text:
Debut is an eye-catching multimedia theme featuring a unique content carousel and responsive gallery style layout. Debut comes with a specific set of theme options to help easily customize the layout, functionality, and design of your theme. Some of the features include: customizable hero slider, custom audio player, custom page templates, and a responsive design for all media.
Responsive design
Debut's "Responsive Design" provides a unique and tailored layout depending on which device (desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile) you are using. This makes Debut not only look great in the browser but also on your iPad, iPhone, or any other mobile device.
Hero Slider
The hero slider in Debut is great to showcase important posts and information. This unique slider comes with a barrage of customization controls. A few featured options include: category, content positioning, content color, slideshow speed, slideshow animation, slideshow direction, slide count, and more.
Featured Content
Debut also helps feature content by adding this section to the Home Page Template and a Featured (Grid) Page Template. There are a few options that come with Debut to help you narrow this content down, some of these options include: category, post count, view, pagination, featured image filter and more.
Need to let your site be heard? Debut comes with a custom audio player that also includes a playlist functionality. Adding audio is easy:
- Select the Audio post format.
- Upload the audio (.mp3) you would like to be included in the player.
- And that's it!
Debut will automatically pull the .mp3 audio files from the gallery and insert an audio player at the top of the post. Nice!
Image posts in Debut utilize the Featured Image to showcase an individual photograph. Setting a featured image and an image post format will display your image at the top of your post.
Galleries & Slideshows
Galleries and Slideshows are easy to set up. You just need to:
- Select the Gallery post format.
- Upload the images you would like to appear in your gallery or slideshow.
- Insert the gallery or slideshow shortcode into your content, and you're done!
Your gallery will display as thumbnails on the page. When an image is clicked, it displays in a popup slider overlay. The slideshow will display as a slideshow on the page.
Of course, you also have the flexibility to create galleries and slideshow using the Standard post format. The difference being the Gallery icon will not be displayed over featured images.
Videos also look great in Debut. Just select the Video post format, and paste your embed code or use the WordPress.com standard shortcodes – that's it! Debut will take the first video embedded and feature it at the top of the post.
Quick Specs ( all measurements in pixels):
- Debut is a responsive-width design.
- Full width content is
- Content with sidebar is
550and sidebar is
- Hero slider images


text:
MU Extension > calendar
Professional development events
This event has been canceled. Internet & Digital Marketing
Tuesday, May 13, 2014, 1:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
SBTDC Offices (located directly across the street from the U.S. Post Office main entrance)500 E. Walnut, Suite 103, Columbia MO map...
There is more to digital marketing than social media and a website. Learn how finding the right tools, strategy, and measurements can grow your business. You'll gain a clear perspective of why all your marketing efforts need to be integrated. Learn how you can optimize your online presence through location and keyword specific campaigns via SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Explore tools such as Google- Keyword, Adwords, Analytics, and Social Media Ads. Take advantage of these fantastic resources to better engage and retain your customers; leveraging your current relationships for content creation, R&D, and digital word-of-mouth for acquiring more customers. Understand how to use online tools like Hootsuite to efficiently manage your campaigns.
Class size:
Event full:
Olivia Gill, firstname.lastname@example.com Connectorphone: 573-884-4334
Add event to your compatible iCalendar such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple iCal.
© 1993
to 2015 Curators of the University
of Missouri, all rights reserved, DMCA
and other copyright information
University of Missouri Extension is an equal opportunity/ADA institution.
University of Missouri Extension
© 1993
to 2015 Curators of the University of Missouri, all rights reserved

subset: commoncrawl


text:
As the 2011 season draws closer, HoustonDynamo.com will introduce you to the newest members of the Dynamo roster. With 10 players who have yet to play a game for the Dynamo, the squad will feature a new look in 2011.
This week we look at five players who the Dynamo either traded for, or signed, since the end of last season. Today we speak with Jason Garey.
Garey came to the Dynamo last December in a trade from the Columbus Crew for a fourth round draft pick in the 2015 MLS SuperDraft. In 2010, Garey appeared in 22 games for Columbus, tallying two goals and two assists. He appeared in all six games during the 2010-2011 Champions League qualifying round, notching a goal and an assist and helping Columbus advance to a quartefinal matchup with Real Salt Lake
Prior to joining the Crew, Garey was a standout forward for the University of Maryland Terrapins. In 96 career games, Garey scores 60 goals, with 20 assists and led the Terrapins to the national championship in 2005. That year he also won the M.A.C. Hermann Trophy, awarded to the top college soccer player in the country.
Watch Jason Garey introduction
HD.com: Give us a bit about your soccer background.
Jason: I grew up playing in Louisiana. It's not really not known as a hotbed of soccer, but we have some good players down there and every now and then a player will come out of there and do pretty well in the college or pros. I went to the University of Maryland for college and did pretty well there. We won a national championshpis my senior year. Then I played for the Columbus Crew over the past five years.
HD.com: How did you get into soccer growing up in Louisiana where football is the big sport?
Jason: I was pretty small. I didn't really hit my growth spurt until college so I wasn't really big enough for basketball or football. I gravitated toward soccer and just fell in love with the game.
HD.com: What is your earliest soccer memory?
Jason: Probably just being four or five years old and playing bee-hive soccer where everyone is running around and chasing the ball. My dad always told me to stay out of the pack so when the ball popped out I could go score.
HD.com: Who is a soccer player that you looked up to that you modeled your game after?
Jason: When I was younger I loved Michael Owen. He was always so aggressive and quick and my favorite team was Liverpool so that was the perfect match.
ARCHIVE: Dynamo acquire forward Jason Garey
HD.com: Did it help that he was also a little undersized?
Jason: Definitely, although I wish I was as fast as him. That would be nice.
HD.com: What is your most memorable soccer moment prior to joining the Dynamo?
Jason: My senior year of college when we won the national championship. I was with all my friends and we finally accomplished the goal that we set out to get.
ARCHIVE: Gulf Coast native excited for return
HD.com: Who is the better soccer player between you and your wife?
Jason: Between me and my wife, I think I have her beat, but my sister could kill me. She is the best of us all.
HD.com: What are your early impressions of the Dynamo?
Jason: I was really excited about coming here. It's been great. The guys in the locker room have been great. On the field, the practices have been intense and the games pretty good. We have been pretty successful so far and we are just looking forward to getting into the season and doing some damage.
HD.com: When you were traded to Houston, what were your initial impressions?
Jason: I was really excited. I have wanted to come here for a long time. It's pretty much the home-town team for Louisiana folks. I've been wanting to come back down south and be in Houston for a long time.


text:
Frenchtown Middle School Student Suspended Over Bomb Threat – Cited in Youth Court [AUDIO]
The Frenchtown Middle and High School complex was evacuated on March 20 after two bomb threats were discovered in a school bathroom. A student has been cited for the incident, and has been suspended from classes, in addition to facing criminal charges in youth court.
Missoula Sheriff's Office Public Information Officer Paige Pavalone said on Tuesday, March 25, that the school's own investigation turned up the male suspect.
"They have security cameras in the school, and they identified a student coming out of the bathroom, because it had happened a second time," Pavalone said. "One warning was written on a mirror and the other in a bathroom stall. They identified the student and issued their own sanctions against him. We dispatched two deputies to the school and he was subsequently issued two citations, one for criminal mischief and another for disorderly conduct. He will be cited into youth court in Missoula."
Missoula Sheriff's Office Public Information Officer Paige Pavalone
Frenchtown Schools Superintendent Randy Kline described the procedure under which a student can be disciplined, suspended or even expelled.
"Each building has a school discipline handbook," Kline said. "The handbook talks about various offenses and what might happen to students if they commit these offenses. A bomb threat such as the one that happened last week would be considered the highest possible threat, and would entail a high level of disciplinary action."
Kline said the parents must first be contacted and brought into the situation.
"We call the parents once we've determined the extent of the student's involvement," Kline said. "If we feel that a criminal act has taken place, then we contact the Missoula County Sheriff's Office and they can choose to pursue criminal actions against the student. We then suspend the student, sometimes for a couple of days, or in the case of expulsion, that goes before the board. They give the student a hearing to determine if expulsion is justified or not."
Kline said the student in question has already been suspended.
"He has been suspended, the parents have been notified and the Missoula County Sheriff's Office has been brought in," Kline said. "The incident caused a great deal of problems, since many parents raced in from Missoula to pick up their kids. Missoula County did a great job in handling the traffic at the elementary school where all the students were moved. I realized as I was watching many of the students texting their parents that I needed to issue a press release. That's the influence of social media, things just move so fast, and if we don't get accurate information out, only panic can result."
Kline said parents need to clearly communicate the consequences of such behavior with their children.
"I'd just like parents to speak to their children about what they might see as just a hoax, they don't understand what all the consequences are going to be," Kline said."
The school was evacuated on March 20, and sheriff's deputies, along with a bomb-sniffing dog determined there was no threat. School resumed the next day.


text:
Featured News - Current News - Archived News - News Categories
Press release
Though there were many carrousel companies during the "Golden Age" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, only a handful are considered to have been major manufacturers. One of these was undoubtedly the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, or PTC.
In the next installment of the Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum's free "Carrousel Chat" lecture series, the museum is pleased to have author Richard A. Gardner on hand to discuss his new book, "PTC Carousels: The History of the Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousels" (published by The Connecticut Press). Gardner, a retired Massachusetts native who now resides in San Jose, Calif., has had a long-time interest in carrousels, and has spent the past several years researching and photographing PTC carrousels across the U.S. and Canada.
This illustrated reference work featuring more than 300 photographs is the first comprehensive history of the legendary company's hand-carved carrousels, which were produced by some of the grand masters of the art. PTC produced or retrofitted some 93 carrousels from 1904-34, all of which are represented in Gardner's work (including those that have been destroyed or are no longer available to the public).
The event takes place Monday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m. A book signing will follow the discussion.
The Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum is housed in the historic Allan Herschell Company Factory building at 180 Thompson St., North Tonawanda. For directions and further information about special events, programs, or group tours, visit www.carrouselmuseum.org call 716-693-1885 or email [email protected].


text:
Yesterday, Dublin police released video of internationally famous Irish DJ Dadi Digi who walked into a self-serve Beer Store on the weekend and purchased a case of 24 Labatt Crystal.
Seconds later he returned and asked if he could switch it for Labatt Blue -- but the case he returned contained capped beer bottles filled with water.
"It seems he wasn't bright enough to notice there was a video surveillance camera," Sr. Const. Steven Star said. "And he claimmed he was Nikhil Sharan from India".


text:
Brandon R Jones necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 805 diseños de 169 diseñadores freelance.
Headcount Live
Refer to the comments section of the contest (underneath the submissions) for more updated guidance AFTER you've ready this brief! I'll be updating with more detailed guidance there.
Headcount Live is a new nightlife + culture + society brand that seeks to become the primary destination for people seeking the hottest, most stylish clubs, restaurants and hotels in your city. Launching in several major cities, HCL will feature tips, live video feeds, discounts, and tons of other perks to some of the most exclusive venues around.
Our goal is to help anyone looking to have an amazing night out on the town to avoid pitfalls like:
- showing up to a club only to wait in line.
- going out on a date and getting the worst table in the restaurant.
- wasting time at venues that don't fit your interests or style.
We'll also be including lots of additional features that we can't talk about much, but rest assured that this is going to be jam packed with exclusive content that won't be found anywhere else on the net.
Branding Notes: The logo should feel like an exclusive pass to high end, desirable, luxurious venues. Needs to be hip, stylish, and sophisticated. Focus on some of our perks like the live video feeds, the idea of bypassing waiting in lines at exclusive clubs, and guaranteed entry at the vast network of venues, etc.
Think of this as the same kind of service that sites like Yelp, OpenTable, and Zagat offer, but much more streamlined to cater to nightlife, clubs, bars, lounges, fine dining, etc.
We are looking for a logo that appeals to the 21 to 35 age bracket but it also needs to be classy enough to appeal to the 50-65 year old man for dinner. Obviously there is going to be a fine line for this and we're not looking for a logo that appeals to just one niche aspect of these high end venues - rather, we're looking for a brand that will identify us as the premier spot for information, photos, videos, and discounts from the hottest clubs, restaurants, hotels and other venues in your city.
The audience we're seeking is a broad group of people who really enjoy going out for a night on the town, but want to avoid years of hitting the wrong spots before they find their favorite venues in town. At our core, we're seeking to connect people with fine establishments that deserve their patronage and fit their interests. Our target audience can be described as fun-seeking socialites willing to spend a little to experience the best that their city has to offer.
Finally, our audience needs to feel that, by visiting the site, they are taking part in an exclusive experience - so consider some of the brands that you think truly set themselves apart from the pack by delivering superior quality, service, and style.
Be sure to check out the attached Brand-Studies document for ideas that might help you brainstorm.
Also - we're on the lookout for copy-cats and clip-art, so please be sure to submit original ideas!
The logo should represent what the service provides (like people in line getting in the door, finding the hottest club in town for your particular style, getting access to events that no one else has access to, etc.).
We're looking for a versatile identity system. The logo should look good for apps, the website header, business cards, and more. We are pretty open for ideas and color schemes - we really need your guidance on this.
Early in the contest we'll be especially open to a wide range of ideas. We'll be providing feedback early and often, so be sure to read what we have to say for the sake of sticking close to our direction :)
Adjective Brainstorm: Dark, glossy, leather, gold, platinum, exclusive, luxury, velvet, access, lock and key, members only, behind the curtains, inside the club, fine dining, high fashion, reservations only, etc.
What we like: Nice alcohol brands (Jack Daniels, Henessy), Luxury Car brands - High end design brands ( http://www.thekdu.com , Maxim, Urban Daddy, The Bold Italic, etc.) - Culture based magazines, etc.
What we don't like: Yelp, Google, anything too cartoony or childish. We also don't want a logo that is limited to one format (ie: business cards). It really needs to be readable and usable in a variety of sizes and media.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


text:
How To Become A Nuclear Engineer in Maine
In order to qualify for Nuclear Power jobs in Maine, it's a smart idea to compare all the technical schools in your target area, as well as consider taking some of your courses online. Check with each engineering school below for assistance with certificate program requirements, degree prerequisites, and class registration. You may request information from several different schools below, without making a commitment.
To prepare for Nuclear Power careers in Maine, you need to complete a technical education in your specialty area, as well as consider taking part of your required courses online. Which college degrees give you the best chances of finding employment after graduation? Completion of an accredited engineering program can qualify you to enter the workforce as a paid intern immediately. Check with the nuclear engineering department for course registration deadlines, and engineering program requirements.
Nuclear engineers research and develop the processes, instruments, and systems used to derive benefits from nuclear energy and radiation. Many of these engineers find industrial and medical uses for radioactive materials, for example, in equipment used in medical diagnosis and treatment. Many others specialize in the development of nuclear power sources for ships or spacecraft. In addition, nuclear engineers are at the forefront of developing uses of nuclear material for medical imaging devices, such as positron emission tomography (PET) scanners. They also may develop or design cyclotrons, which produce a high-energy beam that the healthcare industry uses to treat cancerous tumors.
Nuclear engineers also are charged with writing the operational instructions to be used in nuclear plant operations or in handling and disposing of nuclear waste. A newly hired nuclear engineer at a nuclear power plant usually must complete training onsite, in such areas as safety procedures, practices, and regulations, before being allowed to work independently. Training lasts from 6 weeks to 3 months, depending on the employer. Beyond major requirements within the nuclear engineering department, you may consider Moraine Valley Community College water resources as a complementary elective.


text:
Several readers have asked me how to generate a complete XML document or stream from a stored procedure, then return the XML document or stream as a string to the calling application. Let's look at the options.
You can perform this operation by using a stored procedure that creates a cursor and walks through the record set, setting the XML tags and data for each record. This technique works but introduces cursor overhead.
An alternative approach requires using Visual Basic (VB), Visual C++ (VC++), or any language that supports ADO 2.5. The Recordset object's Save method in ADO 2.5 features new functionality that, in one command, lets you save a record set to a string variable. You can then pass this string, for example, to the code that called the method. You can also pass the string to the Recordset object's Open method, which lets you open a record set from an XML stream. If you use this method, ADO properly formats the XML for you, but you lose the ability to define the schema because ADO formats the XML based on your record set.
Another option, if you have a simple relational structure that you want to implement in XML, is to use a Select statement to build the XML. In SQL Server Administration, "Using Stored Procedures to Build HTML Option Lists," I covered how to use a Select statement to build HTML. You can use this same method to build XML. You can then return the Select statement's output as a variable in the stored procedure, prefix and suffix the variable's string with the correct XML tags, and return the XML string as the stored procedure's return variable. With this technique, you don't need a cursor or to return a record set.
Have you found any other ways to generate an XML document from a stored procedure, then return the document as a string? If so, send your solutions to me at [email protected]


text:
posted by R_T_F_M on Thu 13th Sep 2012 21:19 UTC
"For the past several years we've been working towards migrating from GCC to Clang/LLVM as our default compiler. We intend to ship FreeBSD 10.0 with Clang as the default compiler on i386 and amd64 platforms. To this end, we will make WITH_CLANG_IS_CC the default on i386 and amd64 platforms on November 4th."


text:
Teresa Savaikie slammed her Ford Escort to a halt on the parkways outside lane, near the spot where a chunky construction worker was hauling up water from a riverbed. Ignoring the blaring horns of outraged suburban motorists, the barefoot woman, blond and good-looking in a classic Southern California way, approached the worker.
Dont you know there are fish in there? she asked him.
Yeah, I seen some fish, he said.
Well, youre not supposed to be sucking them up with that hose, she said.
Hey, Im just working here. You dont like it, call the city.
She turned the full force of her blue, mascaraed eyes on the guy. I need one of those fish. Do you have a cup or something?
Savaikie and the fish, a small inconspicuous creature called arroyo chub, were about to become unlikely characters in an intense drama playing out in the hinterlands of Los Angeles County, one that may turn out to be the biggest environmental battle of the decade. When the curtain drops, we just might be left with a new definition of wilderness and a new approach to protecting it, or, failing that, a free pass for the kind of development that ignores it.
Mixing a soccer mom and an environmental activist together might not always seem like a recipe for a David Lynch movie, but it was in this case. Indeed, its safe to say that when Teresa Savaikie got married and moved in 1999 from working-class Highland Park to the uber-suburb of Valencia, California, she had no intention of walking point for a Heidegger-quoting, Jesuit-fired, philosopher-turned-environmental iconoclast named Kieran Suckling. That was before she knew that the Newhall Land and Farming Company planned to build the largest housing development in Los Angeles County history on the banks of the Santa Clara River. The Santa Clara, which runs for 116 miles from Agua Dulce, a high-desert, Old West--feeling community 44 miles north of Los Angeles, to the Pacific, is the largest natural river left in Southern California. At a time when millions of dollars are being spent to restore some semblance of nature to the much-abused Los Angeles River, it looked like the Newhall Land and Farming Company was about to turn a tree-lined ribbon of water into a concrete garbage can.
For more than a decade, a small cadre of women -- old hippies, really -- had bucked business-as-usual by fighting development in this outlying suburb of Los Angeles. But they had been relying on the traditional argument that there wasnt enough water to fill hot tubs and water lawns, working on the assumption that Southern California was still like the movie Chinatown. Their arguments may yet prove persuasive, but with that strange little fish and other odd animals she noticed in her very back yard, Savaikie came upon something even bigger -- her little corner of what could fairly be called a global holocaust.
As it happened, soon after she moved to Valencia, Savaikie saw a bizarre neon-orange-and-black bird outside her window. I thought it had escaped from a cage, she said, laughing. She watched the bird for a few days and realized her mistake. Her husband bought her an Audubon dictionary, where she found a picture of a hooded oriole that matched the creature darting among the palm trees in her neighborhood. I wish I had never seen that damn bird, she says now. I went back to the store and got another book, it was called The Lives of North American Birds. It had the status of each bird. I realized all these birds were declining. The reason the book kept listing was loss of habitat. Declining brown bird, declining this bird. Everything was declining.
She also discovered that Valencia, a locked-down, affluent Republican suburb that looks custom-built for the mallified masses, is actually a pretty remarkable place. She found out, too, that a lot of what is remarkable about it happens right where Newhall Ranch is set to rise, along the banks of the Santa Clara River.
Life congregates around water, especially in arid and semiarid places like Southern California. Behind phalanxes of oil-seeping auto malls and Home Depots, five federally listed endangered species live on the stretch of the Santa Clara River that runs through Los Angeles County. Their names alone help explain why few knew about them: the unarmored threespine stickleback, the arroyo toad, the Least Bells vireo, the southwestern willow flycatcher and the slender-horned spineflower.
As an ecosystem, the Santa Clara River is no joke. From the rivers headwaters to its outlet at the Pacific, you can find 10 species of plants and animals on the federal endangered-species list, and these are just the plants and animals that someone cared about enough to badger the federal government into protecting. For example, in San Francisquito Creek that day, Savaikie and her construction-worker helper captured an arroyo chub, a rare fish that doesnt receive federal protection but has been given special status by the state of California.
Although the Newhall Land Company hadnt yet received final approval for Newhall Ranch, it was quietly amputating the Santa Clara and its tributaries, filling in wetlands, building new wells, and pouring concrete to control natural flooding. In smaller subdivisions with names like Avignon and Bridgeport, megahouses were being constructed up to the waters edge. Savaikie worked the phones, telling her story to brand-name environmental groups like the National Audubon Society. They sympathized, but claimed they didnt have the time or money to fight development in every sprawling suburb. And while they gave lip service to protecting endangered species, they didnt get excited about an obscure toad or a 3-inch fish with a weird name. They kept asking, Did you talk to the Center for Biological Diversity? Savaikie said.
That the Center for Biological Diversity would be anyones idea of a savior belies its roots, which are low-budget and iconoclastic even by environmental-group standards. A dozen years before it would set its sights on Savaikies fight with Newhall Ranch, the Centers founder, Kieran Suckling, had taken a similarly dramatic left turn. Suckling was in his early 20s, a scruffy intellectual who had been ricocheting around the country on graduate fellowships studying everything from linguistics to mathematics at Stanford, Columbia, UC Irvine and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In the summer of 1989, at a gathering of the radical environmental group Earth First! in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, Suckling met a fast-talking biologist-cum-politico named Peter Galvin who was studying the precarious existence of the spotted owl in New Mexicos Gila National Forest for the U.S. Forest Service. The meeting with Suckling would prove to be fateful, not just for the two young environmentalists, but for the environmental movement at large.
If the Forest Service knew Galvin better, they might not have been so quick to hire him fresh out of Prescott College in northern Arizona. He is dogged and his interests havent changed much since bulldozers ripped into the woods behind his house where he used to play cowboys and Indians. That was the beginning of the high-tech boom on Route 128 outside Boston, he says. The pace of sprawl was just unbelievable. For a lot of people in my generation the pace of destruction has been so rapid youd have to be comatose not to notice. Galvin didnt have to work hard to convince Suckling that the Mexican spotted owl should be more vocation than vacation. Having researched the raptor at Prescott College, he knew the owl was in danger of dying out. The studies he and Suckling worked on that summer helped prove it. Galvin, who had been an Earth First! activist as a college student, wanted to do something right away, file papers to get the owl protected under the federal endangered-species act, stage a protest, something.
Think bigger, Suckling told Galvin. Over the next 18 months, Suckling and Galvin pulled all-nighters at the University of New Mexico library in Albuquerque, gathering evidence that at least 100 species of plants and animals were facing extinction in the high country surrounding the Gila River watershed, a 70,000-plus-square-mile region stretching from western New Mexico to the Mexican border. In the shadowed folds of New Mexicos canyon country, Suckling and Galvin stumbled onto a phenomenon that fused the aesthetic, scientific and political arguments of traditional conservation around a hard truth: extinction.
For these two, it was a small step from the Gila a National Forest to global holocaust. The species circling the drain in New Mexico, were, in fact, only a small part of what scientists everywhere were calling an extinction episode rivaling the end of the dinosaur age. The first hints of an extinction crisis had come in the 1980s, when supercomputers allowed biologists to understand entire landscapes rather than a lagoon here or a forest there. As the studies racked up, they realized that the sixth major extinction episode in four and a half billion years of evolution was under way.
It was no coincidence that the appearance of an unfamiliar bird spurred Teresa Savaikie to learn about extinction. She had grown up in a world in which one-fifth of the worlds bird species had already died out. The birds were a portent, the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. E.O. Wilson of Harvard and other scientists predict that an equal proportion of the worlds other species are likely to disappear over the next 30 to 50 years. To see the future, all one has to do is look south: Extinctions in rainforests already have increased to between 1,000 and 10,000 times the usual rate of one species per 1 million species a year. Of the worlds six great extinctions, this is the first caused by humans. The murder weapons are as varied as contemporary life, from unregulated logging in the Ivory Coast to metastasizing condominiums in Florida.
Spurred by the urgency of extinction, Suckling and Galvin began a conversation that has continued almost without interruption for 13 years. Suckling has become the conceptual thinker behind the Center for Biological Diversity, keeping track of a dense library of information and making connections that turn seemingly isolated cases into big-picture causes. Galvin is more a concrete strategist, politically adept and always fascinated by the quirky habits of pink fish and red-legged frogs.
Suckling and Galvin started slowly at first, filing a petition in 1989 to list the Mexican spotted owl on the endangered-species list, and then one to protect the Northern goshawk in 1991. After that came the deluge: 58 frighteningly well-researched petitions to list everything from an orchid called the Canelo Hills ladies tresses to the yellow-billed cuckoo. Unfortunately, their tsunami of petitions landed inside the Beltway just when the Clinton administration was trying to sort through hundreds of previously neglected endangered-species listing petitions approved by the first Bush in his final days. To complicate matters, Republicans had gained a majority in Congress in 1994. Industry-friendly politicians from the West, where the majority of high-stakes endangered-species conflicts were brewing, started whittling away at the Endangered Species Act. Many in Congress threatened to rewrite the law so dramatically that it would become virtually impossible to protect species.
Soon Suckling and Galvins combination of full-on energy and political naivete -- with a soupcon of arrogance -- infuriated people across the political compass. Critics ranged from New Mexico cattlemen to then--Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, who was struggling to change a pattern of misuse of federal lands without being run out of town on a rail by Old West right-wingers.
Theres no question that Kieran and Peter were viewed as huge pains in the rear end, says Don Barry, who was Babbitts assistant secretary of the interior at the time. They were totally upending and reorganizing the Fish and Wildlife Service priorities, imposing their own sense of priorities based on what the grassroots groups wanted when we were dealing with national priorities. They kept hitting the accelerator with us.
Nobody would have paid attention to the guys frenetic paper shuffling if it hadnt been for the one characteristic that truly annoyed the bureaucrats: an ability to win in court that seemed almost uncanny. But there was nothing magical about it. The agency charged with protecting most endangered species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has traditionally been weak and underfunded. Once the extinction crisis hit, the beleaguered bureaucrats were simply unable to keep up. For Suckling and Galvin, the legal possibilities seemed inexhaustible. There were lawsuits forcing the agency to list species, lawsuits against the agency for missing deadlines (sometimes by decades), lawsuits to force the agency to actually protect the species it had listed but then ignored.
They might not have known it at the time, but by moving the battlefield from the lobbying halls of Capitol Hill to courtrooms, Suckling and Galvin were leaving their counterparts in the dust by simply catching up with political realities. These days, corporate contributions to candidates outpace those from do-gooder organizations such as the Sierra Club by more than 50-to-1. Congress is no longer friendly to environmental legislation; only one major environmental law had passed since the 70s, the relatively non-controversial Safe Drinking Water Act. With strong laws already in place, and increasingly complex debates that didnt scan with the general public, the best bet now is using the courts to enforce environmental laws to the hilt, supported by increasingly sophisticated scientific research.
The Endangered Species Act is widely regarded as the nations strongest environmental law. Suckling and Galvin were among the first environmentalists to wield the law as an assault weapon instead of a rapier. The Center relentlessly hounded the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect endangered species and their habitat, regardless of the threat of political fallout.
In environmental lawyer Mark Hughes, Galvin and Suckling found just what they needed. Hughes had tried for years to convince his colleagues at the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now Earthjustice) to bust a move on the Mexican spotted owl. When no action came, he resigned in disgust and founded his own law firm. Galvin, who had a masters degree in conservation biology, but who is the son of a lawyer, begged, cajoled and charmed Hughes into working for what he and Suckling had taken to calling the Greater Gila Biodiversity Project.
Hughes won an injunction that stopped logging for 18 months on 2.4 million acres of national forests. A judge ordered the U.S. Forest Service to spend that time figuring out how many trees it could cut down without hurting the Mexican spotted owl. It turned out to be a lot less than the Forest Service had in mind. Logging on national forests in Arizona and New Mexico declined 84 percent from 1989 to 2001; much of this shift can be attributed to legal strong-arming by the Center for Biological Diversity, as the group began calling itself.
The Mexican spotted owl case started one of the longest winning streaks in the history of the environmental movement. In a dozen years, the Center for Biological Diversity, which moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1995, won 80 percent of its cases, roughly twice the rate of most environmental law firms, gaining protection for 288 species in 44 states. It has changed the way 38 million acres are managed in the American West, ended cattle grazing along hundreds of miles of fragile desert rivers, slowed the sprawl of subdivisions, and reduced logging from Alaska to Arizona. Because they deal in protecting plants and animals and because loss of habitat is the most common cause of extinction, the Center has become a one-stop shopping outlet, suing on everything from big dams to the expansion of military installations.
It may sound elementary to make species protection the main thrust of protecting the environment, but, in fact, the Center was making a radical departure from old-line male environmentalists who cared more about conquering mountains than nurturing warm fuzzy animals. Heather Weiner, a Washington, D.C.--based environmentalist, says that until the Center came along, practically the only people aggressively lobbying for endangered species were tough women like her who did battle on the Hill dressed in short skirts and armed with attitude.
Washington, D.C., environmental attorney Eric Glitzenstein, who has litigated on behalf of the Center, believes the group has almost single-handedly pushed endangered-species protection to center stage, edging out more familiar but less pressing issues like pollution, where the big battles have mostly been won. Fearless was the word that kept coming up when Nathaniel Lawrence of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) -- a more conservative Washington, D.C.--based conservation group that also specializes in science and litigation -- talked about the Center for Biological Diversity. They are, pound for pound, dollar for dollar, the most effective conservation organization in the country, Lawrence says.
The Center for Biological Diversitys rise came at a time when the environmental movement as a whole had lost its footing. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a confusing time for progressive politics in general and above-ground environmentalists in particular. Many environmentalists found themselves wondering what the hell was wrong in their world. Whos the next David Brower? was the question asked over and over in rambling phone calls and buzzed late-night, drunken agonizing.
In the 1960s, Brower, the legendary Sierra Club director and archdruid profiled by The New Yorkers John McPhee, had democratized the elitist wilderness movement, lobbying Congress with theatrical flourishes and taking on issues like nuclear power that lay outside the stodgy movements traditional purview. Brower, who was both a creative genius and a towering egoist, attracted a talented lineup to the environmental movement that has not been matched since. He set loose adman Jerry Mander and world-class photographers like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter to shape the marketing iconography of an idealized America: the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone.
But as environmental groups became institutions with big budgets, they grew vulnerable to the cyclical nature of the publics interest in environmental issues. To support larger staffs and higher overhead through lean times, big groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society had to rely on the whims of rich patrons and the fads of fickle foundations. They became hesitant to offend friends and enemies alike. Once the province of visionaries, environmentalism became the domain of political lobbyists whose only philosophy was pragmatism.
As it turned out, the environmental movement didnt need another David Brower. It needed a 21st-century Arthur Rimbaud, the tousled, dirty prodigy whose only interest in convention was flouting it. Rimbaud reinvented poetry. Kieran Suckling would do the same with environmentalism.
You wouldnt have known it to see him in action in the early days. Ten years ago, the eminence grise behind the Center for Biological Diversity was in a smack-induced stupor in British Columbia, doing field research on the heroin habits of out-of-work loggers. Logical enough, maybe. Suckling thought he should know the culture in which he was working. The environmental movement, with its quasi-religious overtones, is prone to anointing epic heroes for its epic battles. In those days, Kieran Suckling was probably not at the top of anyones list as most likely to be anointed. Paradoxically, it may be just this willingness to go beyond normal limits that helped him become the first truly original thinker that the movement has seen in decades.
Suckling grew up in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Peru, Ireland and England. His mother is Irish and his father is English, a civil engineer whose work on power plants and pulp mills ensured a peripatetic existence. His parents divorced when he was 12. His loyalties swung to his mother, whom he describes as a pagan Catholic. Suckling says his mother keeps not only a lock of a sainted aunts hair but also dirt from her grave, and she prays fervently to an up-close-and-personal Virgin Mary.
This otherworldly bent was not lost on her son. When one of Sucklings many Jesuit uncles returned from a missionary stint in Africa with a hard-to-shake tropical disease, he bequeathed his philosophy books to the impressionable teenager. As an undergraduate at Holy Cross College, Suckling discovered he loved philosophy and befriended Joe Lawrence, a philosophy professor.
Hes intense, hes energetic, hes creative, said Lawrence. A very interesting question is what in the hell was Kieran Suckling doing at a Catholic school.
If you think of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, which was Dostoyevskys critique of the Jesuits, it makes sense. The Jesuit is the one who realizes that Christ should have accepted the Devils offer to turn stone into bread -- he could have fed the hungry. He should have accepted the offer to make a magical display of his power and reformed the world.
That desire for achieving a humanly made perfect world, thats the Jesuit desire, said Lawrence.
Suckling took up phenomenology, the study of direct experience. He studied linguistics and the deconstruction theory that was ubiquitous in the academy. His conversation is peppered with references to mainstream philosophers like Aristotle and Heidegger, but edgier characters like the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida, a coyote trickster whose work suggests that meaning is ever-shifting and relational, clearly have influenced him.
Suckling didnt just study experience. He hurled himself into it. You could say he transcended ethics in favor of Kierkegaardian intensity. He became an industrial-strength shoplifter and all-around grifter, not an illogical lifestyle for a perpetual student from a financially strapped family. Orgies, anarchism and the occasional arrest were de rigueur in the radical environmental movement. Suckling navigated the underworld with apparent ease. When he came back into the mainstream, it would be to fight for the very definition of wilderness.
That fight began with William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin, who is considered one of the environmental movements leading intellectuals. For years, Cronon has been vocal about his belief that wilderness is a mere intellectual construct. Many rank-and-file environmentalists, drawn to the movement by their quasi-religious fervor for the tangibility of the outdoors, found Cronons ideas horrifying. At the very least, Cronons announcement (tantamount to saying God is dead) was spectacularly poor strategy -- especially since he made it rather publicly in The New York Times Magazine in mid-1995, when the newly empowered Republican congressional majority was taking a run at the countrys basic environmental laws, with a special emphasis on the Endangered Species Act. Cronons article, or at least its timing, seemed to characterize the anemia and disarray plaguing the movement.
To Suckling, Cronons ideas seemed outdated, hopelessly pre-postmodern. This is where I take issue with Cronon and Nash [Roderick Nash, author of Wilderness and the American Mind], says Suckling. Because Cronon and Nash want to write a biography of wilderness, they have to come up with a concept of wilderness.
In fact, Suckling contends, wilderness is antithetical to concept itself. Its where you go to get rid of your concepts. Thats what I mean when I say wilderness deconstructs us. Its comforting because you realize you dont need to be in control.
Today, Suckling runs an organization of 30 employees, raises a multimillion-dollar budget, cuts deals with Bushs Interior secretary, Gale Norton, and defends the environmental position on CNNs Crossfire. He also puts up with occasional hostility from the media -- The Wall Street Journal editorial page in particular. Hes not afraid to show that under the Lamborghini brain is a nice Irish Catholic boy from Massachusetts. He still refutes Cronon, for lack of a better opponent. But his argument is subtly different. At 37, he talks less about philosophical ambiguity and more about morality.
Nature isnt moral, says Suckling. Its our relationship to nature thats moral. A humans engagement with the world is always moral, religious and aesthetic. Heidegger talks about wissen and kennen as words for knowledge: wife and husband. This is more a notion of a caring spouse. A rabbi, Emmanuel Levinas, defines it as the experience of meeting the face. Its the face that says to you, Thou shalt not kill. Its the relationship.
When the Center began its spectacular run of lawsuits, suit-and-tie environmentalists worried that a take-no-prisoners assault would give the congressional Republicans an excuse to gut the Endangered Species Act. Those concerns are perhaps elevated now with Republicans owning the House and Senate. Michael Bean, of the Washington, D.C.--based Environmental Defense, which works with corporations to find common ground, is one who believes the Centers aggressive stance could inspire equally aggressive retaliation from opponents.
Theyve been successful in getting a lot of species on the endangered-species list, says Bean. I think that, by itself, doesnt ensure a result that will endure. My view is that lasting solutions to environmental problems require some substantial degree of buy-in from the people who are affected by those decisions. There are just too many ways for disaffected people to undo a particular environmental result.
The Jesuit steel in Suckling, though, remains fired by his absolute conviction that the unprepossessing scrap of habitat for an endangered rat near a highway is as important as a million-acre national forest of cathedral trees. He understood what the professional environmentalists didnt. Its fairly simple, really: People like animals.
Northern California is better-known for its groovy environmental ethic, but Southern Californias roller-coaster landscape of high mountains and sun-blasted valleys, combined with a forgiving Mediterranean climate, has created a near-perfect petri dish for evolution and natural diversity. Thats why Mark Gold, of Heal the Bay in Santa Monica, calls Southern California the endangered-species capital of the nation.
The hitch is that Southern Californias population, now 19 million, is expected to rise 49 percent over the next 30 years. The population of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, the edge habitat between the mountains and the city, is expected to grow even more dramatically, doubling to 6 million by 2025.
Its a pretty volatile situation, said the NRDCs Lawrence. Id draw a parallel between the situation in Southern California and the fight over the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest 15 years ago.
The Newhall Land and Farming Company intends to do its part to make sure Californias population growth comes in on schedule. The company calls the nearly 22,000-home, 60,000-resident city it plans to build Newhall Ranch. Like so many of those evocative names given to nouveau suburbia, this one has a checkered past. A San Francisco auctioneer, some would say carpetbagger, named Henry Mayo Newhall bought the land at bargain-basement prices when its Californio owners ran into tax troubles. The 143,000-acre Del Valle land grant became Newhall Ranch in the 1870s.
Newhall Land is a local behemoth. Aside from the proposed Newhall Ranch development, it controls more than 50,000 acres in the state, including L.A. Countys largest industrial park, the 4,500-acre Gateway Center. The company, which started the town of Valencia, develops master-planned communities, which it then sells off piecemeal to real estate developers, so the actual landholdings have diminished over time. Company spokeswoman Marlee Lauffer downplays the companys influence, saying Newhall Land only owns 25 percent of the town of Valencia, but weve generated 70 percent of the jobs and sales tax. Everybody else in town readily admits that Newhall has ruled over this part of Los Angeles County for a century, in much the same way as the Spanish hacendados who preceded it.
Whats striking is how much rural character remains where Newhall Land wants to develop. Once you leave Valencia, you enter an earlier time, Californias past as limned by California historian Kevin Starr. The old, elegant Rancho Camulos, once the home of the Del Valles and reputedly the inspiration for Helen Hunt Jacksons 1885 novel Ramona, is now a museum sheltered beneath an imposing mountain range. It is as if a time machine threatens to fast-forward from the 1800s to the 21st century, landing this shard of Old California smack in the middle of a Disney theme park Levittown. Only with this machine, there is no going back.
Newhall Lands long history in the region may be one reason the company is behind the curve on urban planning. According to Lauffer, its development approach is based on the post--World War II designs of architect Victor Gruen, whom Newhall hired to design its utopian suburban villages.
Gruen, who designed the countrys first enclosed mall, was more of an architect than one of the fathers of new urbanism, as the company likes to bill him. His ideas predate any notion of what is now called sustainable development. For instance, Gruen clustered houses and commercial development around the Santa Clara River, the way Indians and early settlers settled on rivers in the early days of the West. Today, New Urbanist model cities like Boise, Idaho, and Madison, Wisconsin, are designed to take into account the fragility and value of river corridors by protecting them as natural open space, usually with bike paths and meandering trails.
Of course, when it comes to the old-fashioned civic virtues, Lauffer points out that the company has donated land for the hospital, the city center and the local branch of the county library. Newhall also guarantees funds for school construction, Lauffer said. What she failed to mention was that the Sierra Club, the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and the Environment and a local homeowners association sued the company in 1993 to force them to provide those guarantees. In any case, few would argue with the proposition that, one way or another, Newhall Land has created a place where a lot of people want to live. But the companys sense of noblesse oblige doesnt appear to extend to the environment. Recently, the California Department of Fish and Game officials accused Newhall Land of deliberately breaking environmental laws in its efforts to ensure approval for its sprawling new development.
In May, state Fish and Game investigator Penelope Liotta filed a search-warrant request alleging that Newhall had deliberately destroyed habitat for a state-listed endangered species called the San Fernando Valley spineflower by grading vegetation and planting agaves on the site of a road planned for Newhall Ranch.
It is my opinion that NLF [Newhall Land and Farming Company] is using the idea of an agave farm as a ruse to justify the systematic destruction of habitat that is consistent with SFVS [spineflower] habitat requirements, Liotta wrote. Liotta requested a search warrant because Newhall Land had consistently denied biologists access to search for endangered species on their land.a
Documents indicate that this isnt the first time the company has covered up evidence of endangered species on its property. Biological consultant Louis Courtois reported in the 1994 edition of the California Natural Diversity Database that arroyo toads lived in sections of the Santa Clara River owned by Newhall Land. In 1995, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed the toad on the endangered-species list, stating that 75 percent of its habitat had been lost, and of the 22 remaining populations, only six had more than a dozen toads.
This wasnt surprising, given the state of Southern Californias rivers. The arroyo toad, which exists only in Southern California and Baja, survives by burrowing into the loose sand of riverbanks. Arroyo toads cannot penetrate the soil-cement mix that is commonly used when developers want to build houses without leaving a buffer sufficient to protect them from natural flooding.
In 1999, after being hired by Newhall Land, Courtois reported to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that he had not found any arroyo toads in company-sponsored surveys in 1995 and 1999. This letter failed to mention the results he had reported in 1994.
Teresa Savaikie says the companys own environmental-impact report, required under California law, showed that the toad had been found under a major traffic artery, McBean Parkway, in 1996. Yet in 1998, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed off on a management plan for the river and its tributaries that did not mention the presence of the arroyo toad. Neither Courtois nor Newhall Land admitted that the toad had been found in the river until local environmentalists hired their own biologist, who confirmed that the toads lived in the Santa Clara.
Did the company break the law? Landowners have a legal obligation not to take or harm the habitat the species needs to survive, said Rick Farris, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Newhalls activities in the Santa Clara River and its tributaries might fall within that definition. It would be difficult to prove in court, but its hard to believe that Courtois, who failed to return a reporters phone calls for this article, didnt inform his client that an endangered species lived on their property. Lauffer, meanwhile, contends the river-management plan has already established what Newhall Land is allowed to do on the river. All of this is kind of moot, all this about frogs and toads, she said.
Federal wildlife officials dont agree. Because the arroyo toad was not included in the rivers management plan, agencies are now reviewing the plan to determine if it meets state and federal laws, said Farris. The river-management plan is one of the keys to building the Newhall Ranch development, as well as many smaller developments in the Santa Clara Valley. It basically sets the parameters for everything Newhall Land and other developers can do along the river.
Newhalls public relations materials attempt to depict a company that has become sensitive to its critics. Lauffer points out that Newhall Lands master-planned communities have always contained open space as an amenity. The Newhall Ranch development would cover 19 square miles west of Magic Mountain and include 5.7 million square feet of commercial and business space inside five villages. The plan also calls for 6,000 acres of open space. But nearly all of this open space is in the mountains that loom over the proposed new city. This steep terrain would be difficult or impossible to develop.
Newhall Land may be trying to satisfy the traditional but outdated rocks and ice, or scenery-based, approach to conservation. The problem, though, is that approach has been one of the factors leading to the current extinction crisis. In the last 20 years, scientists have stressed that rivers and valleys, which contain more food and cover for animals, are often more valuable than the scenic high country traditionally preserved in parks. But to Lauffer, science is eclipsed by one incontrovertible fact. We actually own the river, she points out.
Newhall Land and Farming Company may own the Santa Clara, but Teresa Savaikie has adopted the river as her own. One reporter called me Erin Brockovich without the cleavage, Savaikie says ruefully.
Savaikie enumerates the sins committed by Newhall Land with the zeal of a convert. Indeed, her political activism is of an even more recent vintage than her love for nature. In the summer of 2000, Teresa was walking along San Francisquito Creek looking for warblers when she ran across a forest of tall poles with speakers mounted at the top. You know those speakers at the old drive-ins? Thats what they looked like.
When she returned after a July 4th weekend, Newhall Land had cleared the creek of willows and cattails to make way for a housing development. Savaikie placed a few calls and found out that the drive-in movie speakers were called hazing machines, meant to fool birds into thinking a predator was nearby in order to frighten them away. That way the company could claim it wasnt disturbing any endangered species, like the local Least Bells vireo.
They knew they could get away with it because when all these projects came along, nobody knew anything about endangered species. The developers knew but we didnt, said Savaikie.
For months she had been calling Peter Galvin, who had moved to Garberville, in Northern California. Galvin hadnt returned her phone calls. Finally, in desperation, she e-mailed another environmentalist who had shown some interest in her problems. He agreed to talk to Galvin for her.
Galvin finally called. I was absolutely floored, Savaikie said. I felt like God had called or something. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship -- and a spate of lawsuits. First, Galvin got the hazing machines removed. Then he found out Newhall Land had successfully lobbied to get its Newhall Ranch and other development sites taken off what is called critical habitat for the arroyo toad and another endangered species, a fish called the unarmored threespine stickleback. To date, the Center has eight lawsuits that could affect Newhall Land and Farming Company. Whenever Teresa gets upset now, she gets Peter and has a conference call, says longtime Valencia environmentalist Lynne Plambeck.
Newhall Land finally began to feel the pressure. For several years, Plambeck and other community activists had been trying to stop Newhall Ranch by arguing that there wouldnt be enough water to meet the needs of 60,000 new residents. Over their protests, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors had approved the Newhall Ranch project in 1999.
But the next year, a Kern County judge halted the project until Newhall could prove it had enough water for the 22,000 homes, as well as business and industrial facilities envisioned for the new city. After the judges decision, supervisors delayed a new hearing on the development until early 2003. If the company manages to nail down a water supply for Newhall Ranch, it will face a fresh round of opposition. Endangered-species lawsuits will be the only way to force Newhall Land to tailor its development to the needs of toads and birds and obscure flowers that live along the Santa Clara River.
Without Peter Galvin we wouldnt have a clue about the [Endangered Species Act], said Savaikie. Without the Center, we wouldnt have a prayer.
The Center for Biological Diversity recently bought two buildings in Idyllwild to be closer to the ragged edge of sprawl in Southern California, its next hot spot. Not that the Center is an unproven entity in California. Back in 1990, a 20-year-old Center wunderkind named Dave Hogan petitioned to add the California gnatcatcher to the federal list of threatened species, which, under the law, provides it almost equal protection as endangered species. The Natural Resources Defense Council followed up with its legal firepower, and before long, the small, blue-gray bird was on the front page of The New York Times as the showpiece of Bruce Babbitts innovative approach to endangered-species conservation. Babbitt hoped to head off the upcoming train wreck between the gnatcatcher and booming development in San Diego with something called a habitat-conservation plan, which allowed a certain amount of destruction to occur in exchange for protection in other places. The San Diego plan would eventually cover more than half a million acres and ostensibly protect 85 species. A similar plan covers most of Orange County. In San Pedro, a smaller swath of land is being managed to protect the Palos Verde blue butterfly, among other species.
In Idyllwild, the Centers newly hired lawyers, Brendan Cummings and Kassie Siegel, work at the epicenter of the battle over Southern Californias last shreds of wildlife habitat. Cummings, Siegel and staff biologist Monica Bond are going where no national-level environmentalists have gone before -- to turgid, mind-numbingly dull local planning and zoning board meetings. So far, the Center has run into the same kind of labor-intensive cases with nickel-and-dime outcomes that made the big national environmental groups shy away. Last year, the Centers lawyers sued over Oak Valley, a proposed 4,400-home development in Riverside County between I-10 and the 60 freeway. They didnt stop the development, but they forced the developer to reduce the size of the project, preserve wetlands, and set aside a wildlife migration corridor for mountain lions and black bears.
We didnt stop it, but we made it better, says Siegel. Unfortunately, thats been the history of land-use law.
According to Siegel, the Center is determined to change history by flat out stopping development on 647 acres of Lytle Creek near the Cajon Pass in unincorporated San Bernardino County. Lytle Creek, the lower end of an intermittent canyon stream that flows down from the San Bernardino Mountains, is an illicit dumping ground for trash. Growing around the old tires and broken couches is a patch of perilously rare sage and riverbed habitat for the San Bernardino kangaroo rat, which is on the federal endangered-species list, and the California gnatcatcher. Lytle Creek is the unprepossessing face of 21st-century environmentalism, at least in the U.S. With the extinction crisis overriding picture-post-card views of nature, vacant lots outside sprawling suburbs have become the new militarized zone.
As it tries to block the transformation of Jack Londons rough-hewn California into just another modern convenience, it sometimes seems as if the Center is trying to stop time itself. Occasionally, they succeed not only in stopping time, but turning it back. This is most evident in the Centers impact on federal lands in California, where the political power of the states real estate developers is not factor. A 1998 lawsuit over the Angeles, Los Padres, Cleveland and San Bernardino national forests forced the U.S. Forest Service to take into account the needs of newly listed endangered species, such as the arroyo toad. That resulted in a whole raft of actions, including closing areas to off-road vehicles, restricting mining and grazing, and even retrofitting power lines so condors wouldnt get electrocuted when they perched on them.
In the gnarly Charlie Manson outback of the Southern California desert, another Center lawsuit closed 50,000 acres of the Algodones Dunes to off-road vehicles. The Center is currently litigating over the management of the 25-million-acre California Desert Conservation Area, which stretches from the Mexican border almost to Mono Lake. A lawsuit on behalf of 24 endangered species already has forced federal agencies to close off millions of acres in the desert-conservation area to mining, grazing and roads.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. Almost half of the state of Californias 163,707 square miles are under litigation brought by the Center for Biological Diversity.
But Galvin says there is something about the Newhall Ranch that feels different, riskier perhaps, with powerful, entrenched opposition and a lot at stake because of the rivers biological importance.
If you like this story, consider signing up for our email newsletters.
You have successfully signed up for your selected newsletter(s) - please keep an eye on your mailbox, we're movin' in!
Weve never been involved in an issue where we havent felt weve made a big difference, Galvin said. But, as my grandmother would say, we got big tsuris. When we get involved in something, we like to get results and get results fast and get lots of results. The whole Santa Clara River issue is our toughest issue to date. I feel like were up against this unstoppable juggernaut. Well, not unstoppable, but . . .
But maybe. A recent court decision favoring the National Association of Homebuilders that rescinded protection for 4.1 million acres of habitat for the red-legged frog in California -- protection won by the Center -- is evidence that the business community has begun to turn the Centers innovative legal approach against it, lending some credence, perhaps, to Beans argument against the Centers tactics. For his part, Galvin is acutely aware that the Center for Biological Diversitys $1.8 annual million budget is infinitesimal compared to the power and money of Southern Californias real estate developers. What the Center may have on its side is something less easily quantifiable.
Dodie Hoffman is wheeling her daughters stroller through the faux New England village called Bridgeport when Teresa Savaikie stops her car to talk. Hoffman says she is shocked to hear that the Newhall Land and Farming Company may have violated the Endangered Species Act. She is equally disturbed to learn that her gated community may be harming coyotes and funny little toads by pumping groundwater to fill its tacky postmodern ode-to-Venice concrete-lined canal. I was told that they were protected, the animals. Thats what the builder told us. We were told that many times, Hoffman says, pausing in her promenade down Bridgeports impeccably manicured sidewalk. Hoffman probably never heard the word phenomenology. She might not care that this obscure discipline has created a new kind of environmental politics. But she would understand if Kieran Suckling told her that his definition of wilderness is the split second when an owl lights on a branch and locks his gaze on yours.
They will change the game, said John Buse of the Environmental Defense Center in Ventura, which has represented the Center in several cases. Theyve brought a new perspective to the battle against sprawl. Even more than that, theyre bringing the reality of the extinction crisis home to Southern Californians.


text:
greyhoundtom wrote:Just maybe there should be a "used by date" in relation to distance travelled on CF wheels, at which point they should be subject to being X rayed for fractures or other faults.
Wheel manufacturers would love that. Used by date = more sales
But given the severity of the consequences of a wheel falling apart, there is not much other choice but to have one methinks.


text:
Seib & Wessel: Hope Remains for Budget Bargain
WSJ reporter Janet Hook explains why the Obama budget is arriving so late, and looks at whether there is any realistic hope Democrats and Republicans will find common fiscal ground.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
the ... this ... was the real ones present ... that ... comes out next week ... it's the budget that normally kicks off the great budget conversation Washington ... this year says is that the trail ended the conversation what's the meaning of ... what you can either see it as an afterthought you know ... the dollar ... it's too late ... but up with us to lead the Dow morning you can see it as a perfectly timed strategic move ... in the fact is that ... Obama has all of these excuses for why it's late welding couldn't calculate things because that that the fiscal cliff deal was reached so wake protests and a reverse January the ruling comes in January and then the House and Senate passed their budgets well it took them so long to get there at the administration budget together the house a Senate inquiry pass their budgets ... now what does my gets too twisted stake out the EPA polar extremes of what the Republicans won and won the Democrats went so it kind of sets things up for Obama to come in with something in the middle when there was a question about whether he was just going to ... reiterate the Democrats partisan position ... or try to look more coming in it's looking like he's going to ... try to make it look more like he's looking for a middle path ... not a new one he's a bill that they are all the signs are that is he's going to ... put in his budget ... yelling is of ... the West offer he made to speak urbane or when they were negotiating in December ... the last offer for a big deal for a big deal and so that's the thing is that he started trying to gesture before jumpstart ... a Macon gestured towards ... still seeking a BDO and it's not clear whether any of the of the ... kind of pillars of ... the impasse or dinner break its results ... but I think Republicans do see it as more promising than if he just came out and reiterated how petty Mary style liberal ... Democratic candidate


text:
Summer style house track straight from the white isle of Ibiza! On the beach or in the club, this track has elements of both with its light synth line and driving house beat. The track also evolves with quiet moments, a chilled breakdown and energetic choruses.
Preview is watermarked but full purchased version comes without watermark and in both high, CD-quality WAV and MP3 format for convenience.


text:
Pink Open Shoulder Dress
$15.00 $56.00
Use these as a general guide while shopping.
Please note that measurements and cuts may vary between brands and fabrics, if you would like further information on a specific item please contact us at anytime.
Remember, everyone is size BEAUTIFUL!
All orders are shipped out between 1 to 4 days of order date.
By making an order you agree that splurgehandbags.com not be held responsible for any damages or thefts that may occur after splurgehandbags.com delivers your product.
- Pink Ribbed Dress
- Open Shoulder
- Fabric has Stretch
- Fitted Mini


text:
XFX Pro Series Core Edition Power Supply Review
XFX is a division of PINE Technology Holdings Limited, a respected and world-renowned presence in the gaming industry. PINE designs, develops, manufactures and distributes high-performance graphics cards and computer peripherals. Founded in 1989, PINE's main headquarters are situated in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR). The company has two state-of-the-art research and development facilities in Taiwan and Shenzhen, technical support offices in the US, Europe and Asia, a factory in China and now sells its products in over 50 countries.
XFX are perhaps best known for their high performance ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards and motherboards. Power supplies are a relatively new venture for company. The XFX Black and XXX edition power supplies, their first offerings, proved popular and performed very well and are now joined by three new power supplies. The XFX Pro Series Core Edition power supply range retains the industrial theme of their predecessors, include a 650W, 750W and 850W variant, 80 Plus Bronze efficiency and come with a fully wired cable set.
Closer Look:
The basic package design used for the XFX Pro Series Core Edition power supplies is basically the same apart from a few minor changes that reflect the different power supply wattages and output currents. The theme is black with the background in satin and a grid of small gloss squares randomly covering different areas of the box. The front face of the box shows a gloss photograph of the power supply, large XFX logo, the power supply model and a set of smaller logos which include Japan Caps, Crossfire Ready, SLI Ready and 80 Plus Bronze
The only change on the front face of the XFX Pro Series Core Edition power supply boxes is the model number.
The rear face of the box explains the EasyRail technology used for the power (more on this later) and clearly shows the five year warranty.
The top face of the box explains some of the main features of the XFX Pro Series Core Edition power supply. The small circular yellow graphic in the top left hand corner is a true wattage guarantee which is exactly what it says, a guarantee that unlike some other power supplies, these units will deliver their rated wattage continuously at the more realistic working temperature of 50°C.
The only change on the top face of the box across the range is again the model number.
The bottom face of the box gives a list of other features, connector types and quantities along with a specification table and agency approval logos.
Obviously each power supply requires a different specification table as well as power supply model.
The XFX Pro Series Core Edition power supplies come in a box within a box.
Lift the lid and the user manual (same one across the range) sits in the center of its own cardboard tray. Remove the tray and power supply sits neatly in the center of the box, power cord hidden in the section on the right and the captive cable set hidden in the left hand section. The use of cardboard spacers top and bottom ensures the power supply is adequately protected from impact damage and should survive the rigours of most postal systems.
The power supply and full box contents which are a little sparse as there are no cable ties, velcro straps nor anti-vibration mounts. There is a user manual, power cord and mounting screws.
The XFX Pro Series Core Edition power supplies are well packaged but lack a few accessories that are often included with other high-end power supplies like cable ties. But it's not the end of the world so let's move on and have a closer look at the power supply.


text:
Comin Out Da Closet? Spec From Pretty Ricky Challenges Bow Wow & Bow Wow To A Grind-Off To "Tispy" In His Draws!
SPEC from PRETTY RICKY Challenges Bow Wow, Chris Brown to a Grind-Off to "TIPSY" there new Single
Please click the "Report" button below if the video on this page is not working properly.
Comments will only be displayed by verified emails. No Spamming or Racism.


text:
Editor's Note: The following was provided by the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 15
As the nation watches the reports about the recent Connecticut elementary school shooting, many people may find themselves feeling anxious, worried, saddened or otherwise concerned. While adults may know how to express these feelings, often they do not know how to talk with children about such a tragedy.
According to Dr. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, parents should:
• Talk about the event with your children. Silence is not comforting in crisis situations and suggests that what has occurred is too horrible to speak of. After a major crisis, even very young children have likely already heard what has happened – but they may not understand what it means.
• Start by asking what your children have heard about the events and what questions or concerns they have. Listen for misinformation, misconceptions and any underlying fears or concerns. If the children express worry, sadness or fear, tell them what adults are doing to keep them safe, but do not provide false reassurance or dismiss their concerns. Help them identify strategies to cope with difficult feelings.
• Minimize your children's exposure to media (television, radio, print, Internet, social media), and if they do watch, consider recording, screening and watching with them. Children often overhear or see what you are watching on TV or listening to on the radio, or they may be exposed directly as the news evolves through the Internet or social media. While children may seek and benefit from basic information about what happened so that they can understand what is happening in their world, they do not benefit from graphic details or exposure to disturbing images or sounds, nor, for that matter, do the adults in their lives. The aftermath of a crisis is a good time to disconnect from all media and sit down together and talk as a family.


text:
|San Diego, Calif.
As a junior (2014): A second team all-WIRA selection after competing with both the varsity eight and second varsity eight during the spring season…with the varsity eight, she sat at four on three occasions, and once at seven…competed in six races with the JV8, three times at six and three times at stroke…sat at four with the varsity eight during the boat's final three races against UC Davis and at the Conference USA Championships…recipient of CRCA National Scholar-Athlete honors for the second straight year, which recognizes rowing student-athletes with a 3.5 or higher cumulative grade point average…also named to Conference USA's Honor Roll.
As a sophomore (2013): Competed with the varsity eight in all 11 spring races, and helped the boat to an 8-5 dual-meet record…sat in the six seat with the varsity eight on five occasions, the five seat four times, and twice in the seven seat…finished the season in the six seat…one of six Hornets to receive the National Scholar-Athlete Award, given to rowers with a 3.5 or higher cumulative grade point average.
As a freshman (2012): Competed for four different boats during the spring…those included the novice eight, varsity four, third varsity four and novice four…competed with the novice eight in every spring race, sitting in the seven seat (four times), six seat (three times) and stroke seat (twice)…helped the novice eight to a 9-6 dual meet record, and a bronze medal at the WIRA Championships…stroked the novice four to a bronze medal at the season-ending Pacific Coast Rowing Championships.
Personal: A communication studies major…has a personal-best time of 7:19.6 on the 2,000-meter ergometer test.


text:
Leather Sofas We All Can Love
If you haven't seen one in your single guy friends' apartments, you've probably spotted one in your newly married girl friends' living room (where she is putting on a brave face until she can get rid of it). Sorry to generalize guys, but nothing screams "bachelor!" like a black leather sofa. Indeed the ubiquity of the overstuffed black leather sofa has kind of given the whole concept of a leather sofa a bad rap.
It's unfortunate, because leather is a great upholstery material — it's durable, easily cleaned, and comes in every color under the sun! So, I decided to search out some leather sofas that both design-savvy sexes could appreciate.
1. Albert Sectional Design Within Reach $4,845* (*on sale). This sectional achieves the delicate balance of looking both modern and comfortable--not an easy feat!
2. Fulham Leather Sofa Restoration Hardware $3,595. This squishy sofa reminds me of the Le Bambole sofa by Mario Bellini--but without the hefty price tag.
3. Chelsea Wing Settee Williams-Sonoma Home $4,250. Ok, so this is a settee and not technically a sofa, but I find it utterly charming and sophisticated, too.
4. Blu Dot Couchoid Sofa 2Modern $1,799. If you like the look of leather, but prefer a leather-free lifestyle, then this modern couch from Blu Dot which is upholstered in "leather alternative" might be up your alley.
5. Ian Leather Sofa Crate and Barrel $3,499. I love the simplicity of this sofa. You don't exactly want to curl up and watch a movie on it, but I think for a more formal living room it could work.
6. Milos sofa Bo Concept $2,495. On its website Bo Concept describes this sofa as a "modern Chesterfield." Huh.
7. IKEA Stockholm Sofa $1,499. A leather sofa for under $1,500? Only at IKEA!
8. Conrad Sofa Jayson Home & Garden $5,495. In case #6 had you wondering what a classic Chesterfield sofa looks like — this it it.
9. Box Sofa Compact Hive Modern $6,775. I love this mid-century modern inspired sofa from a duo of Spanish designers--it also comes in walnut.
10. Essex Leather Sofa West Elm $1,999. A traditional leather sofa without the traditional price tag — what's not to like?
Do you love or hate the idea of a leather sofa?
Images: DWR, Restoration Hardware, WS Home, 2Modern, Crate & Barrel, Bo Concept, IKEA, Jayson Home and Garden, Hive Modern, West Elm


text:
mwh wrote:Some of the single-author books mentioned are very dated (well, all except Graziosi-Haubold, really). Page is old-fashioned in all respects, and his rhetoric seems tiresome today. (Not that he wasn't a great scholar.)
Of the Cambridge Iliad comms Janko's is generally considered the best (a judgment I'd agree with, without putting down any of the others except maybe Kirk's), and is certainly the most engaging. For the Odyssey there's the three-volume set by Heubeck and others, internally differing according to individual commentator in a more pronounced way than the Cambridge Iliad set. I'm assuming you can't count on knowledge of any language other than English, but when it comes to Homer English-speakers are truly blessed.
cb wrote:as for the classics (parry etc)., i don't think these would be appropriate for people entering the field - they are only for the obsessed (and i rank as a culprit here, see from the rainbow of tabs how i've classified and tabbed every set of formulae in my own copy of parry by length and position: http://mhninaeide.webs.com/parry.jpg ).
Qimmik wrote:I think your syllogism somewhat overstates the authors' position on Iliad 10. They see the "Iliad" as a broad tradition of lore about the Trojan war, that Iliad 10, like the rest of the Iliad as we have it, emerged out of that tradition, and there's no reason to accord any part of the tradition a higher status than any other parts. But I think you're right that the big weakness of their argument is that the texts of both the Iliad and the Odyssey are remarkably uniform, even taking into account the wild versions of the early papyri, and there don't seem to have been any alternative versions in circulation as far back as we can trace.
I also think much of their discussion of the "poetics" of ambush is very illuminating--explaining a number of puzzling features of Book 10. This aspect of their discussion stands on its own and doesn't depend on swallowing "hard Parryism" whole.
However, I really have no idea how the Iliad and the Odyssey actually came into being, and I'm skeptical of all the attempted explanations that have been offered, intriguing as they may be. I think the genesis of the Homeric poems is simply irrecoverable.
Qimmik wrote:Which Skafte Jensen book, the earlier one or the new one? I read the earlier one some time ago but getting a hold of the newer one is difficult or impossible outside of Scandinavia. She's a hard-core "oralist" (as West would call them) and did field work in Albania, but I thought the earlier book was well-argued when I read it, probably 20 years ago. She puts "Homer" in the 6th (!) century.
One book I found really illuminating is Homer's Trojan Theater, by Jenny Strauss Clay. She tries to map out the topography of the battle books, suggesting (without embracing any particular theory about the origin of the poem) that the composer of the Iliad had a very concrete map in his (or her) mind and used it to keep everything straight throughout the narrative--and, more broadly, that this was a technique that an oral poet/singer might have used to manage the task of committing a long narrative to memory. But the book is valuable for explicating the action of the battle books, quite apart from her ideas about compositional technique.
One other thought: ultimately, I think speculation about the origin of the Homeric poems has run its course. It doesn't really contribute to our understanding and appreciation and enjoyment of the poems. That's not to say that much of the scholarship of the past 200 years--much of it focused on the search for origins--has made no contribution to our understanding of the poems. But the specific focus on how the poems came into being has hit a dead end. The more we know about the poems, the more complex the processes, the more contradictory the evidence, and the more mysterious and irrecoverable the origins of the poems become.
quendidil wrote:I like The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins.
It is about the economic history of the late Western empire based on both texts and archaeology.


text:
For a century and a half, photographers have been incorporating a wide range of tools and agendas in their efforts to document the landscape of the American West. Among the lensmen who use more unexpected techniques is U.K.-based Dan Holdsworth, whose latest body of work, Transmission, takes data gleaned from radar scans done by the U.S. Geological Survey to create virtual models of American landscapes. By showing storied locations such as the Grand Canyon and Yosemite in a new way, Holdsworth pays tribute to, and advances, the history of the genre.
The rich and ongoing history of landscape photography in the American West had very practically-minded origins. As interest in the region surged throughout the 19th century, enterprising railroad companies and government organizations sent out small armies of scientists, cartographers, illustrators and photographers to sample, survey and record the recently acquired territories. The best of the photographers, like Carleton Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan, produced work that transcended the scientific genre. Theirs was a vision of an untouched land of sublime grandeur.
Fast-forward a century. Shopping malls and parking lots stretch from Trenton to Tacoma. A group of photographers including Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Joe Deal started producing work that would become known as the "New Topographics." Instead of scrubbing their images of any trace of man, they focused on him. As Baltz once recalled: "I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers — the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams — came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at." Man had sullied the sublime.
For years, the U.S. Geological Survey has used satellite-borne radar to survey much of the United States, and the amount of data collected is staggering. Gallery shows of Transmission include a stack of over 6,000 sheets of paper containing the XYZ coordinate points necessary to map just over 300 square miles of Yosemite Valley alone. Holdsworth appropriated this data (as well as some from Open Topography), and with the help of a university geologist, created computer models of the land. He used a software program to remove everything but the basic contours of the earth and the occasional trace of a road or building. (In a way other photographers may envy, Holdsworth was even able to alter the direction of the virtual sunlight, thus controlling the time of "day.") After he created these 3D worlds, he was able to navigate them at will—peering over the edge of a volcano, or down the corridors of canyons.
From the millions of square miles of mapped territory, Holdsworth carefully chose five locations—the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount St. Helens, Mount Shasta and Salt Lake City, Utah—for his series. The first four were among the places the early photographers of the Romantic Sublime made their awesome, unpeopled images. And it was near the last one, Salt Lake City, Utah, where Lewis Baltz made his seminal New Topographics project on suburban sprawl. Holdsworth thus references the history of the medium but, with his new method, moves the ball forward. As Emma Lewis writes in her essay on the work, "Looking at the world as though from space, Transmission evokes a sense of capturing something that has never been seen before; something especially powerful as these landscapes have been so visually reproduced throughout history as to become embedded in the popular conscience." But they do not merely look new; in their method, they evoke our current era of potentially terrifying technology such as the Gorgon Stare, the U.S. government drone camera whose eyes are said to be able to devour whole cities at a time. Ultimately, as Lewis writes, Holdsworth is arguing that, "the exaltation of discovery can still exist because the man-made and the sublime are not mutually exclusive."
Dan Holdsworth is a British photographer based in London.
Myles Little is an associate photo editor at TIME.


text:
Zlatan Ibrahimovic started on the bench but still netted his 21st goal in as many Ligue 1 appearances as Paris St Germain opened a six-point lead at the top with a 3-1 home win over Bastia on Friday.
The Sweden striker, who replaced Kevin Gameiro in the 65th minute, converted a penalty to add to Jeremy Menez's second-half opener and Ezequiel Lavezzi wrapped up victory with one minute left to put PSG on 51 points from 24 games.
Keeper Salvatore Sirigu failed to chalk up his ninth consecutive clean sheet in the league as Wahbi Khazri scored 13th-placed Bastia's consolation goal with a 35-metre free kick.
"All the games are difficult especially at the Parc des Princes where our opponents come to defend," midfielder Blaise Matuidi told BeIN Sport television.
"It is going to be a long season and that is why the coach let some players rest a little bit with Tuesday's big game in mind," added substitute Matuidi, referring to next week's Champions League tie with Valencia.
With Ibrahimovic and Lavezzi also starting on the bench, PSG were quiet up front early on. Brazilian Lucas failed to threaten in attack and the home side were booed off by an angry crowd at halftime.
Gameiro, who hit the woodwork midway through the first half, came close again after the break when Mickael Landreau stretched to his left to tip away the France international's backheel.
Menez found the back of the net 11 minutes into the second half with a low shot from 18 metres that slipped under Landreau's right arm.
Ibrahimovic quickly found his stride when he came on, triggering chants from the fans with a series of spectacular dribbles in the box.
In the 71st minute he beat Landreau from the spot after Lucas was fouled by Julian Palmieri.
Bastia were lucky to escape when referee Olivier Thual did not show Samba Yatabare a second yellow card for a foul on Menez.
Substitute Khazri then pulled one back for the visitors when he lobbed Sirigu in the 83rd minute, taking advantage with the Italian keeper out of position as he tried to organise his defence.
Khazri looked set to double his tally when he dribbled the ball past Sirigu, only for his low shot to be blocked by defender Gregory van der Wiel.
Lavezzi, who had replaced Lucas, put the game beyond Bastia's reach by poking the ball in after a Menez cross was deflected into his path.
Second-placed Olympique Lyon can narrow the gap to three points by winning at home to Lille on Sunday, the same day as third-placed Olympique Marseille visit Evian Thonon Gaillard.
Girondins Bordeaux, in fourth spot, travel to Ajaccio on Saturday.
Photograph: Jamie McDonald/Getty Images


text:
Istanbul: Top-ranked titleholder Serena Williams will face former winner Petra Kvitova in her group at the WTA Championships, which start Tuesday in Istanbul.
Sunday's draw for the event that brings together the top eight players in the world also put Agnieszka Radwanska and Angelique Kerber in Williams' Red Group.
Second-ranked Victoria Azarenka heads the White Group, which also includes Li Na, Sara Errani and Jelena Jankovic.
Third-ranked Maria Sharapova has pulled out of the event with a shoulder injury.
Williams, making her eighth appearance in the event, is looking to become the first player to defend the title since Justine Henin in 2007. If she achieves the feat, she would tie Chris Evert for third most WTA Championships with her fourth.
"It's a tough group. I have to be ready. That's the thing about this tournament and why it's so tough, you have to be ready from the first match on," Williams said.
Williams heads into the tournament with a career-best 10 titles this year and a 73-4 record.
Kvitova won the event in 2011 and is the only Grand Slam champion in the group apart from Williams.
"Both of the groups are very tough and I don't think you can choose anyone who you think is weaker," Kvitova said. "This means that it's going to be a big fight every day, every match."
Azarenka and Jankovic are former No. 1 players in the world and Li and Azarenka are also Grand Slam champions.
"It's the best eight players in the world. Anybody who is here is going to be a challenge," Azarenka said.
Jankovic has returned to the top 10 for the first time since 2010.
"Playing the championships, you are playing against the best players in the world so there is no easy match, so every match will be tough from the beginning," Jankovic said. "There is no warm up. There is no getting your rhythm. You have to bring your best performance from the start to the end."
Round-robin play goes from Tuesday to Friday, with the top two in each group advancing to Saturday's semifinals.


text:
|START Conference Manager
ASIST 2012 Annual Meeting
Baltimore, MD, October 26-30, 2012
Understanding the Participatory Library Through a Grounded Theory Study
Linh Cuong Nguyen, Helen Partridge and Sylvia L. Edwards
Tuesday, 10:30am
Lankes and Silverstein (2006) introduced the "participatory library" and suggested that the nature and form of the library should be explored. In the last several years, some attempts have been made in order to develop contemporary library models that are often known as Library 2.0. However, little research has been based on empirical data and such models have had a strong focus on technical aspects but less focus on participation. The research presented in this paper fills this gap. A grounded theory approach was adopted to this study. Six librarians were involved in in-depth individual interviews. As a preliminary result, five main factors of the participatory library emerged including technological, human, educational, social-economic, and environmental. Five factors influencing the participation in libraries were also identified: finance, technology, education, awareness, and policy. The study's findings provide a fresh perspective on contemporary library and create a basis for further studies on this area.