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After the Islamic Center was defaced last year, a group of clergy signed a letter in support. Unfortunaelty hate still remains, so after the tragedy in Charlottesville recently, we came together again to denounce hate in our world.
To (Whom It May Concern),
The recent events in Charlottesville and around our country serve as a reminder to all of us. Hate remains a plague on our world. We have seen recent images in the news of hate groups inciting riots as they preach and promote racism and Anti-Semitism, and it disturbs us greatly. These groups promote a belief that they and people "like" them remain superior to those of us they deem to be different or "inferior." Whether they call themselves the KKK, Neo-Nazis or go by some other moniker, we understand their goal is simply to preach hate, nothing more, nothing less.
It's unfortunate that we continue to live in a world with such unbridled hatred. Yet, we know that there are so many more people in our country who preach tolerance and respect as opposed to hate and malice. The news sometimes gives us the impression that these groups dominate the landscape, when in truth they remain the vocal minority. We, the vast majority of the people the United State of America, then understand that the responsibility to combat this unbridled hate rest with every single generation.
We, as clergy of Savannah, stand together and invite our friends, family members, neighbors, and communities to denounce these hate groups whenever possible. We invite everyone to contact your elected officials and thank them when they denounce hate groups and encourage them to do so if they haven't already. Religious tradition teaches us, "You are not expected to complete the task, but neither are you free to avoid it." We must not avoid the task of standing up to those who would promote hate. Until the day comes when it no longer exists, we must support each other as we condemn the hate mongers of our world. This is no room for racism or Anti-Semitism in our country today or tomorrow.
Clergy of the Savannah
Imam Ibrahim 'Abdul-Malik
Masjid Jihad
Reverend Michael Chaney
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Reverend Jan Durham
Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church
Pastor Ben Gosden
Reverend Rachel Greiner
Memorial Health
Rabbi Robert Haas
Congregation Mickve Israel
Rabbi Steven Henkin
Congregation Agudath Achim
Reverend Billy Hester
Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church
Susan Karlson
Unitarian Universalist Minister and Hospice Savannah Chaplain
Rev. George P. Lee, III, Ph.D.
St. John Baptist Church, "The Mighty Fortress
Reverend Claire Marich
Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church
Reverend David Messner
Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah
Reverend Alex T. Moreschi M.Div.
Episcopal Deacon
Spiritual Care Coordinator, Affinis Hospice
Reverend Grady Mills
Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church
Monsignor William Oliver O'Neill
Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
Reverend Hunt Priest
St. Peter's Episcopal Church
Rev. Jeanette Purvis
Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church
Reverend J. Gerard Schreck
Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
Reverend Thurmon Tillman
First African Baptist Church
Pastor Kevin Veitinger
The Foundery
Reverend Jeanette Purvis
Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church
Reverend Michael S. White
Christ Church Episcopal


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Spanakopita Puffs (Convection Steam Oven)
Makes 15 Puffs
This small but flavorful appetizer perfectly captures the zesty spirit of Greek food and will surely get the party started for you and your guests.
Preparation Method
1. Spread the spinach on the perforated pan and place inside the steam oven. Select the Steam Mode set to 210°F. Set the timer for 5 minutes.
2. Remove the steamed spinach and place in ice water bath to stop the cooking process.
3. After the spinach has cooled, remove the spinach and grasping small handfuls, squeeze to remove as much water as possible. Set aside.
4. Melt butter with olive oil in a large heavy skillet over medium heat.
5. Add the scallions and cook until soft, about 3 minutes.
6. Remove the pan from the heat and pour the scallions into a small work bowl.
7. Add the remaining ingredients and stir to combine.
8. Melt remaining 1⁄4 stick of butter in a small saucepan.
9. Remove the thawed phyllo from the package and unroll, leaving all the sheets still in a single stack.
10. Cut the phyllo stack with a pizza cutter into 3 long strips.
11. Cover the phyllo with a towel to prevent it from drying out.
12. Peel the layers apart and lay 4 strips down on the counter.
13. Brush with butter and top with another layer of phyllo. Brush this layer also.
14. Place a small amount of filling in the corner nearest you and fold the phyllo over onto itself, making right triangles along its length (like folding a flag). Repeat with remaining strips of phyllo.
15. Place spanakopita on the solid pan lined with parchment paper and into the oven on rack position 2. Select the More Gourmet Mode and choose Fresh Appetizers – Lightly Browned. Cook until the oven turns off automatically or the desired browning is reached.

subset: commoncrawl


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In case you didn't see it, CBS8 featured Green Carpet Growing on the nightly news on 12/4/2019 and morning news on 12/5/2019. Journalist Tim Blodgett attended a Green Carpet Growing grow class and put a normalizing spin on it.
Special thanks to Dark Heart Nursery for sponsoring our grow classes!


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This is the first in this series sharing footage from in and around Western North Carolina. The final video below is also the first "full-length" video that I have produced in Premier with all my own footage and sound, aside from the music track. Scene selection and storytelling are certainly concepts I need to putContinue reading "Scenes of Western North Carolina: Glen Falls"
Tag Archives: editing
Drone Pilot Gigs: DroneUp (Part 1)
I came across the DroneUp platform just a few weeks ago, again saw a mention of it in some group discussion, so I figured I would take a deeper look. As of yet, I haven't received any indication that I have been "verified" to begin accepting work, but this platform's gamification has been giving meContinue reading "Drone Pilot Gigs: DroneUp (Part 1)"


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Fresh Produce, Eggs and Natur
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Covington, Georgia
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Yellow Hen Farm is located on the Alcovy River in Covington, Georgia. We sell seasonal produce and fresh eggs from our free-range hens as well as a few natural skin care products that we make ourselves. We use no synthetic fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides and take pride in providing fresh, local produce to our local community.
"I can truly say we've had a healthier winter because of Yellow Hen Farm's produce. I love that there is no kind of weekly commitment so I can just order as needed. And the produce she provides is so clean and tasty."
- YHF Customer
Yellow Hen Farm
® 450 Jenkins Road Covington, Georgia 30014
*Delivery area restrictions may apply.
Farm pick up is available.


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I started back on the road a week ago. I had just come off of a month of sloth and sickness while taking Spanish lessons and I was unsure whether what level of fitness to expect, or whether I would be able to ride at all.
But when I got on the bike and started to ride, it was as if I had ridden yesterday. My legs burnt, my lungs felt as if they might burst, and my heart tried to escape my body through my chest, however, the mechanics and habit of it all came back.
That first day I rode 40 miles to Salamanca and called it quits. Along the way I sampled freshly pressed pineapple juice and generally enjoyed the rhythm of being on the bicycle again. I went to bed resolved to take it easy for the next few days as my body got back in shape.
Of course, the last time I resolved to take it easy, I wound up riding 125 miles from Glennallen to Valdez, and this time was no exception. It was only a fraction of the distance, but in the late afternoon I found myself in Morelia after being compelled further by increasingly beautiful country, including some spectacular lakes and marshes.
I arrived in Morelia hungry, filthly and exhausted, and took care of all three in that order. After evaluating my physical condition the next morning, I decided that I had over-extended myself the day before, and for once I would listen to my body and take a rest. I walked around town and pursued the various eating opportunities that Michoacán is famous for, marveled at the architecture and ducked into an internet café when it started to suddenly pour rain.
The next day was sunny and I felt great, so it was time to head up and out of town. The first 30 miles of the day were spent climbing up ever higher into the highlands, and along the way I had to put on a sweater to ward off the increasing cold. I finally ended the day near Ciudad de Hidalgo at Campestre Fogata (Bonfire Campground). It was the second campground I'd encountered on the mainland, and I was grateful for not having to spend the time and energy to find some hidden spot in a cow pasture or abandoned building.
The next day I climbed considerable more, and I think that when I crested the mountain at the border of Michoacán and México State I'd crossed 10,000ft for the first time on my trip. Luckily, the other side was a luxurious descent through a cool pine forest and I was able to bring my heart rate down into non-cardiac arrest levels. I ended that day at one of the most amazing secret campsites I've found on the trip: I was in a pine forest off the road surrounded my masonry of indeterminate age (possibly aztec ruins). The ground was soft and easy to drive stakes into, and the ruins provided convenient locations to set up my stove and cook.
I woke up very cold, having had to put on various articles of clothing throughout the night and wrap my head in a shirt as it became colder and colder. This made me thoughtful for what the Salar de Uyumi will be like when I get there some months from now.
I ate some granola, packed my things and battled trucks and homocidal drivers for the next 40km into Toluca, and called it quits. While in Toluca, I discovered a fruiteria which made a plate of fruit so large that I nearly thought I would be unable to eat it all. A recent binge on ice cream and pasteries called my ability even more into question… But in the end I triumphed and shuffled my way back to my flop hotel room, trying my best to limit the up and down motion in my step.
The next morning I set out early on what I thought would be a very easy and short day. According to the internet, my route would cover 51 miles and descend from 9000 ft at Toluca to 4500 ft at Cuernavaca.
Well, the internet is a lying bastard. Before I could descend down to 4500ft, I had to climb and descend repeatedly, with the final climb reaching 11,500 ft. All of this took 50 miles to accomplish. The final 10 miles into town were a rubber-burning, knucle-whitening, rim-heating plummet which I never hope to repeat. To add to it, the road was imperfectly paved, and in-between dodging traffic, I had to deal with loose gravel and potholes.
But I made it, damn it. And while I waited for my nerves to relax and my rims to cool down I contemplated my final approach into town. I made it, eventually found a place to stay and repeated my experience at Morelia.
Tomorrow I expect to finally reach the road to Oaxaca, and finally realize my months-long dream of arriving in that land fabulous food.


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No, this is not an april's fool ;)
Wow, it's been a long time. My year in Oxford is going really well. I realized few days ago that the end of the year is approaching really quickly. Exams are coming in one month or such and then I'll be working full time on my dissertation topic.
When I learned we'll have about 6 month to work on something, I first thought about doing a packaging related stuff, but finally decided to start something new. After all, that's the good time to learn.
Since a long time, I'm being impressed by the last.fm recommender system. They're scrobbling the music I listen to since something like 5 years now and the recommendations they're doing are really nice and accurate (I discovered a lot of great artists listening to the "neighbour radio".) (by the way, here is my lastfm account)
So I decided to work on recommender systems, to better understand what is it about.
Recommender systems are usually used to increase the sales of products (like Amazon.com does) which is not really what I'm looking for (The one who know me a bit know I'm kind of sick about all this consumerism going on).
Actually, the most simple thing I thought of was the web: I'm browsing it quite every day and each time new content appears. I've stopped to follow my feed reader because of the information overload, and reduced drastically the number of people I follow on twitter.
Too much information kills the information.
You shall got what will be my dissertation topic: a recommender system for the web. Well, such recommender systems already exists, so I will try to add contextual information to them: you're probably not interested by the same topics at different times of the day, or depending on the computer you're using. We can also probably make good use of the way you browse to create groups into the content you're browsing (or even use the great firefox4 tab group feature).
There is a large part of concerns to have about user's privacy as well.
Here is my proposal (copy/pasted from the one I had to do for my master)
Introduction and rationale
Nowadays, people surf the web more and more often. New web pages are created each day so the amount of information to retrieve is more important as the time passes. These users uses the web in different contexts, from finding cooking recipes to technical articles.
A lot of people share the same interest to various topics, and the quantity of information is such than it's really hard to triage them efficiently without spending hours doing it. Firstly because of the huge quantity of information but also because the triage is something relative to each person. Although, this triage can be facilitated by fetching the browsing information of all particular individuals and put the in perspective.
Machine learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which deals with how a program can learn from data. Recommendation systems are a particular application area of machine learning which is able to recommend things (links in our case) to the users, given a particular database containing the previous choices users have made.
This browsing information is currently available in browsers. Even if it is not in a very usable format, it is possible to transform it to something useful. This information gold mine just wait to be used. Although, it is not as simple as it can seems at the first approach: It is important to take care of the context the user is in while browsing links. For instance, It's more likely that during the day, a computer scientist will browse computing related links, and that during the evening, he browse cooking recipes or something else.
Page contents are also interesting to analyse, because that's what people browse and what actually contain the most interesting part of the information. The raw data extracted from the browsing can then be translated into something more useful (namely tags, type of resource, visit frequency, navigation context etc.)
The goal of this dissertation is to create a recommender system for web links, including this context information.
At the end of the dissertation, different pieces of software will be provided, from raw data collection from the browser to a recommendation system.
Background Review
This dissertation is mainly about data extraction, analysis and recommendation systems. Two different research area can be isolated: Data preprocessing and Information filtering.
The first step in order to make recommendations is to gather some data. The more data we have available, the better it is (T. Segaran, 2007). This data can be retrieved in various ways, one of them is to get it directly from user's browsers.
Data preparation and extraction
The data gathered from browsers is basically URLs and additional information about the context of the navigation. There is clearly a need to extract more information about the meaning of the data the user is browsing, starting by the content of the web pages.
Because the information provided on the current Web is not meant to be read by machines (T. Berners Lee, 2001) there is a need of tools to extract meaning from web pages. The information needs to be preprocessed before stored in a machine readable format, allowing to make recommendations (Choochart et Al, 2004).
Data preparation is composed of two steps: cleaning and structuring ( Castellano et Al, 2007). Because raw data can contain a lot of un-needed text (such as menus, headers etc.) and need to be cleaned prior to be stored. Multiple techniques can be used here and belongs to boilerplate removal and full text extraction (Kohlschütter et Al, 2010).
Then, structuring the information: category, type of content (news, blog, wiki) can be extracted from raw data. This kind of information is not clearly defined by HTML pages so there is a need of tools to recognise them.
Some context-related information can also be inferred from each resource. It can go from the visit frequency to the navigation group the user was in while browsing. It is also possible to determine if the user "liked" a resource, and determine a mark for it, which can be used by information filtering a later step (T. Segaran, 2007).
At this stage, structuring the data is required. Storing this kind of information in RDBMS can be a bit tedious and require complex queries to get back the data in an usable format. Graph databases can play a major role in the simplification of information storage and querying.
Information filtering
To filter the information, three techniques can be used (Balabanovic et Al, 1997):
- The content-based approach states that if an user have liked something in the past, he is more likely to like similar things in the future. So it's about establishing a profile for the user and compare new items against it.
- The collaborative approach will rather recommend items that other similar users have liked. This approach consider only the relationship between users, and not the profile of the user we are making recommendations to.
- the hybrid approach, which appeared recently combine both of the previous approaches, giving recommendations when items score high regarding user's profile, or if a similar user already liked it.
Grouping is also something to consider at this stage (G. Myatt, 2007). Because we are dealing with huge amount of data, it can be useful to detect group of data that can fit together. Data clustering is able to find such groups (T. Segaran, 2007).
- Balabanović, M., & Shoham, Y. (1997). Fab: content-based, collaborative recommendation. Communications of the ACM, 40(3), 66–72. ACM. Retrieved March 1, 2011, from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=245108.245124&;.
- Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (2001). The semantic web: Scientific american. Scientific American, 284(5), 34–43. Retrieved November 21, 2010, from http://www.citeulike.org/group/222/article/1176986.
- Castellano, G., Fanelli, A., & Torsello, M. (2007). LODAP: a LOg DAta Preprocessor for mining Web browsing patterns. Proceedings of the 6th Conference on 6th WSEAS Int. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and Data Bases-Volume 6 (p. 12–17). World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS). Retrieved March 8, 2011, from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1348485.1348488.
- Kohlschutter, C., Fankhauser, P., & Nejdl, W. (2010). Boilerplate detection using shallow text features. Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining (p. 441–450). ACM. Retrieved March 8, 2011, from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718542.
- Myatt, G. J.(2007). Making Sense of Data: A Practical Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining.
- Segaran, T. (2007). Collective Intelligence.
The first thing that's come to people minds when it comes to process their browsing data is privacy. People don't want to be stalked. That's perfectly right, and I don't either.
But such a system don't have to deal with people identities. It's completely possible to process completely anonymous data, and that's probably what I'm gonna do.
By the way, if you have interesting thoughts about that, if you do know projects that do seems related, fire the comments !
What's the plan ?
There is a lot of different things to explore, especially because I'm a complete novice in that field.
- I want to develop a firefox plugin, to extract the browsing informations ( still, I need to know exactly which kind of informations to retrieve). The idea is to provide some raw browsing data, and then to transform it and to store it in the better possible way.
- Analyse how to store the informations in a graph database. What can be the different methods to store this data and to visualize the relationship between different pieces of data? How can I define the different contexts, and add those informations in the db?
- Process the data using well known recommendation algorithms. Compare the results and criticize their value.
There is plenty of stuff I want to try during this experimentation:
- I want to try using Geshi to visualize the connexion between the links, and the contexts
- Try using graph databases such as Neo4j
- Having a deeper look at tools such as scikit.learn (a machine learning toolkit in python)
- Analyse web pages in order to categorize them. Processing their contents as well, to do some keyword based classification will be done.
Lot of work on its way, yay !


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Read about the history of GW Law's Library in A Legal Miscellanea: "Life of a Library: A History of The George Washington University Law Library." Using archival materials from Gelman's Special Collections Research Center, the article provides a look at how the Law Library developed. It features a rare focus on the earlier years of the "first" founding of GW Law in 1826 before its reopening after the Civil War in 1865.
The article includes many fascinating facts about the early days of the law school and the library. Images and photos bring the early history to life.
GW Law has been celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2015-2016. The 50th anniversary of the Law Library's move to its current building in Foggy Bottom, The Jacob Burns Law Library, will be marked in 2017.


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How to Take a Stand on Climate Change (When the World Seems Hopeless)
By Beatport News Staff- Published on December 4, 2015 by Beatport
In conjunction with the U.N. Climate Change Conference currently happening in Paris, a group of organizations, including the Ocean Recovery Alliance, Earth to Paris, and Beatport, are hosting #ListenParis2015. This livestream event begins at 11am EST/8am PST on December 5 and features 24-hours of playlists and mixes by artists including Above & Beyond, Oliver Heldens, Treasure Fingers, and Soul Clap. LISTEN will also be streamed at silent discos in cities including Montreal, Beijing, Paris, and Hong Kong.


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Best Villa Rentals in Mae Nam
Local Recommendations from our My Guide Koh Samui team
The latest trend of hiring a private villa for your holiday has become an attractive option on Samui. Private villas, in secluded surrounds, on beachfronts, offer a romantic or family retreat with all the facilities and amenities of a resort.
Koh Samui's tourist hubs are quite busy and have a large variety of resort and hotel style accommodation. Samui has so some much more to offer and for those that would prefer to take advantage of seclusion, privacy, with less crowded beaches, fantastic views. Samui now has a great variety of modern luxurious villas for couples, groups or families to enjoy a private getaway with all the attention and service you'd expect from a a 5 star resort. It's not only high-end offerings, there are private villa options for most budgets. See our list of offerings here.


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Tonight, AMC's Van Ness 14 theater (1000 Van Ness Ave., at O'Farrell) will screen its final film.
A source close to theater management confirmed the closure, but declined to discuss reasons for its occurrence. The theater is not selling tickets for any showings beyond tonight.
When it debuted in 1998, the 14-screen theater inside a former Cadillac dealership was AMC's flagship outlet in San Francisco. But in recent years, it's shown signs of neglect.
Unlike AMC's other San Francisco theaters, the Metreon and the Kabuki, it still lacks assigned seating and alcohol service. In 2017, allegations circulated that the theater had a bed bug infestation.
The theater has received an influx of negative Yelp reviews in recent months, with many reviewers citing low staffing, threadbare seating and declining cleanliness as issues.
The closure is another blow to movie lovers in the neighborhood, who were already facing the potential loss of the nearby Landmark Opera Plaza Cinema (601 Van Ness, at Golden Gate Ave.)
As we initially reported in 2017, the four-screen theater, which focuses on foreign and independent film, is reportedly a money-loser for Opera Plaza's property owner. The owner has proposed demolishing the theater and converting it into space for retail sales and services.
The proposal to close and convert the theater is currently slated to be heard by the Planning Commission at its February 21, 2019 meeting.
As for the former AMC Van Ness theater, there may still be hope. The source that confirmed the closure said that another theater owner may be in discussions to lease the space. Property owner SITE Centers did not respond to requests for comment on a new potential tenant.
We'll keep you posted on the future of both theaters.
Update, 2:44 p.m.: Ryan Noonan, director of corporate communications for AMC, has released an official statement confirming the closure of the Van Ness theater.
"I can confirm that AMC Van Ness 14 will close following the end of business today," he writes. "We'd like to thank our guests for their patronage and invite them to continue enjoying the AMC experience at AMC Metreon 16 and AMC Kabuki 8."
Noonan declined to comment on the reason for the closure, or a potential future tenant for the space.
Thanks to tipsters Rose J. and Brian R. for letting us know about the closure.


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Location: Atkinson Common, 1 Moseley Avenue, Newburyport
Coordinates: 42°49'25.6″N 70°53'53.3″W
Date dedicated: Statue, July 4, 1902 and tablets, June 17, 1913
Architect/sculptor/manufacturer: Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson
Number of names: Tablets list approximately 1,511 who served
Newburyport's monument became one of the most popular in the Commonwealth and was reproduced in several towns. The memorial occupies a large portion of Atkinson Common, consisting of two large cannons, bronze tablets recording the names of all 1,511 men from Newburyport who served in the war, and the centerpiece is a bronze sculpture of a soldier atop a granite boulder. The sculpture is striking and lifelike. Known as The Volunteer, it was sculpted by Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson in 1902 specifically for this location (later recast for other locations). Kitson was the most prolific American female sculptor of the early 20th century. Her sculptures are featured in almost every state in the country.
Born Theodora Alice Ruggles in 1871, she showed great skill in sculpting from a young age. Her parents sought to enroll her in several prestigious Boston art schools but she was repeatedly denied simply because was a woman. This barrier eventually prompted her use the name "Theo" rather than Theodora. Commissions, she found, could be obtained more easily under the ambiguous name Theo Ruggles Kitson, or sometimes "Tho. A. R. Kitson." One piece of correspondence from a potential client addressed to "Theobald Kitson" proves the tactic worked.[1]
An up-and-coming young sculptor eventually agreed to train Theo. His name was Henry Hudson Kitson. Born in England in 1863, he came to the United States around 1877. He brought Theo and her mother to Paris in 1887 were she trained for three years under various artists including Pascal. She earned an honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Francais in 1890—the first woman to do so. In 1893, back in the U.S., she had four works exhibited in the Women's Building in the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1895, she garnered another first when she became the first woman to be admitted to the National Sculpture Society.[2]
Theo married Henry Kitson in 1893. They worked together in a studio in Boston and eventually in Quincy, Massachusetts. Henry Kitson created a number of well-known works, including the Minute Man in Lexington and a statue of Admiral Farragut in Boston. But his health was poor and Theo ultimately became the bread winner of the family.[3]
In designing Newburyport's The Volunteer, Theo rejected the common form of so many Civil War memorials of the late 19th century. In towns across Massachusetts and beyond, many statues of soldiers appear rigid and lifeless, typically at parade rest, the muzzle of their weapon poised, Theo said, as though they were "ready to shoot his own chin off."[4] Her memorial would be different.
The Volunteer is remarkable, not only for its accuracy but for its sense of lifelike movement. The soldier is shown in light marching order, coat unbuttoned, trousers bloused into his woolen socks, musket thrown over his shoulder in a loose version of right-shoulder-shift. A Boston Globe reporter writing about The Volunteer observed no only that Theo had produced the first Civil War soldiers' memorial designed by a woman but also that she was the first sculptor to so perfectly capture the realism and spirit lacking in so many monuments. Breaking away from the confines of stern tradition Kitson "had the courage to give exact expression to the very qualities for which the volunteer soldier has always stood."[5]
Kitson's The Volunteer was reproduced as the Massachusetts monument in Vicksburg Memorial Park in Mississippi. Before long other Massachusetts towns ordered castings of Theo's Volunteer. North Attleborough, Sharon, Townsend, Ashburnham, Topsfield and North Andover are among the other towns featuring Kitson's work.
[1] Ethel Mickey, "Memorial artist honored nearly a century later," Salem News, July 27, 2010.
[2] Jules Heller and Nancy G. Heller eds., North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary, (Routledge Press, 2013), 305.
[3] Heller and Heller, 305.
[4] "Theo Kitson, Sculptor," from the Boston Globe, reprinted in The Indianapolis Journal, August 24, 1902, 22.
[5] "Theo Kitson, Sculptor"


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The remaining Sunderland Avenue houses follow close behind 2 Sunderland Avenue and complete the group of former air-base houses redeveloped by Willis Bond & Co in Auckland's masterplanned residential community, Hobsonville Point.
The construction of Auckland's Victoria Park Tunnel occasioned a range of interesting heritage work for Salmond Reed Architects, including the temporary relocation and restoration of the historic Rob Roy Hotel in Freeman's Bay.
In 2010 the hotel was moved to enable construction to be carried out on the tunnel and then in April of 2011 it was slid back forty metres to its original location, now sited over the southern entrance to the tunnel. Moving the hotel was the climax of six months of painstaking planning to ensure preservation of the Rob Roy as a landmark in the Freemans Bay community. This preparation included structural strengthening of the building and provision of new foundations onto which the masonry hotel was slid, using specially built concrete runway beams. The double move was carried out with the design expertise of Wellington engineers, Dunning Thornton Consultants.
Salmond Reed Architects's key role was to ensure that the heritage values of the hotel were maintained during this process. Working alongside archaeologists, Clough & Associates, we carried out heritage documentation of the hotel and were also engaged to prepare documentation for the additions and upgrading required to ensure reinstatement and effective ongoing commercial and hospitality uses.


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Table of ContentsWhat is Predictive Analytics?How does Predictive Analytics Work?Common Misconceptions of Predictive AnalyticsAcademic Research on Predictive Analytics
What is Predictive Analytics?
Predictive analytics is a form of analytics that seeks to predict the outcome of unknown future events using modeling and advanced statistical techniques. Predictive analytics also uses current and past data to determine the future performance of events. Information is extracted from the data sets using data mining techniques to predict likely future events. Businesses and investors leverage predictive analytics to make definitive business decisions aimed at maximizing possible future events. The common advanced statistical techniques used in predictive analytics are machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, and predictive modeling used in analyzing current and historical data to predict future performance.
Back to: RESEARCH, ANALYSIS, & DECISION SCIENCE
How does Predictive Analytics Work?
Predictive analytics is both an analytical tool and a decision-making tool that is important for businesses and investors. In making business decisions, corporations and investors need to examine past patterns to predict trends or outcomes that are likely to occur in the future. Predictive analytics should not be confused for a toll that tells what will happen in the happened, rather, this statistical analysis predicts likely future patterns and occurrences. Active market traders leverage predictive analytics methods to make trade decisions by drawing information from past and current data. The likely policies that a company can apply when faced with certain situations are influenced by predictive analytics.
Common Misconceptions of Predictive Analytics
There are some misconceptions about predictive analytics, the common ones are;
- Predictive analytics is mistaken to be a tool that tells what will happen in the future. However, predictive analytics only predict likely future occurrences.
- Predictive analytics uses advanced statistical techniques machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, and predictive modeling. Given this fact, it is commonly confused to be the same as machine learning but predictive analytics is different from machine learning.


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"Early detection of retinopathy is an important part of managing care for the millions of people with diabetes, yet many patients with diabetes are not adequately screened for diabetic retinopathy since about 50 percent of them do not see their eye doctor on a yearly basis," said Malvina Eydelman, M.D., director of the Division of Ophthalmic, and Ear, Nose and Throat Devices at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. "Today's decision permits the marketing of a novel artificial intelligence technology that can be used in a primary care doctor's office. The FDA will continue to facilitate the availability of safe and effective digital health devices that may improve patient access to needed health care."
The device, called IDx-DR, is a software program that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze images of the eye taken with a retinal camera called the Topcon NW400. A doctor uploads the digital images of the patient's retinas to a cloud server on which IDx-DR software is installed. If the images are of sufficient quality, the software provides the doctor with one of two results: (1) "more than mild diabetic retinopathy detected: refer to an eye care professional" or (2) "negative for more than mild diabetic retinopathy; rescreen in 12 months." If a positive result is detected, patients should see an eye care provider for further diagnostic evaluation and possible treatment as soon as possible.
IDx-DR is the first device authorized for marketing that provides a screening decision without the need for a clinician to also interpret the image or results, which makes it usable by health care providers who may not normally be involved in eye care.
The FDA evaluated data from a clinical study of retinal images obtained from 900 patients with diabetes at 10 primary care sites. The study was designed to evaluate how often IDx-DR could accurately detect patients with more than mild diabetic retinopathy. In the study, IDx-DR was able to correctly identify the presence of more than mild diabetic retinopathy 87.4 percent of the time and was able to correctly identify those patients who did not have more than mild diabetic retinopathy 89.5 percent of the time.
Patients who have a history of laser treatment, surgery or injections in the eye or who have any of the following conditions should not be screened for diabetic retinopathy with IDx-DR: persistent vision loss, blurred vision, floaters, previously diagnosed macular edema, severe non-proliferative retinopathy, proliferative retinopathy, radiation retinopathy or retinal vein occlusion. IDx-DR should not be used in patients with diabetes who are pregnant; diabetic retinopathy can progress very rapidly during pregnancy and IDx-DR is not intended to evaluate rapidly progressive diabetic retinopathy. IDx-DR is only designed to detect diabetic retinopathy, including macular edema; it should not be used to detect any other disease or condition. Patients will still need to get a complete eye examination at the age of 40 and at the age of 60 and also if they have any vision symptoms (for example, persistent vision loss, blurred vision or floaters).
IDx-DR was reviewed under the FDA's De Novo premarket review pathway, a regulatory pathway for some low- to moderate-risk devices that are novel and for which there is no prior legally marketed device. IDx-DR was granted Breakthrough Device designation, meaning the FDA provided intensive interaction and guidance to the company on efficient device development, to expedite evidence generation and the agency's review of the device. To qualify for such designation, a device must provide for more effective treatment or diagnosis of a life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating disease or condition, and meet one of the following criteria: the device must represent a breakthrough technology; there must be no approved or cleared alternatives; the device must offer significant advantages over existing approved or cleared alternatives; or the availability of the device is in the best interest of patients.
The FDA is permitting marketing of IDx-DR to IDx LLC.
The FDA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, protects the public health by assuring the safety, effectiveness, and security of human and veterinary drugs, vaccines and other biological products for human use, and medical devices. The agency also is responsible for the safety and security of our nation's food supply, cosmetics, dietary supplements, products that give off electronic radiation, and for regulating tobacco products.


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Enbridge's hotly contested new oil pipeline is slated to cross land claimed by indigenous people for thousands of years.
But not before Indian tribes have completed an archaeological survey of the pipeline route, the largest effort of its kind in Minnesota and maybe the country.
Surveyors, hailing from several Upper Midwest tribes, may have already found the remnants of a long lost tribal village. They are documenting everything from traditional wild ricing spots to buried artifacts.
"We're helping to preserve what's ours," Rob King, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and an electrician by trade, said as he used a screen to sift dirt at an archaeological dig. "If we find something, we make an impact."
Minnesota's Ojibwe bands have fiercely opposed the $2.6 billion pipeline, fearing environmental havoc from oil spills. The tribal cultural survey won't stop the pipeline. But it could result in small route changes that would forestall the disturbance of sacred tribal sites during pipeline construction, as has happened on state highway projects in recent years.
The approved route of Enbridge's new pipeline — a replacement for its current Line 3 that will carry Canadian oil to the company's terminal in Superior, Wis. — runs through a pastiche of prairie, woods and wetlands in northern Minnesota. While state regulators have approved the project, Enbridge must get water-crossing permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the pipeline.
Connecting bands to their history
Under federal law, the Corps must consult tribes on historic-preservation issues. In those talks, the tribes pushed for the cultural survey. They weren't satisfied with an earlier archaeological survey done by an Enbridge contractor, saying it lacked the bands' participation. The current survey — funded by Enbridge — is being coordinated by the Fond du Lac band.
"Our history has been erased," said Wayne Dupuis, Fond du Lac's environmental program manager. "Much of the history taught in the United States begins with the landing of Columbus, but there was much more before that."
About 60,000 American Indians live in Minnesota; the Ojibwe, dominant in northern Minnesota, are the largest tribe, followed by the Dakota. But many tribes have ancestral ties to the state, including the Cheyenne and Arapaho, both of which now reside farther west.
The Ojibwe, originally from the Atlantic coast, migrated here in the 1600s, eventually displacing the Dakota in northern Minnesota. The state's Ojibwe and Dakota bands are among 40 tribal groups participating in the survey.
"A tribal survey of this magnitude, with so many tribes involved — this is the first time it has occurred," said Jill Hoppe, the Fond du Lac band's tribal historic preservation officer.
More than a job
On a recent day, the survey crew of 26 Indians included members of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe from South Dakota and the Santee Sioux Nation in Nebraska, as well as members of several Ojibwe bands in Minnesota. They all gathered in a hotel parking lot to start the morning, forming a circle.
The crew's leader explained the day's objectives while workers passed around a conch shell filled with burning sage — a purifying and cleansing ritual. As the shell traveled the circle, Hattie Dunham sang a cappella in her native Lakota language.
The crew then split into four groups and headed to different locations on the pipeline route. Dunham, who works for the Rosebud tribe, spent the day at a site near Bagley digging amid wildflowers and wild raspberry bushes.
"To me, [the work] is a blessing," she said, shovel in hand. "I know it sounds hokey to some people, but it's been spiritual to me."
Other crew members concurred. "It re-centered me and put me back in touch with the native community," said Todd Defoe, a member of the Fond du Lac band. Defoe had worked for years in marketing for casinos, both in the Midwest and in Las Vegas, before tiring of the business.
Now he runs a fishing-guide operation, allowing him time to work on the survey.
"It's more than a job," he said. "When you hold a piece of pottery in your hand, for a split second, you are in the space of someone who held it two or three or 10 thousand years ago."
Surveyors have found pottery shards, as well as points from spears or arrows, possible stone tools and bison bones that have been broken to scoop out marrow. What appear to be human-made mounds have been discovered, though it's not clear yet if they are burial grounds.
Perhaps the most exciting find, so far: possible evidence of a "hidden" Dakota village. Ojibwe oral histories describe a Dakota village obscured by an earthen berm, said Jim Jones, a lead project manager for the cultural survey. The Ojibwe took the village in a long-ago battle.
A spot along the pipeline route — complete with earthen berm — matched the location and lore of the hidden village.
"It's pretty amazing," said Jones, a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.
Using the results
When surveyors find a significant site, they aim to get it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Enbridge will work to avoid such sites during pipeline construction, including tweaking the route if necessary, said Bobby Hahn, the company's Line 3 environmental supervisor.
Enbridge's new Line 3, unlike its six pipelines currently intersecting Minnesota, will not traverse Indian reservations.
But the new Line 3 crosses plenty of land ceded under duress by the Ojibwe in the 19th century. The tribes claim treaty rights to hunt, gather and fish on those lands.
Enbridge needs permits from the Army Corps to cross hundreds of waterways and wetlands with the new pipeline.
The Corps, after meetings with the tribes last year, ordered that a tribal cultural survey be done on 66 miles along the route. At the tribes' behest, the Corps later increased that requirement to 201 miles, and Enbridge eventually opened the entire 340-mile route to surveyors.
Enbridge is paying for the study. The company said it will cost $5 million to $6 million, much of which will cover survey workers' wages.
"We have not done something of this magnitude with the tribes," Hahn said.
Enbridge wants the study completed by September, though Hoppe said it's not likely to be done until October. About 140 miles has been surveyed so far.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), which approved the pipeline in June, has ruled that the cultural survey must be done before Enbridge can start construction.
It's Enbridge's job to get permission from landowners to accommodate the survey. So far, while some property owners have objected, surveyors have been "pretty well received," Jones said.
Jones is on leave from his job as cultural resources director for the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council. He has spent the past 20 years with the council protecting Indian burial grounds, including trying to prevent incidents like the one that occurred last year near Duluth.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation unearthed part of a Fond du Lac grave site while doing an improvement project on Hwy. 23. The graveyard had been documented, and the Fond du Lac band had not been consulted before the state began digging.
The Hwy. 23 incident shows that "the standard interpretation of the archaeological record usually does not recognize sites of cultural and religious significance to the tribes," the Fond du Lac band said in a PUC filing.
A similar incident occurred in 2015 when Indian burial grounds were breached during a road construction project in Minnetonka.
A 'living connection'
Through a tribal lens, the cultural survey takes a broader view than traditional archaeology.
Historically significant places can be directly tied to the present: for instance, wild rice waters and maple-sugaring spots that have been used by generations of tribes. The same goes for a field dotted with traditional medicinal plants.
"There is a living connection to the history," Jones said.
To survey the route, Jones uses everything from global positioning devices to oral histories from tribal elders. He's particularly searching for "cultural corridors" — waterways and trails that tribes have used for hundreds if not thousands of years. Insight into these places is best found within the tribes themselves, Jones said.
"We need to hear the voices of traditional people when we start talking about archaeology," he said. "That's what makes this project unique."


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For the current edition of the MCH we have planned study trips to different neighborhoods and collective housing buildings of Madrid in order to study and understand these places in terms of collectivity and urban dynamics.
Until now, we have visited the neighborhoods of El Pilar, Fuencarral, Vallecas and Moratalaz, where the students could have an approximation to different manners of collective housing development.
The study trips to Madrid are part of the module of "Sociology, economy & politics" of the MCH 2019, and they were guided by Prof. Jesús Leal and Carmen Martínez Arroyo
© 2006-2023 MCH and its logo are registered trademarks.
Dr. José María de Lapuerta and Elli Mosayebi
Nuria Muruais
MCH Manager Assistant
Celia Ramón
e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
phone:+34 910 674 860 // +34 689 74 68 54
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Avda. Juan Herrera 4. 28040, Madrid. Spain


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Palomino in Colombia. Visiting Paradise.
This little piece of paradise will take you back to another time.
Although Wi-Fi is accessible, the atmosphere and vibe of the place is so different from the modern tourist towns we have become used to.
No hi-rise, Little traffic, no traffic lights… lots of secluded B&B's .
If you are done visiting the same old, same old tourist towns. The Eastern Caribbean Coast will be a breath of fresh tropical air for any traveler
Santa Marta
Santa Marta, Is the gateway to this part of the Caribbean.
If you have no car…
Buses run at set times throughout the day to Palomino.
(Or you could take a private tour).
Make your way to the Mercado Publico de Santa Marta.
The best way to do this, is to grab a taxi, and tell the driver you are going to Palomino, and he will drop you in the right area.
The buses from Santa Marta go past Palomino, about another hour further along the coast towards the Venezuelan border to Riochaca.
Costs are about $10,000 – $20,000 COP ($6.00 – $14.00), Torcoroma and Unitransco bus companies run hourly services.
Copetran goes once a day and Rapido Ochoa runs 4 services a day.
To go further up along the coast, past Riochaca up to Bora Bora, you need to hire a taxi in Riochaca.
The cost is between $50,000 – $70,000 COP ($30 – $40.00 ), return. (2019 The Colombian Peso is priced against US dollars.) Negotiating is allowed ?.
Perhaps a better option would be to hire a car or motor bike in Santa Marta and travel to your own timeline.
From Santa Marta, it is an easy drive, less than 4 hours to Riochaca.
Our Starting Point.
Our plan was to stay a couple of days in Santa Marta and link up with Germain ( who runs Kashi Moon accommodation), in Palomino.
We had also arranged for him to take us on a tour of the region around Palomino up past Riochaca towards the Venezuelan border.
(Try to) Go Prepared
As well as taking in the sights , sounds, and nightlife of Santa Marta, it is convenient for buying those essentials we sometimes forget.
Beach towels, hats and sunscreen, toiletries, board shorts, ( if you left yours at home).
Palomino is the perfect place to use as a base for further excursions along the Caribbean coast and experience truly unique culture and scenery.
So lets begin at the BORA BORA beach club, which is above Palomino and right on the Caribbean Sea.
Totally unlike the Bora Bora Beach Club in the Photo Below.
This BORA BORA is the popular Beach Club on the Isle Del Rosario, where on weekends, boatloads of people travel from Cartagena (Colombia), to relax and party.
The Other Bora Bora,
IS Above Riohacha in the La Guajira department in North Eastern Colombia. Long inhabited by the Amerindians of the Wayuu ethnic group.
In the past Riohacha was a place where it was easy to find pearls in the harbour, the city was a magnet for English pirates (Sir Francis Drake being the most famous ), who would raid the place looking for Pearls and Gold.
Above Riohaca the landscape becomes almost desert like.
Mostly Inhabited by goats ( and a few people).
You are off the main tourist track.
Although this is changing as more people expand their horizons on their visits to Colombia.
Like the other Bora Bora, it is situated along the Caribbean coast, with one difference.
This Bora Bora is accessible by vehicle.
But why come here?
- Uncrowded Beaches
- Clear tropical waters
- A changing Desert Landscape
- Flamingo Sanctuary
- Sand Dunes that meet the sea
- Wind Surfing
- Beach Parties
- Family fun
- Secluded Beaches
- Original Traditional Handcrafts
- Friendly People
- Historical Sites
- I never looked for boat hire and diving. Never thought about it actually, but will check it out and update this post. Also…
- Santa Marta has quite a few dive boats and is one of the most inexpensive places in the world to get diving accreditations.
A typical tropical beach, with the remnants on life washed ashore by the high tide.
Seashells which were (are), homes to critters and sea grass lay along the tidal reach.
The water is clear but like all open water that is offering an invitation…
If you cannot swim or are not a good swimmer, be careful and stay near the shoreline.
This is basically the end (or the beginning), of what is becoming a popular backpacker trail.
Starting at either Cartagena or Santa Marta.
Unlike the other Bora Bora there is more to do here than lay about, drink alcohol and swim.
And you can still get refreshments.
There is more to see and do along the coast above Riohacha. Kite Surfing, if your into it, 4wheel driving across sand dunes. Our trip was more exploration than tourist oriented.
As you travel back towards Santa Marta there is a Flamingo Sanctuary. Located in a huge tidal lagoon near Camarones
Getting out to view them is only by sail boat.
Not your average sail boat, but a dugout sail boat. One of the great things about doing things along here is the authenticity of it all.
For instance these tours out to the Flamingos, are only done by Amerindians, in their traditional boats.
Forget about water skiing, surf kiting or any of that stuff on the Lagoon. It is not going to happen. But on the ocean side of the lagoon you have options for those and other water sports.
The Deckhand.
The Flamingos coming into view.
Why Towels on your head?
Someone forgot the hats and sunscreen.
Actually that is another story.
Note: The people who live in this harsh environment are the poorest of the poor, If they approach with items to sell, be polite.
The items they sell are handcrafted and colorful, all done in the traditional manner. For what they are asking for their quality handicrafts or produce, you are getting a bargain.
An Esky with Ice comes in handy if you like prawns.
Germain somehow managed to produce one and we bought enough to fill a small esky to take back with us, where we had Prawns Colombiano, Prawns Australiano, and curried prawns.
Palomino is a must visit. For the past 5 or 6 years it has been slowly developing, as more tourists realize the uniqueness of the area.
Only 100 klms from desert you are in rain forest, from where you can see snow capped mountains.
From Wikipedia. Palomino's paradise attracts a low number of tourists even though the jungle landscape is exotic, there is vast biodiversity, and the beaches are white and uninhabited.
Palomino is close to the entrance to Sierra Nevada National Park and close to the Resguardo Indigena, (Indian Reserve area).
Especially popular, is tubing down the Palomino River.
With a laid back atmosphere, and the majority of accommodation, (B&B's), located among the lush vegetation, you are taking yourself back to a simpler era.
The Kashi Moon Hostel is at the end of a lane way away from the noise of the main street.
Photo from inside the gate. It was Senor Germain's cat, that encouraged this shot.
Why Stay Here?.
No Car?, No problem. Host Snr. Germain runs ( no rush), tours in his 4×4
Car Parking inside the Hostel grounds
New spacious units, separate bath and shower. External Showers to wash the sand and salt off before going to your unit.
Personalized friendly service, It pelted down rain on our first night there. Our intention was to walk to town and try out one of the cafes in the town.
Senor Germain solved our problem. He took orders and drove up to the cafe and returned with ginormous Brazilian ?'s for everyone. Tasted awesome too !
Very Competitive rates
Suitable for visitors of all age groups
Visit the indigenous people of Tuquenca and learn more about their culture (about 45 minutes away).
There are 4 tribes ( Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo ), who have separate tribal areas in the Sierra Nevada.
Not all are able to be accessed by tourists.
We were lucky, as Germain has permits from the tribes that allow him to enter some tribal areas. See video below.
Tubing in the River.
A Go- Pro is useful here, as you could see monkeys or Toucans in the trees along the river bank as you meander down the river.
Waterproof bags to carry your things can be purchased in Palomino if you forgot to get one in Santa Marta.
Generally you can buy one from who-ever you hired a tube from.
Excellent Photography Opportunities
Kids can be Kids.
Adults can relax on the beach, or surfboards can be hired and surfing lessons are available.
Santa Marta (Again)
Santa Marta is South Americas oldest (European), town.
As well as being a busy working port it is also the gateway to many of the best destinations in Colombia.
- Tayrona National Park and its excellent beaches and lanscapes
- Lost City of The Sierra Nevada
- And of course the Caribbean Coast to Riohaca and beyond.
To visit
You can contact Snr. Germain here.
Or by Phone. +57 300 2028810
For Planning your Itinerary go here
For Flights and expert help with all your travel needs Go Here
For private transport from Santa Marta to Palomino or return from Palomino to Santa Marta go here Use "ExploreColombia10" for a 10 % discount.
As usual, I am at :- firstname.lastname@example.com
Please Note:-
Santa Marta and Palomino are often tagged as unsafe because of their past. I have not had any problems in either of them. ( I have visited Santa Marta 3 times over 4 years ).
My only issue was with a Canadian near the beach this year, but that was a no big deal really.
I met some Venezulean youths in Santa Marta this time and I enjoyed their company for a short while. I do not think it any more unsafe than many other cities / towns in the world.
Do a google search if you are unsure.
My eyeballs tell me backpackers and retirees are increasing, even with all the trouble next door in Venezuela.
I did learn, that Venezuelans and Colombians speak a older style of Spanish than other South American countries.
The night life in Santa Marta is more on the scale of a large town than a big city, and with many party hostels popping up all over the place, you have lots of choices as to where you party.
And, yes drugs are here… be careful, if your caught with drugs your next "B&B" will not be very comfortable.
The markets and out door dining scene around Parque de los Novios is a great place to visit on Friday and Saturday nights.
The street performers are great to watch and listen to. Don't forget to put some pesos in the hat or tray.
Next Time
To see my favourite online program click here


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Plymouth Argyle were due some good fortune after their team coach broke down on the way to their away League One game against Rochdale.
And the Pilgrims got it as the decisive goal in their 2-1 victory at a rain-lashed Spotland was a freak own goal.
A 79th minute back pass from midfielder David Perkins took a bobble and Rochdale 'keeper Josh Lillis had an air kick as the ball gently rolled into the net.
After Argyle's second away league win of the season, Adams explained the travel difficulties that they had faced on Friday.
The team coach broke down on the M5 near Worcester but fortunately driver Chris Baser was able to make the repairs himself.
It meant the Pilgrims' squad were only delayed for an hour, although it meant they did not reach until hotel in Bury until 8pm.
Adams said: "The fan belt snapped and we had to sit there and wait for an hour, but Chris Baser is a very good mechanic and he got his going again.
"He is a mechanic. He drives the bus as well but he's taken on board because he can do both. We left at half-past 12 and arrived at eight o'clock."
Joel Grant had put Argyle into a 73rd minute lead when he slid the ball into the net from close range after it had been played inside by Antoni Sarcevic.
However, their lead only lasted three minutes as Brad Inman drove a low shot past Argyle 'keeper Matt Macey.
Then came the own goal, and Argyle retained their slender lead until the end of the match and they moved one position up the League One table to 21st as a result.
Adams said: "I had a good feeling about today. I thought that our fortune was going to turn at some stage.
"Things were going against, and we had Niall Canavan get injured in training on Thursday so he missed out.
"We had been working on things since Tuesday, but we took in Gary Sawyer to replace him and he was excellent in his return."
Canavan, the former Rochdale centre-back, was ruled out by an ankle injury.
That led to Sawyer playing his first game, of any sort, since suffering a broken foot in the 2-1 league defeat away to Charlton Athletic on September 22.
Despite his long absence, 33-year-old put in a strong defensive display as Argyle had to weather Rochdale pressure, and icy rain, during the second half.


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Holiday ideas to Busan
The holiday ideas listed below are designed to give you a flavour of the things to do in Busan. We specialise in tailoring all aspects of your holiday to meet your precise needs. To start planning your trip, just call one of our destination specialists on 020 7590 0613.
List of itineraries
Contrast South Korea's neon futurism with its ancient past on this independent tour, linking Seoul's palaces, Busan's water temples and Gyeongju's ancient-capital heritage with private touring and transfers throughout.


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Yes, my babies are a day apart...barely. It was only 2 short years after Olivia was born that I went into labor during her birthday party! I had him a little after midnight making their birthdays one day apart!
He is one of the happiest, silliest little boys! We love him so much and he is such a blessing to our family!
Happy Birthday Landon! We love you! Our family wouldn't be the same without you!
I baked him a cake the other day too! It was a football! Again, this was my first attempt at cake decorating...it ain't perfect - but at least he knew what it was when I showed it to him.
I got to play with my dome cake pan! It was fun! Of course, it killed him that he couldn't eat it for 2 days after I baked it! But he demonstrated great self control! (I think there are a few finger prints around the cake...hmmmmm)
More to come on their birthdays - I think they're going to be dragged out for the month of February!
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Landon's 3rd Birthday!!!
Labels: Landon
5 comments:
Happy Birthday, Landon!ReplyDelete
HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LANDON!!! I hope this day is super great for you!!!ReplyDelete
Lindz, the cake looks great...as usual. :)
Happy Birthday to Landon!!!ReplyDelete
knowing you I bet those finger prints were yours!!ReplyDelete
Oh, your just hilarious LACEY!! (my sis by the way) I know I have a sweet tooth but I promise ;-) they were HIS fingerprints!ReplyDelete
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Cindy is an experienced RN(NP) residing in Southern Manitoba, Canada, with a passion to support her patients looking and feeling their best at every age. This blog is to support patients in gaining knowledge about skincare, medical aesthetics procedures, and health & wellness practices. It is her goal to share the knowledge she gains from continuous reading of research, and regular continuing professional development sessions. Pursuit of personal and professional growth is paramount to Cindy and she loves to share this learning with her patients.
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text: The Banff Ptarmigan Inn is centrally located in Banff National Park only steps away from the downtown area. This mountain hotel is a great escape to the Canadian Rockies. On your vacation you can enjoy our mountain views, and numerous outdoor activities from hiking trails, canoe rides, and biking in the summer, skiing, skating, and snowshoeing in the winter. We live here full time, so please ask us about how best to spend your holiday. We hope you enjoy exploring Banff National Park just as much as we do.


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I Meant To Do My Work Today
by Richard LeGallienne
I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand,
So what could I do but laugh and go?
If I can make photography my work, if it is what is meant to be....
'So what could I do but laugh and go?'
If I could be a television critic.....
No. I don't want that job.
I just like to watch.
On DWTS, my favorite part was when Len visited all of the pairs and gave his pointers. I like that guy.
If I can't dance with Maksim, I want to dance with Len ;o)
Again the judges were too hard on Kristi Yummygoochi.
I am sure Marisa will go.
I didn't care for House at all last night...until the very end.
And how many times did you yell Amber at the television before House got it?
I am going to confess something....I watched the finale of The Bachelor.
And the bachelor picked the girl I wanted him to pick....and that made me happy.
There was even a real engagement with a real ring.
I hope they are still together. I hope they get married.
I am a kook.
Patrick and I watched Now, Voyager on Saturday Night.
Now there is a classic.
"Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars."
What a great last line.
Any opinions on last night's television fare?
And why don't you share you favorite black and white classic with all of us?
That should be fun!
Encourage one another,


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OK, boys and girls, imagine the biggest storm ever hits New York and you get stuck at home and have to go to work. Boy do you have a problem, first thing to remember is that you are just a number and numbers do matter in this business especially when your absence creates a problem for "The Plan".
When the plan includes every able body, they will need you to come in, this is especially a problem if you are on some sort of probation, because the bosses look at it as if "they made it in you could of also". The best way to avoid having a problem during these big storms is to plan your day with one thing in mind, just get to work.
Wait a minute! They are people that will not be able to make it in, well they are other garages scattered all over the city, before going this route make contact with your people in your garage(Garage Supervisor, Shop Steward, Super or Supers Clerk) NOT civilian clerk or GUs. It is very rare that the order goes out that states you can work in another garage, so don't count on someone being nice, make plans to get to work.
In my first 3 1/2 years I worked in QE8 and didn't have a car. I use to take 2 buses and in some of those storms I walked because the buses weren't running or running real slow and on some of those lucky days I would catch a ride with someone going my way. Garage Supervisor had a cut-down pick me up once because there was no way I could've made it to work on time.
Not until I transferred closer to home did I realize how much easier it is to get to work during those hard days when you live in the district.
Some ways on how I got to and from work.
- 1996 Blizzard: Caught a Spreader going to Garage.
- 2010 Blizzard: Pick up by city vehicle.
- Hurricane Sandy: Drove home in the storm @ 4:00 am.
Advice: I never worked in another garage, I always took these storms seriously and gave myself enough time to get to work, but sometimes I would get there late(Murphy's Law). Get to your work location Safely and Don't be late! People are counting on you, but for Gods sake do not become a statistic "Safety Always"


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Why do I get so upset when my kids are on their devices? It makes me feel so exasperated, deflated, de-energized. Seeing them plugged in, with their headphones on feeling good about being a virtual hero depresses me. Seeing them judge themselves with hearts on Instagram is numbing for me as a Mom. Do you find yourself in battles with your kids over their device use and feeling this way too? My three kids don't even spend much time on their devices and yet I continue to get wound up by it. Having given it a fair amount of thought, there are two reasons why I think it affects me like this. The first one being that I know just how harmful and addictive too much of it can be. I know just how much it can negatively influence their developing sense of identity. But for me it's more than that. It boils down to the fact that no matter how interesting the content, looking at a screen just doesn't cut it for ME and therefore I can't understand why kids love it so much! And why they would choose it over other exciting, real, in person activities. It just …Read more →
Monthly Archives: July 2015
What My 10 Year Old Son Taught Me Totally Blew Me Away
I woke up last Monday morning and knew that the day had finally come. I had an important call to make. I was both excited and anxious about it. I made myself a cup of tea and sat down on the couch. As it was the first day of summer holidays my 10 year old son sat down beside me. We were chatting and I explained to him that I was a bit nervous about my call later that day. "What do you do when you feel nervous?" I asked him. "Okay" he said, "This is what I do Mom." "First of all, I think of kind, happy, nice things. I think of friendly things and I say to myself: 'I can do this'" He then told me about the Mindfulness work he does at school and how it can help him, especially if and when he is nervous. "Oh" I said, "What did you do in your Mindfulness Class?" "Well we all sit on the mat in a circle, cross legged with our hands on our thighs. We close our eyes." "The teacher smacks (loved his choice of word here!) his chime and I have to watch the noise. …Read more →
The Dark Side of Praise and How To Avoid It
We live in such "praizy" (praise and crazy) times it is important that we recognize the ill effects of too much praise on our children. How many times do we hear "Wow, good job", "You are so clever", "That's an amazing painting, "You are a such great artist". "I am so proud of you". Phrases full of praise like these are used so frequently that they almost lose their meaning. Children then become dependent on them in order to feel good about themselves. "If we're going to bring out the best in people, we, too, need to sow seeds of encouragement" – Joel Osteen "A child needs encouragement like a plant needs water" – Rudolph Dreikurs What's the difference between Encouragement and Praise? Encouragement means: to put courage in, to inspire Encouragement makes one feel good about oneself and therefore believe in oneself as it comes from within – it is an internal motivator Encouragement helps build self-esteem and self-confidence Encouragement focuses on how you get there ie. on the effort, improvement, journey and process Praise means: to speak highly of, to commend, to glorify Praise tends to focus on the end result Praise is positive judgment coming from the …Read more →


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QueenSnake – Toy Cars
Hey there once more guys and gals and welcome to some all new and fresh image Queen Snake galleries today. In this new and fresh update we get to see some more new and kinky images with miss Snake herself as she and a female buddy of hers get to be naughty and kinky for you as well in this afternoon scene. So let's take the time to see them in action with this scene as you are about to see the queen herself getting into some more wild and kinky times just like she did a few updates ago, getting wild and naughty outdoors. So let the cameras roll and let's see this babe in action without further delays shall we?
As their nice and wild scene starts off this afternoon, the two ladies make quick work of one another's sexy clothes as well. So take your time to see them getting nude with a nice and long strip show and then you get to see just what this naughty lady wanted to to. She clamped her pussy with some things and then her buddy tied those to a toy car which she controls. So take your time to see her backing up with the car to tease the lovely babe's nice and wet cunt this fine afternoon too. Enjoy the QueenSnake show and see the lady moan loudly in pleasure while her cute and pink wet pussy gets teased for the rest of this scene today!


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This is just a bit of fun (took us a few minutes to add), there probably isn't any useful reason to do this (unless you're running a bitcoin related SaaS business).
Login to your ChartMogul account and go to Settings > Data settings > Change "Primary currency" to 'BTC B⃦'.
All your metrics will now be rendered in Bitcoin using the exchange rates on the day each invoice was charged. So you might see a much more volatile MRR graph.
This won't affect your underlying data in any way and you can switch back to your normal Primary currency at any time.


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e-books and antitrust
More than two years ago (but shamefully still on the same blog page as this entry) we spoke of the imminent launch of the iPad and iBookstore and their consequences for e-book pricing and distribution. I noted that Steve Jobs seemed eerily sanguine about competing with Amazon and its heavyweight Kindle Store despite projected iBook prices being 30% to 50% higher than their Kindle equivalents. "The prices will be the same," Steve predicted breezily.
And he was right. Amazon's famous $9.99 new releases and bestsellers are no more, and now most new trade books cost $12.99—the same as they do on the iBookstore, and indeed on the Nook Store, the Kobo Store, and whatever Google is calling its e-bookstore this week. How did Steve know? According to the US Department of Justice, it's because Apple had already agreed with the major publishers to engineer an industry-wide shift from the traditional wholesale-retail model to a new agency model that would allow publishers to set retail prices directly, paying distributors a uniform 30% commission instead of charging a wholesale price.
On the face of it, this was never an astounding deal for publishers or authors: if the old wholesale price for a new release was $10 or more (so that Amazon's $9.99 broke even or lost money, as has always been argued) then taking $9.09 on a $12.99 title doesn't seem like much of an improvement. But it seems the publishers were more worried about customers getting used to the $9.99 price point and being reluctant to pay any more than that for either e-books or printed books into the future. As a result, they've been willing to sacrifice some short-term revenues—and allegedly limit retail prices to the tiers agreed with Apple—in order to wrest control of the emerging e-book market from a powerful Amazon.
I'm a bit conflicted about all of this since I like basically all of the parties involved. As an itinerant reader I like e-books as well as print books, and I sure liked Amazon's lower prices. I also like Apple hardware, and have a ton of Kindle books on my iPad. As a writer I like publishers and want them to make money and keep publishing books and paying advances—though I would rather see them competing among themselves to innovate in the emerging market instead of just coordinating to prop up print sales. And as a sometime competition lawyer I like the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and am not at all sure that the best answer to a dominant Amazon is the elimination of retail price competition.
Anyway, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have all settled with the DoJ, and will have to renegotiate with Apple and stop preventing other retailers from discounting e-books to undercut the iBookstore. This is essentially a renunciation of the agency model, since an agent who can set the retail price isn't really much of an agent. Macmillan—the first to force the agency model on Amazon—and Penguin have refused to settle, and Apple has denied everything. The world's biggest trade bookseller, Random House, quietly adopted the agency model in February 2011 but has escaped the DoJ's wrath and is referred to only obliquely in the filing as "the holdout publisher" and "the non-defendant publisher" bullied by the other five and Apple for not going agency sooner.
What happens if the DoJ wins or settles with the remaining publishers and the agency model is consigned to a footnote? The publishers and Authors Guild president Scott Turow argue that Amazon will return to its below-cost pricing and kill all other electronic and print outlets. I'm not convinced that this will happen, partly because it's not clear to what extent Amazon's pricing was ever properly predatory, and partly because things have changed considerably in the past two years.
Going in the face of the conventional wisdom, the DoJ asserts, presumably on information from Amazon, that:
From the time of its launch, Amazon's e-book distribution business has been consistently profitable, even when substantially discounting some newly released and bestselling titles.
I'm going to assume that Amazon isn't sneakily accounting Kindle hardware sales into its "e-book distribution business" and conclude that, even if Amazon did sell new releases and New York Times best-sellers at or slightly below the wholesale price it paid to publishers, it could still turn a profit overall by charging comfortably more than the wholesale cost on other books—the slightly older or more specialist titles that make up its immensely long tail. You can see this strategy at any physical bookshop.
The kick from Kindle hardware must have been a factor, but I wonder whether this would still be such a big deal if the wholesale-retail model were to return now. Remember that for the first two years of the Kindle Store, you could only read a Kindle book on an actual Kindle—unless you went to the trouble of decrypting and converting it to read on your computer or sideload onto another e-reader. In very late 2009 Amazon released its Kindle Reader for PC, and since then has provided its own apps for almost every major mobile and desktop operating system, as well as the Kindle Cloud Reader that lets you read your Kindle books on any browser.
As a result, there's no longer any guarantee that a loss on a Kindle title will be offset by any sale of Kindle hardware: instead, cheap Kindle books are just as likely to drive iPad sales (whereas you can't read an iBook on any non-Apple device without significant hackery). At any rate, Amazon's ability to subsidise e-books from hardware sales is no greater than Apple's or Barnes & Noble's. Amazon's expansion beyond the Kindle may well have been a response to the new agency arrangement, but it's hard to see them going back on it now.
The agency arrangements have certainly fostered new competitors to Amazon and levelled the field somewhat. But without retail price competition and the ability of retailers to experiment with new models, this is not a competitive system in any substantive sense—Scott Turow's "the government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition" is catchy but empty. The agency model, whether it resulted from a conspiracy or not, may have been a useful transitional arrangement in a fragile emerging market, but I don't think it's healthy in the long run. I want to see what happens next.


text: On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Stephen Tetley wrote: > On 23 December 2010 21:12, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tetley at gmail.com> wrote: >> I'd go with direct recursion for this one - the pattern of consumption >> and production that generates the answer doesn't seem to neatly match >> any of the standard recursion combinators (map, unfold, fold, >> mapAccum, ...) nor exotic ones (skipping streams c.f. the Stream >> fusion paper, apomorphisms, ...). > > Here's a synthesized functional that matches the needed behaviour. > > It takes from: > > a) apomorphism - has a final flush operation > b) skipping streams (the Stream fusion paper) - a skipping Next case, > though in this case there is no Done > c) unfoldMap - itself a synthetic combination of unfold and map, which > is unfolding against a list as well as state (the unfold equivalent of > mapAccumL). > > Unimaginatively I've called it "lessproductive" as it can produce less > than it consumes, though as it has no Done it must consume > everything... > > data Step st a = Yield a !st > | Next !st This could be seen as "type Step st a = (Maybe a, st)". I have thought about mapping from [Int] to [Maybe (Int, Int)] by mapAccumL, then compressing the result with catMaybes. However we need to append a final pair when the end of the list is reached, which risks a memory leak.


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A History of Whisky (Whiskey)
John-Bryan Hopkins
Though whisky's exact origins are unknown, its existence was first documented in Ireland in 1405. Whisky is a strictly regulated spirit worldwide with many classes and types. The typical unifying characteristics of the different classes and types are the fermentation of grains, distillation, and aging in wood.
Food Finds about Whisky (Whiskey)
- There are two legitimate spellings of whisky. One is 'whisky' – as spelled by Scotts and Canadians and the second is 'whiskey' – as spelled by the Irish and Americans.
- There is a dispute between the Irish and the Scotts, as to who were the first to make whisky.
- Scotch and Irish whisky are made the same way, with the exception of malting and distillation process.
- There are five basic classifications of whisky – Irish Whisky, Scotch Whisky, Bourbon, Canadian Whisky and American Whisky.
- The dark color of whisky comes from the wooden barrels in which it is aged. The wood expands and contracts with the change in temperature, making the movie in and out of the wood. The compounds from wood give whisky its dark color.
- The barrels made from American White Oak have been claimed to produce the tastiest whisky.
- Tennessee whiskey gets its distinct flavor and aroma characteristics from a unique process called "mellowing".
- There are more than 5000 types of Single Malt Whisky.
- Whisky can be called Whisky only when it matured for a minimum of 3 years in oak casks.
- Single Malt Whisky comes from a single distillery and a single grain. However, it is possible that it underwent maturing in multiple casks.
- Blended Whisky is called Blended Whisky because of the mixture of Grain Whisky and multiple Single Malt Whiskies.
- Around 90 percent of Single Malt Whisky comes from Scotland.
- A whisky stops maturing after it is bottled.
- A closed bottle of whisky can be kept for more than 100 years and it will still be good to drink.
- After opening, a half-full bottle of whisky will remain good for five years.
- Pure malt whisky is produced only from malted barley.
Categories: August Food Holidays, Encyclopedia


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France wants to change the rules for countries to join the EU club.
In a two-and-a-half page "non-paper" shared with other EU countries, along with an annex listing new stages, Paris calls for replacing the current accession process, which divides the EU acquis — the body of rights and obligations that includes the EU treaties, as well other rules and laws — into 35 chapters.
EU countries must agree unanimously to formally begin negotiations for accession. An aspiring member country then works with the European Commission to adjust its national laws to match the acquis, and once it has done so, an accession treaty is drawn up, and must be approved by the Council of the EU and ratified in each of the existing member countries.
Under the French proposal, there would be a new, seven-stage process, with "stringent conditions in order to effectively converge towards European norms and standards," plus a "reversibility" component, allowing the EU to abandon membership talks if a candidate country's government backslides away from the bloc's standards.
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"Once negotiations are opened, the integration process would no longer be based on simultaneous opening of a large number of thematic chapters, but on several successive stages, which would form coherent policy blocks," the paper states, adding: "The closing of negotiations corresponding to each stage completed by the country would open up the possibility to participate in EU programmes, to be involved in certain sectoral policies and, where appropriate, to benefit from certain targeted finance."
The proposal comes after France found itself at the center of a contentious, unwanted debate at the most recent European Council leaders' summit, during which President Emmanuel Macron prevailed in his push to block a proposal to open accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania.
France was not alone in opposing the start of such negotiations, but it was most forceful in the face of a large majority that supported going forward, especially in opening talks with North Macedonia. Part of the French argument was its insistence that the current membership process is flawed and is in need of an overhaul.
Some French officials have conceded that making that point without first coming forward with ideas for a new system was potentially a tactical mistake, opening up Macron to criticism.
But even with the new non-paper, there was some quick and forceful pushback in Brussels, where some EU diplomats and officials said it was little more than an attempt by Paris to justify its prior position, and that Macron's advisers seemed not to fully understand just how much support candidate countries already receive.
"All this can't mask the fact that the French proposals are not really about reforming the accession process but about putting an end to EU enlargement" — EU diplomat
One diplomat's interpretation was that France simply wants to block any further expansion of the EU.
"There will be the usual pompous framing by Paris," the diplomat said. "All this can't mask the fact that the French proposals are not really about reforming the accession process but about putting an end to EU enlargement. They are a poisoned chalice for countries like North Macedonia that have done much to fulfill strict EU conditions in order to start accession talks. If France joined the EU consensus on this, we could actually see more reforms and more progress on the ground than by engaging in lengthy discussions about methodology."
One French diplomatic official fired back, calling that reaction "a stupid comment" and urged other countries to refrain from such accusations.
"Let's be serious and try to be constructive because otherwise, we can accuse each other of various things," the diplomatic official said. "It's not only France, it's not a way to kill anything. It's a way to re-engage and the Commission should have done it. Fine we are doing it and we hope we can open the debate now. So nobody's forced to accept the paper or to say that it's perfect. It's to open the debate and trigger a discussion on this.
"If we wanted to be against the enlargement process, it would be very simple, we could just veto," the official added. "That's not what we are doing."
In the non-paper, France reaffirmed its support for the EU's overall approach to Western Balkan countries, including North Macedonia and Albania, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia, which the paper said "belong to Europe, by virtue of their history, culture and geography."
But the French paper says, "The profound political, economic and social transformations required for a future accession to the European Union continue to be too slow and the concrete benefits for citizens in candidate countries remain insufficient."
France has voiced total confidence in its position, but the Elysée has also seemed sensitive to accusations that it unfairly crushed the spirits of North Macedonia and Albania.
Macron met with North Macedonian President Stevo Pendarovski on the sidelines of the Paris Peace Forum last week and sought to clarify the French position. Pendarovski tweeted afterward that his country did not oppose a new system for EU membership. "We don't object to altered methodology for EU accession talks which makes for a more thorough accession process," he wrote.
But in a sign that the EU faces continued competition for influence in the Balkans, Pendarovski also used the Paris event to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
"Most importantly, coming with a French-only proposal is not the way to keep enlargement as a consensual matter" — EU official
An EU official said the paper "looks like it is written without full knowledge of what is already available to Western Balkans countries, and certainly with the agenda of slowing the process by front-loading difficult stuff, such as environment."
But the official said France's approach was not helpful. "Most importantly, coming with a French-only proposal is not the way to keep enlargement as a consensual matter," the official said.
The French diplomatic official said Paris had conferred with other capitals, including Berlin, The Hague and Copenhagen.
Denmark largely supported the French position during the European Council debate and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen will visit Paris on Monday for a working lunch with Macron, where the enlargement issue is certain to be discussed. EU ministers are also scheduled to revisit the issue at a General Affairs Council meeting on Tuesday.
The French official said the main goal of the paper was to jumpstart the discussion before Tuesday's meeting. "It's about having stages toward real integration and convergence, so that countries are starting to get involved politically, financially, in terms of policy and programs, step by step," the official said.
Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting.