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More Time For What's Important To You!
We get up every morning to work with business owners, just like you, to support you in transforming your business so that it makes a positive impact on your life, your team, your family, your community and your world.
We believe that it takes enormous courage to be the owner of a small business and that courage should be rewarded with the time, money and freedom that you went into business for in the first place.
With over a decade of working with business owners, to help them grow their businesses, you can trust ActionCOACH's proven six step pathway to help you make and keep more money, free up your time and give you the freedom to choose how you'll invest your time and energy.
Better Control Over Your Business!
At ActionCOACH we say that people are important and systems should run the business! We put our reputation behind our method.
When you grow your business using our system, you get control of your company like the thousands of others around the world that have benefited from working with an ActionCOACH through small business coaching!
We Believe in Giving
At our ActionCOACH Firm, Team Sage, we believe that a business is about more than just making money, it's about making a difference.
That's why we tithe to our spiritual nourishment, participate in Coaching For A Cause, are an accredited Evolved Enterprise and are members of B1G1, business for good.
Improved Cash Flow! Increased Efficiency
What's the most important thing for you in business?
If you are like most of our clients, you want more money left at the end of the day, more time to enjoy your life and more freedom to do the things that are important to you!
In these times of shifting global markets along with disruption and great opportunity, our clients are more interested in creating a stable base from which to respond to the changes in the marketplace and the ability to scale from a solid foundation. They take comfort in the clarity that working with ActionCOACH provides, so they can stay focused on what matters to them the most.
You can count on us for sustainable growth! Check out our testimonials and see how small business coaching has made improved cash flow and efficiency a reality for so many owners of small businesses. It can be a reality for you too!
Premier Air Conditioning & Refrigeration, Inc. has been using ActionCOACH for 6 months. Our business has been open for 15 years. We wanted to take our business from a small business to an Elite Company, with the help of Jody Johnson we are working towards our goal. One of our priorities was working the numbers, knowing what to look for in our job costing, profit and loss, and budgeting maximizing profit. I am proud to say we have accomplished this. I not only value the gain in the company, but personal development too.
My business and personal life has been completely transformed as a result of having a business coach. As an interior designer, I had lots of creativity but very little business structure. In my first year of coaching I set up systems, understood my financials for the first time, increased my staff and increased my profits by 250%! When I started coaching, I was in personal debt and now I am debt free! My coach has empowered me in every area of life!
The experience has been amazing! Jody has worked with us side by side to transform our business. She helped us to get a handle on and better understand cashflow and create a strategic plan. One of the most important things was helping us to understand that our job as owners is to grow the business and to grow our team members which freed up our time as the owners. Our revenues have increased by 194% in three years. Profit just under 219% while created 20 new jobs for people in our community of which we are very proud.
Through working with ActionCOACH, I have been able to grow my business, build a tremendous team, and truly understand my numbers. However, the biggest benefit of working with ActionCOACH has undoubtedly been having peace of mind throughout the process!
Our coaching experience has been truly transformative. The results we produced speak for themselves. Through this experience I have been introduced to such phenomenal speakers and leaders in the business community. The ideas and knowledge gained in the last 18 months have been life changing. I now have clarity around our margins, discounting, inventory and the importance of having the right team members in place. Our revenue growth was an increased of 50% and our profit increased by 436%. We created a culture by design that attracts potential employees and Yamaha USA has taken notice and commended us for being a model dealership in our industry.
What has most impressed me about having an ActionCOACH is the ability to "see" in me what I cannot see myself. This might be something that is keeping me from achieving my goals or something I truly desire. Either way, I inevitably leave the session with a breakthrough.
It's hard to believe that in less than three months, we have come from being an awkward, fly by the seat of your pants organization to a structured, mature enterprise, and I have more time on my hands. Because of your objective perspective and insightfulness, you were able to guide my partner and I through rough transitions to get exactly what WE want for our company. We are truly on a path that is a plan and not just a dream. What it all boils down to is that we have a significant increase in our productivity, profitability, peace of mind and leisure time. Who knew that was possible?
You took the time to listen and make recommendations that helped our business. You led us thru the exercises that again helped our business. After a few years of struggling and accumulating debt it was our experience with ActionCOACH that made us realize that we were not "bad business owners" but rather uneducated ones. We should have folded and we are still hanging on and I really feel like it was the ActionCLUB that gave us a boost. Words can not say enough THANK YOU for all that you do.


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Everyone has heard about Tempur-Pedic mattresses. The famous Tempur-Pedic mattress is known for its design in the way that it curves and shapes around the sleeper's body. Tempurpedic Mattress Price Range in Northgate the brand carries different models and designs for different preferences. A lot of research has been put into these mattresses to ensure the quality and effectiveness of a great mattress. Because of the advanced research and design of the mattress, Tempur Memory Foam Mattress Sale the pricing on them can be much higher than most people expect to pay for a mattress. The key to being able to afford a Tempur-Pedic mattress is to look for a Tempur-Pedic mattress sale.
Sales allow consumers to purchase these mattresses for lower than retail prices. This also makes it so people that wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it can afford a mattress that is comfortable and state of the art. The first step I would take in looking for a Tempur-Pedic mattress sale is by collecting store ads as they come in the mail. Furniture and mattress stores often mail out flyers and catalogues of their store items and display current or upcoming sales. These catalogues can prepare you to know about the sale and to also price shop based on the different store ads you receive.
Tempurpedic Mattress Sale - Where To Find It
The first step in finding the most comfortable price for you for your mattress is by visiting a store and ensuring this is the mattress for you. You should also see which of the types of Tempur-Pedic mattresses you prefer, as well if you are interested in any of the extras they offer. Once you have decided to purchase this mattress, you should be prepared to wait for the best sale to come around. Do you research online, King Size Tempurpedic Price and then purchase the newspapers with the stores ads in them. Do some comparisons and when the best deal comes around – be sure to jump on it.
Tempurpedic Mattress Price Range in Northgate ?
If you feel bedroom-designing challenged like I am, then bed in a bag sets may just be perfect for you! Everything you need comes in one complete set, and is designed to match or coordinate perfectly. With no guess work, your bedroom will come out looking just like those in the finest home design magazines and at a price you can afford. If you stick with the better designer brands names like Lawrence, Burlington House, Dan River, and Croscill you'll find the attention to detail, fabrics and quality to be superior. They'll typically feature higher thread counts of 200 or more, which will provide the best combination of luxury and durability. Another example would be a simple matter of the elastic that comes on fitted sheets. The better ones will have elastic all the way around the edges, not just on two sides. This insures that your sheet won't pop off the corner of the bed while you're sleeping. I personally hate waking up tangled-up like that! lol To be sure what's included in your bed bag, check your descriptive list carefully. Most of the basics in bed bag sets will include: comforter, flat and fitted sheets, bed skirt, pillowcase (s) Many of the better sets will also offer optional matching drapes, area rugs, accent tables, lamps and other important accessories like accent pillows. You'll be amazed at how much detail and flair a few of these lush little decorative pillows can add to your bedroom! You'll be able to select a complete ensemble that will deck out your entire bedroom from floor to ceiling with matching accessories. You'll know these sets will match your taste to a Capital-"T", whether that means Traditional, Tasteful or Trendy! Bedding in a bag sets are affordable and often cost much less than purchasing the items ala carte. The best part is you know that even the wildest, boldest colors, prints, patterns and fabrics for your bedding and accessories, will be designed to match and coordinate just perfectly. Get that home design magazine look the easy way! If you're like many and simply insist on 5 or 6 pillow cases, you won't find that many in most bed bags. Don't worry. You can add coordinating solid pillow cases easily enough. Maybe with piping and extra detailing that matches the overall color scheme. Some of the best bed bag sets will actually have optional matching pillow cases available. Let's look at just two popular, quality bedding sets. There are hundreds of bed bag sets to select from, so let your creative juices flow! Dan River always designs quality bedding whether you choose separate items or bed in a bags. The Monument Springs set is one example. Using earth tones to create a natural look, this set features a faux suede comforter in tan, brown, beige and chocolate with a large patchwork look. Nothing's quilt-like about these large patches of near-suede material, they look and feel like the real thing...but without the problems of cowhide which feels so heavy and will become shiny with use. This suede-like fabric will last for years and has a light-weight feel and soft, cuddly texture. Solid light neutral tone sheets and pillow shams in 210 thread count provide lasting night time comfort. A 100% polyester bed skirt in a solid brown earth tone completes this set to perfection. Of course, you'll want to dry clean the comforter and bed skirt. The sheets and pillow shams are machine washable. Beautiful enough for the most elegant bedroom, this easy to love bag bed set is just unique and easy to live in. Burlington House Luxury Bed in a Bag Set in their Tuscany design is a fabulous set in shades of greens and ivory. The set includes 220 thread count cotton sheets and pillowcases. The top sheet is edged in a beautiful, small floral pattern which creates the perfect accent. It's got a center of ivory highlighted with the small floral pattern around the edges which matches the flat sheet perfectly. The drop section of the comforter is olive green and the color scheme is perfect for blending into a room featuring natural, earth colors. The comforter needs to be dry cleaned along with the bed skirt. The sheets and pillow cases are machine washable. Complete your look with the matching drapes, area rugs, tables, lamps and various shaped decorative accent pillows, and you'll be proud and amazed at how easy it was to pull your bedroom decor together! You'll love having fun selecting the different bedroom looks you can create from bedding in a bag sets like this. You could even switch themes from bright, cheery florals for spring and summer, to more traditional tones for fall and winter- why keep the same look all year round..? No one but you will know that you didn't call in a professional home designer to help you decorate the perfect bedroom. You'll love the selection of fabrics, the textures, colors and patterns- and the coordinated look you'll get when you choose top quality bedding that comes in sets like this. Simply smile when your friends compliment you on your home decorating skills!
Beds In A Bag Make You An Instant Designing Pro!
With the right method bed knowledge might easily be accessed extremely rapidly, if you take your time when implementing your bed research and you will not go far wrong, if you need specialized advice on merchandise like bunk bed frames then see if you can find a number of expert bed reviews. The way to find out if a bed website might be able to help you with your particular bed search, pretend for a moment a wholesale murphy bed is your specific item, is to discover if the site contains a categorised bed section and a good number of bed articles, if in fact it does supply this type of things then obtaining a bed that is suitable will be easy, if however the site is about a common home improvement topic then it is unlikely you will come up with your required bed targeted help. A large amount of bed targeted guides you will locate online are all about assisting people to buy specific bed items such as metal frame twin beds and king size bed frames, searching for this type of bed guidance can often turn out to be very frustrating indeed. It can be you purchase a and afterwards see that the bed site you got it from was not supplying it at the lowest price, to be confident that this never happens another time try to make sure you make an online price comparison or check out a decent mutlitude of bed online stores first, it could be a king iron bed canopy is selling for a set cost on one particular site however is five percent lower on a competitors site, some good deals can be found if you take the time to look. Before you contemplate any bed purchase be sure that the bedding merchant you could be buying your product from gives you the opinion that obtaining a refund and merchandise returns will not turn out to be a hassle, switching or part exchanging a wrought iron day bed for a twin loft bed must never turn into a real issue. A sizeable number of bed associated searches may buy have led you to a bed or interior design focused site, searches like "find heavy duty bed frames" or "reviews on water bed sheets", the main secret with any home improvement directory is to go straight to the site menu, if you take this advice you should not be side tracked because of bed reviews which are not connected to the bed you require. The easiest way to tell if a bed site may be able to assist you with your particular bed search, lets say that a double bed frame is your specific item, is to learn if the site contains a targeted bed directory and a fair number of bed articles, provided it does supply these types of things then you are clearly in with a chance, if however the site is targeted at a general interior design subject you are perhaps less likely to get your required bed related guidance. The way to find out if a bed portal will hopefully be able to help you with your selected bed search, pretend for a moment a wood bed frame is your particular item, is to find out if the site contains a targeted bed directory and a good quantity of bed write ups, if this is the case and it does contain such things your search for a bed will be easy, if on the other hand the website is focused on a general home improvement subject you will probably not obtain your desired bed related info.

subset: commoncrawl


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- American Civil War: Gettysburg screenshots - 2
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Feb 3, 2019 | by Eddie Finch | series: (All)
Please take a minute to visit this page and listen to the testimony of a man who left denominationalism to join the church that Christ purchased with his blood, the church that follows the Bible only.
To view this page, click here.
τῶν δόυλων τοῦ θεοῦ ἐσμέν


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A Note to Obamaon November 12th, 2012 at 6:37 pm
Dear Mr. President:
You must be tired. Please take some time off. You worked very hard to get re-elected. As a loyal American, I want you in good health, and that means some rest and relaxation once in a while.
But when you ramp it up again, I hope you will consider some suggestions from a citizen who's a bit disappointed in your overall performance. Please understand that I am not looking at this from an ideological perspective, but rather from a sports point-of-view.
I want American leadership to win the game. That means improving the economy, bolstering protection for the folks and running an honest operation from the White House. At this point in history, that's what winning means to me.
Let's take the economy first. Apparently, you believe that massive government spending can create well-paying jobs in the private sector. But after four years and almost a trillion dollars of federal money being fed into the economy, it hasn't worked. Unemployment is about the same as it was when you took over in 2009, and wages are down sharply.
You spent a ton of our money, Mr. President, and we didn't even get a T-shirt.
Now, I know some of my fellow citizens see it differently and voted for you believing your economic vision is sound. But let's be honest: The voter breakdown clearly shows that folks receiving some kind of government largesse supported you big-time, while those avidly competing in the marketplace voted for Gov. Romney.
It was no accident that the day after your victory, the stock market plummeted 313 points.
So I hope you'll rethink the big spending and begin to make it easier for small-business people to make money. When they are flush, the job market surges. When they feel threatened, hiring shuts down.
I well understand that the "tax the rich" mantra got you some political currency. But we both know that strategy will do little to stimulate anything other than jealousy.
On the security front, may I suggest that you be a stand-up guy? Please hold a press conference and tell the folks what you know about the terror attack in Libya and why things are such a mess. This "we're investigating" stuff is a ruse. Telling us what you know does not impede an investigation.
Dodging Libya hurt your honesty index. And that hurts the country. It is very important that the folks trust you even if they don't like you. Take that from me. My television program has been top-rated for nearly 13 years, and it's not because I'm Dale Carnegie. Most Americans respect straightforward talk even if they are annoyed by it.
In closing, congratulations on your victory. You and your guy Axelrod designed a campaign that Romney's Boston boys could not match. But that's not what's important now. Fixing the economy is.
Do that, and your legacy will be assured. Fail, and all hell will break loose.
Veteran TV news anchor Bill O'Reilly is host of the Fox News show "The O'Reilly Factor" and author of the book "Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama."


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The MSP Foundation course looks at the basic principles of the MSP methodology, the components (called themes) and the processes.
The objective of the MSP Foundation course is to give knowledge of all the MSP principles, themes, responsibilities, processes, activities and techniques to allows the participant to be able to interact efficiently when working with a programme board or as an active member of a programme office, a change management team or on a project in an area with a programme managed by MSP.
The Foundation course is a prerequisite to do the next level of qualification MSP Practitioner.
Members of an office programme, members of a change management team, members of a team project involved in the programme.
More generally, anyone who needs to understand the terminology and the underlying concepts of MSP and all those who wish to complete the MSP training path.
To be able to take the exam, it is necessary to have read and accepted the terms and conditions of the examination institute. The acceptance of such terms and conditions will have to be confirmed when taking the exam.
MSP Foundation official certificate


text: Updated 2016 Greenland is somewhere between an island and a continent, and also somewhere between a country and a territory of Denmark. Why haven't these issues ever been resolved? Because there aren't enough people in Greenland to worry about it. With about the same land area as Mexico and enough people to almost fill one football stadium, Greenland has the lowest population density in the world. Part of the biggest real-estate scam in history, the popular tale goes that Greenland's name was traded with Iceland so that colonizing populations would mistake it for the temperate, beautiful destination that is Iceland today.


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Remember yesterday when Fox News kept showing that one smiling beret wearing black guy holding doors for people at a polling station and shrieking that they were being INTIMIDATED AT THE POLLS? Do you recall the last few months, how conservative commentators kept speculating that if Obama won, there would be riots in the streets! (Black people riots, natch) Liberals sure are a bunch of violent, looting, sore losers — wait, what's this about students at Ole Miss rioting because Romney lost? Is it technically called a "riot" when white people do it? (Answer: no. "Disturbance.")
You know, the American South can be a lovely place. Great food. Nice people. Lots of beauty and personality. The accent. But if I were a Mississippian, I'd be pretty embarrassed by the behavior of these tantrum-throwing Ole Miss students rioting after Mitt Romney lost last night.
Not only is property destruction a classless and stupid way to commemorate something, It's Mitt Romney. Literally the lamest reason to riot of all time. I have more respect for people who start couches on fire after national championships. Soccer rioting is cooler. Being really, really mad that Mitt Romney didn't win the Presidency is the ultimate white person problem. If black, pro-Obama people were rioting after an Obama defeat, this would be the only thing on Fox News right now. They'd just be playing it on a loop with dark, foreboding music. It would be a KKK recruiting film.
I guess this is what happens when you choose to live inside a reality of your own construction and are then confronted with evidence that your reality isn't real.


text: Do you have the dedication and drive to do something great? Do you have the courage to act? The ability to perform? Do you have what it takes to be a volunteer firefighter? To be the one running in when everyone else is running out? Not only do you get the satisfaction of helping your community, you also get free training, scholarships and other benefits. Join New Windsor Fire Department. It may be the most rewarding thing you ever do.


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April 4th, 2013
'Arrested Development' to return May 26
When "Arrested Development" comes to Netflix this spring, it looks like the majority of you won't have to stumble bleary-eyed into the office after marathon-watching its return.
On Thursday, the streaming entertainment service announced that the resurrected series will debut online on Sunday, May 26. That's smack-dab in the middle of Memorial Day weekend, so if you do choose to watch all 15 episodes at once, chances are higher you'll be able to do so.
Like with "House of Cards," Netflix is unleashing "Arrested" in its entirety starting at 12:01 a.m. on May 26, for instant viewing. Creator Mitch Hurwitz has described the Netflix version of "Arrested" as an "anthology," with each episode being told from a particular character's viewpoint as other characters pop in and out of scenes.
Rather than looking at this new slate of episodes as a fourth season of the cult favorite series, star Jason Bateman sees it as "the first act of what we hope to continue and complete in a movie, which would be Act 2 and 3."
Netflix's "Arrested" will also have a crew of guest stars, including Seth Rogen, Conan O'Brien, Kristen Wiig, Isla Fisher and Ben Stiller, who'll reprise his role of Tony Wonder.
While the company has said in the past that it doesn't "anticipate" a second season of "Arrested" coming to Netflix, it later clarified that fans shouldn't rule out the possibility.
But for now, there are more important questions to ponder, such as: will you watch all 15 episodes in one sitting, or will you break them up like a weekly show?
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Allstar 9921MT BA9921MT 318 MHz 1-Button Miniature Garage Door Opener Remote Control
This Allstar 9921MT / BA9921MT / ADX9921MT is a single button keychain Mini Garage Door/Gate Opener Remote Control Transmitter.
The 9921MT is compatible with Allstar, Allister, Pulsar, or Heddolf code switch type radio receivers. This unit can control one Allstar, Allister, Pulsar, or Heddolf 9 three position binar (ON/OFF) type code switch devices on the 318MHz frequency.
NOTE: Will not work for receivers that have the Trinary (+/0/-) type code switches, please see the 9931MT. Nor will it work on remotes that are on 288Mhz frequency see 9931MT-288RF for those units.
The Allstar 9921MT remote is directly compatible with the following models on 318MHz to control one device.
Compatible with the following remotes:
Allstar/Allister/Pulsar 9921T, 9921MT, BA9921T, 9921-318
Heddolf P-2222
Not all compatible models may be listed.
Product Features:
-Controls up to one Allstar, Allister, or Pulsar 9 binary (on/off) type code switch door/gate on 318MHz
-Compact size easily fits on keyring
-Easily fits in pocket and is ideal for use to open door or gate when walking
-Keyring attachment loop at top of remote
-Dimensions: 2.625 x 1.25 x 0.5 inches
-Linear Part Number: 190-109393
- Brand: Allstar
- Product Code: 9921MT
- Availability: In Stock
US Shipping - FREE
Canada Shipping - US $7.50
(Quantity shipping discount applied at checkout)


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Message Board
Robert A. Caro Message Board
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Caro has written!
Author Caro's Book Reviews
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent
A superb book chronicling a relatively unknown but critical time in the life of Lyndon Johnson, the years 1941 to 1948. Mr. Caro thoroughly details Johnson's congressional term during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, his questionable war record, and the legendary 1948 Texas Democratic Senate primary, won by Mr. Johnson by 87 votes out of nearly a million cast. In his meticulous research, Mr. Caro resolves the forty years of rumor and uncertain...


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Watch online: MSG-3 launch
Join us for the launch of MSG-3 on Thursday. Dedicated to monitoring the weather from geostationary orbit, MSG-3 will be launched on an Ariane 5 from French Guiana. The 29-minute window opens at 23:36 CEST. Live transmission from Eumetsat in Germany starts at 21:30 CEST.
The launch of the third Meteosat Second Generation, MSG-3, satellite ensures the continuity of meteorological observations to improve weather forecasts from geostationary orbit 36 000 km above Earth. MSG-3 joins Meteosat-8, which has greatly exceeded its expected life, and Meteosat-9.
The MSG series builds on the legacy of the operational meteorological satellites that started with Meteosat-1 in 1977.
ESA has developed the series of weather satellites in close cooperation with Eumetsat, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.
About ten days after launch, Eumetsat will take over routine operations.


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Human Resources
Union Pacific Railroad Recognized by General Motors as a 2012 Supplier of the Year Winner
Omaha, Neb., April 19, 2013
Union Pacific Railroad received the 2012 General Motors Supplier of the Year award during the auto manufacturer's 21st annual Supplier of the Year awards ceremony in Detroit.
"We are devoted to providing customers unparalleled service, and this recognition highlights that commitment," said Linda Brandl, Union Pacific vice president and general manager-Automotive. "Our industry-leading franchise that includes an extensive network, facilities and equipment is positioned to create customer value and continued success."
Union Pacific was one of only 83 suppliers recognized by GM, who have consistently exceeded GM's expectations by being innovative, delivering quality products and services on time and by creating outstanding value. This is the eighth time Union Pacific has received the Supplier of the Year award.
"Union Pacific helped play a critical role in GM's success in 2012 through its dedication and commitment to consistently exceed our expectations by being innovative, delivering high quality products and services on time and by creating outstanding value," said Grace Lieblein, GM vice president, Global Purchasing and Supply Chain. "We are thrilled to recognize Union Pacific, who we consider to be a world-class supplier."
The Supplier of the Year award is given to less than 1 percent of GM's approximately 18,500 suppliers around the world. The winners are recognized for delivering innovative technology, superior quality, timely crisis management and competitive, total-enterprise cost solutions.
The Supplier of the Year winners are chosen by a global team of GM purchasing, engineering, quality, manufacturing and logistics executives.
About Union Pacific
Union Pacific Railroad is the principal operating company of Union Pacific Corporation (NYSE: UNP). One of America's most recognized companies, Union Pacific Railroad links 23 states in the western two-thirds of the country by rail, providing a critical link in the global supply chain. From 2007-2012, Union Pacific invested $18 billion in its network and operations to support America's transportation infrastructure, including a record $3.7 billion in 2012. The railroad's diversified business mix includes Agricultural Products, Automotive, Chemicals, Coal, Industrial Products and Intermodal. Union Pacific serves many of the fastest-growing U.S. population centers, operates from all major West Coast and Gulf Coast ports to eastern gateways, connects with Canada's rail systems and is the only railroad serving all six major Mexico gateways. Union Pacific provides value to its roughly 10,000 customers by delivering products in a safe, reliable, fuel-efficient and environmentally responsible manner.
Union Pacific media contact: Lindsay Tettenborn at 402-544-4296 or email@example.com
The statements and information contained in the news releases provided by Union Pacific speak only as of the date issued. Such information by its nature may become outdated, and investors should not assume that the statements and information contained in Union Pacific's news releases remain current after the date issued. Union Pacific makes no commitment, and disclaims any duty, to update any of this information.


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Respect Natural Resources
- Leave the land better than you found it.
- Adhere to fair chase rules.
- Know your capabilities and limitations as a marksman, and stay within your effective range.
- Strive for a quick, clean kill.
- Ensure that meat and usable parts are not wasted.
- Treat both game and non-game animals ethically.
- Abide by game laws and regulations.
- Cooperate with conservation officers.
- Report game violations.


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|"Mrs. Ingalls Guilty of Slavery Charge," Boston Herald, 20 Jul 1947,
p. 1., cols. 5-6; GenealogyBank (http://www.genealogybank.com :
14 Jun 2013)
Now maybe everyone else knows about his, but I certainly didn't. It cries out for research! Why should the maid be afraid of the affair being made known? Wouldn't the married man be more worried? Maybe that's what caused the divorce. Wasn't it awkward having Dora living under the same roof with husband number two if she had had an affair with husband number one? Was this seriously the first slavery case tried since 1880? I found it curious, and decided to have a look in some original and contemporaneous records, working backwards from 1947.
What Do the Records Say?
In 1940, 52-year old lawyer Alfred W. Ingalls lived with his family at 28 Bassett Street in Boston. His wife, Myra E. was 51, and with them were daughters Ruth, 32, and Helen, 20, both single. Ruth was born in Washington, DC, Helen in Mass. Also with them was Dora Jones, 50, a maid born in Alabama whose race is described as "Neg." [2] This matches the newspaper account pretty well, assuming Myra's middle name was Elizabeth. Interesting to note is the 12-year gap in the daughters' ages.
Let's look at the 1930 census: The family are in the same house at 28 Bassett Street. Their ages are off somewhat: Alfred-47, M. Elizabeth-45, Ruth L.-22, Helen-10, Dora-40. They also have Elizabeth's widowed mother, Estelle Kimball, 70, in the household. Oh, and Dora's race is now white. [3]
In 1920: Same house, same cast of characters, ages are somewhat in line with 1930--Alfred-27, Myra-38, Ruth L.-11, Helen K.-2 months, and Dora-30, who this times is called Mulatto. [4] So they've all been together for at least 27 years.
In 1910 Elizabeth K. Harman, 26 lived in Washington, DC with her first husband, Walter P. Harman, a 29-year old government clerk born in Vermont, and their 2-year old daughter Ruth L., plus Dora L., 20, Mulatto. [5]
What happened between 1910 and 1918?? Well, for one thing, Elizabeth and Walter broke up. The WWI draft registration card of Harman gives his father as his closest relative. His permanent residence is at 137 Grove St., Rutland, VT, but he works in NY, NY. [6]
In 1920 Walter P. Harmon was 38 years old living in DC (born in Vermont), a single clerk working for the US government and boarding with an 80-year old widow. [7]
In 1942 Walter Penfield Harman of Takoma Park, MD, registered for the World War II Draft giving his date of birth as 12 Jan 1881. He provided his nearest relative as Mrs. Walter P. Harman. This would have been his second wife, Myra. [9]
These records not only confirm information in the article, but help us put together a rough timeline of their lives.
Timeline1907 (ca) Walter P. Harman and Elizabeth Kimball marry
1908 Ruth L. Harman, daughter of Walter P. and Elizabeth Harman, is born in DC.
She is not Alfred's daughter.
1910 Walter Penfield Harmon and Elizabeth Myra (Kimball) Harman are living in Washington
DC with daughter Ruth L. and a servant named Dora L. Jones.
Walter and Elizabeth break up
Elizabeth marries Alfred Wesley Ingalls of Lynn, MA
1918 Walter lists his father as next of kin on WWI Draft, so is probably single
1918 Helen Ingalls, daughter of Alfred W. and Elizabeth Ingalls, is born in Massachusetts
1920 Walter lives in DC, is single.
1920 Elizabeth lives with 2nd husband, Alfred Wesley Ingalls, at 28 Bassett St., Lynn, MA
1923 Walter remarries, to another Myra (!) in Vermont
1930 Alfred W. and family still live on Bassett St.
1940 The family is still at Bassett St.
1942 Walter Penfield Harman of Takoma Park, MD, registered for the World War II Draft
giving his date of birth as 12 Jan 1881.
1942 Alfred registered for the World War II Draft, stating...
1947 Case comes to trial
Wider Implications for Civil Rights
|Yikes! I mean, Mira Elizabeth Ingalls [13]
The sordid details of the case were that Elizabeth kept Dora working without pay and in bad conditions by threatening her with prison or a mental institution if she did not comply. Dora's offense thirty-eight years earlier, or circa 1909, was having had an affair with Walter and an abortion after that. She told Dora she could be arrested for that, and either go to prison or a mental institution.
Goluboff states, "For more than twenty-five years, Jones had been 'required to arise at an early hour in the morning and perform practically all of the household labor in connection with the maintenance of the Ingalls household. She was forbidden to leave the household except for the commission of errands and performed drudgery of the most menial and laborious type.'" She was forced to sleep in a car on the street, or in bathtubs, not provided with sufficient food, and given only cast-offs for clothes.
They were unable to convict Alfred, but Elizabeth was sentenced. What made this a watershed case was the fact that not only did Elizabeth have to pay damages to the US government, but she also had to pay poor Dora the sum of $6,000. Elizabeth's prison sentence was suspended, however, perhaps due to fears expressed by her counsel that her life would be threatened.
Some Questions Answered, But Take With Grain of Salt!
An article in the Toldeo Blade provides more detail. "The five-foot, 100-pound maid, Theodora Lawrence Jones... was 17 when she was befriended by the present Mrs. Ingalls, then Miss Elizabeth Kimball, a missionary school teacher in the reconstructed south. When Miss Kimball married her first husband, Walter Harmon, they took Miss Jones to Washington DC, where ten years later they were divorced...In 1918, the former Alabama teacher married Ingalls. [11]
Another article worth mentioning is "Slave Trial Jury Told Dora Jones Was Pushed Down Stairs." We learn more details of Dora's sad existence: that Helen had actually tried to rescue Dora from Elizabeth, who had struck and scratched her, among other things. And finally, we get some great genealogical information: Elizabeth's other daughter Ruth's married name was Castendyk, and she was in Chicago in 1947; Dora had at least two siblings--Myrtle Turrentine of Athens, AL and Arthur Jones of St. Louis! [12]
|Alfred Wesley Ingalls, 1947 [14]
Now I ain't no Judy Russell, but this is one interesting, groundbreaking, horrifying and amazing case. And the only reason I found it was because my little mind was wandering to other articles on a newspaper page!
Bygone Era Be Gone!I found it interesting that "the Jury went out to dinner at 10:30 and resumed their deliberations at 12:00 o'clock." I wonder why they went so late. Was it perhaps to avoid the cost of putting up the jury overnight? I was also sort of surprised at this, too: "Mrs. Ingalls heard the guilty verdict without a quiver. She was remanded to the custody of the US Marshall, who escorted her and her husband to dinner." How very civilized that they were escorted to dinner. Why the hell didn't they take DORA to dinner? By all accounts she needed it. and clearly, Elizabeth was well nourished.
Oh yes, it was an era of stoicism and gentility and SLAVERY. We've come a long way since 1947, but even then this case was outrageous. Newspaper accounts about a crime like this can exaggerate or just be wrong, so these articles should not be considered completely reliable! You can read a summary of the trial at United States v. Ingalls, 73 F, Supp. 76, District Court, S. D. California, S. D., 29 July 1947. [16]
I like to imagine that Dora took that money, went back to her family and lived an easy life thereafter. She certainly deserved it. There are no words for the vile behavior of this couple and I can only hope that they were ostracized from their socialite community for the rest of their lives. They really should have gone to prison for life. It would have been sweetest if Elizabeth had been forced to work for a living, for someone such as evil as herself.
[1] "Mrs. Ingalls Guilty of Slavery Charge," Boston Herald, 20 Jul 1947, p. 1., cols. 5-6; GenealogyBank (http://www.genealogybank.com : 14 Jun 2013).
[2] 1940 US census, Essex County, Massachusetts, Lynn, ED 19-34, sheet 64A, household 365, of Alfred W. Ingalls; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[3] 1930 US census, Essex County, Massachusetts, Lynn, ED 151, sheet 9A [penned], sheet 278 [stamped], dw. 130, fam. 260, household of Alfred W. Ingalls; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[4] 1920 US census, Essex County, Massachusetts, Lynn, Ward 3, ED 146, sheet 5A, dw. 69, fam. 103, household of Alfred W. Ingalls; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[5] 1910 US census, District of Columbia, Washington, Prec. 10, ED 203, sheet 18A, 425 [Mien?] Pl., dw. 327, fam. 391, household of Walter P. Harman; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[6] "World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918," Walter Penfield Harmon, Serial n. 490, Order n. 1264, b. 12 Ja 1881, employed at ; 347 Madison Ave., NY, NY, Local Board Rutland, VT, for Div. N. 1, City of NY, NY, 7 Jan 1918; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[7] 1920 US census, District of Columbia, Washington, ED 284, sheet 5A, 1613 Irving St., dw. 25, fam. 92, household of Maria J. Miner; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[8] "Vermont Marriage Records, 1909-2008," Harman-Hulst, n. 138, 23 Nov 1923, Rutland; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[9] "World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942," Walter Penfield Harman, Serial n. 0303, no Order n., b. 12 Jan 1881, Bennington, VT, Local Board n. 3, Prince George's Co., 27 Apr 1942; Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 16 Jun 2013).
[10] Risa Lauren Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), 162-68; GoogleBooks (http://www.books.google.com : 17 Jun 2013).
[11] "Slavery Trial is Opened for Couple in California," Toledo [Ohio] Blade, 24 Jun 1947, p. 2, cols. 7-8; GoogleNews (http://www.news.google.com : 17 Jun 2013).
[12] Ted McKenna, "Slave Trial Jury Told Dora Jones Was Pushed Down Stairs," The [St. Petersburg, FL] Evening Independent, Home Edition, 3 Jul 1947, p. 2, cols. 2-4; GoogleNews (http://www.news.google.com : 17 Jun 2013).
[13] "Bondage Charge Faced by Couple," and "Coronado Couple Held on Charge of Holding Housemaid in Bondage," San Diego Union, 26 Feb 1927, p. 1, col. 3, and p. 3A, col. 2; GenealogyBank (http://www.genealogybank.com : 17 Jun 2013).
[14] "Alfred Wesley Ingalls," San Diego Union, 26 Feb 1927, p. 3A, col. 2.
[15] "Mira Elizabeth Ingalls," San Diego Union, 26 Feb 1927, p. 3A, col. 2.
[16] United States v. Ingalls, 73 F, Supp. 76, (S. D. Cal. 1947); Leagle (http://www.leagle.com : 17 Jun 2013).


text:
You are welcome to come and join us for a time of God centered worship and Scripture-based preaching. Our Sunday morning service begins at 10:30 am led by one of our elders. The music is a blend of traditional and contemporary selections inviting participants to join in song. Different members of the congregation take turns providing musical accompaniment and leading different components of the service. The whole family gathers for the first half of the service. There is an announced time for the children to leave for Sunday school right before the sermon. Nursery is available for infants and toddlers. A voluntary offering is collected during the service. If interested in participating, envelopes are available for receipt purposes. Around noon, the formal service wraps up but please plan on staying to join us for some refreshments after the service. Dress ranges from jeans to suits. There is plenty of free parking and the main entrance is handicapped accessible. If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line. We would love to have you come and visit us!
1 Thessalonians 2:8 [8]So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. (ESV)Read More


text:
- TE Masters
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- Aaron Thomas, TE 2017 Graduate, Newest Chamber Member
- Bethlehem Entrepreneurs Bringing Sport of Cricket into Mainstream
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- HeliumIQ offers an online 'ecosystem' for entrepreneurs
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Technical Entrepreneurship
Lehigh's Master's Degree in Technical Entrepreneurship (TE) provides training in the art and practice of creating new companies while bringing revolutionary products and services to market.
Like No Other University in the World
Lehigh's one-year, 30-credit professional master's program in Technical Entrepreneurship helps student entrepreneurs create, refine, and commercialize intellectual property through the licensing or launching of a new business. Students in the program learn by experiencing the idea-to-venture process in an educational environment that's hard-wired to support the development of novel, innovative, and commercially viable technologies.
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text:
HRmarketer software analyzes a lot of HR marketplace data. Every day, this includes tens of thousands of HR-related tweets, Facebook updates and LinkedIn updates, as well as 5,000-plus new articles and blog posts. We bring this up because our ability to analyze this data allows us to answer some interesting questions.
Today's question is: What can you discover from analyzing an event's Twitter hashtag?
Quite a bit, actually. To show you, since we're starting to look forward to the 2014 HR Technology® Conference, let's look at the hashtag for the 2013 show, #HRTechConf. The conference has one of the highest Twitter Engagement scores of any HR event. See the graphic on this post for a detailed breakdown.
Scroll down for more fun facts about #HRTechConf. But first here are some things you can do with data from event hashtags:
And, as promised, here is some other interesting information about the people and brands that tweeted with "#HRTechConf" from September to November, 2013.
Top U.S. States of the People and Brands who Tweeted with #HRTechConf
Top International Locations of the People and Brands who Tweeted with #HRTechConf
Top Hashtags in the Twitter Bios of the People and Brands who Tweeted with #HRTechConf
Cool, right? If you are interested in the data we have, visit http://www.hrmarketer.com/web/conference-insight-reports/ to learn more.
Views: 172
Keith: I'll defend this one, because there's actual value in this information that, if anything, is an ad for the HR Technology Conference - which, speaking of ads, is really just a giant infomercial. Guess that's the way this little weird world works...
Wow. Give me a break Keith. Really? A little over the top, aren't you? Not cool. So we sourced how and where we get the data (for credibility) and invite people to contact us if they are interested in more info. Is that really an ad? Lighten up.
@ Matt: OK, you da boss.
@ Mark: "A little over the top, aren't you?" I'm offended by that- I'm WAY over the top! Plus, I've never been, are not now, and never shall be cool in even the "anti-cool, cool" way...
It didn't look like you're saying HR Marketer is your source- it looks like HRMarketer is a vendor of information and you're advertising its services.
"HRmarketer software analyzes a lot of HR marketplace data."
"If you are interested in the data we have, visit http://www.hrmarketer.com/web/conference-insight-reports/ to learn more."
If this is NOT encouraging people to go to the website (which does look like you're affiliated with in some role) for a possible goal of having them spend money on something there (if not now, then at some later time) then I misunderstood and apologize.
Keep Blogging,
Keith "Way Over the Top and Totally Uncool" Halperin


text:
Quote directly from the fascist brain, Hugo Chavez yesterday in Alo Presidente:
"If any of these gentlemen would think again about taking the path of violence, the State has exclusive rights to the use of violence to insure the peace of all Venezuelans"
What ever happened to "damm the solider that points his gun at the people?" What ever ahppened to human rights? Now the State has exclusive rights to violence…Incredible!!


text:
The percentage of unemployed residents was greater than the statewide total of 39.3 percent for this demographic group. In 2017 the total Little Mountain population reached 157.
Out of 86 people who had a job, all belonged to the civilian labor force.
The total unemployment numbers include residents of all ages who are not working.


text:
Amy B necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 59 diseños de 23 diseñadores freelance.
California Crepes
We're a new restaurant in a mall in California. We're looking to bring a fresh and healthy twist to the classic Parisian street food, crepes. Think everything great about San Diego -- our mall is minutes from the water
Our customers are surfers, healthy moms, business types, California-raised teens who may have never experienced crepes, tourists looking for a California experience. Anyone you'd find in an outdoor, upscale mall in a thriving downtown commerce district.They are looking for something quick and that will keep them moving, but won't be unhealthy and will make them feel good.
Bright, fresh colors that communicate a fresh, fast, delicious and healthy experience.
RESTRICTIONS: Our flagship location is going to be located in a former McDonald's and we will be working with some of the original decor, so the logo must be somewhat compatible with the classic Mickey D's red and yellow. Future branches will NOT also incorporate these colors, so the logo DOES NOT need to include these colors, just not horribly clash with them. Please do NOT use both red AND yellow. Included is a picture of where one of our signs will be placed. The sign style is very classic fifties diner, which is dated for us. You should be careful that the design doesn't look too much like "In n' Out Burger" (an established California fast food chain.)
Think fresh, California, fast and easy. Not "fast-food-y" but quick, clean and bright. Emphasis on "California" style. The beach, sun, surf, and a very relaxed but still on-the-go lifestyle.
Logo should incorporate the name with a non-fussy, timeless typeface.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


text:
A young couple in Bethelehem, Pa., was arrested on theft charges recently when they refused to pay an 18% tip that had been rolled into their restaurant tab, 'cause they insisted service was so bad their waiter didn't deserve a tip.
Pope and John Wagner had a meal with friends at Lehigh Pub in Bethelehem and waited for about an hour for their food. They also had to fetch their own napkins and silverware.
When they got their $73 tab, they noticed the 18% gratuity had been rolled into the bill. So they told the head bartender that service was whack, paid him for the food and tax, and prepared to leave.
The bartender, most certainly a weasel considering his next move, called the police and reported the Wagners had stiffed the restaurant.
Charges probably won't stick. So this was all a big fat waste of tax $$$.
So I'm clear, if service is good you must tip. If you don't you suck and will suffer bad karma. There are few less rewarding jobs than waiter/waitress, save eye booger cleaner in a room full of allergy sufferers, or toilet-paper-roll-replacer in a busy nightclub or airport bathroom.
And if you have a really high tab, I don't have a problem with a restaurant adding an 18% or 20% tip to your bill and marking it clearly as such.
That's sometimes necessary to combat the tiny-minded person who thinks it's a sin to tip more than $5 or $10, even when their total bill is several hundred dollars.
But if service is bad, I don't have a problem with you tipping accordingly.
I've made exceptions. Mrs. B and I have been out to eat and gotten lousy service, and just as I prepared to teach the waiter/waitress a lesson for not being nicer, one or both of us noticed a tear in their eye or a miserable look on their face. And it struck us that they were having a bad day and that a bad tip would teach them nothing. It would just make them bitter and add to their bad day.
Still, a theft charge for not tipping? Harsh. Nothing gratuitous about that.
Follow me, please: http://twitter.com/jamesburnett.


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Y. A. Liu, S. D. Stoller, B. Lin, M. Gorbovitski, Appeared in OOPSLA'12.
This paper describes a high-level language, DistAlgo, for clear description of distributed algorithms (e.g., Paxos, mutual execution). In contrast to embarrassingly parallel tasks which involve very regular and simple synchronization patterns (e.g., MapReduce tasks), distributed algorithms generally involve complex and tight synchronization patterns. DistAlgo specifies these complex synchronization conditions via using logical quantifications over message histories of processes involved in the algorithm. But, unfortunately, this turns out to be extremely inefficient if executed straightforwardly: each quantifier will cause a linear factor in running time, and any use of the history of messages sent and received will cause space usage to be unbounded.
To address this inefficiency, this paper focuses on optimizing implementations of DistAlgo programs by incrementalization of these expensive synchronization conditions. To this end, their method first transforms these quantifications are into set queries, and then transforms further to minimize their nesting. Finally, from here, the method systematically extracts single quantified order comparisons, and transforms them into efficient incremental updates of auxiliary variables as messages are sent and received. (An earlier paper that focuses more on the syntax of DistAlgo, and uses Paxos as a running example, appeared at SSS'12.).
To give a glance of DistAlgo and how it does this transformations, I am including some figures from the paper as is. The paper uses Lamport's mutual exclusion algorithm as a running example and shows its DistAlgo and automatically optimized DistAlgo implementation. DistAlgo fills a gap and seems like it can be very useful in the coming years for writing distributed programs. Distributed algorithms can be expressed in DistAlgo clearly at a high level, like in pseudocode, but also precisely, like in formal specification languages, and be executed as part of real applications, as in programming languages. DistAlgo extends Python with processes as objects, send/receive of messages, yield points, synchronization conditions as logical quantifications, and configuration of distributed system topology. DistAlgo compiler and optimizer are implemented in Python (building on Python's parser module and AST package) and generates executable Python code.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Making Geo-Replicated Systems Fast as Possible, Consistent when Necessary
Appeared in OSDI '12, Cheng Li, Daniel Porto, Allen Clement, Johannes Gehrke, Nuno Preguica, and Rodrigo Rodrigues.
In order to reduce latencies to geographically distributed users, big webservices companies (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter) replicate data across geographical regions. But replication across datacenters, create cross-site consistency problems, which is further complicated with the huge WAN latency delays. If you want to have strong consistent updates across sites, you have to pay the price in terms of latency (basically you revert to doing synchronous replication via say Paxos as in MDCC). This is the ELC part in the PACELC.
To alleviate this latency versus consistency tension, this paper proposes RedBlue consistency, which enables blue operations to be fast/asynchronous (and eventually consistent) while the remaining red operations are strongly-consistent/synchronous (and slow). So a program is partitioned into red and blue operations, which run with different consistency levels. While red operations must be executed in the same order at all sites (which make them slow), the order of execution of blue operations can vary from site to site (allowing them to be executed without requiring coordination across sites). "In systems where every operation is labeled red, RedBlue consistency is equivalent to serializability; in systems where every operation is labeled blue, RedBlue consistency allows the same set of behaviors as eventual consistency."
To facilitate this red blue partioning, each program operation u is split into two components: a generator operation g_u with no side effects, which is executed only at the primary site against some system state S, and produces a shadow operation h_u(S), which is executed at every site (including the primary site).
This is simply separation of concerns principle. The generator operation decides which state transitions should be made while the shadow operation applies the transitions in a state-independent manner. This separation leads to a fine-grained classification of operations, with potentially more execution paths leading to blue operations. Also this leads to a simple logic for shadow operations that can be based on operations that are intrinsically commutative (increment/decrement, insertion/removal) or that commute via last-writer-wins strategy.
Red Blue rulesNow here are the rules for labelling the [shadow] operations as red or blue.
- For any pair of non-commutative shadow operations u and v, label both u and v red.
- For any shadow operation u that may result in an invariant being violated, label u red.
- Label all non-red shadow operations blue.
The below is the description from the paper of how to keep track of the order and consistency of red/blue operations:
When a generator operation completes, the coordinator must determine if the operation reads a coherent system snapshot and obeys the ordering constraints of a causal serialization. To do this, the coordinator checks the timestamps of the data items read and written by the completing operation, and compares them to the timestamps associated with operations completing concurrently and the remote shadow operations that were being applied simultaneously at that site. Upon successful completion of a generator operation the coordinator assigns the corresponding shadow operation a timestamp that is component-wise equal to the latest operation that was incorporated at its site, and increments its blue and, if this shadow operations is red, the red component of the logical timestamp. This timestamp determines the position of the shadow operation in the RedBlue order, with the normal rules that determine that two operations are partially ordered if one is equal to or dominates the other in all components.The paper reports an evaluation of this idea by modifying the TPC-W and RUBiS benchmarks on an online social network case study (Twitter is the Hello World of georeplication :-). The experimental results show that RedBlue consistency provides substantial performance gains without sacrificing consistency.
DiscussionAlthough the paper does not mention it, a very relevant work to this is the CALM conjecture and the Bloom project from UC Berkeley. The CALM principle says that (1) logically monotonic distributed code is eventually consistent without any need for coordination protocols (distributed locks, two-phase commit, paxos, etc.) and (2) eventual consistency can be guaranteed in any program by protecting non-monotonic statements ("points of order") with coordination protocols. It is easy to see that the logically monotonic operations correspond to the blue operations, and non-monotonic operations correspond to red operations in the RedBlue work.
After the OSDI presentation of the paper, there were a couple of concerns raised about the approach. Mike Freedman (Princeton) asked the question: "blue cannot overtake the red, so you cannot vary their order, doesn't this degrade performance significantly?". Marcos Aguilera (HP Research) commented that similar approaches have been around; he referred to the generic broadcast work, and the later and more general Generalized Paxos work. The Generalized Paxos work seems to be very related indeed, and I am not sure what in the RedBlue work constitute the major differences. Maybe the RedBlue work provides a case study and more principled approach to identify commutable actions in Generalized Paxos. Another shortcoming of the RedBlue work is that it does not have any fault-tolerance build in. It may be hard to add fault-tolerance as an after thought, so maybe it is best to think of this work in the Generalized Paxos framework.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Sensys'12 (day2)
Here are my much anticipated (at least by Ted :-) notes from the second day of Sensys.
Kyun queue: a sensor network system to monitor road traffic queuesI missed this talk, but this sounds like an interesting paper. The idea seems to be to deploy a transmitter and a receiver node on the opposite sides of a road. Depending on the density and the speed of the cars passing between the transmitter and the receiver, the received radio signal has different signatures. The work studies these signals and figures out the road conditions based on these.
Low cost crowdcounting using audio tonesCrowd counting can be useful for event planning, learning popularity of aisles, etc. This work assumes that everyone in the crowd has a smartphone and this counting app running on their phone. (This is the biggest limitation of the work.) This work uses the audio tones (again ultrasound tones) emitted by the phones to count the people. The app employs the smartphone mic and speaker, no additional hardware is needed. The system uses an initiation tone to start. The phone that hears this tone picks a frequency using uniform or better geometric choosing method and forwards the tone. The frequencies are picked in the ultrasound region (that same 4khz band alluded to in yesterday's work.) Using uniform choosing method is not prone to collisions, the counts can be off due to the losses in collisions. The geometric choosing method employs geometric distributions and hence is more prone to collisions. (My work on thresholding counting is very applicable for this problem: Singlehop Collaborative Feedback Primitives for Threshold Querying in Wireless Sensor Networks.) They did evaluations with 25+ phones, but in pretty controlled environments (phones at hand). The phones don't work well at pockets or behind clothing. The audio tone method is said to be low-power, but it is actually similar cost to the wifi. The authors didn't use wifi because its range can be too long for the region to be counted. They said that, if ZigBee were available on the phones, they would use it.
AudioDAQ: turning the mobile phone's ubiquitious headset port into a universal data acquisition interfaceHow refreshing! The presenter and a lead author of this work is an undergraduate student. This work aims to build a platform (hardware and software components) to collect analog sensor (any sensor) data through the audio port of any phone. But the problem is there is almost no standard I/O connector, no standard programming interface, no third party app support on the smartphones. HiJack did a great job on the iPhone using the audio headset port (the Energy-efficient GPS and the MusicalHeart works at this Sensys used the HiJack approach). But HiJack is iPhone specific. This work extends to other phones using available power from "mic bias voltage" at the audio headset port. Powered this way, the analog data/voltage from the sensor attached to the audio port are encoded as the amplitude of a square wave. This work uses the phone's builtin voice recording app (which is already optimized to be low-energy and use hardware compression) to capture and store the attached sensor data and the phone's ability to send the voice recording via email/mms for exporting the captured data. The software to process the signal and interpret it is at the cloud. The platform is evalued with an EKG application. Now you can use your smartphone as a holter device! The authors estimate that the hardware board for this platform would cost $5 in mass production.
Prius: generic hybrid trace compression for WSNsThe goal of this work is to compress traces efficiently. Traces are important for debugging WSN deployments, but trace sizes can become large, so they need to be compressed otherwise whether you write to flash (most often the case) or exfiltrate to the basestation you are wasting a lot of precious energy. Traditional compression techniques (prediction-based, dictionary-based grammar-based) are not applicable for WSNs because they require more memory and computation than is available in WSNs. The insights behind Prius work are that traces are highly repetitive, traces evolve slightly, and program memory is not as scarce as data/var memory. The Prius approach is to mine trace patterns offline (static-analysis of the program code?) and to store them in program memory. In the offline learning phase, Prius creates a compression dictionary, this dictionary is then processed by data structure generator to obtain an efficient data structure data structure to be used in the headerfile of the deployed program.
DoubledipL leveraging thermoelectric harvesting for low power monitoring of sporadic water useThis work does waterflow monitoring. The motes they built include acceleration and temperature sensors and use wireless communication. The motes are harvesting their energy on the pipes using the thermal gradients of the hot/cold water in the pipe and the environment temperature.
Business meetingThere was a short business meeting in the afternoon. We learned that next year Sensys will be in Rome, Italy at the Sapienza University, Nov 11-15. The rest of the business meeting was spent for some soul-searching about Sensys. Is the excitement for Sensys diminishing as maybe indicated by the Sensys submission and attendance numbers are going down. With the smartphone going big, and also getting a lot of focus at Sensys, how can Sensys distinguish itself from Ubicomp or Ubisys? Andrew Campbell (Darthmouth) said he is nervous and somewhat pessimistic about the future of Sensys. He called on to the PhD students, Assistant professors, to get up and be more engaged/central in Sensys community. Also several people voiced interest for having a workshop on big data / machine learning as part of Sensys.
Demo sessionA lot of the papers in the conference got demoed in the demo and poster session. Probably there were about 10 demos, and 20 more posters. The most interesting demo must have been the proximity social interaction monitoring sensors demo from University of Utah. They had brought in 300 motes. Their large programming board, can program upto 100 motes at the same time. They produced their own hardware, and said each mote cost about $30. They distributed upto 100 motes for monitoring, about half of the people in attendance got a mote from them. They also had stationary motes under each poster table. Although the reception area was quite large, is L shaped, and a lot of humans were in the way (all very detrimental to wireless communication), the stationary motes talk to singlehop to their basestation connected to the laptop. The mobile nodes had much smaller communication radius, they captured signals they heard from nearby motes, and broadcasted these so that stationary motes can pick these up and forward them to the basestation.
The muscle fatigue monitoring demo was also very interesting. Yes, this was the guy with the yoga pants. I got to take a closer look at the Cleon mote from the best paper (energy efficient GPS). I tried the MusicalHeart demo. I was told that music would not be able to slow my heart rate at high activity level (jogging) as I suspected. I was told that I had to set my tempo to the music, and then my heart rate will slow. So the music only becomes the cue to speed up or slow down my activity. Sort of a bummer.
General commentsYou could understand if a talk/paper is well received depending on the number of people asking questions after the talk. The talks that receive no questions mean something was not quite right. (On related news, if I do not receive any questions after my presentations, I will probably have a breakdown and start crying.)
The tea (especially the vanilla orchard variety) was very good and there was a good supply of tea. I observed that more people were drinking tea relatively to previous years. I like this trend as a tea person.
The lunch arrangement was the weak point in the otherwise great organization. Lunch is picked up, and since there wasn't a lunch ballroom, we had to eat lunch in the conference room... facing the screen. This made for a lonely and awkward lunch. Having a lunch room which forces people to sit together helps create chance acquaintances, which adds a lot to the conference experience. I still find it hard to meet new people at the conferences. I think it would be really nice if conferences organized some nerdy ice-breaking events. The demo and poster session in Sensys helped a lot for this. Conferences should try more playful things for ice-breaking. Maybe, instead of writing conference name on nametags (duh, everybody in attendance knows conference name), write a twitter bio-like self-describing line about the person, or what that person wants to talk about: "ask me about crowdsourcing coffee shop line waiting times". Another idea could be to get people collaborating on an acitivity, game, or challenge. For example get people in attendance collaboratively write/edit/produce a dozen different conference summaries! Editors and webservices already exists for collaborative editing, and maybe the conference should randomly or purposefully cluster people into these editing groups.
Hmm, maybe I should start a conference critiquing business. Just pay my registration and travel, and I am set :-) I will write conference critics and reviews for your conference.
Finally, this is my motivation level after this conference.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Sensys'12 (day 1)
I am attending Sensys'12 at Toronto, which is a short distance from Buffalo. Sensys is a premiere conference for wireless sensor network and, more recently, smartphone sensing research. Here are my rough notes from the first day of conference.
Energy-efficient GPS sensing with cloud offloadingThis paper is really good, it blew me away. Later at the conference banquet Wednesday night, the paper got selected as the Best Paper. This work aims to break up the GPS as a blackbox and see how we can make it more energy-efficient. The paper goes into fairly technical detail about how GPS works, which I cannot replicate here. Some basics are: GPS uses CDMA to transmit 50bps information over a carrier signal of 1.575Ghz. Seeing more satellites improves accuracy. GPS localization requires the following phases on the device: acquisition, tracking, decoding, code-phase, least-square calculation.
The insight of the paper is to offload some of these phases to the cloud, so the device does less work and spends less power. For example, the codephase involves getting the "ephemeris" from the signal for learning the location of satellites, but this look up table is already made available by NASA and alike in cloud. So that can be easily offloaded to the cloud, and the device does not need to do it. Another trick is coarse time navigation. If a nearby landmark has same/close nms for the GPS signals (nms= number of milliseconds for time of flight of GPS signal), instead of calculating the location, use the landmark's location. If there is no such known location, then leastsquare calculation may give several possible locations, but there is still hope. It is possible to use the elevation information (the height dimension often ignored in the lattitude-longitude pair) as a checksum and eliminate the spurious possibilities and to figure out the correct location. The elevation data and the computation power to do this is available at the cloud side.
Using similar tricks, they reduce the duration of the acquisition phase at the device and the amount of information to be gathered by the device from the satellites. They develop hardware for this (they call this Co-GPS design). The Cleon prototype is comprised of max2769 gps receiver + msp430 as the chip, and talks to the phone or device (ipod?) using audio communication through the headphone jack. Cleon ends up sampling GPS only for 2ms (16 mHz sampling, 2 bit/sample, 2ms) as that is enough for accurate localization (within 30meters) via offloading to the cloud-side. The awesome thing about Cleon is that it can run on 1.5 years on 2AA battery with continuous sampling. Wow! (This calculation does not take into account the communication cost to cloud as this is done by the device Cleon connects to and can be over wifi, bluetooth, etc.). A byproduct of Cleon is atomic time stamping for outdoor sensors. They will opensource the software and the hardware soon.
Indoor pseudo-ranging of mobile devices using ultasonic chirps
This work presents an ultrasound-based smartphone ranging system. The transmitters for this system is regular speakers, which abound in halls, malls, classrooms, and offices. The sound used is slightly below "normal" human hearing range; they utilize a 4Khz band there. Localization is performed at the smartphone via calculating the time-difference of arrival of sound signals (sound is slow, so this creates an advantage in achieving fine-grain localization) from the predetermined speakers. This is not a new idea. MIT had the Cricket protocol that did this around 2005 for the motes. This work is a refined implementation of the same concepts. Instead of a mote and special receiver hardware, they were able to pull this off with regular smartphone (iphone) microphones. Other noteworthy special touches from the paper are as follows. They use chirp signals, because they found that chirps are error-prone and give better accuracy. When using such chirps, human ear hears click sounds (demonstrated at the presentation). So they employ "psychoacoustic" (perception of sound) properties to solve this. The clicking sounds generated by rapid frequency changes, so they reshape them by adding fading (fading in and fading out) between the chirps, so they become oblivious to your ears. They employ hamming codes in the chirp signals for error detection and correction. As a result, they manage to get localization accuracy with less than 10cm error. A disadvantage is that this method requires line of sight to the speakers, and also that speakers need to be pre-localized and pre-arranged. Another nice touch, they tested this on their cat; the cat, although could hear the sound, didn't seem to be disturbed by it. (They used food association technique to show this.) Another interesting tidbit from the talk is that, 2 people out of the 200 people crowd said they were able to hear the ultrasound even with fading-in/out version. Some people have more sensitive ears it turns out.
IOdetector: a generic service for indoor outdoor detection
This paper aims to provide a service for the smartphone to detect whether it is currently outdoor, semi-outdoor, indoor. The application of this service is to automatically and in "an energy-efficient manner" detect when the phone should not even bother activating the GPS for an app because the phone is indoor or semi-outdoor and the GPS error will be big, and it would not justify the energy wasted by the GPS. The service uses three modalities: light signal, cellular signal, magnetic field signal. Also secondarily, acceleration and proximity & time (to sanitize light readings) are employed. These are all very low energy sensors. The light detector accounts for day or night, and can detect indoor fluorescent lighting. The cellular signal detector uses signal from multiple celltowers to avoid the corner-turning effect. However, each subdetector cannot completely classify the three types (indoor, outdoor, semi), so they fuse these subdetectors employing the confidence results provided by them.
Musical Heart : A hearty way to listen to music
It is a proven fact that music has profound effect on human heart rates. Some music calms, some music gets you worked up. This work presents a biofeedback-based context-aware music recommendation app for smartphones, MusicalHeart. This app requires its own special sensor equipped earphones to achieve the biofeedback part. More specifically, there is an IMU (inertial measurement unit) and a microphone embedded in the headphone. The microphone is used for heart-rate detection (requires some filtering), and the IMU for activity detection (employs k-means clustering). These sensors communicates to the smartphone app via the audio jack, and they are powered by a thin film battery. In addition to the sensors in the headphone MusicalHeart app also uses phone GPS and WAP information for context detection.
MusicalHeart detects what type of activity you are doing (light L1, medium L2, high-level L3) and plays you the "appropriate" music to try to get your heart-rate into the suggested/desired heartbeats per second. The speaker claimed that there is a desired/suggested heartbeat for activity levels, and this is documented in the medical literature. (I am hearing about this the first time.) So, MusicalHeart "custom"-selects a song to fill in the gap between the desired heartrate for your activity and your current detected heart rate. It may use a fast song to increase your heartrate or a slow song to slow your heart rate. Of course things are not that simple. Actually three different features are considered for each song; tempo, pitch, energy. Increase in energy increases your heart-rate more effectively for L1 activities, and increase in tempo increases your heart-rate more effectively for L3 activities. The "custom" part of MusicalHeart is because the app learns over time what kind of music work better on you for the desired effects. The work was evaluated with an empirical study over 37 volunteers. I am still skeptical about if any song can slow my heart rate at L3. I will try this at the demo Thursday (today). Yes, several of the papers below also appear in the demo session so the audience can try if they work as advertised.
The Banquet
The conference banquet was held at the CN tower (the very tall thin tower that is the symbol of Toronto). This banquet is up there for me with the Mobicom'11 banquet. The CN tower was a very interesting and exciting venue to have the banquet. Especially with the glass floor!
Sunday, November 4, 2012
An abundance of solutions
My son started the Kindergarten this year. I try to be a good parent and work with him closely on his sight-words and handwriting. Today we were reviewing his weekly reader magazine, and I read to him the following question from the magazine.
There is only one pumpkin left at the pumpkin patch. Mingo and Zip both want the pumpkin. What should they do?I guess the easy answer (maybe, the answer the magazine tries to teach) is that they share the pumpkin. But my son thought about a little bit, and said they should ask the farmer if the farmer has more pumpkins somewhere. I went along, and together we thought of several more solutions to the problem.
- Mingo and Zip carve the pumpkin nicely, and sell the carved pumpkin at a good price at the bazaar and buy two pumpkins with that money.
- They divide the pumpkin into half. For dividing fairly, you know the trick right. One of them gets to cut in two pieces, and the other gets to choose. (However, my wife argues this is not fair if the person to cut is clumsy and cannot manage to cut into equal pieces. Then the chooser has an obvious advantage.)
- Mingo and Zip share the pumpkin in the time domain. Mingo displays it on the odd numbered days, Zip on the even-numbered. (I wonder if it is possible to share the pumpkin on the frequency domain or via code division.)
- Mingo paints and displays the pumpkin on Halloween, then Zip gets the pumpkin and cooks it.
- They do a coin toss about who gets the pumpkin.
- Mingo pays Zip and gets the pumpkin.
- They take the seeds of the pumpkin, sow the seeds, and next year they have many pumpkins each.
- They both forgo the pumpkin, and present it to one of their mutual friends.
- One of them gets up early and takes the pumpkin, the other gets a good life lesson.
- They help each other and make a nice pumpkin pie together. They apply mapreduce to the problem, make a business out of it, and get rich. See mapreduce in simple terms about how.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
MDCC: Multi-Data Center Consistency
In order to reduce latencies to geographically distributed users, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, etc., replicate data across geographical regions. But replication across datacenters, over the WAN, is expensive. WAN delays are in the hundreds of milliseconds and vary significantly, so common wisdom is that synchronous wide-area replication is unfeasible, which means strong consistency should be diluted/relaxed. (See COPS paper for an example.)
In the MDCC work (Tim Kraska, Gene Pang, Michael J. Franklin, Samuel Madden, March 2012), the authors describe an "optimistic commit protocol, that does not require a master or partitioning, and is strongly consistent at a cost similar to eventually consistent protocols". Optimistic and strongly-consistent is an odd/unlikely couple. The way MDCC achieves this is by starting with Paxos, which is a strongly consistent protocol. MDCC then adds optimizations to Paxos to obtain an optimistic commit protocol that does not require a master and that is strongly consistent at a very low-cost.
Paxos optimizedClassic Paxos is a 2-phase protocol. In Phase 1, a master M tries to establish the mastership for an update for a specific record r. Phase 2 tries to accept a value: the master M requests the storage nodes to store r next (using the ballot number M established in the first phase), and waits for a majority number of ACKs back.
Multi-Paxos optimization employs the lease idea to avoid the need for phase 1 in the fault-free executions (timely communication and master does not crash). The master puts a lease on other nodes on being a master for many seconds, so there is no need to go through Phase 1. (This is still fault-tolerant. If the master fails, other nodes need to wait until the lease expires, but then they are free to chose a new master as per classic Paxos protocol.) Fast-Paxos optimization is more complex. In fast-paxos a node that wants to commit a value first try without going through the master (saving a message round, potentially over the WAN), directly communicating with the other nodes optimistically. If a fast-quorum number of nodes (more than majority number of nodes needed in classic quorum) reply, the fast round has succeeded. However, in such fast rounds, since updates are not issued by the master, collisions may occur. When a collision is detected, the node then goes through the master which resolves the situation with a classic round.
Finally building over these earlier optimizations, the Generalized-Paxos optimization (which is a superset of Fast-Paxos) makes the additional observation that some collisions (different orderings of operations) are really not conflicts, as the colliding operations commute, or the order is not important. So this optimization does not enforce reverting to classic Paxos for those cases. MDCC uses Generalized Paxos, and as a result, MDCC can commit transactions in a single round-trip across data centers in the normal operation case.
The good thing about using Paxos over the WAN is you /almost/ get the full CAP (all three properties: consistency, availability, and partition-freedom). As we discussed earlier (Paxos taught), Paxos is CP, that is, in the presence of a partition, Paxos keeps consistency over availability. But, Paxos can still provide availability if there is a majority partition. Now, over a WAN, what are the chances of having a partition that does not leave a majority? WAN has a lot of redundancy. While it is possible to have a data center partitioned off the Internet due to a calamity, what are the chances of several knocked off at the same time. So, availability is also looking good for MDCC protocol using Paxos over WAN.
ReadsMDCC provides read-committed consistency: Reads can be done from any (local) storage node and are guaranteed to return only committed records. However, by just reading from a single node, the read might be stale. That node may have missed some commits. Reading the latest value requires reading a majority of storage nodes to determine the latest stable version, making reads an expensive operation. MDCC cites Megastore and adopts similar techniques to MegaStore in trying to provide local reads to the nodes. The idea is basically: If my datacenter is up-to-date do a local read, otherwise go through the master to do a local read. (We had discussed these techniques in Megastore earlier.)
MDCC detailsNow, while the optimistic and strongly-consistent protocol is nice, one may argue that there has not been much novel (at least academically) in that part of the paper; MDCC basically puts together known optimizations over Paxos to achieve that optimistic and strongly-consistent replication protocol. The claim to novelty in the MDCC paper comes from their proposed new programming model which empowers the application developer to handle longer and unpredictable latencies caused by inter-data center communication. The model allows developers to specify certain callbacks that are executed depending on the different phases of a transaction. MDCC's transaction programming model provides a clean and simple way for developers to implement user-facing transactions with potentially wildly varying latencies, which occur when replicating across data centers. Figure below shows an example of a transaction for checking out from a web store.
Evaluation of MDCC is done using the TPC-W benchmark with MDCC deployed across 5 geographically diverse data centers. The evaluation shows that "MDCC is able to achieve throughput and latency similar to eventually consistent quorum protocols and that MDCC is able to sustain a data center outage without a significant impact on response times while guaranteeing strong consistency."
ConclusionThis is a nice and useful paper because it tells a simpler united story about using Paxos (more accurately, Generalized Paxos) for executing transactions across datacenters. This paper also provides a very nice summary of the Paxos and optimizations to Paxos, as well as providing a case study where the usefulness of these optimizations are presented. So even if you are not interested with the details and quantitative measurements about the actual multi datacenter replication problem, the paper is still worth a read in this respect.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Auto-dropboxify all web-downloaded documents
I often download pdf presentations from the web, but then when I reopen them in my laptop later, I wonder if they got updated/changed in the meanwhile. It would be nice to have a service where my local copy also gets automatically updated/synced (a la dropbox) when the authoritative source copy gets changed. (The difference from the dropbox model is here the source does not need to cooperate by deploying a sync software, e.g. dropbox, or even be aware that its document is being synced.)
So here is my project idea: auto-sync all web/url downloaded documents, so the downloaded local copy of a file is kept up-to-date with the authoritative copy on the web. I think many people will find this useful. Some other examples of documents downloaded from the web and would benefit from auto-updating include: city documents (e.g., street-parking rules, garbage collection rules, etc.), event calendars, tax documents, CVs. (Do you have any other examples?)
This shouldn't be too hard to build. A completely client-side solution is possible. A client-side software that keeps track of web-downloaded documents, and periodically checks with http to detect whether any of these documents got changed would do it. If a change is detected, the software should download a copy, and should prompt the user when she opens the local document next about whether the updated or the old copy to be used.
Of course a cloud-hosted push-based synchronization solution would be more scalable and efficient. This would be also more gentle for the original content provider as instead of thousands of client-side software periodically checking for updates, only the cloud-hosted synchronization service will check for the update to the document. Upon detecting an update the cloud service will push the updated document to all clients that posses this document. I am sure there are a lot of details to work out to make this service efficient. And there may even be a way to monetize this service eventually, who knows? This cloud hosted synchronization service idea may be seen as extending the CDNs to reach out and embrace the pc/laptops as the last hop for content-replication.
A further generalization of this "auto-sync documents downloaded from the web" idea is to allow any host to modify/update the document and yet still maintain the other copies in sync/up-to-date. This then turns into an application-level virtual-filesystem that is web-scale. And implementing that would be more tricky.
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Two-phase commit and beyond
In this post, we model and explore the two-phase commit protocol using TLA+. The two-phase commit protocol is practical and is used in man...


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03 February 2011 - United States. The Greenpeace ship MY Arctic Sunrise passes in front of the Statue of Liberty during the ship's arrival in New York. The ship is visiting New York as part of the "Coal Free Future" tour that travelled up the east coast in January and February, demanding liberty from coal. Read more
© Michael Nagle / Greenpeace
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Culture Shock
Get Out There
The year's not yet half-way over, but Albuquerque's drama junkies are already planning for 2009. Several theaters, companies and the year-old Albuquerque Theatre Guild are seeking new talent to showcase in '09, and that means you.
Performance Preview
Ham and Jam and SPAMalot
Monty Python does Popejoy
SPAM has acquired many meanings in the Digital Age. SPAM is, of course, a processed meat product made with spiced pork product, that's canned and often served fried with eggs. It's also the bane of e-mail inboxes everywhere, clogging the information highway with pharmaceutical advertisements and nudie pics. And it's a Tony Award-winning music. How's that for the meat of champions?
Book News
Getting it Right
The National Book Critics Circle Awards: A Retrospective
Publishers in North America churned out more than 200,000 books last year. That means in the time it takes you to read this piece, two or three new books will be published. If you pause in the middle to refill your coffee mug, another book will come off the presses. Go outside to let your dog pee and—look out!—one more book has been born.
Art Preview
The Cradle Project
Immense group effort makes a political statement
Walking onto the seventh floor of The Banque is overwhelming. Elevator doors open to an unfinished, raw space, sunny and full of hundreds of the handmade art pieces that make up The Cradle Project. It's hard to take in at a glance, just as it's hard to imagine what they represent. The 500 cradles stand for "the lost potential of an estimated 48 million children orphaned by disease and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa," according to the show's mission statement.


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2019 Football & Cheerleading Registration:
Wilton Youth Football offers the following programs:
For Fall 2019 information specific to Tackle, Flag or Cheerleading click on the menu tab along the top of this page.
Fee Schedule for 2019:
FALL PROGRAMS Registration Fee*
Tackle Football - Grades 3-8 $375 ($475 after 6/16/2019)
Co-Ed Flag Football-Grades 1-12 $165 ($215 after 6/16/2019)
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Cheerleading-Grades K-8 $200 ($250 after 6/16/2019)
*Capital Improvements Fee
A $25 per family Capital Improvements Fee will be added to your registration. If you have already paid the fee through the registration of another player, the fee will be removed during checkout so that only one fee per family will be charged IF your family profiles are set up to correctly reflect all players at your address.
For All Online Registrations CLICK HERE
Please Note: ONLINE REGISTRATION is the only method for registering to participate in the WYF Flag, Tackle or Cheerleading programs. All forms are included in the Online Registration for Flag.
Only two forms must be submitted in hard copy for tackle. Four forms for Cheer:
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These forms must be completed in their entirety and submitted AT EQUIPMENT DISTRIBUTION TIME. No equipment will be distributed unless your registration, payment and the proper forms have been completed and submitted. Please register early online and print out the forms for submission at equipment distribution. SAVE THE DATE: Sunday June 16 is Tackle Equipment Distribution.
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What role does the sun play in the development of autism? That's what a new study hopes to find out. According to a report published today by Environmental Health News, scientists are now looking closely at the possible connection between autism and vitamin D.
A recent Saudi Arabian study published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation looked at the blood levels of vitamin D in children with and without autism and found that the autistic kids had significantly lower levels of the "sunshine vitamin" than their peers. In all, researchers tested 50 children with autism, and 30 children without autism between the ages of 5 and 12. Forty percent of children with autism were also vitamin D deficient, while none of the children without autism were. And the numbers appeared to be inversely proportional - the lower the child's vitamin D levels, the higher that child scored on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale, which measures autism severity.
The researchers also found that 70 percent of the children with autism had higher levels of antibodies in their blood streams that could potentially disrupt the signaling of neurons in the brain. Again, the lower the child's level of vitamin D, the more antibodies they had, and the more severe were the child's measurements on the autism scale. These antibodies could potentially induce inflammation that would trigger some of the symptoms of autism.
"There is a growing body of literature linking vitamin D to various immune-related conditions, including allergy and autoimmunity," said Laila Y. AL-Ayadhi, a professor of neurophysiology at King Saud University and one of the study's lead researchers.
One such study - this one conducted by the Vitamin D Council - found that children with the highest exposure to UVB rays in summer and fall had about half the autism rates of children who lived in states with lower UVB exposures.
In addition to the potential autism link, vitamin D deficiency can also hinder bone strength and growth as the body uses vitamin D to absorb calcium from food. On a sunny day, the body can get all of the vitamin D it needs from 15 minutes of sun exposure without sunscreen. But with the increased use of sunscreen to protect skin, health care professionals are seeing a startling increase in the frequency of severe vitamin D deficiency The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Institute of Medicine recommend a daily intake of 400 IU per day of vitamin D during the first year of life beginning in the first few days, and 600 IU for everyone over age one. Talk to your doctor about the best way for you - and your kids - to get your vitamin D.