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ObjectiveCommunications: The European Journal of Communication Research is an established forum for scholarship and academic debate in the field of communication science and research from a European perspective. Communication science is concerned with the investigation of the structure and function of communication processes and their impact on society, social groups and individuals. Communications highlights the concerns of this discipline through the publication of articles, research reports, review essays and book reviews on theoretical and methodological developments considered from a European perspective. The journal encompasses the entire field of communication science as its domain of interest. The contributions published in the journal cover a wide range of subfields in communication science.
Article formatsOriginal articles, research reports, review essays, and book reviews


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ExploraTour - How to Build a Star
All the gory details .....
First two protons collide and form a deuterium nucleus (one proton + one neutron). This is not as simple as it sounds. Only one collision in ten trillion trillion actually produces deuterium. In fact, the average proton must wait some 10 billion years to be part of the proton-proton chain.
During this collision, a positron and a neutrino are released. A positron is the anti-matter equivalent of an electron (an electron with a positive charge). As soon as the positron encounters an electron, the two anihilate one another to form two gamma rays. The neutrino has virtually no mass and passes right through the sun and out into space.
The deuterium nucleus collides with a proton in less than 1 second. The two form a light helium nucleus which is made up of two protons and one neutron. Another gamma ray is released. The gamma rays are carrying away the energy that results from the conversion of mass to energy.
On the average, about a million years ellapses before two light helium nuclei collide to form a regular helium nucleus (made up of 2 protons and 2 neutrons) with the release of two protons.
Final tally: 4 protons --> 1 He nucleus + 6 gamma rays + 2 neutrinos

subset: commoncrawl


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Show All Answers
Unfortunately, as much as members of the Cedar Falls Fire Division would like to help get your cat out of the tree, for liability reasons we do not perform cat rescues. Your best bet would be to call the Cedar Bend Humane Society at (319) 232-6887 for ideas on how to get your cat down from the tree.
For more information on open burning regulations, check the link to the City of Cedar Falls city code.


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July 2018
Verdant and warm, July on the homestead was awash in the lushness (lusciousness?) of summer. July is the month when the literal fruits of our labors begin to bear. Much of our springtime work is in preparation for July: we till, we weed, we plant, we prepare. And finally, stuff begins to ripen. July is the counterbalance to its half-birthday of January. The striking similarity is the monochromatic landscape: all white in January and all green in July.
In July, nothing un-flowered remains and no leaves have yet turned toward fall. July is the mid-point where we relax into summer and the woodstove gathers dust. Spring is a time of discovery as each new flower presents itself and snow melts to reveal long forgotten troughs in the landscape. But by July, most of these secrets are laid bare.
If you're just tuning in, this is a recurring series in which I document each month of our lives out here on our 66-acre Vermont homestead. After leaving urban Cambridge, MA in May 2016 to chart this wholly different life, we're experiencing a constant learning curve of exploration (and plenty of stupid novice moments). Check out last month's installment here and enjoy the best and worst (ok, mostly the worst) moments of our first year on the homestead here. Wondering if it's less expensive to live rurally? Check out: City vs. Country: Which Is Cheaper? The Ultimate Cost Of Living Showdown.
Garden Check
Harvesting began in earnest with cucumbers, chard, tomatoes, ground cherries, cayenne peppers, jalapeño, and snap peas all ripening. A friend described Vermont as a lot of winter followed by jungle-esque growth. Apt, I'd say. Vegetables suddenly burst forth and we find ourselves harvesting by the wheelbarrow-load. Since there's no way we can consume everything we grow in real time, our major focus is on longterm food preservation. We dipped our toes into the world of preservation last year, but we're throwing our entire bodies in this summer. This year, our garden is an order of magnitude larger–and it's also a lot healthier, thanks to Mr. FW's ministrations–so we are in veggie processing overdrive.
Chard! (and Kale!)
I did a "Day In the Life Of Chard" series on Instagram this month, which chronicled how we harvest and process our mountains of chard and I'll regale you with the tale. Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well for the chard…
Harvesting the Chard (and kale!)
Last year, Mr. Frugalwoods and I would harvest chard and kale haphazardly and in small batches–usually just enough to cook up in a stir fry. This year, thanks to the fact that we planted about 80 chard plants, we've streamlined. Every two weeks, we do a MASSIVE chard harvest and cut the plants back to just a few strong center stalks. The plants seem to thrive with this regime and it allows us to create efficiencies around our food preservation process. We learned last year that it's so labor intensive to wash, chop, and cook chard (and kale) that you might as well do gigantic barrel-loads of it at a time.
When harvesting, I like to use clippers to cut the chard stalks close to the base because I find that tearing them off often damages neighboring stalks. The best system we've found–when we're lucky enough to have both adults (plus kids) in the garden at the same time–is to have one person cut stalks and hand them up to the other person, who runs them down the row and plops them into the wheelbarrow. Fortunately the wheel barrow fits in between our garden rows. We tried to con Babywoods into helping with this task, but she just took the chard stalk and starting eating it, so, uh, not useful.
Harvesting this way yields roughly two wheelbarrows full of chard, which is a monstrous amount. The only container that'll hold it all? The baby pool. Babywoods was concerned that we'd requisitioned her pool as a chard holding pen and requested to climb in and–I kid you not–"live with the chard."
Washing the Chard
Next up is washing! Thankfully we're organic gardeners, so we don't have to worry about pesticides on our plants, but we do have to remove dirt and bugs. Yum! Last year, like a moron, I washed EACH and EVERY individual chard leaf in our kitchen sink. It took me about a year to get through a batch. This year, we did some research and learned that non-moron gardeners do a three-part dunk washing system for their greens. Brilliant!
I line up the baby pool-o-chard next to three large plastic storage totes on our back porch. Two of the totes are 3/4 full of water (from the hose) and the third tote is empty. I first pressure wash the chard (in the baby pool) with our hose. Next, I take a bundle of chard and dunk it in the first water bath and rub the stems clean. Then I shake the leaves off and dunk the bundle into the next tote of water. Finally, I remove it and put it into the third, empty tote to await intervention by chef Mr. FW. Then I pressure wash the next layer of chard in the baby pool and continue on with my washing system. The only downside is that the water coming out of our hose is approximately 40 degrees and so I nearly freeze my arms off. By dint of me writing this, you know I survived.
As a perfectionist/germaphobe/neat freak, I was CERTAIN this dunking system wouldn't work and that I'd be up for 48 hours washing chard in the sink. I am delighted to report that I was wrong. The dunking system totally works and we've found very little residual dirt after this three-part baptism. Woohoo! It still takes me about 1.5 hours to wash two wheelbarrow loads of greens, but that is phenomenally faster than last year's laborious moron-at-the-sink system.
Processing the Chard
We're doing chard three ways this year:
- For immediate consumption in an Asian-spice inspired stir fry of chard, kale, onions, garlic, Hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, and ginger. Yum. Mr. FW cooks up a certifiably GIANT batch of this once a week and it's what we eat for dinner all week along, atop organic brown rice.
- Blanch and freeze (detailed below)
- Kimchi (what you've been waiting for)
And we had one failed idea:
- Pickled chard stems (gross)
Blanch and Freeze
This is a time-honored, straightforward method for preserving greens. After harvesting and washing, we rip the leaves from the stems (faster than chopping) and Mr. FW chops the leaves into ribbons and puts the stems into the food processor using the slicer attachment, which slices them thinly across the grain of the stem (he then adds the stems to the stir fry).
We then blanch the leaves (put them in boiling water for a minute and then dunk them into cold water). After blanching, we wring them out and pop them into plastic bags and into our deep freeze. The reason for blanching is that it locks in the nutrients of the chard. Our plan is to defrost these bags in the winter for Mr. FW to make chard stir-fry. We didn't do this system last year, so we'll have to see how well it defrosts and cooks up.
I have been waiting for MONTHS to tell you about this, because my adorable husband came up not only with the idea to make kimchi out of chard, but also to call it–wait for it–Kimchardashian. I love this man so much. Kimchi is a Korean dish of fermented cabbage (typically Napa cabbage) that's used as a flavor additive. You can put it on top of just about anything and it provides a zesty, zingy flavor. I will note that kimchi is not universally loved and so I advise you try some before you go to the trouble of making your very own Kimchardashian. Is Kimchi ever made out of chard? Not that we know of, but we are pioneering it over here. And it tastes great, I have to say. It's not traditional kimchi–and if you're a stickler for the traditional, you'd probably would sneer at ours. But Kimchardashian tastes fantastic (in our opinion) and adds spice and zest to our lives (plus the fermentation is supposed to be super healthy for you!). The other great advantage to Kimchardashian is that it preserves the chard in a shelf-stable manner, since it's fermented and then put in shelf-stable canning jars. This is good because we are running out of freezer space in a BIG way. I should note that it's sort of shelf-stable. This is also sort of to be determined… we're thinking that if kept in our cool, dark basement it will remain shelf-stable. We'll test it out and see.
Thus far, we've eaten more than half of the Kimchardashian that Mr. FW made, so I think we'll try and ramp up production to make enough to actually save for the winter.
Pickled Chard Stems
This was a bad idea. We thought that perhaps we could pickle chard stems using the same solution we pickle cucumbers with and so we did just that. And they taste awful. It's rare that Mr. FW and I don't like a food–we're both adventurous eaters–and we almost never waste something we've cooked. But these things are pretty much inedible. We each ate one and frowned. Somehow, they do not taste right. At all. So, uh, don't try that one at home. I think we'll be dumping them into the compost, which is a sad end but one that's unavoidable I fear.
Our other gargantuan crop this year are cucumbers, thanks to the 9,000 cucumber plants Mr. FW planted. Ok maybe it's only 8,500. Why so many cucumbers? We have a pickle obsession. Mr. FW coined a spicy pickle canning recipe last year and we inhaled our entire pickle supply before the first frost.
This year, we're ready for such wanton pickle consumption and, as of publication, we've made no fewer than 60 (yes, sixty) quarts of pickles. We may need to build an addition onto our home in order to store all of our preserved foods…
Here's Mr. Frugalwoods' pickling recipe:
Pickling Brine:
- 4 cups water
- 4 cups white vinegar
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/3 cup salt
Place in each jar:
- Crushed garlic
- Mustard seeds
- 1/2 a hot pepper
- Tons of cucumber rounds
- Stuff jar with above ingridents
- Pour pickling brine into the jar
- Process jars in a water bath for 10 minutes
He usually quadruples this recipe, which yields about 15 quarts of pickles.
Note: please follow a real canning recipe to ensure you know and understand canning risks and particulars. This recipe is a guide off of which you could base an actual canning recipe. Please do not give yourself botulism. Thank you.
After a disappointing run with "big" tomatoes last summer, we went with all cherry tomatoes this year and, so far, this seems like a good decision. The big tomatoes never fully ripened, were disease-ridden, and the flavor wasn't that great. The cherries, on the other hand, thrived, so we quadrupled down on those. Mostly we eat these things like candy and I put them in our daily lunch salads. Mr. FW also makes batches of garden salsa using the tomatoes, hot peppers and cilantro from the garden, along with red onion and lemon (from the grocery store). Yum! I'm going to experiment with freezing some salsa to see how it turns out (we can't can it as we don't have a pressure canner). I fear it might lose its crunch in the freezer, but still might taste fine. To be determined.
Black Raspberries
We have cultivated black raspberries (a different berry species from either red raspberries or blackberries) growing in one of our garden beds. Last year, Mr. FW built a trellis system using rope twine and a number of readers pointed out that this was a dumb idea. Turns out, you guys were 100% correct. Rope twine was a totally dumb idea for the very obvious reason that it wasn't strong enough and it, uh, for lack of a better term, collapsed under the weight of the berry vines. This year, emboldened by our past mistakes, Mr. FW built trellises out of STEEL twine. Hooray!
These trellises survived the season and are still going strong. Bonus is that the local birds adore perching on top of them. Downside is that they then poop on our berries (rude). Bird poop aside, we harvested a lovely crop of black raspberries this year, which I freeze in gallon-sized plastic bags and then mete out for our consumption throughout the year. I know that a lot of people recommend first freezing the berries individually on a cookie sheet, but I'll be honest here, I do not have the time for that, so I just shove them all in a bag and they do just fine. This is my third year of the shove-n-freeze method, as it's known in technical circles, and I see no downside to my lazy brilliant methodology.
Snap Peas and Ground Cherries
Rounding out our garden bounty are the snap peas and ground cherries. The snap peas aren't doing all that well–they appear to be afflicted by some sort of fungus among us–so we're just munching those as they ripen. The ground cherries are thriving, but we only have nine plants, so the haul isn't spectacular. Plus, Babywoods had decided that these are her plants and so has assumed sole consumption responsibility for any and all ground cherries. I've managed to eat three and they tasted divine.
Logging Winch Comes to Town
A new-to-us piece of equipment joined the homestead in July: a logging winch! This is one of those things that Mr. FW had a saved Craigslist search set up for as it's tough to find a used winch that's in decent condition. Lo and behold, just such a good condition used winch popped up and Mr. FW leapt into the truck to go buy it. It's taking us some time to build out our farm supplies via the used market, but it is so much cheaper when we're able to find things used that its worth it to us. As I've written previously, the challenge is that most folks keep and use their equipment for decades, which puts a real damper on the used market, but speaks volumes for the ethos of reduce, reuse, and recycle.
What's a winch? You are perhaps wondering (as I did). It is not, I learned, a medieval bar maiden. Rather, it is a sort of pulley system that hooks up to the back of the tractor to pull logs out of the woods for firewood.
We heat our home with our woodstove and Mr. FW harvests all of our wood from our forest of many hundreds of thousands of trees. Properly harvesting wood is an important aspect of managing a healthy forest as it encourages new growth and eliminates diseased/problem trees. It's also an efficient way to heat our home! I have a number of posts detailing Mr. FW's directional felling (that means cutting a tree down and having it fall where you want it to fall) techniques as well as how we split, stack, and store wood. The winch is used in the second step of the process. After Mr. FW cuts down a tree, he then needs to transport that tree back to our yard where he can split and stack the firewood. The winch greatly simplifies the process of tree maneuvering.
I made Mr. Frugalwoods dictate the below so that I could explain it right proper to ya.
The purpose of the winch is three-part:
1) Using a winch saves labor because you can pull tree-length logs out of the woods (after felling them) as opposed to bucking them in place (that means cutting a log up into little sections) and loading the rounds (those are the sections of log) into the tractor bucket. It removes an entire step in handling the wood. Mr. FW's work flow is incredibly faster with the addition of the winch!
2) It allows him to reach trees that are inaccessible by tractor, which vastly expands the perimeter of trees he can fell. This is important since he focuses on diseased/dying trees or dangerous trees that need to be removed. This expanded perimeter will let him target more problem trees.
3) It enables him to dislodge hung-up trees in a safe way (a hang up occurs when you fell a tree and it snags on another tree). Even with safe directional felling techniques, sometimes trees get stuck in other trees and this allows him to pull the tree down safely and with no risk that the tree will fall onto him. Bonus!
The winch itself attaches to the tractor using the PTO and is a pretty basic machine: it's a spool of 160 feet of 3/8 inch steel cable with a clutch. The brand is a Norse 350, which delivers plenty of pulling power for what we need and we bought it in excellent used condition for $1,900 (retails new for $2,600 ). Another possible use for the winch is pulling a car out of the snow or mud. We haven't had to do that since moving here, but seems like something that could happen to us…
Thanks to the advent of the winch, Mr. FW was able to fell, split, and stack close to an entire cord of firewood in mere days. The dream team of the winch and our log splitter has made firewood harvesting faster and more efficient by several orders of magnitude. Machines well deployed make our work much more tenable. I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that the other key element of getting all this wood stacked so quickly was the valuable assistance of my dad, who was visiting us (along with my mom)! Beware: if you visit us in the spring/summer/fall, we will put you to work…
Side note: chainsaw safety is paramount. Mr. FW took several courses on chainsaw safety as well as safe directional felling techniques prior to working with a chainsaw (for locals interested, it was the Game Of Logging course, which he highly recommends). He also wears full protective gear including chainsaw boots, chaps, gloves, helmet, ear protection, and a face mask. Please do not operate a chainsaw without all of these safety precautions in place and please learn how to use one from an expert! As in, not me!
Parents On The Homestead
My parents came to visit us in July as part of an epic three-month road-trip through the United States and Canada. They drove their Prius in one incredible loop from San Diego cross country to Vermont and then up through Canada and back down the west coast to their home in San Diego. While they were here we put them to work harvesting blackberries, helping stack firewood, and above all else, caring for our children!
Mr. FW and I actually went hiking ALONE together without children. Several times!! It was glorious. Hiking with kids is nice and all, but going without them meant we actually covered some distance and didn't have to constantly address questions about trees, birds, and random sounds in the woods. "What's that sound, mama?" After awhile, I have no idea what sounds even are anymore. Hiking alone gave us the chance to rediscover one of the reasons we moved here in the first place: the ability to hike right outside our front door! Many thanks to my parents for all of their help and many thanks to Mr. Frugalwoods' parents for all of their help during their June visit.
Critter Mania
As we returned from one of those soul-refreshing sans-kids hikes, a rotund, furry football bolted in front of us and leapt into the woodpile next to the barn (like he thought we wouldn't see him in there?). This, we quickly deduced, was a groundhog, enemy of yummy gardens and nice lawns everywhere. We've since spotted said hog–also known as a whistle pig, woodchuck, and general world-class nuisance–skulking around our septic mound and mincing 'neath the apple trees. We haven't enacted eviction proceedings quite yet, but if that thing gets into our vegetable garden, someone will be in a stew.
The whistle pig is not the lone menace of the season. As we prepared dinner one evening, we spied a beast in our Red Duchess apple tree, which is our most favorite, most successful, most beautiful apple tree. Not to be trifled with by a beast. I sent Mr. FW out there armed with nothing more than his wits and cheered him on from the porch (someone had to stay inside with the kids, right?). Upon closer inspection, he deduced it was none other than Pork U. Pine, the surly, stinky porcupine who haunts our yard. Pork U. Pine managed to lumber his quill-ridden self into the apple tree and was arrayed on an upper branch, feasting on our prize apples with rude abandon. Mr. FW threw some rocks in his general direction until he got the message and slung himself out of the tree and ambled towards the woods. In disgrace, I might add. Fortunately for Pork U. Pine, Mr. FW is no baseball player and I have to say, I think he hit more apples out of the tree than anything else… but the Pork seemed to internalize the spirit of the rocks (if not their actual force) and hasn't returned (that we know of… ).
Want More Fotos?!
While I only document homestead life once a month here on the blog, I post photos to Instagram (almost every day!) and updates to Facebook with much greater regularity! Join me there if you want more of our frugal woods.
And if you want to make sure you don't miss a post here, sign-up for our handy dandy email list in the box below. You'll get a message from me if you do…
Onward to August, frugal comrades!


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Cute teen lad cums into the bowl in the kitchen
8 years ago
descriptionThis guy is always ready to masturbate and shoot himself with his phone, but this time he hasn't prepared for the consequences. He has to cum into the bowl in the end.
Cumshots Webcam Boys
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Exceptions to Environmentalism: Industrial Harbour Avilés
Our friend from Deconcrete, Daniel Fernández Pascual wrote this week's guest writer essay in which he questions the idea of sovereignty on territories that remain legally blurry. Indeed, the paradigm of the two-dimensional map cannot be enough anymore to describe lands (sky, underground, space, other planets etc.) whose sovereignty had never necessitated to be discussed in another way than theoretically in the past. Our era opens a new paradigm in which the legal action of a State on a territory will be defined through the complexity of space and its multiple layers.
Nowadays, the American military drones fly over Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, Somalia without being seen. The United States are not officially at war with those states and such activity could be considered as an invasion. Once again the example of Palestine is interesting. There are a lot of us who describes the territorial struggle via maps and based on two dimensional interpretation of space. I usually use the figure of 63% to explain the part of absolute territorial control that Israel exercise in the West Bank. In reality Israel controls 100% of the Palestinian sky, 100% of the aquifer of this same territory and many part of the underground in which roads have been built to link the Israeli territory to the various settlements. In addition of that, the water of the Jordan river, the Dead Sea as well as the immediate part of the sea that should belongs to Gaza (thus controlling the fishing economy).
Daniel proposes at the end of his essay to rethink the space of the boundary, maybe the very notion of sovereignty has to be transformed as the Rabbi Martin Goodman proposes for the Israeli/Palestinian territory in his proposal of a double sovereignty for a same territory. A similar proposition was made approximately at the same time (last summer) by Keith Kahn-Harris who was basing his vision on China Miéville's novel The City and the City in which two cities occupy the same place without interfering with each other…
My introduction is too long, I leave it to Daniel and his remarkable essay:
The Funambulist Papers 20 /// The Clear-Blurry Line
by Daniel Fernández Pascual
A good part of globalization consists of an enormous variety of micro-processes that begin to denationalize what had been constructed as national—whether policies, capital, political subjectivities, urban spaces, temporal frames, or any other of a variety of dynamics and domains.
Saskia Sassen[1]
Harvesting energy from the centre of the Earth, squeezing drinking water from maritime fogs, grabbing atmospheric pollution among international agents or even discovering treasures from sunken ships, they could all become soon the main sources of wealth for today's nation-states. But who do all these resources lawfully belong to? The physical boundaries of a country extend far beyond a two-dimensional geographical border. Surrounding the ground surface, three areas of sovereignty – waters, airspace and underground – together with their three dynamic limits articulate these clear-blurry lines. Where does sovereignty of a nation-state actually end? How is that line drawn? Big efforts on their demarcation interfere with being tightly linked to large circulation of capital and economic resources. Regulations struggle to define clear lines, which reality immediately blurs. We are still uncertain how to locate them with accuracy. How to demarcate spatial rights on the fluid sea, the moving clouds and the melting magma? The logic of modern sovereignty over natural resources of a territory is being inverted. It is the notion of collective natural resources that is superseding and reshaping our current system of sovereignty. We are experiencing more and more a shift from the flatness of the nation-state towards four-dimensional complexities. How does critical spatial practice operate within this frame?
[Fig. 1] Expanding landscapes. Fuerteventura, Spain. 2000 & 2009.
Let me take the Spanish case as a first example. Spain has 7,880 km of seashore. It is nonetheless any bucolic or naïve landscape. It is the ultimate fighting arena for a clash of interests among politicians, investors, nature and citizens. Urban booms, corruption, real estate speculation, crisis and natural disasters are the forces that constantly stretch the seaside. If we fly along the shoreline of Spanish Atlantic island Tenerife with Google Maps, some mysteriously blurred spots appear. An artificial fog veils sometimes constructions; other times, landscapes in process of urban change. The proximity to the dark blue deep waters reminds of the Terra Incognita or Hic Sunt Draconis (Here be dragons) legends that used to designate unknown territories in Renaissance maps. The uncharted was nonetheless named or represented at that time. But back to the Canary Islands today, there is no apparent technological reason for such inaccuracies. The shoreline, being one of the most contested sites for its speculative potential, makes the demarcation of the physical limit between sea and land a constant conflict. It seems that the less information accessible to the public eye, the better.
[Fig. 2] Censoring the shoreline in Tenerife, Spain. Google Maps 2012
The Spanish Shore Protection Act (1988) basically draws two lines: the shoreline, according to the very questionable principle of the highest tide ever recorded in history; and a 100-m offset easement of protection, where no construction is allowed. If any building already exists on the strip is sooner or later to be torn down, losing any private property rights. EU authorities, which pushed the law to end with massive coastal developments, are also facing claims coming from many Northern Europeans with second residences by the shore under potential menace of demolition. For instance, one of the coastal blurry spots in Tenerife in the picture above corresponds to the summerhouse of a famous Swiss architect. The spectacular real estate bubble was very much connected to the legitimacy and criteria of local authorities providing building permissions based on their own interpretation of the law. Speculation in this Terra Incognita has rather become what Rogoff describes as Terra Infirma:[2] geography in crisis that is unable to represent the immense changes that have taken place in a post-colonial, post-communist, post-migratory world (post-urban and post-sovereignty I would add). It is relevant to mention that sands also take part of this territorial negotiation of the boundary. Several beaches in volcanic Canary Islands have been literally importing pieces of the Sahara desert with its yellow sands into Spanish territory. The shoreline puts an end to the land and a beginning to territorial waters, which extend to another offset parallel line 200 miles away from the coast. The domain of international waters constitutes the following ideal framework for profitable market-exceptions.
[Fig. 3] Artificial Landfill. Tenerife, Spain.
[Fig. 4] Letting the coast naturally erode. Valencia, Spain.
Demarcating the line between airspace and outer space becomes a similar odyssey. International law claims that every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over its airspace (Chicago Convention 1944) and that outer space is meant to be international domain: the 'province of all mankind'. There is no official rule for the boundary outline, except for the (beautifully named) Air Law and Space Law. We could also read this as if the atmosphere were no actual space! Oduntan brilliantly suggests in his essay The Never Ending Dispute, that 'it indeed may be better not to grant sovereignty over the airspace at all than to grant it without specifying precisely where it ends.'[3] In his text, he goes through different schools of thought arguing for possible versions of this uncertain boundary. It even deals with nations vertically overlapping, such as the case of the US partly controlling the airspace over the Pacific. As a result, sovereignty is turned into a malleable volume that does not always correspond with its horizontal perimeter. According to other theories, airspace is to aircrafts, as outer space to spacecrafts. The difference relies on the line where the flying object loses its aerodynamic lift and centrifugal force takes over (this happens approx. at 53 miles high). Eventually, it is the machine typology that demarcates the boundary of sovereignty[4]. But as Oduntan sharply points out, this rule needs to be discarded if confronted with hybrids like the X-15, a manned rocket-powered aircraft able to navigate in both.
Another controversial demarcation of the same boundary is determined by the speed of the flying object. Every movement with less than circular velocity has to be considered a flight through airspace regardless of its height. As soon as an object has escape velocity, it becomes a space flight. Then, one could speculate again with hybrid aircrafts accelerating up to 11 km/s just to avoid restrictions of nations denying transit through their airspace.
[Fig. 5] An X-15 after being dropped. Source: Wikimedia
Apart from the three-dimensional space wrapping a country, sovereignty disputes can even be related to a line itself, like the near-polar orbit. A satellite using a very specific invisible trajectory also turns into economic resources, where time and duration play a decisive role. In the Bogota Declaration (1976), eight equatorial states claimed rights up to the geostationary orbit (GSO), 36,000 km above their territories. And what happens to the moon? The Outer Space Treaty (1967) — forming the basis of international space law and signed by the United States and other major spacefaring nations — prohibits countries from exercising territorial sovereignty over the moon or other celestial bodies. But it doesn't prohibit resource extraction, in the same logic as the concept of international waters.
The challenge of global market and resources defining new territorial boundaries makes nation-states become more and more flexible in their management of sovereignty. As Ong pointed out with his idea of flexible citizenship,[5] 'in the era of globalization, individuals as well as governments develop a flexible notion of citizenship and sovereignty as strategies to accumulate capital and power.' As a result, we face the conflict of developing nations outsourcing mining concessions to foreign investment. By this fact, the underground of a country becomes the subject of a new conception of post-colonial sovereignty. Who has the right to drill a gas pocket expanding underneath several nations? What happens with oblique drills overpassing surface boundaries? Until now, mining resources simply belonged to the state they are located in, without limit in depth. However, it might arrive the day when boundaries at certain depth towards the centre of the earth play a decisive role aided by new prospection and drilling techniques. As for today, the 'deepest nation-state' in the world is South Africa (Tau Tona gold mine, 2.5 miles deep).
[Fig. 6] Cross-section of ca. 1-km deep San José Mine in Chile, showing the rescue plan of workers trapped in 2010. Source: El País
Far beyond using the highest man-built towers to demarcate the aerial boundary of a country, what will be the role of architecture in all this turmoil? We could assist to an emergence of fantastic typologies of flying cities, floating settlements and excavated resorts either supporting models of these clear-blurry boundaries of sovereignty, or trying to trick the same laws demarcating them. Political powers have been colonising new territories throughout history by means of built infrastructure, be it the vast network of Roman roads, or the Laws of the Indies for urbanisation of the Americas under the Spanish Empire. There is a whole set of possibilities coming from post-sovereignty space. Not in the sense of determining who belongs to, since the market logic will take care of it, but to articulate the space of the boundary.
[1] ONG, A 1999. Flexible Citizenship – The cultural logics of transnationality. Duke University Press.
[1] SASSEN, S 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights – From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[2] ROGOFF, I 2000. Terra Infirma – geography's visual culture. New York: Routledge.
[3] ODUNTAN, G. The Never Ending Dispute: Legal Theories on the Spatial Demarcation Boundary Plane between Airspace and Outer Space. Hertfordshire Law Journal, 1(2), 64-84
[4] LATOUR, B and WEIBEL, P (eds.) 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
[5] ONG, A 1999. Flexible Citizenship – The cultural logics of transnationality. Duke University Press.


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3-pole Lateral operating mechanism right Basic unit without handle flat terminal incl. phase barriers 3KD switch disconnector up to 1600 A as efficient master
emergency stop or maintenance switch. 3KD switch disconnectors up to 1600 A from Siemens offer reliable operator protection and ensure high plant availability in industry
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The Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) lives on. Texas officials and transportation industry leaders gathered in Irving for the annual Texas Transportation Summit to examine how to move people and goods faster. One of the hot topics was to fast track the Loop 9 project just south of Dallas -- a project that's part of the original Trans Texas Corridor due to its strategic connection to the International Inland Port of Dallas. The TTC is the Texas leg of the NAFTA superhighways designed to achieve the economic integration of the United States with Canada and Mexico through trade.
Though officials gave lip service to moving people faster, it was clear the real goal of the conference was to get the coming influx of imported goods moving faster in anticipation of the Panama Canal expansion opening in 2014. Loop 9 would connect trade traffic coming up from the Port of Houston on Interstate 45 with the inland port outside Dallas as well as access from I-35E.
One of the advantages of inland ports is the ability to move the task of sorting and processing international cargo through customs inland, as well as create hubs that optimize logistics and distribution of foreign-made goods. Often referred to as an intermodal transfer, an inland port can serve as a distribution center to off-load containers from one mode of transportation to another, ie - from rail to truck. Inland ports also usually reside in markets outside urban areas, reducing labor and property costs.
Inland ports can also be a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ). The purpose of these FTZs is to make foreign goods more competitive with domestic goods. You read that right. FTZs give foreign goods advantages over domestically made goods.
So if the inland port is also a FTZ, it's a tremendous tax benefit for global corporations since they do not have to pay the tariff or taxes due on the goods until they leave the zone. American companies have no such advantage. They have to pay property taxes to warehouse their goods. Foreign companies shipping their goods from a FTZ to another country are also exempt from duty payments.
So a corporation can essentially house their goods on U.S. soil, duty-free only to turn around and export them out of the country, also duty-free. What a deal! Other countries can also set-up a customs office within an inland port to expedite the customs process for U.S. exporters -- all at taxpayer expense. FTZs also have special customs procedures that allow foreign companies to bypass the congestion of seaway ports and not have their cargo inspected and processed until it reaches a zone.
However, the drawbacks to taxpayers, property rights, national security, and state and national sovereignty cannot be overlooked. Taxpayers should not be footing the bill to bring foreign goods into our country. If these global corporations had to pay the true cost of bringing this cargo into the United States, then perhaps we'd see a resurgence of American manufacturing that's been supplanted by the giveaways and special treatment of foreign goods that came on the scene with the advent of NAFTA.
It's unclear if the land for these inland ports and FTZs was obtained through eminent domain, but one thing is known about the land on which these ports sit -- it's no longer sovereign U.S. territory. A World Net Daily investigation in 2006 found documents stating the Kansas City Smartport inland port allowed the Mexican government to set-up a customs office within its port and said the office would "need to be designated as Mexican sovereign territory."
So these inland ports not only threaten private property rights, they threaten U.S. sovereignty. It's also a matter of national security when containers are not inspected until they're well into U.S. territory. A smuggler's dream!
Heavyweight trucks welcome?
A related topic considered at the conference by Texas officials is the matter of increasing the truck weight limits to 97,000 pounds from the current 80,000 pound limit. The super-loaded trucks expected to flood Texas highways and U.S. markets would require special approval from Congress as well as the Texas legislature and come with a heavy price to Texas taxpayers who will have to pay for the damage done by these overweight trucks.
As a matter of discussion and study by past legislatures, Texas lawmakers know that trucks cause the majority of the damage to Texas highways and yet they pay very little for the overweight truck permits -- certainly nowhere near enough to cover the increased maintenance cost to Texas roads. So lawmakers have considered increasing the permit fee to help offset that growing maintenance cost.
Now the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) seems to be continuing the virtual free pass for overweight trucks, even encouraging the trend by pushing for increased truck weight limits, and continues to shift its focus to economic development and moving goods faster, not providing roads for Texans who pay their bills. In fact, TxDOT is now signaling it's giving priority to projects that facilitate trade connections rather than the projects that relieve congestion in urban areas that would serve the majority of Texas taxpayers.
TxDOT Executive Director Phil Wilson said it best, "We are not in the transportation business," Wilson said. "We are in the economic development and people business. We are the artery and lifeline of how we grow our economy in this state."
Considering TxDOT wields the power of eminent domain for the majority of its projects, it's a frightening statement by Wilson that he sees the job of the Department to be economic development and growing the Texas economy, not building and maintaining public roads. When government gets in the business of economic development, it means eminent domain for private gain, public money for private profits, and a manipulation of the free market economy. Let the private sector grow the economy.
In yet another move that exploits the taxpayers, TxDOT will throw $50 million into the Loop 9 project -- to facilitate trade through an inland port, not for the 100 Most Congested Roads in Texas. On top of that, the City of Dallas is ponying-up $23 million in publicly-funded improvements for water and other infrastructure for the inland port.
When elected officials view taxpayer money as their personal slush fund for special interests like multi-national corporations, such crony capitalism and corruption breed contempt for taxpayers that leads to abuses and tyranny that should never be tolerated in a free Republic. Meanwhile, untold sums of public money continue to get dumped into building out the NAFTA superhighway trade corridors, under the radar without the permission of the American public. Indeed, the Trans Texas Corridor is alive and well.


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St. Virgilius
Feast: November 27
Virgilius was a scientist before his time, and in his monastery of Aghaboe in Ireland he was known as "the Geometer" because of his knowledge of geography. In 743, he left Ireland for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land but got no farther than the court of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne. In 745, Pepin defeated Odilo, duke of Bavaria, and sent St. Virgilius to be abbot of the monastery of Sankt Peter and in charge of the diocese of Salzburg.
In accordance with the Irish custom, the bishop was subject to the abbot, who was the real head of the diocese. This was contrary to continental custom, and so Virgilius consented to be consecrated bishop. His most notable accomplishment was the conversion of the Alpine Slavs; moreover, he sent missionaries into Hungary.
In his first days at Salzburg, he was involved in controversies with St. Boniface, one over the form of baptism, which the pope decided in Virgilius's favor. Virgilius also expressed a number of opinions on astronomy, geography, and anthropology, which to Boniface smacked of novelty, if not heresy. He reported these views to Rome, and the pope demanded an investigation of the bishop of Salzburg. Nothing came of this and apparently Virgilius was able to defend his views.
Virgilius built a grand cathedral at Salzburg, baptized the Slavic dukes of Carinthia, and sent missionaries into lands where no missionary had yet gone. Returning from a preaching mission to a distant part of his diocese, he fell sick and died on November 27, 784. When the Salzburg cathedral was destroyed by a fire in 1181, the grave of Virgilius was discovered and this led to his canonization by Pope Gregory IX in 1233.
His feast is kept throughout Ireland and in the diocese of Salzburg.
Thought for the Day: St. Virgilius was not content to keep his faith to himself, but like many Irish monks at the time he wanted to share it with others. He looked for a ripe harvest and found it in Germany, where he labored for over forty years. If we look around, we can always find some way to share our faith with others.
From 'The Catholic One Year Bible': . . . We have not been telling you fairy tales when we explained to you the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and his coming again. My own eyes have seen his splendor and his glory: I was there on the holy mountain when he shone out with honor given him by God his Father, . . . - 2 Peter 1:16-18
Taken from "The One Year Book of Saints" by Rev. Clifford Stevens published by Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., Huntington, IN 46750.


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Awesome Music (Sugar Wiki)
[W]hen Thorin struck it [his harp] the music began all at once, so sudden and sweet that Bilbo forgot everything else, and was swept away into dark lands under strange moons, far over The Water and very far from his hobbit-hole under The Hill.
This is what music recording and listening technology, from phonautographs to wax drums and gramophones to MIDIs, MP3s, and WAVs, was invented for.
A selection of music that is just... awesome. It brings the moment to life! It compels you to do your best, to collect them all, to use The Power of Love, or just look in shock.
It can come from unexpected places, it can come from a genre of music that you thought you hated. It is the reward for the work, the finishing touch, it is Awesome Music.
See also Climactic Music, Award Bait Song, Theme Music Power-Up, Villain Song, Ear Worm, The Power of Rock and Music of Note. Often the whipped cream and cherry on top for Awesome Moments.
Some of these link to YouTube, so if you wish to listen to them in stereo, add "&hd=1" to the link without the quotation marks. (Or, on the video player, change the resolution to 480p or higher.) If you want to link to a specific part, add the following to the link: "&t=1m10s" and adjust the time accordingly.
Contrast against So Bad It's Horrible/Music.
Note: When posting links to YouTube here, make sure to strip their URLs of all unnecessary fragments - the ?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 parameter is the only one needed, really. It's not recommended to post links to Youtube here due to Corrupt Corporate Executive syndrome. It's better to post webpages of artists themselves due to less regional restrictions there.
- Anime
- Film
- Live Action TV
- Music
- Professional Wrestling
- Theatre
- Video Games
- Web Original
- Animation
- Other


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Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Detectives arrested a teenager Thursday accused of stealing some wreckage from the Porsche that "Fast & Furious" star Paul Walker was in when he died in a crash, and a second suspect was planning to turn himself in, authorities said.
The theft occurred as the 2005 Porsche Carrera GT was being towed from the accident scene Saturday night, Los Angeles County sheriff's officials said.
The investigation led detectives to Jameson Witty, 18, who was arrested at his home in Los Angeles and was being held on $20,000 bail, the Sheriff's Department said in a statement. A second suspect, a 25-year-old man whose name has not been released, was outside California and arranging to surrender, the statement said.
Witnesses told investigators that they saw someone driving behind the tow truck that was hauling away wreckage hours after the fiery crash that killed Walker and friend Roger Rodas, who was driving the car and also died.
The witnesses said a man got out of the car when the truck was at a stoplight, grabbed the part, and drove away.
Detectives identified the two suspects, and while serving a search warrant at a home in Canyon Country, a community north of Los Angeles, they found a red T-top roof panel from the Porsche, sheriff's officials said. They would not say what led them to the two men or what evidence they had against them.
Sheriff's detectives planned to meet with prosecutors to discuss charges.
It wasn't clear if Witty has an attorney, and no phone listings for family or associates could be found.
Walker, who starred in all but one of the six "Fast & Furious" blockbuster films that glorified fast cars and dangerous driving, was killed when the Porsche smashed into a light pole and tree then caught fire on Saturday afternoon, authorities said. The seventh installment of the movie series was on a break from shooting for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Sheriff's investigators are still trying to determine what caused Rodas to careen out of control and crash.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)


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Embed Videos in Help Center Articles with Two Easy Steps (using video.js)
Zendesk level: Beginner
Knowledge: HTML
Time Required: 10 minutes
Updated: 07/24/14 - Latest version of CDN 4.6
Updated: 11/20/15 - Latest version of CDN 5.2.1
Updated: 05/16/18 - Latest version of CDN 6.9.0
- To embed videos in your articles, you must first enable unsafe HTML in pages.
- The links below are examples of videos. You'll need to replace these links with your own content.
- Use the method described in this tip if you are not using a public hosted video service, such as Wistia or YouTube.
This tutorial will show you how you can embed your company's help videos into the Help Center. We will accomplish this in two easy steps and without uploading any files into Help Center.
Let's Get Started
First let's add the Video.js CSS and JavaScript code in your "Document Head" section of your site.
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon in the sidebar.
- Click the theme you want to edit to open it.
- Click Edit Code.
- In the Templates section, open the document_head.hbs template.
- Add the following code, replacing with links to own content:
<link href="https://vjs.zencdn.net/6.9.0/video-js.css" rel="stylesheet">
<script src="https://vjs.zencdn.net/6.9.0/video.js"></script>
Screenshot below is an example of what it should look like. Please note the older version being used.
- In the top menu bar, select Articles > Add Article.
- Click the html button in the article toolbar.
- Copy and paste the following code:
<video id="example_video_1" class="video-js vjs-default-skin"
controls preload="auto" width="600" height="264"
<source src="https://video-js.zencoder.com/oceans-clip.mp4" type='video/mp4' />
<source src="https://video-js.zencoder.com/oceans-clip.webm" type='video/webm' />
<source src="http://video-js.zencoder.com/oceans-clip.ogv" type='video/ogg' />
- Click Add to publish your article and view the video.
You can edit the width and height. Remember that you will need to need to replace https://video-js.zencoder.com/oceans-clip.xxx with the link to your video.
That's it!
In just two easy steps you can embed your own help videos into the articles. If you want to get advanced you can customize the CSS and HTLM for the video player. See the Video.js website for additional details on how to do this.
- HC-Video.png
- HC-Video-DH.png
- HC-Video-Article.png
112 Kommentare
The Youtube embed script would also work for this, right? But I see your approach with making this responsive friendly.
@Andrea - yes the embed youtube script would work for this but this is more geared to in-house videos. For us we can't post videos to youtube as it would break our contracts with our third party vendors. Yes can you tell I'm all about making everything responsive :-)
Thank you! This was very helpful as we a restriction on using YouTube videos as well. I had to adapt this to use with V1 of ZenDesk. If there's a better way to do the following, let me know.
Head into the Settings -> Extensions
Make or edit a global CSS widget and added the following to the top:
@import url('//vjs.zencdn.net/4.2/video-js.css');
Make or edit a global JS widget and added the following:
var js = document.createElement("script");
js.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript");
js.setAttribute("src", "//vjs.zencdn.net/4.2/video.js");
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(js);Update the URL to get the version you want.
Thanks again!
@Matt - Your welcome and I'm glad it helped. Thanks for sharing your code as well.
I did everything you said, but for some reason when I am in the editor in HTML mode when saving, the code gets changed. Look at the attached "zendesk_before_update.png". This is the code that you suggest to copy and paste. I paste it, click update, the video does not appear. I click "edit" to see the code, and as you see in "zendesk_after_update.png" the HTML editor keeps changing the code. Can you make the editor not change the code?
@Steve - Did you make sure you did the following: you must enable unsafe HTML in pages.
Thank you Wes, that did the trick. I guess I missed that at the top of the article. Kind of screwy that Zendesk would make a user make all unsafe tags enabled, when all I need is the single quote.
@Steve - Glad it helped just let me know if you run into any other issues.
Is there a better way to indicate in the article title that there is a video in the article? We want to make it easy for users to identify video content from the article list? Currently we are putting [Video] at the beginning of the title but an icon would be preferable.
Hi Jamie, Check out this article for adding a video icon: https://support.zendesk.com/entries/24003497-Identify-articles-with-video-tutorials-with-an-icon
Thanks for pointing that out, Cheryl. I think it will only work for Web portal, though, not Help Center. I'd love to have the HC version of that tip! Love those little video icons.
Oh shoot - thanks Jennifer, I forgot that. Wes?? ;)
@Jamie - I will post some code that will allow you to do this. Let me do some testing and I'll post it as soon as I can.
Sounds great Wes! If you have a little document one for PDFs too, that'd be dreamy! :)
Wes is the HC King!
Indeed--Wes is the HC King! It'll be great to have this code for HC.
Almost there, just gotta work on the spacing a little. This may become easier once labels are implemented in the Help Center as we may be able to search for the label and then apply the icon. For now the only way I can think of is to keep the word "Video:" in the Title as there is no other way you can identify which articles contain the videos. Here is what I have so far. Let me know if this looks ok and you can any icon that you would like.
Hey Wes,
Thanks for this. If it makes any difference, we have labels turned on and all of our video articles are already labeled with video. Would there be a better way of doing this with that in mind? If not, this would definitely work in the interim.
@Jamie - Since the labels concept is new I'm not sure what the code would be to use that however I will ask Jennifer to reach out to someone so the code below will work in the meantime. Just make sure the word "Video:" exist in your article title. I'm using FontAwesome for the icons as thats what I always use since its easy to integrate.
Document Head (calls the CSS for the icons)
<!-- Font Awesome -->
<link href="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.0.3/css/font-awesome.css" rel="stylesheet">CSS
content: "\f03d";
color: #a83030;
font-family: FontAwesome;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
text-decoration: inherit;
font-size: 18px;
}If you would like to change your icon then look on the below list and put in the
icon code for content: " "http://astronautweb.co/snippet/font-awesome/
You can also change the color of the icon and size if needed.JS
$('ul.article-list a:contains("Video:")').addClass('video');Let me know if you run into any issues.
Hey Wes,
Seeming to have some issues getting it to work. Could you take a look?
Sure thing can you shoot me over a link or if its private you can shoot me an email email@example.com
I use S3 and build players from EZS3. Have you any guidance for this situation?
Hi Daniel - I'm sorry but I'm not familiar with S3 or EZS3. Does it produce any code that you can copy like YouTube.
hi, i have the 'starter' version of zendesk help centre. i have changed the setting to 'display unsafe content' however i cannot successfully embed youtube video into my article. it shows the video as being embedded whilst i am editing the article, however after publishing the article it is not visible. https://enertionboards.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201826400-How-to-install-skate-trucks-
note: currently i must link back to my website so people can view the video.
Give this a try, make sure that you click on the <> button so that you can insert the following code.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Z4kh0Ufzjvc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
hi, thanks for the code, (yes i was using <>)
your code worked..... so why did it work? you only removed the "?rel=0" why would that make a difference?
does zendesk not allow the related videos to play?
Not sure why it worked but I got the following code by going to YouTube and then clicking the "Share" button. It gave me the code above. Glad it worked.
I am just wondering where you uploaded your video to ?
@Andrew - we upload or videos to one of our internal servers
Want to spruce up those "help" articles? What better way to do so than with an accompanying video. And this shows you how--in two easy steps, no less. Good luck.
Post ist für Kommentare geschlossen.


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Today's post is written by Scott Lindsey, director of ministry relations for Logos, who is on the Bible Study Bus road trip. View more road trip photos at Flickr.
Right after Easter service on April 8th, I took off with my family to begin the 2007 Bible Study Road Trip. Our first event was in the Gresham, OR area at Good Shepherd Community Church. We had a great turnout. Those who attended were shocked to see what Logos has been doing for the last 16 years.
The goal of this year's Bible Study Road Trip is to introduce congregations to the potential of using the Logos technology for Bible study. We are honored to have American Family Radio sponsoring this year's tour. American Family Radio is one of the largest Christian radio networks in the country and they will be promoting a majority of the events in the cities where they have radio coverage.
For the past 2 weeks we have been trying to get to the AFR listenership areas as fast as we can…3,000 miles in 14 days! In has been an amazing journey with my wife and children seeing this awesome nation we have the privilege of living in. We have made stops in Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and now Texas. We will be in great state of Texas for the next few weeks.
The children had a great home school learning experience this past Saturday night in Amarillo when we all spent 4 hours in a RV park storm shelter while 11 tornados dropped all around the city! My wife loves the Pacific Northwest even more now! On the way down to Lubbock for our April 23rd event, we stopped through the small town of Tulia, TX where one of the bigger tornados touched down. The tornado completely destroyed a Ford dealership, grocery store, and gas station (see the news story).We took some amazing pictures and were glad to find out no one was seriously injured. My children pay a bit more attention now to Texas storm clouds!
We are currently in Abilene, Texas. I was stationed here at Dyess Air Force Base over 10 years ago and we still have great friends here. It has been a wonderful few days of fellowship. We are on the way to San Antonio this weekend. If you would like more information about the Bible Study Road Trip and where we are going, please visit www.BibleStudyBus.com. We would love to see you at one of the events!
Scott Lindsey & family- The Bible Study Bus Crew Chief


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"The University of Chicago Medical Center has pulled its membership from the American Hospital Association, the nation's largest hospital trade group and lobby.If other hospitals follow suit, what will happen to the lobby's effectiveness on the Hill during "reform" talks?
AHA spokesman Rick Wade confirmed the U. of C. move, "citing financial considerations." He wouldn't say how much the medical center was paying in annual dues."


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Spread the love
Mitch Stephen is an avid songwriter. He likes to say, "I've been writing songs for over thirty years…and I'm going to get good at it any day now!" That being said, Mitch took honors at the 2005 Tejano Music Awards, winning "Crossover Song of the Year" for his part in co-writing the song "Who's That Gringo" performed by multiple Grammy Award winner David Lee Garza and group Los Musicales; Co-writer Billy O'Rourke.
Click on an album cover below to listen to and purchase your favorite tracks!


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A NEW mobile library service launched today has been attacked by a campaign group as an attempt to fob people off.
Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries say they welcome the fact that a mobile service is continuing, but claim the county council did not consult widely enough and many isolated people and communities will be left with a diminished and inadequate service.
Spokesperson Johanna Anderson says: "We are pleased that Gloucestershire County Council has not pursued its former plans to axe the mobile library service, which was ruled as unlawful by a high court judge in November 2011. However, we have grave concerns about the new service."
"We are particularly concerned about GCC's strategy to make longer stops at bigger towns and villages and to miss out smaller ones altogether. This misguided decision leaves those very users most in need of mobile services with no library access at all. It only serves to isolate further the residents of smaller hamlets and villages, inadequately served by public transport. It rather defeats the point of a mobile library service.
Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries accuse the council of "being determined to slash our public libraries by 43%, cut seven of our communities from the public library network, and wanting to axe all of the mobile libraries entirely"
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text:
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Amplify Yourself
One colleague has had multiple surgeries to repair his vocal chords, and another was advised not to speak loudly or in his normal tonal range for several months. Recovering from vocal chord surgery during the academic year and/or not speaking in your usual voice are both difficult to do when speaking is your job. A temporary solution for one colleague was to teach an online course for a term. Another went to a speech therapist to learn how to speak without injuring himself more.
Professors who teach are like professional singers -- our voices are our instruments. If our voices are damaged, our art (of teaching) is damaged.
The biggest strain on a professor's voice probably comes from teaching a large lecture class. I have always been jealous of my colleagues who can teach large classes 'unplugged' -- i.e., without using a microphone. I can make myself heard in a large lecture hall, but at high volume I can't modulate my voice very well and end up sounding like I am shouting rather than merely speaking loudly. I also end up even more exhausted than I normally would be after a 50-75 minute class. Therefore, I find it essential to use a wireless microphone so that I can speak comfortably in a 'normal' (albeit amplified) voice.
It turns out that what I thought of as a weakness may have actually saved me from injury through all my years of teaching.
There are probably ways to speak loudly for years without injury, but many of us don't know how to do that. Add to the list of things that new professors need to get started in their teaching career: voice coaches.
9 comments:
- Unknown said...
A session with a voice coach was included in the new lecturers course at my institution. I found it very useful - I tend to talk squeaky and fast.
My mom is a school teacher and has been suffering from this problem for the past few years. Thanks for bringing this up! And, I am going to suggest that she use a microphone too!
I went to a 5-day teaching workshop/retreat a few years back and one of the sessions was actually taught by a voice/acting coach, who spoke about the way our voices work, the anatomy of the voice, and how to avoid injury. She was a flake, but she said some pretty helpful things that have stuck with me.
I'm one of those people who doesn't use a microphone in a large lecture hall. I currently speak for five 50-minute periods on my heaviest teaching days, and it hasn't seemed to give me problems yet, but I should start taking some care. The microphone always just seems like one more thing to have to deal with in the brief transition period between classes. - 10/29/2008 07:50:00 AM
- barbara said...
I have actually considered taking voice coaching lessons since my throat hurt after long teaching hours. Now I have a low teaching load and the problem is gone.
As a side remark, in my direct experience the main health hazards of pure mathematicians are backache, mountain accidents, and alcohol problems. Backache is extremely common (endemic?) but at least it's not life-threatening. - 10/29/2008 09:03:00 AM
What about asking universities to keep class size to a fixed number for example 50-60 students, having multiple sections in case enrollment is more. I was a teacher in a college in India, and we always had fixed class size for all classes (it was 64 in that case), so generally you can teach in your comfortable voice without having the need to shout. This also keeps burden of grading etc to a sane level for faculty. and I used to know all my students by their first name in a small class size, which actually increases the efficiency of teaching/learning.
Ask away, Female Post-Doc, but the big universities where I've worked don't really care about optimal class size or efficacy of teaching/learning. They care about the efficiency of getting as many students as possible through low-level classes with as little resource outlay as possible, and that has usually meant filling large classrooms and putting a talking head at the front. My evening classes have 80 students and my day classes have 200; in the case of one of those courses, the only reason it's not a lot more than 200 is that there are not enough classrooms and TAs available to schedule more recitation sections.
Until pressure comes from the students in those large classes--in the form of universities losing enrollment because of their class sizes being too large--change will not happen. It's just business. - 10/29/2008 10:55:00 AM
I quite agree with landsnark. But until that time - do take voice lessons! I did a course together with my colleagues (that was actually kind of fun) and also had individual instruction with a voice coach after my n+1 round of not being able to speak.
I learned some great tricks for clearing my vocal cords, how to breathe right, and to keep drinking water all day to keep the vocal cords wet.
Lucky us - we have class sizes of 44. But at our old campus, we had long, thin, high-ceilinged lecture halls that echoed every sound. The new campus has nice, bright, wide rooms, everyone sits comfortably and concentrates - they can hear and I can speak. What a difference the room makes! - 10/29/2008 02:01:00 PM
- usagibrian said...
Well, yes. It's another of those acquired skills. I entered a voice class my first quarter as an undergraduate since I'd had volume issues since I'd started acting. Four years later, I was one of the few people in my graduate program who could fill any of the available spaces without difficulty (I pitied the poor BFA undergrads at my grad school--there was no structured voice sequence in their program, which was a crime in my opinion). It has allowed me to do (most) professional presentations without a mic, which I prefer.
Even people who know what they're doing occasionally shred their voices. Ironically, the worst damage I ever did to myself was in a production of Once Upon a Mattress playing King Sextimus the Silent. Mime for two hours then about a half-dozen lines at the end of the show. Silly me, I thought I didn't need to do a proper vocal warm-up before that scene.
Anyone who thinks it takes no effort or technique to speak clearly and understandably for 50 minutes has obviously never tried to do it. Amplification will mitigate the problem, but not solve it. So yes, learning how to use your voice properly is definitely on the skill set list for academics heading into the classroom. - 10/29/2008 02:03:00 PM
- Ms.PhD said...
Why not use technology if it's available to you? I think people who ruin their voices have a fundamental problem: being out of touch with their own human frailties, their own bodies.
I don't think anyone damages their voices lecturing without knowing they're doing it, since it requires repeated abuse to get to the point of needing surgery. Why are scientists so stubborn about not taking care of ourselves? - 11/01/2008 01:51:00 PM


text:
In 1866 the 17-year-old British colony of Vancouver Island officially ceased to exist thanks to a forced merger with the mainland colony of British Columbia.
In 1878, seven years after joining confederation, B.C. voted to leave Canada in frustration over failed federal promises tied to the Island.
The threat proved empty and the promises remain partially unfulfilled, but a century and a half later, a small group of Vancouver Islanders led by a Harvard-trained economist aims to right that wrong, and, in the process, make the Island Canada's 11th province.
The Vancouver Island Party officially launches tomorrow with the goal of protecting and enhancing the Island's economic, environmental, social and cultural identity by leaving B.C. and applying to join confederation as an independent entity.
Led by Robin Richardson, a former MP in Joe Clark's Conservative government, the VIP intends to field candidates in all 14 Island ridings in the 2017 provincial election and push to get the region full provincial status by 2021.
"Population-wise we are larger than three provinces and all three territories," Richardson said. "Being a province gives us a lot more control."
According to the VIP leader, the primary issues facing Islanders are climate change, federal and provincial government indifference, and economic, environmental and social injustice. The solution, he said, is self-determination.
"We've been largely ignored by the both the federal and provincial governments," he said. "We would be much better off. We'd be Island-first and proud of it."
At the moment, the party has no connection to the deliberately non-partisan VIprovince initiative launched a few years ago by the Vancouver Island and Coastal Conservation Society.
VIprovince spokesperson Laurie Gourlay was unfamiliar with the VIP prior to being contacted by Black Press, but obviously intrigued with its mandate and the fact it hopes to build on the federal and provincial petitions he launched in 2013 requesting provincehood.
"I'm pleased to see it's garnered that kind of interest and has this goal," Gourlay said. "As we see it, Vancouver Island is coming of age and it's a natural progression. It's kind of exciting, but I am hesitant and have to be careful."
Perhaps reflecting the Island itself, the VIP platform is an interesting mishmash of ideas pulled from different ends of the political spectrum.
"The Vancouver Island Party is centrist in nature," Richardson said. "We are fiscally responsible, socially progressive and environmentally green. We welcome all VanIslers, irrespective of their former political affiliation.
"People from all walks of life should find an appeal in our philosophy."
Given that the platform was drafted largely by a former economist for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation who also happens to be a Christian minister, it should be no surprise that balanced budgets, fiscal conservatism and family values play prominent roles. A flat tax is on the table. Tax relief for the middle class and competitive business taxes are promised.
But the vision statement also carries a broad green streak with a commitment to sustainability and social justice. Preferential hiring policies for Vancouver Island residents, buy and grow local incentives, increased investment in public transportation, renewable energy programs, guaranteed annual incomes, a shift from resource extraction to value-added manufacturing, marine and groundwater protection, and cheap or free post-secondary education directives are also in place.
Democratic reform also factors into the plan, including proportional representation, recall laws and a shifting of power from the capital to local and regional governments. Some of the touchier local issues like marine oil tankers and old growth logging could be addressed through planned direct citizens initiatives.
Right now, the party is small, basically consisting of Richardson and a handful a like-minded Islanders, none of whom has a prominent public profile. Their goal is to change that with a recruiting drive over the next few months. Members intend to actively approach local government. community and First Nations leaders and have a team in place by November.
Ideally, voters give the party a presence in the next legislature, which could convince the next government to put the issue on the ballot for 2021.
"We hope to be perceived as well-rounded and serious," Richardson said. "We don't want to be perceived as a fringe party."
He plans to reach out to the VIprovince group in the near future to share ideas, piggyback on the existing petition initiative and see how they can work together.
Gourlay's initiative had some small successes recently with a decision by the B.C. government to temporarily fly the Vancouver Island flag at the legislature a few weeks ago, and a letter earlier this year from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledging the Island's heritage as a separate colony.
He said the reaction from Islanders has been mixed to separation: about one-third in favour, one-third opposed and one-third indifferent. Without making any political endorsement of the VIP, he welcomes the fact that it will get people talking.
"I support the idea being discussed. We've seen a vacuum as far as the idea being discussed," he said. "We are looking at it as a means of opening up a dialogue,"
More on the VIP plan
What the province of Vancouver Island would want from Canada as the terms for it joining confederation is spelled out in the party's statement of guiding principles:
• A bridge connecting the Island to the mainland
• 12 MPs and 10 senators
• free or reduced-rate ferries
• payment of the Island's share of the B.C. debt
• seawall and dike infrastructure to protect against climate change
• a commitment to maintaining the existing military bases
• New light-rail systems for greater Victoria, the Nanaimo area, and the Comox Valley, plus reinvestment in the E&N, including an up-Island extension
• A highway connecting the Alberni/Bamfield area to the south Island via Cowichan Lake
• A Port Alberni shipping hub
— source vanisleparty.com
Follow me on Twitter @JohnMcKinleyBP


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This article is more than 1 year old
Facebook's Swedish data centre will be subject to Snoop Law
The icy location is a big advantage for the new data centre that Facebook is planning in the northern Swedish town of Lulea. But while the frigid Arctic winds will fan the servers, it's the legal climate that could get hot.
A controversial Swedish internet surveillance law passed in 2008 allows the government there to intercept any internet traffic that passes Sweden's borders with no need for a court warrant. It's called the FRA law and the Swedes don't like it, and Google called it "unfit for a Western democracy". And the rest of Europe could start to get annoyed by it too when that internet traffic includes their Facebook data.
When the server kicks up in 2013, it will host Facebook for most of the site's European users and that will mean that photos of you at your sister's birthday party, your status updates and private messages to your girlfriend will be just part of the data pool that the Swedish executive will be able to dip in and of at its leisure. No legal permission necessary.
The Swedish surveillance law, which also extends to phones, was heavily criticised by Google's Peter Fleischer in 2007, who swore that the search engine would never site a server base there because it was "the most privacy-invasive legislation in Europe". Google currently has servers in Belgium and Finland.
A Reg Reader alerted us to the blog of Swedish Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg, who says [translated]
It is much worse news for a couple of hundred million European Facebook users, who will now connect to the servers in the catalog. It implies that everything they send to and from Facebook will pass through the FRA's filters.
Facebook's reaction? Well, they're just going to let it roll.
Access by public authorities to personal data is governed by national laws in all countries including in the US and Sweden. Facebook is committed to meeting its legal obligations in the countries where it operates and already has a team in place to respond to lawful requests from public authorities in Europe. We do not anticipate any changes to this structure with the opening of the new data centre.
Facebook stressed to us that it respected EU privacy laws and that the contract Facebook has with its users outside North America will be unaffected by the new data centre:
Facebook users outside North America have a contract with Facebook Ireland Ltd under Facebook's terms of service. Facebook Ireland Ltd is already compliant with European Union data protection law and acts as the data controller for these users. Facebook Inc processes data on behalf of Facebook Ireland Ltd under contractual arrangements which are similar to those used by other international companies. We expect these legal arrangements to continue with the addition of the new data centre.


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Run the following command in your project folder to install the RebaseData PHP-Client using Composer:
composer require rebasedata/php-client "1.*"
Then you can read the ACCDB file using PHP. The following code sample at first defines the input files. Then it converts the input files so that they are readable. This might take a bit of time, since the operation is executed on the secure RebaseData servers. Finally the database table rows are printed. For more examples about how to use the library, check the README.
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use RebaseData\Converter\Converter;
use RebaseData\InputFile\InputFile;
$inputFiles = [new InputFile('example.accdb')];
$converter = new Converter();
$database = $converter->convertToDatabase($inputFiles);
$tables = $database->getTables();
foreach ($tables as $table) {
echo "Reading table '".$table->getName()."'\n";
$rows = $table->getRowsIterator();
foreach ($rows as $row) {
echo implode(', ', $row)."\n";
The RebaseData PHP-Client internally uses our API to convert the Microsoft Access ACCDB file to a standardized format. Then you can read the data using PHP as shown above.


text:
BigBlueButton (BBB) is an open source real-time collaboration tool. (Audio / Video / Screensharing / Chat / Whiteboard / Recording), which is built upon several open source components and with a focus on distance education.
Table of contents:
Key features of the Tiki & BigBlueButton integration
- 1-click login into BigBlueButton using Tiki user system
- Various permissions on the BigBlueButton session via Tiki's permission and group system
- Listing BigBlueButton recordings in Tiki.
BigBlueButton users need to have Flash. For the server, a dedicated server is needed with 2Gb of physical RAM (not as swap in a virtual machine frmo the host). BigBlueButton is licensed LGPL, just like Tiki.
More info at: http://bigbluebutton.org/
How to use BBB
General comments
You need to have the plugin for the flashplayer properly installed in your browser in order to use BigBlueButton.
This can be tricky for certain combinations of operating system and browser. For instance, if you experience any unexpected crash of your flash plugin at the first attempt to connect to bbb (for instance if you have a GNU/Linux based operating system 64 bits, and installed flashplugin from the system repositories), you can try these steps that use to fix your flashplugin setup:
- Use Mozilla Firefox as browser, and install on it this extension: Flash-Aid:
- Choose the installation of new icon created by the extension, and select the "Quick Mode > Install beta flash"
- This will guide you through the installation. Restart firefox as requested at the end.
- Go back to your BBB installation and try connecting again.
In addition, if you can't click at the window to accept the remote server to use your wecam and microphone, you can manually enable that by means of:
- visit this url with your browser
- accept the connection from the server of your interest so that it doesn't ask you each time you try to connect to that bbb installation.
- Visual indication of who is talking
- Custom and predefined layouts
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Webcams, Screensharing and Notes taken in the Whiteboard shown also in the playback
- Playback: You can point to specific time/part of the recorded session
- Add &t=XXmYYs to the URL of the recorded playback (XX for minutes, YY for seconds)
- Playback: You can switch the main view by clicking the "opposite directions" arrow icon to switch the presentation/webcam views
- interface translated to many more languages
- Start/Stop Button for Recording: Moderators can now mark segments of the class for later playback.
- Improved Audio: BigBlueButton now takes advantage of the web real-time communications (WebRTC) framework built into FireFox and Chrome to give users higher quality, lower latency audio.
- Microphone Check: BigBlueButton now gives every user a chance to check their microphone before entering the session, ensuring when they enter the session they are ready to participate.
- Listen Only Mode: Users without a microphone can join audio in 'Listen Only' mode. In this mode, BigBlueButton displays a speaker icon next to their name letting everyone know they can hear (but not speak).
- Updated tips:
- Add ?t=XXmYYs to the URL of the recorded playback (XX for minutes, YY for seconds)
How to use BBB in Tiki
1.1.1. Enable the feature and plugin
Enable the feature at "Admin home > Community > BigBlueButton" tab.
Enable the plugin at "Admin home > Editting and plugins > Plugins > BigBlueButton plugin"
1.1.2. Place the bbb plugin call in a wiki page
Select the BigBlueButton plugin from the plugin helper popup box thorugh the edit box in the wiki page:
{bigbluebutton name="77777" prefix="guest" welcome="Welcome to the BBB from our web site" logout="http://mywebsite.org/myexitpage" recording="0"}
If you want to record your meetings, change the param recording from 0 to 1.
- Ensure that you are not caching that wiki page (set cache for that wiki page to "0". Otherwise, anonymous users willing to join a meeting might experience some connection problems in some cases.
1.1.3. Connect to BBB
An anonymous user would see this in a wiki page when no one is connected to the metting yet:
If there is anohter guest user connected (not logged in Tiki at the time of connection, thus loged in BBB as VIEWER), the page would look like:
If a user logs in the page, new buttons will be seen for him, depending on his tiki permissions, but for sure the username will be taken from his tiki username, andpermissions will be transferred from Tiki to BBB.
If that user connects to the BBB channel, then he will be connecting as MODERATOR.
Validating Flash permissions to share microphone and webcam:
Check your audio settings in general (speakers, microphone):
Change your microphone settings, if needed:
1.1.4. Desktop Interface
See the BBB desktop:
And the view of the same room by an anonymous users without moderator permissions:
At the end:
1.1.5. Desktop sharing
When you have the role of presenter, you can share your desktop for the other attendants to see it. Click the button in the upper left corner to share desktop (the icons that loocks like a screen).
Selecting a region of the destkop from the moderator user (a web page in this case). the lower right corner allows the resize of the window:
Tray notification:
And the sharing seen at the screen of the moderator itself:
1.1.6. Permissions
Last, editing permissions for that BBB room name:
to be continued...
Videos about Tiki & BBB
The Tiki community Dogfoods BigBlueButton at tiki.org/live.
The Tiki community has been testing BigBlueButton for this type of live collaboration and members of the community have decided to enter in a long-term integration partnership to maintain it as a Tiki feature.
About the integration
Similar to Kaltura, BigBlueButton needs to be installed alongside Tiki (can be on a different physical server). Each project remains standalone, and we'll collaborate to continuously improve the glueware between the two.
At first, Single Sign On, but over time, we expect that many features will meld. The Tiki community will DogFood extensively. Tiki integrated the new record and playback features from BigBlueButton 0.8
Before setting up the tiki integration, the BigBlueButton server stack must be installed. Detailed instructions are provided for multiple platforms. However, using the provided virtual machine is the easiest way to go. Also note that there are heavy bandwidth requirements.
To enable the integration in tiki, you need the following information:
- The BigBlueButton server location.
- The server salt — a secret token used to generate call signatures. This value is located inside the bigbluebutton.properties file on the BigBlueButton server.
- you can also have BBB report to you that server salt key with the command on the server:
Copy to clipboardbbb-conf --salt
- you can also have BBB report to you that server salt key with the command on the server:
Creating rooms
The user interface for BigBlueButton goes through a wiki plugin. You can use it in wiki pages or most wiki-parsed text areas. To schedule meetings on a calendar, you can use the calendar feature.
{bigbluebutton name=My Meeting Room}
If the server location was configured successfully, the BigBlueButton logo will appear. A create button will be proposed to create the new room (a permission is required, but administrators have all permissions). If the salt was set-up correctly, you will be redirected to the meeting room.
Going back to the plugin, you can set-up the permissions to select who can join the meeting room or moderate it.
More info at PluginBigBlueButton
To use the voip feature when using a room name instead of a number:
open the config: sudo nano /etc/asterisk/bbb_extensions.conf then replace: exten => _XXXX.,1,Playback(conf-placeintoconf) with: exten => _.,1,Playback(conf-placeintoconf) and replace: exten = _XXXX.,n,Konference(${EXTEN},H) with: exten = _.,n,Konference(${EXTEN},H) Than reboot the Big Blue Button server with bbb-conf --restart. note: if you don't have nano installed use sudo apt-get install nano
This will help with several related but slightly different uses.
Webinars / e-learning
Scheduled, live, interactive, one to many delivery of knowledge. The session could be one time (webinar) or an ongoing course with a regular schedule. This is BigBlueButton's core objective "our focus is to make the best web conferencing system for distance education."
Remote support
A visitor clicks a link on a brochure website and is put in contact with a representative of the organization. This is similar to Tiki's Live Support feature (ad hoc 1 on 1 chat help support), but with BigBlueButton's feature set, there are way more possibilities (screen sharing, co-browsing, etc.)
Team meetings
Useful for Teams to meet & coordinate. These are typically scheduled (for instance with PluginConvene and Tiki Calendar) and have an agenda (presumably in a wiki page). Ideally, decisions are recorded (presumably in a wiki page). Everyone can be on audio & webcam. Headsets are recommended.
Broadcasting live events
This will be useful during TikiFests. A projector can be setup at the live event so all participants can see everyone and follow the discussion on the chat. Typically, remote participants can listen in, but will respond in the text chat. (Just because of logistics and ambient noise).
- An alternative is http://www.ustream.tv/user/tikiwiki
- An example: TikiFestBigBlueButton
Community chat
This is the place to go to hang out with "everyone". It's on 24/7 and can be idle for long whiles. It should be logged as a lot of knowledge, answers and links are shared there. Quick "decisions" are often taken there as well (ask a quick question and if everyone seems ok with it, it must be ok). Even if some users may be identified with special rights (ex.: ops), the room is very p2p. It's possible to break out of the room into a smaller one for a short, focused or private discussion. Historically, we use irc.tiki.org but we could eventually develop an IRC to BigBlueButton gateway.
Surveillance camera
Typically a video stream which can be monitored and recorded.
Related links
- http://bigbluebutton-blog.blogspot.com/2010/08/pictures-from-tikifestbigbluebutton.html
- http://bigbluebutton-blog.blogspot.com/2010/04/tiki-wiki-looking-closely-at.html
- dev:BigBlueButton
- http://hostbbb.com/ which is known to work with Tiki
- https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=272890