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more useful options | |
PerlMonks |
Re^3: On Coding Standards and Code Reviewsby ruzam (Curate) |
on Feb 20, 2009 at 03:11 UTC ( [id://745264] : note . print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
For Pete's sake people it's tabs and spaces! How many hours of productive time has been wasted in meetings arguing the pros and cons of each? Does Perl care whether you've used spaces over tabs or tabs over spaces? We've already agreed that most editors can seamlessly convert between tabs and spaces of any desired indent size. The pettiness of it just blows my mind. Here's a standard: forget standards. Use Perltidy. A large portion (if not all) of the coding standards listed here could be configured into Perltidy. If every piece of code passed/used/saved anywhere in the company is enforced through Perltidy, then all code will conform to a single layout standard. The coders don't need standards, they can code to what ever style they feel comfortable with. After a pass through Perltidy everybody's code will conform to the same single standard. In time coders will make an effort to conform to that same standard that they've been immersed in because it's just easier to adjust one's personal style choices than to buck miles of existing code. But even if they don't come around, who cares? In the end the code will come out formatted to standards regardless, and all the time that would have been wasted arguing over standards can be put to better use getting actual work done. end grump
In Section


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The "Summer of SEND" has been arranged to celebrate all things Special Educational Needs and / or Disability (SEND) across Bedford Borough.
This page is dedicated to Parents/Carers of Children and Young People who have SEND, providing you with training, get togethers and events across the Summer of SEND.
We will be updating this page with new and exciting events so please do keep coming back to check out what's new and also follow us on social media for the latest updates using the hashtag #SummerOfSEND

subset: commoncrawl


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Can any baroque violist play my favourite song?
Professional baroque violists will often take requests, but you will need to give them plenty of notice. Please also keep in mind that baroque violists may ask for an small additional fee to prepare songs that aren't already on their song list. You can view the baroque violist's song list on their Encore profile.


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It's time once again for "Mr. Holiday" to answer your holiday queries. This week: Thanksgiving.
Dear Mr. Holiday:
I understand that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals want us to give up eating turkey on Thanksgiving. But I love turkey! Juicy, succulent, recently deceased turkey. What should I do?
Hungry in Holliston
Dear Hungry:
PETA is a very well-meaning organization, in that same way that your crazy uncle who thinks he's a founding member of ABBA is well-meaning. But mostly they're just looking for an excuse to parade around naked and get arrested.
In reality, studies have shown that Thanksgiving turkeys are remarkably well treated. They run free on spacious turkey farms, relaxing in little turkey saunas and smoking rich little full-bodied turkey cigars. Then they're slaughtered and plucked, but in a well-treated kind of way.
What you should be really concerned about is the rampant, horrible mistreatment of soy.
Dear Mr. Holiday:
I dread Thanksgiving — sitting around with my family is so boring! Any suggestions?
Bored in Bakersville
Dear Bored:
You seem to have forgotten that Thanksgiving is one of the only chances your entire family gets to sit down together in a meaningful way. With that in mind, here are some topics you may want to consider to liven up the meal:
· How years of browbeating have driven you to therapy;
· The fact that just because you can't get through a family occasion without downing an entire bottle of muscatel doesn't mean you're an alcoholic;
· That you've blown the grandkids' inheritance on Keno.
Dear Mr. Holiday:
I enjoy the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. What's the story behind those tremendous balloons?
Curious in Connecticut
Dear Curious:
It takes dozens of people to control one of those balloons, and in a stiff wind they can actually become quite dangerous. No wait, I'm thinking of Willard Scott.
Dear Mr. Holiday:
What are "giblets"?
Cooking in Cambridge
Dear Cooking:
No one knows.
Dear Mr. Holiday:
I love finishing a huge Thanksgiving meal, heading straight into the living room, loosening my belt and watching football for the rest of the day as the stuffing congeals in my stomach cavity. But recently I began wondering: What are all the women talking about back in the kitchen while the guys watch football?
Suspicious in Scranton
Dear Suspicious:
This is one of the great mysteries of Thanksgiving. But I'm sure it's not how they can't believe they have to wake up every morning next to the likes of your fat, lazy self. They're probably just comparing recipes.
Dear Mr. Holiday:
I was horrified recently to discover that the first Thanksgiving dinner was nothing like the Thanksgiving we have today. Is it really possible that the Pilgrims and Indians didn't really have turkey and pumpkin pie?
Disillusioned in Denver
Dear Disillusioned:
Don't worry your pretty little head off — of course the Pilgrims and Indians had turkey and pumpkin pie! Just like Columbus was a brave and gallant explorer rather than the harbinger of genocide and slavery to a proud indigenous people. Six of one, half-dozen of the other, I always say.
Granted, historians say the menu was probably more likely to include things like lobsters, mussels, grapes, plums and flint corn. However, some traditions have carried on: For instance, a Pilgrim woman named Constance Britteridge was credited with creating a delightful fruit centerpiece for the meal, based on a first-century fresco from Pompeii. Then she was arrested for securities fraud.
Dear Mr. Holiday:
What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving?
Grateful in Greenwich
Dear Grateful:
I'm thankful mostly for loyal, caring readers like you. No wait, I meant to say giblets.
Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. He's currently out shopping for giblets; his "Best of Chianca" column is from 2005. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca.


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INTRODUCTIONThe European Council held a special meeting on 15 and 16 October 1999 in Tampere on the creation of an area of freedom, security and justice in the European Union. At the start of proceedings an exchange of views was conducted with the President of the European Parliament, Mrs Nicole Fontaine, on the main topics of discussion. The European Council is determined to develop the Union as an area of freedom, security and justice by making full use of the possibilities offered by the Treaty of Amsterdam. The European Council sends a strong political message to reaffirm the importance of this objective and has agreed on a number of policy orientations and priorities which will speedily make this area a reality. The European Council will place and maintain this objective at the very top of the political agenda. It will keep under constant review progress made towards implementing the necessary measures and meeting the deadlines set by the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Vienna Action Plan and the present conclusions. The Commission is invited to make a proposal for an appropriate scoreboard to that end. The European Council underlines the importance of ensuring the necessary transparency and of keeping the European Parliament regularly informed. It will hold a full debate assessing progress at its December meeting in 2001. In close connection with the area of freedom, security and justice, the European Council has agreed on the composition, method of work and practical arrangements (attached in the annex) for the body entrusted with drawing up a draft Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union. It invites all parties involved to ensure that work on the Charter can begin rapidly. The European Council expresses its gratitude for the work of the outgoing Secretary-General of the Council, Mr. Jürgen Trumpf, and in particular for his contribution to the development of the Union following the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam. Given that one of the focal points of the Union's work in the years ahead will be to strengthen the common foreign and security policy, including developing a European security and defence policy, the European Council expects the new Secretary-General of the Council and High Representative for the CFSP, Mr. Javier Solana, to make a key contribution to this objective. Mr. Solana will be able to rely on the full backing of the European Council in exercising his powers according to Article 18(3) of the Treaty so he can do full justice to his tasks. His responsibilities will include co-operating with the Presidency to ensure that deliberations and action in foreign and security policy matters are efficiently conducted with the aim of fostering continuity and consistency of policy on the basis of the common interests of the Union. TOWARDS A UNION OF FREEDOM, SECURITY AND JUSTICE: THE TAMPERE MILESTONES1. From its very beginning European integration has been firmly rooted in a shared commitment to freedom based on human rights, democratic institutions and the rule of law. These common values have proved necessary for securing peace and developing prosperity in the European Union. They will also serve as a cornerstone for the enlarging Union. 2. The European Union has already put in place for its citizens the major ingredients of a shared area of prosperity and peace: a single market, economic and monetary union, and the capacity to take on global political and economic challenges. The challenge of the Amsterdam Treaty is now to ensure that freedom, which includes the right to move freely throughout the Union, can be enjoyed in conditions of security and justice accessible to all. It is a project which responds to the frequently expressed concerns of citizens and has a direct bearing on their daily lives. 3. This freedom should not, however, be regarded as the exclusive preserve of the Union's own citizens. Its very existence acts as a draw to many others world-wide who cannot enjoy the freedom Union citizens take for granted. It would be in contradiction with Europe's traditions to deny such freedom to those whose circumstances lead them justifiably to seek access to our territory. This in turn requires the Union to develop common policies on asylum and immigration, while taking into account the need for a consistent control of external borders to stop illegal immigration and to combat those who organise it and commit related international crimes. These common policies must be based on principles which are both clear to our own citizens and also offer guarantees to those who seek protection in or access to the European Union. 4. The aim is an open and secure European Union, fully committed to the obligations of the Geneva Refugee Convention and other relevant human rights instruments, and able to respond to humanitarian needs on the basis of solidarity. A common approach must also be developed to ensure the integration into our societies of those third country nationals who are lawfully resident in the Union. 5. The enjoyment of freedom requires a genuine area of justice, where people can approach courts and authorities in any Member State as easily as in their own. Criminals must find no ways of exploiting differences in the judicial systems of Member States. Judgements and decisions should be respected and enforced throughout the Union, while safeguarding the basic legal certainty of people and economic operators. Better compatibility and more convergence between the legal systems of Member States must be achieved. 6. People have the right to expect the Union to address the threat to their freedom and legal rights posed by serious crime. To counter these threats a common effort is needed to prevent and fight crime and criminal organisations throughout the Union. The joint mobilisation of police and judicial resources is needed to guarantee that there is no hiding place for criminals or the proceeds of crime within the Union. 7. The area of freedom, security and justice should be based on the principles of transparency and democratic control. We must develop an open dialogue with civil society on the aims and principles of this area in order to strengthen citizens' acceptance and support. In order to maintain confidence in authorities, common standards on the integrity of authorities should be developed. 8. The European Council considers it essential that in these areas the Union should also develop a capacity to act and be regarded as a significant partner on the international scene. This requires close co-operation with partner countries and international organisations, in particular the Council of Europe, OSCE, OECD and the United Nations. 9. The European Council invites the Council and the Commission, in close co-operation with the European Parliament, to promote the full and immediate implementation of the Treaty of Amsterdam on the basis of the Vienna Action Plan and of the following political guidelines and concrete objectives agreed here in Tampere. A. A COMMON EU ASYLUM AND MIGRATION POLICY10. The separate but closely related issues of asylum and migration call for the development of a common EU policy to include the following elements. I. Partnership with countries of origin11. The European Union needs a comprehensive approach to migration addressing political, human rights and development issues in countries and regions of origin and transit. This requires combating poverty, improving living conditions and job opportunities, preventing conflicts and consolidating democratic states and ensuring respect for human rights, in particular rights of minorities, women and children. To that end, the Union as well as Member States are invited to contribute, within their respective competence under the Treaties, to a greater coherence of internal and external policies of the Union. Partnership with third countries concerned will also be a key element for the success of such a policy, with a view to promoting co-development. 12. In this context, the European Council welcomes the report of the High Level Working Group on Asylum and Migration set up by the Council, and agrees on the continuation of its mandate and on the drawing up of further Action Plans. It considers as a useful contribution the first action plans drawn up by that Working Group, and approved by the Council, and invites the Council and the Commission to report back on their implementation to the European Council in December 2000. II. A Common European Asylum System13. The European Council reaffirms the importance the Union and Member States attach to absolute respect of the right to seek asylum. It has agreed to work towards establishing a Common European Asylum System, based on the full and inclusive application of the Geneva Convention, thus ensuring that nobody is sent back to persecution, i.e. maintaining the principle of non-refoulement. 14. This System should include, in the short term, a clear and workable determination of the State responsible for the examination of an asylum application, common standards for a fair and efficient asylum procedure, common minimum conditions of reception of asylum seekers, and the approximation of rules on the recognition and content of the refugee status. It should also be completed with measures on subsidiary forms of protection offering an appropriate status to any person in need of such protection. To that end, the Council is urged to adopt, on the basis of Commission proposals, the necessary decisions according to the timetable set in the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Vienna Action Plan. The European Council stresses the importance of consulting UNHCR and other international organisations. 15. In the longer term, Community rules should lead to a common asylum procedure and a uniform status for those who are granted asylum valid throughout the Union. The Commission is asked to prepare within one year a communication on this matter. 16. The European Council urges the Council to step up its efforts to reach agreement on the issue of temporary protection for displaced persons on the basis of solidarity between Member States. The European Council believes that consideration should be given to making some form of financial reserve available in situations of mass influx of refugees for temporary protection. The Commission is invited to explore the possibilities for this. 17. The European Council urges the Council to finalise promptly its work on the system for the identification of asylum seekers (Eurodac). III. Fair treatment of third country nationals18. The European Union must ensure fair treatment of third country nationals who reside legally on the territory of its Member States. A more vigorous integration policy should aim at granting them rights and obligations comparable to those of EU citizens. It should also enhance non-discrimination in economic, social and cultural life and develop measures against racism and xenophobia. 19. Building on the Commission Communication on an Action Plan against Racism, the European Council calls for the fight against racism and xenophobia to be stepped up. The Member States will draw on best practices and experiences. Co-operation with the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and the Council of Europe will be further strengthened. Moreover, the Commission is invited to come forward as soon as possible with proposals implementing Article 13 of the EC Treaty on the fight against racism and xenophobia. To fight against discrimination more generally the Member States are encouraged to draw up national programmes. 20. The European Council acknowledges the need for approximation of national legislations on the conditions for admission and residence of third country nationals, based on a shared assessment of the economic and demographic developments within the Union, as well as the situation in the countries of origin. It requests to this end rapid decisions by the Council, on the basis of proposals by the Commission. These decisions should take into account not only the reception capacity of each Member State, but also their historical and cultural links with the countries of origin. 21. The legal status of third country nationals should be approximated to that of Member States' nationals. A person, who has resided legally in a Member State for a period of time to be determined and who holds a long-term residence permit, should be granted in that Member State a set of uniform rights which are as near as possible to those enjoyed by EU citizens; e.g. the right to reside, receive education, and work as an employee or self-employed person, as well as the principle of non-discrimination vis-à-vis the citizens of the State of residence. The European Council endorses the objective that long-term legally resident third country nationals be offered the opportunity to obtain the nationality of the Member State in which they are resident. IV. Management of migration flows22. The European Council stresses the need for more efficient management of migration flows at all their stages. It calls for the development, in close co-operation with countries of origin and transit, of information campaigns on the actual possibilities for legal immigration, and for the prevention of all forms of trafficking in human beings. A common active policy on visas and false documents should be further developed, including closer co-operation between EU consulates in third countries and, where necessary, the establishment of common EU visa issuing offices. 23. The European Council is determined to tackle at its source illegal immigration, especially by combating those who engage in trafficking in human beings and economic exploitation of migrants. It urges the adoption of legislation foreseeing severe sanctions against this serious crime. The Council is invited to adopt by the end of 2000, on the basis of a proposal by the Commission, legislation to this end. Member States, together with Europol, should direct their efforts to detecting and dismantling the criminal networks involved. The rights of the victims of such activities shall be secured with special emphasis on the problems of women and children. 24. The European Council calls for closer co-operation and mutual technical assistance between the Member States' border control services, such as exchange programmes and technology transfer, especially on maritime borders, and for the rapid inclusion of the applicant States in this co-operation. In this context, the Council welcomes the memorandum of understanding between Italy and Greece to enhance co-operation between the two countries in the Adriatic and Ionian seas in combating organised crime, smuggling and trafficking of persons. 25. As a consequence of the integration of the Schengen acquis into the Union, the candidate countries must accept in full that acquis and further measures building upon it. The European Council stresses the importance of the effective control of the Union's future external borders by specialised trained professionals. 26. The European Council calls for assistance to countries of origin and transit to be developed in order to promote voluntary return as well as to help the authorities of those countries to strengthen their ability to combat effectively trafficking in human beings and to cope with their readmission obligations towards the Union and the Member States. 27. The Amsterdam Treaty conferred powers on the Community in the field of readmission. The European Council invites the Council to conclude readmission agreements or to include standard clauses in other agreements between the European Community and relevant third countries or groups of countries . Consideration should also be given to rules on internal readmission. B. A GENUINE EUROPEAN AREA OF JUSTICE28. In a genuine European Area of Justice individuals and businesses should not be prevented or discouraged from exercising their rights by the incompatibility or complexity of legal and administrative systems in the Member States. V. Better access to justice in Europe29. In order to facilitate access to justice the European Council invites the Commission, in co-operation with other relevant fora, such as the Council of Europe, to launch an information campaign and to publish appropriate "user guides" on judicial co-operation within the Union and on the legal systems of the Member States. It also calls for the establishment of an easily accessible information system to be maintained and up-dated by a network of competent national authorities. 30. The European Council invites the Council, on the basis of proposals by the Commission, to establish minimum standards ensuring an adequate level of legal aid in cross-border cases throughout the Union as well as special common procedural rules for simplified and accelerated cross-border litigation on small consumer and commercial claims, as well as maintenance claims, and on uncontested claims. Alternative, extra-judicial procedures should also be created by Member States. 31. Common minimum standards should be set for multilingual forms or documents to be used in cross-border court cases throughout the Union. Such documents or forms should then be accepted mutually as valid documents in all legal proceedings in the Union. 32. Having regard to the Commission's communication , minimum standards should be drawn up on the protection of the victims of crime, in particular on crime victims' access to justice and on their rights to compensation for damages, including legal costs. In addition, national programmes should be set up to finance measures, public and non-governmental, for assistance to and protection of victims. VI. Mutual recognition of judicial decisions33. Enhanced mutual recognition of judicial decisions and judgements and the necessary approximation of legislation would facilitate co-operation between authorities and the judicial protection of individual rights. The European Council therefore endorses the principle of mutual recognition which, in its view, should become the cornerstone of judicial co-operation in both civil and criminal matters within the Union. The principle should apply both to judgements and to other decisions of judicial authorities. 34. In civil matters the European Council calls upon the Commission to make a proposal for further reduction of the intermediate measures which are still required to enable the recognition and enforcement of a decision or judgement in the requested State. As a first step these intermediate procedures should be abolished for titles in respect of small consumer or commercial claims and for certain judgements in the field of family litigation (e.g. on maintenance claims and visiting rights). Such decisions would be automatically recognised throughout the Union without any intermediate proceedings or grounds for refusal of enforcement. This could be accompanied by the setting of minimum standards on specific aspects of civil procedural law. 35. With respect to criminal matters, the European Council urges Member States to speedily ratify the 1995 and 1996 EU Conventions on extradition. It considers that the formal extradition procedure should be abolished among the Member States as far as persons are concerned who are fleeing from justice after having been finally sentenced, and replaced by a simple transfer of such persons, in compliance with Article 6 TEU. Consideration should also be given to fast track extradition procedures, without prejudice to the principle of fair trial. The European Council invites the Commission to make proposals on this matter in the light of the Schengen Implementing Agreement. 36. The principle of mutual recognition should also apply to pre-trial orders, in particular to those which would enable competent authorities quickly to secure evidence and to seize assets which are easily movable; evidence lawfully gathered by one Member State's authorities should be admissible before the courts of other Member States, taking into account the standards that apply there. 37. The European Council asks the Council and the Commission to adopt, by December 2000, a programme of measures to implement the principle of mutual recognition. In this programme, work should also be launched on a European Enforcement Order and on those aspects of procedural law on which common minimum standards are considered necessary in order to facilitate the application of the principle of mutual recognition, respecting the fundamental legal principles of Member States. VII. Greater convergence in civil law38. The European Council invites the Council and the Commission to prepare new procedural legislation in cross-border cases, in particular on those elements which are instrumental to smooth judicial co-operation and to enhanced access to law, e.g. provisional measures, taking of evidence, orders for money payment and time limits. 39. As regards substantive law, an overall study is requested on the need to approximate Member States' legislation in civil matters in order to eliminate obstacles to the good functioning of civil proceedings. The Council should report back by 2001. C. A UNIONWIDE FIGHT AGAINST CRIME40. The European Council is deeply committed to reinforcing the fight against serious organised and transnational crime. The high level of safety in the area of freedom, security and justice presupposes an efficient and comprehensive approach in the fight against all forms of crime. A balanced development of unionwide measures against crime should be achieved while protecting the freedom and legal rights of individuals and economic operators. VIII. Preventing crime at the level of the Union41. The European Council calls for the integration of crime prevention aspects into actions against crime as well as for the further development of national crime prevention programmes. Common priorities should be developed and identified in crime prevention in the external and internal policy of the Union and be taken into account when preparing new legislation. 42. The exchange of best practices should be developed, the network of competent national authorities for crime prevention and co-operation between national crime prevention organisations should be strengthened and the possibility of a Community funded programme should be explored for these purposes. The first priorities for this co-operation could be juvenile, urban and drug-related crime. IX. Stepping up co-operation against crime43. Maximum benefit should be derived from co-operation between Member States' authorities when investigating cross-border crime in any Member State. The European Council calls for joint investigative teams as foreseen in the Treaty to be set up without delay, as a first step, to combat trafficking in drugs and human beings as well as terrorism. The rules to be set up in this respect should allow representatives of Europol to participate, as appropriate, in such teams in a support capacity. 44. The European Council calls for the establishment of a European Police Chiefs operational Task Force to exchange , in co-operation with Europol , experience, best practices and information on current trends in cross-border crime and contribute to the planning of operative actions. 45. Europol has a key role in supporting unionwide crime prevention, analyses and investigation. The European Council calls on the Council to provide Europol with the necessary support and resources. In the near future its role should be strengthened by means of receiving operational data from Member States and authorising it to ask Member States to initiate, conduct or coordinate investigations or to create joint investigative teams in certain areas of crime, while respecting systems of judicial control in Member States. 46. To reinforce the fight against serious organised crime, the European Council has agreed that a unit (EUROJUST) should be set up composed of national prosecutors, magistrates, or police officers of equivalent competence, detached from each Member State according to its legal system. EUROJUST should have the task of facilitating the proper coordination of national prosecuting authorities and of supporting criminal investigations in organised crime cases, notably based on Europol's analysis, as well as of co-operating closely with the European Judicial Network, in particular in order to simplify the execution of letters rogatory. The European Council requests the Council to adopt the necessary legal instrument by the end of 2001. 47. A European Police College for the training of senior law enforcement officials should be established. It should start as a network of existing national training institutes. It should also be open to the authorities of candidate countries. 48. Without prejudice to the broader areas envisaged in the Treaty of Amsterdam and in the Vienna Action Plan, the European Council considers that, with regard to national criminal law, efforts to agree on common definitions, incriminations and sanctions should be focused in the first instance on a limited number of sectors of particular relevance, such as financial crime (money laundering, corruption, Euro counterfeiting), drugs trafficking, trafficking in human beings, particularly exploitation of women, sexual exploitation of children, high tech crime and environmental crime. 49. Serious economic crime increasingly has tax and duty aspects. The European Council therefore calls upon Member States to provide full mutual legal assistance in the investigation and prosecution of serious economic crime. 50.The European Council underlines the importance of addressing the drugs problem in a comprehensive manner. It calls on the Council to adopt the 2000-2004 European Strategy against Drugs before the European Council meeting in Helsinki. X. Special action against money laundering51. Money laundering is at the very heart of organised crime. It should be rooted out wherever it occurs. The European Council is determined to ensure that concrete steps are taken to trace, freeze, seize and confiscate the proceeds of crime. 52. Member States are urged to implement fully the provisions of the Money Laundering Directive, the 1990 Strasbourg Convention and the Financial Action Task Force recommendations also in all their dependent territories. 53. The European Council calls for the Council and the European Parliament to adopt as soon as possible the draft revised directive on money laundering recently proposed by the Commission. 54. With due regard to data protection, the transparency of financial transactions and ownership of corporate entities should be improved and the exchange of information between the existing financial intelligence units (FIU) regarding suspicious transactions expedited. Regardless of secrecy provisions applicable to banking and other commercial activity, judicial authorities as well as FIUs must be entitled, subject to judicial control, to receive information when such information is necessary to investigate money laundering. The European Council calls on the Council to adopt the necessary provisions to this end. 55. The European Council calls for the approximation of criminal law and procedures on money laundering (e.g. tracing, freezing and confiscating funds). The scope of criminal activities which constitute predicate offences for money laundering should be uniform and sufficiently broad in all Member States. 56. The European Council invites the Council to extend the competence of Europol to money laundering in general, regardless of the type of offence from which the laundered proceeds originate. 57. Common standards should be developed in order to prevent the use of corporations and entities registered outside the jurisdiction of the Union in the hiding of criminal proceeds and in money laundering. The Union and Member States should make arrangements with third country offshore-centres to ensure efficient and transparent co-operation in mutual legal assistance following the recommendations made in this area by the Financial Action Task Force. 58. The Commission is invited to draw up a report identifying provisions in national banking, financial and corporate legislation which obstruct international co-operation. The Council is invited to draw necessary conclusions on the basis of this report. D. STRONGER EXTERNAL ACTION59. The European Council underlines that all competences and instruments at the disposal of the Union, and in particular, in external relations must be used in an integrated and consistent way to build the area of freedom, security and justice. Justice and Home Affairs concerns must be integrated in the definition and implementation of other Union policies and activities. 60. Full use must be made of the new possibilities offered by the Treaty of Amsterdam for external action and in particular of Common Strategies as well as Community agreements and agreements based on Article 38 TEU. 61. Clear priorities, policy objectives and measures for the Union's external action in Justice and Home Affairs should be defined. Specific recommendations should be drawn up by the Council in close co-operation with the Commission on policy objectives and measures for the Union's external action in Justice and Home Affairs, including questions of working structure, prior to the European Council in June 2000. 62. The European Council expresses its support for regional co-operation against organised crime involving the Member States and third countries bordering on the Union. In this context it notes with satisfaction the concrete and practical results obtained by the surrounding countries in the Baltic Sea region. The European Council attaches particular importance to regional co-operation and development in the Balkan region. The European Union welcomes and intends to participate in a European Conference on Development and Security in the Adriatic and Ionian area, to be organised by the Italian Government in Italy in the first half of the year 2000. This initiative will provide valuable support in the context of the South Eastern Europe Stability Pact. ANNEXCOMPOSITION METHOD OF WORK AND PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE BODY TO ELABORATE A DRAFT EU CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS, AS SET OUT IN THE COLOGNE CONCLUSIONSA. COMPOSITION OF THE BODY
The Body shall hold its meetings in Brussels, alternately in the Council and the European Parliament buildings. © European Parliament: 1999 |


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Vaught's Hill
Battle Name: | Vaught's Hill |
Other Names: | Milton |
State: | Tennessee |
Location: | Rutherford County |
Campaign: | Middle Tennessee Operations (1863) |
Dates: | March 20, 1863 |
Principal Commanders: | Col. Albert S. Hall [US]; Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan [CS] |
Forces Engaged: | 2nd Brigade, 5th Division, XIV Army Corps (a combined force of infantry, artillery, and cavalry comprising detachments from six units; approx. 1,300) [US]; Morgan's Cavalry Division (approx. 3,500) [CS] |
Estimated Casualties: | 435 total (US 62; CS 373) |
Description: | During the inactivity following the Battle of Stones River, a Union brigade-sized reconnaissance force, under Col. Albert S. Hall, left Murfreesboro on March 18. Circling to the northeast, Hall encountered Confederate Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan's cavalry command which caused him to fall back to a position east of Milton. Pursuing Hall, Morgan's men caught up with him on the morning of the 20th, at Vaught's Hill. Dismounted, Morgan struck at both Union flanks, even to the point of encircling Hall's hilltop position. Hall conducted a perimeter defense and withstood all Confederate attacks, which lasted till after 2:00 pm. Morgan continued to bombard the Yankees until 4:30 pm, when he broke off the engagement, after learning that Union reinforcements were en route from Murfreesboro. Union forces continued to strengthen their position in Middle Tennessee. |
Results: | Union victory |


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Today, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is holding a hearing provocatively titled "How Convicts and Con Artists Receive New Federal Contracts." POGO's General Counsel, Scott Amey, will be testifying at the day-long hearing, the webcast of which can be found here.
The subject of the hearing is a new report that will be released later today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that federal agencies continue to award business to contractors even after they have been suspended or debarred as a result of criminal violations or poor performance. Congress is worried that these so-called "convicts and con artists" will not be excluded from the billions of dollars in contracts that will be awarded under the $787 billion economic stimulus program.
The Excluded Parties List System (EPLS), a federal database of suspended and debarred individuals and businesses, is supposed to prevent these parties from receiving any future federal contracts. However, the GAO found numerous instances when they continued to receive new contracts due to flaws in the database and inadequate contracting procedures. Many of these parties were debarred for egregious violations that directly threatened national security and the safety of U.S. troops and citizens.
The GAO report found that contracting officials are either not checking the EPLS as they are required, or are checking it but are not aware that certain individuals or companies are in it due to a flawed database search system. When agencies suspend or debar parties from future contracts, they often enter them in the EPLS without a unique identifying number. This requires users to search by name, which invariably misses nicknames, aliases, or corporate name changes.
-- Neil Gordon
UPDATE: The GAO report is now available here.


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My Foray Into Weblogging. Using this to store interesting items for later review.
posted by Mark Harr @ 7/13/2004 05:33:00 PM
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Independent software consultant specializing in Microsoft technologies and products. Mostly work in custom application development (both Windows desktop and public/private internet applications) using .Net (VB, C#, ASP.net, ASP.Net Ajax), SQL Server DBA, and a little work with Sharepoint installation and design.
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Is 6:1-2a, 3-8
Ps 138:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 7-8
1 Cor 15:1-11 or 15:3-8
Lk 5:1-11
God initiates. Man responds. Jesus calls. Man answers.
Such is the dynamic relationship at the heart of salvation history and at the center of human existence. "Through an utterly free decision," the Catechism explains, "God has revealed himself and given himself to man. This he does by revealing the mystery, his plan of loving goodness, formed from all eternity in Christ, for the benefit of all men." Today's readings offer a challenging view of God's revelation of Himself, His call to specific men, and His desire for all Christians to be "fishers of men."
Let's take a brief look at three men caught up in the divine drama: the prophet Isaiah, the apostle Paul, and Peter, the head of the Apostles and the first Pope. In many respects they were quite different from one another. Isaiah was likely from an upper-class family, was apparently well educated, and was married to a prophetess (Isa 8:3). Paul was also highly educated, the prize student of the great rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), and, prior to his conversion on the Damascus Road, a fervent enemy of the budding Church. Peter was certainly fervent as well, but was a fisherman and a blue-collar businessman. Yet, however different they were from one another, each man was called, in dramatic and personal fashion, to proclaim the Word of God in difficult, harrowing circumstances.
Some seven centuries prior to Jesus and the apostles, the prophet Isaiah had a dazzling vision of the throne room of the Lord of hosts. Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, initiated contact with the prophet and called him to the task of proclaiming the glory of God and exhorting Israel and Judah to repent of their sins. Isaiah recognized and confessed his own sinful state: "Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips…"
As the Catechism says so well, "Faced with God's fascinating and mysterious presence, man discovers his own insignificance" (CCC 208). When man sees himself in the light of God's holiness and recognizes his desperate plight, he can then admit his sinful state and be given the grace needed for the work of God. "See," Isaiah was told by the seraphim, "now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged."
Paul was also transformed and purified by a heavenly vision. Having held the cloaks of those who stoned Stephen, the first martyr, the young Saul was intent on persecuting the Church in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas (Acts 7:58; 8:1-3). Then, while traveling to Damascus in search of more Christians to arrest, "a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him" (Acts 9:3). As he wrote to the church in Corinth, in today's Epistle, "Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me. For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God." Whereas Isaiah's sinful lips were purified by fire, Paul's blinded eyes were healed by the prayer and hands of Ananias, a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Paul eventually spent time with Peter (cf. Gal 1:18), whose life contained more than a few instances of dramatic response to God's call. Luke's account of the miraculous catch of fish sets the stage for one such moment; it begins with the note that the crowds following Jesus were eagerly "listening to the word of God." Some of the early Church Fathers, such as Ambrose and Augustine, saw this event as both historical and metaphorical: the boat of Peter represents the Church in history, going forth to catch men through the guidance of Christ, the head of the Church. Peter, who would eventually be the Vicar of Christ (Matt 16:16-18), accepted by faith the command of Jesus. Upon witnessing the miracle he responded with the same humility as Isaiah and Paul: "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." Yet Jesus does not ask only Peter and the apostles to be fishers of men; He asks it of every son and daughter of God.
God is calling. How will we answer? Jesus tells us to cast our nets. Will we?
(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the February 4, 2007, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
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Son 'mom-shames' mother after she keeps asking for late-night snacks, then falling asleep
LANCASTER, Pa. - Thanksgiving is going to be awkward this year.
A college student visiting his family got tired of his mother asking for late-night snacks - then falling asleep by the time he brought them to her bedroom.
After this happened several times, 20-year-old Nick Avallone took to Instagram to 'mom-shame' her.
Avallone, who attends Northeastern University in Boston, posted several photos of his sleeping mom with the caption, "I adore my mom beyond words but I have to mom-shame her for always doing this to me."
He added, "I love u mom don't kill me for posting this."
"This is not a new thing. She constantly asks for snacks and always falls asleep so I got to a point , 'I'm going to make this into a post. This is like funny,'" he told ABC News.
Avallone says his mother thought it was cool when she learned she'd gone viral on Instagram, adding that they remain best friends.


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The canon of great literature, philosophy, and art is thriving—in the marketplace, if not on college campuses. For the last 20 years, a company called the Great Courses has been selling recorded lectures in the humanities and sciences to an adult audience eager to brush up its Shakespeare and its quantum mechanics. The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want. And that, it turns out, is a curriculum in the monuments of human thought, taught without the politically correct superiority and self-indulgent theory common in today's colleges.
To open a Great Courses catalog is to experience an intellectual seduction. "When was the last time you read the classics of American literature?" teases one course description. "Possibly not as recently as you'd like. These carefully crafted lectures are your royal road to recapturing the American experience—and our intellectual and cultural heritage." A course on Plato's Dialogues—"for millennia the objects of devoted study by the noblest minds"—invites you to "become engrossed in the 'romance of the intellect.' " The company uses words to describe learning—such as "joy," "beauty," "pleasure," "classic," and its favorite, "greatness"—that have long disappeared from the academy's discourse. "As you read or reread these masterpieces, you will likely experience such joy from great reading that you may wonder why you have spent so much time on contemporary books," asserts one course description, committing several transgressions against the reigning post-poststructuralist orthodoxy.
And the company offers a treasure trove of traditional academic content that undergraduates paying $50,000 a year may find nowhere on their Club Med–like campuses. This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken "Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans," "Women in American History, 1600–1900," or "Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs," but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck. A Great Courses customer, by contrast, can choose from a cornucopia of American history not yet divvied up into the fiefdoms of race, gender, and sexual orientation, with multiple offerings in the American Revolution, the constitutional period, the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, and the intellectual influences on the country's founding. There are lessons here for the academy, if it will only pay them heed.
The Great Courses, originally called the Teaching Company, wasn't begun with the goal of creating an antidote to today's politicized academy. Tom Rollins, chief counsel and chief of staff to Senator Ted Kennedy's Labor and Human Services Committee, quit his post in 1989 with the idea of finding the most charismatic college professors and having them tape college-level courses for the adult-education market.
Rollins, then 33, soon discovered that his assumptions about the university—that it existed, in his words, "to transmit to the young everything the civilization has figured out so far and to discover new things"—were not shared by everyone in the academy. "My first baptism came quickly," he says. One of his earliest hires was Rick Roderick, a philosophy professor at Duke University, whom Rollins describes as to the left of Karl Marx. Nothing disqualifying there, so long as a professor injects his political views into a course only if relevant. Roderick had already recorded two popular courses for the company and was in the middle of his third when he let fly the observation that we shouldn't bother to listen to anyone—Ronald Reagan came immediately to mind, he said—who scored too low on the "DQ index." (That would be the "Dan Quayle index," after the purportedly stupid vice president.) Roderick went on to speculate on tape that the only reason Nancy Reagan had ever had power was that she "gave the best head in Hollywood." At this point, Rollins, who had considerable capital resting on the success of Roderick's course, intervened: "Rick, I'm deleting this material." Roderick coolly replied: "Tom, truth is a defense to libel." Ultimately, the index stayed in; Nancy Reagan's alleged source of power was out.
An American literature course by two theory-drenched Ivy League professors provided another early learning experience. The professors made little effort to conceal their contempt for the presumed racism and sexism of their audience and of the authors they were discussing. Within a month of the course's release, customers were calling the company to complain about the lecturers' condescending tone. In an institution that would live or die according to its customers' satisfaction, Rollins couldn't afford to alienate his audience. He destroyed all the master tapes of the course, so that no further copies could ship out, even accidentally. "Teaching shouldn't be an opportunity for a professor to get off his chest burning issues that no one would listen to except students," Rollins says, sadder but wiser now about the academy. "People want to know what the field has discovered; they aren't interested in your personal views."
Some of the early surprises involved the camera's power to terrify even seasoned lecturers. By 1992, Rollins was living in an attic, after burning through his retirement savings to invest in his company. Maxed out on his credit cards and having sold 12 of his 13 Washington power suits, he had bet everything he had left on a history of Western philosophy course, for which his customer polling indicated a huge demand. A $10,000-a-day film crew had set up in the basement of the Georgetown University School of Medicine, ready to tape the course's Machiavelli lecture—but the Columbia University professor who was supposed to deliver it was nowhere to be found. Rollins assumed that he was having a last smoke in the stairwell; instead, he found him there curled into a fetal position. "If I have to leave this stairwell, I will either throw up or faint," vowed the professor, a large, strapping fellow. "I need Machiavelli in 30 seconds!" Rollins called out. Michael Sugrue, one of the two other lecturers in the course and a historian of colonial America, volunteered. He gave a superb talk, and the series became one of the company's biggest sellers. Another professor in a different course actually did throw up before the taping—but then gave an excellent presentation on Greek civilization.
Despite several brushes with mortality in its start-up years, after a decade, the firm was earning $20 million in sales, reported Forbes this January. From the start, some customers developed an intensely personal relationship with the product, accusing Rollins of failing if he wasn't constantly putting out new material. "They'd call me to say, 'C'mon, Tom, I'm done with your latest; when's the next one out?' It was like intellectual crack." The audience—mostly older professionals with successful careers—sees the liberal arts as a life-changing experience, observes Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University who has recorded courses on C. S. Lewis and on literary criticism for the company. "They are hungry for this material."
The company markets deftly to that hunger. The catalogs are learning opportunities in their own right, tantalizingly laying out the material that each course will cover, such as the contributions and foibles of the Renaissance popes. This peekaboo strategy presumes a burning desire for knowledge on the reader's part. "Starting with the Renaissance, the culture of the West exploded," begins the description of a Western civilization series. Then it irresistibly reels the reader in: "Over the next 600 years, rapid innovations in philosophy, technology, economics, military affairs, and politics allowed what once had been a cultural backwater left by the collapse of the Roman Empire to dominate the world. But how—and why—did this happen? How did the decentralized agrarian principalities of medieval Europe remake themselves into great industrial nation-states? How and why did absolutism rise and then yield to democratic liberalism?"
In promoting its wares, the Great Courses breaks one academic taboo after another. The advertising copy for "Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life" asserts: "Beginning with the definition of a great book as one that possesses a great theme of enduring importance, noble language that elevates the soul and ennobles the mind, and a universality that enables it to speak across the ages, Professor Fears examines a body of work that offers an extraordinary gift of wisdom to those willing to receive it"—a statement so reckless that it would get its proponent thrown out of the Modern Language Association's annual convention. Indeed, one could take the company's definition of literature in another course description as a rebuke to the prevailing academic mores, not least in its very use of the word "literature" rather than the usual "text": "While we sometimes think of literature as anything written, it is in fact writing that lays claim to consideration on the grounds of beauty, form, and emotional effect." The Great Courses' uninhibited enthusiasm is so alien to contemporary academic discourse that several professors who have recorded for the firm became defensive when I asked them about their course descriptions, emphatically denying any part in writing the copy—as if celebrating beauty were something to be ashamed of.
The most striking thing about the Great Courses' humanities curriculum, however, is how often the same thinkers appear across a large range of courses. The canon has been "problematized" in the academy, but it is alive and well in these recordings. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Paul, Erasmus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Molière, Pope, Swift, Goethe, and others are foregrounded again and again as touchstones of our civilization. This repetition occurs not because the company is on a mission to resuscitate the canon but because customers want it. The insatiability of the demand for such courses surprises even the producers themselves. "We were reexamining the same material," says Rollins, "and I kept wondering: 'How can customers keep buying "Great Ideas of Philosophy" and "Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition?" ' But people bought both. They wanted different takes on Kant, Socrates, and the Enlightenment."
So totalitarian is the contemporary university that professors have written to Rollins complaining that his courses are too canonical in content and do not include enough of the requisite "silenced" voices. It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy. Of course, outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like "Queering the Alamo," say, can't compete with "Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition."
The Great Courses is by no means a theory-free zone; it even offers a course in canon formation. The title of another course, "Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature," uses the mannered gerundial construction so beloved of theory-besotted academics—not surprising in a course built on the briefly trendy idea that law is a form of literature. But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers on the company's website. Overwhelmingly, the professors act as handmaidens to their subjects, laying out their material clearly and objectively, rather than avenging 4,000 years of injustice by unmasking the power relations supposedly hidden in a hapless text. Whitman College classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver notes in a course on Homer's Iliad that ancient Greek culture was patriarchal, unlike the modern era. Seth Lerer, a literature professor at the University of California at San Diego, does not chastise Milton for sexism in the famous description of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost:
For contemplation he and valour form'd,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him.
If the Great Courses were a college, its students would graduate with a panoramic view of human accomplishment and the natural world. Their knowledge of the past would be bolstered with courses in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt; the early, high, and late Middle Ages; the Renaissance and the Reformation; Chinese, Russian, and African history; and modern European history, including the Enlightenment, Victorian England, and World Wars I and II. In science and mathematics, they could study cosmology, algebra, calculus, differential equations, quantum mechanics, chemistry, chaos theory, basic biology, probability, the history of mathematics, the great ideas of classical physics, and the science of consciousness. To understand how mankind has thought about human life, they could plunge into Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's Republic, medieval philosophy, Eastern philosophy, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Voltaire, the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism, and modern philosophy since Descartes. In literature, they could read the Greek tragedies, Homer, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare, the English Romantic poets, Mark Twain, the English novel, and masterpieces of Russian literature. Their appreciation of beauty could be enhanced by studying the Dutch masters, cathedral architecture, Michelangelo, Mozart's operas and chamber works, northern and Italian Renaissance art, Wagner's operas, the lives and times of Stravinsky and Shostakovich, and Beethoven's piano sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets.
True, the Great Courses emphasizes breadth over depth and offers largely introductory material. In literature and intellectual history, the survey format predominates, with relatively few courses on individual writers or philosophical schools. The company planned a series dedicated to single authors but changed its mind after its Chaucer and Milton series didn't sell as well as expected. "People don't want to spend six hours on a single author," Rollins says. (What about Dickens or Trollope? I ask. "You should have seen their polling numbers," Rollins responds.) The company offers little genre or period specialization, and there is insufficient close reading of literary and philosophical language. But there is also none of the specious specialization of such courses as Wesleyan's "Circulating Bodies: Commodities, Prostitutes, and Slaves in Eighteenth-Century England," which "explores the period's circulating bodies as they were passed from hand to hand, valued and revalued, used, abused, and discarded," or Bowdoin's "Renaissance Sexualities," which "reimagines the canon of Renaissance literature from the perspective of desires that have not yet been named, [and] explores homoeroticism, sodomy, and heteronormativity . . . with special attention to the politics and poetics of same-sex desire and the erotics of theatrical performance by boy actors."
In the past, the company used polling to determine not only which courses to offer, but even the individual lecture topics within each course. Seth Lerer was told to omit Old English from what would become his extremely popular lectures on the history of the English language because only 10 percent of likely buyers wanted it. Lerer insisted on including it anyway. "The company was good at understanding its audience but at the time not good at understanding what college professors were like," he says. "Professors generate content and teach it because they think something should be taught, not because it meets a market." (This lofty conception of academic freedom and intellectual responsibility sounds admirable in theory; in current practice, the results are less impressive.) Ultimately, however, the company agreed with Lerer and a substantial fraction of its audience that there were commonsense limits to the consumer model of education. "We don't know what should be in each course," the polled customers told the company, according to Rollins, "and neither do our fellow customers!"
Beyond the promise of knowledge, the Great Courses markets itself by invoking the Eros of the great teacher. It claims to have identified the very best of the country's more than half-million college professors. Company recruiters sit in on classes of professors who have won awards or been recognized for their teaching; the most promising are invited to the Great Courses headquarters to record an audition lecture. That recording then goes to the company's most valued customers. If enough of them like it, the company asks the professor to create a lecture course.
In the company's "heroic" early period, as insiders call it, professors, once chosen, received carte blanche in crafting their courses. Now, however, the company closely involves itself in the creation of each course to make sure that it isn't being sold "five pounds of manure in a ten-pound bag," as Rollins puts it. Professors must submit a detailed outline of each lecture according to strict deadlines before taping begins. Company employees work with each professor to make sure that courses are logically coherent in parts as well as the whole. Each lecture must be 30 minutes long: no ignoring the clock or deferring material to the next week, as on a college campus. Such a quality-control regime contrasts sharply with the academy and has led some professors who recorded in the freewheeling "heroic" era to part ways amicably with the company. The amount of work required to create a course is fully equivalent to writing a book, says City Journal contributing editor and author John McWhorter, whose linguistics lectures are among the company's most popular.
In its emphasis on teaching, the company differs radically from the academic world, where "teaching is routinely stigmatized as a lower-order pursuit, and the 'real' academic work is research," notes Allen Guelzo, an American history professor at Gettysburg College. Though colleges ritually berate themselves for not putting a high enough premium on teaching, they inevitably ignore that skill in awarding tenure or extra pay. As for reaching an audience beyond the hallowed walls of academe, perhaps a regular NPR gig would gain notice in the faculty lounge, but not a Great Courses series. Jeremy McInerney, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1998 that he wouldn't have taped "Ancient Greek Civilization" for the company if his tenure vote had been in doubt: "This doesn't win you any further respect. If anything, there's a danger of people looking down on it, since many people are suspicious of anything that reeks of popularism." So much for the academy's supposed stance against elitism.
Do the Great Courses' professors live up to their billing? Not always. A few ramble in their presentations or oversimplify (even sugarcoat) their material—making Nietzsche, for example, sound almost like a self-help guru. But most of the professors are solid to very good, with the best exhibiting an infectious enthusiasm for their subject matter, whether expressed through the debonair showmanship of an Allen Guelzo or the ingenuous directness of his colleague on the company's superb American history survey, Emory professor Patrick Allitt.
The Great Courses' highest-selling lecturer—music professor Robert Greenberg—unquestionably deserves his devoted following. Greenberg's patent love for the music of the past is utterly endearing. During one course, he implores: "My friends, if it wasn't an unseemly thing to do, I would go down on my knees and beg all of you to go out and get a recording of [Robert Schumann's] magnificent piano quintet. You will never regret it." Recounting how Johannes Brahms destroyed his first 20 string quartets, Greenberg says mournfully: "We rightly ask: 'J.B., J.B., did you have to?' " Greenberg's blue-collar New Jersey persona ("I grew up in Levittown," he explains; "if you spoke hoity-toity, you got the shit kicked out of you") might put off some super-serious listeners—to their loss, since his composer biographies are superb, vividly drawn portraits of quixotic geniuses and their cultural environment. "When Brahms started his first concert tour in 1853," Greenberg narrates, "the not-quite-20-year-old was an insignificant bit of blond lint from a bad neighborhood who played some piano and wrote some music. Seven months later, he would be hailed as the heir to Beethoven." The only flaw in Greenberg's courses is the frequent mediocrity of the anonymous performances that he uses to illustrate them, the result of strict copyright rules on recordings, which have also limited the composers he can cover.
Predictably, the Great Courses has come under pressure for not having enough "diversity" in its teaching ranks. Rollins has received angry letters from women complaining about the paucity of female lecturers; his nonstop efforts to recruit them have yielded few results, in part because women lecture less than men. As for the truly big-name female professors, they command speaking fees so high that the Great Courses' pay scale looks insignificant. The same applies to the black superstars, one of whom told Rollins: "Tom, honestly, I make several thousand dollars a night from Martin Luther King Day through Black History Month; you're not even on my radar screen." (A Great Courses lecturer earns a royalty that varies according to how highly viewers rate his performance; the base royalty is 4 percent of the course's gross revenue, but that rate can rise to 6 percent if a course receives high enough evaluations. The average royalty is about $25,000 a year for a course.)
The very fact that the Great Courses has found professors who teach without self-indulgence may suggest that academia is in better shape than is sometimes supposed. But the firm's 200-plus faculty make up a minute percentage of the country's college teaching corps. And some Great Courses lecturers feel so marginalized on their own campuses, claims Guelzo, that "if the company granted tenure, they would scramble to abandon their current ships and sleep on couches to work for the firm." Further, it isn't clear that the Great Courses professors teach the same way back on their home campuses. A professor who teaches the Civil War as the "greatest slave uprising in history" to his undergraduates because that is what is expected of him, says University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors, will know perfectly well how to teach a more intellectually honest course for paying adults.
Unfortunately, even some Great Courses faculty demonstrate the narrowing of the academic mind. I contacted another Penn history professor to interview him about his experiences with the company. After a positive initial response to my request, he suddenly announced that he wouldn't speak with me. "I ought to have looked up the Manhattan Institute [City Journal's publisher] before I replied to your first e-mail," he wrote. "I cannot in good conscience contribute in any way to any project associated with an institution which rejects everything I believe. It says something about the undeclared civil war in U.S. life that I have to say that to you."
While the Great Courses, then, is only an ambiguous marker of the academic scene, the meaning of the audience's response is far clearer: there is a fervent demand in the real world for knowledge about history and the high points of human creation. Public libraries have formed discussion groups around the most popular courses. Customers accost Great Courses professors in airports as though they were celebrities. Alan Kors has received fan letters from forest rangers and from prison convicts. By contrast, "students never thank you; college is simply what they do next," says Patrick Allitt.
The company releases no information about its buyers, but professors say that they have been told to think of their audience as just as educated as they are, but in a different field. The customers must be well-off enough to pay what can be a hefty sum for the courses; a typical 24-lecture course costs $255 on DVD, and Greenberg's 32-lecture course on Verdi runs $520, though patient customers wait for sales to snap up courses for around $70. A few professors suggest that the company has pegged the audience as leaning conservative. Seth Lerer claims that the firm told him in the 1990s that some of its clientele would be uncomfortable with his including Black English in his "History of the English Language" course. "They were very conscious of their political demographic," he says. Lerer got an angry e-mail from a customer asking how he could include that "leftist son of a bitch" Noam Chomsky in the course. John McWhorter was told to omit from his linguistics lectures his usual argument that the idea of grammatical "correctness" is an "arbitrary imposition." Such caveats on the company's part, however, could simply reflect the desire to avoid alienating any customers.
Some popular professors make more money from their Great Courses royalties and the resulting speaking engagements than from their academic salaries. Greenberg's "Understanding the Fundamentals of Music" sells 20,000 units a year, according to Forbes; Lerer says that his "History of the English Language," which the company has told him is a high-mid-range seller, has sold tens of thousands of units over a dozen years. All in all, the firm has sold more than 9 million courses since 1990.
Brentwood Associates, a private-equity firm, acquired a majority stake of the Great Courses in 2006, spotting a thriving company with huge growth potential. "The foundation that Rollins created was unlike anything we'd seen," says Brentwood's Eric Reiter. "He was a brilliant entrepreneur, building the company brick by brick through rigorous testing." Profits have doubled since 2006, thanks to major investments in advertising—visible to anyone who reads the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, or Science News or who is on the receiving end of some of the 50 million catalogs that the company sent out last year. "Few businesses have such a passionate customer base," says Reiter. "Nine out of ten people on the street have never heard of it, but nine of out ten, upon learning about the product, want it."
Forbes reports the company's annual sales as $110 million. The firm recently opened a high-tech headquarters in Virginia for its 200 employees and is beefing up the visual learning aids on its DVDs—a sorely needed correction. But the Great Courses confronts a major challenge as it tries to expand its course offerings: "finding great lecturers, a talent that seems to be increasingly rare these days," says Lucinda Robb, the company's director of professor development. In fact, the company has been recycling its most popular professors on topics increasingly remote from their official competencies. It is also diversifying into nonacademic realms, such as wine appreciation and personal health. The growing reach of free online university courses might seem to pose a competitive challenge, but for now, the Great Courses adds enough value to its lecturers to justify the product's sticker price.
The biggest question raised by the Great Courses' success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. "If you say to kids, 'We're doing the regendering of medieval Europe,' they'll say, 'No, let's do medieval kings and queens,' " asserts Allitt. "Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War." Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students encounter attention to character and plot and can non-ironically celebrate literature's power.
But the educational market works very differently inside the academy and outside it, and the consumers of university education are largely to blame. Almost no one comparison-shops for colleges based on curricula. Parents and children select the school that will deliver the most prestigious credentials and social connections. Presumably, some of those parents are Great Courses customers themselves—discerning buyers regarding their own continuing education, but passive check writers when it comes to their children's. Employers, too, ignore universities' curricula when they decide where to send recruiters, focusing only on the degree of IQ-sorting that each college exercises sub rosa.
Universities are certainly doing very well for themselves, despite ignoring their students' latent demand for traditional learning. But they would better fulfill their mission if they took note of the Great Courses' wild success in teaching the classics. "I wasn't trying to fix something that was broken in starting the company," Rollins says. "I was just trying to create something beautiful." Colleges should replicate that impulse.
Photo: Thurtell/iStock


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From Lady Gaga to LL Cool J, CES is as much about celebrity star power as it is about technology.
The 2012 International CES event from Jan. 10-13 is no different with celebrities from music, movies and the sports worlds descending on Las Vegas for three days next week.
The Consumer Electronics Show is an annual trade association event that draws some of the world's biggest companies showcasing new technology and products.
This year, as years past, the celebrities will be pushing products and companies at CES. The list includes Justin Bieber, Eliza Dushku, 50 Cent, Jillian Michaels, Dennis Rodman, Miss America Teresa Scanlan, LL COOL J, Snooki and more.
Two years ago a shaky cell phone video of Lady Gaga stumping for Polaroid drew thousands of hits. And the companies paying the celebs to make the trip to the desert know this all too well.
Each celebrity will be promoting their individual cause and some will also hold autograph sessions or perform for the tech-loving crowd.


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Columns Retired Columns & Blogs |
Listening #25
First Watt isn't a real company, and the F1 power amplifier isn't a real product. Consequently, this isn't a real review.
Nelson Pass, who founded the Threshold Corporation in the 1970s and continues to operate the successful Pass Labs, also likes to indulge his more radical side as an audio designer. For some years, his outlet for doing so was Pass DIY", a sort of an online think tank that encourages audio hobbyists to build and elaborate on recent Pass designs that are more niche than needful: ultra-simple and generally low-powered solid-state amplifiers. But the appeal of Pass DIY has been limited to experienced builders. And, in a commercial sense, they've limited themselves to selling the occasional printed-circuit board—for crazy-low prices, it must be said.
For people who want to hear what lies beyond the tired old megabuck megawatt audio experience yet who don't wish to spend their evenings reading schematics and testing MOSFETs, there is now First Watt, which Pass describes as "a kitchen-table company." If the purpose of Pass Labs is to make audio products that answer certain needs, the purpose of First Watt is to ask more questions.
Looked at another way: If Pass Labs were R.E.M., First Watt would be the Hindu Love Gods.
Current events
Given the name—inspired by Dick Olsher's famously correct observation that the most important watt out of a power amp is the first one—one might assume that Nelson Pass created First Watt so he could manufacture low-power amplifiers for hobbyists who, above all else, enjoy vinyl, tubes, and horn-loaded speakers. And that's partly true: First Watt's first product, the F1, is indeed a low-power amp. But it's a low-power current-source amp—and, as such, it's currently (haw) in a class of one, because everything else on the market is a voltage amplifier.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. God knows we've gotten along well with voltage amplifiers for some 80-odd years. But you have to bear in mind that a conventional loudspeaker is an AC motor, and that it thrives on current. (A phono cartridge is the same thing in reverse, of course: a prodigious current source.) When a conventional loudspeaker is presented with a music signal of continuously varying voltage—itself an electrical model of the input signal—and is thus stimulated to draw current, the speaker's electrical complexities cause it to draw a level of current that isn't always proportional to the voltage supplied. The amplifier's high-voltage output may accurately track the low-voltage input, but the loudspeaker's current draw does not—and so the acoustical output is not a faithful replica of the electrical input.
Electrical complexities? Many of those inhabit that relatively small amount of real estate we call the passive crossover—something that has evolved, reasonably enough, over the many years during which the world has been dominated by voltage amplifiers. Think, for example, how the designer of a crossover network tailors the amplitude response of various drivers to achieve a pleasing and uncolored whole: with combinations of high-pass and low-pass filters, each of which depends on output voltage in order to function at all. Filters work in part by selectively throwing away voltage, and it's a lucky break for them that the past 80 years' worth of amplifiers have gone along with the game.
Output current, on the other hand, virtually ignores such passive filters—or, to be precise, ignores the filter elements that are in series with the amplifier's output. Current also more or less ignores the impedance and inductance of the voice-coil, which we hope and presume were taken into account by the loudspeaker designer.
Thus, if a current source is used to drive a loudspeaker with a passive crossover network, and/or a loudspeaker with drastically varying reactance characteristics related to cabinet loading, voice-coil overheating, or whatever else—which is to say, 99% of all loudspeakers on Planet Earth—the resulting sound will be drastically different from that achieved with a voltage amplifier, said difference being safely relegated to the file folder labeled SUCKY.
And what's left in the 1% of loudspeakers not affected by that observation? Pretty much just Lowthers and Fostexes. Now you know why Nelson Pass sent the First Watt F1 amp to me instead of, say, Mikey Fremer.
Five to one with a man on First
Nelson Pass says the idea for the F1 came about when he and his colleague Kent English were experimenting with ribbon tweeters—simple drivers that are simply impossible for a voltage amplifier to drive without an in-line matching transformer, owing to the ribbon element's naturally low impedance. (Said trannie is virtually identical to the kind used between low-output moving-coil cartridges and preamplifiers, only in reverse: High current and low voltage on one side translates into low current and high voltage on the other. To see such a thing at either end of an audio system is to see Ohm's Law at work, which I truly believe is akin to poetry.)
Pass and English wondered, naturally enough, what would happen if they drove the ribbon with a voltage-actuated current source, thus allowing them to dispose of the transformer altogether in the interest of simplicity and, presumably, increased transparency of sound. The output impedance of the current source was so high that the amp exhibited virtually no damping factor vis-à-vis the loudspeaker load (again with the Ohm's Law!), but Pass and English noted that the small and magnetically (if not spiritually) centered ribbon didn't seem to require electrical damping, arguably because a ribbon element is so low in mass. (Cripes, if it's not Ohm, it's that wig-wearing Newton with all his stupid laws. Let's deregulate electricity so we can start seeing some real he-man performance!) Pass and English noted that the ribbon sounded and measured better in every way once its transformer had been removed from the equation. Inventors everywhere will recognize this as the switching on of a cartoon light bulb.
Those events didn't take place in a vacuum, of course. Somewhere in the background, Pass DIY was busy with a design called the Zen—a very-low-powered solid-state amplifier design that has found favor with a great many do-it-yourselfers. In the original Zen amp of 1996, gain was generated by a single MOSFET operating in common source mode, biased by a second MOSFET that was configured as a constant current source, in-line from the positive voltage supply. After the Zen amplifier came Son of Zen, which used a differential pair of gain MOSFETs, but which dispensed with the constant-current source and instead used resistors to power up the two MOSFETs.
The First Watt F1 could be considered the Out-of-Wedlock Grandson of Zen (in which sense it may also be related to Strom Thurmond). The F1 uses a differential pair of MOSFETs for current gain, driven by a trio of slightly different-spec MOSFETs configured as constant-current sources, the latter making the F1 much more efficient than the passive-source Son of Zen. That makes a total of five MOSFETs per gain stage—and one stage is all you need for 10 class-A watts. In the interest of design simplicity and smoothness of sound, the F1 does not have a negative feedback loop—another reason for its tube-like high impedance and low damping factor—although there's a feedback mechanism for keeping DC voltages stable, driven by a pair of bipolar small-signal transistors.


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WWF concerned Rio talks may collapse
Posted on 05 June 2012
Two weeks out from the 20-year reprise of the Rio Earth Summit, and two years after negotiations started, global conservation organization WWF issued a World Environment Day warning that failures of commitment, failures of process and failures of leadership could lead to the collapse of talks on achieving a long-term sustainable world.
Gland, Switzerland: Two weeks out from the 20-year reprise of the Rio Earth Summit, and two years after negotiations started, global conservation organization WWF issued a World Environment Day warning that failures of commitment, failures of process and failures of leadership could lead to the collapse of talks on achieving a long-term sustainable world."Currently we are a long way from where we need to be in these negotiations," said WWF Director General, Jim Leape. "Heads of State still have a unique opportunity in Rio to set the world on a path to sustainable development – but they need to step up their game dramatically. As things currently stand, we are facing two likely scenarios – an agreement so weak it is meaningless, or complete collapse. Neither of these options would give the world what it needs."
An extra week given over to negotiations fell into disarray over the weekend as the talks fractured into 19 separate dialogues with internal disagreements on the processes to be followed. "Country positions are still too entrenched and too far apart to provide a meaningful draft agreement for approval by an expected 120 Heads of State," said Leape.
The most recent text was a significant weakening of previous drafts, particularly in the areas of valuing natural wealth, energy and ocean protection, and even that was privately rejected by a number of delegations.
"When they gather in Rio, governments must restrain the flow of weasel words that is threatening to emasculate any agreement," said Leape. "They are not helping their people or the planet by 'noting', 'recognising' or 'emphasising'. We need to see time-bound commitment and action words like 'will', 'must' and 'deliver'," said Leape.
"These talks about our common future risk being strangled by short-term views focused on national interests that are to nobody's long-term benefit. Governments must come out of their corners, and together embrace a bold vision for a better future for all – and do what it takes to get there."
WWF's recent Living Planet Report warned that the world currently consumes 1.5 planets worth of resources, with Rio+20 being one of the most immediate and potentially influential opportunities to equitably bring consumption to sustainable levels.
While rescuing the Rio talks will be difficult, leaders need to deliver a clear political mandate to ensure food, water and energy security for all by 2030. Concretely, this means agreeing to integrate the value of nature into national and corporate accounting standards, eliminating harmful subsidies, agreeing to Sustainable Development Goals and strong regimes to protect oceans.
Heads of State can deliver concrete outcomes by instructing foreign ministers and delegations to focus on points of agreement rather than points of difference. "This is a matter of urgency – and we need our political leaders to show they mean business by quickly coming to agreement on the fundamental changes in the way economies are managed to protect our future," said Leape.


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Nov 25, 2013
Was Glinda an International War Criminal? Channel 37 reports!
The Channel-37.net staff writers, Paul Lagasse and Gary Lester discuss Science Fiction. Every podcast brings a new topic whether Star Trek or Star Wars, or even current event or controversies in the Science Fiction World. We even try to have guests, both writers and real science people.
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When I'm tired, and wish to forget work and care
I get my old deck and play a few games of solitaire.
Whne my dogs want to bark, and my limbs ache
I play 18 ways of solitaire for my nerve's sake.
Sometimes I play twins, Minneapolis and St. Paul
Maybe I win, and again, maybe the right cards won't fall.
I play California when I wish the day to be sunny.
But often it rains there, and I lose my hard earned money.
Sometimes I play my other twins, Chicago and St. Joe
That's when I want to go to my very own native state
Where the tall corn and enormous pumpkins grow.
Where I always went to work early, and went to bed late.
Sometimes it's a la Ferris Wheel, where the queens I crown.
Sixes build up to the Jacks, and fives to the Kings build down.
Sometimes I shuffle and shuffle, in a hunt for the aces
And usually,m they never show a tiny peep of their faces.
Sometimes 'tis the ever losing game of Gambler's Delight
Then I think, how foolish is the poor duped fool's plight.
When he loses his money, and everything, even his shirt,
And his shoes and his poor naked feet are out in the dirt.
I play up and down Germany, when I want to fight
I think of the Nazis and the cards flop with all my might.
What I think of the beasts? The words I won't even try to spell.
They'll never go to Heaven, they are too mean to go to H--l.
According to my various moods, the others, in I mix.
But when I lose on all of them, I'm in a terrible fix.
Sometimes I feel much better, quite happy and gay.
Other times, I get mad, and put the cards away.
Then I think I'll put in my time with a good book.
Sometimes I get busy with thread and crochet hook.
But more often, when I have a little spare time.
My pen gets busy, to spell out some silly rhyme.
These are copyright 1996 and reprinted with permission.


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Horticultural Science (i.e., "the green industries") is the largest segment of plant agriculture, by economic measures, in Massachusetts and New England. Abundant career opportunities exist in the field and in related industries and services.
The next generation of students graduating from Land Grant universities will be faced with the challenge to redesign landscapes in response to diminishing supplies of fossil fuels and water as well as greater financial stress in public and private enterprises.
Students in Horticultural Science may pursue a variety of careers:
- Landscape plant production and use – plant production in greenhouses, outdoor plant production in field and container nurseries of woody landscape, wetland, and native plants; plant propagation by tissue culture and other means, and landscape firms specializing in landscape and garden design, plant installation, and plant maintenance.
- Allied commercial businesses – technical and sales representatives for firms specializing in greenhouse and nursery supplies, landscape plant breeding and improvement, production of horticultural substrates and compost, commercial soil testing, production of biological control agents and "biorational" pest control materials, and design and marketing of greenhouses and other major pieces of horticultural equipment.
- Retail businesses – garden centers, nurseries, roadside and farm markets, and managers and buyers for national retailers.
- Education and recreation ‐ public outreach through state and federal government agencies, education programs providing courses at community colleges, adult education programs, and youth education at vocational and other high schools. Positions of horticulturalist or grounds administrator at botanical gardens, arboreta, public parks, historical sites, zoos and theme parks are also available.
Recently, two Horticultural Science students assisted in the building of a pollinator garden, part of the Million Pollinator Gardens initiative. Check out the video here: