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Survey Suggests Higher Risk of Falls Due to Dizziness in Middle-Aged and Older Americans - 05/25/2009
Survey Suggests Higher Risk of Falls Due to Dizziness in Middle-Aged and Older Americans
Millions unaware of danger from vestibular dysfunction; diabetes a risk factor, along with age
Release Date: May 25, 2009
May 20, 2009- A full third of American adults, 69 million men and women over age 40, are up to 12 times more likely to have a serious fall because they have some form of inner-ear dysfunction that throws them off balance and makes them dizzy, according to Johns Hopkins experts.
Among the other key findings of the three-year survey and study on the subject by the Johns Hopkins team are that a third of this group, or more than 22 million, were unaware of their vulnerability, having had no previous incidents of disequilibrium or sudden falls to suggest that anything was wrong.
In the survey, to be published in the Archives of Internal Medicine online May 25, these asymptomatic people were six times more likely to suffer a potentially fatal fall than people with a healthy sense of balance, whereas people already experiencing symptoms of imbalance had a 12-fold increase in risk.
Accidental falls are among the leading causes of death in the elderly, killing an estimated 13,000 seniors each year in the United States and resulting in more than one and a half million visits to hospital emergency rooms, experts say.
"Vestibular imbalances need to be taken seriously because falls can be fatal and injuries can be painful, lead to long hospital stays and result in significant loss in quality of life," says Lloyd B. Minor, M.D., the Andelot Professor and director of otolaryngology – head and neck surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Minor says that recent government reports estimate that fatal falls in the elderly cost the U.S. Medicare program nearly $1 billion in hospital charges, and those injured with broken bones cost an additional $19 billion.
More than 5,000 men and women over age 40 participated in the survey, which took three years to complete and involved specialized exams and balance testing to find out who had vestibular dysfunction, its early signs and symptoms, and who did not.
And the chance of having a balance problem, survey results showed, increases with age and diabetes. Eighty-five percent of men and women over age 80 had an imbalance problem, 23 times more than people in their 40s. And people with diabetes were 70 percent more likely to suffer from vestibular problems. Researchers say this is likely due to damage done by high blood sugar levels to the hair cells in the inner ear that facilitate balance control and to the long-term damage from diabetes to the inner ear's small blood vessels.
"Our survey shows that balance testing needs to be part of basic primary care, and that all physicians need to be monitoring and screening their patients for vestibular dysfunction so that we can take preventive measures to guard against falling," says Minor.
Lead study investigator Yuri Agrawal, M.D., says one reason for the large numbers of undiagnosed and untreated individuals is that balance testing requires specialized training and the tests take more time and effort to perform than other diagnostic or screening procedures.
As part of the new survey, study participants were subjected to a half dozen key tests of unsteadiness, including physical exams.
Balance function was assessed by subjects' ability to stand upright with and without visual cues, such as being able to stand upright while wearing a blindfold or with their eyes closed, or by not having to use their arms to maintain balance while standing on a foam-padded mat.
"Now that we have identified the magnitude of balance problems, primary care physicians are more likely to be on the look out for its early signs and symptoms, and more attuned to when a patient needs to be referred to a physical therapist," Agrawal says.
Minor points out that physical rehabilitation exercises can aid people with vestibular dysfunction. Balancing and walking exercises can be used to train the brain to compensate for inner-ear deficits and episodes of dizziness. One such exercise has unsteady people practice standing on one leg, while resting the other leg on a Styrofoam cup and trying not to crush it. Another exercise has people turning their head while walking.
Minor adds that people with vestibular dysfunction can take preventive steps to avoid falls in their homes, such as installing guard rails along stairs or hallways where a fall might occur, making sure rooms are well lit, and removing carpeting in places where people are more prone to trip.
Agrawal says the team's next steps are to evaluate screening tools for identifying as early as possible which people are at a heightened risk of falling. She also says other risk factors, such as sleep patterns and nutrient deficiencies, which may play a role in predicting risk of falling, need further study. Various rehabilitation techniques should also be examined to pinpoint which techniques work best at preventing falls and, ultimately, to allow people to live longer and healthier lives.
Funding for this study was provided in part by The Johns Hopkins Hospital. However, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys are funded directly by the National Institutes of Health.
In addition to Minor and Agrawal, other researchers involved in this research, conducted solely at Hopkins, were John Carey, M.D.; Charles Della Santina, M.D., Ph.D.; and Michael Schubert, Ph.D., P.T.
For the Media
Media contact:
David March 410-955-1534; [email protected]


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Is fintech a failure?
That's the question that Jake Fuentes, co-founder of Level Money, posed in an article on Medium late last year. Fuentes points out that, while some tech firms have had success in the world of finance (Stripe and Square being obvious examples), we haven't yet seen the sort of fundamental, disruptive changes in the finance industry that thought leaders had predicted at the beginning of the fintech boom.
Fuentes writes: "Winners certainly exist, but tech has yet to revolutionize banking in any real way. The tone of the fintech space has shifted from disrupting incumbents to partnering with them, and VC dollars have started to shift to more promising fields. Perhaps we just haven't seen the right company yet, but the oracles of disruption would have painted a very different picture for 2017 than where we are today."
And on that point, I agree: If we evaluate fintech by the predictions made 10, or even just 5 years ago, we've largely fallen short.
But rather than looking at why fintech has failed to meet the lofty expectations set by those "oracles of disruption," I'd question whether they were ever realistic in the first place—and point out that the industry has actually been more successful in disrupting the established financial order than it might appear.
Heavily-regulated industries are difficult to disrupt
Cryptocurrency mania is sweeping the globe, but it's important to note that a major factor of cryptocurrencies' success has been that these payment systems operate outside the ambit of regulations placed on companies dealing with fiat currencies. It's that strict regulatory oversight which makes evolution in other segments of the financial industry such a slow process.
Just take a look at healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and energy: all huge industries with significant legislative barriers that prevent disruption from happening overnight.
It's not as simple as developing an app—you have to ensure that every part of the ecosystem is in step with your innovation. Even in more loosely regulated industries such as transportation and hospitality, disruptors like Uber and Airbnb run into trouble with governments as soon as they reach a certain scale. Their focus then shifts to security and compliance.
Finance is the same way. No one was ever going to flip the entire ecosystem on their own.
Instead, we're seeing separate companies targeting smaller segments at a time. When was the last time you went to a physical branch to perform a transaction, or used an ATM to deposit a check? Instead, we're trading global stocks and sending money across the world from our smartphones. Sure, these innovations don't always feel like earth-shaking transformations of the financial sector—bit by bit, though, they're bringing much-needed modernization to the industry.
Parameters of success for fintech were skewed
Let's think about the timeframe within which fintech was expected to change the game in finance.
Back in 2011, most payments experts would tell you that success meant the ubiquitous use of mobile—and it seemed like it was just around the corner. But while services like Apple Pay and Google Wallet have gained some ground, digital wallets still only accounted for roughly one percent of all transaction volume in 2016. If you asked someone to guess today's digital wallet adoption rates a few years ago, I guarantee that it would have been a lot higher than it actually is. But consider that it took credit cards 28 years to hit just 50 million users. There's no doubt that the pace of change has increased significantly.
In that same vein, most industry observers predicted that payments would be disrupted under a zero-sum model: one new digital payment method would emerge as the preferred way to transact and it would dominate the market.
Of course, that wasn't realistic either—even before fintech, we saw individuals using a range of payment methods depending on things like their age, or their socio-economic conditions. Younger people were quick to adopt debit and credit cards, while older people continued to write checks. The unbanked or underbanked (typically lower income) preferred to work with cash.
What fintech has done is increase the breadth of payment options, providing more flexibility and convenience across the board.
Fuentes notes in his article that fintech companies have mostly given up on the idea of toppling financial incumbents, and now are looking to build partnerships with them instead.
But to think that these startups could replace the networks and relationships that took legacy institutions decades to build—and do it in just a few years, no less—was misguided from the beginning. Disruption doesn't always happen by dismantling. Partnering was (and still is) the clearest path to real change in the financial industry, and it should have been the goal all along.
There's more to fintech than technology
Which brings me to my final point: Most fintechs have focused their efforts on the cosmetic—improving the user experience in financial transactions rather than addressing the fundamental issues (the "plumbing" problems) that have plagued the industry for so long.
For the most part, these companies have succeeded—they never set out to fix the underlying layer, and in disruptive cycles, the cosmetic friction is typically the first to be addressed. Softcard, for example, was just employing near-field communication (NFC) technology to let consumers use their credit cards at a retail store.
There's a smaller segment of the fintech industry, though, that has centered its attention on the root causes of financial frustration: newcomers like Ripple, Traxpay, and—yes—Hyperwallet.
Though progress is slow, these companies are starting to see success. For example, a recent McKinsey report highlights how a number of digital innovators have targeted the correspondent banking model and driven positive change in cross-border transactions, improving the speed, cost, and transparency of international payments.
Finance isn't transportation or hospitality
Financial disruption isn't sexy. It doesn't happen fast. There aren't any outright winners. It would be great if there was a financial Uber or Airbnb that could flip the industry overnight, but that's just not the nature of the space.
Rather than criticizing the industry's shortcomings or writing it off as a failure, I feel that we need to do a better job of recognizing just how much fintech has accomplished over the last few years.
These are real victories in a sector notorious for its glacial pace of change.
If they don't match the glamorous expectations set earlier this decade, perhaps the fault lies with the oracles—not the industry.
The blog originally appeared on Hyperwallet.

subset: commoncrawl


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Large-scale iwi investment in the New Zealand heartland could reinvigorate rural economy.
Tainui has overtaken South Island powerhouse Ngai Tahu as Aotearoa's richest iwi.
A comparison of latest annual accounts shows the Hamilton-headquartered iwi, which on August 15 opened its new multiplex movie theatres at Hamilton's The Base and is now filling its new Novotel at Auckland International Airport with cup guests, is the country's richest tribe.
Tainui has more assets by dollar value and is making more money, so if a Maori Rich List existed, it would show Tainui laying claim to total assets of $658 million, $5 million ahead of earthquake-hit Christchurch headquartered Ngai Tahu's $653.2 million.
Tainui's net annual profit for 2011 was $23.1 million, ahead of Ngai Tahu's $19.6 million for its latest reporting period of 2010.
With about 600,000 of New Zealand's 4.4 million population being Maori, iwi powerhouses like these have vast potential.
For years, the South Island iwi has been the attractive face of tangata whenua success, leading the way towards riches tipuna could only dream of, as we opened pots of their oysters, flocked to their tourism businesses and marvelled at the sheer size of their vast rangatiratanga (tribal authority) over more than 80 per cent of the South Island.
Biggest was obviously best.
Now, Tainui with far less land and about 60,000 people, has taken top spot and distributed $10.5 million this financial year.
Ngai Tahu owns significant assets and is the most widely diversified iwi since 1998 when it received $170 million in a Treaty of Waitangi settlement.
But now the once-financially riven Tainui is on a fast-paced growth plan, with a 30-year plan for 500ha at Ruakura on Hamilton's outskirts.
Yet chief executive Mike Pohio is a reluctant winner, pointing out that Ngai Tahu has not yet issued their accounts for 2011.
"But even if there is a number that's a little bit bigger than another number, it doesn't matter because it's really, really early days and it would be better not to develop that sort of position but to talk about where we are in the journey. We have to be humble because we have a really long way to go," Pohio says.
Pushed to acknowledge financial achievements, he attributes success to management and systems.
"It's discipline and decision-making from governance through to management. There's a discipline about how we make decisions so there's a higher probability of success and a low probability of getting commercial equations wrong because we concentrate on managing risks."
Tainui got a Treaty of Waitangi settlement in 1995 of $170 million.
While primary industries have unlocked Ngai Tahu's fortunes, land is the key to Tainui's success via the commercially successful Tainui Group Holdings and Waikato-Tainui Fisheries.
By 2020, Tainui plans to have assets worth $1 billion and already its asset base has grown from a mere $147 million in 2002.
Greg Campbell, Ngai Tahu's chief executive, disliked the comparison between the iwi.
"It's not a matter of who's bigger. We generate a lot of cash through our operating surplus. Ngai Tahu has 63 per cent of assets in property but we have investments in tourism, seafood businesses and capital markets so we're a slightly different business," he says.
Auckland's Ngati Whatua is the third-richest iwi, declaring in its last annual report gross assets of $403.5 million but standing to make many millions annually in new land rental deals from Quay Park on Auckland's waterfront, returned to the iwi with a demand for a 15-year rent holiday which has now expired, potentially enriching that Queen Street-headquartered iwi run by Tiwana Tibble.
Iwi take varying approaches to presenting their accounts. Some hold the information close and distribute only to hapu while others post fully audited highly detailed accounts, easily accessible to all on websites.
Tainui's annual report is most impressive at 69 pages, presented like an NZX listed company with full disclosure and transparency and Ngapui also issues a detailed 59-page annual report.
"The big thing with most iwi is they are asset rich and cash poor and most of them don't publish accounts, they like to keep it all in the family and will only distribute information to the runanga," says one consultant.
In 2007, Maori commercial assets were estimated to be worth $16.5 billion, of which $8 billion is in primary industries, according to information presented at May's Maori Economic Summit.
By last year, the Maori economy was estimated to be $36.9 billion.
Some iwi communicators have a plan to deliberately target business media to overcome what they see as ignorance or racism and control the way their news is disseminated. The financial pages are where they see their future, not in the local or regional pages, they say.
Ngai Tahu Tourism, a subsidiary of Ngai Tahu Holdings, operates iconic tourism businesses Franz Josef Glacier Guides and Glacier Hot Pools, Queenstown's Shotover Jet, Dart River Safaris, the Hollyford Guided Walk, Hukafalls Jet in Taupo, Rainbow Springs in Rotorua, Abel Tasman's Aqua Taxi and Kaiteriteri Kayaks. In August the business bought into Rotorua-based farm show and tour business The Agrodome. It exports crayfish, oysters, shellfish, paua and other species and has residential and lifestyle subdivisions.
Tainui and Ngai Tahu, with assets worth a collective $1.2 billion, are the giants of the Maori economy but experts say Ngapuhi, with about 20 per cent of Aotearoa's Maori population standing at around 100,000 people, has the most growth potential of any iwi as it prepares for further settlements following fisheries settlements.
Chris Wikaira, who handles Tainui's communications, points to rural New Zealand particularly in the North Island becoming dominated by iwi businesses.
"You can conceivably see out in provincial New Zealand the biggest game in town, apart from maybe forestry or Fonterra, is likely to be an iwi asset holding company and it's all money that's invested in New Zealand," he says.
One of Ngai Tahu's most successful exports is live crayfish into Asia, a market Campbell says is only just beginning to unlock as China's wealth increases and demand for protein rises.
Some iwi have already looked at buying assets overseas and are investing, one in Australia's primary sector leading an expert to conclude this: once they have dominated parts of Aotearoa's economy, offshore is the next frontier for iwi.


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Nov 13, 2012
Building an Adaptive Grid with MUELLER
MUELLER is a modular grid system for responsive/adaptive and non–responsive layouts, based on Compass. You have full control over column width, gutter width, baseline grid and media queries.
This post is a brief step–by–step tutorial on how to work with MUELLER. I assume that you're comfortable using Sass and Compass. Moreover, a decent knowledge of Grid Theory is an advantage.
"The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropiate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice. (Josef Müller–Brockmann)
Why another Grid System?
Mainly because no other grid system met our requirements: Full control, clean code, maximum flexibility. We use MUELLER for either standard (non–responsive) layouts or for building complex adaptive layouts with media queries. Although you can do fluid designs with MUELLER, I personally don't recommend it since you lose control over your typography (that being said, you might need to go fluid with targeting small handhelds).
MUELLER does not help you decide on the number of columns (per media query), the width of your columns or the width of the margin between columns. To put it another way, MUELLER doesn't help you with your layout, because that's your decision and a grid system shouldn't force or restrict you in any way. Before starting, you should have an idea about which devices you would like to target and what kind of grid you want to use (e.g. 24 cols for large desktops, 12 cols for tablets, 6 cols for handhelds and so on). Moreover, you shouldn't be scared of coding. MUELLER is not an out–of–the–box-drag–and–drop–on–the–fly grid system. It does require coding. Once you understand it, you're able to define a grid which perfectly adapts to all devices.
Download & Install
First, you obviously need to download the MUELLER source code. The repository is hosted on GitHub, so you have several options (clone git–repo, download zip/tar) to choose from.
I assume you already have a working version of Compass, so you just need to place the two folders (grid, partials) and the file screen.scss in your Sass folder. If you're struggling at this point, it's probably a good idea to consult the Sass documentation. You can also use Codekit to automatically compile Sass/Compass files.
First off, we're going to define columns for each device resp. media query. Then we'll build layouts (and templates) on top of the media classes and I'll explain some helpers for fine–tuning your layouts. Finally, I'll touch on the topic of baseline grids.
Basic Grid Structure
Inside the folder media there are different files for media queries (e.g._handheld_landscape.scss). You can rename these files, delete the files you won't use or even choose to combine all files. The file layout is completely up to you. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to explain things based on the given structure.
If you target tablets in portrait mode and you want to define 12 columns with a width of 40px for each column and a 20px margin, you should open the file _media-tablet-portrait.scss and change the variables according to your needs:
$gc: 12; /* grid columns */ $gw: 40px; /* grid width */ $gm: 20px; /* grid margin */ // container .g-tp-c { @extend .g-base-c; width: $gw*$gc+$gm*($gc - 1); /* 700px */ } // creating the grid-columns @include grids(tp, 0 1 2 3 4 6 12 16 24, /* columns */ $gc, $gw, $gm, 0 2 4 8 12 16); /* append/prepend/push/pull */
That's basically it. You're now able to use media classes like .g-tp-6 (6 columns for desktop) or .g-tp-12 (12 columns for desktop) within your templates, though you're not able to use .g- tp-5 (because you didn't specify that column). You also just defined classes to append, prepend, push and pull. You should repeat this for every media query you want to use (e.g. large desktop, handheld landscape, handheld). And don't forget to add a file with default values (e.g. _media-desktop.scss) for browsers that can't interpret media queries as well as your default target.
If you think this concept through, you'll end up with templates looking like this:
While this is fine for prototyping, it's not clean code and not maintainable at all. That's where layouts come into play...
Layouts & Templates
A Layout is an abstraction on top of several media definitions. For example, you could define a two–column asymmetrical layout by extending the media classes like this (note that I choose to override the columns with small handhelds):
.l-2c { @extend .g-d-24; @extend .g-tp-12; @extend .g-hl-12; @extend .g-h-6; } .c-1 { @extend .g-d-16; @extend .g-d-f; @extend .g-tp-8; @extend .g-tp-f; @extend .g-hl-8; @extend .g-hl-f; @extend .g-h-6; } .c-2 { @extend .g-d-8; @extend .g-d-l; @extend .g-tp-4; @extend .g-tp-l; @extend .g-hl-4; @extend .g-hl-l; @extend .g-h-6; }
So, instead of using the media-classes...
... ...
you can now use the layout-classes...
... ...
This makes your templates much more redable and maintainable. But we're still using presentational markup here.
Going on step further, you are also able to define so–called templates in order to remove the presentational markup:
.tpl-1 { section { @extend .l-2c; } article { @extend .c-1; } aside { @extend .c-2; } }
Your template now looks like this ...
... ... ...
Please note that while using templates may seem tempting at first, it'll bloat your code and you'll end up with a huge stylesheet. For now, you're better off using layouts until browsers natively support the @extend directive.
MUELLER includes helpers in order to append/prepend resp. push/pull certain columns and to show/hide elements per media query.
To append or prepend columns, you just have to extend the classes you defined with your grid setup:
.l-2c { ... .c-1 { @extend .g-d-12; @extend .g-d-prepend6; @extend .g-tp-8; @extend .g-tp-prepend4; ... } }
The same applies to push and pull. Here´s an example to switch columns:
.l-2c { ... .c-1 { @extend .g-d-16; @extend .g-d-push8; @extend .g-d-f; ... } .c-2 { @extend .g-d-8; @extend .g-d-pull16; @extend .g-tp-l; ... } }
Moreover, there are classes to show/hide certain elements, e.g. the class .hl-hide in order to hide an element with handheld landscape or .tp-show in order to show an element with tablets in portrait mode:
... ... ... ...
Vertical Rhythm
So far, we've only been talking about a horizontal grid: splitting the screen into columns and adapting the width of these columns based on different devices (resp. screens). But what about a vertical/baseline grid? Changing font size and line height is obvisously as important in order to preserve the overall harmony.
With Compass, that's quite easy to achieve. First, you need to define a default font-size/line-height
@import "compass/typography/vertical_rhythm"; $base-font-size: 16px; $base-line-height: 24px;
Second, you can change the font size/line height within your media-query:
@include establish-baseline(14px);
With this command, you end up with a font-size of 14px and a line-height of 21px (14*1.5). If you now use 1.5em (or 3em, 4.5em ...) throughout (e.g. for margins/paddings), you'll end up with a very strict vertical rhythm.
As already mentioned, there are a lot of different grid systems out there and you need to find the one that fits your needs (or write your own). I can personally recommend Susy and you might want to give Gridsetapp a try as well.
Conclusion & Credits
I hope this (slightly superficial) article gives you an idea about how to achieve an adaptive website using MUELLER. Note that the only file you actually need is _grid_system.scss. All other parts that come with MUELLER are just examples of how to use the grid system, so you're free the change the file structure, use templates (or not use them), define your custom layouts etc.
MUELLER is largely a copy of the ideas outlined by Chris Eppstein in his article Building Responsive Layouts with Sass. The name MUELLER refers to Josef Müller-Brockmann. It's also part of my last name.
If you need help with using MUELLER, feel free to ask me via Twitter or GitHub. If you have ideas on how to improve MUELLER, please share your thoughts (or fork and send a pull request).
About the Author
Patrick Kranzlmueller (*1972 in Vorarlberg/Austria) studied Media Science in Vienna & Liverpool. He has worked in the fields of Webdesign and Webdevelopment since 1996, mostly doing websites based on Django/Python. Lead developer of Grappelli and MUELLER. Occasionally gives lectures and writes articles.
http://www.vonautomatisch.at, http://www.twitter.com/sehmaschine


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Hall of Fame broadcaster Jerry Coleman, a former second baseman for the New York Yankees who interrupted his pro career to fly as a Marine Corps pilot in World War II and Korea, died Sunday, the San Diego Padres said. He was 89.
Coleman spent more than four decades with the Padres as a broadcaster. He managed the team in 1980.
Padres president Mike Dee said Coleman died at a hospital Sunday afternoon. He said the team was notified by Coleman's wife, Maggie.
A family friend told The Associated Press on Sunday night that Coleman had surgery before Christmas for bleeding in the brain. Doctors discovered more bleeding last week and Coleman had more surgery, said the friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the situation.
"It's a sad day," Padres manager Bud Black said. "We're losing a San Diego icon. He's going to be missed."
The Padres planned to keep Coleman's statue at Petco Park open until 11:30 p.m. Sunday so fans could pay tribute.
While recounting his military career in an interview days before the statue was unveiled in September 2012, Coleman said: "Your country is bigger than baseball."
Coleman spent some seven decades in pro baseball, a career that included four World Series titles with the Yankees and was interrupted by his service in World War II and the Korean War.
He flew 120 missions combined in the two wars. Coleman was awarded two Distinguished Flying Crosses, 13 Air Medals and three Navy Citations.
AUDIO: Coleman Talks Life On The Field, In The Air And On The Air
Around Petco Park and on Padres radio broadcasts, Coleman was known as "The Colonel," having retired from the Marines with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was the only major leaguer to see combat in two wars.
"He was a wonderful human being and a great guy," Black said. "He was one of a kind. He sort of blazed his own path from San Francisco and ended up as a war hero and a major league ballplayer and doing so many things in our game. As much as he's remembered for all he accomplished as a baseball man, he was more proud of his military service."
Coleman's broadcast schedule had been reduced to home day games. He also did a pregame interview with Black, who said Coleman was self-deprecating and preferred to talk about the Padres rather than anything he'd done with the Yankees or in the Marines.
"You wouldn't know it walking down the street that he was a World Series champion and also a guy that flew fighter planes," Black said.
Coleman was known for calls of "Oh, Doctor!" and "You can hang a star on that!" after big plays. He received the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005.
He also was known for malaprops, like the time he was describing Dave Winfield going back for a long fly ball.
"I said, 'Winfield hit his head against the wall and it's rolling toward the infield.' I meant the ball, of course," Coleman said in 2012.
In a statement, commissioner Bud Selig said Coleman "was a hero and a role model to myself and countless others in the game of baseball. ... But above all, Jerry's decorated service to our country in both World War II and Korea made him an integral part of the Greatest Generation. He was a true friend whose counsel I valued greatly."
VIDEO: Coleman Shares World War II Experience
After graduating from high school in 1942, Coleman traveled three days by train from San Francisco to Wellsville, N.Y., to report to the New York Yankees' Class D affiliate.
Still 17, he was too young to enlist and fight in World War II, so he got to spend the summer playing ball. After he joined the military, he flew Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers in the Pacific in World War II. He played three more seasons of minor league ball before making his big league debut with the Yankees on April 20, 1949. He was The Associated Press' Rookie of the Year that season.
Coleman's best season was 1950, when he was an All-Star and was named MVP of the Yankees' four-game sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series. Among his teammates were Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto and Johnny Mize.
"We won the first game 1-0 and I drove in that run," Coleman recalled in 2012. "We won the second game 2-1. I scored one of the two runs and DiMaggio hit a home run in the 10th to win it. In the third game I drove in the winning run in the last inning, and in the fourth game I rested."
By "rested," he means he went 0 for 3. "I was exhausted," he said.
In October 1951, Coleman found out that Marine pilots from World War II were not discharged, but on inactive status and that he'd be going to Korea for 18 months. He missed the bulk of two seasons.
Coleman said he took his physical along with Ted Williams in Jacksonville in 1952. Williams, a San Diego native, also was a Marine pilot in World War II, but didn't see combat duty. He did fly combat missions in Korea.
When Coleman returned to the Yankees, he hit only .217. He was sent to an eye doctor, who told him he'd lost his depth perception.
"If you're trying to hit a baseball and you don't have depth perception, you have a problem," Coleman said.
He got that corrected but then broke his collarbone in April 1955. The night he came back from that injury, he got beaned.
His last season was 1957, when he hit .364 in a seven-game World Series loss to the Milwaukee Braves.
Coleman worked in the Yankees' front office before beginning a broadcasting career that eventually brought him to San Diego.
"First and foremost, he was an American hero whose service to this country is his lasting legacy. He was also a great Yankee, a true ambassador for baseball, and someone whose imprint on our game will be felt for generations," Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner said. "On behalf of the entire New York Yankees organization, we send our deepest condolences to the Coleman family."
Coleman managed the Padres in 1980, when they went 73-89 and finished last in the NL West. Coleman was fired and returned to the booth.
"I should never have taken it," he said. "I look at it now and see the mistakes I made. If I wanted to be a manager, I should have gone to the minor leagues and developed there."
Coleman's statue at Petco Park depicts him in a flight suit.
Coleman said the closest he came to being killed was in Korea when the engine in his Corsair quit during takeoff and his plane flipped. He preferred to talk about his comrades.
Coleman remembered a mission over Korea when a plane piloted by his buddy, Max Harper, blew up and flew straight into the ground.
"I knew there was no need for help. It was an unpleasant thing," Coleman said.
In describing the two-seat Dauntless he flew in the Solomon Islands and the Philippines, Coleman said the gunner "was the bravest man I knew. If I did something wrong, he died, too."
Longtime San Francisco Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper mentioned the various halls of fame Coleman belonged to and added: "More than anything he's just a Hall of Fame guy. If he had a bad day, it was never around us. He was always in a good mood. He was quite funny. Northern California guy. Really just a great guy. I'm shocked and saddened that he passed away.
"Here's a guy, what didn't he do in life?" Kuiper said.
AP Baseball Writer Janie McCauley in San Francisco contributed to this report.


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The race for mayor in Boston intensified on Wednesday night as dozens of leaders and activists from the city's African-American communities met behind closed doors and considered asking some candidates of color to abandon their campaigns and rally behind the remaining hopefuls.
Kevin C. Peterson, who helped spearhead the gathering at the Second African Meeting House of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, described the meeting as "pretty heated up" in an update outside the building halfway through the nearly four-hour session.
"There is some concerted interest in asking two or three of the minority candidates to step out of the race and endorse one or two" other candidates of color, said Peterson, who directs the New Democracy Coalition and who is a longtime friend and active supporter of candidate Charlotte Golar Richie.
One option that was discussed, Peterson said, was asking the six candidates of color to meet and identify three hopefuls who would step aside. Those three candidates would then be urged to each endorse two candidates of color, he said.
However, organizers made no public statement after the meeting on that plan or any other to possibly whittle down the number of minority candidates.
In fact, Mel King, a longtime activist and former mayoral candidate who was described by multiple attendees as a lead organizer of the meeting, denied afterward that any such plan was discussed.
Organizers said much of the meeting was also devoted to identifying the issues relevant to people of color that they would like the candidates to address.
State Representative Carlos Henriquez, a Dorchester Democrat supporting John F. Barros, said outside the church that he objected to any effort to clear the path for a particular candidate.
He added that the city's white political establishment does not appear to be engaged in any such effort.
"There's not 70 white people in a room in Hyde Park saying, 'You know what? We have too many white candidates running for mayor,' " Henriquez said.
The race for mayor remains fluid, with polls showing none of the 12 candidates breaking away from the pack, although three white, non-Hispanic candidates — City Councilor John R. Connolly, state Representative Martin J. Walsh, and Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley — have tended to outpoll competitors.
The goal of Wednesday's meeting, according to a letter signed by Peterson and 10 other black leaders, was to get the black community to coalesce behind a single candidate. The gathering was held less than three weeks before the Sept. 24 preliminary election, when Boston voters will take the first step toward selecting a successor to Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who is retiring after 20 years in office.
Peterson served as campaign manager for Golar Richie's first run for state representative in the 1990s. Many of the other black leaders who signed the letter have publicly endorsed Golar Richie or donated to her campaign.
One significant exception is King, a former state representative who is the first, and only, person of color to make it to the final election for mayor of Boston. He has endorsed Charles Clemons.
Even with King's name on the letter, some black leaders said they suspected the meeting was driven by supporters of Golar Richie.
"Walking into to it, it doesn't feel balanced," said Mariama White Hammond, 34, a community organizer from Dorchester who is supporting Barros's mayoral bid, in an interview before the meeting.
"At the end of the day, I'm not sure we can get to behind one candidate. I think there's a generational divide."
Peterson rejected the suggestion that the meeting was set up for Golar Richie, although he said his candidate did have substantial support.
"It's not just people supporting Charlotte, but the black community is leaning that way," Peterson said. "Mel is a Clemons guy. It's not a Charlotte show. It's not an okey-dokey, wink, wink thing. It's a serious discussion among serious adults about politics in Boston."
As the meeting began, attendees were asked to introduce themselves and name the candidate they are supporting. Their answers covered a range of hopefuls, including Golar Richie, Clemons, and Barros.
Before the meeting, King said the goal was to "just to be open, straight out, and talk with folks."
He said he was not interested in the personalities of individual candidates but wanted to be sure that marginalized communities gain power in the election to make Boston "a city where all the tribes are welcome and all the gifts are shared."
Another black leader who signed the letter was Carroy "Cuf" Ferguson, a longtime professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Ferguson said he has not backed a candidate but thought the meeting could prove helpful if black leaders coalesced behind "one or two candidates for mayor."
"It has a lot to do with affirming the potency of the black community around this election," Ferguson said before the meeting.
"It's one of the few opportunities that's allowed the possibility to elect a mayor of color."
Travis Andersen can be reached at email@example.com. Andrew Ryan can be reached at email@example.com .firstname.lastname@example.com.


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We recognize that nothing a women wears can prevent a man from lusting after her. We also take a firm stance that personal responsibility must be taken for a man's sin toward a woman (be it lust or rape). That being said, ladies can be either a tremendous help or a tremendous hurt to the men in their lives. Here is one man's perspective. Um, ladies? Can we talk? It's not like we guys don't appreciate how you look in all of these flattering summer fashions you like to wear. We know that currently, to be stylish is to show a lot of skin. We also know that since we're supposed to control our sexual urges, and we're supposed to let you wear whatever you want… or don't want… we're supposed to keep our opinions on this matter to ourselves.
Frankly, however, it's all very convenient for you, but not so much for us. Because even if, in our silence, you think we don't see all of that skin you're showing us, don't be mistaken: we do. And more often than not, it's causing us to stumble into sexually impure thoughts. We're now into the dog days of summer, and this year, the styles for women seem to rely less and less on fabric and more and more on exposed flesh. After all, the less we wear, the more comfortable we feel in the heat. We get it. If we could get away with wearing shorts and tank tops to church, we would. And it's not like we men would prefer that you dress like shapeless, dour prudes. But please understand: you're not doing us or yourselves any favors with some of the stuff you're wearing. Or, not.
Rules or Responsibilities? Sure, this sounds like the same old sermon about "nice girls" you've probably heard from some curmudgeonly old preacher, or maybe your own strict parents, or maybe some domineering former boyfriend. And sometimes, people make rules simply to have rules, so they can evaluate how obedient everybody is. Some religious sects force their women to wear ankle-length skirts and long-sleeved blouses, regardless of the weather, but even then, modesty is relative, isn't it? If men really want to undress you with their eyes, we have an amazing ability to do so no matter what you're wearing.
Inversely, however, have you ever wondered whether guys who appreciate the "less is more" philosophy in women's clothing truly have your best interests at heart? The more they see, the less their lustful brains need to work. Why bother trying to attract guys like that? So this isn't about rules, or rulers for measuring skirt length. What women wear has been a topic of conversation in practically every generation since God introduced Eve to Adam. In some cultures, women literally wear practically nothing, but then again, the same goes for their men. It's less a matter of modesty or immodesty, and more a primal accommodation for climate.
But does that mean our summertimes in North America provide the perfect excuse for seeing how little fabric we can get away with in public? You ladies may think so, but then again, you may not fully appreciate how visual men can be. Particularly in our sexually charged culture. On the beach, of course, things are somewhat different, even though relative modesty should still be a virtue. Unless you attend a church whose Sunday services take place on a beach, however, we rarely confuse corporate worship with the frivolity of swimming. Yet how many men at your church are met each Sunday with amazingly short skirts, provocatively deep necklines, and sheer fabrics of the thinnest materials which cling ever so delicately to, well, your most delicate spots? Swimsuits may hide the bare essentials, but some of the things some of you wear to church don't really cover up much else.
You expect us to be men of God. You hope that we be chaste, as well you should. After all, you know what lust is. You know that just looking lustfully at somebody is a sin. Might you be contradicting yourselves, meanwhile, when you wear what you wear and then get upset when we sin with our eyes? What is the extent of your culpability when we men lust after you? Are we men supposed to simply look up at the ceiling when you walk by? How fair is it for you to figure you can dress however you want to dress, and it's up to us men to deal however we can with the sin it causes us?
The writer of Proverbs 11:22 put it bluntly: "like a gold ring in a pig's snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion." In other words, even if you're drop-dead gorgeous by anybody's standards, if you lack modesty, you're demonstrating a lack of integrity. And even though our society tends to reward people regardless of their integrity, doesn't God expect us to hold higher standards? We're supposed to be brothers and sisters in Christ. Maybe in your family, growing up, you didn't care how you looked in front of your male siblings, but now that you're grown up, how appropriate is childish behavior?
Dress for True Success: When you're shopping in the mall, or surfing clothing websites by yourself at home, perhaps the allure of trendy fashions tends to displace more rational evaluations of what styles are appropriate for public exposure. Retailers don't want you to think about modesty; they want you to purchase what they have to sell. And they probably don't lower prices just because what they're selling these days features less and less fabric. Unless, of course, you genuinely do intend to seduce men in your church by what you wear and the way you wear it? If that is the case, then perhaps the man you end up seducing will match your ambitions. But that will be a pity for both of you.
Indeed, men, how much of this problem is perpetuated by those of us who shamelessly flirt with women who dress immodestly? Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing; do women dress immodestly to gain attention, or do the attention women receive simply by being a woman feed even a subconscious desire to stoke their allure? After all, women have been known to dress to impress other women, but men can encourage such fashionista posturing for their own benefit and disguise it as female empowerment. Not that covering one's entire body like a babushka readying for winter is the appropriate response here, either. Feigning piety is as much a sin as men lusting and women causing us to lust.
And yes, intentionally enticing your brothers in Christ to sin is also a sin. Instead, shouldn't modesty that comes from an understanding of one's true value before our Savior translate into respectable clothing choices that honor others? The same grace God exercises to save us from our sins is available for all of us to use as we interact with each other. Maybe this all still sounds too much like subjective standards being applied to something in which believers has freedom. But where does God ever say freedom in Christ means we can do whatever we want? We are not our own; we've been bought with a price. Doesn't this mean that being clothed in righteousness never goes out of fashion for believers? Some of us men will be more grateful than others, ladies, if you take our request to heart. Even so, who should you be hoping to please more than any of us?
Dr. Lewis Akpogena
E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com


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I'm using Drupal with search engine friendly URLs. The way Drupal works is that there's two ways to reference a node with SEF URLS switched on:
- The SEF way, eg.
- Via the node ID, eg.
(The second form issues a 301 to the first.)
The first path can be changed quickly and easily, the second is fixed (for the lifetime of the site or node). I'm not suggesting it's a good idea for websites to change their paths on a regular basis, but it's something that might happen, so it occurred to me that I could use the second form as a canonical URL, and that would mean that the same page would be always correctly indexed, and would always retain its Page Rank etc.
Could folk help list the pros and cons of such an approach?


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Washington, DC–(ENEWSPF)–April 16, 2013.
On the 65th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, I join my fellow Americans in wishing the Israeli people a joyous Independence Day. On this date 65 years ago, the Jewish people realized their dream of the ages—to be masters of their fate in their own sovereign state. From that moment on, a free and independent Israel has had no greater friend and ally than the United States. As I said during my visit to Israel last month, our two nations stand together because it makes our countries safer, stronger and more prosperous and it makes the world a better place.
Among the many memories I will always cherish from my visit will be my time at Mount Herzl. There, I was honored to pay tribute to Theodor Herzl who did so much to realize the dream of an independent Israel, to the presidents and prime ministers who guided her, and to those in uniform who have laid down their lives to protect her. The strong and prosperous Israel we see today proves Herzl's vision—"if you will it, it is no dream." On this anniversary, we reaffirm the unbreakable alliance between our two nations and our shared determination to realize the dreams of our people to live in security and peace.
Source: whitehouse.gov


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This soap was a real challenge for me! It was my first time using a couple of the ingredients in soap (mango butter and jojoba oil); the first time I've made a 100% milk soap (it was easier than I thought it was going to be!); and the first time creating such an elaborate soap recipe using so many specialty ingredients. It's also my first time posting a picture tutorial! One of my blog followers requested that I do a detailed picture posting of the making of this soap, so here it is!
Final layer of soap down the centre. I try to stagger each layer of soap, so that the mounds are offset as they pile up on each other.


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Event Series:
December 19 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Join us each Thursday at 8pm for trivia! It's free to play and prizes are awarded to the top three teams! Trivia does get busy so teams are strongly encouraged to make a reservation by either emailing us or sending a message through our facebook page.


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Fitness Machines
Topic Overview
Many people choose to exercise with fitness machines such as treadmills, stair-climbers, stationary bicycles, and cross-country skiing machines. These all offer aerobic conditioning and may also strengthen muscles.
Fitness machines can be great for exercising when the weather is bad or days are short. You may also like the fact that these machines let you control the intensity of your activity and may give you information about your heart rate, calories burned, or miles covered. Fitness machines are safe and handy, but they can be boring. Listening to music, watching TV, or exercising with a friend may make it more fun.
- Treadmills offer the simplicity of walking or jogging along with precise information about your activity, such as time, distance, and speed. Many have adjustable inclines to provide a greater challenge when you want one. Handrails (located in front) should be provided to allow you to keep your balance or to steady yourself now and then, but you should not hold onto them during exercise. It's better to swing your arms as you walk or jog and to only use the handrails if you need to steady yourself or keep from falling.
- Stationary bicycles work much like regular bicycles. Many come with computers that calculate your workout or programs to simulate real bicycle courses. These extras aren't necessary and aren't as important as having a bike with a good overall design that pedals smoothly, has a comfortable seat, and can be adjusted to the proper height. If your seat is too high or low, you can have knee or hip pain. Try to have a slight bend in the knee at the bottom of your pedal stroke.
- Cross-country ski machines are very good for burning calories and developing both upper- and lower-body muscles with little stress on your joints (low impact). But they require coordination and they may tire you sooner than other machines, because they use muscles in both the upper and lower body. If you are new to this activity, start slowly (5 to 10 minutes a session) and gradually do more as you are able. Look for models with pulley systems for the arms (rather than poles that you pull) and adjustable parts.
- Stair-climbers (stepping machines) are similar to ski machines, but they work only the lower-body muscles. They are simpler to use than ski machines, requiring no special coordination. Beginners should start slowly and gradually increase intensity and length of time on these machines. Keep good posture and avoid leaning on handrails.
- Elliptical cross-trainers combine elements of treadmills, stair-climbers, cycles, and cross-country ski machines. Some machines include arm resistance to work both the upper and lower body. Like ski machines, they require some coordination and may tire you faster than other machines, but they give a very thorough aerobic workout along with some resistance training.
Advertising for fitness products often promises large gains with little effort. This is a promise that sounds good but is rarely true. Before you buy, think about these tips:
- Be sure you already like the activity. A machine or device probably will not make you like an activity you dislike in the first place.
- Avoid products that are available only through a television offer. You won't be able to "try before you buy."
- Test a machine in the store before deciding to buy it. Make sure it feels right to you. Sometimes the more expensive machines work more smoothly and make exercise more comfortable and fun.
- Get the opinion of a trainer or experienced person at a health club, YMCA, or other fitness setting about the equipment you are interested in.
- Many products promise to help tone and develop abdominal, thigh, or buttock muscles. These muscles can be strengthened and toned without special devices, and most devices don't make it easier or safer than doing exercises on your own.
Health Tools
Health Tools help you make wise health decisions or take action to improve your health.
Current as of: May 5, 2019
Author: Healthwise Staff
Medical Review:E. Gregory Thompson, MD – Internal Medicine & Adam Husney, MD – Family Medicine & Kathleen Romito, MD – Family Medicine & Heather O. Chambliss, PhD, FACSM – Exercise Science
Topic Contents
This information does not replace the advice of a doctor. Healthwise, Incorporated, disclaims any warranty or liability for your use of this information. Your use of this information means that you agree to the Terms of Use. Learn how we develop our content.


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Happy New Year! | by Pat
For those watching the Cincinnati-Florida Sugar Bowl, here's your open thread. It would be a stretch to try and take too much much from the game, but UC's defensive coordinator Bob Diaco will likely be ND's defensive coordinator as soon as the game ends, so the style of defense is worth paying attention to. Likewise, UC's spread offense is more or less what we should expect next season so fell free to note what you like and don't like.
And speaking of future ND assistant coaches, it sounds like Kelly has hired his new offensive line coach. Again, it probably won't be until next week for anything official, but it sounds like former Kansas assistant Ed Warinner is ND's next line coach.


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The woman who claimed she won a $5,000 contest on a baby-name website to have an online vote determine her baby's name is actually an actress, hired by the website's founder to drum up publicity, the actress and website founder confessed.
Natasha Hill, a struggling single art teacher in Los Angeles, was named by the website Belly Ballot last month as the winner of an essay contest and the $5,000 prize for agreeing to let the Internet name her unborn baby.
Dozens of TV, online and print media outlets, including TODAY Moms and the TODAY and Weekend TODAY broadcasts, covered the story. "Saturday Night Live" even spoofed the contest. Hill, who said she was due in September, told TODAY Moms in a phone interview last week that she planned to use her winnings to pay off credit card debt and start her baby's college fund.
But it appears Natasha Hill is actually Natasha Lloyd, an actress, and she is not pregnant, according to Belly Ballot founder Lacey Moler of Texas. After TODAY Moms received a tip and uncovered seeming inconsistencies in Hill's story, Moler confessed to the hoax Sunday night and admitted it was her idea.
"We came up with the idea for the contest and we knew it would be controversial," Moler said. "But we're a start-up and we wanted to control the situation."
So, she said, she and her staff decided to "hire someone to be the mom."
Moler approached media outlets about the story, and originally said that 80 women applied to the contest. On Sunday, she admitted that, in fact, no one entered it. Lloyd was hired to play the "winner" and then the public would get to cast a vote for one of five boy names and five girl names on March 18.
Moler said that Lloyd is not pregnant. She would not say how much she paid Lloyd for her part in the hoax, or whether Lloyd would still receive payment now that her identity has been revealed.
"We never thought it would get this big," says Moler. "But after ["Hill" was announced as the winner], so many real applications from moms came pouring in."
When reached by phone Sunday night, Natasha Lloyd confirmed that she was an actress who played the role of Natasha Hill. She declined to comment further on any details of her contract with Belly Ballot, her alleged pregnancy, or the site's contest.
When TODAY Moms first reported on the contest, some readers were incredulous; they couldn't believe a real mom would do such a thing. Now it appears they were right.
This story, originally published on March 1, was updated on March 4.


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We seem close to a good account of overconfidence:
We study a large sample of 656 undergraduate students, tracking the evolution of their beliefs about their own relative performance on an IQ test as they receive noisy feedback. … Subjects (1) place approximately full weight on their priors, but (2) are asymmetric, over-weighting positive feedback relative to negative, and (3) conservative, updating too little in response to both positive and negative signals. These biases are substantially less pronounced in a placebo experiment where ego is not at stake. We also find that (4) a substantial portion of subjects are averse to receiving information about their ability, and that (5) less confident subjects are more likely to be averse. We unify these phenomena by showing that they all arise naturally in a simple model of optimally biased Bayesian information processing … [of] agents who derive utility directly from their beliefs (for example, ego or anticipatory utility). (more; HT Dan Houser)
They also have results on how overconfidence relates to IQ and gender:
We show that agents who are of high ability according to our IQ quiz, and hence arguably cognitively more able, are just as conservative and asymmetric as those who score in the bottom half of the IQ quiz. … In our data women differ significantly in their priors, are significantly more conservative updaters than men while not significantly more asymmetric, and significantly more likely to be averse to feedback. These gender differences are consistent with our theoretical framework if a larger proportion of women than men value belief utility.


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Does the sound of your husband's chewing make you want to punch him in the face?
Last week, there was a story on the Today show about a woman with misophonia, a condition where certain sounds can literally drive a person crazy.
Kelly Ripa opened last Friday's episode of Live! with Regis and Kelly by telling guest co-host Seth Meyers that she believes that she has misophonia! Ever since she was a child, the sound of chewing drives her nuts. Her children have been trained to eat quietly with their mouths closed, and she "has to leave the house" if her husband, All My Children actor Mark Consuelos, eats a "juicy peach".
"Hatred of Sound"
Misophonia literally means "hatred of sound" and is a form of decreased sound tolerance. The term was coined by American neuroscientists Pawel and Margaret Jastreboff in 1991. For those with misophonia, everyday sounds can lead to extreme reactions. Misophonia is not a problem with the auditory pathways in the brain. Instead, there is an abnormally strong reaction of the limbic (emotional system) and autonomic nervous system (body control system) which are closely connected with the auditory (hearing) system. Hearing the hated sound activates a "Fight or Flight" response -- either you become angry and potentially violent or you get anxious and run away.Left: Neural systems and mechanisms involved in
misophonia. Gray ovals indicate the primary brain
areas responsible for misophonia.
From Margaret M Jastreboff and Pawel J Jastrebof
According to support organization Misophonia UK :
- the age of onset will often be around 10-12
- the "trigger" sounds which tend to be most difficult are connected with eating and breathing
- the reaction starts with the sound (or some aspect of the sound) and often develops to include actions associated with the sound and even anticipation of those actions
- the closer the sufferer is emotionally to the "trigger" person, the more offensive the sound tends to be
- the reaction is experienced most commonly as extreme rage
- the trigger sound can create an overwhelming fight or flight response in the sufferer, so they experience a desire to do extreme violence to the maker of the sound, or to escape the vicinity of the sound at all costs.
The Sounds to Silence
There is no cure for misophonia, but some treatments have shown promise for some sufferers:- Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT) is a form of habituation (tolerance) therapy designed to help people who suffer from tinnitus (ringing ears). Relies on a patient getting used to a low level of the disturbing sound.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) teaches people to change negative thinking and behaving that contributes to their illness.
- Psychotherapeutic hypnotherapy uses hypnosis to deal with triggers and the response to them.
- Anti-anxiety medications
Is there a particular noise or sound that drives you crazy?
Have you diagnosed any patients with misophonia?
Please share your experiences with us.
For more information about misophonia, click here to go to the Resounding Health Casebook on the topic.


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Challenges in Research
As an international faculty member, you face some additional challenges to conducting your research. Here are some suggestions for overcoming those hurdles, gathered from your peers.
Jump down toFunding
Some granting agencies only make their funds available to U.S. citizens or permanent residents.- In some cases those policies are negotiable. Talk to the program officer and to your institution's Office of Research to discuss the possibilities.
- Many agencies (including the National Science Foundation) do not have such restrictions. Search them out.
International travel
After you have applied for lawful permanent resident status, you aren't supposed to leave the U.S. until your case is decided.- If you have a compelling reason to travel, you can apply for what's called "advance parole." Such reasons might include the need to attend or present your research at an international conference, or to do field work abroad, either of which could be essential to your professional advancement. Note: you must apply for, and receive, advance parole prior to traveling abroad. Otherwise, you may not be able to re-enter the U.S. Because the laws governing citizenship and immigration are subject to change, you should verify this information with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
- Citizens of many countries need a visa to travel abroad, even if they are lawful permanent residents of the US. Apply for a visa as soon as you know your travel plans.
Recruiting graduate students
This can be challenging for any new faculty member. Successful strategies include:- Network with colleagues who teach undergraduate courses in your specialty.
- Go to professional conferences and keep an eye out for promising undergraduate students with interests similar to yours.
- Serve on the graduate admissions committee for your department.
- If there is a required course for incoming graduate students, volunteer to teach it, and use examples from your research in class.


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Hi friends! As I said in my last post I've moved my blog. I'm really excited about the move and you can find me here.
I'm not sure, but some things may have gotten confused in the transfer, namely Feedburner so the new feed is below or you can visit me at my new site and click the RSS button in the menu.
Come on over and say hi!


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In her April review of Thomas Kunkel's Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm discussed Mitchell's beloved, beautiful stories — "cryptic and ambiguous and incantatory and disconnected and extravagant and oracular and apocalyptic" — and his inclination toward invention — toward "radical departures from factuality." "Mitchell's genre," she wrote, "is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named."
Almost three-quarters of a century after The New Yorker published Mitchell's first story, Mitchell's genre, some kind of hybrid, still has yet to be named. Or, rather, perhaps, Mitchell'esque genres have yet to be given a name that fits. Literary Journalism? New Journalism? Literary Nonfiction, Narrative Nonfiction, Immersion, Creative Nonfiction, Faction? Fiction?
Some time ago, I received the suggestion that I conflate two characters in a manuscript I hoped would someday be a book that, in the tradition of, say, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, combined field reporting, memoir, essay, and history. Some kind of hybrid.
Conflating my characters — two children, in this case — would create a single and more compelling protagonist, I was told. Reflexively, I etched in quotes. "My" characters? But I also felt a different urge: It was true. Inventing one composite kid from two could make the story stronger. Certainly it would make writing the story easier for me, and I wanted that too. But how did what I want matter? I come in part from cheating stock — thieves, adulterers, at least two murderers, as far as I know. I was curious: Could I be a cheater, or, more precisely, a compositor, too?
According to Dan Ariely, absolutely. We all are cheats and liars, his research suggests, and, for writers of some kind of hybrid, this matters, perhaps a great deal. Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, Ariely has spent more than a decade studying why humans don't tell the truth. Last month, with collaborator Yael Melamede, he released a documentary film, (Dis)Honesty: The Truth about Lies. In 2012, he published a book, The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves, including a back-cover blurb by A. J. Jacobs, author of the immersion memoir The Year of Living Biblically: "…those who claim not to tell lies are liars."
Humans, evolved to find advantage at the lowest possible cost, possess "a deeply ingrained propensity to lie to ourselves and to others," Ariely reports. We are dishonest to serve the self — the ego, Latin and Greek for "I," distinct from the world and others. We are dishonest to serve our fears — of inadequacy, of rejection, of difference, obscurity, going broke, oblivion, death. We are dishonest to serve our desires — for meaning, love, power, fame, a single compelling protagonist. In Joseph Mitchell's case, perhaps, for art.
Sometimes, he says, we're dishonest so we can think of ourselves as good and honest people. As Marcel Proust once also observed, "It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying." To further complicate matters, says Ariely, "The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests." This, it seems to me, is both the good news and the bad.
Orwell for one believed that "all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy." He himself was sometimes a cheat, and also a coward, at least as far as we know. I've read Homage to Catalonia several times over now, and an essay he wrote about writing books. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle," he observed, "like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
The Polish author Ryszard Kapuściński, complicated, enigmatic, alternately choleric and charming, comes to mind. "One Kapuściński is worth more than a thousand whimpering and fantasizing scribblers," said Salman Rushdie of his friend. Said John Updike, Kapuściński wrote "with a magical elegance that…achieves poetry and aphorism." Yet, in Imperium, a personal account of communist Russia — the camps, the purges — Kapuściński reports nothing of his onetime collaboration with the communist party in his homeland Poland. When the director of Iranian studies at Stanford met with Artur Domoslawski, Kapuściński's biographer and friend, he said to Domoslawski, "You can open Shah of Shahs at any page, point to a passage, and I will tell you what's wrong or inaccurate." And then he proceeded to do so.
Kapuściński once yelled at a friend asking about his books' omissions and fabrications. "You don't understand a thing! I'm not writing so the details add up — the point is the essence of the matter!" On this point, Kapuściński was right. In literature, the essence of the matter rather than the adding up of details is the point. But, if in the end, readers perceive that "essence" comes in disregard of the worlds of possibility found between writer and reader — and if readers never pick up another of your books again — what's the point at all?
Fabricators like Mitchell and Kapuściński may now be the exception, as Charles McGrath wrote in his New Yorker review of Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, "because now…it's harder to get away with," but their stories, Ariely'esque in the telling, are enduring, and enduringly stirring.
Consider anthropologist Wendy "Wednesday" Martin, for instance. Her new book, The Primates of Park Avenue, one of two books she's written that she describes as "very research-intensive blendings of memoir and social science," earned this New York Post headline in early June: "Upper East-Side Housewife's Tell-All Book Is Full of Lies."
After The Post published its revelations of Martin's practices — compression, conflation, fabrication — Cary Goldstein, vice president and executive director of publicity at Simon & Schuster, told The New York Times, "It is a common narrative technique in memoirs for some names, identifying characteristics and chronologies to be adjusted or disguised, and that is the case with Primates of Park Avenue."
Ariely argues that the human inclination toward deception, highly evolved and driven by dread or desire, has a slow corrosive effect on society. Think subprime mortgage crisis. Neural MRIs show the more we lie, the less the region of the brain associated with guilt responds, suggesting the act of lying desensitizes us to the shame of lying. There are those who argue dishonesty has a slow, corrosive effect on nonfiction. Think Jim Fingal, the one-time Harper's fact-checker who took John D'Agata and his fictionalized essay "About a Mountain" to task in the book they co-wrote, called The Lifespan of a Fact. Near the end of the book, Fingal and D'Agata come to verbal fisticuffs. Fingal writes, exasperated, "I mean, the whole point of all these shit storms over the last ten years…isn't that the reading public doesn't understand that writers sometimes 'use their imaginations.' It's about people searching for some sort of Truth…and then being devastated when they find out that the thing they were inspired by turned out to be deliberately falsified…for seemingly self-aggrandizing purposes."
Or maybe don't think of Jim Fingal, however spot-on his words. Maybe we ditch Jim Fingal, who, it was revealed in post-publication coverage, partially reinvented his correspondence with D'Agata for their nonfiction book. "Contrary to the impression created by the promotional material, and the way it has subsequently been characterized in reviews," wrote Craig Silverman on Poynter.org, "…The Lifespan of a Fact isn't, you know, factual. D'Agata never called Fingal a dickhead, to cite but one example."
In journalism, where truth is an explicit part of the deal between writer and reader, shit storms are understandable and necessary, as real harm is often a consequence.
Ironically, during filming, Ariely and Melamede couldn't find any journalists who'd talk to them about deception in their field.
Yet in hybrid genres where rules are less clearly defined, the consequences of unreliability are also often felt at great intensity. Even in memoir, recently described by Daphne Merkin as an "elasticized form for truths and untruths," outrage and pain seem to register when a writer is perceived to betray the trust.
It is curious to note the research that suggests the emotional experience of social pain, and betrayal specifically, lights up the same regions of the brain as physical pain. Humans remember social pain more acutely and for a longer duration than physical pain. Neurologically, the experience of being cast away appears to mirror that of being burned. Like, with fire. I confess to feeling something akin to this when I learned the cat in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek didn't exist. It was a metaphorical cat. Jesus Christ. Annie Dillard. I thought she was perfect.
The truth is, many readers want to believe they know who the author is. Readers have for millennia. In Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, novelist Gish Jen reminds us that the independent self — "the self unhitched from the collective" — has been "making things up [since] even before the words 'fiction' and 'poetry' were coined." In ancient Rome and Greece, writers who fabricated were eyed with suspicion, "not only because they could make the untrue seem true, but because they tended to be highly individualistic, with interests that might or might not be yours." This has not changed. Many readers still eye with suspicion writers who fabricate. Which, if we're really being honest with ourselves, (which, as Ariely notes, is harder than it might first appear) is quite a lot of writers. Hell, many readers eye with suspicion writers who don't fabricate. As author Robin Hemley observes in A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, "Whether you're putting yourself in harm's way emotionally, psychologically, or physically, it's almost a guarantee that you're going to get pummeled in one way or another."
Orwell called for "discipline." In Homage, he copped, "…beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events."
In her essay for the anthology Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations on the Fringes of Nonfiction, Naomi Kimbell advises, "[T]he first and most important gesture a writer can make to the reader is letting him or her in on the joke." And yet, in the words of author Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine, there are no "creative nonfiction police" handcuffing those who don't, nor should there be.
Gutkind, identified on his website with a quote from Vanity Fair as "the Godfather behind creative nonfiction," advises writers to rely upon conscience. Yes, fact-checking is critical, he writes in You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction, but so too "following the old-fashioned golden rule by treating your characters and their stories with as much respect as you would want them to treat you." "Conscience," he writes, "a reminder and an invisible artbiter over us all."
And, yet, as Ariely's research and the nonfiction world's regular shit storms reveal, relying on conscience is slippery business.
Ariely recommends concrete approaches designed to address the conflict of interest between self and other — a signed legal contract, if you're a trader at J.P. Morgan Chase & Company, for instance. If you're a writer of some kind of hybrid that blends fact and invention, an author's note, disclaimer, afterword, use of the conditional tense, caveat, or limitless other artful and crafty techniques. It's reasonable to assume this is why Simon & Schuster announced soon after The Primates of Park Avenue shit storm that they would add "a clarifying note" to the e-book and subsequent print editions. At the back of the Kindle edition I consulted in mid June, in addition to an introduction that describes the book as "an academic experiment," is now an author's note:
This work is a memoir. It reflects my experiences over a period of several years. Some names and identifying details have been changed, and some individuals portrayed are composites. For narrative purposes and to mask the identities of certain individuals, the timeline of certain events has been altered or compressed.
"Every time we lie, we dilute the trust," Ariely said when we corresponded. Ariely can't prove this with empirical evidence, but he believes it to be true. When Ariely was in high school in Israel, a magnesium battlefield flare exploded at his feet, and he was trapped in a chemical fire. He spent three years in a hospital. "The experience of pain has led me to beauty," he later wrote in an essay. Also, "as I am not very concerned with my personal 'small problems,' I…can't get too excited about the 'small problems' others are experiencing."
All the same, Ariely took time to respond to my questions: Given everything we know, why do nonfiction writers continue to make stuff up and not tell readers? Given everything we know, why do readers continue to feel betrayed and outraged when nonfiction writers do this?
"I don't think this is planned," Ariely said in a recording he made because typing can be hard. "I think people start writing something that is based in reality, and then the boundary for what is acceptable and what is not acceptable is not very clear." He said, "It's very human."
So, too, the timeless desire for a good story well told. Writes Malcolm of Mitchell, "We should respect his inhibiting reverence for literary transcendence and be grateful for the work that got past his censor."
While Mitchell's genre remains nameless, there is a name for the startling discovery of the truth of it: Anagnorisis, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, the moment of change from ignorance to knowledge. I was wrong. It is here, he believed, "the finest recognitions."
This essay was adapted and updated from a longer article about constructing nonfiction personae, originally published in the pedagogy department of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.
Image Credit: Pexels/Sergey Zhumaev.


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Peyton Manning has suffered some disappointing losses in New England before. This time he was wearing a different uniform.
Manning, who in his time as quarterback of the Colts had some big wins but more big losses against the Patriots, faced New England for the first time as the quarterback of the Broncos, and the result was a loss.
The loss wasn't the fault of Manning, who completed 31 of 44 passes for 345 yards, with three touchdowns and no interceptions. But Manning didn't get a lot of help from the Broncos' defense, which simply couldn't stop New England's offense, or from Broncos running back Willis McGahee, who dropped a perfect pass from Manning on a fourth-and-1, and later fumbled away the Broncos' final chance at a come-from-behind victory.
Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was methodical, completing 23 of 31 passes for 223 yards, with a touchdown and no interceptions, but the real story of the day was the inability of the Broncos' defense to stop the Patriots' running game. New England running back Stevan Ridley had 28 carries for 151 yards, Brandon Bolden had 14 carries for 54 yards, Danny Woodhead had seven carries for 47 yards (including a stunning 19-yard run on third-and-17) and Shane Vereen only got the ball once, but it was a one-yard touchdown.
Seeing Manning and Brady on the field together is always a pleasure, and both played well again today. Considering that they're the two oldest starting quarterbacks in the NFL, we're probably running out of opportunities to see them face off. Maybe they'll do it again in the playoffs.


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It was a quiet day on Wednesday at the World Headquarters of NewsCut so I decided to get a head start cleaning up my 40 acres of the cubicle farm. That's when I found two anatomically correct bovine figurines, gifts to me from the time I met the Johnson family of Hendricks, Minn.
There were no gymnastics facilities for the schoolkids in town, so they cleared out a machine shed and built one. At the first meet, they had no trophies, just bovine figurines. Good enough.
At the same competition, the mayor led cheers with fight songs played on his accordion.
Hendricks is heaven.
(Originally published April 11, 2013)
Gary Johnson, shown with Sadie, one of three daughters, raises corn, soybeans, cattle, horses and gymnasts on the family farm in Hendricks, MN. (MPR Photo/Bob Collins)Stop me if you've heard this before. A farm couple builds a sports complex in the belief that people will come. And they do. In Hendricks, MN., however, it's not baseball and corn. It's a farm shed and gymnastics that's gotten people to sit up and take notice.
The town in western Minnesota — population 713 — didn't have high school gymnastics a few years ago, partly because it didn't have a high school. It shared school space with nearby Ivanhoe. The elementary-school-age kids went to school in Hendricks. The high school kids went to Ivanhoe, until that community decided it wanted schools for both, and pulled out of the arrangement.
Hendricks was left to start its own high school, only to get unnerved a year ago when a state representative filed legislation to dissolve Hendricks schools and force all the students to go to Ivanhoe. The legislation failed, but it shook the people's confidence in the school's future, especially with open enrollment. As many communities in Minnesota have learned, if you don't have a school, you don't have much of a future.
That's when a couple with a little creativity, some gymnastics equipment, and a plan for a farm shed stepped in.
"We wanted to make the school unique and help market it," Sherri Johnson told me this week. A veteran gymnastics coach, she had volunteered to coach the Hendricks girls — there's no budget for gymnastics — but the school building wasn't suitable for a gymnastics program. Their three daughters had been riding 40 minutes each way to the big city — Brookings, S.D. — for proper gym facilities.
Her husband, Gary, had planned to build a new "shed" to house the occasional combine and other equipment on their spread.
"I had some older gymnastics equipment sitting in the garage — some bars and a vault — and I just wanted a little corner (in the new building) for some space for the girls," she said.
Instead, she got this.
The only evidence that the building is on a farm are the two pallets of seed corn waiting for winter to flee. But, it's what you don't see here that is the story: You don't see what it apparently did for the town.
The Johnsons hired local construction workers, electricians, and plumbers, and used local businesses as suppliers. It was, to an outsider at least, a statement to the community. "We just want the town to thrive and grow," Gary said, acknowledging that it might've been cheaper to buy from the chains.
The Barn Bash. (Photo courtesy of Steve Hemmingsen) When the building was ready in January, the Johnsons hosted the first Hendricks gymnastics meet, calling it the First Annual Barn Bash. Sherri Johnson's team – four girls — invited the third-largest school in South Dakota — Sioux Falls Roosevelt — over for a little competition.
"When I told them that the meet would be in our barn, they said, 'Oh, my word,'" Sherri said. But it was built with gymnasts — and combines — in mind, including the floor radiant heat for the benefit of the girls who perform in bare feet.
It was a hit with the other team and the rest of the town, and not just because the town's mayor — Jay Nelson — led the pep squad with the classic sports-cheer instrument — the accordion.
Local construction workers cheered from the "VIP section," some space above the bathrooms, easily accessed via a hydraulic scaffold and a ladder.
Hendricks didn't have any medals to give out to the winners — gymnasts just throw them in a drawer anyway — but Gary Johnson, for reasons not fully explained, had purchased 1,000 anatomically correct hereford figurines which, it turns out, make swell gymnastic medals.
"It was so much fun," Sherri said. "The girls from the other team came up and thanked us after." So did others in the community.
"Against all odds, in a village looking to find its feet, our girls dominated," Mayor Jay Nelson said. The squad is a fraction of the size of teams in the region — Pipestone, Marshall, and Luverne, for example.
Hendricks High gymnast Hailey Teske with coach Sherri Johnson. Photo courtesy of Sherri Johnson via the Hendricks Pioneer.
Despite a disappointing showing in the sectionals, however, gymnast Hailey Teske advanced to the state gymnastics meet in the uneven-bars competition, becoming the first new Hendricks High student to compete at a state tournament.
"She wouldn't have even been at the school if not for gymnastics," Sherri Johnson said. "She'd be going to school in Brookings."
When the team returned to Hendricks, they were met by a fire truck, making a parade through town on the way to the ice cream parlor.
"Hendricks, like most small towns, has been on defense for decades," Mayor Nelson said. "It takes some keystone moment to get people to believe in the future and go on offense. This was our keystone moment. In five weeks, Sherri took kids, some of whom had never competed, and matched schools with one-hundred times our enrollment."
The shed — or maybe it's a gym — has become a community center. "Go Grizzlies" signs dot a few shops in the center of town.
"People want something to cheer for," Gary Johnson said. "There's a community pride that hasn't been here."
There's also a big bill for building the place, but times have been good in farm country lately. "We're keeping up with it," he said.
"Hendricks is now beginning to rehabilitate a theater closed since 1972 and we're in talks with a national cable TV station to have two shows filmed there. Our school is starting a drum line, rifle team and Nordic skiing team. The city is offering beachfront land for a resort, should an investor come forward." Nelson points out. "And none of this happens without Gary and Sherri turning a machine shed into a gymnastics facility."
"Gymnastics gives kids coordination , confidence, and strength," Sherri said.
It can do wonders for a town, too.


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Sullivan now wears the public editor hat at The
New York Times and with a recent
ombudsman column took on a huge media problem: False balance aka false equivalency. False balance
reports are those that appear fair because they have two sides, except that one
side reflects neither knowledge nor a right to speak.
on Catholicism are especially vulnerable to false balance, and often it is
achieved through manipulation of the name "Catholic" and religious symbols such
as veils and Roman collars. More media than The New York Times fall prey to it.
Some agenda groups who oppose one or more Catholic teachings, for example, use the name "Catholic," even when there seems little evidence of Catholics in their ranks and no evidence that they represent Catholic teaching. Catholics for Choice, once known as "Catholics for a Free Choice," comes to mind. When some reporters, especially inexperienced ones, cover a story with a Catholic angle, they presume a mere use of the term "Catholic" means knowledge. They will turn to any group with "Catholic" in its name to respond to an issue. Catholics for Choice is happy to talk whether it's about abortion, nuns, pedophilia or the pope and AIDS. Apparently this satisfies some sleepy editor's quest for balance. However, going to Catholics for Choice for a so-called Catholic view is like asking Catholic Atheists (yet to exist, I think) to opine on the meaning of God.
Surely the Catholic Church has a right to its "brand" which includes getting to say who validly can use its name. Be assured that a group such as Catholics for a Free Choice, founded by the former director of the National Abortion Federation, a trade association for abortion clinics, and funded by pro-abortion foundations specifically to neutralize the Church on abortion, doesn't qualify as a legitimate Catholic group. It is hard to imagine how anyone can take seriously a group whose founder celebrated the first anniversary of Roe v Wade by having herself crowned pope on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
However, religious clothing drew attention then, and, even today, religious clothing draws reporters. Media love veils and collars and attribute to them infused knowledge. For a picture, any nun in a veil will do. One sister who has been sans veil for decades, for example, donned one and drew cameras last February to lobby the Maryland statehouse for same-sex marriage. Her remarks about being a Catholic sister since 1961 were more crass in-your-face than Catholic as she stood against the Church on this issue.
A Roman collar, imagined or otherwise, also works for media. Once I got a call from a reporter who wanted to interview a priest. With none available, I suggested he speak with a knowledgeable layman. The reporter said that if he couldn't have the priest, he wanted me. Asked why, he said he wanted a collar. I explained gently that in the Catholic Church I would not be wearing a collar anytime soon. Clearly he was less after an informed opinion than a stereotypical image.
Margaret Sullivan has her work cut out for her at the Times. I hope she can stand up to reporters and doesn't opt to do her job the easy way, and that she can stand fast in her fight for coverage that's a fair reflection of reality. It's a great goal for the nation's newspaper of record and for all media.


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RIA Novosti
18:13 22/09/2010
RAMENSKOYE (Moscow Region), September 22 (RIA Novosti) - Russia is working on a military laser system, the chief of Russia's Armed Forces General Staff said on Wednesday.
"Work on laser weapons is underway across the world, and that includes us," Gen. Nikolai Makarov said.
It is "too soon yet" to speak about the specifications of the Russian laser system, he added.
According to some media reports, Russia has been developing an airborne laser - the so-called flying laser - to disable enemy reconnaissance and data processing systems, as well as shoot down missiles in flight.


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Grande Centre Point Hotel Elevates the Luxury Experience with Harman
Mahajak Development Co., Ltd., deploys cutting-edge audio and lighting solutions from JBL, Crown, Soundcraft, BSS and Martin in Thailand's Grande Centre Point Hotel
AV integrator Mahajak Development Co., Ltd., recently deployed a wide range of class-leading HARMAN Professional Solutions audio and lighting systems in four of the Grande Centre Point Hotel's facilities to create immersive audiovisual experiences.
Located in the heart of North Pattaya, the Grande Centre Point Hotel is a 32-story luxury hotel and resort that offers comfort, convenience and fun for the whole family. In addition to 396 lavish rooms and suites, Grande Centre Point also offers a variety of amenities and activities, including the famous Terminal 21 shopping mall, the Sky 32 rooftop lounge, an amphitheater for events and a family waterpark. The hotel also includes the Port Ballroom and its seven adjoining meeting rooms, which are used for formal meetings, conferences, private dinner parties and exquisite banquets. To elevate the entertainment experience, Grande Centre Point hired leading integrators Mahajak Development Co., Ltd. to design and install state-of-the-art audio and lighting solutions in the Port Ballroom, the water park and the Sky 32 Lounge, as well as a mobile AV solution for events. Mahajak selected a wide range of world-class solutions from JBL, Crown, Soundcraft, BSS and Martin.
"The client required various audiovisual and lighting solutions for four of the hotel's facilities," said said Pongsakorn Kanchanachayphoom, Director of Project, Mahajak Development Co. Ltd. "They required a versatile audio solution for the meeting room, which consists of seven rooms that can either be combined or separated for events. The family water park required a PA system to make announcements, play background music and more. They required mobile audio, visual and lighting setup for activities such as seminars, concerts and events. Finally, they needed an audio system for the Sky Lounge on the 32nd floor. We decided that JBL audio solutions and Martin lighting systems would be best suited for this multi-faceted project."
In the Port Ballroom and adjoined meeting rooms, Mahajak deployed JBL Control 14C/T in-ceiling loudspeakers to deliver clear, detailed sound for meetings and events. To power the system, Mahajak selected Crown CDi 2|300 amplifiers for their impressive performance and streamlined functionality. A Soundcraft Si Impact digital mixing console delivers uncompromising sound quality and provides staff with complete control over the system.
Mahajak equipped the water park with a complete HARMAN Professional Solutions networked audio system to enable staff to make announcements and play music throughout the facilities. Compact JBL Control 25-1 indoor/outdoor loudspeakers mounted throughout the park deliver detailed sound with consistent coverage. MTC-25WMG-1 WeatherMax grilles provide the Control 25-1 speakers with greater protection against the environmental damage and extend their service life. The system is powered by Crown CDi 2|300 amplifiers and routed through a BSS BLU100 Signal Processor via BLU link. To enable crystal-clear sound for announcements, Mahajak installed a JBL CSPM-1 microphone system.
Mahajak deployed JBL Control 29AV-1 indoor/outdoor loudspeakers in the Sky 32 Lounge to enhance the ambiance with their sleek design and deliver clear, balanced sound for background music. With rugged construction and a highly weather-resistant design, Control 29AV-1 speakers are well protected against the elements and offer an extended service life.
To provide staff with an easy-to-use mobile production setup for concerts and events, Mahajak deployed a complete HARMAN Professional Solutions audio and lighting rig, including solutions from JBL, Soundcraft and Martin. JBL EON615 and EON612 two-way powered loudspeakers deliver pristine sound in a versatile, easy-to-use system. For powerful low-frequency reinforcement, Mahajak included the lightweight JBL EON618S portable subwoofer. The system is controlled with a Soundcraft Si impact digital mixing console. To create immersive lighting displays, Mahajak equipped the mobile production rig with compact, powerful Martin Rush MH 2 Wash fixtures. The lighting system is routed through a Martin DMX 5.3 Splitter and controlled using the intuitive Martin M-Touch stage lighting control system.
"We required versatile audiovisual and lighting solutions for some of our facilities and attractions," said a spokesperson of Grande Centre Point. "In addition to the high-quality performance of the systems, reliability was of utmost importance for us. We are delighted with the solutions provided by Mahajak Development Co., Ltd. The sound and lighting solutions have matched up to our expectations."
"The project at the Grande Centre Point Hotel called for a flexible solution which adhered to the highest standards of performance and dependability," said Ramesh Jayaraman, VP & GM, HARMAN Professional Solutions, APAC. "We would like to thank our partner Mahajak Development Co., Ltd., for expertly devising and delivering a solution that involved several critical variables and components."
Harman: pro.harman.com
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