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Monday, 3 February 2014
Chasing prizes
On the one hand, the four lit prizes that CBe books have won (plus watch this space), and the several shortlistings, and without the little flurries of publicity (plus a few sales) attached it would have been harder to keep CBe going.
Prizes – and the news stories they generate – help keep the show on the road. They're ubiquitous: from the big ones that keep the riffraff out (the Booker, the Costa and the Dylan Thomas all require the submitting publisher to contribute a large sum of money towards publicity for books that reach the shortlist stage; the Guardian First Book award requires £180 just to enter) to the ones that welcome all (13,000 entries to the National Poetry Competition last year). Where there is a perception that the existing prizes reward only a certain kind of book, another one is set up (the Goldsmiths). For small presses, prizes are a traditional way of creating income: get a writer with a known name to judge, offer publication (book/pamphlet/anthology) as prize, charge a few quid entry fee, and it's hard, I think, given the number of writers longing for publication, not to turn a profit. (The simple reason why CBe has not tried this is that I dread having to publish work that I myself don't like.)
On the other hand … Though I read on average more than a book a week, and more fiction than poetry, I haven't read a Booker Prize winner since 2001, and of the 65 titles on the shortlists since that year I've read just seven.
Prizes ritualise the element of competition that is there from the start – from the day you send off a poem or story to a magazine, and thereby compete with others for the available space; through the struggles to convince an agent or publisher that your work is more worth their attention than the other submissions; and on, after publication, to the shouting of your wares in the marketplace. But rituals, rites, ceremonies, are constructs, not real life; nor are prizes literature, though they are not unrelated.
Prizes are generally conservative: they tend to reward fine examples of forms of writing that are familiar. With any more than two judges, they are being judged by committees, which themselves tend to deliver conservative judgements. Prizes influence what is sold and read. Do they influence what is written? Indirectly, maybe. Agents and mainstream publishers follow the money; if you're writing 'literary fiction', or even poetry, you may well have more luck with them if your work accords with the type of writing that wins – or is expected to win – major prizes, with attendant publicity and sales. And if that is so, then the range of writing being published mainstream is narrowed. (Just as, in schools, the measurement of success by grades narrows the focus of teaching towards the criteria by which grades are assessed, and narrows the syllabus too.)
On the third hand, I doubt that any serious writer actually sets out to write a prize-winning book. Nor do publishers at the CBe end of the scale take on books on the basis of whether or not they are potential prize material. I can celebrate prize-winners but I don't have to take prizes literally ('best' book?), and I can make my own choices about what to read.
(The above picture shows, I think, a satyr play at the 5th-century-BC City Dionysia, at which prizes were awarded for tragedies. Forward Foundation: can we too please have a satyr play? Imagine entering your play and building up your hopes only to find that Aeschylus has won again.)
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Agreed! There is an 'elephant in the room' here: the preponderance of winners who are students or ( more likely ) teachers on creative writing courses. This is the real leveller, creator of conformity, uniformity, and of course breathtaking originality and brilliance ( good writing obeys no rules ). I picked up a book the other day whose blurb was just a catalogue of the author's prizes; nothing about the book itself . Yes, I teach (nonfiction) creative writing myself . Life would be so dull without the bracing salt tang of hypocrisy .
- 3 February 2014 at 21:44
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Fidaa 2018 Full Movie Hindi Dubbed Watch Online HD
A romantic story of Ishaan ( Yash ) and Khushi ( Sanjana ) – two different people, with a different perspective on love, life and philosophies. How their love blossoms, misunderstandings happen due to their ego. This is about how their relationship evolves. Written by padmashri
Views: 200
Genre: Drama, Hindi Dubbed, Romance
Director: Pathikrit Basu
Actors: Anindya Chatterjee, Sairity Banerjee, Sanjana Banerjee
Country: India
Duration: 124 min
Quality: 720P
Release: 2018
IMDb: 6.7

subset: commoncrawl


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There is a downside to extrinsic motivation. It is temporary. To keep students motivated, you must continue to increase the reward. I read about a school district that wanted their students to read more. At the elementary level, students received a free book when they read a certain number of books. The reward proximity theory by Linda Gambrell (1996) notes that this is an effective use of rewards—to closely tie the "prize" to the activity, rather than using something like pizza to reward reading.
When the students moved to the intermediate and middle grades, however, books were no longer seen as a worthwhile prize. So the schools used small gift cards, such as iTunes or local restaurants (clearly, this district had more money than mine did). Of course, the problem was that by the time the students were in high school, that wasn't good enough. So at that level, their names were entered into a lottery for a car. Yes, a real car. I was both amazed and dismayed. How does this prepare students for the future? When they get a job or go to a college or university, they may not receive a prize for doing something they are supposed to do anyway!
The other side effect that the district didn't anticipate was the negative impact on intrinsic motivation. For students who did like to read, the prizes became a hoop to jump through,
A final negative aspect of extrinsic motivation that I saw with my students was that they began to see circumstances as out of their control. In other words, they didn't succeed because of their own efforts, but because of the prize. And that led to an attitude that if they were successful, it was because they were "lucky" or "I gave them the grade." If rewards are overused, students lose their internal strengths.
Next Time: Effective Ways to Use Extrinsic Motivation


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Alex Massie observes that the questions asked on le bac — basically France's college admissions test — seem mighty ambitious. From the literature series (my translation):
— Does objectivity in history presuppose the impartiality of the historian?
— Does language betray though?
— Explicate an excerpt from Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation
And from the science series:
— Are there questions that are un-answerable by science?
The correct answers are no, no, I don't know anything about Schopenhauer, and yes. Apparently there's also a question asking if it's absurd to desire the impossible. I think it is.
Either way, I think it's safe to say that Barack Obama's nowhere near turning us into France.


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Precious Khuthadzo (Precious Khuthadzo) Razwiedane
contact information
Precious Khuthadzo Razwiedane is a Research Lab Technician at IBM Research | Africa - South Africa Lab providing technical assistance, practical support and information as required in the preparation and use of the information technology (IT), audio visual (AV) and workshop equipment at the IBM Research | Africa, South Africa lab.
Precious obtained his Bachelor of Science and Information Systems degree from University of Venda.He then joined the National Department of Higher Education and Training as a Senior Administration Clerk for Data Management unit were he was collecting, analysing and collating data from all colleges across the country and present data to management as well as providing statistical reports and responding to data queries. He is currently pursuing his BSc Honours degree in Computer Science at the University of South Africa(UNISA).
Prior his BSc degree, Precious studied Chemical Engineering at Vaal University of Technology. He then joined Keyplan (Pty) Ltd as a Chemical Process Controller where he served Anglo Coal and Mittal steel in their Industrial waste water treatment plants and fossils fuel gas extraction industries which includes water purification and separation of Methane gas from ground water using operations unit such as Clarifier, Evaporator, Granular Activated Carbon(GAC), Ultra filtration(UF), Iron Exchanger(IX) and Reverse Osmosis(RO).


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A Westminster police officer accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Broomfield while on duty has been formally charged by the 17th Judicial District Attorney's Office.
Officer Curtis Lee Arganbright 40, is charged with sexual assault using force to obtain submission of the victim and sexual assault of a person in custody of law by a person in a position of authority, both class 3 felonies.
A warrant for his arrest was issued Monday and Arganbright turned himself in the same day. Arganbright was booked at the Broomfield Detention Center on Tuesday and is free on $20,000 bond. His next court appearance is at 1:30 p.m. Oct. 5 for formal advisement and return on bond.
Broomfield police were notified about 2:20 p.m Aug. 24 by Westminster police of the allegations, which reportedly occurred between 1 and 2 a.m. that morning in the area of West 144th Avenue and Zuni Street.
Arganbright has been an officer with Westminster since December 2013 and has been in patrol his whole career there. Previously, he had worked with Federal Heights Police Department.
Westminster Police Chief Tim Carlson said the department is working on a comprehensive review of the citizens Arganbright has contacted while he has been an officer with Westminster.
Jennifer Rios: 303-473-1361, email@example.com or Twitter.com/Jennifer_Rios


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Fantasy Basketball Box Score Breakouts – 12/4/10
Here's a look at some fantasy basketball players that blew up the box score last night.
Jodie Meeks & Thaddeus Young, Philadelphia 76ers
Meeks scored 26 points (9-16 FG, 1-2 FT, 7-10 3PM) with a rebound an assist. If he continues to start, he could give you a boost in scoring, but doesn't help elsewhere. Young added 20 points (8-11 FG, 4-4 FT) with 3 rebounds and an assist. He is very inconsistent.
Brad Miller, Houston Rockets
Miller scored 20 points (6-13 FG, 4-5 FT, 4-9 3PM) with 3 assists and 3 blocks. He's averaging 14.6 points and 1.8 three-pointers in his past five games.
Ramon Sessions, Cleveland Cavaliers
Sessions scored 18 points (7-10 FG, 4-4 FT) with a rebound, 6 assists, and a steal. He's averaging 12.2 points and 4.8 assists in his past five games.
Wesley Johnson, Corey Brewer, & Wayne Ellington, Minnesota Timberwolves
Johnson scored 20 points (8-9 FG, 1-1 FT, 3-4 3PM) with 6 rebounds, 2 assists and 2 blocks. Brewer scored 15 points (6-10 FG, 1-1 FT, 2-4 3PM) with 3 assists and a steal. Ellington added 16 points (6-9 FG, 4-6 3PM) with 2 rebounds, 3 assists, and a steal. The extra production was due to Michael Beasley's absence. They aren't fantasy options.
Quentin Richardson, Orlando Magic
Q scored 16 points (6-14 FG, 3-4 FT, 1-5 3PM) with 4 rebounds, an assist, and a steal. He simply took advantage of the Magic being without Dwight Howard, Jameer Nelson, and J.J. Redick.
Donte Greene & Beno Udrih, Sacramento Kings
Greene scored 19 points (8-15 FG, 3-6 3PM) with a rebound, an assist, and a steal. Udrih added 16 points (6-11 FG, 2-3 FT, 2-4 3PM) with 3 rebounds, 6 assists, and a steal. They both appear to be back in Paul Westphal's favor.


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I've been complaining for a while now about the tendency of commentators to treat the $700 billion TARP bailout as if it's 100 percent losses when it's always been clear that some large fraction of that money was going to be recouped. Indeed, as Zachary Couwe writes in The New York Times thus far the government is earning healthy profits:
The profits, collected from eight of the biggest banks that have fully repaid their obligations to the government, come to about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15 percent annually, according to calculations compiled for The New York Times.
Two things happen in a panic. One is that huge profit opportunities arise for anyone who has a giant pool of cash or the ability to raise it. The other is that thanks to the "flight to quality" it's suddenly very easy for the government to raise cash. Hence, profit. Which isn't to say that we'll see a profit overall, lots of opportunities for losses still exist:
The government still faces potentially huge long-term losses from its bailouts of the insurance giant American International Group, the mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the automakers General Motors and Chrysler. The Treasury Department could also take a hit from its guarantees on billions of dollars of toxic mortgages.
This should be a real worry. That said, it's worth noting that none of this is core TARP. AIG, Fannie, and Freddie are all separate initiatives. The Fannie & Freddie bailouts were inevitable and anyone would have done them. GM and Chrysler represented diversion of TARP funds away from their main purpose (banks) toward something progressives were more friendly to. It's really only AIG on this whole list of bailouts were I think clearly condemnation-worthy recent policy mistakes were made. The underlying situation at Fannie & Freddie was a horrible policy blunder, but it evolved over the course of decades so it's hard to point the finger at anyone in particular.


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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Man shoots 12 nails into his head?
An Oregon man who went to a hospital complaining of a headache was found to have 12 nails embedded in his skull from a suicide attempt with a nail gun, doctors say.
The unidentified 33-year-old man was suicidal and high on methamphetamine last year when he fired the nails -- up to 2 inches in length -- into his head one by one.
The nails were not visible when doctors first examined the man in the emergency room of an unidentified Oregon hospital a day later. Doctors were surprised when X-rays revealed six nails clustered between his right eye and ear, two below his right ear and four on the left side of his head.
No one before is known to have survived after intentionally firing so many foreign objects into the head, according to the report, written by Dr. G. Alexander West, the neurosurgeon who oversaw the treatment of the patient.
The man at first told doctors he had had a nail gun accident, but later admitted it was a suicide attempt. The nails came close to major blood vessels and the brain stem but did not pierce them. The patient was in remarkably good condition when he was transferred to Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where the nails were removed.
The patient was later transferred to psychiatric care and stayed under court order for nearly a month before leaving against doctors' orders.
Wow. This is crazy. Article here.
Paris Hilton has a gambling problem
In The News has confirmed that Paris Hilton has been losing a lot of money in poker games recently, and she is very pissed about losing her car. Paris lost her Bentley over the weekend during one hand at poker.
Here's what Paris had to say about the loss: " I'm obsessed with poker. It's my favorite game. I'm really lucky in Vegas, I always win."
Naked man found stuck in chimney?
A man who spent five hours naked and stuck in the chimney of his stepmother's home was arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of drugs, police said.
Police say Michael Urbano, 23, locked himself out of the house early Saturday morning and decided to get in on a cable TV wire through the chimney. But the wire broke and Urbano fell, getting stuck about three-quarters of the way down. He was freed when a firefighter pushed him to safety.
"We get him up, and he's naked as a jaybird," said Lt. Gary Branson. "He tells us he took his clothes off because there would be less friction going down the chute. We did find his clothes. So that part checked out."
Authorities were called about 6:15 a.m. Saturday. A neighbor heard "faint, distressing" calls since about 2:30 a.m. and decided to call police. Police say it probably wasn't a comfortable few hours for Urbano. "He's not fat," Branson said, "but he used to play football. He's not that little."
Naked huh? Weird. And "He's not fat… and he played football"? Sweet quote to get in the paper, bet he feels like a jack-ass. Article here.
Dad, son, neighbor swalloed by cesspool
A 71-year-old man who went outside in the rain to pick up the Sunday newspaper plunged into a cesspool in his front yard, and his son and neighbor were sucked in when they tried to help.
The victims escaped, two with the help of firefighters, covered in raw sewage but not badly hurt. Andrew Palladino said the soggy ground, soaked by two days of rain, gave way outside his Long Island home: "I walked across the lawn, and all of a sudden I disappeared."
He yelled to his wife for help, and she threw a rope and called their son, Dan, who lives with them. The son said the scene "was like a horror picture."
A neighbor who heard the commotion ran over to help — but the ground gave way again, swallowing him and the son. The neighbor crawled out and passers-by tried to hold onto the others until the Huntington Fire Department arrived.
Firefighters secured the ground, lassoed Palladino and his son and dragged them out. It's not the first time a cesspool — a pit that collects waste from toilets and sinks — has swallowed someone in Huntington.
Holy sh*t. No way! Article here.
Pieces of body found on freeway?
The call came in from a passing motorist that someone had just been struck on the freeway. Body parts were strewn across the breakdown lane and adjacent median, which was sparsely covered in grass and weeds. Stranger still was the fact that all they found were pieces of a person's legs.
The torso, arms and head were nowhere to be seen.
The Sheriff's Department sent a helicopter to search for the body from above. A Colton fire engine arrived with infrared scanners to do the same. Still, no luck.
California Highway Patrol officers fanned out, driving down nearby exit ramps and cruising the surrounding neighborhoods. Soon after, one officer got lucky.
"An officer was driving on Valley Boulevard when he saw a car pulling out of a parking lot," said Sgt. Fernando Contreras. "The windshield had a huge hole in it." The officer stopped the driver, Chico explained that he was driving about 70 mph east on I-10, about a half-mile east of Pepper Avenue, when he hit the woman, whose upper body broke through his windshield and landed in the back seat of his 1987 Honda Prelude.
Behind a Mexican steakhouse on the north side of West Valley, authorities found a blue commercial trash bin. Inside was the rest of a woman's body. "Because of the impact (with Chico's car), it split the woman in half," Contreras said. Click here to read the full article.
Boater finds human head off florida keys
Monroe County officials say a boater found a human head in the ocean just a few miles off Islamorada.
Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Becky Herrin says part of the spine was still attached, and some teeth remained. The head was found off of Alligator Reef, a popular snorkel and dive spot about four miles east of Indian Key.
The head is now with the medical examiner, who will try to determine its identity and how it got separated from the body.
WTF? Part of the spine was still attached to the head? Sounds like the work of Scorpion from Mortal Combat… "finish him!" (only true video gamers will get that joke). Article here.
You can't be fired for web-surfing at work
A judge in New York has ruled that surfing the web is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone, and only a reprimand is appropriate as punishment for a city worker accused of failing to heed warnings to stay off the Internet.
Administrative Law Judge John Spooner reached his decision in the case of Toquir Choudhri, a 14-year veteran of the Department of Education who had been accused of ignoring supervisors who told him to stop browsing the Internet at work.
The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city's legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer.
In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work."
He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes."
Spooner dispensed the lightest possible punishment on Choudhri, a reprimand, after a search of Choudhri's computer files revealed he had visited several news and travel sites. Martin Druyan, Choudhri's lawyer, called the ruling "very reasonable." Article here.
Teacher blasts his kids/friends on blog
In an anonymous blog he called "Fast Times at Regnef High," a Fenger High School teacher unleashed his frustration over the chaos he saw around him.
He labeled his students "criminals," saying they stole from teachers, dealt drugs in the hallways, had sex in the stairwells, flaunted their pregnant bellies and tossed books out windows. He dismissed their parents as unemployed "project" dwellers who subsist on food stamps, refuse to support their "baby mommas" and bad-mouth teachers because their no-show teens are flunking.
He took swipes at his colleagues, too--"union-minimum" teachers, literacy specialists who "decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda," and security officers whose "loyalty is to the hood, not the school."
In his blog, the teacher did not identify himself or his students, the exact name of his school or the city where he taught. But like most bloggers, he wanted an audience, so he wrote in his blog that he had leaked news of his site to a few co-workers. Soon enough, the 30-year-old teacher's name was the talk of the school.
This week, after returning from spring break, the students read how they were depicted and flamed the blog with profane threats and righteous indignation toward the teacher. By Thursday, the reaction grew so vitriolic that the blogger took down his site from Blogger.com.
Click here to read the full story. Semi-sorta-interesting stuff.


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Planning For My Retirement
Planning For My Retirement
I am eligible to retire from my current job on April 4, 2018 .
And that is the day that life without work begins.
My retirement will be different than most in that my monthly take home will increase over the years .
This is due to a government pension, military retirement and social security.
When I hit 57 years and 4 months, I will be able to call it quits .
I will have 5 years working with the US government and will be eligible for a small pension .
It will not be enough to live on, but I also have a Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) which is very similar to a 401(k) .
Unlike the 401(k), I can withdraw my TSP when I retire as long as I am at least 55 years old .
I will use this to supplement the small pension.
I also have a 401(k) that I invested in while I was a government contractor for 5 years .
I can start making withdrawals at 59 ½ and must have it depleted by 70 ½.
Once I hit the ripe old age of 60, I become eligible for my US Army Reserves retirement .
This will triple my monthly income and make living a lot better .
Then, at 62, I can add in my Social Security .
I can also defer this until 66 or 70 .
I will have to crunch the numbers to see which one is most beneficial and find the break even points.
I also plan on selling my house when I initially retire and will use this money to purchase my retirement home in Thailand .
Yes, I will leave Hawaii and move to Khon Kaen, Thailand .
The cost of living is way less than Hawaii and I will be able to live out my golden years easily.
Add into this mix, I live online and make some money marketing on the Internet .
I make money from ads and banners, affiliate hotel rooms, credit cards and a few more .
This will provide beer money for me and keep me occupied.
For most retirees, their money starts to dwindle as they get older .
For me, at least for the first five years, it increases .
Plus, I still have some gravy money in my 401(k) and some other investments.
All of this didn't happen overnight .
And it didn't happen because I saved for 40 years .
Granted, the military retirement is based on 30 years service, but all the rest is over the past 7 years .
Contributing to a 401(k) and now to my TSP makes it easy to see that I will be taken care or, and that I won't be a burden on my family.
I look forward to that day when I can walk away from my desk and never have to return .
Starting work at age 12 with my paper route and being able to retire at age 57 is a long time but not as long as those who have to wait until 65 .
Right now I put in the absolute IRS maximum allowed into my retirement fund and add as much as I can to my mortgage payment in hopes of paying it off early.
It may be hard to save when you are young and plan for retirement, but, trust me, it is well worth it .
You want to have everything all set up once your work days are over.


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Answer 11
The school is fully compliant with the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).
The school is on a split-level with easy access, double doors and a lift.
There is a disabled toilet, with changing facilities.
We ensure, wherever possible, that equipment used is accessible to all children regardless of their needs.
After-school provision is accessible to all children, including those with SEND.
Extra-curricular activities are accessible for children with SEND.
All website content copyright © Holme Hall Primary School
Website design by PrimarySite


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Monday, December 13, 2010
Book Review - The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
The centerpiece of Daniel Mason's lovely and graceful debut novel, The Piano Tuner, (published in 2002), is a grand piano that belongs to Surgeon Major Anthony Carroll, a strange and perhaps dangerous, officer stationed in a remote village in Burma (now Myanmar). The piano isn't an ordinary grand piano, however, it's an exquisite 1840 Sebastian Erard with a black mahogany veneer and a delicate mother-of-pearl inlay of flowers.
The Piano Tuner opens in October 1886 and centers around shy, retiring Edgar Drake, a forty-one-year-old London piano tuner who is well-known as being the best in the business. In fact, he specializes in pianos made by the French firm of Sebastian Erard, the preferred piano of Napoleon, Beethoven and even the incomparable Haydn. However, when Drake is summoned by the War Office and told to go to Burma to repair and tune Surgeon Major Carroll's piano, no one could be more surprised than Drake, himself.
Readers might wonder why Surgeon Major Carroll even has a grand piano in such a remote area of the world, but in The Piano Tuner, Mason makes the reasons seem quite believable. Mandalay has fallen, and Burma's last king, King Thibaw, has been deposed. Shan warlords are beginning to revolt. Only Surgeon Major Carroll, the British believe, can form the necessary alliances with Burma's royalty and thus stave off both Siamese and French advancement into Indochina. Surgeon Major Carroll has steadfastly refused to work without a piano, however, something that is more necessary to his war plans than are guns. And for now, what Surgeon Major Carroll wants, Surgeon Major Carroll gets.
Drake doesn't really want to go to Burma. He's not a traveling man, and in fact, this would be his first trip abroad. He doesn't like the military, and he's happy at home with his loving wife, Katherine. The five thousand mile trip to Burma, he knows, would be fraught with danger, involving a long sea voyage, then a trek through the jungle, just to reach Carroll's remote outpost, Mae Lwin, in the northern Shan states. Yet go he does, not so much out of loyalty to Britain as love for music and the piano.
The journey to Burma encompasses about one-third of the book, but Mason's writing in these passages is some of the novel's most poetic and lyrical. Mason weaves unusual stories into this section of his narrative, which are told by unusual people: Drake meets the "Man with One Story" who tells him how he was caused to be deaf by the songs of the sirens in the Straits of Bab al-Mandab; he hears of a ferocious tiger hunt; stories of the Suez Canal and beautiful descriptions of old Pagan and old Mandalay. As Drake travels through France, Egypt, India, and into Burma, he writes letters to Katherine that are filled with lush descriptions of the new sights he's seeing, his doubts and fears about the journey he's undertaking, his awe at the brilliant and mesmerizing beauty of the East. We realize, little by little, that Drake has been thoroughly seduced by Burma, herself. And we realize that we are being seduced as well, by the power of the images Mason creates.
When Drake finally does meet Anthony Carroll, the enigmatic surgeon seems a bit like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He obviously loves Burma; he obviously loves poetry; above all else, he obviously loves music. He also seems to be very happy to have Edgar Drake as a companion, just as Drake seems, somehow, strangely drawn to the somewhat puzzling Carroll. Along with his Shan guard, Carroll takes Drake on one of his "hunts" in the mountains, during which he searches for plants and herbs to catalog and study:
Above them, a raptor circled and caught a rising current, and he imagined what the bird must see, three tiny figures winding their way along a dry trail which traced the collar of the karst hills, the tiny villages, the Salween snaking languidly, the mountains to the east, the Shan plateau dropping to Mandalay, and then all of Burma, of Siam, of India, of the armies gathered there, grids of French and British soldiers blind to each other but visible to this bird, gathering, waiting, while in between, three men rode together, collecting flowers.
Drake, however, soon becomes most enchanted with Carroll's beautiful assistant, Khin Myo, a woman who is rarely seen without a parasol. I couldn't empathize completely with Drake's infatuation with Khin Myo. I kept remembering Katherine, back in London, and her great love for her husband. Even Drake, himself, does not approve of the infatuation, for he thinks, "This (his love for Khin Myo) expects too much of a piano tuner, whose life is defined by creating order so that others may make beauty. It expects too much of one who makes rules to ask that he break them."
However, love her he does, and Mason develops the love Drake feels for Khin Myo very sensitively:
He stood and watched her and for a moment she held his gaze, and in the deep recesses of his chest he felt something stir, a longing, that she would invite him to her room, to dry off only, of course, he would never ask for more. To dry off only, and then in the darkness of the room, scented with coconut and cinnamon, a wish that perhaps their hands would brush, first accidentally, then again, perhaps, bolder, deliberate, that their fingers would meet and entwine and they would stand like that for a moment before she looked up and he looked down. And he wondered if she thought the same, as they stood outside and felt the coolness of the water on their skin.
Mason is obviously a writer whose natural talents lie in the realm of setting and description rather than in character and dialogue. A California medical student who studied malaria in Myanmar, Mason is dead-on perfect in his descriptions of the scenery and culture of Southeast Asia. I absolutely relished the description in this book. Mason describes a trip Carroll and Drake take to Mae Lwin like this:
On the lonely road, they passed through an old temple complex where dozens of pagodas were aligned in rows. The structures were of various sizes and ages and shapes, some freshly painted and capped with ornaments, others pale and crumbling. On one, the body of the pagoda had been crafted into the shape of a coiled serpent. It was eerily silent. Birds flitted over the ground. The only person they saw was a monk who looked as old as the temples themselves, his skin dark and wrinkled, his body tinted with dust. He was sweeping the path as they approached, and Edgar saw Carroll press his hands together and bow slightly to the man. The old monk said nothing, but kept sweeping, the grass broomstick swaying with the hypnotic rhythm of his chant.
Mason also doesn't stint on descriptions of the art and craft of piano tuning, itself. It's obvious that he's researched this novel meticulously and the details only serve to strengthen the narrative:
He began the day's work by voicing the hammers, repairing damaged felt so that the hammer strike would produce a good clean tone. Back in England, he often waited until fine-tuning was complete before voicing, but he had been bothered by the tone: It was either too hard and tinny or too dull and soft. He needled the harder felt to soften it and pressed the softer felt with the voicing iron to harden it, reshaping the hammerheads so that they presented an even-angled surface to the strings. He tested the voicing by running through each octave chromatically, in broken arpeggios, and finally by pounding individual keys, so that the hardness deep within the felt would be noticed.
While Edgar Drake is quite beautifully characterized, both Carroll and Khin Myo are a little clichéd and a little "off key." The characters' thoughts were, at times, rather clumsily written, as was the dialogue, but only at times, and at least the thoughts were there. Many of today's authors skip them entirely, something that is, in my opinion, a huge mistake. Some of the dialogue between two characters is written in one long paragraph, sans punctuation. I've heard some criticism of The Piano Tuner because of this, but I don't think that criticism is valid. It's not at all confusing and Mason only employs the technique in one section, to make a very important point, one that is crucial to a full understanding of this beautiful novel. I think readers who criticized this artistic choice really didn't read the book as carefully as they should have/could have done.
This book is really two intertwining stories: the first is Edgar Drake's, and revolves around his fascination with Burma and his identification with Carroll; the second belongs to Surgeon Major Anthony Carroll and his agenda (I'm not going to tell you if it's good or evil). At times, I didn't think the two stories connected and intersected as seamlessly as they should have. From time to time, a disjointed note would interrupt the otherwise beautiful, hallucinatory quality of this novel, but only from time to time. Overall, The Piano Tuner is extremely fluid.
Interwoven through the narrative of The Piano Tuner are letters, official documents, reports, and various stories told by various people at various times. Although one might expect this to make for a choppy narrative, I thought Mason did a wonderful job of integrating them into the plot line.
The theme of The Piano Tuner is not only one of British colonialism, it's one of the power of music to transcend the barriers of language and culture. Music is the first love of both Carroll and Drake, and Carroll even uses music to "soothe the savage beast," i.e., the Shan revolutionaries. Drake is entranced, early on, by a story of how Carroll once prevented a Shan attack by playing his flute and converted a local chieftain to his beliefs by reciting Shelley's Ozymandias. Of the flute rendition, which turns out to be a Shan courting song, Carroll, himself, later tells Drake, "...no man could kill one who played a song that reminded him of the first time he had fallen in love." Another character speaks to Drake of Carroll, telling him, "Half the mail that comes to Upper Burma is scientific correspondence for Anthony Carroll. And the other half is sheet music for him." Thoroughly in love with Burma and the Burmese people, Carroll has learned their language and embraced their customs. He is even translating Homer's Odyssey into Shan.
The Piano Tuner is a slow moving, languidly paced book and that pace "fit" the story perfectly. Mason draws us into his book; he mesmerizes us, along with Drake, with the beauty and the exoticism of the East. This isn't a novel with a neat-and-tidy ending, and it might not be the ending every reader is hoping for, but it does fit the story that came before perfectly. There are many unanswered questions, not of plot, but of what was real and what Drake only wanted to be real.
The Piano Tuner is a surreal, dreamy, languid, hallucinatory book that hypnotizes, mesmerizes, and intoxicates. It lingers and resonates long after you've finished the final page. The dénouement was so moving it brought tears to my eyes. It still does and I really can't stop thinking about the book or Edgar Drake. In this book, one doesn't always know where dreams end and reality begins, but that was fine with me. Despite its few faults, I loved this book beyond dreams.
Recommended: Yes, to those who can tolerate a slow paced book and love a dreamy and hallucinatory story in which the lines between reality and dreams blur. The locale is exotic, but be aware that while the protagonist is beautifully characterized, the secondary characters can be a little stereotypical.
Posted by Literary Corner Cafe at 9:28 PM
1 comment:
- Jim Arnn said...
A very helpful review. You have described the plot, the style of writing, details that might be of interest, and abit about the charactets...enough to help any reader in deciding to open the book.
- April 23, 2014 at 3:59 AM
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For the bed, the original idea was to spray paint the brass headboard black. But my mother suggested that we pad it and cover it in black fabric instead. Both ideas sound good. So, either way works for me.
As for the chest of drawers, they're definitely getting painted black. I'm also thinking about replacing the current knobs with glass ones. Other plans include painting the walls a silver/gray color, and putting up black curtains. That's all for Aji's Decorating Corner. Til next time. XD


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Friday, 15 October 2010
Tejo Remy
Info Here
Posted by Pigeon Vintage at 01:49
1 comment:
- liisa said...
i like this! think about all the secrets you could put into the boxes.
cause i dont have extra £12,000 i need to build one for myself. maybe not very practical thou..
- 30 October 2010 at 02:32
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by Yves Pierre-Louis and Kim Ives (Haiti Liberte)
After installing a new government led by Prime Minister Enex Jean-Charles, Haiti's interim president Jocelerme Privert has now passed a second hurdle: setting up another Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) on Mar. 30, 2016. This is the sixth CEP formed in the past four years.
The new CEP has as its president Léopold Berlanger, formally the representative of the National Association of Haitian Media (ANMH) and the Association of Haiti's Independent Media (AMIH). Berlanger is also the informal representative of Haiti's bourgeoisie and the so-called "Core Group," the ambassadors who follow U.S. leadership in Haiti.
The CEP's vice-president is lawyer Carlos Hercule, who represents the Catholic Church of Cardinal Chibly Langlois and Bishop Patrice Aris.
Marie Frantz Joachim, the representative of Haitian Women Solidarity (SOFA), is the CEP's Secretary General, while Dr. Frinel Joseph, representing Haiti's Protestant sector, is the treasurer.
Haiti's human rights sector, represented by the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) and the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), nominated Jean Simon Saint-Hubert to the new CEP while the Peasant and Vodou sector sent Kenson Polynice. Marie-Herolle Michel represents the business community on the new CEP, while Josette Jean Dorcely represents the trade union sector, and Lucien Jean-Bernard, the university sector.
Mr. Bernard was a member of the CEP which organized the massively boycotted election of Jan. 17, 1988 that brought to power President Leslie François Manigat. Four months after his Feb. 7, 1988 inauguration, Manigat was overthrown by the same general, Henri Namphy, who put him in power. That 1988 CEP was chaired by Jean Gilbert, who held his election less than two months after a Nov. 29, 1987 election was aborted after paramilitary thugs macheted and shot to death dozens of would-be voters around Haiti.
The new CEP is also trying to hold an election in an extremely polarized and volatile political atmosphere. The big question is this: will it annul the Aug. 9 and Oct. 25, 2015 rounds, as demanded by Haiti's people and most of the political class, or will it attempt to hold a third round which accepts the results of the first two, as demanded by the "Core Group"?
Haiti's leading presidential candidates demand the formation of an independent commission of inquiry to review the ballots and tally sheets of the Aug. 9 and Oct. 25 pollings, marred by fraud and violence, to determine what the true results were, if that can even be done. Many doubt it can.
If the independent investigation is not carried out, it is doubtful that any major presidential candidate will participate in the elections whose schedule the new CEP must establish.
On Apr. 4, popular organizations and students organized a sit-in in front of the National Palace and the Justice Ministry to demand that in addition to an independent commission of electoral verification, there be formed a commission to audit the management of three funds.
First, they want an investigation of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), co-chaired by former U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, which decided how to spend about $13 billion in post-earthquake international aid to Haiti.
Secondly, they want to know how over $1.5 billion was spent by the government of President Michel Martelly out of Haiti's PetroCaribe account, where 40% of all state oil sales are parked to provide capital for social welfare programs. Even Mary Barton-Dock, the World Bank's Special Envoy to Haiti, told the Financial Times that "transparency in the use of PetroCaribe funds is minimal." Today, Haiti owes 86% of its foreign debt to Venezuela, and it has not paid the 60% of oil revenues it owes Venezuela up-front for over nine months.
Finally, Martelly and his Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe established an illegal tax (it was never ratified by Parliament) of $1.50 on every international money transfer and five cents on every international phone call. The tax generated tens of millions of dollars which have never been accounted for, although the money was supposed to be "funding education."
The demonstrators also denounced the interference of the Core Group, the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH) chief Sandra Honoré, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Peter Mulrean, and Canadian Ambassador Paula Caldwell St-Onge in Haiti's internal affairs. Under the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relations, accredited diplomatic representatives are formally prohibited from interfering in their host nation's internal affairs.
In recent weeks, students mobilizing at State University's Faculty of Ethnology and the Faculty of Law have clashed with the Haitian National Police (PNH), as they clashed with MINUSTAH troops last year. Today, they say loud and clear that they will not obey the dictates of the Core Group and Washington. If Leopold Berlanger allows his CEP to be used by Washington like that of his predecessor of Pierre-Louis Opont, he will suffer the same fate of having to resign in disgrace, they say.
Interim President Jocelerme Privert and Prime Minister Enex Jean-Charles are also not immune from popular anger if they don't establish commissions to verify Martelly's elections and audit his finances, demonstrators say.


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All visitors welcome to the Akaroa Yacht Club, please sign in at the foyer on your arrival.
The Clubhouse has showers, toilets and a kitchen with a microwave and tea and coffee making facilities in the Stevens Room for visting Boaties. A small freezer is available for short-term requirements. Reasonable rubbish disposal is also available.
These facilities are available to visiting boat owners at a cost of $5.00 per crew member per week or part thereof. Access to the Clubhouse may be obtained from the duty officer or Wardroom Manager during busy times or Brian Little at the Akaroa Auto Centre. This $5.00 charge makes each crew member a temporary member of the Club. This is essential in terms of our Club Premises Licence and all names must be entered into the book provided for this purpose.
Weddings, Conferences & Meeting Venue Hire
The Clubhouse wardroom and bar is very inviting and all visitors are most welcome. the Club has a new extended deck with a retractable roof which means the clubhouse is an attractive venue for private social functions, conferences and weddings and are able to accomodate 60 - 80 people. Members receive preferential rates of hire, for more information please email Clubhouse Hire or phone Brian Little on 03 304 7055 or Kev Kerr on 03 3047366


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Lancaster County offers a variety of events during the holidays—many of them steeped in history and tradition. It's a great place to get into the spirit of the season.
A Dickens of a Christmas
Each year this beautifully decorated mansion hosts a Christmas party, at which the guests can enjoy interactive holiday theater.
Mount Hope Estate, 2775 Lebanon Rd, Manheim, PA 17545
(717) 665-7021
All Aboard Railroad
Only open for public viewing over the holidays, this is one of the few (if only) animated layouts sporting American Flyer trains.
1952 Landis Valley Rd, Lancaster, PA 17601
(717) 392-1568
Country Christmas Village, grounds of Landis Valley Museum
Pennsylvania German Christmas traditions are highlighted in this 1800s village decorated for the holidays. The Belsnickel visits, too. Fun family holiday event.
2451 Kissel Hill Rd, Lancaster, PA 17601
(717) 569-0401
Downtown Lancaster for the Holidays
It's more than shopping. Weekends during the Christmas season in downtown Lancaster has horse-drawn carriage rides, strolling entertainment, visits with Santa and more.
Lancaster, PA 17603
(717) 291-4758
Dutch Winter Wonderland, Dutch Wonderland Family Amusement Park
Truly a holiday wonderland, this popular family theme park decorates for the season with thousands of lights. Also offers themed rides, seasonal entertainment and visits with Santa.
Dutch Wonderland Family Amusement Park, 2249 Lincoln Hwy E, Lancaster, PA 17602
(866) 386-2839
Early American Candlelight Christmas
A charming, peaceful self-guided tour through an historic complex with period decorations, blacksmithing and open hearth cooking demonstrations.
Conestoga Area Historical Society, 51 Kendig Rd, Conestoga, PA 17516
(717) 872-1699
Hans Herr Christmas Candlelight Tours
A wonderful journey into yesteryear, the tour of this 18th century Germanic-style homestead changes its focus annually.
Hans Herr House, 1849 Hans Herr Dr, Willow Street, PA 17584
(717) 464-4438
Kitchen Kettle Christmas
Granted this is commercial, but the holiday village feel of Kitchen Kettle during its Christmas weekends is charming and fun. Special events each weekend. You might even get some shopping done.
3529 Old Philadelphia Pike, Gordonville, PA 17529
(717) 768-8261, (800) 732-3538
National Christmas Center
Absolutely a must-see for anybody wanting to drink in a little Christmas spirit. A treasure of Christmas through the years.
3427 Lincoln Hwy E, Paradise, PA 17562
(717) 442-7950
Yuletide at Wheatland
Celebrate the season the way the 15th President of the United States might have.
President James Buchanan's Wheatland, 1120 Marietta Ave., Lancaster, PA 17603
(717) 392-8721
— Kathy Daminger


text: From the beginning, Jane Tran's hair jewelry collection has reflected her love of color and texture, incorporating the finest pearls, turquoise, corals, crystals, stones and other semi-precious materials. As the collection has matured, it has continued to reflect her individuality and her sense of style, where beauty of form and function are marvelously integrated. Today, her hair jewelry collection sets stylish trends with a minimum of fuss for today's modern woman.


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Do you know Mélanie Crété's amazing Tumblr This or That? Well, if you don't, you should visit it right now (if you do, you should too. There's some seriously cool new stuff). In her now iconic blog, Mélanie compares two similar things and gives you the possiblity to express yourself and say which one you prefer. She also gives you the possibility to contribute and send your own This or That. I already guest posted a long time ago (you can see my contribution clicking here), but tonight I'm posting my very own (very silly) saturday night fever This or That in here. So here we go:
Enjoy your saturday night, I sure I'm going to!


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A pervasive myth holds that the impact generated by social enterprises is the result of innovation. Indeed, prevailing models of social innovation lead people to ask the wrong question about achieving impact in the social sector. They ask: What are the ingredients of successful innovation? They seek to discover "a magic innovation formula" or to define a set of "innovation success factors." We find it useful to turn this question inside out. Instead of focusing on how innovation succeeds, we look at the dynamics of failure within the innovation process. We ask, in particular: What are the factors that undermine the impact potential of an innovation effort?
For the past several years, we have been studying social enterprises in order to determine what enables them to achieve high levels of impact. Innovation, we have concluded, is just one part of a larger social impact creation process. Indeed, we have found that innovation plays a minor—yet very specific—role in allowing highly successful social enterprises to deliver solutions at an appropriate scale. In examining less successful organizations, meanwhile, we have found that what holds them back is not an inability to innovate but a failure to embed their innovation efforts within a robust process for translating those efforts into impact.
Throughout the social impact creation process, there are a number of ways that innovation can go wrong. We use the term "innovation pathologies" to describe these all-too-common missteps. Organizations that actively pursue innovation but fall short of achieving impact invariably suffer from one or more pathologies. These organizations typically have a flawed understanding of how innovation works. As a result, they develop habits and practices that render their innovation efforts unproductive.
Identifying these pathologies, we argue, will help social enterprises to generate more impact from their investments in innovation. In this article, we set forth a model for understanding the relationship between innovation and impact, and we provide a way to diagnose the pathologies that interfere with that relationship. We also offer insight into how organizations can counter these pathologies by developing innovation practices that optimize their effectiveness.
Removing Uncertainty
In 2012, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal wrote an article that cast a critical eye on the obsession with innovation that has overtaken the business sector. Companies today, Leslie Kwoh observed, routinely attach the term "innovation" or "innovative" to just about any new product or service. "But that doesn't mean the companies are actually doing any innovating," Kwoh noted. "Instead they are using the word to convey monumental change when the progress they're describing is quite ordinary."1 A similar dynamic operates in the social sector, where organizations often assume that they must generously sprinkle the term "innovation" throughout a proposal if they want to have any chance of receiving a grant. In both sectors, the result is the same: People call every new thing an "innovation," and the term loses all objective meaning.
Around the time when that article appeared, we wrote an article titled "Innovation Is Not the Holy Grail" for Stanford Social Innovation Review. The article explored the limits of "innovation" as people in the social sector had come to use that concept. But in the article we also tried to establish a rigorous framework for understanding innovation—what innovation is and is not, what it can and cannot do. Crucially, we differentiated between innovation as an outcome and innovation as a process. People who care about social change, we suggested, should stop associating innovation with new products or services (that is, with outcomes). Instead, they should regard innovation as a process that has distinct characteristics and potentials.2
So what are those characteristics and potentials? What kind of process is innovation, exactly? Since the publication of our previous article on this topic, we have continued to investigate the nature and purpose of innovation in the social sector. And here is one critical finding from our research: Innovation processes involve efforts to address—and ultimately to remove—various forms of uncertainty. During most parts of an innovation process, it's not clear whether and when an innovation will succeed. Progress is nonlinear and does not follow carefully prepared plans, milestones, or budgets. Working through this process is like riding a roller coaster; it's full of ups and downs and sudden swerves in one direction or another. For organizations that are built to execute plans that follow established recipes, the challenge of navigating an innovation process can seem overwhelming. Only organizations that cultivate an ability to understand and eliminate uncertainties will survive the twists and turns of innovation. (See "The Innovation Process: Reckoning With Uncertainty" below.)
The core purpose of an innovation process is the conversion of uncertainty into knowledge. Or to put it another way: Innovation is essentially a matter of learning. In fact, one critical insight that we have drawn from our research is that effective organizations approach innovation not with an expectation of success but with an expectation of learning. Innovators who expect success from innovation efforts will inevitably encounter disappointment, and the experience of failure will generate a blame culture in their organization that dramatically lowers their chance of achieving positive impact. But a focus on learning creates a sense of progress rather than a sense of failure. The high-impact organizations that we have studied owe much of their success to their wealth of accumulated knowledge—knowledge that often has emerged from failed innovation efforts.
Innovation uncertainty has multiple dimensions, and organizations need to be vigilant about addressing uncertainty in all of its forms. (See "Types of Innovation Uncertainty" below.) Let's take a close look at three aspects of the innovation process that often involve a considerable degree of uncertainty.
Problem formulation | Organizations may incorrectly frame the problem that they aim to solve, and identifying that problem accurately may require several iterations and learning cycles.
BRAC, founded in Bangladesh, is one of the largest social enterprises in the world. In the 1980s, it launched a search for ways to treat diarrhea, a leading cause of mortality among children in Bangladeshi communities. The organization settled on a simple, cheap, and effective treatment option that took the form of a sugar-and-salt formula. In the beginning, enthusiasm for this solution ran high. BRAC, having framed the problem as one that involved a lack of awareness and a lack of access, began raising awareness of the treatment and training people to deliver it. As it turned out, however, the organization had not fully considered the broad context in which the problem of childhood diarrhea occurs in many parts of Bangladesh. Before long, BRAC leaders realized that social norms and power relations are important factors that affect how people perceive this kind of problem—and how they view potential solutions to it. People who followed traditional religious norms, for example, cast suspicion on the treatment and prevented their communities from adopting it. Even members of BRAC's own field staff did not trust the treatment at first, and many local pharmacists and doctors also didn't trust it.
In struggling to understand the dynamics at work in local communities, BRAC had to deal with problem frame uncertainty. Figuring out how to collaborate with community members and staff members to deliver the sugar-and-salt formula involved a series of challenges that tested its resolve. Eventually, BRAC overcame this uncertainty and found ways to implement its solution, and the organization came away from this experience with valuable knowledge about working with various stakeholders.
Solution development | Even when an organization has an adequate understanding of a problem, it may not be able to access and deploy the resources needed to create an effective and robust solution.
Aravind, a nonprofit organization based in India, operates a large and highly productive chain of eye hospitals. It focuses on performing cataract surgery, and it uses a cross- subsidy model to provide that service to poor people at little or no cost. In the late 1980s, Aravind ran into a bottleneck that limited its ability to scale up part of its operation. Donations of the artificial lenses used in the cataract procedure had declined, and the cost of purchasing lenses from manufacturers was prohibitively high. Aravind leaders understood the problem clearly, but the existing resources and competencies of the organization were not adequate to solving it. So they had to consider options that entailed a high degree of solution uncertainty. One idea was for the organization to begin manufacturing its own lenses. But the feasibility and the potential adverse consequences of enacting this idea raised serious questions. Did Aravind have the management capabilities to build and run a manufacturing facility? Could it handle the financial risk of investing in such a project? The founder of Aravind, Govindappa Venkataswamy, initially opposed the idea.
Ultimately, Aravind leaders decided to create a lens manufacturing company called Aurolab. They were able to create consensus around this move because it directly promoted Aravind's long-term scaling strategy. Even Venkataswamy eventually gave his full support to this solution. To launch Aurolab, the organization leveraged its reputation and drew on a global network of partners. The Aravind innovation team provided management capabilities, a lens manufacturing company provided technical knowledge, and a foundation provided fundraising assistance. Today, Aurolab makes a wide range of ophthalmic products and exports them to 130 countries worldwide.
Alignment with identity | Innovation may lead an organization in a direction that does not fit its culture or its sense of its purpose—its sense of "who we are."
For Aravind, the idea of manufacturing its own lenses involved identity uncertaintyas well as solution uncertainty. After all, lens manufacturing is an endeavor that aligns more closely with a forprofit culture than with the nonprofit, care-oriented culture that characterizes Aravind. To overcome this uncertainty, Aravind set up Aurolab as a nonprofit charitable trust that is structurally and financially separate from the organization's hospital operations.
Another organization that encountered identity uncertainty is Gram Vikas, a social enterprise that brings water and sanitation solutions to rural Indian communities. Its core mission is to reduce levels of gender and caste inequality among populations that it targets. In its first decade of operation, Gram Vikas pursued several innovations that failed to create the kind of impact that it sought. One day, it discovered that cow dung from a failed dairy-farming project could produce biogas for use in electricity generation. Responding to an opportunity to create economic benefits for poor communities, Gram Vikas proceeded to become a major developer of biogas projects. This innovation was a success on its own terms, but it led the organization in a direction that did not align with its focus on confronting gender and caste issues. In fact, the biogas solution increased rather than reduced levels of inequality, because only farmers benefited from it and most community members were not farmers. So Gram Vikas spun off its biogas program and returned to pursuing innovating efforts that match its sense of purpose.
Pursuing Impact
Viewing innovation as a process—and, in particular, as a process of addressing various kinds of uncertainty—has led us to a crucial insight: Innovation per se does not create impact. The work of converting uncertainty into knowledge requires a significant investment of time, effort, and other organizational resources. When that work is successful, it gives rise to new products, new services, and new interventions. But these outcomes merely have the potential to create positive social impact. If an organization cannot effectively deliver innovation outcomes to people who need them, then its investment in developing them will be for naught.
What enables an organization to create actual impact on the basis of potential impact? In a word: scaling. Focused and committed scaling—delivering effective products and services to more people and doing it more reliably, more efficiently, and with a steady improvement in quality—is what creates impact. An investment in scaling allows for the development of effective routines and capabilities, and it fosters a deep understanding of the problems that an organization aims to solve. Such an investment also strengthens an organization's sense of purpose and prevents unproductive deviations from its mission.
In short, innovation plus scaling equals impact. Innovation is an investment of resources that creates a new potential; scaling creates impact by enacting that potential. Because innovation creates only the potential for impact, we advocate replacing the assumption that "innovation is good, and more is better" with a more critical view: Innovation, we argue, needs to prove itself on the basis of the impact that it actually creates. The goal is not innovation for its own sake but productive innovation.
Productive innovation depends on two factors: (1) an organization's capacity for efficiently replacing innovation uncertainty with knowledge, and (2) its ability to scale up innovation outcomes by enhancing its organizational effectiveness. Innovation and scaling thus work together to form an overall social impact creation process. Over time, an investment in innovation—in the work of overcoming uncertainty—yields positive social impact, and the value of such impact will eventually exceed the cost of that investment. But that will be the case only if an organization is able to master the scaling part of this process.
To be sure, some organizations achieve real impact without scaling up their innovations. One promising model is Waste Concern, a social enterprise in Bangladesh that turns waste products into usable resources. The founders of Waste Concern excel at conducting innovation processes but have little interest in managing a large organization. So by design, their innovation work incorporates methods that make it feasible for other groups to adopt and scale up their outcomes. Waste Concern, for example, develops each innovation to the point where it can create a demonstration site that allows interested parties to observe and receive training on the innovation. The organization also places patents on its work to ensure that outside groups will go through the training process before they adopt an innovation. In that way, Waste Concern goes beyond simply "transferring" the knowledge gained from an innovation effort to an outside entity, and it maximizes the social impact of its investment in innovation. This approach frees up time for Waste Concern's founders to do what they do best: start new rounds of innovation work.
In most cases, though, transferring innovation-based knowledge to another organization is remarkably challenging. There are two main reasons why it's so difficult. First, this kind of knowledge is more contextually bound than people typically assume. Indeed, most organizations struggle when they try to replicate their own innovations in a different context. And second, such knowledge is deeply embedded in the structure and culture of an organization, and other organizations that have different characteristics are often unable to absorb that knowledge. In 2011, for example, Aravind launched an effort to transfer its knowledge about high-efficiency cataract surgery to other hospitals. The results of that project were disappointing, and Aravind abandoned the project a few years later. Its leaders realized that most partner hospitals could not productively use the knowledge that Aravind shared with them.
Most organizations that succeed in achieving substantial impact, therefore, do so by investing in scaling capability. Any organization that applies enough effort and invests enough resources will likely succeed in creating an innovative product or service. But scaling up the outcome of innovation presents a much bigger challenge.
Focusing on Pathologies
Through our study of social enterprises, we have devised a set of six pathologies—six ways that organizations limit their capacity for productive innovation. From the stage when people first develop (or fail to develop) the idea for an innovation to the stage when scaling efforts take off (or fail to take off), these pathologies adversely affect an organization's ability to make its way through the social impact creation process. (See "Creating Social Impact: Six Innovation Pathologies to Avoid" below.) Organizations can greatly improve the impact of their innovation efforts by working to prevent or treat these pathologies.
Never getting started | In too many cases, organizations simply fail to invest seriously in the work of innovation. This pathology has many causes. People in organizations may have neither the time nor the incentive to develop or communicate new ideas. Or they may find that their ideas fall on deaf ears. Or they may have a tendency to discuss an idea endlessly—until the problem that gave rise to it has been replaced by another urgent problem or until an opportunity has vanished.
At some organizations, the costs of deciding not to pursue innovation may be hard to recognize. People in established enterprises rightly focus on scaling and improving their current products and services. By doing so, after all, they can use their resources to serve more people and to create more immediate impact. But they may miss special opportunities for innovation that closely fit both their organization's purpose and its unique resources and capabilities. Organizations that never exploit such opportunities risk losing relevance. As a result, talented people may start to leave the organization, and supporters may lose enthusiasm for the organization as well.
The pathology of "never getting started" has other costs, too. First, effective organizations use innovation processes to support talent development. Innovation work provides staff members with opportunities to be creative, to make decisions, and to see projects through to completion. Innovation also provides learning opportunities for leaders that day-to-day work rarely offers. And second, organizations that focus primarily on scaling efforts risk burning people out. A minimum amount of innovation may be an important instrument of organizational "hygiene." Innovation gives people a way to break out of their daily routine and to explore their own passions, and it can be a highly effective way to rejuvenate an organization.
How can organizations overcome this pathology? Aravind explicitly links its innovation work to emerging bottlenecks in its scaling efforts. When operational priorities drive innovation, new ideas readily gain support and legitimacy. And because Aravind has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience through its scaling efforts, linking innovation to those efforts enables the organization to create better ideas and to lower its level of innovation uncertainty. BRAC, meanwhile, is a large and very hierarchical organization that faces particular challenges when it comes to initiating innovation. To overcome bureaucratic tendencies that can stifle idea creation, BRAC has created a social innovation lab. A team of young, experienced people run the lab, and they actively scout ideas from all parts of the organization. In addition, BRAC has an extensive meeting culture that allows ideas to flow across the organization quickly and to gain the attention of senior decision makers.
Pursuing too many bad ideas | Organizations in the social sector frequently fall into the habit of embracing a wide variety of ideas for innovation without regard to whether those ideas are sound. The recent obsession with "scientific" evaluation tools such as randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, exemplifies this tendency to favor costly ideas that may or may not deliver real benefits. As with other pathologies, many factors potentially contribute to this one. Funders may push their favorite solutions regardless of how well they understand the problems that those solutions target or how well a solution fits a particular organization. Or an organization may fail to invest in learning about the context of a problem before adopting a solution. Wasting scarce resources on the pursuit of bad ideas creates frustration and cynicism within an organization. It also increases innovation uncertainty and the likelihood of failure.
The key to preventing this pathology lies with leaders. Many of the most effective organizations that we have studied share an important characteristic: Senior leaders spend a lot of time in the field, where they gain exposure to the reality of the problems that their organization seeks to address. These leaders also make an effort to keep managers on board as long as possible. That way, their organization is able to accumulate institutional knowledge that enables it to create better ideas and to avoid bad ideas. In addition, leaders at effective organizations often strive to limit their dependence on external funding sources that might pressure them to explore unsuitable ideas. (A manager at BRAC shared this proverb with us: "If you keep your hands in a friend's pocket, [then] if that person moves, you'll have to move.")
Stopping too early | In some instances, organizations are unable or unwilling to devote adequate resources to the development of worthy ideas. When resources are scarce and not formally dedicated to innovation processes, project managers will struggle to develop an idea and may have to abandon it prematurely. Too often, they end up taking the blame for failure, and others in their organization ignore the adverse circumstances that caused it. Decision makers then reallocate resources on an ad-hoc basis to other urgent problems or to projects that seem more important. As a result, even promising innovation efforts come to a grinding halt.
Another cause of this pathology is the use of project plans that set forth milestones in a linear fashion. As we have noted, innovation progress is not linear. When managers compare a set of project milestones with the actual progress of an innovation, they often perceive a huge gap and decide to stop the innovation prematurely. "Stopping too early" is costly not only because promising opportunities remain unexploited but also because it deprives organizations of important learning opportunities.
This pathology also occurs when groups accept the first solution that they identify or when organizations push to scale up innovations that are not yet mature. Under pressure to demonstrate impact, they rush to implement half-baked ideas. This form of "stopping too early" sharply reduces an organization's potential for impact. Effective organizations therefore maintain an innovation orientation even when they shift into a scaling mode. They never assume that an intervention is working perfectly, and they persist in their efforts to identify problems proactively. Both BRAC and Aravind, for example, have senior leaders who engage directly in innovation work. Not only do they ensure proper resource provision and maintain high motivation, but they also keep asking the right questions about the status of an innovation project: Are we still learning something? Are there occasional promising signs of progress? Answering "No" to one of these questions signals that it might be time to stop.
Stopping too late | Even more costly than stopping too early is stopping too late. In this pathology, an organization continues an innovation project even after the innovation proves to be ineffective or unworkable. This problem occurs, for example, when an unsuccessful innovation happens to be the pet project of a senior leader who has limited experience. Leaders who have recently joined an organization and who are keen to leave their mark rather than continue what their predecessor has built are particularly likely to engage in this pathology. Another cause of "stopping too late" is the assumption that a project budget needs to be spent. The consequences of this pathology are clear: Organizations expend scarce resources with little hope for success and without gaining any useful knowledge.
This pathology also occurs when a project becomes "too big to fail." If an organization invests all of its innovation funding into a single large pilot, it becomes susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy: That investment creates an emotional attachment that prevents leaders from abandoning the pilot even if it clearly has little potential. An organization can avoid this problem by running several small pilots that have different design parameters. This approach also facilitates low-cost learning and strategic flexibility.
BRAC, for its part, avoids the "stopping too late" pathology by investing both in a dedicated research and evaluation division and in an explicit monitoring function. This organizational infrastructure ensures that BRAC leaders make decisions about innovation efforts that are grounded in timely and objective data.
Scaling too little | To repeat an essential point that we made earlier: no scaling, no impact. This pathology—which involves a failure to move beyond the initial stages of developing, launching, and testing an intervention—is all too common in the social enterprise field. Thousands of inspired young people want to become social entrepreneurs. But few of them are willing or able to build an organization that can deliver solutions at scale. Too many organizations, therefore, remain small and lack the resources and capabilities required for translating innovation into impact.
Our research on social enterprises suggests a counterintuitive insight: The best way to get good at innovation is to get good at scaling. By building scaling capacity, an organization can advance productive innovation in several ways:
- Scaling accumulates knowledge about the context in which an organization operates—about the economic, cognitive, normative, and political factors that affect its target communities. This deep knowledge enables the organization not only to create better ideas but also to create fewer bad ideas.
- The experience of scaling up past innovations empowers an organization to say "No" to questionable ideas because it now feels less pressure to enact every idea that arises.
- Successful scaling builds trust between an organization and the people and communities that it serves. That trust in turn enables the organization to test ideas quickly by incorporating small pilots into its ongoing operations.
- Organizations that are good at scaling often develop surplus resources that they can use to limit the negative effect that an investment in innovation may have on overall performance.
Innovating again too soon | Too many organizations rush to launch new innovation projects instead of investing in efforts to scale interventions that they have already developed. The causes of this pathology are fairly well known: People often portray scaling as dull, routine work and innovation as its more attractive sibling. "Innovative" proposals thus attract funders more readily than proposals that focus on scaling. Reinforcing this bias is the preference among many funders for "lean projects" that reduce overhead costs to a minimum. These factors lead organizations to jump opportunistically from one innovation grant to another.
Most high-impact organizations counter this pathology by investing heavily in organizational infrastructure and in a capacity for systematic learning and training. Leaders at these organizations understand that nurturing management talent and building execution competence are crucial factors in transforming innovation into impact.
Making a Diagnosis
Organizations that seek to establish the conditions for turning innovation into impact need to identify specific pathologies that hold them back, along with the factors that cause those pathologies. Our innovation pathologies framework creates an opportunity for constructive and strategic conversations about the social impact creation process.
We use the framework as a diagnostic tool in a workshop that we have offered to a number of organizations in both advisory and educational settings. In the workshop, we typically divide participants into three or four groups of 5 to 10 people. We try to keep the ratio of senior managers to other participants at 1-to-5. The presence of senior managers in this exercise sends an important signal that they are willing to listen to people at all levels of their organization. Attending these sessions also allows them to feel the "innovation pulse" of the organization and to learn about ways that they may be thwarting productive innovation.
In our research, we suggest that an innovation process unfolds in four phases: (1) internal idea creation, (2) interpreting and evaluating ideas, (3) experimenting and consensus building, and (4) formalization and routinization—a phase that corresponds to the scaling process.3 When we conduct our workshop, we ask each group to focus on one of these phases. (In some cases, we invite one group to address the first two phases in tandem.) The task for each group is to identify and explore pathologies that affect their organization, particularly during the phase to which we have assigned them. The group that tackles the first phase, for instance, may talk about a failure to get started on an innovation process, or about a tendency to generate too many bad ideas. In another version of the workshop, we ask people in each group to consider the entire innovation process and to explore the full range of pathologies that occur in their organization.
Participants work individually for 15 minutes and then discuss their findings with others in their group for 60 minutes. During that time, participants are usually able to identify a large number of organizational barriers to productive innovation. At that point, each group presents its conclusions to the full workshop. Participants often say that they find the workshop liberating: It directs attention away from individual responsibility for innovation failure and toward larger organizational dynamics.
For organizational leaders, the workshop has clear benefits. A careful and honest diagnosis of innovation pathologies enables an organization to base interventions on concrete realities instead of general recipes. Unproductive excuses ("We have the wrong staff," "Management keeps us too busy") give way to strategic considerations. And what had been a blame game ("We tried suggestion boxes, but no one offered any suggestions") evolves into a fruitful discussion of organizational design.
Practicing Innovation
Once an organization identifies the pathologies that create barriers to successful innovation, it can begin to design interventions in a way that will prevent those pathologies from taking hold. Toward that end—and in the spirit of treating innovation as a learning process—we recommend that leaders approach each innovation effort as if it were a research project. This approach, we have found, is the best way to ensure that social innovation will result in social impact. Here are some steps that you can take to improve the practice of innovation in your organization.
Define a clear objective | Start by asking, "Why are we pursuing this innovation?" Answers like "We received money to do it" or "Our funders expect us to be more innovative" do not make a good case for investing in innovation. Instead, your answer should explain how this innovation will advance your mission and inspire your teams. Otherwise, your organization will not have the stamina needed to ride the innovation roller coaster, or you run the risk of accepting solutions that are convenient but inadequate to the problem at hand. Recall two examples that we cited earlier: BRAC's work to develop and implement a treatment for diarrhea arose from an observation of high rates of child mortality—a problem that was central to the organization's mission. Aravind, similarly, began to manufacture artificial lenses because that was the most effective way to meet its commitment to delivering cataract surgeries to poor patients.
Ask meaningful questions | Recast your ideas as research questions about the problem that you intend to solve: "What prevents women in our region from participating in decision-making processes? Why do women remain excluded from economic opportunities?" Such questions provide a clear focus for your project and enable a productive search for knowledge. Too often, people start an innovation effort by positing solutions. Instead, they should undertake a deep investigation of a problem that they find meaningful. Gram Vikas, as we have seen, struggled early in its history to establish a clear focus for its work. Experts and powerful stakeholders lured the organization into adopting solutions that had negative consequences both for Gram Vikas and for the communities that it aimed to serve. ("The world is filled with experts [who are] trying to find a problem to attach their solution to," a senior manager at BRAC once said to us.)
Draw on relevant knowledge | Survey stakeholders who engage in some way with your problem of interest. Focus, in particular, on learning from the intended beneficiaries of your project. Then identify research that covers similar problems in other contexts, and look for data on solutions (including both solutions that failed and solutions that seem to have worked). Categorize and analyze the various dimensions of your problem—the economic, political, and cultural aspects that make up the overall "problem space" that you are striving to understand.
Formulate hypotheses | Use the knowledge that you have gained to formulate explicit hypotheses—assumptions about which actions would alter aspects of the problem that you have targeted. This practice helps you to learn in an intentional and systematic manner. Document your learning, update your assumptions, and reformulate your hypotheses as new information becomes available.
Test potential solutions | Explore your hypotheses in the real world. Develop small, low-cost pilots, and run multiple pilots at the same time. This approach will allow you to test your hypotheses more quickly. Pilots can generate useful information about the influence of various contextual factors, the strength of causal links between actions and desired outcomes, and the many ways that an intervention can go wrong.
Synthesize findings | Conduct innovation debriefings in order to solidify emerging knowledge and to spell out implications for future innovation efforts. Which pathologies occurred during your innovation process, and how can your organization avoid them in the future? Which assumptions turned out to be faulty enough to require a thorough redesign of your project? If an innovation succeeds, use similar methods to document your success, and identify lessons on how best to scale up your solutions. What are you learning about the resource requirements for successful scaling, the potential for replicating solutions in other contexts, and the challenges that arise from collaborating with implementation partners? Are there unresolved uncertainties that might affect further scaling efforts?
Building Competence
A strategic approach to building a productive innovation capability is far more effective than an approach based on following a supposedly magic formula. If waving a wand worked, then every innovation effort would succeed. By considering the entire social impact creation process, organizations can realistically confront the need for both innovation and scaling. They can also begin to take seriously the various pathologies that cause that process to go wrong. By keeping a close eye on innovation uncertainties, moreover, organizations can shift their attention away from the naive pursuit of success and toward an investment in learning. In that way, even an innovation "failure" can generate important knowledge that informs the next round of innovation.
Focusing on pathologies builds innovation competence. It removes unrealistic expectations about the potential of innovation to create impact, and it enables better decision making. It establishes a shared understanding that innovation does not just happen. Indeed, organizations need to set up systems and practices that legitimize and enable productive forms of innovation. And senior managers need to recognize—and then correct for—the ways that they make innovation difficult for their staff. When they do so, they open up opportunities for creating real social impact.


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DALLAS, Feb. 4 /PRNewswire/ — Enabling the trend toward 'flat architectures' for the cellular network, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) announces the availability of a development platform for the recently ratified HSPA+ (High Speed Packet Access Plus) standard. Based on the wireless infrastructure-optimized, multicore TMS320TCI6488 digital signal processor, the platform offers updated WCDMA Receive Accelerator (RAC) software drivers and a reference platform. Now, basestation manufacturers can design a single product spanning HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE (Long Term Evolution), greatly reducing development costs. For more information, go to http://www.ti.com/beyond3g.
HSPA+ offers many benefits for wireless infrastructure basestation manufacturers. Essentially, HSPA+, as defined by release 7 of the 3G mobile data protocol, introduces the concept of a flat architecture for cellular infrastructure. This new approach makes the basestation into an IP router, connecting to the Internet with cost effective modern IP link layer technologies like Ethernet and eliminating expensive leased T1/E1 lines. With data speeds of up to 42 Mbit/s on the downlink and 11 Mbit/s on the uplink, HSPA+ is a significant step toward LTE.
"The fervor around LTE is undeniable, leading many to posit that LTE will be a commercial service reality within just a few years," said Peter Jarich, Research Director with Current Analysis. "Promising a flat architecture for wireless network design along with enhanced data rates, HSPA+ paves the way for LTE going forward and allows operators to move on technology upgrades at their own pace while still benefiting from IP evolutions and improved throughput."
Optimized platform extends customers' existing designs
With TI's leadership in 3G basestation technology, the majority of the world's basestation manufacturers have products designed and deployed based on the TMS320C64x+(R) core. By leveraging the C64x+ core-based TCI6488 device, basestation manufacturers can utilize the same board footprint, dramatically reducing the time and cost needed for new board development.
Updated RAC software drivers also capitalize on the embedded platform currently in place with TI's customers. By providing the new features necessary to support HSPA+, basestation manufacturers can extend their existing software code and devote more time to optimizing the channel card for specific deployment criteria.
"TI's latest development platform enables our customers to easily extend their solutions to include HSPA+," said Arnon Friedmann, product manager for TI's wireless infrastructure software solutions. "The platform also allows customers to develop systems that are software upgradeable from HSPA+ to LTE with the multi-core TCI6488 DSP."
As an active participant in the development of the 3GPP standard release updates, TI can quickly adapt and modify its software library to match any changes or new developments. This system expertise, coupled with the company's leadership position in wireless infrastructure, enables TI to be an active partner with customers and service providers as the industry moves toward the next step in mobile communications.
The HSPA+ platform, including the DSP and updated software drivers are available today. The third party development platforms will be available in 1H08. TI will highlight its complete infrastructure offering at the Mobile World Congress Conference in Barcelona, Hall 8, booth #8A84.
About Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) helps customers solve problems and develop new electronics that make the world smarter, healthier, safer, greener and more fun. A global semiconductor company, TI innovates through manufacturing,
design and sales operations in more than 25 countries. For more information, go to http://www.ti.com.
All registered trademarks and other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE Texas Instruments Incorporated
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Tom Gregory's Hollywood Vault radio clips, as featured on Leeza Gibbons' national radio program Hollywood Confidential!
Jayne Mansfield
Below is a transcript of the review on the audio file playable above.In this day of Paris' prolific self-promotion, it's fittingly fun to remember buxom Jayne Mansfield. That's Jayne with a "Y" and Mansfield, dotted with a heart. She said "A woman should be pink and cuddly for a man."
Famed reporter Walter Winchell bellowed, "Jayne Mansfield is making a career of being a girl." Listen, says Jayne, I've been Miss Freeway, Miss Nylon Sweater, and Miss 4th of July Heck, the only award I ever turned down was: Miss Roquefort Cheese, "it just didn't sound right."
Mansfield's legend is a potpourri of posing, performance, and pink. Don't think she was all fluff. Her turn as Rita Marlowe in 1957's "WIll Success Spoil Rock Hunter" sealed her star as a legitimate actress in Hollywood.
Jayne and her body-builder husband Mickey Hargitay lived their storybook life in love on Sunset Blvd. Their mansion became known as the Pink Palace. Painted this coral color the house boasted a fireplace, pool, and Jacuzzi - all in her trademark heart shape.
Jayne was the queen of the wardrobe malfunction as self-promotion. More than once her candid picture was plastered across the entertainment page with the word CENSORED across her exposed attributes.
Sadly, in 1967 34-year-old Jayne, her attorney, and a business companion were killed when their car rear-ended a truck on a dark Louisiana highway. Her three children, asleep in the back seat, survived. Daughter Mariska Hargitay is a regular on TV's Law and Order. Her Mother would be proud. Bravo, or as Jayne would have purred, "Isn't she Devoon??!!"


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On Limeroad.com, you will find a collection consisting of coolest summer clothing. We have the trendiest women clothing to chic you up for the summer. We have a range of the most fashionable dresses for girls to buy for the season. We have the printed as well as the solid ones in shades that are absolutely upbeat. Check out the variety of the most fashionable jumpsuits to go show off a high fashion statement. We have them in the sassiest motifs. With Limeroad, you will find the most stylish ethnic attires. We have a range of classy kurtas, kurtis, suits, sarees and more. Shop online on Limeroad.com and get in trend this season. Download the Limeroad App to save on what you shop. The app keeps you updated with all the deals and discounts that we have for you.


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Every week this winter, we will highlight one of our Hamilton County, Indiana restaurants. This week we are all about the pizza at Mellow Mushroom in Carmel, Indiana.
For purposes of full disclosure, Mellow Mushroom does serve much more than pizza. They have hearty calzones and hoagies, a yummy tortilla soup and a great Chef Salad. But if I am going to Mellow Mushroom, it's typically to get one of the specialty pizzas. The only problem is that there are too many to choose from! The Philosopher's Pie is my latest favorite. It is an olive oil and garlic base pizza, topped with loads of grilled steak, Portobello mushrooms, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives and a feta, mozzarella, provolone cheese mixture. It's a little bit like a Philly Cheese Steak on a crust but, when you add the olives and artichokes, it has a salty, sweet side too. All together satisfying, even if I can only eat one slice before I am full. You can't go wrong with the House Special topped with traditional favorites - and lots of them. This pizza has pepperoni, sausage, ground beef AND bacon. It also has a full assortment of veggies and extra cheese. Yum. If you are a little more adventurous, try the Red Skin Potato Pie. With the applewood smoked bacon, caramelized onions, cheeses, sour cream and chives, it tastes a little bit like a really good batch of potato skins. Of course you can build your own pizza too. See just how creative you can be! As they say at Mellow Mushroom, "Come in with an open mind and an empty stomach."