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Tropical Bisque
|Potatoes, Vegetables, Dairy
|Day Part
|Lunch, Dinner
|Menu Part
|Cuisine Type
A bowl of this fragrant, steaming bisque is filled with both white and sweet potatoes. The creamy soup has notes of cilantro and lime to brighten it.
4 large sweet potatoes, cut into 1-in. cubes
4 large white potatoes, cut into 1-in. cubes
4 large onions, chopped
8 cloves of garlic, minced
4 bay leaves
4 tsp. salt
4 tsp. thyme, crushed
1⁄2 tsp. cayenne pepper
8 cups chicken stock
4 cups buttermilk
4 cups milk
1⁄2 cup fresh lime juice
3⁄4 cup cilantro, chopped
1. Combine first nine ingredients in a stock pot. Bring to boil. Reduce heat; simmer, covered for 15 min.
2. Transfer the mixture to a food processor; blend until very smooth. Return mixture to stock pot. Add buttermilk, milk, and lime juice.
3. Heat soup to serving temperature. Spoon into soup bowls. Garnish with cilantro.


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2013 Mazda Mazda5 Values
Select a 2013 Mazda Mazda5 trim level
Mazda Resources:
2013 model year changes
The Mazda5 is essentially unchanged after its debut in 2012. Several new colors are available and the automatic version now gets a little bit better fuel economy around town. Otherwise, the innovative 5-door remains unaltered.
Competitive comparison
Seating for six; space-efficient layout; versatility; steering and handling; fuel-efficiency; new, more stylish look
Special features for 2013
The Mazda5's sliding side doors might lead some to dismiss it as a minivan, but they shouldn't; there's nothing else on the market quite like this unique vehicle, which combines some of the attributes of a minivan (but smaller) and a crossover utility vehicle (but lower). The Mazda5 has excellent passenger design: It takes up about the same parking footprint as a compact sedan, but it has comfortable seating for six. Mazda says that even with all six seats up in place, there's enough cargo space for a standard baby stroller. Also, the sliding doors are easy to operate and are easier to manage when in tight parking spaces. Furthermore, this model is already known for its entertaining driving character, and with a little more power and steering and suspension tuned even more for handling, the Mazda5 is one family choice for those who like the twisties.
Best described as a compact minivan, the 2013 Mazda Mazda5 offers seating for six. The Mazda5 is powered by a 2.5-liter 4-cylinder engine that produces 157 hp, for a 0-60 time of 8.8 seconds. FWD is paired to a 6-speed manual, or optional 5-speed automatic transmission, for an EPA estimated 21 mpg city and 28 mpg highway. Features include 17-inch alloy wheels, HID headlights, rear backup sensors, leather seats, power moonroof, automatic climate control, and steering wheel mounted controls. Safety is comprised of anti-lock braking system (ABS), brake assist (BA), electronic brake force distribution (EBD), traction control system (TCS), and tire pressure monitoring (TPMS). The Mazda5 is backed by a 3-year/36,000-mile warranty.


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Professor Emeritus Rev. Dr. Edward "Ted" Campbell stands as one of the few remaining members of the Drew-McCormick-Harvard Shechem excavation team that first set foot in the arid hill country of what is now the West Bank in 1957.
Professor Emeritus Rev. Dr. Edward "Ted" Campbell stands as one of the few remaining members of the Drew-McCormick-Harvard Shechem excavation team that first set foot in the arid hill country of what is now the West Bank in 1957. Campbell worked on the seven major excavations from 1957 until 1970 and then assumed a coordinating role after the passing of G. Ernest Wright of Harvard Divinity School. Campbell provided oversight and direct involvement not only with the dig but also with collecting and publishing the data. Tireless in his efforts to support ongoing research of the Shechem artifacts, he now has committed his time to making the materials accessible to other archaeologists at the Semitic Museum at Harvard University.
"Scholars need to have a place where they can come to encounter the remains of an archaeological project and reassess them," Campbell said. "We wanted to make the archives available so anyone can have access but also so that the second generation of research on the materials can continue."
Although originally a collaborative project between McCormick, Drew University, and Harvard University, McCormick and Drew eventually recognized that they did not have the facilities to keep and maintain the Shechem archives. As the number of people who wanted to continue research on Shechem increased, it became necessary that one institution serve as the owner and custodian of the materials. Harvard seemed the logical choice, and by common consent, Harvard became the repository of the archives.
"Harvard is the institution of the three that has the capacity to provide the custodial maintenance as well as financial support for the project," Campbell said.
Joseph Greene, Assistant Director of the Semitic Museum, remarks that the material collected at Shechem and now transferred to the university is relevant to the kind of teaching and research that Harvard will support long-term.
"Archival work makes artifacts meaningful, and having the artifacts fits into the plan to continue studying Shechem, since the work is never is finished," Greene said. "As well, Ernest Wright ended his career at Harvard Divinity School so there are strong academic and sentimental connections to Shechem on our behalf."
With the archives now stored in one central location, the original team's plan to publish an exhaustive collection of volumes on the artifacts appears to be a growing reality. Campbell authored Shechem II and III of the four volumes published to-date. Nancy Lapp (Class of 1954), wrote Shechem IV, detailing the Persian and Hellenistic pottery findings. Five McCormick Seminary alumni will further contribute to the project, which will total seven or eight volumes by its completion.
Catherine Duff, studying at the University of Toronto, will publish Shechem V as her dissertation by the end of 2011. John Scott Holladay (Class of 1959) is completing a study of remaining pottery to be published as Shechem VI. Meanwhile, Jacob Moody at Andrews University, Michigan, is responsible for taking all findings that are not pottery and studying those to be compiled as Shechem VII. Work on the mountain above Shechem will be published as the eighth volume.
"Once you leave the field, the follow-up can last for years to get material published," Campbell said. "As Professor Emeritus I have been able to work in official capacity for McCormick Seminary to ensure that a highly reputable institution takes on the work required to ensure publication."
Students will not need to be on site or studying at Harvard to access the materials, but Campbell will be able to instruct the institution as to whom to designate for a particular study. The student will then follow a standard procedure of requesting the needed materials in order to do necessary chemical and physical analysis. When research is completed, all items will be returned to the repository at Harvard.
Campbell believes that the Shechem excavation will continue to shape the fields of archaeological and biblical studies in primarily two ways. Because of its location in the hill country of Palestine, it is one of the rare upland locations wherein the people had a law unto themselves and a different culture that can provide more knowledge about site in the biblical narrative. Shechem was also the geographic center of Samaria and provides key information about the northern kingdom and the background of the Samaritans.
"One of the key things working at Shechem raised for me as a scholar and teacher was the question, 'How am I supposed to understand everything prior to and after the book of Joshua as well theology of the covenant?'" Campbell said, referencing Joshua 24 and the renewal of the covenant between Israel and God that occurred on the site. "The work on this site will always be ongoing."
- by Jennifer L. Aycock


text:
Discussing Agile With a CFO
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The Chief Financial Officer is responsible for financial planning, financial reporting, financial analysis and managing financial risks. What would be a better language than finance, to explain the benefits of Agile to a CFO?
David Chilcott, started this interesting discussion on the Scrum Development group to understand the important points about Agile which would interest a CFO. Michael Spayd mentioned that he would certainly like to talk in terms of pure business benefit. According to Michael, he would talk about
- The benefits of frequent deployments by considering the NPV for a waterfall and an Agile project.
- The ability to stop a successful project when it is past its value realization curve.
- Capitalization vs. expense benefits in terms of how the investment of Agile projects is accounted for in the company's books vs. waterfall projects.
- Lower turnover on Agile teams thus leading to lower training and hiring costs.
Likewise, John Goodsen suggested that he is more inclined to use lean thinking than Scrum when talking to the CxO's. According to John,
I like to feel them out if they understand the difference between cost and throughput accounting, first, and then understand which model they are using. If it's the latter, you are on solid ground. If it's the former, then you have more work ahead of you. The follow-on conversation is about the cost of WIP, the cost of Delay and the value of Limiting WIP to establish flow. You might draw an ROI over Time chart that compares to traditional development showing short, frequent releases do not require as deep of an initial captial investment before you see a return.
According to John, the longer you wait to deliver value and receive money, the deeper the investment gets. Small features should be released on frequent intervals to establish a quicker return on investment. John has an interesting picture to show the ROI difference for an Agile versus a waterfall project scenario.
Trond Wingård presented his thoughts about Agile for a CFO by comparing the NPV (net present value), IRR (internal rate of return), payback period and ROI (return on investment) for a waterfall project and an Agile project. He laid down the criteria for his fictional project as
Let's imagine a project:
- It is scheduled to last for 12 months
- During that time it costs 5 million USD
- The resulting product will provide a financial benefit of USD 200,000 per month (extra revenue or saved costs minus any monthly expenses), until
- The product abruptly stops producing its benefit 4 years after the project is started. You may say there's a 4-year window of opportunity for this particular product.
- (I also assume a 10 percent discount rate in the NPV calculations
According to the calculations, the statistics for a going in a waterfall mode versus making one release every 6 months versus making a release every 3 months were as follows,
Release every 6 months
Release every 3 months
Break Even
37 months
34 months
33 months
44,0 %
56,0 %
62,0 %
Net Present Value (NPV)
Internal Rate of Return (IRR)
20,7 %
28,7 %
33,5 %
Likewise, Trond aslo compared the situation when there was a 4 month delay in the project. Still, as per the numbers, making frequent releases justified the financial statement
Waterfall, as planned
Waterfall, 4 months delay
Frequent releases, 4 months delay
Break Even
37 months
39 months
44,0 %
-4,0 %
29,8 %
Net Present Value (NPV)
Internal Rate of Return (IRR)
20,7 %
-2,0 %
20,0 %
Trond's worksheet for the CFOs can be downloaded here.
Thus, there is enough meat to discuss Agile in financial terms with the CFO. The numbers under various scenarios adequately demonstrate the benefit of going Agile.
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What has Agile go to do with it?
Peter Evans-Greenwood
So two questions come to mind.
1. Does Agile/LEAN have any financial benefits which can't also be ascribed to *any* incremental/iterative method? (I.e. Is this a business case for going Agile? Or is it a business case for incremental/iterative delivery, and Agile is just an example of one possible way of doing this?)
2. Are you prepared to do benefits realisation? (And I don't mean "we delivered the software so the benefit must be there.") You need to be able to prove that you project is delivering value if you want to make claims like "we can drown the puppy when it's no longer of use" or "it generated 100k in value." Think sales campaign: we can ascribe sales to a campaign (offering via a channel) so we can determine stuff like ROI and identify the point when return dips below cost.You also need to factor in substitutions: generating 100k of sales on the new portal is nice, but but how many more sales is this than you would have received on the old portal? If there's no change then why did you bother with the investment?
Chris Matts
NPV is calculated using interest rates. They are currently at 0.5% in England. You are adding unnecessary complexity that is unnecessary and misleading. The future cash flow projections in Business (IT) projects have massive variance which drowns any accuracy that NPV would add. For example, we predict a cash flow of £100 to £200 which we have made more accurate by applying NPV so the cashflow will be £99.5 to £199. Sound silly. It will do to a CFO as well.
The benefits of Agile/Lean are nothing to do with NPV.... or IRR or ROI. The benfits are all to do with business investment risk.
There are many real options in Agile/Lean that make it easier to manage risk than on a more traditional approach. ( even the option to change code and know you have broken something - TDD )
Lets drop the silly accouting talk. The business see straight through it. It reminds me of authors who want to sound techy by talking about sed and wak.
For more info on real options, ask Olav. :-)
Re: What has Agile go to do with it?
Vikas Hazrati
Regarding your second part, I believe that there are ways to do the value realization of software. Wouldn't you know if your sales on the portal are going up or down. Like wise wouldn't you know the if the cost of adding a new feature on the current platform is becoming increasingly prohibitive and thus you need to bother about the investment
Re: Sigh
Vikas Hazrati
I am sure that people understand the benefits of Agile as you correctly point out. Agilists like Michael and Trond are trying to give a financial perspective to it and make it interesting for the CFO.
It is more like the analogy that all of us understand the benefits and the need to save paper. Have you seen those messages in many mails which ask you not to print the email unless absolutely necessary ;) Some of who are environmentally inclined would like to think of saving some trees. Some of us who are financially inclined would also be interested in how it saves money for the organization and makes my books look greener :)
So the same concept, the same end goal but different lenses to look at it by different people. I believe that there is nothing wrong with that.
Also as Trond points out with his calculations and as John depicts in his picture you are managing business investment risk by releasing early and often.
Re: Sigh
Chris Matts
You miss my point.
A CFO will have CIMA, ACCA, CFA or some similar qualification. They will have been using NPV, IRR etc. for many many years before hitting the executive suite.
Using NPV, IRR to communicate the benefit of Agile/Lean will simply telegraph your lack of understanding of Finance. It is NOT a good argument. When valuing the Cash Flows associated with the benefits of an IT related business investment, the NPV effect is INSIGNIFICANT compared to the risk associated with the cash flows themselves. Bringing those cash flows early to reduce the the uncertainty in the returns has huge benefit and it also has nothing to do with NPV.
If you want to communicate to the CFO, you need to explicitly talk about business investment risk and the real options that Agile/Lean offer to manage that risk.
I apologise if I'm being a bit harsh here but this is what I have been doing for a living for the past 15 years. I moved away from NPV 10 years ago when I worked on a project that created a business model using NPV. The cashflows estimates fed into that model were two orders of magnitude out.
The benefit is about risk. NPV, IRR etc. are a total red herring.
Re: Sigh
Vikas Hazrati
I think this is a very good point. This adds a lot of value to the discussion at hand. May be you are right that NPV and IRR are not good arguments and one should focus on business investment risk. Having said that are there other economies around the world where NPV is not that insignificant. I know you mentioned the example of UK but what about China and India? Could the NPV argument hold some weight there?
Another look at Agile
XebiaLabs XebiaLabs
Re: Another look at Agile
Robert Merrill
Have you seen much talk of deployment automation when discussing Agile benefits?
The recent DevOps movement, with an emphasis on extending smooth flow through integration and deployment using automation and collaboration, is doing exactly that.
Re: What has Agile go to do with it?
Robert Merrill
There's also a number of incremental/iterative IT approaches which don't belong to the Agile/LEAN family. (Believe it or not, but RUP was conceived as incremental and iterative, it's just not practiced that way very often.)...
(I.e. Is this a business case for going Agile? Or is it a business case for incremental/iterative delivery, and Agile is just an example of one possible way of doing this?)
RUP was indeed a step in the right direction.
- It called for aggressive reduction of technical risk and an architecture focus.
- It transformed requirements into something that could actually be used as is to guide design and development (use cases), instead of the granular IEEE "the system must" statements more suitable for contract disputes
- It laid the foundation for empirical process control (feedback loops), as opposed to defined process control (plan the work, work the plan)
But IMO, RUP had two big problems (well, three, if you count the lack, of a UI modeling component of UML, but that could be bolted on)
- If used "out of the box" RUP was extremely heavy. Roles and deliverables oh my! It could (and should) be cut to fit, but to do that without breaking it, you had to understand why it worked. The same is true of Agile, and people are still cutting through the Load-Bearing Walls, and then saying, "we tried Agile but it didn't work."
- RUP didn't really have a built in mechanism for schedule and budget estimation and commitment, so it tended to be executed in a waterfall "but you promised" governance framework, with all of the attendant problems when the initial commitment was too optimistic (death march, mistakes and loss of discipline, throw people at it, loss of design coherence, loss of quality, rising bug count and swelling remediation work leading to even more schedule pressure etc)
What agile did was
- cut out a lot of the RUP weight (not needed for the vast majority of projects),
- built an estimation, planning, and scope management mechanism right in (the Planning Game, Story Points, and Velocity in their various forms), and
- reduced the batch size (cycle length) so that feedback control on plan, quality, and fitness for use could really work.
By keeping the product of shippable quality (though feature-incomplete) at all times, it's possible to do a true variable-scope project within a schedule and budget constraint without generating a lot of waste. And that alone solves the estimation-and-commitment problem.
I once heard Bob Martin convincingly argue that eXtreme Programming (XP) was actually a small subset of RUP.
Re: What has Agile go to do with it?