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Today, Apple announced a bunch of enhancements to Siri and voice search. How does Siri UX compare with Android 4.0? What's just around the corner for Voice Search? Don't tell your phone or tablet anything else until you've read the article.
Is Your UI Causing Zero Search Results Pages?
Mobile Auto-Suggest on Steroids: Tap-Ahead Design Pattern
In contrast to desktop Web search, auto-suggest on mobile devices is subject to two additional limitations: typing avoidance and slower bandwidth. The new patent-pending design pattern, Tap-Ahead, uses continuous refinement to create an intuitive, authentically mobile auto-suggest solution. This helps dramatically reduce the amount of typing needed to enter queries, and utilizes slower mobile bandwidth in the most efficient manner. Using this novel design pattern, your customers can quickly access thousands of popular search term combinations by typing just a few initial characters.
Immersive Mobile E-Commerce Search Using Drop-Down Menus
Specialized drop-down menu are one of the ways of creating immersive experience in mobile e-commerce search UIs. A novel design pattern, status bar drop-down menu, allows 100% of the screen real estate to be dedicated to search results, while also providing convenient and intuitive access to navigation and filter functions.
Faceted Finding with Super-Powered Breadcrumbs
Designing Brand Landing Pages for Mobile Devices
People love to search by brand names. On the small screens of mobile devices, well-designed landing pages can provide a much better experience than keyword search results. This makes brand landing pages today's biggest sleeper opportunity for mobile and tablet ecommerce. But you have to learn to be completely ruthless with your features and content. Here's how.
Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II
In Part I of Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search, I looked at Four Corners, Modal Overlay, Watermark, and Full-Page Refinement Options design patterns, which maximize the mobile screen real estate. This column covers strategies for making people aware of the filtering options and methods of improving transitions between the various states of a search user interface.
Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part I
In my previous Search Matters column, Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunity, I discussed how mobile search user experiences differ from those on the Web. In this and my next column, I'll look specifically at the challenges and opportunities of mobile faceted search. This column covers design patterns for maximizing the real estate available for search results, while the next will cover strategies for making people aware of filtering options.
Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities
Thinking of porting your Web finding experience to iPhone, Android, or Windows Mobile? Just forget about the fact that these devices are basically full-featured computers with tiny screens. Designing a great mobile search experience requires thinking differently: In terms of turning limitations into opportunities.
Numeric Filters: Issues and Best Practices
Filters with numeric values remain among the most confusing in faceted search, because many sites have not been able to design usable numeric filters that people can use in an intuitive manner. In this column I cover how to show discrete numeric values, avoid overly constrained filter states, and display key inventory information, and introduce a novel pattern of histogram sliders.


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Free Hawaii has an interesting but I think pointless post up about the American annexation of Hawaii in 1898.
It reads, "The United States Congress twice rejected treaties proposing the annexation of Hawai`i. They opted to 'annex' Hawai`i by joint resolution. Being a domestic law, no resolution other than one ratifying a treaty has any effect on an international level. For instance, Congress cannot annex Russia without Russia's consent."
Texas and Hawaii were both annexed to the USA via Joint Resolutions of Congress. (See http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ref/abouttx/annexation/march1845.html and http://www.hookele.com/non-hawaiians/newlands.html). If the Hawaiian annexation was illegal, so then was the Texan annexation. Is Texas legally part of the USA? If so, then Hawaii is too.
If Texas is not legally part of the USA, then LBJ and George W. Bush were never legally President of America as they were not naturally born Americans according to the Constitution. President Obama is a poser too as he was born in Hawaii and is not legally the Prez.
If this Joint Resolution of Congress thing is a big deal, then I suppose we can expect Hawaiian and Texan independence proponents to file a case with the US Federal court system or the International Court of Justice very soon. If they don't, I can only assume they don't have a real case but their arguments are just legal sophistry and propaganda. If your argument about a Joint Resolution of Congress not being legal is full-proof, why not take it to court?
Blog of Dr. Miland Brown that features different aspects of world history. Not everything can be covered but sites dealing with any historical issue or topic are possible future posts. Also includes sites which discuss teaching history. Dr. Brown is an academic in North America.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Were Hawaii and Texas Legally Annexed to the United States?
Posted by M at 12:00 AM
Labels: American History, American Separatists, Hawaii, Oceania, Texas
1 comment:
Of course there will be no court case. The argument you are ranting about is weak and would lose in any legal case. The person who wrote this at the blog you linked to knows this too. However, the point of that Free Hawai'i blog is to broadcast their message, not necessarily to bring court cases. I am surprised you are giving them free publicity by linking to them and responding to their "case."
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subset: commoncrawl


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The initial process was fairly straight forward, adding culture, rennet, cutting curds, slightly heating, draining and light pressing. Adding a culture called Brevibacterium linens is the distinguishing difference to begin with.
Once it is in the cheesecave,every alternate day the cheese gets flipped and washed with a light brine solution. This I have to do for 2 to 6 weeks. Meanwhile the cheese will develop a yellow orange colour and the inside will get soft and pasty and very stinky I think.
I just hope I know when it is ready and that it hasn't gone off! So far so good.
I have also done a bit more foraging for more elderflowers in parks and along a disused railway line. I had the (I hope) brilliant idea that I could preserve any excess flowers in the freezer by vacuum packing them.I hope this prevents any discolouration so that they can be used later in the year to make the super easy Sparkling Elderflower of my last post.


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Survive a post-apocalyptic frontier as you build up your aresenal of weapons to battle the Highwaymen and their leaders, the Twins, in Far Cry New Dawn.
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Conquer with character in Apex Legends, a free-to-play Battle Royale shooter where legendary characters with powerful abilities team up to battle for fame and fortune on the fringes of the Frontier.
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KINGDOM HEARTS III tells the story of the power of friendship as Sora and his friends embark on a perilous adventure.
Catch a glimpse of Deacon's softer side as he reminisces about his lost love, Sarah, and their unlikely romance.


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The nominations for the Oscars (or the 79th annual Academy Awards if you're bing picky) have been announced:
Best Picture:
The Departed
Letters From Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen
Best Actor:
Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland)
Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond)
Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson)
Peter O'Toole (Venus)
Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness)
Best Actress:
Helen Mirren (The Queen)
Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal)
Penelope Cruz (Volver)
Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada)
Kate Winslet (Little Children)
Best Supporting Actor:
Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls)
Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine)
Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children)
Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond)
Mark Wahlberg (The Departed)
Best Supporting Actress:
Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)
Adriana Barraza (Babel)
Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal)
Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine)
Rinko Kikuchi (Babel)
Best Director:
Martin Scorsese (The Departed)
Clint Eastwood (Letters From Iwo Jima)
Stephen Frears (The Queen)
Paul Greengrass (United 93)
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel)
The Queen for best picture? Is that the same film we saw? The one with the bit with the stag that made us laugh out loud? The one that seemed to be all about the unrequited love that Blair felt for Liz? Best picture? The Academy really is senile isn't it?
We'll kick off our Oscar preview coverage tomorrow with a review of Blood Diamond followed by Venus on Thursday and then give The Queen a good kicking on Friday.


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Items filtered by date: 18 October 2017
ACC boosts third quarter cement sales as new plants come online 18 October 2017
India: ACC's cement sales rose by 18% year-on-year to 5.96Mt in the third quarter of 2017 from 5.07Mt in the same period of 2016 as its Jamul and Sindri plants have come online. Its sales volumes increased by 10% to 19.3Mt in the first nine months of the year. Net sales rose by 16.5% to US$1.46m in the first three quarters and its net profit after tax rose by 27% to US$110m.
Despite its positive result the cement producer warned against rising import costs from higher slag prices and fuel costs. Higher usage of imported and auctioned coal, caused by a limited availability of linkage coal, adversely affected fuel costs. However, the company said that it partly mitigated this through improved raw material mixtures and fuel mix optimisation.
Semen Indonesia suspends construction of Aceh plant 18 October 2017
Indonesia: Semen Indonesia Aceh has suspended construction of its Pidie cement plant in Aceh due to a land dispute. Local community leaders say they support the project but are calling for the disagreement to be resolved first to avoid problems later on, according to the Antara news agency. Locals are also waiting for environmental impact report requirements to be met. Previously, Semen Indonesia Aceh halted a plant construction project in Laweung until land issues were resolved.
Angolan government to tackle unfair competition in cement market 18 October 2017
Angola: President João Lourenço plans to submit a competition law to parliament to tackle imbalances in the cement market. He has decided to do this in response to rising cement prices following the shutdown of two plants, according to the Angola Press Agency. Lourenço made the comments at the opening meeting of the First Legislative Session of the Fourth Legislature of the National Assembly.
Peruvian cement production down so far in 2017 18 October 2017
Peru: Cement production fell by 3% year-on-year to 7.3Mt in the first nine months of 2017 from 7.5Mt in the same period in 2016. Data from the Association of Cement Producers (Asocem) shows that the third quarter of 2017 is the first quarter where production rose so far during the year. This was due to a 4.3% increase to 0.88Mt in September 2017 from 0.85Mt in September 2016.
Canadian cement industry meets with government 18 October 2017
Canada: Representatives from the Canadian cement and concrete industries have met with government ministers, members of parliament, senators and civil servants in Ottawa, Ontario as part of a two-day advocacy event.
"The cement and concrete industry is uniquely positioned to help all levels of government in Canada achieve their climate change priorities, while also ensuring best value for money invested," said Michael McSweeney, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Cement Association of Canada.
More than 60 industry delegates hailing from across the country and industries have gathered for the event. The delegation includes the CEOs of Canada's cement industry and representatives from the ready mixed concrete, insulated concrete forms, masonry, precast concrete and precast concrete pipe sectors. They hope to highlight the economic and lifecycle benefits of their products to legislators.
PPC workers strike at Slurry cement plant 18 October 2017
South Africa: Members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) members at PPC's Slurry cement plant in North West province have gone on strike over wages. The NUM gave the cement producer a notice to strike in mid-October 2017 and then workers started taking action on 17 October 2017. The union wants a pay rise on 12% and other benefits, but PPC has only offered 6%.


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Bruce hosted us at HOK this month (thanks, Bruce!). He had a great presentation on "BOB - BIM Outside the Box" and has graciously shared slides from his powerpoint presentation with us. You can download it here.
Bruce was delayed in starting his presentation due to enthusiastic discussion as people were arriving.
Bruce and Glen compared notes on the current state of Revit MEP. HOK now mandates that MEP work be performed in Revit. Interface Engineering has about 120 projects on Revit MEP. They agree that implementation has been difficult, though improving. The software is now adequate for the task, but workflow remains a major issue.
Data remains an ongoing challenge in BIM. Nancy notes that over the life of a project/building, it's difficult to maintain the integrity of the data. While designers don't want to be data-driven, Nancy points out that heavily-programmed buildings can benefit greatly by using data in a BIM design workflow. Nora notes that hospitals are in the forefront of this strategy because while the diagnostic and testing (D+T) components are different every time in terms of various metrics and adjacencies, patient rooms remain similar from project to project. Dave and Glen agree that hospitals benefit the most from evidence-based design because the owners are deeply involved in the design process, which is critical for its success.
Bruce began his presentation by identifying various aspects of implementing BIM and comparing the cost implications of each. While BIM software is not inexpensive, that direct cost is a small fraction of the overall costs, as shown in his pie chart above. Marla and Karen questioned the slice for coordination since coordination has always been the architect's responsibility, but Bruce and Dave agree that the effort for BIM coordination is significantly greater than what's traditionally been done by architects because it's handled in the earlier phases of the project rather than getting pushed off to the contractor.
The largest single cost of BIM is for the content. The elements of this are building the firm-specific content for templates, building the firm library, acquiring content as needed, and managing all that content. Bruce's presentation focused on acquisition of content: building, finding, and/or buying it.
Built content can be started from a template, or by modifying existing content. Intuition would assume that using existing content would be easier, but as Glen pointed out, between time spent searching, modifying, and reverse-engineering to fix defects, it's often faster and easier to build from scratch.
Free content can be found from a variety of sources:
- BIM box: In addition to the default content provided, Autodesk offers 30 additional regional libraries.
- Within the firm: project archives, firm library, local office library
- Community exchanges: Balda Architect, Beck Group, CADforum, Revit City, Revit Database, Revit Forum, TurboSquid, Woodwork Institute
- Commericial consolidators: ATS, Autodesk SEEK, ARCAT, ARCxl, Bimobject, BIM STOP, Bimstore, CADdetails, Design content, National BIM Library, POLANTIS, PRODUCTSPEC, SteelSelect, Sweets Network, Reed Construction, RevitFAMILIESonline, SMARTBIM
- Manufacturers: Bruce has identified over 1100 manufacturers providing BIM content, with more coming on board every day. He feels that manufacturers are supporting BIM much better/faster than they had CAD.
Buying content can be done from stores (Archvision, BD GROUP, Designconnected, ENGworks, FORMFONTS, Little Details Count, Revit Content, Revit Furniture, revitstore, RevitBay, revitcars, Symbol Machine, TurboSquid, Yellowbryk) or commissioned to be custom-built (andekan, LONDON INFOTECH, Pinnacle Infotech, REVIT FACTORY, Revit MEP Store, SumexDesign, Revit Content, TheModus).
Level of detail within a family is critical—it has to have enough information to be worthwhile, but too much detail blows up the size of the model and slows down the work. Bruce promoted three levels of detail within a family: simple cubes with schedules can serve for preliminary design; 2D symbols are usually sufficient for orthographic views; while more detailed 3D geometry can be reserved for where it's really necessary. Dan also suggests swapping out objects as necessary when rendering.
Bruce proposed that it's up to us to address the difficulties we face with content. Currently our efforts are redundant—all firms are addressing these topics independently. Instead we must ask for what we want, provide feedback, and contribute to an industry-wide solution. As a starting point, he solicited input from us on our greatest frustrations related to BIM content. Among those things most mentioned were time lost due to searching for content, content that's not appropriate for a model's needs, poorly-built content, and interruption to work flow.
Bruce identified the things we want:
- A massive library: all the content we need, including system objects, generic objects, and manufacturer-specific objects.
- Consistency: file names, type names, parameters, and parameter names. These standards should be established and maintained by industry groups, professional organizations, national and international standards groups, some kind of AECO Wiki, and all of us in the industry.
- High quality: adherence to standards and quality control, making sure all parameters flex properly.
- Findable: A searchable database or some other resource is necessary to make accessing the content from so many sources feasible. Search parameters need to include discipline, Revit category and library folder names, object name, author, LOD, standard followed, generic vs. specific, and a rating of the quality.
- Accessible: cloud-based, mobile, download-able, and insert-able
- Free or low-cost: all stakeholders should sponsor improvement: manufacturers to fund specific content; consolidators to fund generic content; stores to develop generic and non-component content; professional and trade organizations to develop standards for names and units; and content users to develop standards for display and function, and to provide input and feedback. Large AEC firms could also be drawn upon to build content.


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Drive-ins within 100 miles of Nineteen, KY
Open Drive-insHoliday Drive-in
646 N. State R. 161
Rockport, IN 47635
The Holiday Drive-in is Indiana's largest drive-in. It opened in 1955 as a single screen drive-in but added additional screens throughout the years u...more about Holiday Drive-in
Franklin Drive-in
6250 Nashville Road
Franklin, KY 42134
Established in the later years of America's drive-in boom in 1969, the Franklin Drive-in is one of the lucky survivors of them many Kentucky drive-ins...more about Franklin Drive-in
Macon Drive-in
3570 Scottsville Road
Lafayette, TN 37083
The Macon Drive-in is Tennessee's second oldest continuously operated drive-in. It is very rural tucked away just south of the Kentucky state line. ...more about Macon Drive-in
Skyline Drive-in
5600 Hodgenville Rd
Greensburg, KY 42743
The Skyline Drive-in is a single screen drive-in movie theater that was opened in 1956. Like many drive-ins, it closed in the late 1980's but found n...more about Skyline Drive-in
Calvert Drive-in
111 Drive in Ln
Calvert City, KY 42029
The Calvert Drive-in opened during the early days of America's drive-in boom back in 1953. It has been opened ever since. It is a single screen thea...more about Calvert Drive-in
Georgetown Drive-in
8200 State Road 64
Georgetown, IN 47122
Originally opened as a single screen drive-in theater in 1951, the Georgetown Drive-in is now a two screener showing double features on both screens (...more about Georgetown Drive-in
Stardust Drive-in Theatre
310 Purple Tiger Dr
Watertown, TN 37184
Tennessee's most recent contribution to America's drive-in renaissance is the newly opened (2003 which is new for drive-ins) Stardust Drive-in Theatre...more about Stardust Drive-in Theatre
Mitchell, IN 47446
The Holiday Drive-in Theater has been around since 1962. The Holiday Drive-in is a single screen venue showing double features seasonally. The Holida...more about Holiday Drive-in
Birdsong Drive-in
907 Shiloh Church Road
Camden, TN 38320
The Birdsong is a great little drive-in that was opened in 2006. It is on the small side with a single screen and a capacity for about 200 cars. Bu...more about Birdsong Drive-in
Recently Closed Drive-insTri-City Drive-in
Beaver Dam, KY 42320
The Tri-City Drive-in in Beaver Dam is another recent victim of the "Go Digital or Go Dark" epidemic facing the drive-in community. The drive-in just...more about Tri-City Drive-in
Starlite Drive-in
2534 Highway 60 E
Henderson, KY 42420
Irvington Drive-in
Irvington, KY 40146
The Irvington Drive-in was not killed by digital, but a tornado. After the tornado destroyed the screen in 2002, the owners decided not to rebuild it...more about Irvington Drive-in
Knox Drive-in Theater
514 West Vine Street
Radcliff, KY 40160
Sumner Drive-in
1401 Nashville Pike
Gallatin, TN 37066
Sky View Drive-in
1500 Celina Road
Tompkinsville, KY 42167
The Sky View Drive-in was opened in 1953 with a capacity for 300 cars. It remained open seasonally March thru October. It was sold in 2014 and close...more about Sky View Drive-in
Kenwood Drive-in
7001 Southside Drive
Louisville, KY 40214
Until its recent closure in 2009, the Kenwood Drive-in was a lot of things. It was Louisville's only remaining drive-in. It was one of the largest d...more about Kenwood Drive-in
Paoli Drive-in
860 E. US Highway 150
Paoli, IN 47454
Preston Drive-in
6705 Preston Highway
Louisville, KY 40219
Broadway Drive-in
3020 Highway 70 East
Dickson City, TN 37055
New Albany Drive-in
2239 State Street
New Albany, IN 47150
The New Albany Drive-in was closed and demolished in around 1997 to make room for a Home Depot. What made this such an awesome drive-in was that it w...more about New Albany Drive-in
Valley Drive-in Theatre
Waverly, TN 37185
It appears the Valley Drive-in was recently closed in 2015. We are not certain of its future.more about Valley Drive-in Theatre


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Tuesday, 14 January 2014
Fabric Tuesday
8 comments:
I haven't seen that range before. Beautiful.ReplyDelete
Really pretty fabrics!ReplyDelete
Nice looking fabric! I've just been catching up with your blog - you were really busy last year, weren't you? Well done on all the lovely makes!ReplyDelete
Oooh yummy fabric. I will support all the fabric "browsing" you want to do. I promise I'm not enabling!!ReplyDelete
E xx
That handmade one is SO adorable!!! I haven't seen that anywhere. I would just pet it for a while too. ;)ReplyDelete
Nice bundle xReplyDelete
Fabby fabrics - I'd be stroking them too! What WILL you make out of them?ReplyDelete
Lovely fabric! By the way I have been sending you emails and getting no reply - are you getting them Sarah? I am keen to get a hotel room booked for July!ReplyDelete
Hello, thank you so much for taking the time to comment. I love to hear from you and will reply soon!


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And I'm sure it won't be the last.
She and I were at Kroger yesterday. We were there for three things ~ bottled water, gatorades and coffee. And we were on a timeline. We had two other stops to make before we could come home and get her ready for a birthday party. I bee-lined my way to the water aisle, throwing in a case as we high-tailed it to the Gatorade aisle and put that case in the cart. The final stop was the next aisle over for coffee. Mission accomplished.
While we were running through Kroger, gathering our three things, I heard the announcement over the loud speaker "all available help please report to the front lanes to help bag. All available help please report to the front lanes."
Awwww...shit! I knew what that meant. Lanes were backed up and that meant my timing was gonna be thrown off a little. Since I only had three items I knew I had more options...self-checkout or express.
In situations like these, I usually chose the self-checkout but for some odd reason they had several people waiting in line so I chose the shortest of the express lanes. What I failed to take into account was that the woman in front of me clearly couldn't read the signs at all of the express lanes "About 15 items, please," is what the signage says. But by the time I realized she had about 30 items, it was too late. I had been standing there for a couple of minutes and it would have meant more precious minutes wasted ~ waiting at another register.
So I waited. I waited for the checker to bag the lady's items. I waited for the lady to finish her conversation on her cell phone. I waited for the lady with 30 items in the express lane to finish paying for her groceries. And I waited for the lady who had a shopping cart full of groceries, in the express lane, to walk away before my inside voice came out.
"I only brought three items into the express lane...not that I'm pointing fingers at anyone." The checker laughed and said "Thank you!" And Claire, God love her, actually muttered "Moooooommmm" under her breath, turned beet red and put her head down. I finished paying for our things and we walked out of the store together.
As we were walking to the car, I asked the question..."Did I embarrass you back there?" And I heard the answer I've been dreading..."Yes, you did." Well, shit....not really what I wanted to hear, because I thought I was a little funny (and a lot sarcastic) but at least Claire was honest with her answer. I'm sure I'll embarrass her more times than I'll be able to shake a stick at. Sometimes I'm not so good at keeping those damn inside voices inside. So Claire will have to learn to live with the mortification, just like I'm going to have to learn to live with the fact that, for the first time, I've crossed over the line and I am now fully capable of embarrassing Claire.
Oh, for the love of my children....


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This archive contains the FREE climate-economy model, as documented in my thesis. Continue reading "FREE"
Category: Data/calibration
Bathtub Statistics sandbox
See my related blog posts:
The model uses macros for pink noise generation and second-order trend smoothing, so it requires Vensim Pro or DSS or the free Model Reader.
Social network valuation with logistic models
This is a logistic growth model for Facebook's user base, with a very simple financial projection attached. It's inspired by:
Quis pendit ipsa pretia: facebook valuation and diagnostic of a bubble based on nonlinear demographic dynamics
Peter Cauwels, Didier Sornette
We present a novel methodology to determine the fundamental value of firms in the social-networking sector based on two ingredients: (i) revenues and profits are inherently linked to its user basis through a direct channel that has no equivalent in other sectors; (ii) the growth of the number of users can be calibrated with standard logistic growth models and allows for reliable extrapolations of the size of the business at long time horizons. We illustrate the methodology with a detailed analysis of facebook, one of the biggest of the social-media giants. There is a clear signature of a change of regime that occurred in 2010 on the growth of the number of users, from a pure exponential behavior (a paradigm for unlimited growth) to a logistic function with asymptotic plateau (a paradigm for growth in competition). We consider three different scenarios, a base case, a high growth and an extreme growth scenario. Using a discount factor of 5%, a profit margin of 29% and 3.5 USD of revenues per user per year yields a value of facebook of 15.3 billion USD in the base case scenario, 20.2 billion USD in the high growth scenario and 32.9 billion USD in the extreme growth scenario. According to our methodology, this would imply that facebook would need to increase its profit per user before the IPO by a factor of 3 to 6 in the base case scenario, 2.5 to 5 in the high growth scenario and 1.5 to 3 in the extreme growth scenario in order to meet the current, widespread, high expectations. …
This is not an exact replication of the model (though you can plug in the parameters from C&S' paper to replicate their results). I used slightly different estimation methods, a generalization of the logistic (for saturation exponent <> 1), and variable revenues and interest rates in the projections (also optional).
This is a good illustration of how calibration payoffs work. The payoff in this model is actually a policy payoff, because the weighted sum-squared-error is calculated explicitly in the model. That makes it possible to generate Monte Carlo samples and filter them by SSE, and also makes it easier to estimate the scale and variation in the standard error of user base reports.
The model is connected to input data in a spreadsheet. Most is drawn from the paper, but I updated users and revenues with the latest estimates I could find.
A command script replicates optimization runs that fit the model to data for various values of the user carrying capacity K.
Note that there are two views, one for users, and one for financial projections.
See my accompanying blog post for some reflections on the outcome.
This model requires Vensim DSS, Pro, or the Model Reader. facebook 3.vpm or facebook3.zip (The .zip is probably easier if you have DSS or Pro and want to work with the supplementary control files.)
Update: I've added another set of models for Groupon:
groupon 1.vpm, groupon 2.vpm and groupon.zip groupon3.zip
See my latest blog post for details.
Theil Statistics
Source: Created by Rogelio Oliva, 1995; Updated by Tom Fiddaman, 2009 2011 – slight improvement to numerical robustness.
See Sterman, J. D. 1984. Appropriate Summary Statistics for Evaluating the Historical Fit of System Dynamics Models. Dynamica 10 (2): 51-66.
Units balance: Yes
Format: Vensim; requires an advanced version
D-4584 Theil Statistics documentation– D-memo documentation
Theil_2011.mdl – Theil Statistics model
Theil_2011.vpm – published binary version; includes data.vdf so it'll run right out of the box
Dummy_data.mdl – dummy data generator creating input to Theil model
Sea Level Rise
Citations: Rahmstorf 2007, "A semi-empirical approach to projecting future sea level rise." Science 315. Grinsted, Moore & Jevrejeva 2009. "Reconstructing sea level from paleo and projected temperatures 200 to 2100 AD." Climate Dynamics [1]
Source: Replicated by Tom Fiddaman based on an earlier replication of Rahmstorf provided by John Sterman
Units balance: Yes
Format: Vensim; requires Model Reader or an advanced version
Notes: See discussion at metasd.
Grinsted_v3b – first model; default calibration replicates Rahmstorf, and optimization is set up to adjust constant terms to fit Rahmstorf slope to data
Grinsted_v3c – second model; updated data and calibration, as in Part III
Grinsted_v3c-k2 – third model; set up for Kalman filtering, as in Part V


text: The small town of Trinidad, Colorado has been deemed the sex-change capital of the United States, thanks to one transgender doctor's private practice and the Rocky Mountain town's tolerant community. In 2003, Dr. Marci Bowers (formerly Mark Bowers) took over the nation's first private practice for gender reassignment (commonly known as a sex-change) in Trinidad and became an important part of the economic stimulus of the small mountain community, which is visited by some 300 people a year looking for surgical reassignment. For the most part, the town has been welcoming of the business that Dr. Bowers' private practice brings to the town and some townspeople are even proud of their sex-changing doctor. Isn't it nice to see a community so tolerant of other people's lifestyle choices? That's one "small town value" we'd like to see certain politicians adopt. [CBS]


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Mon, Mar 15, 2010 | By Hugh Hewitt
The Four Biggest Democratic Targets In The Fall
House Democratic Whip James Clyburn has identified four Democrats who voted against Obamacare in the fall who are preparing to vote for it now:
Clyburn took the unusual step of naming four former Democratic opponents who he's hopeful are preparing to vote for the reform legislation: Reps. Brian Baird of Washington state, Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania, Bart Gordon of Tennessee and John Boccieri of Ohio.
"That's four people right there who voted no before," Clyburn said. "Why don't we talk about them? Everyone's talking about who we might lose."
Use the House switchboard at 202-225-3121 to tell these four what you think of their decision to turn their backs on voters.


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Leprosy is a chronic granulomatous infectious disease and is still endemic in many parts of the world. It causes disabilities which are the consequence of nerve damage. This damage is in most cases the result of immunological reactions.
To investigate the differences between a type 1 leprosy (reversal) reaction and relapse on using histopathology.
The histopathological changes in 167 biopsies from 66 leprosy patients were studied. The patients were selected when their sequential biopsies demonstrated either different patterns or maintained the same pattern of granulomatous reaction over more than two years during or after the treatment of leprosy.
In 57 of the patients studied, a reactivation was seen which coincided with a decrease in the bacteriological index (BI), suggesting that this reactivation (reversal reaction or type 1 leprosy reaction) coincides with an effective capacity for bacteriological clearance. In nine patients, an increase of the bacteriologic index (IB) or persistence of solid bacilli occurred during the reactivation, indicating proliferative activity, suggestive of a relapse. The histopathological aspects of the granulomas were similar in both groups.
Bacterioscopy provided the only means to differentiate a reversal reaction from a relapse in patients with granulomatous reactivation. The type 1 leprosy reaction may be considered as a part effective immune reconstitution (reversal, upgrading reaction) or as a mere hypersensitivity reaction (downgrading reaction) in a relapse.
Author Summary
Leprosy is a serious infectious disease whose treatment still poses some challenges. Patients are usually treated with a combination of antimicrobial drugs called multidrug therapy. Although this treatment is effective against Mycobacterium leprae, the bacillus that causes leprosy, patients may develop severe inflammatory reactions during treatment. These reactions may be either attributed to an improvement in the immunological reactivity of the patient along with the treatment, or to relapse of the disease due to the proliferation of remaining bacilli. In certain patients these two conditions may be difficult to differentiate. The present study addresses the histopathology picture of and the M. leprae bacilli in sequential biopsies taken from lesions of patients who presented such reactions aiming to improve the differentiation of the two conditions. This is important because these reactions are one of the major causes of the disabilities of the patients with leprosy, and should be treated early and appropriately. Our results show that the histopathology picture alone is not sufficient, and that bacilli's counting is necessary.
Citation: Trindade MAB, Benard G, Ura S, Ghidella CC, Avelleira JCR, Vianna FR, et al. (2010) Granulomatous Reactivation during the Course of a Leprosy Infection: Reaction or Relapse. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 4(12): e921. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0000921
Editor: Richard O. Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) School of Medical Sciences, Ghana
Received: April 5, 2010; Accepted: November 18, 2010; Published: December 21, 2010
Copyright: © 2010 Trindade et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: MABT was a recipient of a fellowship of Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Capes, Brazil. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae and is still endemic in many parts of the world. Circa 250 000 new cases were reported in 2009 [1]. It affects nerves and skin, may cause deformities and may evolve with acute exacerbations. The disease is the result of a granulomatous reaction to bacilli living inside phagocytes; the host therefore depends on cell mediated immunity for bacterial elimination. This response varies in different hosts and therefore gives rise to a clinical spectrum. Two clinical, histopathological and bacteriological stable poles are defined within the spectrum. The pole with high cell mediated immune reactivity to the bacillus is the tuberculoid (TT) pole while the opposite pole with a predominant humoral immune response is the lepromatous (LL) pole. Between these poles, intermediate forms are found; these are immunologically unstable and are called borderline (B): borderline-tuberculoid (BT), borderline-borderline (BB) and borderline-lepromatous (BL) leprosy [2]. A form that can't yet be classified is the indeterminate form (I) [3].
Borderline patients have partial resistance to the bacillus and during the natural course of the disease some bacilli may multiply and induce morphological changes in the granulomatous response. In these cases the granulomas become less compact due to the presence of oedema, with fewer, more dispersed epithelioid cells and infiltrating histiocytes. Jopling referred to this as a downgrading reaction (BB to BL); it was previously described by de Souza, when no treatment was available [4], [5]. It may also occur in borderline patients with irregular treatment or drug resistance, who then move in the leprosy spectrum to the lepromatous pole. The inhibition of the cellular immune response could be due to cell wall antigens such as phenolic glycolipid and/or lipoarabinomanam released by proliferating bacilli [6], [7]. Patients with this evolution (BL to LL) have been classified by Ridley as having the sub-polar lepromatous leprosy (LLsp) [8]. As M leprae has a very low replication rate which usually results in incubation time of at least 3 to 7 years, the disease may develop with discrete symptoms; the diagnosis is delayed until clinical manifestations of the downgrading appear. With specific treatment, the bacilli are destroyed and fragmented. However, clearance of the antigens and resolution of the skin lesions occur at a rate that depends largely on the immune resistance of the patient [4], [8], [9].
In this regard, there are borderline patients who during treatment show a clinical reactivation of old lesions or develop new skin lesions with erythema and oedema, suggestive of an upgrading reaction. These lesions tend to regress after a few weeks or months, sometimes even without treatment. However, in many cases biopsies of these lesions still show fragmented bacilli inside nerves, vessels or erector pill muscles or in vacuoles of activated macrophages, which suggests that a downgrading process took place before the upgrading reaction and shift to the tuberculoid pole [9]. The mechanisms underlying such reactions are not clear; it appears that the presence of dead and fragmented bacilli would lead to an improvement of the cell mediated immune response. Although they have originally been described in patients under treatment, they may also occur before or after the treatment, suggesting that they belong to the normal course of a leprosy infection [4], [8], [9], [10].
For better understanding the histopathology of these reactions, effort was made to classify the acute granulomatous tuberculoid reaction found in lesional biopsies of leprosy patients as either a reversal reaction (type 1 reaction or upgrading) or a relapse (with downgrading). We thus hypothesized that a relapse would be defined when the granulomatous reaction was accompanied by an increase or persistence in the bacilloscopy index (BI). On the other hand, a reversal reaction would be defined when the granulomatous reaction was accompanied either by a fast decrease in the BI. For this purpose we analyzed the histopathological changes in patients who show a granulomatous reactivation during or after treatment. Patients with suspected histopathologically reversal reaction and relapse are included, in order to examine the differences between these two states. Relapse has become rare after the introduction of MDT (multidrug-therapy); therefore this study analyzes patients registered between 1987 and 1994, when MDT in Brazil was restricted to a research institution [11].
Materials and Methods
In this study the leprosy patients included presented with at least one histopathological examination indicating reactivation, determined either by a tuberculoid granulomatous infiltration with a change of classification or by a granulomatous infiltration that persisted for more than two years either during or after treatment. All biopsies were analyzed at the Lauro of Souza Lima Institute (ILSL), SES-SP, Brazil, between 1987 and 1994. Data concerning clinical history were obtained from patients' records from the different centers: 26 from ILSL (Bauru-SP), 16 from the State Institute for Sanitary Dermatology (Curupaiti, RJ) and 24 from the State Center of Dermatology (Rondonópolis, MT). All three sites were referral centers for leprosy patients and followed the guidelines of the Brazilian Program of Leprosy. A total of 179 histopathological examinations from 66 patients were studied: all patients were more than 18 years old, 39 were male, 27 were female. The biopsies were done at the initiation of the treatment and whenever the clinicians suspected of a reaction, which was clinically defined by worsening of the previous lesions or identifying new lesions. Twelve biopsies were excluded because they showed a non-specific inflammatory reaction or no bacilli. All biopsies were identified with a code and processed and analyzed at one center (ILSL, Bauru) by the same pathologists (RNF and MABT), who were not aware of the clinical data at that moment.
The Committee for Ethical Research of the Escola Paulista de Medicina, Universidade Federal de São Paulo approved this study. Informed consent was not necessary because the study was retrospective and no personal identifiers were used.
The Ridley & Jopling histopathological classification was used [2]. The method used for BI determination was counting the bacilli per field according to the criteria established by Ridley & Hilson (1967) [12], using Fite-Faraco staining. This was done in oil immersion, 600× magnification, by examining 25–100 fields, and using a logarithmic scale to score the numbers of bacilli, ranging from 0 to 6. All slides were also stained with haematoxylin-eosin (HE) for histopathology analysis. Granulomatous reactions demonstrating signs of acute inflammation (congestion, oedema, deposit of fibrin, etc.) were classified as Rc (reactional) [8]. Patients with an initial histopathological classification of LL whose later biopsies demonstrated a borderline histopathological picture, were reclassified as LLsp. Patients who histopathologically moved from a TT pattern to BT pattern were then classified as BT. Since a single biopsy may not be sufficient to classify a patient, the definitive classification took the clinical changes through time into account. The TT pole is stable; it is not expected to show any change in clinical, histopathological, and bacteriological examinations. BT patients showed a higher number of skin and nerve lesions than TT patients and the bacterioscopy was usually positive. The bacterioscopy was graded using Ridley's morphological (MI) and bacteriological (BI) indices [12].
In table 1 the histological patterns of the 66 patients who showed granulomatous reactivation during or after the treatment of leprosy, are recorded, grouped by the diagnosis made at first biopsy: (a) 12 patients were classified as Indeterminate (I); in 11 the histopathology changed to TT or BTRc, only one changed to BB; (b) of the 9 patients classified TT and TRc, 5 continued to be TT, 2 TRc became TT and 2 TT became TRc; (c) of the 17 BT and BTRc patients, 15 remained as BT or BTRc and 2 BT moved down to BB; (d) all 10 patients classified as BB and BBRc became BT or BTRc; (e) of the 10 BL and 8 LLsp patients, 7 BL became BT or BTRc, 3BL became BB or BBRc, while 4 LLsp became BB or BBRc and 4 LLsp became BT or BTRc.
In table 2 the BI of the 66 patients are shown according to the results of the first biopsy: (a) of the 9 patients with a negative BI on the first biopsy, 6 showed a positive BI between 1+ and 4+ on the biopsy taken at the time of reactivation; (b) of the 13 patients with a BI of 1+ on the first biopsy, 7 showed a BI between 1+ and 5+ on the reactivation biopsy; (c) of the 18 patients with a BI of 2+ or 3+ on the first biopsy, 7 showed a BI of 1+ or 2+ on reactivation; (d) of the 26 patients with a BI of 4+, 5+ or 6+ on the first biopsy, 25 showed a BI of 1+ to 5+ on reactivation. Of the other 21 patients, 18 moved to bacterioscopy negative and 3 remained bacterioscopy negative.
Of the 31 patients who had a histopathology showing features of an acute inflammation (Rc), 9 were patients without treatment while 22 patients were on or had already finished treatment; in all cases, the patients had histological patterns ranging from TRc to BBRc, predominating those with BTRc (data not shown).
When the patients were analyzed according to the treatment modality, 9 patients who were treated with dapsone or another monotherapy, but none of the 57 patients who received the WHO MDT regimen, showed an increase in or persistence of their bacilli or the bacterioscopy became positive during the reaction (data not shown).
This study analyzes the histopathological changes of a subset of leprosy patients who showed either a different histopathological pattern on subsequent biopsies or maintained the same pattern of granulomatous infiltration for two years or longer, during or after the treatment of leprosy. They were considered to have a granulomatous reactivation, which includes both reversal reactions and relapses.
The patients who were classified as indeterminate (I) on the first biopsy developed granulomatous reactions that were classified as TT or BT. This occurred regardless of the treatment regimen, with the exception of one patient whose initial biopsy showed a positive bacterioscopy with a very mild inflammatory infiltrate, who subsequently developed BB- leprosy. This suggests that in the more resistant individuals treatment does not necessarily modify the natural course of the disease. Alternatively it may be suggested that the bacteriostatic/cidal action of the drugs would lead to bacilli fragmentation and enhanced antigen exposure, which in turn induced a granulomatous reaction. Analysis of the patients that presented with histopathological acute reactional patterns during treatment showed that the granulomatous reactivations occurred earlier and more frequently among those who had received rifampicin. This is probably a consequence of the rapid bactericidal activity of the drug [13]. This granulomatous reactional (Rc) aspect was also found, albeit less frequently, in the initial biopsy of some patients before treatment; in these cases it was considered to be the result of changes in the immune status of the patients, due to as yet unknown host factors [4], [8], [14], [15].
Patients who at the first biopsy were classified as borderline subsequently showed different histopathological patterns. During the reactivation resulting in granulomatous infiltrations, in some patients the patterns moved towards the tuberculoid pole of the leprosy spectrum, thus presenting an upgrading or reversal reaction. This was more evident in patients initially classified as subpolar lepromatous or borderline lepromatous. Patients with these changes may have gone through a downgrading before treatment, as previously suggested [16]. These reactivations do not necessarily represent a return to the initial situation, because only two histopathological patterns of reactivation were observed (BT and BB); there was no granulomatous reactivation with a BL pattern.
At the tuberculoid pole, some patients showed a reversal reaction while maintaining the same histological presentation, especially the patients classified as BTRc. This was previously reported by Souza Lima & Souza Campos, before the advent of sulphone treatment [5]. Following the start of dapsone treatment it was reported by Opromolla, who suggested that it was caused by episodes of bacterial proliferation (presumably of persisting bacteria) in resistant individuals [17].
In the majority of the patients studied, the episodes of granulomatous reactivation coincided with a decrease in the bacteriological index, suggesting that this reactivation occurs parallel to an effective capacity for bacterial clearance. In contrast, in nine patients there was an increase in the BI during the reactivation episodes (≥2+ relative to the previous BI) or appearance or continuous presence of solid bacilli, indicating bacilli replication [18]–[20]. These reactivations are considered to represent a relapse or a downgrading reaction, probably due to bacteriological resistance or inadequate treatment. These patients had all been treated previously with a single drug regimen; in two of these patients, a change to a MDT regimen resulted in effective reduction in BI in the reactivations/reactions biopsy.
In general the reversal reactions showed a more intense histopathological pattern: more granulomatous with a clearer tuberculoid aspect, more epitheloid cells, usually more grouped than before treatment, suggesting that an active immune reconstitution is taking place. This has been demonstrated in studies showing a more tuberculoid pattern with signs of increased immunological activity with a Th1 response in skin and/or nerves in patients with a reversal or type 1 leprosy reaction when those patients were compared with patients clinically not in reaction. These studies showed enhanced in situ staining for TNF and other pro-inflammatory cytokines such as IFN-γ and IL-12 and for the enzyme nitric oxide synthase in reactional lesions [21], [22].
The same pattern of histopathological changes occurs in patients with AIDS coinfected with M. leprae when they start on highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). This is considered an immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS). This occurs in some coinfected patients, in whom, due to the AIDS-associated cellular immunesuppression, leprosy remains a latent infection and clinically manifests as type 1 reaction after immune restoration is induced with HAART [23]–[29]. The reactions that appear after the start of leprosy treatment, specially MDT, may represent a similar immune restoration phenomenon [13], [14], [30]. In these cases the bacilli are destroyed by the granulomatous reactivation during the reactional episodes (reversal or type 1 reaction). This is illustrated in the present study by the 57 patients who where on MDT (or in a few cases with an alternative treatment containing rifampicine, the only mycobactericidal drug) and evolved with granulomatous reactional episodes and decrease in the BI [30], [31].
In patients on MDT, episodes of bacillary proliferation of persistent bacilli would be rare and possibly controlled by a similar granulomatous reaction. However, occasionally an increased bacillary load or decreased immune resistance may occur and resemble a relapse. This was observed in patients who had received sulphone mono-therapy exclusively over a long period of time. In these patients, persistent bacilli and/or drug-resistance may give rise to a new episode of bacillary proliferation during or after the treatment; subsequently the host fosters a new granulomatous reaction in a relapse. The granulomatous histopathology of relapses studied here were not different from the histopathology of downgrading type I reactions described by Jopling [4].
Our hypothesis is that the granulomatous reactivations, both the up- and downgrading reactions, can be triggered by live bacilli that multiply. However, in upgrading reaction the granulomatous immune response is effective, leading to destruction of the bacilli and reduction of the BI. In the downgrading reaction, the granulomatous reaction is not as efficient in the control of bacilli multiplication and an increase in the BI can be more easily detected. Thus, the histopathological patterns of granulomatous reactivations are similar and differentiation between reversal and relapses type 1 reactions, are only possible when an increase in BI is seen.
We would like to thank Diltor WA Opromolla (in memorium), Maurício MA Alchorne, Maria M. Escuder and Pranab K Das for their comments and suggestions, and Mary Wheeler for reviewing the English usage. This work is part of the PhD thesis of MABT presented at the Dermatology Department of the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil as a fellowship from Capes, Brazil.
Author Contributions
Conceived and designed the experiments: MABT RNF. Performed the experiments: MABT RNF. Analyzed the data: MABT GB BN RNF. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MABT SU CCG JCRA FRV ABM RNF. Wrote the paper: MABT GB BN RNF.
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Trindade MAB (1996) Evolução histológica de reativações da hanseníase durante ou após o tratamento. 63 p. http://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/regional/resources/lil-204390 accessed on 27/03/2010.
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Jet is 44 months, Dude is 7 years old, & Spudder is 5 years old
We did some art experimenting today that evolved into 3 different art projects for my 3 different students. I was trying to find a way to have them all involved and the pictures above show my proud fellas with the resulting projects.
We started off with a little bit of reading in our Polar Lands book and decided to make snowflakes as described in the book. I knew we'd need a little bit heavier than normal paper for the extension projects I wanted to do, so we went with fingerpaint paper, but later switched to cardstock for Spudder's project. You'll see why later.
One thing we learned from the book was that all snowflakes are actually 6 sided. This was news to me, and necessitated a different method of paper folding than I was familiar with. Instead of folding a square into 1/8ths, I traced a dinner plate to get a large circle, cut these out for everyone and folded them into 1/6ths. I found the easiest way to do the folding to be to fold the circle in half, bend (but don't fold) it in half again and just put the smallest crimp in the top edge (so the center point is marked) and then fold the 1/2 into 1/3s. Despite my wordy description, it was actually really easy.
Each of the boys cut triangles or other shapes into the edges of their snowflakes, being careful not to cut all the way across. Jet was a little unsure of himself at first, but after showing him how easy it was to cut two intersecting lines, he took off cutting triangles.
After the snowflake unfolding excitement, Jet continued with his part of the project by turning his snowflake into a stencil for some blue paint. A paint roller or sponge pouncer probably would have been ideal for this project, but we didn't have either, so I just reminded him to dab with his paintbrush instead of smearing. I also didn't bother to tape the snowflake down. I just held it and got my hands messy. The M&D paint we used washes up pretty well.
For Spudder's snowflake we did something a little different. I wanted to let him use his snowflake to make prints. We tried using the snowflake he'd cut out of fingerpaint paper first, but it was just too big and delicate after multiple attempts, so he went back and cut a smaller snowflake out of cardstock, and that worked better.
After spreading a thick layer of paint on his snowflake while it was laying on a scratch piece of paper, he turned it over, positioned it on his project page, covered it with a paper towel, and applied a little pressure.
Then carefully peeled the snowflake back to reveal his print. I tried to encourage him to overlap his prints, but he wouldn't have any of that.
(This could also be a fun start to a winter scene project.)
(This could also be a fun start to a winter scene project.)
Dude did go ahead and make the snowflakes with his brothers, but I really had a different project intended for him. His project was from the book, The Usborne Art Treasury, a wonderful book that combines artist studies with simple art projects. This particular project was inspired by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.
We didn't do the project quite like the book said, but we were close. To make his print Dude used a pencil to etch a Hokusai inspired drawing into a piece of Styrofoam that I cut from a disposable food tray. He then used blue paint to make several prints from his etching. Dude enjoyed this immensely and immediately suggested we make 30 prints! We settled on 6 instead.
His favorite!
You can find biographical info on Hokusai, a nice size picture of one of his most famous prints, the full details of this project as well as many more in The Usborne Art Treasury. Dude used it as well as the Children's Book of Art to put together a short presentation on Katsushika Hokusai for his homeschool co-op class.
Here's a link to an animated documentary about Hokusai on YouTube that you might also find helpful:
More book suggestions for an artist study:
More book suggestions on snowflakes:
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Tree Valley Academy & Tot School @ 1+1+1=1


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Video by UNHCR: There are 1.5 million people in Manhattan. Would you notice if they disappeared?
Learn more at http://rfg.ee/FZodJ
Video by UNHCR: There are 1.5 million people in Manhattan. Would you notice if they disappeared?
Learn more at http://rfg.ee/FZodJ
The aim was clear and specific: to buy some equipment for drilling and running a water well in the town of Al Atareb in the Aleppo province in collaboration with the Local Revolutionary Council.
Like other cities, Al Atareb town was subjected to shelling by the Syrian regime. Shelling with all kinds of weapons including artillery and warplanes has severely damaged the town's water supply network leading to a complete cutoff of water supplies to the town except for a few areas that were not shelled; also the water tanks were hit by bullets and are no longer able to hold water.
The town has a population of 28.693 people. The number of displaced people reached 8 – 10 thousand after the Syrian regime attacked the northern areas of the Aleppo province as well as the northern areas of Hama province.
Eighty five percent of Atareb's population gets water two or three days per week. Atareb's water supply is divided in three parts: water supplies arrive in the southern area for three days, in its northern area for three days and in the higher area for one day. Three days are not enough to meet the people's need for water.
(1 U.S. dollar = 200 Syrian pounds on 20/06/2013)
The cost of a new water well project is between 7 and 8 million Syrian pounds ($35,000 – $40,000) as the prices are rising, the rest of support to the project can be in the form of active work or through other supporters.
The new water well is drilled in a high area in order to improve the water situation in the town.
The Local Revolutionary Council of Al Atareb received the amount of $ 8100 which has been spent to drill the water well in Atareb. Theamount was distributed as follows:
300,000 Syrian pounds ($ 1,500): price of the electricity cable
600,000 Syrian pounds ($ 3,000) price of pipes
400,000 Syrian pounds ($ 2,000) price of an electricity generator
350,000 Syrian pounds ($ 1,750) reward for the drilling of a well 300 meters deep
The well was a success but our mission is not over. After seeing women and children living in conditions that can only be defined as subhuman on the way back and during our passage through the Atmeh refugee camp on the Syrian – Turkish border.


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from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A professional killer or gunman.
- n. An employee or contractor whose role is to terminate or fire other employees.
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Guiliani's attempted transformation into a right-wing hatchetman is just bizarre.
The flick stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate hatchetman who spends the larger portion of his days in flight, constantly moving from place to place in the execution of his work.
In The Studio For 'Up In The Air' In Today's Daily TwitPic » MTV Movies Blog
And, just to make sure the U.S. is caught up in the regime's anti-foreign tirade, Ahmadenijad's political hatchetman, Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi fired a preemptive shot at Washington warning President Obama that any further statements on his part will irrevocably impair any hope for a serious dialogue -- as if Ahmadenijad was going to listen to reason in the first place.
Amb. Marc Ginsberg: Supreme Leader to Demonstrators: "Drop Dead!"
-- GOP hatchetman Rick Wilson, who did the 2002 Cleland-Osama morph ads, talking about what the GOP will do with Obama-Wright connection,
MSNBC Reporter: Obama Campaign Didn't Push Story That Hillary Was Behind Passport Files Breach
-- GOP hatchetman Rick Wilson, who did the 2002 Cleland-Osama morph ads, talking about what the GOP will do with Obama-Wright connection
He'd be perfect for playing the VP's candidates traditional hatchetman role, he'd provide the wise grey hair that both would need on the ticket and he'd provides regional balance for their tickets.
Another shadow government figure who would later become instrumental in the transformation of America into the fascistic Homeland is one David Addington, Cheney's crackerjack legal mind and longtime hatchetman who has along with others such as John Yoo (a man who once said that the president had the legal authority to crush a child's testicles were it deemed necessary) have toiled to change the law of the nation into something dark and foreign.
US Govt Spy Program: Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt.2)
Either way, subpoenas need to be delivered to the hatchetman-in-chief, Karl Rove, as well as to members of his crew, to gather their sworn public testimony on the matter.
Bush and his hatchetman, Karl Rove, have gotten away with it because they are seen as members of the "conservative" tribe.
The latest right-wing hatchetman to go after Simpson is John Hinderaker, writing at The Weekly Standard.


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Well, I slept through the eclipse last night, wouldn't you know? Even though I promised to watch it. And I gave the wrong time for it in my post yesterday. So, I've got to make it up to everyone with a holiday gift. I thought I'd share a couple of pretty neat photo website I've discrovered recently.
The first is called Vintage Nerds, and it is nothing but wonderful pinup photos from the past. In other words, naughty stuff for hipsters. (The site itself uses another word instead of "naughty stuff," but "naughty stuff" is far, far more tasteful if less precise.) When I say the site is nothing but pinups, I mean it--no text, no value-added historical insights...just photographs. Sometimes the names of the models are included (Bettie Page, of course). But the range of imagery is remarkable, and the pictures themselves are often charming examples of old-fashioned barbershop reading. For hipsters who take pictures like this, the site is certainly worth checking out.
I also recently ran across a site called Iconic Photos, which, as you might expect, features pictures that stunned the world, in one way or another. What I like about the site is the weird range of imagery—everything from Paul Strand's "Wall Street" (above) to Annie Leibovitz's portrait of Queen Elizabeth to Patrick Robert's photo of the body of deposed Liberian ruler Samuel Doe. Be careful if you're skittish--some of pictures, like Robert's view of the naked corpse of Doe and images of the body of 14-year-old Emmett Till—are gruesome. But the texts accompanying the images are very sharp, adding historical perspective and while explaining the significance of each picture. The site is a very good source for finding controversial imagery that made an impact.


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|Brian Pane <bri...@apache.org>
|Re: [PATCH] mod_cache: support caching of streamed responses
|Wed, 04 Sep 2002 07:54:08 GMT
Graham Leggett wrote: >> For the expiration case, there's a much easier solution than >> shadowing the >> incomplete response. Add a new state for cache entries: >> "being_updated." >> When you get a request for a cached object that's past its expiration >> date, >> set the cache entry's state to "being_updated" and start retrieving >> the new >> content. Meanwhile, as other threads handle requests for the same >> object, >> they check the state of the cache entry and, because it's currently >> being >> updated, they deliver the old copy from the cache rather than >> dispatching >> the request to the backend system that's already working on a different >> instance of the same request. As long as the thread that's getting >> the new >> content can replace the old content with the new content atomically, >> there's >> no reason to make any other threads wait for the new content. > > > Hmmm... ok, not a bad idea, however I see a few hassles though. > > What if a user force-reloads the page. In theory the cached copy > should be expired immediately - but here we don't, because shadow > threads need to access the cached content in the meantime. I actually think we *shouldn't* expire the cached copy in this case. I want the server, rather than the client, to be able to decide whether to expire a cache entry. If the client gets to dictate the expiration semantics, then we're vulnerable to a DoS attack (all a malicious client would need to do is start submitting lots of requests that invalidate cache entries). > Also - there will be a load spike until the first page is cached (in > the case where no previous cache existed). Yep. I think the ideal solution would be to combine this technique with shadowing support. Then mod_cache could do one of four things depending on the cache state: * cache hit, normal case: deliver the object from cache * cache hit, while another thread is updating: deliver the old object * cache miss, normal case: go retrieve the content * cache miss, while another thread is updating: shadow the response in progress > What happens if an attempt to update an expired cached page hangs? The > proxy could find itself serving stale content for a long time while a > timeout occurs. One solution is to add a timestamp for the "being updated" flag. If another thread sees that the flag is set but the timestamp is more than 'n' seconds old, that thread sets the timestamp to the current time and tries to retrieve the object itself. (This logic just needs to be atomic so that we don't end up with multiple threads all deciding to retrieve the content at once.) >> * It's going to take a while to make the shadowing work >> (due to all the race conditions that have to be addressed). > > > I don't see any significant race conditions though. > > All that needs to happen is that all cached responses are > readable-from-the-cache the moment they are created, rather than the > moment the download is complete. A flag against the cache entry marks > it as "still busy". If this flag is set, shadowed threads know to keep > waiting for more data appearing in the cache. If the flag is not set, > the shadow thread is a normal CACHE_OUT case, and finishes up the > request knowing it to be complete. The race conditions arise in cases where, for example, we find out halfway through a streamed request that it isn't cacheable after all because it's just exceeded the max cache size. Therefore we won't be caching this response permanently, but we do need to keep the buffered buckets around until all threads that are shadowing the response have finished using those buckets. And then, after the last of those threads finishes using the data, we need to delete the saved brigade. But if the response is *really* large, we can't keep the whole thing in memory until the last thread finishes delivering it. Instead, we'd have to incrementally delete buckets from the start of the brigade as all the threads finish dealing with each one. (And keep new threads from shadowing the response from the moment when we first delete a bucket.) This can all be done with reference counts and careful synchronization, but it's going to be challenging to debug. Brian
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michaela-2.jpgJuly 12, 2013
The Poster for my ExhibitionJune 16, 2013
designed by Hazel Stephenson, of The Painting Pottery cafe, Brighton
Sketchbook!June 16, 2013
a standing pose i'm really pleased with, and a drawing that would be cool if the drawing of the hand weren't so bad!
I made a Puppet!March 4, 2013
Ian with sandals…October 3, 2012
emmaseatedOctober 1, 2012
Emma Seated
September 28, 2012
Thursday Themed Life Drawing SessionsAugust 27, 2012
I have recently undertaken the exciting adventure of running Draw's life drawing sessions weekly on a thursday evening. So far I've done a Pandora's Box and a Puppet theme, and next week will be a gothic theme. Here is one of my drawings from the session:
The Hurly Burly Drawing Circus Printing PressJune 7, 2012
Above are the newsletters I designed and had published for the Brighton Fringe Festival for the Hurly Burly tent. I put on a wonderful children's outdoor circus themed drawing event over three weekends, with some fantastic drawings produced by children and adults alike. Here are some photos from the day:
Below is the winning drawing:
I love letraset markersMarch 13, 2012
Grimms Fairy Tales DrawingsMarch 6, 2012
Grimms' Fairy Tales by Jake Spicers Drawing CircusMarch 5, 2012
Dry Point PrintFebruary 27, 2012
Collage and DistortionFebruary 27, 2012
Playing with CollageFebruary 27, 2012
Crayon, Pen and Sugar PaperFebruary 27, 2012
Frankie with Spinning WheelFebruary 27, 2012
Frankie in Briar Rose themeFebruary 27, 2012
Exhibition: "Squash: 2011"December 14, 2011
I decided to take a risk and paint directly onto the wall of the exhibition space, which worked really well: the time constraint and adrenaline meant I managed to break free of my usual A3-sized restraint and produce something quick, fluid and intuitive. I am also happy that I finally managed to realise some of my more ambitious ideas through the opportunity of an exhibition – the scale allowed me to incorporate 3D work (the violins) on a plinth, and a piece of creative writing from the "Chance and Order" project in which i randomly chose words and composed a piece of writing from a word pool which reads :
"Silence, could it be darkness? It's marrow always screams bone not density. Breath in the squawked oxygen calling lightness crushed as though diamond. She had only charred ash. They were exploding sun carbon like sever nothing. It was gasping voice."


text: In article <tan-0812941554100001 at smac.ethz.ch> tan at mol.biol.ethz.ch (Song Tan) writes: >Someone in our lab tried unsuccessfully to use lactose instead of IPTG for >induction a while ago and decided the problem was pH changes as the >lactose was hydrolyzed by the cells. IPTG doesn't suffer from this >problem because it is nonhydrolyzable, of course. >Still, I've love to hear if others have been successful in replacing IPTG >with lactose. I used lactose for a while but didn't compare the level of induction achieved with what IPTG might give. Here's my $0.02: 1. IPTG conc. can be decreased from 1 mM to 50-100 uM without substantial change in induction level 2. Lactose can leak into the cell with Km in millimolar range and needs only beta-gal to be converted into the inducer. So it is not necessary that the cells metabolise lactose, presence of lacZ (or truncated lacZ plus alpha- peptide) should do the trick. 3. Lactose can be added shortly (say, 1 hour) before harvesting the cells. This should alleviate any problems with its metabolism. Michael Galperin <galperin at biotek.mcb.uconn.edu> Dept. Mol. Cell Biol. U-125 Phone: 203-486-4330 The University of Connecticut Fax: 203-486-4331


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The British hacker, who in 2001 admittedly broke into computer systems in the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA and the U.S. Army, has lost his latest battle in a seven-year fight to avoid being extradited to the U.S. for prosecution.
The Crown Prosecution Service, a U.K. government arm that handles public prosecutions, announced today that it will not prosecute Gary McKinnon for hacking into the U.S. sites, freeing him to be tried in the U.S.
The case took on a new level of cause célèbre late last month, when the mayor of London wrote a column in London's Telegraph newspaper, calling on President Barack Obama to call off U.S. efforts to extradite and prosecute McKinnon. Mayor Boris Johnson called U.S. efforts to prosecute self-acknowledged hacker Gary McKinnon a "legal nightmare" and equated the prosecution to "American bullying."
"These were not random experiments in computer hacking, but a deliberate effort to breach U.S. defense systems at a critical time, which caused well-documented damage," said Alison Saunders, head of the CPS Organized Crime Division in a written statement. "They may have been conducted from Mr. McKinnon's home computer -- and in that sense there is a U.K. link -- but the target and the damage were transatlantic."
McKinnon, who was an unemployed system administrator in the U.K. at the time of the 2001 hack, has been using a series of legal maneuvers and appeals over the past seven years to fight extradition to the U.S. McKinnon, now 43, was indicted in November 2002 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He has said he broke into U.S. military computers hoping to uncover evidence of UFOs.
He has admitted to hacking the computers and described how he did it in presentations at computer security conferences in London. He also has said he wasn't trying to damage the systems but was looking to find evidence of UFOs on U.S. military computers.
McKinnon had long been looking to be prosecuted in the U.K., even though his extradition order has been approved by the U.K. government.
In a statement, Saunders noted that while British prosecutors do have enough evidence to prosecute McKinnon, their evidence does not reflect the seriousness of the charges being leveled by U.S. federal prosecutors. She added that they would not be able to hand down a sentence that matches the seriousness of the charges.
"The facts have remained the same," she added. "The bulk of the evidence is located in the United States, the activity was directed against the military infrastructure of the United States, the investigation commenced in the United States and was ongoing, and there are a large number of witnesses, most of whom are located in the United States. Having reached our conclusions on these matters, as is our wider duty in accordance with the Attorney General's guidance for handling criminal cases in the USA, we also reconsidered in which jurisdiction the case is best prosecuted -- and that remains the United States."
The U.S. government alleges that McKinnon caused $900,000 in damages to computers in 14 states, and that he caused the shutdown of critical military networks shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He faces a sentence of 60 years or more in the U.S.


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Energy Roundtable in Odisha -The Energy - Equity Link
The fourth and final round of roundtables on the energy study undertaken by Laya -INECC together with Misereor, Germany was co organised together with DESI Technologies.
This roundtable was organized on the backdrop of an India case study that Laya - INECC and MISEREOR (Germany) have been involved with. The key objective of this study is to explore how India could address its chronic energy poverty and development challenges in a manner that not only ensures human rights but respects environmental integrity and planetary boundaries.
Green energy entrepreneurs, think tanks and energy practicerners shared the reality of the energy story in Odisha and developed an action plan to follow up on the discussions.


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Thank you for your interest in riding at Nine Acres Equestrian. You can call or email us to book, or you can now reserve a time slot online, just by clicking on the button on the right of this page. If you're a new client, we will get in touch before your lesson to confirm your details, so we can be sure to match you to the right horse.
For more information on the training centre, please click here , or feel free to call us on the number below.
We offer a friendly, professional service for all abilities, and pride ourselves on the high standard of care given to all our horses. We are open every day, from 8am to dusk. We have an excellent safety record, because we don't believe you learn by falling off or being scared, but by learning what balance really feels like, and by feeling confident when undertaking new challenges.
Lesson Charges
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30 Minute Starter lesson: £25 (Recommended for those new to riding)
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1 hour Group lesson: £20 / rider (Available to clients of compatible ability)
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