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LONDON (AP) The head of the World Anti-Doping Agency has told Russia's sports minister that ''much more still needs to be accomplished'' to fix the country's doping problems.
WADA President Craig Reedie responded to a letter from Russian minister Vitaly Mutko, who said his ministry carried out a ''significant amount of work'' to combat doping and pledged further cooperation with the global agency.
WADA spokesman Ben Nichols says Mutko's letter acknowledged ''the deep-rooted doping problems the country has encountered, and the difficulty with eradicating such a doping culture in a short space of time.''
He says Reedie responded in a letter to Mutko, ''recognizing some of the steps that have been taken towards ensuring an effective anti-doping system in Russia, but stating that much more still needs to be accomplished.''


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Ferrari's Italian Villa – Review
Elegant and welcoming are our first thoughts upon entering Ferrari's Italian Villa in Grapevine. We were immediately greeted and treated like family on our Friday night visit.
Ferrrari's has a circular bar area just to the right as you enter. To the right of that is an area that looks like it is reserved for larger dining parties, just the way you would imagine large Italian families eating dinner.
We were sat to the left in the main dining area at a table in the middle of the floor. Everything about the restaurant is done in a classy way, yet not in a snooty fashion. Ferrari's manages to be very elegantly comfortable which is a hard dynamic to maintain, but they do it very well.
The music and lighting were just right. This restaurant is one where you get the right vibe just by being there.
When we were seated we were brought two glasses of water and some garlic bread with a marinara sauce. We could have just eaten the garlic bread and been satisfied because it was so good. It had a little bit of a spicy kick that we've never had before.
Before dinner, we enjoyed a Ceasar salad which was light and fresh. It was perfectly done.
For dinner we ordered the Salmone Bella Donna (salmon, shrimp, vodka cream) and Pollo Valdostana (sautéed chicken breast, ham, mozzarella, mushroom cream) to go along with a half bottle of wine. Both meals came with creamy mashed potatoes and spinach.
Both meals were excellent. It would be very difficult to choose which was the better choice. We believe the sauce on both dinners were extremely good and helped make the meals.
After dinner, we ordered a slice of cheesecake. We were stuffed at this point so this was probably a mistake. This was the only part of the meal that was a bit of a let down. It is possible that we were let down because we were full, but the cheesecake did not seem to have the light fluffy flavorful taste that we expect. It also did not have a crust on bottom which sometimes is the best part.
The service all night was very good. We could tell the waiter was very busy as it was a Friday night and you would expect this. He did manage to bring us an extra glass of wine because he thought dinner took too long to get to the table. We did not think it took particularly long, but certainly did not turn down the extra glass.
We look forward to visiting Ferrari's again and trying more of the traditional pasta dishes next time. We had a wonderful experience on our first visit.
Pricing here is above average at roughly $18-$25 per plate, but the food and the experience are worth it.
Located at:
1200 William D Tate Ave
Grapevine, TX 76051
(817) 251-2525
Ferrari's Italian Villa website

subset: commoncrawl


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LONDON — Every now and again, you get lucky in this business.
I know almost nothing about gymnastics. Oh, because of my mother I've been watching Olympic gymnastics since I was a kid, since watching a skinny 14-year-old named Nadia. I know that falling off the beam is bad. I can spot a bobble, maybe, and I know that sticking the landing is important. But that's pretty much it. I watch Olympic gymnastics the way a fan does — through emotion and through wonder at what these athletes can do. That's always been good enough. That's how I was going to watch Thursday's remarkable all-around final.
Then, every now and again, you get lucky in this business. I ended up sitting next to a man named Paul Ziert. He is at the event in his role as publisher of International Gymnast Magazine, which claims to be "the authority on gymnastics since 1956″ — a claim I don't believe is often challenged.
But, beyond that, here's Ziert's story: He was an All-American gymnast at Stanford. He taught high-school math and coached gymnastics in Chicago for a while before becoming the gymnastics coach at Oklahoma. There, he recruited a gymnast named Bart Connor, and together they won a couple of national championships and some Olympic hardware (and later, co-wrote a book). Ziert gave a home and job to a Romanian defector named Bela Karolyi, who had coached Nadia Comaneci and, of course, has become the doyen of American gymnastics. He was a coach for the 1980 U.S. women's gymnastics team, which did not get to compete because of a boycott. He tried for a while to start a gymnastics tour.
And so on. It's been a gymnastics life — for more than 50 years. The point is, I ended up sitting next to somebody who saw gymnastics not only as a fan, but also as someone who has lived inside this sport. And through his eyes, well, watching this gymnastics event was unlike any I had seen before.
There are, in Ziert's mind, four gymnasts who have a legitimate chance at gold. Yes, of course he says it is possible for someone else to surprise and emerge. For instance, there is the tall and graceful Romanian, Sandra Raluca Izbasa. There are the two Chinese gymnasts, Linlin Deng and Qiushuang Huang. There is the gutsy Italian, Vanessa Ferrari, who had won the World Championships in 2006 but later dealt with weight issues and injury issues.
"But look at her now," he says. "She made it all the way back. What an inspiration."
Still, he knows that unless things go wrong, there are four competitors who are one step up from the rest. Two are American: Gabby Douglas and Aly Raisman. Two are Russian: Viktoria Komova and Aliya Mustafina.
Douglas is first on the vault. Both Americans and one of the Russians, Komova, are attempting the same vault, the toughest in the competition, a vault with a 6.50-degree of difficulty. Ziert explains that this means the highest possible score they can get on the vault is 16.50; most of the other vaults have a 5.8 degree of difficulty, meaning they can not get anything higher than a 15.8, and realistically they are unlikely to get more than a 15.3.
Douglas scores a very high 15.966 — what will be the highest score on vault all night — despite a bit of a choppy landing where she almost steps out of bounds.
"She will be great tonight," Ziert predicts. Before the day, he says he had been talking with Nadia Comaneci, and she thought that Douglas had an advantage over the other three super competitors because she is younger. She is only 16, while the two Russians are 17 and Raisman is 18. Nadia said what she had going for her in 1976, when she had touched perfection, was that she was so young she did not know enough to be nervous. In 1980, once Comaneci had become a worldwide icon and she understood the scope of what was happening and felt the nerves, it was not so easy. She won silver.
Raisman is next and she also scores very well, a 15.900. Ziert says her strength comes from her extreme will. She is not necessarily a naturally graceful gymnast, like the Russians or her great friend Jordyn Wieber. Raisman's brilliance comes from her consistency, and her refusal to give away anything. "She sticks everything," Ziert says.
This, he says, makes her very different from the third gymnast to vault, Russia's Komova. Ziert says that, without question, Komova is the most gifted gymnast in the world. But, for whatever reason, she does not dig in like Raisman or Douglas or her fellow Russian, Mustafina. He says she gives away points with avoidable mistakes. He says she is just not quite competitive enough.
While he talks, Komova vaults, and it is a beautiful vault. She does have a different look than any other gymnast in motion, like a ballerina. But she lands awkwardly, and she is off balance, and she drifts out of bounds. Then she does something Ziert cannot believe: Instead of holding her ground after her stumble, she keeps drifting until she has stepped off the mat completely and is standing on the arena floor. Ziert is stunned. He thinks this has to be a major deduction. Sure enough, she scores a 15.466 — almost 0.5 behind Douglas.
Mustafina is the last of the four to vault. She had a serious injury last year and so does not try the difficult vault the other three try. She is good on her more conservative vault, but the degree of difficulty is too much to overcome and she scores a 15.233. "That's her worst event," Ziert says. "Watch out for her now."
Raisman is first on uneven parallel bars … and she struggles a bit. She is at her best in events where she can be explosive and full of life, like the vault and the floor exercise. The bars require a bit more precision. She scores a 14.333, well off the pace needed to stay in the gold-medal chase.
Komova is next … and her performance is extraordinary. They say that Jascha Heifetz was so brilliant on the violin that just one note could make other violinists cry. Well, Ziert looks like he might break down as he watches Komova perform. Every move is fluid, graceful … "perfect," Ziert says softly.
And then Komova dismounts, and she lands a little bit off and does not hold her ground. "She just gave away another three-tenths of a point," Ziert says. "Amazing."
Mustafina goes third, and Ziert starts talking about how her father was a great Russian wrestler and her mother a gymnast. He believes she took the best from both — the elegance and agility of her mother, the extreme will of her father. Like Komova, her performance is astounding. Everything is in rhythm. She lands her dismount and, unlike Komova, refuses to buckle. Her score, 16.100, is the highest any gymnast will get in any of the events. She has worked her way back into the gold-medal picture.
Finally, it's Douglas. Against her coach's wishes, she has been keeping an eye on the scoreboard. She knows she shouldn't, that she should focus on her own performance, but she cannot help it. "She's a jock," Ziert says. "She's a competitor." He says he has heard that at practices, she never stops talking. She loves the game of it. "It's go time," is one of her favorite sayings. She nails the bars, too, scoring a 15.733. She leads Komova in the all-around, but now by less than three-tenths of a point.
"Three tenths of a point is just one deduction," Ziert says. "That's nothing."
Komova is first on the beam, and Ziert admits he is doubtful about how she will hold up. He seems to look at Komova the way a baseball scout looks at a pitcher with everything — a 100-mph fastball, a dazzling curveball, a biting slider, a tantalizing changeup — but one who, when it matters, cannot throw strikes.
She surprises him on the balance beam. Though she wobbles just a touch in a couple places — setting off my keen ineptitude to judge gymnastics — Ziert thinks she is quite extraordinary. On replay, it's easy to see that he is right. On one move, she is so flexible she actually kicks herself in the back of the head. On another she almost seems to bend in two. And her dismount, Ziert says, is the most difficult in the world. The judges see it his way and give her a 15.441, by far the highest score up to that point.
Then comes Mustafina. This time Ziert expects nothing less than brilliance — "This is where her competitiveness comes out," he whispers — but again he is off. It is Mustafina, the wrestler's daughter, who gives way. She falls off the balance beam. She almost falls off again. Ziert is in shock. Two years ago, Mustafina won the all-around gold at World Championships, and people around gymnastics expected her to dominate the sport for a decade. This time she scores a 13.633. It's the lowest score any of the four will have in any of the events. She won't win the gold. She will have to fight for a medal.
Now, it's the Americans and Gabby Douglas, who once again has defied her coach and looked at the scoreboard. She knows how well Komova did. Later, Douglas would talk about how she had learned to deal with these moments, learned that when the pressure is at its thickest the important thing is not to think about what can go wrong, but to think about what will go right. That sounds like the sort of Zen talk you might hear on the old "Kung Fu" show, but from the mouth of an ebullient 16-year-old girl who has given up all she knows to be the best gymnast in the world, it sounds just right. "It's like, can I do it?" she would say. "Pressure should help us do better and greater things."
The pressure pushes her to a near-flawless performance. Her 15.500 is the highest score of the night, and it pushes her lead over Komova to just more than three-tenths of a point.
While Raisman struggles through her balance beam performance (14.200), Ziert talks about the excitement of the floor exercise. He says that Douglas' floor exercise is full of life and joy. "It's like a ride," he says. "You just want to hold on."
And he said Komova's floor exercise was very different, pure grace — "When it's right," he said, "it's like going to The Bolshoi (the historic theater that houses the Bolshoi ballet in Moscow)."
It sounds like the last event will be pretty fun.
Mustafina is the first of the four to go, and she knows that she needs an inspired performance to clinch a bronze medal. Her performance is solid, Ziert said, but not quite inspired. The medal is not hers yet. With some quick math (Ziert was a math major at Stanford) and help from the scoreboard, he realizes that Raisman needs a 15.133 to tie Mustafina for the bronze medal.
"She can do that," he says excitedly.
Douglas is next, and she knows that a good performance will clinch the gold medal — everything she has dreamed. She seems to love the moment. She smiled throughout her performance, gives a little extra, never makes an obvious mistake. When she is done, Ziert cannot help himself. "She has won the gold medal," he announces. "She is the Olympic champion." The judge's score of 15.033 is a good one. Ziert appears to be right.
Raisman walks on the mat, and she is terrific. It was her floor exercise that had clinched the gold for the U.S. team two nights earlier, and again she has the crowd clapping and cheering. Amazingly, she scores exactly a 15.133, which ties her with Mustafina. It appears, to those of us who don't know the rules (like yours truly) that they will both get bronze. But they will not. The tiebreaker will be the sum of the three best scores, and Mustafina, once unburdened of her disastrous beam score, is the easy winner in the tiebreaker. She will get the bronze. Raisman, though her score is the same, finishes fourth.
"It's wrong," Ziert says. "They should both get medals. That's ridiculous."
Finally, it's time for Komova, the last gymnast of the night. To win the gold, she will need 15.359 — by far the highest score of the night. Is it possible? "I don't think so," Ziert says. "I don't think they would give a score that high."
Then Komova performs … and based on Ziert's reaction it is clear that she is breathtaking. Actually, it's not hard to see even through an amateur's eye. Ziert is right about her talent. She lands softly, and everything is elegant, and Ziert cannot find even one thing wrong with her performance, cannot find one deduction. "That," he says, "might have been the greatest performance under pressure I've ever seen."
Everybody watches the scoreboard closely. Ziert still does not believe that the judges will give her a 15.359 — it's too high a score. But, he admits, "I would. I would give her that score and make it a tie."
The judges are not quite so theatrical. They give Komova a 15.100 — a good score, but not good enough. Douglas is the Olympic champion. Ziert talks about how wonderful it is, how happy he is for her, how happy he is for gymnastics to have her as champion. "She's so good for the sport," he says.
After it ends, and I thank Ziert for making this night so much more interesting, I wander in to listen to the gymnasts who won medals. Mustafina says she is happy with everything except for her balance beam. "Any fall is very bad," she says through an interpreter. Komova says she is proud of her night and a little disappointed that it wasn't quite good enough. Both of them talk about how great Douglas was on this night.
"She performed beautifully," Komova says.
"I agree," Mustafina says. "She was absolutely fantastic."
Then Douglas comes out, and she is fantastic again, talking about how much it all means to her, how she kept it together, how much fun she had. Someone asks her about smiling through her floor exercise, and she says that she had smiled more in other events but that when it was over, "I wanted to give a big smile for you guys."
She is now America's sweetheart, with all the endorsements and appearances that go with it, and I'm sure she will enjoy it. And she should. But what is striking was how much she enjoyed this whole night. Every four years, we see gymnasts strain under the intense pressure, and who can blame them? But not Gabby Douglas.
In the end, what Ziert had heard from Comaneci might be right. Maybe Douglas really was too young to know that she was supposed to be scared. If that's true, well here's hoping, in that way, she never grows up.


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Below is a program overview for the 2016 Arts Leadership Series I developed and implemented. The panel discussion and network series gave young and diverse professionals the knowledge, network, and skills to become leaders on arts nonprofit boards and committees. The Arts Leadership Series sold out in under 35 days and engaged more than 215 guests.
The 2013 + 2014 ArtsKC Annual Report below was the first organizational annual report since 2011. It highlights my effectiveness as a project manager and my ability to compile and present information in a succinct and understandable manner that also tells a compelling story.
The report below highlights my ability to evaluate, synthesize, and report program information. The report also highlights the results of the programs I managed or was involved with at the City of Phoenix, which included the Volunteer Assistance Program, Community Bin Program, Blight Busters Volunteer Program, Graffiti Free Phoenix: Wipe It Out!, and the direct outcomes of my work as an AmeriCorps VISTA member. The report was provided to the City of Phoenix City Council's Neighborhoods, Planning and Development, Housing and Homeless Subcommittee regarding the Neighborhood Services Department's volunteer efforts. I wrote the document on behalf of Chris Hallett, Neighborhood Services Director, during my appointment as an AmeriCorps VISTA member.
The action report below highlights my writing ability and result of my work at People to People International to mobilize international members toward a common goal.
The reflective essay below served as the capstone to my Master of Public Administration degree. The essay provides insight into my background and guiding principles as a public administrator as well as displays my critical-thinking and writing skills.


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2014 Research Conference
Celebrating Collaborative Research
RVS' 2014 Research Conference, Celebrating Collaborative Research - Using Data to Inform Practice, was deemed highly informative, engaging, and insightful by the 100+ participants that attended the two-day conference August 22 and 23, 2014. Of the 43 presenters, 23 are affiliated with RVS, reflecting a wonderful and growing commitment to in-house research. Following the conference 10 presenters publish blogs regarding their presentations. Listed below is a lineup of the blogs, as well as a number of their actual actual presentations.
Research Blogs
|Guest Blogger
|2014 Research Conference
|Susan Lynch
EDI, EYE and CLIC assessments with implications for Assessment, SIS design and ECS programming
|Leslie Waite
Re-awakening Wonder: Creativity in Elementary Mathematics
|Kathy Howery
Assistive Technology Implementation
|Cynthia Prasow & Jennifer Lock
What Are Partner Research Schools?
|Pamela Adams
|Implementing a Comprehensive & Coordinated Professional Learning Plan
|Heather Hill & Stacy Pothier
Using the Right Technology and Pedagogy to Enhance Thinking, Learning, & Teaching: The Impact of a Collaborative Action Research Project
|John Burger
Measuring SOS-Q in RVS: Key observations
|Elizabeth Gouthro
Early Years Evaluation - Teacher Assessment: What CBE Has Learned?
Assistive Technology Implementation / Kathy Howery
Beginning Teachers Professional Learning / Heather Fansher
Calgary Thrives: Calgary Child and Family Community Data Repository / Dawne Clarke & Nancy Ogden
Early Years Evaluation / Elizabeth Gouthro
Emerging Student Information System - System Design & In Applied Context / John Burger & Ahmad Jawad
Implementing a Comprehensive Professional Learning Plan / Pamela Adams
Measuring SOS-Q in RVS - Key Observations / John Burger & Anna Nadirova
Partner Research Schools Initiative / Cynthia Prasow & Jennifer Lock
Re-Awakening Wonder: Creativity in Elementary Mathematics / Leslie Waite
RVS Screening Process - Using Data to Inform Practice / Lynda Hemsworth & Chris Pawlek
SOS-Q Applications at Middle School / Jeff Chalmers, Denise Weaver, Brenda Valario, & Chael Wyper
Using Data to Support a Focus on Healthy School Communities / Elizabeth Coldbeck
Using the Right Technology & Pedagogy to Enhance Thinking, Learning, & Teaching / Stacy Pothier & Heather Hill
Using EDI Data To Support the Well Being of Young Children / Sue Lynch


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There aren't enough accolades for Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer.
The five-time All-Star and reigning back-to-back National League Cy Young winner is playing the best baseball of his career and making a strong case for being the best pitcher of his generation.
The Tampa Bay Rays got a taste of Scherzer's finest on Tuesday, most notably Johnny Field, Christian Arroyo and Daniel Robertson, who went down in order on nine pitches in the sixth inning without putting the ball in play.
That's right. Scherzer threw nine pitches for nine strikes and three strikeouts for what is known in some circles as an immaculate inning.
It's the second time Scherzer has achieved the feat in his career, which rightly puts him in rarified air with some of the best to ever play the game.
#Nationals Max Scherzer joins Lefty Grove, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, and Randy Johnson as the only pitchers in baseball history with multiple Immaculate Innings.
— Ryan M. Spaeder (@theaceofspaeder) June 6, 2018
Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson and Lefty Grove make for pretty solid company. They're all Hall of Famers and will most assuredly be joined by Scherzer when his career is done.
In total, Scherzer allowed two runs in eight innings of a 4-2 win over the Rays Tuesday. He struck out 13 while walking none to improve his record on the season to 10-1 to go along with a career-best ERA of 1.95, a 0.83 WHIP and an astonishing 13.6 strikeouts per nine innings. Of the 99 pitches he threw Tuesday, 81 of them were strikes.
So, yeah. Scherzer was dealing, even by his lofty standards.
MLB video from Yahoo Sports
More from Yahoo Sports:
• Warriors and Cavs united on one front: A Trump visit
• Convicted child molester presents dilemma for MLB
• Terez Paylor: As Trump wages war on NFL, players grow tired of 'lies'
• Report: Trump 'angry' that Brady skipped 2017 visit


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Archive for category Keyboards
Matias Wireless Aluminium Keyboard Review
I'm not an Apple fanboi, but I do appreciate that Apple has brought some better design influence to the otherwise price-fixated PC market.
Today, my daytime workplace got a shipment of Matias Mac keyboards in all the colours of the iPhone rainbow – read on if Macs are something you work on daily.
EditorsKeys FSX Backlit USB Keyboard Review
"If flying your IBM PC got any more realistic, you'd need a license" .
Check out the keyboard that could make that a reality….
nKeyboard Mechanic LED mech KeyBoard review
KUL ES-87 Mechanical Keyboard Review
What's special about the ES-87, and why would you pay over AUD $150 for just a keyboard that's not even got a full set of keys?


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In the closing days before the Iowa caucuses here, Howard Dean has slipped into turbulent territory, facing challenges in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states where he is looking to nail down the nomination with early victories.
Here in Iowa, where the race between Dr. Dean and Representative Richard A. Gephardt is remarkably close, Dr. Dean's supporters expressed distress at what many described as his faltering performance in a televised debate Sunday. The Des Moines Register, the state's largest newspaper, described Dr. Dean in a front-page article as ''again on the defensive.''
It was the latest in a series of difficulties Dr. Dean has encountered at the very moment his competitors -- in particular, Senators John Edwards and John Kerry -- have made an aggressive late-campaign push for support among undecided voters.
In New Hampshire, which holds its primary a week after the caucuses, Gen. Wesley K. Clark has taken advantage of having the state almost to himself, as Dr. Dean tends to the tough battle in Iowa, drawing crowds that are beginning to rival the ones that typically show up to see Dr. Dean. Although Democratic strategists say they see little chance that Dr. Dean will lose New Hampshire, General Clark's rise is threatening Dr. Dean's once-dominant position in the state and could dash his hopes of essentially ending the contest with an overwhelming victory there.
General Clark is not competing in Iowa, and until at least Monday, when a group of Kerry supporters in Manchester challenged his Democratic credentials, escaped the attacks that have battered the Democrats who are competing here.Continue reading the main story
As he adjusted to this new terrain, Dr. Dean dropped all pretense of comity on Monday, throwing away big chunks of his stump speech and abandoning his pledge to avoid attacks on opponents. ''I'm going after everybody because I'm tired of being the pin cushion here,'' he said.
At the same time, advisers debated what -- if anything -- they needed to do to deal with General Clark's success in New Hampshire. One Dean adviser likened the retired military man's performance to Dr. Dean's early rise in the polls last year that went unnoticed and largely unchecked by Mr. Kerry, who at the time was the dominant candidate.
''The reason that all those folks are coming at us debate after debate, newspaper column after newspaper column, is because they're afraid,'' Dr. Dean said Monday as he charged across Iowa in full fighter mode. ''They're afraid of having ordinary people run their country. This is our country, it's not their country.''
This difficult period comes as Dr. Dean's almost nonstop year of campaigning appears to be taking a toll. He seemed tired and rattled on Monday morning, as he did at the debate, and stumbled over a few words at several smaller gatherings as he recited yet again the sound bites he has repeated easily 1,000 times. But by evening, as he roused a crowd at a spaghetti dinner in Fort Madison, he seemed back on his game, and indeed delivered his fuller speech.
''I am rejuvenated and ready to fight,'' he said. ''When people attack me, that rejuvenates me.''
Dr. Dean's advisers said Monday that they were neither surprised nor worried about the suddenly stormy climate.
''Of course it's going to have an effect,'' said Joe Trippi, Dr. Dean's campaign manager. ''Who can get hammered this long without it having some effect?''
Still, some of Dr. Dean's advisers said they felt constrained by how hard they could battle back, worried that Dean supporters drawn to the campaign by a promise of an ''end to politics as usual'' would recoil at a reprise of the tough campaign tactics that have become a staple of American politics. In New Hampshire, some Dean supporters objected when the campaign distributed leaflets at a rally for General Clark noting that the general had voted for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
Several Dean advisers said that they remained confident of victory not because of their candidate, but rather because of the campaign organization he had assembled. Mr. Trippi pointed to the extensive get-out-the-vote operation Dr. Dean has put together in New Hampshire and Iowa, as well as the intensity of his supporters, factors that many Democrats say continue to give Dr. Dean a big edge in both these states.
''We have more volunteers and more active supporters than any campaign,'' Mr. Trippi said. ''Does anyone question the strength of the Dean organization in Iowa and New Hampshire?''
Many Democrats said that Dr. Dean also had the advantage of an uncommonly loyal base of supporters.
Still, even some Dean supporters expressed distress at his halting performance at the debate, in which the Rev. Al Sharpton managed to do what none of Dr. Dean's more established competitors had managed this year: knock him off his game. Mr. Sharpton challenged Dr. Dean on the absence of minorities in his cabinet when he was governor of Vermont.
''He looked like a deer caught in the headlights,'' Jeff Bovee, 33, a professor of exercise science at Central College and a Dean supporter, said at a Dean appearance here Monday morning. Throughout the day, Dr. Dean portrayed himself as an outsider, and criticized his three main opponents -- Mr. Gephardt, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards -- as Washington insiders, lambasting them for voting to authorize President Bush to go to war in Iraq and in favor of his education initiative.
''Who was the first one who stood up against George Bush?'' he asked when a woman asked whether he was tough enough to face the incumbent in a general election. ''Who was the one who was willing to take on George Bush when his popularity was at 70 percent?''
''We've had a hard couple of months with all those folks from Washington beating up on us,'' he told a few dozen people gathered in Washington, Iowa. ''This is the time we can get our revenge.''
Several Democrats said that Dr. Dean's challenge in New Hampshire was less serious than the one he faced here. For one thing, General Clark is suddenly being challenged. On Monday, Mr. Kerry's campaign chairwoman, Jeanne Shaheen, attacked General Clark, noting that he had spoken warmly about President Bush at a fund-raiser shortly after the president took office, and had voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
''This candidate is not a Democrat,'' she said. ''Wes Clark is not a Democrat.''
General Clark spent much of his day in New Hampshire, where he avoided responding to Mr. Kerry's attacks.Continue reading the main story


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To the Class of 2017,
Congratulations! The moment many of you have probably been waiting for is finally here. You are now seniors. As I watched you rush the senior steps nearly two weeks ago, I experienced a flood of emotions. At first I felt sad that my class had been "replaced", but then I felt immediate relief that our long journey through college was almost over. As I finished and turned in my finals however, that feeling of relief quickly turned into longing. For as happy as I am to be finished with the rigor of Bryn Mawr, I am not nearly ready to be finished with my college experience completely. You have one more year in this place, and so I wanted to offer some words to consider as you embrace your seniority that I wish I had been told.
Don't be afraid to set aside time for yourself. While it can be tempting to fill empty spaces in your schedule with work, other responsibilities, and commitments, if possible, try to leave some time for yourself. Senior year has many perks, but it comes with many unknowns, many stresses at times, and many things left to do. You will need this time to unwind, destress, hang out with friends, or just watch Netflix. At Bryn Mawr, I've noticed that it is all too easy for students to feel guilty when they choose to not work on school stuff, but as long as you manage your time and keep track of what you need to do, taking time for yourself can only help you do well.
Go out and enjoy the time you have with your friends. 9 months. That's what stands between you and graduation when you come back to campus in August. It flies by incredibly fast. Enjoy every moment of those nine months. Go out to a restaurant you've never tried before, head to that museum you've always wanted to see, or go to that festival in center city. Thankfully with the technology we have today it will be easier to keep in touch with each other, but nothing can compare to the memories you make together.
It's never too late to become involved (or even more involved) on campus. I didn't find my groove on campus until spring semester of junior year. As a result, I have learned that it is never too late to join or become involved in activities, clubs, and organizations on campus. If you want to do it, do it.
Keep your goals in sight. No matter what your plans are after graduation, I found it easiest to get through the ups and downs of senior year by looking forward to my end goal. Whether that's more school, a job, an internship, a service year, a gap year, or wherever your heart may lead you, planning for that and looking forward to it got me through some of the hardest parts of the year.
Don't forget to stop and smell the roses. I know, this is incredibly cliche, but it's true. One day when I was walking back to my room, I stopped and stood in awe of Thomas. I am going to miss this beautiful campus. Because we live, work, study, and learn here it's easy to forget how special this place can be. So go sit in the cloisters, or lounge in one of the hammocks and admire the nature and beauty that surrounds you.
And most importantly: don't forget to celebrate yourself and your accomplishments. A wonderful professor told my class this semester that too often she hears students talk about their work in terms of what they couldn't or weren't able to do. I know I am guilty of this. She pushed us to change our frame of thinking from what we didn't do, to what we had done. I want to push you to do the same. As you probably know, senior year is hectic and chaotic at times, and there are only so many hours in the day we can spend working and doing homework. So if you ever find yourself stressed or overwhelmed next year, stop and think about everything you have done in your academic career that has lead you to that point, and be proud. Be proud of being a mawrter, a senior, and a student. Be proud of what you have done, and think of ways to healthily keep working on the rest.
As I walked up the senior steps yesterday for what was probably the last time and rang the bell to ring in the end of my undergraduate career, my heart was heavy with emotions, just like it was on May Day as I watched you rush the same steps. Enjoy every moment of your senior year, and make the most of it. Anassa Kata, 2017. I can't wait to see what the future holds for you.


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I need a million, you sons of bitches
Started by Wade , Jun 25 2018 06:35 PM
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Authors: Adenike Boyo1, Henry Boyo2, Olasunkanmi Kesinro1
Abstract: Energy was generated by using methanol as a solvent to extract dye from Aspilia africana Flowers. The maximum absorption of the extracted dye was observed at different wavelengths (350-1000nm). TiO2 was annealed at different temperatures and phytochemical screening was done. We observed insignificant presence of anthocyanin compared to flavonoids in the flowers. The solar energy conversion efficiency changes from 0.21% to 0.52%, due to the sintering of the TiO2 at different temperatures. The increase in solar energy conversion efficiency can be attributed to the changes in the morphology, crystalline quality, and the optical properties caused by the sintering effect.
Keywords: Aspilia Africana, Methanol, Anthocyanin, Flavonoids and Dye Sensitized Solar Cell
The technology of harvesting solar energy in producing photovoltaic systems has attracted worldwide attention. Several researches have been done on photovoltaic technologies which includes dye sensitized solar cells [1], [5],[8], organic solar cells [4], and multijunction solar cells [9]. Dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have played an important role in the development of photovoltaic technology, although encouraging efficiency of the DSSCs have been presented by many authors, but the use of the DSSCs is still not feasible for commercial applications. These low efficiencies of DSSCs might be due to challenges faced in obtaining suitable materials for its production. Thus, careful importance is placed in harnessing dyes that have a long lifespan, cheaper, and environmental friendly solar cells.
The nano-crystalline dye sensitized solar cell is a photo electrochemical cell. The basic working principle of DSSCs is that photons strike the monolayer of dye which gives up energy. This excites electrons from the dye, instead of generating electron – hole pairs. As shown in 'Fig.1' the solar cell consist of two conductive glass slides (ITO or FTO) with nanoparticle TiO2 sintered on one of the conducting glass slides, stained with the dye and the other conducting glass slide is carbonized with soot. DSSCs are placed in the category of third generation photovoltaics where new trends in the photovoltaic technology are applied. In the first generation PV cells, the electric interface is made between doped n-type and p-type bulk silicon. First generation PV cells provide the highest so far conversion efficiency. The second generation PV cells are based on thin film technology. These cells utilize less material and they thus drop the production cost, however, they are less efficient than the bulk cells. Both first and second generation cells are based on opaque materials and necessitate front-face illumination and moving supports to follow sun's position. Thus they may be either set up in PV parks or on building roofs. Third generation solar cells, are based on nanostructured (mesoscopic) materials and they are made of purely organic or a mixture of organic and inorganic components, thus allowing for a vast and inexhaustible choice of materials.
A liquid triiodide electrolyte is added in between the glass slide.. The absorption of photons causes dye molecules to be attached to the surface of the nanocrystalline titanium dioxide which produces photoelectrons. The titanium dioxide is the photoanode, photoexcitation of the dye results in the transfer of electrons into the conduction band of the nanocrystalline titanium dioxide.
Annealing nanoparticle titanium dioxide at different temperature plays an important role in the solar energy conversion performance of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells. These affect the physical, chemical and optical characteristic of TiO2. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) can crystallize in three different phases namely: rutile (tetragonal), anatase (tetragonal) and brookite (orthorhombic) [10]. The rutile-TiO2 is thermodynamically stable at all temperatures and can be obtained in most crystal growth processes.
The anatase-TiO2 and brookite are less dense and less stable in comparism to the rutile-TiO2.phase [10].
We fabricated DSSCs using Aspilia africana flowers dye extracted from methanol and study the effect of annealing of TiO2 films at different temperature intervals from 1000C, to 500 0C for 30 minutes on the performance of DSSCs.
This study was borne out of the availability of these plants in Nigeria. Another important factor is that Nigeria uses about 3 trillion kWh of energy each year, and with energy requirement growing every year, it is the responsibility of the government and other institutions to develop energy harvesting technologies from renewable energy sources for a sustainable future.
Hence, in order to improve the generation of electricity in our country and beyond, it would be necessary that devices like dye-sensitized solar cells are produced at commercial scale to meet energy demands in Nigeria.
Read full research paper here:http://bit.ly/1MbkjCQ


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Hello Crafters,
Just getting my day started off early this morn. Hope you have a great day planned, we do and are ready for the fun! Just a reminder card to send some sunshine into someone's day.
Stamp set: Endless Birthday Wishes (#137553)
Paper: Daffodil Delight (#119683), Whisper White (#100730) and All Abloom (#133703)
Ink: Tangerine Tango (#126946)
Misc: Banner punch (#133519) and Stampin' Dimensionals (#104430)
This card is entered in the following challenges:
4 Crafty Chicks #214 Sunshine!
Avenue 613 - Challenge #92 - Anything Goes
If you would like to purchase any of the products used in this card you can SHOP by clicking HERE or on any of the item #'s above.
As always, thanks for stopping by for a visit.
Blessings and Happy Crafting,
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Have a Great Day!
4 comments:
- Rainey's Craft Room said...
I love this bright and cheerful card, just what I need as Autumn has truly arrived where I am. Thanks for joining us at 613 Avenue Create.
Lorraine DT
- October 7, 2014 at 2:49 PM
- Lori said...
What a very cool way to make a sun, Belinda!! So glad you came to play with us at 4 Crafty Chicks this week xoxoxo
- October 7, 2014 at 8:23 PM
- Leanne said...
Awesomeness sunshine...way to go, love it. Thanks for playing our Sunshine challenge at 4 Crafty Chick.
Leanne DT
4 Crafty Chicks
- October 8, 2014 at 11:01 AM
- Maureen said...
Cute card! Love that you used the banner punch this way!
- October 18, 2014 at 5:34 PM
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NEW BEDFORD — A leaking underground oil tank and asbestos-laden boiler materials will have to be cleaned up at the Cliftex mill before the building can be demolished.
NEW BEDFORD — A leaking underground oil tank and asbestos-laden boiler materials will have to be cleaned up at the Cliftex mill before the building can be demolished.
There is also a question as to whether demolishing the mill will imperil a "not-to-sue covenant" between the Attorney General's Office and the mill's owner, Norseman Properties.
The request to demolish the Cliftex mill has been a hot topic this summer, with the City Council approving the demolition request in June, Mayor Scott W. Lang vetoing it, and the City Council overriding his veto last week. Mayor Lang has said he will "pursue all legal avenues" to prevent Norseman Properties from demolishing the mill, but has not laid out what those legal options might be.
The demolition request from Norseman Properties has not been received by the city's Building Department, according to Ronald A. Durgin, the city's commissioner of inspectional services. Edward W. Fitzsimmons Jr. of Dartmouth, who has been the public face of the demolition effort, has been discussing his next steps with inspectors in his office, Mr. Durgin said.
Mr. Durgin said Mr. Fitzsimmons has indicated to him that he will first apply for a salvage permit, which would allow the company to remove non-structural items like flooring, interior walls, piping and old equipment.
For Norseman to receive a demolition permit, Mr. Durgin said the company must provide proof that the environmental contamination has been cleaned up; that engineering plans show how the company will protect the adjoining building that Norseman does not own, and how it will keep portions of the building standing; that water, sewer, electricity and other utilities be disconnected; and that all tenants have left the building.
Mr. Durgin said he will depend on Scott Alfonse, the city's director of Environmental Stewardship, and Conservation Agent Sarah Porter to handle the city response to the cleanup at the site. "I assume that the state will be involved in that oversight as well," he said.
Mr. Alfonse said it appears to him the cleanup provision in the agreement has not been met by Norseman Properties.
Mr. Fitzsimmons has to address the contamination.
"That's the key to maintaining his liability release," Mr. Alfonse said. "I don't know that any work has been done. There doesn't appear to be a deadline for when this has to occur."
Mr. Alfonse said state DEP regulations typically give property owners five years to remediate a contaminated site, meaning that Norseman could have two more years to address the contamination. But Mr. Alfonse said Norseman is also required to submit a cleanup plan and fence off potentially contaminated areas. To his knowledge, neither of those had been done.
Mr. Alfonse said agreements like this are created to give developers an incentive to clean up contaminated brownfield sites, without being held liable for causing the contamination. Cliftex Corp., a company that filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors in 2001, is no longer around to be sued.
Contamination at the Cliftex mill was first discovered in 1998, when the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection cited the Cliftex Corp. as the "primarily responsible party" for a leaking underground storage tank and asbestos contamination found in discarded boiler materials in a collapsed section of the mill.
When Norseman Properties purchased the mill in 2003, it sought protection from being blamed for causing the environmental contamination.
The agreement between the Attorney General's brownfields unit head and Norseman Properties, signed in January 2004, stated that the Attorney General's office will not sue Norseman Properties for causing the contamination.
The agreement stipulated that Norseman "renovate and preserve the Cliftex mill so it is suitable for a regional trucking operation, a surplus equipment supplier, one or more regional warehouses and/or storage facilities and a national brand clothing manufacturer." The agreement stated that by renovating the mill, Norseman would create 75 to 85 new jobs and retain 125 to 155 existing jobs.
Whether demolishing the mill could place Norseman in violation of the covenant could not be determined Friday. Ben Erickson, the head of Attorney General Martha Coakley's brownfields unit, was not in the office and unavailable for comment.
The 2004 agreement also stipulated that Norseman "shall achieve and maintain a permanent solution with respect to the soil contamination" and "with respect to water-borne contamination at the site." The agreement was signed by Mr. Fitzsimmons, who was then listed as the manager for Norseman Properties.
Mr. Fitzsimmons, who has made presentations to the City Council as well as picketed City Hall, is no longer listed anywhere on the ownership documents for Norseman Properties.
He signed over control of Norseman Properties to Anthony Zaloumis, a bed and breakfast owner in Newport, in 2005.
Neither Mr. Fitzsimmons nor Mr. Zaloumis returned phone calls for comment.
Contact Aaron Nicodemus at email@example.com


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Correspondence and Other Writings of Six Major Shapers of the United States:
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Over 183,000 searchable documents, fully annotated, from the authoritative Founding Fathers Papers projects.
Quick links
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- Adams, John (4)
- American Commissioners (5)
- Deane, Silas (6)
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- Lee, Arthur (5)
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Franklin Nut Cake
Cooking Recipes Catalogue
This is a recipe from my family's cookbook. The flavor can be enhanced by pouring 1/2 cup of wine or sherry over cake while still warm.
INGREDIENTS (for 1 servings):
2 cups butter
2 cups white sugar
6 eggs
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup candied cherries
1 cup candied pineapple chunks
3 cups chopped pecans
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 250 degrees F (120 degrees C). Grease a 10 inch tube pan and line it with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time.
Sift together 3 cups of the flour, baking powder and salt. Mix remaining flour with fruit and nuts. Stir into batter. Add vanilla.
Pour into tube pan. Bake at 250 degrees for 3 hours. Cool in pan.


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Learn how UGC can help you discover user content that converts. Request Demo
At Tint, we value transparency. Transparency is one of our five company values and we've blogged about it several times. Everything at Tint is discussed openly as a team and nothing is hidden, including the salaries of other team members and how much money is in our bank account. We're also transparent with our customers – about pricing, our product roadmap, and mistakes we make along the way. So when Josh Pigford from Baremetrics (a platform that helps companies calculate their revenue data) reached out to us to see if we wanted to make our financial data public, it wasn't a difficult decision. We said yes.
Whatever we see on our Baremetrics dashboard, you can now see, in real time. Anyone will be able to see our monthly recurring revenue, user churn, a live stream of transactions with customers, and more. In the interests of privacy, the real names of our customers will be replaced with fake names, but the dollar amounts are real. Here are some of the big numbers we're exposing:
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is one of our key metrics to evaluate how fast we are growing. This number represents the portion of our revenue that is very likely to continue in the future. With a subscription service like ours, most of our revenue falls into this category. We calculate this by subtracting one-time payments, like insTint update days, from our gross revenue. Multiply this number by 12 and you have your expected annual revenue.
Our Baremetrics dashboard reveals both Revenue Churn and User Churn. These numbers represent the rate at which customers downgrade or cancel their plans, so a low churn is good. When a customer buys two months of Tint and then cancels, that increases our churn. Our user churn looks relatively high, because many of our customers subscribe for just one event/temporary campaign and then cancel until their next event/campaign. Showing clients the advantages of using Tint beyond their events is one strategy we've employed to decrease our churn.
Pretty simple: MRR x 12. An estimation of our annual revenue, if conditions from this month continue. We're growing, so we hope this number keeps growing too. You can see we've 10x our annual revenue in 1 year and we are very proud of that.
Including upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations, our Baremetrics dashboard exposes a lot of information about the flow of clients at Tint. "Active Customers" displays all customers who have paid us within the given time period. This past month, we had 863 active customers, and 98 new customers. Wahoo!
Not many companies are this transparent about their revenue, financial data, and more. Buffer, another social media startup practicing transparency, and Baremetrics themselves have made their dashboards public, but it's still an unorthodox move. Then again, who ever said startups should make orthodox moves? We believe this level of transparency is a good idea for a couple of reasons: accountability will push us to grow faster, transparency will encourage customers and investors to trust us, and sharing our financial data may help other entrepreneurs.
Nothing is hidden from the public eye. This means that we're more accountable for our successes and our failures. Knowing that all of these numbers are out there will push us to increase revenue, decrease user churn, and continue to grow the business at the fast pace we've set for ourselves. On the flip side, if we do poorly one month, there's no hiding it. Our hope is that this level of transparency will inspire trust. Here are our numbers. Make of them what you will.
We love helping other entrepreneurs. It wasn't long ago that Tint was tiny and pivoting to stay alive too. If seeing our financial data is useful to them (and we think it will be) then we're happy to share it. Come. Study our financials. See what's working. See what's not. And let us know what you find most helpful!
Our CEO, Tim Sae Koo, has led this push for transparency. But even he has misgivings about putting it all out there. As Tim explained, "Data doesn't paint the whole picture." It is easy to look at these numbers and assume you know how a company is doing. But the numbers are only part of the story. It's likely there will be months when outsiders look at our dashboard and wonder "Why isn't this growing as fast as last month?" or "Why did this number dip?" They might assume they know how Tint is doing based on those numbers alone, but they wouldn't have the whole picture.
We're not going to stop with making our real-time revenue dashboard public. In the coming weeks, we plan to begin sharing a monthly update with a slew of numbers that help to paint a fuller image of what is going on at Tint. These numbers will include sales metrics, like number of demo requests per month, support metrics, like response time on support tickets, and development metrics, like number of bugs fixed, and much, much more. We're excited about this next step in transparency, and we hope you'll join us on this journey. What other metrics would you like to see from us? Have you seen other startup companies do this well? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below. -Muriel, Content Hero
—- **Update: Our two month experiment in exposing our dashboard in real-time has come to a close. We've made our revenue dashboard private again, for the time being, but we plan to continue finding other ways to practice transparency. The decision to remove our dashboard from public view was not made lightly. Due to concerns from our customers and giving competitive insight as an enterprise B2B company, we are reconsidering what we should make public while maintaining a transparent culture. We will continue to openly share our numbers as we grow, and to keep you updated with our metrics – feel free to suggest the kinds of numbers or data you'd like to see from us in the comments below!


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University of Illinois-Chicago, PhD 1976; University of Chicago, MA 1970
Hasia R. Diner
Paul And Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, Professor Hebrew, Interim Director of Glucksman Ireland House NYU
Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017)
We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945 – 1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009)
* Winner of the National Jewish Book Award
|From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Age, with Elliott Barkan and Alan Kraut (New York University Press, 2007)
|The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004)
|Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002)
*Nominee, James Beard Award, "writing about food" category
|Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present (with Beryl Lieff Benderly) (New York: Basic Books, 2002)
|Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections, with Jeffrey Shandler and Beth S. Wenger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)
|The Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.)
American Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).(Part of a series for young readers) -Reissued, 2003, as A New Promised Land: A History of the Jews in America.
|In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks. 1915-1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; reissue of 1977 edition)
|A Time for Gathering. 1820-1880: The Second Migration, Vol. 2 in, The Jewish People in America, Henry B'eingold, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
|Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1984)
"Buying and Selling 'Jewish': The Historical Impact of Commerce on Jewish Communal Life," Imagining in the Jewish American Community, Jack Wertheimer, ed. (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2007). pp. 28-44.
"The Local and the Global: Lombard Street and the Modern Jewish Diaspora," Voices of Lombard Street: A Century of Change in East Baltimore. Deborah Weiner, Anita Kassof, and Avi Y. Decter, eds. (Baltimore: Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2007). pp 10-21.
"American Immigration and Ethnic History: Moving the Field Forward, Staying the Course," Journal of American Ethnic History, 25, 4 (Summer) 2006. pp 130 – 141.
"Entering the Mainstream of Modern Jewish History: Peddlers and the American Jewish South," Southern Jewish History, 8 (2005), pp. 1 – 30.
"The Vanishing Middle Ground: Religion and Culture: Views of 10 Scholars," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2004.
"American Jewish History," Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Martin Goodman, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). pp. 471 – 490.
"American West, New York Jewish," Jewish Life in the American West, Ava Kahn, ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003). pp. 33 – 51.
"Embracing World of Our Fathers: The Context of Reception," Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, Jack Kugelmass, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). pp. 210 – 222.
Contact Information
Hasia R. DinerPaul And Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, Professor Hebrew, Interim Director of Glucksman Ireland House NYU firstname.lastname@example.com 53 Washington Square South, Room 104
Phone: (212) 998-8988


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- Proceedings
- Open Access
Compareads: comparing huge metagenomic experiments
- Nicolas Maillet1Email author,
- Claire Lemaitre1,
- Rayan Chikhi2,
- Dominique Lavenier1 and
- Pierre Peterlongo1Email author
© Maillet et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012
- Published: 19 December 2012
Nowadays, metagenomic sample analyses are mainly achieved by comparing them with a priori knowledge stored in data banks. While powerful, such approaches do not allow to exploit unknown and/or "unculturable" species, for instance estimated at 99% for Bacteria.
This work introduces Compareads, a de novo comparative metagenomic approach that returns the reads that are similar between two possibly metagenomic datasets generated by High Throughput Sequencers. One originality of this work consists in its ability to deal with huge datasets. The second main contribution presented in this paper is the design of a probabilistic data structure based on Bloom filters enabling to index millions of reads with a limited memory footprint and a controlled error rate.
We show that Compareads enables to retrieve biological information while being able to scale to huge datasets. Its time and memory features make Compareads usable on read sets each composed of more than 100 million Illumina reads in a few hours and consuming 4 GB of memory, and thus usable on today's personal computers.
Using a new data structure, Compareads is a practical solution for comparing de novo huge metagenomic samples. Compareads is released under the CeCILL license and can be freely downloaded from http://alcovna.genouest.org/compareads/.
- Hash Function
- Bloom Filter
- Balance Function
- Memory Footprint
- Suffix Array
The past five years have seen the arrival of High Throughput Sequencing (HTS), also known as Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). These technologies drastically lowered sequencing costs and increased sequencing throughput. They radically changed molecular biology and computational biology, as data generation is no longer a bottleneck. In fact, nowadays a major challenge is the analysis and interpretation of sequencing data [1]. HTS democratized access to sequencing to almost all biological labs over the world. It also opened the doors to new techniques such as ChipSeq [2], ClipSeq [3], RadSeq [4] and the topic of this work, metagenomics [5].
Metagenomics, also known as "environmental genomics", provides an alternative to traditional single- genome studies for exploring the microbial world. Most microorganisms (up to 99% of Bacteria [6]) are unknown and possibly "unculturable". Even if traditional genomics sequencing methods are well studied, they are not suited for environmental samples, because of the need to cultivate clones. By sequencing uncultured genomes directly from environmental samples, metagenomics offers new ways to study this unexplored diversity.
HTS technologies provide fragments of sequences (called reads) of length a few hundred base pairs without any information about the locus nor the orientation on the molecule they come from. In the metagenomic context, an additional difficulty comes from the fact that each read may belong to any species.
Nowadays, it is difficult to assemble complex metagenomes (such as soil or water metagenomes) into longer consensus sequences, because reads from different species may be merged into one chimeric sequence. Mende and colleagues [7] showed that for a 400-genomes metagenome, using simulated Illumina reads, 37% of the assembled sequences were chimeric. Thus currently, reads from metagenomes are used to estimate the biodiversity [8] or may be compared to known databases, providing information with respect to the current scientific knowledge [9, 10]. Another way to exploit two or more metagenomic datasets is to compare them together, enabling to understand how genomic differences are related to environmental ones (biotopes localizations and/or time spent after an event).
Comparative metagenomics usually deals with many aspects, such as sequence composition, i.e. GC content [11], and genome size [12], taxonomic diversity [13], functional content [14], etc. Several methods are currently developed for comparative metagenomics analyses. Some are based on statistical methods with a large number of descriptive variables, e.g. principal component analysis (PCA).
To the best of our knowledge, there is no software designed to compare two or more metagenomic samples at the read level, i.e. to identify reads that are shared or similar between samples. This can be simply used to compute a similarity measure between samples such as the number or percentage of similar reads between pairs of samples. When dealing with more than two samples, this would enable among others to classify metagenomics samples based on their raw reads content. One could use the popular tool BLAST to align reads in an all-vs-all way, however it is not designed specifically to this task, and more importantly, it cannot cope in time and memory with the size of nowadays metagenomic samples obtained with current sequencing technologies. For instance, with the aim of exploring the diversity of small eukaryotes in the oceans all over the world, the expedition "Tara Ocean" [15] is generating more than 400 metagenomic samples containing each around 100 million short reads, that will need to be compared to each other.
Here, we introduce a time and memory-efficient method for extracting similar reads between two metagenomic datasets. The similarity is based on shared k-mers (words of length k). In order to fit with current memory capacities, the data structure we use is a modified version of a Bloom filter [16]. Bloom filters have recently been used in bioinformatics, notably for assembly graph partitioning [17], which enabled to perform metagenomic de novo assembly using 30x less memory.
This manuscript presents two main contributions: (I) a new algorithm, called Compareads, which computes the similarity measure between two metagenomics datasets; (II) a new simple but extremely efficient data structure based on the Bloom filter for storing the presence/absence of k-mers in huge datasets. The manuscript is organized as follows: in Section "Methods", we depict the Compareads algorithm and the new data structure. In Section "Results" we provide results both about the data structure and about Compareads, showing the efficiency of our approach in term of computation time, memory and biological accuracy.
Preliminaries and definitions A sequence is composed by zero or more symbols from an alphabet ∑. In this work, as we are dealing with DNA, ∑ = {A, C, G, T}. A sequence s of length n on ∑ is denoted also by s[0]s[1] . . . s[n - 1], where s[i] ∈ ∑ for 0 ≤ i < n. We denote by s[i, j] the substring s[i]s[i + 1] . . . s[j] of s. In this case, we say that the substring s[i, j] occurs at position i in s. We call k-mer a sequence of length k, and s[i, i + k - 1] is a k-mer occurring at position i in s.
Overview of Compareads Compareads is designed for finding similar sequences between two read sets. This basic operation may appear extremely simple. However, it has to be highly efficient, in term of computation time and memory footprint, in order to scale with huge metagenomics datasets.
In order to perform efficiently this operation, Compareads indexes k-mers and uses a rough but efficient notion of "similar sequences" defined as follows:
Definition 1 (shared k -mer) Two sequences s1and s2share a k-mer if and only if ∃(i1, i2) such that s1[i1, i1 + k - 1] = s2[i2, i2 + k - 1].
Definition 2 (Similar sequences) Given integers k and t, two sequences s1and s2are said similar if and only if they share at least t non overlapping k-mers.
In a few words, given two read sets A and B, the goal of the Compareads algorithm is to find the subset of reads from A which are similar to a read in B such set being denoted by As it is a heuristic (see Section "Dealing with false positives"), our algorithm outputs an over-approximation of set denoted by .
Compareads computes in two steps. The indexing step consists in storing in memory all k-mers having at least one occurrence in the set B. The query step processes reads from set A one by one. For a read r ∈ A, the index is used to test the presence in the set B of each k-mer of r. If at least t non-overlapping k-mers are returned as present, then the read r is inserted in . The main practical challenge faced by Compareads is to index the possibly huge volume of k-mers contained in B. The data structure must therefore fulfill three criteria: it must be quick to build, have a low memory footprint and be quick to request. Section "The Bloom Data Structure index" describes the chosen probabilistic data structure, based on a Bloom filter.
Limiting the indexing space To control the approximation error (see Section "Dealing with false positives"), the indexing phase is interrupted whenever the volume of k-mers in the first reads of B exceeds a fixed value n. The query phase is then performed on the whole A dataset. This phase returns a partial intersection between A and a first chunk of reads from B. The remaining partial intersections between A and the next chunks of reads from B (each representing a volume of n k-mers or less) are sequentially computed, until all the reads from B have been indexed. Eventually, Compareads returns the union of all partial intersections. Note that, in terms of results, this partitioning approach is strictly equivalent to performing a complete indexing of B then a query of all the reads from A. To avoid redundant computations, reads from A considered as "similar" in one of the partial intersections are tagged using a bitvector and are not queried further.
Time complexity Let n A and n B be the number of k-mers respectively in set A and set B. Computing is done in time O(n B ) (indexing) + (query). The term is due to the limitation of the indexing space.
Ad hoc data structure
The index data structure we use is based on a Bloom filter, specially designed for the task of storing efficiently a huge set of k-mers, while being fast to build and to query. We shortly recall in Section "Bloom filter" what a Bloom filter is before describing, in Section "The Bloom Data Structure index", our data structure called BDS.
Bloom filter
A Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure designed to test the membership of elements in a set [16]. It consists of an array of m bits, all initialized to zero, and a set of hash functions. Each hash function maps an element to a single position in the array. Each element is associated, through the values of the hash functions, to several positions in the array. To insert an element in the structure, the bits in the array associated to this element are all set to one. The structure answers membership queries by checking whether all the bits in the array associated to an element are set to one.
This data structure is probabilistic in nature, as false positives are possible. Even if an element is not in the set, its bits in the array may still be all set to one. This is because the bits associated to an element may independently be associated to other elements. Hence, the Bloom filter returns a wrong answer with non-zero probability. This probability is the false positive rate. An asymptotic approximation of the false positive rate is 0.6185 m/n , assuming n elements are inserted in the m-bits array, and (ln 2 · (m/n)) hash functions are used [18]. False negatives never occur: if an element belongs to the set, the Bloom filter always answers positively. Bloom filters are space-efficient: only (n log2e · log2(1/ε)) bits are required to support membership queries for n elements with a false positive rate of ε[18].
The Bloom Data Structure index
In this article, we consider a slightly different variation of Bloom filters: instead of using a single array of bits, each hash function corresponds to a distinct array, disjoint from all other functions. In terms of performance, with uniform hash functions, this variation is asymptotically equivalent to the original definition [18]. To avoid confusion with classical Bloom filters, we refer to this variation as BDS, standing for Bloom Data Structure.
One important property of these functions is that there is a simple relationship between the hash values of two consecutive k-mers in a read. One can see that the hash value of the next k-mer can be quickly computed, by left-shifting the binary sequence of the previous hash value and appending an extra bit. These functions are not classical hash functions, yet we show that they exhibit good hashing properties when applied to k-mers. In Section "Practical performance of the BDS, comparison with other data structures", the performance of these functions is compared with that of a classical hash function in terms of computation time, and false positive rate in the BDS.
The Compareads pipeline
Computing is asymmetrical. Indeed does not contain the reads from B which are similar to reads in A. For doing this, one needs to compute also . In practice, for fully and symmetrically comparing two sets A and B we apply a pipeline slightly more complicated than simply followed by . This whole pipeline, designed for reducing a heuristic effect is described in Section "False positives due to k-mer shared between a read and a dataset".
Similarity measure While comparing read sets A and B, the result provided by Compareads is composed of two sets: and . Then, a similarity measure between the two datasets is computed as follows:
where |X| denotes the cardinality of the set X.
Dealing with false positives
Our approach may generate false positives for two reasons we describe in the two upcoming sections, which also expose solutions for limiting these effects.
False positives due to k-mer shared between a read and a dataset
Using t > 1, Compareads algorithm can call similar sequences that do not respect strictly the definition of similarity given in definition 2. Indeed, steps described in Section "Computing " detect reads from A that share at least t k-mers with reads from B. This is less stringent than finding reads from A that share at least t k-mers with at least one read from set B. In fact, the t k-mers found in read A are possibly spread over two or more distinct reads from set B.
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Compute , storing the results in a set denoted by .
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Compute storing the results in a set denoted by .
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Compute storing the results in a set denoted by .
In a few words, the two output datasets and are obtained by applying the fundamental operation between a query and a read set being itself already the result of the asymmetrical operation. This enables to remove some false positives due to k-mers spread over several reads.
Note that in practice, the last set is obtained by computing instead of simply (used here for simplifying the reading). This operation provides the same result but is computed faster as .
As outlined in the example Figure 1, this pipeline still yields some false positives. These are characterized by t shared k-mers with at least two distinct reads from the indexed dataset B, themselves considered as similar to reads of set A. Even if this side effect is difficult to assess, we show in Section "Comparison with a classical approach using BLAST" that Compareads provides trustworthy results, highly similar to a classical approach, on several real datasets.
Bloom filter false positives
As exposed in Section "The Bloom Data Structure index", the BDS index is a probabilistic data structure, that may consider a k-mer as indexed while this is not the case (i.e. a false positive or FP). Here, we analyse the variations of the false positive rate for each hash function and their combinations with respect to the parameter k and the number n of distinct indexed k-mers. This enables to determine optimal parameters and appropriate combination of functions, that give the best trade-off between memory usage and false positive rate.
FP probablity for each function Assuming the nucleotide composition of the indexed k-mers and of the query k-mers are unbiaised, we can easily compute the probability, P FP (f i , k, n), for any query k-mer to be a false positive with one of the seven hash functions, f i (see Additional file 1 for details). The expression of this probablity is presented in equation 3 for a balanced hash function, and 4 for an unbalanced one.
This "independence" property implies also that combining these 3 functions in our BDS is a very efficient strategy to reduce the FP rate, as can be seen in Figure 2a, especially for large values of n
Concerning the unbalanced functions, such property does not hold, since it is possible to find couples of distinct k-mers that share the same couple of hash codes for at least 2 of the unbalanced functions, or for one balanced function and at least one unbalanced. Therefore the theoretical FP rate of unbalanced functions is much more difficult to compute. We performed simulations to compute an empirical FP rate. We found that empirical results are very close to the formula obtained by multiplying the individual probabilities, i.e. assuming complete independence between all functions (Figure 2a). For details about how empirical results were obtained, see Additional file 2.
Choice of parameters The comparison of these FP curves led us to choose the combination of the three balanced functions plus an unbalanced one. This choice is motivated by the fact that unbalanced functions are not essential, as they have a limited effect on the FP rate (Figure 2a). Since hash functions described in Section "Particular hash functions" have a fixed range, the memory used by the BDS depends only on the value of k and the number of hash functions used. Recall that each hash function is associated to a dedicated bit array which occupies 2 k bits. Using 7 hash functions, the BDS has a total memory footprint of 7 · 2 k bits and can be stored in 2 k bytes. When using only 4 hash functions, the BDS occupies 4 · 2 k bits and can be stored in twice less space (2k-1bytes).
For the chosen combination of functions, we plotted the FP rate as a function of n and for several values of k in Figure 2b. The larger is k, the less FP we get for a given number of indexed k-mers. Consequently, for large values of k, more k-mers can be indexed while maintaining a reasonable FP rate. However, the memory allocated to BDS grows with k and larger values of k increases the stringency of our similarity measure. We can see in Figure 2b, that using k-mers of size at least 30 enables to index at least 300 millions of k-mers with less than 2% of false positives.
For k = 33, when indexing up to one billion distinct k-mers, we obtain a theoretical upper bound of 0.13% of false positives (with 3 balanced functions, equation 5). The FP rate is even lower when adding one of the unbalanced function, we estimated it empirically to 0.114%. Thus, using 4 hash functions and k = 33 is a good set of parameters for indexing one billion distinct k-mers. With such parameters, the memory usage of Compareads is 4 GB.
Practical performance of the BDS, comparison with other data structures
We propose here a comparative analysis of the BDS with other data structures. In the following, we show that classical non probabilistic data structures result in a worse time and memory performance, while in Section "Comparison with other hash functions and with a classical Bloom filter", we show that the BDS is the best suited for the problem of indexing huge amounts of k-mers.
Comparison with non probabilistic data structures: suffix array and hash table
Indexing n characters using the simplest version of a suffix array (not enhanced [19] and without LCP information) requires 5n bytes of memory [20]. Compared to our set of parameters where n = 1 billion, the memory footprint would be 5 × 109 bytes, i.e. 4.66 GB. While this is comparable to the BDS, the query time of the suffix array, O(k log n), is significantly worse.
An hash table can be used to store an exact set of k-mers. Such structure stores the k-mers explicitly, hence it requires at least bits (assuming no overhead), i.e. 16.5 GB for one billion of 33-mers. Thus, the BDS is four times more succinct.
Comparison with other hash functions and with a classical Bloom filter
Time comparison with other hash functions The hash functions defined for BDS were designed with speed in mind. In this paragraph, we compare them with a popular and fast hash function (Jenkins hash, specifically hashlittle2 from http://burtleburtle.net/bob/c/lookup3.c). We simulated 1 millon of 100-bp reads, where each nucleotide is drawn uniformly and independently. To simulate the behavior of computing hashes for the BDS, 4 hash values were computed for each 33-mer. For the hashlittle2 function, we simulated this behavior by computing 4 hashes with 4 different initial values. We recorded the time required to compute the hashes for all the 33-mers present in the reads, averaged over 3 executions. Computing the hash with the hashlittle2 function took 13.1 seconds (5.2 MHashes/s), whereas for the BDS hash functions, the same computation took 1.4 seconds (49.8 MHashes/s). Hence, the BDS hash functions are one order of magnitude faster than a classical set of hash functions.
Comparison with a classical Bloom filter A classical Bloom filter requires a fixed amount of memory to index n k-mers. Evaluating the Bloom filter memory using formula from Section "Bloom filter" for one billion elements, with a false positive rate of 0.114%, yields 1.8 GB of memory. While this is twice smaller than the BDS, a classical Bloom filter would require classical hash functions. However, as shown above, classical hash functions are an order of magnitude slower to compute.
Comparison with a classical approach using BLAST
Our approach is an heuristic based on shared k-mers between reads. Here we compare Compareads with a well-established method, BLAST[21], that is based on sequence alignment. The dataset used is composed of 15 bacterial metagenomes obtained from fresh water with three different conditions of Carbon/Nitrogen ratio (unpublished data). On average, each sample is composed of 176409 reads with an average of 400 nucleotides per read (Roche 454 technology).
Comparison between Compareads and BLAST.
Total Time (min)
Mean Time for one intersection (s)
Reads Found
33 400 091
Compareads 1 ∗ 33
35 898 023
Compareads 4 ∗ 33
31 997 243
Compareads 10 ∗ 33
21 350 268
Applying Compareads to Global Ocean metagenomic samples
Those results show that Compareads can also be used on Sanger reads and deliver reliable biological conclusions. Indeed, despite of false positives and the simple definition of similarity, we were able to retrieve the classification of metagenomes according to their geographical origin.
Motivated by de novo comparative metagenomics, this paper proposes two main contributions. The first one is a data structure based on Bloom filters that can index, for instance up to one billion distinct words of length 33 (33-mers) using 4Gb of memory, with an error rate of 0.11%, and that is faster to build and request, to the best of our knowledge, that any other existing data structure. The second main contribution is a software, called Compareads which uses this data structure to efficiently perform de novo intensive comparisons of huge metagenomic datasets generated by High Throughput Sequencers. We have shown that this approach enables to retrieve and classify differences in species content between metagenomic samples. For this kind of comparison, our approach is much faster than alternative ones such as BLAST and thus enables to scale to huge datasets. We furthermore tested the scalability of Compareads on a large oceanic dataset (unpublished), from the Tara Ocean expedition [15]; it is composed of 31 metagenomes and contains overall 3.5 billions of Illumina short reads (108bp). Each intersection was performed in 10 hours and 55 minutes in average using 4Gb of memory. Such features enabled us to compute the metagenome datasets intersections in 6 days and 10 hours using 50 cores of Intel® Xeon® CPU X5550 at 2.67GHz. This would have been unfeasible with any other known existing tools (based on results Section "Comparison with a classical approach using BLAST", BLAST is about 30 times longer and would take more than 6 months to complete this task with the same resources).
Compareads has been conceived for being parallelizable both at fine and coarse grained levels. Future work will consist in implementing a parallel version exploiting multi-core and GPU chips. Compareads is released under the CeCILL license and can be freely downloaded from http://alcovna.genouest.org/compareads/.
This work was supported by the french ANR-2010-COSI-004 MAPPI Project. Authors warmly thank O. Jaillon from the Genoscope and P. Vandenkoornhuyse from the Ecobio UMR for providing their biological expertise and metagenomic datasets. Additionally, we thank G. Rizk for its help and comments with the data structure and F. Gauthier for the symbol creation.
This article has been published as part of BMC Bioinformatics Volume 13 Supplement 19, 2012: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) Satellite Workshop on Comparative Genomics. The full contents of the supplement are available online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbioinformatics/supplements/13/S19
Authors' Affiliations
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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What our clients have to say about us: I purchased a run program from Lauren to train for my first 6 mile, team trail race. Lauren was very thorough in understanding my goals and designed a program that not only worked with my schedule but was easy to follow. I trained for 6 weeks without injury and saw my mile times drop every week. She checked in on my … [Read more...]
Lauren Padula – Running and Yoga
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Vishal Patel – Nutrition
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It's definitely a mixed message - I'm leaving, but I'm wearing a bright color so your eyes - and maybe you - can follow me.
I liked the last one best -- not sure why, but it seemed different.
She's the only one who looks calm.
You've heard of the Red Hat Society? Well, we're the Red Coat Society. Activities include fleeing from the past, contemplative jogging, and gazing off into the distance. All applicants wishing to join must be brunettes.
I wish I could like this comment or star it or favorite it. I really like contemplative jogging.
Totally stealing this for my FB post today.
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Good morning!
Great news! The Independent's annual Pink List has come out and two women are at the top. Bisexual Olympian Nicola Adams is at number one, with out sports presenter Clare Balding right behind her.
Nicola Adams
Also on the list: Heather Peace came in at number 7, Sue Perkins at 13, Jessie J at 18, Carol Ann Duffy at 25, Mary Portas at 27, Pratibha Parmar at 28, Val McDermid at 38, Jane Hill at 40, Stella Duffy at 41 and Phyllida Lloyd at 74,
Also on the list: Lucy Spraggan, who just quit X-Factor this past weekend because she was ill. Such a bummer!
Model/actress Mink Brar is a guest in the Big Boss house, which is like a Bollywood Big Brother. Apparently Mink was a lesbian that later denied it, so she's perfect for reality TV.
Sex.com wants Miley Cyrus to star in a softcore porn video, saying "It's just a naked make out, but if Miley wants to make sex part of the deal, that's cool too." I'm sure Miley is interested in all facets of this project.
If you are looking to help out after the Sandy disaster, the Ali Forney Center could use your donations. The LGBT homeless shelter is located a half a block from the Hudson River, so it was completely destroyed. Anything you can give would be a huge help.
Lindsay Lohan and Michelle Rodriguez are in a new film together, a comedy anthology called inAPPropriate Comedy. I don't get the feeling they are in the same scene together, much like their last co-starring roles in Machete.
Lady Gaga wants you to vote for marriage equality. So in case you were on the fence!
Here's another one from Lyon Fine Jewlery, aka The Real L Word's Lauren Russell and friends.
Tonight on Logo at 10:30/9:30c, tune in for Wanda Sykes' NewNowNext Vote With Wanda Sykes Election Special. I know I will!
Our Good Taste columnist Candace Walsh is going to be at the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat March 15-17 at the Sleeping Lady Resort in WA's Cascades. It sounds super rad, with Cheryl Strayed and Ariel Gore amongst the other teachers and speakers.
Today in Lesbianish TV: The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Talking Liberally with Stephanie Miller (Current 9 a.m.), The Children's Hour (MGM 11:15 a.m.), *Roseanne (We 11:30 a.m.), Black Swan (TMAX 12:40 p.m.), The Talk (CBS 2 p.m.), *Secrets of a Restaurant Chef (Food Network 2 p.m.), The Kids Are All Right (WMAX 2:50 p.m.), *Reba (ABC Family 5:30 p.m.), Jane Velez-Mitchell (HLN 7 p.m.), The Voice (NBC 8 p.m.), Upstairs Downstairs (PBS), *Iron Chef America (Cooking Channel 8 p.m.), *Finding Bigfoot marathon (Animal Planet 8 p.m.), The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC 9 p.m.), *Degrassi (TeenNick 9), Our Idiot Brother (TMC Xtra 9 p.m.), Wanda Sykes: NewNowNext Vote (Logo 10:30 p.m.), Chelsea Lately (E! 11 p.m.), Iron Chef America (Cooking Channel 11 p.m.) and *Roseanne (We 11:30 p.m.) (Thanks Roni!)
*Denotes a rerun


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A slim volume of meditations on the conundrum that is happiness.
Early on in the book, Malouf (Ransom, 2010, etc.) reflects on the unique position we find ourselves in with regard to the idea of "unrest," noting that something seemingly in opposition to a broad idea of happiness has undergone a reversal of sorts. Smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, constant news updates, etc.—the situation maintains a state of unrest, without which we're faced with unendurable inactivity, stillness and quiet. The author notes that it's likely that a majority of people reading this book would, when asked if they are happy, report that they "can't complain"—even though the opposite is often true, with disgruntlement about politicians, the pace of modern life and other issues leading to a too-common base line of unrest. Malouf bounces among ideas throughout this short book, calling on a who's-who of philosophers and writers for historical perspective on the winding path happiness has taken through the milleniums. Perhaps the world's interconnectedness in the digital age has led to an increased feeling of insignificance; perhaps not, but Malouf takes these theories and mines Seneca, Thomas Jefferson and others to shed light on both the ideas and their naysayers. At certain points, the author comes off as crotchety and out-of-touch with current realities, but the majority of the text is engaging.
A tidy introduction to basic philosophies and their relation to how we view our happiness.