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Are you struggling to make money with affiliate links on your blog?
I was too. (Even though this happened.) Let me explain:
I've been a part of the Rewardstyle affiliate program for years, but only started really using it in the summer of 2012. As I mentioned in the post linked above, when I started trying, I started seeing results. Small results for sure, but actual sales! I was thrilled, and felt I was definitely on the path to finally making those blogging bucks.
Then I hit a wall. The payment threshold for many affiliate networks (including Rs and SS) is $100, meaning until you hit that earnings mark, you get nada. Well, even though I had garnered more than $300 worth of commissions between July and December, I had been sitting on $97 for months. Waiting for more sales to close (which they often didn't!) was discouraging.
The payment threshold for many affiliate networks is $100, meaning until you hit that earnings mark, you get nada.
Fresh off my blogging New Year's resolutions, in mid-January I decided to try an experiment. I reopened my ShopSense program account, and started using their affiliate links in my content consistently. (I felt inspired after reading Grace's comment on this post.)
Here's what you need to know:
Rewardstyle is a commission-based program. This means you only earn money on sales that close. The commission rates are included with individual item listing (and differ by retailer), so you know exactly how much earning potential there is with each link from each retailer.
ShopSense is a pay-per-click program, meaning you earn a (slightly varying) amount from (quality) clicks on the links you provide. (Read more about that here.) The rate you are paid per click will vary between the retailers, and there's no way to know which ones pay more other than educated guessing from your analytics.
Note: There are lots of affiliate programs out there with different payment structures and different sign-up criteria, including ones outside the United States – so don't limit yourself to only the ones I'm mentioning.
Let's look at the numbers:
Here's where I'm going to be extremely transparent with you guys, and show you exactly what's been happening with my links. Keep in mind that my unique monthly views have been pretty consistent this whole time (around 6,000), so the data is applicable from month to month. First, let's look at November 2012, a month when I was using Rewardstyle links frequently:
The blue represents the clicks, and the pink shows my sales. In 30 days, I had 766 clicks, but only 6 sales, resulting in a commission total of about $49. So, my readers were really interested in what I was wearing or shopping for at the time, but not necessarily motivated to purchase the items for themselves.
Now let's look at my first month using ShopSense links, from mid-January to today:
I know this isn't a lot of money, and my little chart here is pretty inconsistent – but the results are clear and extremely positive. On days I posted links the lines went up, and when I didn't, they went down – simple as that. The same behavior from my readers resulted in dramatically different earnings for me. I hit the $100 threshold in about two weeks and my first check is already on it's way. The second isn't far behind.
What I've learned:
The key to hitting your stride with an affiliate program is to know your audience. Based on my analytics, I know that my readers are very inclined to click on the links I provide, but that hardly ever results in a sale, no matter the price point of the item. This tells me that my readers come to me for inspiration, but that's pretty much it.
What I don't have that some of the bigger bloggers do is the "hero worship" factor. Meaning, the traffic to their site is high enough and their influence is powerful enough to inspire a lot of sales, not just clicks. People want exactly what they have. For these bloggers, commission-based affiliate programs are really smart. (However, Some big blogs like Cupcakes & Cashmere use PPC as well or exclusively!)
I can't say for sure just yet, but I think that a PPC structure is a very smart strategy for us bloggers with small-to-medium followings who are still building up traffic as well as a trust level with our readers. For some, it may also be smart to incorporate a mix of both structures, like PPC for higher-price items less likely to be sold, and commission-based for more budget friendly items.
What's next?
I'm not done experimenting. Since I am almost completely convinced that pay-per-click is the best strategy for my blog, I want to try a different PPC program – like Beso for a month to compare. Different programs have different payouts, from 10 cents per click up to 90 cents. Can you imagine if I had earned nearly a dollar per click in November? I could have made almost $700…
Any questions? I'm an open book! Share your thoughts, questions and experiences with affiliate programs in the comments!
*This post is not a guarantee of results for anyone, or a guarantee of success using any one particular program. Every individual is responsible for researching and figuring out a strategy or a program that works best for their business.


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ATLANTA, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- An analysis indicates the incidence of U.S. hospital newborn male circumcision has slightly declined during the last decade, federal health officials say.
Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Nationwide Inpatient Sample from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Charge Data Master from SDIHealth, a private, non-governmental source, to estimate rates of newborn male circumcision.
Incidence of newborn male circumcision decreased from 62.5 percent in 1999 to 56.9 percent in 2008 in National Hospital Discharge Survey; from 63.5 percent in 1999 to 56.3 percent in 2008 in Nationwide Inpatient Sample and from 58.4 percent in 2001 to 54.7 percent in 2010 in Charge Data Master.
The study, published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, says the recent decreases followed increase during the previous 10-year period -- from 48.3 percent during 1988 to1991 to 61.1 percent during 1997 to 2000.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Blue Rodeo was formed in 1984 in Toronto by songwriters Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor as a vehicle for their own brand of Americana music, well before the term Americana was widely used. 29 years and 11 Juno Awards later, the band has released their 13th record, 'In Our Nature'. We will listen to every track this week on High Plains Morning, Monday through Friday from 9am to noon.


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Clarence Clemons, The Big Man In The E Street Band, Has Died
Clarence Clemons, saxophone player for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, has died of complications of a stroke. He was 69.
If the above seems abrupt, that's because Clemons's death was abrupt. Unlike when his bandmate, keyboard and glockenspiel player Danny Federici, succumbed to cancer in 2008, there was no time to prepare, little opportunity to make peace with the fact and say goodbye. Clemons's stroke hit on June 12; there was just enough time for fans of Lady Gaga (whose recent single "Edge Of Glory" featured his sax work) to make a heartfelt "get well soon" video, and then he was gone.
Clemons was, of course, Springsteen's main onstage foil and the first among equals in the E Street Band. No other E Streeter got such an explicit mention in any of Springsteen's songs as he did in "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," where everybody knows what happens when the change was made uptown. And with Born To Run, he was the only one to ever share focus with Springsteen on the cover of an album. Take a look again at that photo: Springsteen is leaning on him for support, sure, but he's also implicitly asking for his approval. He was the person that the Boss wanted to impress.
It was the same with Lady Gaga. Like her or loathe her, she's the biggest pop star in the world right now, and her video for "Edge Of Glory" (which premiered on Thursday, after Clemons's stroke but before he died) ditched the extravagant concepts, sets and armies of dancers in favor of just her and Clemons on an apartment stoop. He was the only one with whom she'd share the spotlight.
But the more affecting tribute may be the video Lady Gaga released on Wednesday collecting her fans' wishes for Clemons to make a speedy recovery. It was put together with astonishing speed, and watching it earlier this week was like being overwhelmed with an ever-increasing snowball of love. It was little more than one person after another offering their well-wishes from all over the world, and the longer you watched it, the more momentum it generated and the more wonderful it became. Now it may be unwatchable for more than a few seconds. The emotion is still overwhelming, but it now breaks your heart instead of warming it.
Lady Gaga's just the latest artist to introduce Clemons to a new generation. He also played with Jackson Browne (remember "You're A Friend Of Mine"?), Aretha Franklin, Gary U.S. Bonds, punk icon Jim Carroll and hair-metal titans Twisted Sister, among many others. More detailed tributes to his musicianship are sure to pour in over the next few days. I'll simply recommend putting on Born To Run in the meantime. Listen to Clemons bursting into his solo with the joy of unleashed freedom on the title track, hitting the hard-soul groove of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," blowing with uncommon grace on "Jungleland." And marvel at the final minute of "Thunder Road," one the most transcendent moments in all of rock and roll.
In the recent "Plan B" episode of 30 Rock, as Liz Lemon wonders if bring a writer makes her obsolete, she encounters "people whose professions are no longer a thing." One of them is someone, clearly modeled at least in part on Clemons, who "played dynamite saxophone solos in rock and roll songs." It's possible that Clemons was the last of his kind. It's certain that he can't be replaced.


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This lesson will be addressing how practice/business managers (or compliance offers) need to get their HIPAA house in order as HIPAA is now fully enforced and the government is not using kid gloves any more.
It will also address major changes under the Omnibus Rule, Trump administration, and any other applicable updates for 2022 and beyond.
There are an enormous amount of issues and risks for covered entities and business associates these days.
I will speak on specific experiences from over 18 years of experience in working as an outsourced compliance auditor, expert witness on multiple HIPAA cases, and thoroughly explain how patients are now able to get cash remedies for wrongful disclosures of private health information.
More importantly I will show you how to limit those risks by simply taking proactive steps and utilizing best practices.
Why should you Attend:
Omnibus has changed the HIPAA landscape for good!
This once rarely enforced law has changed and you need to know what's going on!
Protect your practice or business!
These day's trial attorney's pose a higher risk than the Federal government!
What changes under the Trump administration can we expect?
State laws are now in place increasing liability for patient remedies!
What factors might spurn a lawsuit or a HIPAA audit?are you doing these things?
Why are the Feds enforcing after all these years?
We will be discussing 2022 changes taking place in Washington with the Health and Human Services in regards to the enforcement of the HIPAA laws already on the books as well as some detailed discussions on the audit process and some current events regarding HIPAA cases (both in courtrooms and from live audits).
Areas Covered in the Session:


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


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"A time comes when silence is betrayal." — Martin Luther King
My heart is very heavy today as I read about the eight boys who were sexually assaulted by Gerald A. Sandusky in his home and in the locker rooms of the Penn State University campus. My soul deeply grieves to think that for more than 10 years the abuse was seen and known by others and overlooked.
I made myself read the Grand Jury report about Sandusky's alleged crimes and it was 23 pages of vile and inhuman behavior not only by the predator but by those who actually saw it, heard of it, or received reports about it across their desk.
Then to also learn that all these children were black deepens my sadness.
I am forced to ask some really hard questions.
Are black people that expendable?
Was the fact that they were black, poor and powerless the reason it was overlooked?
Is football, a school, and personal reputation so important that a 10-year-old black boy being raped in a bathroom can be covered up?
I had an idea that power was corrupt, but this is much more than simply corrupt. It is pure evil.
Last week, I watched Penn State students , upset over the firing of their beloved football Coach Joe Paterno, trash a campus with scant news coverage.
If a black neighborhood or campus was behaving in this way, it would lead every news program show known to man.
That it wasn't is further proof to the point that "Joe Pa" was bigger than life on that campus. The fact that he didn't ask questions, that it never came up again as a concern for him or that he simply turned his head away, is a travesty.
I keep hearing that Joe Paterno did what was legally correct. Yet there was nothing morally correct about his actions and silence.
Another question that I have is this: What is the difference between what Gerald Sandusky, Joe Paterno, Joe Miller, a wrestling coach who walked in on him on the floor with a boy, Tim Curley, Gary Shultz, and Graham Spanier did from sex trafficking?
Would a business that allows kids to be trafficked in its back room get shut down and its owner be prosecuted?
Penn State allowed this shady business to happen in its "store" and it's no different, is it? Oh yeah, it's millions and millions of dollars and 61 years of coaching football versus only a few black boys.
If any African American man you know was seen in the shower naked with a 10-year-old white boy, it would not take more than 15 minutes for him to be arrested.
Yet Sandusky's abuse — a white man sexually assaulting lack children — reportedly went on for 15 years.
If any black man you know was talking to a white woman about being in the shower with her son and admitting to "lathering him up and giving him a bear hug" he would be in prison faster than you can say "prosecute."
I am afraid to know what else goes unspoken and covered up by the powerful white men in our world who hold extreme power and influence.
What is covered up and who is expendable when money and power are threatened?
I am saddened today to know what can happen in our world.
I am saddened as well to see these families so victimized and the same laws that are supposed to protect them being used to protect people such as Paterno from being prosecuted.
Sandusky was arrested and charged, but his co-conspirators (and they surely are that) will go free to live their lives protected by the rule of Law.
And the victims?
Well, there is no moral law so I guess they just lose.
Leroy Barber is President of Mission Year, a national urban initiative introducing 18-29 year olds to missional and communal living for one year of their lives, and is CEO of FCS Urban Ministries. He is co-pastor of Community Life Church, and on the boards of CCDA and Word Made Flesh. Leroy is the author of New Neighbor: An Invitation to Join Beloved Community and Everyday Missions: How Ordinary People Can Change the World and was also chosen as a contributor to the groundbreaking book UnChristian. Leroy is married to Donna and together they have five children.


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CSIS Events:
Live in 18 hoursLive in 19 hoursLive in 1 dayLive in 1 dayLive in 2 daysLive in 2 days
Major Munitions Transfers from North Korea to Russia
Ammunition supplies have become critical in the Ukraine war. CSIS studied hundreds of commercially available satellite images since August 2023 on the continuing transfer of large quantities of munitions between North Korea and Russia.
Commentary by Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., Victor Cha, and Jennifer Jun — February 28, 2024
Secretary Raimondo: An Update on CHIPS Act Implementation
Transcript — February 26, 2024
Skirting the Shores: China's New High-Tech Research Ship Probes the Waters around Taiwan
Digital Report by Matthew P. Funaiole, Aidan Powers-Riggs, and Brian Hart — February 26, 2024
Food as the "Silent Weapon": Russia's Gains and Ukraine's Losses
Report by Caitlin Welsh and Joseph Glauber — February 29, 2024
The CommonHealth Live! with Dr. Vanessa Kerry and Minister Austin Demby
Podcast Episode — March 1, 2024
On China is a leading resource for policymakers confronting a new era of great power competition, with innovative research, diverse viewpoints, and cutting-edge multimedia from across CSIS.
Featured Event
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CSIS Appoints KKR's Henry McVey to Board of Trustees
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is pleased to announce that Henry McVey, CIO of KKR's Balance Sheet and Head of Global Macro and Asset Allocation, has been appointed to the CSIS Board of Trustees.
Press Release — February 28, 2024
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• simpatico •
Pronunciation: sim-pæ-ti-ko • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. Congenial, likable, agreeable, pleasant, easy to get along with. 2. Of like mind, compatible.
Notes: Simpatico comes to us as is, that is to say, without a derivational family. Some have used a feminine form, simpatica, as do the Italians when referring to women. However, since English does not maintain gender any more, Italian words tend to be used in their base form, the masculine. Bimbo is another example. A bimbo can only refer to a girl in English. Italians call a boy a bimbo; a girl is a bimba.
In Play: Today's word has two meanings that are very close to each other: "congenial" and "compatible". You may not even want to make the distinction. If you do, here is how you use the word in its first sense: "Harry Wormser-Goode isn't very simpatico: always making snide remarks and sneering at his officemates' best efforts." Here is the other sense of the word: "Molly Coddle is pleasant enough but not very simpatico: she never goes out for a glass of wine with the girls or invites anyone from the office over to her place."
Word History: Today's Good Word is either Spanish or Italian simpatico "sympathy". Italian and Spanish inherited this word from Late Latin sympathia "sympathy", which, in turn, picked it up from Greek sympatheia "sympathy". The Greek word started out as a compound sympathes "affected by similar feelings", literally "feeling with" from syn "(together) with" + pathos "feeling, emotions". English borrowed pathos "a sense of pity or sympathy" directly from ancient Greek. Pathetikos, the adjective accompanying pathos, meant "capable of emotions". However, somewhere along the way from Greek to English pathetic the meaning shifted to "causing an emotional reaction" and, finally, to "causing pity". (Susan Ardith's contributions of such excellent Good Words as today's make her very simpatico with all of us here at alphaDictionary.)
P.S. - Register for the Daily Good Word E-Mail! - You can get our daily Good Word sent directly to you via e-mail in either HTML or Text format. Go to our Registration Page to sign up today!


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We love our Voyage.
It's been voted the #1 Wooden Coaster on the Planet since it was one year old.
This year is Voyage's seventh season. (Gosh, and it seems like only yesterday we were potty training … oh, wait, I seem to be confusing work and home. Once again. Never mind.)
All of our coasters get some TLC during the fall and winter months. This year, Voyage gets a little something extra.
Why? Because we can.
And we want to.
Our president, Dan Koch, invited one of the top-notch engineers from The Gravity Group to take part in a video shoot just before Christmas. (The Gravity Group designed Voyage, along with Dan's late brother Will.)
This video includes details about this year's track work, plus an update about the Timberliner trains that have been designed for Voyage.
We hope this appeals to coaster enthusiasts and the general public alike.
Any questions? Please post them below and I'll try my best to get you answers. Comments are welcome as well.
Meanwhile, can't wait till opening day!


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More than three years after a deer in Prince Rupert gained celebrity status for getting a hammock caught between its antlers, another deer is turning heads locally – this time involving a bright, pink yoga ball.
The deer, which hasn't yet earned a nickname, was spotted earlier this week by Kayla Vickers and posted to social media.
Sgt. Tracy Walbauer, with BC Conservation Officer Service, told The Northern View that officers are aware of the deer roaming around the city.
"The ball will pop and he won't be as popular," Walbauer said.
In November 2017, Hammy the deer took social media by storm after it became tangled in a backyard hammock on 6th Avenue East. Police were called to rescue the deer and after an approximately 30 minute struggle he was freed with part of the hammock still attached to his antler.
READ MORE: Hammock deer has celebrity status
What ensued was a month-long chase, before Hammy was finally freed of the purple threads. But in that time, Hammy became an internet sensation, leading to people selling merchandise and the creation of a dedicated Facebook page.
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
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I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 and is packed with all sorts of interesting options for connecting peripherals to it. One particular feature that caught my eye was the option to connect to an X Server.
Aside from the really cool stuff regarding X11, I'm absolutely fascinated by the user interface of this exotic piece of hardware. It's quite utilitarian, but still has an interesting sense of beauty and focus. I'd love to play with this (even though I have no idea what this equipment actually does).


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Teen Anger Leads To Heart Disease
A happy child is more likely to grow into a healthy adult, according to a new study. A research team led by Karen A. Matthews, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, looked at children aged 8 to 10 and adolescents aged 15 to 17 and found that young people with the highest levels of anger and hostility were also more likely to become overweight or to develop insulin resistance (a precursor to type 2 diabetes), high blood pressure, or unhealthy cholesterol profiles in the three years following the study (Health Psychology, 2003, vol. 22, no. 3). These developments are collectively referred to as metabolic syndrome and can lead to adult cardiovascular disease.
Given this evidence, encouraging kids to destress may be as heart healthy as having them eat a plate of green veggies. Karen Thompson, a licensed clinical social worker and a child and adolescent psychotherapist in Indianapolis, Indiana, suggests that curbing teen anger begins in childhood. Parents can help children express emotions in appropriate ways by empathizing with their kids' negative feelings rather than trying to fix or correct the problem. Thompson says, "If a child gets called a name, saying 'I understand why that made you mad' is much more helpful than saying 'Don't let it bother you.'" Parents who do this can help their kids express anger and hostility in healthier ways, such as play or language in which young children make their dolls or toys act out angry scenarios. Parents can also teach adolescents the vocabulary to express anger, plus be willing to listen to these negative feelings. In this way, Thompson says young people can learn that "angry feelings are OK, but angry behavior isn't." Kids who adopt these types of coping strategies may reap the health benefits well beyond their playground years.
—Corinne McKay


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Potential essay questions for the final exam
1. How does antibiotic resistance occur? Pick one antibiotic from the list below, and describe how resistance to that drug occurs. Be sure to address what the target of the drug is, how evolution to antibiotic resistance occurs, and what human behaviors contribute to antibiotic resistance. (10 points)
• Vancomycin
• Penicillin
• Zithromax
• Tetracycline
• Ciprofloxacin
• Isoniazid
• Rifampin
• Augmentin (amoxicillin-clavulanic acid)
2. Ewald's hypothesis predicts that, in general, pathogens evolve towards reduced virulence in their primary host. Is this hypothesis more likely to be true or false, based on what you know about host-pathogen interactions? Be sure to cite specific relationships between at least two pathogens and their hosts.
3. Bacteria have lots of genes, but not all of them are expressed all the time. Pick two of the examples below, and explain how that bacteria changes its gene expression in changing circumstances. Be sure to specifically mention which genes are turned on and turned off, and why the differential regulation of these genes is advantageous to the bacteria in question.
Bacillus subtilis control of competence
Yersinia pestis control of virulence factor expression
Pseudomonas aeruginosa control of biofilm formation
4. Describe your independent research project and what you have learned from it addressing the following questions:
a. What was your hypothesis? What makes your hypothesis a scientific claim?
b. What evidence would have disproved your hypothesis?
c. Was your hypothesis disproven or supported, or do you lack enough information to say? If the latter, why?
d. If you had this experiment to do over again, how would you change it to provide better results?
e. What other research projects do your research results suggest?
Lab Report 3 Papers are due on Dec. 15th by noon!!!!
The Velveteen Rabbit
An online full-text version, with pictures, can be found here.
The video about viral replication we watched on Monday 11/24:
We'll talk more about viral replication on Monday 12/1.
On this site, students in BIO 252: Microbiology at Morningside College can post papers, lecture notes and other miscellany related to class. Peer review of research reports will occur via this site. Lecture notes can be shared among students by filling in the lecture note outlines posted here.
All work on this site is copyright of its original authors, as signed on the individual pages. All work is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Final lab report authorship clarification
Having graded a bunch of your second lab reports, I thought I should offer the following clarification about how many people are allowed to co-author a lab report. THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF AUTHORS ON ANY LAB REPORT ARE THREE. This policy is the one that's laid on in the syllabus section on lab reports and research projects.
Now, if you've already turned in a lab report (i.e., Lab Report 2) with more than 3 authors on it, don't worry about it. My reiterating this policy now isn't going to affect your grade on Lab Report 2. However, I won't accept final lab reports of your original research projects with more than 3 authors.
Of course, you're still allowed to (and encouraged to!) collaborate with students who are doing similar research projects. You may share protocols, data, and references. When you turn in your final lab report including your protocol and data & documentation, these sections (protocol and data/documentation) may be identical to those turned in by another group working on the same project. (i.e. You don't have to worry about "plagiarizing" another group's protocol if you gathered data together using the same protocol. You don't have to artificially reword your protocol to avoid charges of "plagiarism" or anything like that.) You just shouldn't have more than 3 authors on the lab report itself, and the lab reports should be independently written by the separate groups of 3 or fewer students turning them in.
If you share data/protocols/etc. with another group of students (who aren't co-authors on your final lab report) be sure to add an "Acknowledgements" section following the Discussion section but preceding the References section of your lab report. In this Acknowledgements section, mention the first and last names of people who helped you with this research and thank them specifically for what they helped you with. For instance, "We would like to thank Barbara Fegley for help with troubleshooting gram-staining techniques. We would like to thank Eric Elsinghorst for assistance with writing the research protocol." Also, list in your Acknowledgements section any people outside of our microbiology class who might have helped you with your project as well. This would include any off-campus researchers you e-mailed who e-mailed you back with tips, or outside people or organizations that helped you with data collection. A sample Acknowledgements section can be seen on the MRSA poster of Beau & Colin's research from last year, which is hanging on the bulletin board right outside the microbiology lab room.
Hope this helps. Have a happy Thanksgiving!
Note to students in BIO 252: When you post your original work (e.g., drafts of your research papers), you must sign the paper with the real first and last names of all of the contributing authors. You do not have to sign your additions or edits to others' papers or notes outlines, although you should put your name in the "short description of changes" box below the main editing box whenever you do edit a page.
Links to cited journal articles should be provided within the text of your posted research papers. For this reason, I strongly recommend that you cite only open-access journals so that all of your readers are able to follow your links.


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Global Finance presents the winners of its awards for the World's Best Islamic Financial Insititutions 2013.
With Islamic banking assets predicted to pass the $1.1 trillion mark in 2012 and Islamic finance growing at a much faster pace than conventional banking in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, shariah-compliant banks are at a turning point. The difference is striking: Islamic finance boasts a five-year compound annual growth rate of 20%, versus less than 9% for other types of banking. Malaysia, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and MENA regions are still the most dominant centers when it comes to Islamic dealmaking and capital markets. But even within the GCC region, where Islamic finance is fairly well established in markets such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE, some countries—like Oman—only introduced legislation permitting Islamic financing in 2012.
In North Africa there is optimism that the Arab Spring will give birth not only to a new generation of more democratic political leaders but also to new forms of shariah-compliant financial services. However, the passion for ethical financial services is not necessarily matched by the regulatory resolve in these countries for creating a level playing field, which is necessary for Islamic finance to flourish alongside conventional financial services.
The same is also true in Europe, where despite a sovereign debt crisis and slowing economic growth, markets outside the UK still flirt with Islamic banking but struggle to take the next steps forward to make it a reality. One positive sign is that talk of a sovereign sukuk by the UK Treasury resurfaced again this year.
Last year was certainly the year of sovereign sukuk, with Malaysia, Turkey and Qatar all launching significant deals. HSBC predicts that 2013 will be another landmark year for sukuk issuance, particularly in the Gulf markets, as borrowing costs decline. While sukuk is the most popular Islamic financial instrument, the capacity of Islamic banks to support highly complex structured deals—whether on a syndicated or stand-alone basis—is also gaining ground. Some of this year's winners in Global Finance 's Islamic Financial Institutions Awards participated in landmark deals demonstrating their balance-sheet capacity to hold their own against conventional counterparts and to support new and innovative Islamic financial structures leveraging a wide range of assets. Challenges remain, however. For Islamic finance to truly flourish and spread to new markets, it needs to enjoy wider appeal among the non-Muslim community. Islamic financial institutions still have considerable work to do to reduce their cost-to-income ratios in order to become more profitable and compete against conventional financial institutions. In the area of takaful (Islamic insurance), shariah-compliant providers, particularly in the GCC region, face a much higher cost base and lower levels of profitability than conventional insurers, despite the fact that takaful is growing at a faster pace than conventional insurance in some of these markets.
Risk management and compliance remain a weakness of the industry as Islamic financial institutions align themselves with international standards such as Basel III. A number of Islamic banks are also overexposed to real estate, and the quest to leverage other types of assets outside this sector continues.
The sixth annual Global Finance Islamic Financial Institutions Awards honor the leading shariah-compliant firms in the regions, countries and product areas in which Islamic banking has an established or growing presence. The awards criteria incorporated a range of subjective and objective factors, including customer service, growth in assets, profitability, geographic reach, strategic relationships, new business development, innovation in products and banks' financial stability.
The selected winners represent best-in-class Islamic financial institutions that not only stand out in terms of financial performance, profitability, market share and assets but also continue to innovate and strive for greater operational efficiency through enhanced risk management and technology. They are leaders in their home markets who are also expanding globally in order to drive growth and sustain future profitability.


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When I stepped into the room, I was overcome with the sweet fragrance. I actually smelled it before I saw it, walking up the stairs. The first thing I thought of was tea. Tea with honey, of course. Then my mind wandered to exotic travels, steaming hot summers, and spices. I was reminded of nature, damp winters, feather comforters, biscuits (the English kind), and Christmas.
In short, I felt good when I stood in the Laib Wax Room. I even felt warmer being in that bright, small space.
I read the wall label only after leaving the room and discovered that the artist, Wolfgang Laib, was profoundly influenced by his experiences in India and Southeast Asia. My initial thoughts tell me that my experience of the room was also influenced by travels abroad and memories that remain special.
Have you been to see the Laib Wax Room yet? What did it make you think of?
Jane Clifford, Marketing Intern


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I am celebrating 2010 by transcending from good to great. I will be a great sister, daughter, girlfriend, friend, employee. I will be a great writer, photographer, artist, runner, yogi. I will climb great mountains and bike great distances. I will learn new sports, read great books, spend time giggling and snorting with friends and family. I will put my ego aside to instead be curious and appreciate the adventures ahead.
I will take time this year to cherish those I love, and the gift of this time.
Wishing you a year of radical happiness,


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The UAB Comprehensive Cancer, Supportive Care and Survivorship Clinic and the Division of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology will be holding its first communitywide conference for young cancer survivors ages 15-39. The event will be from 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Saturday, March 15, at the Wallace Tumor Institute, 1824 Sixth Ave South.
Leonard Sender, M.D., chairman of Stupid Cancer, the largest adolescent and young adult cancer survivor's advocacy group in the United States, will be the featured keynote speaker. He is also chief of the pediatric oncology division at Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California at Irvine.
"Even with the tremendous successes in pediatric oncology, more and more adolescents and young adults are surviving cancer but living with long-term side effects and issues," said Teri W. Hoenemeyer, director of education and supportive services at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Because of what they have been through, they may face feelings of social isolation, or even have some lifestyle challenges. If the conference is successful, we hope the outcome will be a social network for young cancer survivors in Birmingham."
Topics and workshops at the conference include: treatment effects, preserving fertility, honest talk about social relationships, guided meditation from the yoga mat, a drumming circle, understanding good nutrition and exercise, and a panel discussion to share experiences and network.
For more information contact Teri Hoenemeyer at 205-934-5772 or email@example.com.


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The world petfood market is worth US$65.8 billion and registered 3.9% growth over 2010, says a recent report by the Italian Pet Food and Pet Care Association (ASSALCO). The spread of a different attitude towards pets, together with increasing international urbanization, has contributed significantly to the increase in the number of pet owners, in turn driving greater demand for petfoods across various regions. And this trend shows no signs of stopping, even during worldwide economic uncertainty. The global petfood market is currently forecast to reach US$95.7 billion in 2017.
Let's take a closer look at petfood markets in different regions and find out who's growing, who's slowing and who's emerging around the world. For numerical data, please refer to Figures 1 and 2 for Euromonitor International's take on global petfood sales and a breakdown of global value sales of petfood by region.
Market under the microscope: Latin America
According to Euromonitor International, Latin America's pet care market continues to perform well, with retail values growing faster than any other region. By 2016, Brazil will usurp Japan as the world's second-largest pet care market, behind only the US. Retail prospects remain strong, as urbanization continues, disposable incomes rise and more consumers turn to pets for companionship. As Latin Americans move from pet ownership to pet "parenthood," opportunities will arise for those manufacturers savvy enough to seize them.
Argentina was Latin America's fastest-growing pet market from 2006–2011 (see Figure 4), driven by strong consumer spending, high grain prices and a growing demand for goods from Brazil, but was hindered by inflation in the region. Dog food accounts for 73% of Argentinean petfood retail values, with only 31% of pet owners feeding commercial petfoods, which means there is still significant room for potential growth. Although cat treats remains a niche category across the Latin American region in absolute terms, sales are growing strongly. For instance, Chile is the world's fastest-growing market for cat treats, achieving impressive 22% constant value growth in its second year. In dog treats, Argentina is the world's fastest-growing market, with year-on-year gains of 21% expected in 2012.
Market under the microscope: Western Europe
According to the 2012 Assalco-Zoomark Report on the Feeding and Care of Pets in 2011, the Italian petfood market grew both in turnover and in volume purchased, remaining one of the few product sectors in that region which has experienced growth during the European economic crisis. A total of €1.6 million (US$1.97 million) with a corresponding 536,900 tons of dog food and cat food saturated the Italian market during that time. This is an overall 2.1% growth in value terms in the dog and cat food segment. To compare, in Europe (taking into consideration Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands), sales have increased in value terms, though to a limited extent: 1.6% in 2011, according to the report. In Western Europe, where pet care is expected to perform sluggishly overall, the cat treats category is expected to post 5% constant value growth in 2012. Germany leads global spending in pets, with US$44 per cat-owning household currently spent on treats.
There continues to be a moderate increase in dog and cat food sales volumes in Italy which in 2011 led to a 0.5% increase for distribution channels. "Italians now seem aware of the importance of a healthy and proper diet for their animals' well-being, and will continue to feed them kibbles and canned foods despite economic difficulties," concludes the report. The data also suggests a growing demand for innovative products in the premium and superpremium brackets, with specialization in functional and therapeutic foods and products characterized by leading-edge packaging and small sizes in both dry dog food and wet cat food.
Market under the microscope: Asia Pacific
According to Euromonitor International (see Figure 3), the Asia Pacific region is growing in some places (India, Indonesia, Thailand) and maturing in others (Japan). From 2010–2011, cat food and dog food declined in volume (down 4.75% and 2.45%, respectively) across the region, but sales of petfood continued to increase (3.27% in cat food and 4.16% in dog food).
Excluding Japan, specific retail markets experienced significant growth in 2006–2011, including a growth rate of 168% in Internet retailing, 118% in pet superstores and 63% in supermarket and hypermarket channels. Countries like Thailand, Taiwan and Malaysia, according to Euromonitor International, can all sustain a premium products market due to increased consumer interest and relatively stable mid-range incomes.


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Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - Michael Emerson has played a serial killer, a mysterious, villainous Island leader and currently stars as a billionaire computer genius on "Person of Interest." But he says playing the romantic interest for his real life wife has been his most unsettling role.
Emerson plays the off-beat Harold Finch in "Person of Interest," which airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. Eastern. His wife Carrie Preston has a recurring role as Finch's former fiance, who believes he is dead.
The couple has acted together in a few independent films and Preston even played Emerson's mother in an episode of ABC's "Lost," but this was their first romantic pairing. This season even showed the characters' first kiss.
"Neither of us are the kind to get a lot romantic work in front of the camera so for us to get a big old languid first kiss with music underneath it and everything _ that's a first in my career," he said.
Emerson said having his wife play his love interest can be tricky: "It's a little hard to turn off her wife-ness to me to make her just this other character."
Still, the Emmy-winning actor said he's happy to have his better half on set _ even though he didn't help get her there. "Maybe Jonah (writer Jonathan Nolan) called me on the phone and said, Would you have a problem if we asked your wife to play a character that we're working on?' And I said,
No.' That's how much I politicked to get her the part. I was completely unaware of it."
Preston, who also appears in "True Blood" and "The Good Wife," also found working with him a little strange but that nothing was more bizarre for them than watching the kiss on TV.
"We both sat and watched it together at home on the sofa and we got all kind of giggly and shy about it. It was like we didn't know how to look at each other," he said. "It's like, `Oh God, there we are. We're kissing.'"
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)


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Jan 12, 2011 | |
Nanofilters for molecule selection by size and substance |
(Nanowerk News) Separating molecules is an important part of many manufacturing and testing processes, including pharmaceutical production and some biomedical tests. One way of carrying out such separation is by using nanofilters — materials with holes of a precisely controlled tiny diameter, to allow molecules up to that size to pass through while blocking any that are larger. But a new system devised by researchers at MIT could add an important new capability: a way to selectively filter out molecules of the same size that have different chemical properties. | |
Karen Gleason, an MIT professor of chemical engineering and associate dean of engineering for research, and postdoctoral fellow Ayse Asatekin described the process in a paper published this month in the journal Nano Letters. | |
Karen Gleason holds a filter that can selectively remove molecules of the same size that have different chemical properties. (Photo: Patrick Gillooly) | |
This is "a fundamentally different way" of separating molecules, Gleason says. "People usually think of size as being the defining factor," but by making the pores in the filter small enough so that there is a significant chemical interaction between the pore walls and the molecules passing through them, it becomes possible to discriminate according to other characteristics, she explains. In this case, the selection was based on the molecules' affinity for water. Because the walls of the pores were hydrophobic (water repelling), other hydrophobic molecules were more easily drawn to the pores and propelled through them than were other, less hydrophobic molecules. | |
In living organisms, cell walls routinely perform this kind of chemical separation, letting certain specific kinds of molecules — for example, nutrients, enzymes or signaling molecules — pass freely through pores in a cell membrane, while blocking all others. But this is the first time, Asatekin says, that such chemical separation has been demonstrated in a synthetic membrane. | |
Many biological molecules that are similar in size yet have very different functions or properties, so the ability to separate them efficiently could be important. In this initial proof-of-concept demonstration, the molecules selected were two dyes, chosen because of their similar size and ease of detection. Using a polycarbonate membrane (a type of plastic) treated with a vapor-deposited layer of another polymer, the researchers were able to separate the two dyes very effectively, with more than 200 times more of one type passing through than the other. The coating process they used not only adds the capability for discriminating between molecules based on their differing affinities for water, but by coating the insides of tube-like pores in the material it also provides a way of creating extremely small pores of uniform size — much smaller than can be produced by conventional methods. | |
Joerg Lahann, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan who was not involved in this work, says that the team's ability to produce tiny, uniform pores smaller than 10 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across is itself a significant accomplishment that solves a major problem in existing nanoseparation technology. | |
To test how the system works, the team tried making two different kinds of pores — some that were uniformly sized tubes, others that had a narrow bottleneck at one point and then widened out. The uniform cylinders were much more effective, demonstrating that the key factor is the interaction of the molecules with the wall of the pore over its entire length, which in this case was about 4,000 times the width. | |
In pharmaceutical manufacturing, many processes involve chemical reactions in which both the reactants and the chemical being produced are very similar in molecular size, so being able to separate the two efficiently could be a significant advance in allowing large-throughput processing instead of small-batch production as is done currently, Asatekin says. | |
In addition to possible applications in drug manufacturing, such membranes could be important for the detection of biologically significant molecules. For example, the U.S. military, which funded this research through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology, is interested in their possible use in detectors that could identify a chemical marker the body produces when an inflammatory response is triggered, which could be a way of quickly revealing that the body had been exposed to a toxin even without knowing what the toxin was. | |
As a next step, Asatekin and Gleason plan to try the technique to separate biomolecules that are of real relevance to biological processes, to demonstrate that it works for materials that would be of interest for actual applications. | |
Professor Mathias Ulbricht, chair of technical chemistry at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, calls this a "powerful experimental demonstration" of a new technique that he says holds great promise for practical applications. | |
"This study opens a new avenue for truly 'tailored' nanoporous membranes with different selectivities than those of traditional membranes," he says. "More experimental work toward preparation of membranes with varied structure and other separation experiments are to be done. However, I am optimistic that the promising prospects can be demonstrated practically in such follow-up studies." |
Source: MIT |


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Stress isn't just a problem for humans; your pet can experience the negative effects too. Illness, changes in the usual routine or the death of another pet can lead to an increase in your pet's anxiety level. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to help your furry friend relax. Signs of Stress Your
Read more


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According to the Star-Telegram.com, the Dallas Mavericks are close to signing San Antonio Spurs' free-agent, Ian Mahinmi:
The Dallas Mavericks are close to signing former San Antonio Spurs center Ian Mahinmi, NBA sources said Sunday.
Mahinmi, 25, is a 6-foot-11 Frenchman who played 26 games for the Spurs last season and is an unrestricted free agent. He averaged 3.9 points and two rebounds in six minutes per game. Several NBA sources said he's ready to make a significant improvement.
With the Spurs re-signing Matt Bonner and Brazilian center, Tiago Splitter, coming to the team, not to mention other big-men such as Tim Duncan, DeJuan Blair and Antonio McDyess on the roster, Mahinmi seems to be the odd big-man out.
Also, Mahinmi never could get on time on the court whether it be due to injuries or simply falling out of the rotation. Perhaps now he will be able to get significant time on the floor and show what he can do.
According to ESPN, the Mavericks and Mahinmi have agreed to a two-year deal:
The Dallas Mavericks, seeking youth and front-line help, have agreed in principle to a two-year deal with 6-foot-11 project Ian Mahinmi, a source with knowledge of the team said Monday.
Mahinmi, 23, averaged 3.9 points and 2.0 rebounds in 26 games for the San Antonio Spurs last season. The French center played briefly in two games against the Mavericks in their first-round playoff series. According to the source, the deal is believed to be for the bi-annual exception of about $2 million per season. The second year is a team option.


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The new University-wide coalition announced last month to address high-risk alcohol use among undergraduates has added eight more students to its ranks, begun identifying focus groups with which it hopes to meet and set the dates for three workshops in February.
The coalition has been charged by the Healthier Princeton Advisory Board with taking a comprehensive look at issues related to high-risk alcohol use. Made up mostly of students but also including faculty and staff, the group will gather information from a variety of sources over the next few months and produce a draft comprehensive strategic plan by May.
The coalition's formation was announced Nov. 28 following several weeks of meetings by a planning group established by the Healthier Princeton Advisory Board to define the group's goals and create a roadmap for moving forward.
Many members of the planning group are continuing to serve as members of the coalition, including co-chairs Sanjeev Kulkarni, professor of electrical engineering and master of Butler College, and Agatha Offorjebe, a junior majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology.
Other returning members are: undergraduates Daniel DeGeorge, Esther Lee and William Scharf; graduate student Tanya De Mello; Joshua Rabinowitz, assistant professor of chemistry and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics; Gina Baral, director of health promotion and wellness services at University Health Services; Amy Campbell, special assistant to the vice president for campus life, who is serving as project manager; Janet Finnie, interim director of University Health Services; Steven Healy, director of public safety; and Hilary Herbold, associate dean of undergraduate students.
The new student members joining the coalition were nominated by student groups or by themselves and chosen by the group's leadership. They are undergraduates Chloe Angyal, John Baker, Elizabeth Dilday, Laurie Frey, Elizabet Sucuyan, Chris Chandler and Alex Cantwell and graduate student Kellam Conover. In addition, women's soccer coach Julie Shackford is a new member of the coalition.
The group has determined that the strategic plan will be informed by five elements: the work of the planning group; data collected about Princeton; best practices at other colleges and universities; stakeholder meetings with campus and community partners; and three themed workshops open to the entire community.
With the first two elements in hand, the coalition has begun working to identify best practices at other institutions and to gather information about them. In addition, the coalition has started to identify the stakeholder groups with which it hopes to meet in January. Kulkarni, Offorjebe and Campbell will lead these sessions, explaining the themes for the February workshops and encouraging participation in them by members of the stakeholder groups. They plan to return to these groups after the workshops to use them as a sounding board for emerging ideas from the first draft of the report.
The workshops are set for Fridays, Feb. 15, 22 and 29. They likely will begin at lunchtime and run through mid-afternoon. Each will feature a speaker to address the specific theme, and then include break-out sessions to encourage small-group discussion. Reports will be written on the break-out sessions.
The themes proposed for the workshops are: Feb. 15 -- reasons and motivations for high-risk drinking; Feb. 22 -- structures that promote high-risk drinking; Feb. 29 -- responsibilities of students to address high-risk drinking.
The coalition is expected to present a draft strategic plan at the May 9 meeting of the Healthier Princeton Advisory Board. The coalition is seeking to achieve several specific goals with the plan:
- Promote a culture in which undergraduate students who choose to drink alcohol do so responsibly in a safe social environment and make decisions about their use of alcohol free from unhealthy peer influence.
- Promote the development of and encourage students to participate in social activities that are not centered around high-risk drinking.
- Encourage students to develop healthy behaviors with respect to alcohol that will continue beyond their years at Princeton University.
- Support policies and processes that hold individuals and student groups accountable for their actions with respect to alcohol use and that address problematic alcohol use consistently and effectively.
- Foster a culture in which students treat both their academic and social lives with a high level of maturity, reflecting high community standards.
Those who wish to contact the alcohol coalition or provide input on its work may do so by e-mailing firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Health Sciences (HS) degree programs consist of open enrollment courses (general education and division specific) and program specific courses with limited enrollment. The open enrollment courses may be taken prior to entry into the limited enrollment courses. The limited enrollment courses are offered during the technical portion of the program that includes clinical, practicum, or professional practice experience.
The technical section of a program has restrictions on the number of students that may start the limited enrollment courses each term (or year), based on space availability and accreditor guidelines, i.e., objective quantitative factors. As a result of this limited class size, there may be a waiting period between completion of the prerequisites and other program requirements for entry into the limited enrollment courses, and the start of those courses. This waiting period varies by program, and it is recommended that students use this time to prepare for the rigorous coursework ahead. Suggestions include taking additional classes needed for graduation and planning for the financial and time obligations that are associated with completion of the program.
The Physical Therapist Assistant, Respiratory Care and Veterinary Technology programs have instituted a competitive selection process for entry to the limited enrollment/restricted courses. Additional information on the process can be found at the Program Specific Information link on the department's webpage.
For information regarding program specific requirements, or to discuss making the most of any waiting period, please contact the program's department office or view the program specific information packets available on each department page.


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The boogaloo is, or was, one of the thousand dances the land was full of in the 1960s, enumerated in inventory songs such as James Brown's "There Was a Time" and the Isley Brothers' "Nobody But Me": the skate, the swim, the pony, the monkey, the camelwalk, the shing-a-ling. Arthur Kempton notes that it made its debut as the title of a million-selling but faintly remembered 1965 release by the Chicago duo Tom and Jerrio, a song that launched two major catch phrases of the era, "sock it to me" and "let it all hang out." The boogaloo outlasted many of its competitor dances, or at least its name did, even making the transition into Spanglish as bugalú.
Somewhere along the line, perhaps around the time most people forgot its steps, the name metamorphosed into a sweeping term that could encompass almost all of African-American popular music, or at least everything that has arisen since World War II. The names of styles, which embody novelty, date more quickly than the substance they describe. "Soul" now sounds antique; "R&B" can be applied to the works of Wynonie Harris in the late 1940s, or to those of Mary J. Blige fifty years later, but not much in between. But because "boogaloo" is a term transmitted more often orally than in writing, it has enjoyed an immunity to the flux of fashion.
Boogaloo is therefore an exactly apposite title for Arthur Kempton's book, which is a panoramic critical survey of black popular music over some seventy-five years, and which emphasizes the continuities that underlie fashion cycles. There is no book quite like it. The story it tells has been parceled out in genre studies and recording-industry histories, and in the as-told-to autobiographies of individual performers, but attempts at a broader synthesis have been few. Moreover, Kempton has chosen to tell the story as a multiple or sequential biography, a form which is most familiar from Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, as well as from Part of Our Time, by Arthur Kempton's late father, Murray.
The form allows for an intimacy not available to other sorts of historiography, and when the biographies are sequential, as is primarily the case in this book, it emphasizes genealog-ical connections and currents of influence. As in a quattrocento portrait, each subject stands in relief against the broad and teeming landscape of his or her time, figure and ground each illuminating the other. In such a work the choice of biographical subjects may be obvious, as it generally was in Wilson's study of the development of socialism, the shape of which was determined by the impact of the books written by its protagonists. Kempton, however, is faced with a much more diffuse history, especially in its early stages, and he has made subtle choices that may not immediately appear inevitable but soon prove convincing.
He might, for example, have begun his story with W.C. Handy, or Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Louis Armstrong (although that would have turned the narrative in the direction of jazz, which is another story). Instead he starts off with Thomas A. Dorsey, a figure at once so towering and so emblematic that his being not quite a household name, at least in white America, is itself revealing. Dorsey grew up in Atlanta, left school at fourteen, learned to play piano by studying the musicians in vaudeville theaters and taught himself to read and write music from books, then made his way to Chicago, where he would spend the rest of his long life (he died in 1993 at ninety-four). As a rough, down-home, gutbucket pianist, he found himself beneath notice in the national capital of black musical sophistication, the city to which the mainstream of New Orleans jazz had emigrated en masse just before the First World War. It so happened, though, that in 1920, the year after he settled permanently in Chicago, a white record company was finally persuaded to issue an actual blues record by a black singer, Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues." It proved a sensation, selling more copies than it was thought the Aframerican market could bear. Dorsey, a keen student of trends, suddenly knew where his niche lay, and he copyrighted his first song that same year.
Soon, however, he underwent a nervous collapse, and then a conversion experience under the influence of the most electrifying of the era's singing preachers, the Reverend A.W. Nix. It was to be the first of three journeys down the Damascus road for Dorsey, but numbers one and two were cut short by the exigencies of material existence. In his first relapse he became writer, arranger, director, and accompanist for the great Ma Rainey, who had invented most aspects of the urban or vaudeville blues style, although she had been performing for over twenty years and had never cut a record. In the mid-1920s, however, she was in demand because of the overwhelming success of her epigone Bessie Smith (who, by the cruel arithmetic of the time, made a million dollars for her record company in ten years and was compensated a total of $28,575).
Dorsey was happy working for Rainey, until he contracted a "wasting illness" that consumed two years. Another conversion set him on his feet, but once again poverty intervened. This time relief arrived in the form of his friend Hudson Whitaker, who had some words for a song. Dorsey wrote the music; they called it "Tight Like That." As Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, the two recorded it the next day. It was a huge hit. Dorsey and Whitaker had just invented hokum, a breezy offshoot of the blues noted especially for its double-entendre lyrics, and singly or as the Famous Hokum Boys they made scores of records. But the profits—or whatever portion was left after recording executives had skimmed the cream—were vaporized by the 1929 Crash. It was time for conversion number three.
That one took, because Dorsey finally figured out how to make religion pay. In the 1920s and 1930s the division between middle-class Northern Negroes and their poor Southern brethren was tangibly expressed in their respective choices of church music. The Northerners were embarrassed by the shouting and testifying and clapping and foot-patting, the raw emotional intensity of the sanctified churches in the old country. Instead they stressed decorum and reserve and limited the sacred repertoire to works of European origin. But at the time the big churches in Chicago were faced with an influx of parishioners from the South, and they were not to be appeased with "Ave Maria." Dorsey got his foot in the door by organizing gospel choruses, which appealed to the new congregants' tastes and their need for participatory worship, while satisfying the ministers' desire for control:
Dorsey saw people worked on from stages and from pulpits and saw no distinction. Dorsey understood church as theater and employed the same techniques in both. "Everything's a show," he said, "but you got to know how to work your show."
From there he went on to flourish both as a songwriter—"Take My Hand, Precious Lord" became an undying standard of the black church, while "Peace in the Valley" did the same for its white counterpart—and as an impresario. The many careers he launched and at least initially molded included that of gospel's great crossover star Mahalia Jackson ("broadcast so often into so many living rooms, she became like an ambassador to suburban America from its kitchen help") and, through her, the young Aretha Franklin.
Dorsey can be said to have created gospel music, still a redoubtable force both as an element of worship and as a commercial entity. At the same time, his early vacillations between sacred and profane set the tone for much of the black (and, to a lesser extent, the white) pop music of the following several decades. The struggle between the narrow path and the tenderloin seems—among Western nations—peculiar to America, where freethinking is seldom considered an option; the dramatic polar swings in the careers of such pop figures as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis enacted a relentless combat between halves of a personality that was undoubtedly shared by many of their listeners. But gospel created its own renegades, the first and best-known example being Ray Charles, who galvanized audiences beginning in the mid-1950s by taking nearly everything specific to gospel—the song form and the vocal style and the ragged, crying, handkerchief-waving passion—and applying it to strictly carnal ends. Charles had the arrogance to be the first, but the idea had just been waiting for somebody to pick it up; the erotic had always been barely draped by gospel's robes.
An important subspecies of gospel was the male quartet, which evolved in mid-century from the well-behaved barbershop sound of sundry jubilee ensembles to the wild cries of outfits such as the Fairfield Four, the Pilgrim Travelers, the Sensational Nightingales, and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Julius Cheeks of the Nightingales and Archie Brownlee of the Blind Boys, as well as Claude Jeter of the gossamer Swan Silvertones, were particularly seminal—you can hear Cheeks in Wilson Pickett, Brownlee in James Brown, Jeter in Al Green. Doo-wop, which arguably began in 1948 with "It's Too Soon to Know," by Sonny Til and the Orioles, was a secular, street-corner application of gospel- quartet dynamics.
Kempton's second major subject, Sam Cooke, emerged from quartet culture and made himself into a bridge, not just between sacred and profane but between the black and white nations, between the "chitlin circuit" and the Copacabana. Cooke was five years old when his family moved to Chicago from Mississippi; his father had been simultaneously pastor of three churches and a houseboy on a plantation. As a boy Cooke sang on the street for spare change, then started a teenage gospel quartet called the Highway QCs, then stepped into the lead of a major established outfit, the Soul Stirrers. He must have seemed like something of a changeling, an emissary from some future realm of showbiz: preternaturally boyish, clean-cut, light-voiced.
Cooke drew crowds, specifically teenage girls, and that is why he was hired. His style severely contrasted with that of his fellows, whose commitment to transporting their audiences was so complete that they nightly worked themselves into a lather and shredded their voices. When the silken Claude Jeter sang hard, for example, he sounded, Kempton writes, like
a man pushing himself as close as he can get to the edge he knows he might fall from. When Cooke was called upon to rise to such occasions, he skirted the brink.
This is not to say that Cooke wasn't a brilliant singer and stylist; he was simply cut out for a different department of the trade, for all that he traveled endlessly and uncomplainingly from town to town in sedans crowded with big men, eating bologna sandwiches they called "quartet chicken."
Eventually Cooke got the opportunity to record some secular sides. "You Send Me," a tossed-off number intended as a B-side, became an overwhelming hit, and he was on his way. Once again, though, an odd disjunction appeared between his talent and its setting. His publicity dubbed him "Mr. Soul," but he imagined himself to be competing with the crooner Paul Anka rather than James Brown, "Soul Brother Number One." Not long into his career he set his sights on Vegas, where you could make some serious change playing two-week stints rather than being condemned to continual touring; the intended A-side of his first single was, to that end, a reworking of the already bewhiskered "Summertime." He managed to get himself booked twice at the Copa, where he would have to tell weak jokes and sing "(Won't You Come Home) Bill Bailey," and he went over only the sec-ond time, when the twist craze hit the suburbs.
Like Dorsey, Cooke ricocheted between the spirit and the flesh, if less dramatically. Like Dorsey, too, he became an entrepreneur. In 1959 he launched SAR Records, and ran the firm, successfully, for five years. It was far from being the first remunerative black-owned record company (Duke Robey's Duke/Peacock label in Houston, for one, had been around since 1949 and enjoyed more and bigger hits), but in the context of the era it made a statement, and moved units throughout "young America," rather than just on the black side. Along the way, however, Cooke fell for the blandishments of a rising young accountant, Allen Klein, whose advertised specialty was extracting overlooked profits from labels and booking agents, and who would soon begin collecting British beat groups as if they were so many postage stamps. Before Cooke knew what had happened, most of what he owned belonged irrevocably to Klein.
In December 1964, just as he was intending to fire Klein, Cooke was shot dead by the proprietor of a Los Angeles hot-sheet motel. He was wearing only a suit jacket, undershorts, and shoes, having allegedly invaded the office in search of a prostitute who had robbed him and frightened the owner sufficiently that she reached for her gun. The story was studded with holes, none of them answered by the subsequent investigation, and the matter was buried along with Cooke. "A Change Is Gonna Come," his greatest record and possibly the single most breathtaking musical expression of the civil-rights struggle, was released posthumously, in truncated form, as a B-side.
In two lives, Kempton has hurdled the decades, from a time when Bert Williams and the Fisk Jubilee Singers were the only African-Americans to have been permitted to make phonograph records, to the March on Washington and the breaking of an apparent dawn. Both of his subjects were artists who engaged in trade at least as much to free themselves from slavery as merely to acquire money and power. "Cooke," Kempton notes,
reserved his imagination's most strenuous exertions for the leap-takings required in his campaign to become the property of himself…. [He] was cautious in his art so that he might be daring in the conception of his life.
His third subject, Berry Gordy Jr., was a good-enough songwriter early in his career to have staked a claim to artistry, and he was inevitably race-conscious, but his chief interest, his skill, and his passion were all singlemindedly consecrated to empire-building, for its own sake. Gordy was born in Detroit to a family of Southern migrants, and he was far from their leading prospect for success. The family was sufficiently serious about advancement that it fostered its own co-op fund for seeding its members' projects. An ill-educated veteran of the Korean War who worked in an auto plant, Gordy was given his loan reluctantly, but he turned the stake into the biggest African-American enterprise to that date: Motown.
The company consisted of three major labels—Motown, Tamla, and Gordy—along with a few smaller satellites, the Jobete music-publishing firm, a talent agency, and some subsidiary outfits. It turned into a factory almost right away, on the model of a movie studio of the 1930s, cherry-picking young talent from the vast field of Detroit youth facing bleak futures, grooming them, developing their voices as well as their social graces, choreographing their stage routines, and assigning them songs, which in turn were issued at an alarming rate by an atelier of professionals, and arranged and performed by workers in another wing. The talents of all concerned were extraordinary. Bob Dylan was only partly being provocative when he told an interviewer in 1965 that Smokey Robinson was the greatest living poet, and the team of Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier were hitmakers as unerring as any to have flourished in America since the golden age of the musical theater.
The musicians were no less first-rate, the bass player James Jamerson in particular imprinting his style on every subsequent player of that instrument in popular music (for an enlightening account of the Motown house band, the Funk Brothers, see the recent documentary film Standing in the Shadows of Motown*). The faces and voices, meanwhile, included those of the Su-premes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and eventually the Jackson Family. All of them were treated by Gordy as chattel of one sort or another.
Gordy's style was at once imperious and intimate; not for nothing does Kempton punctuate his account with relevant portions of advice to prospective pimps from the pages of Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life:
Gordy slapped Gaye's face one night at the Twenty Grand when the singer, wracked with anxiety about going onstage, dithered too long in his dressing room. ("The show can't stop when a whore bleeds.")
Motown was all-inclusive, not only supplying its own lawyers, accountants, costume designers, and choreographers, but also the performers' entourages, the members of which doubled as informers for Gordy. The female performers were not permitted to consort with outsiders; most of them married other Motown inmates. For more than a decade, the factory turned out a seemingly endless succession of hits, all bearing the distinctive Motown sound, all pitched across the racial divide ("The Sound of Young America"), nearly all perfectly shaped and lapidary, and of an astonishing consistency that could finally only be attributed to Gordy's overseeing presence.
Eventually things began to fragment, as major talents left, sometimes litigiously, and discarded lesser ones fell back into poverty or killed themselves. Gordy, who had all but owned Detroit, moved the company bag and baggage to Los Angeles, and delegated most responsibilities to others while he concentrated singlemindedly on the disastrous cinematic career of lead Supreme Diana Ross, his lover and alter ego ("I can't marry this woman," he told his sister. "[She's] as selfish as I am."). The company continued to lurch along, shedding pieces of itself by the mile like an old car, until Gordy sold out in 1988 for $61 million (and, in 1997, half his publishing house for $132 million) and became a full-time gentleman of leisure.
Kempton counterpoints this story with that of Stax/Volt, the Memphis-based purveyor of deep-fried Southern soul (Otis Redding, Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Eddie Floyd, the Staples Singers, Isaac Hayes). Begun on a shoestring around 1960 by a naive and well-meaning white Tennesseean, and expanded considerably by the black disk jockey and promoter Al Bell, who became de facto head of the company in time to make it a household name, Stax/Volt fell prey to questionable distribution partnerships made with larger entities, then to agreements made with bankers, then to looting by questionably empowered employees, capped off per tradition by a final vacuuming administered by the IRS. Stax/Volt was a noble record company which issued many sides of enduring value at a significant time in interracial cultural history, but its story is less a parable than an account of managerial failure and tawdrily protracted cash-flow collapse. With or without such eye-catching details as Isaac Hayes's gold-plated Cadillac, it merely sounds like a larger-scaled version of the rise and fall of any number of independent record companies with more ambition and imagination than financial acuity.
Considerably more edifying is the story of George Clinton, once a barber from Plainfield, N.J., who nurtured a group called the Parliaments from his teenage years, through a brush-off by Motown (which employed Clinton briefly as a songwriter) and a single hit in the 1960s, "(I Wanna) Testify" (1967), to, finally, hitsville in the 1970s. Clinton not only wrote great songs, but evolved the works and the images of his outfits, Parliament and Funkadelic among a host of lesser entities, into a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk. He created a mock empire the ongoing saga of which was expressed in a combination of music, obsessive wordplay, comic strips, and stagecraft (an apparently life-size spaceship landed and disgorged P-Funk onto the stage of Madison Square Garden when I saw them sometime in the late 1970s, transfixing an audience that thought it had already seen and been bored by every variety of extravagant prop). Clinton gave his people science fiction and psychedelic guitars while making fun of everything he touched, imagining what something like Motown would be like if it were a comic-book interplanetary colonizing force instead of a mere earthbound pop-song production line. He had the energy and enterprise to be a kind of Berry Gordy himself, except that he could never take himself one bit as seriously, let alone treat his friends and hirelings as peons. He ran out of creative steam in the early 1980s, but his influence was probably the single biggest on the burgeoning world of hip-hop.
Kempton folds Clinton's tale into the disquieting saga of Marion "Suge" Knight, head of Death Row Records. If Clinton represented among other things a lighthearted and humane parody of earlier black-pop empire-builders, Knight was their B-movie reduction, a man who patterned his entrepreneurial style after some hybrid of Al Capone and Meyer Lansky. Suddenly disputes really were being settled in blood, and the content of the material, which was rapidly dubbed gangster rap, was all threat, consistently and deliberately ugly while at the same time often sonically brilliant. Hip-hop (now the preferred term for what was once called "rap") began in New York City in the late 1970s, at street parties and on basketball courts, where disk jockeys manipulated records while rappers talked over the beats. The immediate inspiration came from the contemporaneous Jamaican "toasters," but the rapping style goes back at least to Speckled Red's "Dirty Dozen No. 2" (1930)—probably far beyond it into the mists of African-American oral tradition. The first raps were mere boasts, doggedly following the beat in lines of equal length, but as the style became more syncopated and complex—and hip-hop deejaying got progressively jazzier, more musically and technologically sophisticated—the content became subject to an escalation of hostility. "The industrialization of street chic" meant that to qualify as "real" each succeeding record had to supply more weapons, more blood, and more callous cynicism than the one before.
Suge Knight, born in Mississippi to parents who migrated to L.A. when he was four, fits the historical pattern the book establishes, but he grew up among Bloods and Crips rather than strivers, and the real violence that surrounded him was hardly to be distinguished from the pulp violence that filled his records. As soon as he began running a business he was indulging himself in such petty displays of force as, for example, in 1992 having "two brothers trying to break into show business…beaten, stripped, and broken down at gunpoint for using a public telephone in the lunchroom at Death Row Records when its proprietor was expecting a call." The body count began not long after, and eventually it included Tupac Shakur, Knight's biggest star and the one most promising of a long and fertile career, who was shot in a drive-by after a Mike Tyson bout in Las Vegas in 1996, his presumed assailant, a Crip (Knight is famously affiliated with the Bloods), widely known if unproven. In another of many such galling ironies, Tupac had recently settled into a quieter life and had been on the verge of terminating his contract with Knight. Death has previously been noted as a canny career move, but Tupac's case is singularly necrophilic, since in some unexplained fashion he has continued to garner hit after hit posthumously. He is both stone cold in his grave and arguably the most potent international black star, outselling every other American artist in Africa, for example.
Knight's style has found numerous echoes, most notably in the form of Sean Combs, originally "Puff Daddy" and currently "P. Diddy," who has himself photographed riding a jet-ski in his bathrobe on the French Riviera and consorts with the heavy hitters of the white entertainment world, but touts his own dead star, Biggie Smalls, a k a the Notorious B.I.G. And there the story stands. The public's interest in bloodletting translated into musical idiom has been declared on the wane at various times in recent years, but the current star du jour, the abrasive Fifty Cent, has risen partly on the wings of his back-story, possibly the most brutal to date. But even when lyrical styles finally shift (and it should be noted that gangster rap's largest market share by far is provided by white teenagers), it is debatable whether managerial styles can possibly improve, or whether the next incarnation will be a sort of black-pop Enron.
It is difficult to do justice to Kempton's book in a brief review, since while his primary storyline is concerned with the sorry evolution of African-American pop-music enterprise, much of the book's heart lies in asides, in brief studies of lesser figures—his account of the deep and versatile but lower-keyed singer-songwriter-producer Curtis Mayfield is, in a few pages, as rich as anything in the book. It might seem that Kempton is at his best when engaged with minor byways, such as his opening evocation of the unjustly neglected two-hit crooner Billy Stewart (he remembers seeing Stewart at the Apollo in 1965, when teenage girls initially mocked his sweating bulk, but after he started singing, "I looked around to scan rows of girls standing like soldiers under command, hands on hearts, raptly singing their pledged allegiance to this object of their recent scorn"), or his tracking of the pop genealogy of the word "rap." These are moments that open up like Bob and Earl's 1967 hit "Harlem Shuffle," a record which seems to include the presence of its vast audience in its grooves.
When Kempton discusses Mayfield, he gives a quick glimpse of the future reggae star Bob Marley, listening hard to his radio, and you can feel the ripple effect around the globe. When he talks about the first usage of "rap" in a lyric, in the C.O.D.s' forgotten "Michael the Lover" of 1967, he sketches the outline of a whole nation of street-corner kids making up their own culture on their own terms:
"Michael" was a jitterbug hero of the first aural cartoon made for black kids, the dashing star of a "perp walk" through a cluster of hard-eyed peers so moved by this "loveliest boy"'s manifesting graces that exclamatory praise broke out as he passed…. Black schoolboys walked around with the tune on their breaths, substituting their own names.
Kempton's writing style, the legacy of a clerical lineage, is long-breathed and often biblically cadenced, superbly tailored in particular to his discussion of gospel. Few are the observers of popular music who could spin out such a sentence as: "Sufficient youth-market currency now bought its bearers' way into highly respectable circles in an industrial society that was respectful of its newly rich because they were presumed to have recent knowledge of the whereabouts of fresh money." If he has a defect, and it is an understandable one, it is that he is conscious every second of the fact that he is white, so that he is sometimes given to overcompensation, for example in undervaluing the white singer Janis Joplin, who was something more than the "screamer" he castigates her as, and in being ungenerous about the motives of the white youths who made a crossover star of Otis Redding.
He also renders the N-word as "N[egro]" whenever it is employed, which is virtually always in direct quotes uttered by black speakers, and this raises the uncomfortable and unanswerable question of whether the wish not to give offense trumps the historical record. But then there is at present no way to engage racial matters from a completely race-blind perspective, in particular if one is white. The whole subject of race may be anthropologically fraudulent, but if it cannot be wished away in American society, Kempton's example resoundingly shows how the racial divide can be breached by a writer to whom nothing human is alien. His surpassingly sympathetic and probing attention to all the most fraught aspects of his subject shows how much he is able to shed his skin.
This Issue
July 17, 2003
Directed by Paul Justman, 2002. ↩


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The University of Wyoming Staff Senate is seeking nominations for Outstanding Staff Employee of the third quarter. Sept. 13 is the nomination deadline.
The award recognizes UW staff for their efforts toward excellence in the workplace. Several gifts are available to the winner. Nominees can be any UW staff employee and must receive three nomination forms from three separate individuals.
"We encourage you to take a few minutes to identify deserving staff members," says Jim Logue, Staff Senate president. "Peer recognition is an important factor in boosting job satisfaction, productivity and overall morale, so please take advantage of this opportunity."
The nomination form can be found at https://www.uwyo.edu/staffsenate/employee-of-the-quarter/index.html.


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Demand for electronic devices of increasingly smaller sizes and with substantially improved processor and graphics functionality has resulted in higher-density power requirements. Consequently, significant increases in heat generated are being registered at the component, board and system levels. These higher operating temperatures can significantly shorten the operational lifetime of an electronic device. As a result, managing the evolution, distribution and dissipation of thermal energy in electronic components and circuits is important for their long-term reliability.
AltaSim Technologies partnered with the Ohio Supercomputer Center to evaluate the thermal behavior of newly developed printed circuit boards designed for use in the process control industry. The partnership evolved last year through the federal National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium (NDEMC) program, a public-private partnership funded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration to support and enhance the use of modeling and simulation among America's small and medium manufacturers.
"At AltaSim, we realize that customer needs vary depending on time in the product design cycle, availability of validated thermal models and selection of technology to meet cost, manufacturability and thermal design targets," said Kyle C. Koppenhoefer, Ph.D., a principal at AltaSim. "Integration of strategically designed computational simulations allows us to quantify the effects of specific design changes and the interrelationship between multiple variables, thus providing a broad, yet metered view of the product design."
To achieve the required scale and level of accuracy, AltaSim engineers needed to consider large numbers of components to achieve a comprehensive simulation of the full printed circuit board. They also wanted to include a significant level of detail in both the board and surroundings, and consequently the size of the model escalated significantly. To allow the engineers to analyze the modeled behavior within a reasonable length of time, AltaSim accessed OSC's flagship HP-Intel Xeon Oakley Cluster and the ANSYS-ICEPAK engineering simulation solution software package. ANSYS prototyping tools can be used to put a virtual product through a rigorous testing procedure before it is created as a physical object.
The decreased completion time for analyses allowed AltaSim engineers to consider different designs rapidly and make design recommendations for improved product performance that would otherwise not have been possible. As a consequence, they achieved final designs for operational components that have significantly improved product performance.
Project Lead: Kyle Koppenhoefer, AltaSim Technologies
Research Title: Thermal energy management of electric circuits
Funding Source: National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium
Website: http://altasimtechnologies.co


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Despite all the attention given to filched credit-card numbers and other damage wrought by computer hackers, a new University of Washington study puts hard numbers to what security experts have long claimed: you have more to fear from insiders than from outsiders.
The study looked at almost 600 incidents of compromised data over the past quarter century and found that employees are to blame about 60 percent of the time. Often it's not because they are maliciously out to steal or destroy information, but simply because they make mistakes. Lost laptops, sensitive information inadvertently forwarded via E-mail, and similar bungles are rampant.
Employee education has long been seen as the key to prevention, but companies can now buy new technologies that can prevent such errors. Code Green Networks, for example, makes a security appliance (a combination of hardware and software) that will do everything from monitor the content of E-mails to "fingerprint" sensitive documents so they can be tracked or, if needed, prohibited from being forwarded. Technologies for protecting data on laptops, and for locating the machines if they are lost or stolen, are now offered by many vendors.
But companies still have plenty to fear, from both within and without. As Steve Jones, chief technology officer at Signal Financial Credit Union, notes, "Even though accidents are a more common form of inside risk, the damage done by a single malicious incident can be huge."
That holds true for hacking as well. The University of Washington researchers found that while hackers were responsible for a smaller percentage of incidents than were insiders, they walked away with more data. Even in some of those cases, researchers say, companies are often to blame. They cite the example of Acxiom Corp., which saw 1.6 billion customer records compromised in 2003. In that case, a nonemployee who had been granted a password to upload data guessed (correctly) that the same password would allow him to download data. So he did.


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Friday Feb 23, 2024
Saturday, 19 January 2013 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Reuters: Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, has tipped Lewis Hamilton to win races this season, despite his move from McLaren to Mercedes, and sees the Briton as more the man to watch than triple champion Sebastian Vettel.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday at the Italian Formula One team's 'Wrooom' media event at the Dolomites ski resort of Madonna di Campiglio, the Spaniard singled out his former McLaren team mate as the strongest rival.
"Who is the strongest opponent, the strongest driver on the grid? Who is the one you have to keep an eye on? It is Hamilton and it will still be Hamilton next year," he said.
"I am sure he will be able to win. He is a super good driver because he won every year with any car. He won in 2007 and 2008.
"In 2009 they started around two seconds off the pace with the McLaren and Hamilton was able to win races. And it was the same in 2010."
Alonso pointed out that Germany's Nico Rosberg won a race last year for Mercedes in a season when the car was largely uncompetitive.
On that basis, he said Hamilton "Will be able to win more than one race."
Hamilton made his Formula One debut alongside Alonso at McLaren in 2007 and ended the season as overall runner-up, ahead of the double champion although tied on points, with four victories and podium finishes in his first nine races.
The Briton remains the only team mate to have beaten Alonso over the course of a season.
The 28-year-old, champion in 2008, has said he does not expect Mercedes to challenge for the championship this season and has also played down the chances of race wins before sweeping changes to the regulations in 2014. Alonso said it was too early to say who his main championship rival would be with that depending on a range of factors including the car, team, testing and luck and he recognised Vettel's qualities at Red Bull.
Vettel, at 25 the youngest triple champion, beat Alonso to last year's title by three points after a final race in Brazil that could have gone either way. "For sure in these three years there were moments when he was better than anybody else and he deserved these three championships," said the Ferrari driver.
Alonso also replied to a suggestion from Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko, in a recent interview that he played political games while Vettel shut out all the chatter to focus on racing.
"I simply drive cars," he asserted, adding that Marko's comments appeared 'mixed up' and 'meaningless'. "They say that they did not listen and they did not speak. They were saying they were not being influenced by what we said, but it means they did listen or someone woke up at night and read the comments because they had to calm down," said Alonso.
The Spaniard was optimistic about the coming season, which starts in Australia on 17 March, after Ferrari began last year with a car that was well off the pace.
"We can be faster or slower, but not 1.5 or two seconds off the pace. It is maybe impossible to be worse than last year, so I am confident," he said.


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Showing Collections: 1 - 1 of 1
Tower Guard records
Record Group
Identifier: UA-12.2.45
Scope and Content
The records of the Tower Guard consist of minutes, reports, correspondence, memos, agendas, and scrapbooks. The records have been created by the students in the organization and are rather informal and vary in their content. In addition, there are a large number of undated records.
The minute book contains a brief history of the Tower Guard and minutes of the meetings from 1933 to 1944. The administrative folder contains the Articles of the Tower Guard and the Preamble. The agendas...
1933 - 2012
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- Subject: Letters (correspondence) X
- Subject: College students -- Michigan -- East Lansing X
- Subject: College students -- Societies and clubs X
- Subject: Scrapbooks X
- Subject: Constitutions X
- Subject: Women college students -- Michigan -- East Lansing -- Societies, etc. X
- Names: Michigan State University. Students X