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I have experience as a copywriter, I take great pride in my headlines. But, now working at an optimization company, I see that all of my copywriting, and that means even my headlines, can be optimized.
But how? How do you write an effective headline to begin with? And how do you continue to improve those headlines?
Well, MECLABS CEO Flint McGlaughlin will be sharing some of our headline optimization discoveries at 4 p.m. EDT in today's Web clinic – Headline Optimization: How testing 10 headlines revealed a 3-letter word that improved conversion more than major changes – with plenty of time spent on audience submissions as well.
But first we asked your peers for a few of their optimization tips. Here is some of our favorite advice (and if you have any ideas for a better title for this blog post, please let me know in the comments section)…
A formula for an effective headline
From our experience, what makes an effective headline is the combination of three elements:
- Valuable Offer/Proposition
- Keywords of your target market (i.e. what are their concerns and/or aspirations)
- Incentive; ideally with some urgency
Being the science folks, I know you'll like the formula we use:
Great Headline = Valuable Offer/Proposition + Keyword(s) + Urgency IncentiveAs an example of this formula, "Free eBook – Tells You 12 Secrets of Better Email List Hygiene"
Keywords = Email List Hygiene
Valuable Offer = 12 Secrets
Incentive = Free eBookAs mentioned in the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook (plug for you), the key is to keep your headline 15 words or less as that is what someone can read in 2 to 8 seconds – the time they will give you.
I fully expect the gurus at MECLabs will be testing our formula…:o)
– Troy O'Bryan, President & CEO, Response Capture
Wash, rinse, repeat
Even though the concept may seem simple and straightforward, in order to get the best results I recommend you do all of the following:
- Do your keyword research. All of your online activities should include a focus on the keywords that will bring in the best conversions (sales or leads). We first use Google's External Keyword Tool, then run all of these through Market Samurai. Pick the keywords that have:
a. the most relevance to your business
b. the lowest competition
c. the highest SEO Value
d. the most traffic
- Test the headline with multiple tools available like PPC ads (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Adwords, etc.), landing page split-tests or email. Start with several headlines and the same
- If testing landing pages, set up a split-test using any of the available online tools. We use the free Google Analytics Split-Test tool.
- When you test, do it with headlines as the only variable. Test several that are completely different. You'll get results that typically follow the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule. That means that you'll see great results in roughly 20% of the headlines, and marginal results in the others.
- Take the 20% that do well, dump the others. Create variations of that 20% and re-test.
In other words – wash, rinse, repeat. Be patient and you'll get great results. That directly translates into more leads and sales.
– Michael A. Cordova, President/CEO, 21st Century Technologies, Inc.
Three keys to powerful blog post titles
Here is a Venn Diagram that we share with clients to help them build a mental framework for coming up with blog post titles and headlines:
Internally, we often use the ellipses to close out a strong headline that starts a compelling thought. We are wired to want to finish a thought process and the use of ellipses helps pull readers through the headline into the first couple of sentences.
We have tested this on emails and seen a statistically significant increase in open rates on subject line testing.
– Herb Jones, Gainesville Marketing
Related resources:
Headline Optimization: How testing 10 headlines revealed a 3-letter word that improved conversion more than major changes (Today's Webclinic)
Copywriting: 10 headlines tested
Optimizing Headlines & Subject Lines
Optimizing Your Headlines: How changing a few words can help (or hurt) conversion


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NEW YORK (AP) - These aren't the same New England Patriots everyone's used to seeing. Sure, it's still Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, but who are those receivers? And, with all the injuries, who are some of those guys on defense?
Well, it doesn't matter.
The Patriots are still the class of the AFC East, despite new faces all around the field and a few key players out for the season with injuries. At 7-2, it appears New England is heading for its 10th division title in 11 years.
It's a remarkable stretch that could be capped by one of Belichick's best coaching jobs. Think about it: Brady's top receivers are Julian Edelman, oft-injured Danny Amendola, rookies Kenbrell Thompkins and Aaron Dobson, and a just recently returned Rob Gronkowski. The defense has also had to deal with season-ending injuries to Vince Wilfork and Jerod Mayo, and top cornerback Aqib Talib has been sidelined nearly a month.
''I feel like the players have worked hard this year,'' Belichick said. ''We have a lot of football left, a lot of big games.''
It seems as though the real race in the division is for second place, currently held by Rex Ryan's surprising Jets (5-4). Despite alternating wins and losses with up-and-down rookie quarterback Geno Smith, New York is very much in the playoff hunt.
So are the Miami Dolphins (4-4), who will have to overcome an ugly harassment case in which the league is investigating the relationship between suspended guard Richie Incognito and offensive linemate Jonathan Martin.
''We're not really going through too much as a team,'' defensive lineman Jared Odrick said, ''other than trying to win football games.''
Things are looking up a bit for the Buffalo Bills (3-6), who are getting rookie quarterback EJ Manuel back from a sprained right knee. Manuel has missed four weeks and the Bills have struggled after having to start undrafted rookie Jeff Tuel and journeyman Thad Lewis in his place.
Here are five things to know about the AFC East going into the second half:
FANTASTIC FINISH: It's difficult to imagine the Patriots not ending up on top again, not with a two-game lead. But the NFL's schedule makers provided a bit of intrigue for the second half.
In December, the Dolphins play each of their AFC East rivals, including the Jets twice. Miami is at New York in Week 13, then hosts New England in Week 15 and is at Buffalo the following week. If New York and Miami keep pace with each other, Week 17 could be the equivalent of a play-in game as the Jets are at the Dolphins to wrap up the regular season.
BRADY'S BUNCH: Brady is having one of his more underwhelming seasons with 13 touchdowns and six interceptions, but provided a reminder of just how dominant he can be last Sunday. With Gronkowski and Amendola on the field together and healthy, Brady threw for over 400 yards and four touchdowns in a 55-31 rout of Pittsburgh. Brady's first two TD tosses? To Amendola and Gronkowski.
Shane Vereen might be back soon from a broken left wrist, bolstering the Patriots' backfield and providing Brady with another playmaker.
Just what the rest of the division needs.
JEKYLL-AND-HYDE JETS: They win one, then lose one. Win one and lose one. And, repeat.
They joined the 2005 Patriots as the only teams to alternate wins and losses through their first nine games, but they know they need to start ripping off some wins - consecutively - if they still plan to make the playoffs.
New York holds the No. 6 spot in the AFC race, an improbable position considering many had the Jets ranked among the NFL's worst heading into the season. Smith has also gone back and forth between game-winning performances and turnover-filled disappointments while trying to establish himself as the future of the franchise.
DOLPHINS IN TURMOIL: Some considered Miami to be the one team capable of knocking New England from the top of the division, but second-year quarterback Ryan Tannehill and the Dolphins have been inconsistent.
Now, they're dealing with a situation that has rocked the NFL as Martin left the team last week because of emotional issues, while Incognito was suspended indefinitely last Sunday by coach Joe Philbin for his treatment of Martin.
On the field, Miami is trying to build off a 22-20 overtime victory over Cincinnati that ended a four-game skid and was the Dolphins' first win in 39 days.
BILLS BOUNCEBACK?: Buffalo was off to a 2-2 start before Manuel was injured for the second time in two months. He's coming back, and the schedule is favorable, too, with the Bills' remaining opponents combining for a 20-38 record, including back-to-back matchups with currently winless Tampa Bay and Jacksonville in December.
But with six losses already, the Bills might need to go 6-1 the rest of the way to even have a shot at the postseason. Otherwise, the NFL's longest active playoff drought will reach 14 seasons.
PREDICTED WINNER: Patriots.
Story By DENNIS WASZAK Jr., AP Sports Writer

subset: commoncrawl


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On the evening of November 4th some members of the Coexistence team had the privilege of being invited to participate in the activities celebrating the 50th anniversary of Christian Life.
The occasion brought together many at the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, where there was a mass presided over by the Cardinal of Havana Jaime Ortega Alamino, his auxiliary bishop Monseñor Juan de Dios, Father Alberto Garcia, director of Catholic Sunday publications and other priests of the Jesuit Congregation.
God wanted the Gospel proclaimed this day, as appropriate for the occasion, with love your neighbor as the central theme. In his homily the Cardinal emphasized that love conquers all, all hopes; he recalled the words of Father Felix Varela when he said "There is no Fatherland without virtue", highlighting that virtue is in love rather than knowledge and recalling the first Encyclical Letter of Pope Benedict XVI making a call to live in faith and love in all its facets.
After the Mass there was a cultural evening that began with a few words about Christian Life followed by the invitation of Father Alberto for other voices to take the floor. I remembered when he shared in Pinar del Rio, more than six years ago on the 10th anniversary of the magazine Vitral and ceded the floor to who was at that time director, and is still the director. of the project and the magazine Coexistence, the engineer Dagoberto Valdés Hernández.
Dagoberto focused his words in an infinite gratitude to this publication, "this little leaf" as everyone there calls it, a symbol of perseverance, of how much can be achieved by the love of Christ, for others and society. He emphasized that Christian Life today is a sign of how far we can get if we truly believe in the power of the small and the usefulness of virtue. He thanked also the older sister of all publications that later emerged within the Church, for this necessary catechism, simple but direct, for all the good both do for the Cuban family. Finally he thanked Padre Alberto, the Editorial Board of Christian Life and God for allowing us to participate in the celebration and for teaching us that "everything has its time, and there is a time for everything under heaven."
The Editorial Board and staff of the magazine Coexistence are most especially grateful to Father Alberto Garcia and his invitation to the team, congratulate Christian Life and urge them to continue working for the love of Cuba and its Church.
by Yoandy Izquierdo Toledo
November 8 2012


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Adobe Illustrator CC Classroom in a Book (2014 release)
- By Brian Wood
- Published Oct 30, 2014 by Adobe Press. Part of the Classroom in a Book series.
- Sorry, this book is no longer in print.
- Copyright 2015
- Dimensions: 7-3/8" x 9-1/8"
- Pages: 480
- Edition: 1st
- Book
The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe® Illustrator® (2014 release)
Classroom in a Book, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, offers what no other book or training program does—an official training series from Adobe Systems Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.
Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book contains lessons that cover the basics, providing countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.
In addition to teaching the key elements of the Illustrator interface, this completely revised edition covers the new Live rectangle and rounded rectangle functionality, preview a path as you draw with the Pen tool, new workflow for dealing with missing Typekit fonts, anchor point enhancements like repositioning the closing anchor point as you draw, and much more.
Purchasing this book gives you access to the downloadable lesson files you need to work through the projects in the book, and to electronic book updates covering new features that Adobe releases for Creative Cloud customers. For access, goto www.peachpit.com/redeem and redeem the unique code provided inside this book.
"The Classroom in a Book series is by far the best training material on the market. Everything you need to master the software is included: clear explanations of each lesson, step-by-step instructions, and the project files for the students."
Barbara Binder,
Adobe Certified Instructor
Rocky Mountain Training
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Online Sample Chapter
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Other Things You Might Like
- Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book 2024 Release (Web Edition)
- Web Edition $41.59
- Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book 2024 Release
- eBook (Watermarked) $41.59


text:
Ten years ago, I sat in a college classroom listening to a professor argue the importance of theology—the study of God. Of course it's important, I thought. But what blew me away was how much work it seemed to require: buying textbooks that were thicker than the Yellow Pages, learning how to use various commentaries and concordances and encyclopedias, becoming fluent in Greek and Hebrew and Latin and Aramaic, reading the complete works of Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Aquinas and Augustine and Barth and every other notable philosopher and theologian who ever lived on the planet, and, finally, making sure to pick the right Bible translation (out of the hundreds available).
He was trying to encourage us to delve deep in the knowledge of God—but the whole package process seemed to difficult, too painful for the average person to take on.
Why not leave the expert work to the experts?
And that's what we did for a long time. Theological study, debate and dialogue were owned, constructed and maintained mainly by academic institutions. Sources of information were restricted to professors, classrooms, seminars and—sometimes—dry textbooks.
But then came the advent of the Internet. Today, the web has become a burgeoning forum for theology. The study of God is no longer restricted to universities and churches but is open to anyone who has an Internet connection. This has caused a dramatic change in the landscape of teaching, learning, discussing and experiencing theology. Whether we like it or not, our theology is now influenced by the Internet more than any other form of media.
And while there's plenty of negative digital side effects, there's also a bounty of advantages when it comes to learning about God with the digital-sphere at our fingertips.
1. It's all-access.
Theology has never been more accessible, nor more interactive, than it is now. This vast accessibility—for free!—is the Internet's greatest theological achievement. We no longer have to attend expensive conferences, buy an author's book or pay enrollment fees in order to hear what theologians are saying. The information is ours, right now, with no strings attached.
Today, professors and theologians not only teach online, but they have their own websites and social networks. They spread their ideas through blogs, podcasts, video clips and Tweetable quotes. Not only are the most brilliant theologians more accessible to the public, but they're also more accessible to each other, allowing us to witness the dialogue of the world's leading minds without having to leave the comfort of our home.
2. It's immediate.
This has been the second greatest gift the internet has bestowed upon our theologies: speed. We are forced to constantly test our beliefs, realign ourselves, ask new questions, face new challenges, shift our positions, adapt new ideas and adjust—or not—accordingly.
This fast-paced version of theology has also allowed us to engage with current events and cultural issues on a daily basis. Our dialogue is now happening in real-time, and we're constantly engaging with the most important breaking news, viral trends and pop-culture phenomenons of our era through a theological lens. The conversations shift with each new headline, changing not just by the hour, but by the minute.
3. It's interactive.
The Internet has the powerful ability to unlock a person's inner voice. Whether through social networks, blogs or the comment section, people use the web to interact and spread their opinions. It may be as subtle as "liking" a Facebook post, as provocative as taking your friend to task for a personal belief on their wall, or as simple as reposting and passing along a popular image.
The cyber world is a wild place, and your belief in God will be ridiculed, humiliated, detested, attacked, questioned and denied. Comment boxes and the ability for people to communicate anonymously allow for some pretty harsh, mean and hate-filled reactions. Websites sometimes feel like battlegrounds where you might not come out unscathed. But you will also learn, grow and mature—this is what theology is all about.
In many ways, online observation and interaction is one of the best ways to learn theology. The classical version of learning theology often consisted of sitting within a classroom and discussing God with like-minded peers who often came from identical socioeconomic backgrounds, within the confines of strict denominational or academic restrictions, in an effort to determine a non-heretical "right answer" to please your professor.
Yet reality is messy, and the theological questions, rebuttals and doubts raised online can help expand your perspective and create a more well-rounded and confident worldview.
The rise of online theology certainly has its dangers. For every good and reputable website there will be hundreds of horrible ones, and unless you have a solid faith foundation to begin with, simply trying to create a theology—without any foundation or accountability—using Google can be a very dangerous thing. Discernment is required—and practice as well. Because whatever is learned via a computer screen isn't worth much if it's not translated into our physical, daily lives.
Yet no one can deny the power of the web in its ability to communicate, test, and sharpen ideas. It's a powerful channel, that can be used poorly or well, if we choose.
So choose to use the Internet to join today's theological discussions, share your own convictions and think critically about how you and others view God. There are no prerequisites, required reading or scholarly merits needed. Are you willing to be vulnerable and take criticism? More importantly, are you open to allowing God to use the medium of the Internet to change, shape and impact the way you live out your faith? If so, welcome to a whole new world—the Internet.


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Hello everyone.. my last challenge just ended 2 days ago, Thanks for all the great entries in my last challenge, and congratz for the winner!
Now, I challenge you people to make Chinese New Year themed wallpaper. The wall can be from any anime or manga but I don't accept real life picture.
Follow theOtaku rules, no stealing and yaoi/yuri.
Good luck, I give you 1 month. Unlimited submission.


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August/September 2013 (Volume 22, Number 8)
Following the June meeting of the Executive Board, APS announced that it would be working with the federal government and journal publishers to help develop a system for scientists to access publications resulting from federally funded research.
The Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States, or CHORUS, would be an online platform that links to open access journal articles stored on publishers' servers. Developed by the American Association of Publishers, it would use publishers' existing infrastructure to comply with recent federal open access mandates.
In February, the administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a memo that would ultimately require all scientific papers stemming from federally funded research to be available for free to anyone after an embargo period. The specific form of the policy was not spelled out in the memo, and one of the biggest open questions was whether the papers would be hosted on the publishers' websites, other non-governmental repositories or a government server akin to PubMed Central, which is managed by the National Institutes of Health.
"The OSTP memo has a set of requirements that are going to be met one way or the other. The question is how," said APS Treasurer/Publisher Joseph Serene. "We would prefer people to find papers on our own sites."
He added that he would like to see federal funds spent on science research rather than on maintaining a server for journal articles, similar to those already maintained by the publishers. "Publishers have been hosting their content for a long time; we know how to do this."
A significant feature of CHORUS is a central web portal through which researchers can link to open access articles stored on the publishers' servers. The CHORUS website would cross-reference metadata of the papers to make them more easily discoverable.
A new standardized metadata tag that identifies the funding source of research has been developed. Everyone would be able to more easily track which papers received federal funding and are therefore subject to the requirements outlined in the OSTP memo.
The inclusion of the funding information is as effortless as possible for the authors.
"All they have to do is put the proper acknowledgement in their paper and they're done," Serene said. If all goes well, it is likely that a proof of concept version of CHORUS will be running by the end of summer and a full version by the end of the year.
In another action by the Executive Board, APS decided not to participate in the proposed SCOAP3 open access initiative. Based at CERN in Geneva, the initiative intends to redirect institution subscription revenue to participating publishers to make high-energy physics papers available open access.
APS encourages the redistribution of the materials included in this newspaper provided that attribution to the source is noted and the materials are not truncated or changed.


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March 14, 2022
Dr. Mo Maniruzzaman's Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing Labs have received a federal grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to develop personalized 3D printed non-hormonal intrauterine devices (IUDs). The project's goal is to increase global access to long-term and effective contraception while minimizing some of its most debilitating side effects.
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September 10, 2021
The college's Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) labs, led by Assistant Professor in Molecular Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery Mohammed (Mo) Maniruzzaman, Ph.D., has recently earned several national and international awards and scholarships for outstanding research contributions to the field of pharmaceutical science and technology.
Texas Pharmacy Rises to #8 Nationally for Total Research Funding
June 15, 2021
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May 26, 2021
The UT College of Pharmacy's Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) Lab earned a Texas Global Faculty Research Seed Grant for its work on patient-specific treatment of COVID-19.
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April 1, 2021
Three researchers from the College of Pharmacy won an award from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Foundation. Leticia R. Moczygemba, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Carolyn M. Brown, Ph.D. and Michael Johnsrud, Ph.D., R.Ph. were awarded $5,000 from the PhRMA Foundation for their proposal to advance racial and ethnic representation in value assessments.
Suh and PharmE3D Labs Win Fellowships for 3D Bioprinting Research
March 18, 2021
Student pharmacist Johana Suh earned an undergraduate fellowship award for research on 3D bioprinted modeling of the neurodegenerative disease NPC-1, or Niemann-Pick disease type C1. Suh is a second-year Doctor of Pharmacy candidate in the UT College of Pharmacy, and serves as an undergraduate researcher in the Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) Labs led by Mo Maniruzzaman, Ph.D.
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by George Wolf
Yes, it's clichéd irony, but here goes: Rush, a movie steeped in the world of Formula One (F1) racing, excels because it downshifts, taking the time to examine the intricacies of a rivalry between two very distinct personalities.
Those two are James Hunt and Niki Lauda, legendary drivers who rose through the ranks together, ultimately waging an epic battle for the 1976 F1 championship. In the midst of that battle, Lauda suffered a near fatal accident, then subjected himself to the accelerated, painful rehabilitation needed to get back in the car before season's end.
Rush is the latest in a line of historical dramas from veteran director Ron Howard, and thankfully, it's one that favors the insightful subtlety of Frost/Nixon more than the overwrought melodrama of Cinderella Man.
That shouldn't be a huge surprise. Oscar-nominated screenwriter Peter Morgan, who penned Frost/Nixon (as well as The Queen and The Last King of Scotland) delivers another thoughtful, character-driven script that supplies Howard with the sharp dialogue and wonderful themes necessary to develop the engrossing drama Rush ultimately becomes.
While Morgan again proves himself a master wordsmith, Howard displays a deft command of the pacing and camerawork needed to balance the human drama with the sports spectacle.
There are stories floating around that the film became a dual character study only because Howard didn't have the budget necessary for all the racing he wanted to film. True or not, what matters is we get the best of both, with some truly pulse-pounding race sequences amid a faithful recreation of the international F1 scene during the swinging 70s.
Still, a superior drama requires superlative lead performances, and Rush offers those as well. Chris Hemsworth (Thor) puts his charisma to good use, painting Hunt as the cavalier playboy who drifted through life looking for something, or someone, that could give him the high he got from his race car. Hemsworth's looks and movie star status make him an easy choice for the Rush poster, but while his turn is strong, it his co-star who drives the film.
As Lauda, Daniel Bruhl creates a persona that becomes utterly fascinating, especially when pitted against his rival. While Hunt is raw talent, charm and bravado, Lauda is brainy, meticulous, blunt and socially inept. In a commanding performance that needs to remembered come awards season, Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds) makes an "unlikeable" character both sympathetic and compelling, drawing you into how Lauda views Hunt, and the world.
Exciting, enlightening, heartfelt and humorous, Rush flat out delivers, on all pumped-up cylinders.


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LONDON (AP) — Uncertainty over the outcome of a budget battle in Washington pushed world stock markets lower on Monday.
President Barack Obama and his political opponents have failed so far to agree on a way to roll back automatic spending cuts that took effect Friday. Those cuts slash $85 billion from the nation's budget, which could slow down the economy.
U.S. lawmakers say they want to undo the cuts so that federal programs can be spared but are divided over whether higher taxes should be used to pay for them.
Evan Lucas, an analyst at IG Markets, said he believes the budget fight is just "another political distraction that will cause some investors to cash out and buy back in on the dips."
European stock markets opened lower. Britain's FTSE 100 declined 0.4 percent to 6,355.55, with shares in HSBC down 2.7 percent after the bank reported a drop in net profit for 2012 due to fines it paid in the U.S. and U.K. on top of other one-time charges.
Germany's DAX fell 0.5 percent to 7,671.93 while France's CAC-40 lost almost 0.1 percent to 3,698.65.
Finance ministers from the 17-country eurozone will meet later in the day in Brussels to discuss a bailout for Cyprus, but a final deal is expected to take another few weeks since a new government has just taken over in Nicosia.
Wall Street appeared headed for a lower open, too, with Dow Jones industrial futures slipping 0.4 percent to 14,019 and S&P 500 futures shedding 0.3 percent to 1,512.30.
Stock markets in China were dragged down by property shares that tumbled after China's Cabinet ordered new measures to cool surging housing prices. The government said it will raise required minimum down payments in areas where prices are deemed to be rising too fast and crack down on efforts to evade limits on how many properties each buyer can acquire. The Shanghai Composite Index slid 3.7 percent to 2,273.40.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 1.5 percent to 22,537.81. South Korea's Kospi lost 0.7 percent to 2,013.15. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 dropped 1.5 percent to 5,010.50. Benchmarks in Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines also fell.
But Japan's Nikkei 225 bucked the negative trend, rising 0.4 percent to close at 11,652.29. Investors are seemingly in a buoyant mood ahead of a leadership change at the Bank of Japan. Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa will step down March 19, making way for a new chief who supports Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's call for bolder monetary easing. The central bank meets Wednesday and Thursday for a regular monetary policy review.
Benchmark oil for April delivery was down 35 cents to $90.33 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $1.37 to close at $90.68 a barrel on the Nymex on Friday.
In currencies, the euro fell 0.2 percent against the dollar, to $1.2994, while the dollar fell 0.1 percent against the Japanese yen, to 93.56 yen.


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Ian Holloway is adamant that any deal to sell Wilfried Zaha in January must include the provision for the winger to return to Crystal Palace for the rest of the season.
Zaha has been linked with a string of Premier League clubs and reports have claimed that Manchester United are leading the hunt for the 20-year-old.
Holloway has not disclosed the identity of the clubs chasing the England cap and has confirmed he has discussed the situation with Zaha this week.
The Palace boss has praised the way Zaha has handled the speculation and stressed a deal will only be agreed if the attacker comes back to Selhurst Park on loan.
"Wilfried Zaha is wanted by some of the biggest clubs in the Premier League," Holloway wrote in his Sunday Mirror column. "And THAT, in the football silly season that everyone else calls January, is the problem.
"The need for confidentiality makes it impossible to reveal who is interested in Wilfried and who has made a bid.
"But the constant buzz of speculation is difficult to cope with. It is a great tribute to Wilf himself that he has been able to hang on to his sanity.
"He had a little dip in form when the transfer talk started to get louder last month, but he has since shown that class is permanent.
"I felt it necessary to have a chat with Wilfried this week about what might happen and what definitely won't be happening. Even if we do reach an agreement with a club, it would have to include a clause that Zaha stays put for the rest of the season."


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Province in Asia Minor. Antiochus the Great transferred 2,000 Jewish families from Mesopotamia and Babylonia to Phrygia and Lydia (Josephus, "Ant." xii. 3, § 4). They settled principally in Laodicea and Apamea. The Christian Apostles also were familiar with Jews from Phrygia (Acts ii. 10). Christian teachings easily gained entry there on account of the numerous Jews in the country. It is noteworthy that in the Phrygian city Mantalos there is an inscription written from right to left (Ramsay, "The Historical Geography of Asia Minor," p. 150, London, 1890). In the Byzantine period Amorion was a Phrygian city, in which Jews held the supremacy (see
- Schürer, Gesch. iii. 3, 5, 10, 13;
- W. M. Ramsay, The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, i., part ii., 667-676, London, 1897.


text:
Clearwater, FL (SportsNetwork.com) - Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels will not throw for a week after experiencing continued soreness in his left shoulder, the team's official site reported Thursday.
Hamels, who had already been ruled out for the start of the regular season due to inflammation in his throwing shoulder, told reporters his arm felt "fatigued out" after a bullpen session this past Saturday.
"I believe I threw 35 pitches. To my body, it felt like a thousand," Hamels said. "It just wasn't healing up or getting that response back so I could go out and do it again. I didn't feel like it was safe to push it in that direction because I think that would have led to injuries."
The Phillies do not plan to have Hamels undergo an MRI or receive a cortisone injection, though the setback could conceivably keep the three-time All-Star sidelined until May.
Hamels is coming off a somewhat disappointing 2013 campaign in which the 29- year-old went just 8-14 with a 3.60 earned average in 33 starts.


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Dir: Tsai Ming-Liang. Taiwan-France. 2013. 135mins
Stripped back until it is almost devoid of story, then stripped back some more, Taiwan auteur's Tsai Ming Liang's latest film – likely to be his last, he has declared – is a meditation on the derelict fringes of urban life. Watching paint dry is an action movie compared to some of the agonisingly slow one-shot or two-shot scenes that Tsai forces his audience to sit through – like the six-minute take of a guy eating a cabbage that his daughter has adopted as a kind of doll.
Tsai throws down the gauntlet in the very first scene, a five-minute fixed-camera shot that shows a woman languidly brushing her hair, stopping for a while, and brushing her hair some more.
And yet this is still a resonant film, a sort of recession-themed cinematic tone poem reminiscent of some of the more out-there cinematic forays of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, that keeps on evolving once the pain of the viewing experience has subsided. Audience reactions will depend largely on whether we are prepared to supress our desire for narrative coherence, turn off the pretension-ometer, abandon all hope of anything resembling 'entertainment value', and simply absorb this radically uncommercial work as one might a piece of video art or a gallery installation.
Needless to say, Stray Dogs (Jiaoyou) divided critics at its two Venice press showings, with some hailing a masterpiece and others dismissing it as the ultimate in auterist self-indulgence. In the real world, most will likely fall into the latter camp. But while Stray Dogs will never achieve even the niche arthouse play of previous Tsai outings like Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) or The Wayward Cloud (2005), there will be some small demand out there for a film that promises to make it onto at least a couple of critical years' best lists.
In an almost dialogue-free two-and-a-quarter hour slog, Tsai throws down the gauntlet in the very first scene, a five-minute fixed-camera shot that shows a woman languidly brushing her hair, stopping for a while, and brushing her hair some more. We never find out who she is. We spend quite a bit of time thereafter observing two men who work as human billboards on the streets of Taipei, holding up placards advertising real estate developments in the wind and rain while traffic thunders past.
One of them is eventually homed in on: a puffy-faced middle-aged guy (Hsiao Kang) who, it later turns out, is (we presume) the father of two cute and surprisingly well-dressed kids, a young girl (Lee Yi Chieh) and an older boy (Lee Yi Cheng), who we have seen wandering through city parks and streets, and hanging out in a supermarket, where they get free meals from promotional stands. Their utterly natural performances (and the sense that there's nothing particularly special about life on the streets) do a lot to ground a film that has few other anchors.
Abandoned buildings feature prominently. There's the single-room space behind a flap of corrugated iron where the father and his kids seem to live. And there's a disintegrating public building of some kind, or perhaps a multi-storey car park, where a woman who feeds stray dogs stops, for what seems like an age, to consider a chiaroscuro mountain scene mural painted on a wall, before squatting to relieve herself on the floor.
Later, she will appear in a rain-lashed boat escape scene where, like a supernatural kung fu spirit, she hoists the two kids up into a tree and disappears. Later still, we see her installed with the kids and their dad in another derelict building (or the same one?) where she calmly helps them out with their homework.
The mix of tenderness and dereliction, the constant presence of rain and wind, the eerie sense of a life on the fringes in which other humans pass by like ghosts in the background (or are we watching a family of ghosts?), the possibility that the cabbage, the mountain mural and a patriotic Chinese song the father sings at a certain point may add up to a lament for a lost rural lifestyle, and the other-worldly melancholy that pervades the whole exercise, are the scraps we cling on to in the absence of story. Not enough for a square meal – but sometimes at the movies, hunger is more memorable than satiety.
Production companies: Homegreen Films, JBA Production
International sales: Urban Distribution International, www.urbandistrib.com
Producer: Vincent Wang
Co-producers: Jacques Bidou, Marianne Dumoulin
Screenplay: Tung Cheng Yu, Tsai Ming Liang, Peng Fei
Cinematography: Liao Pen Jung, Sung Wen Jhong
Editor: Lei Zhen Qing
Production designer: Masa Liu, Tsai Ming Liang
Main cast: Hsiao Kang, Yang Kuei Mei, Lu Yi Ching, Chen Shiang Chyi, Lee Yi Cheng, Lee Yi Chieh


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The earliest followers of the historical Buddha (c. 6th/5th century BC) were required to beg for a living and were prohibited from taking up permanent residence in any one place. The exception was during the monsoon season when monks were obliged to gather together in a single place as a community (sangha). The question of when the transition from peripatetic living to sedentary monasticism took place is still debated, largely by textual historians, some of whom have drawn on published archaeological evidence to date passages in Buddhist texts which are seen as indicators of what is often referred to as the 'domestication' of Buddhism.
The understanding of such issues has been hampered by a lack of integration between textual and archaeological frameworks of analysis. On the one hand, nineteenth century, and largely site-based archaeological reports are the usual points of reference, and on the other, it takes time for new discoveries in the field to be absorbed into broader historical scholarship.
History and chronology of monastery architecture
The project builds on earlier findings from the Sanchi Survey Project regarding the history and chronology of monastery architecture, and seeks to build up a comparative framework based on material further to the west and south.
The typology from the Sanchi area includes i) the previously unrecognised 'platformed' monastery, datable to c. second century BC, and originally surmounted by towering superstructures of brick and stone; ii) simple single or double roomed structures; and iii) the classic courtyard monastery which was traditionally thought not to have arrived in the area before the Gupta period, but was most probably developed as early as the second century BC, based on the SSP material; similar quadrangular plans are found on the summits of the early platformed structures in the area.
This material has helped to challenge received views regarding the apparent late 'domestication' of the sangha in central India which have for the most part been based on the supposed late chronology of the courtyard monastery, which with its emphasis on planning and 'order', has been taken as the key archaeological manifestation of textual allusions to the transition between peripatetic and sedentary monasticism.
The monastic re-occupation of rock-shelters
Another category of monastic dwelling in central India is the prehistoric rock-shelter showing evidence of adaptation for monastic use. Central India has a particularly rich concentration of rock-shelters showing evidence for occupation from at least the Chalcolithic period, and in some cases as early as the Mesolithic and upper Palaeolithic. Some of the shelters at well known complexes such as Bhimbetka show evidence for having been reoccupied by Buddhist monks (and other ascetic groups) in historical periods. Other such instances are found on the outer cliff-top edges of hilltop architectural Buddhist complexes such as Sanchi and neighbouring sites, whose constructional sequences date from the third or second centuries BC. The study seeks to establish the chronology of monastic use of such shelters and how their history relates to the wider history of monasticism and monastery construction in central India and areas further to the south. Did they, for example, represent a transitional phase between peripatetic and settled forms of monasticism, or did they continue to be occupied in later periods, thus representing a form of 'forest' as opposed to 'urban' monasticism?
Prospective PhD students who would be interested in working on themes related to this project are encouraged to contact Julia Shaw directly.
Related outputs
Shaw, J. (2011). 'Monasteries, monasticism, and patronage in ancient India: Mawasa, a recently documented hilltop Buddhist complex in the Sanchi area of Madhya Pradesh', South Asian Studies 27 (2): 111-130.
- Shaw, J. (2007). Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi hill and archaeologies of religious and social change, c. 3rd century BC to 5th century AD. London: British Association for South Asian Studies, The British Academy.
- Shaw, J. and J.V. Sutcliffe (2005), 'Ancient Dams and Buddhist Landscapes in the Sanchi area: New evidence on Irrigation, Land use and Monasticism in Central India', South Asian Studies 21, 1-24.


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Telligent Integrates With SharePoint 2010
The platform, now in beta, unites Telligent's social community software and Microsoft's document collaboration tools to boost enterprise collaboration.
February 16, 2011
Top 10 Microsoft Stories Of 2010
(click image for larger view)
Slideshow: Top 10 Microsoft Stories Of 2010
Social-collaboration software developer Telligent Wednesday released a beta version of an integration package for Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
Telligent's software -- including its Evolution Platform, Telligent Enterprise, Telligent Community, and Telligent Analytics -- is built on a Microsoft infrastructure, and supports Microsoft technologies ranging from browsers to enterprise search to unified communications, according to the Dallas-based developer. Microsoft also is a Telligent customer, using the company's products to power more than 30 groups, including product communities for Microsoft Windows, Bing, and Microsoft Office 365, Telligent said.
"This new integration with SharePoint 2010 furthers our commitment to Microsoft and advances our vision of providing game-changing people-centric collaboration," said Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent, in a statement.
The enterprise social software market is expected to reach $769 million this year, up 15.7% from $664 million in 2010, Gartner said. By 2012, the market could hit the $1 billion mark, the research firm predicted.
As part of its SharePoint 2010 integration package, Telligent has developed a unified platform for knowledge-capture that combines the company's social community software with Microsoft's document collaboration tools, it said. This allows employees to use the Telligent Enterprise interface to check-out, edit, and organize documents, using the controls embedded within Microsoft Office applications. With the Telligent Enterprise user interface, employees can review prior versions of documents and revert to previous editions from within the social collaboration software, according to Telligent.
"Our commitment to integration [of] Microsoft technologies helps companies achieve community by leveraging their Microsoft assets with Telligent," said Wendy Gibson, Telligent CMO, in a release. "The idea is to combine innovative social tools with companies' investments in Microsoft and evolve into a true community where employees feel free to collaborate and innovate."
Because of the integration with SharePoint 2010, workers familiar with the Microsoft application will require no additional training since they will use the same controls and editing tools.
Businesses can connect media libraries within Telligent Enterprise to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 document libraries, and continue to maintain the appropriate level of security and privacy. Through a simple linking technique, files stored within Telligent Enterprise immediately are moved to Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and any changes or additions automatically are captured. In addition, the integration of the two applications includes consolidated messaging, giving SharePoint 2010 members visibility into the activities of users connected to the Telligent platform.
Last month, Telligent released mobile features for Telligent Enterprise and Telligent Community, giving users the ability to access content and collaborate via an interface optimized for touchscreen mobile devices.
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from Wall Street Journal
If a good political compromise is one that has something for everyone to hate, then last night's bipartisan debt-ceiling deal is a triumph. The bargain is nonetheless better than what seemed achievable in recent days, especially given the revolt of some GOP conservatives that gave the White House and Democrats more political leverage.
The big picture is that the deal is a victory for the cause of smaller government, arguably the biggest since welfare reform in 1996. Most bipartisan budget deals trade tax increases that are immediate for spending cuts that turn out to be fictional. This one includes no immediate tax increases, despite President Obama's demand as recently as last Monday. The immediate spending cuts are real, if smaller than we'd prefer, and the longer-term cuts could be real if Republicans hold Congress and continue to enforce the deal's spending caps.
The framework (we haven't seen all the details) calls for an initial step of some $900 billion in domestic discretionary cuts over 10 years from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline puffed up by recent spending. If the cuts hold, this would go some way to erasing the fiscal damage from the Obama-Nancy Pelosi stimulus. This is no small achievement considering that Republicans control neither the Senate nor the White House, and it underscores how much the GOP victory in November has reshaped the U.S. fiscal debate.
No wonder liberals are howling. They have come to believe in the upward spending ratchet, under which all spending increases are permanent. Not any more.
The second phase of the deal is less clear cut, though it also could turn out to shrink Leviathan. Party leaders in both houses of Congress will each appoint three Members to a special committee that will recommend another round of deficit reduction of between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion, also over 10 years. Their mandate is broad, and we're told very little is off the table, but at least seven of the 12 Members would have to agree on a package to force an up-or-down vote in Congress.
If the committee can't agree on enough deficit reduction, then automatic spending cuts would ensue to make up the difference to reach the $1.2 trillion minimum deficit-reduction target. One key point is that the committee's failure to agree would not automatically "trigger" (in Beltway parlance) revenue increases, as the White House was insisting on as recently as this weekend. That would have guaranteed that Democrats would never agree to enough cuts, and Republicans were right to resist.
Instead the automatic cuts would be divided equally between defense and nondefense. So, for example, if the committee agrees to deficit reduction of only $600 billion, then another $300 billion would be cut automatically from defense and domestic accounts (excluding Medicare beneficiaries) to reach at least $1.2 trillion.
This trigger is intended to be an incentive for committee Members of both parties to agree on more cuts, but defense cuts of this magnitude would do far more harm to national security than they would to domestic accounts that have been fattened by stimulus. This is the worst part of the deal, and Mr. Obama's political goal will be to press Republicans to choose between tax increases and destructive defense cuts. The GOP will have to fight back and make the choice between domestic cuts and harm to our troops fighting multiple wars.
While the "trigger" includes no revenue increases, the committee itself could agree to raise taxes to meet the $1.2 trillion deficit reduction target. This means GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have to be especially careful in their choice of appointees. No one from the Senate Gang of Six, who proposed tax increases, need apply. The GOP choices should start with Arizona Senator Jon Kyl and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, adding four others who will follow their lead.
One reason to think tax increases are unlikely, however, is that the 12-Member committee will operate from CBO's baseline that assumes that the Bush tax rates expire in 2013. CBO assumes that taxes will rise by $3.5 trillion over the next decade, including huge increases for middle-class earners. Since any elimination of those tax increases would increase the deficit under CBO's math, the strong incentive for the Members will be to avoid the tax issue. This increases the political incentive for deficit reduction to come from spending cuts.
Mr. Obama's biggest gain in the deal is that he gets his highest priority of not having to repeat this debt-limit fight again before the 2012 election. The deal stipulates that the debt ceiling will rise automatically by $900 billion this year, and at least $1.2 trillion next year, unless two-thirds of Congress disapproves it. Congress will not do so.
Given how much the current debate has damaged the public perception of Mr. Obama's leadership, this will be a relief at the White House. This is part of the negotiating price that Mr. Boehner had to pay because of the back-bench revolt that showed he couldn't guarantee a debt-limit increase with only GOP votes. This gave Democrats more leverage.
The same supposedly conservative Republicans and their talk radio minders may denounce this deal as a sellout, but we'll be charitable and assume they've climbed so far out on the political ledge they don't know how to climb back without admitting they were wrong. They're right that this deal doesn't "solve" our fiscal crisis, but no such deal is possible as long as liberals run the Senate and White House.
The debt ceiling is a political hostage the GOP could never afford to shoot, and this deal is about the best Republicans could have hoped for given that the limit had to be raised. The Jim DeMint-Michele Bachmann-Sean Hannity alternative of refusing to raise the debt limit without a balanced-budget amendment and betting that Mr. Obama would get all the blame vanishes upon contact with any thought. Sooner or later the GOP had to give up the hostage.
The tea partiers pride themselves on adhering to the Constitution, which was intended to make political change difficult. Yet in this deal they've forced both parties to make the biggest spending cuts in 15 years, with more cuts likely next year. The U.S. is engaged in an epic debate over the size and scope of government that will play out over several years, and the most important battle comes in the election of 2012.
Tea partiers will do more for their cause by applauding this victory and working toward the next, rather than diminishing what they've accomplished because it didn't solve every fiscal problem in one impossible swoop.


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Jesse Owens Wins his First Gold
Despite a climate thick with racial tension, 75 years ago today, the track star made history at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin
Last week, Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford called the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin "the most fascinating and historically influential Games." Reflecting on the 75th anniversary of those summer games, he wrote, "It was novelty and glory and evil all in athletic conjunction as never before or since."
Adolf Hitler went into the Olympics with the hopes of displaying the supremacy of the so-called Aryan race. "With that inherent thoroughness for which they have long been noted, the Germans plunged gayly into every event, some of which they scarcely understood a few years ago," wrote John Drebinger in the New York Times in December 1936.
Ultimately, the Germans placed first overall in the medal count with 101 medals to the United States' second-place earning 57. But, one sport, which the United States prevailed in, was in track and field—thanks, in great part, to a track star from Cleveland named Jesse Owens. The son of a sharecropper and grandson of slaves, Owens began racing at age 13. He became one of the top sprinters in the country while attending East Technical High School in Cleveland and went on to break world records in the broad jump (now called long jump), 220-yard dash and 220-yard low hurdles—and match one in the 100-yard dash—while just a sophomore at Ohio State University. A year later, in 1936, Owens traveled to Berlin, as one of 66 athletes, ten of whom were black, on the United States Olympic track team. "The Nazis derided the Americans for relying on what the Nazis called an inferior race, but of the 11 individual gold medals in track won by the American men, six were won by blacks," reads Owens's 1980 obituary in the New York Times.
Owens became an instant hero, taking home four gold medals—in the 100 meters, 200 meters, broad jump and 400-meter relay. "Traveling with the speed of a Mercury incarnate, this most amazing athlete of all time confounded even Hitler, considered no mean achievement in itself," wrote Drebinger. "Most every time he stepped on the track he broke a record of some sort and in the end received a record-smashing ovation from a vast gallery that seemed fully cognizant of the fact it was acclaiming a most marvelous athlete."
Hitler, however, refused to congratulate him with even a simple handshake.
It was a huge snub. Yet, years later, Owens would acknowledge that the response even from leadership in his own country fell short of what might be expected. President Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn't congratulated him either. Owens never received a phone call from the president or an invitation to the White House. Finally, in 1976, the track star received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford.
Today marks the day, 75 years ago, when Owens earned the first of his four Olympic golds, by edging out his teammate Ralph Metcalfe in the 100-meter dash. Post-Olympics, Owens became a much-desired public speaker. In his speeches, he often described what it was like to line up on the track and represent his country in the Olympics. "It's a nervous, a terrible feeling. You feel, as you stand there, as if your legs can't carry the weight of your body. Your stomach isn't there, and your mouth is dry, and your hands are wet with perspiration. And you begin to think in terms of all those years that you have worked. In my particular case, the 100 meters, as you look down the field 109 yards 2 feet away, and recognizing that after eight years of hard work that this is the point that I had reached and that all was going to be over in 10 seconds," said Owens. "Those are great moments in the lives of individuals."
The National Portrait Museum has in its collection (not on display, but in an online exhibition) a painting by the late Paul Calle depicting Jesse Owens leaping over a hurdle. Commissioned by the United States Postal Service, the painting served as the image on a stamp, also in the museum's collection, issued in 1998.
Calle was highly regarded as a stamp designer. His best known stamp is one he made in 1969 to commemorate the moon landing. He was actually the only artist allowed to watch astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins prep for the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11, and a series of his pen-and-ink sketches are on exhibition in "NASA Art: 50 Years of Exploration," at the National Air and Space Museum through October 9.
When Calle passed away in December 2010, at age 82, his New York Times obituary resurrected a morsel he once shared about his process. "When you do a stamp," he said, in an interview after the moon landing, "think big, but draw small."


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When Sheryl Sandberg was a kid, she was already exhibiting the traits of a leader.
In Sandberg's upcoming book about women advancing in the workplace, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, she discusses, among other things, how she took charge as a child, The Huffington Post reports.
Sandberg writes in the book that she "allegedly spent [her] time organizing shows that [she] could direct and clubs that [she] could run."
But she also spent a lot of time organizing the lives of other people. At Sandberg's wedding, here's what her brother and sister told guests during a speech:
"To the best of our knowledge Sheryl never actually played as a child, but really just organized other children's play. Sheryl supervised adults as well. When our parents went away on vacation, our grandparents used to babysit. Before our parents left, Sheryl protested, 'Now I have to take care of David and Michelle and Grandma and Grandpa too. It's not fair!'"
Sandberg also taught her younger siblings to follow her around, listen to her monologues, and "scream the word 'Right!' when [she] concluded," Sandberg writes.
Now, Sandberg is one of the richest self-made women in the world. Granted, that was back when Facebook was a billion-dollar company. But the company is still doing great.


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The KDE Community participated in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for the first time this year. It was more successful than expected. KDE got many great applications and mentored 4 students contributing to Free Software. The Outreach Program for Women encourages women to get involved in free and open source software.
Read more »NVIDIA to partially open up their GPU specification
Yesterday NVIDIA announced that they are supporting Nouveau development by providing documentation on certain aspects of their GPUs. This is good for the Open Source community – but their competitors still provide much more.
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FSF certifies ThinkPenguin USB Wifi adapter with Atheros chip to be free software friendly
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the TPE-N150USB Wireless N USB Adapter, sold by ThinkPenguin. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The TPE-N150USB can be purchased from http://www.thinkpenguin.com/TPE-N150USB.
Read more »Don't let the myths fool you: the W3C's plan for DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all Web users.
The Free Culture Foundation has posted a thorough response to the most common and misinformed defenses of the W3C's Extended Media Extensions (EME) proposal to inject DRM into HTML5. The FCF counters the three most common myths by unpacking some quotes which explain that 1.) DRM is not about protecting copyright. That is a straw man.
Read more »NetBSD turns 20 years old
NetBSD has turned 20 years old, based on the initial CVS commit dated from March 1993. Congratulations and wishing many more year to come.
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2012 Free Software Award winners announced
Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF's annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony held during the LibrePlanet 2013 conference.
Read more »Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards
There is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped.
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Document Freedom Day, March 27th, 2013
Document Freedom Day is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats which takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate. Document Freedom is about all forms of data, including artwork, sheet and recorded music, emails, and statistics.
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LibrePlanet software freedom conference announces line-up
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the line-up for its upcoming LibrePlanet 2013 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Harvard Science Center on March 23-24.
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Freedom on Buses, Computers and Everywhere
Today, I watched the president of the USA speak at the installation of the statue of Rosa Parks. She was an icon of the US movement for civil rights when I was just a child. In the world of computers we have our own Rosa Parks, Richard Stallman, who expanded the concept of freedom to include running the software, examining the software, modifying the software, and distributing the software.
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A Vision of the Future of FOSS Collaboration
Participation and open access are key themes in Free software. It encourages dynamic community structures that blur the line between technology consumer and creator. This has been so successful that echoes of it can be found throughout the technology world from mobile app user engagement to game community content creation.
Read more »FSFE Interview with Anna Morris on Free Software ecommerce
Anna Morris is co-founder of FLOSSIE conference for women in Free Software, Manchester Fellowship Group Deputy Coordinator, and Co-Director of ethical-pets.co.uk. She is currently writing a book on video editing with Free Software, and volunteering with Document Freedom Day 2013 in her spare time.
She talks about running her e-commerce company with Free Software tools.
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Matching grants for EFF donations until Tuesday
Every dollar you give will provide two dollars to help EFF! Thanks to bonus challenge grants, donations up to $158,000 will get a 2x matching grant until Tuesday.
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Support the FSF: Turn your dollars into decibels
Make a one-time donation to help us make your voice for software freedom heard. Please support us at whatever amount feels right to you. Every dollar helps us raise your voices one more decibel.
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TLWIR 48: Revealing the Hidden Biases Against Free Software
Let's face it: we all have biases. I readily admit that I have a very clear bias in favor of Free Software. There is no human being that is truly objective and neutral. However, in the modern world of technology blogging, these biases are often cleverly hidden. "Studies" are released without revealing the true motivations behind those that conducted the study.
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I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing. That's one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.Back from what? That is the question the SJW feminists never want to answer. We know they don't actually care about equality. We know they don't actually care about fairness. So what is it that they want?
The answer is always the same: more. Women will cast down the foundations of science, they will destroy the Church, they will cast down Western civilization itself rather than give up their Quest for More.


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Twitter reported its earnings this morning for Q3, and watchers of the company, used to seeing declines across the board, got an unexpected piece of news: the social media platform reported revenues of $590 million on adjusted earnings per share of $0.10.
Total monthly active users for Q3 were 330 million, up 4 million from the prior quarter and an increase of 4% year-over-year. US MAUs grew 1 million sequentially to 69 million, while international MAUs grew 3 million sequentially to 261 million, the company said.
But, notably, the company also slipped in some bad news about MAUs, too: it had been overstating the numbers since Q4 2014 due to a flaw in Digits, and SDK that was part of its now-divested Fabric platform, and how it reported third-party access:
"We discovered that since the fourth quarter of 2014 we had included users of certain third-party applications as Twitter MAUs that should not have been considered MAUs," Twitter noted. "These third-party applications used Digits, a software development kit of our now-divested Fabric platform, that allowed third-party applications to send authentication messages via SMS through our systems, which did not relate to activity on the Twitter platform. The table below presents the impact for the periods beginning in the fourth quarter of 2016. Due to our data retention policies, we do not have data to reconcile periods prior to the fourth quarter of 2016, but our estimates suggest the prior period adjustments are smaller than those in the fourth quarter of 2016."
The Q3 revenues were still a decline over a year ago of about four percent compared to a year ago, when Twitter reported EPS of $0.09 on revenues of $615.93 million. But it still appears to have been a surprise turn of events as far as analysts were concerned: they collectively were expecting EPS of $0.07 on revenues of $586.73 million.
Other notable metrics for today are that daily active users are up 14 percent over last year, and monthly active users are up four percent, with the absolute increase working out to 4 million users.
Advertising revenue totaled $503 million, a decrease of 8% year-over-year, with data licensing accounting for $87 million, up 22 percent.
US revenues were $332 million, down 11 percent, while international revenues were $258 million, up 6 percent.
The two areas where Twitter continues to get hit publicly are in the fact that its service continues to present itself as a hotbed for harassment and spreading false information, alongside its important role in providing a communications platform, which remains the problematic paradox of the service.
"We're committed to making Twitter safer, and we continue to improve and leverage our technology to reduce the reach of abusive Tweets," CEO Jack Dorsey wrote in the shareholders letter out today. "This quarter, we further refined our machine-learning algorithms in order to better identify and act on accounts demonstrating abusive behavior. Moving forward, we're focused on addressing this issue from a policy, enforcement, and product perspective, and we'll be taking a more aggressive stance on our abuse rules and on how we enforce them. We published a roadmap of the upcoming changes we plan to make to the Twitter Rules, how we communicate with people who violate them, and our enforcement processes, and we will share regular, real-time updates about our progress."
Similarly, the company has to keep working on making its service easier, especially with a focus on onboarding those who are not regular existing users.
"We remain focused on making Twitter easier to use," the letter continues, "and this quarter we launched new product features aimed toward helping people find and engage with Tweets that are relevant to them. In Q3, we further personalized the Twitter experience by launching new topic modules in the Explore tab tailored to people's interests. We also increased the relevance of our notifications by adding new, interest-based notification types to the notifications tab, and applied machine learning to further personalize Trends. In September, we began testing longer character limits for a small percentage of people in certain languages, based on research that indicates that running into the character limit can sometimes lead people to abandon their Tweets. We expect to see fewer Tweets running into the character limit over time, and we'll be sharing the results of this experiment publicly in the coming weeks."
More to come.


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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) — Sam Darnold and the New York Jets are feeling a whole lot better about themselves — and their prospects for this season — after a gritty win.
Even if it came against the equally lowly Giants.
Le'Veon Bell scored a go-ahead 1-yard touchdown early in the fourth quarter after a 33-yard pass interference penalty on DeAndre Baker, and the Jets rallied and then held on to beat Daniel Jones and the Giants 34-27 on Sunday for Big Apple bragging rights.
"We needed that one," Darnold said.
Darnold threw a touchdown pass to Jamison Crowder and ran for another score, and Jamal Adams scored on a 25-yard fumble return on a strip-sack as the Jets (2-7) bounced back from an embarrassing 28-16 loss last week at previously winless Miami. It also snapped a three-game skid, during which the seat under coach Adam Gase had grown increasingly hotter.
"We need every win from now on," said Darnold, who was 19 of 30 for 230 yards and no interceptions. "We've still got a chance. I mean, if we got on a roll here and win out, we've got a chance at the playoffs. Guys in this locker room know this."
The postseason seems little more than a pipe dream at this point, but the Jets are suddenly optimistic again.
"Today was not nearly a perfect game," Bell said, "but it was good enough for us to win."
Jones threw a career-high four touchdown passes, two each to Darius Slayton and Golden Tate, but couldn't prevent the Giants (2-8) from losing their sixth straight game. It's their first six-game skid since 2014, and has some frustrated Giants fans calling for Pat Shurmur's job.
"We're disappointed we haven't been able to win a game for six," the Giants coach said. "That's the way it works. I am disappointed we didn't win this game. That's where it's at. The state of the team? That's where we are at."
Saquon Barkley had the worst game of his young career, finishing with just 1 yard on 13 carries. He also had five catches for 30 yards.
"I just have to get better," said a curt Barkley, who was seen going to the X-ray room after the game but wouldn't discuss it.
"It makes it a lot easier when you make the other team one-dimensional and take away their biggest threat," Jets linebacker Brandon Copeland said.
With the Giants trailing 21-19 in the third quarter, Jones marched them down the field on nine plays, capped by a 15-yard touchdown pass to Tate.
Shurmur opted to go for a 2-point conversion and Jones found Bennie Fowler III in the end zone to put the Giants ahead for the first time, 27-21 with 5:21 left in the third quarter.
Sam Ficken's 53-yard field goal late in the third quarter cut the Jets' deficit to three. The drive was kept alive by Darnold's 24-yard run — the longest rush for the Jets this season — on third-and-7.
The Jets retook the lead on Bell's short touchdown run 8 seconds into the final quarter. After a 25-yard catch by Crowder, Darnold threw a deep pass to Robby Anderson and Baker was called for pass interference in the end zone — a 33-yard penalty that put the ball at the 1.
"That P.I., I know it won't be on the stats sheet (for Anderson)," Gase said, "but that was really a big play."
Ficken's 35-yarder made it 34-27 with 7:36 remaining, and the Jets defense held firm from there.
Darnold gave the Jets an early lead by running it in from 2 yards out, capping a 13-play, 75-yard drive.
On New York's next drive, Gase opted to go for it on fourth-and-1 from the 41 and rookie tight end Trevon Wesco ran for a 2-yard gain. Four plays later, Darnold fired a strike to Crowder for a 23-yard touchdown to make it 14-0.
Jones, who finished 26 of 40 for 308 yards, got the Giants moving on their next drive, helped by three penalties on the Jets. On first-and-goal from the 5, Jones connected with Slayton to cut the Giants' deficit to 14-7 early in the second quarter.
Jones found Slayton again for a TD later in the quarter when Shurmur opted to go for it on fourth-and-4 from the Jets 39.
With the Giants looking to tie it, holder Riley Dixon picked up Zak DeOssie's wayward snap on the extra point, but his throw to Kaden Smith for the 2-point conversion attempt fell incomplete to make it 14-13 with 5:24 left in the half.
Adams gave the Jets a 21-13 lead just three plays into the second half, when he ripped the ball out of Jones' hands and ran it into the end zone 25 yards for a touchdown.
The star safety told Gase on the sideline shortly before the play that he was going to cause a turnover.
"That's just my mindset," said Adams, who had two sacks and two forced fumbles. "Each and every Sunday or Monday, whatever it is, I just try to be the best on the field. I try to be the best in the league."
Jones threw a screen to Tate for a 61-yard touchdown in the third quarter and the Giants went for the 2-point conversion — but Tate was called for offensive pass interference.
Shurmur then opted for the extra point, but Aldrick Rosas was wide right — and the Jets still led, 21-19.
Giants: LT Nate Solder left in the second quarter with a concussion. ... CB Janoris Jenkins also suffered a concussion in the second half.
Jets: RG Brian Winters injured a shoulder in the third quarter and didn't return. ... Bell said he came out briefly with sore ribs, but expects to play next week.
Giants: have a bye-week break before traveling to Chicago to face the Bears on Nov. 24.
Jets: hit the road to take on the Washington Redskins next Sunday.
More AP NFL: https://apnews.com/NFL and https://twitter.com/AP_NFL
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Building Garrett's Bow: Bringing Thief's Deadly Weapon Into The Real World
The latest Thief game from Eidos-Montreal has been in development for a long time. While the development team was hard at work designing and redesigning the systems, a small forge in Montreal was given the task of building the protagonist's bow for both marketing and research. In the spring of 2010, machinist Dan Nyborg and blacksmith Mathieu Collette spent one month designing and bringing Garrett's weapon to life. The forge has made props for films like the upcoming Riddick sequel and the unforgettable Adventures of Pluto Nash, but the complex and mechanical bow from Thief was one of their biggest challenges.
Watch the video below to see how the team created Garrett's bow and how their hard work ended up changing the weapon's design in the final game.
To learn more about the gameplay and world of the Thief reboot, click on the banner below to enter our content-filled hub.


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If you're planning not to pay off your Nationwide mortgage before retirement, you won't be alone. Fewer than half of owner-occupiers in the age group 65-69 years were mortgage-free in 2015.
What's in and what's out
That record-low number came from an October 2017 study by Fannie Mae. But the report revealed something even more surprising: Younger baby boomers, in the 50-59 years cohort, were actually more likely to own their homes outright than people the same age were in 2000.
In other words, the trend for carrying mortgages through into retirement may be losing ground. Fashions change. So, should you too be rethinking when to pay off your mortgage? It's certainly a lively debate.
Why people retire with mortgages
There are two main reasons why people retire before paying off their mortgages:
- They have no choice — Especially following the Great Recession, many have seen their financial plans blown off course
- They strategically choose to keep their mortgages going — Some arguments for doing this to maximize wealth are compelling
Those in the first group can do little about their predicament. But those who choose keeping this debt in retirement might want to keep their decision under review.
When not paying down your mortgage makes sense
Does the end of your mortgage term happen to coincide with your retirement date? If not, paying down your loan by that deadline will mean paying more than your required monthly payment.
Here are some situations in which it's often better to prioritize other things:
- If you have a pile of higher-interest debt — As a rule, you should pay down accounts with the highest interest rate first, and then work your way down to the lowest-interest account. That's almost certainly your mortgage
- If you don't have a good emergency fund — With medical expenses likely, you're almost bound to need ready cash more in retirement than at other stages of life
- If you're stinting on your 401(k) — If your employer is matching your contributions to your retirement fund, make sure you get the maximum benefit possible
- If you've a big mortgage and will be itemizing your tax deductions once you're retired — Do the math
- If you're planning on relocating or downsizing — Just pay off your mortgage as part of that transaction
- If you can get a better return on your money elsewhere — With mortgage rates so low (and generally tax-deductible) and markets so high, the chances of finding an investment where your cash will earn more are excellent
Most of those have been common sense for generations. But that last one has become more influential more recently. And that's the one that needs thinking through.
Large institutional investors with sophisticated automated trading are better positioned to protect themselves and react swiftly. Individuals can be left holding the bag when bad news erupts.
Forever blowing bubbles
Perhaps the first financial bubble happened in 1636-37 in the Netherlands. At one point, a single tulip bulb was worth the same as a house on an Amsterdam canal.
That sounds stupid now. But falling for the allure of a big shiny bubble has nothing to do with intelligence. In the 1720s, Sir Isaac Newton lost his shirt in the South Sea Bubble.
And bubbles have been a feature of capitalist economies ever since. The Great Depression followed one. The dot-com (or tech) bubble inflated between 1997 and 2000. A debt bubble burst in 2007-08.
Another bubble soon?
But there's no reason to believe we're all bubbled out. In June 2017, Forbes ran a feature under the headline, "The Next Recession: We Are Witnessing The Largest Twin Bubbles In History."
Of course, alarmist predictions of economic doom are two-a-penny. But, after many years of booming stock markets, it's easy to forget a simple fact: returns are a reward for risk. And the higher the reward, the greater the risk.
Risks in retirement
It's one thing to take risks when you're young or middle-aged. But, by definition, retirees are in a less strong position to recover from losses: They may have less time to do so. And they have fewer opportunities to earn enough to return to their previous levels of wealth.
Of course, managing risk doesn't mean avoiding it completely. If you spread your money across enough FDIC-insured certificates of deposit and savings and money market accounts, you can be pretty sure you won't risk losing a cent. But you can be certain you'll watch your wealth being whittled away by inflation year after year.
That's why a diversified portfolio is so important in retirement. Mutual funds are one way to diversify your stocks and reduce your risk. Laddered CDs are another way to increase your earnings without risking your principal. You need enough salted away in safe investments to keep you afloat if your risky ones blow up.
Being mortgage-free is a safe investment
Paying down debt counts as an investment. True, you don't get a positive return on your money. But the interest payments you save are just as real as any dividend or yield.
You have to decide whether paying off your mortgage before you retire fits within your diversified portfolio. Your return won't be handsome if you do, especially if you're going to itemize your tax deductions, but it would certainly count as one of your safe investments.
And, in the event of a depression, recession or economic meltdown, it could be one you'd value a great deal.
You still have options
Finally, paying down a mortgage doesn't necessarily mean closing down your options. Providing you remain creditworthy, you could still likely borrow against your home with a new mortgage.
Alternatively, you may prefer to borrow using a home equity loan or home equity line of credit (HELOC).
Reverse mortgages
And, of course, you could still borrow using a reverse mortgage or home equity conversion mortgage (HECM — a reverse mortgage backed by the Federal Housing Administration). You have to have cleared your original mortgage to be eligible for one of these. However, you can use some of the proceeds from the new loan to pay off any small balance on that original one.
That opens the possibility of being free of mortgage payments, while still borrowing through a mortgage. And that's something you may find attractive. Just be sure you understand all the potential disadvantages before you commit.
Take advice
Nothing's certain in this world. That's why there are no automatically correct answers to retirement planning. It all depends on your resources, your needs and your appetite for risk.
If you want to discuss this further, give me a call at (833) 211-5626…I will do my best to help you secure your financial future in Nationwide.
Questions? Contact The Kewin Team Today!