text:
Privacy and Biomedical Research: Building a Trust Infrastructure
An exploration of data-driven and process-driven approaches to data privacy
Trust. It's the basis of every patient/physician interaction: Shared personal health information is kept confidential and used only for the patient's benefit. It's a tradition that started before the time of Hippocrates, endured through the era of records stored in filing cabinets, and persists today as we move to electronic patient records. And it's codified in the form of HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which ensures the privacy of health records.
But as sensitive personal health data accrue in ever larger databases, concerns over privacy breaches are on the rise. And as researchers perceive the potential usefulness of this vast data trove, they seek strategies to access it without violating HIPAA. In response, data privacy experts are developing ever more sophisticated methods to protect electronic health data from unwanted exposure. And while many of these experts have raised alarms about the vulnerabilities of the privacy-protection schemes currently in place, they have also begun talking about the possibility of implementing far more powerful technologies in the near future.
"This is the start of the golden age of privacy research," says Dan Kifer, PhD, a computer scientist at Pennsylvania State University who has investigated privacy-preserving techniques for applications ranging from biomedical research to the U.S. Census.
Privacy Fears Drive Innovation
The rapid progress taking place in privacy research in the biomedical arena is driven in large part by fear—namely, fear that the vast warehouses of biomedical data now being assembled could be vulnerable to the same kinds of privacy breaches that have in recent years plagued such information aggregators as Google and Facebook.
Granted, the evidence of such breaches in the realm of medical records, clinical data, and genomic information remains slim. The most alarming incidents to date have involved simple failures of security, or of access control, such as the theft or loss of unsecured computers containing electronic medical records, rather than the unintentional leakage of sensitive information from large biomedical databases; and as yet, no one has reportedly been harmed by the unauthorized release of their biomedical information. Instead, the most impressive privacy breaches to date have been perpetrated by academic researchers who were trying to find weaknesses in the systems they were attacking: identifying the medical records of a particular individual in a hospital system, for example, or identifying participants in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) designed to link particular diseases to specific genetic variations.
Yet anxiety over the possibility of more public, and more harmful, privacy breaches continues to build, the principal concern being that insurers and employers might use biomedical data to discriminate against policyholders and employees. Such fears are not unfounded. "Insurers have historically used data to make coverage determinations," says Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit public interest group in Washington, DC. Carl Gunter, PhD, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois who studies the health information exchanges that enable hospitals to share electronic medical records, emphasizes the "dreadful risks" posed by medical identity theft, in which one person assumes the identity of another when seeking medical care, and the medical histories of both victim and thief become dangerously entangled. And there is rising concern over the privacy risks associated with genomic data in particular. As Brad Malin, PhD, director of the Health Information Privacy Lab at Vanderbilt University, points out, genomic data is highly distinguishable, extremely stable, and can in certain situations be used to predict the likelihood that an individual might fall prey to this disease or that one—information that could be used to deny coverage or a job.
Some of these scenarios might seem unlikely at the present time. It's doubtful, for example, that many people outside of a university computer science department would have the technical wherewithal to pick a single individual out of the mass of statistics associated with a GWAS. But technological progress has a way of closing the gap between the improbable and the probable. "There's nothing to say that what's unreasonable now won't be unreasonable in the near future," Malin says. And even the smallest risk of a privacy violation can be enough to scare a patient away from participating in a clinical trial, or persuade an institution to withhold data from researchers due to ethical or legal concerns. According to Gunter, some health information exchanges have already prohibited the sharing of electronic medical records for research purposes. "There is such fear that we need to address it before we can make full use of this data for research purposes," says Lucila Ohno-Machado, PhD, founding chief of the division of biomedical informatics and associate dean for informatics at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and principal investigator for iDash (integrating Data for Analysis, anonymization, and SHaring), a National Center for Biomedical Computing.
All of this unease—over the privacy rights of individuals, over potential discrimination, and over the chilling effect that privacy concerns can have on research—has prompted a great deal of innovation amongst the mathematicians, cryptographers, and computer scientists who are working to develop mechanisms that will allow researchers to analyze biomedical data without compromising privacy.
Data-Driven Privacy Measures
Staal Vinterbo, PhD, a computer scientist in the division of biomedical informatics at UCSD, distinguishes between two broad classes of privacy-protecting mechanisms currently under development: "data-driven" mechanisms that define privacy in terms of the data itself, and "process-driven" mechanisms that define privacy in terms of how they access the data. Both are intended to let researchers perform meaningful analyses without disclosing sensitive personal information, but they stem from very different concepts of data privacy, and they often work via very different means. The most common data-driven approaches, for example, modify raw data so that it can be released without revealing sensitive information, while most process-driven approaches leave the underlying data alone and instead build privacy protections into the algorithms they use to extract it. Data-driven mechanisms came first, but process-driven ones may offer better protection—albeit at a price.
De-identification, or anonymization, is the most commonly employed privacy measure, and one that lies very much on the data-driven side of the divide. Rather than freely sharing all of the data in a group of records, de-identification protocols suppress or modify the bits that might allow an attacker to determine precisely to whom a particular record belongs. Some of these protocols, especially the more experimental ones, can be quite sophisticated. Spectral anonymization, which Vinterbo has investigated with Thomas Lasko, MD, PhD, a researcher at Vanderbilt, manipulates data in mathematically complex ways so that useful correlations can be maintained for research purposes even after the information has been randomized to prevent specific individuals from being identified. Synthetic data generation, which Kifer has explored, creates new data that statistically mimics the real stuff, but shields the actual participants in the original data set. But the anonymization schemes that are most often used to de-identify electronic health records in the real world simply delete or truncate specific data fields containing identifiable information like proper names and ZIP codes.
The advantage of de-identification is that it allows analysts to examine the raw data itself, albeit in altered form, rather than running queries against it from behind a privacy-preserving interface. The disadvantage is that it does not always work.
The first and most widely publicized demonstration of the weaknesses of de-identification occurred in 1997, when Latanya Sweeney, PhD, linked the supposedly de-identified health records released by the Massachusetts state insurance commission to the state's voter-registration rolls and re-identified the personal medical records of then-Governor William Weld. (Sweeney, who was a graduate student at MIT at the time, is now director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University.)
Sweeney's successful re-identification attack helped prompt the adoption of the HIPAA Privacy Rule in 2000. The Privacy Rule imposes restrictions on the release of "individually identifiable health information." These federally legislated constraints on disclosure are waived, however, if the data has been de-identified by applying the so-called "safe harbor" method, which involves removing 18 identifiers, including names, dates, and Social Security numbers. Since data that has been de-identified under the safe harbor method is no longer considered to be individually identifiable, it is no longer covered by the Privacy Rule, and can be freely shared.
Yet there is a growing sense among data privacy experts that no form of de-identification will ever be good enough to meet the highest standards of privacy protection, and that the entire approach will only grow less reliable over time. The reason for this is simple: as more and more data is collected and stored about us all—in online databases and on social networking sites, in publicly available government repositories and elsewhere—it becomes easier and easier to launch the kind of linkage attack that allowed Sweeney to re-identify William Weld's medical records. As the computer scientists Arvind Narayanan, PhD, and Vitaly Shmatikov, PhD, noted in a 2010 article in Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), "any attribute can be identifying in combination with others." In other words, no matter how many fields are deleted from an individual's record, as long as there is something left for researchers to work with, there will also be enough left for re-identification.
Moreover, because de-identification techniques have for the most part been designed to protect specific kinds of data from specific kinds of attack, they lack the flexibility needed to deal with a rapidly changing data landscape. The task of anonymization will only become harder, for example, as more and more categories of information, from handwritten clinical notes to genetic sequences, are gathered and stored in digital repositories. The ad hoc nature of such data-driven methods also means that they tend to lack a rigorous mathematical basis; and by their very nature they can only access a very limited amount of data. As a result, it can be difficult to quantify just how much privacy protection they truly offer. Scientists can only estimate their efficacy by trying to break them—thereby proving their limitations, but not their strengths.
This is not to say that de-identification and other data-driven approaches do not have their uses. Malin and his colleagues at Vanderbilt, for example, have for several years used de-identification strategies such as k-anonymization to help protect the privacy of electronic medical records used for research purposes. "We have de-identified more than 1.5 million medical records from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center," he says. K-anonymization works by suppressing or modifying enough data to make a certain number of records (k) in a database appear to be identical. If done appropriately, the data can still be used for research, but the individuals who provided it become lost in a crowd of look-alikes. Several data privacy experts have pointed to flaws in k-anonymization—for example, an attacker who possesses sufficient background knowledge about someone can break k-anonymity and re-identify that individual– but the risks of re-identification remain low. And like any de-identification scheme, k-anonymization allows researchers to examine the raw data.
Process-Driven Privacy Measures
Still, many scientists have begun moving away from data-driven approaches and toward more mathematically rigorous process-driven ones. "Eventually, all of us realized that this is just a never-ending cycle: find a way of perturbing the data, find weaknesses, try to fix them, find more weaknesses, try to fix them," says Kifer. While a graduate student at Cornell University, Kifer helped develop a more robust refinement to k-anonymity known as l-diversity—a refinement that was soon shown to have flaws of its own. Recognizing the apparent limitations of de-identification in general, he and his fellow researchers began seeking a different path: one that involves devising ways of querying statistical databases while providing privacy guarantees that can be expressed as mathematical and statistical statements.
The first and still the most promising of these approaches, differential privacy, was proposed in 2006 by Cynthia Dwork, PhD, and colleagues at Microsoft Research, Ben-Gurion University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Dwork recognized the cycle described by Kifer from the history of cryptography. She also knew that modern cryptographers only liberated themselves from that cycle when they developed formal, provable definitions of information security that could be quantified. So Dwork and her collaborators did the same in the realm of privacy, formulating a mathematical definition of the concept that amounts to a promise to the data subject that his life will not, in Dwork's words, "change substantially for the better or the worse as a result of a computation on the data." Precisely how that is achieved is more or less up for grabs; any solution that satisfies the basic definition, which in its true form looks more like a mathematical proof than a verbal guarantee, will necessarily be differentially private.
Scientists like Dwork and Kifer are still working out how to implement differential privacy in the real world, and few applications have moved beyond the lab. In general, however, differential privacy is achieved by writing special algorithms that sit between a statistical database and an analyst who wishes to run queries against it. If an algorithm is differentially private, then the results it produces should be essentially the same independent of whether any single person is included in the database or not. One important consequence of this is that no matter what an analyst knows—no matter what background knowledge they might possess—they still cannot learn anything more about a specific individual just because they happen to be in the database. Conversely, even if an analyst were to know everything about each individual represented in the data except for one, they still should not be able to learn much about that one remaining person. No de-identification scheme can make those kinds of guarantees.
In practice, differential privacy is achieved by introducing some random noise into the query responses. For example, if an analyst were to ask how many people in a database were over 5 feet tall, and the true answer was 56, then a differentially private algorithm might grab a random variable from a probability distribution and add it to the true answer, spitting out 57 instead. The noise is the difference between the response (57) and the true answer (56). "Our choice of randomness," Dwork writes in an e-mail, "makes responses close to the truth much more likely than answers that are far from the truth (which is what we want for accuracy)."
Nonetheless, attentive readers will have noticed that differential privacy does in fact work by providing slightly inaccurate results; as Dwork says, it uses probability to introduce "a little bit of uncertainty." This has two significant consequences.
First, in a differentially private setting, an analyst can only see the blurry answers provided by the algorithms; he can never examine the raw data itself. Dwork and several colleagues are currently investigating the possibility of allowing trusted individuals to view the underlying data—a situation Dwork describes as "differential privacy with a human in the loop"—but that is still very much under development. At least for now, researchers who need to see the innards of the data sets they are working with must look elsewhere for privacy protection.
Second, the question of how much noise is enough noise, and how much noise is too much noise, is a rather thorny one. The trick is to add just enough randomness to the query answers to protect the privacy of the individuals whose records lie in the database, but not so much that an analyst can no longer learn accurate or meaningful things from a statistical perspective about the sample population they comprise. This is the price of privacy, or the trade-off between privacy and utility; and it may be the most serious challenge facing those who are trying to bring differential privacy out of the lab. "We can always find wildly inaccurate ways of computing something that ensures a given level of privacy," says Dwork. The science lies in finding ways of ensuring privacy that do not destroy utility.
As it turns out, some queries, and some databases, are more "sensitive" than others, meaning that they are more prone to leak information. As a result, they require more noise. According to Vinterbo, more fine-grained information also requires more noise—a situation that may prove challenging in the case of genomic databases, which contain enormous amounts of incredibly detailed data. Since you wouldn't want to add more noise than is absolutely necessary, matching the appropriate amount of noise to the sensitivity of the query and of the database—in effect, figuring out how to balance privacy against utility—is crucial. And as Kamalika Chaudhuri, PhD, an expert on machine learning at UCSD, says, it also turns out to be "fairly technical and complicated."
Which is not to say that it can't be done. A number of researchers are investigating ways of relaxing differential privacy so that it still offers strong privacy protection without requiring excessive amounts of noise, while others are trying to find novel methods of adding noise that won't degrade accuracy.
Chaudhuri, for example, is interested in using algorithms called "classifiers" that can be used to trawl through large collections of medical records in order to predict things like whether a particular individual might require hospitalization. Classifiers must be trained on standard data sets, however, and the training process can leak sensitive information about the training samples. A differentially private approach would typically involve adding a bit of noise to the results coming out of the classifier—a technique known as "output perturbation." This protects privacy, but also makes the classifier more error-prone. Chaudhuri has figured out a way to insert the noise earlier in the process, injecting it into the classifier itself—a technique she calls "objective perturbation." The latter still ensures differential privacy, but the results are more accurate.
Efforts like these bode well for the adoption of differential privacy in the coming years. But even its supporters agree that differential privacy alone cannot be counted upon to solve the privacy problem once and for all. "There is no single solution that will suit every possible scenario," says Vinterbo. In a recent paper, Kifer pointed toward a few specific weaknesses of differential privacy, most notably some limitations on its ability to protect privacy in social networks and in circumstances where some statistics have already been released into the wild. "Differential privacy works," Kifer says. "But nothing works all the time."
Finding Integrated Solutions
As a result, many experts are beginning to envision a more integrative and contextual approach to biomedical data privacy—one that would offer a menu of technical solutions backed up by policy measures, the precise mixture of which would depend on the nature of the data, the needs of the researchers, and the concerns of the data subjects themselves.
Haixu Tang, PhD, and XiaoFeng Wang, PhD, at the Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing, advocate for what they call a "hierarchical method of data release" that would consider the kind of analysis researchers wish to perform on a particular data set, the level of privacy risk involved, and the degree of utility required before deciding on a particular privacy mechanism. (The two recently won the 2011 Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies for their work demonstrating that individuals could be identified in a GWAS even when the precision of the published statistics was low and some of the data were missing. They are currently investigating ways of introducing miniscule amounts of noise in order to guard against such attacks without sacrificing utility.)
Vinterbo, for his part, thinks that a comprehensive solution to the privacy problem will require a "trust infrastructure" that includes not only technical solutions, but also "legal frameworks that efficiently combine technology and law." "The needs that will be met by technical measures alone are a minority," he says.
Similarly, Malin would like to see a holistic, risk-based approach that draws on the pooled expertise of technologists, legal experts, and ethics review boards, all of whom would have a say in determining how best to safeguard privacy in a particular context—whether that meant implementing the most rigorous technical scheme possible, or applying something less formal and backing it up with carefully crafted use agreements and legal sanctions. Only then, he believes, will the biomedical community have the kind of flexible, nuanced tools needed to address the challenges of protecting its data.
"We have developed great technical solutions, and more are coming down the pipeline," says Malin, echoing Kifer's prediction of a golden age. "But we have to keep the bigger picture in mind."


text:
Fairfax's progressive zoning under threat
June 26, 2014 4 Comments
About 16 years ago, I was excited to be a newly-minted Drake High freshman and Fairfax was excited to start on a major update to its General Plan. Three months ago I celebrated my 30th and Fairfax celebrated the passage of the final piece of its general plan update. But last month, the town started to undo its work, and the most substantive part of the General Plan – its zoning and housing elements – are under threat.
These elements are separate but connected pieces. The zoning element is something I neglected to praise when it was first revealed in 2012. It rezones all highway commercial zones as downtown commercial, a dramatic step away from the auto-centric design that defines Sir Francis Drake and Center. It also adds scatters in three Planned Development Districts to accommodate specialized developments: one at Christ Lutheran Church for 40 units of senior housing; one at 10 Olema Road for 22 small, single-family homes; and one at School Street Plaza for 9 homes mixed with commercial space.
Built atop the zoning element is the first state-approved housing element in over a decade. It puts Fairfax in compliance with state law regarding affordable housing, allowing it to avoid writing another housing element for 8 years. The element also allows second units (a major goal of anti-development activists), home sharing, and other non-traditional affordable home formats.
Unfortunately, the zoning element suffered from typos and inconsistencies between its tables and the actual policy text and maps. Though Fairfax's legal counsel and planning staff assured the public and the council that the typos were not a problem, project opponents alleged the typos opened up dozens of other properties for development. Led by former councilmember Frank Egger, the opponents drew up a ballot initiative to withdraw zoning. That would have the housing element out of compliance with state law and put the town back to Square One.
Opponents relied upon this falsehood to sell their initiative and gathered 1,000 signatures, which they submitted the afternoon before the town council was scheduled to vote on addressing the typos the initiative was intended to address. That locked the zoning from any changes and prevented the council from fixing the problems opponents complained about.
While opponents claim they had no idea this would lock the zoning, it strains credulity that a former mayor and a coterie of old political hands wouldn't know that legislation that's the subject of a ballot initiative is locked down.
Yet rather than face a ballot fight and further divide the town, the council decided in a 3-2 vote in May to start the process to rescind the zoning themselves. Mayor David Weinsoff, one of the votes to keep the zoning, said the town was capitulating to bullies.
The vote to rescind is bad policy, an attempt to find a compromise with opponents who refuse to work with the council. If they were concerned about typos, they would have submitted their signatures after the council had a chance to change them, not before. If they were concerned about the content of the General Plan, they had 16 years of public process to voice them.
The rezoning is the most progressive step by any town in Marin
As I've said before, the guiding light of this blog's view that the beauty and livability of its town centers are at the heart of what makes Marin's towns great. The policy under threat, to allow Fairfax's downtown to grow into areas where it has not been, fits hand in hand with that understanding.
While other towns have decided to innovate and create standalone developments in driving strips, or to create driving-oriented developments on their fringes, Fairfax decided to invest in its downtown. It's a recognition that what makes Fairfax great isn't its parking lots on Center; it's the shops and homes Bolinas.
Pursuing affordable housing in a way that doesn't just fit with Fairfax's character but is inspired by the physical and spiritual heart of town is the only way to turn the lemons of affordable housing mandates into lemonade.
Coalition for a Livable Marin has launched a petition asking the council to stop the process of rescinding the zoning. The coalition's steering committee, of which I am a member, believes the decision to rescind the zoning is bad for the town. Not only does it spit in the face of downtown, essentially saying it's an aberration that shouldn't be replicated, but it puts in jeopardy 71 affordable housing units.
It puts Fairfax on a path toward legal confrontation with California, as the zoning underpins the already-certified Housing Element. And it undoes possibly the most promising reform of second unit policy in the county, setting back a key goal of both affordable housing proponents and the anti-development party.
What the council is doing runs counter to its history as the funky, progressive place we know it as. Fairfax should keep its zoning.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Here at National Geographic, we'd like to celebrate International Women's Day by highlighting favorite quotes from our women explorers. Whether they are educating young girls in Africa, or searching for fossils in Madagascar with their two young children, we are proud to support their work.
"Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right."
Kakenya Ntaiya created the first and only primary school for girls in her remote village in Africa. Photograph courtesy Kakenya's Dream
Watch Joyce Poole's talk on elephant conservation:
Who is your favorite female explorer?
NEXT: International Women's Day Photos: National Geographic's Women Explorers
Learn More
Women's Exploration Timeline


text:
Q: What is the .NET Framework 3.0?
A: .NET Framework 3.0 includes a new set of managed code APIs that are an integral part of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems. It is also available for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 as a download. There are no major architectural changes included with this release
Q: What does the .NET Framework 3.0 Consist of?
- Windows Presentation Foundation
- Windows Communication Foundation
- Windows Workflow Foundation
- Windows CardSpace
Q: What is the Windows Presentation Foundation?
A: Windows Presentation Foundation
Q: What is the Windows Communication Foundation?
A: Windows Communication Foundation
Q: What is the Windows Workflow Foundation?
A: Windows Workflow Foundation
Q: What is Windows CardSpace?
A: Windows CardSpace


text:
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Send a link to a friend
This can be a very confusing time of year. As one
looks around town one sees leaves showering lawns
laying down a carpet of yellow, brown and gold. On
front porches pumpkins left over from Halloween can
be seen and the stores around town are festooned
with Christmas lights. I noticed the other day that
the freezer case in the grocery is over flowing with
frozen turkeys and a cardboard pilgrim was standing
nearby holding a facsimile of a frozen pie crust
which leads me to believe that in spite of the
confusion of reminders it is a fact that
Thanksgiving is near.
Roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy,
cranberry sauce, hot steaming corn, sweet potatoes,
the aroma of seasoned stuffing fresh from the oven,
pumpkin pie, pilgrim hats, cornucopias, uncles,
aunts, cousins, grandmothers and grandfathers,
gathered around a lavish table, are but a few of the
images of Thanksgiving. Dads watching football, long
lines at airports
these are part of the scene as well.
But Thanksgiving? How much do our celebrations
and observances have to do with giving thanks? Where
do we see God in all of this?The first settlers at
Plymouth lived close enough to the soil to know how
dependent they were on God's providence. They had
learned to thank God in the midst of the bitterness
of winter and they were quick to thank God during
abundant times of harvest affirming that God is near
in all times and things.
Even though there are times when we may not feel
especially blessed the Apostle Paul reminds us,
there is always something for which we can be
thankful. The Pilgrims had a custom of putting five
kernels of corn on each empty plate before eating a
meal as a reminder of the daily ration of corn that
each person received before the first harvest. Life
was hard, but even so, there was still a spirit of
At the sailing of the Mayflower the
Rev. John Robinson, pastor to the Pilgrims, commented in his
farewell address that God wasn't finished with this band of
believers and that more would surely be forth coming. Would that he
could have seen that this bold step into a new world would evolve
into a nation that would establish as a national holiday a day for
thanking God. Little did he know that it wold be a rich land in
which more would wonder about "what" they would eat over "if" they
would eat, that it would be a land in which the rising obesity of
it's children would become a major health concern. To deny that We
are blessed is to ignore the obvious.
We teach our children to say "please" and "thank you"; as the
rudiments of civility and courtesy, yet it is so easy to be
unthinking toward the God from whom all blessings flow. The Apostle
Paul reminds us, "to give thanks in all things." (1 Thessalonians
5:18) Thanks and giving thanks are mentioned no less than 168 times
in the Bible. Google it. So obviously, it's something that is near
to God's heart. No matter what our circumstance there is always
something for which to be thankful. Happy Thanksgiving
Rev. Richard W Reinwald Pastor- St. John United Church of Christ
Recent articles
Back to top
News |
Sports | Business |
Rural Review |
Teaching & Learning
Home and Family |
| Obituaries
Community |
Law & Courts |
Leisure Time
Spiritual Life |
Health & Fitness |
Teen Scene
Letters to the Editor


text:
Game 9: Toronto at Minnesota pregame
As noted in the previous post, Jesse Litsch landed on the disabled list today with a right elbow/forearm injury. He will be shut down for the next two weeks before resuming on a throwing program. Toronto won't say, but that makes it seem like Litsch will miss at least a month, likely more.
Litsch said he first felt the pain in his arm after striking out Justin Morneau with a four-seam fastball to end the first inning on Monday. Litsch stayed in the game and didn't alert the team that he was hurting until the fourth inning.
Up from Triple-A is Bill "Dropkick" Murphy — I just gave him that nickname, hoping it sticks. He'll move into the bullpen and lefty Brian Tallet moves into the rotation. Tallet will start on Saturday and will probably get a few turns in the rotation.
Why not Brett Cecil, whose next turn falls on Saturday, or spring wonder Brad Mills? The Minor League season just started and the Blue Jays don't feel they're ready for the call just yet. Maybe one of them comes up later this month. We'll see.
Manager Cito Gaston opted to sit Travis Snider today against lefty Glen Perkins, even though Lunchbox crushed two homers yesterday. "Shoulda hit three," I joked when Snider walked by today. "Yeah, already heard that one today," he said with a smile.
I'm sure plenty of you Jays fans would like to see Snider in there, but Gaston wants to hand playing time to his bench guys like Jose Bautista and Kevin Millar (the latter in at first for Lyle Overbay today, too). It's not a strict lefty/righty platoon situation, according to Gaston.
Today's lineups:
1. Marco Scutaro, SS
2. Aaron Hill, 2B
3. Alex Rios, RF
4. Vernon Wells, CF
5. Adam Lind, DH
6. Scott Rolen, 3B
7. Kevin Millar, 1B
8. Rod Barajas, C
9. Jose Bautista, LF
Starter: LHP Ricky Romero (1-0)
1. Denard Span, RF
2. Alexi Casilla, 2B
3. Justin Morneau, 1B
4. Michael Cuddyer, DH
5. Joe Crede, 3B
6. Delmon Young, LF
7. Mike Redmond, C
8. Nick Punto, SS
9. Carlos Gomez, CF
Starter: LHP Glen Perkins (0-1)
28 Comments
Why not give Snider a chance against LH pitchen, I would rather watch Snider over Bautista anyday.
I think they could have given Lind a break instead of Snider. I know he's scorching hot, but a little breather against a lefty wouldn't hurt I don't think.
That's a tough blow for the Jays regarding Litsch. I like that they give Tallett a few starts, as opposed to throwing out Cecil and Mills so soon though. Tallett should give them a few good innings, and Cecil along with Janssen should be up in May regardless, as previously planned.
I'm surprised they called up Murphy and not Wolfe or Accardo, but I suppose at some point he deserves a kick at the can.
Lind hits leftys well.
Worth keeping an eye on… AJ has a no-no through 5. Hopefully I just jinxed him – lol!
rene-you did well on AJ. lol
The Jays are lucky they have one run in this game, they will now be 6 and 3.
Certainly does look that they will drop this one. How about some Rios 8th or 9th inning heroics. He's due isn't he?
Way to go Rickie. I think we have a fighter, that was a tough patch to work out of and might change the game.
Nice to see Barajas's bat start to come alive.
finally Wells gets an important hit
Rickie strikes out Morneau to end the eight inning. What a huge outing for Romero. Gives the pen a needed rest. Come on guys-lets get the kid a couple of runs for the win.
I'm surprised Cito didn't put Moonraker in to bat for Bautista
Looks like Dice-K caught Wang's disease. Threw 43 pitches in the first inning against Oakland, only 22 strikes and gave up 5 runs.
I thought that idiot Cito was going to take out the LH pitcher against the RH batter, Also why did he not put Snider in in the 10th against a RH pitcher, he is 8 for 11 against the Twins??????.
Disappointing loss, but we won't win many games when our first five hitters combine for 3 hits and 1 walk in 25 at bats. As hot as these hitters have been, a game like this was probably overdue.
But some very positive things from this game. Romero is one, the other is Wells started to hit the ball to center field instead of trying to pull everything and rolling over on it.
In the past that's been the first sign of Wells getting hot, let's hope that's the same this year.
I hate to say it Gs, but I think your Moonraker attempt is failing, i know, its sad, it wasn't bad. I had the same problem with Alexander Ovechkin, when he came in I dubbed him Ovy Wan Kenobi, to this day I think its gold, however it never caught on. Its tough to swallow but eventually I had to accept it, damn you Alexander the Gr8.
Anyways Romero was awesome, in the past I have been one to question the pick of him in '05. Looks like I will have to eat my words, which I will gladly do. Yes Snider should have pinch hit for Bautista, and its easy to question Cito for leaving Carlson in but I refuse to do that. Tough loss, if we have any chance at competing this year we have to win every game like the one tonight.
Actually I never came up with the name Moonraker, the guys on blue bird banter did, but I do like it.
It looks to me like that extended time Romero spent in the minors is paying off, he has yet to show the jitters of a debut in the majors and looks better each time out. I hope it continues.
I don't blame Cito for leaving Jessie in either. Point is one way or the other we had to go at least one more inning so I think he was trying squeeze that last out with Carleson.
I have also recognized a long time ago that Cito isn't the best manager in the world in game situations, BUT he gets more out of players than any manager I know and he did win two series for us.
If it wasn't for Cito these young guys like Lind, Snider, Romero and others wouldn't be doing what they're doing-so I'm a big Cito fan and have been for a long time.
One thing Bautista probably did tonight in his 0 for 4 was give Cito a reason to start Snider against some lefties. Snider seems to bring this entire team energy when he's in the lineup along with Lind.
Well. They have lost the game.But Jose Bautista choked against left hander Perkins although Snider would have advantage over a Left hander. I totally disagree with Cito's decision in this game to let Bautista play instead of a guy who is hitting close to .400 avg.
Dallas billionaire Tom Hicks risks losing control of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars now that his sports firm, HSG, has formally defaulted on $525 million in loans, financial experts say.
Although experts agree that creditors could force HSG into bankruptcy, that possibility also appears to be a long way down the road. Lenders have notified HSG that it has formally defaulted on $525 million in loans. Hicks said recently that he intentionally missed the March 31 interest payment as he tries to restructure the debt.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Hicks missed a $10 million quarterly interest payment on HSG loans. The paper reported that the largest lender is Galatioto Sports Partners, a New York sport-financing group, which has lent nearly $100 million to HSG.
In a statement on Tuesday, Hicks reiterated that he is in negotiations to restructure HSG's debt and emphasized that the baseball and hockey teams have not been affected by the discussions.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
One of the knocks on Cito has always been that he will leave somebody in when anybody else would have pulled him. But then, one of the ways Cito gets the best from his players is to give them a role, and let them run with it. That way, they know the don't have to be looking over their shoulder if they make a mistake, and they are still in the game to pick themselves up later. So is he a bad game manager because he lets his guys know that he has confidence that they can get the job done? I think the record speaks for itself.
You guys are all wrong! I know why they lost last night. I had a nice big bag of fresh pistachios, and I FORGOT to get them out! My bad. (Ball players aren't the only ones to be superstitious.)
You guys are all wrong! I know why they lost last night. I had a nice big bag of fresh pistachios, and I FORGOT to get them out! My bad. (Ball players aren't the only ones to be superstitious.)
Our draft order for the June draft
First round: number 20
Sandwich pick:number 37-for Burnett
Second round: Number 69
Third Round: Number 101
Third round: number 104 for Burnett
It's disappointing that that's all we get for Burnett.
Our draft order for the June draft
First round: number 20
Sandwich pick:number 37-for Burnett
Second round: Number 69
Third Round: Number 101
Third round: number 104 for Burnett
It's disappointing that that's all we get for Burnett.
Our draft order for the June draft
First round: number 20
Sandwich pick:number 37-for Burnett
Second round: Number 69
Third Round: Number 101
Third round: number 104 for Burnett
It's disappointing that that's all we get for Burnett.
sorry for the multiple posts
I'm getting everyone I know, here in Dallas, Texas, to vote for our jays and see if we can get Adam Lind in as the write-in candidate, INSTEAD OF ALEX RIOS.
I'm getting everyone I know, here in Dallas, Texas, to vote for our jays and see if we can get Adam Lind in as the write-in candidate, INSTEAD OF ALEX RIOS.


text:
Four months after a massive trading-technology glitch that cost it nearly half a billion dollars, Knight Capital Group is on the block, say people involved with the discussions, and could be merged in to one of its chief competitors.
In recent weeks, Getco LLC and Virtu Financial have each approached Knight about the possibility of purchasing the company and merging into it, say these people—a transaction that would increase the resultant company's trading footprint considerably and enable the acquirer to go public without undertaking a traditional IPO.
Exact terms of a potential deal aren't yet clear, but Knight expects to see more detailed bids as early as this week, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
Based on Friday's share price, which preceded initial reports of a possible deal, and a premium of 30 percent to 40 percent, the value of a Knight purchase could range from $600 million to $700 million, say the two people familiar with the matter.
The deal negotiations were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Still, caution the people familiar with the matter, talks are at an early stage and no deal may come together at all.


text:
e-CFR Navigation Aids
Advanced Search
— Boolean
Related Resources
e-CFR data is current as of August 11, 2020
Title 5 → Chapter I → Subchapter C → Part 1001
Title 5: Administrative Personnel
Authority: 5 U.S.C. 552a, 7301.
Source: 71 FR 43345, Aug. 1, 2006, unless otherwise noted.
In addition to the regulations contained in this part, employees of the Office of Personnel Management should refer to:
(a) The Executive Branch Financial Disclosure, Qualified Trusts, and Certificates of Divestiture regulations at 5 CFR part 2634;
(b) The Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch at 5 CFR part 2635;
(c) The Limitations on Outside Earned Income, Employment and Affiliations for Certain Noncareer Employees regulations at 5 CFR part 2636;
(d) Regulations Concerning Post Employment Conflict of Interest at 5 CFR part 2637;
(e) Post-employment Conflict of Interest Restrictions regulations at 5 CFR part 2641;
(f) The Supplemental Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Office of Personnel Management at 5 CFR part 4501;
(g) The Employee Responsibilities and Conduct regulations at 5 CFR part 735;
(h) The restrictions upon use of political referrals in employment matters at 5 U.S.C. 3303.
(a) An employee shall avoid any action that results in the appearance of using public office to collect or gain access to personal data about individuals beyond that required by or authorized for the performance of duties.
(b) An employee shall not use any personal data about individuals for any purpose other than as is required and authorized in the performance of assigned duties. An employee shall not disclose any such information to other agencies or persons not expressly authorized to receive or have access to such information. An employee shall make any authorized disclosures in accordance with established regulations and procedures.
(c) Each employee who has access to or is engaged in any way in the handling of information subject to the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552a, shall be familiar with the regulations of this subsection as well as the pertinent provisions of the Privacy Act relating to the treatment of such information.


text:
LMC's Colon Cancer Challenge 2014
Lexington Medical Center held its fifth annual Colon Cancer Challenge bike ride on Saturday, March 29 in Irmo. Despite the rain, more than 130 riders participated, the largest turnout in event history. Proceeds from the event pay for screening colonoscopies for people who are uninsured. This year's event will provide 15 screening colonoscopies. Thank you to everyone who braved the inclement weather to take part in this important event. We're grateful. Here are some photos.


text:
Twenty-five people accused of using thousands of stolen identities to claim $36 million in fraudulent tax refunds have been arrested in the latest South Florida sweep, federal authorities said Thursday.
Among those charged in 19 separate cases is a middle school food service worker who swiped the identities of at least 400 Miami-Dade County students, a mail carrier charged with filching tax documents out of mailboxes and a jail guard who stole identities of inmates, according to Miami U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer.
Florida has led the nation in identity theft for the past three years, with a rate of about 193 complaints per 100,000 residents in 2013, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The Miami area is far worse, with a 2013 rate of 340 complaints per 100,000 residents.
U.S. & World
Stories that affect your life across the U.S. and around the world.
Ferrer said the latest batch of arrests brings to nearly 300 people charged with identity theft and tax fraud since a special strike force was established in August 2012. Those cases involved more than $485 million in fraudulent tax refund claims to the Internal Revenue Service, of which about $106 million was actually paid out.
"This has become an epidemic in South Florida," Ferrer said at a news conference. "It is also becoming a consumer's worst nightmare."
George L. Piro, chief of the Miami FBI field office said, "Criminals all over South Florida are turning to computers to make an easy buck at the public's expense."
But many of the latest suspects wouldn't fit the typical criminal profile.
A case in point is Pamela Rhim-Grant, 40, a food service manager at Miami's Horace Mann Middle School. Prosecutors say Rhim-Grant used her access to a systemwide database of student information to steal over 400 identities that were used to file 216 fraudulent tax returns.
Rhim-Grant has pleaded not guilty to computer fraud conspiracy and identity theft charges and is free on $100,000 bail.
Authorities said people must take extra safeguards to protect personal information, such as shredding sensitive paperwork before tossing it out and not carrying around a Social Security card. It's also advisable to file tax returns as early as possible and make sure any tax preparer is well-established and reliable.


text:
Sign In
Returning Customers
If you have already registered with HerveLeger.com, then sign in here.
Not Registered?
Registering makes checkout faster - we promise. How? Let us count the ways...
- Quick and easy checkout
- Keep tabs on your orders and what you bought in the past
- Sign up to receive first-to-know news (and private sales) through email.
If you are new to HerveLeger.com please click register now.


text:
Happy Camper Stamped Cuff Bracelet
Happy Camper stamped cuff bracelet with vintage camper. This is a 1/4" x 6" polished aluminum cuff bracelet. Just slip it over your wrist and press on each side to close the bracelet around your wrist.
Because each piece is hand-stamped by me, there could be slight variations in the spacing and placement of each letter stamp. These are not flaws, but simply a unique feature of hand-stamped jewelry.


text:
NEW ORLEANS — Drew Brees and the Saints can hardly wait to get Sean Payton back and move beyond the bounty scandal that overshadowed their worst season in half a decade.
Brees made more NFL history in New Orleans' finale, but so did the Saints' defense in an undesirable way. The Panthers rallied for a 44-38 victory on Sunday that dropped the Saints to their first losing season since 2007.
"It's going to be an eye-opener for some people, I'm sure, as it should be, because this is not our standard, what happened this year," Brees said as he spoke of Payton's impending return from his season-long suspension in connection with the NFL's bounty investigation. "Sean's going to come in chomping at the bit and we're going to have to be ready to roll. This offseason can't come fast enough."
DeAngelo Williams rushed for 210 yards, including touchdown runs of 54 and 12 yards, for Carolina (7-9). His 65-yard gain set up the first of three 1-yard scoring runs by Mike Tolbert.
The Panthers trotted to the locker room brimming with hope about 2013 after closing the season winning four straight and five out of six. That finish will reflect well on coach Ron Rivera, who has been answering questions about his job security as his second straight losing season wound down.
"I'm proud of the fact that those guys showed up every day and worked, did the things we asked and did them very well," said Rivera, whose eyes were red after he stood by the locker room door and exchanged hugs with players walking off the field. "This is a good group of men and they deserved this. They deserved the opportunity to win four in a row."
He said he wants to be back and expects to meet with Panthers owner Jerry Richardson in Charlotte in the next couple days.
"Mr. Richardson has been fair and I appreciate the opportunity he has given me, and we will see how things unfold," Rivera said.
Brees passed for 396 yards, giving him 5,177 this season, also third most behind the 2011 totals of himself (5,476) and New England's Tom Brady (5,235). Brees became the first player to eclipse 5,000 yards three times. His four TD passes gave him 43 in 2012, and he's the first player with 40 TD passes in consecutive seasons.
The Saints (7-9) also gave up 530 yards, raising their season total to 7,042 to break the old record of 6,793 allowed by the 1981 Baltimore Colts.
"Totally unacceptable what happened today," said Joe Vitt, who has been serving as interim head coach during Payton's absence. "Very disappointing. There's no way to sugarcoat this."
Payton, who agreed to a five-year contract extension, is expected to return to work after New Orleans hosts the Super Bowl on Feb. 3.
"To have gone through what we went through this year and just to hang tough ... it would have been very easy at times to fracture and not have the togetherness that we had," Brees said. "We just have to believe that what happened this year is going to serve us well in the future."
Carolina has its own reasons to be optimistic about 2013.
Kicker Graham Gano had field goals of 20, 31 and 42 yards. Cam Newton was 16 of 33 for 248 yards.
Newton was intercepted once, but for only the second time in seven games. The interception, returned 18 yards for a touchdown in the first half, was made by linebacker Jonathan Vilma, a central figure in the bounty scandal. Vilma, who the NFL called a ringleader in the Saints' cash-for-hits program, initially was suspended the entire season. He never served a game of that ban after he, defensive end Will Smith, and former Saints Scott Fujita and Anthony Hargrove fought successfully to have their suspensions of various lengths thrown out on appeal.
Leading 24-13, the Saints looked ready to seize control in the third quarter. Panthers tight end Greg Olsen fumbled along the sideline in Carolina territory, and defensive back Johnny Patrick appeared to recover. Initially, the play was blown dead and Olsen ruled down. Vitt challenged the call, and the play was ruled a fumble, but Patrick's right foot was so close to the sideline that referee Al Riveron could not determine if the Saints took possession.
"He didn't get the same angle that we, I guess, had on the Jumbotron," Vitt said, adding he was more upset by his team's mistakes after that pivotal play.
The ball remained with the Panthers, and Williams ran for his long TD soon afterward.
Carolina took a 27-24 lead after converting Brees' 19th interception of the season into Tolbert's second short scoring run. Charles Godfrey picked off an underthrown pass that had Brees ripping at his chin strap in disgust. Two of Brees' scoring passes went to Marques Colston for 7 and 9 yards. He also hit tight end Jimmy Graham for a 19-yard score and Darren Sproles for a 33-yard TD in the fourth quarter as the Saints, who trailed 41-24 with 8:23 left, nearly mounted a late comeback.
Lance Moore had four catches for 121 yards and Graham had nine catches for 115 yards. Moore finished with a career-high 1,041 yards receiving, second on team behind Colston's 1,154. ... Colston had five catches to give him 532, tied for first in franchise history with Eric Martin. ... In the fourth quarter, Newton appeared to injure his lower left leg. It was caught awkwardly under defensive end Turk McBride on a hit shortly after Newton had thrown. Newton returned after missing several plays to complete a touchdown drive.
Panthers come from behind to beat Saints 44-38
NEW ORLEANS — Drew Brees and the Saints can hardly wait to get Sean Payton back and move beyond the bounty scandal that overshadowed their worst season in half a decade.


text:
BBC to show WSL One matchesCrystal Palace become first Premier League club to sack their managerFootball related betting sponsorship under scrutiny from Labour PartyNewcastle United announce Tyre company to be first sleeve sponsorLeicester City's Jamie Vardy sees early success from V9 AcademyEngland and Arsenal's Jodie taylor named Player of the YearJimmy Floyd Hasselbaink reckons new side Northampton Town can 'be a bigger Burton'Tottenham announce world first pitchAFC Fylde to launch education programmeQPR announce fantasy partnership
Member sign in
You need to enter a correct username and password to access the member section of this site.
Please, register to get access to the member section.
If you have lost your password – we can send it to the e-mail address you used when you first registered.
Sign in
Order tracking
Forgotten your password?
If you have forgotten your password, please enter your email address below and we will send you a link to reset your password.
Please note that your username is always your email address.


text:
Mouth ulcers - or aphthae in doctorese - are shallow painful ulcerations in the soft tissue inside the mouth. Although they normally heal within a week to 10 days, for many people, they are recurring and persistent.
In girls, there seems to be a relationship between recurrences and menstruation; persistent cases often improve during pregnancy. Certain drugs, such as sulphonamides, gold, penicillamine, barbiturates, cytotoxics, carbimazole and sulphasalazine, can predispose you to mouth ulcers.
Coeliacs and Crohn's disease sufferers are prone to mouth ulcers, and ulcers are also common in conditions like Reiter's syndrome (inflammation of the urethra, conjunctivitis and arthritis), Behcet's disease (chronic inflammation of the small blood vessels), systemic lupus erythematosus, mononucleosis (glandular fever), tuberculosis, syphilis, Wegener's granulomatosis and Schultz's syndrome (agranulocytosis).
When not caused by a specific condition, mouth ulcers can often be related to food sensitivities or nutritional deficiencies (Oral Surg, 1982, 54: 388-95; BMJ, 1975; 2: 490-3).
Food and environmental allergens
Following a diet or programme to eliminate allergens (using, for example, the food elimination diet or the pulse test for allergies) has been shown to have good therapeutic results in the control of recurring mouth ulcers (Oral Surg, 1984; 57: 504-7).
In my own practice, I have often found dental metals or acrylics to be the sensitising agents in some cases of recurrent mouth ulcers. Suspect this cause if the onset of the problem was relatively soon after any dental work and if the ulcers appear mostly in the vicinity of the new dental material.
Gluten sensitivity
Switching to a gluten-free diet can result in complete remission or much improvement of recurrent mouth ulcers in coeliacs (Gut, 1980; 21: 223-6; J Dent Res, 1979; 58 [Special Issue C]: 1271).
In one study of 330 individuals with recurrent mouth ulcers, 14.2 per cent proved to be deficient in iron, folic acid and/or vitamin B12. As soon as their deficiencies were eliminated by supplements, the majority achieved a complete remission (J Oral Path, 1978; 7: 418-23). For patients who are deficient in zinc, taking extra zinc supplements has proved effective (BMJ, 1975; 2: 490-3).
In cases where mouth ulcers have resulted from allergies, a combination of flavonoids has been shown to have anti-allergy effects as well as relieved symptoms (J Allergy Clin Immunol, 1984; 73: 819-23, 801-9).
Traditional Chinese Medicine
The rhizome of Cimicifuga foetida (bugbane; sheng ma in Chinese) will clear toxins from the superficial parts of the body, such as your gums.
Other effective remedies include the rhizome of Anemarrhena asphodeloides (zhi mu in Chinese) and Mirabilitum (mang xiao in Chinese; Bensky D, Gamble A, Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica, Seattle, Washington: Eastland Press, 1993: 50-1, 56-7, 117-8).
Folk remedies
Several teas, taken freely, have a long history of curing mouth ulcers. These include ladies' bedstraw tea (Galium verum, or cheese rennet), made with 1-2 teaspoons of tea to each cup of boiling water and infused for 15 minutes, and wild strawberry tea (Fragaria vesca), made with two teaspoonfuls of dried leaves to each cup of boiling water and infused for 10 minutes. (Note: cultivated strawberry leaves do not possess the same properties; Bartram's Encyclopaedia of Herbal Medicine, London: Robinson Publishing, 1998: 53, 406).
A single, controlled proving of Beryllium metallicum performed 50 years ago managed to produce small ulcers in the mouths of all seven healthy volunteers participating in the proving (Br Hom J, 1953; 43: 79, 84). (In homoeopathy, a remedy is said to be 'proved' when the full potency of the substance produces the very symptoms that are to be treated.) I have found low potencies of this homoeopathic medicine to be very reliable in treating common mouth ulcers.
Harald Gaier
Harald Gaier is a registered homoeopath, naturopath and osteopath.


text:
Tencent offers its more than 700 million online customers a range of services, including online gaming, social networking and instant messaging. DigitalGlobe's imagery will first be integrated into Tencent's online mapping service, enabling Tencent to provide a superior end-user experience, increase its subscription base, and expand the location-based features it can offer its customers.
"Tencent is excited to incorporate DigitalGlobe's industry-leading content into one of our most promising applications, the mapping service," said Wang Jianyu, head of Tencent's mapping service. "The launch of this service represents an important step in achieving our strategic goal of providing users with 'one-stop online lifestyle services.' High-resolution satellite imagery is now a basic requirement for any online mapping portal, because it enables a very intuitive user experience."
Moving forward, Tencent will have the ability to integrate the imagery across the full range of their social media and entertainment services, including their QQ instant messaging service, which is today one of the most widely used social media applications in China.
"DigitalGlobe is honored to be Tencent's key provider of high-resolution satellite imagery," said Takayuki Odawara, vice president of Asia Pacific commercial operations at DigitalGlobe. "With the addition of Tencent, one of the world's most influential and rapidly growing technology companies, DigitalGlobe now has relationships with the three largest internet companies in China. This will give us exposure to over half of the Chinese population."
About DigitalGlobe
DigitalGlobe is a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution earth imagery products and services. Sourced from our own advanced satellite constellation, our imagery solutions support a wide variety of uses within defense and intelligence, civil agencies, mapping and analysis, environmental monitoring, oil and gas exploration, infrastructure management, Internet portals and navigation technology. With our collection sources and comprehensive ImageLibrary (containing more than two billion square kilometers of earth imagery and imagery products) we offer a range of on- and off-line products and services designed to enable customers to easily access and integrate our imagery into their business operations and applications. For more information, visit www.digitalglobe.com.
About Tencent
Founded in November, 1998, Tencent has grown into one of China's largest and most used Internet services portals. Since its establishment over the last decade, Tencent has maintained steady growth under its user-oriented operating strategies. On June 16, 2004, Tencent Holdings Limited (SEHK 700) went public on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It is Tencent's mission to enhance the quality of human life through Internet services. Presently, Tencent is providing value-added Internet, mobile and telecom services and online advertising under the strategic goal of providing users with "one-stop online lifestyle services." Tencent's leading Internet platforms in China -- QQ (QQ Instant Messenger), QQ.com, QQ Games, Qzone, 3g.QQ.com, SoSo, PaiPai and Tenpay -- have brought together China's largest Internet community, to meet the various needs of Internet users including communication, information, entertainment, e-commerce and others. As of Sep 30, 2011, the active QQ users accounts for QQ IM amounted to 711.7 million while its peak concurrent users reached 145.4 million. The development of Tencent has profoundly influenced the ways hundreds of millions of Internet users communicate with one another as well as their lifestyles. It also brings possibilities of a wider range of applications to China's Internet industry.
DigitalGlobe is a registered trademark of DigitalGlobe.
Safe Harbor Statement
Our reports, filings, presentations and public announcements may contain or incorporate forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. Forward-looking statements relate to future events or our future financial performance. We generally identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "could," "intends," "target," "projects," "contemplates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential" or "continue" or the negative of these terms or other similar words, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words.
Any forward-looking statements are based upon our historical performance and on our current plans, estimates and expectations. The inclusion of this forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by us that the future plans, estimates or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions. A number of important factors could cause our actual results or performance to differ materially from those indicated by such forward looking statements, including: the loss, reduction or change in terms of any of our primary contracts; the loss or impairment of our satellites; delays in the construction and launch of WorldView-3; delays in implementation of planned ground system and infrastructure enhancements; loss or damage to the content contained in our ImageLibrary; interruption or failure of our ground system and other infrastructure, decrease in demand for our imagery products and services; increased competition that may reduce our market share or cause us to lower our prices; our failure to obtain or maintain required regulatory approvals and licenses; changes in U.S. foreign law or regulation that may limit our ability to distribute our imagery products and services; the costs associated with being a public company; and other important factors, all as described more fully in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K.
We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any of these forward-looking statements.
Add to Digg Bookmark with del.icio.us Add to Newsvine


text:
Or are they just setting us on the wrong track! </tinfoil>
can we get a timestamp on when this appeared?
Oh good i wasn't the only one to notice! XD
The worst ps i ever saw.
His face will forever be remembered!
Haha, that's pretty funny.
Blizzard has to be the most incompetent company out there, plus that looks like they just recycled the Cata logo, so freaking lazy...
I'd almost say that is noobish..
Oh well.
No more TDB talk please <3


text:
Indenture(redirected from indentured)
Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Legal, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Related to indentured: Indentured labor
Agreement between lender and borrower that details specific terms of the bond issuance. Specifies legal obligations of bond issuer and rights of bondholders. An indenture spells out the specific terms of a bond, as well as the rights and responsibilities of both the issuer of the security and the holder.
A contract for a bond. An indenture sets the terms of the bond; for example, it includes the coupon rate, the period until maturity, and whether the bond comes with any special features like convertibility or whether it is callable. All bonds must have an indenture. Indentures are usually summarized in a bond's prospectus.
A legal contract between a bond issuer and its lenders that specifies the terms of the issue. Typical provisions are the amount and dates of interest payments, name of the trustee, maturity date, collateral, restrictions on dividends or other borrowing, and specifics of a sinking fund or potential calls. It is the trustee's job to ensure that the terms of the indenture are fulfilled. Also called bond indenture, trust deed. See also covenant.
An indenture is a written contract between a bond issuer and bond holder that is proof of the bond issuer's indebtedness and specifies the terms of the arrangement, including the maturity date, the interest rate, whether the bond is convertible to common stock, and, if so, the price or ratio of the conversion.
The indenture, which may be called a deed of trust, also includes whether the bond is callable -- or can be redeemed by the issuer before it matures -- what property, if any, is pledged as security, and any other terms.


text:
File safety and health complaint
Public employees have a right to a safe and healthful workplace free from recognized hazards. Employees may refuse unsafe job assignments with a risk of death or serious physical harm (imminent danger).
Click here to download a PERRP complaint form.
To file a complaint or report an imminent danger condition, call 1-800-671-6858.
If your complaint is related to COVID-19, visit coronavirus.ohio.gov or call 1-833-4-ASK-ODH.
Who can file a safety and health complaint?
A current public employee (i.e., persons employed by state agencies, counties, cities, townships, villages, school districts, state universities and special districts) or employee representative (e.g., union official). Peace officers employed by public employers do not fall under PERRP jurisdiction.
NOTE: PERRP does not have jurisdiction to process complaints from: former public employees; family members of a public employee, or; members of the general public.
What is a formal complaint?
Under Ohio law, public employees who believe that a hazardous condition exists in their workplace that threatens physical harm, or creates an imminent danger, may file a complaint with PERRP requesting an inspection. Filing a complaint is confidential and your name will not be revealed to your employer.
If you think your job is unsafe and you want to discuss your concerns, contact us at 1-800-671-6858.
You can also send us an email. Please include your name and contact information in your correspondence so that we can call you back and discuss your concerns. Click here to start the conversation!
When will my complaint be sent to my employer?
Within five business days of the receipt of the complaint, PERRP will send a letter of notification to the public employer by certified mail, which outlines the allegations. This notification letter will not include the name(s) of the complainant(s).
How long does my employer have to respond to my complaint and what does the employer have to do?
The public employer must investigate, correct and respond to the allegations within 30 days. If the employer does not respond, or if PERRP determines the response is inadequate, an inspection of the workplace will result.
Two outcomes can result from a complaint inspection:
- PERRP determines there are no reasonable grounds to believe that a violation or danger exists. If this occurs the complainant will be notified of the outcome.
- PERRP identifies violations and issues citations to the employer that require corrective action. If the employer fails to correct identified hazards within the allotted time, they may face fines.
What are the conditions to file a refusal to work?
If you believe your employer is asking you to perform work that presents an imminent danger of death or serious physical harm, you have a right to refuse those job assignments.
Examples of potential imminent danger conditions include: working in a trench or excavation without adequate protection; entering and performing work in a confined space without proper equipment and training; working in a roadway right-of-way without high visibility work apparel or advance warning signs.
How do I file a refusal to work?
You must notify your immediate supervisor that the assigned work task has a risk of death or serious physical harm. If the employer refuses to correct the hazardous conditions, you must notify PERRP by calling 1-800-671-6858. You will be required to submit a written statement that describes the imminent danger conditions to PERRP.
Am I protected from discrimination or retaliation?
Yes. Employees are protected from discrimination or retaliation for exercising their rights under the Act. Employees who feel they have been discriminated for exercising their rights can file an appeal with the State Personnel Board of Review.
- ${title}${badge}


text:
Note Taking Policy & Procedure
Student Success Center
Contact Us
Genevieve Kruly
Coordinator of Disability Services
Student Support Center
(in the Academic Support Center)
Huber 101
(716) 566-3088
Reference Material
Apply Now
First time freshmen, transfer students and students who wish to apply for associate or bachelor's degree programs.
Students who wish to apply for master's degree programs or advanced certifications.
Students who wish to apply for our online-only degree programs.
Visit Medaille
Undergraduate Programs
High school students and transfer students who want to enroll in day classes at the Buffalo campus.
Adult and Graduate Programs
Adult learners applying to our undergraduate or graduate degree programs at either our Buffalo or Rochester campuses.
Online Programs
Adult learners applying to our online undergraduate or graduate degree programs.


text:
The Central Connecticut softball team honored five members with the title of captain for the 2013 season. The five Blue Devil captains are seniors Lauryn Alibozek and Kelsey Barlow and juniors Emily Pogemiller, Tessa Brown and Arielle Bruno.
"I am very proud of this group," Head Coach Jeff Franquet said. "Each of these student-athletes brings different but important things to our team. The team looks up to each of these girls and in naming these five athletes captain, we have raised the expectation of their leadership."
Alibozek, a senior outfielder and pinch runner, has proven her leadership throughout her three seasons with the Blue Devils. A hard-worker on the field, Alibozek also works hard in the classroom as she was recently named NFCA All-America Scholar Athlete.
"Lauryn brings a positive attitude to the team and is always willing to help out," Franquet said. "She also has a great relationship with her teammates and will be a great leader."
Pogemiller entered 15 games for the Blue Devils last season, mostly as a pinch runner. In addition to being a valuable team member on the field, Pogemiller also assists in day-to-day operations regarding the team. She goes above and beyond in helping the team behind-the-scenes.
"Emily helps to keep the team cohesive," Franquet said. "She's always helping set up for practice, catch for the pitchers and anything else the team needs. She is a true team player."
Senior outfielder Barlow currently ranks second in CCSU history in career home runs (19). The senior also holds the single-season home run record at 10 (tied with classmate Nicole Springer). She is also ranked fourth all-time in CCSU history in RBI with 74.
"Kelsey has emerged as a leader coming into this season," Franquet said. "She led the team in fall practices and the team looks to her for guidance. I know she is ready for this role."
Brown, a junior utility player, played an integral role for the Blue Devils last season starting in 49 games and posting 43 hits, 25 runs, three doubles, one triple and eight RBI. She currently ranks seventh in CCSU history in career batting average (.302) and 10th in career slugging percentage (.416).
"Tessa is a natural leader and the team really respects her both as an athlete and a leader," Franquet said. "They look to her for mechanical and technical tips on the field."
Also a junior, Bruno started 49 games last season and racked up 54 hits, 38 runs, nine doubles, four triples, seven home runs and 26 RBI. The outfielder ranks in the top 10 in five out of 11 statistical categories in CCSU history. She is second in slugging percentage (.494), fourth in batting average (.326), sixth in runs scored (77), tied for eighth in home runs (10) and ranks 10th in total bases (173).
"Arielle is a born leader due to her athletic talent and ability to lead by example," Franquet said. "She is one of the best players in the league and always puts in 100 percent during practice and games."
The 2013 Blue Devil softball season will kick off on Friday, March 1 at the Under Armour Invitational hosted by the University of South Florida in Clearwater, FL.


text:
|Optimized for:
|Moz. Firefox 3.6
|Internet Expl. 8
Written by SBS systems for business solutions Administrator
SBS systems for business solutions is a private marketing company based in Rome and Berlin.
Since 1999 we have designed and managed events to create international opportunities. We are specialized in the internationalization of foreign companies in Italy. Since 2006 we have been managing 8 all inclusive projects on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.
For further information about SBS systems for business solutions please visit www.sbs-business.com.


text:
I got a request to write about healing the Lich King fight (as opposed to healing the Lich King– that doesn't happen, you don't get to heal the Lich King). I'm a bit of at a loss for words. I don't have an epic story to tell, my tears of frustration are too fresh to have gained that (melo)dramatic tint of QQ. I don't have a specific mechanic in mind to focus on. Heck, while I've seen the first two phases way more often that I care to admit, phase 3 is a bit of a blurr in my mind. Once you get there, Arthas gets really squishy, really fast, so my memories of that phase are mainly fumbling around for my boss fight notes while pretending to know what I'm doing.
So I reach out to my final (and usually also first) resort: cheap pop psychology/health with a "they're against us" feel. Things about healing the Lich King fight that the Lich King doesn't want you to know.
1- You'll have your hands full with the tanks
I hate infests, I really do. Not because they chew up your team if your discipline priests and raid healers are otherwise occupied with whatever else they may be doing, but because there's all that deep, glorious damage going on and there's nothing I can do about it. If I take my attention away from the tanks, the tanks go splat. Chances are you'll face the same. Despite what Arthas wants you to do, you have to trust your raid healers and keep your attention on the tanks.
2- You can dispel diseases in Phase 1
It's tough, but you can do it. On both 10 and 25 man, we typically have a disc priest cover dispels, but I've done it on occasion. Make sure you have Necrotic Plague showing on your raid frames. Call out whoever gets the Plague so they can move towards the Shambling Horrors pronto. (Assuming here you have all the range stacked together on Phase 1.) Dispel sooner than later. A death due to Plague will likely be a wipe, an extra jump of the Plague is salvageable.
3- During the parts with two tanks, direct heal the Lich King tank, beacon the other tank
More often than not, you'll have more people hanging around the Lich King, cheerfully in range of your Glyph of Holy Light splash. This is especially true of phase 1. After that, it's just more convenient and I'm all about convenience. On 25 man, during the single tank parts, I'll move beacon to myself since constantly swapping beacon around is hassle on top of being a waste of mana and global cooldowns. On 10 man, we don't tank swap so I keep Arthas' tank beaconed.
4- Following Arthas' cooldown timers helps you move to the right spot, at the right time
Your boss fight addon of choice keeps track of Val'kyrs, Defiles and Soul Reaper. I've had guildies complain that their timers are off, but I haven't had any problems. I use Deadly Boss Mods. Have a Holy Light timed to hit right after a Soul Reaper. Right after a Defile, move back to your Val'Kyr position. Right after the Val'Kyr(s) chooses its/their target, position yourself in a way to move fast if you get targeted for Defile, but within Hammer of Justice path of the Val'Kyr(s).
You've probably discovered by now that moving too much isn't very compatible with tank healing, especially on this fight, so you'll want to limit movement as much as possible by anticipating the upcoming optimal location and timing your moving with Soul Reaper.
5- Raging Spirits don't have to eat your face
If a Raging Spirit (during the transition phases) spawns near you, you can, you know, move. It can take the tanks a second or two to pick up the Spirits and it takes far less than a second for the Spirits to turn you into pulp. The solution is to be far enough from a newly born Raging Spirit to be able to kite it if you happen to grab healing aggro.
Also, I probably shouldn't have to say this, but please, oh, please don't stand in front of Raging Spirits. Also make the sure the tanks aren't silenced by Soul Shriek. Soul Shriek is a magic debuff and should be showing up on your frames. If doesn't, then fix your frames. Dispelling Soul Shriek is a priority. You can split dispel jobs between other healers by each claiming a tank, but still, make sure neither tank is ever silenced.
6- Aura Mastery, Hand of Sacrifice, Divine Sacrifice: You have them, you can use them.
Aura Mastery + Devotion Aura can be helpful for phase 1, especially if the Shambling Horrors are getting pissy and the tranquility shot is slow on coming. (Lots of physical damage.)
Aura Mastery + Shadow Resistance can be helpful for Infests and Soul Reaper.
Aura Mastery + Frost Resistance can save slackers making their way to the edge too slowly during transition phases.
Hand of Sacrifice is a saver during Soul Reaper or if you have to run at an unfortunate time (say you've got defile and all the other healers are getting carried away by Valks…)
Divine Sacrifice really shines at the beginning of the second transition phase, when you'll undoubtly have some slackers and space cadets making their way to the edge of the platform waay too late.
7- If you make it to the end of the second transition phase, rejoice.
Or not. I have no tricks for phase 3. My memory's hazy but I know I really like ending up inside Frostmourne. Makes me feel like a real paladin. Use healing boost cooldowns to up healing without wasting as much mana. On the outside, my guild tanks Arthas along the edge of the ring and we drop our Defiles in the middle. Anticipating the next optimal position works even better in phase 3. Um, and run from Vile Spirits if they chase you. Spirits exploding on your face is unpleasant. Someone once told me that bubbling and running through the Vile Spirits kills them but I've never gotten it to work. Most of the time, I've already used my bubble as an emergency resort by phase 3 anyway.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT. All the things about healing the Lich King fight (and not the Lich King) that Arthas didn't want you to know.
Now go forth and complain about others standing in defiles.
ps. Huge thanks to Hempia for the first screenshot.


text: Astronomers weekly announce the discovery of new exoplanets, some similar in size or temperature to our planet –- but Earth-like worlds are not always far away. Though Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is a small, cold world orbiting on the outskirts of the solar system, it actually boasts many familiar features. "Titan is fascinating because it has some surprising properties so similar to Earth," said planetary scientist Oded Aharonson from the California Institute of Technology. "It has a liquid which erodes channels, an atmosphere, a hydrologic cycle, and many other parallels." Chief among Titan's interesting qualities is that it's the only body other than Earth where liquids are known to flow in large concentrations on the surface. Because average temperatures there are -300 degrees Fahrenheit, these liquids are not water. Instead, hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane rain down from clouds, course over the landscape in rivers and eventually pour out into large lakes and seas. The presence of liquids has sparked scientists' imaginations. If Titan has so many Earth-like features, perhaps it possesses one more terrestrial trait: the presence of life. Native organisms on Titan would be an incredible discovery, showing that life may have formed more than once and suggesting it's common in the universe. In this gallery, Wired looks closer at the details of this strange wet world so similar and so different from our own. Above: Sea of Ligeia Creatively colored in this image, Ligeia Mare looks like an inviting place for a summer vacation. Ligeia is one of Titan's largest lakes, with a surface area bigger than Lake Superior, located in the planet's northern high latitudes. The radar data for this picture came from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004. Around the edges, many channels are visible. Rivers of hydrocarbons carved these channels, in much the same way that the Colorado River etched out the Grand Canyon. Image: Antoine Lucas, Oded Aharonson & The Cassini Radar Science Team, Caltech/JPL/NASAThe Rains in the Plains NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured evidence of large weather systems on Titan. In 2010, astronomers noticed that the parts of the surface had darkened after the passing of rain clouds, suggesting the areas became wet after rainstorms. Much like Earth, Titan has seasonal changes as well as longer-term climate cycles, which may take place over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Researchers are now creating models of interactions between Titan's surface, liquids, and atmosphere in order to better understand these processes. Image: NASA/JPL/SSIEnormous Lake The largest lake yet found on Titan is the gargantuan Kraken Mare. Discovered in 2007, researchers don't yet know its full extent but it's been estimated to be about the size of Earth's largest lake, the Caspian Sea. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteRivers of Methane The Huygens lander detached from NASA's Cassini satellite and plummeted toward the surface of Titan in 2005. Along the way, it captured spectacular details of the water and landscape. This image shows a high ridge with channels bringing liquid hydrocarbons into a river. One thing that researchers hope to better understand is how such flows erode the crust of Titan. The surface is composed of rocks and water ice frozen hard as rock, and scientists don't yet know the details of how liquid hydrocarbon eats away into such material. Image: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaLake Ontario The largest lake in Titan's Southern Hemisphere is named Ontario Lacus. Slightly smaller than its Lake Ontario namesake, Ontario Lacus boasts many features reminiscent of Earthly bodies of water. Along the northern shoreline are flooded river valleys and hills more than half a mile high. A round-headed bay can be seen at the southeastern shore. And the middle western shoreline features the first delta observed on Titan. The delta's shape suggests that liquid first flowed in one channel from the higher plain and then switched at a later point. Such channel-switching deltas can be seen on Earth at the southern end of Lake Albert between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Image: NASA/JPL-CaltechRiver Plateau Titan's Xanadu region is an Australia-sized plateau composed of water ice. Flowing over this frozen landscape are remnants of rivers networks, seen as bright cobweb-like filaments in the right side of the image. Image: NASA/JPLDrowned Mountains Ever-changing plate tectonics have built continents and drowned mountains on Earth. Similarly, the surface of Titan has been remolded by geologic processes and the presence of liquid on its surface. The shoreline in this image features many easily identifiable aspects, such as bay, channels, and islands. The islands located in the lower left are likely peaks of a mountain chain that has been flooded by Titan's liquid hydrocarbon lake. Image: NASA/JPLDistant Islands An enormous island lies right in the middle of a section of Kraken Mare on Titan. The landmass, surrounded on all sides by liquid, is roughly the size of the Big Island of Hawaii. Using radar data, researchers have mapped the elevation of islands such as this on Titan. What they find is a steady rise and then a flat "bench" existing near the shoreline. This is similar to islands on Earth, which show the same type of bench topography due to erosion from liquid water. Image: NASA/JPLRiver Rocks When the European Space Agency's Huygens lander reached the surface of Titan in 2005, it captured the first-ever evidence of liquid on the surface of another planet. Landing near the edge of a dried lakeshore, it also photographed the rocks seen in the left-hand image. With their flat shape and rounded edges, the Titan pebbles bear a very strong similarity to rocks from a terrestrial shoreline, suggesting that similar processes generated them. Image: NASA/JPL/ESA/University of Arizona and S.M. MathesonSaturn-rise Over the Lake This is an artist's depiction of a large lake on Titan, as seen from the surface. The landscape is at once alien and familiar: peaceful waves lapping at the shoreline contrast with a strangely-colored sky lit by the bright rings and body of Saturn. While this image is fanciful, astronomers may get a chance to capture even more spectacular views if the Titan Mare Explorer (pdf) is selected to fly to Saturn. This mission would land a small boat-like probe on a large lake of Titan – likely Kraken or Ligeia Mare – in order to explore the seas of another world. TiME is currently competing with two other proposed missions, a comet-hopping satellite and a Martian seismometer, for selection as part of NASA's low-cost Discovery program. If selected, the boat-probe would launch from Earth in 2015 and reach Titan by 2022. Images: 1) NASA 2) Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Corby Waste


text:
Indians bats quieted by Vargas as rally falls short
Kluber has a couple of rough innings, errors contribute to loss
KANSAS CITY -- Corey Kluber approached the mound in the third inning looking poised and confident.
There was reason to be -- he had just disposed of the Royals in the first two innings using just 17 pitches, and the Indians ace dealing did not bode well for Kansas City and its hapless offense.
But after a few dinks and dunks and a massive defensive flub, Kluber and the Indians found themselves in a 4-0 third-inning hole, one they could not dig out of.
Cleveland fell for just the second time in its last 11 games after the Royals started a two-game series at Kauffman Stadium, with a 9-5 victory Tuesday.
Kluber, who brought MLB's fourth-highest strikeout total into the game, allowed a season-high six runs (three earned) in five innings.
"I thought [Kluber] went into the game [with] really good stuff," Indians manager Terry Francona said. "The line's probably not indicative of the stuff he had."
The damage came from two innings, as the Royals tallied four in the third, then two in the fifth. Kluber threw 51 pitches in the two innings he allowed runs. His other three innings required just 27.
"I wasn't at my best, but I think I did a decent enough job of making good pitches when I needed to, unfortunately there were a couple times where some soft hits, things like that, fell in," Kluber said.
Kluber's adversary, Jason Vargas, tamed an Indians offense that broke out for 17 runs Monday against the Rangers. He threw 7 2/3 innings of three-run ball, scattering six hits and walking zero.
Cleveland was unable to make Vargas uncomfortable until his final inning.
For Vargas' first seven innings, the Indians failed to board two runners in the same frame.
In the eighth, Jason Kipnis slugged a two-run double off Vargas, and Carlos Santana added an RBI single with KC's starter removed from the game.
"He just got ahead of us all night, and then spun his breaking ball and for the most part, pitched like you're supposed to with the lead," Francona said. "We hit some balls hard, but we couldn't string anything together, [until] later."
The sharp, economical version of Kluber in the first two innings vanished in the third frame as he walked Mike Moustakas, then Alcides Escobar ripped a single to left with one out to start Kansas City's barrage.
A defensive miscue contributed greatly to the rest of the scoring.
Jarrod Dyson smacked a grounder to second baseman Kipnis, who fielded the ball and fired a throw to Asdrubal Cabrera for the force at second. But the shortstop dropped the ball before he could relay the throw to first.
Second-base umpire Marvin Hudson ruled that the drop came on the transfer, thus forcing Escobar out for the second out. However, Royals manager Ned Yost challenged the call, and replay ruled that Cabrera simply dropped the ball.
Everyone remained safe, and Kluber faced a bases-loaded one-out jam that he could not escape.
Omar Infante looped a single into center that plated Moustakas, Eric Hosmer dribbled an RBI groundout, then Billy Butler rapped a two-run single to make it 4-0 Royals.
"If we don't win that challenge, we lose out on three extra runs. It looked to me from the dugout that Cabrera didn't have control of it… It worked out really good for us," Yost said.
"When you give teams extra chances, or extra opportunities, especially against the middle of the order, sometimes you pay a price for it," Francona said.
Hosmer added to Kluber's mess with a two-run home run in the fifth inning, to push KC's lead to 6-0.
Kluber exited after the inning despite his pitch count standing at 78.
The bullpen crumbled as well. After Cleveland tacked on three runs in the eighth to cut the deficit to 6-3, the relief combination of Nick Hagadone, Scott Atchison and Josh Outman allowed three runs.
Alex Gordon smashed a leadoff home run off Hagadone, then Moustakas hit Kansas City's third home run of the night, a two-run shot, off Outman, with one of the runs being charged to Atchison.
The Indians tacked on a pair of runs in the ninth on a David Murphy double and Cabrera's sacrifice fly, making the final score 9-5.
Lonnie Chisenhall continued his hot hitting with a 2-for-4 night from the plate. Chisenhall erupted for a 5-for-5, three homer, nine-RBI performance in the team's 17-7 win over the Rangers Monday.
Santana, who entered the game batting just .169, also clubbed a pair of hits.


text:
This website provides access to the research results of the VECTORS project, which can be used to support marine management decisions, policies and governance as well as future research and investment.
VECTORS was a large scale project that brought together more than 200 expert researchers from 16 different countries. It examined the significant changes taking place in European seas, their causes, and the impacts they will have on society.
On a global scale, jellyfish populations in coastal marine ecosystems exhibit increasing trends of abundance. High-density outbreaks may directly or indirectly negatively affect human economic and recreational activities, as well as public health through impacts on tourism, fisheries, industry and local wildlife.
For example, Rhopilema nomadica is a large, tropical invader jellyfish which arrived through the Suez Canal in the Mediterranean in the late 1970s and is now considered one of the 100 worst invading marine species because of its potential for population outbreaks. In 2010, a 200km long swarm formed off the coast of Israel, composed of more than 100 million jellyfish individuals, with a total biomass of 500,000 tons. The jellyfish consumed 5,000 tons of plankton (from small crustaceans - larval fish food - to fish eggs and larvae) every day, scraping clean the oligotrophic Levantine sea. Coastal trawling and purse-seine fishing were disrupted due to net clogging and inability to sort yield, one swarm forced the shutdown of a power plant after clogging the coolant water pipes and local municipalities reported a decrease in holiday-makers frequenting the beaches because of the public's concern over the painful stings inflicted by the jellyfish. This jellyfish is slowly migrating westward into the Mediterranean and VECTORS scientists have reported the westernmost record - off the Maltese islands, suggesting that climate change is becoming conducive to the spread of species of warm water affinity, as another hallmark of the warming trend in the Mediterranean Sea. As predicted, this species has now entered the Western Mediterranean Sea, with an established population in the Gulf of Tunis.
The VECTORS finding of a new, conspicuous and out-breaking jellyfish species (Pelagia benovici, new to science) into the Gulf of Venice, has remarked the high susceptibility to bioinvasions of the Mediterranean Sea and the value of large-scale citizen science campaigns.
Also, increasing proliferation of artificial structures (ocean sprawl) associated to human activities on coastal zones (e.g. shipping, aquaculture, coastal defences, maritime tourism, coastal industries) are providing new habitats for the completion of life cycles of jellyfish species with benthic stages (i.e. living on the sea hard bottoms). VECTORS scientists assessed the impact of secondary hard substrated represented by wind farm pillars, on the occurrence and distribution of the moon jelly Aurelia aurita in the SW Baltic Sea. The study confirmed offshore wind farms have the potential to increase the abundance of jellyfish populations, expanding environmental issues on several sectors, mainly fishery, energy and tourism.
Conversely, with a positive perspective, the large amount of jellyfish biomass could be considered to be a valuable source of bioactive compounds beneficial for humans, including bioactive peptides, collagen and gelatine, oligosaccharides, fatty acids, enzymes, calcium, water-soluble minerals, and biopolymers. The various identified biological activities, including antioxidant activity, make them a potentially valuable material for food, cosmetic, and biomedical industries, such as has been proposed for seafood processing by-products.
VECTORS research has provided new tools to understand and predict potential changes to local marine environments in the event of non-indigenous jellyfish species invading new areas or native species periodically producing large outbreaks. By understanding the drivers of invasions local authorities can, where possible, administer preventative management through better informed policy and governance to at least minimise the impacts caused by the jellyfish presence. Where this is not possible, the research can help management bodies to identify the likely mechanisms and to forsee impacts of the invasion for the environment and socio-economy of the area. Through understanding these impacts there is an opportunity to adapt and / or mitigate the effects through awareness raising, adaptive governance and evolving practices. Furthermore, VECTORS has identified potential socio-economic benefits from jellyfish harvesting that could have far reaching implications for food, health and industry so that we no longer need to look on the number of increasing jellyfish as a management problem but also an opportunity.
The content of this website may be subject to copyright, if you wish to use any of the information or figures please contact the attributed author(s).
This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 266445
© Vectors 2015. Coordinated by Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
Legal | Privacy & Cookies