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Rob Richer, the No. 2 ranking official in the CIA's clandestine service, paid a visit to Glenn Carle's office in December 2002 and presented the veteran CIA operative with an urgent proposal.
"I want you to go on a temporary assignment," Carle recalls Richer telling him. "It's important for the agency, it's important for the country and it's important for you. Will you do it?"
Richer, who resigned from the CIA in 2005 and went to work for the mercenary outfit Blackwater, told Carle that agency operatives had just rendered a "high-value target," an Afghan in his mid-forties named Haji Pacha Wazir, who was purported to be Osama bin Laden's personal banker as well as financier for a number of suspected terrorists. Wazir was being held at a CIA black site prison in Morocco, and the agency needed a clandestine officer who spoke French to take over the interrogation of the detainee.
Carle, formerly the deputy national intelligence officer for transitional threats, who had no prior interrogation experience, agreed, and within 72 hours, he boarded a CIA-chartered jet bound for Morocco.
The Interrogator
Carle recounts what unfolded next in his riveting book, "The Interrogator: An Education," which stands as a damning indictment of the CIA's torture and rendition program and the Bush administration's approach to the so-called Global War on Terror.
Carle refers to Wazir in his book as CAPTUS. The CIA, which did not respond to requests for comment for this report, would not allow Carle to print Wazir 's name in his book, nor was he permitted to disclose the locations of the two black site prisons where Wazir was imprisoned and tortured.
A report published in Harper's in July first disclosed that CAPTUS is Wazir and the location of the CIA black site prisons where he was held.
During an on-camera interview with Truthout in Washington, DC, Carle said he originally believed the agency had captured a "significant Al-Qaeda leader" who had been a concern to US intelligence agencies "for a long time."
"The assessment that was made of [Wazir] was quite compelling and I accepted it," Carle said. "I knew my colleagues to be hard-working and careful and that they reviewed their assessments regularly and the assessment was that [Wazir] was one of the top players in Al-Qaeda."
Although Carle was told by a top agency official that he should do "whatever it takes to get this man to talk," which he said he understood meant using torture to "break this fellow's will" and obtain intelligence, Carle said he "would not do it [because] it was wrong."
Instead, Carle said he interrogated Wazir using standard rapport-building techniques and "psychological manipulation" that led the detainee to believe Carle was his "friend."
Carle concluded not long after he began interrogating Wazir that the agency had "kidnapped" the "wrong guy" and Wazir, who ran an informal money-transfer business known as a Hawala, was not a "committed jihadist" or Bin Laden's personal banker.
Wazir was "more like a train conductor who sells a criminal a ticket," Carle writes in "The Interrogator." "Slowly, progressively, first in dismay, then in anger, I had realized that on the CAPTUS case the Agency, the government, all of us, had been victims of delusion."
Wazir's life had been "destroyed" based on what Carle characterized as an "error."
But the CIA's position did not change. The agency believed Wazir was withholding intelligence due to the fact that he could not answer specific questions. So in an attempt to convince him to reveal information about Al-Qaeda, agency operatives kidnapped his older brother, Haji Ghaljai, in December 2002 and held him captive for six months at the same black site prison.
Carle documented his conclusions about Wazir, and called for his immediate release, in top-secret cables he prepared that were supposed to be sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. However, Carle said when he later inquired about his cables he discovered they "were never transmitted so they never formally existed."
The US government eventually moved Wazir from Morocco to the infamous Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan, which Carle refers to as "Hotel California," and then transferred him to the Bagram prison facility.
Psychological Torture
Carle described in great detail the conditions in which Wazir and other detainees were held at the black site prisons.
"It was instantaneously, completely black," Carle said about the black site prisons. "Not dark, black. A darkness where literally I could not see my hand…Totally black. And there was loud incessant noise or a series of other sounds. Babies wailing, sounds that would appear to be someone being hit or car crashes or wheels screeching. The goal is to play upon the senses so as to disorient the prisoner."
Carle said he believed the psychological methods used to disorient detainees rose to the level of torture. He said that if "things got out of hand" during an interrogation a CIA psychologist would step in. Carle said, however, he "never saw any of the physical techniques being administered [to Wazir]" while he was present.
"Whenever anything came up to make that possible I wouldn't allow it," Carle said. "I stopped it. So I wasn't aware of that happening. But I don't know what happened to him after I left" the black site prison.
Habeas Denial
Blogger Marcy Wheeler reported that Wazir filed a habeas petition in September 2006 and "his suit was ultimately consolidated with the three Bagram detainees whose DC Circuit habeas denial remains the relevant decision denying Bagram detainees habeas."
"But Wazir's petition was denied in spite of the fact that a former Bagram detainee revealed that Wazir had been told some time in June or July 2008 there was no evidence against him," Wheeler reported.
Tina Foster is the constitutional attorney who represented Wazir in his habeas petition against the US government. She told Harper's, "the Justice Department maintained that Pacha Wazir was legally detainable on unspecified grounds, but that the determination had been properly made by those with knowledge of his case."
"Had the conclusions reached by [Carle in cable assessments he sent about Wazir] not been destroyed, and instead acknowledged and disclosed by the government to the court, it would likely have tipped the scales of justice in his case and possibly also in other cases," Foster said.
Wazir was not freed until February 2010, eight years after his capture.
Heavily Redacted
The CIA's Publications Review Board, "under the guise of 'protecting sources and methods,' imposed numerous redactions and elliptical phrases on my manuscript," Carle writes in "The Interrogator," which was published following a year-long battle with the agency. "These have eliminated or softened harsh facts about what our government has done in pursuit of terrorists, rounded edges of wrongdoing, and obscured the corruption of our institutions and of our system of government caused by the rendition, detention, and coercive interrogation of terrorists or terrorist suspects."
Still, Carle footnoted the redactions and summarized, in general terms, what the agency had censored. For example, in response to a redacted paragraph on page 134, Carle added this footnote:
The deleted passage concerns my assessment of why Headquarters would persit in its conceptual and operational errors in [Wazir's] case. The passage is acidic. This is the only reason I can see why it would be redacted, for it reveals no source or method—other than contemptible institutional incompetence.
Carle told Truthout that since his book was published in June, he has been the subject of a "whispering campaign," where "unnamed anonymous representatives and supporters of [torture] and defenders of them will speak to significant members of the media and say, 'You shouldn't take a chance on [reporting] his story because you don't want to damage your access to useful sources."
"That's had some effect on my ability to get this story out," Carle said, without citing the media outlets that were allegedly contacted. "The effort clearly has been, and I have heard this from multiple sources, to keep me from having access to the major media networks and newspapers and magazines. It has worked. I have not been able to share my story on a major network."
Prosecutions Would "Divide Us"
Yet Carle, who retired from the CIA in 2007, refuses to endorse an investigation and/or prosecution of key Bush administration and CIA officials who he said they were responsible for violating numerous laws in the name of national security, claiming it would "divide" the country.
"It's not to protect the guilty," Carle told Truthout about the reasons he does not support accountability. "I think a trial or series of trials would divide us, polarize us and become a he said, she said, 'I attempted to protect the nation' – and I am sure everyone sincerely intended to do that – and 'You're just for political reasons coming after me.' I think that would be counterproductive."
"The country is already 'divided,'" Truthout retorted, "even without a full-scale investigation or prosecution. You're well aware of the partisan bickering currently taking place in Washington, DC. How would a criminal probe further polarize the country?"
"Well, we are divided in a more distressing way than at any time since the the Vietnam War," Carle said. "But Vietnam was over an issue not over a political philosophy. By taking steps that fuel the divisions we don't end them. My objective is to make the feeling more broad among the American public that [torture is] un-American and unacceptable and doesn't work. I think that comes not by going after the designers of them, but by taking steps that make the average American think, 'well, yeah these methods don't work and are incompatible with what it means to be an American citizen. So, I think strengthening the feeling that the measures are wrong is more important than having three or four people pay a penalty for this."
"I Did My Best"
Another CIA officer took over Wazir's case in 2003 and Carle returned to the United States. He said he did not inquire about what happened to the detainee until he reluctantly typed his name into Google in December 2010.
"I was an undercover CIA operations officer for most of my career," Carle said. "I was known to foreign services around the world as a CIA officer. It would be unwise for me to associate my name with an operation. I never asked [about Wazir] and I never looked. I learned only last year, nine months after [Wazir] had been freed, that in fact he had been freed. I knew nothing about it."
Ultimately, Carle said, "I did my best and I think in this case I made the right decisions and acted honorably, although I was unable to accomplish much of what I tried."


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MediaFunnel, a social media management platform that offers an integrated combination of outbound publishing features and audience engagement capabilities, today announced the release of customizable customer service quality assurance protocols for the social channel.
MediaFunnel addresses the three key areas that drive the quality of the overall brand experience in the social sphere: outbound communication, audience engagement, and premium customer service throughout all social touch points.
In addition to MediaFunnel's fully featured publishing and engagement tools, the ability to create customizable user roles and capabilities at a granular level ensures that only authorized personnel are responding to customer inquiries and comments in the social sphere.
The customer service ticketing workflow tool lets users capture, route, and track inbound communication until resolution is achieved. The tracking system maintains a communication log that provides brand advocates with access to the entire communication string in the social sphere. Administrators can assign tickets to specific personnel who are best equipped to handle incoming inquiries.
"At MediaFunnel we designed our product with our customers' customers in mind. We recognize that the social channel is growing and evolving quickly and dramatically and that our customers' customers now consider social media a brand portal that extends to customer service," said Andreas Wilkens, CEO and co-founder of MediaFunnel, in a statement. "Because the social channel's influence on the customer service experience is significantly increasing, we believe that it's critical to provide our customers with the tools they need to deliver against these expectations. And, by delivering better customer service in the social sphere, retention and lifetime value improves. At the end of the day, we know that this is what matters to our customers."
Giving Quality Initiatives the Respect They Deserve
Why companies are missing the consumer experience boat.
Social@Scale Crisis Management
When unexpected publicity hits, it pays to be prepared.

subset: commoncrawl


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Matthew Pennell
"How would you handle the issue, should it come up, if Mike and Sam were to compare their impressions of the site during their review, realize the differences between the browser renderings, and then confront you about it?"
This is the real issue, and one Andy always avoids providing a proper answer for. Why should the client care that you don't want to make a dozen rounded corner images so their site looks the same on IE? And really, what is the point of CSS gradients when for an extra 500 bytes you can improve the design for another 60-90% of your site audience?


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Banyan Resort BYT
TUG Home | Browse Resorts | Florida - East Coast / Keys |Resort Descriptionx
The Banyan Resort is the ultimate destination for a weekend get-a-way or long term accommodations in our well appointed suites which offer the perfect blend of history and modern convenience located on a Historic Caribbean Estate tucked away in the heart of Old Town Key West.
Two Blocks from Mallory Square's Nightly Sunset Celebration
Two Temperature Controlled Swimming Pools and Hot Tub
One Block from World Famous Duval Street
Extensive Lush and Fragrant Gardens
Certified Florida Green Lodge
Full Kitchens
Free Wi-Fi
Enjoy the best of both worlds that only our unique location can offer: A serene atmosphere within steps to most everything the island has to offer including: restaurants, pubs, shops, water-sports and art galleries. Now is the perfect time to make The Banyan Resort your home away from home in the Tropical Island Paradise of Key West!


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CHEAP EATS In weather, it was daytime and I had to go to work wearing a scarf. And gloves. On the bridge, traffic was red so I was running late, and I had to pick up dog medicine for the family dog along the way, El Cerrito.
I didn't know why the traffic was so bad. Time of day, it didn't make sense. But when I came out from under the upper deck into Oakland daylight, there was weather. And so maybe that was it. Traffic and weather together, as they say on the radio.
But this is the paper.
So I never seen anything like it: a skinny strip, almost a funnel of darkness, raining relatively hard on the MacArthur maze, and me, and nothing but blue skies on either side. It was a beautiful day behind me, in San Francisco. It was a beautiful day in downtown Oakland, and in Berkeley. Even in Emeryville, the skies were blue.
Meteorillogically, I had never seen anything like it. Just a ribbon, a ribbon of inclement weather.
I went to work.
by Hedgehog
We're back in San Francisco! It's getting nigh Christmas time! And while neither of our fathers broke his neck whilst climbing down the chimney dressed like Santa Claus (like that poor Phoebe Cates in Gremlins,) Chicken Farmer has bad Germanic-Romantic associations with this time of the year and I myself was raised by a Master Humbugger. But we're trying to get some of that seasonal spirit, despite our instincts' best efforts to the contrary.
Alas, the world is against our holiday cheer. First, Google maps told us that ceremonial shrubbery could be had at the corner of Dolores and 15th. Liars. Instead of actual trees, we found only a banner pointing us toward Mission and 14th. Four blocks away.
But by the time we got there (six hours later, what with one thing, then the other) they were closed. 8:30pm.
Next day at 1pm, closed again. Just a lot of expensive trees behind a locked chain-link fence. And no hours posted. Sons a bitches.
Anyway we'll probably have a tree or at the very least a green pillow propped in the corner, wrapped in lights, by the time you read this. In the meantime, I've got some bad news: no restaurant this week. We ate so much and so poorly as a touring rock band (Like us on Facebook! Listen to us on Bandcamp!) last week that I had to put my fork down: I am hereby and forthwith abstaining from all alcohol, cooking oils, dairy, gluten, and anything that the internet says could possibly cause bloating. But only until I can firmly establish that my clothes fit better, and then I'll start adding things back in that I don't want to be the culprit. It might take a few weeks though.
Actually, if anyone wants to submit a review in the meantime. . . Chicken Farmer isn't here right now but I'm sure she's fine with the idea.
Until one of youse steps up though, and by way of keeping to some sort of a format, I do have some sports news. Terry Francona is now managing the Cleveland Indians. I think I like that. At least I like it better than the thought of Bobby Valentine managing the Cleveland Indians.
The Indians also got Didi Gregorious (my favorite name in professional sports this year), Jason Donald, and Drew Stubbs from Cincinatti. And all they had to do was give the Reds $3.5 million in return. And Shin Soo Choo. Which is to say: $3.5 million. (Ba dum bum!)
But then the Indians turned around and traded my favorite name in professional sports to Arizona along with two other guys (neither of whom were Chris Perez) in order to acquire Trevor Bauer and two other pitchers (neither of whom were David Hernandez).
In other news, Josh Hamilton is no longer a Texas Ranger. He's an Anaheim Angel. Which is fine by me, since I dislike both teams and therefore can continue to root against Josh Hamilton.
OK, maybe one food-related thing, since we have space. Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland. There's one on either side of the Williamette River, but the "Too" in Buckman has shorter lines. We got a maple bacon doughnut. I liked it quite finely, but Chicken Farmer claims there are better ones right here.
I would tell you where, but she never took me so I can't remember the name. Anyway, the Portland version was a couple of long strips of cold, well-done bacon lounging atop a hole-less, maple icing-blanketed log of fried dough. And the mystical SF version is circular and holed and apparently the bacon is crumbled and softer, so as to release more of its salty, meaty goodness into the sweet maple layer.
Either way: yum.


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Last modified: Thursday, July 23, 2009
Technology on way to forecasting humanity's needs, IU researcher reports in 'Science'
July 23, 2009
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Much as meteorologists predict the path and intensity of hurricanes, Indiana University's Alessandro Vespignani believes we will one day predict with unprecedented foresight, specificity and scale such things as the economic and social effects of billions of new Internet users in China and India, or the exact location and number of airline flights to cancel around the world in order to halt the spread of a pandemic.
In tomorrow's (July 24) "Perspectives" section of the journal Science, Vespignani writes that advances in complex networks theory and modeling, along with access to new data, will enable humans to achieve true predictive power in areas never before imagined. This capability will be realized as the one wild card in the mix -- the social behavior of large aggregates of humans -- becomes more definable through progress in data gathering, new informatics tools and increases in computational power.
Vespignani is the James H. Rudy Professor of Informatics and adjunct professor of physics and statistics at IU, where he is also the director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) at IU's Pervasive Technology Institute and the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing.
Researchers have already shown they can track the movement of as many as 100,000 people at a time over six months using mobile phone data, and use worldwide currency traffic as a proxy for human mobility. There are sensors and tags generating data at micro, one-to-one interaction levels, much as Bluetooth, Global Positioning Systems and WiFi leave behind detailed traces of our lives.
Such are some of the new sources of basic information that researchers are using to gain knowledge about aggregated human behavior. This new "reality mining" should in turn enhance the ability of researchers and scientists to accurately forecast the effects of phenomena like catastrophic events, mass population movements or invasions of new organisms into ecosystems, Vespignani said.
"It is analogous to what happened in physics when we saw the shift from the study of atomic and molecular physics to the study of the physics of matter," he said. "Here we see a movement from the study of a small number of elements, or small social groups, to the study of the behavior of large-scale social systems consisting of millions of people that can be characterized in space, both social and geographic, and in time."
In his article "Predicting the Behavior of Techno-Social Systems," Vespignani also recognizes challenges in creating a predictive system that includes social adaptation. Large-scale data, for example, is still needed about how information spreads and society reacts in times of crisis, but he believes advancing communications databases may address that issue.
Quantifying effects of risk perception and awareness phenomena among individuals on the larger techno-social network's structure and dynamics needs to be designed into formal models, he added, and a need remains for the deployment of monitoring infrastructures capable of supplying real time information to computational models.
"While the needed integrated approach is still in its infancy, using network theory, mathematical biology, statistics, computer science and nonequilibrium statistical physics will play a key role in the creation of computational forecasting infrastructures," Vespignani said. "And that should help us design better energy distribution systems, plan for traffic-free cities and manage the deployment of the world's resources."
Vespignani's work on complex systems appears again in the same "Perspectives" section of Science as he is listed as co-author with five others on lead author Frank Schweitzer's "Economic Networks: The New Challenges."
Schweitzer, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, led the research examining interdependencies of economic networks as complex systems. The paper, among other things, notes a need for advancing research on the complexities of the international financial network that in turn could lead to revision and extension of established paradigms in economic theory.
To speak with Vespignani, please contact Steve Chaplin, University Communications, at 812-856-1896 or firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Galileo Cruises the Inner Jovian System
On November 5, 2002, the Galileo spacecraft made one final close flyby of the innermost regions of Jupiter's system. Galileo, which has orbited Jupiter since 1995, took one final plunge deep into the heart of the Jovian system, where radiation levels could kill a human in minutes. The spacecraft will intentionally crash into Jupiter on September 21, 2003, to ensure that it cannot accidentally collide with Jupiter's moon Europa at some future date. Europa is one of the prime candidates for life beyond Earth within our Solar System, so scientists want to make certain that microbes onboard Galileo could never contaminate Europa. Galileo had never ventured so close to Jupiter before the November 2002 encounter. Radiation close to Jupiter could severely damage the robotic spacecraft's systems, so Galileo had been kept at a safer distance on earlier passes. Since scientists knew the craft's days were numbered, they decided to risk a closer flyby to gain the opportunity to directly measure aspects of the space near Jupiter.
The animation below portrays some of the information Galileo gathered on the November 2002 encounter (known to Galileo mission team members as the the "A34 pass" because it was Galileo's 34th orbit and the main target was the moon Amalthea). To view the animation, you will need to have the latest version of the Flash player installed on your web browser. Details about the features shown in the animation are described below.
The animation shows the area close to Jupiter. Jupiter has moons; the five closest to the planet (Adrastea, Metis, Amalthea, Thebe, and Io) are shown here. Jupiter also has a series of rings, like the famous rings of Saturn. Jupiter's rings are much fainter and smaller than are Saturn's. Saturn's rings are mostly ice, while Jupiter's are made of dust. Jupiter has three major rings. The Main Ring is very narrow and thin. It begins at a distance of 122,800 km from the center of Jupiter (Jupiter's radius is a whopping 71,398 km, so the ring is about 50,000 km above Jupiter's cloud tops). The Halo Ring is even closer to Jupiter, and is a larger, diffuse cloud of particles. Outside the Main Ring is the wispy Gossamer Ring, which extends to a distance well beyond 200,000 km from the center of Jupiter. The material in the rings is fine dust hurled up from the surfaces of Jupiter's inner moons by meteor impacts. Data from Galileo led scientists to discover the source of the ring material! The Gossamer Ring is further subdivided into the Thebe Gossamer Ring (further out) and the Amalthea Gossamer Ring (closer in). The two Gossamer Rings are named for the two small moons from which the material in each ring comes - Thebe and Amalthea.
Although it is nearly invisible, the dust of Jupiter's rings fills much of the space near the giant planet. There are other, even less visible, features near Jupiter that Galileo's instruments helped us detect. The space near Jupiter is seething with powerful magnetic fields, intense storms of radiation, and swarms of energetic particles.
Galileo Data
Three types of data are shown in the animation: radiation, energy, and electron density. The radiation values represent the general background radiation levels, and are expressed in units of counts. These radiation values are not directly expressions of data from Galileo's instruments; instead, they are values generated by a model that is based, in part, on data from Pioneer 11 (the last time a spacecraft penetrated deep into the radiation belts of Jupiter). Notice how the radiation values rise dramatically as Galileo gets close to Jupiter. The type of radiation depicted here is bombardment by electrons.
The energy values are measurements from an instrument designed to register counts per second of sulfur ions in the energy range of 16-30 keV per nucleon. The atmosphere of Io is mostly composed of sulfur compounds spewed into the atmosphere by Io's many volcanoes. These sulfur compounds are gradually torn from the top of Io's atmosphere in a process called 'sputtering', thus entering the general space around Jupiter. This high energy environment pulls the individual atoms in the sulfur compounds apart, then rips some of the electrons from the sulfur atoms, producing electrically charged sulfur ions. These charged ions are then subject to the forces of Jupiter's powerful magnetic fields, which accelerates them to high speeds and energy levels. The energy values shown in the animation are counts of sulfur ions in a specific energy range, 16 to 30 keV per sulfur ion. An electron volt (eV) is an energy unit used by particle physicists; a keV is one thousand electron volts (kilo-eV). Galileo's Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) measured counts of many types of ions in several different energy ranges, only one of which is displayed in this animation. Scientists are uncertain whether some of the readings of the EPD accurately depict ion counts; the detector may have been swamped by the swarms of energetic electrons found near Jupiter, causing it to register misleading readings.
The third value shown is electron density. It is expressed in terms of electrons per cubic centimeter. Remember the electrons that were ripped from the sulfur ions? That is one of many sources of free electrons in the space around Jupiter. Since electrons are also electrically charged, Jupiter's magnetic field accelerates them to high speeds and energies as well. Many of the electrons striking Galileo were traveling close to the speed of light! Notice how the electron density is high near the moon Io, and drops off suddenly at a point slightly inside the orbit of Io. Io's orbit is surrounded by two regions filled with energetic particles. They are the Io Warm Torus and the Io Cold Torus. The dropoff in electron density slightly inside the orbit of Io marks the boundary where the Warm Torus gives way to the Cold Torus.


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Sony Alpha A6400 Digital Camera with 16-50mm Power Zoom Lens - Black
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Click here for a quoteNeed some more questions answered? Enquire about this product
• World's Fastest 0.02 seconds AF acquisition speed plus 425 phase-detection and contrast-detection AF points covering approximately 84% of image area
• Advanced Real-time Eye AF
• New Real-time Tracking for object tracking
• 24.2MP APS-C Exmor™ CMOS image sensor and latest-generation BIONZ X™ image processor
• 180-degree fully tiltable LCD touch screen for self-recording
• High-speed continuous shooting at up to 11 fps mechanical shutter / 8 fps silent shooting with continuous AF/AE tracking
• High-resolution 4K movie recording with full pixel readout and no pixel binning, plus advanced AF speed and stability
• Interval recording for time-lapse videos
The α6400 brings many of Sony's most advanced technologies from their acclaimed full-frame line-up to a compact, lightweight APS-C camera. The speedy new camera boasts the world's fastest AF acquisition of 0.02 seconds, while also introducing the new advanced 'Real-time Eye AF' and 'Real-time Tracking' capabilities. Also included is high speed shooting at up to 11 fps with AF/AE tracking, a new-generation BIONZ X image processing engine that produces excellent image quality, 4K video recording, a 180-degree fully tiltable LCD touch screen and much more, making it the ultimate tool for all types of creators ranging from professionals to everyday vloggers.
Speedy Performance that Captures Decisive Moments
The impressive autofocus system on the new α6400 inherits many technologies from Sony's newest line-up of full-frame cameras including the α9, α7R III and α7 III models. The new camera features 425 phase-detection AF points and 425 contrast-detection AF points that are placed densely over the entire image area, covering approximately 84% of the image area. This high-speed, high-performance-tracking AF system is paired with a new-generation BIONZ X image processing engine that together allows the camera to acquire focus in as little as 0.02 secondsii and maintain subject lock extremely effectively, ensuring even the fastest moving subjects can be tracked and captured with ease.
The α6400 introduces an advanced Real-time Eye AF, the latest version of Sony's acclaimed Eye AF technology. This exciting new capability employs artificial intelligence-based object recognition to detect and process eye data in real time, resulting in improved accuracy, speed and tracking performance of Eye AF. In all autofocus modes, the camera now automatically detects the eyes of the subject and activates Eye AF with a half press of the shutter button, and when in AF-C or AF-A mode, the preferred eye (left or right) of your subject can be selected as the focus point. Choices include Auto / Right Eye / Left Eye, and a Switch Right / Left Eye function can be assigned to a custom function as well. This exciting new technology completely frees the photographer to focus solely on composition with full trust that focus will be tack sharp on the subject's eye. Eye AF support for animals will be added in Summer 2019 via a system software update, ideal for wildlife photographers.
Also debuting on the α6400 is Sony's newly developed 'Real-time Tracking'. This mode utilises Sony's latest algorithm including Artificial Intelligence based object recognition and processes colour, subject distance (depth), pattern (brightness) as spatial information to ensure that all subjects can be captured with excellent accuracy. Plus, when photographing or videoing humans or animals, face and eye position information is recognised by AI and the subjects eyevii is monitored in real time with extremely high tracking precision. This can be activated by a simple half press of the shutter button , or can be assigned to a custom function as well.
In terms of overall shooting speeds, the new camera can shoot at up to 11 fps with full AF/AE tracking while utilising the mechanical shutter, and up to 8 fps with full AF/AE tracking while silent shooting. It can shoot at each of these speeds for up to 116 frames JPEG Standard / 46 frames RAW compressed, greatly increasing the chances of capturing the perfect moment.
All-around Advancements in Image Quality
Sony's new α6400 is equipped with a 24.2 MP APS-C sized image sensor that is paired with an upgraded BIONZ X processor to deliver incredible advancements in image quality and colour reproduction in all types of shooting conditions. Standard ISO ranges up to ISO 32000 for both still and movie, and is expandable up to ISO 102400 for still images, with excellent noise reduction at medium and high sensitivities.
The camera also inherits many of the image processing algorithms from Sony's newest full-frame cameras, greatly suppressing noise while preserving resolution and improving texture depiction.
Advanced High-Resolution 4K Movie Recording with Fast Hybrid Autofocus
The versatile α6400 is an exceptional video camera, offering internal 4K (QFHD: 3840 x 2160) movie recording with full pixel readout and no pixel binning to collect about 2.4x the amount of data required for 4K movies, and then oversamples it to produce high quality 4K footage with exceptional detail and depth. Focusing during movie shooting is fast and stable thanks to upgraded Fast Hybrid AF technology, which keeps the subject in constant smooth focus no matter the scene, and even if an object crosses in front. This advanced AF plus touch focus functionality make it an ideal camera choice for many vloggers and video creators that are regularly creating and uploading content online.
For time-lapse movie creation, the new camera features built-in interval recording that can be set anywhere between 1 and 60 seconds, with a total number of shots from 1 to 9999. AE tracking sensitivity can be adjusted to "High", "Mid" or "Low" during interval shooting, allowing for reduced changes in exposure over the shooting interval.
Additionally, for the first time in a Sony APS-C mirrorless camera, the new model includes an HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma) picture profile, which supports an Instant HDR workflow, allowing HDR (HLG) compatible TV's to playback beautiful, true-to-life 4K HDR imagery. Furthermore, both S-Log2 and S-Log3 are available for increased colour grading flexibility, as well as Zebra functionality, Gamma Display assist and proxy recording. The camera can also record Full HD at 120 fps at up to 100 Mbps, allowing footage to be reviewed and eventually edited into 4x or 5x slow-motion video files in Full HD resolution with AF tracking.
Upgraded Build to Maximise Versatility
The new camera is designed to offer a high level of functionality and customisation to maximise shooting freedom. New on the α6400 is a 180-degree, fully tiltable, 3.0-type LCD flip screen with 921k-dots of resolution that allows for simple and effective framing of selfie-style shooting for both still and video capture. Utilising this capability, vloggers will be able to check and monitor composition throughout their entire creative process. The LCD screen is also equipped with touch functionality, with options for Touch Pad, Touch Focus, Touch Shutter and new Touch Tracking which quickly activates Real-time tracking through the touch screen.
The camera features a high quality XGA OLED Tru-finder™ viewfinder, extensive customisation with 89 functions that are assignable to 8 custom keys, the new My Dial and My Menu functionality, enhanced overall menu usability, a help screen for menus, star rating for images, and many other features that allow for a seamless shooting experience. It is also built with a tough magnesium alloy design, is dust and moisture resistant and has an extremely durable shutter that is rated for approximately 200,000 cycles . It is also capable of seamlessly transferring files to a smartphone or tablet when connected to the brand-new 'Imaging Edge Mobile' application.


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- Feature Links
- Flood Zone Map
Flood Zone Map
Flood Zone Determinations
The National Flood Insurance Program Community Rating System (NFIP/CRS) has issued a Classification of 8 to the City of Hollywood. This classification equates to a 10 percent premium reduction for all National Flood Insurance policy holders within Hollywood.
Standard homeowner insurance policies do not cover losses due to flooding. The National Flood Insurance program provided by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) makes flood insurance available to everyone in the City whether they live in a floodplain or not. Information on the costs and coverages of flood policies can be obtained from your insurance agent. If you own your home you can purchase coverage for the structure and the contents, if you rent you can purchase coverage for contents.
In most cases there is a 30-day waiting period before the flood insurance policy becomes effective. For most people, a home and its contents are their greatest investment. Maintaining flood insurance to protect yourself from a devastating loss is essential.
Click here to view a map that identifies the portions of Hollywood that lie within a floodplain.
If you need assistance in determining if you are located within a floodplain within the City of Hollywood, please call the ECSD Flood Determination Line at 954.921.3939 and leave your name, phone number, and the address to be checked, and a representative will get back to you as soon as possible.
Additional documents about flooding and other subjects can be found at the Federal Emergency Management Administration's (FEMA) website.
The Coastal Barrier Resources System
A Coastal Barrier is a unique landform that provides protection for diverse aquatic habitats, and serve as the mainland's first line of defense against the impacts of coastal storms and erosion. Coastal Barriers are naturally occurring islands, sandbars, or other strips of land, including coastal mainland, that protects the coast from severe wave wash.
Congress recognized the vulnerability of coastal barriers to development by passing the Coastal Barrier Resources Act (CBRA) in 1982. The purpose of this Act is to minimize the loss of human life, wasteful expenditure of Federal revenues, and damage to fish, wildlife, and other natural resources associated with coastal barriers along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts. The CBRA restricts Federal expenditures and financial assistance that have the effect of encouraging development of coastal barriers. The CBRA, while not prohibiting privately financed development, prohibits most new Federal financial assistance, including Federal flood insurance, within a designated Coastal Barrier Resources System (CBRS).
In 1990, Congress passed the Coastal Barrier Improvement Act (CBIA). The CBIA tripled the size of the System established by the CBRA. The CBIA also prohibits the issuance of new Federal flood insurance within "otherwise protected areas" on buildings constructed after November 16, 1991, unless the building is used in a manner consistent with the purpose for which the area is protected. Otherwise Protected Areas (OPAs) are generally used for certain activities such as fish and wildlife research and refuges.
CBRA/OPA Zones: Land areas designated as undeveloped coastal barriers. These areas are shown on flood insurance map panels and have certain coverage restrictions. There are two CBRA zones within the City of Hollywood, FL-20P and P14A.
Flood insurance not available for structures newly built or substantially improved on or after October 1, 1983 in designated coastal barriers.
Flood insurance not available for structures -- newly built or substantially improved on or after November 16, 1991 -- not used in a manner consistent with the purpose of the otherwise protected area.
If you need assistance in determining whether or not you are located within a CBRA in the City of Hollywood, please call 954.921.3939. This is a no cost service for properties within the City limits.


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Contest closure date: 31/10/2011.
The winners of SQL Server Performance Contest 2011 are:
The winner of best story and winner of iPad 2 is: Jason Brimhall (USA) with a story about a PROC with a fair amount of business logic and performance problems both in the SQL, the network and IO.
The random 3 participants won the second prize of $100 gift card on amazon.com are: Michael Corey (USA), Hakim Ali (USA) and Alex Bernal (USA).
5 participants won a printed copy of a book of mine (Book Reviews of SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros: SQL Performance Tuning Techniques Using Wait Statistics, Types & Queues) are: Patrick Kansa (USA), Wagner Bianchi (USA), Riyas.V.K (India), Farzana Patwa (USA) and Wagner Crivelini (Brazil).
My problem is rather simplistic in it's own terms. First a little background information, I'm a consultant and I've been working with SSIS for about 1 year now and it's been a fun ride. However lately I had been running into some performance issue, while moving data from file to stage to dw. SSIS package running time had changed from 30 minutes to 120 minutes, not really acceptable in my world. So my investigation began! I primarly used DETA and SQLP and common sense. This helped me find out that my tables used in SSIS were being used by other people/profiles. Someone had been given access to create index, views, stored procedures in our staging area. After a quick chat with the person, we've solved both our issue, I redirected him to the proper database. By both our issues I mean, he was also experiencing the same problems as I with long execution times. Regards Martin.
I recently started working on an issue where performance has been going down couple of times a day during peak hours. There are around 400+ tables in database, out of which 8 are most important tables. All of these 8 tables has around 60 indexes on them each (rounding up here..). out of these 60 indexes - 20 indexes have 0 reads (seeks + scans + lookups) - around 10 indexes have less than 100 reads. The writes on these indexes are 1.5+ million ( user_updates). These numbers can be used since SQL Server has been running for 230 days. What has happened here is the developers had been running profiles to capture workloads and using DTA to create indexes, which has led to many *useless* indexes being created. Moreover, all of these indexes are created on single column - exactly as suggested by DTA. We dropped all the unnecessary indexes, (after testing workloads and checking with Vendor - this was the toughest part :) ) and the issue which happened almost daily, is happening once a week (still need more investigation... )
Development decided to add a table for performing validations. This table was to have a record for each record of our credit card transaction processing system. Records could be archived after 3 days. We collected data. On day 3 the automated job kicked off to delete, based on date, and the process took 9 hours to complete and caused various issues. It wasn't until we fought the system for a few weeks and finally rearchitected the delete solution to generate a list of IDs to be deleted, initially based on the composite primary key and secondarily based on the index of date, then deleted those that matched that list that we could perform the operation in minutes, rather than hours.
We had a client that comprised of about 70% of our customer data and typically if we were going to encounter performance problems it was going to be with that client. It makes sense because the execution plan is going to change for that client because of the distribution of data. One particular occasion there was a web report this client was running that was not finishing. They were getting a session timeout on their browser. I was called, hooked up profiler and grabbed the stored procedure parameters. I boldly fired up the query analyzer, pored over the execution plan and took it from running over a minute and a half to running in under 5 seconds. All I did was add an index and (more importantly) swapped out 2 correlated subqueries for temp tables. BOOM! I did the DBA touchdown dance and went back to my normal life. A couple of weeks roll by and they call again with the same problem. I fire up profiler and lo & behold the execution times are around 5 seconds and suddenly they can't reproduce the error. I shrug it off until the next week when the same problem happens. I fire up profiler and once again I see that execution times are fine and they can't reproduce the error. This proceeds off and on for a few months until the rest of my hair fell out. Sensing some missing facts, I set about on a path with a Sr. web developer to finally discover that it was an Ajax rendering problem, and that my finely tuned query was never being displayed or used and it was never even the source of the problem! The client was told to use Firefox and their problem was solved. The morale of the story is that we can go astray when we don't have all the facts. The second morale is that you can always find a performance problem if you look for one :)
It was a dark and stormy night… Ok, maybe that is a little too dramatic, but if you have ever worked for a financial business, you know full well how dark and stormy it can be in the office if "the business" is waiting on financial data to run reports on. We had already gone through the rigmarole of log-shipping to a read-only reporting database. "The business" did not like the idea of 15-minute refresh times that all too often missed their mark due to one of a plethora of issues we encountered getting log backups from point (a to point (b and restored correctly. We brought in a third-party application to replicate the SQL Server 2000 database to the SQL Server 2005 reporting database using CDC, which made updates "near-real-time". The business was somewhat satisfied with that solution; however, it was not free of its own issues. One issue in particular dealt with a summary table. The main application that this database supported would truncate a particular summary table, and rebuild the data in the table from scratch – each night. After the truncate, a process would gather data from several detail tables and sort it, among other (very important) tasks, creating a file that would then be BCP'd back into the summary table. Sounds simple enough, right? This summary table would grow – thanks to said application, and the way that it used this summary table – by upwards of over 30 million records per month. (Apparently, the vendor did not factor in scalability to their design plans, but that is a topic of a totally different Jerry Springer episode.) So here was our dilemma: The source database would receive a BCP load of approx 150M records every night. That load would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 – 3 hours to execute. Not too bad, we thought, considering all of the factors that we had in play. The problem was that we were replicating this table, with our new CDC third-party application. The truncate would replicate without issue, typically in milliseconds, but when the BCP would start, it would leave CDC in its dust, as we could only get about 10k records a second to process. While the source database was complete in 2.5-3 hours, the reporting database was complete in about 6-7 hours. This time-frame was encroaching on our release time of 8 AM, and we would miss that on occasion due to the fact that there were precious few PKs in the database, and updates oft failed when records could not be verified, etc. We discovered that the CDC application could "ignore" named transactions, if requested to do so. We decided to use this functionality – after yet again missing the 8 AM release time to the business –and not allow replication to "play catch-up", waiting for those 150M+ records to replicate. We created a stored proc that essentially named a transaction that would use SQL Server's BULK INSERT to insert the sorted data file into the source table, and then BCP the same file into the reporting database. Because BULK INSERT shares SQL's memory space, and BCP does not, we started having the reporting database actually available BEFORE the source! We effectively saved over 4 hours of overnight processing, and were able to eliminate a lot of the issues we would encounter due to long-processing times. Most importantly, we bolstered application stability, and improved our track-record with the business thanks to a more reliable (and SQL internal) process.
See here: http://jasonbrimhall.info/2011/09/19/performance-tuning-over-the-top-biz-logic/
Here is my entry for the contest. Please, read the following as an entry in a DBA's personal journal. And yes, unfortunately the following facts are based in a true storey. 07:50. My arrival at work. I came 10 minutes before the start of my turn in order to see if I can start ahead some work before my coworkers and my by boss arrive although I did some extra time yesterday. As always, one of the programmers has on its disk two full spread pages of a morning tabloid open. He says hello to me and start to talk about the latest celebrity scandal. 08h:10. Finally the programmer realizes that I was not interested in the details about the celebrity affairs. I sat down on my not so comfortable chair (the department's boss is the only one that have a good leather chair) and log in. I found 25 e-mails marked as not read: 8 are about a discussion regard an user unhappy about the ERP system, 10 are spam, 1 is a greeting about an upcoming birthday of someone that I don't know. The rest of them I cannot understand how the hell they are forwarded to me since they talk about the poor specification of a system that don't even use a database. 09h:05. Writing an e-mail to the infra guys on which I ask for a follow up about the restart problem of the servers. Also querying them about other issues such as: the delayed purchased of more memory to a database server (one week delayed), the purchase of another server to create the second SQL Server cluster node of a major database (one month delayed), the installation of the latest service pack on all the Windows servers (lost track about the delay of this one...) and requesting the firewall authorization to access the www.microsoft.com website that was blocked by mistake for my net user. I remember to send another e-mail for the help desk guys asking to replace my monitor, since it show a horizontal green like across it for the last three weeks. Last time one of the help desk guys came they replaced my optical mouse by an analog one and don't even looked at my monitor. 09h:25. The analysts start to receive phone calls from the users while I go get a coffee. I don't even get mad to find out that today's coffee is basically what left from yesterday warmed up. I go for a tea while I hear the following phrase said by an analyst during a phone talk with some user: "bla bla bla... the system is working perfectly... bla bla bla... do you want me to fix it using the right or the quick way? Bla bla bla..." I think to myself: this is going to be a long day. No signal of the boss yet. 09h:50. The analyst talks to me and say that the HR system is extremely low today. The responsibility about this system was upon a programmer that quit last week and there wasn't a person assigned to handle it. This was the start of a great performance problem that took the rest of my day. The analyst said to me that this was a major task and has the biggest priority because if this system is not working on time the HR guys cannot print the papers necessary to send all the employees month payment. A little bit of physiological pressure is in order, since if I cannot solve this on time everyone in the company will receive it's payment with delay and I will be the one to receive the full blame. 10h:15. While I was looking the SQL Server code used by the specific task some analysts join a gang to lower down the air conditioning level and the interns, programmers and other department's member gather to battle for the increase of the air conditioning level. I can hear the sound of knuckles snapping. Meanwhile I try to focus on a stored procedure's code that contains strange variable names such as SATURN1 to store an employee code, PLUTO69 to store the number days worked... 11h:45. This programmer was really something. He has the ability to use everything in the database in the wrong way. For instance, he used cursors to navigate in a temporary table that has 100.000 rows and no index. So I start rewriting it to employ many SELECT statements. While looking for the stored procedure I found more interesting things that can fit perfectly in a horror show: instead of triggers with many levels of recursion! And all of this copped with queries with SELECT *, many updates without a WHERE clause and on top of that the following compled select that store its data in a temporary table: select distinct TIT_ID,dev_cpf CPF,MAX(substring(DEF_FONE,1,4))DDD,MAX(substring(DEF_FONE,5,8))FONE,SALDO, ATRASO, TERMINAL, SEGMENTO, PARCELADO, UF,replace(replace(substring(acn_descricao,1,2),'Re','19'),'-','') COD_ATEND,convert(varchar(30),dea_data,103)AS DTE,convert(varchar(30),DATEPART(HH,DEA_DATA))+':'+convert(varchar(30),DATEPART(mi,DEA_DATA))+':'+convert(varchar(30),DATEPART(ss,DEA_DATA)) AS TME,USU_CODIGO_ACESSO AS AGENT,ISNULL(epo_codigo,'0') PESQ_INADIMP,replace(substring(DEA_HISTORICO,charindex('- Agendado para',DEA_HISTORICO),26),'- Agendado para','')DT_AGENDA,TPA_DATA_DEVOLUCAO DT_BAIXA into _SEMANAL_PASSADA from tab_devedor_acionamento (nolock) inner join tab_devedor (nolock) on dea_devedor=dev_id inner join tab_devedor_telefone (nolock) on def_devedor=dev_id inner join tab_acionamento (nolock) on dea_acionamento_id=acn_id inner join tab_usuario (nolock) on dea_usuario=usu_id inner join #BRTC(nolock) on tit_devedor=dea_devedor LEFT JOIN TAB_TITULO_PARCELA (NOLOCK)ON TIT_ID=TPA_TITULO AND TPA_STATUS='D' inner join tab_carteira (nolock) on car_id=tit_carteira AND CAR_DESCRICAO<>'TESTE' left join TAB_ENQUETE_RESPOSTA (nolock) on ere_devedor=dev_id AND CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),DEA_DATA,103)=CONVERT(VARCHAR(30),ERE_DATA,103) left join TAB_ENQUETE_RESPOSTA_ITEM (nolock) on ERI_ENQUETE_RESPOSTA=ERE_ID left join TAB_ENQUETE_PERGUNTA_OPCAO (nolock) on epo_sequencia=ERI_ENQUETE_PERGUNTA_OPCAO where DEA_DATA BETWEEN '2009-02-10 07:00:00.000' AND '2009-02-23 22:00:00.000' and acn_grupo_acionamento IN (1014,1016) and tit_cliente=60 AND TIT_CARTEIRA = 23908 --fixa AND CAR_ID=23930 group by SALDO, ATRASO,TIT_ID,dea_id,dev_cpf , dea_data,acn_descricao,USU_CODIGO_ACESSO,usu_nome,ACN_DESCRICAO,TERMINAL, SEGMENTO, PARCELADO, UF,epo_codigo,USU_CODIGO_ACESSO,replace(substring(DEA_HISTORICO,charindex('- Agendado para',DEA_HISTORICO),26),'- Agendado para',''),TPA_DATA_DEVOLUCAO --,epo_codigo--,COD_ATEND, DTE, TME,AGENT order by dev_cpf,tme I used the great on-line SQL formater (http://www.dpriver.com/pp/sqlformat.htm) to simplify this query. Needless to say, I send a few hours trying to understand it and to break it into simpler SELECT statements. By the way, no launch time for me while I did not fix the HR performance problem. During the study of the query I noticed the triumphal boss entrance. I could hear the sound made by multiple ALT+TAB keystrokes and small talks being stopped abruptly. As background noise I could almost hear the Star Wars imperial march while the boss walks toward its desk at the end of the room where he can see what is going on in the monitor of everyone in the department. 14:27. After understanding the query I did a simple test case to ensure that any modification on it do not produce different results. The query received some parameters for the columns (such as TIT_CARTEIRA and CAR_ID) but I was able to use a technique called dynamic search conditions to isolate then and be more fast. For more information about dynamic search conditions check this link: http://www.sommarskog.se/dyn-search-2008.htm. 16:15. I did my best to break the big and complex query and to optimize it with indexes and other techniques. In this exactly time the internet is down. Luckily for me, I did have a local copy of the code I was working on. But other analysts and programmers start a game of poker, play the harmonica and I could swear I hear a guitar riff nearby. 17:20. After more work in the stored procedure I was stuck in a specify query that seems OK but took more time than it should. I tried many ways to optimized it but I still could not do it. A quick look at the execution plan show that some parallelism has been done by the optimizer but some of the cores of the Intel 16 cores processor were not being used during the query execution. I recall a great new approach to use parallelism via a .NET assembly that I studied a few weeks ago when I was writing an article to compare the alternatives to explore parallelism in SQL Server. The following link show the assembly I used and that was proposed by Alan Kaplan in an article called "Asynchronous T-SQL Execution Without Service Broker": http://www.codeproject.com/KB/DATABASE/ASYNCHRONOUSTSQL.ASPX 18:30. Internet's back. I adapted the long running query in 5 threads in order to split the load. What I did was to separate each filter in the WHERE clause with a simple select statement. The result of the separated queries stored its contents in a temporary table. For instance, the following piece of the select statement: select ... where DEA_DATA BETWEEN '2009-02-10 07:00:00.000' AND '2009-02-23 22:00:00.000' and acn_grupo_acionamento IN (1014,1016) and tit_cliente=60 AND TIT_CARTEIRA = 23908 AND CAR_ID=23930 Was broken down to 5 threads something like this: -- Thread 1 select ... where DEA_DATA BETWEEN '2009-02-10 07:00:00.000' AND '2009-02-23 22:00:00.000' -- Thread 2 select... where acn_grupo_acionamento IN (1014,1016) -- Thread 3 select ...where tit_cliente=60 -- Thread 4 select ...where TIT_CARTEIRA = 23908 -- Thread 5 select ...where CAR_ID=23930 Then I executed these 5 queries in parallel with Alan Kaplan's assembly and stored its results in a temporary table. The rest of the processing (aggregations, joins, etc) was done directly in the temporary table. I did notice that with this approach every core of the server now was busy and the query runs much, much more faster. In the end, the results vary according to the values of the parameters, but in some cases the speedup go up to 5x. To finish up, I made some tests in the development environment with the analyst and a programmer. Then we implemented it on the production environment while our boss was telling that every extra hour will not be paid in money and must be stored in a hour bank that will be dealt with later on. When we tested the HR application with the user we received a simple answer: 'It was about time that the IT departments solved this one. Everyone was expecting it a few hours ago! Why did it so long guys? I mean, you probably just have to push some buttons or change some parameters to make that specific function in the application runs faster, isn't it? I bet any of our interns could have done it in 5 minutes'.
I tried to consult with different SQL guys including one MS SQL MVP and none provided me with the method of how to move hundreds of millions records in a quick way instead of spending days for this process. Eventfully one person which is also MS SQLMVP suggested me to use small batches. I tried that and that reduces the process by far in the most amazing way and also could control the size of the log file. Also to get the ultimate performance see this article: http://dfarber.com/computer-consulting-blog/2011/1/14/processing-hundreds-of-millions-records-got-much-easier.aspx Processing hundreds of millions records can be done in less than an hour based on small batches... Handling of hundreds of millions of records requires a different strategy and the implementation should be different compared to smaller tables with only several millions of records. Say you have 800 millions of records in a table and you need to delete 200 million. Obviously you can use this code: DELETE FROM Users WHERE DOB = '' The problem is that you are running one big transaction and the log file will grow tremendously. The process can take a long time. It also depends on the speed of your server as well. The solution is to use small batches and process 1 to several millions of records at the time. This way the log file stays small and whenever a new process starts, the new batch will reuse the same log file space and it will not grow. Before I used the batch process technique, in one time I had 250 GB log file when I tried to split the Address field. In order to improve the process with even less time, then I added a clustered index on the PK and with a combination of small batches I can handle 300 mil in less than hour, and that was major at the time. Even with WHERE condition 1 clustered index was enough.
Providing accurate statistical information to an optimizer is a simple & efficient way to obtain optimal performance. These are some MS Sql Server links which I've found to be very helpful in this regard - o Best Practices for Managing Statistics - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966419.aspx#XSLTsection135121120120 o Using Statistics to Improve Query Performance - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190397.aspx o Recommendation # 8 of Top 10 Best Practices for SQL Server Maintenance for SAP - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966447.aspx My work takes me to various customer sites and I would like to narrate an example of performance tuning which also involved a combination of DB2 & Oracle. This specific client was using DB2 as a "federated" data server and MS Sql Server & Oracle data sources were configured as remote ones. Some queries were performing horrendously & on further analysis, it was discovered that some crucial tables had stale statistics. An enhancement request was provided to IBM to add a column like remote_stats_time to syscat.nicknames & sysproc.fed_stats objects to make it easier for a dba to determine when statistics was updated the last time at remote data sources from a consolidated perspective. http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.db2.luw.sql.ref.doc%2Fdoc%2Fr0021734.html http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.swg.im.iis.fed.query.doc%2Ftopics%2Fiiyfqnnsvcl.html
My I/O Nightmare (an excerpt from my previous written article) Imagine the scene: You're at home on a Friday night, choosing to watch movies on the weekend - like a good nerd, the complete collection of Star Wars - when the phone rings. X: "Laertes my friend, it is XXXXXX. I URGENTLY need you here tomorrow. I already bought the plane ticket." - (Detail as to where he lives: almost 4,000 km away.) Me: "Ok XXXXX, but what happened?" X: "Man, I NEED to put 3 stores and a distribution center online in 2 days, and the disks are HUGE LOADED, otherwise I will lose the contract with this guy" Me: "OK Man, I am going, I'm going!" Well, when I arrived there and saw the big picture, I really did see his problem. I never in my life saw disk counters as I saw in there. The client had purchased a really nice, latest-generation server (SAN and Blade, 32 GB RAM, 16 processors, W2K8 64, SQL2K8 64), and the whole disc apparatus was set up according to Microsoft best practices (block size of 64K, stripe size of 128K, set raids 0+1 to separate log and data).. But some counters were completely out of the ordinary. On one of the more accessible databases (Approximately 400 GB – out of a total of almost 4 TB of user Databases), the disk readings were really quite scary. Many of these were way out of the standard norm. I do not like the things that show you the resolution automatically (as DETA), but in this case I needed some magic. PS - The server was with 30 stores online and more than 1500 simultaneous connections Then, I remembered to read about the missing indexes DMVs on SQLServerCentral.com. And I used the script posted there. The DMV Surprise When I set out to solve this problem, I focused on the avg_user_impact and user_seek columns because I was more interested in improving 40% of queries by a factor of 50 than 90% of queries by factors of just 2 or 3. Admittedly, once I was done with that I had a second job of reviewing the unused and little-used indexes, review queries, take off cursors etc., but that's an ongoing project, and not something I'm going to even mention here. I didn't bother with fill factor at this point (although it is very important) because I just didn't have time to analyze the load that these indexes would come under. To tell the truth I was expecting an improvement, just not one like this, as I am deeply skeptical of anything suggested automatically. Sure, I'll use the Index Tuning Wizard very occasionally, but I really prefer to manually review queries. In this case, because of those phenomenal improvements to the numbers, I decided to understand a little more about these DMV's, and I had some questions: • When a query which uses this index is run, is the user_seeks column really updated? • When a query which uses this index is run, is the last_user_seek column really updated? • When columns are suggested for the index, does the optimizer take into account selectivity, density and other statistical information to make that suggestion, or does it just look at the order of WHERE clauses? • Does the avg_user_impact column report the actual percentage of potential performance improvement Conclusion: Well, given that the predicted avg_user_impact was 98.71%, and I had 4471 ms brought down to1308 ms, the data from DMVs was pretty close. My last question was answered - The avg_total_user_cost is a 'real' number, or at least is very, very near the mark. This is possibly one of the better features included in SQL Server. Obviously these indexes are only suggested, and the system may become very slow if we create too many indexes on the table. Nor can we forget that these indexes will also be using disk space. So analyze the potential impact before creating them. One thing I can tell you for sure is that we can trust the data of the "Missing indexes" DMVs. I hope this fantastic feature can help you like it helped me. Finally in the Monday, the 3 stores and DC are up and the disk load 100% better than saturday. You can see the complete history with statistics and measures here in my Simple-Talk article: Reducing I/O with the 'Missing Indexes' DMVs
In one of my previous jobs, I worked for a company that provided consulting services to hospitals for healthcare reimbursements from the government. This was a very highly data-intensive operation, where we accepted incoming data from various sources including government agencies (Medicaid and Medicare), hospitals, and private insurance companies. Of course, all these sources had their own custom formats for data export, and these formats were neither consistent from one financial period to the next, nor were they compatible with each other. Just getting the data pulled out of these sources and imported into a relational database was a nightmare, but that is not the jest of this story. Once we had all the data imported, we processed it. Fortunately, the solution was designed to handle all business logic, processing and number crunching with the SQL Server database. Unfortunately, it had not been designed as one solution, but rather as bits and pieces that handled one specific thing, and were put together into the application as an afterthought. One of the most important parts of this solution was a module that attempted to match records from different sources. So say you have a record from an insurance company, we had to match it to various other data sources to find and verify the matching records in all places and ensure the claim was recognized by all parties involved. Except, the matching was not straightforward because sometimes it was a 1:1 match, sometimes 1:many, sometimes many:1, and worst of all, also many:many. This was further compounded by reversals, refunds, false charges, unrecognized charges, combined reversals (two initial charges combined and refunded as one amount), and various combinations of the above. The SQL stored procedure that did this was written a long time prior, and was chock full of code using "in", "not in", rerunnning the exact same selects multiple times (instead of storing results in temporary tables or variables), and not using any indexing at all! On a large project, this module alone would take 48-72 hours. Even allowing for the fact that it handled 80+ complicated business rules, that was a ridiculously long wait time. I rewrote this module from scratch using joins instead of "in" and "not in", added indexes, stored results in temp tables for reuse, and managed to get the run time for this process down to under ten minutes for the same sized projects. It was a very big accomplishment for me, and was recognized by the company's leaders as a very significant improvement in our processes.
Allow me to break the ice, and share one of my performance stories with you with respect to SQL Server. In this instance, the problem wasn't missing indexes or un-optimized code. It required a little out-of-the-box contemplation, but nonetheless was the cause of extremely slow performance, and the clients were not happy! It was quite a number of years ago at an e-commerce company that still was running its core business on v6.5. Even after v.7.0 has been out for a year with SP1 already released. After my assessment, I issued a DBA report that the entire business is at risk due to its lack of adaption of current technology. Not only would it fall behind its competition, they actually risked losing customers and having its server crash with no failover or HA protection. (I even built my own automated log shipping scripts, before it was part of the Enterprise package.) Sadly, what every true technologist wishes to avoid, there were office politics involved, and it came down to two camps. I was aligned with my manager, the CFO and CEO, while the rest of the hotshots before me aligned with the Chairman and CTO. I just wanted to ensure that from a database perspective, they would follow industry standards and best recommended practices. So, as clients relied on the system to return client data reports on-demand, this process became painfully slow and even time-out way too often. After some intense research and analysis, I saw that network packets were being dropped. After looking at the network protocols setup, I saw that ONLY named pipes were enabled. The protocols were a bit nebulous back then, and you had to decide at installation which protocols were installed. I have reading a bit on TCP\IP, and was convinced that this would be the appropriate route seeing that we tried almost everything else. We already knew it was a network communication issue, so I was so confident to try to enable TCP\IP. By default TCP/IP protocol is not enabled in v.6.5, and had to go through "SQL Setup" from the MSSQL Server v6.5 on the programs menu to install. I had to add the network library for TCP/IP and then after you must restart SQL services for the new settings to take effect. This process of course, needed full permission and sign off of the executive team, and only half agreed. Meanwhile, the client report generation suffered and suffered. My manager asked me to put together a short technical summary lending support to my theory, and why we should go with TCP\IP. Of course today, this is a no-brainer, but it wasn't really apparent back then, especially in the non-technical executive branch. The irony is the CTO was a very influential, yet closed minded person. Rather than work and embrace my theory for the greater good of the company, he wasn't going to let a young "snot-nosed" DBA interfere with his absolute technical know-how! I basically outlined in my summary, the technical info below: In a fast local area network (LAN) environment, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Sockets and Named Pipes clients are comparable in terms of performance. However, the performance difference between the TCP/IP Sockets and Named Pipes clients becomes apparent with slower networks, such as across wide area networks (WANs) or dial-up networks. This is because of the different ways the communication (IPC) mechanisms communicate between peers. For named pipes, network communications are typically more interactive and very chatty over the network. A peer does not send data until another peer asks for it using a read command. A network read typically involves a series of peek named pipes messages before it begins to read the data. These can be very costly in a slow network and cause excessive network traffic, which in turn affects other network clients. For TCP/IP Sockets, data transmissions are more streamlined and have less overhead. Data transmissions can also take advantage of TCP/IP Sockets performance enhancement mechanisms such as windowing, delayed acknowledgements, and so on, which can be very beneficial in a slow network. Depending on the type of applications, such performance differences can be significant. TCP/IP Sockets also support a backlog queue, which can provide a limited smoothing effect compared to named pipes that may lead to pipe busy errors when you are attempting to connect to SQL Server. In general, sockets are preferred in a slow LAN, WAN, or dial-up network, whereas named pipes can be a better choice when network speed is not the issue, as it offers more functionality, ease of use, and configuration options. I was approached by the CEO, who after speaking to my manager, decided to throw in his lot with the DBA (me :-), and arranged for an "executive meeting". During that time, I would go ahead and install and enable TCP\IP, which require a SQL Server service restart. The CEO was also the founder, and since it was his baby, he really had his heart in it, and the most invested. Now the mission began - one of espionage and intrigue. :-) Like any good spy movie to retrieve the "crown jewel" (We actually dubbed this operation "crown-jewel"), we cut the feed to the cameras, in this case, disable the monitoring system so there would be no alert generated when the SQL service briefly went down. A few minutes into the "executive" meeting, the CEO stepped out of the board room, to give the green light. I truly felt I was in the middle of a Mission Impossible film, and if I was, the CEOs final words would be, "Your Mission, should you choose to accept, is to install and configure TCP\IP, restart the service and re-enable the monitoring system. Once that's done, we will contact client X standing by to test the reports. As always, should you or any of your team be caught or killed, the CEO will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Your DBA career will self-destruct in 5-seconds…. Good Luck." Well, that's reassuring! But, I was determined not to let him down. But just in case, I had updated my resume. Anyway, I began to do the needy, and after all was said and done, the reports ran successfully in less than 30 seconds. This was down over 4 minutes and 30 seconds, from 5 minutes and change. Plus, after multiple tests, there were no network time-outs. Performance was significantly increased. Mission accomplished. Although the other side wasn't informed right away, they chalked it up to some "new" code released some 4 days before. Ha! The CEO knew the task was a success, and the clients happy as a clam. The point here is, sometimes, even a small configuration change can make the world of difference, but stubbornness and inflexibility can stand in the way of what seems to be common sense. Fortunately, it turned out ok, and I stayed a little while longer. The CTO still seemed to undermine me, and I eventually moved on. However, the CEO was grateful, and personally offered his highest recommendation to my next employer. We now know TCP\IP is the industry standard protocol used in today's SQL Server versions, especially in e-commerce and communication to remote clients over the internet. Now that you've read my performance story, let's see yours! Don't you guys and gals want to win a FREE iPad2?
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The mathematician Sophus Lie - It was the audacity of my thinking
"I am certain, absolutely certain that...these theories will be recognized as fundamental at some point in the future."
Sophus Lie said these words more than hundred years ago. We know now that he was right, absolutely right. The notions of "Lie groups" and "Lie algebras" are in the vocabulary of every mathematician and physicist today. Lie's theories are indispensable tools for understanding the physical laws of Nature.
In this biography Arild Stubhaug tells the story of Lie's life. Born in 1842 in the western part of Norway, he enrolled at the Royal Fredrik's University of Christiania (now Oslo) in 1859. Lie was a hard-working student, to whom second or third best was a personal defeat, hardly to be endured. After graduating second in his class in 1865, he left university disappointed. He did not know what would become of him; he had not found his "calling".
According to Stubhaug, in the following years Lie suffered from almost suicidal tendencies, but nevertheless decided to continue living. One way he coped with his depression was to go hiking. To him, these long hiking tours were a kind of therapy; they brought him ease and gave him back the will to live.
Gradually he became involved with the university once more, giving lectures on various topics - mathematics had still not become his vocation in life. Ludvig Sylow, one of his teachers from the university, who later made his own major contributions to mathematics, once said that he would never have guessed that young Lie would be one of the greatest minds of the century. However, Lie drifted gradually into the realm of mathematics, and by 1868 he realised "there was a Mathematician hidden inside me".
Lie started to read geometry, starting with Euclid's "Elements", and continuing with books describing a "new geometry". Non-Euclidean geometry was still in its infancy, and in the years to come Lie contributed significantly to this new branch of mathematics. In December 1968, he had one of his first breakthroughs as a scientist. His "Imaginary Theory" became his first scientific publication. It resulted in a travel scholarship - his first tour abroad - during the course of which he became one of the most renowned mathematicians in Europe. Stubhaug tells how Lie started this journey as a clever student and returned to Norway as a famous mathematician. The doctoral dissertation that followed resounded through Europe's mathematical communities.
Just a year after his dissertation Lie was appointed to a professorship in his motherland. He was a Professor in Christiania for almost 14 years. During this period he produced a steady stream of works. Apparently, his lectures were incredibly inspiring and extremely enlightening for the students.
In 1886, Lie moved to Leipzig with his wife and three children to take up a professorship. Leipzig was at the mathematicial heart of Europe, close to the greatest contemporary mathematicians of the time. He was a hard-working man, and Stubhaug tells how he drove himself to a nervous breakdown during his stay in Leipzig. His "beautiful mind" led him to more or less a state of paranoia, and a fear that other mathematicians would not properly recognise his wonderful mathematical ideas. After his nervous breakdown he was never really himself again - he would accuse other mathematicians of stealing his ideas, without properly referring to his works.
In the mid-1890's, Lie started to express a desire to return to Norway. Lie was a Norwegian at heart, and he greatly missed Norway's majestic scenery. In addition, Norway was on the brink of independence, and there were strong political forces at work that wanted Lie back in Christiania. However, it would be several years before he was offered a suitable position in Christiania, and he actually returned home. In 1898 Lie resigned his post in Leipzig and went back to his motherland.
Unfortunately, he did not have long to enjoy his return. Six months later, on February 18th 1899, he died of pernicious anaemia. It was a sad day for mathematics around the world.
Lie was dead, but his ideas were not. On the contrary, Lie's name will forever be written in the science textbooks, his ideas will be told and taught to generations and generations of scientists.
Stubhaug tells the story of the man behind the famous name. He provides us with a reference to Lie's life and time, and gives a complete bibliography of all Lie's published works in one of the appendices. For anybody that is interested and wants to learn more about Sophus Lie, this book is surely worth reading. Knowledge of mathematics is by no means a prerequisite; Stubhaug succeeds in painting a clear picture of this man's genius, while avoiding the mathematical details of his theories.
The French scholar Jean Dieudonne said,
"Lie theory is in the process of becoming the most important part of modern mathematics. Little by little it became obvious that the most unexpected theories, from arithmetic to quantum physics, came to encircle this Lie field like a gigantic axis."
- Book details:
- The mathematician Sophus Lie - It was the audacity of my thinking
- Arild Stubhaug
- Hardback - 555 pages
- Springer
About the reviewer
Guest reviewer Sigbjørn Hervik is a PhD student in the Gravitational and Relativity Group at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.


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Rusty Yates remarried Saturday in the church where the funeral for his five children was held and less than two days before his ex-wife's murder retrial was to begin.
Yates married Laura Arnold, 41, during a private ceremony attended by 100 people at Clear Lake Church of Christ, where they met.
The church minister said Yates chose to move on with his life while resisting temptation to pity himself or seek revenge on people who may have wronged him.
"It is easy to judge the actions of another, as though we know all the intricate details of their life story. Jesus has warned us against such judgments," minister Byron Fike said in his prepared statement. He took no questions.
Yates divorced Andrea Yates in March 2005, three years after she was sentenced to life in prison on two murder convictions for drowning her children in a bathtub. An appeals court overturned those convictions based on mistaken testimony by a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrists in her original trial testified Andrea Yates suffered from schizophrenia and postpartum depression, but disagreed over the severity of her illnesses and whether she knew her actions were wrong.
She is again pleading insanity at her retrial. A request to delay the trial until summer is due to be heard before the trial starts Monday.
Rusty Yates returned home from work in June 2001 to learn his wife had drowned their five children. Noah, John, Paul, Luke and Mary, ages 7 years to 6 months, were found laid out on a bed or in the bathtub.


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15 February 2015 | ||
19:00 | to | 23:00 |
meeting point calle Vallaresso
Sunday 15 February @ 7 p.m.
The real Venice can be seen from the water and the true Venice can be tasted through its food. With this event you will have the possibility to experience both.
The name, Lagoon Moonlight, is inspired by the reflection of the moon on the water of the lagoon, which can be seen up close during a ride on a gondola. The evening starts with a gondola tour of 30″ from the "stazio" (gondola station) of St. Marks (calle Vallaresso) through the Venetian canals and ends at Taverna La Fenice. There the guests will enjoy a refined meal catered by the chef of the restaurant whose philosophy is to select the best local ingredients to prepare dishes from the Venetian Lagoon's culinary tradition. During the four-course seated dinner the guests will enjoy a performance by our artists.
Dress Code: costume
If you need a costume visit the Atelier Tiepolo
Full program of the Venice Carnival in Costume™ 2015: www.meetingeurope.com


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Two drugs currently used to treat heroin and prescription painkiller addiction may work together to fight cocaine as well — without causing dependence themselves, according to a new study in rats.
Human Rights Watch: Hundreds of Thousands Still Tortured in Name of Drug Treatment
If we want to end human-rights abuses in drug-detention centers in Asia, we should start by addressing the abusive "treatment" practices being used in our own backyard
How Childhood Trauma May Make the Brain Vulnerable to Addiction, Depression
Childhood trauma has long been known to raise a child's odds of developing depression and addiction later on. Now, a small but intriguing new study links these risks to specific changes in the brain, finding that disruptions in …
Bogus Alcoholism Cure: Pay Up or We'll Tell Your Boss!
A Florida court orders more than $700,000 in restitution for victims of an online scam selling a phony cure for alcoholism
The Prescription Painkiller Experience: Less than a Third Say They Like It
Many people fear that mere exposure to prescription painkillers like Vicodin or OxyContin will set them down the road to addiction. But new research on the response to opioid medication suggests that most people don't …
Abuse-Proof OxyContin Pushes Addicts to Heroin and Other Opioids, Survey Finds
Abuse-deterrent reformulations of widely misused prescription painkillers may not be the "magic bullets" many hoped they would be in the battle against addiction
The Other Health Care Announcement: A Tool Kit for the World's Mentally Ill
While the Supreme Court was making health care news in Washington, voting to uphold the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, a smaller gathering at the United Nations was discussing another, completely non-binding document that could …
Addiction Treatment in America: Not Based in Science, Not Truly 'Medical'
Addiction is typically characterized as a disease by experts and government officials. Yet, unlike most known diseases, the treatment of addiction is not based on scientific evidence nor is it required to be provided by people …
Control Yourself! Inhibiting Physical Action Cuts Risky Gambling and Drinking
Want to gamble smarter, make less risky financial decisions or cut down on your drinking? Practice stopping yourself midway through a simple physical movement, new research suggests.
The Case of Cameron Douglas: Prison Is Not Rehab, Say Addiction Experts
An unusually harsh prison sentence handed down to the drug-addicted son of actor Michael Douglas has prompted addiction experts to indict the courts for ignoring the treatment needs of inmates.
DSM-5 Could Categorize 40% of College Students as Alcoholics
Most college binge drinkers and drug users don't develop lifelong problems. But new mental-health guidelines will label too many of them addicts and alcoholics.
Number of Babies Born Suffering from Drug Withdrawal Triples
The rate of babies born to mothers who use prescription painkillers during pregnancy has risen sharply over the last decade. Though the long-term effects of such drug exposure are uncertain, true harm can come of labeling these …
Can Addictive Behaviors Be Predicted in Preschool?
Children's behavior at age 3 offers some surprising clues about their risk of developing addictive behaviors like problem gambling or drug misuse in their 30s


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Saturday, February 24
A Curated Gallery of Smashing Fonts for Creative Designers
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"My Dearest Friend" is how she began nearly all her letters to her husband, John. I refer, of course, to Abigail Smith Adams, first Second Lady and second First Lady of the United States. Her famous correspondence with John Adams produced nearly 1,200 letters over a span of some 40 years, leaving us with a priceless record of early American life—from household routines to war and politics to expressions of personal worry and devotion. Although Abigail's was not the loveliest hand, I found it sure and expressive, as befitting her extraordinary sway and intelligence; it also carries a genuine flavor of the period. OpenType features include numerous ligatures, standard and contextual alternates, lining and old-style figures, cross-outs, ink blots, and complete Central/Eastern European alphabets.
Font Family: Abigail Adams Regular