her continued passion to create music with a purpose. With her husband, Grammy nominee and Dove Award winner Bernie Herms, as well as longtime collaborator and Dove Award winner Shaun Shankel at the production helm, Natalie wrote more than ever before for Relentless. She penned or co-wrote seven of the album's 12 cuts, collaborating with acclaimed singer/songwriter Matthew West as well as GMA's 2006 Songwriter of the Year Christa Wells (writer of Natalie's multi-format hit and signature song, "Held"), among others.
Artistic fervor resonates from a variety of sources, but Natalie's comes from a deep desire to live a life that mattersâ "one that has eternal significance. Motivation has manifested itself in a variety of ways in her life, but in no way more clearly than through Natalie's commitment to combat international human trafficking. As one of the first artists to open the eyes of the Church to the atrocities of children around the world forced into the sex trade, Natalie created The Home Foundation in 2005 to raise both awareness and financial support for this important fight.
"My work with The Home Foundation is shaping everything I do," Natalie says. "I was the girl who fell hardcore for the American dream. I fell for the idea that if I worked hard enough I could pursue my dreams. My life was all about me. But when I met girls like Auscha, who had been abused for seven years, I decided to do everything I could to help these innocent victims.
"I resolved to give my life away, and as a result, it really began to shape a belief that regardless of circumstance, hope still endures. And that's why the work of The Home Foundation is so life-changing for me. Lives are being affected for eternity."
Natalie is also motivated by her role as a popular speaker and performer on Women of Faith's "Revolve Tour" for teen girls. After overcoming a struggle with bulimia as a young adult, her message of self-worth from God's perspective has yielded thousands of affirming letters and e-mails from girls who have taken Natalie's words to heart.
"Teenage girls come to the arena, screaming and having fun, but underneath it all, they are one straw away from breaking into a million little pieces," Natalie shares. "They are carrying such a heavy load, and that makes me feel like I'm not only a part of something meant to change the lives of these girls, but of something that will impact generations to come."
These days, Natalie's newest role is one she treasures the mostâ "mom to one-year-old twin daughters Grace and Isabella. And motherhood has given her the kind of fulfillment she never could've imagined previously.
"Now that I'm a mother of two little girls, its all the more reason to fight for what's important," she says. "Now I can't help but wonder what it will be like when my Bella or my Gracie is 15. It would be irresponsible of me to not try and shape the world they live in."
In a nutshell, that's precisely why Natalie won't make an album without being intentional about its purpose. Dove Awards, radio hits and album sales, while inconsequential in the light of eternity, have graciously afforded Natalie an even broader platform from which to share her message, and she doesn't take that lightly. On a mission to push musical boundaries and change lives, Natalie Grant is no longer afraid to break the mold and swing for the fences. She's determined, and she's relentless.


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Creating and sharing a software project is a leap into the unknown. Will anyone use it? Will anyone like it? And although download numbers are a very imperfect measure, they can provide encouragement when engaged in the numerous tasks associated with a project. So it is with great pleasure that I can announce SOFA Statistics has passed the 150,000 milestone on Sourceforge.
Thanks to all the people who have helped make this possible. I'm still thinking about what to do with SOFA next but it seems to have found a niche as a general purpose, open source statistics application. And I'm still trying to stay true to the mantra "ease of use, learn as you go, and beautiful output".
If you've liked using SOFA, please consider sending me a brief message at firstname.lastname@example.com. I'm keen to hear where in the world people are from, what sorts of things SOFA has been used for, and anything else interesting. Please include at least your first name – I'd like to display some of these messages to promote SOFA. Thanks in advance. [Note – my purpose is to collect some feedback to share, not to gather email addresses. But I expect I will personally reply to a few emails if I have time.]


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The Penn Center for Molecular Discovery
Institute for Medicine and Engineering 1024 Vagelos Research Laboratories The University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel 215-573-5702 (office) Tel 215-573-5704 (lab) Fax 215-573-7227
Email firstname.lastname@example.com
The Penn Center for Molecular Discovery (PCMD), founded at the University of Pennsylvania, is a multi-disciplinary center that screens small molecules from around the world in search of new, potentially useful biologically effective agents. The Penn Center for Molecular Discovery is housed within the Institute for Medicine and Engineering.The Director of the Center is Scott Diamond, Ph.D., the Arthur E. Humphrey Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The PCMD contributes to a massive, public-domain database (PubChem) where interactions between the NIH repository and thousands of biological targets can be data-mined at an unprecedented level.
The Chemical Biology in Translation (CBIT) is directed by Dr. Scott Diamond and Dr. William DeGrado and provides resources in assay development, high throughput screening, hit confirmation, mechanism-of-action studies, docking, and medicinal chemistry expansion of prioritized scaffolds. Request for Proposals (RFP) are broadly advertised each year to the biological research community for chemical biology targets suitable for HTS and chemistry optimization.
RFA-RM-06-003 Pilot-Scale Libraries (PSL) for High-Throughput Screening (P41). Letter of Intent: Sept. 4, 2009; Application Due: Oct. 1, 2009; $250K directs/year for 3 years.
Grants of $100,000 for one year are available for the development of assays in collaboration with the PCMD. Assay projects that are successfully developed in this Program will be eligible to directly enter the Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network (http://mli.nih.gov/mli/mlpcn/).
RFP: Assay Development for High Throughput Molecular Screening (R21) Notice of Fast Track Eligibility


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REGENSBURG, GERMANY, November 02, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The new works by Ivana Koubek, dedicated to video games, are technically and colorfully daring. A total of three monumental canvases, each 3.5 m high, and thirty large and small works on paper occupy half of the exhibition space. Not only thematically, but also by using garish neon colors from the virtual worlds of video games, they stand in complete contrast to the ground tones of her older works. It is not for nothing that Koubek devotes herself to the subject of gaming in the works created in 2019/2020: with up to 60% of the population playing video games, the subject is highly topical and exciting for every generation. The main focus is on the emotions and feelings of video gaming. Joy, success, as well as fear and anger, which players feel when playing video games, become the leitmotif. With enthusiasm, they enter the attractive worlds of video games, in which reality and virtuality unite to form a momentary reality.
Thus, five emotionally charged faces of the players can be seen on the screen The Game Controllers. Their avatars Super Mario, Link, Pokémon characters Pikachu and Sannah, and the battle bus from Fortnite stand for the history of video games. The title of the picture refers to the composition of the grid-like structured picture surface, which in turn reflects the cross-shaped keys of the controller. The next picture, Parable of the Cave, on the other hand, shows a modern interpretation of the famous theory of the Greek philosopher Plato. Transferred to the video game, the young enthusiastic gamer and the thoughtful gamer represent the prisoners in Plato's cave. Captivated and carried away by the game, however, they consciously enter a virtual world that feels real in many sensory impressions while playing and replaces the real world.
Finally, the third canvas LAN party was created under the impression of a visit from the Dreamhack in Leipzig. The neon colors and themes seen there can also be found in the colorful works on paper. Inspired by World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario, they show emotional relationships between avatars and gamers.
Using purely artistic means of drawing and painting, Koubek succeeded in reproducing the digital worlds of video games. This distinguishes her from many artists in the art category of Game Art, whose works are predominantly drawn from the technology of video games and often created with the help of the computer. Rather, Koubek addresses the players themselves. Bold perspectives, diagonals, circling lines accompanied by strong brushstrokes give the works an unusual dynamic and expressive power.
The historical rooms of the Städtische Galerie Leerer Beutel with their 100 m² and mighty wooden beams, seem to be made for this presentation. They offer enough space for the monumental canvases and also perfectly underline the colorfulness of the works of art. In addition to the new game art project, which is being presented to the public here for the first time, the exhibition also includes the well-known cycles Faust and Agnes Bernauer as well as a large number of paintings dedicated to Regensburg's old town. New works also include the designs for the Goebel porcelain factory. The exhibition 'Dynamic Facets' is open until November 8, Tuesdays to Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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When President Trump finds himself in the middle of a controversy, he can turn to his lawyer for guidance. And that lawyer is White House counsel Don McGahn. NPR's Peter Overby introduces us to the man who interprets which ethics rules apply to the White House and when.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: Don McGahn was the lawyer for Trump's presidential campaign committee. Like his boss, he takes a dim view of too much regulation. And like his boss, he isn't shy about saying so. Consider this moment back in 2011, when McGahn was at the Federal Election Commission. He was arguing with another commissioner over the role of super PACs. Listen closely here.
DON MCGAHN: You don't get to take matters in your own hands and take the book and just rip out the coordination rules, you know? And now my book's complete because we don't have the rules in there anymore.
OVERBY: And he tossed the ripped-out pages in the air. Brad Smith, head of the conservative Center for Competitive Politics, says McGahn worked hard to rein in FEC lawyers that he saw as overzealous.
BRAD SMITH: The vituperation he sometimes receives I think reflects the fact that he was very effective at, you know, what he sought to do, which was keeping the FEC within its constitutional and statutory role.
OVERBY: NPR asked to talk with McGahn for this story. The White House said he doesn't participate in interviews. Virginia Tech political scientist Karen Hult is co-author of an essay on the White House council rewritten every four years for the White House transition project.
KAREN HULT: Mr. McGahn is a certain kind of a lawyer who is known for taking very aggressive positions and outlining sometimes radical legal strategies.
OVERBY: Long before Don McGahn went to work for Trump, one of his uncles did. Patrick Paddy McGahn did legal work for Trump's move into the Atlantic City casino business. Trump also turned up in an FEC case that Don McGahn helped put an end to. In 2011, Trump was talking up running for president, as he did here on CNN.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I won't make a decision till June, but I will make a decision. And it may surprise people, frankly.
OVERBY: One of Trump's lawyers helped launch a website called Should Trump Run? FEC lawyers investigated whether Trump had to disclose his political spending. It became one of the many cases deep-sixed by the commission's Republicans. Led by McGahn, they said Trump clearly wasn't a candidate and the FEC lawyers had overreached. Craig Holman of the progressive watchdog group Public Citizen says the campaign and transition showed that McGahn and Trump are in sync when it comes to ethics.
CRAIG HOLMAN: I mean, if the White House is not going to be subject to conflict of interest codes, if the White House isn't going to have ethics training, what does that signal to the rest of the administration and the rest of the agencies?
OVERBY: But anybody in McGahn's job has to understand who the client is.
HULT: The White House counsel is the lawyer to the office of the presidency.
OVERBY: Again, Karen Hult, the expert on what White House counsels do.
HULT: That means not only the sitting president but the institution and the office itself, which makes it a very difficult balancing act for the White House counsel.
OVERBY: This winter, McGahn closed a different chapter of his life, his longtime gig playing lead guitar in a bar band on the mid-Atlantic shore circuit.
SCOTT'S NEW BAND: Oh, yeah.
OVERBY: The band had its last gig New Year's Eve. Three weeks later, McGahn was working at the White House. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MIGOS SONG, "BAD AND BOUJEE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


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Don't shop at Wal-mart. They use child labor, and they are the biggest drain on our medi-caid because they pay so little and limit employee's hours. This new idea is another example of a company trying to get a service from the poorest people for nothing, or next to nothing. Brilliant or Greedy?
Walmart wants to get the jump on e-tail competitors such as Amazon by widely offering same-day delivery for online purchases, executives told Reuters in an exclusive interview. Instead of contracting with a shipping provider, it would use one of its most plentiful and never-ending resources: the customers who stream into its 4,000 stores every day.
Walmart would essentially crowdsource the deliveries by offering customers in the store the opportunity to deliver packages to nearby recipients. In exchange, the customers would get a discount on their own purchases.
The idea is still in the very early planning stages, according to the Reuters report, and it is unclear if it will ever come to fruition.
Walmart did not respond to our request to comment for this story.
An Interesting Twist
The idea is an interesting twist on the crowdsourcing business model, CorraTech COO Michael Harvey told the E-Commerce Times. "It is also intriguing because Walmart is proposing to aggressively use something that Amazon simply doesn't have — in-store customers."
That said, "there are a lot of issues that need to be settled before this could ever see the light of day," he acknowledged.
Indeed, there are enough potential pitfalls to give a corporate attorney immediate chest pains.
Long – Very Long – List of Liabilities
For starters, the in-store customers might be tempted to keep the packages intended for delivery, noted attorney Karen E. Edwards, an instructor in the University of South Carolina's retailing department.
"Walmart would want to have a proof-of-delivery system, as well as a written agreement with the delivery person that includes a reimbursement clause if the goods are damaged or not delivered," she told the E-Commerce Times. "That would probably have a chilling effect on some people who otherwise might have performed the service, but would also reduce the likelihood of theft."
Even so, disputes would certainly arise.
"Bottom line, Walmart would most likely be held ultimately liable to the online customer for delivery of the product, because it developed the delivery mode," said Edwards.
Also, depending on the state law, Walmart could be liable for injuries to the delivery person or injuries caused by the delivery person.
"Walmart would likely work into the agreement with the delivery person an acknowledgment that they are not an employee and therefore not covered by Worker's Compensation, plus a waiver and release of liability for injuries that occur as a result of the errand, which would seek to cover for accidents that may occur, as well as intentional injuries caused by third parties or the online customer," Edwards said.
"Note that such releases are not bullet-proof," she added.
Walmart also would need to make sure the driver was insured, and it would likely require the online customer to agree to hold it harmless for any injuries related to the delivery of the goods, Edwards pointed out.
"Plus, it would need to work into the agreement with the delivery person an indemnification clause that would state that the delivery person would reimburse Walmart if the online customer or other third party sues Walmart for something the delivery person did to harm them," she suggested.
In short, Walmart has some very big legal hurdles to overcome with this idea.
Walmart the Job-Killer
Walmart might also find itself the target of widespread outrage if something should go wrong with the idea, warned David Johnson, principal of Strategic Vision.
If anyone — customer, delivery person or bystander — were hurt in connection with the system, the cost to Walmart would be far more than any financial liability.
People might also question why Walmart would use its customers when it could be creating jobs by hiring professional delivery staff, Johnson told the E-Commerce Times.
"It took Walmart a long time to defuse the idea that it was killing mom-and-pop stores, and many still believe that is true," he pointed out. "This service will only restart that conversation."


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The White House President George W. Bush |
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For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
January 14, 2004
President Bush Announces New Vision for Space Exploration Program
Fact Sheet: A Renewed Spirit of Discovery
In Focus: Space
Renewed Spirit of Discovery
Today's Presidential Action
Background on Today's Presidential Action
America's history is built on a desire to open new frontiers and to seek new discoveries. Exploration, like investments in other Federal science and technology activities, is an investment in our future. President Bush is committed to a long-term space exploration program benefiting not only scientific research, but also the lives of all Americans. The exploration vision also has the potential to drive innovation, development, and advancement in the aerospace and other high-technology industries. The President's vision for exploration will not require large budget increases in the near term. Instead, it will bring about a sustained focus over time and a reorientation of NASA's programs.
President Bush's Vision for U.S. Space Exploration
The President's plan for steady human and robotic space exploration is based on the following goals:
Key Points on the President's FY 2005 Budget
President's Commission on the Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy
To ensure that NASA maintains a sense of focus and direction toward accomplishing this new mission, the President has directed NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to review all current space flight and exploration and direct them toward the President's goals. The President also formed a Commission on the Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy to advise NASA on the long-term implementation of the President's vision.
Space Technology Affects the Lives of Every American
More than 1,300 NASA and other U.S. space technologies have contributed to U.S. industry, improving our quality of life and helping save lives.


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April 26, 2012
Office of Research and Sponsored Programs to host two data management plan information sessions
The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs will be hosting two informational sessions on data management plans. The first is a video presentation, developed by the Principal Investigators' Association. The presentation will be shown at 2 p.m. May 3 in the K-State Union. The video is titled: "Data Management Plans for Successful NIH and NSF Grants." This session is geared toward investigators who have never written a data management plan or who would like more information about writing these required plans.
The second session addresses resources available on campus for writing data management plans and for storing and sharing the data addressed by these plans. This second session will start immediately following the first at 3 p.m. May 3 in the same room.
Feel free to attend one or both of the sessions. Please RVSP to Caron Berges at firstname.lastname@example.com by May 2 to receive location information.


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Some of the ikiwiki configuration files on dragonflybsd.org were accidentally overwritten during a software upgrade. Normally this would mean some work to locate and replace them from backups, but since it was a Hammer volume, a quick look in /var/hammer/usr/… found them for me.
I want to point out what Hammer does, here. Restoring from backup isn't new – it is in fact probably one of the most basic and necessary of system administration duties. However, Hammer makes it so easy that the incremental work of using it falls to almost nothing. There's no extra preparation or syntax to learn for retrieval, which is wonderful. Hammer's easy fix has helped me out several times now, saving me time that, while probably still successful with any other backup system, would have been taken up just restoring things back to normal.


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Jerz > Writing > Professional > Résumés
Wondering how to write a resume? Here are the top 5 ways my students can usually improve the resumes they submit for class assignments.
- Value the Chance to Try Again
- Balance Creativity with Function
- Details, Details, Details
- Presentation Matters
- Strike the Right Tone (Don't Undersell or Overhype Yourself)
09 May 2000 — first posted;
07 Feb 2012 — last modified by Dennis G. Jerz
1. Value the Chance to Try Again
Any time you venture into a professional environment, welcome any kind of feedback — even criticism.
Your resume may be the most important professional document you produce. Don't waste an opportunity to share it. If you ask a professor for a letter of recommendation, if you want to be elected as a club officer, if you want to volunteer at your community, your resume is a valuable opportunity for you to take some control, demonstrating your thoroughness and dedication. For most professional jobs, the employer won't provide a model "correct answer" to make the process less stressful for the applicants. And if you don't get the job, most of the time nobody will tell you why.
So if you are fortunate enough to get feedback — any feedback — from a mentor, teacher, or anyone with experience, be grateful for the opportunity to learn, and do better next time
Writing is hard work. There are no shortcuts.
A successful resume is a persuasive document. If you want to write anything well, you must learn to rewrite. And rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite — even a short document like a resume.
2. Balance Creativity with Function
If you claim "creativity" as one of your strengths — and who wouldn't? — but you choose an out-of-the-box resume template, you are sending a mixed message. Anyone whose job involves looking at resumes will immediately recognize the "creative" template that dozens of other applicants also found in Word or Pages.
Change it up a little before you submit it. It may well be the most important document you ever write. Make it your own.
On the other hand, if you go crazy with multiple typefaces and colors, you'll look like you're trying too hard.
Quick tips: don't use more than two typefaces in your resume — a strong, readable type for the headings, and a narrower type for the details; if you want to be taken seriously, never use Comic Sans;
If the job you are applying for requires graphic design skills, and you're trained in graphic design, then ignore what I'm about to say. For the rest of us, who are not trained as graphic designers, because it's very easy to make a rookie design mistake, the traditional format is usually the best format. A simple, unobtrusive design keeps the focus on the content of the resume. Carefully chosen words, well-organized sections, and (of course) relevant experience matter more than the size and shape you choose for the lettering.
Good design won't cover up weaknesses in your application, but bad design can hide your strengths.
A student of mine once created a resume in the form of a tri-fold brochure. The design was creative, and the content was great. When folded, the cover clearly gave the student's name. Unfolding the brochure once revealed an employment objective, and then opening it all the way revealed all the details.
When I handed the brochure to my colleagues and observed their behavior, they all skipped the middle section (where the student stated her employment objective) and went straight to the details. One of my colleagues didn't even put her reading glasses on until she got to the details. As a result, my colleagues found the student's resume to be unfocused. They didn't immediately recognize the brochure as a resume, since most resumes don't come in the form of a brochure.
When I pointed out how the brochure worked, my colleagues looked at again and said, "Oh, now I see. That's pretty clever!" But they had already made the kind of snap judgement that lands a resume in the trash can.
Design Problems
I haven't taught the "write a resume" assignment in a class for several years, so I'll be watching out for the latest design problems. Here's a problem that used to crop up all the time.
A resume template that used to come with MS-Word was laid out with a two-column format that ate up a lot of space. Students in my technical writing classes tended to want to write a lot in the right column, which means they often reduced the type size too much in order to cram all their words into the right column. That left a lot of wasted space in the left column.
Too much white space: text squeezed to one side or one corner; lots of blank space to the left or right of bulleted lists. A popular MS-Word resume template uses tables inefficiently. (Note: in order for the following example to work on this web page, I have to present the text in a small, monospace font. You should probably stick to Times Roman, 12-pt instead.)
Education SEE ALL | University of Wisconsin — Eau Claire; Eau Claire, Wisc. (1999-present) Major: English (Technical Writing; GPA 3.9) Minor: Web Design (Minor GPA: 3.7) Joe Jade High School ; Bananaville, Wisc. (1994-1999) Senior GPA: 3.7 SAT: 1250 |
Work Experience STILL MORE WASTED SPACE HERE | Sales. Grandma Rose's Zucchini Shack; Bananaville, Wisc. (Summer, 1999) Sold merchandise, deposited receipts, opened and closed a small business. Often worked alone, but also trained and supervised part-time employees. Set new sales records 8 of the 12 weeks I worked there. Asst. Groundskeeper . Memorial Hospital ; Bananaville, Wisc. (Summers, 1995-1998) Performed general grounds-keeping chores, including mowing, weeding, and pruning on a regular schedule. Started at $5.50/hr; steadily received raises to $7.00/hr. |
The content of the above sample resume is excellent; yet the presentation (featuring huge empty blocks beneath "Education" and "Work Experience") makes the page look awkward. If this author starts to run out of room on the page, he or she may be tempted to reduce the type size; but because of the big open spaces, this text already looks crammed. The revised version (below) makes better use of white space.
Education University of Wisconsin — Eau Claire Eau Claire, Wisc. (1999-present) Work Experience Sales Attendant. Grandma Rose's Zucchini Shack; Bananaville, Wisc. (Summer, 1999) |
The revised example makes better use of white space.
- The heading occupies a single line all by itself.
- The details beneath the heading are indented from the left margin.
- Each item is a little wider, which means each item takes up less vertical space.
3. Details, Details, Details
In a list of terms, do you always put a comma before the "and"?Are all your bulleted items short phrases or full sentences?James E. Breezley, a UWEC alumnus who hires detail-oriented technical writers, explains that he values consistency in job applications:
Quick… the abbreviation "MI": does it stand for "Mississippi" or "Missouri"? (It's actually Michigan).
Someone from the Midwest would probably guess that "MN" means "Minnesota", but what about Maine or Montana?
To avoid confusion, you should use the longer abbreviation of the state's name (you can find it in a dictionary).
What if you live in a state that nobody is likely to confuse? Pennsylvania, for example, is pretty recognizable as either "PA" or "Penn."
Use the two-letter abbreviation (with no period) if you are giving a full address.
"I live in Greensburg, PA."
"I live in Greensburg, Penn."
"My address: 1234 Main Street, Greensburg, PA 54720"
I'll be honest. Plenty of employers probably won't notice or won't care about such details; however, if you are applying for a job that deals with the handling of information, the careful analysis of data, or any profession that has strict certification procedures or a complex ethical code — any profession where little mistakes matter — then your resume is better off if you can demonstrate you understand a writing convention that exists for the convenience of the reader.
- Consistency. All items in your resume should employ parallel structure. If you start some job descriptions with a verb, you should start all job description with a verb. If you end some lines with a period, you should end all lines with a period.
- Currency: If you list all the software you have ever used, and you specify "Office 2010", but you don't specify "Office 2012," you will hurt your credibility. (Better simply to say "Microsoft Office" — unless of course the job description requires experience with particular software.)
- Credibility. If you leave out your GPA, your employer will automatically assume that it was bad. If you neglect to mention what you accomplished during the three years you participated in a particular club, your employer will automatically assume that you showed up for pizza parties just so you could have a line on your resume. Provide details, with measurable results. ("Worked on student newspaper" is vague. Far more convincing is a list of accomplishments: "After one semester as a staff writer, was promoted to assistant news editor; served as features editor for three semesters, and online editor my senior year. Wrote 22 news articles, 12 feature articles, and laid out 11 two-page center-spreads.")
- Accuracy: Get your facts right, and get your grammar right. Make sure the names and titles of the people you mention are correct. If you use MLA style, or APA style, or AP style in your coursework, then follow the conventions of that style guide to determine how to present the titles of any articles you've published, the names of the periodicals that published you. etc.
- Legibility and Brevity: Don't shrink your type size below 10pt or choose "Arial Narrow" to jam more words on the page; likewise, don't crank up the type size or expand the margins to puff up a resume that's too short. For an entry level position, keep your resume to a single page. You can always add a separate sheet that lists special additional information (such as a detailed list of all the debate awards you've won; clippings from school newspaper articles you've written or a list of computer game reviews you have contributed to a public newsgroup). In the 21st century, every applicant for a professional position should probably have an online portfolio of some kind — maybe a blog, maybe a static web page — but not Facebook. Keep your printed resume short, but include the URL of your full online portfolio, where your reader can find your writing samples, slide shows, videos, etc.
- Clarity: Explain acronyms and group affiliations. You may know what the "Keyette Club" is supposed to be about; you may know whether the "Toxic Avengers" are a service club or a rock band; you may know that STD stands for "Sigma Tau Delta" (the English honor society). But your employer may have no idea.
- Note: Don't Overcapitalize.
- Do not capitalize the names of subjects (biology, computer science, journalism, technical writing) unless you are referring to the title of a course. You would write "I am studying for a biology test," but "My favorite course is 'Biology 101.'" The same goes for nursing, politics, medicine, etc. Exceptions: "English," "French, "Spanish," etc. (all of which are derived from proper nouns).
- Only capitalize titles (doctor, botanist, nurse) when the word is part of a person's name (Associate Professor of English Dennis G. Jerz, Doctor Anderson, Nurse Jones). When you are speaking of the title in general, it is lowercased: "I want to be a technical writing professor someday," "I need a nurse," "The doctor is in."
4. Presentation Matters
- Hierarchy: Anything with bold, capital letters, or larger type will attract the eye.
- Emphasize your name above all else. (Not the title of the job you want — all the other resumes in the stack will be applying for the same job. You want your name to stand out.)
- Emphasize your job titles, even if they were volunteer or self-directed positions. If you worked somewhere famous, you might instead emphasize the names of the employer.
- But whatever you do, don't emphasize the dates you worked at a job. I don't meant that you should hide the dates, I just mean don't make the dates the most prominent thing on the page. Everyone was doing something during Fall 2012. What you want to emphasize is WHAT you did, not WHEN you were doing it.
- Pagination: An entry-level resume should fit on one page. If you must provide a longer resume, put "(page 1 of 2)" or "(over)" at the bottom right of the first page. Put "(page 2 of 2)" or "(continued)" at the top of the second page.Even if you are submitting the document electronically, or you print the pages back-to-back, a potential employer who is dealing with dozens of different stacks of documents and different databases (that might have been duplicated and re-distributed by an $8/hr temp worker) can sometimes lose a page. Trust me — this happens! (Put your name and email on every page you submit.)
- Bulleted lists: they save time and space. But don't create a "list" out of just one item.
- Every time you have one point, you must follow it with another.
- If you simply cannot think of a second point, then collapse the heading and the single point into one line.
5. Strike the Right Tone (Avoid Underselling and/or Overselling)
Don't undersell yourself: People who are fresh out of school sometimes underestimate the transferable job skills that they have picked up during their part-time or volunteer work. Even if all you did was cook hamburgers or turned a bolt on an assembly line, you can probably say that you "followed instructions in a high-pressure environment" or "trained new employees" or "regularly received 'high' evaluations" or "was named employee of the month three times over two years" or "never missed a day of work."
Don't oversell yourself, either: Instead of saying "I am really great with people," list specific, relevant accomplishments ("recruited 14 new members and won 'volunteer of the month' award at local Red Cross agency; delivered 12 safety speeches at area middle schools, to a total of 600 fourth graders; counseled preteens whose parents have recently divorced"). If you don't have any such activities to list, then you should consider what volunteer or extra-curricular activities might give you the kinds of experience you need. (See Cover Letters — Support Your Claims [But Don't Oversell])
by Dennis G. Jerz
09 May 2000 — first posted
24 May 2000 — incorporated James E. Breezely's suggestions
18 Jan 2013 — began revising
06 Feb 2013 — continued revisions
Writing Your Resume |
Erin Vanden Wymelenberg and Dennis G. Jerz Resumes — Content Employers read resumes in order to find evidence that a particular applicant is well qualified for a particular job. Experience, education, training, and personal qualities relevant to the job are all important. The resume should describe what has led the applicant to where he or she is now.Erin Vanden Wymelenberg and Dennis G. Jerz Resumes — Presentation Many employers look for creativity and imagination when the job calls for it. However, it is best to aim for a professional, neat, and organized look for your resume. If you are applying for a job that requires radical creativity, you can always include a portfolio of your wildest, most unbusinesslike work! |


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Global Water Technologies, Inc., a company utilizing advanced technologies and engineered solutions to provide process cooling water to industry and municipalities worldwide, has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Psychrometric Systems, Inc. (PSI), was awarded a $2.7 million contract to supply two water cooling towers for the Mutnovsky Geothermal Power Plant, located in southern Siberia, which is being financed by the European Development and Reconstruction Bank.
Commenting on the contract, George Kast, President and CEO, stated: "We believe this will be the first of many projects that will be awarded to us from this region. The growing need for new power will require cooling water to operate these facilities. This project will supply power to several regions that historically did not have a reliable source of power."
The cooling water system supplied by PSI will cool 50,000 gallons of water per minute. PSI will supply its proprietary fiberglass structure that is designed to withstand the severe weather conditions encountered in this region.
SOURCE: Global Water Technologies, Inc.


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In chrome, when on a webpage or site you use regularly, right-click on the tab at the top and choose "PIN TAB". Do this for all the sites you want so you have 6 or 8 tabs. These are NOT permanent and will disappear when you close the browser. To prevent that and make them permanent.
Follow these instructions.
Go to the Google Chrome Shortcut on your desktop or toolbar and right-click on it. Choose Properties. Look for the Target field.
Add this line:
– -pinned-tab-count=x
to the end of this string in Target. C:UsersnameAppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe so it looks exactly like this:
C:UsersnameAppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe – -pinned-tab-count=x
Now all you have to do is change the X to represent the number of tabs that you want to make permanent on the chrome browser and it will look like this every time you open your browser:
Simple as that!
Thanks to Addictive Tips for that info. Was exactly what I was looking for!


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I'm really in a bit of a hurry today. I'm off to Moss to have a class.
So I'll show you two fast and easy little projects.
I really LOVE this little folded "french fry bag" Perfect for a sweet little gift. I've filled mine with some chocolate hearts.
Here are easy step-by step pictures, how to fold this bag:
Here in Norway we use to have count-down calendars for the kids in december before christmas evening (we celebrate the 24th.)


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Despite glossy PR materials touting its ability to deliver on sustainable development and energy access goals, the coal industry routinely threatens human rights around the world, particularly in South Asia. Land grabs, forced evictions, violence, and environmental destruction are all disturbingly prevalent in coal industry projects.
Taking coordinated action to avert yet another massive violation of human rights, seven United Nations special rapporteurs have issued a press release calling for an immediate halt to plans to excavate a vast open-pit coal mine in northwest Bangladesh.
The UN human rights experts are concerned for good reason. The Phulbari Coal Project would displace hundreds of thousands of people, including entire villages of vulnerable indigenous people, posing "an immediate threat to safety and standards of living." The project would also threaten access to safe drinking water for 220,000 people, destroy a fertile agricultural region that supports the entire country"s food needs, and increase poverty and vulnerability to climate events for generations to come."
All in a day's work for an industry salivating at the thought of the profit it would reap from this destruction. In this case, that would be London-based Global Coal Management Resources (GCM), which claims Bangladesh's coal reserves in Phulbari as its primary asset.
GCM's efforts to force the coal mine forward have already resulted in bloodshed. Three people have been killed and as many as 200 wounded for the simple act of protesting against the mine. These are among the human rights violations associated with the project that the US government chose to disregard while supporting GCM in pushing the government of Bangladesh to approve the project.
Despite pressure exerted behind the scenes, the project has been stalled by controversy over whether Bangladesh's new national coal policy will institute a historic ban on open-pit mining – a measure deemed essential due to extremely high population densities and the enormous levels of displacement open-pit mining would cause.
So, GCM share prices plummeted following the UN action. Right? Well actually, no.
In fact, GCM share prices popped 14 percent the day the news of the UN action was posted on interactive investor bulletin boards. Worse, the volume of trading on their shares increased to almost three times the daily average.
Some GCM investors were themselves initially baffled. Why the sudden, unexpected upticks in their share price? Investors were ecstatic over a single sentence in the UN press release:
"A national coal policy is pending in a parliamentary committee, with early indications suggesting that open-pit coal mining will be permitted and, thus, would allow development of the Phulbari coal mine in northwestern Bangladesh."
That single sentence in the UN press release unleashed a gleeful round of back-slapping on investor bulletin boards, as longtime investors watched their share price climb and congratulated one another on the, "emergence of more positive news" in an otherwise disappointing year: "Hats off to the steadfast believers … She is flying now … LMFAO … We live in hope and it brightened up the afternoon … " and on and on.
While one could dwell on the cynical and heartless joy expressed by these investors, there is another, far more important story to tell. The push for coal use is generating increasingly fierce resistance by those asked to bear the most toxic and destructive burdens of coal expansion: the people living next to coal mines and coal-fired power plants. Their story is one of a vibrant grassroots movement that in Bangladesh has supported massive protests against the Phulbari Coal Project involving tens of thousands of people fighting to protect their homes, land, livelihoods and communities from complete wanton destruction.
Their fight in northwest Bangladesh, sustained for over six years, is part of a thriving global anti-coal movement that has celebrated numerous successes in the past two years alone. From the retirement of 100 coal plants in the United States, to victory in Borneo. to a vibrant struggle in Kosovo, grassroots activists are standing up and fighting back.
Their struggle bears witness to a new reality, one of communities united across political boundaries in defense of livelihoods, health and a clean energy future. This is in diametrical opposition to the accepted wisdom that across Asia, and much of the world, the drive for more coal-fired power is "unstoppable."
Coal is not, in fact, unstoppable. The fact is that some of the world's largest coal plants are going bankrupt due to skyrocketing coal prices. More importantly, communities are increasingly aware of the devastating economic costs of coal, which are regularly externalized at every stage of its life cycle. These costs include lives cut short and lingering illness for people living with coal – costs that are borne by people and governments rather than the corporations and banks that finance coal projects. A recent Harvard study found that these public health impacts effectively triple the cost of electricity generated by coal.
Today frontline communities threatened by coal projects are refusing to bear these costs. They are increasingly supported by international coalitions demanding social, environmental and developmental justice that prioritizes access to clean energy services for all, environmental sustainability and human health. Financial analysts and conventional wisdom may deem coal inevitable, but in the wise words of Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Further information is available on the International Accountability Project (IAP's) Phulbari Project page.


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Literature review on diabetes mellitus type 2 pdf
The correlation between cardiovascular disease and psychosocial factors including concomitant mental disorders as well as personality traits or the effect of social environment has been established in numerous studies aimed at investigating pathogenesis or various clinical endpoints.
The Guidelines of the European Society of Cardiology include the assessment and the management of psychosocial problems with behavioral medicine interventions as a I. A level recommendation.
The implementation of these guidelines in everyday clinical practice is crucial to decrease cardiovascular risk. This involves the training of health care professionals, the facilitation of multidisciplinary collaboration and the integration of behavioral intervention into everyday care.
The Williams Life Skills WLS program is an evidence based behavioral medicine intervention aiming to improve stress management and communication skills which implemented internationally and also available all over Hungary.
It involves the learning of simple coping strategies that facilitate the successful management of every day psychosocial stress situations and the self-conscious reduction of bodily and psychological tensions.
In cardiovascular disease, this improves quality of life and survival.
The WLS program is especially recommended for healthcare workers to decrease the negative health consequences of their high stress load and to prevent burnout. Stress may affect both doctors and patients during their interactions.
Bálint groups have a positive impact on the physician-patient collaboration and help to reduce burnout by improving the understanding of the diseases from a more complex approach.


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Case Study
Case Study
How does a clothing company educate consumers about the reinvention of one of its classic offerings?
Use OOH to blanket the market with messaging and drive consumer interaction with the brand.
Download the full case study »
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In May 2012, Gap launched its summer "Be Your Own T" campaign to showcase three distinct categories of the brand's new t-shirt collection -- the Now Tees, Essential Tees and G Tees -- plus t-shirt inspired styles in the form of dresses, skirts and rompers.
"Be Your Own T" expresses the qualities that make each one of us unique through the lens of a 'T,'" said Seth Farbman, Gap's Global Chief Marketing Officer. "Just as we did with our 1969 jeans, we've reinvented our t-shirt collection from the ground up, offering a t-shirt that fits everyone's personality, style, passions and budget."
To make a statement, the media had to be bold. Large-format, high-profile bulletins or walls were used in every market. "Be Your Own T" would celebrate individuality where Millennials live, work and play.
After identifying key areas of interest, the agency leveraged tactical OOH formats to be Gap's "voice" on city streets. Media penetrated neighborhoods, high traffic corridors, shopping districts, restaurants/clubs & downtown cores to reach the target audience. The agency leveraged the creative innovation & flexibility that traditional OOH offers by creating, large-scale installations that used real t-shirts as part of the "T"-shaped spectaculars.
Since social media was a key driver in the overall campaign, the technology of digital OOH was harnessed to create a social experience that would transcend beyond the MTV digital billboard in Times Square. People interacted with the billboard by tweeting a photo of themselves with the hashtag #beyourownt. Using a camera across the street, Gap took a keepsake photo of the user's photo on the billboard and tweeted it back to the consumer. Keepsake photos were also published on Gap's Facebook page, allowing fans to tag each other.
Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles/Orange County, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC
Flighting Dates:
May 7 - June 3, 2012
Out of Home Formats:
Bulletins, Wallscapes, Transit Shelters, Urban Panels, Phone Kiosks, King Size Bus Posters, Street Kiosks, Muni Kongs, Digital Bulletins (including the interactive MTV Times Square unit), Back Bay Banners (Boston), Commuter Rail 2-sheets (Philadelphia), Digital Shelters (DC)
Embellished walls/bulletins using t-shirts were placed in all markets except Philadelphia and Washington DC
"Be Your Own T" was a success. Using high-profile bulletins, wallscapes, static and digital bus shelters, urban panels, kiosks, bus posters, digital billboards and spectaculars, GAP successfully targeted 18-34 year old Millennials for the launch of their new t-shirt collection.
GAP North America saw a 6% increase in sales, compared to a 4% drop the previous year. While not the only medium in the plan, OOH served as the canvas upon which "Be Your Own T" could celebrate individuality by speaking directly to Millennials as they moved throughout their day.


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FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- After protesters stormed a U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the 82nd Airborne Division based out of Fort Bragg is preparing to be deployed to Kuwait, according to officials.
Wednesday morning, soldiers boarded C-17 aircrafts after learning they would be deployed just 18 hours earlier. A release from the 82nd Airborne Division says that more than 650 Paratroopers are being deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of operations as part of the Immediate Response Force.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper later announced that "in response to recent events" in Iraq, and at Trump's direction, he authorized the immediate deployment of an infantry battalion of soldiers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to the Middle East. He did not specify their destination, but a U.S. official familiar with the decision said they will go to Kuwait.
"When the president dials 9-1-1, Fort Bragg answers the call," said North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson. "Renee and I are praying for these paratroopers and their safe return home, for their families, and for all of America's men and women in uniform."
Esper said additional soldiers from the 82nd Airborne's quick-deployment brigade, known officially as its Immediate Response Force, are prepared to deploy over the next several days. The U.S. official, who provided unreleased details on condition of anonymity, said the full brigade of about 4,000 soldiers may deploy.
According to the U.S. Army's website, the 82nd Airborne Division is "a force prepared to respond to crisis contingencies anywhere in the world within 18 hours."
"This deployment is an appropriate and precautionary action taken in response to increased threat levels against U.S. personnel and facilities, such as we witnessed in Baghdad today," Esper said in a written statement. "The United States will protect our people and interests anywhere they are found around the world."
The 750 soldiers deploying immediately are in addition to 14,000 U.S. troops who have deployed to the Gulf region since May in response to concerns about Iranian aggression, including its alleged sabotage of commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf
Tuesday's breach of the embassy compound in Baghdad, which caused no known U.S. casualties or evacuations, revealed growing strains between Washington and Baghdad, raising questions about the future of the U.S. military mission there. The U.S. has about 5,200 troops in Iraq, mainly to train Iraqi forces and help them combat Islamic State extremists.
The breach followed American airstrikes Sunday that killed 25 fighters of an Iran-backed militia in Iraq, the Kataeb Hezbollah. The U.S. said those strikes were in retaliation for last week's killing of an American contractor and the wounding of American and Iraqi troops in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base that the U.S. blamed on the militia. The American strikes angered the Iraqi government, which called them an unjustified violation of its sovereignty.
Trump blamed Iran for the embassy breach and called on Iraq to protect the diplomatic mission even as the U.S. reinforced the compound with Marines from Kuwait.
"Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many," he tweeted from his estate in Florida. "We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible. In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!"
Even as Trump has argued for removing U.S. troops from Mideast conflicts, he also has singled out Iran as a malign influence in the region. After withdrawing the U.S. in 2018 from an international agreement that exchanged an easing of sanctions for curbs on Iran's nuclear program, Trump ratcheted up sanctions.
Those economic penalties, including a virtual shut-off of Iranian oil exports, are aimed at forcing Iran to negotiate a broader nuclear deal. But critics say that pressure has pushed Iranian leaders into countering with a variety of military attacks in the Gulf.
Until Sunday's U.S. airstrikes, Trump had been measured in his response to Iranian provocations. In June, he abruptly called off U.S. military strikes on Iranian targets in retaliation for the downing of an American drone.
Robert Ford, a retired U.S. diplomat who served five years in Baghdad and then became ambassador in Syria, said Iran's allies in the Iraqi parliament may be able to harness any surge in anger among Iraqis toward the United States to force U.S. troops to leave the country. Ford said Trump miscalculated by approving Sunday's airstrikes on Kataeb Hezbollah positions in Iraq and Syria - strikes that drew a public rebuke from the Iraqi government and seem to have triggered Tuesday's embassy attack.
"The Americans fell into the Iranian trap," Ford said, with airstrikes that turned some Iraqi anger toward the U.S. and away from Iran and the increasingly unpopular Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
The tense situation in Baghdad appeared to upset Trump's vacation routine in Florida, where he is spending the holidays.
Trump spent just under an hour at his private golf club in West Palm Beach before returning to his Mar-a-Lago resort in nearby Palm Beach. He had spent nearly six hours at his golf club on each of the previous two days. Trump spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi and emphasized the need for Iraq to protect Americans and their facilities in the country, said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley.
Trump is under pressure from some in Congress to take a hard-line approach to Iranian aggression, which the United States says included an unprecedented drone and missile attack on the heart of Saudi Arabia's oil industry in September. More recently, Iran-backed militias in Iraq have conducted numerous rocket attacks on bases hosting U.S. forces.
Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and supporter of Trump's Iran policy, called the embassy breach "yet another reckless escalation" by Iran.
Tuesday's attack was carried out by members of the Iran-supported Kataeb Hezbollah militia. Dozens of militiamen and their supporters smashed a main door to the compound and set fire to a reception area, but they did not enter the main buildings.
Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blamed Iran for the episode and faulted Trump for his "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran.
"The results so far have been more threats against international commerce, emboldened and more violent proxy attacks across the Middle East, and now, the death of an American citizen in Iraq," Menendez said, referring to the rocket attack last week.
By early evening Tuesday, the mob had retreated from the compound but set up several tents outside for an intended sit-in. Dozens of yellow flags belonging to Iran-backed Shiite militias fluttered atop the reception area and were plastered along the embassy's concrete wall along with anti-U.S. graffiti. American Apache helicopters flew overhead and dropped flares over the area in what the U.S. military called a "show of force."
The U.S. also was sending 100 or more additional Marines to the embassy compound to support its defenses.
The embassy breach was seen by some analysts as affirming their view that it is folly for the U.S. to keep forces in Iraq after having eliminated the Islamic State group's territorial hold in the country.
A U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is also a long-term hope of Iran, noted Paul Salem, president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute.
And it's always possible Trump would "wake up one morning and make that decision" to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq, as he announced earlier with the U.S. military presence in neighboring Syria, Salem said. Trump's Syria decision triggered the resignation of his first defense secretary, retired Gen. Jim Mattis, but the president later amended his decision and about 1,200 U.S. troops remain in Syria.
Trump's best weapon with Iran is the one he's already using - the sanctions, said Salem. He and Ford said Trump would do best to keep resisting Iran's attempt to turn the Iran-U.S. conflict into a full-blown military one. The administration should also make a point of working with the Iraqi government to deal with the militias, Ford said.
For the president, Iran's attacks - directly and now through proxies in Iraq - have "been working that nerve," Salem said. "Now they really have Trump's attention."
Associated Press writers Matthew Lee, Darlene Superville and Sagar Meghani contributed to this report.
Stay with ABC11 for more information.


text: SAVE CHRISTMAS WITH THE POWER OF ROCK! Santa needs your help! Take your guitar and rock all around the world, delivering presents in the Merry Christmas Stage Sled with the help of the Reindeer Band. Test your skills in this amazing music game, with incredible rock versions of the best known Christmas Carols.


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Judge Raymond Joseph Dearie
September 2012: Average Prison Sentence
District Court - New York East
Lead Charge: 21 USC 952 - Importation of controlled substances
Program Area: Narcotics/DrugsFor all cases disposed of in the current fiscal year (2012) that were credited to Judge Raymond Joseph Dearie in the Eastern District of New York, the average prison sentence was 60.0 months, when looking only at cases with a lead charge of "21 USC 952 - Importation of controlled substances" falling under the broad category of "Narcotics/Drugs". During the current fiscal year, Judge Raymond Joseph Dearie has sentenced 2 defendants compared with 2 defendants during the twelve months of the previous fiscal year.
Over the last five years, the average prison sentence imposed on defendants that were credited to Judge Dearie was 25.2 months. This was 13.0% higher than the 22.3 months typical in New York East and 19.8% lower than the 31.4 months average prison sentence for the nation. Judge Raymond Joseph Dearie sentenced 32 defendants during the past five years.
(CAUTION: The kinds of cases handled by individual judges influences statistical information about their sentences. It therefore is important to consider the breakdown of cases that each has handled, available below, when making judge-by-judge comparisons.)
Figure 1 compares Judge Dearie's numbers to those for judges in this district and in the United States as a whole for cases of this type over the last five years.
During the last five years there were 21 other judges in the Eastern District of New York with information on convictions during that period. Average prison sentence numbers passed down for those judges ranged from 9.0 months to 90.0 months, putting Judge Dearie's average prison sentence of 25.2 months at the higher end of the range. The average prison sentence for the whole Eastern District of New York during that time was 22.3 months.
Professional Biography
Born 1944 in Rockville Center, NY
Federal Judicial Service
Judge, U. S. District Court, Eastern District of New York
Nominated by Ronald Reagan on February 3, 1986, to a new seat authorized by 98 Stat. 333; Confirmed by the Senate on March 14, 1986, and received commission on March 19, 1986. Served as chief judge, 2007-2011. Assumed senior status on April 3, 2011.
Fairfield University, B.A., 1966
St. John's University School of Law, J.D., 1969
Professional Career:
Private practice, New York City, 1969-1971, 1977-1980
Assistant U.S. attorney, Eastern District of New York, 1971-1977, 1980-1982; chief, Appeals Division, 1971-1974; chief, General Crimes Section, 1974-1976; chief, Criminal Division, 1976-1977; executive assistant U.S. attorney, 1977;
�����chief assistant U.S. attorney, 1980-1982
U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, 1982-1986Lead Investigative Agencies in Cases Handled
The lead investigative agency that referred cases disposed of by Judge Raymond Joseph Dearie for the past five years was the Homeland Security - Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It accounted for 84.4% of all cases.
Other agencies with substantial numbers of cases that were disposed by Judge Raymond Joseph Dearie over the past five years were: Justice - Drug Enforcement Administration (12.5%), Homeland Security - Other (3.1%).
Agency Judge District US Homeland Security - Immigration and Customs Enforcement 84.4% 71.8% 90.5% More Justice - Drug Enforcement Administration 12.5% 5.0% 2.3% Homeland Security - Other 3.1% 10.9% 1.7%
Table 2: Composition of Cases for the Past Five Years (Top 10)
Number of Defendants in Judge Raymond Joseph Dearie's Cases


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James Gandolfini Is Dead; Can Tony Soprano Rest In Peace?
James Gandolfini's death at 51 shocked and saddened the millions of viewers for whom Tony Soprano elevated primetime television to an art form rivaling cinema, while shaping "The Sopranos" into a show that intimately and permanently connected with its followers, who saw pieces of it as a proxy for their own lives and relationships. How else could Edie Falco, who played Tony's wife Carmela Soprano on the HBO drama, say in earnest in a statement responding to the tragic news that "the love between Tony and Carmela was one of the greatest I have ever known"?
Implicit in Falco's words is the sense that Tony and Carmela Soprano were more than just characters on a screen. Indeed, "The Sopranos" were a three-dimensional family, one with a terrible, irresistible secret, who invited us into their kitchen and bedrooms just as casually as we welcomed them into our homes every Sunday night. They offered us an unvarnished view not just of life inside the Mafia, but of the life that goes on in the margins of a career criminal's dark pursuits: Morning coffee in his bathrobe and a cigar for the road; the peyote in the desert; the geese in the backyard. These slices of humanity permitted us to care for a cold-blooded murderer; to hope against all reason that he might be spared the sudden, violent death he always had coming; and sometimes, to forget -- or willfully ignore -- the morbid specter, even after a gunshot wound that nearly took his life left him in a surrealist coma. As Carmela cried to her husband in the show's final season: "We walk around here as if there isn't a giant piano hanging over your head."
But the piano didn't fall, at least not that we can be sure of. It remains suspended in the black abyss of the instantly notorious closing image of the series finale (still online at YouTube), one that left bewildered viewers wondering, for a collective, panicked moment, if their cable service had cut out at the worst imaginable time. The panic gave way to angry frustration among those who felt the show's creator David Chase had shortchanged his faithful audience, and cheers for him from others who were convinced that he had ended the series in the best, and only, imaginable way. Six years later, there is no overriding consensus about whether Tony Soprano and his family are still alive or died in a hail of retributory bullets over the gang war that had just culminated in a supposed truce; whether Meadow Soprano was the lone victim or the sole survivor; or whether we have any right to know how it all ended for the Soprano family -- if it ended.
However irrationally, it appears that Gandolfini's death could reshape some of our ideas of what happened in that diner. If James Gandolfini is dead, how can Tony Soprano still be alive? On Thursday, crowds flocked to pay tribute to the actor at the very New Jersey eatery where he filmed his last scene; choosing to honor him in a place where we saw him just once, and, as far as we know, neglecting the Elizabeth, N.J., restaurant that was the setting of the original Vesuvio's, where Tony and company went again and again, and walked out alive every time.
Details -- gratuitous, tasteless and of questionable veracity -- describing Gandolfini's last hours before he died of a heart attack in Italy on Wednesday promote a salacious suggestion that a different kind of piano had hung over the actor's head in the years since we last saw him as Tony. Gandolfini had previously admitted to struggles with substance abuse, and was clearly a bit overweight. And now, tales of fried shrimp, pina coladas and extra shots of rum (compliments, naturally, of the New York Post) are being served up as an explanation for the star's early demise.
It's not unusual for the media to scramble for the how and why in the wake of a sudden tragedy. Nor is it unusual for an actor to be inextricably linked to a signature role, especially, as in Gandolfini's case, when the actor is introduced to a mass audience for the first time as a wholly original, unforgettable character. Since it's impossible to prove a negative, we can't know if the public and the media reaction to Gandolfini's death would be different if Tony Soprano's fate had been made clearer. Would a part of Gandolfini's public image have already died with Tony, just as a part of him now lives on through our beloved Mafia kingpin? Even when it comes to people far less extraordinary than Tony, it's almost always easier to know a character than the actor who plays him. That we can sometimes so easily confuse the two is a testament to the way great characters and stories like those we found in "The Sopranos" can permeate our consciousness, twisting our imaginations into what feels like a kind of reality. In Gandolfini's case, almost certainly, we are mourning the loss of Tony Soprano as much as we are the man who brought him to life.
For years there has been talk of a "Sopranos" movie. Chase himself has said that he is open to it, but surely any plans, however vague and preliminary, will have to be reconsidered in the wake of Gandolfini's death -- which at least for the purposes of any future "Sopranos" projects, will likely mean that Tony Soprano too is gone. And whether or not you believe that Tony was killed at the end of the series, Chase has in a way already addressed Tony's death, during the extraordinary, mind-bending first half of season six (the final Soprano season), when Tony was in a medically induced coma after Uncle Junior, the former head of the Soprano crime family, shot him in a case of dementia-fueled mistaken identity. Tony's unconscious mind transported him, and us, into an afterlife dream, in which he was forced to confront the man he had become through the eyes of another man, who himself was just another version of Tony -- someone he might have been in a different kind of life.
When Tony Soprano lay in his hospital bed, with both his families keeping anxious vigil, I believed he would never wake up. I worked out a half-baked theory that the second half of season six would exist in a post-Tony Soprano world, where Carmela would rise as matriarch and boss, and where we would learn who Tony's friends really were -- a question that crept in while Tony was unconscious. It seemed like the dream allowed Tony to confront his deepest fears and most profound guilt in a way that he never quite could with his therapist and sometime-love interest, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. It seemed, for a little while, like he was free to go.
Although we were all relieved when Tony did finally come back to life, I felt a vague sense of loss for the man we had met in his unconscious -- a loss that now feels somehow like it has come full circle, in the worst imaginable way. The dream sequence only lasted two episodes, but whenever I think of Tony Soprano, I will always think of him there, suspended between life and death, as he was again in the cut to black that brought all those people to the New Jersey diner this week. And because, like so many of us, I don't know where Tony Soprano ends and James Gandolfini begins, it's all too easy to imagine that Gandolfini is once again inside that terrifying and beautiful dream, visiting with the ghosts of "The Sopranos" past. Maybe now, Tony Soprano finally is free to go.
© Copyright IBTimes 2024. All rights reserved.


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You might expect transgender Jews to see Jewish law and tradition as constricting or limiting, full of static categories and lines that must not be crossed. But two new memoirs by male-to-female transsexuals suggest otherwise: Kate Bornstein's A Queer and Pleasant Danger and Joy Ladin's Through the Door of Life use Jewish tropes and themes to explore the authors' identities, with surprising results.
For Bornstein and Ladin alike, Jewish boundaries around sex and weird gender hang-ups—whether the pressures of passing Jewish manhood between generations, or God's sexless aphysicality—provide productive language for expressing transgender experience. Bornstein is an award-winning writer, performer, and queer activist, whose sprawling memoir chronicles a journey across continents, religious traditions, and (many, many) partners. The pained Jewish masculinity of Bornstein's youth formed the backdrop for an eventual embrace of Scientology; though she may not intend this, it also helps explain and frame her subsequent rejection of Scientology.
Ladin, a professor of English literature at Yeshiva University's Stern College, has written a more claustrophobic book, which tracks journeys that are less physical than psychological. She writes about attempting to save a strained (and then broken) marriage, and she explores the process of transition in close detail. But religion—and Judaism in particular—also plays a key role in her book. She found, in her idiosyncratic reading of the Bible, a God as alien to the physical world as she was to her male body. Both books illustrate a deeper point. For people negotiating complex and unfamiliar relationships to gender, religion affords some of the only language intense and strange enough to understand experiences that defy social and sexual norms.
At first glance, Judaism may seem peripheral to A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today (Beacon). It gets, after all, only one of the subtitle's 27 words. But then, it is a rambling title, reminiscent of the chapter heading of an early English novel. That's fitting, because her memoir is told as a picaresque. As a boy in Interlaken, N.J., Bornstein dreamed of being a girl in a Norman Rockwell painting. Though Bornstein's family was not observant, Bornstein's Judaism stuck out: The Jewish family was "one of a handful" in Interlaken, and both Nazis and anti-Semitic tsars figured prominently in the family's lore. It is hard not to hear in Bornstein's transgender dream the echo of another venerable American Jewish desire: assimilation.
After studying theater at Brown, Bornstein journeyed cross-country, falling in with the Church of Scientology along the way. During those years with the Church, Bornstein worked as a deckhand and a salesman and also married a woman and had a child. Finally, after being expelled from Scientology, Bornstein changed sexes, discovered a queer community, and settled down to a life of domesticity and BDSM.
Bornstein had also sampled other faiths, trying out life with the Amish and the Baha'i, and reading about Zen Buddhism and pagan witchcraft before joining the Scientologists. Scientology ultimately appealed because its myths offered a solution to Bornstein's gender trouble. Though church officials publicly deny the existence of these myths, Bornstein and many other ex-Scientologists tell the same story of Xenu, an alien overlord, who long ago enslaved the race of "thetans" by imprisoning them within human bodies. Here's Bornstein's take:
My gender was a ship without sails, tempest-tossed. I needed an anchor. I needed a life preserver. Here's what the Church of Scientology threw me: they said I'm not my body, and I'm not even my mind. They told me that I am a spiritual being called a thetan … Male and female is for bodies, they told me. Thetans have no gender.
Can you imagine a more appealing theology for someone like me?
Scientology offered Bornstein a revision of Genesis' "male and female he created them," a world in which gender was just one more human dysfunction that thetans had to slough off. This austerity came naturally: Immediately before Scientology, Bornstein flirted with Essene asceticism and was a longtime anorexic. Disaffection from the body gave Bornstein a curious tolerance, and even fondness, for pain.
A sense of masochism made Bornstein a perfect fit for Scientology's intense psychological discipline. Similarly, years of studying men's physical gestures (to perform as male) proved good preparation for the church's regimented physicality (stare people in the eyes when you talk to them; "verbally acknowledge anything that anyone says to you"). Both Scientology's strictures and its science fiction were otherworldly. They allowed Bornstein to escape from an ill-fitting body into a fantasy.
Though she devotes few words to Judaism, Bornstein recalls how Jewish myth provides a powerful counter-narrative to Scientology. After explaining Scientology's beliefs in her memoir, she turns to another set of "wacky" stories, the Bible:
I believed that Abraham, the Patriarch of Judaism, was visited by God, who, doubting Abraham's devotion, ordered him to lay his beloved son, Isaac, on an altar, and kill him with a knife. … Isaac was fully conscious, and he agreed to do this. Why? Because Abraham said, "I love you, Son. You're a good boy, and I want you to make me proud of you in the eyes of my father, God, who's up there watching us right now."
She reads the Akeidah as the abusive intergenerational transmission of masculinity ("Do Jewish fathers know how badly they're traumatizing their sons each time they tell them this story?"), which makes sense. Her own father was a self-proclaimed "male chauvinist pig" who, to "cure" his son's virginity, set up a young Bornstein with a prostitute. But surprisingly, within this dark reading, Bornstein finds some pleasure:
Then Abraham raised the blade. Was Isaac smiling, do you think? The Bible never tells us what's going on in Isaac's mind. Might he have wanted to die under his daddy's blade? He did, after all, just lie there. Might he have been the world's first goth kid with a death wish, looking up at the blade in his daddy's hand and thinking, Yeah, cut me, daddy, Wanna bleed for you, daddy. Well, that's how I've always read it.
Reading this passage, it is striking that Bornstein's sex-change treatment and return to the physical were fully realized within a BDSM relationship. In the last portion of her book, she explains with great precision how, for instance, someone "rubbed two fists full of coarse sea salt into the long bloody scores on my back." Though there are differences, her Akeidah foreshadows this discovery of a pleasurable pain. Though this midrashic mix of abuse and bondage is unsettling, there's a compelling religious archetype here. Against Scientology's inhuman, otherworldly perfection are pitted the body's pains, its joys, and the strange paradox of their interdependence.
If A Queer and Pleasant Danger is picaresque, Through the Door of Life (University of Wisconsin Press) is inches from poetry. It is dense with metaphors, literary framing devices (trying to perfect iced coffee, for instance, symbolizes Ladin's failed attempt to preserve her marriage), and heady reflections (buying a scarf releases "some ancient emotion that flows at the root of buying and selling, the extraordinary intimacy of strangers exchanging bits of themselves before turning back to their separate worlds").
Bornstein is polyamorous and international; Ladin is monogamous and mostly rooted in the tri-state area. Much of Through the Door concerns Ladin's attempt to "make it work": to squeeze, in her forties, being transgender, and eventually transsexual, into a conventional, straight marriage with kids and a job as an English professor at Yeshiva University.
This contrast extends to the authors' spiritual lives, too. The mythic distance from the physical that Bornstein journeyed outside to discover in Scientology, Ladin had all along in the Bible. Ladin was drawn to God as an alien; God was estranged from the world, somehow bound to it but unable to take part. She finds the television show Smallville's Clark Kent similarly compelling, since his otherness and yet entanglement in—and responsibility for—the world trigger guilt, confusion, and alienation. This religion lacks the easy freedom Bornstein found (for a time) in Scientology, but both allowed gender misfits to retreat from their bodies into a world of spirit.
And, like Bornstein, Ladin found her myth unsustainable: There is no better refutation of the Platonic idea that minds, not bodies, matter than the lives of transsexuals. Ladin frames that discovery as a new, deeper insight into Judaism. "In Judaism you're really not where you need to be," Ladin told me, "if you're out of your body." Judaism's goal, as she sees it, is not a paradise of souls, but something earthier and more physical: each man under her fig tree. As a child, she valorized the Moses who "didn't much like people" and preferred the mystical top of Mount Sinai to the mixed multitude below; later, she realized that Judaism is built on human relationships.
If Judaism meant such contrary things to Ladin, what use was it? The answer is that Ladin and Bornstein use religious myths not as firm laws for life, but as language: flexible vehicles to express experience. And Ladin and Bornstein face two difficult, conflicting imperatives, which required two opposing mythic languages. First, as children, they needed to make sense of a gender disassociation for which mainstream culture gave them no models, to forge myths of idiosyncratic difference and resist social norms according to which they didn't exist. But second, as adults, they found they needed recognition and the language to explain who they were to an outside audience. They needed to reject the judgments of others; then they needed to change them.
For each writer, the second demand is crystallized in her fraught relationships with her children. Ladin meticulously tracks her children's confusions at their parents' divorce, as well as their father's becoming a woman. At one point, her son offers her fashion advice, triggering a fight when Ladin's ex-wife hears about it. Her son won't talk about it, but, Ladin senses, "there would be a time in the very near future when talking about my betrayal of him would be exactly what he wanted to do."
Ladin's attentiveness to the pain she caused is striking. It would be easier—and perfectly legitimate—for her to claim sex-transition as a sacred right. But her children introduce social expectations in a particularly wrenching way. Born into a heterosexual marriage, they have rights, too. For the children, the social norms aren't just narrow prejudice; they are the relationships on which they have depended. The analogical work of explaining being transgender to them is particularly urgent.
In Bornstein's case, that urgency comes from being a 68-year-old woman with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She frames her book as a letter to her estranged daughter, Jessica, who remained in the church with her biological mother, Molly, and who is now nearly 40. Scientologists, according to Bornstein, are hostile to ex-Scientologists. Bornstein has not seen her daughter for many years. In the epilogue, she writes directly to Jessica. Though she cautions Jessica against accepting Scientology without questions, Bornstein can still use the church's language to communicate. For instance, even after she has rejected the idea that bodies don't matter, Bornstein can still invoke the phrase "thetans have no gender" to prove that "you get to fall in love with any thetan or thetans, no matter the gender of their body."
Ultimately, it seems, it doesn't matter much what the myths—whether Scientology's or Judaism's—are supposed to mean; what matters is what they let you say.
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Raphael Magarik is an editorial assistant at Open Zion.
Raphael Magarik is an editorial assistant at Open Zion.


text: When Victor Delgado wanted to propose to his girlfriend Liz, he got a few friends involved. The result was a sci-fi action movie that mashed up your favorite film franchises in all their glory. Participants included the Costumers Guild of Hawaii, The Pacific Outpost 501st, Ghostbusters: Hawaii Division and the League of Shadows Hawaii. It took months to shoot and weeks to edit. Read more about it here. Buried in the comments at YouTube was the crucial information that she said "Yes." -via Geeks Are Sexy