text:
Blockbuster of 2012 set Marlins up with talent
One year later, club seeing young players blossom into quality core pieces
MIAMI -- A year ago at the General Managers Meetings, the seeds were planted for what blossomed into one of the biggest and most controversial trades in Marlins history.
The framework of the 12-player package was discussed at last fall's GM Meetings in Indian Wells, Calif. On Nov. 19, 2012, the deal became official, as Miami sent established stars Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, John Buck and Emilio Bonifacio to Toronto for Adeiny Hechavarria, Henderson Alvarez, Jeff Mathis, Jake Marisnick, Justin Nicolino, Anthony DeSclafani and Yunel Escobar.
Escobar, at the Winter Meetings a few weeks later, was sent to the Rays for Derek Dietrich.
The trade shed roughly $168 million in future salary commitments by the Marlins, and it purged the remaining high-priced pieces from the high-profile 2012 Miami roster.
At the time, the deal created a backlash locally and nationally because the Marlins cleaned house after just one season in their retractable-roof ballpark.
A year later, Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill understands why people were upset. He also noted several of the returning pieces in the deal are core pieces to the organization pushing forward.
"It's always tough when you move talented players," Hill said. "They were established players in the game, with established pedigrees. And the names coming back, a lot of people didn't know.
"What I tried to do in following up the trade was to just have people reserve judgment. See what we got back. See the talent we got back before they made an opinion."
The 2012 Marlins, with a $100 million payroll, ended up in last place in the National League East, losing 93 games. In 2013, a transition season with younger players, the Marlins dropped 100 games and also ended up last in the division.
As the organization pushes to move forward, it will be banking heavily on a number of the players acquired a year ago from Toronto.
Hechavarria is an athletic shortstop with slick defensive skills, but he ultimately will be evaluated on how much improves as a hitter. Alvarez is a fixture in the rotation, and he no-hit the Tigers in the last game of the '13 season.
Mathis is the starting catcher, and Marisnick has a chance to be the center fielder of the future.
DeSclafani and Nicolino were standout pitchers in Double-A, and Dietrich made contributions at second base at the big league level and in the Minors. Dietrich will be in the mix to contribute at second or third base in 2014.
"As we look at where those guys are now, they're a big part of our future moving forward, with a year of experience under their belts," Hill said. "When we made the deal, we were pretty confident we had gotten a lot of talent back. To anyone who would listen that's what we said, we got a lot of talent back."
DeSclafani, a right-hander, was named the organization's Minor League Pitcher of the Year. Nicolino is a left-hander who will head into Spring Training looking to earn a roster spot. The two pitchers could be in position to reach the big leagues in '14. They also may be dangled as trade pieces in Miami's quest to land impact bats.
Marisnick is terrific defensively, but he has a ways to go at the plate.
Marcell Ozuna is the front-runner to win the center-field job in Spring Training. If he does, Marisnick likely could open at Triple-A New Orleans to refine his swing.
Dietrich, a left-handed hitter, belted nine home runs in 57 games with the Marlins, and another 11 at Double-A.
Mathis was commended for the way he handled the young pitching staff, but he had his struggles at the plate. Most likely, he will split time behind the plate next year.
"You look back a year later, and DeSclafani was our Minor League Pitcher of the Year," Hill said. "Nicolino had a very good year at Double-A. Jake Marisnick gets to the big leagues for us. Hechavarria plays a Gold Glove [caliber] shortstop, and he is our everyday shortstop. Henderson Alvarez is a big piece of our rotation and he finishes the year with a no-hitter. We strongly felt we were getting quality back. A year later, my opinion hasn't changed a bit. I'm even stronger in the belief that we did get a lot of talent back."


text:
Sunflower Valley is a game for 2-5 players.Game info on BoardGameAtlas.comGame info on BoardGameGeek.com
Game info on BoardGameAtlas.com
Game info on BoardGameGeek.com
This form will move this price for this item to a new item. Search for the item you want to move to below, then submit.
You can find a BGG ID for a game by visiting it's game page on BGG's website. Then copy/paste the ID found in the URL. Below is a screenshot of where to find the ID.
An Odd 1s Out Food Fight Card game
$259,197 / $10,000
Ends in 26 days
"Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination."
- The first ideal of the Knights Radiant, from The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
For those of you who have already read the Stormlight Archive books by Brandon Sanderson, you're gonna l...
Princess Bride Board Game Announced by Ravensburger>
Cafe Chaos: An Odd 1s Out Card Game Now on Kickstarter!>
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Making The BEST Board Game Search Engine (BGA feature #77)>

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Man on finding missing girl: "I said, 'Come on, baby. Everybody's looking for you. We're gonna take you home.'
Zoe Carles told family she'd gotten lost and couldn't find her way home.
Zoe Carles told family she'd gotten lost and couldn't find her way home.
Zoe Carles told family she'd gotten lost and couldn't find her way home.
Missing South Carolina 12-year-old, Zoe Carles, was found safe Saturday morning.
Denise Crain, Donny Crain and their daughter, Cheyenne, who were among the volunteers helping search for the missing girl, told WYFF News 4's Aly Myles, they found Zoe in a field 1 1/2 miles from her home. The Crains said they were driving when Cheyenne saw something move in a field. They went to that area and found Zoe alone and scared.
"We told her we were going to take her home and I told her there were many people that loved her and her parents loved her also," Denise Crain said.
The Crains said social media helped lead them to Zoe.
"If it weren't for the social media and the shares, she might not have been able to be found," Denise Crain said.
They said Zoe told them she'd gotten lost and couldn't find her way home.
"She was just scared. She didn't really want to come (with us) and I told her who I was and who Cheyenne was," Donny Crain said. "I said, 'Come on, baby. Everybody's looking for you. We're gonna take you home.'
Deputies said they got a call just before 11 p.m. Thursday reporting that Zoe had headed toward a barn on the property near Clinton around 6 p.m. and had not returned.
Several local and state agencies and the FBI joined the Laurens County Sheriff's Office in the search during the morning hours. K-9 units, community volunteers and a SLED helicopter also were involved in the search.
"We never stopped trying. We changed our focus. We were always concentrating on her," Laurens County Sheriff Don Reynolds said.
When the sheriff was asked about the massive response from many law enforcement agencies, he called it a "blessing."
"I think it's just a blessing that kind of outreach happened. I hope it happens like that every time," Reynolds said. "I hope there's not another time like this but if there is, I pray there's that kind of outreach again."
Jen Amick, Zoe's aunt, said Zoe was adopted from Liberia, and is the fourth of 10 children.
On Saturday, Amick said the family was ecstatic to have Zoe home.
"We've just been blown away by the community support and just all over the country," Amick said. "The FBI, the Laurens County Sheriff's Office was involved, the local first responders. Lots of families and individuals, just community got involved. We're just overwhelmed."
Amick said Zoe could hear people calling her but said she didn't know which way to go and has a bad sense of direction.
"I think toward the end she just started staying in one spot so she wouldn't get more lost," Amick said.
Many of her siblings were in tears, hugging their sister when she came home.
"My parents haven't slept at all and I knew they wouldn't sleep until we found her. I'm just so glad we did," Phoebe Carles, Zoe's sister, said. "My dad is bawling, crying. I've never seen him cry like that before. We're just so so happy."
Officials said an Amber Alert had not been issued because there was no sign that Zoe had been abducted.


text:
$15 for ZIP Code: 20146
Your order should arrive in 1-3 days. We will contact you via the provided phone number to schedule the date and time of your delivery. Our local partners will pick up your order from the store, notify you that it's on the way and drop it off at your home. You will also receive a completed delivery email which may include a photo of your delivery.Delivery Terms
Not all orders can be processed for the initial fee charged. Larger orders may require a two-person delivery and a larger vehicle which could result in those deliveries costing more.
If there is a question about stock availability, you will be contacted by someone from The Container Store.


text:
Deer Tee
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text:
HAppS (the Haskell Application Server framework) recently got a whole lot more awesome when it added support for HTML templating using HSP (Haskell Server Pages).
HSP is an extension to Haskell which allows you to use XML syntax in your Haskell source. It is implemented as a preprocessor, trhxs, which transforms the source into regular Haskell code. Unlike some templating systems, you are not restricted to simple string substitution, or a limited templating language. Using HSP we can use the full-power of Haskell in our templates.
In this quickstart guide I will give a brief overview of how I use HSP with HAppS. I assume you already know the basics of using HAppS and so I do not cover those aspects, unless they differ when using HSP. This quickstart is very heavy on the "what to do", but a bit light on the "why" portion. The biggest contribution is the working example directory, which gets you started on the right foot.
Extracting and Running this QuickStart
This quickstart is written in Literal Haskell, and can be executed directly. But, more usefully, I have also written scripts which will automatically extract the code from this quickstart and create a nice template directory to start your projects with.
Among other things, you must be using a version of trhsx which was built against haskell-src-exts >= 0.3.5. And you should be using a version of HAppS-Server that has my support for on-the-fly output validation. However, it is trivial to comment out the validation support if you need to.
You can get a copy of this quickstart via
darcs get http://src.seereason.com/examples/happs-hsp-quickstart/
To recreate this quickstart as a .html file, just run:
To run the quickstart in-place do:
make test
and then point your browser at http://localhost:8000/
To load the quickstart Main.lhs into GHCi, set the option -ipages
To extract the code into a usable template run:
make template
This will create a subdirectory named template which you can copy, modify, and use for your own projects.
A Very Simple HSP Example
The following example highlights the basics of mixing XML and Haskell together. This example uses HSP, but not HAppS.
The first thing to notice is the extra options we pass to GHC, namely
-F -pgmF trhsx. This tells GHC (and GHCi) to call
trhsx to pre-process the source code before trying to compile it.
trhsx will automatically translate the XML syntax into normal Haskell code which the compiler can understand.
> {-# OPTIONS_GHC -F -pgmF trhsx #-}
> module Main where
> import Data.Char (toUpper)
> import HSP
> import HSP.HTML
Next we see how to write a simple function which generates XML using the special XML syntax as well as dynamically creating some of the XML using ordinary Haskell expressions.
> -- |hello creates a simple hello <noun> page
> hello :: String -> HSP XML
> hello noun =
>
>
> <title>Hello, <% noun %></title>
>
>
>
Hello, <% map toUpper noun %>

>
>
To use the XML syntax, we just use it -- no special escaping is required to insert XML in the middle of a Haskell expression. On the other hand, if we want to evaluate a Haskell expression and insert it into the XML, then we need the special
<% %> escape clause. If we had just written, <title> Hello, noun</title> then the
title would have been Hello, noun. Likewise, if we did not have the
<% %> around
map toUpper noun, the page would say, "Hello map toUpper noun" instead of evaluating
map toUpper noun and substituting the result in.
We can evaluate any arbitrary expression inside the
<% %>, provided HSP knows how to turn the result into an XML value. By default, HSP knows how to handle
Char, numbers, and some other common Haskell data-types. You can add additional class instances if you want to convert other datatypes (including your own) to XML automatically.
Next we have a simple
main. The first line evaluates
hello and gets back the generated XML. The second line uses
renderAsHtml to turn the XML into HTML.
renderAsHtml expects you to pass in valid XHTML which it will transform into valid HTML. However, it does not check the validity of the input or output. We will do that using a more general mechanism in the HAppS code.
> main :: IO ()
> main =
> do (_, xml) <- evalHSP (hello "World") Nothing
> putStrLn (renderAsHTML xml)
If we run this example, we get the following output:
>Hello, World</title
>Hello, WORLD</p
The formatting probably looks a bit funny to you -- but the web browser will read it fine. In HTML, the whitespace between the open and close tags is sometimes significant. However, the whitespace inside the open or close tag itself is never significant. The rendering algorithm is designed to exploit those properties to ensure it never adds significant whitespace where you didn't explicit have it in the input file.
Integrating HSP with HAppS
The integration of HSP with HAppS brings a few things to the table:
- Dynamic HSP recompilation and loading - this means you can modify your HSP templates with out having to completely recompile and restart your HAppS application. Recompiling an HSP page usually happens faster than I can switch from emacs to the web browser and hit reload.
- JSON data serialization - in order to pass data from HAppS to the HSP template, the data is serialized as a JSON object. This can be especially useful if you want to extend your application to support AJAX or if you want to expose your API to third parties using JSON, because you can use a single unified JSON API for all three instead of having the JSON API be some extra thing that is tact on.
If you decide you do not like using JSON and the dynamic page loading provided happs-hsp-template, but you do like HSP, it should be fairly straight forward to use HSP directly in your HAppS application, similar to how you would use Text.XHtml. However, this quickstart will focus on using happs-hsp-template.
Basic framework
This is the basic framework for creating a HAppS application using:
- HAppS-Server for HTTP, cookies, etc
- HAppS-State for persistent storage (aka, our database)
- HSP for HTML templating
- RJson for JSON marshalling
> module Main where
> import Control.Concurrent
> import Control.Monad
> import HAppS.Server
> import HAppS.State
> import HSP
> import HAppS.Template.HSP
> import HAppS.Template.HSP.Handle
> import Interface
> import State
> import System.Environment
> import Text.RJson
main function is mostly boilerplate.
> main :: IO ()
> main =
newStore just creates an
IORef to a
Map which will map template source files to compiled object files.
> do store <- newStore
startSystemState starts the state transaction system.
> control <- startSystemState entryPoint
Next we parse the command-line arguments to extract a default config file. We also enable validation using wdg-html-validator. In theory, validation should be enabled and disable via a command-line argument, but I have not quite figured out how to add the desired functionality to
parseConfig. If you do not have a version of HAppS-Server which support validation, then just change the last line to
Right c -> c.
> eConf <- liftM parseConfig getArgs
> let conf = case eConf of
> Left e -> error (unlines e)
> Right c -> c { validator = Just wdgHTMLValidator }
We then fork off the HTTP process in a new thread. This will take care of handling all incoming requests for us in the background.
> tid <- forkIO $ simpleHTTP conf $ impl store
Now we are just waiting around for someone to terminate us.
> putStrLn "running..."
> waitForTermination
Finally we cleanly shutdown the system. The system will not get corrupted if it is shutdown unexpected or improperly, however it may be possible that some pending transactions are lost. (That is true of most (or all?) database systems. The Consistency part of ACID means that the database will not get corrupt. That neccesarily means that sometimes data will be lost during an abrupt shutdown or intentionally thrown out during recovery.)
> killThread tid
> shutdownSystem control
> destroyStore store
entryPoint is just there to provide type information to
startSystemState. The type should be the one you want stored in your State. In our case that is
> entryPoint :: Proxy HitCounter
> entryPoint = Proxy
impl function is your typical HAppS-Server impl function with a few new constructs:
> impl :: Store -> [ServerPart Response]
> impl store =
> [ runHSPHandle "pages" "objfiles" store $ multi
> [ dir "json"
> [ dir "times"
> [ path $ \c ->
> [ method GET $ ok (toResponse (toJson (if c == (1 :: Integer) then "time" else "times")))
> ]
> ]
> ]
> , method GET $ do hits <- webUpdate IncHits
> addParam "hits" hits
> ok =<< execTemplate Nothing "Index.hs"
> ]
> ]
runHSPHandle takes four arguments
- the directory which holds the templates
- the directory to store the compiled template object files in
- a handle to the
storewhich manages the objects
- a
ServerPart a
dir "json" provides our JSON API, which can be accessed via HSP, client-side javascript, or as a 3rd party API. We currently only provide one API call,
times. It takes an integer and returns
"time" if it is 1, otherwise
"times". The
toJson function converts the value into JSON data. Our JSON API must be inside
addParam function adds the
hits value to the environment used by the page template later. This allows us to pass information to the page template without having to add a JSON API call. We can not always use this method because we may not know what information the page template will need until we run it. More on this later.
execTemplate function is responsible for actually invoking a specific template. It takes two arguments:
- default XMLMetaData (mime-type, doctype, etc), to use if the template does not provide any values.
- the name of the template file relative to the directory passed to
JSON Interface
JSON, short for Javascript Object Notation, is a lightweight data-interchange format. It's primary appeal is that it is natively supported by Javascript. This means you can create javascript objects using JSON notation in the javascript program text, and you can easily convert between JSON and javascript objects at runtime.
happs-hsp-template uses RJson for converting Haskell values to and from JSON. See the README in the RJson tarball for more information on using RJson.
We define our datatypes which will be turned into JSON objects in pages/Interface.lhs. It is in the pages subdirectory because it needs to be imported by both our HAppS backend as well the the HSP templates. This ensures that they are both talking the same specification.
> {-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell, UndecidableInstances, FlexibleInstances, GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving, MultiParamTypeClasses, DeriveDataTypeable, TypeFamilies #-}
> module Interface where
> import HAppS.Data
> import HAppS.State
Next we define a type which will be used as JSON data:
> $(deriveAll [''Eq,''Ord,''Read,''Show,''Num,''Enum,''Default]
> [d|
> newtype HitCounter = HitCounter { hits :: Integer }
> |])
One key thing to note is that we use the record syntax in our type declaration. This is so that RJson can automatically convert our data-type into a JSON object. If we did not do this, we would have to manually declare instances of
ToJson and
FromJson for HitCounter.
It is critical that you read the RJson README to get an understanding of what it supports, or you will be mystified as to why your JSON data is getting silently corrupted.
Because we might want to store HitCounter in the HAppS State we also
deriveSerialize for it, and create a
Version instance. In theory this could also be useful if clients attempt to pass JSON data back to the server using an older format. However, I have no idea how to handle that in practice.
> $(deriveSerialize ''HitCounter)
> instance Version HitCounter
State Definition
In this quickstart our State will just be
HitCounter. There is nothing HSP-specific about this module, aside from the fact that we have already defined
HitCounter in Interface.lhs.
> {-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell, UndecidableInstances, FlexibleInstances, GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving, MultiParamTypeClasses, DeriveDataTypeable, TypeFamilies #-}
> {-# OPTIONS_GHC -F -pgmF trhsx #-}
> module State where
> import HAppS.Data
> import HAppS.State
> import Control.Concurrent
> import Control.Monad.State
> import Interface
> -- |increment hit counter, and return new value
> incHits :: Update HitCounter HitCounter
> incHits =
> do hc <- fmap succ get
> put hc
> return hc
> $(mkMethods ''HitCounter
> [ 'incHits
> ])
> instance Component HitCounter where
> type Dependencies HitCounter = End
> initialValue = HitCounter 0
Index Page
Now that we have our JSON interface and our State defined, we can implement a page template.
We will use the OPTIONS_GHC pragma to automatically pass this file through trhsx. happs-hsp-template will automatically add this command-line option when compiling pages, but adding it explicitly means we can easily load the file into GHCi.
> {-# OPTIONS_GHC -F -pgmFtrhsx #-}
> module Index where
> import Control.Monad.Trans
> import HSP
> import HAppS.Template.HSP
> import UACCT
> import HSP.Google.Analytics
> import HAppS.State
> import Interface
In our templates, the entry point is always
page and it always has the type
Web XML. (If you use HSP without HAppS then you will want HSP XML instead of Web XML). This is similar to how normal programs always start at
main and
main always has the type
> page :: Web XML
> page =
> withMetaData html4Strict $
> do (HitCounter hits) <- localRead "hits"
> times <- globalRead $ simpleRequest ("/json/times/" ++ show hits)
> page' hits times
page function does fours things.
- Sets the XML meta-data to html4Strict. This will:
- render the page as HTML (instead of XML)
- set the DOCTYPE to HTML 4.01 Strict.
- set the content-type to "text/html"
- render the page as HTML (instead of XML)
- reads the
"hits"value from the local environment.
- Uses the JSON API to determine if it should say, "time" or "times"
- Calls the
The environment read by
localRead is created way back in the
impl function when we did:
> addParam "hits" hits
globalRead simulates an HTTP request to the HAppS server. In this example, we just do a simple GET request to /json/times, but any type of HTTP request can be simulated.
globalRead returns "Missing content-type", it is probably because your JSON API is not inside the runHSPHandle call.
page' function is straight-forward HSP code. We could have put the contents in the
page function itself, but I prefer to split it out, because it looks neater, and makes gives you the option of calling the
page' function.
> page' :: Integer -> String -> Web XML
> page' hits times =
>
>
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
> <title>HitCounter 3000</title>
> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/css/hg.css" media="screen" title="default" />
>
>
>
HitCounter 3000

>
This page has been viewed <% (show hits) ++ " " ++ times %>.

> <% analytics uacct %>
>
>
Google Analytics Code
UACCT module is just a place to keep our Google Analytics account code so that we can easily import it into all the pages on the site. Since you are likely to want to use a different Google Analytics code for each site, it makes more sense to keep this code in the pages directory on a per-project basis, rather than store it in a system-wide library.
> module UACCT where
> import HSP.Google.Analytics
> uacct :: UACCT
> uacct = UACCT "UA-4353757-1"
I hope you now have a basic idea of what is going on. The next step is to extract the template directory and attempt to make your own site.
In this quickstart, our State and our JSON interface are very closely related. In fact, they are just the
HitCounter type. For a simple application such as this one, Storing your JSON objects directly in the State seems like a sensible approach. For other sites, you will find that you want to have one set of data types for your State, and a separate set of data types for your Interface, though some data types may still be shared between the two.


text:
Sep 14, 2019
Universe in the Park at Kohler-Andrae State Park
Universe in the Park (UitP) is a popular outreach program of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. A typical UitP session begins just after sunset with a talk and slide show about astronomy. At the conclusion of the talk, weather permitting, we set up a telescope and provide park visitors the opportunity to view available astronomical objects. The statewide Universe in the Park program of the UW-Madison Astronomy Department is funded entirely by the generous support of Jere and Anne Fluno.


text:
In her debut feature film "Sufat Chol" (Sand Storm), which was awarded the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Israeli director Elite Zexer tells the story of Bedouin women struggling to change the unchangeable rules, each in her own individual way. Interview by Igal AvidanMore
″Morus 14″ is a charitable organisation that aims to promote social integration based in Neukolln – one of Berlin′s more deprived neighbourhoods. Along with other volunteers, Jewish Israeli Hagar Levin manages the organisation′s successful drop-in project for Muslim children and teenagers. Interview by Igal AvidanMore
At present, IS is the most dangerous terrorist militia in the world. It controls a territory that stretches from north-eastern Syria to western Iraq, including almost all Syrian oil and gas fields. Igal Avidan spoke to Christoph Reuter (correspondent for the German weekly news magazine "Der Spiegel") about the ascent of ISMore
In his impressive 3D documentary "Iraqi Odyssey", the Iraqi-born Swiss filmmaker Samir combines the personal stories of some of his relatives with archive footage of events in Iraq from the Ottoman Empire to the era of Saddam Hussein. Igal Avidan spoke to him in BerlinMore
Mor Loushy's moving documentary "Censored Voices" is based on the Israeli book "The Seventh Day" (Hebrew: Siach Lochamim), in which soldiers who fought in the Six Day War in 1967 talk about their personal experiences and intimate feelings. The interviews were conducted only days after the conflict by writers, including a young Amos Oz and the editor and publisher Avraham Shapira, who were, like the soldiers, Kibbutz members at the time. They wanted to understand the grief of the soldiers, grief that had been drowned out by the victory parades. Igal Avidan spoke to the directorMore
Green is the colour of Hamas. The documentary "The Green Prince" tells the story of a Palestinian who turned informer and worked for the Israeli secret service for years. Igal Avidan watched the film and spoke to its director, Nadav SchirmanMore
With its exhibition "SNIP IT! Stances on Ritual Circumcision", the Jewish Museum in Berlin offers surprising and diverse insights into the significance of a ritual about which few people in Germany know very much at all. Igal Avidan went to see the exhibitionMore
Judith Katzir is one of the most interesting young authors in Israel. Her books deal mostly with strong women who undertake journeys into their own past. Her new novel, "Tzila", is based on letters belonging to her great-grandmother and describes her journey to Gaza, where her Jewish family once lived. Igal Avidan spoke to the authorMore
The film "Asabani Nistam!" (I'm not angry!) was the only Iranian entry at this year's Berlinale film festival. On screen, young Iranians vent their anger and frustration at the day-to-day economic hardship and the general hopelessness of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's term as president. Igal Avidan spoke to the director and producer Reza DormishianMore
In Mehran Tamadon's new documentary, the director enters into a debate with four loyal supporters of the regime, who better him in every aspect of the discussion. Igal Avidan saw the film at the BerlinaleMore
Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial institute for the first time granted an award to an Egyptian for rescuing a Jewish family during World War II in Berlin. Igal Avidan spoke to Irena Steinfeldt, director of the Department for the Righteous Among the Nations in Yad VashemMore
The film Sanctity tells the story of Areej, a young, pregnant Saudi widow, who will do anything to protect her unborn child. Kamel not only wrote and directed the film, she also played the leading role. It was shot on location in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and is her second film. Igal Avidan met her in Berlin and asked her about women's rights and film-making in a country that has no cinemas.More
In "A World not Ours", Danish-Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel portrays for years the refugee camp Ain el-Helweh in Southern Lebanon, from where his family originates and where his grandfather still lives. Interview by Igal AvidanMore
"Sharqiya" is the first Israeli film to deal with the dire situation of the country's Bedouins. At the film's international premiere at the Berlinale Film Festival in Germany, Igal Avidan spoke to screenwriter Guy Ofran, director Ami Livne and lead actor Adnan Abu WadiMore
In this interview, Palestinian politician Ilan Halevi describes the hurdles that have to be overcome on the road to statehood and speaks of the rapprochement and the animosity between Fatah and Hamas. Igal Avidan spoke to him at a conference organised by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in BerlinMore
A powerful explosion rocked the Lebanese capital of Beirut, killing at least 100 people and injuring thousands more. Hospitals quickly filled beyond capacity and there have been appeals for people to give blood. By Darko Janjevic


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Privacy and consumer groups are urging a federal judge to sign off on a controversial Facebook settlement over its "Sponsored Stories" advertising program which will net them a combined payout of $10 million, despite indifference to or confusion over the terms of the vaguely written settlement, according to interviews, e-mail and court records.
But groups not getting any money say the settlement does little for the privacy rights of Facebook's 850 million users and want the deal scuttled, according to court documents and interviews.
Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, D.C., said the settlement amounts to "just putting some more words in Facebook's privacy policy that nobody reads." He added in a telephone interview that, "The proposed changes to the privacy agreement don't serve the class."
The Facebook settlement, which needs a judge's approval, provides a glimpse into the dark side of large class-action settlements: The plaintiff's lawyers get rich, class members get little and non-profit groups often reap millions by urging judges to approve the deal regardless of its merits.
In this deal, which settles a year-old lawsuit, Facebook is agreeing to give its users the right to "limit" how the social-networking site uses their faces in ads under Facebook's "Sponsored Stories" program.
But whether the settlement will allow Facebook users to completely opt out of the program, which turns the act of pressing the Facebook "Like" button into a potential commercial endorsement, is totally unclear in the settlement.
The suit, filed in April 2011, claimed Facebook did not adequately inform people of the feature or give them a way to opt out of the advertising program that began in January 2011.
The settlement provides $10 million in fees to the lawyers who brought the privacy litigation and a $10 million donation to charity — earmarked to dramatically boost the budgets of 15 consumer activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.
Known in legal terms as cy pres awards, charity payouts to settle class actions are not unusual. Such arrangements often happen when there are so many members of a class-action suit that compensating them for their damages would literally annihilate a company, which judges are loath to do.
The EFF, known for its online freedom initiatives including ongoing litigation accusing the National Security Agency of vacuuming all of Americans' electronic communications without warrants, stands to reap $1 million from the deal. That amounts to almost one-fourth of its $4.3 million annual budget last year. The group's executive director, Shari Steele, told the federal judge presiding over the matter that the group backed the settlement. (.pdf)
The group's legal director, Cindy Cohn, explained in a telephone interview that the San Francisco-based group supported the plan for budgetary reasons.
"We haven't taken a position on this settlement, whether it's a good idea or not," Cohn said. "In general, EFF is happy to receive cy pres money. We can continue to educate people about privacy."
The most vociferous voice opposing the settlement is Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Washington, D.C.-based group heading privacy litigation against the nation's nude body scanners.
His group is getting nothing in the deal and he wants the court to block it. But he also petitioned the court to include his group among those awarded parts of the purse.
He believes that the settlement should demand Facebook rewrite its terms of service so that only users who deliberately opt-in would be included in the Sponsored Stories program. He also believes his group should also get a share of the money.
"The mechanisms contemplated by the settlement agreement will produce relief that is largely illusory," he said in an e-mail.
But those getting the money have a different interpretation.
The Center for Democracy & Technology, also in D.C., which urged the judge to sign the deal, said the accord provides Facebook users the ability to completely opt out of being featured in "Sponsored Stories." The center is set to receive $1 million under the settlement, almost one-fourth of its $4.2 million 2012 budget.
The group's executive director, Leslie Harris, sent the judge a letter declaring the group's support for the accord. (.pdf)
In "Sponsored Stories," if a Facebook user clicks the "like" button for a product or service with a Facebook page, that user's profile picture and name may be automatically used in advertisements for that product or service that appear in the their friends' Facebook pages. Facebook also reserves the right to show such ads on sites other than Facebook.
As part of the settlement, (.pdf) the social-networking site will have to disclose to Facebook users in its new terms of service that it can use its 850 million users as public spokespersons for some company for just having "liked" that company, perhaps to watch a movie or get a discount. Terms of the deal, unveiled last month, also require Facebook to ensure that its users "are apprised of the existence and mechanics of Sponsored Stories ads, and they will then also be capable of taking steps to limit their appearance in those ads." Yet another section of the accord says, "Facebook will further engineer settings to enable users, upon viewing the interactions and other content that have been in Sponsored Stories, to control which of these interactions and other content are eligible to appear in additional Sponsored Stories."
Nowhere in the deal does it expressly say users get the ability to completely opt out. Currently, Facebook does not allow such an opt-out, saying, "You can't opt out of being featured in Sponsored Stories, but you can visit your activity log to make sure that only the people you want to share with can see your activity."
Facebook declined to comment on whether its users could opt out of the program under the settlement. It also declined to comment on how it chose the recipients of the $10 million. None of the plaintiffs' lawyers who sued Facebook responded to repeated phone calls or e-mails seeking comment.
"I do think it is clear that it's an opt-out," Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy for the Center for Democracy & Technology, said in a telephone interview. "I would prefer the language to be different."
Even if were not an opt-out, he said: "This is an improvement over existing policy, and is better than anything else that we are going to get. You sign away your rights to your face when you sign up for Facebook."
The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the Boalt Hall School of Law at Cal Berkeley stands to reap $600,000 under the deal.
Chris Hoofnagle, a privacy law lecturer there, believes the settlement "allows Facebook to continue sponsored stories, albeit with more disclosures."
However, "this isn't unreasonable. Sponsored Stories and similar indignities are the centerpiece of Facebook," he said in an e-mail.
Unlike the other groups that submitted declarations in support of the settlement, Hoofnagle said the Berkeley Center was not asked by the settling parties to submit one.Groups Getting a Share of $10 Million from the Facebook "Sponsored Stories" Settlement
|Joan Ganz Cooney Center
|$1 million
|Center for Democracy & Technology
|$1 million
|Electronic Frontier Foundation
|$1 million
|MacArthur Foundation
|$1 million
|Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
|Consumers Federation of America
|Consumers Union
|Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society
|Boalt Hall School of Law Berkeley Center for Law and Technology
|New York University Information Law Institute
|Santa Clara University School of Law High Tech Law Institute
|Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society
|Rose Foundation
|Connect Safely
|Wired Safety
(Source: Court documents)
UPDATE at 9:15 a.m. PDT Saturday: Consumers Union has rejected the $500,000. "While Facebook is giving consumers some controls they ought to have, we are seriously concerned the default settings still allow use of names and photos for marketing campaigns without express consent," said Ioana Rusu, the group's regulatory counsel.
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society stands to get $600,000 under the deal, which will be a generous boost to the program's $5.5 million budget for 2012. Its director, Urs Gasser, said in an e-mail that the center has taken no position on the merits of the litigation.
"Although the Berkman Center has been identified by the parties as a proposed recipient of settlement proceeds, we are basically an outsider to the case. For that reason, we must rely upon the court to consider fully and appropriately whether the proposed settlement protects the interests of the class," he said.
The Boston, Massachusetts-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood stands to more than double its $361,000 budget for 2012 with a $500,000 infusion under the deal.
"I believe that the settlement negotiated by plaintiffs in this case will be a tremendous benefit to the class," Susan E. Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, wrote (.pdf) the judge.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of San Jose, California, abruptly recused herself from the case Wednesday without comment. A new judge has been assigned and the settlement hearing scheduled for Thursday has been delayed indefinitely.
Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director at the Center for Internet and Society in Palo Alto, California, wrote the court that the group "is honored to be considered" for a $600,000 check, which she said would fund privacy research. That's more than half her group's $990,000 budget for 2012.
In an e-mail, Granick said that "doesn't mean that CIS is in agreement with any of the details of the settlement."
The group, she said, "doesn't have a substantive position one way or the other on the legal or policy merits of the other details of the settlement proposal."
Infographic: Mike Cerwonka/Wired
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Explore Atlassian events
Watch 2019 Sessions
- Underwear, Clocks, and Companies: How to Change When You Must
Kim Perkins, NOBL
- Being Intentional About Teaming
Bernie Ferguson, R&D Team Coach, Atlassian
- Building a Culture of Success on Open Principles
Josh Lowy, Co-Founder & CEO, Hugo
- Ethical by Design: How to Build Good Technology
Matt Beard, Fellow, The Ethics Centre
- Scaling The Future Workforce Of High-Performing Distributed Teams
Alastair Simpson, Head of Design, Atlassian
- Empathizing Your Way to Effective Teamwork
Sophie Wade, Workforce Innovation Specialist and Founder, Flexcel Network LLC
- The "Pipeline Problem" and Other Myths About Workplace Diversity
John Paz, Senior Content Designer, Atlassian
- Feedback Is the New Black: Building Trust So You Can Scale
Dominik Katz, Product Ops Lead, Siteminder
- Create the Future of Work While You're Living It
Dominic Price, Work Futurist, Atlassian
Underwear, Clocks, and Companies: How to Change When You Must
Kim Perkins
Organizational change is merely individual change carried out at scale. And like the changes we carry out as individuals, organizational change can vary between overwhelming, tedious, and refreshing. In order to understand how we can change our companies, or dare we say, the world, we need to understand change at the human level.
Join Kim Perkins of NOBL for an interactive session that explores resistance to change, as illustrated by real client stories and case studies. She'll share the six types of loss employees experience during change, and you'll walk away with a framework for leading teams through authentic transformation.
Presentation video
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Being Intentional About Teaming
Bernie Ferguson
R&D Team Coach, Atlassian
You've heard all the concepts: trust, culture, autonomy, collaboration. Sounds great in theory, but how do you bring it all to life as your team cycles through forming, storming, norming, and performing?
Using these four stages of team development as a backdrop, Atlassian team coach Bernie Ferguson will explain how to be intentional about evaluating team performance, setting goals, and creating action plans for shoring up your weak spots. This session is best for those ready to clear time on their team's calendar and experiment with new ways of working together. No passengers, please!
Presentation video
Presentation slides
Building a Culture of Success on Open Principles
Josh Lowy
Co-Founder & CEO, Hugo
Two entrepreneurs stumbled upon a few Summit keynote recordings and the Atlassian Team Playbook. What followed was the transformation of their business. Starting with a fractured team and a product struggling to find its place in the market, they emerged as a leader in their space with a tightly aligned team that is smashing their goals.
The secret to their success? Openness. Easy access to information across teams and a safe environment for admitting and learning from mistakes – principles they've even built into the software they make. Hugo co-founder Josh Lowy will share the lessons they've learned about how openness affects the bottom line, attracts the best talent, and develops a culture of success. Spoiler alert: the issue isn't what's going on outside your business – it's what goes on inside.
Presentation video
Presentation slides
Ethical by Design: How to Build Good Technology
Matt Beard
Fellow, The Ethics Centre
From gender-biased resume scanning bots to the dissemination of fake news to apps that send our every smartphone action back to the mothership, the ethics of technology is now under a 10,000-watt spotlight. How can your company avoid becoming the center of the scandal? By putting ethics at the heart of your technical design process.
Join Dr. Matt Beard from the Ethics Center for a primer on embedding ethics into your development process. You'll learn how to prevent costly re-designs, how to become an advocate within your organization, and the philosophies underpinning it all.
Presentation video
Presentation slides
Scaling The Future Workforce Of High-Performing Distributed Teams
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
What would you do if your department grew 3000% (yes: three thousand) in just a few years? That's just what happened with Atlassian's design team from 2012-2018. And just to make things even more fun, this giant new team was spread across four cities and two continents. For a devout people person and "water-cooler guy" like Alastair Simpson, Atlassian's Head of Platform Design, adapting to this brave new world was a challenge at first.
Join Alastair for some real talk about tough lessons learned managing, motivating, and developer a high-performing team of teams that spans an ocean. You'll learn practical strategies for maintaining human connections as you lead and scale.
Presentation video
Presentation slides
Empathizing Your Way to Effective Teamwork
Sophie Wade
Workforce Innovation Specialist and Founder, Flexcel Network LLC
What we used to think of as "soft skills" are now essential for moving fast and future-proofing our careers. (The robots are coming, after all...) As our work environments become more distributed and our teams more diverse, empathy is emerging as the key to everything from performance and productivity to connection and community.
In this session, Sophie Wade will explain how executives, managers, and team members can learn how to develop, measure, and practice empathy at work every day. You'll walk away with new tools for relating, communicating, and collaborating effectively.
Presentation video
Presentation slides
The "Pipeline Problem" and Other Myths About Workplace Diversity
John Paz
Senior Content Designer, Atlassian
If you're having a hard time filling your hiring pipeline with a diverse mix of candidates, you're not alone. You're also not looking in the right places. The so-called "pipeline problem" is a convenient scapegoat for tech's slow progress on the diversity front, but it's nothing more than a cop-out and a myth.
Companies that get serious about installing the right "plumbing" find that their pipeline problems disappear rather quickly. (Fancy that!) In this talk, you'll learn how to start attracting and seeking out talent that represents the makeup of the communities where you live and operate. You'll also learn how to build a culture were diverse employees can find a sense of belonging and bring their full selves to the table.
Presentation video
Presentation slides
Feedback Is the New Black: Building Trust So You Can Scale
Dominik Katz
Product Ops Lead, Siteminder
It's no secret that feedback is an important tool for continuous improvement and building trust within your team. So why is feedback still so darn difficult? Any why do we still rely on managers to do the heavy lifting here?
Join Dom Katz, an Agile Coach who has worked with teams from startups to governments, as he discusses why building trust is a crucial component in allowing teams to be more autonomous, and how peer-to-peer feedback fits into the picture. You'll walk away equipped with techniques for giving and getting better feedback – and a little extra empathy, too.
Presentation video
Presentation slides
Create the Future of Work While You're Living It
Dominic Price
Work Futurist, Atlassian
Throw away your crystal ball because the future is already here. Yes, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain dominate the headlines. But the day-to-day manifestations of the future of work (i.e., the present) are more mundane – though no less daunting. We see it in the way businesses struggle to scale smart and stay one step ahead of disruption. Or how leaders try to manage a global, 24/7 workforce while tasked with meeting ever-increasing customer demands.
The time to take action is now. In this session, Dom Price will break down the five obsolete ways most of us are working, and share new, essential approaches to growth and retooling. He'll also reveal some of the collaboration hacks he's seen from enterprises around the world. Don't be a bystander. Come learn how to create a future where you and your team don't just survive, but thrive.
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Stay tuned
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This year Mech Warfare had quite a few new upgrades. Between a new scoring system/server, a new arena and even more new competitors, there was a lot on the line. Well, we're proud to report that Mech Warfare 2012 was a huge success. 15 qualifying teams battled it out to see whose mech would reign supreme.
In this video you'll see the final Mech Warfare 2012 match. Squaring off were Mech Warfare 2011 Champion "Immortal" and our own Andrew Alter's "Insanity Wolf". This match was incredibly exciting not only because of the amazing technical ability of these two mechs but also because of the excellent piloting of their creators. Be sure to watch all the way through to see the conclusion to this down-to-the-wire match.
Stay tuned for more videos, pictures, and inside scoops on Mech Warfare 2012.


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Nicole Lau
Product Manager, eBay
Nicole Lau is a Product Manager of Experimentation A/B Testing at eBay. Prior to her current role, she was a Business Development Associate at Kroll and an Investment Analyst at Fenox Venture Capital. She is Certified in the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science. Nicole is skilled in Business Development, Due...
More from Nicole Lau
What our instructors and students say
I find that those who generally transition well into Product Management have Empathy and Growth Mindset as key traits.
The most successful students are proactive and think ahead to aggressively set up their career plan.
The course covers every aspect of the PM process, but also provides real cases & examples from leaders in product.We combine principles with real-life examples, and hands-on exercises to develop Product habits.
What makes for a successful student in the class?
Several students figured out to reach out to companies of interest early in the course, to see if they can get feedback on their class project.
Those students then have a good shot at an interview with their project!
My instructor shared plenty of insightful real-world examples during class discussions, which shed light on the nuances of being a product manager. I was always impressed with how he made himself available for his students even with his busy schedule.
My advice to future students would be to:
1. Take advantage of all the resources that Product School offers.
2. Network with your cohort. Your classmates are future product managers and great colleagues to have in the industry.
3. Reach out to your instructors. Buy them coffee and ask questions! They are a great library of product knowledge.
Jason Zhao
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Product Management requires a lot of rigor, as it's important to understand the business, design, development and marketing components of a product. Also, a willingness to give and receive feedback on your work and ideas is very helpful.
In the classroom, I ask them tough questions about applying the lessons from class to their final projects to give them a feel for what it will be like on a product management team.
My instructor was incredible, she has offered to be my mentor and she has always been available to answer all my questions.
I was able to move into a PM position at my company from the Customer Experience position.
What would be your advice for someone starting a Product Management course at Product School?
My advice to future students: Do the readings and talk to your instructor anytime you need clarification. Get a head start on what you want to do for your final project and just have fun! It turns out, that's also the attitude you need to succeed as a product manager!
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Associate Product Manager at Topology
How do you mentor your students for success?
I mentor students by focusing on their goals and setting up a plan to get closer and closer to it.
The course covers every aspect of the PM process, but also provides real cases & examples from leaders in product.
Online training is ideal because you are free from space and time. The future of online education is completely taking education global and to the masses.
This access to top tier education also provides economic opportunity for countries & professionals looking to build better careers & opportunities for both themselves & their families.
I'm a product manager now because I can define my vision for the product and the direction of travel for the project.
What would be your advice for someone starting a Product Management course at Product School?
Do all the assignments, they add a lot of value!
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Head of Products and User
Behaviour Analytics at Jüssi
Your Product Management Certificate Path
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Well wishes for the holidays.
>> Tuesday, December 20, 2011
I hope you all have a great holiday filled with love, good health, financial wealth and answered wishes.
We downsized from a three bedroom to a two bedroom apartment to save money. I'm glad we kept the two baths, especially with three "men" in the house. I was in the holiday spirit and decorated the outside of our door. I think I may have over done it, my poor neighbors.
I also decorated our tree with the same decor that has lasted three years now. It makes our new apartment look so warm and beautiful.
Don't worry about the presents. We are in the middle of translating the funds in fun gifts for the kids. Unfortunately, my older son lost his DSI in the movie theater. Of course we will have to replace it. He cried for a long time. I was going to stop him but realized it's the same feeling when we grown ups loose our phone. It was heart wrenching to watch and I could only imagine what he felt, so I let him get it all out.
My husband and I will have to wrap a card that says "Coupon for a DSI redeemable in January 2012". We can't afford it this Christmas but we can when the sales are on. Thank God he is an understanding kid.
I'll have my last blog for the year next week. It will be about the events of 2011, highlights on LEA and behind the scenes of LEA. You won't want to miss that. Until then, "Have a Wonderful Holiday Season!


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We know that your vehicles are vital to your business. So whether you have a combine harvester or a fleet of coaches you need to know that your vehicle glass needs can be met, quickly and professionally.
No matter when or where you need our help we'll be there providing world-class support for you and your business.
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rub the wrong way
Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Medical, Financial, Encyclopedia.
rub (one) the wrong way
To irritate one due to someone or something's presence, nature, or habitual behavior (as opposed to directly and intentionally). Primarily heard in US. The way she smiles all the time really rubs me the wrong way. It seems so fake. He's always talking about how those commercials rub him the wrong way, but I think they're cute.
rub someone('s fur) the wrong way
Fig. to irritate someone. I'm sorry I rubbed your fur the wrong way. I didn't mean to upset you. Don't rub her the wrong way!
rub the wrong way
Irritate, annoy, as in His remarks about welfare rubbed a great many people the wrong way. This idiom alludes to rubbing an animal's fur in the wrong direction. [Mid-1800s] Also see ruffle someone's feathers.
rub (someone) the wrong way
To annoy; irritate: "One can see ... how [his] expression of his ideals and intentions must have rubbed many people the wrong way" (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt).
rub the wrong way, to
To annoy. This expression transfers rubbing a cat's fur in the wrong direction to irritating a human being. (See also against the grain.) The British locution is to rub someone up the wrong way and dates from the mid-nineteenth century. "Don't rub her prejudices up the wrong way," wrote H. Aïdé (Carr of Carrlyou, 1862).


text: Eric Buechel/Illustrator, Photorealist Painter, Graphic Artist and Photographer"I grew up in what was, at the time, a rural northern neighborhood in the state of New Jersey, just west of Manhattan. I first acquired my skills from my father, Ernest J. Buechel Sr., who was a talented artist and master ship-modeler born in Koblenz, Germany. After spending much of my early youth studying the works of the masters and working diligently on my craft, I won a scholarship in 1977 from the New Jersey Art Directors Club and went on to attend DuCret School of Art in Plainfield, NJ. During this time I took countless trips to some of the worlds most renowned museums in New York City with pencil and sketch book in hand. Perhaps the most important thing to happen in my early career was meeting Dr. Furman J. Finck, the Dean of DuCret and an official presidential portrait painter and author. Under Finck's tutelage and studying Dr. Finck's work at his Manhattan studio, I learned a technique using a Wolff's carbon pencil to draw incredibly detailed portraits.After my studies in New Jersey and NYC I attended Broward College in South Florida and earned a degree in fine art. Soon I was on the way back to New Jersey and Manhattan to start my career as an illustrator and later an art director. In 1991 my path yet changed again. I began experimenting with metals in the electronics field, specifically cathode ray tubes, circuit boards and base metals. On April 14th, 1993 my part-time experimental efforts became the feature story on the front page of the New York Times as a pioneer in the field of electronic recycling, later coined "e-waste". Later United States Senator Lautenburg would nominate me The New Jersey Pride Award In Science and Technology for my environmental process in the recovery of lead from the glass of a cathode ray tube.My hobby would later grow and my company Advanced Recovery was hired to help clean up the Trade Center after the 911 attack. In 2002 I sold the company, moved to Tennessee, and opened an art supply store complete with gallery, cafe and art restoration studio. Nothing could be better and life was good. Then I started to slow down, needing long rests during the day. I finally went to the doctor and received news no one likes to hear - 4th stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A three year battle with cancer and a survival story follows with yet another medium for my artwork arsenal - the camera. During my entire battle there were few days I did not think of my art. I love this quote by Chuck Close "Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and go to work."My work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and London."There is nothing permanent except change. If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we wither and fade away". Eric Buechel


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The search found 207 results in 0.01 seconds.
A new study reveals that while homicide victimization rates declined for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in the United States from 1990-2010, the drop was much more precipitous for the two minority groups.
Despite having only about 5 percent of the world's population, the United States was the attack site for a disproportionate 31 percent of public mass shooters globally from 1966-2012, according to new research that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Women are more likely than men to initiate divorces, but women and men are just as likely to end non-marital relationships, according to a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Prior U.S.-based research examining the collective remembrance of racially charged events has focused on the black-white binary, largely bypassing such remembrance among U.S. Hispanics. In this article, I ask how a group of Mexican-origin Hispanics in an historic Houston barrio remember two racially charged events as well as whether and how these events are publicly commemorated. Additionally, race and collective memory research has often highlighted the role of collective memory in shaping race relations.
In three studies, we examined the influence of social network reactions on feelings toward a romantic partner. Study 1 was a large survey (N = 858), Study 2 was a vignette design in which social network reactions were manipulated, and Study 3 was a laboratory-based, dating game experiment. We found extensive support for the social network effect, whereby relationship approval from family and friends leads individuals to feel more love, more committed, and more positive about a partner. We also examined whether psychological reactance moderated social network influence.
The American Sociological Association (ASA) has sociologists available to discuss the Orlando nightclub massacre from a variety of perspectives.
Despite significant public, political, and media attention to the issue of criminal violence in the United States, we know surprisingly little about the trends in violent crime for different racial/ethnic groups in recent decades. For example, what are the disparities in homicide between whites, African Americans, and Hispanics? Have these disparities changed over the past 20 years? If so, why? This lack of knowledge is largely due to data limitations, as ethnic identifiers are rarely collected in many official crime statistics.
"What does it mean to live for sociology, today?" Michael Burawoy asks in his timely essay, "Sociology as a Vocation." Drawing on insights from Max Weber's classic lectures on science and politics, Burawoy argues that sociology is uniquely positioned to reinvigorate civil society and the university in the face of the relentless growth of marketization across the globe.
—Michael Sauder, editor, Contemporary Sociology
Michael Burawoy
This Report shows the magnitude and complexity of violence in U.S. society, explicates the important ways that social science has already contributed knowledge, and sets forth a challenging set of research directions. The Report makes clear the need for a sustained violence initiative to produce fundamental research. Federal support for a major initiative requires an examination of priorities for allocating scarce resources. Across the landscape of serious issues where serious science must be done, research on violence should be enlarged.
The American Sociological Association (ASA) recently played a key role in support of the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2016 ruling in the affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The judgement allowed the university to continue using race as a factor in admissions decisions.
"Scientific research shows that having a diverse student body leads to a number of educational benefits, including a decline in prejudice, improvements in students' cognitive skills and self-confidence, and better classroom environments," said ASA Executive Officer Sally T. Hillsman.


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- Back in black (and white). Meyer, David N. // Entertainment Weekly;10/27/95, Issue 298, p92
Reviews several music videos. Includes `Peace and Love,' by Neil Young; `Go Walking Down There,' by Chris Isaak; `I Want You,' by Madonna; `Enough,' by Dance Hall Crashers; `Friends of P,' by The Rentals.
- Stinky `feet.' Farber, Jim // Entertainment Weekly;11/01/96, Issue 351, p69
Reviews four music videos. Alanis Morissette's `Head Over Feet'; Republica's `Ready to Go'; Jewel's `You Were Meant for Me'; Schleprock's `Suburbia.'
- Live sex, creamed Korn. Farber, Jim // Entertainment Weekly;3/28/97, Issue 372, p66
Reviews, in brief, the music video presentations of songs from five musical groups. `Lakini's Juice,' from the group Live; `The Perfect Drug,' from Nine Inch Nails; `Electrolite,' from R.E.M.; `Addidas,' from Korn' `Greedy Fly,' from Bush.
- Four blokes and a `baby.' Farber, Jim // Entertainment Weekly;10/10/97, Issue 400, p92
Rates four music videos. `Anybody Seen My Baby?,' by The Rolling Stones; `Dream,' by Forest for the Trees; `Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth,' by The Dandy Warhols; `Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,' by Busta Rhymes.
- Big `smack' attack. JF // Entertainment Weekly;01/16/98, Issue 414, p70
Rates several music videotapes. `Together Again,' from Janet Jackson; `Brimful of Asha,' from Cornershop; `Smack My Bitch Up,' from Prodigy; More.
- Freak previews. Farber, Jim // Entertainment Weekly;06/07/96, Issue 330, p58
Previews and rates music videos. `Pretty Noose,' by Soundgarden; `Salvation,' by The Cranberries; `Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check,' by Busta Rhymes; `The 13th,' by The Cure; `Mother, Mother,' by Tracy Bonham.
- Video clip bored. Browne, David // Entertainment Weekly;5/20/94, Issue 223, p58
Reviews a list of music videos. General Public's `I'll Take You There'; Prince's `The Most Beautiful Girl in the World'; Aaron Hall's `I Miss You'; Meat Loaf's `Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through'; Enigma's `Return to Innocence'; Snoop Doggy Dogg's `Doggy Dogg World'; Madonna's `I'll Remember';...


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Taunton Municipal Lighting Plant invites you to become an e-SMART kid. Becoming e-SMART means learning about electricity and how to use it safely and wisely. Check out our games and activities, and you'll be on your way!
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WP Super Cache is an available plugin for Wordpress installations to store cached versions of your dynamic PHP pages. Installing WP Super Cache can also reduce the number of compute cycles used by a site since it reduces the load on the cluster as well.
WP Super Cache is available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache and is included by default with the Wordpress One Click Install in the control panel.
Before You Begin
- Have your PracticalHost cloud hosting login credentials ready.
Install WP Super Cache
To install WP Super Cache, follow the instructions provided for the plugin located here:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/installation/. If you have installed Wordpress via the Wordpress One Click Installer you already have Super Cache installed.
Recommended configuration
In addition to the instructions included with the manual, the following additional changes are recommend and have been tested and shown to increase the efficiency of WP Supercache in Cloud Sites.
Advanced settings
Go to settings for SuperCache and click on the Advanced tab.
Mark the following items:
- Cache hits to this website for quick access. (Recommended)
- Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files. (Recommended)
- Compress pages so they're served more quickly to visitors. (Recommended)
- Don't cache pages for known users. (Recommended)
- Cache rebuild. Serve a supercache file to anonymous users while a new file is being generated. (Recommended)
- Mobile device support. (External plugin or theme required. See the FAQ for further details.)
- Extra homepage checks. (Very occasionally stops homepage caching) (Recommended)
After making those changes, click Update Status.
Mod_rewrite settings
After the screen refreshes scroll down to the Mod Rewrite Rules section and click Update Mod_Rewrite Rules.
Expiry time and garbage collection
Scroll down to Expiry Time & Garbage Collection.
Change cache timeout to 0 seconds then click Change Expiration.
Preload settings
Click on the Preload tab next.
- Select Preload mode (garbage collection only on legacy cache files. Recommended.).
- Set the refresh rate for preloaded supercache files by changing the number of minutes in the Refresh preloaded cache files every ___ minutes field (0 to disable, minimum 30 minutes) to a number appropriate for the traffic your site receives, like 1440 (24 hours) or 10080 (1 week).
- Click Update Settings, then after the page refreshes click Preload Cache Now and in around 10 or 15 seconds the cache will start building for the site. Depending on the size of the site and amount of content, the cache will take a few seconds to a minute to build. Once complete you will see a much improved response and load time.
Any time a layout change has been made (such as adding a widget or changing the theme), it will be necessary to go to the admin panel and click Delete cache, verify your page looks as you want, then go into into the Supercache settings, go to the Preload tab and click Preload Cache Now to regenerate the cache for the site.
Updating the Supercache plugin
For security purposes and optimizations, it is important to keep the plugin (and Wordpress itself) up-to-date. This can be done through the Wordpress Dashboard.
- Login to your WordPress Dashboard.
- Click the Plugins tab on the left-hand column.
- Check the box next to Plugin to select all available plugin updates.
- Click the Bulk Actions drop down and select Update.
- Click Apply.
- The page will change once all of the plugins are updated.


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In a simple and elegant gesture, chef Larry Stewart is drawing attention to the humble glass of water at his restaurant, the Hardware Grill.
Stewart has installed an $8,000 premium water filtration system at the venerable restaurant to please customer palates, and make table service operate more smoothly. Called Q water, the system puts Edmonton's tap water through four stages of filtration yielding both still and sparkling options.
"The motivation is to bring people a better product," says Stewart, who was inspired when he saw a similar system last year at Thomas Keller's French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. "People gravitate to the Q water as a cleaner, fresher flavour."
Previously, Hardware Grill servers asked patrons if they wanted sparkling or still water with a meal. Some said tap water was fine, but many ordered bottled brands such as Evian, Perrier or Voss. (The latter label, imported from Norway, sells for $9 per bottle at Hardware Grill.) Stewart is offering the new product free of charge.
"Edmonton has good tap water, but there is an environmental impact" to bottled water, says Stewart.
The Q water system has sediment and carbon filters to remove sand, silt and rust and to reduce the taste of chlorine, organic chemicals, lead and odours that come along with tap water. The product is served, chilled, either in a vintage-style milk bottle or an elegant decanter.
Stewart says the new system also saves staff the trouble of dealing with roughly 200 pounds of ice that was used to chill water each day. Now they simply place a carafe of Q water on the table and guests can help themselves if they choose.
In other restaurant news, the Hardware Grill will close from July 1 to 16 to facilitate a $150,000 renovation. Gone will be the dark tones of the interior, replaced by a fresh shade of blue with chocolate and black accents. New chairs, carpet, banquettes, lighting and wallpaper complete the package.
Stewart, who has been at the corner of Jasper Avenue and 97th Street for 15 years, has just signed another 10-year lease on the 110-seat restaurant.
"We're going to be here for a while, and I wanted to freshen-up the look," he says.
Bookmark my blog at edmontonjournal.com/eatmywords or follow me at twitter.com/eatmywordsblog


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We're calling it: Animal Crossing: Wild World is a hit with the Japanese. A pretty bold claim, we know, but with five million copies under its belt in Japan alone, we're feeling pretty confident.
Japanese sales tracker Media Create revealed that the Nintendo DS game is the second title for the platform to move past five million. The other is, probably unsurprisingly, New Super Mario Bros. which actually made it past the five million mark much faster. It took Animal Crossing for the DS a little over three years to do it.
In terms of revenue, if every copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World was sold at the suggested retail price of 4,800 yen, the company would have sold 24 billion yen worth of the game. That equals a lot.


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Gaining an advantage from information management
William McKnight is founder of McKnight Consulting Group, which focuses on helping clients solve business problems using proven, streamlined approaches in information management. He is also the author of a new book titled, "Information Management: Strategies for Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Data."
William talked about the value that many companies are leaving behind by not making the most of their data, and he gave advice on how organizations can become more agile—both in their methodology and mindset.
Follow William on LinkedIn and Twitter (@williammcknight) and on his blog. Follow podcast host David Pittman on Twitter @TheSocialPitt.
To learn more about IBM big data & analytics, visit www.ibmbigdatahub.com, where you'll find podcasts, videos, blogs and more.


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This course will consider how methods of natural language processing
can be used to bridge this gap: to extract information from text, and to
answer a user's questions about text and data base information. We will
consider several levels of text analysis, including syntactic analysis
(grammars and parsing), semantic analysis (word and sentence meaning),
and discourse analysis (pronoun resolution and text structure).
We will use both systems based on hand-coded rules and those trained
automatically from corpora using statistical methods.
During the course you will use and extend a suite of text processing tools, JET, coded in Java, building up all the basic components for an information extraction system. There will be 10 small weekly assignments (some 'paper-and-pencil', some running and modifying Jet), a term project, and a final exam.
Students should have
Textbook: Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing (Prentice Hall)
For further information, you can consult the course pages from 2006, when the course was last given. You may also want to look at the pages of our natural language research group, the Proteus Project, and in particular its work on information extraction.
For further information, contact Prof. Grishman.


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MONTVILLE -- State Sen. Edith Prague, a longtime supporter of senior rights, said Friday she favors a new town ordinance that aims to keep registered sex offenders away from the town's elderly and would like to see it become a statewide mandate.
"They're scared. They're frail. They're vulnerable," said Prague, D-Columbia, who is set to retire at the end of the year and made a visit to the senior center here. "Why should they be subjected to that kind of anxiety?"
The ordinance, passed a month ago by the Town Council, was designed to create so-called senior safety zones that keep registered sex offenders from town-owned property such as the senior center or senior buses as well as from events for the elderly.
The council adopted a similar ordinance that deals with children. Registered sex offenders are not allowed at town-owned or town-leased playgrounds, beaches, pools or sports facilities.
Both ordinances drew sharp criticism from Councilor Dana McFee and the state American Civil Liberties Union. Andrew Schneider, the ACLU's executive director, said sex offender safety zones trample on basic fundamental rights.
He also said there was little evidence to support the town's belief that its seniors are targets of sex crimes. McFee argued the ordinances are unenforceable and a waste of time and money.
The Town Council is scheduled to discuss amendments to both ordinances at its meeting Wednesday. But both Mayor Ronald K. McDaniel Jr. and Councilor Billy Caron said Friday they intend to continue the push to make sure both ordinances go into effect.
"We are taking some criticism on it, but we're not going to stop," Caron said.
The sex offender safety zones were proposed as the town fought the state's plan to open a residential sex offender treatment facility on the grounds of the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center. The 24-bed January Center opened Feb. 14.
The sex offender restrictions resemble other child safety ordinances adopted in Brookfield, Danbury, New Milford, Ridgefield and Windsor Locks. Danbury was the first in 2006 to adopt child safety zones that preclude sex offenders.
Danbury Mayor Mark D. Boughton said Friday the city has issued very few tickets for sex offenders found in violation of the safety zones. A first offense in Danbury means a warning and a second offense results in a $250 fine, Boughton said. Montville has instituted a $99 fine for the first offense.
Boughton said the main point was to put sex offenders on notice that they are being watched. He did not see the merit of creating an ordinance to protect seniors from sex offenders.
"I'm not really sure you could ban a sex offender from the senior center," Boughton said. "I'm not a constitutional law expert, but I think you'd have a hard time defending a challenge (in court). I don't think there's any public good you can demonstrate."
Prague pointed Friday to a former legislative proposal that aimed to create statewide restrictions on where sex offenders are allowed.
She has spoken with other state lawmakers, who have assured her the proposed law will be revisited in the coming session of the General Assembly. Cathy Osten, the first selectman of Sprague, will take Prague's Senate seat.
A previous version of the legislation, introduced in 2011, would have created a risk assessment board that would determine the likelihood of whether sex offenders would commit future sex crimes.
Based on the board's findings, certain offenders would then be prohibited from living within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, senior centers or elderly housing.
Leo C. Arnone, commissioner of the Department of Correction, argued against it. He said it would interfere with the state's ability to supervise sex offenders on parole and would limit already scarce housing options for these offenders.


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Welcome to the new melodeon.net forum
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Story highlights
- Riots claim dozens of lives after an Islamist leader's death sentence
- Delwar Hossain Sayedee was convicted of war crimes dating back to 1971
- His political party says the allegations are part of a smear campaign
At least 37 people died in rioting across Bangladesh after the leader of the country's largest Islamist party was sentenced to death on decades-old allegations of war crimes.
Supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami movement battled with police in several cities after 73-year-old Delwar Hossain Sayedee was sentenced to hang by a war crimes tribunal. The two-time member of parliament was convicted of eight of 20 counts involving killings and rapes during Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971.
During that war, between 1 million and 3 million people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of women were raped. In 2010, Bangladesh set up a court called the International Crimes Tribunal to finally bring to justice those it accused in the massacre.
Sayedee is the third of seven Jamaat party leaders to be charged with war crimes and the second to be sentenced to death.
Tens of thousands of people, including many of those who fought for the country more than 40 years ago, celebrated the judgment against Sayedee. But furious Jamaat supporters rioted in Dhaka and other cities after the decision, leaving at least four police officers among the dead, police and other officials said.
Police around the country fired gunshots and tear gas shells to disperse the mobs, who also exploded a series of homemade bombs.
Most of the people were killed in the districts of Rangpur, Gaibandha, Satkhira, Thakurgaon and Chittagong. At least two of the police officers were beaten to death in the streets, while a bomb killed a pedestrian in Dhaka, authorities said.
Monirul Islam, a Dhaka police spokesman, said two grenades were found near Shahbag Square, where thousands of people were celebrating the court verdict. The grenades, which were later defused, were found abandoned on the pavement near the five-star hotel Ruposhi Bangla, he said.
Home Affairs Minister Shamsul Haque told reporters that the government has stepped up security nationwide. Paramilitary troopers have been called in to patrol the troublesome cities, and the government has imposed ban on rallies and gatherings in some districts.
Since early February, widespread rallies have sprung in Dhaka's Shahbag intersection, with protesters calling for justice against war criminals and rejecting fundamentalism in politics.
But Jamaat has called the Shahbag participants "anti-Islamic atheists."
Increasingly, the Islamists are letting their presence known with larger and larger rallies and strikes first in cities outside Dhaka and then in the capital city. Violence has been reported with police firing shots and tear-gas to disperse mobs.
Jamaat-e-Islami called a nationwide general strike Thursday to protest the trial, which it called "politically motivated.
Physically separated by India, Bangladesh had been the eastern part of Pakistan until it gained independence in 1971 in a war. Jamaat-e-Islami opposed East Pakistan's struggle for independence and has decried what it calls a smear campaign against it.


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People have distrusted both business and government for decades. Since Gallup began measuring public trust in 1976, 19% of people polled have held a "very high" or "high" opinion of the honesty and ethics of business executives. Public trust in congressmen has been even feebler, averaging just 15%. So current low levels of trust are not just the result of recent scandals.
There is evidence to suggest that the levels of trust in the two institutions are related. The high-water mark for both came in 2001, when the Gallup poll found them each favored by 25% of people. The scores for 2008, the all-time low, were also identical, at 12%.
In any event, public trust in both business and in government is in dire straits. That isn't surprising, given the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the financial crisis and subsequent bailouts. The 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer reports that 84% of the American public holds business responsible for causing the financial credit crisis and 81% holds the government and regulators responsible.
How exactly are public trust in business and public trust in government related? You get to the answer by asking a question: Why do people trust their own congressman but distrust Congress as a whole? They do tend to do that.
In 1993 Suzanne Parker and Glenn Parker wrote an article for The Journal of Politics that asked just that question. They started seeking an answer by examining how personal contact, such as meeting with a representative, affected trust in that person, and found that it didn't make enough of a difference to provide an explanation. They then went on to find that trust in a whole system--in Congress or in business, as opposed to individuals--is driven by "perceptions of waste, economic outlook, and socioeconomic status," and that "perceptions that the state and federal government are wasting tax dollars lead to lower levels of system trust." Your view of the system as whole may not shape your opinion of any one individual, but it is easy to see how in a time of recessions and bailouts a broad sense of waste and inefficiency could bring down your general respect for both government and business in tandem.
Furthermore, that level of trust or distrust in a whole system tends to be shaped by shared opinions and narratives about how things do or don't work. Research has shown that when a person hears an opinion expressed three times, he or she will typically believe it to be widely held. Experiments by the psychologist Solomon Asch explain why that matters.
Asch demonstrated that when we perceive opinions to be widespread, they shape how we see the world--even when the incorrectness of those opinions should be obvious. He had conspirators identify two unequal straight lines as being of equal length. Surprisingly many people would go along with them. Popular opinion defeated the basic rules of geometry 37% of the time.
What does that tell us about building trust in government and business? The U.S. Postal Service--the most trusted federal agency every year in the Ponemon Institute's annual survey--offers some clues.
First, the Postal Service almost always delivers. Second, there is little perceived waste associated with it. You can send a letter across the country for just 44 cents. Third, people know the names and faces of their mail carriers. Fourth, there are harsh penalties for violating the sanctity of the mail. Fifth, violations are extremely rare, because people believe in and respect the system.
Forging a new way forward, leaders in business and government must actively question their own narratives about both systems. Open dialogue can help weed out false opinions and lead to action in the mutual interest of all parties. The public doesn't see business or government as solely responsible for the financial mess. It does expect these two great vehicles for social cooperation to collaborate efficiently in ways that serve its interests.
If business and government leaders can work together to build confidence in the financial system, trust in business and government may well rise too.
Brian Moriarty is associate director for communications of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics and is co-author of the report The Dynamics of Public Trust in Business: New Opportunities for Leaders.


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Just a few weeks after being arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct in California, Dick is now facing a lawsuit over an incident that allegedly occured during a comedy perfomance in Dallas in December.
A man named Robert Tucker is suing Dick for emotional distress and defamation after he claims the comedian walked through the crowd with his genitals exposed and then rubbed his privates on Tucker's face.
U.S. & World
Tucker's suit cites a January 2010 case where Dick was arrested in West Virginia on charges he groped a bouncer and a parton at a bar.
Dick's agent and the club are also named in the suit.
So far, there has been no statement from Dick or his lawyers.
Selected Reading: MSNBC, E! Online, New York Daily News


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make game of (someone or something)
Like this video? Subscribe to our free daily email and get a new idiom video every day!
make game of (someone or something)
To ridicule, mock, or tease someone or something; to make fun of someone or something. I really don't appreciate you making game of my disability like that. Don't make game of your sister—you know how sensitive she is!


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If you find CSST in your Plano home or Plano business, it is strongly recommended that you determine if the CSST system has properly bondng and grounded. In order to reduce the chances of a natural gas leak or fire a bonding device should be installed. Bonding is used to prevent an electric shock to someone who would come in contact with the gas piping and other metal objects connected to the grounding system. Lightning strikes can result in an electrical surge and can possibly puncture a hole in the CSST. Proper bonding and grounding will reduce the risk of damage and fire from a lightning strike.
In the United States, the threat of lightning to a Plano building or Plano home is not a part of the mandated national model building codes. It is up to the Plano building owner or Plano homeowner to perform a lightning assessment. Therefore, most Plano homes and Plano buildings are not designed to withstand, damage from lightning. It is no wonder why the annual loss due to lightning damage is almost $800 million.
Without a proper grounding, Plano, Texas businesses and homeowners are vulnerable to a lightning strike. Upon inspection, you should find that the house's electrical system has a grounded connection to provide a safe operation. If other systems are connected to the electrical system those systems should be "bonded" to the electrical ground. Bonding means to install a wire from the bonded component to the electrical system ground.
All systems that are bonded to the electrical system will have the same electrical potential so that they will all be energized at the same rate. Consequently, if the system is struck by lightning the chances that the lightning energy will jump from one system to the other is reduced because all of those systems are at an equal electrical state.
However, if other systems in the house are not bonded they will have a different electrical potential. In the event that lightning strikes in Plano, Texas those systems then it is possible that the electricity may have a lower resistance to ground.
Bottom line, bonding is provided to prevent a possible electric shock to someone who would come in contact with the gas piping and other metal objects connected to the grounding system. Proper bonding and grounding will reduce the risk of damage and fire from a lightning strike.
For further information about CSST and the importance of grounding your CSST system in Plano, Texas, please contact Barney's Electric at 972-771-9464. For your convenience, you may also request services from our site.


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How does interferometry work?
A standard radar satellite image superficially resembles a black and white version of an optical image. But while optical sensors are dependent on reflected light to capture an image, radar sensors send out their own microwave signals in order to 'see' how they backscatter, dependent on relative surface roughness. So one great advantage of radar instruments is that they go on working through local clouds or darkness.
Another advantage of radar is that its signal contains additional useful data, accessible when two radar images of the same site, taken from the same position, are combined together.
Radar equipment operates at extremely high frequencies and correspondingly low wavelength – just 5.6 centimetres in the case of ASAR, meaning a complete cycle through a signal wave occurs for every 5.6 cm of distance.
The division of the total distance the ASAR signal travels – from space to Earth and back again – by its wavelength determines at what fraction along the peak or trough of a wave the returning signal will be, a detectable value known as the signal 'phase'.
If the same target on Earth is re-acquired from the same point in space, then in theory the total signal distance will be unchanged and the signal phase should remain the same.
However the slightest millimetre-scale ground shift occurring between acquisitions will cause the phase to alter. Just like sets of ripples meeting in water, the combination of radar signals that have different phases sets up interference patterns - hence the term 'interferogram'.
Successful paired-image (or multiple-image) interferograms can reveal changes in a landscape across a wide area to an extraordinarily high degree of detail. To look at they resemble the iridescent rainbow swirls you see on the surface of soap bubbles or a thin film of oil on water – which are actually optical interference patterns from light being reflected together.
The coloured fringes seen in a given InSAR image can be regarded like contour lines on a map – except on a vastly reduced scale. One complete set of coloured bands represents ground movement relative to the spacecraft of half a wavelength, 2.8 cm in the case of ASAR.
InSAR practice is a little more complicated than theory, since it is difficult for satellites (though even more difficult for radar-carrying aircraft) to precisely revisit the same vantage point. Slightly different perspectives on the same landscape can cause phase shifting due to apparent variations in surface elevation.
This effect is similar to the way overlapping pictures can appear stereoscopic using 3-D glasses. InSAR is therefore often used to derive height elevation and create an accurate digital elevation model (DEM) of a landscape.
To measure millimetre-scale ground shifting however, a technique strictly known as differential interferometry (D-InSAR) must be employed. This involves the removal from the interferogram of topographic effects by use of a DEM, which can be performed if the distance between the acquisition viewpoints – called the baseline – is less than about a kilometre.
And for added accuracy any atmospheric variation between acquisitions is often also taken account of. This process of subtraction means any remaining interference patterns are solely due to ground movement taking place between acquisitions.
There is one fairly fundamental limitation on interferometry; a requirement that the collection of numerous small reflective surfaces forming the landscape maintains consistent between acquisitions.
Events such as the growth of vegetation, wind scattering leaves, or rainfall smoothing out soil can stop InSAR images from properly matching up, or correlating, and the longer the timespan between acquisitions, the more this is likely to occur.
However proposed radar sensors based on a longer signal wavelength – such as the L-band used with the GPS navigation system, due to be employed by the forthcoming Japanese ALOS (Advanced Land Observing Satellite) or the TerraSAR-L mission currently under study as part of ESA's EarthWatch programme – would have the ability to 'see' through vegetation cover, snow or small stones or soil to widen the suitability of InSAR across more varied terrain, with a slight trade-off in image resolution.