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TIFF 2013: The Round-Up
For me, the star of this year's TIFF wasn't a director or performer but instead the brilliant programmer Andréa Picard. Her Wavelengths program was strong, open-minded and imaginative, combining the best of contemporary narrative and avant-garde cinema. In Picard's hands it has become the crowning glory of this festival.
I've been going to TIFF for 15 years, and this was among the best I've ever attended. I caught about 30 films, and I will have a piece on the festival in the current (fourth) issue of LOLA that Adrian Martin and I and our webmaster Bill Mousoulis are in the process of rolling out. Meanwhile, here's a quick personal summary evaluation of the films:
At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, France)
Bastards (Claire Denis, France)
Manakamana (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, USA)
The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, Germany)
Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, USA)
Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan)
Three Landscapes (Peter Hutton, USA)
Song and Spring (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA)
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
Abuse of Weakness (Catherine Breillat, France)
Our Sunhi (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Redemption (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (Ben Rivers & Ben Russell, Estonia/France)
A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, China)
Un Conte de Michel de Montaigne (Jean-Marie Straub, France)
The King's Body (João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal)
Love is the Perfect Crime (Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu, France)
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
October November (Götz Spielmann, Austria)
We are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson, Sweden)
Didn't work for me:
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, UK)
Fascinating, but I had reservations:
Story of my Death (Albert Serra, Spain)
R100 (Hitoshi Matsumoto, Japan)
The Summer of Flying Fish (Marcela Said, Chile)
Links to recent reads:
-- "Melville Variations," a video essay and text by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin at MUBI. Also: Adrian on Ruiz's final film Night Across the Street at Fandor.
-- Andréa Picard interviewed by Blake Williams.
-- Michael Guillen collects Jonathan Rosenbaum's writings on Pier Paolo Pasolini in a post.
-- Farran Smith Nehme reviews Ben Urwand's book The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler.
-- A tribute post to the late Allan Sekula by Matthew Flanagan.
-- "Filming a Land in Flux": an interview with Wang Bing in New Left Review.
-- Bourbon Street Blues (1979), a 25-minute short film by Douglas Sirk starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, at The Seventh Art.
-- The latest issue of Nonsite.org is devoted to Bertolt Brecht.
pic: "At Berkeley" (Frederick Wiseman, USA)


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I was skipping through a page of Facebook updates and came across a discussion about what parents were spending on their little ones. The typical amount spent by these parents – on babies – was from $500 to $800 on a single child.
Call me old fashioned or Mrs Judgeypants if you like, but I am in shock. Babies under a year old don't even know what day it is, and they're just as happy playing with a cardboard box as the toy inside it. Most of all, though, I'm baffled as to what you could spend this amount of money on. What toy, for a child under two, could possibly cost several hundred dollars?
Even if children are old enough to know that it is Christmas, do we really need to spend hundreds of dollars on gifts? Will it make our children feel more loved? Or will we be encouraging a sense of entitlement – that they 'deserve' to be spoilt rotten? There really is nothing more nasty than a kid who expects to be so showered with gifts that the magic of surprise and appreciation is dimmed for them.
It might be time to do a quick reality check. Are you burning up the plastic because you're feeling pressured to spend more than is sensible? Ask yourself: are we doing this for our child or ourselves? Are we competing in some way with other parents? Are we being seduced by advertising to prove to ourselves – and everyone else – that we're great parents by putting more and bigger packages under the tree?
Perhaps it's also time to step back and consider the bigger picture, not just one day of the year that will be over in a flash anyway (sorry to be a Grinch!). As you race around, trying to find the perfect gift for your little ones, consider that among the most precious gifts we can give our children are those that will last long beyond the festive season: roots and wings.
As you nurture your baby intensely and relentlessly around the clock, you're helping him develop roots. Rather than doubting that you may be creating 'bad habits' or 'spoiling' your baby, cherish each moment by reminding yourself that you're teaching your little one to love – and to love life. As these roots grow deep and strong, your baby will feel safe and secure enough to spread his wings and reach out for the world beyond your arms.
And whether your child is a baby learning to crawl, a toddler taking his first tentative steps, or a teen who thinks he's worldly enough to fly 'solo', it isn't always easy to let go. Being a responsive parent requires us to constantly surrender as we adapt our nurturing to match each new stage of our child's development. Above all, we each have to trust that when it's time, the strong roots we've nurtured will allow our child to stretch those budding wings and soar!
I'd like to wish you and your family a warm and wonderful Christmas, and to offer suggestions for other special gifts we can all give to our children, regardless of how we choose to celebrate the festive season:
- Self confidence: Help your child understand and accept that nobody can be approved of all the time, so when she encounters disapproval she needn't feel immobilised, and that she must trust herself, not the opinions of others. Give this gift with a hug.
- Possibilities: Give children the freedom to be anything they choose, rather than limiting them with labels or roles. Teach them, by example, that a boy or girl can sew or play football, cry or be brave, mow lawns or do dishes. Give this gift with a smile.
- Life without needless fears: Encourage children to become 'doers' by showing them that you'll tackle problems and not be a worrier yourself. Give this gift with a laugh.
- The gift of loving life: Encourage children to be fully alive in every way. Allow them to have adventures, a chance for laughter, fun, and creativity. Give them the supreme gift of being able to find happiness in virtually all circumstances. Give this gift every day throughout the year.
If you're after the gift of silent nights, check out Pinky's book Sleeping Like a Baby.

subset: commoncrawl


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As you probably know, incorrect usage of events is one of the main causes for memory leaks in .NET applications : an event keeps references to its listener objects (through a delegate), which prevents the garbage collector from collecting them when they're not used anymore. This is especially true of static events, because the references are kept for all the lifetime of the application. If the application often adds handlers to the event and never removes them, the memory usage will grow as long as the application runs, until no more memory is available.
The "obvious" solution, of course, is to unsubscribe from the event when you're done with it. Unfortunately, it's not always obvious to know when you can unsubscribe… an object that goes out of scope usually isn't aware of it, so it doesn't have a chance to unsubscribe from the event.
Another approach is to implement the WeakEvent pattern, which principle is to keep only weak references to the listeners. That way, unsubscribed listeners can be claimed by the garbage collector. Microsoft included in WPF a few types to deal with the WeakEvent pattern (
WeakEventManager class and
IWeakEventListener interface), and gives guidelines on how to implement your own weak event. However this technique is not very convenient, because you need to create dedicated classes to expose new events, and the listeners need to implement a specific interface.
So I thought about another implementation, which allows creating weak events almost the same way as normal events. My first idea was to use a list of
WeakReferences to store the list of subscribed delegates. But this doesn't work so well, because of the way we typically use delegates :
myObject.MyEvent += new EventHandler(myObject_MyEvent);
We create a delegate, subscribe it to the event, and… drop it. So the only accessible reference to the delegate is actually a weak reference, so there's nothing to prevent its garbage collection… and that's exactly what happens ! After a variable period of time (from my observations, no more than a few seconds), the delegate is garbage collected, and isn't called anymore when the event is raised.
Rather than keeping a weak reference to the delegate itself, we should use a less transient object : the target object of the delegate (
Delegate.Target) would be a better choice. So I created the
WeakDelegate<TDelegate> class, which wraps a delegate by storing separately the method and a weak reference to the target :
public class WeakDelegate<TDelegate> : IEquatable<TDelegate> { private WeakReference _targetReference; private MethodInfo _method; public WeakDelegate(Delegate realDelegate) { if (realDelegate.Target != null) _targetReference = new WeakReference(realDelegate.Target); else _targetReference = null; _method = realDelegate.Method; } public TDelegate GetDelegate() { return (TDelegate)(object)GetDelegateInternal(); } private Delegate GetDelegateInternal() { if (_targetReference != null) { return Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(TDelegate), _targetReference.Target, _method); } else { return Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(TDelegate), _method); } } public bool IsAlive { get { return _targetReference == null || _targetReference.IsAlive; } } #region IEquatable<TDelegate> Members public bool Equals(TDelegate other) { Delegate d = (Delegate)(object)other; return d != null && d.Target == _targetReference.Target && d.Method.Equals(_method); } #endregion internal void Invoke(params object[] args) { Delegate handler = (Delegate)(object)GetDelegateInternal(); handler.DynamicInvoke(args); } }
Now, we just need to manage a list of these
WeakDelegate<TDelegate>. This is done by the
WeakEvent<TDelegate> class :
public class WeakEvent<TEventHandler> { private List<WeakDelegate<TEventHandler>> _handlers; public WeakEvent() { _handlers = new List<WeakDelegate<TEventHandler>>(); } public virtual void AddHandler(TEventHandler handler) { Delegate d = (Delegate)(object)handler; _handlers.Add(new WeakDelegate<TEventHandler>(d)); } public virtual void RemoveHandler(TEventHandler handler) { // also remove "dead" (garbage collected) handlers _handlers.RemoveAll(wd => !wd.IsAlive || wd.Equals(handler)); } public virtual void Raise(object sender, EventArgs e) { var handlers = _handlers.ToArray(); foreach (var weakDelegate in handlers) { if (weakDelegate.IsAlive) { weakDelegate.Invoke(sender, e); } else { _handlers.Remove(weakDelegate); } } } protected List<WeakDelegate<TEventHandler>> Handlers { get { return _handlers; } } }
This class automatically handles the removal of "dead" (garbage collected) handlers, and provides a
Raise method to call the handlers. It can be used as follows :
private WeakEvent<EventHandler> _myEvent = new WeakEvent<EventHandler>(); public event EventHandler MyEvent { add { _myEvent.AddHandler(value); } remove { _myEvent.RemoveHandler(value); } } protected virtual void OnMyEvent() { _myEvent.Raise(this, EventArgs.Empty); }
This is a bit longer to write than a "regular" event, but considering the benefits, it's very acceptable. Anyway, you can easily create a Visual Studio snippet to quickly create a weak event, with only 3 fields to fill in :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet"> <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0"> <Header> <Title>wevt</Title> <Shortcut>wevt</Shortcut> <Description>Code snippet for a weak event</Description> <Author>Thomas Levesque</Author> <SnippetTypes> <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType> </SnippetTypes> </Header> <Snippet> <Declarations> <Literal> <ID>type</ID> <ToolTip>Event type</ToolTip> <Default>EventHandler</Default> </Literal> <Literal> <ID>event</ID> <ToolTip>Event name</ToolTip> <Default>MyEvent</Default> </Literal> <Literal> <ID>field</ID> <ToolTip>Name of the field holding the registered handlers</ToolTip> <Default>_myEvent</Default> </Literal> </Declarations> <Code Language="csharp"> <![CDATA[private WeakEvent<$type$> $field$ = new WeakEvent<EventHandler>(); public event $type$ $event$ { add { $field$.AddHandler(value); } remove { $field$.RemoveHandler(value); } } protected virtual void On$event$() { $field$.Raise(this, EventArgs.Empty); } $end$]]> </Code> </Snippet> </CodeSnippet> </CodeSnippets>
This snippet gives the following result in Visual Studio :


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I love good salted fish like "mui heong"(mackerel) but to get a good salted fish in States is not easy...either it's comes soaked in oil or in dry form..But still we can get"Asian Made" salted fish in major Asian market in NYC.I know salted fish is an inexpensive food in any Asia countries but the "Asian Made" salted fish sold here is quite pricey.I tried trout salted fish before and found it's acceptable.The only thing is that this kind of fish is skinny and not salty at all..Well,beggars can't be choosy,right? As long as it's tasty and feel good,why not?
3 pieces boneless chicken thigh,cut chunk


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Please select your meditation time
Start Meditating
Conclude Meditation
Material related to John Main OSB
The John Main Seminar is a major event of the World Community hosted annually in different countries. In 2011 it was led by the English Dominican Timothy Radcliffe and hosted by the Irish Christian Meditation Community. The pre-Seminar retreat was led by Fr Laurence on "Fruits of Crisis".
For more information on the Seminar theme and the speaker visit: www.jms11.com.
320 meditators from 22 countries participated. Below, there are comments from some of the participants and the gallery of the seminar. Medio Media will be publishing the talks of the seminar shortly.
Liz King
How does one appraise Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? And Van Gogh's masterpieces? In the same vein, what words can I use to describe the Memorial Mass for our beloved Fr. John held at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday, December 29? Magnificent. Beautiful. Majestic. Glorious. Timeless.
Everything was perfect: the weather, the venue, the program, the music, the liturgy, the homily, the offering, the petitions and the attendance (well over 800) that almost filled the church. No detail was overlooked—thanks to the hard-working efforts of the London organizers: Giovanni Felicioni and Roger Layet and their team, with assistance from Pauline Peters and Bjorn and Christian from Germany.
Homily by Laurence Freeman OSB
(Links to memories at the bottom of this page.)
December 29th 2007
Many are needed to plant the Word and many to water it. The spread of the faith, the increase in population demand this. God's people in the past who had but one altar still needed many teachers. How much greater now are the needs of the rich gathering of nations, for whose sacrifices Lebanon itself could not provide enough firewood.
If it were not for the reference to Lebanon as a source of firewood we might think that these words of Thomas a Beckett were contemporary. The population of the world is increasing (by 211,000 a day and by the size of Germany every year). The churches are painfully conscious of how they need to plant and water the seed of the living Word of God and how difficult this is proving. We know how many teachers of wisdom we need.
Today we come to this sacred place, one of the mother churches of English Christians to celebrate the life and teaching and continuing influence of one of the teachers of teachers whom the Lord raised up in our time to help meet these urgent needs.
John Main OSB (1926-1982)
was born in London on 21 January 1926. His roots were in Co Kerry, Ireland. Educated at Westminster Choir School and by the Jesuits at Stamford Hill, London, he served in the Royal Signals at the end of the war after which he joined the Canons Regular of the Lateran for a short period. He left and studied law at Trinity College Dublin and then joined the British Diplomatic Service and studied Chinese at SOAS in London.
Attached to the Governor General's office in Malaya during the Emergency his duties took him one day to meet an Indian monk and Justice of the Peace, Swami Satyananda. From him he learned how to meditate and took up the discipline of silence, stillness and simplicity as part of his Christian faith and daily prayer.
Bede Griffiths:In my experience John Main is the most important spiritual guide in the Church today. He opened the way to the direct experience of God, of truth, of reality from within the Christian tradition. He was a man of great wisdom and above all of great love.
Rowan Williams:John Main effectively put the desert tradition of prayer to work in our own day. The roots of his distinctive spirituality lie deep in the fourth and fifth centuries, especially in the works of that great expositor of the desert world, John Cassian. The World Community for Christian Meditation which continues his mission is for me, as for many throughout the world, a taste of what a commitedly contemplative church might look and feel like.
Richard Rohr:John Main never said things in flashy ways, he is saying a lot more than a superficial reading might allow one to see. By going to the roots of spirituality he laid a solid and radical foundation for social critique and social involvement. John Main teaches us to move beyond all images for the sake of powerlessness. I have personally been gifted by the wisdom of this man.
After you've read this page, learn more about John Main here. Also use the left-hand menu to visit the special "John Main Anniversary" page.


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Here is the latest article from the Dating site at BellaOnline.com.
Battling Shyness
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Everyone can benefit from free knowledge so go ahead and pass this message along to family and friends.
Kristina de la Cal, Dating Editor
One of hundreds of sites at BellaOnline.com


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As you hopefully recall from our last update, we've been working with StreetWise, the street paper of Chicago, to apply our learnings from Homeless Hotspots. StreetWise's issues felt most appropriate to tackle not only because of the organization's innovative mindset (see their recent launch of Neighbor Carts), but because solutions that work at scale in Chicago can likely work in most other cities. StreetWise is a member of both the North American Street Newspaper Association and the International Network of Street Papers, organizations that cover the majority of street papers across the world and ensure the best ideas at any single paper scale.
One of the first issues we've tackled together is digitizing the transaction. As of this week, people can use their mobile device to PayPal money to participating StreetWise vendors in a public beta. Similar to Homeless Hotspots, a visit to the vendor's unique short URL will provide their personal story. This was a critical step in the process, as street newspapers play a much bigger role than employment for homeless individuals; they offer a chance for meaningful connection across socio-economic boundaries. Assuming a successful beta, the program will rollout across Chicago in January.
Street papers are the most valuable tool homeless populations currently have to step out of invisibility. We see the digitization of that process as a critical first step (as do a number of other street papers we've been talking to– they're testing everything from QR codes to mobile issues). However, there's a long way to go. It's why our other ongoing project with StreetWise will involve piloting a more fundamental evolution of their offering. It's a big undertaking, but hopefully it sets the stage for a new model, scalable across large cities around the world. The premise behind the idea is rooted in our learnings from Homeless Hotspots. As always, we'll keep everyone posted on progress once the pilot has been completed.
We'd also like to give a special thanks to PayPal Labs. They've worked with us to create a custom offering to ensure mobile payments are seamless, secure, and free to the vendors to use. We've thoroughly enjoyed working with them.
As always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments. We don't edit our blog comments unless they contain offensive language.


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Our Story
Experienced. Dependable. Flexible.
Our home is Philadelphia. Our client list is all over the place. Ad agencies to art museums, Fortune 500 to TV networks, Boston to Denver to LA.
And we're growing. That makes CCFV an exciting place to be. It keeps us on our toes, ahead of industry trends, always game for change. What never changes is our client-centric collaborative style, fine-tuned over three decades serving long-time clients such as Johnson & Johnson, Comcast and Time Life.
We're proud of all the awards we've won—from Webbys for Sprout to Emmys for documentaries. But we're more proud of winning the confidence of so many great clients.


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Developing a deep quality of desire and interest in your spiritual practice is one of the keys to the whole art of concentration. Steadiness is nourished by the degree of desire with which we focus our meditation. Yet, to the beginning student, many meditation subjects appear plain and uninteresting. There is a traditional story about a student who complained to his master that following the breath was boring. The master grabbed this student and held his head under water for quite a long time while the student struggled to come up. When he finally let the student up, the master asked him whether he had found breath boring in those moments under water.
Concentration combines full interest with attention. This attention should not be confused with being removed or detached. Awareness does not mean separating ourselves from experience; it means allowing it and sensing it fully. Awareness can vary like a zoom lens. The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide and I start all of my students here. Steadying attention on the movement of the life breath is central to yoga, to Buddhist and Hindu practices, to Sufi, Christian, and Jewish traditions. While other meditation subjects are also beneficial, and each has its unique qualities, we will continue to elaborate on the practice of breath meditation as an illustration for developing any of these practices.
Photo by Fotolia/jedi-master
Breathing Meditation
Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration. The breath is available to us at any time of day and in any circumstance. When we have learned to use it, the breath becomes a support for awareness throughout our life.
But awareness of breathing does not come right away. At first we must sit quietly, letting our body be relaxed and alert, and simply practice finding the breath in the body. Where do we actually feel it—as coolness in the nose, a tingling in the back of the throat, as a movement in the chest, as a rise and fall of the belly? The place of strongest feeling is the first place to establish our attention. If the breath is apparent in several places, we can feel its whole movement of the body. If the breath is too soft and difficult to find, we can place our palm on our belly and feel the expansion and contraction in our hand. Or if you are on the floor, flip over onto the belly in crocodile pose (hold your elbows, rest your forehead on your arms, legs back and relaxed) so you can feel the diaphragm move with the breath. It is the most amazing thing to experience one of the few things you actually have control over…your breath …via your vagus nerve, the only cranial nerve that you can willingly control. The breath can become a great teacher because it is always moving and changing. In this simple breathing, we can learn about contraction and resistance, about opening and letting go.
When you start your initial meditation practice, you will begin to recognize that certain external conditions are particularly helpful in developing concentration. Finding or creating a quiet and un-distracting place is necessary. Select regular and suitable times that best fit your temperament and schedule. You may wish to begin with a short period of inspiring reading before sitting, or do some stretching or yoga before sitting. I find it the easiest after my yoga and breathing practices, as my mind is the most quiet at that time. Experiment with these external factors until you find what works for you. Then make them a regular part of your life. By creating this space and this time just for you, you are also creating suitable conditions to living wisely, providing the best soil for your spiritual heart to be nourished and to grow.
As you develop the art of concentration over the weeks and months, you will discover that your concentration will slowly begin to settle by itself. Initially you may struggle to focus, trying to hold on to the object of your meditation. Then gradually the mind and the heart become eased from distractions. You will feel your breath more often and more clearly, or you may recite your prayers or mantra with greater wholeness. This is like beginning to read a book; we will often be interrupted by any distractions around us. But if it is a good book, by the last chapter we will be so absorbed in the plot that people can walk right by us and we will not notice them. In meditation, at first, thoughts carry us away and we think them for a long time. Then, as concentration grows, we remember our breath in the middle of a thought. Later we can notice thoughts just as they arise or allow them to pass in the background, so focused on the breath that we are undisturbed by their movement.
J. Renée DeTar earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Wichita State University in communicative disorders and sciences and liberal studies. She is the founder and director of Yoga Teacher Training of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Yoga Studies, a subsidiary of ReneeYoga since 1991. She offers yoga teacher trainings and spiritual events in Kansas City, MO. She has two children, David and Jamie, and lives with her significant other, David Schafer in north central Missouri on a sustainable farm.


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Elements Of Style
Beautiful Boxwood
As I get used to having a home with a yard that needs landscaping I am starting to become more educated about plants and how to use them properly. Being a busy person who doesn't have the greenest of thumbs I constantly am looking for plants that make a big impact with as little maintenance as possible. Enter the boxwood.
I love the sculptural essence of this plant and the modern yet traditional vibe that boxwood can take based on how it's potted and shaped. From using it in the yard to in pots by a front door, it's the perfect way to fill your beds and outdoor space with big impact greenery. Here's some inspiration…
Here are some great planter choices to try for your patio or front of your home this spring!
1. // 2. // 3. // 4. // 5. // 6. // 7. // 8. // 9. // 10. // 11. // 12.


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LEDs light up Intercontinental Hotel
Downtown Miami hotel adds to skyline
MIAMI – Nineteen floors of LEDs are lighting up the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Miami.
The digital display is made by a thin strip of LEDs across six windows of the hotel.
"When we light up the two digital canvases tonight, it certainly is going to change the city skyline forever," said Robert Hill, general manager at the Intercontinental Hotel. "The guests inside the room can't see them. They're sealed against the window and they only penetrate outwards to create this digital canvas.
Hill said that the LEDs were unveiled during Art Basel Miami Beach as a statement that Miami has come a long way in terms of arts and culture.
"Miami is no longer just about sun, sea, and sand. There is a whole new array -- a wide array -- of arts, culture, and entertainment taking place," said Hill.
Hill added that the display is part of a multi-million dollar renovation at the hotel.
"Like the Hong Kongs of the world, the Dubais of the world, and that's what exciting about changing the skyline and making Miami that great global city," said Hill.
Copyright 2012 by Post Newsweek. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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If you are an alumnus/alumna of the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Georgia, we would love to hear from you!
You can stay in touch with us by liking our Facebook page, attending one of our events, reading our annual newsletters, or emailing us with your own story/announcement/news (firstname.lastname@example.com).
Consider making a donation to support the excellence in teaching, research, and outreach offered by the Department of Plant Biology at UGA.


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Embark upon the nursery design process with beautiful baby bedding. Want something tailored and traditional, simple and sweet, or fresh and modern? PoshTots is a great place to start. Select your crib bedding and begin your design.
Soft fabrics should be a focus when sourcing the best baby bedding. Sumptuous cottons, silks and velvets in solid colors create luxurious crib linens. Bold colors and graphic patterns like dots and stripes offer another adorable look for crib linens. Fun, time-honored themes such as ballerina and jungle animals make a stylish statement on baby bedding. Coordinating, themed accessories accent the crib bedding and complete a custom look in the nursery.
Looking for custom baby bedding? Contact a PoshTots Design Consultant at 866-POSHTOT.
All baby bedding should be carefully secured to ensure baby sleeps safely and soundly in splendid style.
*Free shipping offers are limited to the 48 contiguous states of the USA.


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Our blog focuses on project, database and data management, with some fun thrown in so that we can enjoy what we do. We want to help you be part of TeamData.Read more »
Presentation Topics
Karen speaks primarily on data modeling, data architecture and databases. She also gives presentations on diversity in IT, generational challenges in development teams, and tool training. To see a complete list of her current presentation portfolio, click the read more… below.Read more »
We are TeamData. We help you get the most value out of data and information assets. We focus on practical, real world application of project and data management services.Read more »


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Shooting victims in Chicago this past week . . . 92
Poor Black Americans, if we would only elect a Black President! What? Huh?
A REAL OPPOSITION PARTY would put an end to this madness. BARACK OBAMA & The Democratic Party have & always will be enablers of this murder & mayhem. Enough!
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
President Donald J. Trump, Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 2017
Let's support President Trump if and when he tries to confront this. We want Black Americans to vote for us? Then fix this problem first, and let's not be PC about it. Throw the thugs and gang bangers in jail. We need more cops not less! More cops to punish the gangs and some compassion for the law abiding folks in these communities that are terrorized every day, that's what we need. NO EXCUSES.
The map below shows where people were shot in Chicago, broken down by community area. Darker shades of blue indicate greater numbers of victims in those community areas.
Chicago Shootings Reached 4,368 in 2016 – 132 in the very last week . . . Someone Shot Every 85 Minutes. Crushing 2015's Totals! Record madness, carnage, & mayhem! Record Shooting Sprees! Record Butchery! They got a "Cop Problem" in Chicago? LOL!
2016 4,368 !!!
2015 2,988
2014 2,587
2016 . . . final adjusted total 4,368.
2015 . . . final adjusted total 2,988.
Not only are the people heavily regulated in Chicago, but guns are also heavily regulated. Any long gun with a grip protruding from the stock or a firearm with a telescoping stock is prohibited and classified as an "assault weapon."
Magazines are limited to a 12-round capacity.
Even a spring-powered pellet gun with a muzzle velocity of 700 feet-per-second is classified as a "firearm," although it does not use gun powder, the component that puts the "fire" in "firearm."
A stun-gun — a non-lethal device with no projectile — is considered a deadly weapon and cannot be carried for self-defense.
Chicago, for all intents and purposes, is a "gun-free zone."
But all the state and city regulations associated with firearms in Chicago have failed to produce a safe city, and these are the policies that current Mayor Emanuel, former President Obama, and losing Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton have been promoting for the rest of the country.
While saying that "criminals go out-of-state to places where it is easier to obtain guns" is often used to push gun control, it illustrates that criminals ignore gun laws in every state and that onerous access to Second Amendment rights on law abiding citizens doesn't stop crime.
Clinton's campaign platform included call for federal legislation mandating background checks on all private firearms transfers and sales. Clinton also wanted to repeal the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act." That law protects firearm manufacturers from lawsuits for negligent use of firearms.
President Obama, through his spokesman Josh Earnest, had announced, "The president has frequently pushed his team to consider a range of executive actions that could more effectively keep guns out of the hands of criminals and others who shouldn't have access to them. That's something that is ongoing here."
President Obama did nothing. Nothing!! NOTHING!!
Per the president's policy, Chicago has taken every action "that could more effectively keep guns out of the hands of criminals and others who shouldn't have access to them."
Yet the shootings continue to rise.
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Red State Rebellion on Twitter
Ban the Democratic Party on Facebook


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Sum regnskap necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 93 diseños de 30 diseñadores freelance.
Sum Regnskap AS
We are a small accaunting bureau which is also helping entrepreneurs and general financial advising. We are relativly young ( 33 and 34) and we have offices in a innovation park. We are quick and proffesional.
Small and medium sizes businesses with need of financial advices or accounting.
The first part of the name (SUM) har almost the same meaning as the english sum (summarize). The second part regnskap is the same as accounting. We might start Sum Invest and other SUM companies later so its nice if sum stands out. And we have been thinking that the logo maybe should be the zigma sign (summarize in excel program) in some way. I think a logo is best if it relativly simple and clean. We are going to make stickers for our cars and it might be best if it has clear colors. Maybe blue/bluegrey. We tried to make one ourselfts which we have attached as a pdf, but it was not particulary good. We hope to get a logo as soon as possible
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


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Scenes from the desert art festival.
Burning Man, that art and music pyro-party in the middle of the desert, kicked off this week. According to the website:
There are no rules about how one must behave or express oneself at this event (save the rules that serve to protect the health, safety, and experience of the community at large); rather, it is up to each participant to decide how they will contribute and what they will give to this community. The event takes place on an ancient lakebed, known as the playa.
Below, photos from the event from Reuters photographer Jim Urquhart.


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The trout is a blue fish of the salmonid family that lives in fresh water in the Iberian Peninsula.
La Rioja produces a considerable number of trout, which usually belong to the common variety. There are different varieties, like the seatrout, the lake trout and the common or river trout, whose colouring varies a great deal depending on the age of the specimen. However, the most prized are the salmon trout. The best trout do not come from viveria, but instead are the wild ones that grow up in mountain water. They are normally eaten roast, steamed, grilled and griddled.
More information
Product information
- Type of product: Fish
- Season: All year round.
- Origin: Trout is fished in fresh water throughout the Iberian Peninsula, especially in the northern parts.
- To drink with it: White wines and, if it is prepared in the Navarrese style, rosés.
- Recipes: Navarra style trout
Nutritional information
- Energy: Average
- Cholesterol: Low
- Comments: Rich in proteins.


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Laura Schoppe�s small business gets about half of its revenue from contracts with the federal government. It�s at risk of losing a chunk of that money when 2013 arrives.
Schoppe and thousands of other small companies with federal contracts are watching to see if Congress will stop a mandatory $109 billion in federal budget cuts scheduled to take effect Jan. 2 in what�s being called sequestration. The cuts were triggered by the failure of Washington lawmakers to strike a budget deal that would begin chipping away at the U.S. deficit.
Unless Congress acts to stop the sequester, it�s estimated that 9.4 percent of non-essential defense spending and 8.2 percent in non-essential spending in other parts of the federal budget will be reduced. No one knows yet where exactly the cuts might be made, but many expect they would have a devastating effect on small companies and slow an already lumbering economy. According to one study, the reductions could mean the loss of nearly 1 million small business jobs. In the meantime, small company owners are trying to find ways to soften any loss of revenue by prospecting for new business, cutting back on hiring and slashing spending.
Schoppe�s company, Fuentek, helps federal laboratories license their technology innovations so they can be sold to companies for use in their own research and development. Most of the Raleigh, N.C., company�s government contracts are with NASA and the Pentagon. It also works with universities.
�Our funding has a very real possibility of big cuts,� Schoppe says.
She has talked with officials at NASA and met with her senator and congressional staffers to try to get a sense of how deep the cuts will be.
�The answer we�re getting is, �we�re working hard not to make it happen,� � she says. �I�m sure they have plans, but they�re holding it very close to the vest.�
Schoppe says she believes Congress will find a way to avoid the cuts. But she�s taking no chances and is looking for other business that will make her company less dependent on the government. One snag is that U.S. universities also face the possibility of big cuts in the money they get from the government. That could make them less able to develop and sell their own technologies. In the coming years, Schoppe�s revenue could drop more. So she�s soliciting business from overseas schools.
If she isn�t able to bring in enough revenue to replace money lost to budget cuts, Schoppe says some of her staff of 30 would have to be furloughed until more business comes in.
Congress is in recess and isn�t expected to debate or vote on sequestration until after the election. It�s a thorny issue for small business owners because the planned cuts would coincide with tax increases scheduled to go into effect in January. The combination of steep budget cuts and higher taxes is being called the �fiscal cliff� because of warnings from some economists that it will send the country into recession. A bipartisan group of senators has been working on a plan to avert the cuts by creating a plan to reduce the federal deficit over the next 10 years � but the success of any proposal is uncertain given the sharp divisions in Congress.
The risk to small businesses and the economy could be severe. Small businesses would have to eliminate more than 956,000 jobs if all the cuts were implemented, according to researchers at George Mason University and the economic forecasting firm Chmura Economics and Analytics.
Their findings are based on what they believed would be the most vulnerable agencies. But it goes beyond the job losses likely to be suffered by companies with government contracts. It also includes businesses that benefit indirectly. For example, a company that provides cleaning or catering services to a government contractor might be one of the casualties when a contractor has to cut costs. Or a retailer that depends on a contractor�s staffers for its business may have to lay off workers when sales fall.
�A lot of these companies don�t know they�re dependent on federal contracts,� says Stephen Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason in Fairfax, Va.
Fuller says small businesses would account for nearly 52 percent of the job losses expected from companies. The study forecasts that more than 157,000 jobs at federal contractors would be lost. Nearly 800,000 would be lost at subcontractors, suppliers and the retailers, wholesalers and service providers who sell to contractors or their employees. The exact number of small business federal contractors in the country isn�t known, but the Small Business Administration roughly estimates the number at more than 130,000.
Small businesses won�t find out on Jan. 2 whether they�re losing business. The agencies themselves may not know where they�re going to make the cuts, Fuller says. But he has warned in testimony to Congress that small businesses are likely to suffer more than their larger counterparts from sequestration, partly because they have less access to financing and they have fewer products and services.
Many owners who belong to small business lobbying groups are staying in close touch with group leaders, trying to get any information they can about what might happen.
�Contractors are very seasoned business owners. They get the connection more than most business owners of what policy means to their bottom lines,� says Barbara Kasof, president of Women Impacting Public Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for women and minority business owners.
�The uncertainty in general is very hard to cope with. How do you make your business plans? How do you hire?� she says.
Although companies across the country could suffer from budget cuts, areas where there are large government facilities or clusters of federal contractors are particularly vulnerable.
�The consequences of sequestration are amplified in North Carolina given our large military footprint and the economic importance of the defense contracting industry in our state,� says Sen. Kay Hagan, a Democrat who met with Schoppe, the Fuentek CEO.
Many owners are already looking at how they can cut back their business.
�You try to lower your costs of doing business on a daily basis,� says Catherine Giordano, owner of Knowledge Information Solutions in Virginia Beach, Va. About 85 percent of Giordano�s business is with the government. She sells high-tech hardware such as computers, printers and photocopiers to federal agencies including the Pentagon, the General Services Administration and the National Institutes of Health. The company has been a government contractor for 10 years.
Giordano has no plans to add to her staff of 44 workers � down from 50 a year ago � and she�s looking for cheaper space to rent for her offices. Sequestration would be yet another blow to already challenging times. Any cuts that come in 2013 would be on top of a 25 percent drop in revenue from the government that Giordano has suffered in the past year.
Federal contracts have been vulnerable to budget cuts over the years, even when the government�s deficit wasn�t seen as a crisis. The White House and Congress have routinely cut funding to some programs while boosting funding to others. Giordano says she�s prospecting for new business from companies and colleges and universities.
Amber Peebles� company, Athena Construction Group, has been a contractor and subcontractor on federal construction projects since 2009. She gets 85 percent of her revenue from the government doing everything from carpentry work to helping build hospitals for the Veterans Administration. She and her co-owner, Melissa Schneider, founded the Dumfries, Va.-based company nine years ago. The former Marine was wounded during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, giving her company a special status that gives it preference in winning government contracts. It�s also reducing her anxiety over sequestration. Even if Peebles loses some contracts, she expects that competitive advantage to position her company to win others.
�I could go crazy trying to second-guess and prepare for what we don�t know,� Peebles says.


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Our specialty is 60s and 70s comics, but we have thousands of back issue comics from other decades as well, Golden Age and Bronze Age. Our comics expert has over 25 years of comic-book selling experience via mail order, retail, and conventions, and is co-founder of the Berkeley Comic Show, a quarterly old-school show featuring only comic books!
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Click here for more details about our comics-only show. 4 times a year!


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Lorna Mitchell has a new post to her blog today looking at a very handy piece of PHP functionality sprinkled around in different functions - using callbacks to handle complicated processing.
Recently I was working on something and I wanted to call an object method as a callback, but got confused when I realised the method had been caused statically. This was caused by my inability to RTFM and I wondered how I'd come so far without actually coming across the many and varied things you can pass into any place a callback is needed.
Besides the normal callback functions you can put in something like call_user_func, she also mentions something a bit more powerful - passing in an array that contains a pointer to an object and a method inside it. This ability allows you to keep your OOP encapsulation intact without having to make global functions. In PHP 5.3, there's even some of the PHP functions that use call backs that will allow you to use closures/anonymous functions without even having to make a separate function.


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Manuel's V-8 Machine
Tonight's Lineup:
Rollins, ss
Victorino, cf
Utley, 2b
Howard, 1b
Burrell, lf
Jenkins, rf
Feliz, 3b
Ruiz, c
Hamels, p
Brett's Back
A shaky first inning, three runs on three hits, didn't bode well for Brett Myers. But, he regrouped and turned in an outstanding performance. He rode Charlie Manuel's V-8 Machine to an impressive win and first place in the East. Over the next seven innings, he gave up three hits and no runs while fanning 11.
Hopefully, Brett's early-season troubles are in the rear view mirror. He pitches like last night, look out.
What can you say about Chase Utley? The best offensive player in the game? As has been said here, he had a great April, cooled off a bit but has returned to lead this offense (4 HR, 15 RBI, last 5 games).
A V-8 engine is very powerful when all cylinders are working. Miss a few cylinders and the engine will sputter. For a while there, Manuel's V-8 Machine was sputtering. Not lately as eight of the eight starting players seem to contribute. Big innings have become the norm (5 or more runs in an inning, 10 times). At some point, Manuel's V-8 Machine will slow down but it awesome to watch right now.
Countdown to the Draft
5 more days to baseball's First-Year Player Draft.
Dykstra, Gordon, Weeks, Roenicke.
All are available in the draft. Actually, there are two Dykstras, Cutter, a high school second baseman turned centerfielder and Allan, a college first baseman. Guess which one is Lenny's son? If you guessed the centerfielder, you are correct.
Tom Gordon's son, Devaris Strange-Gordon, is an infielder who hasn't been played much baseball but he's really caught the eyes of baseball scouts with his multiple tools.
Weeks is Jemile, a high school second baseman whose brother, Rickie, is the Brewers' second baseman. Gary Roenicke is the nephew of Ron, who played for the Phillies in 1986-87.
There are two other prospects with familiar names. Kyle Long is a high school first baseman-pitcher, the son of Pro Football Hall of Famer Howie. Kyle's brother was the first player taken in the NFL draft last month. Some kind of athletes in that family!
Then there is a LHP, Daniel Schlereth, out of the University of Arizona. His dad is Mark, a former NFL offensive lineman and current ESPN Commentator.
This Date
In Phillies history……
1994 Phillies rally for 87 win at Wrigley Field, ending the month with a 1513 record despite losing three starting pitchers (Curt Schilling, Tommy Greene, Ben Rivera) and three regulars (1B John Kruk, SS Kevin Stocker, 3B Dave Hollins) to the disabled list during the month.


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Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a central figure in the political transformation of the South and the longest-serving senator in American history, died yesterday in Edgefield, S.C. He was 100.
He had been living in Edgefield, his hometown, since retiring from the Senate in January, after 48 years.
Mr. Thurmond first came to national attention in 1948 as the States' Rights candidate after Southerners walked out of the Democratic convention to protest the party's new commitment to civil rights. Mr. Thurmond finished a distant third to President Harry S. Truman that year, but his million votes cracked the once-solid Democratic South and helped set the stage for political realignment.
In 1964, Mr. Thurmond switched parties to back the Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry M. Goldwater. Four years later Mr. Thurmond held the South for Richard M. Nixon's nomination and election, after assuring Southerners that Mr. Nixon, as president, would go easy on civil rights.
Despite the role of civil rights in his political evolution and his record-breaking filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes against the civil rights bill of 1957, Mr. Thurmond always insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority.
As governor of South Carolina, he led the effort to abolish the state poll tax, but in Congress he fought efforts to ban it nationally. Running for president in 1948 as what the press called a Dixiecrat, he said that ''on the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line.'' And, he went on, ''all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.''
His opposition to integration, which he often attributed to Communism, was the hallmark of his career in Washington until the 1970's. In 1971, he was among the first Southern senators to hire a black aide -- in recognition of increased black voting resulting from the legislation he had fought. From then on, black South Carolinians, like all other residents, benefited from his skills as a pork-barrel politician who took care of the home folks.
''We've looked out for the state,'' he said in a 1999 interview, ''and everything that was honorable to get, we got it.''
Mr. Thurmond went to the Senate in 1954, the only senator ever elected by a write-in vote. His death was announced on the floor of the Senate last night by Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader. The Senate, at work on Medicare legislation, paused for a moment of silence. Mr. Frist said Mr. Thurmond had ''a life really unmatched in public service.''
Though his long career brought him national prominence, Mr. Thurmond was better known in the Senate for looking out for South Carolina and the United States Army than for any particular legislation he sponsored. As a lieutenant colonel in an Army civil affairs unit in 1944, he landed in France by glider on D-Day and captured German soldiers at pistol point. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the French Croix de Guerre.
Until his last years, Mr. Thurmond was a man of uncommon energy and legendary fitness. He neither smoked nor drank, did more pushups and sit-ups than many men decades younger and fathered children into his mid-70's. He was also known for fondling women in Senate elevators, including a woman who turned out to be a fellow senator, much to his surprise.
But he became very hard of hearing and, unwilling to use a hearing aid, sometimes had trouble following debates. He collapsed on the Senate floor in October 2001, and moved into Walter Reed Army Medical Center in November. In those last years, he had to be helped on and off the Senate floor by aides, who also told him, in voices audible in the Senate gallery, how to vote.
The final political furor of his career involved him indirectly. At his 100th birthday party Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, paid tribute to Mr. Thurmond, saying the nation ''wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years'' had he won the presidency in 1948. The racially charged political firestorm over the next two weeks forced Mr. Lott to resign his leadership post.
James Strom Thurmond was born on Dec. 5, 1902, in Edgefield, a combative town that had produced several governors, among them Benjamin R. Tillman, a race-baiter whom Mr. Thurmond met at the age of 6 and from whom he learned the firm politician's handshake he would use all his life.
He did not go straight into politics. After graduating from Clemson College in 1923, he became a teacher and quickly rose to the job of county school superintendent. He studied law with his father, a Tillman protégé and former United States attorney, and in 1930, while still an educator, he was admitted to the bar.
Three years later, he was elected a state senator. In 1938, he campaigned hard among his fellow legislators, and they elected him a circuit judge, which provided an opportunity for him to become known statewide and broaden his political contacts. In 1940, he called on the grand jury in Greenville to be ready to take action against the Ku Klux Klan, which, he said, represented ''the most abominable type of lawlessness.'' Years later, as a United States senator, he insisted that the four death sentences he had imposed as a judge had deterred crime.
A War Hero Seeks the Statehouse
In 1941, Mr. Thurmond joined the Army as a captain. After the invasion of Normandy, his civil affairs unit was among the first to arrive at the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. In 1996 he remembered the ways the Germans had murdered their victims -- by starvation or shooting or bashing in their skulls. ''I had never seen such inhuman acts in my life,'' he said. ''I couldn't dream of men treating men in such a manner. It was awful.''
He had been re-elected judge while overseas, but when he returned from the war he resigned to run for governor in 1946. When two state political leaders in Barnwell refused to endorse him, he had a campaign issue. As the 11 candidates traveled around South Carolina for joint meetings, he regularly denounced ''the Barnwell ring.''
Mr. Thurmond, as a war hero and a tireless campaigner, led the field in the first primary. In the runoff, he attacked his opponent for being insufficiently loyal to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mr. Thurmond won the runoff and the Democratic nomination, which was tantamount to election, with 56 percent of the vote. He faced no further opposition and was elected with 26,520 votes, the 10th governor to come from Edgefield.
A month after he took office in 1947, a mob in Greenville lynched a black man accused of robbing and killing a white taxi driver. As governor, Mr. Thurmond brought in a tough prosecutor, but a jury acquitted all 28 white defendants. Mr. Thurmond was widely praised for his efforts, and he said he believed the prosecution would deter lynchings in the future. South Carolina has never had another lynching.
In many areas, Mr. Thurmond was a progressive governor, pressing to improve black schools, promoting equal pay for women and fighting for better working conditions at textile mills. He even called for rent control. And when a federal judge, J. Waties Waring, ordered the state Democratic Party to allow blacks to vote in the primaries, Governor Thurmond kept silent, neither denouncing nor praising the decision.
At 44, Mr. Thurmond proposed to his 20-year-old secretary, Jean Crouch, in an intraoffice memorandum he dictated to her. She consented by memorandum, and by all accounts it was a happy marriage. Until her death in 1960, they would share many interests, including reading the Bible together. They had no children.
After President Truman announced a broad civil rights program and issued an executive order to integrate the armed services in 1948, Mr. Thurmond was not among the president's most strident early critics. He said nothing comparable to the analogy by Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia that using the Federal Bureau of Investigation on civil rights cases was comparable to Hitler's use of the Gestapo.
But when other Southern governors turned up the rhetoric against civil rights, Mr. Thurmond joined in, declaring: ''No fight was ever won by staying out of it. Our cause is right and just. We shall honor ourselves by pressing it to the end.''
A Political Legacy
At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey, electrified the hall when he spoke for a strong civil rights plank in the platform, saying that ''the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights.'' When the convention adopted the plan, delegates from Alabama and Mississippi walked out.
The next weekend in Birmingham, Ala., Mr. Thurmond became the leader of an effort to capture the Democratic Party and its electoral votes in the South -- a first step in a strategy of trying to deadlock the electoral college and force the election into the House of Representatives, where the South had power to bargain for its positions.
In November, Mr. Thurmond got 1.1 million votes and the 38 electoral votes of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, plus a vote from one elector in Tennessee. But Mr. Truman won, helped by farm votes, the overconfidence of his Republican opponent, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, and the support of Northern blacks who rallied to his civil rights banner.
Prof. Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University, said in 1999 that the Thurmond candidacy had a lasting impact on American politics.
''Forty-eight is when you see the first drop in white vote for Democrats in the South,'' Professor Black said. ''It helped to realign the conservative and more racist Democrats. Later on, many of those votes went to Goldwater and Wallace.'' Dwight D. Eisenhower's Southern support in his successful campaigns in 1952 and 1956 came from different states than those Mr. Thurmond carried, and especially from newly suburbanized areas.
As his term as governor expired in 1950, Mr. Thurmond ran for the United States Senate as a Democrat and lost to Olin D. Johnston, the incumbent. He then moved to Aiken and began a law practice.
But in 1954, Senator Burnet R. Maybank died two days before the deadline for certifying the Democratic Party's nominee. He had already been nominated and was sure to win. The Democratic State Committee did not call for another primary election. Instead, it nominated one of its members, Edgar A. Brown, one of Mr. Thurmond's old antagonists from Barnwell.
Backed by Gov. James F. Byrnes, a former United States Supreme Court justice and former secretary of state, Mr. Thurmond made bossism the issue and won the election as a write-in candidate. He got 143,444 votes to Mr. Brown's 82,525. But, as he had promised, he resigned in 1956 to open the primary for anyone to oppose him. No one did, and he returned that fall to the Senate, where he remained until this year.
Once in Washington, he attacked the Supreme Court decision requiring that segregation in public schools end. In 1956, with Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, he proposed a Southern manifesto, which, after various drafts, argued that the Supreme Court justices, ''with no legal basis for their action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal and political ideas for the established law of the land.'' Nineteen of the 22 Southern senators signed -- those who did not were Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Albert Gore and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The manifesto gave major encouragement for Southern delay and defiance of the court's verdict to end segregation.
In 1957, after widespread efforts by the White Citizens Council to purge blacks from Southern voting rolls, the United States attorney general, Herbert Brownell, pushed for civil rights legislation. He drew up a bill to create a civil rights commission and a civil rights division in the Justice Department and outlaw efforts to bar people from voting in federal elections. The bill's most important section would allow the attorney general to file suits to halt discrimination in voting, education and elsewhere.
Senator Russell said the bill would lead to ''concentration camps'' and the use of the military to ''destroy the system of separation of the races in the Southern states at the point of a bayonet.'' But behind the scenes he worked with Senator Johnson to weaken the bill but allow it to be passed, fearing that all-out Southern opposition would turn the nation firmly against the South and foreclose Mr. Johnson's hope for the White House.
Although the fight was obviously over, Mr. Thurmond staged a one-man filibuster. He had taken steam baths to dehydrate himself so he would not have to yield the floor to go to the restroom. At 8:54 p.m. on Aug. 28, 1957, he started talking, and he did not stop until 9:12 p.m. the next day. Two hours later, the Senate passed the first civil rights bill since 1875. Other Southerners were furious at Mr. Thurmond for grandstanding, and Mr. Russell accused him of ''self-aggrandizement.''
Mr. Thurmond was no less committed in his condemnation of Communism and suggested, in 1962, that Communists had infiltrated the government. He called them ''silent socialists'' and once said: ''I don't know of any right-wing extremists, as I define them, bringing harm to the government. Left-wingers have.''
His support of the right was much in evidence in 1962, when he was an active participant in a special subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which held hearings on accusations that the Kennedy Administration had ''muzzled'' officers of the armed forces and prevented them from teaching their soldiers about the menace of Communism.
He continued to connect Communism and civil rights, calling the Freedom Riders of 1961, who sought integrated bus travel, ''red pawns and publicity seekers.''
Five days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Lyndon Johnson went to the Congress as his successor, saying that ''no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.'' The next summer Mr. Johnson, breaking a filibuster, won passage of the legislation, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, employment and the use of federal money. He succeeded despite the opposition of the Southerners and a handful of Republicans, including Senator Goldwater of Arizona.
After the Republicans nominated Mr. Goldwater to oppose President Johnson in the 1964 election, Mr. Thurmond switched parties and endorsed him. Mr. Thurmond condemned the Democratic Party for ''leading the evolution of our country to a socialistic dictatorship,'' for having ''forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors,'' for invading ''the private lives of the people'' and for supporting ''judicial tyranny.''
''The party of our fathers is dead,'' he said.
Mr. Thurmond helped Mr. Goldwater carry the four states he himself had won in 1948. But Mr. Goldwater won only two others in the Johnson landslide.
In 1968, Mr. Thurmond, then 66 and a widower for eight years, married for the second time. His bride, Nancy Moore, a former Miss South Carolina, was 22. That marriage effectively ended in 1991 when Ms. Moore announced that she wanted ''some measure of independence.'' They separated.
Although Mr. Thurmond had been criticized for marrying a woman much younger than he, the marriage produced four children. The oldest, Nancy Moore Thurmond, was killed by a drunken driver in 1993, a month before her graduation from college and weeks before her entry into the Miss South Carolina pageant, where she had hoped to follow in her mother's footsteps.
Her death at 22 shook the senator, and he became one of the Senate's strongest crusaders against drunken driving, a cause he had already embraced by calling for labels on alcoholic beverages identifying drunken driving as a health hazard of drinking.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Thurmond is survived by his sons, Strom Jr. and Paul, and his daughter Julie.
In 1968, Mr. Thurmond played a central role in Mr. Nixon's nomination and election. After Mr. Thurmond first won a promise that Mr. Nixon would favor an anti-ballistic missile defense system, he worked over Southern Republicans. He started in his own delegation, where there was almost solid support for Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, an undeclared candidate who was plainly running. Mr. Thurmond told his colleagues to be practical, that only Mr. Nixon could win. ''Believe me, I love Reagan, but Nixon's the one,'' he said.
At the Republican convention in Miami Beach, Mr. Thurmond prevented a slide to Mr. Reagan that could have nominated him on a second ballot. Mr. Thurmond met with Mr. Nixon and told him that Southerners needed reassurance that he would not press hard on school desegregation and that his choice of a vice-presidential candidate would not be a Northern liberal. Mr. Nixon promised to consult Mr. Thurmond before he made his choice.
Then Mr. Thurmond made the rounds of the Southern delegations to reassure them, making it sound as if he had been promised a veto on Mr. Nixon's running mate. In the end, Mr. Nixon chose Gov. Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, who was known for his hostility to black demonstrators.
On Mr. Thurmond's advice, Mr. Nixon promised the Southern delegations that he would not ''use the South as a whipping boy'' and that he would fight to win the region against the third-party candidacy of George C. Wallace, the populist and race-baiting governor of Alabama. The Southern delegations held for Mr. Nixon, and he went on to barely defeat Mr. Reagan on the first ballot.
Mr. Thurmond campaigned heavily against Mr. Wallace, telling Southerners that a vote for a sentimental favorite would be wasted because if Mr. Nixon did not triumph, the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, then the vice president, would.
Mr. Thurmond was influential in the Nixon administration, but it could not deliver on its promise to slow school desegregation. And by 1970 blacks were voting heavily in South Carolina.
Changing With the Times
Mr. Thurmond was not up for re-election in 1970; the race that year involved his choice for governor, Representative Albert Watson, who was linked to various racial conflicts in the state and who boasted of standing up for ''hard-core rednecks.''
Mr. Watson lost to the Democratic candidate, John West, and Mr. Thurmond got the message. He hired Thomas Moss of Orangeburg, a state director of the Voter Education Project, which sought to encourage blacks to register to vote. Mr. Moss was the first black employed by any of South Carolina's members of Congress. For a quarter of a century, Mr. Moss worked for the senator and for black South Carolinians, using Mr. Thurmond's clout to win sewer grants for black hamlets and grants for black colleges and small businesses.
Mr. Thurmond's political agility, his ability to remember names and faces and his fine hand at pork-barrel politics enabled him to win re-election with 64 percent of the vote in 1972, 56 percent in 1978, 67 percent in 1984, 64 percent in 1990 and 53 percent in 1996. In that year, at 93, he became the oldest person ever to serve in Congress, and questions about his age finally began to worry some voters.
His political pragmatism played a part when Mr. Reagan became president in 1981. That year he persuaded some new, very conservative Republican senators to stick with the administration and Senate leaders on a budget with deep tax and spending cuts, even if it did not go as far as they wanted toward ending deficits. It also showed in some of the votes he cast -- votes in favor of extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and putting teeth into the Fair Housing Act in 1988. And although he was an intense foe of abortion, he broke with anti-abortion campaigners over the issue of using fetal tissue for research, telling the Senate that this research would help people like his daughter Julie, who had juvenile diabetes.
When the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1981 for the first time since 1955, Mr. Thurmond, as their senior senator, was elected president pro tem. That put him behind the vice president and the speaker of the House in the line of succession to the presidency. When his party regained control in 1995, he was again chosen president pro tem.
The Republican majorities also brought him two committee chairmanships. He headed the Judiciary Committee from 1981 to 1987, working successfully with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to pass a major rewriting of federal criminal law, including an end to parole in the federal prison system.
In 1995 he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee, where he had served since 1959 in a time when he rose to the rank of major general in the Army Reserve. But under pressure from Republican colleagues who thought he was no longer up to the job, he resigned the chairmanship on Dec. 4, 1998, the day before his 96th birthday.
Asked in his 1999 interview if there was anything in more than 70 years of public service he would do differently, Mr. Thurmond said: ''I can't think of anything. My guardian angel has guarded over me. And everything has turned out all right. I love serving the public, and I get pleasure out of helping people. We help an average of 2,000 people every month.''
Although Republicans were again the minority, he presided over the Senate on Nov. 19, 2002, the last day of his last session. In a raspy voice, he read, ''The Senate stands adjourned.''
Then he threw up his gnarled hands and said his final Senate words: ''That's all.''


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First National Bank of Omaha would like to thank the service men and women that protect our freedom and we want to help you understand your rights under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA). The SCRA provides financial relief and protections to eligible military personnel serving on active duty. As an active duty member of the United States Military, you may be eligible for SCRA benefits and protections on the following products:
- Line of credit, credit card and installment loans.
- Mortgage and home equity secured loans.
- Consumer, commercial and small business loans.
Active duty members of the military, including those described below, who received their loan or credit prior to active service may be eligible for an interest rate reduction benefit and reduced payments. In addition, you may be protected from non-judicial foreclosure and repossession of property without a court order.
- Active duty in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps or Coast Guard, including reservists serving on active duty.
- National Guard service for more than 30 consecutive days under federal orders issued by the President or Secretary of Defense.
- Commissioned officers of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and Public Health Service on active service.
- First National Bank of Omaha may also extend certain benefits to the spouse of a covered servicemember, even if the servicemember is not on the account.
- First National Bank of Omaha may also extend certain benefits to full-time National Guard (AGR) servicemembers who are called to active service by the Governor or State command for more than 30 consecutive days.
Your responsibilities:
- To apply for SCRA interest rate benefits, you must provide a copy of your military orders calling you to active duty service along with a cover letter requesting the benefit and if applicable, a marriage license. Please fax to 402-633-2520 or mail to: SCRA, 1620 Dodge Street Omaha, NE 68197-3326. You will receive a notification by mail once your request has been reviewed.
- Servicemembers have up to 180 days from the date military service is completed to request benefits and provide the above documentation.
- Your SCRA benefits do not relieve you of your responsibility to make your payments on time, nor do they prevent us from reporting past due payments to credit bureaus. If you're having trouble making your payments, please contact us so we can help you manage them.
- Although you're not required to, it is a good idea to alert lenders of your military status to receive foreclosure and repossession protections.
First National Bank of Omaha is committed to providing benefits above and beyond what is required under the SCRA. Please direct any questions to the SCRA Centralization Team at 800-393-5754 for more details.


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CDC: Flu deaths increase "sharply" as epidemic continues
A flu epidemic continues to hit the United States, according to newly released statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For the week of January 6-12, 8.2 percent of all deaths were tied to influenza and pneumonia, the CDC reported, which exceeds the 7.2 percent threshold used to measure an epidemic. Last week 7.3 percent of deaths were attributed to flu and pneumonia. The CDC called the rise in proportion of flu-related deaths a sharp increase.
Forty-eight states are seeing widespread flu activity, meaning more than 50 percent of its counties are reporting flu, while 30 states and New York City experienced high activity of influenza-like illness. Illnesses appear to be increasing in the West, and the only two states not showing widespread activity are Tennessee and Hawaii.
"The bottom line is that the flu season continues," CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden, told reporters during a Friday conference call. "We're in the middle of flu season, about half way through."
Last week's report showed widespread flu activity in 47 states and high activity of "influenza like illness" in 24 states and New York City. At the time of that report, the CDC thought the virus may have peaked for some regions including the South and Southeast, however the agency noted the numbers may not provide a complete picture because they detailed disease activity during holiday season, a time people may be less likely to see doctors.
A complete list of the new state-by-state flu information can be found on the CDC's website.
Also over the past week, nine more pediatric deaths were reported, raising the total to 29. In the last 10 flu seasons, between 43 and 153 children have died from flu in the United States, according to the FDA. The CDC does not track adult deaths related to flu, but noted in its report that a high proportion of deaths in people 65 and older are occurring.
"Even a single death in a child is one too many," said Frieden.
This year's predominant flu strain is H3N2, the CDC said; 153 children died during the 2003-2004 flu season when it was a particularly bad year for that strain.
- The flu vaccine: What's stockpiled, why you should get one now
- Cold or flu? How to tell the difference
- Complete coverage: Flu season
The agency does track flu-associated hospitalizations, and found about 19 per 100,000 Americans are getting hospitalized for influenza-like illness. Based on hospitalization rates, the elderly are being hit hardest: About 82 per 100,000 people 65 and older are being hospitalized with flu-like illness.
"These rates are undoubtedly an underestimate," said Frieden. He added that H3N2 flu tends to be more severe for the elderly, and these hospitalization rates are comparable to previous flu seasons when H3N2 was the predominant strain.
Frieden explained that flu-related statistics come in waves, so increasing rates of disease and hospitalizations will likely be followed by increases in flu-related deaths.
That's why early treatment with an antiviral such as Tamiflu and Relenza is so important, according to CDC. When given promptly within 48 hours of disease onset, the drugs can reduce symptoms and duration of illness, and reduce the risk for hospitalization and death, Frieden said. For high-risk patients such as the elderly, young children and those with asthma or underlying diseases, the treatments can mean the difference between a mild illness or a trip to the intensive care unit.
Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told reporters during the conference call that some areas of the country are experiencing shortages of liquid Tamiflu, shortages that may persist for the remainder of the flu season. The liquid formulation is most often given to children.
Because of these shortages, Hamburg reported that Tamiflu-maker Genenetech has received permission to release 2 million more units of Tamiflu pills, which pharmacists can then use to create liquid formulations for children. She said the FDA will continue to update the public on antiviral supply through its website.
The CDC and FDA also reported spot shortages of vaccines during Friday's conference call. Companies that provide the vaccine were projected to give out 135 million doses of vaccine for this flu season, and to date 129 million doses have been distributed. Hamburg said another 10 million doses will be distributed, raising the total to 145 million flu vaccines; however, some formulations of the vaccine may be harder to come by. Doctors will be able to order more flu vaccines, she said, and people looking for shots should use the interactive map on Flu.gov to find available doses.
Last week, the CDC's new flu numbers coincided with the release of a study that looked at less than 1,200 patients and found the flu vaccine was 62 percent effective.
Dr. William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University and immediate-past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, told CBSNews.com this Tuesday that the figure means the vaccine will prevent flu completely 62 percent of the time. However, that doesn't mean people who got the shot won't get sick.
Dr. Adam Stracher, director of the primary care division of the Weill Cornell Physician Organization at Weill Cornell Medical College, told CBSNews.com this week that, "While it may not be 100 percent effective, even in those patients who get the flu after getting the flu vaccine, they tend to have a milder illness than patients who haven't gotten the flu vaccine."
Other helpful tips to reduce your risk for flu include proper hand-washing, coughing into your elbow, avoiding contact with sick people and keeping your hands out of your eyes, nose and mouth.


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Natural Resources
The Town of Antrim has a wealth of natural resources. Due to the hilly topography, most of Antrim is undeveloped. There are abundant conservation areas, hiking trails and waterways for recreation, wildlife habitat and preservation.
Hills and Mountains
The following is a list of the major elevation points in Antrim:
|Elevation (Ft.)
|Elevation (Ft.)
|Bald Mountain
|Goodhue Hill
|Gibson Mountain
|Holt Hill
|Riley Mountain
|Meetinghouse Hill
|Robb Mountain
|Patten Hill
|Willard Mountain
|Tuttle Hill
|Windsor Mountain
Source: United States Geologic Survey
Water Resources
The Town of Antrim is gifted in the number and quality of its water resources. Antrim falls entirely within the Contoocook River Watershed, which is a part of the Merrimack River Basin. A watershed is an area in which all the land drains to a particular common point or body of water. There are four main watersheds in Antrim: the Contoocook River, the North Branch of the Contoocook River, Great Brook, and Cochran Brook. The Contoocook River flows approximately 70 miles from Poole Pond in Rindge north to Concord, where it flows into the Merrimack River with Antrim located approximately at its midpoint. All of Antrim's surface water drainage eventually flows into the Contoocook River.
The North Branch is a major tributary of the Contoocook River and which flows northerly from Highland Lake in Stoddard to its confluence with the Contoocook River in Hillsboro, just north of the Antrim town line. Both of these rivers were placed in the New Hampshire Rivers Management and Protection Program in June 1991.
The following are a list of significant lakes and ponds in Antrim with a brief description of the recreational and other uses of each waterbody listed.
- Franklin Pierce Lake is approximately 519 acres in size. The southern third of the lake is in Antrim, while the main body and the Harriman Electric Power Dam are in the town of Hillsboro. It is a warm water fishery. Recreational uses include fishing, water skiing, boating, sailing, swimming and bird watching. There is, at present, limited public access in the town of Antrim to this lake.
- Gregg Lake is approximately 195 acres in size. It is a moderate warm water fishery. Recreational uses include fishing, picnicking, water skiing, boating, sailing, and bird watching. Public access is adjacent to the Antrim town beach, three miles from downtown Antrim.
- Willard Pond is approximately 96 acres in size. It is an excellent cold water fishery. It is part of the dePierrefeu-Willard Pond Wildlife Sanctuary. Fly fishing, hiking, and bird watching are the main recreational uses of the sanctuary. Public access is provided for boats, however, petroleum powered motors are prohibited. Access to Willard Pond is off of Route 123 in Hancock.
- Campbell Pond is approximately 17 acres in size. It is the former water supply and present back up water supply for Antrim. There is no road access to Campbell Pond.
- Lilly Pond is under 10 acres in size. Hiking and bird/wildlife watching are the main recreational uses of the pond. Public access is by foot trail through a series of formal and informal easements.
- Rye Pond is approximately 13 acres in size with portions of the pond in the towns of Antrim, Nelson, and Stoddard. It is a warm water fishery with limited public access.
- Steele's Pond is approximately 36 acres in size. It provides the water source for a small hydro power plant, whose generated electricity is sold to Public Service of New Hampshire. There is no recreational activity at this Pond, other than some limited fishing off of the bridge, a short distance from Route 9.
In addition to these lakes and ponds, wetlands constitute about 2,475 acres (11%), out of Antrim's total land area of 23,125 acres. They are distributed fairly evenly around town, consisting primarily of small pockets or areas adjacent to streams. There are, however, a number of significant and large wetland areas in town. Some of these wetlands are listed here, but this list is not all inclusive: Meadow Marsh, Cochran Swamp, Great Cedar Swamp, Liberty Farm Swamp, Salmon Brook Swamp, and bottom land areas adjacent to the drainage in town (i.e. including but not limited to the Contoocook River, Great Brook and the North Branch).
Trails & Protected Land
- Lily Pond, Ziegler/Hurlin Trail –is a trail system starts at the Meetinghouse Hill cemetery and wends its way down the southern flank of the Meetinghouse Hill. From the trailhead on Route 31, it continues across the highway and out the rear of the old Center cemetery. From the Center Cemetery, the trail travels along a deeded trail easement along the stone wall. The trail formally terminates at the Lily Pond. Land around the pond as well as at the rear of the Meetinghouse Cemetery are privately owned and the land should be treated with the utmost of respect and care. The overall trail length is approximately 4,500 feet, with Route 31 transecting the trail at the halfway point.
- McCabe Forest Trail is a trail system cared for by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (SPNHF). It is a two-mile trail loop that leaves the parking lot off Route 202 and loops through the 192-acre McCabe Forest to the Contoocook River and back.
- DePierrefue-Willard Pond Wildlife Sanctuary (Bald Mountain) Trail System is a sanctuary and trail system maintained by the New Hampshire Audubon Society. The 1,000+-acre sanctuary is the largest New Hampshire Audubon property, and along with additional easements, gifts and protected lands brings the protected lands around Willard Pond to more than 2,000 acres. Willard Pond is about 100 acres is size and is surrounded by Bald Mountain and Goodhue Hill. There are four substantial trails in the system, two of which go to the summits of Bald Mountain and Goodhue Hill. DePierrefue-Willard Pond Wildlife Sanctuary Trail System Map
- Loverns Mill Cedar Swamp Preserve is a 613 acre conservation project cooperatively developed and maintained by the Nature Conservancy and SPNHF. The preserve is located along Route 9 in an undeveloped section of North Branch. It contains several trails which transect portions of the property and leads to the nearly 50 acre boreal, cedar swamp. Nature conservation partners have connected the preserve to a larger conservation project. This larger project is to include the 5,000 acre SPNHF owned Peirce Reservation (in Stoddard and Windsor) and the Nature Conservancy's 1693 acre Otter Brook Preserve.
- Meadow Marsh is a short trail (approximately 0.5 miles) on Town property along the wetland areas at the north end of Gregg Lake on either side of Craig Road at the intersection of the former Hattie Brown Road.
Important Timberlands
Much of Antrim's landscape is heavily wooded. A large portion of this is located in the Rural and Rural Conservation Zoning Districts of town. These two districts occupy over 70% of Antrim's land mass. There are hundreds of undeveloped acres in Town under single title ownership. These woodlands are viewed as a renewable resource and are logged on a regular basis. A typical woodlot cut frequency is between 25 and 50 years.
Timber harvesting, if proper erosion control management practices are not utilized, can expose soils to severe erosion. Severe erosion can occur during the construction of skid roads, haul roads, landings, and the cutting of timber on steep slopes. Without proper erosion control mechanisms in place, severe soil erosion may also cause harmful and unlawful sedimentation of wetlands and water bodies, negatively impacting aquatic life by adding nutrient and sediment loads to nearby water bodies.
Significant Wildlife Areas
While it could be stated that much of Antrim is a habitat for wildlife, certain areas stand out for the abundance and diversity of wildlife present. A brief listing of wildlife to be found in Antrim include:
Deer, moose, black bear, muskrat, woodchuck, porcupine, beaver, squirrel, chipmunk, mink, fisher, otter, skunk, weasel, raccoon, red fox, coyote, and a wide variety of snakes, frogs, birds, and fishes.
The Rural and Rural Conservation Districts are the districts that have been identified by their nature to be home to these creatures. This is not to say that these wildlife are not found in the other districts, because they are, but that in the two rural districts they can inhabit the ecological niche (habitats) they require.
The more diverse the wildlife species, the greater the need for diverse habitats. Some species require only small areas – less than an acre. Others need hundreds (or even thousands) of acres and some require a mix of different habitat types throughout the year. A diverse habitat is one that consists of a variety of landforms and vegetative cover, for example: open fields, woods, streams, marshes, ridges, and valleys. Significant habitats will typically be connected by migratory routes or wildlife corridors. Frequently, these are found along stream and river paths, ridgelines, large tracts of undeveloped woodlands, etc.


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Julius Kammerl from Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Munich, Germany spent his internship at Willow Garage working on the Point Cloud Library (PCL). To find out more, please watch the video above. You can also read the slides below (download pdf) for more technical details.
Robots such as the PR2 by Willow Garage employ depth sensors for acquiring information about the shape and geometry of their environment. These sensors discretely sample the three dimensional space with high spatial resolution and high update rate and therefore generate large point data sets. Once these so called point clouds have to be stored on the robot or transmitted over rate-limited communication channels, the interest in compressing this kind of data emerges and efficient algorithms for compressing and communicating point clouds become highly relevant. Further applications for point cloud compression can be found in the field of 3D television/conferencing.
In our work we compress the point distribution by performing a spatial decomposition based on octree data structures. Furthermore, by correlating and referencing the currently sampled sensor data to previously sensed and transmitted point cloud information, temporal redundancy can be detected and removed from the point cloud data stream. In this context, the detection of changes within the point data sets is of great importance. By subsequently analyzing and comparing the octree data structures of adjacent point clouds, spatial changes in point data can be extracted and used to successively extend the point clouds at the decoder. In addition, an entropy coder (range/arithmetic coder) is used for further removing redundancy from the signals to be transmitted/stored. For more information, please visit pointclouds.org.