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[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't yet read or watched The Night Listener, you may not wish to read this article!] Novelist Armistead Maupin has seen his Tales of the City series adapted into three television miniseries: Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City. Now his novel The Night Listener has become a major motion picture, adapted by Maupin, along with his ex-boyfriend Terry Anderson and director Patrick Stettner. Stettner made his name with the indie drama The Business of Strangers, starring Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles, before helming The Night Listener, a story inspired by the strange story of "Anthony Godby Johnson," a boy author believed to be the invention of his "adoptive mother" Vicki Johnson (a.k.a. Vicki Fraginals). I spoke to Maupin and Stettner about the novel, film, and unusual real-life case at San Francisco's Clift Hotel.
Groucho: The ruthless honesty of self leaps off the page of the book The Night Listener, and I wonder: do you allow yourself a lot of wishful thinking in your writing, as well, in adapting things that maybe sort of happened to you?
Armistead Maupin: Well, I have total freedom to turn it into fiction, but I try to imbue it with the spark of my own emotions, if you follow me. The facts aren't true, but I try to remember how I felt in any given instance to lend a verisimilitude to the experience. Yeah, and I often—I generally tend to be pretty hard on myself in terms of the way I—. I try to pull out my worst, most neurotic moments because I think they work better in print. I had a friend of a friend who read the script—or rather, the book—before I submitted the manuscript to my publisher, and she said, "God, I hope people don't think this is you!" Which is really disconcerting. I thought he was kind of loveable!
(All laugh.)
G: I thought so too. And you have an objectivity—a total objectivity—in taking this material, I would think. What vision did you bring to it that wouldn't perhaps otherwise be there in the hands of another director?
Patrick Stettner: Well, I don't know about the hands of another director, but my job as the director is to think about—obviously to convey the important themes Armistead had so beautifully lined out, but also think about things visually. Because cinematically I'm very concerned about how to strip away language and try to do as much things visually as you can. And personally as a director I'm always interested in telling the audience three-quarters and allowing them to make that discovery. I think that's really kind of important and keeps the audience active.
AM: Constant active understatement.
PS: Yeah! It's this process of working the story themselves, you know?
AM: Yeah.
PS: So that they are part of the process.
AM: Yeah, yeah.
PS: They're not just delivered everything.
AM: Yeah, yeah.
PS: So that they are kind of completing sentences, and they are completing character arcs in some kind of way.
AM: But that's what was so brilliant about—did you see The Business of Strangers, his first—?
G: Oh, yes, yes.
AM: That's what that did. You were const—your mind was working through the whole thing.
PS: So just that's always kind of where I'm kind of looking to do.
G: Well, there are great cues in the film, I think—and since it's a mystery those cues are clues, too—that, yeah, give the audience that little push. They're subtle, obviously visual cues. I wanted to ask you about those. Like, for example, when you have the camera move into Robin Williams' head as he starts to read "The Blacking Factory"—those sorts of things. Could you talk a little bit about how you designed those visual entrees to character?
PS: Yeah, you know, you try to set up a visual language. I'm a very strong believer that what you do—you can't kind of introduce a new visual element that you don't set up in the first ten minutes. So because a lot of this that we see is part of what the Gabriel character sees in his imagination, while we're seeing his imagination, I need to have that first setup of it so that to start this kind of sense that we do show his imagination. So when he reads the book, us coming around the head is also a subtle introduction to later when he is talking on the phone, and we are now seeing a character that we have never seen. (Laughs.) That might not, or might not exist. And visually what I did there was to try to put elements of his world in the Rory world, because that is his [Gabriel's] imagination. So there were all these details that you see in Rory's kind of world that you later see in Gabriel's reality, like the curtains, the mug the neighbor has, the medicine bottles, the—you know, there's binoculars. And there's all these kind of things. And even colors of wallpaper come back later. Even the imag—even the phone that Donna talks on is the same phone that he has in his kitchen. And so these are just elements that no one's going to ever see (laughs), even if they watch the film eight times.
G: I was looking for them the second time—
PS: (Laughs.)
G: And I saw a few! Now, so The Night Listener is fiction, but it is also inspired by events that happened to you, so you have this new dramatic architecture and also this emotional reality. To what degree, though, was your own experience, in real life, an investigation?
AM: I didn't get active in any way, in terms of actually going to the spot. I allowed my fiction to take me there.
PS: But you had lunch with her—
AM: No, yes, I—not lunch, but I met her. And it was, for me and Terry Anderson—the other screenwriter—a sort of Hardy Boys adventure that went on for about six years!
PS: (Laughs.)
G: I actually wanted to ask you: where did it start, and where do you think—will it ever end?
AM: Well, I don't know if you caught 20/20 the other night.
G: Oh, no.
AM: They did half an hour on the real story, and they—
PS: If you go to the website, you can see a link to it, I believe.
AM: Oh really?
PS: [The]nightlistener-movie[.com], I think they link to it now.
AM: Oh cool.
PS: Yeah, I saw all the articles—Tad Friend articles and a bunch of articles now. In the "True" section, they now have it.
AM: In Miramax, or 20/20?
PS: The Miramax website—
AM: The Night Listener website?
PS: Yeah, you go to the "True" section now; there's all these articles.
AM: Oh good!
PS: You can see the 20/20 video, and all that stuff.
G: I've read about the case.
AM: Yeah, well, 20/20 started investigating it about four years ago. And that particular show got shelved, and the story got stuck on a shelf. So they pulled out what they had, including, you know, the voice analyst's playing both voices, so people actually listened to the voice. So that was the sort of—for me, oddly enough—just the simple, hard machinery of this machine said this voice and this voice are the same person. And I knew both voices very well because I had been talking to both of them for about six years. And I must say, from one moment to the next, doubting and not doubting.
G: And I think it's really ingenious the way the film does the same thing to the audience, that we hear her voice as his, and they're blended together so seamlessly.
PS: Yeah, it was the sense of we wanted to have sort of ethics.
AM: I didn't even notice it the first time, I realized. I didn't notice what you were doing.
PS: Toni's own husband didn't notice.
AM: Didn't notice, yeah.
G: We're so trained to believe what we're being shown in the context of the story.
AM: And what was so smart about it was the way in which the phone—the sound of the voice is distorted through a phone anyway, so the fact that it didn't quite sound the same as before—you had a perfectly logical reason for it.
PS: Yeah, yeah.
G: When you look at your own works, you must see a kind of semi-secret diary of your own life. That's probably true of any artist. Do you have a fairly infallible compass for what is fair game in terms of talking about family and friends and lovers?
AM: Well, I usually talk to them first. A number of characters in this story named themselves.
PS: Including—
AM: Including Anthony Godby Johnson—he named the character Pete. I told him I was going to write a story, and I said, "What do you want to name the character?" And Terry named himself Jess. My sister named herself Josie. But I do care. I'm not one of those writers that loves the idea of skewering anybody, even people that might have cause me pain. I don't—it's not my purpose. But at the same time, I'm aware that my best material comes from the truth of my own life, so I try to use it as much as possible. And I have confidence in those emotions. Even if they're fucked up, you know. They're real.
G: Was writing this story at all a process of forgiveness? To, say, Anthony Godby Johnson?
AM: I was forgiving a number of people, actually.
(All laugh.)
AM: The two people to whom the book was dedicated—my father and my ex—were—that was part of that process for me. And I suppose myself, not so much around the mystery of the boy on the phone, but whatever failures I might have had in our relationship.
G: I wanted to ask both of you, regarding what I see as sort of the central theme of the film: we have fiction versus reality and the idea of how we can deceive ourselves, and then also that's sort of a metaphor for faith versus cynicism as kind of a worldview.
AM: Absolutely.
PS: Yeah.
G: So I just sort of wanted to have you guys address that: does it reflect your own ways of seeing the world?
PS: I think so. I mean, one of the points that comes at the end, in terms of Gabriel, is that he kind of embraces what has happened to him, even though it might be a fictitious character. And in many ways this is how Armistead still kind of embraces what that relationship was and who that boy was, even though—
G: It still has meaning.
PS: Yeah! And then so this idea that, you know, everything empirical is truth (laughs), I don't necessarily agree. There are truths that aren't always tangible.
AM: The truths of the—
PS: Of the heart.
AM: The quote—
PS: Are just as valid.
AM: Yeah, what is the quote? The epigraph I use in the novel is from Keats saying, "I am certain of nothing but the truth of imagination and the holiness of the heart's affections."
PS: Yeah.
AM: That always makes me almost tear up, because that is exactly the only things that I'm certain of.
PS: Yeah.
AM: In fact there was a time that I was thinking of calling the book "The Truth of Imagination." But, yeah, we had to make our own peace, basically, in the end, and that's what Gabriel ends up doing, realizing that, "Well, whatever happened happened. And whatever soul I was connected with had something to say to me."
G: And that's really an enlightened response because it could very easily send one into further cynicism, or deeper cynicism, to be betrayed, possibly, by that experience.
AM: Yeah, yeah, I never felt. Some people did. I talked to a number of people who'd been through this experience, believe me, because a lot of 'em came crawling out of the woodwork after the novel came out. And said, "I was talking to him too." But my self-worth did not hinge on whether or not this person was real. I just found it extremely interesting, and I think I was rescued by my instincts as a storyteller because mostly I just couldn't wait to tell people about it.
PS: It's kind of like the James Frey and JT Leroy situation. Especially the James Frey, where people were like "Uhhh. I can't be—", like when he was on Oprah, "I can't believe you'd do that. I was so affected by the story. It really changed my life." I was like, "Wait a minute!"
AM: How much did it change?
PS: Exactly! "And now it's all for nothing." Excuse me. You know? I mean, first of all, I'm a cynical New Yorker. I always think people—there's some fucking lying going on in someone's memoir. You know, I can't tell a story the same time twice! There's always—a little embellishment. That's what good storytelling is! And this idea that, you know—I mean—
AM: Yeah, I don't—I'm not—I don't approve of him. I think he really lied in a big way. It wasn't his memoir. On the other hand, people who say that they were—
PS: "Outraged!"
AM: Outraged, it's like—the same 20/20 thing, the people outraged because they had been helping to support this couple that is supposed to have septuplets, and they—it was all a huge fraud. What are you, outraged because someone else hasn't had multiple births?! What are you talking about?
PS: Jon Stewart saying people seem to be more outraged by this than the fact that the government lied for going into Iraq.
AM: Yeah.
PS: You know? Just like—. (Laughs.) It's a sense of perspective here, people.
G: Well, in turning the subject to adaptation of the novel to a film, there's such a wealth of material in the book, and not all of it is obviously going to be as cinematic. Did you find in writing the initial screenplay with Terry that it was easy for you to kind of slash and burn and find the spare quality of the story, or did you find that you had to make some ruthless decisions?
PS: They had a made a lot of ruthless decisions themselves. I just pushed them to make more. (Laughs.)
AM: Yeah, and it became more and more pure. I looked at it as a purification process, really. And it was hard. It was hard at times, but I felt like we were getting closer to the essence of what we were trying to say. I mean there were—some of the early drafts involved a greater role for Gabriel's father. I'm trying to remember—I mean, I had a really early one that you never even saw, that—
PS: Yeah.
AM: In which she kills herself—you see her hanging herself.
PS: Yeah.
AM: As she's listening to the radio broadcast or something. There were a whole—it went in a whole lot of different directions, and I really feel that we arrived at the best possible version of the story.
G: What's the omission that was hardest for you, and what's the best addition, maybe, that you didn't expect the story to take on?
PS: I know what the omission is. The blowjob scene.
AM: For a straight guy, you're awfully in love with that blowjob scene!—Well, it should be a movie in itself is the problem.
PS: Do you know what we're talking about? What he does is he goes, gets a burger at a rest stop. And then he goes to take a piss, and then he's taking a piss and the trucker looks at him and goes "Mmm-mm."
AM: Oh, don't make him act it out!
AM: It's embarrassing enough
PS: The trucker looks at him, and then he follows the trucker, and they go in and have sex. He gives him a blowjob, and then he looks up at his family photos, and do they know? And then the trucker says, "I'm not gay!" and kicks him out. And it's such a beautiful statement of this kind of—I don't know—it's a beautiful—it really—once you put that in, it just kind of like weighed everything—(dissolves into laughter).
AM: Blowjobs tend to stop action short—
AM: From my personal experience.
G: In more ways than one.
PS: Yeah. (Laughs.)
G: I get the drift.
AM: Let's see.
PS: I didn't mean to interrupt you, but you were—
AM: No, no. I was actually the first to say that that had to go. But what was it? Oh yeah. I think we still fight a little bit over the death scene. We filmed the scene with Rory under the gas mask with Robin talking to him, as he's about to die, and Patrick decided—I think probably rightfully—that it was —the melodrama was too high. Is that a fair interpretation of what you felt about it?
PS: Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
AM: And we didn't need it. That it was just really pushing it too far. For me it was—to me, it was the height of her accomplishment, when it was actually happening to me, because I did spend two hours with this kid on the phone that I thought was going to be dead by morning, talking to him about life and what he'd done and how important he was, you know. And I realized it was how she seals the deal, the marriage contract, you know. That's really the only one that I can think of. And as far—and certainly is outweighed by the additions that Patrick brought to it in terms of making active some of the neurosis in Wisconsin. The actual—the scene in the basement I love. I think it's my favorite scene in the movie now. And when Patrick first sent it to me, I thought—well, it was very eerie, because I thought, first of all, what the fuck is he going down in the basement for, and why is he going there, and "Stop! Don't go in the basement!" because I was identifying with it. But it's such a —it turns that convention on its ear. Because it's not Mrs. Bates.
PS: Yeah, yeah.
AM: It's some sad woman who wants to put on a sweater and show him how pretty she looks in it.
PS: Yeah. You know, thinking about that scene—of course, here I am regretting it—I think the way I shot it was just so sentimental, and we shouldn't have had—I'm going back to the scene, y'know. We should've cut the sentimentality and not had him in the hospital. Y'know? It should've been just his home, kind of you get the sense that he's deeply bedridden maybe, but not like needing a gas tank and that whole—
AM: Well, it approached the Oprah documentary—
PS: Yeah! It became—
AM: They had this bed draped in—
PS: And it also felt that once Robin had to go to that place it became very heavy, you know—
AM: Yeah.
PS: Where he became—
AM: Patch Adams.
PS: Yeah, a little bit. It did have that Patch Adams texture, and it just became—and I should've—because I didn't shoot that with both of them in the same room. I think I would've shot that differently if I would've seen the scene as one.
AM: Yeah, yeah.
G: This is probably a very stupid question, but how did you feel about Robin Williams playing your fictional self?
AM: Well, I asked him to, for start—I sent him the script. Obviously I knew that he could really play the role. Well, yeah, I could've gotten Harrison Ford. I would've been—.
PS: "You go—"
AM: No, I let go any vanity around "Is this a representation of me?" or anything else, or "Is he playing me?" It was our understanding from the beginning that he was simply playing the character, so he was bringing who Robin would be in that circumstance to it. But Patrick made the remark one time that Robin was a great choice because he looks like a guy who might love a little bit too much, and that's a description of Gabriel. And in a way, it is kind of turning all his—some of his more feel-good films on their ear.
PS: Yeah.
AM: It is the sort of dark side of Patch Adams.
AM: Forget that—that might end up in print. We don't want—
PS: But it's like—. Wait a minute! I gotta call Miramax! Don't put "the best reviewed thriller of the summer"! Put "the dark side of Patch Adams"!
AM: (Cackles.)
G: That's a whole other audience you've tapped into there.
(Hysterical laughter.)
AM: If we only had that damn rubber nose!
PS: I knew I should've—but you didn't get me the costume!
AM: But you know what I'm saying. He's the healer. He's the kind, the gentle one. So naturally he's the one who's pulled into this thing.
PS: Yeah.
G: He brings a wonderful, subtle comic edge to the movie, too, that maybe another actor might not. A dark comic edge.
PS: A comic understanding. Because he plays the straight man in a lot of these scenes. He's just setting up jokes for Sandra Oh, or the woman on the plane, or the guy in the Wisconsin store, and it's like—or the security guards. He does that a lot!
AM: Yeah!
PS: And he does it perfectly. Just like—.
G: Oh, and the role of the patsy, though it's very serious ultimately in the film, it can be comic. In the investigation, he's no Harrison Ford.
AM: His life is getting worse and worse.
PS: Yeah.
G: Was there ever any consideration to shooting the film here?
PS: Yes! Yeah, we only did it in New York because of financial reasons. San Francisco's expensive to shoot in, and we were taking advantage—we were the first film to take advantage of tax credit that New York state started to give. Yeah.
AM: I wasn't bothered by that. San Francisco's a character in my other novels, but I didn't really see it as a character in this one. It's a guy on the phone at home, and that can happen anywhere.
G: Sure, sure. I wanted to ask you about: since through your fiction, to some degree, your life has become an open book—you've written about your family and whatnot—gay domesticity has a certain mainstream quality about it now, but the gay marriage issue is still such a sticking point. And I wonder if you feel, on a practical level or a personal level, that's an important issue for you, or just as a political one. What's your take on that?
AM: On gay marriage? I'd like to be able to marry my partner. I'd like to have the economic benefits that come with that. I'd like to have the official government recognition of our love, especially in these times. So yeah, I think it's extremely important. At the same time, I don't feel less married. I don't feel unmarried, if you follow me. It wouldn't make us any closer than we already are, but it would bring us legal benefits that would be important. I'm very proud that this film—I don't think there's many other films in which a mainstream actor in a mainstream film has played a central character who's gay, and gay is not the issue.
PS: (Laughs.) I was doing an interview, and the paper said, "But, you know, he's done gay characters before, Robin." I was like, "What?" "You know, Birdcage."
AM: We had a whole lot of jokes about "Just don't do the 'Fosse, Fosse, Fosse' thing."
PS: "Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart."
AM: I never had a single moment's worry about that.
PS: Yeah.
AM: You know, that he would do that. And most actors now just don't do—they know, have the sense to know that you don't go play gay.
PS: And it's also on the script, so he didn't approach it in that way at all.
G: Has any more info about this real-life case come to light since the production, or as a result of the production?
PS: Well, during production, and we don't know if this is a fact or not, both Robin and Toni received postcards from somebody who had similar handwriting, which Terry and you identified as similar to Vicki. They were given different—the person who signed the cards were different—they said they were different names. I can't remember the names.
AM: Quite clearly in the same handwriting.
PS: Clearly the same handwriting. Kind of wishing us the best of luck.
AM: "Can't wait to see—."
PS: "Can't wait to see what you do with this character."
AM: And there have been—well, 20/20 released its voice-analysis findings the other night. And a lot of people—I mean people just keep surfacing all the time on my website, for instance, telling me about their experience with it. People just now who are figuring it out, what had happened to them.
G: I smell a special bonus audio commentary here.
PS: "Hi. This is—Toni." (Laughs.) "This is really my story." That would be great. Take it to Vicki. She does her commentary.
AM: "Hello."
PS: "Hi. This is Pete." Nice.
G: Well, it's great to talk to you guys. Best of luck with the film.
PS: Thank you very much!
AM: Thank you for your interesting questions.
PS: Thank you. We really appreciate it. It was great. That was really great.
[For Groucho's review of The Night Listener, click here.]


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LACMA's displays for art from the ancient world (including Egypt, Greece and Rome, and the Near East) have just been reinstalled in newly refurbished galleries in the Hammer Building. As the curator of the Egyptian portion of the new installation, I'm excited to display some works that have not been on view for many years, including two colorful mummiform coffin lids, a diorite blocky squatting statue from the 26th dynasty, wooden tomb models of figures performing household duties, and burial implements including an embalming hook, a heart scarab and a two-finger amulet. Four 1850s to 1870s era photographs of Egypt by photographers Francis Frith and Antonio Beato drawn from LACMA's Vernon Collection also add a new dimension to the gallery.
The Egyptian portion of the new gallery installation has been organized to address several specific themes: tomb, temple, animals, and royal images; it includes a number of works reflecting the surprising ingenuity of the ancient Egyptians. Three of my favorite works revealing this characteristic have not been seen before in LACMA's galleries. All three objects seem to evidence the intentions of the artist, an aspect that helps to bridge the very wide span of time between their creation and the present.
The artist who created this elegant vase carefully incorporated a sweeping red vein of stone into the design, positioning the colorful band to form a bold swoop across the body of this vessel.
Here a combination of materials—weathered wood for the feathered body and patinated bronze for the elongated beak and head as well as the feet—creates a lifelike image of an Egyptian Sacred Ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus).
The artist decorating this ceramic vessel created an amusing pattern of faux-stone, imitating the coloration and bold occlusions typical of breccia, a more enduring, and presumably eternal material.
Nancy Thomas, Curator, Egyptian Art, and Deputy Director, Art Administration and Collections

subset: commoncrawl


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2:00 - 5:00
Free book! Just swap us a review.
Here's how it works: the teen librarian will bring out several books (new titles, old titles, and titles that have not been published yet) and allow teens the chance to browse through them for one that they'd like to keep.
Teens will, in turn, swap us a review of the book by the next swap. For ages 12–18.


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Ferrari were very unlucky with the timing of the safety car in the European Grand Prix.
Seeing one of their principal rivals avoid the same misfortune by illegally overtaking the safety car prompted howls of criticism from the team, calling the result "a scandal" and claiming Formula 1 "could lose some credibility".
Four points for eight place was a meagre result from a weekend where much had been expected as the team introduced its exhaust-driven diffuser upgrade.
Felipe Massa | Fernando Alonso | |
Qualifying position | 5 | 4 |
Qualifying time comparison (Q3) | 1'38.127 (+0.052) | 1'38.075 |
Race position | 11 | 8 |
Average race lap | 1'46.600 (+0.242) | 1'46.358 |
Laps | 57/57 | 57/57 |
Pit stops | 1 | 1 |
Felipe Massa
Very close to Alonso in qualifying, Massa made it up to fourth on the first lap by passing Webber around the outside of turn three.
But his race suffered even more from the safety car appearance than Alonso's did, as he had to wait behind his team mate in the pit lane.
Alonso and Massa were the only cars who had to wait behind the safety car before pitting. Robert Kubica, 1.8 seconds behind Massa, got the message early enough to get in the pits.
After the safety car came in Massa was 17th. He moved ahead of the Virgin duo with little difficulty but couldn't pass Vitantonio Liuzzi's Force India. Penalties promoted him to a point-less 11th after the race.
Compare Felipe Massa's form against his team mate in 2010
Fernando Alonso
Alonso was fastest in front of his home crowd in second practice but both F10 drivers struggled to find the same performance improvement on the super-soft tyres that their rivals enjoyed.
Fourth place on the grid behind the Red Bulls and Lewis Hamilton was a minor disappointment. But the team looked in good shape for the race and Alonso was able to keep pace with Hamilton in the opening stages.
Then came the safety car deployment which clearly ruined his race. In front of Alonso, Vettel was far enough ahead not to get stuck behind the safety car, and Hamilton overtook it.
Alonso was tenth when the safety car came in and quickly passed Nico Hulkenberg for ninth, all the while urging his team on the radio to press ahead with complaints against Hamilton.
While Adrian Sutil ahead of him was able to find a way past Sebastien Buemi, Alonso could not do the same, which hurt the Ferrari driver when penalties were handed out to ten drivers at the end of the race.
By the end of the race Alonso, on worn medium tyres, could to little to hold back Kamui Kobayashi when the Sauber driver appeared behind him on a fresh set of super-softs. Alonso crossed the line in ninth place and inherited one place thanks to Buemi's penalty.
Sutil also got a penalty, but kept his place ahead of Alonso having pulled more than five seconds ahead of the Ferrari after passing Buemi.
Ferrari continued to criticise the race today, issuing further statements such as this:
'Scandal Hamilton, Ferrari deceived,' titles the Gazzetta dello Sport. 'It's Formula Chaos' claims La Repubblica, while the Spanish daily Marca underlines in an article titled ?'Formula 1 drivers have to oppose Hamilton's favourable treatment' pointing out how the whole race was distorted.
Read more: Alonso fumes after Hamilton penalty, Ferrari calls result 'a scandal' (Updated)
Compare Fernando Alonso's form against his team mate in 2010
2010 European Grand Prix
- The physics of Webber's Valencia crash
- Technical review: European Grand Prix
- Sauber "thrilled" by Kobayashi's passes
- 2010 European Grand Prix – the complete F1 Fanatic race weekend review
- Alonso retracts Valencia criticism
- FIA must learn from Valencia shambles
- Best finish of 2010 (Williams race review)
- Di Grassi shines (Virgin race review)
- Double finish at home (HRT race review)
- Buemi slips to ninth (STR race review)


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This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources, and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published at Inc.com.
During the dog days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, most of us become accustomed to the inevitable summer slow-down. Key people aren't available (holidays); projects stall, waiting for Fall to roll around, and a general sense of lassitude begins to creep in.
Summer doesn't need to be a write-off however. Here are 10 ways you can use those months to get ahead of the game:
1. Conduct your personal annual review.
There's something seemingly magical about the calendar year end that has us all trapped in its spell. We see the turn of the year as a time for reflection and a time to plan the year ahead. But the reality is, the calendar year-end is an entirely mechanistic construction.
An annual review (looking back at what you learned, what you achieved, what you missed out on, and rearranging priorities for the incoming year) is an incredibly useful exercise, but there's absolutely no reason your need to conduct it in the middle of a much-needed holiday, and during what is a busy time for all of us.
Do what I do. Move your personal annual review to the summer. You still get to review the entire previous year, but you also get to do it in a much less frenzied state, and with much more likelihood that you will actually implement the lessons you learn (remember all those never-happened new years' resolutions?).
2. Read.
Most of us read less than we ought to. Time constraints notwithstanding, there's something about cracking open the spine of a book (or double-clicking on an ebook file) that sparks low-level guilt pangs in many leaders. The sense that there must be something more important, or urgent, to do robs us of the opportunity to learn from others.
Grab just two books from the pile you've been meaning to get to, and build a daily reading time into your summer schedule. Read consciously, deliberately, and read to learn. If you've been too busy to even set aside some books, there are many fine lists out there, and at a pinch this book and this book are as good a place to start as any.
3. Review your project list.
You should know by now which of your current-year projects are bearing fruit, which are dead in the water, and which are still teetering between the two.
Use the summer dead-time to review your project list (if you don't have a master list of every project you're involved in, start by making a brain dump of them all. This exercise in itself will prove invaluable) and use the principles I outlined in this article to re-prioritize them.
4. Get to and learn to maintain inbox zero.
If there was ever a time to finally get on top of your email overload, it's the summer, when both email volume and (perhaps) demands on your time goes down.
I'm a big proponent of David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) methodology. It just plain works, but at the cost of an initial time investment. Get the book, set aside two or three days, and get started. Most importantly, use the dog days of summer to stay on the inbox zero horse, and groove the GTD principles.
5. Do your annual budget.
If your responsibilities include the construction and oversight of an annual budget, you may well be able to do a large percentage of the underlying prior-year analysis and budget construction during the summer months.
Why wait until the fall, when everyone is once more up to their eyes? Unless there are unavoidable reasons otherwise (the need for seasonal information, for example), get started now.
6. Take a break.
A real break. Not one of those "I'm away but I'll be checking my email and voicemail" martyr deals.
Whats that? You can't? Then I suspect you have deeper problems. Unless you're managing a start-up that's still in Early Struggle, you're either a lousy leader who can't hire or delegate well, or you have an inflated need to be needed. Maybe you should spend your summer working on that.
7. Reset your single pre-eminent goal.
Leaders who achieve great things almost always have a Single Pre-Eminent Goal(SPG)–a clear, unambiguous deliverable that sits below their 50,000-ft objectives, and which dictates and prioritizes their activities on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.
SPG's should be reviewed about twice a year, so why not use this article to do just that over the summer?
8. Do something "it's never the right time for".
Go paperless. Change accountant. Take up yoga. What projects are on your "someday/maybe" list that you wanted to start, but felt "this isn't the right time to start".
Well, now's the time. Pull up that list of deferred projects (or spend 10 minutes recollecting and listing them), pick one, and get started.
9. Rebuild your working environment.
Look around you. Chances are your working environment is less than ideal for high-quality, highly creative work. The summer months are a perfect opportunity to fix that.
Over time, we let crud accumulate in our working environment. Files for since-aborted projects; books, papers and other reading materials we'll never get around to; Old, unused tech; Souvenirs, gizmos and tchotchkes that once seemed cute, but which now just get in the way. Grab a trash bag and flush the lot. Stick it all in storage if you're queasy about throwing it away. Now take another look around. What else can you do to refresh your working pace for great productivity?
10. Give back.
Many leaders I know are generous of heart and spirit, but are so consumed with daily responsibilities that their ability to give back to the wider community shrinks, often to the point of becoming inactive.
If the last occasion you can recall doing something altruistic and substantial is over a year ago, why not make this summer the time to change that? Don't make the giving back (necessarily) about money. Instead, gift what is most valuable to you: your time. Volunteer, mentor, coach, encourage. I guarantee that you – and therefore your business – will be the better for it.
Les McKeown is the President & CEO of Predictable Success, a leading adviser on accelerated business growth. He has has started more than 40 companies and was the founding partner of an incubation consulting company. Les is the author of the bestseller Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization On the Growth Track – and Keeping It There. His latest book is The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success. @lesmckeown
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Business Etiquette: Who Should Pick Up the Check?
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This hedgehog craft was so fun, it's simple, but we had a great time doing it while Little Missy was swinging in the swing in the morning. What I really loved was his imagination when I gave him the crayons to draw where the hedgehog lived, it's habitat ( new word for the day). He made me go get more crayons for different things like grass, water and toys. It would be cute to make a whole family of them with your hand prints too!
- Gather your materials. You will need 2 colors of construction paper, I used 2 sheets of brown because my guy has insane long fingers and one yellow. Also some crayons, glue, scissors and one googly eye.
- Start by tracing your child's hand. I find it easier to trace once, and fold the paper into layers to cut the number I want out.
- Hand your child the crayons and sheet of paper to draw the hedgehog's habitat. New vocab word slipped in there!
- Cut the hand prints out while they draw.
- Cut out a head.
- Time to glue.
- Add a hand or twoAdd more for the next layer if need be.
- Add the head
- Add the glue for the eye.
- Add the eye and let dry!
Hedgehog, Pig, and the Sweet Little Friend by Lena Anderson is not a book I like. I hate giving bad reviews mostly because I think that every book has something for some child and that may be true of this book. I worry though as a parent about the message about strangers this one gives. A little pig seeks refuge at Hedgehogs house after getting lost, and while I like that the little pig asked for help the hedgehog suggests:
"First fill your tummy, then I'll make up a bed. We can all sleep together tonight. Tomorrow we'll find your mama for sure."
WHAT? Maybe I am just paranoid ( I tend to be a little over safety conscious, especially in the first few months postpartum ) but really? I immediately started to say something to my son about it and he chimed in saying that he wouldn't want to stay at someone else's house. Not saying he wouldn't but that he wouldn't want to. I told him that it's not a good idea and luckily we have phones unlike Hedgehog and we can ask a nice person to call for help or better yet find/call a police officer. Don't even get me started about the subplot of the seemingly adult male pig falling in love with this little-lost pig too. The book was originally written in Swedish and I keep thinking that perhaps the story was lost in translation? Perhaps.
Hedgehog (Animal Neighbors) by Michael Leach is a great resource about these spiky little creatures. My son and I learned so much neither of us knew about hedgehogs. Did you know baby hedgehogs are called hoglets? The book has a good mix of pictures, illustrations and short pieces of text filled with facts. The short paragraphs of text are perfect for little guys who aren't ready for a full book but want to learn more about the subject, parents can pick and choose which tidbits to share while exploring the pictures too.


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We should've figured that going to Capitol Hill to talk about the connections between free trade agreements (FTA) and migration in Latin America wouldn't go over well with our congressional representatives.
I was with Nicaraguan Uriel Carazo who was travelling in the United States to speak about how the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) was exacerbating already dire conditions in Nicaragua and pushing people to look for economic alternatives - mainly, of course, via migration (see video below of his talk at Occupy Wall Street in New York). With all the buzz around the subject, particularly in GOP debates, you'd figure folks would be keen on hearing what Carazo had to say about why people were migrating. On that rainy Washington morning, we were there to meet with the offices of Rep. Katherine Castor (D-FL), Rep. Albio Sires (D-NJ), and Dennis Cardoza (D-CA). Problem was, they didn't seem too interested. In Sires office, we didn't even get past the couch in the waiting room.
Trade agreements, especially after the 'uncontroversial' passing of the Colombia, Panama, and Korea FTAs in October, couldn't be further off the congressional radar. Castor, Sires, and Cardoza- all Democrats - voted for the bill. In their offices we ran into the typical Washington portfolio problem - the trade person tells you to talk to the immigration person, and the immigration person tells you to talk to the trade person.
Problem was, it turned out, we were in the wrong debate all together. The connection that Washington made with migration was with militarization, not trade. This we probably should've known, in October Republican candidate Herman Cain brought up the possibility of electrifying the fence along the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Though Cain later apologized for this, his response was on-line with Washington's border and immigration policy. It really wasn't so far-fetched.
In the very Cannon House Office Building where we were making our congressional visits, there was another debate going on in a congressional hearing called "Protecting the Homeland: How can DHS use DOD Technology to Secure the Border?" It was about the use of war-zone equipment returned from Iraq on the U.S.-Mexico border – such as "Humvees, night vision equipment and unmanned surveillance aircraft," or drones. This debate has had enough political traction that Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) has introduced a bill called the The Send Equipment for National Defense Act. "The American people have invested billions of dollars in equipment used to secure Iraq;" according to Poe, "now it's time to use that equipment to secure the United States."
On that same very rainy day, down the street from where we were, the Department of Homeland security issued a notification that it would be requesting proposals for its integrated fixed tower program from the private sector. This is the resuscitation of the "virtual fence" on the U.S.-Mexico border, a project that was temporarily disbanded last year when it was known as SBInet- the application of advanced surveillance and computer technology to border enforcement, an invisible wall that officials hope has the same effect as a real wall in rural areas near the U.S.-Mexico boundary. In 2006 the three year multi-billion dollar contract went to Boeing Corporation, but its equipment didn't work properly. Now DHS requires that the equipment be able to detect a single, walking, average-sized adult human at a range of up to 7.5 miles.
University of Texas El Paso anthropologist Josiah Heyman described the virtual wall in broad terms as a continuation of the strategy of "massing of police forces, including military and intelligence agencies, in the border region," and that all walls "physical and technological" need to be understood as part of this wider development. In the absence of any guiding comprehensive immigration reform, all debates always end up with this sort of militarization as the solution. Thus, this becomes the answer to the migration-free trade "problem".
The fundamentals of this free trade problem in Nicaragua, Uriel Carazo told congress members, were the privatization of basic services, the low wages and employee abuses in the free trade zones- especially in textile and tobacco factories, and small farmers going bankrupt. "It is these conditions," he told the representatives, "that are driving people north." Small farmers who could no longer make it sold their land to finance their journey.
But Washington, Heyman wrote, has moved ". . . to transform border issues into security issues" and this is "highly contested and contradictory." He said that the United States has arrived to this point because of "insecure prosperity" and "clinging to order" in a world of vast inequalities. Two fundamental ways in which arising concerns are expressed are through "citizenship differences" in which citizens, or "deserving insiders," are pit against "serving (but not deserving) outsiders"; and flat out racism against Latino/as, especially Mexican and Central American migrants. With one "rigid and coercive mechanism" border policy attempts to solve these problems that are socio-economic at root. Carazo fleshes out this analysis even more by stressing that free trade agreements such as CAFTA both exacerbate these vast inequalities and create countless socio-economic problems in Nicaragua.
Carazo also realized that such CAFTA-like policies have been put in place in the United States and recognized a common struggle in a message to Occupy Wall Street demonstrators when we were in New York at the beginning of November:
"Now that I'm here I realize the struggle you have here at Occupy Wall Street is the same struggle we've had in Nicaragua for a long time."
The walls and militarization are less between countries, Carazo seemed to say, and more between the economically rich and poor. Maybe this is the real logic behind the Washington immigration narrative.


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Kanye West's Paris Fashion Week debut was rap with a capital-C.
BY Lisa Armstrong | 02 October 2011
It was certainly a grand venue, a ravishing neo-classical Lycée opposite the Panthéon on one of Paris's most imposing cobbled squares. Inside the Lycee's library, the book-lined walls were concealed behind temporary white screens and the room frazzled with infra red light. Kanye West's fashion debut was like being subjected to an hour long MRI scan - but not as much fun. Those blanked-out books turned out to be a depressingly apt metaphor for this entire stupendously vacuous enterprise. Even those actresses turned designers, Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen sisters struggled to look engaged.
Kanye West's spring/summer 2012 collection in pictures
There has been much breathless speculation in the media in the past few days about who was really designing Kanye West's collection. He was spotted shopping for fabric and zips in London, and he was rumoured to be consulting Louise Wilson, head of St Martin's fashion course (an allegation she furiously denied). In the end rumours settled on young British designer Louise Goldin as a possible collaborator, along with a stylist from Australian Harper's .
Double vision: luxury fashion by the Olsen twins
Really, though: who cares? If this is the way fashion's going then anyone with any real talent should seriously consider a career in Tesco instead. Because that's a job with dignity. Unlike ghost-designing for a rapper who has the presumption to show "his" very first collection in Paris during prêt-à-porter - supposedly the summit for true creativity in fashion. It was the equivalent of Karl Lagerfeld launching a hip-hop career: i.e. absurd.
Paris Fashion Week: Miracles? Maybe, but muted ones
To be fair, what West and his ghosts sent out looked well enough made, and all that video-set experience means he knows how to make a model look sexy - no death-head make-up for him. Backstage, he was even tweaking the clothes before the models walked. But Oh dear God, those clothes: does the world really need another slashed bandage dress that requires a woman to go commando and depilate every last centimetre of her body or for that matter another pair of Balmain-esque spray-on shiny jeans? Not sure those fur rucksacks are a major - or even minor - contribution to civilisation either. Why so much fur in a spring collection?
We could endlessly debate the merits of hooker dressing - it comes down to taste in the end. But we can certainly take issue with clothes so tight they reduce a woman's walk to a hobble. Not big, not clever, and not welcome. Afterwards, we asked an Olsen if she'd liked it. "Yes!", she trilled. Any particular look? "Ummm....". Exactly.


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The comprehensive Missouri Historical Counties Dataset shapefile holds the polygons, metadata, and attribute data for every different configuration of every county or county equivalent in Missouri, dated to the day, from the creation of the first county on 1 October 1804, through 31 December 2000. The Historical Counties Dataset, together with a number of supplementary cartographic data files and text files, enable users easily to employ a geographic information system for the analysis and display of county-related historical data.
First among the non-cartographic data files is the Missouri Comprehensive Database (a tab-delimited text file that can be imported into a database or spreadsheet program), which provides descriptions of all known changes in state and county boundaries, changes in county organization and attachments, and changes in status and name, together with citations to the sources. These data include unmappable boundary changes, which usually means changes too small to plot as polygons at compilation scale, changes whose shapes could not be plotted at compilation scale (e.g., shift of a boundary line from the centerline of a road to one shoulder or the other), and changes that could not be mapped for other reasons (e.g., the location of the change could not be determined). In the Comprehensive Database, there is a separate entry for each county involved in each event. That facilitates assembling all the events pertaining to a single county.
In addition to the Comprehensive Database, there are five supplemental texts. These are: (1) a comprehensive County Index (includes proposed and extinct counties and non-county areas and provides cross references for name changes, with hyperlinks to corresponding individual county chronologies), (2) a Consolidated Chronology that organizes all the data by date, combining all the counties involved in an event into a single, composite entry, (3) a set of Individual County Chronologies, each one covering all the changes in a single county or equivalent, (4) a Bibliography that lists the primary and secondary sources found useful in the historical research, and (5) a Commentary on the research problems and materials that were remarkable or unusual in the process of historical compilation (Not every state requires a commentary.). A "Read Me" file introduces all these files and indicates how to get started with them.
Counties and their equivalents (e.g., parishes in Louisiana and independent cities in four other states) cover all the territory of the United States, function as repositories of valuable records, and long have been used as the geographic base units for the gathering of essential social, political, and economic data. The authority to create, change, or eliminate counties and to specify their functions lies with the states and their predecessors. In detail, the role of counties varies from state to state, but in every state they administer the judicial system and provide a great number of services. In the process, counties collect and preserve large quantities of information. For example: records of marriages, births, and deaths; probated wills; militia training; real-estate transfers; tax collections; welfare benefits; school programs; voter registrations; etc. Outside densely populated cities, counties have served as colonial, territorial, and state legislative districts and as the building blocks of congressional districts. In the nineteenth century they became the grassroots centers for the development of political parties. Moreover, counties have been the principal geographic units for the collection and aggregation of data from colonial/territorial, state, and federal censuses.
Unfortunately for researchers, the average county has changed size, shape, or location between four and five times. Therefore, knowing the present county of the place where a past event occurred may not be sufficient to find its official records. If county boundaries changed in the meantime, it is necessary to learn what county had jurisdiction at the time of the event to identify the courthouse where the record is stored today. If the reported population of a county changed from one census to another, was that because of an increase or a decrease in the number of people, or an annexation or loss of populated territory, or a combination of both? Trying to analyze county-based historical data without controlling for boundary changes is almost certain to yield errors and lead to false conclusions.
Plotting boundary changes of all counties together and in sequence, not merely reconstructing the counties at different points in time (e.g., dates of censuses) or concentrating on a single county at a time (thereby taking it out of the context of what happened to its neighbors), is an important aspect of the historical compilation process. Doing so gives the compiler valuable insight into how the counties developed and whether the intentions of legislators were realized in their enactments. For example, a law may say its purpose is to transfer territory from County A to County B, but the actual effect, visibly evident from the plot, may be to transfer territory from both A and C to B. When boundaries are plotted this way, gores (gaps between counties) and overlaps created accidentally by the legislature are readily apparent, and errors in plotting are discovered almost immediately. It is nearly impossible to detect such developments unless the counties are plotted together. Descriptive entries in the comprehensive database and in the chronologies reflect actual changes because they are written from the compilation plots, not from the laws alone or from secondary works.
One additional benefit of this approach is that it provides an automatic checking mechanism. When the historical compiler reaches the end of the development of the county network, the final version should be identical with the boundaries of the present county. If there is a difference between the completed compilation and the standard, current map, the compiler knows there is a mistake somewhere. Such a discrepancy is rare, but when one is discovered, the compiler reviews the compilation to find the source of the problem. Usually it is a matter of the compiler erring in the plot of a boundary or accidentally omitting some change, either of which can easily be corrected, but occasionally the fault is found on the current, federal map. When the error appears on the federal map, the boundary is plotted accurately and a brief explanation of the difference is added to the supplemental Commentary.
Problematic Data. Every so often, a state's law makers mistakenly overlapped the lines of two or more counties. Once such an overlap was detected, it seldom lasted long because dual jurisdictions generate only trouble, and states acted swiftly to eliminate them. This atlas treats areas of overlapping jurisdiction as distinct polygons and provides the usual data (e.g., start dates and end dates) for each one.
Much more common than overlaps are non-county areas, that is, areas not within the jurisdiction of any county. Sometimes legal boundary descriptions left small areas, known as gores, outside the bounds of any county. Such inadvertent omissions errors most often occurred in the early days of a state's history when boundary makers lacked knowledge of the state's topography. Sometimes, legislators purposely did not extend county jurisdiction over all of their state's territory as early as possible, but waited until they had a better understanding of the lay of the land and until the prospect of European settlement was closer. Under those circumstances, they often provided a minimum of legal and administrative services for each non-county area by formally attaching it to a fully operational county; later, when the area was ready for settlement or was already under development, the state created one or more counties from the non-county area.
This atlas aims to be absolutely comprehensive and, with a few exceptions (see next paragraph), to leave no "holes" in its historical and geographic coverage of a state. In practice, each state compilation includes all the territory within its bounds in 2000, regardless of what authority created or altered a county there, plus all other territory that may have been within the state's jurisdiction at an earlier time. Also, there are no empty spaces, no areas outside a named polygon. Each non-county area, whether an accidental gore or a region purposely set aside for future settlement, is represented by a polygon, the polygon is named (often merely as a non-county area with a number, such as NCA1), and a full set of data about it is entered in the database and the attribute file.
The exceptions to the "no-holes" policy described above are the large non-county areas in western Virginia, New York, and the New England states during much of the seventeenth century. In London and the other European capitals, officials had access to so little accurate information about inland territory that imperial claims and land grants, including colonial charters, often were incomplete or imprecise or asserted limits (e.g., the Pacific Ocean or "South Sea") that were so extreme as to be impractical to plot. Compilers treated those large, indefinitely bounded, and inadequately described, non-county areas as empty territory and made no attempt to represent them as coherent, historically complete polygons. Because the ArcGIS program requires that all polygons be closed, the compilers supplied estimated boundary lines to close polygons representing indefinitely extensive frontier counties and noted their action in the "Change" field.
Some changes have not been mapped because the change is too small to map, or the location is unknown, or both; for example, a law that transferred ten acres belonging to farmer Smith from one county to another would be unmappable because the parcel is too small to be mapped at the standard compilation scale or because the location of Smith's farm cannot be discovered. When the location of a change too small to map is known, the historical compiler marks the location and the digital compiler digitizes it as a point. All such tiny changes are collected in a separate shapefile, usually labeled [YEAR]_pt.shp.
Using the historical compiler's plotting overlays and associated material (e.g., notes, copies of the laws), the GIS compiler draws the counties in digital form. For digitizing, the program is ArcGIS 9.1, and the electronic modern "base map" is from the Digital Chart of the World (DCW) provided with ArcGIS by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), plus, as needed, such other data (often from another source) as the grid of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). By repeating much of the procedure of the historical compiler, the digital compiler implicitly checks the work of her predecessor and occasionally finds line segments that must be corrected. As digitizing proceeds, data from the comprehensive database are entered into the attribute table.
After perfecting the boundary lines, the GIS digitizer assembles copies of all county polygons and attribute data into a single shapefile, the Historical Counties Dataset shapefile.
The locations of places and landmarks cited in the boundary descriptions are gathered from the modern, federal base maps or from secondary publications (e.g., gazetteers, county histories, articles in historical journals), old maps, or local experts.
Several steps are taken to insure the accuracy of the boundaries as they are manually plotted, and to maintain the precision of those plots as they are manually digitized. The digitizing process involves faithfully drawing the sketched counties using landmarks such as rivers, roads, and places. These positional data were obtained from ESRI's Data and Maps collection (1:100,000 scale). Additionally, Public Land Survey System data at 1:100,000 scale were used to digitize boundaries in Missouri. These PLSS data were acquired from the Missouri Spatial Data Information Center. Once the initial digitizing is complete a master file is created and uploaded on IMS. When the digitizing is complete, the digitized polygons and their attribute data are once again checked for accuracy against the chronology for the state.
No regular or systematic updating of the pre-2001 data is anticipated because (a) the historical data cannot change and (b) the compilers believe their methods and materials are sufficient to produce data that are complete and correct. (That is not to say no error can slip through. Suggestions for ad hoc changes or additions to the historical data, together with an explanation of why the change should be made and supporting evidence, should be directed to email@example.com or Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture, The Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., Chicago, IL 60610.) County boundary changes that occur after 31 December 2000 will routinely be digitized by both the state of Missouri and the federal government and, therefore, will be available from agencies of those governments in separate files in the indefinite future.
The base map for this operation was the Missouri map from the U.S.G.S. State Base series at the scale of 1:500,000. (The 1:1,000,000 version of the map was employed whenever smaller scale was appropriate or needed to plot large or simple changes.) The original strategy for the Atlas was to publish all states in book form before venturing to digitize the data, and the 1:500,000 scale maps were used in making the books. Before switching to all digital products and methods, about 80% of the states had been researched and compiled using this series of base maps, including 24 states published in 19 printed volumes. It was not practical to re-compile those data at a larger scale like 1:100,000. (See below, the next two process steps.)
As digitizing proceeds, data from the Comprehensive Database are entered into the attribute table. The process of entering attribute data entails an implicit review of the database and, if the greater map detail involved in working at digitization scale (see below) is different from the original descriptions, that may lead to updates of the database, including dates and version numbers and even descriptions of changes.
The compiler works "heads up," facing the monitor and using the mouse to draw lines against a background of the digital base map. The historical compiler's plots are not scanned and overlaid on the digital base map, nor does the digital compiler trace the earlier work on a digitizing tablet, because neither technique is as efficient or accurate as drawing the lines anew. One reason is that the scale for most of the historical compilations is 1:500,000 and the scale for digitization is 1:100,000. It is most unusual to draw a map at a larger scale than its source or early version, but in this case it was unavoidable because digitization did not commence until after nearly all the states had already been compiled at the smaller scale. In effect, the historical plots are a preliminary stage, and the plots from that work become the chief sources or guides (supported by the historical notes and copies of the legal descriptions, and other material) for the digital compiler who renders the final, detailed version of the boundary lines.
Based on the original historical county data, a table was created to specify, for each component polygon, the different counties to which it belonged and the time frames. The table was programmatically checked to verify that each component polygon was correctly assigned to historical counties throughout its life, with no unexpected gaps or overlaps.
The component polygons were then reassembled back into the historical counties, and converted to a shapefile. The resulting historical county shapefile consists of a large number of overlapping polygons; however, as a result of the topology check process, the subset of counties in effect at any selected date is topologically correct, with no unexpected gaps or overlaps. There are a number of known gaps and overlaps, however, due to legislative or surveying errors, and to conflicting territorial claims.
Because the FIPS system (see below) provides no codes for some extinct counties, no codes for non-county areas, and no codes for the colonies and territories that were predecessors of the states, it has been necessary to create a more comprehensive, alternative system of identifiers. The system adopted by the Atlas identifies each state and colony or territory with three letters, the first two based on the system of two-letter codes employed by the U.S. Post Office and the third indicating the status of the organization. (In most cases that is simply a C for colony, a T for territory, or an S for state.) For example, IAT stands for Iowa Territory and IAS for the state of Iowa. Some precursors of states need special ID codes, most of which are intuitively easy to read and to apply, especially in the context of a particular state's dataset. Examples are NWT (Northwest Territory, formally named Territory Northwest of the River Ohio), SWF (Spanish West Florida), FRS (State of Franklin), DKT (Dakota Territory), CRC (Colony of Carolina), and TXR (Republic of Texas).
Counties are identified by appending their names to the state codes, as in "KYS_Adair" for Adair County in the state of Kentucky. Non-county areas are abbreviated NCA; within a specific state they are differentiated from each other by adding a numeral to the abbreviation, as in "MOS_NCA1" for non-county area number 1 in the state of Missouri. Occasionally special codes are needed to deal with unusual historical situations, as in Vermont where the original Washington County, identified as "VTS_Washington01," became extinct and later the name was applied to another county ("VTS_Washington") that continues today. The county identifiers also have been created with an eye towards users who may wish to download and work with more than one state file for regions and want a comprehensive way to sort and select shapefiles or to link the attribute table to the comprehensive database.
Historically, almost every colony and territory transformed smoothly into statehood with no complications that might have required separate datasets for the state and its predecessors. The exception is Dakota Territory, which has its own dataset, and which split into a pair of states.


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VW Polo SE 1.6 TDI 75
With a classy look inspired by the Golf, and the promise of wallet-friendly costs, new car aims to regain supermini crown
Evolution, not revolution, was clearly the watchword for Volkswagen's designers. The firm was never going to take any risks with the styling of the latest Polo, and the result is as conservative as they come.
With its unmistakable VW face and solid proportions, the newcomer looks like a shrunken Golf. It is longer, wider and lower than the model it replaces, and its thin, horizontal grille, swept-back headlights and more pronounced arches give it a leaner appearance than before.
Video: watch CarBuyer's video review of the VW Polo
There are no surprises inside, either; the quality dashboard and driver-friendly layout are exactly what you'd expect from the firm.
There's a superb range of seat and steering wheel adjustment, while the audio and ventilation controls are located high up and within easy reach.
With the same white-backlit dials as in the Golf and decent soft-touch materials, the upper part of the Polo's cabin has a classy feel.
But you get a plastic steering wheel as standard. Moving downwards, the materials are no better than those in the Fiesta. And while build quality is excellent, this is also true of the Ford and Mazda.
Despite having the shortest wheelbase of our quartet, the VW provides good rear legroom, while its 280-litre boot capacity trails the Fiesta's by only 15 litres.
This small margin is unlikely to make a lot of difference day-to-day, but there is more cause for concern at the front end.
Start up the 1.6-litre TDI motor and you'll hear a clatter from under the bonnet. Even though the car is all-new, our noise meter indicated
that externally at idle it was 10dB louder than the Ford. Decent soundproofing means this is less obvious on the inside, though, and once on the move things do improve. In fact, excellent wind noise isolation resulted in the Polo being the quietest car here at 70mph.
Less easy to hide is the diesel's lethargic nature. The TDI is slow to rev and its power delivery lacks urgency.
With only 74bhp and 195Nm of torque – the Ford delivers 88bhp and 200Nm – our VW sprinted from 0-60mph in 14.3 seconds. That's 2.3 seconds slower than the Fiesta.
In-gear pace is also sluggish. Long ratios and the heaviest kerbweight here meant 50-70mph in fifth took 13.6 seconds. That's nearly five seconds down on the Ford, and all three rivals felt quicker.
The more expensive 88bhp variant would undoubtedly fare much better, but the lazy throttle response below 2,000rpm and the poor refinement take the edge off our less powerful version.
Even its five- speed gearbox is a major disappointment – it feels the same as the one fitted to the outgoing model and has a reluctant shift that is far removed from the snappy action of the Mazda or Ford.
Unfortunately, the handling does little to bring a smile to your face, either.
While the Polo is safe and undramatic, it can't match the poise and precision of the Fiesta. Its responses seem muted and slow, with more body roll and less front-end grip.
Crucially, the VW's ride comfort isn't perfect, either. It isn't as firm as the Mazda's, but neither does it iron out imperfections in the same accomplished way as the Fiesta.
Ultimately, all our testers agreed that motorway surfaces were best dealt with by the Renault.
On the plus side, the Polo feels as solid and reassuringly well built as ever.
Also, stability control is standard across the range, although curtain airbags are an expensive £550 option.
So, the new VW is a step forward from its predecessor – but is it enough of a leap ahead to rise to the top of this toughest of segments?
Chart position: 4
WHY: Polo needs to raise its game, and all-new model looks the part with scaled-down Golf styling and a prestige image.


text:
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Archived since: Jul, 2019
On July 24, 2019, Governor of Puerto Rico's Ricardo Roselló announced he was resigning from office effective August 2nd. It was the culmination of two weeks of mass protests in Puerto Rico calling for his resignation amid corruption scandals and the leak of a chat between Roselló and his inner circle that included homophobic and sexist language, where the casualties of Hurricane María were mocked, and where possible illegal activities were commited. This is a collection of web resources documenting the events that led to the governor's resignation, and the protests that were characterized by the social media hashtag #RickyRenuncia. It covers the period between July 11 to August 2nd, and includes news reports, opinion articles, and social media content. El 24 de julio de 2019, el gobernador de Puerto Rico Ricardo Roselló anunció que renunciaba a su puesto efectivo el 2 de agosto. Este anuncio se da luego dos semanas de protestas masivas en Puerto Rico exigiendo su renuncia debido a escándalos de corrupción y la filtración de un chat entre Roselló y sus ayudantes cercanos que incluye comentarios homofóbicos y sexistas, donde se toma ligeramente las muertes causadas por el huracán María, y donde se cometen posibles violaciones a leyes de administración pública. En esta colección se documentan los eventos que llevaron a la renuncia de Ricardo Roselló y las protestas caracterizadas en redes sociales por el hashtag #RickyRenuncia. Cubre el período del 11 de julio al 2 de agosto de 2019, e incluye noticias, artículos de opinión y contenidos de las redes sociales.
Archived since: Aug, 2014
In August of 2014, the Archive-It team put out a call for URLs related to the August 9th shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. Soon after we were joined by Archive-It partner Washington University in St. Louis, MO who contributed lists of URLs and solicited URLs from communities in and around Ferguson. Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities contributed a significant number of URLs extracted from tweets about Michael Brown and Ferguson. In December we expanded the collection to include content related to the July 17th chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY, and the reactions around the country to the acquittal of the police officers in both cases. The collection then progressed further to reflect the movement building in reaction to police violence against people of color. Today the #blacklivesmatter Web Archive contains news articles, blogs, social media, and other websites related to Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, protests and demonstrations around the country, and seeks to document the movement as it grows and evolves. Note: Many of these sites contain videos, some of which may not play back in the page. To view archived videos click on the Videos link in the yellow banner at the top of the archived web page.
Archived since: Jan, 2012
This is a collection on the events leading up to the 2012 Russian Elections. Thanks to the State Historical Public Library in Moscow for helping to curate this collection.
Subject: Spontaneous Events, Politics & Elections, Government
Archived since: Apr, 2013
This collection is comprised of contributions from curators and subject matter experts; and includes news articles, blogs, social media sites, and organizational websites related to the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing and its aftereffects
Subject: Spontaneous Events
Archived since: Mar, 2013
News articles, blogs, organizational websites, and social media related to the 2013 Supreme Court hearings and subsequent rulings for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California's Proposition 8.
Subject: Government - US Federal, Politics & Elections, Government - National
Archived since: May, 2015
This is a collection of web resources related to the April 25th, 2015 earthquake and it's after effects in Nepal. Contributors to this collection include Columbia University Library, Yale University Library, and the Bodleian Library.
Archived since: Jun, 2016
This collection includes web material related to the June 12, 2016 mass shooting perpetrated at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, its victims, and its impacts on the local and global LGBTQ and Latinx communities. It includes news reports and blog posts, social media feeds, interactive timelines, and videos. The Internet Archive seeks your nominations of further materials to be included in the collection and preserved for future generations. Help us by contributing URLs and descriptions here: http://goo.gl/forms/vvxbaE6oxxHYF4Lq1
Collector: Internet Archive
Archived since: Nov, 2016
A collection of news stories, websites, and social media commentaries collected after the 2016 presidential election results. URLs for this collection were crowd-sourced from the general public.
Subject: Politics & Elections
Archived since: Mar, 2014
A collection of news stories and websites related to the death of Spain's first democratically elected prime minister, Adolfo Suarez. URLs for this collection were provided by the National Library of Spain.
Archived since: Jul, 2014
The main website of the Burning Man event.
Subject: Arts & Humanities, Society & Culture
Archived since: Jan, 2015
A collection of social media, news stories, and institutional websites related to the January 7th 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris. Seed URLs were nominated by the Archive-It team and IIPC member organizations.
Archived since: Dec, 2015
This collection is a snapshot of the Cuban Web Domain (.cu) from early 2016.
Archived since: Oct, 2016
This is a collection of websites, social media feeds, news articles, and videos concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and actions related to its direction through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. To add to this collection, please use the submission form available at: https://goo.gl/forms/rtXoCHb9zdwhOqu52 [collection image attribution: "A tribal elder addressing people at the pipeline blockade" by Shane Balkowitsch; CC BY-SA 4.0]
Archived since: Jun, 2016
The Decentralized Web Summit was an event held June 8-9, 2016, at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, CA. The summit brought together web technologists, service providers, thinkers, journalist, and others in order to imagine and articulate the needs of a World Wide Web that is "open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing, and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control." Its program included keynote addresses by Mitchell Baker (Mozilla Foundation), Vint Cerf (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (W3C) Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), and Cory Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation); panel discussions; and lightning talks by web developers , designers, and academics. This web archive preserves and provides access to the Summit's official website and YouTube-based livestream of events, its surrounding social media conversation, its reactions and recaps among blogs and the popular press, and materials related to its speakers' and panelists' presentations.
Collector: Internet Archive
Archived since: Jan, 2010
This collection is currently documenting the events of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath, including the rescue efforts from around the world and the stories and circumstances of the Haitian people. Archive-It partners Library of Congress, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Virginia Tech and CTRnet, and University of Texas Libraries have all contributed websites for this collection.
Subject: Spontaneous Events, Society & Culture, earthquake, poverty, global aid, infrastructure, survivors
Date: 2010-01-21 00:00:00
Archived since: Aug, 2019
This archive contains digital news and social media coverage of the El Paso mass shooting, August 3, 2019, and related events.
Archived since: Dec, 2016
This is a collection of press articles about the End of Term 2016 project. End of Term is a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government web sites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2017.
Subject: Government, Politics & Elections, Computers & Technology, Web archiving, Government
Collector: Internet Archive
Archived since: Oct, 2016
A collection of various press and media documenting the GifCities project (http://www.gifcities.org/). GifCities was released as part of the Internet Archive's 20th anniversary celebration in October 2016.
Subject: Arts & Humanities, Computers & Technology, Society & Culture
Archived since: Aug, 2017
This is a collection of websites, news articles, advisories, social media feeds, and other online materials related to Hurricane, later Tropical Storm, Harvey in 2017. To add to this collection, please use the following contribution form: https://goo.gl/forms/PKvXnR3Zc59QzBU12 / / Esta es una colección de sitios web, artículos de prensa, avisos oficiales, feeds de las redes sociales y otros materiales en línea relacionados con el huracán, y luego clasificado como tormenta tropical, Harvey en 2017. Para agregar a esta colección, utilice el siguiente formulario de contribución: https://goo.gl/forms/VrD0Y0Ixsr2pwQks1 / / Translations by Ana D. Rodriguez and Natalie Baur.
Archived since: Jan, 2011
This collection consists of websites documenting the revolution in Tunisia in 2011. Our partners at Library of Congress and Bibliothèque Nationale de France have contributed websites for this collection, and the sites are primarily in French and Arabic with some in English.
Subject: Spontaneous Events, Blogs & Social Media, Government - National
Archived since: Jan, 2011
This collection documents the events in Northern Africa and the Middle East starting in January 2011. Content includes blogs, social media and news sites about Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and other countries. Countries separated by site groups (scroll down the page to see all of them). Archived content is in Arabic, English, and French.
Subject: Spontaneous Events, Government, Blogs & Social Media, North Africa, Middle East, blogs, social media
Creator: Archive-It
Publisher: Archive-It
Coverage: North Africa, Middle East, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Sudan
Date: 2011
Rights: CC
Archived since: Nov, 2011
This collection documents and aggregates information related to the Occupy Movement
starting in the Autumn of 2011 and continuing in 2012. In September of 2011, a demonstration was held in New York City, calling itself Occupy Wall Street
. This demonstration inspired similar protests and demonstrations around the world calling for social and economic equality, which are collectively now referred to as the Occupy Movement
Subject: Spontaneous Events, Society & Culture, Politics & Elections, occupy movement, activism, politics
Creator: Archive-It
Publisher: Internet Archive, Archive-It
Coverage: international, US
Date: 2011
Language: english, spanish
Collector: Archive-It, Archive-It Partners
Archived since: Jan, 2012
A collection on the January 2012 web blackout in protest of the SOPA and PIPA legislation being considered by the US Congress. Sites include those participating in the black out as well as commentary and news surrounding the event. Thanks to Library of Congress and other colleagues for Url submissions.
Subject: Blogs & Social Media, Government - US Federal, Spontaneous Events
Date: January 18, 2012
Language: English
Archived since: Jul, 2013
This is a collection of news sites, articles, blogs, and social media related to the train accident in Santiago de Compostela Spain compiled by the Biblioteca Nacional de España
Archived since: Jun, 2013
This is a collection of news articles, blogs and social media sites covering the 2013 Protests in Turkey. Websites in this collection were submitted by individuals and institutions around the world. Archived content is in both English and Turkish.
Archived since: Jan, 2013
Family, friends and colleagues remember Aaron Swartz November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013
Archived since: Aug, 2017
A collection of news, social media, and information on the solar eclipse occuring on August 23, 2017. This eclipse is notable that a wide range of the United States was in view of its totality.
Subject: Science & Health, Society & Culture, Blogs & Social Media
Collector: Internet Archive
Archived since: Feb, 2014
This collection seeks to document conflict in Ukraine. Contributions to this collection were made by the Archive-It team and subject matter experts from Stanford University, Library of Congress, Global Investigative News Network, and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in the fields of Investigative Journalism, Russian, and Eurasian studies. Content includes news outlets, social media, blogs, and government websites. Sites are in English, Ukrainian, Russian, and other languages.
Subject: Government, Spontaneous Events
Archived since: Oct, 2013
This collection documents United States federal government shutdowns. Documentation of the September 2013 government shutdown consists of websites that address the impact of the shutdown in some way on their front page. These URLs were suggested by a very active community of librarians and archivists using an online seed URL nomination form created by Archive-It staff. Documentation of the January 2018 shutdown additionally includes a dataset of 29,403 seed URLs extracted from #shutdown-related Twitter data using Social Feed Manager.
Subject: Government - US Federal, Politics & Elections
Date: 2013, 2018
Archived since: Jul, 2010
A collection of websites, news coverage, and commentary surrounding the Wikileaks releases. This collection includes documents released from the Afghan war diaries and the Iraq war logs, as well as the more recent release of the US State diplomatic cables. Please note, there are thousands of news articles, blog entries, etc. that are not listed below. To access these, the best way is to perform a search for the content you are interested in.
Subject: Spontaneous Events, Government - National
Page 1 of 1 (31 Total Results)


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A House GOP conservative blocked a long-overdue $19 billion disaster aid bill Friday, complaining it leaves out money needed to address the migrant crisis at the border and extending a tempest over hurricane and flood relief that has left the measure meandering for months.
The move came a day after the measure flew through the Senate despite a Democratic power move to strip out President Donald Trump's $4.5 billion request for dealing with a migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a former aide to Texas firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz, complained that it does not contain any money to address increasingly urgent border needs. "It is a bill that includes nothing to address the international emergency and humanitarian crisis we face at our southern border," Roy said.
He also objected to speeding the measure through a nearly empty chamber, saying it was important for lawmakers to actually vote on a bill that "spends a significant amount of taxpayer money."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a key force behind the measure which moved through the Senate with the enthusiastic embrace of Roy's two GOP senators, said the delays have gone on too long. Senate action came after Trump surrendered in his fight with powerful Democrats over aid to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.
"Now, after the President and Senate Republicans disrupted and delayed disaster relief for more than four months, House Republicans have decided to wage their own sabotage," Pelosi said. "Every day of Republican obstruction, more disasters have struck, more damage has piled up and more families have been left in the cold."
Democrats said the House might try to again pass the measure next week during a session, like Friday's, that would otherwise be pro forma. If that doesn't succeed, a quick bipartisan vote would come after Congress returns next month from its Memorial Day recess.
Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla., said she was upset at Roy's action. "The fact that one person from a state that is directly affected could object, it's just irresponsible," she said. Texas was slammed by record floods in 2017, though not Roy's San Antonio-area district.
GOP leaders and Trump support the bill, as do some lawmakers who are otherwise some of the chamber's staunchest conservatives, such as Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga.
"This is a rotten thing to do. This is going to pass," said Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass.
Hours after Roy blocked the measure, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a digital ad in his district criticizing his move. It depicted a submerged Roy and said he's "keeping Texas families underwater."
Roy won his 2018 election by less than three percentage points. House Democrats' campaign committee considers him a prime target for next year's elections.
The relief measure would deliver money to Southern states suffering from last fall's hurricanes, Midwestern states deluged with springtime floods and fire-ravaged rural California, among others. Puerto Rico would also get help for hurricane recovery, ending a months-long dispute between Trump and powerful Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Trump said Thursday that he will enthusiastically sign the bill, which delivers much-needed help to many areas in the country where he performs well with voters.
The House drama came less than 24 hours after the Senate passed the bill by a sweeping 85-8 vote that represented a brush-back pitch by a chamber weary of Trump's theatrics and where some members are increasingly showing impatience with the lack of legislative action.
Trump said he favored the bill even though $4 billion-plus to deal with the humanitarian crisis involving Central American migrants border has been removed.
"I didn't want to hold that up any longer," Trump said. "I totally support it."
Much of the money would go to Trump strongholds such as the Florida Panhandle, rural Georgia and North Carolina, and Iowa and Nebraska. Several military facilities would receive money to rebuild, including Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and Tyndall Air Force Base in Northwest Florida.
Disaster aid bills are always ultimately bipartisan, but this round bogged down. And a late-week breakdown on the appropriations panel left important must-do work for lawmakers when Congress returns next month.
After months of fighting, Democrats bested Trump and won further aid to Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory slammed by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017.
Talks over Trump's border request broke down over conditions Democrats wanted to place on money to provide care and shelter for asylum-seeking Central American migrants. Talks were closely held and the opaque process sometimes left even veteran lawmakers in the dark.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., accused Democrats of insisting on "poison pills" that made the talks collapse. But his office wouldn't go on the record to specify what they were. Other Republicans, especially those trying to project a bipartisan image for next year's campaign, were more circumspect.
"Right now the total dollar amounts are pretty close on border security. Democrats and Republicans are pretty much in agreement about it," said Sen. David Perdue. "We're just trying to work out some detailed language, but we didn't think we could wait any longer to get this done."
In fact, among the reasons for the late-week breakdown was a demand by Hispanic forces and House liberals such as Pelosi ally Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., to insist on a provision to tighten up existing language that tries to block the Homeland Security Department from getting information from the Department of Health and Human Services to help track immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally if they care for migrant refugee children arriving in huge numbers at the border.
All sides agree that another bill of more than $4 billion will be needed almost immediately to refill nearly empty agency accounts to care for migrants, though Democrats are fighting hard against the detention facilities requested by Trump.
Trump rushed to try to claim credit, too, though his budget office never submitted an official request for the disaster aid. But he talked up the aid in a recent trip to the timber-rich Florida Panhandle, his best region in a state without which it's virtually impossible for him to win reelection.
"Well, we're going to get the immigration money later, according to everybody," Trump said. "I have to take care of my farmers with the disaster relief."q


text:
The main goals of the Center for Hereditary Retinal Disease are:
- To provide state-of-art patient care to affect patients and their family members
- To maximally advance clinical and basic research into the cause and treatment of hereditary retinal conditions.
Rationale for Establishment of the Center
Patients with hereditary retinal disease are usually not adequately managed by the practicing clinician. There are multiple reasons to why this occurs. First, the clinician may not have a broad knowledge of this large group of conditions to make the correct diagnosis. Access to specialized tests necessary for diagnosis such as electrophysiologic tests is difficult. Likewise, access to genetic testing is limited. The clinician typically lacks the required in-depth knowledge of current research to counsel patients with hereditary retinal disease in terms of cause, visual function, prognosis, genetic pattern, risk to other family members, and information on the latest clinical trial and research. Furthermore, such clinical and genetic counseling requires time that is not ordinarily possible in the clinician's busy clinic.
Therefore, there is a great need to provide patients with hereditary retinal disease with state-of-art clinical care that includes proper diagnosis, comprehensive clinical characterization, and prompt low-cost genetic testing. This will not only aid in the management and counseling of patients but will also advance our knowledge into the expression and treatment of these conditions.
Genetic testing and genetic research is important in hereditary retinal disease. Genetic testing allows the identification of the fundamental cause of the patient's disorder. Prompt genetic testing identifies the patient's genetic causal mutation and allows clinical correlation that helps to determine the degree of how a disease is expressed. Genetic testing and research also leads to the discovery of new disease-causing gene and mutations. Most importantly, genetic testing identifies patients for current and future gene directed clinical trials.
Identification enough patients for a particular gene directed clinical trial is not an easy task because the number of genes and genetic variations for hereditary retinal diseases are numerous. This means that only a small percentage of patients with a particular condition will harbor mutations on a specific gene and qualify for a specific clinical trial. Therefore, a large number of existing patients who are well-characterized both clinically and genetically is required for current and anticipated future clinical trials.
Components and Goals
Patient Care. A weekly clinic dedicated to patients with hereditary retinal disease. Each patient will have a comprehensive assessment and management including:
- Comprehensive history with detailed pedigree
- A Miami contingent visited Iowa's John & Marcia Carver Non-Profit Genetic Testing Laboratory in February 2006. Left to right: Dr. Wen-Hsiang Lee (BPEI), Dr. Edwin Stone (Iowa), Dr. Craig McKeown (BPEI), Dr. Byron Lam (BPEI), Dr. Audina Berrocal (BPEI), Dr. Sander Dubovy (BPEI), geneticist Tania Arguello, MS (BPEI).
- Thorough examination including ancillary tests such as visual fields, fundus photography, optical coherence tomography, and electrophysiology
- Prompt screening for known genes of the clinical condition by the John & Marcia Carver Nonprofit Genetic Testing Laboratory (NGTL) of the University of Iowa
- Counseling of cause, prognosis, inheritance pattern (including family members at risk), and up-to-date research and treatment strategies.
- Scheduling of appropriate follow-up
- Comprehensive evaluation offered to pertinent family members
Qualified patients will be asked to participate in clinical trials (e.g. gene-directed clinical trials). As new clinical trials are developed, qualified patients will be recalled and informed.
Education of Ophthalmologists-in-Training. An ophthalmology resident and a fellow will be an intrinsic part of the hereditary retinal disease clinic. At the end of the clinic, the attending will hold a teaching session to discuss clinical findings and genetics for patients seen that day.
Genetic Testing and Genetic Research. Genetic testing will be performed on all patients of the hereditary retinal disease clinic.
Prompt screening for known genes of the clinical condition will be performed by the Nonprofit Genetic Testing Laboratory (NGTL) of the University of Iowa. The genetic laboratory at the University of Iowa under the direction of Dr. Edwin M. Stone has 20 years of experience in genetic research and has extensive experience in gene screening. DNA samples of patients including those with currently unknown genotype will be stored and be available for new genotype identification for investigators at the University of Miami and University of Iowa.
Clinical Research. Clinical findings and images will be catalogued and made available on the computer in a user-friendly manner to foster clinical research into clinical expression of hereditary retinal disease. Examples of clinical studies will include:
- Penetrance of disease-causing genetic variations
- Detailed natural history of disease associated with certain groups of disease-causing genetic variations
- Novel retinal imaging features in disease subtypes
Community Outreach to Physicians and Patients. A sustained outreach program to referring physicians and patients with hereditary retinal disease will include:
- Mailings and Conferences to educate referring physicians about the Center and the latest in hereditary retinal disease
- Patient-friendly webpage of the Center