text:
Conservation and Environment in Fiji: Monthly Updates
Conservation in Fiji - Monthly Update August - September 2014
Wow! What an amazing eight months it has been. If someone had told me that this project would have been so successful i would not have believed it! But here we are already been recognised as the "Best Shark Conservation project in the world" WWF. This accolade comes from the diversity of the project, with everything from collecting 50,000 plastic bottles to diving with 60 Bull sharks, from planting more than 20,000 mangroves to giving Puppet shows to kids, we do it all.
Not ones to sit back relax we are constantly making new partnerships and pushing forward. I look forward to coming to the project every day and seeing the excitement on the faces of the staff and volunteers.
"Be the change you want to see in the world" Gandhi
Well everybody related to this project certainly lives this quote.
Andy Hill, Project Manager
Shark Surveys
The shark surveys continue to produce exciting data. We have been adding more survey sites as well as continuing our Safe Diver training program for new divers. We have also added a more detailed before and after dive briefing to ensure that everybody knows what they are doing and is prepared to deal with emergencies should they arise.
The survey training dives that we do with the new divers helps them gain confidence, have better buoyancy control, be prepared for emergencies and be more aware about their environment and the team around them. This enables them to focus on the actual survey dive where we record sharks, rays, turtles and commercially important predatory fish species instead of being concerned about their diving skills.
We now have two marine reserves and associated control regions that we are surveying. The marine protected area in the South of Beqa Island has been fully implemented as a survey site and we continue to explore the region and find sites appropriate to conduct survey dives. This has been named the Medium Reserve and is around 5 km2. Next to this area we survey the control fishing area which is the same size called Medium Control.
Additionally are in the process of acquiring permission from three villages to survey and drop BRUVS in another marine protected area which will be our Small Reserve and Small Control region also situated in the South of Beqa Island. So far we have seen most of our sharks in the Yanuca marine protected area however we have been surveying this area the longest. We have observed the most rays (Bluespotted Ribbontail Rays and Spotted Eagle Rays) and Zebra sharks in the Medium Reserve.
We are excited to keep moving this project forward and support the BRUV research project.
Mangrove - Community Education and Awareness Project
We have built a new nursery at our new HQ capable of holding more than 3000 mangrove propagules for which we have planted more than 2300 propagules to date. Towards the end of this month we will be replanting the grown propagules from our planting partners' mangrove nursery which are located at the Pacific Harbour Multi-Cultural School and Vunibau village. We (volunteers and staff) will be replanting these mangroves with the help of the students and the villagers mentioned above. The CEO of Coca Cola (South Pacific) will be meeting with us soon regarding our Recycling Project. We also have covered the province of Serua extensively with our Community education. Everyone is starting to recognize us and the important work we do here.
Juvenile Bull Shark Tagging Report
During the last 4 months the Juvenile Bull Shark Tagging Project has changed and moved forward in several ways.
The major accomplishment has been the Local Environmental Knowledge (LEK) survey of all villages adjacent to the Navua River from the river mouth to a distance over 16 km upstream (Fig.1). The volunteers made a total of 91 interviews to local fishermen from the different surveyed villages. Questionnaires were designed following the main concept from (Rasalato et al. 2009).
Basically, fishermen were asked the location and frequency of juvenile bull shark sightings/catches, season of such sightings/catches, distance from the River mouth, and time of day, among other important questions.
The general outcome from our LEK surveys suggest that juvenile bull sharks are generally found in the first 7 km from the River mouth upstream in the Navua River (Fig. 1). Another interesting result was that over 90% of the surveyed fishermen agreed on November and summer time to be the best season to see/catch juvenile bull sharks inside the Navua River. This season correlates with the parturition season for pregnant female bull sharks in Fijian Rivers (Rasalato et al. 2009; Brunnschweiler & Baensch 2011; Brunnschweiler & Barnett 2013).
In addition, during these last four months we conducted 48 fishing trips with a total of five juvenile bull sharks caught (Fig.2). An indirect measure of the relative abundance of a fishing resource is the Catch Per Unit of Effort (CPUE), which takes into account the number of sharks caught, the number of hooks used and the soaking time per set. Usually CPUE is measured as individuals catch per 1000 hooks hour. Our lines are currently 60 m long with a total of 28 hooks each. Therefore, our highest and lowest CPUE during these 4 months were:
Highest CPUE= (2 sharks / 3 hours x 56 hooks) x 1000 = 29,76 sharks per 1000 hooks hour
Lowest CPUE= (0 sharks / 4 hours x 56 hooks) x 1000 = 0 sharks per 1000 hooks hour
Our average CPUE was 1,11 sharks per 1000 hooks hour. This CPUE is low, although similar when compared to other studies with juvenile bull sharks in riverine systems during winter season (Simpfendorfer et al. 2005). So far three hypotheses come to our mind to explain the low abundance found so far.
The FIRST HYPOTHESIS comprises a migration out of the Navua that we do not know about and might explain the low abundance found. In fact, there are studies in different systems around the world that have found juvenile bull sharks in a wide range of area including areas of fresh water environments in different seasons (Simpfendorfer et al. 2005; Heupel & Simpfendorfer 2008; Ortega et al. 2009; Drymon et al. 2014).
The SECOND HYPOTHESIS involves the fact that there might be a lack of juvenile bull sharks due to a conservation issue. This might include anthropogenic impacts such as effects of dredging 11 km upstream from the River mouth on the entire ecosystem, habitat loss and pollution. Several previous studies in shark nursery areas have found detrimental consequences of these type of impacts in sharks' nursery grounds (Gruber et al. 2001; Feldheim & Edren 2002; Gruber & Parks 2002; Jennings et al. 2008).
The THIRD HYPOTHESIS involves quick growth rates and therefore shorter times inside the nursery ground. This hypothesis although unlikely, has been proven in other species and systems (Dibattista et al. 2007). There has been hypothesized that juvenile sharks in nursery areas with high abundance of prey and high levels of predation risk grow bigger and faster, and therefore leave the nursery much faster, than sharks in protected shallow lagoons (Dibattista et al. 2007). During these four months we also had our first recapture. On April 28th we caught a 95 cm TL female and we did recapture her on the 14th of August being 111 cm TL. This suggests an extremely fast growth rate in only a few months which might be related to our third hypothesis.
Therefore, in the next months we have a specific plan of action to try to elucidate what is happening in the Navua River with the juvenile bull sharks (Supp. Material Table 1). We will keep conducting our normal fishing effort to compare our catching success in different seasons, since spring and summer are approaching. In addition, we will start experimenting with other fishing techniques such as gillnets to compare our catching success. Moreover, we will estart conducting a fishing survey to assess the density of prey items for juvenile bull sharks along the Navua River. This survey will help us estimate the best areas to catch the juvenile bull sharks since, as predators, they follow their prey. Finally, we will start with our acoustic tracking of juvenile bull sharks to learn more about the movements of captured individuals in the River as well as evaluating absence/presence data through active tracking.
BRUV Project
August and September proved to be our most productive months thus far with the BRUV project. Biologically speaking, we observed shark species that were previously unseen by our BRUV camera. We recorded two tiger sharks, a juvenile silver tip, zebra shark. We also observed the more common grey reef, white tip and the occasional lemon and black tip! One of the most exciting videos of the month came with much anticipation when the staff dropped to retrieve the BRUV we found the bait cage torn to shreds 20 meters down current from where the BRUV was set.
When the staff and volunteers viewed the footage we found a large female grey reef and red snapper were taking turns ripping at the bait cage. The cage stayed intact for a while until the grey reef grabbed the bait cage, ripped it off the arm and shook it like an angry dog, all for our cameras to see. A photo is attached. What a sight it was! Even more exciting was the up-close encounter with the tiger shark in the Yanuca Marine Protected Area. The three meter juvenile female tiger interacted with our bait cage several times; bumping the bait cage, rubbing her nose on the bait arm and even giving the bait cage a test bite. Photo attached. These are the most exciting moments on the project, as tiger sharks are listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List. We know there is a tiger shark population here that goes unseen by divers and fishermen because they typically stay away from divers and travel long distances across the ocean. Thanks to our BRUV's they are being recorded for scientific data.
In July and August we managed to drop 27 BRUV's despite the rough weather during the windy season here in Fiji. We had five BRUV drops cancelled due to foul weather conditions and therefore safety precautions. This Fiji winter-time also resulted in the chilliest water temperatures to date. The average temperature in early July was 27oC but dropped and stayed at a range between 24-26oC, compared to 28-30oC in the summer months. This could potentially affect the behavior or location of the sharks in the shallow waters of the lagoon versus the deep waters of the passage. A trend could prevail after more sampling after a few years of research.
It is still too early to make conclusions about our BRUV experiment because we need to drop 30 BRUV's in each area of study, that will be a total of 180 BRUV drops with all three Regions of study; more about that later. At the moment, we have two regions (Large = Yanuca and Medium = South Beqa), each with a marine reserve or Marine Protected Area (MPA); this makes four areas of study. A reminder, we are testing the effectiveness of MPA's and reserves versus traditional fishing areas (control area). We are also testing to see if the size of the reserves/MPA effects the conservation of shark, ray and indicator fish populations. At the end of August we had dropped 38 BRUV's in total. We have dropped 12 BRUV's in the Yanuca MPA and 10 in the Yanuca Control. This is our Large Region of study. Eight BRUV's were dropped in the Medium Control and Reserve (Medium Region). The Medium Region of study was new to the project in June.
Looking forward to October, we have confirmed our third and final region of study. This will be our Small Region of study (~3.5km2). This gives us a total of six areas of study; three reserves/MPA's and three control areas. This area is located on the southeast side of Beqa Island and the fishing rights belong to Dakulbeqa and Dakuni Villages of Beqa Island. The Small Region is near passages to the open ocean, the exterior of Beqa Lagoon's barrier reef. Our hope is that the proximity to the deep water will bring more exciting action to the BRUV's, meaning larger coastal/pelagic associated sharks such as Tiger Sharks, Hammerheads, Bull Sharks,, Silver Tips and even Spotted Eagle Rays and Manta Rays! Fingers crossed!
Other news in our BRUV world is our brand new BRUV! We now have a light-weight aluminum BRUV which makes transport as well as BRUV drops and ascents in-water much more manageable and safe for the volunteers and staff.
BRUV highlight video:
Dirty Days
August Dirty Day saw Shark Conservation volunteers join the Bula festival which is the biggest festival in Fiji. We created a float to promote shark Conservation and had the great pleasure of transporting Miss Bula around for the day. All proceeds from the festival will go towards the charitable organisations in Nadi.
For Septembers Dirty Day we dedicated our time to clean up the Navua river. We tasked people with recording every piece of trash we picked up and the others kept count of each item as they cleared the river of trash. Some of the most common things picked up was plastic or glass bottles, diapers, food wrappers or appliances like T.V.'s and stereos. In some areas there was too much trash for to be cleared as the locals had dedicated these places as trash dumps on the side of the river. By the end of the day 4 boats had been filled with trash that was taken to the dump.
Part of our role as volunteers with Projects Abroad is to educate the community on the affect their actions have on their environment and in turn their sharks. By keeping the trash out of the river we are keeping the mangroves healthy. Mangroves are important to sharks because that's where the pregnant females go to give birth. If there aren't any mangroves then the baby sharks are more likely to die. Sharks have a low reproductive rate which means they only reproduce once every 2 or 3 years. They also take a long time to reach sexual maturity. If we aren't giving them a chance, we are going to lose them which in turn destroy the surrounding ecosystem. When the community sees us picking up trash and caring for the river, we are showing them an alternative to the approach they have for trash disposal.
Social Events
One of our many social events was the very entertaining Traditional Dance classes.
Volunteers dressed up in traditional costumes and learnt the art of the Filian Meke which is a dance that is used to protect the local fishermen from the dangers of the ocean and give them good luck and a fruitful harvest.


text:
How did Crytek get picked to purchase Free Radical over the various other companies vying for a piece of the floundering studio? By harnessing the power of dreams.
Crytek purchased the TimeSplitters developer in February, following a period of reorganizing that resulted in the layoff of 140 employees. In an interview with Develop, CEO Cevat Yerli explains that Crytek was picked to purchase the failing Free Radical because they offered the remaining staff the opportunity to create the sort of games they've always wanted to create.
"We are working with Free Radical on things that they always dreamed to do" Yerli said. "We are providing the team a roadmap and the chance to grow, which is why we were picked as a partner, and not anyone else."
Hopefully those dreams include finishing TimeSplitters 4.
Crytek giving Free Radical 'dream projects' [Develop]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
So here we are in 2019 and I can't help but wonder where the time has gone in the last…well…, at least the last decade. Time IS moving faster than ever isn't it?! (Probably not scientific fact but ya know).
This summer will mark TWENTY YEARS since I did my GCSE's and then left secondary school to venture into the big, bad world alone.
But thinking back to my schooldays has kind of made me a bit sad as well as a bit annoyed. I'm sad and annoyed that school didn't even somewhat prepare me in any way, shape or form for adulthood.
Sure, it wasn't the worst experience ever, and of course I look back fondly at certain things from that time in my life. But I feel as if I could've learned so much more from school, if only it'd been on the curriculum and actually taught to me and my classmates.
I can't comment much on what may or may not be on school curriculums in this day and age, as I'm 20 years over the hill now. But I can't help but feel that what we were taught, just wasn't enough.
I didn't underperform at school by any means. I was in what was called the 'top set' for almost all of my subjects (not sure if these still even exist anymore) and passed all of my GCSE's with grades A* to C. I had a lot of potential according to my teachers. And maybe I did/do. But as I've discussed in a previous post, sadly nothing really interested me enough to pursue it at university.
What I'm talking about here though is a separate issue than going to uni for further study and to hopefully build a successful career.
I've been watching a lot of news coverage in recent months in regards to Brexit and it's made me realise one thing: I know absolutely NOTHING about what it really entails. To be fair, it looks as if half of Parliament don't either…
But seriously. I hear terms such as 'free movement', 'single market', 'backstop' and 'customs union' bandied about and it just goes right over the top of my head. I WISH I knew more about it.
Back in 2016 when we were given the choice of voting in or out, I felt as if I wasn't informed enough to make the decision. So rather than not vote (I would NEVER do this), I took to the good ol' world wide web to help me. I researched as much about it as I had the time to do but still found it really confusing. As stated earlier, I did fairly well at school and I don't consider myself to be unintelligent, but nothing appeared to be in layman's terms. The more I read, the more confused I ended up.
But seeing some of the faces who were campaigning for 'Team Leave' – Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (urgh x3) – was enough to convince me that remaining was the right way to go.
As we all know (unless you've been living on Mars for the last two and a half years), remain lost and now we're all in this gigantic mess. I'm not going to wax lyrical about why the decision may be wrong or anything like that. But the fallout from the leave vote has definitely left me feeling as if Politics HAS to be taught in schools. From conversations with family and friends, I know I'm not the only one struggling to understand it all.
Of course it would have to be taught in as unbiased a way as possible. It wouldn't be right for any teacher to stand in front of a class and say "Party X is great, whilst Party Y are terrible". No child should be influenced in this way. But what SHOULD be taught are at least the basics. For example:
• What is a general election?
• How does a party win a general election – e.g. how seats work, the first past the post process and so on?
• What is a referendum?
• What is a hung parliament?
• Or I dunno… how about how important it is to actually bloody vote in the first place??!!
It isn't just politics being taught that I feel strongly about. Where are the other subject areas about actual LIFE? About things that will effect each and every one of us in adulthood?
We should be taught about the value of money, savings accounts, applying for a mortgage (if this is what you want), interest rates, credit scores, how to change a tyre, global warming, saving the planet, recycling, how to check your boobs for lumps, how to check your balls for lumps… do you see where I'm going with this?
I've always thought that First Aid should be taught in schools too and I'm happy to see that apparently, this will be implemented from 2020 – yay!
I'm not trying to dismiss important, fundamental subjects such as maths and English at all. But my God, weren't we taught some utter rubbish at times?! (Prime example at the end of this post)*
There's a lot of negative press out there in regards to 'millennials' and the 'snowflake generation' (I can't bear either of these labels by the way), but maybe we'd be in a different boat if we'd been properly educated? And sure, maybe none of these things were taught way back in the day either but going forward, I truly believe that there is a dire need for these subjects to be on curriculums up and down the country. Anyone agree?
* I'm going to leave you now with a photo of a genuine certificate I was given in secondary school at 15 years of age. Who cares if I don't understand what Brexit means for my country, so long as I can rustle up a good full English eh?!! (Despair)


text:
The 'East West' large cross-body bag from Michael Kors is a classic style that will see you through Season after Season. Crafted from premium saffiano leather featuring gold tone hardware. Chic curb chain and leather cross-body strap creates a comfortable wear. The zip fastening main compartment will be sure to keep all your handbag essentials safe and secure. Signature Michael Kors branding is seen to the front of this must have New Season bag, finishing it off perfectly.
UK Priority Delivery: Delivered within 48 hours Monday -Thursday using courier DPD, Our Priority Delivery charge is £6.99
Standard: Delivery takes 2-4 working Days. (Sent via DPD or Hermes). Our standard delivery charge is £3.49 or Free for orders over £80
Republic Of Ireland / Northern Ireland
Orders take 2-4 working days from despatch date. Our delivery charge is £5 orders are sent by Hermes or UK Mail.
All parcels are despatched on a signed for service, we recommend you do not change this. If you wish to do so Daniel Footwear do not take responsibility for lost items.
This product has not been reviewed yet.


text:
Abstract: A collection of folklore and local history stories from Belvoir, Kilkishen (school) (Belvoir, Co. Clare), collected as part of the Schools' Folklore Scheme, 1937-1938 under the supervision of teacher Bríd Ní Chadhla.
Original reference: 0586/1
In collection The Schools' Collection : County Clare schools
Original reference: 0586/1
Belvoir, Kilkishen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright of the original resource: University College Dublin
To use for commercial purposes, please contact the National Folklore Collection, UCD - See: http://n2t.net/ark:/87925/h1cc0xm5


text:
Joe Volpe was the volatile, rags-to-riches general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. In the Met's rarified Upper East Side social environs, an apprentice carpenter who rises through the ranks to take over the whole shop is an oddity—never happened before and not likely to happen again. So, The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera is Joe Volpe's Cinderella story, although Cinderella he is not.
The story is as self-serving as any news-name memoir usually is. Volpe casts himself as the hero in the drama with flawless recall of the one-line zingers he delivered to those unwise enough to cross swords—or words—with him. He served as general manager for sixteen years, working at the Met from 1964 until becoming the top dog in 1990 and then retiring in 2006. His is a story of mastery and ambition—Volpe seems to have always envisioned himself as destined for Valhalla—the Met's version anyway. And he was good at what he did—from building a set to reorganizing how opera's massive sets are struck in order to streamline the work, to negotiating with the intractable musicians' union when a last-minute walk-out threatened to scuttle the whole season.
Many chapters are devoted to the larger-than-life personalities who strut and fret and deliver high C's on the Met's stage. Sopranos and tenors get the lion's share of the ink as they tend to be the biggest divas and pitch the most histrionic fits. Volpe was legendary for not taking crap from trantrumming performers and their insistent managers. He spends time twice justifying his firing of the troubled (and troublesome) Kathleen Battle—a move that generated international headlines and fatally damaged Battle's career. To be fair, she seemed to be doing an excellent job of damaging her own career without any help from Volpe and that is the reason we are given for her dismissal. Pavarotti and Domingo, the two legendary tenors in lifelong contention for top billing, had some less-than-public issues about that competition that Volpe details at length. The failures and foibles of leading ladies, villains and heroes–weight, sex appeal, musicality, professionalism–all end up under the magnifying glass. The dishy stuff is fun.
Opera directors—the designers and shapers of the multimillion-dollar new productions that are the flash and dazzle of the opera world—can't hide behind the scenery when Volpe is telling tales. I have been fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on the production) to observe several new productions from pre-rehearsal to opening night, critical reviews and run of the debut season at the Met and the drama is crazy, the results not always predictable. Some directors create enduring dreams that deliver on first performance and fill the house season after season. Quite a few fail to measure up. A number of the successes are trotted out year after year until they are dusty, shabby and tired but audiences still clamor for them. Horses, donkeys, dogs and other fauna ensure that chorus members step lively to avoid stepping in anything. Occasionally, scenery fails to perform as expected and can even be dangerous. Predictably, artists have love-hate relationships with directors and those may be carefully smoothed over or end badly with ugly headlines and empty seats.
I won't grant Volpe the evaluation that the Met is the toughest show on earth. It's a complex, risky and exhausting venture, with too many capricious constituents and perilous finances at the best of times. But opera is story and music and, while you can really mess that up, you never start from square one with an opera. The art form has its perennial devotees and new presentations thrust it into a continual limelight of discovery. It takes heroic effort to land a solid hit or even a mediocre performance. But a Verdi chorus or a Mozart flute trumps any single player, general manager or prima donna. Volpe's epic run at the Met gave him a lot of gray hairs and a lot of great stories. Quite a few of them surface in this engaging book. Not precisely a 3-ring circus but a little something for everyone, including a few high-wire acts, daredevils and snarling beasts.
The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera Joseph Volpe | Alfred A. Knopf 2006


text:
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan | WIG391 | Released: 04/06/17
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan release their new album Neuk Wight Delhi All-Stars on 7th April. It follows the band's debut album, 2016's critically acclaimed Everything Sacred, and presents a confluence of currents, among them the north Indian sarangi; jazz-tinged bass, reminiscent in places of Danny Thompson; acoustic guitar that owes a debt to Elizabeth Cotton, Dick Gaughan and Mississippi John Hurt; and three very different vocalists - James Yorkston (East Neuk of Fife), Jon Thorne (Isle of Wight) and Suhail Yusuf Khan (New Delhi).
WIGLP391X | Domino | Out nowAdd to cart: $24.00
Double heavy weight vinyl, gatefold, printed inners with vinyl only track 'First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' & 24" foldout poster
1. Chori, Chori
2. Samant Saarang / Just A Bloke
3. Bales
4. Jaldhar Kedara (Wedding Song)
5. False True Piya
6. The Blue Of The Thistle
7. Recruited Collier
8. The Blues You Sang
9. Halleluwah
10.One More Day (Jon's Song)
WIGCD391 | Domino | Out nowAdd to cart: $12.00
Mini-gatefold Wallet With A 12 Page Booklet


text:
Scheduling, Estimating, and Safety Lab
The Scheduling, Estimating, and Safety Lab is a state of the art lab with 26 workstations and an advanced audio visual system for providing instruction. The workstations provide the students access to numerous software packages for estimating and scheduling of construction projects. The workstations also are equipped with the latest Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, which is incorporated into many of the BCM courses. In additional to the computer workstations, the lab is an ideal location for displaying and hands on use of the latest worker personal protection equipment and other construction safety equipment.


text:
Celebrating illustration, design, cartoon and comic art of the mid-20th century.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Our Fascination with Mars
They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or no dreams at all. But a government finger pointed from four-color posters in many towns: THERE'S WORK FOR YOU IN THE SKY: SEE MARS! and the men shuffled forward, only a few at first, a double-score, for most men felt great illness in them even before the rocket fired into space. And this disease was called The Lonliness, because when you saw your home town dwindle to the size of your fist, and then lemon-size and then pin-size and vanish in the fire-wake, you felt you had never been born, there was no town, you were nowhere, with space all around, nothing familiar, only other strange men.And when the state of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, or Montana vanished into cloud seas, and, doubly, when the United States shrank to a misted island and the entire planet Earth became a muddy baseball tossed away, then you were alone, wandering in the meadows of space, on your way to a place you couldn't imagine.
Ray Bradbury The Martian Chronicles 1950
8 comments:
Thanks for your comment, thelittleman! I'm glad you like what you see here - I should point out that today's post has work by two illustrators: Frederick Siebel did the top piece ( he also did that odd looking T-rex piece from Monday's post) and the bottom one is by Arthur Lidov.ReplyDelete
Thanks for pointing that out. I guess I'm loving the series then. You can tell the illustrators enjoy the subject matter. Better than illustrating a product eh?!ReplyDelete
Tom (aka thelittleman) hehehe...
Haha, no doubt. Science fiction subjects were rare indeed in mainstream magazines of the 50's. Romance, western, crime, war - and pretty much any combination or permutation of those genres were commonplace, but the images you see this week represent the total of all the two hundred-or-so issues of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's magazines I flipped through to find source material for this week's posts.ReplyDelete
For the illustrators who regularly received assignments from thos magazines to paint fiction illustrations, painting a sci-fi scene must have been quite refreshing!
Love the top piece.ReplyDelete
I've got a soft spot for Mars myself.
My son's name's Carter ........ you figure it out ;)
Thanks for posting.
P.S. I've posted some new stuff on my blog that you might dig.
Just wonderful stuff this week, Leif. I posted a note on my blog today about going to the Society of Illustrators, where one can see framed originals by so many of these wonderful commercial artists from the past. I took a couple photos.ReplyDelete
My grandfather, William Sambrot, was a science fiction writer who appeared in the same issue as Lidov's Cathedral painting. He wrote Lidov saying how much he enjoyed the illustration. A few weeks later the original came in the post.ReplyDelete
I remember many hours listening to my grandfather's stories in his study, all of it framed by the strange painting which seemed so unfathomable to me. That astronauts would clamor over a spindly, alien coral hillside only to find the most human of edifices.
Seeing it in my room now I do feel that something vital is missing from what we do, what we enjoy- a certain craft. The world these men reached to describe seems not to have a home in it for them.
Thanks for sharing your special insight on the topic, julian. Its much appreciated and very eloquently put! :-)ReplyDelete


text:
Alex Buchholz
Height 6-0, Weight 185, B/T: R/R, DOB: 09/30/1987
2008 Redlegs Baseball Prospect Ranking: Not Ranked
Alex Buchholz seems to continue the Reds trend of drafting players who have the baseball IQ and work ethic to make their tools play up a notch. It seems to be the exact opposite of the Jim Bowden school of thought, which permeated the organization until just recently. Jimbo collected toolsy outfielders who never performed up to their tools. The new Reds draft philosophy focuses on players who overachieve, rather than those who may have higher ceilings, but are unlikely to ever reach them.
The Reds selected Buchholz with #179th overall pick in the 2008 draft. Buchholz attended the University of Delaware, where he was an offense first type player. During his three years at Deleware, he posted slash lines of the following:
2006: .378/.433/.721/1.154
2007: .387/.433/.689/1.122
2008: .319/.401/.515/.916
Oddly enough, his performance got progressively worse from the high-water mark of his freshman year. Even so, his production as a junior was still impressive. And, he demonstrated an advanced approach at plate, as evidenced by his slash line of .364/.441/.527 with runners in scoring position.
At Delaware, Buchholz spent time at second base, third base, shortstop, and even did some pitching. His versatility is intriguing, but could also be a sign that his glove just doesn't profile well at any one position. That said, he made a concerted effort to improve his defensive skills in college to avoid the "offense only" label and also has the work ethic to improve. Not to mention, his willingness to move around the diamond demonstrated his selflessness and desire to put what's best for the team first. Delaware head coach Jim Sherman compared Buchholz to Jeff Kent, which is lofty praise indeed, though Buchholz has a long way to go to justify that comparison.
In 2008, Buchholz started 41 games, missing time after suffering a leg injury late in the year. Despite the injury, he had 14 multiple hit games and at least 2 RBI in nine contests. On his career, he has a .366 batting average (14th best in school history), 34 homeruns (8th in school history), and 161 RBI (10th in school history).
At the plate, Buchholz hits from an upright stance and can drive the ball to all fields. He does a pretty good job of controlling the strikezone, but he could stand to improve his plate discipline, as his walk rate needs improvement. He handles both lefties and righties well, so he doesn't suffer from much of a platoon split.
The Reds sent Buchholz to the Rookie Pioneer League to begin his professional career. Buchholz didn't take long to "announce his presence with authority." He posted a slash line of .396/.471/.604/1.075 with 3 homeruns and a 25/16 K/BB ratio in 134 ABs.
Continuing the trend from his college performance, Buchholz actually performed better with runners in scoring position, which is an attribute currently lacking from the MLB Reds. For Billings, he hit .415/.520/.780/1.300 with runners in scoring position. While, admittedly, it is a small sample size, it does seem to be more evidence of the effectivenss of his polished approach at the plate.
Unfortunately, Billings was the one and only professional stop for Buchholz in 2008, as he was hit on the hand by a pitch. He suffered a "boxer's break" when he fractured a bone in his hand, which put an end to a promising rookie season.
While injury shortened his season, Buchholz had a fantastic debut for the Reds. Buchholz adds both needed middle infield depth and a potential impact bat to the farm system. That said, he'll need to show more with the glove to climb up the rankings. His bat plays well at second, but if he doesn't have the defensive ability to stay there, then his prospect status takes a significant hit. Fortunately, Buchholz has the type of work ethic and baseball smarts to continue to improve as he climbs the ladder.
For now, Buchholz checks in at #16 on the list. He could climb up the list in the future, as he does have some projection in him, but he could also slide down the list if he doesn't prove capable with the glove. For now, the professional sample size is just too small to say which direction he'll head.
A running discussion on the Cincinnati Reds and everything else in the baseball universe.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
2009 Top Prospect List: #16 Alex Buchholz, 2b
Labels: 2009, A.Buchholz, Baseball, Reds, Top 15 Prospects
2 comments:
- AnonymousJune 15, 2010 at 9:08 AM
Buchotlz was lazy in College and treated his team mates with disrespect. Coach Sherman treated Alex like he was scared of him. Alex is a good ball player but not a good team mareReplyDelete
I'll have to take your word for it, as I haven't heard anything of the sort. If true, well, they say karma is a boomerang. He's not performing all that well in the professional ranks and you won't be around long if you are lazy. Even the best players have to work hard to succeed in the minors and even more so in the majors.
Hopefully, he's learned and matured since his college days. Anyway, thanks for the comment!
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Up to [mozdev] / chimera
Request diff between arbitrary revisions - Display revisions graphically
Keyword substitution: kv
Default branch: MAIN
You can now create bookmark groups.
remove attempt to subclass window
Checking in UI for adding bookmark groups.
Teaching the personal toolbar how to wrap to multiple lines.
Fix a lot of warnings and some bad method calls. Also change use of keyWindow to mainWindow so commands still work when the find panel is the key window.
Hooking up new folder.
New bookmark icon. WOrking on the personal toolbar.
implemented text zoom.
MOre stuff.
So many changes I can't even go into it. :)
Open link in new window/tab now works from the context menu.
make "find again" work, as well as across multiple windows. uses a new "Find" protocol and puts all the logic in the find controller.
Context menus come up! Yay!
Fix a slew of activation issues.
Chimera now shrinks and moves the window to accommodate the sidebar drawer.
Make find window global to app, remove its cancel button, hookup find functionality.
This represents my final planned checkin for version 0.2.0 of this project. BrowserWindowController was modified to allow for a dynamic 'Sidebar' toolbar icon, and the requisite graphics have also been added. Credits were modified to include a few individual contributors. A TruncatedTabView object is being created, but is not ready for 0.2.0. I am adding it to CVS anyway to alleviate the potential for error, but it is not linked. The sidebar tab icons have been updated, along with the Stop and Reload toolbar icons.
A couple ui tweaks, but the main thing is the icons in the sidebar tabs. Also, a bit of Project cleanup.
Adding some groundwork for the NSTabViewItem subclass that will draw icons in its tab labels. Added a line to the BrowserWindowController that creates a dummy instance of this subclass. It will be removed when things work better. Added the tab icons themselves. Adding some of the updated toobar icons. The BrowserWindowController has a new outlet to the sidebar tabview, and the project was touched, of course.
Full implementation of window autosaving (including correct ignoring of windows opened as popups by web pages.
Make tab link loading work, although background loading is whacked.
Getting command clicking working.
Add the tri-license to all files.
Last checkin for the night. This makes tabs fully usable. What's left: Menu item validation code. This will cover all menu items, but most importantly, it will switch the key shortcut for Close Window between cmd+w and shift+cmd+w and Close Tab between blank and cmd+w.
A bunch of new stuff. window.open now works, and security is getting closer.
Mouse moves work now.
Lots of tweaks and cleanup.
Tabs now update everything properly except for progress/status on a switch.
Tabbed browsing lives.
Stubbing out New Tab
Tab browser is coming online!
Deleting of bookmarks works. You must update your mozilla tree again. mozilla/extensions/xmlextras and then make in that dir.
Bookmarks work! Update your Mozilla tree though or chimera won't build.
Checking in a prototype sidebar.
Find dialog UI is wired up. not implemented yet, but wired up.
Print preview works.
Oops. Cut/copy/paste much easier than I thought.
Impl cut copy paste etc. Some focus issues plague this feature still.
Printing works! You'll need to update your mozilla tree to get a bug fix though. mozilla/content/base/nsDocumentViewer.cpp to be more specific.
A huge amount of code for File/Save As...
Stubbing out save page and toggle offline modes.
Chimera: Tons of updates. Have fun merging this.
Open file now works!
The open location command is now hooked up in the menu! New windows properly focus their url bar now.
Chimera: A few tweaks including memory deallocation.
Chimera: Header comments modified for consistency
Initial commit of Chimera, a Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa front end.


text:
Black & grey striped 18mm HD NATO ballistic nylon strap. This double striped HD NATO is the most popular nylon strap coloration we carry. It is commonly refered to as a "Bond" style, although the original "Bond" used olive and burgundy stripes, not grey.
Crafted with an extra-heavy weave ballistic nylon webbing, this strap is thicker, heavier, stronger, and stiffer than our NATO straps. They are the ultimate in durability and great at supporting large & heavy watches.
This HD NATO features a stitched construction. 3.25mm heavy duty hardware and a matching sewn in buckle finish off this HD NATO strap. Brushed and Black PVD hardware options.
Please note: 18mm Heavy Duty NATO straps are only available in the 3-ring style configuration.
Privacy / Terms / Legal
Crown and Buckle LLC
of International Watchman, Inc.


text:
freenode/#lisp - IRC ChatlogSearch
9:12:37 hhdave_ ** NICK hhdave
11:04:27 loke` Oladon: Well, I'm here now.
11:09:11 flip214 splittist: my HR asked me a few times already, too... but I'm convinced that Shinmera will keep us updated ;)
11:09:36 Shinmera I haven't heard back from Didier is all I can say.
11:10:36 Shinmera splittist: as for how it works, it'll work the same as two years ago; there'll be a registration form on the website and you can pay through credit card directly (via stripe).
11:10:41 splittist Those French jazz musicians!
11:10:54 splittist Shinmera: I look forward to it.
11:17:58 Shinmera I had to make some changes to it due to new EU regulations
11:18:19 Shinmera I did those a long time ago though and Didier never got around to testing it. I think.
11:24:47 Shinmera Ugh, once again annoyed at the poor support for streams in Lisp (where's my poll/select/etc?)
11:26:59 Cymew I remember seeing that sentiment once in a while, and I remember thinking I see lot of stuff about grey streams and other kind of streams. I don't think I've ever seen it exemplified like that before, mentioning poll/select.
11:34:43 flip214 Shinmera: https://github.com/fukamachi/woo is a fast non-blocking HTTP server built on top of libev
11:35:30 flip214 Shinmera: if you're thinking about high-performance IO, I'm afraid that CL streams are already a major hurdle...
11:35:40 flip214 I guess the low-level functions are a better bet
11:35:44 no-defun-allowed (lparallel:psome (lambda (stream) (peek-char stream) stream) streams) ; I am truly sorry for this pretend select.
12:00:31 X-Scale` ** NICK X-Scale
12:00:56 flip214 mop:slot-definition-readers only works on direct slots, but mop:class-slots returns the effective slots only - which are incompatible. What am I missing here?
12:11:28 Shinmera flip214: This does not help me for lisp streams.
12:16:12 jackdaniel Shinmera: at least two implementations have an extension called serve-event, is that what you are looking for? that works fine only for file streams though
12:16:21 jackdaniel just as select and poll do
12:18:06 Shinmera Unfortunately not, but good to know!
12:19:26 jackdaniel writing something working any kind of streams would probably require some kind of busy waiting based on listen
12:23:32 Shinmera Hmm, listen doesn't seem to work right under Swank. At least (loop until (listen)) seems to just loop forever no matter what I enter.
12:26:14 jackdaniel swanks input stream is not an interactive-stream afair
12:27:26 Shinmera then it should always return true.
12:28:27 jackdaniel according to spec yes. if you want to understand what's going under the hood you need to check swank's gray stream implementation
12:28:36 Shinmera I guessed so, sigh.
12:28:40 jackdaniel afaik it has some internal buffer which is lazily filled when you call read on the stream
12:30:21 flip214 when using xcml:parse with a cxml-xmls:make-xmls-builder, can I tell it to ignore the whitespace in the XML?
13:59:38 flip214 No package form found while trying to define package-inferred-system lil/interface/monad from file /home/marek/.quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/lisp-interface-library-20180430-git/interface/monad.lisp
13:59:42 flip214 [Condition of type ASDF/PACKAGE-INFERRED-SYSTEM:PACKAGE-INFERRED-SYSTEM-MISSING-PACKAGE-ERROR]
14:31:18 _paul0 ** NICK paul0
14:39:39 jcowan Does anyone know why tokens composed of two or more dots are illegal? No reason is given either in the CLHS or in CLtL1. If there are a lot, it's hard to read, but no harder than ____________ (as distinct from _____________), both of which are valid symbols. Certainly ... is not hard to read.
14:40:42 jackdaniel what would (a . b . c) mean? ((cons a b) c) or (cons a (cons b c)) :?
14:41:29 beach jackdaniel: That's not the situation jcowan is referring to.
14:41:41 jackdaniel or maybe (cons (cons a |) (cons ↄ c))
14:41:49 jackdaniel hm, no?
14:41:54 Bike i for one would be kind of annoyed to see (.. . ...)
14:41:56 jcowan jackdaniel: I mean (let ((... 32) ...)
14:42:09 jackdaniel ah, thanks
14:42:20 jackdaniel did you notice how I've ripped the b letter in the last example? :-)
14:42:34 jcowan Of course such names can be used tastelessly, but why go to the trouble of forbidding them specially when all-underscore names are not.
14:42:55 jcowan ?
14:43:08 Bike well, underscores aren't as important a part of the syntax, they're just constituents
14:43:10 dlowe maybe some ancient system choked on them
14:43:20 _death I think (a . b . c) used to have meaning (hunks)
14:43:23 Bike wheeas dots are for conses as well as numbers
14:43:33 jcowan ACTION looks in the maclisp manual
14:43:38 Bike probably not any super important reasons, though
14:44:05 _death http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html
14:44:38 _death so (a . b . c .)
14:44:38 scymtym note that only two or more /unescaped/ dots are illegal
14:44:48 jackdaniel '|...|
14:47:32 jcowan Yes, hunks are interesting. The syntax chapter of the Pitmanual, however, only explains the special cases, not the defaults.
14:47:41 jackdaniel (a joke) multiple dots may mean multiple zeros, invoke (format t "~0,0f~0,0f~0,0f" 0.0 0.0 0.0) for instance ;)
14:49:24 pjb jcowan: It's just that the standard reader doesn't parse this syntax, and there's no easy way to read the dot. It's not a first class lisp object! It's pure syntax. To be able to read several dots, a user program would have to implement a reader macro for #\(, and cannot use just READ or READ-DELIMITED-LIST.
14:49:58 pjb jcowan: moreover, the standard leaves it to implementations to provide meaning for multiple dots, as well as multiple colons.
14:50:20 pjb (foo . bar . baz) foo::bar::baz or foo:::bar could mean something, implementation dependent.
14:51:03 pjb (foo .. bar) and (foo ... bar) could also mean something, implementation dependent.
14:51:30 pjb Note that you could also write a reader macro for #\(, that would read them eg. as ranges, or something else.
14:51:51 pjb (1 .. 5) -> (1 2 3 4 5) #(1 .. 5) -> #(1 2 3 4 5)
14:51:56 _death don't schemes use them in hygienic macros?
14:52:06 pjb (1 .. 5 11 .. 15) -> (1 2 3 4 5 11 12 13 14 15)
14:52:13 pjb _death: scheme uses ...
14:57:14 jcowan AFAICT the CLHS is silent about such tokens: they are not potential numbers, and they are not required to be symbols, but every token is a symbol or number, so that says to me that they are invalid.
14:58:14 jcowan _death: ... is used in a limited context in macros, but is otherwise an ordinary identifier, as are all other all-dots symbols other than the consing dot.
15:00:03 _death jcowan: so maybe they wanted to reserve ... for the possibility of future CL extension.. if you use a nonstandard readtable as pjb suggests, it's easy to allow that
15:00:40 Odin- http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_cc.htm
15:01:29 jcowan Odin-: Thanks, that's definitive. So reading .. etc. has a defined behavior and can't be extended by an implementation.
15:02:06 Odin- At least not using the standard readtable. Aren't all bets off once you start messing with that?
15:02:38 jackdaniel they are
15:03:34 jcowan Sure. If you change the readtable, then making your favorite CL also accept Algol 60 is just a SMOP.
15:03:55 scymtym it says "If a token …" which implies that the characters are not interpreted under the control of a reader macro
15:04:44 Odin- Reader macros happen before tokenisation, so they can make the token vanish.
15:05:48 scymtym yes, and then 2.3.3 does not apply and thus is not violated is what i'm thinking
15:06:34 pjb jcowan: readiing .. has no definde behavior, and CAN be extended by an implementation.
15:07:05 pjb Well, it has the defined behavior of signaling an error if the implementation doesn't extend it: (read-from-string "..") #| ERROR: Reader error on #<string-input-stream :closed #x3020028BEA7D>: Illegal symbol syntax in "..". |#
15:08:06 pjb or (read-from-string "..") -> #<anwer-to-your-philosophical-question 42>
15:08:35 Odin- Isn't the initial readtable required to be equivalent to the standard readtable?
15:08:37 pjb ^ implementation specific extension. This one has a mind reader attached.
15:08:44 pjb Odin-: nope :-(
15:08:59 Odin- Then what does "conforms to standard syntax" mean?
15:09:03 _death in cl-su-ai Steele writes "I find I can't easily write myself something akin to READ-DELIMITED-LIST that handles dotted lists because of the problem of recognizing all-dots tokens. PEEK-CHAR can only peek one ahead, so I can't tell whether there is a space after a dot before calling READ recursively." .. there are responses mentioning the issue more generally
15:09:12 pjb Odin-: adding (setf *readtable* (copy-readtable nil)) to your rc file.
15:09:26 Odin- http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_aac.htm <-- Specifically, here.
15:10:16 pjb Hmm. Conforms to the standard syntax, but can be distinct frmo the standard readtable !
15:10:20 Bike it means that altering the initial readtable doesn't change the standard readtable
15:10:21 Bike i think
15:10:26 pjb If it's distinct, how can it conform to the standad syntax?
15:10:32 Odin- Yeah, you're allowed to change it.
15:10:49 pjb This is contradictory, so it's meaningless.
15:10:53 splittist _death: fascinating
15:11:08 Bike and you can always call (copy-readtable nil) to get a new copy of the standard readtable
15:11:09 pjb The fact is that in ccl, in clisp, and probably other implementations, the initial readtable contains non-standard reader macros.
15:11:19 _death specifically, Moon says "How about a way (a special variable?) to turn off the somewhat silly restriction that you can't have a symbol named .?"
15:11:39 pjb ccl has #/ #_
15:12:20 pjb _death: yes. Just implement your own reader with that way.
15:12:59 _death pjb: sure.. this is from cl-su-ai, wrt standard syntax
15:13:56 pjb _death: it's a little complex, since the internal data structure of the lisp reader is a sequence of pairs (character character-trait). There are several ways to represent it. One would have to define an agreed API, or a specific representation for a token to lisp-object parametrable function.
15:14:19 _death with your own reader you may find it ok to assume greater lookahead
15:14:33 pjb See readtable-parse-token in https://github.com/informatimago/lisp/blob/master/common-lisp/lisp-reader/reader.lisp
15:15:19 Odin- pjb: I wonder if the idea is that "standard syntax" means "don't mess with the syntax types", and not "don't define any macro characters".
15:15:50 pjb and https://github.com/informatimago/lisp/blob/master/common-lisp/lisp-reader/reader.lisp#L1179
15:16:07 Odin- pjb: Because the section on sharpsign explicitly notes which undefined characters are verboten to the implementation ... implicitly saying that certain ones are fair game.
15:16:30 pjb Odin-: yes, the reasonable interpretation is that the initial readtable contains the standard readtable and only "extends" it, still allowing all valid standard syntax.
15:16:47 pjb Odin-: exact. And Unicode.
15:17:10 pjb _death: and https://github.com/informatimago/lisp/blob/master/common-lisp/lisp-reader/reader.lisp#L1156
15:17:43 pjb _death: I wanted to write a CDR to define this API, but never too the time to do it.
15:17:47 pjb +k
15:18:34 _death pjb: cool.. did you use these customization hooks for something specific?
15:20:33 Odin- pjb: Technically the standard only specifies the status of the standard characters, so unless you're going to prohibit a wider range of characters - which the standard very obviously doesn't intend - clearly extension that doesn't conflict with the specified syntax is allowed.
15:21:50 Odin- Since . is defined as a constituent and not a macro character, I'd say the implementation is _not_ free to define a reader macro on it in the initial readtable.
15:22:55 splittist But it would be a non-standard / extended implementation of the #\( reader macro, for example
15:23:12 pjb _death: cf. readtable-parse-token. All those URLs mean something!
15:23:47 pjb Odin-: exact. Hence I'd suggest having fun with · instead of .
15:24:14 pjb (quote (foo · bar · baz)) #| --> (foo · bar · baz) |# works perfectly in all unicode implementation.
15:24:37 pjb Even all 8-bit implementation using iso-8859-1 or iso-8859-15. (char-code #\·) #| --> 183 |#
15:24:53 Odin- pjb: That should be fair game, yes, even to the implementation.
15:25:13 Odin- There's also UTF-32 vs. UTF-16.
15:25:26 pjb ² is in iso-8859-1 too, so (let ((x² (* x x))) (+ (* a x²) (* b x) c))
15:25:30 Odin- ABCL uses UTF-16, and according to the docs so does Allegro. :)
15:27:22 jcowan Hunk syntax like this is interesting, but separate from my original issue, which was why .. and ... etc. aren't identifiers. Thanks for the Steele quote, btw.
15:28:05 jcowan UTFs are only relevant at the bit-bashing level: at the character level they implement exactly the same character repertoire.
15:28:13 _death pjb: I meant, did you use readtable-parse-token for something specific.. all these URLs you gave are for the reader implementation, not for user code that makes use of it.. but there is user code in your repo as well, so the answer is yes
15:28:21 pjb jcowan: basically, because of scheme, CL wanted to reserve them for future extensions such as ... like in scheme.
15:29:02 pjb _death: oh, right. Somebody used my lisp reader to read lisp source files to generate documentation. They definitely used it to avoid interning symbols as normal symbols.
15:29:24 pjb (and reported a bug too).
15:30:06 pjb Samium Gromoff
15:30:20 pjb IIRC.
15:31:12 _death pjb: the "because of scheme" was just my speculation, no evidence
15:32:28 Odin- jcowan: Yes and no. UTF-16 can and does make things complicated for code points above U+FFFF, because if the internal representation is UTF-16, then the lisp-level functions give you surrogates.
15:35:29 splittist Before we switch into our regular #lispunicode programming, can anyone suggest a replacement key-chord for emacs' kill-region (since it is stolen by the browser through which I am manipulating the terminal on which I am running emacs)?
15:35:44 splittist s/it/C-w/
15:36:31 splittist (Although I must say its absence is making me use ESC C-k a lot more)
15:37:15 pjb kill-region is on C-w, s-x, <S-delete>, <menu-bar> <edit> <cut>
15:37:54 pjb M-x kill-region RET occasionnaly.
15:38:13 splittist S-delete - of course! thanks
15:38:40 pjb splittist: C-h w kill-region RET
15:38:50 splittist pjb: indeed
15:39:21 jmercouris necessary to provide encoding for cffi:foreign-string-alloc, reccommended?
15:39:40 jmercouris or is cffi:*default-foreign-encoding* OK?
15:42:54 _death if you don't know, leave it to the special?
15:43:23 jcowan Odin-: If so the implementation is broken.
15:43:59 jmercouris _death: OK
15:44:06 jmercouris I just thought I may explicitly set to UTF-8
15:44:21 _death jmercouris: does the foreign code expect utf-8?
15:44:25 pjb jmercouris: it depends on the foreign code!
15:44:33 pjb jmercouris: read the doc!
15:44:35 jmercouris I write the code...
15:44:37 jmercouris it is User data
15:45:36 jmercouris but that is a good point, for future thinking
15:45:40 Odin- jcowan: I won't disagree, but that exact brokenness is also in Java, JavaScript, and pervasive in Windows land.
15:46:00 _death you can define your own special jmercouris:*default-foreign-encoding*
15:47:26 jcowan Java at least has character-oriented as opposed to codepoint-oriented methods, and on recent Javas strings in the Latin-1 range are stored 8-bit rather than 16-bit, which makes both sets of APIs equally fast.
15:49:03 pfdietz I have wanted lisps to use adaptive representations that use less space for Latin-1 strings (even if the type is formally (vector character)).
15:49:47 Bike i wrote a thing with lisp utf-8 strings to see if i could, and i could, but linear time random access kinda blows
15:49:47 pjb jmercouris: you write the C or foreign code?
15:50:08 pjb jmercouris: how do you use those strings in C? Don't you call some API expecting some specific encoding?
15:51:45 jmercouris pjb: No, it is an optional void* user data for a callback
15:51:57 jmercouris so, I get to write the callback, and then decode my own data I encoded
15:52:04 jmercouris that said, is there a function version of with-foreign-pointer-as-string?
15:52:11 jmercouris AKA, how to convert pointer to string?
15:52:14 pjb Then why do you want to pass a string? Just pass some random refnum.
15:52:42 jmercouris foreign-string-to-lisp?
15:53:06 jmercouris pjb: what is a refnum?
15:53:17 jmercouris I'm trying to pass a key to a hash table
15:53:55 pjb A reference number. A handle in Microsoft.
15:53:56 pfdietz I also want the adaptive representation to work well if the string is "almost" Latin-1.
15:54:09 pjb jmercouris: yes, a key to a hash-table. Just use a fixnum.
15:54:11 pfdietz (has a few characters that are not)
15:54:24 jmercouris pjb: fixnum would would work...
15:54:37 jmercouris either way, there would be no performance benefit to fixnum
15:54:51 pjb simplicity in the API.
15:55:37 jmercouris maybe, I was thinking about gensym'ing symbols in some package to store some data
15:55:42 jmercouris instead of using a hash table, not sure though
15:56:18 jmercouris I'm not sure how bad of a idea it is (defparameter x (make-hash-table)) in a top level library form...
15:56:48 _death you likely want defvar..
15:56:49 pjb jmercouris: for example: https://github.com/informatimago/patchwork/blob/2cc6e94929d47a5b4ac8a2d136cba4c264378146/src/pw-lib/cl-midi/pw-midi.lisp#L421
15:56:58 jmercouris ah, yes, defvar is what I meant
15:57:01 jmercouris the sentiment still stands
15:57:28 jmercouris pjb: find = slow
15:57:31 jmercouris pjb: it is simpler though
15:57:43 jmercouris there are many callbacks taking place here, and I want absolutely 0 performance penalty
15:58:28 pjb jmercouris: if you can manage the range of your refnums, you can use a vector instead of a hash-table.
15:58:46 pjb jmercouris: this is the advantage of using small integers as handles. Like unix file descriptors.
15:59:17 jmercouris ... hm now that is an interesting idea
16:01:29 jmercouris how to make pointer to integer...?
16:01:43 _death cffi:make-pointer
16:02:03 _death well, maybe you meant something else
16:02:16 pjb (cffi:pointer-address (cffi:make-pointer 42)) #| --> 42 |#
16:02:17 _death an integer need not have an address..
16:02:41 jmercouris Yes, I get that, but I'm expected to supply a pointer
16:03:24 jmercouris it is void* that I get to supply as user data
16:04:05 pjb (let ((object (make-hash-table))) (values object (cffi:make-pointer (read-from-string (com.informatimago.common-lisp.cesarum.utility:object-identity object))))) #| --> #<hash-table :test eql size 0/60 #x302002B1820D> ; #<A Foreign Pointer #x302002B1820D> |#
16:04:18 _death in theory some platforms may take issue with arbitrary integers as addresses
16:04:22 Bike you can use with-foreign-object to stack allocate an integer, if t hat's what you mean?
16:04:33 pjb (com.informatimago.common-lisp.cesarum.utility:object-identity (cons 'a 'd)) #| --> "#x302002B3E883" |#
16:04:36 jmercouris What does it mean to stack allocate an integer?
16:04:41 jmercouris allocate an integer on the stack?
16:04:43 pjb jmercouris: yes.
16:04:45 Bike well, yes.
16:04:48 Bike like an auto variable in C.
16:04:56 pjb jmercouris: works nicely for fixnum, less so for bignums.
16:05:14 jmercouris _death: which platforms?
16:05:20 jmercouris you think I should actually make a pointer to an integer..?
16:05:20 _death it's unlikely that you want to stack allocate it.. since that pointer will likely be stashed somewhere and passed back at a different time
16:05:52 pjb _death: as long as you don't dereference them, it should be ok.
16:06:01 _death jmercouris: basically make-pointer will be ok.. what pjb said
16:06:16 pjb jmercouris: of course: (cffi:make-pointer (expt 2 100)) #| ERROR: The value 1267650600228229401496703205376 is not of the expected type (unsigned-byte 64). |#
16:06:42 jmercouris OK, then I won't stress about it
16:06:53 jmercouris that is quite a few... calls :-D
16:07:07 _death pjb: that's why I said in theory.. there are architectures that will care, but x86/amd64 are quite lenient
16:09:37 _death also, providing an actual lisp object's address would be worse, then you have to worry about pinning
16:10:28 _death but you could (cffi:foreign-alloc :char :count 0) I suppose
16:35:01 jmercouris pjb: I ended up going with the small list in the end
16:35:17 jmercouris pjb: I ended up going with the small list in the end
16:35:44 jmercouris _death: maybe I do that
16:35:50 jmercouris I see if it actually ends up being a problem
16:44:37 jmercouris how to get function body from symbol OR lambda?
16:45:08 jmercouris I want the user to be able to invoke my function (defun my-fun (some-fun) ...) (my-fun (lambda (xyz) ...)) or (my-fun #'potato)
16:46:06 jmercouris I want to store the lambda or potato in some variable
16:46:12 jmercouris actually, specifically a slot of a struct
16:46:16 beach clhs funcall
16:46:16 specbot http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/Body/f_funcal.htm
16:46:33 jmercouris I know of funcall
16:46:36 jmercouris I want to save the value of the body
16:46:44 jmercouris so that I can invoke it at a later time
16:46:53 beach What "body"?
16:47:03 jmercouris you know, maybe I'm just saying nonsense here
16:47:23 jmercouris what I want to do is (make-my-struct :function my-fun) within the body
16:47:25 jmercouris will that work?
16:47:32 jmercouris I guess I don't see why it wouldnt
16:47:42 beach It will.
16:47:50 beach But there is no "body" involved here.
16:48:03 jmercouris Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm quite tired :-)
16:48:11 jmercouris I started overthinking this and thinking gibberish or so
16:53:31 pjb jmercouris: see Image Based Development http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/small-cl-pgms/ibcl/index.html
16:53:48 pjb jmercouris: (you need to save the source yourself).
16:54:11 pjb clhs function-lambda-expression
16:54:11 specbot http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/Body/f_fn_lam.htm
16:54:14 pjb jmercouris: sinon ^
16:54:18 pjb s/sinon/otherwise/
16:54:20 jmercouris that is way more than I need to do :-D
16:55:14 _death another kind of image based development: https://i.imgur.com/piCKqJd.png the image tells how to develop
16:55:19 pjb jmercouris: if you want the function object, of course, just (symbol-function 'symbol) or (function fname).
16:55:46 pjb _death: :-)
18:57:48 fengshaun_ ** NICK fengshaun
19:27:39 X-Scale` ** NICK X-Scale
19:32:17 ted_wroclaw Hey guys. Is anyone going to the European Lisp Symposium?
19:39:52 rpg If someone around can set the topic, would you mind mentioning that I have just released ASDF 3.3.4, a bug fix release?
19:40:20 Xach rpg: that kind of thing is not put in the topic any more.
19:40:27 Xach But thank you for the news!
19:40:46 rpg Xach: I'm afraid it's been a while since I spent much time here... Too busy!
19:41:41 rpg Xach: BTW, Mark E and I are going to have a conversation about how to improve the way ASDF and QL work together. I gather you talked about it at ELS.
19:41:52 rpg or ... no, I meant the SBCL party
19:43:13 Xach I have one main problem that I can't figure out
19:44:40 Xach And that's, as a third party, establishing some environment around the compilation of a system based on some property of the system, without interfering with any first-party stuff.
19:44:48 Xach so conventional methods are right out
19:46:11 rpg Xach: the key thing to remember is that ASDF is *not* hierarchical, so that wrapping PERFORM on, say, LOAD-OP, on the system will not work -- that will only wrap post-processing. I think Fare made a kind of clunky method for dealing with this. Let me have a quick look.
19:49:07 rpg Xach: There's an `around-compile-hook`
19:52:20 rpg Xach: see https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/asdf.html#Controlling-file-compilation
19:53:43 rpg ACTION waits while the "your message to implementation development list awaits moderator approval" emails flood in. Would it really hurt so badly to add me to the accept list?
20:08:38 Xach rpg: i can't add methods
20:14:42 pfdietz You could act like you can, though. I hear this is called "method acting".
20:16:20 dale_ ** NICK dale
20:16:21 jackdaniel congrats on a new release
20:17:56 Xach pfdietz: vigorous boo


text:
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Hundreds of investment bankers, venture capitalists and geeky tech entrepreneurs gathered near the pool of the Phoenician, a luxury resort outside Phoenix. The occasion? A high-profile gathering of education innovators, and as guests sipped cocktails, the mood was upbeat.
Major innovations — forged by the struggles of the Great Recession and fostered by technology — are coming to higher education.
Investment dollars are flooding in — a record-smashing 168 venture capital deals in the U.S. alone last year, according to the springtime conference's host, GSV Advisors. The computing power of "the cloud" and "big data" are unleashing new software. Public officials, desperate to cut costs and measure results, are open to change.
And everyone, it seems, is talking about MOOCs, the "Massive Open Online Courses" offered by elite universities and enrolling millions worldwide.
As with so many innovations — from the light bulb to the Internet — the technology is emerging mostly in the United States, fueled by American capital. But as with those past innovations, the impact will be global. In this case, it may prove even more consequential in developing countries, where mass higher education is new and the changes could be built into emerging systems.
One source of this spring-like moment is the wintry depths of the financial crisis that struck five years ago, pushing higher education as never before to become more efficient. Another is simply the arrival of a generation demanding that higher education, at long last, embrace the technologies that have already transformed other sectors of the economy.
"The consumer, after five years on a tablet and five years on an iPhone, is just sick of being told, 'you can't do that," said Brandon Dobell, a partner at William Blair & Co., an investment bank and research firm based in Chicago. "I can do everything else on my phone, my tablet, why can't I learn as well?"
But while technology is at the center of this wave of innovation, many argue it is merely the pathway to something even bigger.
Cracks are opening in the traditional, age-old structures of higher education. Terms like "credit hour" and even the definition of what it means to be a college are in flux.
Higher education is becoming "unbundled." Individual classes and degrees are losing their connections to single institutions, in much the same way iTunes has unbundled songs from whole albums, and the Internet is unbundling television shows and networks from bulky cable packages.
Technology isn't just changing traditional higher education. It's helping break it down across two broad dimensions: distance and time.
But that doesn't necessarily mean, as some contend, the traditional university is dead.
At his desk at a telecom company in Lagos, Nigeria, Ugochukwu Nehemiah used to take his full one-hour lunch break. Now, he devours his meal, then watches his downloaded MOOCs. He's already finished courses in business, energy and sustainability, and disruptive innovation, taught by institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland.
Nehemiah needs a master's to advance at work, but cannot afford the United Kingdom program where he's been admitted. The MOOC learning doesn't translate into a widely recognized credential. But the teaching is free, not available locally, and helps him even without a credential.
"It's a form of self-development," said Nehemiah, a father of two. "The way I would speak when I have meetings to attend," he added, "would be much different than the way I had spoken if I had not taken this course."
When non-profit edX offered its first MOOC in "Circuits and Electronics" in 2012, 154,000 students from more than 160 countries signed up (though only 8,000 lasted to the final). Now edX has more than a million unique users in about 60 courses. For-profit rival Coursera has exploded with 4.1million students, 406 courses and 83 partner institutions.
From radio to television to the Internet, technology has always promised to revolutionize higher education. So far, it's enabled good teachers to lecture to thousands of even millions of students. But truly teach them, with individualized interaction and feedback?
It's not clear the MOOCs can do that, either, and only 10 percent who sign up for a course are completing it. But with their more advanced interactivity, they are arguably the most sophisticated effort yet to solve the central the problem of college access and affordability: the difficulty of "scaling up" learning.
"This is virgin territory in terms of having tens or hundreds of thousands of people engaged in the same educational experience simultaneously in a way you can capture what you're doing," said Kevin Carey, director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation. "We've never had that. The assumption is we'll learn lots of things and that will lead to better classes the future."
The MOOCs are just one part of this new landscape.
Sal Khan, a charismatic former hedge-fund adviser, discovered his knack for explaining things while tutoring his young cousins in algebra in 2004. In 2006, he uploaded his first YouTube video and two years later founded Khan Academy.
Today, Mountain View, Calif.-based Khan has 6 million unique users a month from 216 countries, who watch the 4,000-plus videos available on Khan Academy's website. These are not full courses, but connected series of free, bite-sized lessons — about 10 minutes each — taught by Khan and others in everything from math to art history.
Khan talks excitedly not just of shaking up education across distance, but time. He says students can learn what they need, when they need it, without having to take and pay for an entire course.
"Whether we're talking basic literacy or quantum physics, it's the ability to cater to one person's needs," Khan said.
Some at cutting-edge traditional universities are also rethinking notions of academic time.
One morning last spring, not far from the innovation conference, at Arizona State University, a handful of students worked through problems in a developmental math course that looks little like the traditional model. There's no lecturer; software takes students through the material at their own speed, adjusting to their errors. An instructor is available to answer questions — a model that's proven cheaper and more effective than the traditional class.
Yet what matters most is what isn't here: Most students have mastered the material and moved on to other classes.
"We've organized higher education into this factory model where we bring a group of students in post-high school and march them through more or less in lockstep," said Richard Demillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "People that don't conform are rejected from the factory and people that make it through are stamped with a degree."
ASU has broken up the traditional model of two-semesters-per-year into six parts. Some classes have accelerated versions that run essentially at double-speed: six or 7.5 weeks. So students who quickly finish a flexible-time class don't have to wait before starting a new one. They can move more quickly and cheaply toward their degree.
"We began to say, 'What are all these sacred cows about time?'" said ASU President Michael Crow, who has transformed ASU into a laboratory of innovation. "What we're looking for is intensification by freeing up the clock."
More than a century ago, the Carnegie Foundation invented the "credit hour," the basic unit of academic time, measuring hours spent in class but not necessarily what students learned.
Now, the foundation is reviewing that model and may move toward a competency-based approach — awarding credit for what students learn, not how long.
In March, the Department of Education approved a competency-based program at Southern New Hampshire University, inviting other colleges to seek approval for programs that don't mark time in traditional credit hours.
ASU's challenges are a microcosm of the country's and the world's. Amid scarce resources, it's trying to accommodate diverse and growing demand. Yet despite a 50 percent state funding cut during the Great Recession, ASU did something unusual: It kept growing, from 50,000 students to around 72,000 over the last decade. Completion rates are up, too.
Still, Crow's careful to emphasize innovation's purpose is to make traditional universities work better, not replace them. He wants technologies like those in use in the math class to free up faculty resources for upper-division and critical-thinking courses where personal interaction really matters, and for the other endeavors of a physical university.
"Technology cannot produce new ideas," Crow said. "Technology cannot produce new understandings. Technology cannot produce new connections between disciplines."
In much of the world, the question isn't whether innovation can make higher education more efficient and affordable. It's whether it can help it function at all.
A year ago, the campus of Felix Houphouet Boigy University, the largest in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, was nearly deserted, an institutional casualty of recent post-election violence. During the conflict, so-called student groups had become armed militias, accused of racketeering and rape. Buildings were looted, and the university shut down for 17 months.
Today, the campus is open again but bursting at the seams and barely functional. It's added 10,000 students, for a total of 60,000. But there's a shortage of classrooms, and no books in the two libraries.
For students like Abdoulaye Coulibaly, it would be easy to see the appeal of other options. To reach his 8 a.m. class by bus, he leaves home around 5 a.m. He's been robbed a half-dozen times en route.
Yet he's skeptical.
"We're going to be very lazy online," he said. "If you put my class online I'm going to take it and I'm not going to come to the university again. We need to come to class. They're the teachers and they have to teach us. If we don't understand, we need to ask questions. That's the only way for us to understand."
Fellow English student Stephanie N'Guessan was also unconvinced.
"Many of us don't know how to manage the Internet very well," she said. "I myself am computer illiterate."
Many experts argue the hype of technology transforming higher education in such places is overblown.
"Disadvantaged populations need higher-touch services, not self-services," said Peter Stokes, an expert on education innovation at Northeastern University in Boston.
Still, roughly 40 percent of Coursera's registered students come from developing countries, and close to half of edX's.
India's latest official 5-year plan calls for increasing college enrollment by roughly 2 million students each year, to help it catch up with emerging economies like Brazil and China. Coursera co-founder Daphne Kohler says meeting its goals would require India to build 1,500 new universities — when it can't staff its current ones. Scaled-up teaching through technology is its only hope.
Francisco Marmolejo, a longtime Mexican university administrator who now leads the World Bank's higher education efforts, said global policymakers are intrigued by technology like MOOCs, but also anxious. They fear such innovations will become an excuse to ignore the imperative of building local institutions.
Physical universities are "a place where you train to become a citizen," he said. "It is not the new technologies against the old system. It is the blended component that I believe may be the key."
Indeed, an experiment underway in California's public universities has found students doing well when MOOCs used in conjunction with traditional classes, supplementing them. When they replace traditional classes, they have done worse.
In 1997, Marmolejo noted, the late management guru Peter Drucker predicted big university campuses would disappear within 30 years. Yet the importance of place, and human interaction, appears if anything to have been magnified.
Still, Drucker may well be proved correct in comparing the scale of the changes coming to higher education to the revolution unleashed by the printing press.
Universities "need to change and they will change," Marmolejo said. "Technology will absolutely help them to change."
Robbie Corey-Boulet reported from Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Follow Justin Pope on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Justin_Pope1


text:
For the regular visitors, The Boba Fett Fan Club is undergoing a new maintenance system.
Updates will resume soon but the site will return to normal after Thanksgiving weekend.
For new visitors, welcome and be prepared for the relaunch of a legendary site. Since 1996, this has been an archive for the most popular Star Wars character on the internet. Thank you for visiting and please return in the next few days.


text:
Darien girls cross country team claims 13th place at New England Championship in Maine
Staples senior Henry Wynne continued his dominance in cross country this fall by winning the New England championship Saturday at Twin Brook Recreation Center in Cumberland, Maine.
Wynne, the FCIAC, Class LL and State Open, finished in a time of 16:12.86, beating out runner-up Trevor Cawley of Cumberland, R.I., who finished in 16:14.21.
Other regional runners who finished among the top 25 to earn all-New England honors were Jake Feinstein of Newtown (4th, 16:26.14), Christian Alvarado of Fairfield Prep (9th, 16:37.53), Trevor Hopper of Ridgefield (11th, 16:39.19), Logan Fulton of Barlow (16th, 16:49.28), Mitchell Russo of Newtown (20th, 16:53.45) and Mickey Kozak of Danbury (22nd, 16:54.41).
Bishop Hendricken of Rhode Island won the team title with 85 points. New Milford was the top regional finisher among the 30 teams who qualified with 263 points for fifth place followed by Newtown (6th, 266), Staples (9th, 317) and Amity (11th, 378).
In the girls competition, Staples freshman Hannah Debalsi was the top regional finisher in 11th place with a time of 19:32.27. Other regional finishers among the top 25 were Laura Hergenrother of Ridgefield (18th, 19:47.4), Anne Johnston of Darien (19th, 19:48.53) and New Fairfield's Gabrielle Richichi (20th, 19:50.88).
Barrington of Rhode Island won the team title with 75 points. Ridgefield was the top regional finisher among the 30 teams who qualified with 218 points for fifth place followed by Wilton (12th, 386)and Darien (13th, 399).


text:
Greetings from Toronto,
It's hot and balmy here, and I'm loving it.
As you may know, my friend Jane Glassco passed away this April. Jane was a benevolent being, and a wonderful source of inspiration to me. Her apartment downtown has been home for me for more than three summers, and since this space is going to change, I have begun documenting aspects of this wild and magical realm.
Here are some watercolours from this sketchbook, as an Ode to Jane's apartment.
Have a wonderful summer,


text:
Indonesian police say a Chicago teen and her boyfriend are refusing to cooperate with investigators after they were arrested in connection with the death of the girl's mother.
Sheila von Wiese-Mack, 62, formerly of the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, was discovered Tuesday in a suitcase in the back of a taxi at the upscale St. Regis Hotel in Denpasar.
Wiese-Mack's daughter, Heather Lois, 19, and 21-year-old Tommy Schaefer were arrested on Wednesday in connection with her death.
The suspects are being held at South Kuta police station at Nusa Dua where investigators say they are refusing to talk.
U.S. & World
NBC 5 has learned that Oak Park police made 86 calls to Wiese-Mack's former home between January 2004 and June 2013 for a combination of domestic violence, theft and a missing person.
The domestic incidents involved the daughter and mother, according to authorities.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports Lois used her mother's credit card to charge for a room at the Conrad Chicago Hotel on Rush Street last month. NBC 5 has learned that Schaefer and a female were arrested following an incident at the hotel. The female was released and Schaefer was charged with disorderly conduct.
Brittany Strangmann lived on the same dorm floor as Schaefer at Northern Illinois University before he dropped out last year. She describes him as a "nice guy."
"He was so focused on his music. That was his life," Strangmann said. "He would show me videos of stuff that inspired him."
"A few days ago on Facebook he said he was going to Indonesia and wasn't sure when he was coming back, and then going to China. I thought that was odd."
Denpasar police chief Djoko Hari Utomo told local media that Wiese-Mack and her daughter had been staying at the hotel for several days before Schaefer joined them. Surveillance cameras later recorded Wiese-Mack and Schaefer arguing in the hotel lobby, The Daily Mail reported.
The morning after that argument, Lois and Schaefer checked out of the hotel and took a large suitcase out to a taxi stand. The pair then went back into the hotel and snuck out through the back of the resort.
After a two-hour wait, the taxi driver was instructed by hotel personnel to drive to the police station. Authorities there opened the suitcase and found Wiese-Mack's body.
Utomo said Lois and Schaefer were tracked down and arrested while they slept at a hotel in the Legian tourist area.
A doctor who performed an examination on Wiese-Mack's body said there were defensive wounds.
Wiese-Mack and her husband, composer/producer James Mack, lived in Oak Park for a number of years, a neighbor said. James Mack died in August 2006. His widow remained in the home before moving to a downtown Chicago condo after taking a big hit in the 2008 real estate market crash.
Music producer Willie Nance is a long time family friend who said when he spoke with Lois last week, it was clear she was "hurting inside."
"I never thought it would go this far. I never dreamed it would go this far," Nance said.
Neighbors said the Oak Park home masked a volatile relationship between the mother and daughter, but none expected it would end in such tragedy.
"I heard they had some domestic issues especially after Heather's dad died but I didn't know it was this bad," said Lois' former classmate Alex Bailey.
"[Sheila] had a hard time of it since her husband died," said neighbor Barbara Watkins. "She didn't deserve this."


text:
The Keva Planks Museum Exhibit
"We have featured Keva twice in our traveling exhibit gallery. Both times was a big hit. Last fall, we decided to give Keva its own gallery for an extended period of time, and I can tell you that it is mighty popular.
Building with Keva is inspiring, it creates community, and it has a meditative quality."
Erik Schurink | Director of Exhibits | Long Island Children's Museum
From tiny startups to iconic national museums, we look forward to working with you. To receive exhibit specifications and pricing, send us an email or give us a call. 540 421-3786
The Top 10 Reasons to Bring KEVA planks to Your Museum
Stealth Learning
As children conceive of a project and strive to build it, they must solve many physics challenges using principles of balance, cantilevers, geometric shapes, optimum proportion, stability and more. They must think in three dimensions while problem solving. Because they are focused on their project and having so much fun, they do not even realize how much they are learning. A typical project is inherently filled with small experiments that slyly transform intangible concepts into working tools of the trade.
From a 5000 foot headline exhibit to a play table in the corner, the KEVA Exhibit can be as large or as small as you choose. Use it as a secondary exhibit when not headlining…use it for school programs (we provide an excellent curriculum/activity guide)…liven up your fundraising events with building contests…use it for day camps. You will think of even more ways to use KEVA Planks in your programs.
Easy parent /child interaction
Parents rarely resist the draw of KEVA Planks. Most parents immediately find themselves on the floor building , playing and collaborating with their children. Moms, Dads and grandparents find conversation is easy as they discuss building plans, new ideas, words of admiration and encouragement. Working side by side builds relationships.
Artistic Scientists and Scientific Artists
We have blended an art gallery and a science lab to create a beautiful place to design and invent. The KEVA exhibit gently nudges scientific minds toward art and artistic minds toward science. To complete a sculpture an artist may need to overcome various physics challenges. The engineer who builds a tall tower may want to explore ways to make it more interesting or attractive.
How do they work?
Every KEVA plank is the same. No sorting, no glue, no Connectors- just simple stacking. Children and adults already know how to stack things, so the creativity and experimentation begin with very little instruction. The simplicity is compelling.
Spectacular possibilities
How high is your ceiling? The construction and demolition of large structures is always a crowd pleaser. Tall towers are fun and easy to build. Someone on your staff would love this assignment. Science World builds a tower to destroy every Saturday.
Expert Staff Training
"Ken brings not only a wealth of knowledge to the training, but a teaching style that is immediately comfortable and engaging. You can tell that his experiences with the blocks are time tested and thoughtfully picked, and that his passion for what they can teach us is equally extensive. We would recommend Keva and Ken for any museum not only as an engaging exhibit experience, but also as a team and discovery building workshop. "
Clay Braxton
Museum of Life and Science
"Just a few more minutes…"
People spend a lot of time in the KEVA Exhibit. Visitors take ownership of their KEVA creations; they often plant themselves in the KEVA room and won't leave until their masterpiece is complete. An extended period of concentration and total immersion in the activity is the typical experience with KEVA. This sets us apart from most other exhibits- even exhibits costing thousands more. Our simplicity is truly engaging.
FREE Exhibit?
Not really, but… The KEVA Exhibit is designed to be purchased at a price that is comparable to many rentals. After the first showing, all repeat runs can be considered to be free. The exhibit stows compactly when not in use. Never again worry about a gap in your schedule or a shortfall in your budget. You will always be prepared with a top quality exhibit when you need it.
STEM Every Day
STEM happens every time a child picks up a KEVA plank. As a design emerges from the mind of the builder, he must grapple with balance, structural integrity, symmetry, form and function. Builders gain a personal understanding of physics as they stack planks.