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New Tiger, Old Stripes
He's won again! He's back! Or so we're told again and again as we prepare for the most highly-anticipated Masters in years. But, as we argue in the forthcoming May issue, the sad truth is that Tiger Woods—the real Tiger—is still the same cursing, pouting, hermetically sealed prima donna he's always been, before the car wreck, before the affairs, before the fall. And if all that didn't change him, then nothing ever will
There were colors in the sycamores on the back side of the Santa Monica Mountains like high autumn in Maine, and a cool swirling breeze worked its way around the Sherwood Country Club, giving the golfers at the Chevron World Challenge fits of indecision. You could publish a coffee-table book filled with images of Tiger Woods in aggrieved postures, swatting at passing leaves and glaring at distant sounds. For the thirteenth year running, he was the host of this unofficial off-season invitational, and all weekend he seemed to feel singularly antagonized by the elements. The book might be called Don't I Deserve Better?—only you wouldn't be able to take your pictures, even if you tried.
On the civilian side of the gallery ropes lining the sixth fairway, I watched with maybe forty other fans as Tiger strode to his ball in the center of the troughed fairway. Trailing him was a security detail of plainclothes heavies with backpacks and earpieces. While Tiger stood in the fairway waiting out the gales, one of them approached and demanded that the fans turn over their cell phones. This big dude—dutiful and jacked and bald as Obama's former body man—handed them each a ticket stub to reclaim their phones after the round. He radioed something, and after an eternity Tiger hit his shot, a ballooning draw that came up short and left in a collection area. Tiger bitched audibly about the wind and then carried on up to the green, where the security canvassed the crowd all over again.
Golf tournaments used to ban cell phones; this one—an unofficial PGA Tour charity jam featuring a field of just eighteen—permitted them. Which is why the gallery wore that same Tiger-patented body frown, a sag of persecution. Many cheered him throughout the weekend; others grumbled with disdain; we all tripped over ourselves to get a look when his presence was felt or heard, sucking inward toward the source like lint to a vacuum cleaner.
Later, along the sixteenth fairway, young swaggerer Nick Watney hacked a punch shot out of creekside rough, winding up in more trouble than where he'd started—and yet as he passed a gaggle of children lining the ropes in front of me, he met their outstretched hands with a grateful swipe of high fives.
"So great," said a man in lime. "Just like Tiger."
"Are you kidding?" honked another guy standing nearby. "Tiger does not do that. Tiger's a dick."
On Sunday afternoon, Tiger rolled in a snaky six-footer to claim what several media outlets would call "his first win in two years." Tiger was back, they declared. The drought was over. We'd witnessed the inflection point from which he could at last recast his career and move beyond the personal failures that swelled our breakfast reading two winters ago. None among you will forget the avalanche of raunchy testimonials (porn star, restaurant hostess, Vegas VIP), the forehead-slapping text messages ("Hold you down while i choke you and Fuck that ass that i own"), and the frozen helplessness with which Tiger and his team responded to it all. It's been a while, but there was very much a moment, right on the eve of his gutless public apology, when he'd been MIA for two-plus months and sports fans wondered whether he'd ever return to golf. Of course, he did. Not so brilliantly, but still—he was playing. And now…Tiger had won again. He had proven he possessed the physical wellness (he'd recovered from busted leg ligaments) and the talent (the purity of his perfection-training hadn't evaporated overnight), but more important the head strength to seal a victory. He had fid whatever was the matter, marched with a purposeful step in the direction of recovering our good favor.
But as I watched Tiger hole that clincher on Sunday, I couldn't quite share in the bigness of the moment. He'd swung his arm wildly and figured his face into an emphatic sneer, yet he'd beaten only seventeen other golfers, in his own off-season invitational. His reaction was enormous, comically outsize, like a Will Ferrell character after stuffing a third-grader in a shoot-around. Still, there it was: the patented fist pump. Vintage Tiger. _Back, baby. _
Much in Tiger's life has changed since Thanksgiving 2009. While the fallout from his affairs thinned in time to a less consuming presence, he quickly lost many of the sponsors that had made him a rich man—Accenture, ATT, Gatorade—not to mention his wife, full-time rights to his children, and the less financially or emotionally explicit "trust" of his fans. He returned with low-level fanfare during the 2010 Masters (a tournament during which any funny business in the crowd would've been identified and erased quicker than a bloody mishap at Disneyland) and, until just this past month, played un-notably on all but a few occasions.
In July of last year, to the surprise of many, Tiger dumped his longtime caddy, Steve Williams. Many figured Williams to be a critical asset to Woods's redemption—someone who had remained above the fray and allegiant. Williams had stood by through the personal trials, waited out the return, and responded to being fired with this: "I've stuck by him through thick and thin. I've been incredibly loyal. Basically, you could say I've wasted the last two years of my life.… The timing of it's extraordinary to me." Thankless as Tiger seemed, Williams reacted by taking every public opportunity to chip back. When his new boss, Adam Scott, won an event in late summer, Williams proclaimed it to be "the best win I've ever had"; later, he reportedly shrugged off the remark at an end-of-season caddy dinner by getting casually racist, saying it "was my aim to shove it right up that black ass."
This came on the heels of Tiger parting with his longtime coach Hank Haney, one of the country's alpha golf instructors. Haney masked the hard feelings, but then last week he published a memoir about his six years with Tiger, The Big Miss. An early excerpt detailed his pupil's reverence for the Navy Seals and claimed that Tiger once considered leaving golf to join their ranks. When a reporter pressed Tiger on the validity of that fairly harmless claim, Woods blew up at him: "I've already commented on the book. Is that in the book? Is it in the book?" When informed by the reporter that, um, he actually hadn't commented on it yet, Woods leveled a shearing, silent glare before delivering the icy Tigerism, "You're a beauty, you know that?" This was Tiger defaulting into battle mode. If you grasp the weirdness of bristling when someone discloses your respect for the Seals, you can begin to appreciate Tiger's bitterness when former friends overshare.
Since his professional arrival in 1996, the phrase Team Tiger has slipped from reporters' lips with a pejorative snag. Over the years, Team Tiger has been fluidly re-rostered, but it typically included Tiger's late father, Earl; Tiger's superagent, Mark Steinberg; his caddy, coach, wife, and best bros Jerry Chang and Bryon Bell. (Bell, Vanity Fair tells us, seems to have arranged most of the rendezvous in the long, laborious extramarital fuckings-around of Tiger Woods. He'd book the Southwest flight, screen the phone calls… Think of him as the Turtle in Tiger's entourage.) Team Tiger mortared itself into an arm-linked fortress, and the ruby of rules among the pack was always discretion. Shut your mouth, talk to no one; speak and risk banishment.
Which is why it's so dazzling when figures like Williams and Haney open up. Try as his publicity squad might, it's tough to maintain—or now restore—the Tiger Image when former insiders sprout secret-sharing campaigns. "It's always a divorce," David Feherty, longtime commentator and golf-gab-show host, told me recently. "Tiger expects the curtains to remain drawn, and when somebody opens them, it pisses him off. He has appeared superhuman for so long, and it's like he feels the need to perpetuate that myth."
Which, it should be said, has been the biggest problem with Tiger all along. Even during the soaring years of his infallibility—when his talents were impossible, his true character untested—no one really knew anything about the most recognizable athlete on earth. In the presence of reporters, Tiger seems only on the rarest occasion to have articulated a fully authentic statement. That's common enough. Most athletes undermine the highly interesting things they do in competition by being aggressively uninteresting when pressed to comment; many just don't have it in them. But Tiger was the rare supertalent who we suspected was capable of depth. And yet he actively chose the path of doublespeak. Watch any of a million interviews with him: He listens intently, looks you in the eye, verbalizes plenty of words, says nothing.
Years ago, Sports Illustrated published an exchange Tiger's father said he had with his son at age 3:
"Where were you born, Tiger?" Earl says.
"I was born on December 30, 1975, in Long Beach, California."
"No, Tiger, only answer the question you were asked. It's important to prepare yourself for this. Try again."
"I was born in Long Beach, California."
"Good, Tiger, good."
When the secrets expelled themselves from the Tiger bubble like sludge from a sewer pipe, I supposed that something positive could come of it all: I figured Tiger might start speaking more openly. For years, fans yearned to know a broken part of him. Even when his image was unscuffed—possessed of its most bloated moneymaking potential—fans reveled in the cracks. Tiger, it's been known inside the game since his boyhood, has always had one of the dirtiest mouths on Tour. Cursing at every turn, overflowing with middle-school jokes about lesbians, blow jobs, and black penises. (In 1997, GQ published a piece in which many of those dirty jokes were relayed; Tiger chose never to speak with us again. Nine years later, he told one of those very same jokes to a mistress as an ice-breaking pickup line. Almost a decade and no new material.) At the course, people loved to hear Tiger swear. They found it funny when he erupted at camera shutters and picked fights with fluttering leaves. It humanized his extraordinariness. There are scores of YouTube clips devoted to that mouth. Also to Tiger farting.
But when the fissures in Tiger's veneer became faults and their friction brought on a big old global quake, what was left to gain was the clearest picture of the star we'd ever seen. Instead of coming clean, though, and owning up in full to—or maybe even altering—the behavior he'd concealed all along, he has made certain he is less exposed, not more. He's doubled down on the strategy that broke him. The mistake, Tiger seems to believe, was that the secret had gotten out, not that he'd misplayed his power.
Shortly after the win in December, Tiger announced that his first tournament of 2012 wouldn't be the PGA Tour event at San Diego's Torrey Pines—a course on which he'd won at every imaginable level—but rather a little-known European Tour stop in Abu Dhabi. It was an odd choice, but some golf writers justified it as a thoughtful move because "the expectations won't be as high" to follow up with another victory. By the time Tiger arrived in Abu Dhabi, we'd glimpsed the reveal: The event had paid him a reported $2.5 million appearance fee, a practice strictly banned in the States.
In Abu Dhabi, he put on a fair show. After two rounds of playing with no great mistakes but few highlights (he blamed his poor putting performance on Thursday on the grain of the greens), Tiger tore through the field on Saturday. Through fifty-four holes, he was tied for the lead with an unknown Brit named Robert Rock.
There were a number of years, enough to be called an unmatchable era, when Tiger won every single tournament in which he held a third-round lead. Part of this dominance was aided by the thumb-sucking meltdowns of his playing partners; when paired with Tiger, opponents put up notably worse scores than they did with anyone else. And these were great players, major-championship contenders. In the past, guys like Robert Rock would stub themselves right out of contention, their intestines were knotted so tightly.
Then Tiger vanished, and by the time he returned, golfers, even (or maybe especially) the young and inexperienced ones, no longer feared him like they had. He was as breakable as any, and his game showed it.
So back to the case of Robert Rock. Late January, I woke up in the middle of the night to watch the final round at Abu Dhabi play out live. Rock, who had started the round tied with Tiger, broke free, but by the turn it looked as though Rock might crumble. The conditions were ripe for Tiger to make his move, and yet he mishandled opportunities and gave away the tournament. There was nothing of the old acceleration through the finish line.
Still, it'd be irresponsible to write off Tiger's potential. He is the most capable golfer of all time, and now that his body seems mostly healthy, there is a great deal of transcendent play left in him. At the Honda Classic in March, the tournament during which he recoiled at the Seals talk, I scrummed along with Tiger's gallery for four days—and on the last, we witnessed the sort of articulate command of his golf shots Tiger hadn't mustered since his return. All week, the Tiger cops spread along the gallery ropes like ill-wishing oil, insisting that phones be pocketed and kicking out those who refused. Even so, at times it seemed half the fans on the course were following Tiger alone, stacked rows deep, like shark teeth, at each tee and green.
"The affinity that fans have for Tiger has remained strong and they show it in many ways," his agent, Mark Steinberg, said in a statement, adding that Woods declined to comment. "Tiger understands how fortunate he is to have the public's support and has expressed that appreciation often. While some in the media want to harp on the past, it's obvious that the public has moved on."
There seems to be plenty of truth to this last bit. When Tiger announced his intentions to play the Honda, sales at the event rose appreciably. And for the first three rounds, the galleries committed to an uncomplicated advocacy. If you asked me to split them into for and against, you'd be left with an empty plot of critics to my left and an army of support to my right, muscled up behind that little blond kid with the TW logo razored into his hair. And all this before Tiger's 62 on Sunday—the lowest final round of his career. Though he still fell short, that thing we'd all suspected was verified: He was surely going to win again.
And then he did. In the manner of the old way—as though bottled and teleported from before the scandal. He beat the field at Bay Hill two weeks ago not by dropping our jaws but by exhibiting a maddening consistency, more in control than anyone else. The win brought an end to a thirty-month drought. He walked off the eighteenth green Sunday to the chorus of his name being cheered as if it were the end of an underdog movie, Rudy or Rocky.
But why was Tiger winning so important to us, anyway? If we accept the whole mirage as we once did, doesn't that make us suckers? What's dishonest about Tiger now is not that he's looking us in the eye and lying; it's that he's asking us to remain complicit in that grand lie of infallibility long after it's been publicly obliterated. Golf is better with Tiger around. And in order to preserve his presence in its most electrifying form, it's tempting to buy what he seems to insist: that he has organically improved, as both person and player, because of what he's been through.
For the duration of his professional career, Tiger accepted our attention, investment, adulation, and trust in a manner that suggested he felt he deserved them. He had, after all, done more than anyone ever to change golf. He had grown our interest in the game by a double-digit exponent, and he had done nothing for years to subvert the untethered heights to which his achievements and global image could soar. (His father, infamously, said that Tiger could do more for humanity than anyone in the history of the world.) We accepted his inhuman qualities as mechanical by-products, behavior we'd put up with in exchange for the robotic precision. When our idea of Tiger Woods was exposed as vaporous, we felt conflicted—or at least this fan did—about Tiger's future success: Did we want him to win again in spite of the duplicity, or to lose as payment for it?
When he ultimately returned, what I think we wanted was a sense that he felt fortunate to be back out there. Blessed, maybe. That even though he had not cheated in competition, it was not his implicit right to be paid millions to indulge in retirement pleasures. That as compared with the rancorous storm of his personal life, the golf course was a reprieve, a place he could love to be.
Instead, Tiger seemed to act more entitled upon his return than he had even during his ascendance. At that first tournament back, the 2010 Masters, it took him just a few days to explode a promise—that he'd try to tone down his negative outbursts—by coming as unthreaded as ever, shouting into a tee-box microphone ("Tiger Woods, you suck! God dammit!") to the salivating joy of the Internet. Soon after, he met a question from a reporter—the same guy from the Seals tiff—about his drop in ranking with: "The good thing is...I might be able to beat you." He got into hot water over a report that he'd started dating his former neighbor's daughter, a woman who'd been 9 years old when Tiger first moved in down the street. Jimmy Fallon said that when he and Tiger were fooling with the new TW video game off-air, he suggested that Tiger try some trick; Tiger unsmilingly nipped, "Don't tell me how to play my game." Even when he was grinning wide with NBC's Jimmy Roberts and signing balls for fans after his 62 at the Honda, the takeaway was that only a career-low Sunday could elicit those sorts of niceties.
What we've longed to see these last two years was that he comprehended—and maybe even enjoyed—his good fortune. Which got me thinking: When was the last time Tiger looked beholden on the golf course, overwhelmed with the sense that he'd been dealt an extraordinary hand? You might have to go back to the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open, the first glimpse of the 20-year-old by a national television camera after he turned pro. On Sunday, at the par-3 fourteenth, Tiger holed out with a 6-iron—his first professional ace. One tournament down, one indelible, unexpected lightning bolt of a highlight already chalked up to his legacy. He won just twenty-five hundred bucks that weekend, and yet you can see, in the luck-struck comprehension in his face, that he senses the jet engines pitching from low hum to full throttle. None of us knew anything then, and yet we expected everything. We will never see that look again.


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Club Play Launch "Play Wet" Sunday Pool Party Independence Day Weekend [User Submitted]
"Club Play took Independence Day Weekend to launch a new
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And what is Play Wet you ask?
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Overall, the party was a success and you can look forward to an even better second edition of Play Wet - coming soon!
Please click the "Report" button below if the video on this page is not working properly.

subset: commoncrawl


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Os designers de todo o mundo estão enviando designs criativos para kittight na categoria de design de página da web - custom.
We have a website that we would like to launch called pokermoneygames.com
This will be a poker affiliate portal.
Poker Money Games
We require an total web design for a new poker portal that we are launching called pokermoneygames.com
As an idea we like sites like the following
We would require all logos etc.
We will be promoting the following poker rooms.
Full Tilt Poker
Titan Poker
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The site will consist of poker room reviews, poker articles, exclusive bonuses,
The site should be heavily focused on the main page sign up bonuses and there should be small logos and review sections of the top poker rooms.
The site should have a main page
A page for the poker room review example
Main index of poker rooms
Main bonuses on the home page like the best online poker sites area on http://www.pokerlistings.com/
We are looking for this to be done in wordpress but will still take entries in PSD format.
- Areas for poker articles
- Indicating if a poker room is for US players
- Item 1...


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In the aftermath of traumatic events like the Newtown massacre, Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, children need to heal, just as adults do. But in turning to research to find out what approaches work best for young people, one finds little guidance, according to a research review published February 11 in Pediatrics.
The study focused on non-interpersonal trauma, such as natural disasters, terrorism and community violence, and excluded sexual abuse and domestic violence. A total of 22 trials meeting the criteria provided evidence on interventions for children exposed to trauma. The criteria required studies to have low or medium risk of bias, to compare at least two groups of children and to measure at least one outcome related to post traumatic stress symptoms that children may experience after such events, such as depression, anxiety attacks, psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, stomachaches, general pains), poor grades, nightmares and similar symptoms.
Among the 20 treatments included in those trials were various psychotherapies focusing on trauma or grief, school-based programs, group therapy and three medication trials: imipramine (Tofranil) , fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft).The results are sobering: researchers don't know if any medications help and if anything works long-term, and don't know much about possible harms from interventions.
"I thought we were going to find a lot of studies on different interventions and make clinical recommendations," says Valerie Forman-Hoffman, the study's lead researcher and a psychiatric epidemiologist for RTI International in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Many of the excluded studies failed to include comparison groups, which are important because children may recover without treatment, she added. "It's depressing. The evidence base is just lacking."
Many children do heal on their own from one-off events, especially with good support systems. Yet, about 30 percent will continue to experience nightmares, anxiety attacks, stomachaches and other post traumatic stress symptoms more than a month later, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Past research has also shown children can develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms simply in response to watching news coverage of traumatic events.
A variety of treatment approaches showed some evidence for effectiveness, but not enough studies compared approaches or replicated other results. "That's not saying that no treatment works," Forman-Hoffman says, "but based on the evidence, we don't know what works."
What we do know
One reason for the limited findings may be the review's exclusion of studies about relational trauma, such as sexual abuse or domestic violence. A companion review awaiting publication did review that evidence, but separating the two types of trauma may have made it harder to see a big picture.
"Had they looked at all of the research done on trauma exposure for kids, you would have seen replications for some of the intervention models," says Todd Sosna, the senior vice president in charge of program evaluation at the Children's Institute in Los Angeles. "The research does give some directions for treatments that can be helpful, and they tend to be the ones that are cognitive behavioral and involve trauma narratives."
With trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), clinicians spend 12 to 18 weeks with a child and parent to help them understand the effects of trauma, how to cope and how to retrain their thoughts and behavior responses. TF-CBT (pdf) also uses trauma narratives—stories children tell about an event while reprocessing it in a healthy way. Put another way, it's telling the story while getting back on the horse. This study and another recent review both found some evidence for reduced symptoms with TF-CBT, but the studies were small and short-term. TF-CBT studies also often involve only children who were sexually abused, providing less specific guidance regarding survivors of a school shooting or hurricane.
Excluding studies involving abuse also leaves out the most common trauma children experience, though, so the new findings were unsurprising, says Ryan Herringa, at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. "There's clearly a great need for research," he says. "It's just really difficult to do."
Barriers to research
The biggest research obstacle is the population itself. Researchers need to get involved with children early after an event. Without knowing what will happen or when, arriving in time to enroll children in trials can be tough, not to mention lag times in getting ethics approval. "Ideally, you would have some sort of rapid-response team that would fly into a tragedy and begin enrolling people in a study on the spot," Herringa says. "Then, ethically, is it appropriate to be approaching someone for research just as they're trying to cope?"
Forman-Hoffman says lack of funding and the sensitivity of working with traumatized children may also be limiting research. "As a researcher, I wouldn't want to go running to Sandy Hook and say, 'Can I study your kid and see if this works?'—to add to what they're already going through and without knowing if any of these treatments could potentially be harmful," she says. In fact, some PTSD therapies have shown harm in adults recovering from sexual abuse, such as retraumatization, but only five studies in this review even looked for harm. No harm was found in two psychotherapy trials, but among the three medication trials, none showed benefit and one showed possible harm. The placebo group in the sertraline study showed more improvement in quality of life measures than those receiving the medication showed, and those taking sertraline experienced side effects from the medication and more suicidal thoughts.
Katey Smith, coordinator of the Trauma Response Team at Family Centers in Fairfield County, Conn., worked with Newtown families right after the shooting. She is not involved in ongoing interventions in Newtown, but she uses TF-CBT in her own practice—without having much information about long-term effectiveness. "We have to follow these kids over time to know if this model is working," she says, because research shows that experiencing trauma before age 18 can increase adults' risk of depression, suicide and other problems. It is also difficult to control for differences between children that may influence recovery. "We're talking about human beings here, and there's so much variability between subjects," Smith says.
Future research
A growing body of research points to the importance of "protective factors" in helping children cope with trauma and develop resilience. Protective factors include how engaged children are with their communities, schools and faith; how well they regulate their emotions; what their support systems are; and how attached they are to a caregiver.
The Children's Institute's Sosna says protective factors are part of a multi-faceted solution to treatment. "We think research will advance, and we think therapy will be part of a larger solution to helping kids recover from trauma," he says.
Another approach entirely is to view these children's experiences through the lens of loss and grief, says Robert Lucia, a pediatric counseling specialist at Children's Hospital of Illinois. Both Lucia and the study authors pointed out that discussing PTSD in children is controversial because children may not show the full constellation of symptoms that garner a diagnosis. "I would challenge researchers and clinicians to switch the lens," says Lucia, who treats children coping with death. "You need to treat the grief too, and there is no pathology to grief. Everyone does it differently. Look at the impact of the loss that traumatic event has on the child," he says, whether it's loss of home, community, friends or a way of life.
The authors said their findings should serve as a call to action. "We hear so much about gun control and mental health coverage following Newtown, and those are important in terms of prevention, but there's no easy solution," Forman-Hoffman says. "These kinds of traumas and natural disasters are going to keep happening, so we really do need to turn attention to determining what works best for these kids."


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Indicative Rate * AU$99 to AU$190
Tower Court Motel is located in the beautiful seaside town of Hervey Bay and is the perfect place to stay when visiting the region as you explore all the attractions on offer. Tower Court Motel is directly opposite the beach and close to great eating outlets. Tower Court Motel provides great value with spacious, clean and affordable suites suitable for all requirements, business and pleasure. To cool off Tower Court Motel has a large salt water pool. Also available is a guest's barbecue and off street under cover parking.
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Note: Information on listed products and services are provided by the operator and were correct at the time of publishing. Rates are indicative based on the minimum and maximum available prices of products and services. Please visit the operator's website for further information. All prices quoted are in Australian dollars (AUD).


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Come to stay: Working at Liebherr
Working at Liebherr means being able to commit resolutely to one thing and growing from it. As an individual and as a whole – in a family enterprise that creates fascinating products around the world. Once you experience it, you'll want to stay.
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The bond among our employees comes from the fascination of technology and the desire to find optimal solutions for our customers.
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Liebherr quality is in the detail. Staff stand by this with their awareness of quality and their responsibility.
Employees from Liebherr stand by the values of the company. They are loyal towards the company and its customers.
Co-operation in the company as well as with customers and partners is distinguished by mutual respect, fairness and trust.
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Staff throughout the world stand for cultural diversity. Teamwork that transcends boundaries enriches the company.
Corporate culture that creates a bond
Co-operation at Liebherr is distinguished by a pragmatic working style and also mutual respect, fairness and trust. Therefore, all staff have a great amount of freedom within their areas of responsibility.
Of particular importance here is that everyone understands what they bear responsibility for. Through their efforts, everyone contributes towards the success of the company. Acknowledging this and implementing it in the daily routine is of particular importance to us.
Strong bond
Our staff identify themselves with the company and a passion for technology bonds them together. This strengthens the international cohesion and encourages cross-national teamwork within the Group.
At every location and in every country, our staff receive the professional and personal support that they need. Those who share our enthusiasm and engage themselves actively find a work home with an unprecedented plethora of possibilities.


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Former Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright will speak at St. John's High School Jan. 23 as part of the Abdella Center for Ethics Lecture Series.
Her talk, "The Courage to Listen," will discuss her concerns about the breakdown of civility in dialogue and focus on ways to restore international discourse. She will take questions from students after the lecture.
Ms. Albright was ambassador to the United Nations from 1991 until January 1997, when she became secretary of state. She was secretary of state for four years and was the first woman to hold that office.


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There is something pleasingly apt about the fact that repeats of Open All Hours precede Top Gear on BBC2 each week. With its off-colour jokes, laddish clowning and casually sexist attitudes, the TV car show fits perfectly into Arkwright's late 1970s heyday where the introduction of self-service in his corner shop can be compared to "hiring your wife out for parties."
But if it were only blokes behaving badly, Top Gear would never have survived this long. The formula may be as smooth as a worn shop counter, but there is life in the old dogs yet. And as the series finale began its two-part journey with our intrepid presenters crossing Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania in what we already suspect is a doomed attempt to find the source of the Nile, they were all in excellent form..
All the essential ingredients were here. There are three estate cars, of varying degrees of decay, purchased for £1,500. True to form, Jeremy Clarkson chose a classic BMW, and James May a Volvo – both wildly unsuitable for the African terrain. Less predictably, Richard Hammond for once seems to have made a sensible pick – a Subaru four-wheel drive turbo – though the fact that he has already jettisoned the spare wheel is ringing warning bells with me.
The Subaru Impreza WRX Wagon and the Volvo 850R
So our heroes assemble in a village where the locals look warily neutral, josh about their car choices and set off. Five minutes later, they seem to have reached their destination: the vast expanse of Lake Victoria. But because this is Top Gear and there are two hours to fill, Clarkson comes up with a hare-brained theory about the source of the Nile stretching back from Gibraltar (I wasn't entirely concentrating on the geography) and it is off to the traffic jams of Kampala, the horrors of Ugandan hotels, and the mud-clogged roads of the interior.
Kampala traffic
What makes it all so infinitely and addictively watchable is that it is genuinely funny. Once out of the studio, where their banter can become forced, the chemistry between the three presenters is a joy. You just know that Clarkson and May are going to buy Hammond an unsuitable gift to transport, but his face when he sees the leopard-print-covered armchair they have purchased still makes you laugh.
So did the perfectly delivered Clarkson putdown: "Our colleague was in horrible pain…so we left him behind." When May, in turn, threatens Hammond with instant "celebrated TV death" if he suggests camping, the line may be scripted, but it is sharp. So is the sequence where they each customise their rides to provide themselves with perfect accommodation: Egyptian cotton and a coffin for Clarkson, a kitchenette for Hammond and a library for May.
Africa itself plays its part in keeping the journey so vividly alive. When Clarkson buys the bananas a girl in Kampala has gracefully been carrying on her head, his surprise at their weight is genuine and touching; Hammond's response to the mystery of the red roads and dark green vegetation – "this is just heaven" – is as full of wonder as the fact that he surrounds his car with Insect-O-Cutors is predictable. The theory that Victorian explorers loved the place so much they lied to their wives about its perils, wanting to stay lost for as long as possible, is clever.
Previous journeys have shown the lads at their most parochial and small-minded; perhaps consciously this one doesn't. When an immensely strong group of Ugandan soldiers push Clarkson out of the mud – and then rebuild him a road to drive on – we not only see them paid, but also hear the admiring applause from the entire crew. The continent is consistently more than an extra in a very British story of hi-jinks.
The cringeworthy moments are still there: a visit to a village called Jezza prompted terrible jokes and I don't like ever much like Clarkson on the subject of homosexuality or women. But his petulant fury when he discovered that May had taken half of his car door to do repairs on his own vehicle, made me laugh out loud, just as I did at the observation – matched by shots of animals streaking out of view – that "Top Gear cameramen do struggle when they're not filming cars."
It all shows that a formula can be infinitely extended, provided the content is good. Predictable they may be, but the Top Gear adventures are skilfully-made, perfectly shaped TV, driven not only by petrol and car worship, but by enough warmth and silliness to make almost everyone smile.


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10 Excellent Etsy Finds For Your Travels Abroad
No matter where your adventures take you, sometimes it's nice to have something with a little soul and handmade love to accompany you along the way. We love this small gathering of travel items, each one aims at making your journey a little easier. Which one is your favorite?
Here's a few of our travel favorites that might make the journey a bit easier. Do you have a favorite item that you simply can't live without when you're on the go jet-setting like a rock star? Let us know in the comments below!
Top Row, Left To Right
• All Natural Buckwheat Hull Pillow: for $18.00 from Etsy seller Tresmarias.
• Handmade Leather Journal: for $29.00 from Etsy seller Peasblossomstudio.
• Shampoo Bar with Travel Case: for $11.00 from Etsy seller ShopRedLeaf.
• Leather Travel Tray: for $45.00 from Etsy seller zenokleather.
• Travel Laundry Bag With Green Monster: for $29.00 from Etsy seller Soxypuppet.
Bottom Row, Left To Right
• Happy Cow Leather Travel Belts: for $65.00 from Etsy seller justintime67.
• Weekend Travel Bag: for $179.00 from Etsy seller StudioOneDesigns.
• Vintage Seth Thomas Travel Alarm Clock: for $20.00 from Etsy seller VintageHomeRecycled.
• Travel Wallet: for $35.00 from Etsy seller Mansewn.
• Travel Aggravation: for $18.00 from Etsy seller woodcraftstore.
(Images: As linked above)


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"Everything about skip-row cotton, we love — it has made us profitable again," says Keith Morton, who with his wife, Beth, farms 1,000 acres in the north Mississippi hills near Falkner, just south of the Tennessee line.
Even so, this fall he's planning, based on research on his farm the past three years, to switch to a 60-inch row system, with the first crop slated for the 2007 season.
"This system may not yield as much as 38-inch solid cotton," he said at the ninth annual National Conservation Systems Cotton and Rice Conference at Robinsonville, Miss., "but I believe it will make more money and that we'll be able to increase soybean yields on the raised beds."
His farm is divided equally between cotton and soybeans and is all no-till, non-irrigated.
Morton, who grew up on a farm and learned the business from his father, says the family farm ran into financial difficulties in 2000. Working with Mississippi State University economists and agronomists, he started growing 2x1 skip-row cotton, which helped reduce costs and increase yields.
The one drawback to the skip-row system, Morton says, is that "it's hard to rotate with beans; in most cases, we plant cotton for three years, then switch to beans. This allows the cotton beds enough time to flatten down so we can no-till behind."
Since switching from conventional to skip-row, he says, cotton yields have been averaging about 830 pounds per acre and the 15-inch solid-planted beans have a five-year average of 46 bushels.
In an attempt to further refine his production methods, Morton has been cooperating with the Mississippi State specialists on a research project that compares 15-inch row solid cotton production and variations (30-inch, 60-inch, etc.) with conventional 38-inch rows.
After three years of research and personal observation, he says the narrow row system has produced higher yields and more yield stability on mixed soils; among disadvantages are the need for a specialized harvester, a more expensive planter, more plant growth regulator, and no options for lay-by or late-season weed control. "When harvesting costs are figured in, overall net returns are lower."
With the 60-inch system, Morton says, lower seeding rates will reduce the cost of seed and technology fees, using a planter with fewer units will cost less, and once 60-inch beds are established, rotation with soybeans and corn will be simpler. "The greatest advantage is using a four-row cotton picker that harvests 20 feet in a pass."
The system calls for 60-inch beds, with 120-inch wheel tracks. All field operations will run in multiples of 20 feet and all wheel traffic will be controlled. On the 60-inch beds, he'll have the flexibility to plant one row of solid cotton or two rows of 15-inch 2x2 skip, two rows of 30-inch corn, or three rows of 20-inch soybeans.
"Our objectives with this system are to increase net profits, to be able to no-till all crops, and to reduce input costs while striving for better yields. We hope this will allow us the flexibility to rotate or plant any one crop anywhere at any time if market conditions change just prior to planting."
e-mail: [email protected]


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blueplanet 50.0 TL3
Up with economy, down with costs.
The blueplanet 50.0 TL3 is a solar PV inverter for commercial and industrial-scale solar power plants that feature a decentralized plant concept.
The transformerless, 3-phase unit offers an intelligent design for simple installation: 50 kVA that are easy to transport, hang up and take down outdoors – even on the module support.


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UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME*LOSE LOBBYIST*END ELECTORAL COLLEGE*CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY*GREEN TRANSPORTATION GRID*END MOUNTAIN TOP REMOVAL*PROTECT the remaining ENDANGERED NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS{i.e.Primary Rainforest, Mature Woodlands, Coral Reefs, Wild Meadows, Coastal Habitats, Wetlands, ect...} to PRESERVE BIODIVERSITY of LIFE*HEALTHY OCEANS*Eco Safe Chemical Reform*Address IMPERVIOUS SURFACE POLLUTION*RESTORE AMERICA'S RIVERS*STOP CHEMTRAILS*STOP SPRAWL*GREEN SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE*LEGALIZE CANNABIS*Probable Cause Active THC Testing NOT for Inactive Metabolites*LIVING WAGE*NO ONE HOMELESS*EMPLOYMENT JUST CAUSE LAWS*HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT*NATURAL GAS DRILLING DESTROYS ECOSYSTEMS,COMMUNITIES and releases MORE CARBON than COAL watch GASLAND...
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The International Studies Office (ISO) is a University-wide
resource that supports the Universitys international mission by developing
and coordinating activities and services designed to create and enhance a globally
aware, culturally diverse education and research environment. The area of international
studies is crucial to the fulfillment of Thomas Jeffersons vision of UVa
as a symbol of superior intellectual enterprise and accomplishment for women
and men around the world.
The staff of the ISO is committed to shaping the vision described
in the Plan for the Year 2020: "The University must prepare individuals
for a world characterized by heterogeneous and increasingly interdependent societies,
(and) a complex global economy." (Plan for the Year 2020)
ISO administers the Universitys:
The International Student and Scholars Program (ISSP) administers
the F, J, H-1/B, O-1, TN and PR visa programs on behalf of the University. ISSP
supports students, researchers, faculty, and official short-term visitors who
are neither citizens nor permanent residents of the U.S. by:
ISSP collaborates with University divisions and departments
by apprising them of the complex and frequently changing federal regulations.
The ISSPs comprehensive website includes information and forms for international
students, scholars, and selected employees, for departmental use: www.virginia.edu/iso/issp.
Since 1972, UVas International Center (IC) has promoted
intercultural exchange through various educational and social programs. The
IC provides a comfortable and dynamic forum for learning about the worlds
cultures and exploring the rich diversity within our international community
of students, scholars, faculty, and local residents. The IC offers:
The International Studies Office offers a variety of study
abroad programs. All students are encouraged to consider studying abroad for
a summer, semester, or full academic year sometime during their undergraduate
career. International study relates to every academic department at the University
and gives students the opportunity to face a different intellectual tradition
and to see the world from a different perspective. In a study abroad program
students enjoy the opportunity to learn about their chosen academic field or
career from an international perspective, develop intercultural communication
skills, and learn how to establish successful relationships with others around
the world. Study Abroad Advisors have weekly advising walk-in hours, and students
can make appointments as well.
Types of Programs There are many study abroad options
available to University of Virginia students. These include Exchange Programs,
Affiliated Programs, Sponsored Programs, Summer Programs, and Direct Enrollment
options. Students may also attend non-UVa study abroad programs.
Transfer Students Transfer students who have previously
earned 60 or more non-UVa credits may study abroad through direct UVa programs
and earn credit that is UVanot transfercredit. The University has
seven summer and three semester programs with full UVa credit. www.virginia.edu/iso/studyabroad.


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The information provided here is meant to give you a general idea about each of the medications listed below. Only the most general side effects are included. Ask your doctor if you need to take any special precautions. Use each of these medications only as recommended by your doctor, and according to the instructions provided. If you have further questions about usage or side effects, contact your doctor.
Note: Be sure to tell your doctor what other prescribed or over-the-counter medications, supplements, or herbs you are taking; they could interact with your medications.
If your cholesterol level is elevated, your doctor may recommend medication in addition to diet and lifestyle changes. The decision to start cholesterol-lowering drugs depends not only on your cholesterol level but also on your overall heart-disease risk. Heart disease risk factors include age, obesity, family history, smoking, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
The following medications may be used to treat lipid disorders.
Statins (HMG CoA Reductase Inhibitors)
Selective Cholesterol Absorption Inhibitors
PCSK9 Inhibitors (Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin-Kexin Type 9)
Common names include:
Statins lower total blood cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyceride levels. They also lower heart disease risks. The drugs are usually taken daily with dinner or in the evening. Your doctor may measure your blood cholesterol levels regularly while you are taking these drugs.
Even if you currently have no known coronary heart disease (CHD), you may benefit from taking statin (cholesterol-lowering) medications, particularly if your cholesterol levels are elevated. The medication may reduce the incidence of heart attack, stroke, and death.
Significant side effects that have been reported with the use of statin medications include:
Common names include:
Bile acid sequestrants lower cholesterol levels by changing the way that cholesterol is metabolized. The drugs are in powder form and are taken with meals to decrease side effects. They should not be taken within hours of any other medications. Usually you should take other medications either one hour before or four hours after taking this medication.
Possible side effects include, but are not limited to:
Niacin is a B vitamin. At higher doses, it can lower cholesterol levels and triglycerides. It is not known how it works. Niacin should be taken with meals, 2-3 times per day, or once a day with the extended-release pill.
Possible side effects can include, but are not limited to:
Common names include:
Fibric acid derivatives are usually taken to lower triglyceride levels and increase HDL (good) cholesterol. They may also help lower LDL cholesterol.
Possible side effects include, but are not limited to:
Ezetimibe lowers both total cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol. It works by a different mechanism than the statins by decreasing the amount of cholesterol that your body absorbs.
Possible side effects include, but are not limited to:
PCSK9 inhibitors are a class of medications that can lower LDL cholesterol levels. The medications are only available in injection form and need to be given every 2 to 4 weeks under the skin. The experience with these drugs is still limited. They are expensive and some insurance companies do not cover them.
Common names include:
Significant side effects that have been reported with the use of statin medications include:
Follow these general medication guidelines:
American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association. 2013 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Treatment of Blood Cholesterol to Reduce Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Risk in Adults. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2013: early online. Available at: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/early/2013/11/11/01.cir.0000437738.63853.7a. Accessed March 9, 2017.
How is high blood cholesterol treated? National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute website. Available at: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/hbc/treatment. Updated March 30, 2016. Accessed March 9, 2017.
Hypercholesterolemia. EBSCO DynaMed Plus website. Available at:http://www.dynamed.com/topics/dmp~AN~T114250/Hypercholesterolemia. Updated December 19, 2016. Accessed March 9, 2017.
Hypertriglyceridemia. EBSCO DynaMed Plus website. Available at:http://www.dynamed.com/topics/dmp~AN~T115419/Hypertriglyceridemia. Updated February 2 ,2017. Accessed March 9, 2017.
PCSK9 inhibitors. Heart UK website. Available at: https://heartuk.org.uk/healthcare-professionals/learning-resources/pcsk9-inhibitors. Accessed March 9, 2017.
Prevention and treatment of high cholesterol. American Heart Association website. Available at: http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/Cholesterol/PreventionTreatmentofHighCholesterol/Prevention-and-Treatment-of-High-Cholesterol_UCM_001215_Article.jsp#.VxflXE2FMdU. Updated August 30, 2016. Accessed March 9, 2017.
1/30/2009 DynaMed Plus Systematic Literature Surveillancehttp://www.dynamed.com/topics/dmp~AN~T114250/HypercholesterolemiaMills EJ, Rachlis B, et al. Primary prevention of cardiovascular mortality and events with statin treatments: a network meta-analysis involving more than 65,000 patients. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2008;52(22):1769-1781.
3/5/2012 DynaMed Plus Systematic Literature Surveillancehttp://www.dynamed.com/topics/dmp~AN~T114250/HypercholesterolemiaFDA announces safety changes in labeling for some cholesterol-lowering drugs. US Food and Drug Administration website. Available at: http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm293623.htm. Updated March 2, 2012. Accessed March 5, 2012.
Last reviewed March 2017 by Marcin Chwistek, MD Last Updated: 3/15/2015


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It's hard to put into words the magic, beauty and chaos that is New York Bridal Fashion Week. An intoxicating mix of gorgeous gowns, inspiring people, lots of bubbly and an excited energy buzzing about, it's truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And this year, we partnered with Allure Bridals to give one of you lucky loves the chance to experience it for yourself! From a stay at the incredible Innside by Meliá New York NoMad to an appointment at Kleinfeld to a front-row seat at some of the hottest runway shows, read on to get the deets on Nicole's incredible weekend!
Photography: Heather Waraksa + Greg Finck
Over the course of the six days of New York Bridal Fashion Week, we shuffled around Manhattan, going to more than 50 runway shows, presentations and appointments. In short, we saw a lot of drop-dead-gorgeous wedding dresses. It was overwhelming, but for our beautiful winner and bride-to-be, attending a couple of runway shows was "a great way to kick off my bridal weekend adventure in NYC! It was a fun way for me to see dress styles live as opposed to on paper!"
Photography: Heather Waraksa + Greg Finck
Next up on Nicole's itinerary? A trip to Kleinfeld where she said "Yes to the Dress!" thanks to a little help from a generous $1,500 dress credit and Kleinfeld's own consultant extraordinaire, Shay. "Kleinfeld was simply amazing — it's hard to put the experience into words that will do it justice," said Nicole. "Let's just say, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to be the bride I've always dreamed of being if I hadn't gotten the chance to visit Kleinfeld!"
Photography: You Look Lovely Photography
Incredible, right?! Nicole certainly thought so, saying "Words can't describe how thankful I am to have won this sweepstakes! It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and my mom and I had such an amazing time!"


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At this year's Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit in Seattle, Washington, I had the opportunity to talk with Doug Leland, General Manager of Product Management, Business Platform Marketing Group for Microsoft, to discuss some of the new SQL Server technologies that Microsoft had recently announced at the Strata and PASS conferences. (See also, "Notes From PASS 2012" and "PASS Summit 2012 Slide Decks").
Michael Otey: Let's talk about some of the new announcements -- Hekaton, what's going on with that; maybe a little bit about HDInsight and what's going on with that. Hopefully, we can inform our readers about what this stuff is all about.
Doug Leland: Well, let me start off with HDInsight, our set of announcements that we essentially made at Strata a few weeks ago. And I may even rewind the clock back to . . . actually back up into, basically, past last year, when we made our first announcements of our strategy we wanted to dictate our strategy going to Big Data Hadoop. We said in the past that we were bringing this to market a year ago at PASS and essentially we're bringing nonrelational and unstructured data into SQL Server as a first-class citizen as part of our data platform. And look at what that meant for us strategically. What that means for us strategically is, one, deliver an enterprise-grade implementation of Hadoop. Offering it on premise[s] and on top of Windows, integrate it with SQL Server, and also as a subscription-grade service offering on [the] Windows Azure platform. And when we talk about enterprise grade, I can frame it up a little bit, kind of block a little bit more detail of what we really mean by that. But that means bringing the simplicity, flexibility, and the security of Windows. All of what our customers enjoy today -- who enjoy the benefits of the Windows and Windows Server platform, bringing all that to what is essentially an open-source software set of projects (i.e., Hadoop) that has been built around a predominantly Linux platform.
Otey: Hadoop is very weird for a relational guy, you know -- MapReduce, and creating things like that. It's very foreign to SQL Server guys.
Leland: Very foreign; right. So it is fabulous to bring all that in and make it not foreign to core database people, people who are dealing with big data. So there's the bit around securities of integrating the platform with AD; there's a lot around management. So we're going to integrate it with our management stack, which means a combination of Windows Server plus System Center. We're going to provide Windows Server communities technologies with the ability to manage this entire environment with a single pane of glass. That's why we're using the management tools they use today to manage their virtualization environment, to be able to take those same tools, we also provide management packs for SQL Server to be able to use that as a single pane of glass for managing that entire structure of that entire platform. And then bring the value of all the data to all of the information workers, and to do that by plugging in our BI tool, which we also showed today, which is now fully integrated into Office, and Excel specifically.
Otey: Right; the new version of Office 2013?
Leland: Office 2013, which now has in it, natively, PowerPivot and Power View. So Excel 2013 really is a complete BI tool for information workers. And information workers don't need to go anywhere else for any other tool to do BI. Then take that power and plug that into Big Data. So that you can now use real-time insight across all databases -- whether they're relational or nonrelational. That was the strategy, and now we've been executing on that strategy. And now with that in your head, put into context the announcements that we made two weeks ago, and then today. At Strata, we announced essentially the next major product milestones for SQL Server as a service. So the Windows Hadoop implementation, which we now call HDInsight, will be available both on premise[s] or as a service.
Otey: Right; this is the new Windows version of Hadoop that you implemented either on-premise[s] or in Azure as a service?
Leland: Yes; so HDInsight for Windows is the on-premise[s] implementation that was announced at Strata. So now our customers broadly have downloadable access to preview bits, for Hadoop on a Windows implementation -- and a preview for the service.
The benefits of these different approaches are kind of like the following. First, we are the only vendor out there who is providing both on-premise[s] offerings and cloud offerings. So the customer has incredible flexibility in their ability both to choose whatever solutions that they need. If I want to run it in my data center, then I'll run it in my data center. If I want to run it in Microsoft's data center, I could now run it in [a] Microsoft data center. I can move it back and forth with the same implementation, 100 percent code compatible. And I can build hybrid scenarios where I may have a piece of the implementation running on data that lives in my data center; or I've got data that's been born in the cloud and I don't really want to bring it back on the prem, so I'll move it into the service. So the flexibility in terms of what we're offering is incredibly valuable to customers in terms of choices that we offer. The flexibility in the scenarios of my data center, the cloud, or some combination of both is also incredibly helpful. And then you kind of bring that back and say, "Now I can use the power of Excel 2013 to get to that data . . . incredibly valuable propositions.
The value of the service, of the HDInsight service, is simpler to the value proposition than you get for products. As a company, I'm not investing in the capital of the infrastructure to build out the software, and I don't have to buy a bunch of machines to build up a cluster. I don't need to hire a Hadoop expert to know how to deploy and build out a Hadoop cluster because I can go to the service, and with basically three clicks and ten minutes, I can deploy a cluster of any size. I pay for that by capacity, but again I don't need that implementation expertise. What I do need is the individual who knows how to build my jobs.
Otey: Right; because that is kind of the hard part in all this . . .
Leland: You know, ultimately, there are two hard parts. It turns out that the implementations that a lot of customers are consuming from the open-source community are actually pretty hard to set up in this way. So there is that hurdle. I would say the valuable part actually is, once you've gotten your cluster set up, you've got your data loaded in it, the valuable part is when you can set your data scientists or statisticians or business analysts loose on that data actually to derive some insights out of it.
So with the service we take all that complexity out of the IT world, and we take it out to a significant degree for the server because we are focusing on the manageability of the system, setup of the system on a Windows platform, thereby bringing the simplicity of Windows to Hadoop. So extract that complexity out of the set so that customers can really get to what they want to do, which is deriving insights across them. And then doing that either using the traditional tools that scientists are using on top of the Hadoop platform like R as a language, which is available and we're supporting, or bringing this power of democratizing the power of this data for the broader [Information Worker] by plugging in Excel into that picture. You can basically do queries across big data in HDInsight using Excel.
Otey: That's good to know.
Leland: So those are the announcements there. Let me take it forward to what we have today with specifically PolyBase. This in many ways completes a very significant arc that we've been on in terms of bringing together relational and nonrelational data. With PolyBase, you can, as we showed in the demo today, you can create a single query, which joins information stored in SQL Server -- that'd be relational -- and joins that information with information stored in HDInsight.
That was in the in the demo that we showed today. So that shows you a couple of interesting things. One, it's delivering on the strategy that we talked about, which is bringing this into the platform that Microsoft offers. Two is being able to unify, in this single query, structured and unstructured data. And then three is empowering the SQL development team; they can now use key people, and their people, to access data now over Hadoop. So now, if you know SQL, you know Hadoop, and you don't have to get into the guts of understanding how to build MapReduce jobs.
Otey: Ah . . . that's very nice! That really opens it up for SQL Server developers. And you're saying that's your standard SQL. Are you referring to T-SQL, or a variation of that?
Leland: T-SQL; yeah. Because here you use T-SQL and all the extensions that you can use with T-SQL in order to fulfill data access for both relational and nonrelational data. And it'll join the information up, which is incredibly valuable.
Otey: Right. That really opens it up because it's nice to be able to have access to the data, or to have the platform out there to do it. But if you don't have the tools that can help you get into it, or if the tools are unfamiliar, then that kind of makes it hard. So adding Excel 2013 and then T-SQL to be able to do that really bridges that gap.
Leland: So all these things kind of come together like here, right? It's kind of interesting to see the pieces all start coming together: bringing in the Hadoop piece; at the same time, building and delivering the query engine, which allows you to query off a Hadoop data set; and then now that we have Office 2012-13 with Excel, you would be capable of being able to now do queries over all that data -- this benefits both the end user and developers who can now use T-SQL. So you've really created that virtual cycle.
So then the other conversation is really in what I would describe as an adjacent complementary area, which is all about business acceleration through in-memory information access.
Otey: Oh, right; yeah. The new Hekaton.
Leland: Yeah. So that is, I would say, in many ways equally as exciting, and also the completion, or the next major step in the strategy that we've been on for quite some time. When you lay out the in-memory strategy completely, and Ted [Ted Kummert, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Business Platform Division ] did a bit of this today and I'll frame it up in more detail; we believe we have a couple of important principles to understand. First is that in order to have truly a strong in-memory solution for customers, it needs to have a couple things. One, it needs to support all your workloads; so all your database workloads, whether it be for traditional data warehousing workloads, you need to have the integration capabilities there. Whether it be your analytics workloads running analysis services, you need to have that in-memory capability there. And now, in your transaction-processing scenarios, the there's streaming, so there is a set of scenarios around -- I don't know how familiar you are with complex CEP technologies; or complex event-processing technologies . . .
Otey: Well, I know what StreamInsight is . . .
Leland: There you go. So StreamInsight is a CEP [Complex Event Processing] technology; so take super high-velocity applications like stock trading systems, where the information is coming in so fast that it actually can't even touch disk. That stream has to be processed completely in memory as it's coming in. And that's essentially what the CEP does with StreamInsight specifically. So covering all those forward, from data warehousing, to analytics, transaction processing -- to high-velocity transaction processing is the way to think about it, that you need to have a complete range of offerings. So that's principle number one. Now principle number two is that we believe it needs to be built in to the core data platform versus a separate app you bolt on top because whenever you bring in something new and different, you bring in cost and complexity.
Otey: Right; that's kind of the same strategy with the original OLAP services with SQL Server 7 incorporated into the core database engine. And it really allowed it to be accessed by a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have bought into it.
Leland: Exactly. To manage it at that scale, and developing it -- both principles kind of apply to this one as well. So bringing it in to the core platform -- not introducing a new API or any language in order to access it. Because literally, if you know SQL, you know Hekaton, which I thought was a big plus. Because if you know how to program in SQL and T-SQL, you can program, do your business logic, with Hekaton. You don't have to learn any big new language. That is not the case for some of the competitive offerings that are out there. The competitive offerings that are out there are specific point solutions for a particular problem. I've got an analytics problem, I've got an analytics appliance. Oh, and by the way, has a completely new interface language; it has a completely new programming language in order to get to it. So you have to bring in the complexity of having to manage a new thing -- the IT complexity. And you bring in the developer complexity of having to build up an understanding and skillset as you develop the language. Our approach is the exact opposite. Build them in, so it's deeply integrated with what you already know and what you have.
Otey: Right. Hekaton takes advantage of what you see in the big advances of today's hardware processing capabilities, too, and the memory capabilities that they have.
Leland: Absolutely. It will exploit what you have. You're not pushed into consuming any more economy. So you're not buying another piece of hardware to bring it into your IT department. You can take the SMP box that you're running, your transaction processing back end -- classic high-end transaction processing, and you're running in a HP DL-98, right? So you put that on an 8-way box with a bunch of RAM in there, and then you're cranking away. You've hit the top end. There's nothing you can do anymore to tweak the performance. You can take, hopefully, PowerPivot and that new SQL Server with Hekaton enabled, land it on that same box. You don't have to buy different hardware. Pick your hot tables and move them up into memory, and all of a sudden you're looking at some 10x, 20x, 30x performance increase along the way, without changing your apps, and without changing your hardware. Now if you want to start optimizing your hardware, there are a lot of great things you can do. You can plant more memory in, which is kind of an easy win because you can move more stuff up there, more stuff up into memory.
Otey: You can move more data up there.
Leland: But the big difference between the other approaches is the fact that they are, for Oracle and SAP for specific examples, are requiring the acquisition of a pure appliance offering with the hardware-software coupling.
Otey: Oh, really? That's how they're doing it, through an appliance?
Leland: Exalytics and HANA are both only delivered as appliances, which brings in that cost and that complexity. And then there's the app migration. What we're basically saying is we've designed it in such a way that you can migrate your system applications completely; there's no rewrite. That's not the case when you're bringing a HANA into your environment. You're talking a rewrite and we feel that that's a big blocker to adoption.
Otey: Oh. That certainly would be. Obviously, it might be worth it to get the performance that you need; but if you can get it without having to do anything different in your application, you're already there. That's awesome.
Leland: So let's take you back to what's shipping and then what's coming. There are some nuances in all this. So with SQL Server 2012 that shipped back in April. [General availability] on April 1st; we delivered in-memory solutions for data warehousing and for analytics. And those are called xVelocity in-memory column store for data warehousing, so that would be column-store technology that we demonstrated today. And then there's the xVelocity analytics, which provides key memory for SQL Server Analysis Services. So now both the relational engine and the analysis engine both have in-memory capabilities built in. If you get 2012, you've got in-memory BI, and you've got in-memory for data warehousing. Now with Hekaton, we complete that picture.
Otey: Is any of what Hekaton is built on using the Vertipaq data compression technologies?
Leland: It's interesting in that when you're designing your transaction-processing system, versus designing your analytics, there are very different design points. So while there are shared algorithms for memory optimization, they're not really based on the same Vertipaq technologies. Vertipaq was really built around two to three fundamental things. One is column store; so the ability to store data in columns. Then two is the massive compression that you get out of it, the 10x compression that we have today and then three is the in-memory. So it's those three pieces when you think about the Vertipaq technologies, that we call xVelocity. Those are the three things. We've borrowed the in-memory capabilities and rendered those for Hekaton, but you wouldn't typically store your transaction-processing system in a columnar structure. You'd stay with a highly optimized store for inserts, updates, and deletes. And you normally don't compress your data. So we render where we can, but the design points really wouldn't want the same thing.
Otey: Sure; got you.
Leland: So that's kind of the in-memory story and Hekaton. So those two are shipping. Hekaton will ship in the next major release of SQL Server and has gone into what we call the private reviews. So between now and the end of the year we're going to be recruiting about 100 customers to participate. And these will be field nominated, as we can do at this stage of the cycle: customers who we have identified who are field contracts who have applications that would be well suited to helping us continue to build out and test out and validate and phantom test the capabilities of the architecturing along the way.
And then the other thing in the news we also announced today was the [general availability] of SQL Server 2012 and Service Pack 1. And that really is all about making Excel 2013 the complete BI offering because it provides the native integration of Power View into Office. So you open up Excel, now it's in the ribbon, and then you start doing BI, and then you write into a Power View workbook.
Otey: So the PowerPivot and Power View capabilities are built right in to Excel 2013? They're not an add-on anymore?
Leland: No. Our engineering team has been doing a lot of work with the Office engineering team on the strategy and on globalization. And our joint strategy is to deliver, to have Excel be the complete BI offering, full stop. There is no reason for a BI user to have to leave Excel or go to a different tool from a different company. They can do everything that they want to do, across any kind of data, Big Data or small data. And they can do that right within Excel. That's our strategy. And this is a pretty big step in achieving that strategy. We've moved from an add-on to really natively integrated, providing rich BI capability.
Otey: Yeah; that makes perfect sense. You kind of expected that would be the way it would go because, you know, they were developed separately, and then the add-ins were added into the initial package; but then as the product evolves you would want it to be natively incorporated. So that makes perfect sense.
Leland: Ideally, yes, yes. And that's an important element of our strategy as we talked about it: bringing BI to the masses. Again, it has been one of those capabilities that has traditionally been narrowly available to users within most organizations because of the fact that it has been predicated on having to acquire and learn some exotic tool.
Otey: Sure; yeah. I had one question, and that was about PolyBase. What are the requirements for using that when you connect a SQL Server system, or you're trying to use queries with PolyBase and you're going to a SQL Server system, you're going to a nonrelational system like the HDInsight system. How is this implemented?
Leland: Well, there are a couple considerations that you would want to take into consideration. Because what we showed today and what we're delivering in market first is that PDW is the first to receive PolyBase.
Otey: PDW 2012, right?
Leland: PDW 2012 is the first to receive PolyBase capabilities. So the first architectural decision that a customer is making is, "Hey, I'm building up my data warehouse, and I want to have that capability." And one of my architectural decisions is to acquire and implement our enterprise data warehouse appliance software. That's kind of at that point. And that gives you your rack of MPP SQL servers and away you go. Then the next design consideration is, "How do I want to implement Hadoop?"
Ideally, HDInsight, and it's on Windows or it's in Azure. So let's say let's take the BI on Windows phase. I would acquire software and then spec out my Hadoop cluster. Decide how many nodes I want and then the next consideration is your interconnects because you want faster interconnects between your two clusters. So your design consideration becomes then, "OK; what's the faster interconnect to choose for connecting my two clusters?" And the fastest interconnects that you can find will probably [depend] on what your performance needs are, then your data volume, and that kind of thing. Because that will commit both the characteristics of the cluster that you build in terms of number of nodes and discs and horsepower (i.e., CPU), combined with what you have in your PDW environment, and the networks that will ultimately determine what kind of data loads that you can handle along the way, and what kind of performance you're ultimately going to get out of the system once you've got it put together. Those become the high-level design considerations.
Otey: All right. Well, that sounds pretty good. I think that's really all I have time for; I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. Great information; a lot of good stuff. Thanks!
To learn more, see "SQL PASS Summit 2012: Day 1."


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Home > News & Events > Wayland Press Release Archives > 2006 News Releases > October 2006 > Science, math students at Wayland offering tutoring assistance
Science, math students at Wayland offering tutoring assistance
PLAINVIEW – Science and math students at Wayland Baptist University will offer free tutoring sessions for junior high and high school students on four upcoming Saturday afternoons, the first slated Oct. 28 from 1-4 p.m.
The sessions will provide one-on-one help for students in any math or science course, whether help is needed in completing homework or learning skills for testing or projects.
Many of the Wayland students providing tutoring will be members of Pi Sigma Sigma, a fraternity of math and science students.
"Pi Sigma Sigma is a service organization dedicated to raising interest in math and science," said Jerod Clopton, a senior math major from O'Donnell and president of the organization. "This is our first time to do tutoring outside of the campus."
Clopton said the organization originally planned the tutoring sessions as a fundraiser, but opted instead to make it a free service to the community. Student tutors will be approved by professors, he noted.
The tutoring sessions will be held in Moody Science Building on the Wayland campus. Additional sessions are planned from 1-4 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 4, Nov. 18 and Dec. 2.
For more information, contact PSS sponsor Dr. Scott Franklin at 291-1131.


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1. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0w00thisButtonDo Aug 18, 2009 9:08 PM (in response to wesg79)
Before RMA it please post your S.M.A.R.T. data
You can use speedfan online service or anything you want (speedfan http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.phphttp://www.almico.com/speedfan439.exe Open SMART tab, select drive and press "perform an in-depth online..." and post link given under "The link to get back and see a new report about this hard disk in the future is this." in opened http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepanalysis.php ) .
And you can try hdderase v3.3 to erase drive completely (remember to use IDE mode and onboard SATA1 connector, disable other sata controllers in BIOS setup, more information can be found here - http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=6), this solved my problems.
Message was edited by: w00thisButtonDo
2. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0redux Aug 18, 2009 2:19 PM (in response to wesg79)
I had the exact same problem you are describing but experienced it with both hard drives & SSD drives. In my case I was running raid 0 with a 7.5 Intel ROM. It had occasional problems booting when non raid drives were added and the raid array would fail on a random basis (every two or three weeks) when rebooting. Updating the Intel ROM fixed this problem. I note you are using a later rom that should be OK, but I guess the point is it might not be your SSD. Is it for example the same sata port or is it the same ssd?
Another thing to check, are your sata connections completely engaged on the mobo? I've just got a new mobo and the board just overhangs the sata connections by a mm or so. I've got one set of sata cables that hit the board and stop it engaging fully. It looks like it's fully engaged but it isn't. This caused the problem you are describing as I did not spot it for a while.
3. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0redux Aug 18, 2009 2:30 PM (in response to w00thisButtonDo)
wOOthisButtonDo. I tried that link to almico. When I tried to download it IE tried to block it. When I started the download my AV pops up and tells me it has "TrojanDownloader:Win32/Wintrim.BY" - Threat severe??
4. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0wesg79 Aug 18, 2009 3:05 PM (in response to wesg79)
Ive already had an RMA done
i tried the cables, both in and out of my backplane but one the drive fails no matter how you hook it up it wouldnt "redectect" its like the drive removed itself from the array and its no longer a member and only breaking the array and re-creating it fixed it, it was also always the same drive.
if it continues after the drive replacement its possible it is the bios for th ICH10R, hope not, god knows how long itll take EVGA to release a bios addressing that.
5. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0w00thisButtonDo Aug 18, 2009 9:11 PM (in response to redux)
Ask your AV support why it gives false alarms. Speedfan is not trojan downloader, I am sure.
6. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0redux Aug 19, 2009 1:00 AM (in response to w00thisButtonDo)
I use MS Essentials and I don't think it was a false alarm. Details of the trojan can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Threat/Encyclopedia/Entry.aspx?Name=TrojanDownloader%3AWin32%2FWintrim.BY
"TrojanDownloader:Win32/Wintrim.BY is a component of the greater Win32/Wintrim family that is used for downloading and installing additional Win32/Wintrim or Win32/Skintrim components. Win32/Wintrim is a family of trojans that display pop-up advertisements depending on the user's keywords and browsing history. Its variants can also monitor the user's activities, download applications, and send system information back to a remote server."
7. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0w00thisButtonDo Aug 19, 2009 6:52 AM (in response to redux)
8. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0PeterUK Aug 19, 2009 6:18 AM (in response to wesg79)
Are you using Matrix Storage Manager 8.9? if so try 8.8.
Just checking...
9. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0wesg79 Aug 19, 2009 7:12 AM (in response to PeterUK)
using what ever shipped with the board (evga classified) and the latest but the failure occurs before the software is even loaded
the last time i seen this happen it locked up on the Windows load screen when it reported both drives as ok, then after rebooting from the lockup on the windows logo the error 0 occured
wonder if the intel matrix stuff is messing it up
10. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0w00thisButtonDo Aug 19, 2009 8:31 AM (in response to wesg79)
It's probably flash failure, I have the same. Controller messed up with errors coming out bad flash chip, that causes him to stop responding (detecting problems and etc). This is my theory. I have succefully remapped my drive after ~10 times of securely erasing. You can find Reallocated Sector Count in SMART data, for Intel SSDs looks like current value (not RAW) grows up when spare flash blocks used. My current value is 128 (stable 3 month) that is about 1 SLC memory chip capacity (I am not sure) because there is no standart for SMART implementation and every manufacturer can use own technology as is.
11. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0blowd Sep 21, 2009 8:53 AM (in response to wesg79)
I have had the same issue. Raid0 2 drives, ICH10. I noticed it the first time in the OS after I've moved from screen saver to the desktop. Matrix was complaining about a missing disk and windows was about to search for the ssd driver. Power saving in my setup is off but screen will go off after 20 min.
I've attempt a reboot and it didnt succed. The drive has gone lost from my stripeset. *****
So I decided to connect each individual drive to different SATA ports. None was flagged missing any more but in Raid configuration with 2 drives ruinning the same time, one was flagged as fault still. After checking again all my connectors (power/data) the Raid was visible without error but it won't boot because the OS was missing.....
I then attempt to reinstall, but when I was powering the PC on again it just bootet into the OS and since it is running again.
Anyone any ideas? Thought I have bought a good product.
12. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0blowd Sep 27, 2009 12:34 PM (in response to blowd)
And today it happend again. Disappointing. Anyone from Intel reading here in the community?
13. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0swmike Dec 5, 2009 5:22 PM (in response to blowd)
I'm seeing the same thing. Intel matrix manager 8.9, win7, x25-m g1.
I have two SSDs (one OCZ vertex, one X25-M G1) in RAID1, I can run one, then initialize the second one, run verify and see ECC errors, then run verify and repair and now all of a sudden I have 200 ECC errors plus media errors. These worked properly under Vista. Every time I run verify&repair I get 200+ ECC errors. First I had problems with the X25-M, now second time it's kicking the Vertex drive instead saying it has errors. This must be something else.
Intel Core i7, Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, Win7 with all updates, Gigabyte driver install, Intel Matrix 8.9 (latest today). This was a fresh install. Machine has been running Vista without these problems for half a year.
Putting the x25m drive in a linux box reveals SMART UNC errors, overwriting makes them go away again.
14. Re: Constant x25m ssd failure in raid 0
Yep, same thing here. Have a pair of X-25Ms in raid 0, with an Asus Rampage Formula MB and running matrix storage 8.9. I've been running this configuration for maybe 1 1/2 years now. The anoying random bluescreen 'failures' keep happening around once every few days. I actually RMAd the first two X-25Ms after seeing this problem and having it happen more and more frequently (once per hour or so before I replaced them), now I'm back to a 'stable' once per few days. This is super frustrating to say the least! Any advice would be appreciated.


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After losing LaRon Landry, Jets replace him in secondary with brother Dawan
NEW YORK – The New York Jets are replacing departed safety LaRon Landry with his brother.
Dawan Landry has signed with the Jets, nearly a month after his younger brother left New York to sign with the Indianapolis Colts as a free agent. Dawan Landry, 30, played the last two seasons with Jacksonville before being released last month.
He spent five seasons with the Baltimore Ravens, playing his first three years under Rex Ryan, who was Baltimore's defensive coordinator, and current Jets defensive coordinator Dennis Thurman. Landry has started all but two games in his seven-year career and has 12 interceptions, three touchdowns and 5 1/2 sacks.
The Jets were thin at safety after the departures of both starters, LaRon Landry and Yeremiah Bell, and the release of Eric Smith.


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Event: Bollywood superstar Salman Khan was snapped waving to his fans on the day of Eid. Arbaaz Khan, Malaika Arora Khan and Salim Khan were also spotted.
Guest List: Salman Khan, Arbaaz Khan, Malaika Arora Khan, Salim Khan
Bollywood celeb Aamir Khan along with wife Kiran Rao were spotted at PVR.
Bollywood producers-directors Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Krishan Kumar, Ravi Bahl, Divya Khosla Kumar, Sajid Nadiadwala, Wardha Nadiadwala celebrate diwali with Bhushan Kumar
Bollywood celebs Kareena Kapoor Khan, Malaika Arora, Sonali Bendre, Nimrat Kaur among others were snapped by paparazzi.Bebo looked super cool in a casual look. She wore a white t-shirt with yoga pants...
Bollywood actress Shama Sikander celebrated Diwali festival at her residence.
Bollywood celebs Aamir Khan, Zaira Wasim, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Sanya Malhotra, Anil Kapoor, Nitesh Tiwari, Aparshakti Khurrana, Bhushan Kumar, Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Sachin Tendulkar, Rajkumar Hir...


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Radio's Smerconish jumping to satellite
- Article by: DAVID BAUDER
- Associated Press
- March 5, 2013 - 11:09 PM
NEW YORK - Michael Smerconish is jumping from traditional talk radio to satellite, saying the media form he has loved essentially left him.
The Philadelphia-based radio talk show host is syndicated in more than 80 markets nationally. Smerconish said Wednesday he will move his three-hour program to SiriusXM on April 15, airing weekdays at 9 a.m. ET with a repeat at 6 p.m. ET.
Smerconish changed his voter registration from Republican to independent three years ago, and believes the rigid ideology of many hosts is a dead end for radio. He's been gaining in popularity, moving to No. 9 on Talkers magazine's list of the "Heavy Hundred" political talk hosts from No. 19 last year.
"It gives me the opportunity to move away from an environment that, quite frankly, is not conducive to the type of program I'm offering," he said. "I don't do ideologically-driven talk, I do content-driven talk. I'm not on the air to carry anybody's water on a day-to-day basis."
Most of the conservative talk show hosts bash President Barack Obama for four hours a day, whether the president deserves it or not, Smerconish said.
Talk radio is a place where incivility is the norm, and program directors haven't responded to his warning that their audiences are getting "too white, too male, too angry and too old" to promote future growth. He said he believes that talk radio contributes to gridlock in Washington.
Smerconish, who also appears on MSNBC, said independents are the fastest-growing segment of the population and rarely hear their views reflected on the radio.
"The only people that I meet for whom the issues are hard left or hard right, the only people who see the world through ideological glasses, are those who have a microphone in front of them," he said.
Still, the desire to do a show where the opinions aren't predictable puts Smerconish at a disadvantage on terrestrial radio, said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers.
"Although he really is a conservative, he has broken away from the mold and is truly independent," Harrison said. "He's not afraid to judge issues on an issue-by-issue basis. He's one of the few conservative hosts, if any, that Barack Obama has granted interviews to."
SiriusXM currently has 24 million subscribers. Smerconish's show will appear on the service's P.O.T.U.S. political channel.
© 2018 Star Tribune


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Events for 8th Jul 2018
Hartlebury Castle's History as a WWI Voluntary Aid Detachment Hospital: 'A Happy Convalescence'
- Date: 12th March 2016 - 23rd December 2018
- Every day
- Time: 10:00 - 17:00
- Location: County Museum at Hartlebury
- Cost: Adult-£9, Concession-£8, Child-£5, Family Ticket-£25 & under fives are free
Stories of fun, friendship and romance that offered a brief respite from the front lines for injured soldiers sent to recover at Hartlebury Castle Hospital.
The exhibition will feature real objects from the trenches, including gas masks, cigarettes and even a surgeon's kit used at the front. The exhibition has been curated from Museum Worcestershire's collection along with loans from George Marshall Medical Museum, The Mercian Regiment Museum and from local people.
A Happy Convalescence, is part of the Worcestershire World War One Hundred project.
The County Museum at Hartlebury closes Mondays.
Please visit the County Museum at Hartlebury page for opening information
The War to End All Wars
- Date: 3rd February 2018 - 10th November 2018
- Every day
- Time: 10:30 - 16:30
- Location: City Art Gallery and Museum
- Cost: FREE entry
Using artefacts from the Museums Worcestershire and partner collections, this exhibition will explore how our future was changed for ever by the First World War.
WW1's legacy was a wide impact on life in the C20th, making changes in class structure, politics, fashion, food production as well as our national defence.
Please note that Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum is closed Sundays.