text:
takes a portfolio approach to technology development as a way to mitigate risk, as well as enjoy earlier returns on investment. The company identifies promising new natural sources of compounds, creates new chemical entities where appropriate, validates those drug candidates for neurological disease and sells those assets to pharma players for early returns.
More specifically, Neurodyn preferentially such as traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine or other sources. Compounds are chosen which can be quickly de-risked and protected, and the company then partners aggressively at an early stage in order to mitigate risk and obtain earlier returns. Alternatives to traditional drug development are also explored, such as Medical Foods, as routes which are faster to market with lower regulatory barriers.
Neurodyn's main area of technical focus is in neurological disease. The company enjoys access to a large sourcing pipeline with numerous promising natural extracts, compounds and drug candidates through its international partners.
With its experienced business and scientific team, Neurodyn has the capability to:
i.) systematically evaluate and select new technologies and drug candidates from both a scientific and marketing perspective,
ii.) validate, de-risk and add commercial proof of relevance to those assets, and
iii.) sell or out-license those assets to the pharmaceutical or natural product industry for early returns.
· – a treatment for early stage Parkinson's which has demonstrated in vivo pre-clinical efficacy in acute (MPTP based) models as well as Neurodyn's proprietary chronic model of Parkinson's disease. A Medical Food product is expected to launch in the USA in 2014.
· – a novel therapeutic demonstrating in vivo pre-clinical efficacy in ALS, PD, Alzheimer's disease and Spinal Muscular Atrophy. The company is in its third year of collaboration (late stage pre-clinical evaluation) with the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
· (NQ1123) – within a class of compounds showing rare first-in-class state-dependent neuromodulation and dual mechanism of action on Nav and TRP, being prepared for a topical orphan status nerve pain condition. This NCE is based on in vivo and human clinic validated natural BioActives. A product is being developed for early entry into the Chinese marketplace.
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Note that this behavior of the T channel is qualitatively identical to that of the Na + channel underlying conventional action potentials, with several quantitative differences. These are:
This last point means that it is only conventional action potentials that convey the information relayed to cortex.
The real significance of T channel behavior is shown in the figure. That is, the low threshold Ca 2+ spike is sufficiently large (typically 25-40 mV) to activate a transient, high frequency burst of conventional action potentials. If the relay cell is relatively depolarized for \geq 100 msec (panel A), T channels are inactivated and play no role in neuronal responses. Now, a depolarizing current pulse (or EPSP ) directly activates a series of unitary action potentials for as long as the input remains suprathreshold; this is the tonic mode of firing . However, if the same cell is sufficiently hyperpolarized for \geq 100 msec (panel B), T channels are de-inactivated and primed for action. Now, the very same depolarizing pulse (or EPSP) activates the low threshold Ca 2+ spike, which in turn, activates a burst of 2-10 action potentials; this is the burst mode of firing . Note that the very same input (or EPSP) results in a very different message relayed to cortex, depending on the recent voltage history of the relay cell. Note also that, because of the slow kinetics of the inactivation gate, a polarization change must be sustained for roughly \geq 100 msec to change the inactivation state and affect a switch between firing modes.
Panel C shows some of the consequences of the tonic versus burst firing modes (Sherman, 1996, 2001; Sherman and Guillery, 2006). Because tonic firing represents a direct link between an input depolarization or EPSP, the larger the depolarization, the greater the response. There is thus a fairly linear input/output relationship during tonic firing. In contrast, burst firing represents an indirect link between the input EPSP and action potential generation, the link being the low threshold Ca 2+ spike; because this is all-or-none, meaning that a larger EPSP does not evoke a larger low threshold Ca 2+ spike, this input/output relationship is decidedly nonlinear, approximating a step function.
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In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for,computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".
His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".
And he notes that "the Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites".
Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the "so-called 'Artificial Intelligence' and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."
Read on as Jaron Lanier throwns a lit Molotov cocktail down towards Palo Alto from up in the Berkeley Hills...
THE REALITY CLUB: Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold
(JARON LANIER:) My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no one ever sees it again.
In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.
Twice in the past several weeks, reporters have asked me about my filmmaking career. The fantasies of the goblins have entered that portion of the world that is attempting to remain real. I know I've gotten off easy. The errors in my Wikipedia bio have been (at least prior to the publication of this article) charming and even flattering.
Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet oldMondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.
No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.
There was a well-publicized study inNaturelast year comparing the accuracy of the Wikipedia toEncyclopedia Britannica.The results were a toss up. While there is a lingering debate about the validity of the study. The items selected for the comparison were just the sort that Wikipedia would do well on: Science topics that the collective at large doesn't care much about. "Kinetic isotope effect" or "Vesalius, Andreas" are examples of topics that make theBritannicahard to maintain, because it takes work to find the right authors to research and review a multitude of diverse topics. But they are perfect for the Wikipedia. There is little controversy around these items, plus the Net provides ready access to a reasonably small number of competent specialist graduate student types possessing the manic motivation of youth.
A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.
For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.
When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannicahas an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too "Dead White Men."
If an ironic Web site devoted to destroying cinema claimed that I was a filmmaker, it would suddenly make sense. That would be an authentic piece of text. But placed out of context in the Wikipedia, it becomes drivel.
Myspace is another recent experiment that has become even more influential than the Wikipedia. Like the Wikipedia, it adds just a little to the powers already present on the Web in order to inspire a dramatic shift in use. Myspace is all about authorship, but it doesn't pretend to be all-wise. You can always tell at least a little about the character of the person who made a Myspace page. But it is very rare indeed that a Myspace page inspires even the slightest confidence that the author is a trustworthy authority. Hurray for Myspace on that count!
Myspace is a richer, multi-layered, source of information than the Wikipedia, although the topics the two services cover barely overlap. If you want to research a TV show in terms of what people think of it, Myspace will reveal more to you than the analogous and enormous entries in the Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
These Web-based designs assumed that value would flow from people. It was still clear, in all such designs, that the Web was made of people, and that ultimately value always came from connecting with real humans.
Even Google by itself (as it stands today) isn't Meta enough to be a problem. One layer of page ranking is hardly a threat to authorship, but an accumulation of many layers can create a meaningless murk, and that is another matter.
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
Kevin Kelly, the former editor ofand the founding Executive Editor of, is a friend and someone who has been thinking about what he and others call the "Hive Mind." He runs a Website called Cool Toolsthat's a cross between a blog and the old. OnCool Tools, the contributors, including me, are not a hive because we are identified.
In March, Kelly reviewed a variety of "Consensus Web filters" such as "Digg" and "Reddit" that assemble material every day from all the myriad of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.
That new magnitude of Meta-ness lasted only a month. In April, Kelly reviewed a site called "popurls" that aggregates consensus Web filtering sites...and there was a new "most Meta". We now are reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.
Is "popurls" any good? I am writing this on May 27, 2006. In the last few days an experimental approach to diabetes management has been announced that might prevent nerve damage. That's huge news for tens of millions of Americans. It is not mentioned on popurls. Popurls does clue us in to this news: "Student sets simultaneous world ice cream-eating record, worst ever ice cream headache." Mainstream news sources all lead today with a serious earthquake in Java. Popurls includes a few mentions of the event, but they are buried within the aggregation of aggregate news sites like Google News. The reason the quake appears on popurls at all can be discovered only if you dig through all the aggregating layers to find the original sources, which are those rare entries actually created by professional writers and editors who sign their names. But at the layer of popurls, the ice cream story and the Javanese earthquake are at best equals, without context or authorship.
Kevin Kelly says of the "popurls" site, "There's no better way to watch the hive mind."But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?
Readers of my previous rants will notice a parallel between my discomfort with so-called "Artificial Intelligence" and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent.
There is a pedagogical connection between the culture of Artificial Intelligence and the strange allure of anonymous collectivism online. Google's vast servers and the Wikipedia are both mentioned frequently as being the startup memory for Artificial Intelligences to come. Larry Page is quoted via a link presented to me by popurls this morning (who knows if it's accurate) as speculating that an AI might appear within Google within a few years. George Dyson has wondered if such an entity already exists on the Net, perhaps perched within Google. My point here is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical entities, but just to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the expectations we hold for individual human intellects.
The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.
Compounding the problem is that new business models for people who think and write have not appeared as quickly as we all hoped. Newspapers, for instance, are on the whole facing a grim decline as the Internet takes over the feeding of the curious eyes that hover over morning coffee and, even worse, classified ads. In the new environment, Google News is for the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the aggregated.
The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it's easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday's moves in a conversation.
The artificial elevation of all things Meta is not confined to online culture. It is having a profound influence on how decisions are made in America.
What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.
As a consultant, I used to be asked to test an idea or propose a new one to solve a problem. In the last couple of years I've often been asked to work quite differently. You might find me and the other consultants filling out survey forms or tweaking edits to a collective essay. I'm saying and doing much less than I used to, even though I'm still being paid the same amount. Maybe I shouldn't complain, but the actions of big institutions do matter, and it's time to speak out against the collectivity fad that is upon us.
It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.
I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.
The collective rises around us in multifarious ways. What afflicts big institutions also afflicts pop culture. For instance, it has become notoriously difficult to introduce a new pop star in the music business. Even the most successful entrants have hardly ever made it past the first album in the last decade or so. The exception is American Idol. As with the Wikipedia, there's nothing wrong with it. The problem is its centrality.
More people appear to vote in this pop competition than in presidential elections, and one reason why is the instant convenience of information technology. The collective can vote by phone or by texting, and some vote more than once. The collective is flattered and it responds. The winners are likable, almost by definition.
But John Lennon wouldn't have won. He wouldn't have made it to the finals. Or if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of person and artist. The same could be said about Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Duke Ellington, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash, Bob Dylan (please!), and almost anyone else who has been vastly influential in creating pop music.
As below, so above.The New York Times, of all places, has recently published op-ed pieces supporting the pseudo-idea of intelligent design. This is astonishing.The Timeshas become the paper of averaging opinions. Something is lost when American Idol becomes a leader instead of a follower of pop music. But when intelligent design shares the stage with real science in the paper of record, everything is lost.
How could theTimeshave fallen so far? I don't know, but I would imagine the process was similar to what I've seen in the consulting world of late. It's safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong.
Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.
The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.
This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.
But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.
The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.
What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence. A marketplace can't exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.
In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask the questions which are answered by collective behavior. They put the jellybeans in the jar.
There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective that is reasonably free of manipulation or runaway internal resonances. But when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.
Here I must take a moment to comment on Linux and similar efforts. The various formulations of "open" or "free" software are different from the Wikipedia and the race to be most Meta in important ways. Linux programmers are not anonymous and in fact personal glory is part of the motivational engine that keeps such enterprises in motion. But there are similarities, and the lack of a coherent voice or design sensibility in an esthetic sense is one negative quality of both open source software and the Wikipedia.
These movements are at their most efficient while building hidden information plumbing layers, such as Web servers. They are hopeless when it comes to producing fine user interfaces or user experiences. If the code that ran the Wikipedia user interface were as open as the contents of the entries, it would churn itself into impenetrable muck almost immediately. The collective is good at solving problems which demand results that can be evaluated by uncontroversial performance parameters, but bad when taste and judgment matter.
Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual, and in important cases, stupider. The interesting question is whether it's possible to map out where the one is smarter than the many.
There is a lot of history to this topic, and varied disciplines have lots to say. Here is a quick pass at where I think the boundary between effective collective thought and nonsense lies: The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn't defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse.
Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.
If the above criteria have any merit, then there is an unfortunate convergence. The setup for the most stupid collective is also the setup for the most stupid individuals.
Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There's a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind.
The pre-Internet world provides some great examples of how personality-based quality control can improve collective intelligence. For instance, an independent press provides tasty news about politicians by reporters with strong voices and reputations, like the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. Other writers provide product reviews, such as Walt Mossberg inThe Wall Street Journaland David Pogue inThe New York Times. Such journalists inform the collective's determination of election results and pricing. Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances. (Recent events in America have reflected the weakening of the press, in my opinion.)
Scientific communities likewise achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and "blind" elitism — blind in the sense that ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy. The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective.
Another example: Entrepreneurs aren't the only "heroes" of a marketplace. The role of a central bank in an economy is not the same as that of a communist party official in a centrally planned economy. Even though setting an interest rate sounds like the answering of a question, it is really more like the asking of a question. The Fed asks the market to answer the question of how to best optimize for lowering inflation, for instance. While that might not be the question everyone would want to have asked, it is at least coherent.
Yes, there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy and in the press. No mechanism is perfect, but still here we are, having benefited from all of these institutions. There certainly have been plenty of bad reporters, self-deluded academic scientists, incompetent bureaucrats, and so on. Can the hive mind help keep them in check? The answer provided by experiments in the pre-Internet world is "yes," but only provided some signal processing is placed in the loop.
Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as modulating the time domain. For instance, what if a collective moves too readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a single answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open markets.
One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge of writing laws. It's a terrifying thing to consider. Super-energized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax-code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The Internet would be swamped.
Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly, by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an over-excited state when too many rapid changes to answers coincide in such a way that they don't cancel each other out. (Technical readers will recognize familiar principles in signal processing.)
The Wikipedia has recently slapped a crude low pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as "President George W. Bush." There's now a limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else's text fragments. I suspect that this will eventually have to evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the Internet arrived.
The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives would yield brilliant results given enough time but there isn't enough time. A problem like global warming would automatically be addressed eventually if the market had enough time to respond to it, for instance. Insurance rates would climb, and so on. Alas, in this case there isn't enough time, because the market conversation is slowed down by the legacy effect of existing investments. Therefore some other process has to intervene, such as politics invoked by individuals.
Another example of the slow hive problem: There was a lot of technology developed slowly in the millennia before there was a clear idea of how to be empirical, how to have a peer reviewed technical literature and an education based on it, and before there was an efficient market to determine the value of inventions. What is crucial to notice about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not just pure openness and concessions to the collective.
Let's suppose that the Wikipedia will indeed become better in some ways, as is claimed by the faithful, over a period of time. We might still need something better sooner.
Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism. If wikis are to gain any more influence they ought to be improved by mechanisms like the ones that have worked tolerably well in the pre-Internet world.
The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.
These are just a few ideas about how to train a potentially dangerous collective and not let it get out of the yard. When there's a problem, you want it to bark but not bite you.
The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.
Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold
Lately, there's been a lot of news concerning the Wikipedia and other user-generated websites such as Myspace, Flickr, and others.
For example, in today's "portals" column, Lee Gomes ("Why Getting the User To Create Web Content Isn't Always Progress", June 7, 2006, p B1) writes:
"Mash-ups", which allow active (vs. "passive") participation, is another term for "'user-generated content', referred to by the smart set as "UGC:"
Yesterday, at a panel discussion at a Conference on Science, Technology and Education, the moderator, Brian Williams, Anchor and Managing Editor, NBC Nightly News, spent a great deal of his time at the hour-long panel disparaging the Wikipedia.
Williams noted that NBC Nightly News was the largest news provider in America, reaching 9 to 12 million Americans, vastly more than any of the discrete digital audiences for websites; when he goes to his office and walks in the door, people are there and they are gathering the news. They are professionals, you know their names, and this is very different than anonymous contributors to the Wikipedia or other user-generated websites.
On Monday of this week, in "Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules" (June 5, 2006,) Motoko Rich writes:
John Updike's comments were also reported by Bob Thompson in ("Explosive Words", May 22, 2006, p C01):
About ten years ago, the big realization (as expounded by , Nicholas Negroponte, among others) was a perceptual migration from atoms to bits, from the world of the physical to the world of information.
Now, another big idea is taking hold, but this time it's more painful for some people to embrace, even to contemplate. It's nothing less than the migration from individual mind to collective intelligence. I call it "here comes everybody", and it represents, for good or for bad, a fundamental change in our notion of who we are. In other words, we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of person.
I've been tracking this development since 1969 when I wrote in :
This isn't going away. Rather than demonize, we need to think through what's going on.
In this regard, no one is deeper, more thoughtful, on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies than Clay Shirky, a consultant and NYU professor. His writings, mostly web-based, are focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that are leading us into a new world of user-generated content. As adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.
Shirky commands wide respect within the user-generated web community, both for his authoritative writings as well as his leadership role as a speaker. I have reached out to him for help in organizing a serious response to Jaron Lanier's essay, and he graciously accepted. The people he assembled, a "who's who" of the movers, shakers, and pundits of this new universe of collective intelligence, of the "hive mind", have written essays that are at once unfailingly interesting, maddening, thought-provoking, depressing, and a window not to the future but to where we are today.
I am now pleased to turn the proceedings over to Clay Shirky with warm thanks from for his help in organizing this project. But before I get off the stage, one final note.
Shakespeare's snippets pound in my head, as I ask myself Banquo's question...
Introduction by Clay Shirky
When Jaron Lanier's piece on "Digital Maoism" first went out on Edge, I knew he'd be generating hundreds of responses all over the net. After talking to John Brockman, we decided to try to capture some of the best responses here.
Lanier's piece hits a nerve because human life always exists in tension between our individual and group identities, inseparable and incommensurable. For ten years now, it's been apparent that the rise of the digital was providing enormous new powers for the individual. It's now apparent that the world's networks are providing enormous new opportunities for group action.
Understanding how these cohabiting and competing revolutions connect to deep patterns of intellectual and social work is one of the great challenges of our age. The breadth and depth of the responses collected here, ranging from the broad philosophical questions to reckonings of the ground truth of particular technologies, is a testament to the complexity and subtlety of that challenge.
— Clay Shirky
Projects like Wikipedia do not overthrow any elite at all, but merely replace one elite — in this case an academic one — with another: the interactive media elite. — Douglas Rushkoff
Our new tool for communication and computation may take us away from distinct individualism, and towards something closer to the tender nuance of folk art or the animal energy of millenarianism. — Quentin Hardy
Networked-based, distributed, social production, both individual and cooperative, offers a new system, alongside markets, firms, governments, and traditional non-profits, within which individuals can engage in information, knowledge, and cultural production. This new modality of production offers new challenges, and new opportunities. It is the polar opposite of Maoism. — Yochai Benkler
The personal computer produced an incredible increase in the creative autonomy of the individual. The internet has made group forming ridiculously easy. Since social life involves a tension between individual freedom and group participation, the changes wrought by computers and networks are therefore in tension. To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear. — Clay Shirky
Wikipedia isn't great because it's like the Britannica. The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous. — Cory Doctorow
The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go. — Kevin Kelly
So, to get the best results, we have people sharpening their ideas against one another rather than simply editing someone's contribution and replacing it with another. We also have a world where the contributors have identities (real or fake, but consistent and persistent) and are accountable for their words. Much like Edge, in fact. — Esther Dyson
How can both I reject epistemic collectivism and yet say that Wikipedia is a great project, which I do? Well, the problem is that epistemic collectivists like Wikipedia but for the wrong reasons. What's great about it is not that it produces an averaged view, an averaged view that is somehow better than an authoritative statement by people who actually know the subject. That's just not it at all. What's great about Wikipedia is the fact that it is a way to organize enormous amounts of labor for a single intellectual purpose. — Larry Sanger
This rich context, attached to many Wikipedia articles, is known as a "talk page." The talk page is where the writers for an article hash out their differences, plan future edits, and come to agreement about tricky rhetorical points. This kind of debate doubtless happens in the New York Times and Britannica as well, but behind the scenes. Wikipedia readers can see it all, and understand how choices were made. — Fernanda Viegas Matthew Wattenberg
My response is quite simple: this alleged "core belief" is not one which is held by me, nor as far as I know, by any important or prominent Wikipedians. Nor do we have any particular faith in collectives or collectivism as a mode of writing. Authoring at Wikipedia, as everywhere, is done by individuals exercising the judgment of their own minds. — Jimmy Wales
Lanier does not want to debate the existence or non-existence of metaphysical entities. But his argument that online collectivism produces artificial stupidity offers no reassurance to me. Real artificial intelligence (if and when) will be unfathomable to us. At our level, it may appear as dumb as American Idol, or as pointless as a nervous twitch that corrects and uncorrects Jaron Lanier's Wikipedia entry in an endless loop. — George Dyson
The debate does demonstrate how much we need to update our media literacy in a digital, distributed era. Our internal BS meters already work, but they've fallen into a low and sad level of use in the Big Media world. Many people tend to believe what they read. Others tend to disbelieve everything. Too few apply appropriate skepticism and do the additional work that true media literacy requires. — Dan Gillmor
Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons). — Howard Rheingold
"At first, it seemed like the sort of silly, self-serving thing that many companies are wont to say about their products. Only later did I realize it represented the opening of another front in the battle against traditional culture being waged by certain parts of the technology industry."
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Saturday, November 20, 2010
My First Jelly Making, Gluten-Free Food Gift Ideas and Some Crispy Housekeeping
First, I had a poll here on the blog to see which holiday recipe readers would most like to make gluten-free this year and the winner was clearly bread and rolls. Ah yes, a crusty roll or piece of bread is what my GF hubby misses most. I manage to bake crumbly, soft rolls and buns but without that evil gluten, bread does not have that lovely tall structure and crispy crust that he crunches in his bread reveries. I'm going to try doing some more bread baking over the winter and will try those artisan GF bread recipes that I've seen circulating around the Internet, so I will give this top priority in the Crispy Cucina and will report back on my results.
The second most popular thing poll participants want to see made gluten-free is cheesecake. Well, I have my Mom's GF Cheesecake recipe here in the Crispy Cook archives, as well as a toothsome Lime Cheesecake with a Raspberry Swirl (Christmas colors!) that you can check out. But clearly people want some more GF cheesecake recipes, so I'll think on it. My family loves caramel so maybe I'll try that out (and double up on my gym workouts).
Coming in third on my poll list was Stuffing and I do plan a post on converting my Southern Grandma Trudie's cornbread dressing into a gluten-free version, but since I will be making it for Thanksgiving I won't be posting the recipe until afterward. Hopefully I will remember to photograph it in all its luscious stuffing-dressing glory during the madness of getting all the feast dishes done at the same time.
The second item of housekeeping is to announce the winner of the Live Gluten Freely prize package full of General Mills GF products and the random number generator picked commenter number 3, Margaret. Congratulations Margaret! Please contact me by email at oldsaraTog abooKs AT gmaildo tcom to let me know your shipping address so you can receive your prize. If I don't hear from you within the week, I'll move on to another randomly generated winner.
Last on the announcements is a cool contest and poll by the good folks at Triumph Dining. They have a survey over at their blog to assess the winners of their First Best of Gluten-Free Awards. The first 2,000 folks who complete the survey and vote for their favorite GF foods and brands will receive a pack of their GF Dining Cards. Triumph Dining publishes the Essential Gluten-Free Grocery Guide and Essential Gluten-Free Dining Guide and these are great resources, especially when you are traveling. The Dining Cards are handy for passing over to your wait staff when you are trying out a new restaurant and they include specialized cards for Mexican, Thai, French, Italian, Greek, Indian, Japanese and Chinese eateries.
I gave them my input yesterday and there were Dining Cards to sign up for (I already have a pack, so I left mine unclaimed), so head on over if you want to give your favorite GF manufacturers some love. I know I appreciate having Nut Thins, Chex cereals and Redbridge beer readily available in my local stores to keep my celiac husband happy. Holiday hint: the Dining Cards are perfectly sized as stocking stuffers.
Back to my first successful jellymaking experience. I am not counting the time I tried harvesting some wild grapes and ended up with blotchy purple skin and a whole lot of nothing after realizing I needed a jelly bag halfway through my never-ending recipe. I've made a little strawberry jam, and canned a whole basement full of pickles, relish, chutneys and dilled veggies, but jelly has seemed kind of daunting, what with needing to be crystal clear and firm and all.
I had a bountiful garden harvest of garlic and after planting a bunch of cloves for next year's crop, there were many cloves left over which had naked patches where they didn't separate from the other cloves as neatly. One doesn't plant these skinned cloves as they may rot in the ground without their papery covering, so I have been having a bit of a garlic cooking festival at our house to use up these partially-peeled babies up.
A bunch of garlic went into a batch of this terrific Rosemary Garlic Jelly, recipe courtesy of The Lemon Verbena Lady. I didn't mince up my garlic as finely as I should have, as most of it clustered at the top, even when I turned it over a couple of times during cooling (a jelly no-no?), but it set quite well which I was happy about.
This jelly has a great flavor; it's mellow from the garlic, herby from the rosemary and sweet behind it all. It is nice blobbed over a softened brick of cream cheese and served with crackers. I am going to try it over tangy goat cheese next and think that will be even better to cut the sweetness. Lemon Verbena Lady also recommends using it as a glaze for roast pork or chicken.
I'm linking this post over to this week's edition of The Gluten-Free Holidays, which has the theme of "Gifts of Good Taste". Alta at Tasty Eats at Home is this week's hostess and she shares her recipe for Macadamia Almond Brittle. Alta will have a whole batch of GF food gift ideas and recipes to share later in the week, so be sure to hop over there to check them out and to look into her GF cookbook giveaways too.
I have some other previous posts about other great gluten-free food gifts to give out during the holidays, for care packages for your favorite students or to bring as a little gift when you are a dinner guest. And here they are:
Puppy Chow - an easy to make gift of crushed Chex, peanut butter, powdered sugar and chocolate. Fun to make with your favorite junior chef.
Homemade Preserves and Pickles - This is a quick gift if you were a busy bee during canning season. I like to cut out a little fabric circle with pinking shears and then secure it over the top with a rubber band to dress it up my jars. I have a bunch of canning recipes here to look through, but the ones that are particularly appropriate for gift giving are Dilly Beans (great on a relish tray or as a cocktail garnish), Apple Chutney (for spicy food fans), and Sweet and Sour Wax Beans (cut them up into winter salads).
Sesame-Rosemary Crackers
Toasted Nuts
Southern Cheese Crisps - Tasty by themselves or with a schmear of your favorite dip.
Sweet Treats - I buy tins at the local charity thrift shop for 25 cents, clean them and line them with waxed paper or foil to cushion them. Favorite gift cookie recipes include Elegant Sesame-Ginger Cookies (vegan), Rudolph's Nose Cookies (no bake cookies packed with cocoa and cherries and rolled in red sugar), Peanut Butter Kisses and Almond Cloud Cookies. I also have a few tiny loaf pans and you can make mini-loaves of GF zucchini bread, cranberry nut bread, banana bread or other favorites for gift giving.
I am also linking this post about Gluten Free Gift Ideas to Linda the Gluten-Free Homemaker, who is the brains behind Gluten-Free Wednesdays. This weekly blog carnival provides a wealth of gluten-free recipes, menu ideas, restaurant reviews and other blog posts. I had the pleasure of meeting Linda in person recently and have been really enjoying reading her blog posts. She is one great cook!
4 comments:
- Foodycat said...
Wow! So many delicious ideas! That jelly sounds amazing.
- Sunday, 21 November, 2010
- postzoom said...
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- Monday, 22 November, 2010
- Simona said...
A few days ago, I received a small jar of garlic jelly as a gift and now I see your post. I guess this is a gentle invitation to try. I particularly like the addition of rosemary. And your sesame-rosemary crackers are so tempting! I wonder if I can use some other flour instead of sorghum, maybe barley or buckwheat. Have a great Thanksgiving!
- Thursday, 25 November, 2010
- Tasty Eats At Home said...
This is so unique! Love it! Thanks for linking up to gf holiday!
- Tuesday, 30 November, 2010

subset: commoncrawl


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(US) Opera Today: "GOEHRING: Three modes of perception in Mozart — the philosophical, pastoral, and comic in Così fan tutte" (Book review by Dr. Brad Eden, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
(FR) Les Passions, Les Eléments (dir. Joël Suhubiette)): "Requiem by Jean Gilles" (Concert, 16 oct 2011)
From the Catherine Kauffmann-Saint-Martin (Agency Media Relations, specialized for musical events) blog pages:
Sunday, 16 october, under the direction de Jean-Marc Andrieu, Les Passions, Les Eléments (dir. Joël Suhubiette), Anne Magouët, Vincent Lièvre-Picard, Bruno Boterf and Alain Buet, will perform at the Baroque de Pontoise. On the programme: Requiem et Lamentations by Jean Gilles (1668-1705).
(CA) The Toronto Consort: "Venetian Splendour: The Music of Johann Rosenmüller"
(UK) The English Concert: "Critical acclaim at the Wigmore"
"We opened our 2011-12 season this week with Artistic Director Harry Bicket at Wigmore Hall with two performances of a programme featuring music by Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, Vivaldi and Venturini. Scarlatti and Handel were sung by renowned tenor Ian Bostridge, while Mr Venturini, despite his name, turned out to have come from the Low Countries, only adding to the interest surrounding his unfamiliar Sonata in G minor, a piece that particularly attracted the attention of Geoff Brown in The Times -
(US) Early Music Foundation Presents French Harpsichordist Bertrand Cuiller (18 Nov 2011)
Early Music Foundation presents Bertrand Cuiller, French harpsichordist. Bertrand Cuiller (Paris), young, exceptional harpsichordist, has received praise by European music critics. He appears regularly as soloist in many European cities, in prestigious festivals and places including Folles Journées, la Roque d'Anthéron, la Cité de la Musique, Saintes, Utrecht, les Concerts Parisiens, le Printemps des Arts de Nantes, and Japan. This event is Mr. Cuiller's exclusive New York debut.
(IT) New at LIM Editrice SRL: "Balbi e il suo tempo"
"Balbi and his time"
by Alberto Da Ros and Stefano Lorenzetti
with a foreword by Giulio Cattin
Edition: Lucca, LIM, 2011 (Biblioteca Musicale Lim - Saggi)
Pages: 19 + 87
Format: 14 x 21 - Paperback
Paolo Da Col
Ai confini della Serenissima
Stefano Lorenzetti
Ludovico Balbi 'magister musicae' nel Veneto del secondo Cinquecento
Vittorio Bolcato
L'eredità musicale di Costanzo Porta nelle composizioni di Ludovico Balbi
Piervito Malusà
Il manoscritto di Feltre
(UK) Early Music discounts from Chaconne Label
200 Early Music Albums at 25% Off
"This month we are offering over 200 early music albums at 25% off, courtesy of the early music label Chaconne, which is renowned for its broad cross section of early-music repertoire from Medieval to Classical, performed on original or period instruments.
(UK) Brighton Early Music Festival (BREMF) (21 oct - 6 nov 2011)
"The theme of 'Dance' has provided us with the perfect follow on the last year's 'Ritual'. It again allow us to look into the very origins of music and its place in human culture from the dawn of civilisation. Music and dance have always been intimately bound together -- each influencing the other -- throughout human history, and dance can be the physical expression of how music makes us feel, as well as being an integral part of how we have always enjoyed ourselves.
(UK) October news from Handel House Museum
We also have a recorder workshop for people of Grade 5+ standard led by Handel House regular and recorder specialist Lisete da Silva which is perfect for those who want to improve their technique and learn new repertoire." …
(FR) Froville News: Froville International Baroque Voice Competition 2011
Results from the "Froville 1st International Baroque Voice Competition" awarded by a jury of professionals and presided by James Bowman:
Hasnaa Bennani: 1st prize
Estelle Béréau: 2nd prize
Daniel Cabena: 3rd prize
The Audience Recognition Award awarded to Kamila Mazalova
(DE) Claas Harders, Viola da Gamba
EarlyMusicNews.org Weblinks Revisited
"Claas Harders began learning viola da gamba at the age of seven. He continued his studies with Jaap ter Linden and Sarah Cunningham at the Akademie für Alte Musik Bremen as well as at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon with Marianne Muller.
(DE) "Bach and the "Snake-Fire-Sprayers" - Fire-Fighting Regulations and Equipment During Bach's Time in Leipzig"
"One might rightfully ask how this topic will enhance our understanding of Bach's life and music. For this I do not have a reasonable answer. Perhaps this topic was selected out of frustration that other digitized scholarly sources like the 1733 revision of the Schulordnung for the Leipzig Thomasschule are not available online.
(US) Midwestern and Southeastern Historical Keyboard Societies: Call for Proposals (Deadline: 2 dec 2011)
The joint meeting of the Midwestern and Southeastern Historical Keyboard Societies will be held at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, March 21-25, 2012.
Proposals for papers, mini-recitals, or lecture-recitals are invited on topics relating to historical keyboard instruments and repertoire. All presentations are limited to 25 minutes, with five minutes reserved for discussion.
(US) Folger Consort: A New Song (Concert, 30 sep 2011)
English composers Thomas Thomkins and Orlando Gibbons, and later Henry Purcell and John Blow, were inspired by the visionary, world-changing translation of the Bible completed under the sponsorship of King James in 1611.
(US) Brilliantly Accessible: Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (San Francisco Classical Voice Review By Jonathan Rhodes Lee) (23 sep 2011)
(FR) La Simphonie du Marais - Hugo Reyne: "Viennoiseries musicales" (Concert, 16 oct 2011)
"Musique pour csakan (flûte-canne) et quatuor à cordes, Vienne 1806-1826"
La Simphonie du Marais - Hugo Reyne invites you to share a festive and delicious moment on the occasion of this "chocolated" concert.
(US) Review: Indy Early Music's '¡Sacabuche!' by Tom Aldridge (NUVO, Indy's Alternative Choice, Indianapolis) (25 jul 2011)
(FR) Clavecins Jean-Paul Rouaud
EarlyMusicNews.org Weblinks Revisited
Harpsichord maker, Jean-Paul Rouaud instrument making spans the following: great French or Flemish harpsichord, spinet, virginal, clavicytherium. Since 1965 he produced unique instruments that have been heard in numerous recordings, concerts, films.
(CA) Julie's Big Adventure (I FURIOSI Concert) (1 Oct 2011)
"Thinking of attending Nuit Blanche? Why not start the night with a fun concert?
Like the rest of us, you probably wish you were on sabbatical with our own violinist Julia Wedman when she took her grand European tour. Well, now you can experience it in musical form, as I FURIOSI welcomes her back with the harmonious stylings of her many ports of call.
(US) The Gothic Revolution: Music in Western Europe, 1100-1300 (Princeton University Conference) (4-6 Nov 2011)
(US) Chalice Consort Early Music Conference 2012 (CCEMC) (14 Apr 2012)
(ES) Cantiga de Santa Maria CSM 103 - Quen a Virgen ben servirá
This is the story of a monk who one morning left to meditate at a small nearby mountain and there listened to the beautiful trill of a bird. So beautiful was the birds song that he remained listening for 300 years or more, although to him it seemed only a moment.
(UK) Cambridge Handel Festival (1-2 Oct 2011)
The Cambridge Handel Festival takes place next weekend! Four fantastic concerts, two talks, two services, an exhibition, a festival lunch and a guided walk of Baroque Cambridge. We very much hope to see you at one or more of these events – there may be tickets available at the door for most events, but there is still time to book online at www.CambridgeEarlyMusic.org.
Louise Jameson
Assistant Administrator
Cambridge Early Music
Trinity College
Cambridge CB2 1TQ
(UK) 2011 Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music (13-21 May 2011) -- Reflections by Lindsay Kemp
"Lindsay Kemp reflects on the 2011 Festival:
The Lufthansa Festival can go by in a bit of a blur, it has to be admitted. We spend a year getting ready for those eight busy days, and by the time they come around I'm already having to think hard about what to put on next year.
(US) GEMS Project 2011 (30 Sep - 1-2 Oct 2011)
Welcome to the home page of our fifth annual series of sampler concerts, showcasing the richness of New York's early music performing community. This is your chance to preview the offerings of 8 of the City's finest ensembles in three venues -- West Side, East Side, and Downtown. The Saturday evening concert will feature an unusual demonstration of the relationship between Galileo's scientific work and his musical involvements, and will end with a gala reception.
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I have been using Reunion for a long, long time since I changed over from PAF (probably since 1985 or 1986). I tend to be a person who stays loyal to one product. Hence the reason why I have only ever owned an Apple computer, buy Fountain tomato sauce and Colgate toothpaste.
There are many new features to Reunion 10. Immediately I can see a couple of great improvements.
- Reunion now integrates with Google maps. This was one of the reasons I have dabbled with TNG over the past 12 months but I haven't really had enough time to play with TNG to get the most out of it. Perhaps I may leave it now and concentrate on Reunion now that it has this feature. Will need to investigate putting this on the web instead.
- It is now much easier to merge source information. At one stage I was lazy entering date and only added town names as I figured I knew which state and country they were in. Lately I have become more particular with entering data. I have been tidying my files for some time, but this will speed up the process.
If you own a Mac and don't use Reunion you can download here and use the demo version to load 50 people.


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Uncertain growth prospects in the developed world are turning more companies and investors toward emerging markets for better gains. How secure are the financial systems in these rapidly developing economies? While some banks in emerging markets may be growing at an unprecedented pace, they could also be exposing clients to more credit risks and higher funding costs.
With this in mind, we look at the 10 safest banks in emerging markets based on rankings by the Global Finance magazine, which publishes an annual list of the top 50. The rankings are based on ratings assigned by the three major credit ratings agencies — Fitch Ratings, Standard & Poor's, and Moody's. To be eligible for the ranking, banks must be among the 500 largest in emerging markets by asset size and have a rating from two of the three major agencies.
So, which are the safest banks in emerging markets? Click ahead to find out.
By Rajeshni Naidu-Ghelani
Posted 22 January 2013


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Oregon Campus Biomedical Science Graduate Programs & Graduate Schools
Biomedical Science Graduate Programs on Campus Overview
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Since Masters in Biomedical Sciences and doctoral programs tend to be research intensive, and require internships and laboratory work, it may be beneficial, to look into campus programs. These offer students the chance to interact and network with professors and classmates, as well as offer the entire array of services and facilities that the university or college has. When you imagine that much of your time may be spent in a lab, or involved in research, you may enjoy being on campus where it is all-accessible.
If you are searching for a campus-based Biomedical Science graduate degree, you might want to initiate a search by location, to see where these programs are offered. Use the city, state, or country tabs to generate listings. Refine this process using the program level tabs to find graduate certificate, masters and PhD in Biomedical Science degrees. Some of your options might include MS in Medical Technology, MS in Biotechnology or MS in Emerging Infectious Diseases. Some of these programs are available at the doctorate level, or you might at that stage be ready to specialize
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- Corvallis, ORCorvallis, OR
Oregon State University
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i.c.Health needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 265 designs submitted by 59 freelance designers.
ystreet, ystreet.com, Yst
Premier Information Technology hiring, recruiting and staffing solutions. The Y stands for gen Y: Impact, communication, flexibility, technology. Young, hip, professional company.
All IT management levels are being targeted. There is a lot of competition in this field, so we are relying on the name and logo to brand something that they will not forget. Logo needs to pop and be memorable.
1. professional, hip, colorful, fun., etc.
2. Generic name used, so maybe something that incorporated what we do
3. idea: Y to be silhouette of a person and then the two curves of the Y to be streets
4. Idea: Yst, name and logo in one
5. Be creative, looking for some really unique ideas. We need to think different.
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


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The Stuttgart High School's air conditioning units would have second priority. Bryant said the units are presently sitting on top of the school's roofs and are now 15-years old.
The layout of the Stuttgart Junior High is the first priority for the Stuttgart School District as officials start the process of using bond funds for construction.
Superintendent Dr. Melvin Bryant said the junior high's round layout is a safety concern and an official entry way would be created to allow the school's officials to greet each person as they enter the building.
The Stuttgart High School's air conditioning units would have second priority. Bryant said the units are presently sitting on top of the school's roofs and are now 15-years old.
It's urgent that they are replaced. Bryant said, first, they were not installed adequately and will have to be retrofitted to the ground. Officials would next have to consider how to patch up the roof where the units were originally.
Bryant said these are the mains goals for now, although they also hope to use bond money to expand the band and choir rooms, possibly add a safe room in some form or fashion and to move the air conditioning units at the other school campuses from the roofs to the ground.
Funds for the project would come from the school millage increase that Stuttgart residents approved in September 2012. Residents voted for 31.9 mills to increase to 36.9 mills on the understanding that the funds would be divided into four categories: Construction, instructional/technology, maintenance and operation and physical plant.
The millage allowed $11,541,549.25 to be transferred Nov. 21, 2012, to pay off the July 1, 2010, bond issue while $28,214.58 went toward the district's bond fund or debt service fund.
Approximately $4,543,837.14 was credited to the district's construction fund. Bryant said the district has to have all funds committed within 21 months with the commitments completed within 36 months after that.
The board of education selected two architect firms from Little Rock, Jackson Brown Palculict and WER, on Tuesday. Bryant said two firms were selected to help the district accomplish several projects in a short period of time.
School officials are also moving forward with salary increases. In November 2012, a $1,000 bonus was given to all full-time certified and classified employees. At the time, the board said it was a good faith gesture as they continued to look at employee raises.
Bryant said the increase would cost about $800,000 and should be in place before employee contracts go out in April for the upcoming school year. It would be the first salary increase given in five years.
On Tuesday, board member Henry Newby said the salary increases are a high priority to help increase the district's competitiveness in attracting and retaining the quality of teachers needed.
In instructional/technology, Bryant has said the money would be used to update and repair existing technology. It would also go toward a state mandate for all students to take their assessments online within another two years.
Each student would have to have a computer or iPad to take the annual test.
Bryant said they are still trying to decide on whether to purchase desktop computers or iPads, and the decision is on hold until the state Board of Education responds further on the mandate, including what will be provided and how the mandate will be paid for.
An answer is expected by July 1. Bryant added that the update will be easier since the school was proactive last year in having a fiber optic network put in.
The district also plans to use funds to keep its bus fleet in good shape. Bryant said they need to purchase at least two buses a year to keep the fleet in good shape and operation.


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The Javier Vazquez deal both helps and hurts the Mets.
It helps in that the Braves are worse today than they last night. Vazquez is worth more to them than Melky Cabrera. This was a cost cutting move on their part. However, before judging this completely, realize the possibility the Braves might do something else with their savings. For one thing, Adam La Roche is still out there.
It hurts, because the Yankees now have a hole in left field that can be filled by Jason Bay or Johnny Damon. It would not surprise me in the least if the Yankees made a run at Bay, even if it means having their payroll swell over $200 million.


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Shimano Sora has traditionally been the Japanese company's entry-level road groupset but that's set to change for 2012/13. Its scope will be expanded beyond drop-bar 'racers' to encompass touring bikes, hybrids and flat-bar urban commuting machines, with wider gear ratios, slicker shifting and improved durability.
Sora will no longer be lowest in Shimano's road pecking order, either – there's a new beginner group in the form of Tourney A070 (see below), an offshoot of the established touring/urban group. This will bring STI levers down to a lower pricepoint, to feed the growing grassroots interest in road and sportive riding.
The new nine-speed Sora 3500 group offers a wide range of gearing options, with a choice of two cassettes (12-30 or 11-30-tooth) and four chainsets – a super-compact 46/34t option for town bikes that should cross over well to cyclo-cross, plus a standard 50/34t compact, 52/39t double and 50/39/30t triple. The crank is a two-piece design with integrated bottom bracket and SG-X chainrings
The drop-bar STI levers have been improved – the downshift paddle has moved from the inside of the lever body to behind the brake lever, as on Shimano's more expensive groups – and are joined by new Rapidfire Plus flat-bar shifters. Both have optical gear displays and can be used with the same front derailleur.
There's also a choice of brakes – a new Super SLR brake calliper or a compact V-brake. The Sora levers can also be used with standard V-brakes, mountain and road cable discs, cantilevers and roller brakes thanks to a 'mode converter' chip at the lever pivot. The groupset is available in 'Mica Black' only.
The Tourney 'trekking' groupset stays in the Shimano line-up for 2012/13, with a few tweaks. The big news, though, is the launch of a new Tourney A070 variant aimed at road riders. Shimano's UK distributors Madison say this is an entry-level groupset aimed at people who want to get into road riding but don't want to spend a lot on a bike. The seven-speed group consists of Shimano 2300-style DCL STI levers, front and rear derailleurs, and 50/34-tooth chainset.
R540-LA pedal
Also aimed at beginner road riders is a new SPD-SL pedal, the R540-LA. The LA tag stands for Light Action – it's easier to clip in and out of than the standard R540, making it ideal for those who are scared of going clipless. In fact, Shimano reckon 75 percent less force is needed to clip in, and 43 percent less force to clip out. It's available in black or white, with a claimed weight of 330g/pair.
Ultegra, 105 & Tiagra
There are no major changes to Shimano's second-tier groupset for 2012/13. However, Ultegra 6770 Di2 gets a new top-mounted satellite shifter option and the mechanical version gets optional wide-ratio rear gearing. While the standard 6700 rear mech can only be used with up to 28-tooth sprockets, the new 6700-A can handle 30. It'll work with close-ratio gearing too, down to 11-23t, and is available in SS (short cage) and GS (medium cage) versions, in silver or black.
The mid-range 105 and Tiagra groups also both get new wide-ratio rear derailleurs. The 5701 (black or silver) and 4601 (silver only) rear mechs can both be used with cassettes between 11-25t and 11-32t, and come in SS and GS variants.
Mechanical disc brakes
Shimano are adding two new drop-bar mechanical disc brakes to their line-up for 2013. The R515 is an evolution of the R505 road brake. It's said to be 30 percent more powerful, as well as having a lower profile design which reduces weight (to 181g, claimed) and makes it less vulnerable to crash damage. It's available in silver or black.
The CX75 is the cyclo-cross version. It uses the same calliper design but comes in 25g lighter (156g, claimed) – due to use of lighter small parts, according to Shimano – and has a slightly heavier action. It only comes in grey. Both designs can be used with Shimano's Ice Tech rotors for extra braking power.
Pricing & availability
Shimano have yet to confirm pricing for any of their 2013 kit. Initial delivery of the CX75 disc brakes is slated for June 2012. The new Sora parts are due to start shipping in May and the full groupset, with all its component options, should be available by July – see below for a rundown of availability. We haven't been given shipping dates for the other new parts.
- May: SS rear derailleur, 3500 (double) front derailleur, 3500 (double) Dual Control levers, brake calliper, 50/34t crankset, 11-30t cassette
- June: GS rear derailleur, Rapidfire Plus shifters, brake levers, 46/34t cranks
- July: 3503 (triple) front derailleurs, 3503 (triple) Dual Control levers, 50/39/30t cranks


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DBW Privacy Policy
Division of Boating and Waterways (DBW) employees, in the performance of their duties, may have occasion to receive, use, maintain, or disclose personal information pertaining to DBW employees and members of the public. The guidelines set forth in this policy memo are designed to ensure that such personal information is received, used, maintained and disclosed in accordance with applicable laws and to ensure that the privacy rights of individuals who are the subject of such information are adequately protected.
This policy applies to personal information received, used and/or maintained by DBW, regardless of it source. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, personal information contained in personnel records, program records, completed applications and forms, and correspondence, whether in hard copy or electronic form.
The following principles shall apply to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of personal information:
- "Personal information" is that information protected under the Information Practices Act of 1977 (Civil Code section 1798 et seq.). "Personal information" means any information that identifies or describes an individual, including, but not limited to, name, social security number, physical description, home address, home telephone number, education, financial matters, and medical or employment history. It includes statements made by, or attributed to, the individual.
- Employees responsible for the collection, use maintenance, and disclosure of personal information shall comply with the provisions of the Information Practices Act, the Public Records Act, and all other laws pertaining to information privacy.
- Personal information may only be obtained through lawful means.
- The type of personal information requested must be relevant to the purpose(s) for which it is being collected. Employees shall not require individuals to disclose personal information that is not necessary and relevant to the lawful state function for which the employee is responsible.
- The purposes for which personal information is collected shall be specified at or prior to the time of collection, and any subsequent use shall be limited to and consistent with the fulfillment of those purposes previously specified.
- Personal information may not be disclosed, made available, or otherwise used for a purpose other than as specified, except with the consent of the subject of the information, or as permitted by law or regulation.
- Personal information shall be protected against loss and unauthorized access, use, modification, or disclosure by the following general means:
- Employees responsible for collection, use, maintenance, or disclosure of records containing personal information shall follow proper administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect the accuracy and integrity of personal information and shall ensure that personal information is not disclosed contrary to applicable law. DBW shall implement procedures to review documents to be disclosed pursuant to a Public Records Act request, subpoena, or otherwise and, if necessary, remove/redact personal information prior to release.
- DBW Staff Counsel is the designated position with responsibility for adherence to and implementation of this privacy policy.
- DBW employees with questions about this policy or applicable law regarding the collection, use, maintenance, or disclosure of personal information shall contact Staff Counsel for guidance.
- DBW employees shall not use personal information for their own interest or advantage. Improper use or disclosure of personal information in violation of this policy may be cause for discipline.
- DBW employees shall respond courteously and promptly to individuals who inquire about personal information pertaining to them in DBW records. Employees shall assist individuals who seek such information to make their inquiry sufficiently specific and descriptive so as to facilitate locating the records requested. Employees shall respond to requests to review, obtain copies of, amend, or correct personal information in accordance with Section 1798.30 through 1798.44 of the Civil Code (or successor code sections).
This policy shall be prominently posted at DBW Headquarters and on the DBW website. Copies of this policy shall be distributed to all DBW employees and to contractors who have access to personal information collected by or on behalf of the state. Any questions regarding this policy should be directed to DBW Staff Counsel.


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Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality.
Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.
Your comment is subject to the rules of our Posting Policy
This comment may appear on your public profile. Public Profile FAQ


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- Forum
- Topics
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About the animations
Noticed something? Want to ask a question? Want to say what you think about the latest animation? Fancy arguing who would win in a fight between Mittens and Samurai Lapin? This is the place to do it.
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Put up your artwork, poetry, links to sites you've made and anything else you've created in here!
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The place for non-serious chat. If you fancy increasing your post count without annoying people this is the place to be! Suggested content: jokes, links, daft threads when you want to say something/anything
- 3,876
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Tell people about things that have been happening to you and keep up to date with your friends on the board.
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This is the place to put games such as word association and the like.
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Introductions and where to find a guide
Tell us who you are and then get a regular to help you settle in with the adoption scheme!
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Talk about films you've seen, books you've read, music you like and games you've played. From X-Men to Nietzche this is the place for it!
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Non-English forums
For anyone who fancies posting in a language other than English, whether the language is your first language or you just fancy practising.
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Personal concerns
If you need to talk about something away from your physical surroundings, a shoulder to cry on, a place to ask for advice about problems you're having, or about something that is happening to friends, then this is the place to post. It's for personal issues that are affecting your life.
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Site fault reports
If something isn't working then tell me here but make sure you've checked through the FAQ first!
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The Issues Forum
A place for dicussion of serious issues. Please keep it lighthearted and non-flaming. 'Discussion' is the keyword here. A guide to topics: politics, art, sexuality, religion
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Tips and tricks
Found out something cool? Want to find out something? This is the place to share and ask. Computers, hardware, software, shoes, carpentry, hang-gliding, cooking, knitting... Someone's bound to know the answer! Don't forget to share cool things you know too!
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- About the animations


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By Len Lear
Chestnut Hill College will show the film "Tak for Alt: Survival of a Human Spirit" ("Thanks for Everything" in Danish) on Monday, Oct. 15, 7 p.m. in the Redmond Room, St. Joseph Hall. Judy Meisel (seen here), 83, Holocaust survivor, civil rights activist and subject of the documentary, will speak after the viewing. "Tak for Alt" tells the story of Meisel, whose experiences during World War II inspired a life-long campaign against racism. Meisel raised her family in West Mt. Airy from 1950 to 1983.
According to Judy, "The film underscores that the Holocaust is not just a historical event or Jewish issue. Unfortunately, acts of intolerance continue across the world today, impacting people of varying colors, religions, political affiliations and sexual orientation. There is much work still to be done."
Judy was born in a small town in Lithuania, the youngest of three children in a middle-class family, but her father died in 1938, one year before the Russians occupied Lithuania. The Russians discriminated against Jewish residents, but that was nothing compared to what happened when the Germany army invaded in June of 1941.
"Later we heard by word-of-mouth that all of the Jewish children with whom I had shared a cabin had been taken out and shot by the Nazis," recalled Judy. "It was impossible for me as a 10-year-old to realize that I would never see my friends again.
"A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, there was a knock at the door. All of our windows were smashed. The Gestapo was in our house. They dragged us outside and threw us into trucks. Neighbors cheered and threw rocks at us as we left my house of childhood for the last time.
"There were hundreds of trucks with other Jews. As we crossed the bridge to a town called Shlabotka, we saw boys leaving a Yeshiva carrying Torahs in their arms. The students were thrown into a large pit and shot. As long as I live, I will never forget the moans and screams of those boys and the men, women and children who were thrown in with them."
After more unspeakable horrors, Judy wound up in a ghetto in the city of Kovno, where "people died by the hundreds of starvation. The Germans would dig trenches and slide the dead bodies down a shaft into the trenches, where the bodies would pile up. Once a week the Germans would fill the trenches with dirt.
"We children would stand and watch the bodies slide down. It became a gruesome game of counting the bodies and running to tell our families who we had recognized as dead. Occasionally the Germans would add to their fun by including a few live people."
In late 1942 Judy was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. "We were ordered to remove all our clothes and shoes. Gold teeth were simply yanked out…It was winter, and I can remember standing in the snow without shoes. After a long time I felt no pain…"
Judy and her sister, Rachel, and 3,000 other Jews were transported in June, 1944, to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. After seven more months of unspeakable suffering and cruelty, they were taken on a death march with many other inmates, who were taken to be massacred. However, allied bombs began to fall, and both guards and inmates scattered. While trying to run away from the death march, Judy nevertheless stopped to assist a German parachutist when she saw he was shot. "After all, I'm still human," she told her sister.
That night, Judy and Rachel played dead in a ditch. After many more harrowing experiences, the sisters crawled across the frozen Vistula River to a Catholic convent that took them in. The sisters left the convent and found work in Poland with a woman farm owner who regularly beat them. (Rachel still has scars today from the beatings.)
They escaped from the farm and wound up on a boat to Denmark, where they were liberated on May 5, 1945, "the most wonderful day of my life." Two Danish angels, Paula and Sven Jensen, took the sisters in and cared for them.
One Danish woman Judy met "broke down crying. Her son had been hung in Copenhagen for saving two Jewish families…Rachel and I spent four-and-a-half years in Denmark. Those were wonderful years, and I could never repay the Danes for all the goodness they bestowed upon me.
"At the end of the war, I was 15 years old and weighed 47 pounds. I spent a year-and-a-half in a Danish hospital. I cannot say enough about the Danish people. They saved countless lives during the war while constantly risking their own lives."
Sadly, Judy's mother was killed in the Stutthof concentration camp two weeks before the end of WW II. Despite the horrors Judy had to endure, her powerful messages to students in countless schools all over the U.S. for decades have been filled with hope and forgiveness but not bitterness.
Judy arrived in Philadelphia in 1950.One year earlier she had married Gabriel Cohen, who had gone to Palestine in 1947 to fight in the Israeli War of Independence. They had three children — Michael, who now lives in Minneapolis; Mina, who lives in California, and Debbie, who currently lives in Maryland.
Judy eventually divorced and married Fred Meisel. In 1983 the couple moved from Mt. Airy to Santa Barbara, California, to be near Fred's family. Judy had earned a degree in early childhood education at Temple University and was a nursery school teacher at the Germantown Jewish Centre in Mt. Airy.
In the early 1960s Judy saw a TV report of the Folcroft race riot in Delaware County, near the Phila. International Airport. She said to herself, "Here I was in the City of Brotherly Love, and it was like Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938; nobody was doing anything about it."
So Judy went to Folcroft to help the Baker family, an African American family who had been attacked by a white mob, and brought their children to her home and safety. That incident changed her life. It so moved and affected her that it has resulted in two movies about her fight to survive and caused her to literally speak to thousands of students about the lessons to be learned from the Holocaust.
Judy was even invited to have dinner with Dr. Martin Luther King before he was a nationally known civil rights leader. Later she marched with him in D.C. — both memorable highlights in her life.
Presently Judy still resides with Fred in Santa Barbara, where "she is treasured," according to her good friend, Marge Gleit, 68, of Ambler who was once a student of Judy's at the Germantown Jewish Centre. 146 of Judy's relatives, including 43 children, were murdered in the Holocaust.
The event at CHC is free and open to the public. More information at 215-248-7044 or firstname.lastname@example.com.