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In 1989, Carlos Picón, who is the curator of the Greek and Roman department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, got a telephone call from Richard Keresey, the head of the antiquities department at Sotheby's: A curious sculpture was about to come on the market. It was almost seven feet tall and depicted a feminine but muscular figure, with a striking, noseless face, standing in a relaxed posture and dressed in an abbreviated tunic and lace-up sandals. Oddly tucked under the figure's armpit, as if the statue were leaning on it, was a smaller female figure, swathed in robes and standing stiffly upright, like a self-conscious guest at a toga party. Keresey told Picón that the sculpture was being sold by a society family in Palm Beach, Florida, who had displayed it next to their swimming pool, under a canvas awning. The family thought it was a statue of Artemis, but Keresey and Picón immediately made a different identification.
"The sellers called it an Artemis because the figure has something like breasts, but I said, 'No, that is the Hope Dionysos, and it has been lost since 1917,' " Picón explained the other day, in his office at the Met. "I said it was a famous statue in antiquity." Only a year earlier, Picón had written an article for an academic journal in which he lamented the disappearance of the statue. The last known purchaser had been Francis Howard, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who had bought the Dionysos at Christie's in London, in 1917, when it was auctioned off as part of the famed Hope Collection. (In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Hope became an enthusiastic collector in the newly fashionable field of antiquities, purchasing recently excavated Greek vases in bulk, and filling his homes in England with ancient statuary shipped from Rome.)
Picón joined the Met in 1990, after spending four years as the curator of Western antiquities at the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Hope Dionysos was his first acquisition. Later this month, the sculpture will be on view at the center of the Met's new Leon Levy and Shelby White Court—a grand two-story atrium that is modelled on Imperial Roman architecture and is paved with red and green marble, in a pattern that alludes to the Pantheon. (The space used to be a cafeteria.) "It is appropriate that the statue is something that used to be so famous and was completely neglected, that went out of taste and fashion," Picón said of his new centerpiece. "And it is also a great fact that it is not a statue of the Furies, of something lethal and deadly—that it is beneficial and kind."
The auspicious demeanor and distinguished provenance of the Hope Dionysos would offer aesthetic and historical satisfactions at any time, but they are particularly welcome at this moment. The renovation of the Met's Greek and Roman galleries—a fifteen-year project—has been completed at a controversial time in the world of antiquities. In the past decade, a number of high-profile court cases have centered on the illegal excavation and exportation of ancient archeological finds. Two years ago, Giacomo Medici, an international dealer whose wares made their way into private and public collections, was convicted in Italy of trafficking in antiquities dug up by tombaroli, or tomb raiders. (Medici is appealing the conviction.) In 2002, a New York jury convicted Frederick Schultz, a prominent dealer, with conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. Five years earlier, one of Schultz's associates, a British dealer named Jonathan Tokeley, had been convicted of handling stolen objects; he had smuggled antiquities by coating them in plastic and painting them to look like garish tourist trinkets. (He was sentenced to six years in prison, after attempting suicide by swallowing hemlock.) Marion True, formerly the curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, is currently being tried in Italy for handling illegally excavated antiquities, along with Robert Hecht, an antiquities dealer now in his late eighties. (Both deny any wrongdoing.)
Meanwhile, Italian and Greek authorities have successfully applied moral suasion to American institutions. Last fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, sent thirteen objects back to Italy, including a statue of Hadrian's wife, Sabina. (According to the Italian police, photographs of the dirt-encrusted statue were found in a raid on Medici's warehouse, in Geneva.) The Met, too, has been obliged to reëxamine its holdings, and last year agreed to return twenty-one items, including one of the museum's most prized possessions: a krater—a vaselike object used for mixing wine and water—depicting the death of Sarpedon, painted by the Greek artist Euphronios. Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Met, bought the krater in 1972, for an unheard-of million dollars; in his 1993 memoir, "Making the Mummies Dance," he called it "the single most perfect work of art I had ever encountered." Suspicion was cast upon the provenance of the Euphronios krater almost as soon as its purchase was announced. (Hoving jokingly, if presciently, dubbed it the "hot pot.") Italian authorities claim that Medici supplied the krater to the Met, via Hecht, and that it was illegally excavated; however, under the terms of the agreement, the Met is giving up the krater without acknowledging any wrongdoing. ("The guy who sold it to us faked us out," Hoving told me. "It is kind of a nice object. Leonardo would have loved to own it.") The Italians have permitted the Met custody of the vase until 2008; it is currently on display in a section of the Greek and Roman galleries that opened eight years ago.
The legal basis for these arrests and negotiations is a 1970 UNESCO convention in which the participating countries agreed to coöperate in efforts to curtail illicit traffic in antiquities. The United States adopted the provisions of the accord in 1983; the discovery of Medici's warehouse, in 1995, provided the Italian government with the evidence it needed to make a case on a grand scale. As a result of the Italian and Greek repatriation campaigns, museums around the world have been reconsidering their own acquisition standards: last fall, the Getty said that it would buy no undocumented antiquities that have surfaced since 1970. Underlying all the complex regulations and evolving standards, though, are broader philosophical questions: Who has the better claim to ownership of cultural treasures—the countries in which they were produced or found, or the international museums in which they have ended up? And who should determine how those cultural treasures are displayed—the art historians, for whom a Greek vase is an expression of the taste of the ancients, or the archeologists, for whom any vase, sublime or mundane, is an artifact that helps illuminate how an ancient Greek or Roman actually lived?
The Met made a public-relations virtue of legal necessity over the return of the Euphronios krater: in its 2006 annual report, an introductory letter signed by Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, speaks of the "leadership position" the museum had taken in crafting an agreement with Italy, as if the relinquishing of the vase were a triumph rather than a much resisted capitulation. Picón is less diplomatic. "In the nineteenth century, it was called treasure hunting—you would go to foreign lands far and wide and you would gather what was going to be destroyed and bring it back to a safe place in the Age of Enlightenment," he told me one day as he strode around the new sculpture court. The spectacular statues were carefully positioned and lit by sunshine streaming in from the enormous skylight two high stories overhead; the blocky gray basalt plinths—imported at considerable expense from Orvieto—and the creamy walls were as inconspicuously luxurious as the fixtures of a Giorgio Armani boutique. "Treasure hunting used to be thought of as something very worthy," Picón went on. "Now someone goes into his back yard and excavates a coin and it is called 'looting' and 'rape,' and all this. Well, I need say no more."
Picón, who is fifty-two, comes from San Juan, Puerto Rico; his father was in real estate and his grandfather a celebrated poet. (Of his home country, he said, "Lovely beaches, wonderful rain forest, and great Colonial architecture, but no Greek or Roman.") He has dark-brown hair, a quizzical smile, and a manner that shifts from intimacy to imperiousness in the deliberate blink of an eye. "The archeologists in Greece and Turkey—those who are worldly and responsible—are going to say, 'Where are we going to put all this stuff that is coming from America?' " he continued. "They have no storage. They have no galleries. The things they took from Boston were shown in Italy for one week—where are they now? In some basement, crumbling away?" The surrender of the Euphronios krater—which Picón first saw two years after its purchase, while he was working as a summer intern at the Met—was, he said, "very sad. Because it had been here for thirty-five years, and it is very beautiful."
Picón told me that the Italian authorities and the American archeologists who have supported them—including the leadership of the Archaeological Institute of America—are misguided in supposing that pursuing collectors and museums will halt the illegal excavation of antiquities. "This claim that collecting encourages people to dig? People have always dug at home," he said. "Treasure hunting is part of man's instinct. You don't know what treasures are down there, and you are curious, and if you are lucky you are going to hit something you can sell. People say you shouldn't collect, but that, too, is part of human instinct. You collect rocks when you are a child; you collect coins. But this deadly dull group of archeologists think that they are the only people who should have any say over the ancient world." Archeologists, Picón told me, are jealous of the tomb robbers: "They go on an excavation and find nothing; but an uneducated person, because they have the instinct of a Gypsy, they find a tomb. These tombaroli know where to go and dig!" In any case, he claimed, most unprovenanced antiquities were chance finds, stumbled across by a farmer in a field or a construction worker building a road. "In America, you hit a stone and it's going to be a boulder," he said. "In Italy or Turkey, you hit a stone and chances are it's going to be a chunk of something that was destroyed by the early Christians."
Picón reminded me that, despite the skepticism of many archeologists, most acquisitions of antiquities are perfectly legal. "Last year, I bought a sensational urn with snake handles that goes back to a very old European collection," he said. "Nobody, not even the most demented archeologist, can criticize me for doing this. It is absolutely as legal as buying a condominium. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine per cent of what we have bought in the last generation has been absolutely and straightforwardly documented. Museums had better continue collecting. The rules change, or evolve, like everything else. In dog breeding, the rules change, too. Not that I am comparing dog breeding to curatorship."
As Picón led me into the museum's new "study collection"—which is on a mezzanine above the court and contains more than four thousand items insuffici-ently extraordinary for the main galleries—he paused in front of a cabinet containing fragments of ancient colored glass, coin-size shards that were arrayed in rows, like butterflies pinned to velvet. "People of knowledge and taste in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries used to collect these things," he said. "You would buy them in Rome or Beirut or Istanbul—actually, you can still buy them in the bazaar in Istanbul, though it is not supposed to happen. I thought, Let's have a case of this sensational glass, because it is a feast to the eyes. I am sorry, but that is not Turkish patrimony, or Italian patrimony. Here am I, a Puerto Rican of French, Spanish, and Italian descent—this is as much my culture as somebody who was born in Florence. Actually, it's more mine, because I have taken my time to study it."
The Met's first curator of Greek and Roman art was Edward Robinson, a classical archeologist and the former director of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Robinson worked in concert with John Marshall, an Englishman who, until his death, in 1928, served as the museum's agent in the European marketplace, buying with a free rein—without the need to consult either curators or trustees—and shipping his purchases back to New York in bulk. Among the most spectacular were frescoes excavated in 1900 from Boscoreale, Italy, including those from a bedroom that had been painted with architectural and trompe-l'oeil pastoral scenes. One wall was found complete with a small metal window grate, which had been warped and melted by the heat of Mt. Vesuvius's eruption. In the Met's refurbished galleries, the window is dramatically backlit, reminding the visitor of the fate of the house's inhabitants.
Robinson's successor as curator was Gisela Richter, who oversaw the opening, in 1926, of the Met's original Roman sculpture court, which was modelled after a Pompeiian villa and featured gravel walkways and cypress trees. In 1959, the curatorship was turned over to Dietrich von Bothmer, a descendant of Hanoverian aristocracy and an expert in Greek vases. Bothmer's department had been marginalized by the museum's director at mid-century, Francis Henry Taylor, a medievalist who disliked ancient art. Taylor's signature act in respect to antiquities was to hire Dorothy Draper, the interior designer, to transform the sculpture court into a swanky restaurant.
Von Bothmer, who retired from the role of department head in 1990 but remains a curator, had a didactic bent. Cornelius Vermeule, a retired curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, says of him, "If he had ten pots of the same shape and the same period, he would show all ten of them lined up." Philippe de Montebello, who has run the Met since 1977, says, "Dietrich von Bothmer, in large part because of his despondency and frustration over lack of space, never tried to do a complete rethinking, and there is something deadening about trying to fix something à moitié. Everything was shown in an old-fashioned way, and that is, from a visual point of view, rather boring. You walk into a gallery that is exclusively filled with Greek vases and you want to run away."
To revivify the collection—much of which had been banished to the museum's basement—de Montebello turned to Picón, who, before becoming a curator in San Antonio, received a doctorate in classical archeology from Oxford University; his undergraduate studies were at Haverford and Bryn Mawr. "I called John Boardman, the grand old man of classical studies at Oxford, and said, 'Do you remember Carlos Picón?' " de Montebello recalls. "He said, 'Of course. He is the most brilliant student I have had in the last twenty years.' "
It was not Picón's intellectual gifts alone that attracted de Montebello. In San Antonio, Picón had created a Greek and Roman department from scratch, with the help of Gilbert Denman, a wealthy collector and local grandee. Picón learned to shoot, in order to participate in weekend house parties dedicated to boar-hunting, a pastime that is to Texas billionaires what golf is to those in the Northeast. He also learned to drive, a skill he had avoided acquiring in Oxford, where he favored a bicycle. "Gilbert Denman provided him with a car to learn to drive on—an old Nash that had been deaccessioned from San Antonio's transportation museum," recalls James Godfrey, a consultant in Chinese art who, at the time, was a fellow-curator. "Carlos was very indignant when he was challenged by the local police—I think he was stopped for driving erratically. He turned with all of his candor to the young police officer and said, 'I thought I was doing rather well.' "
In New York, Picón's fund-raising accomplishments have been substantial—a necessity given that the renovation of the Met's southern wing has cost more than two hundred million dollars. "There is an élan in the air which did not exist before," Michael Steinhardt, the hedge-fund founder turned philanthropist, says; one of the galleries of Greek art has been named the Judy and Michael H. Steinhardt Gallery. (Steinhardt also contributed fifty thousand dollars toward the purchase of the Hope Dionysos, a sum so negligible that he doesn't remember parting with it. Picón got the statue for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.) Picón counts many of the museum's benefactors among his friends, including Renée Belfer, who underwrote the first phase of Greek and Roman gallery renovations, and Michael and Mary Jaharis, whose names grace a neoclassical hall filled with Greek statuary. Two years ago, the Jaharises threw Picón a fiftieth-birthday party; according to Robert Guy, a scholar of Greek vases, who is one of Picón's oldest friends, the party was part of a weekend-long celebration, "like Carnaval in Rio. Martha Stewart was there, and it was the week before she was going into the clink." Picón, who is an excellent cook, met Stewart when he served as a high-end tour guide aboard a Mediterranean cruise ship chartered by two friends—Thomas Dittmer, a co-founder of Refco, the financial-services firm, and his wife, Frances—who were celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary. (The company has since collapsed and the marriage ended.) "The first person to show up for every tour in Turkey and Greece was Martha," Picón recalled. "She was the most eager student of all, and we became great friends." Cornelius Vermeule says, "Carlos went and visited Martha in Maine, and he sent me a picture of himself cooking with her. He said, with some humor, that he wanted me to know that some people of Puerto Rican origin ate something more than Tostitos." Another friend was Bill Blass, the fashion designer—also a connoisseur of antiquities—whom Picón started advising on his purchases in the late eighties. "He once told me, 'Don't let me buy anything you wouldn't like for your institution,' " Picón said. Blass, who died in 2002, left twenty-six million dollars to the Met—half his estate—as well as several important art works, including a pair of Imperial Roman statues of half-draped young men in heroic poses, armless and headless but still with impressively defined torsos.
"If you're an academic and you don't like people, and you'd rather do your own research and be in a cubicle and grow old very grumpily, writing great books and indexing them, then you really shouldn't be in a job which has a significant aspect that is client development," Picón said. Collectors of antiquities, he added, tend to be unusual people. "A lot of people are very afraid of this field, in terms of collecting, because it is anonymous. The first thing that people say to me about an antiquity is 'How can you tell that it's old? Is there a test?' I say there is no test for marble. Here is a good, honest businessman who is used to getting an answer—you don't invest in copper futures without knowing you are getting copper. There are some people who don't always trust their own taste, or who feel they would like to have something that is objective. That is why people who collect antiquities are more—not adventurous, but they are more like artists in a way, because they don't require the firm proof that this is in the catalogue raisonné of Joan Miró. People ask, 'How do I know it's not a forgery?' I say, 'You can't prove it, but trust your eye, trust your dealer, trust your scholars, trust your museum.' It takes a certain amount of gravitas and a certain amount of confidence for somebody to go into a field like this, and that is why there are so few collectors. People want to be able to say, 'That is my Rauschenberg, and that is my early Warhol, and that is my latest Jeff Koons,' not 'That is my sculpture by an anonymous Roman.' "
The ancient Romans were the first collectors of art, and saw no contradiction between holding a culture in high esteem—as they did the Greeks—and plundering its treasures for purposes of interior decoration. In medieval times, Greek and Roman art was sequestered in monasteries; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ancient marbles, bronzes, coins, and gems were sought after by Popes and by other prominent Italians, including Lorenzo de' Medici. By the eighteenth century, a busy trade of restorer-dealers could be found in Rome, refinishing sculptures to decorate the grand homes of European nobles and merchants, and the opening of tombs had become a gentlemanly pursuit. An engraving of the time shows William Hamilton, one of the era's greatest gatherers of ancient treasures, observing a group of Italian peasants lifting a tomb's lid; his wife, in an enormous hat, stands by, as if they were at a picnic.
Archeological critics of antiquities collectors see the practice in a much grimmer light. They argue that, as long as historically rich artifacts are treated as exquisite art works that can be placed in a vitrine, looting will continue; in their view, collectors or institutions who profess surprise that some of their purchases have illegal origins are willfully ignorant. James Wright, the chair of classical and Near Eastern archeology at Bryn Mawr, says of museum curators, "They preferred to cast a blind eye. They didn't think about it because they were so desirous of having those things." In 2000, David Gill, a professor of ancient history at Swansea University, in Wales, and Christopher Chippindale, of Cambridge University, tabulated the provenance of the contents of several published collections, including that of the San Antonio Museum. They calculated that ninety-nine per cent of the Greek vases in the San Antonio Museum's collection had no definitive "find-spots," or exact locations in which they were known to have been dug up. Picón's suggestion that many antiquities are chance finds of a farmer and a plow rather than the product of concerted illegal excavation is, archeologists say, a convenient fiction. Elizabeth Stone, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, who has been a vocal critic of antiquities trafficking, says, "What happens with the illegal antiquities trade is no different from the illegal drug trade, except that the people who are receiving the stuff are not at the bottom of society; they are at the top. If collecting antiquities gets the kind of reputation that wearing fur coats has, then it stops."
Picón scoffs at such talk. Speaking of Gill and Chippindale's report, he told me, "Making a graph of what may or may not be published is not scholarship; it is a pastime. It is like counting beans." The suggestion that looted objects dominate the marketplace, he said, betrays an ignorance of history. "Some of our colleagues in the archeological world have no idea that collecting has been going on for two thousand five hundred years, since ancient times," he said. "There are a limitless number of objects, in every corner of the universe. I don't know what Mr. Giacomo Medici may or may not have supplied, but he is not the source of all the antiquities in the universe. The market is more than Mr. Medici—with all respect to Mr. Medici."
Picón told me that he never bought anything from Medici and knew him only glancingly, though Medici did make a gift of two vase fragments to the San Antonio Museum during Picón's tenure. Medici, he recalled, had bought the fragments at auction for about twenty-five hundred dollars. "It was the Comtesse de Béhague collection, in Monaco, 1987," Picón told me. "Never again will there be an auction like this—everything from Saint-Porchaire ceramics to medieval ivories. Such taste! I saw Medici at the end of the auction. A friend of mine was with me and said, 'You bought that fragment that Carlos wanted for San Antonio,' and he said, 'I will give it to him.' I thought it was rather touching. He put it in my hands and said, 'Give it to your museum.' He had never been to Texas. He had never seen my museum." Upon hearing Stone's suggestion that the collecting of antiquities will eventually earn the same degree of opprobrium that the wearing of fur has acquired in some quarters, Picón lifted a derisive brow. "I don't have a fur coat, but I would like to have one," he said.
One of the private collections that has come under the most scrutiny is that of the late Leon Levy, who was a partner at Oppenheimer & Company, the investment firm, and his wife, Shelby White. The collection was displayed at the Met in 1990—shortly after Picón was hired—in an exhibition titled "Glories of the Past." Levy, who died in 2003, and White, a sometime financial journalist and the author of a 1992 book, "What Every Woman Should Know About Her Husband's Money," had developed an interest in antiquities in the nineteen-seventies. The investor Robert Rosenkranz, a protégé of Levy's at Oppenheimer, recalls being summoned to Levy's office to view his first purchase, a Greek vase: "He talked about how cheap it was, and how old it was." The Levy-White apartment in Manhattan was filled with museum-quality pieces: the front door opened onto a hallway lined with Roman busts—emperors on one side and now anonymous notables on the other. A bronze sculpture from the first century B.C. of a well-muscled man, approximately one and a half times life size, stood in the living room. In the Levy-White household, it was familiarly referred to as Harry. (The statue acquired the nickname while on loan to the San Antonio Museum, in the late eighties, because of a resemblance to one of the museum's young patrons. Harry is currently on loan to the Met, where he stands near the entrance to the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court.)
Picón got to know Levy and White while he was a student in England, where they would stop off to visit on their way to the Continent or to archeological excavations that they funded in Ashkelon, Israel. Picón recalled Levy's fascination with ancient emperors and generals, whose histories he read avidly: "He kind of liked them. He felt like he would like to be as good as them. Levy was very absent-minded—he would say to his driver, 'George, is this our car?' and he would forget that Shelby was with him at a dinner and walk out—but he wouldn't forget anything to do with a historical fact or a work of art." In 1995, the couple contributed twenty million dollars to the Met, a gift that the museum's president, Emily Rafferty, says was crucial in enabling the museum to undertake the renovation of the sculpture court.
A partial catalogue of the Levy-White collection was published for the "Glories of the Past" show. As a result, the couple's collecting has been examined particularly closely by the archeological lobby; Gill and Chippindale calculate that no findspot was given for ninety-three per cent of the objects in the catalogue. An amphora returned to Italy by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had been a gift from the couple. And other institutions have questioned the propriety of accepting their largesse—Bryn Mawr, where Picón studied, has for a decade had a policy discouraging the acceptance of donations from the Leon Levy Foundation. Last year, Randall White, a professor of anthropology at N.Y.U., resigned from the university's Center for Ancient Studies when it was announced that the foundation was giving two hundred million dollars for the creation of a graduate institute devoted to the ancient world. (The institute is to be modelled, in part, on the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, where Levy was a trustee; it will be based in a town house across from the Met.) White's collection has also been targeted by the Italian authorities, and she is negotiating with them over the return of several items.
At the Met, where White is one of thirty-eight elected trustees—and where donors supply the resources that in European institutions would be provided by the government—the Levys' generosity has been courted. Levy, in his 2002 memoir, "The Mind of Wall Street," recalled when Philippe de Montebello, paying a call to Levy's home in search of funding, promised that the sculpture court would be named for him "in perpetuity." (Levy asked how long in perpetuity was. Fifty years, de Montebello replied. Levy bargained him up to seventy-five.) Picón told me that White—whose name has just been affixed to a wall of the sculpture court—has been unfairly attacked. "Poor Shelby White," he said. "There are hundreds of antiquities collectors worldwide, but they pick on her only because she is generous. They are so unworldly and so uninformed that they think that attacking Shelby and making graphs of her acquisitions, which she has generously shared with the public, is going to change the field. They are very naïve."
I recently met with White at the Park Avenue headquarters of the Leon Levy Foundation. We sat in a small office with an undistinguished view which was filled with books and antiquities: some Roman busts, a Greek vase, a fragment of a Roman mosaic on the wall. She wore a trim tweed pants suit and gold jewelry. White, who was born in 1938 in Flatbush, is the daughter of a businessman in the garment trade; she attended Mount Holyoke and Columbia University. "For us, collecting was much more of an intellectual pursuit," she told me. "Our interest was in learning as much as we could about ancient cultures." She and Levy went to Ashkelon every year: "Leon would walk around the site, talking about the history. I loved being in some tiny little pit digging with dental tools." She was thrilled when, one year, a coin bearing the image of Cleopatra, one of her heroines, was found on the site. "I don't have the Cleopatra coin—it's in the Israel museum," she said. "I have the Cleopatra T-shirt."
White, who rarely talks to the press, toyed with a pair of glasses as she expressed her puzzlement at the criticisms of her: "You'd have to ask someone in the field why there is hostility, because I don't have any toward archeologists. To me, what they do is remarkable. They can re-create an entire civilization from a small shard." She and Levy had no idea that what they were doing might later be castigated. "If you go to Sotheby's or Christie's and buy something at a public auction, you don't think you are doing anything inappropriate," she said. "Or if you buy from a dealer on Madison Avenue, you don't think you are doing something wrong. It is legal to buy antiquities. It is hard to apply current standards to something that happened thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, you would have been sitting here smoking a cigarette." When she and Levy began collecting, she said, "it was considered something special and admirable. And we saw it as a very public-spirited thing to do." Speaking of Gill and Chippindale's analysis of her collection's provenance, she said, "Even the National Museum in Rome has objects where the provenance is unknown. They are reducing the great collections of the world to meaningless numbers."
When asked if she was looking forward to the opening of the galleries bearing her name, White unfolded and refolded her spectacles. "I am thrilled that the Met is going to have those wonderful galleries," she said, carefully. "I'm looking forward to seeing the galleries open to the public." The negotiations with the Italians over her own collection, she said, were under way, and she hoped that their claims would soon be resolved. Although she recently bought a Greek vase—one whose provenance was first published in the nineteenth century—she is no longer doing much collecting, she said: "It was something that Leon and I did together. It was very much a joint project." Still, the experience of living among her statues of masterful Greeks and famous Romans was, she said, a remarkable one. "It's like having a lot of friends," she said, with a wan smile. "I imagine them at night talking to each other, saying whatever guys say to each other at night: 'I told you not to turn left at the Rubicon.' "
When Picón took me on a detailed tour of the new galleries, pointing out some of his favorite acquisitions and the most celebrated items from the Met's long-standing collection, he was careful to note the provenance of each object. In the newly refurbished treasury—a small chamber, formerly a men's room, in which ancient gold and silver are displayed—he showed me a gold armband studded with garnets and an emerald, dating from the second or third century B.C. "I bought this in 1999," he said. "It was in the Japanese collection of a man called Ishiguro, who had the best French restaurant in Tokyo. It was dirt cheap, something like eighty-five thousand dollars. You go to one of New York's noble emporia—without naming any particular jewellers—and that won't get you far." He stopped at a funerary urn; the lid and a side panel were missing. "Look at this fabulous urn, which was found in the eighteen-nineties southeast of Rome, published, and sold privately—completely legally—in the teens," he said. "A fragment appeared out of the blue at auction in 2002, and I bought it. I found another fragment in the collection of a friend of mine, who bought it in London eight years ago. And it joined! So I have hopes that I will find the rest, and the lid." He paused at an enormous chunk of porphyry, the color of venous blood, that featured carvings of flowers and, at its base, a lion's paw. "This was in the Hever Collection, in England," he said. "I bought it in 1992. This was one of two supports for a bath. Another fragment is in the Palazzo Capponi, in Florence, and I found another two years ago in a house in Scotland. Another part, one of my Italian colleagues says, is in a church in Rome. It is indestructible. To have one of these things, with this magical floral pattern, and these paws! It is the most sumptuous ancient porphyry carving in America." We stopped at an enormous sarcophagus, intricately carved with an image of Dionysos and the Four Seasons. "This is from Badminton Hall, from the Dukes of Beaufort," he said. "A great figure of Dionysos on his panther, very grand." The sarcophagus sat upon four black marble balls and a plinth that was designed by William Kent, the Palladian architect, in the early seventeen-hundreds; the plinth bore the legend "Probably Found in Rome." Picón said, "It was sold by the Italians! It wasn't stolen. They paid money for it, and the Italians made money selling it. They still make money selling things—whether it is legal or not, that is up to the politicians."
We ascended to the mezzanine, where the museum's Etruscan art is displayed, the highlight of which is a bronze chariot, or biga_._ Picón said that the chariot, which looks like something Cecil B. De Mille would have been thrilled to order up from the props department, is "the grandest piece of sixth-century Etruscan bronze anywhere in the world. It has a representation of the arms of Achilles, and an image of Thetis, the mother of Achilles, handing him his armor. Homeric iconography, fabulous quality."
The chariot, which the Met bought in 1903, has been the object of its own restitution bid, although a rather less successful one than that concerning the Euphronios krater. The claim has been made by a lawyer in Atlanta named Tito Mazzetta, on behalf of Monteleone di Spoleto, the Umbrian village in which the biga was discovered and from which Mazzetta's family hails. "My grandmother told me that she had played on the biga when it was found," Mazzetta said when I called him about the case. He explained that it had been discovered by a peasant farmer named Vannozzi as he was plowing his land: "He pulled out the chariot, and he pulled out all these ornaments and shields that had been buried with it, and he put them all around his house. He used the shields to boil water in." A dealer of antiquities from a neighboring town came by and, recognizing the potential value of the find, offered to buy the chariot and pots—he called them ferro vecchio, or junk—for nine hundred and fifty lire, enough for Vannozzi to buy shingles for his roof. Afterward, it was alleged in the Italian parliament in 1904, the chariot was smuggled to Paris. The Italian journalist Mario La Ferla, in a new book titled "La Biga Rapita" ("The Stolen Chariot"), claims that it was stored in the basement of the Crédit Lyonnais until J. P. Morgan, then a trustee of the Met, arranged for its acquisition and transport to New York. (The Met did not respond to a request for comment on La Ferla's assertion.)
"I love to go around the museums," Mazzetta told me. "They do make a great contribution. But I am offended by the way they manage to get what they got. Maybe for them the biga is just another piece of art, but for us it's the Liberty Bell." The return of the chariot to the regional capital of Perugia, or even to Rome, an hour and a half away, would provide a much needed boost to the region, Mazzetta said. The mayor of Monteleone, which has a population of about six hundred and fifty, has even grander aspirations. "He would be very happy to have an Etruscan museum in Monteleone," Mazzetta said. The Met, meanwhile, has dismissed Mazzetta's claims. "I'm sorry, I am not even going to spend any time discussing this claim," Picón told me. "It was bought in Paris. You can't sell it and then ask for it back."
One Saturday morning, I met Picón at his apartment, which is on a quiet, tree-lined block in the East Seventies, not far from the Met. The apartment had a loftlike living room with fourteen-foot ceilings, two walls of which were lined with books—art-history texts and sales catalogues, some of which dated back a century, many of which Picón had annotated with careful pencil marks. There were works of contemporary art, including a portrait of Picón by Philip Pearlstein, which was a fiftieth-birthday gift—"You can paint me as long as you don't ask me to take my shirt off," Picón had told him—and a couch that Picón suspected was Biedermeier and which he bought from the estate of the late silent-movie star Pola Negri, who had been a neighbor in San Antonio. A door balanced on two nineteenth-century marble capitals and covered with a kilim served as a table; near the window stood a pockmarked marble torso, also from the nineteenth century, which Picón bought at Sotheby's in En-gland. "It had been stuck in a garden, covered with ivy, God knows," Picón said.
The apartment is an expression of Picón's taste, as well as that of his partner, Andrew Kepler, an architect; and Picón sees no reason that a museum should not also exercise discernment in what it displays, even if by doing so it risks charges of élitism. "What are we supposed to do, show you the worst example and the best example in the primary galleries? Is that what museums are about?" he said. "If I want to spend three wonderful hours learning something about sixth-century China, I don't want to see their Tupperware. But some archeologists only care about the dirt. I don't care about the bones, and the person buried there. I care about what this person took with him or her, what it says about them, what it says about their imagination, their concept of quality, what they would like to be remembered for. What can you know about them, anyway? That he or she died at the age of thirty-five, with no teeth?" A visit to a museum, he said, should be a pleasure, and seeing masterpieces was a pleasure. "Of course it is uplifting—why bother to take care of broken objects of the past if it is not going to be edifying, instructive?" he said. "I think most intelligent people take it for granted that it will be of interest, that they will learn something, that they will be moved by it."
One of the Met's founding trustees, Joseph H. Choate, declared that the museum's mission was "to humanize, to educate, and refine a practical and laborious people." The very first item acquired by the museum, when it was chartered in 1870, was an ancient tomb—which, along with a hundred and seventy-four paintings, constituted the initial collection at the museum's original location, a former dance academy on Fifth Avenue between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets. The sarcophagus, which dates from the third century and is decorated with garlands, was found in Tarsus, which is now in Turkey, and was donated to the fledgling museum by its discoverer, Abdo Debbas. "They got twelve buffalo and dragged it out, because it was so heavy," Picón told me. "I guess people would call that 'looted' now, right?" He smiled at the absurdity. "You cannot put modern terms to old history," he said. "How was the Berlin Museum formed? How was the Louvre formed? What did Napoleon do in Italy? How was the British Museum formed? You return all the contents of the British Museum and you close it down?"
At the time that Abdo Debbas found the sarcophagus, Picón recalled, there were no scientific excavations. "Archeology had not been born as a discipline, but things could be found, and this is what our distinguished colleagues in the dirt fields forget," he said. "This was found by this man on his property, and he said, 'I want to give this to the New World, from the Old World.' He was an Ottoman citizen—you cannot say Turkish, because Turkey did not yet exist. It's like Italy. The Metropolitan Museum is six months older than Italy. Italy unified in 1870, six months after we were founded. That puts things in perspective, eh?" ♦


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"Indoor and outdoor falls are both important," says senior author Marian T. Hannan, D.Sc., a senior scientist at the Institute for Aging Research, "but people at high risk for indoor falls are different in many ways from those at high risk of outdoor falls. Failure to separate the two can mask important information on risk factors and may hamper the effectiveness of falls prevention programs."
Published online (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1532-5415/earlyview) in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, the study found that indoor falls are associated with an inactive lifestyle, disability, and poor health, while outdoor falls are associated with higher levels of activity and average or better-than-average health.
Older adults who fell outdoors were somewhat younger than those who fell indoors, more likely to be male and better educated, and had lifestyle characteristics indicative of better health. Those who fell indoors had more physical disabilities, took more medications, and had lower cognitive function than those who fell outdoors.
The study examined 765 men and women, age 70 and older, from randomly sampled households in the Boston area. Study participants underwent a comprehensive baseline falls assessment, including a home visit and clinic examination. Falls were reported on monthly calendars submitted to the researchers. Over a nearly two-year period, 598 indoor falls and 524 outdoor falls were reported. When a participant reported a fall, a structured telephone interview was conducted to determine the circumstances.
Dr. Hannan says the study has several implications. First, a fall is not necessarily a marker of poor health. In fact, almost half of all falls occurred outdoors, and people who fell outdoors had the same or better health than those who did not fall at all. Second, epidemiological studies of risk factors for falls in older people may be hampered when falls are combined, with important associations between risk factors and indoor and outdoor falls potentially being missed. Third, intervention programs need to be tailored differently for people more likely to fall outdoors than those who tend to fall indoors.
"Most fall prevention programs emphasize the prevention of indoor falls, particularly through strength, balance and gait training; use of assistive devices; treatment of medical conditions; reduction in the use of certain medications; improvement in vision; and the elimination of home hazards," write Dr. Hannan and her colleagues.
Many of these programs do not take into account the causes of outdoor falls, she says. Falls interventions for community-dwelling seniors, she adds, should consider their health status, activity level, and other characteristics. Most seniors who fall outdoors do so on sidewalks, streets or curbs, or in parking lots.
"Healthy, active older people should be aware of their surroundings, especially when walking outdoors," says Dr. Hannan, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "More attention needs to be paid to the elimination of outdoor environmental hazards involving sidewalks, curbs and streets, such as repairing uneven surfaces, removing debris, installing ramps at intersections, and painting curbs."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 40 percent of seniors who live in the community fall each year, with many suffering moderate to severe injuries, including hip fractures and traumatic brain injuries. At least half of these falls occur outdoors.
The study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, was part of MOBILIZE Boston (Maintenance of Balance, Independent Living, Intellect and Zest in the Elderly), a long-term cohort study based at the Institute for Aging Research. The study is determining the causes of falls in older adults in order to develop new ways to prevent falls from occurring. MOBILIZE Boston is directed by principal investigator Lewis A. Lipsitz, M.D., director of the Institute for Aging Research, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a leading authority on falls.
Scientists at the Institute for Aging Research of Hebrew SeniorLife seek to transform the human experience of aging by conducting research that will ensure a life of health, dignity and productivity into advanced age. The Institute carries out rigorous medical and social studies that discover the mechanisms of age-related disease and disability; lead to the prevention, treatment and cure of disease; advance the standard of care for older people; and inform public decision-making.
Founded in 1903, Hebrew SeniorLife, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is a nonprofit organization devoted to innovative research, health care, education and housing that improves the lives of seniors.
Contact: Scott Edwards
Hebrew SeniorLife Institute for Aging Research

subset: commoncrawl


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Things have gotten increasingly messy this year for Mt. Gox, Bitcoin's largest exchange. There was the whole currency crash in April followed quickly by a DDoS attack directed at the exchange. Next came the US government stepping in to seize Mt. Gox funds from Dwolla, a mobile payment service. And in late June as that investigation continued, Mt. Gox flat-out suspended US-based withdrawals as the volume of transactions continually overwhelmed the site.
Today, the site tried to offer followers some positive news. Mt. Gox announced "Midas," a new engine that supposedly benchmarks at more than 500,000 trades per second. Mt. Gox even claims Midas "is capable of much more than that." While no firm rollout date was given with the announcement, Mt. Gox indicated that Midas will be deployed soon "after a couple of hardware updates."
Mt. Gox also said it is now partnering with Akamai, the content delivery network, while simultaneously taking more control over its own infrastructure. Mt. Gox explains:
Mt. Gox is now proud to be supported by Akamai, meaning that mtgox.com is hosted on thousands of servers all around the world, connecting our customers at their local level. Not only does this massively increase our protection, but since the transition the performance and speed of mtgox.com has been greatly improved. Both factors are very important for the next few items. Structurally we've moved from being a hosted service to being entirely self-hosted, meaning that we have much more flexibility in what we want to do and have full control of our data center. This is a major step up for Mt. Gox in our evolution.
The exchange lumped a few additional notices in with the Midas and Akamai news. On the pro- side, Mt. Gox is toying with new user interfaces to make the customer experience smoother. On the con- side, the Litecoin support delayed by those DDoS attacks is still a ways off (without much information as to why):
We hate to apologize yet again for the delay in implementing Litecoin, but the fact of the matter is that it depends on a variety of factors, including completing all of the above before we launch. We're looking forward to the rollout, but at this point are reluctant to speculate on when. We are sorry to keep Litecoin enthusiasts hanging.
And despite increasing speeds for trade on the horizon, getting money to and from Mt. Gox itself remains slow. "It currently takes up to 10 days to process a deposit because our bank, upon receiving deposits, notifies us of the deposit but holds them for seven to 10 days before transferring them to our account," the exchange revealed. "This has always been the case, and we were still crediting customer accounts before receiving the funds ourselves, but some cases in which the bank subsequently rejected the deposits meant that we incurred significant losses. The risk is now too high for us to credit accounts prematurely." In other words, the act of transitioning from real world cash to digital world bitcoins through Mt. Gox may be slower than ever.


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New England region braces as deadline approaches for automatic federal spending cuts
BOSTON (AP) � Defense contractors, medical research facilities and social services providers are among those in the New England region sounding the alarm over looming federal spending cuts.
Officially known as the sequester, $85 billion in automatic reductions would be triggered on March 1 absent a deal involving Congress and the White House. The cuts would be split equally among defense and non-defense programs, with some exemptions including Social Security and Medicaid.
James Brett, president of The New England Council, said the region's defense-related industries could see a loss of $300 million in federal funding at a cost of about 3,300 jobs in the first year of the sequester.
Hospitals and medical schools say an 8 percent cut in research grants from the National Institutes of Health could also lead to the loss of thousands of jobs.


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Nokia is constantly tweaking their user experience on their Windows Phone 8 lineup and while sometimes we get new features, other times we just get fixes and under the hood changes.
It's the latter case today with Nokia Audio getting bumped to version 18.104.22.168 and a quick cursory look reveals no new addition to the 19 presets or Dolby features. That doesn't mean that things haven't improved of course as speed in launching the Settings or other adjustments to those presets could have certainly occurred.
Anyway, as the kids like to say, less talk, more rock. Grab Nokia Audio enhancements here in the Store. Thanks, Asad H., for the tip!


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Exterior and interior images of constructions large and small
Use this control to limit the display of threads to those newer than the specified time frame.
Allows you to choose the data by which the thread list will be sorted.
Order threads in...
Note: when sorting by date, 'descending order' will show the newest results first.
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The members of California's High Speed Rail Authority have announced major changes to the structure and cost elements of the massive program. Whether the modifications pass muster in the state legislature next week remains to be seen, but the Authority has at least opened the door for critics to take an important second (or is it third or fourth?) look at the proposed project.
With respect to structure, the new plan envisions a build-out process that will begin in the Central Valley per the federal government's requirement and move south into the greater Los Angeles area. By tapping into a large population, the project should be able to generate traffic and revenue within 10 years, sooner than previously expected.
Cost, the most critical factor, has a revised price tag of $68 billion. That's $30 billion less than the
previous estimate but still $25 billion higher than the amount pitched in the original proposition. Much of the reduction will come from using existing tracks in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The service may a bit slower because of competition with other rail traffic, but the savings may be well worth the trade-off.
Clearly, the Rail Authority has done a good job in creating a more efficient, less expensive plan for building the high speed rail system.
But is it enough?
The original bond passed by the voters in 2010 provides $9 billion for the system and the Feds have kicked in another $3.5 billion, but those numbers combined are a long way from the new projected cost of $68 billion.
So, where do we get the money? This is the central question that remains without an answer. From the state?
We're broke and in the midst of massive cutbacks to woefully under-funded programs.
From the Feds? They're broke and very divided. Despite the Obama administration's commitment to high speed rail, the Republican-led House of Representatives wants to spend fewer transit dollars on high speed programs in the northeast.
From the private sector? So far, there's been no interest in any joint partnership.
There are many laudable reasons to develop high speed rail in California, ranging from less pollution to tens of thousands of high-paying jobs to passenger convenience. But unless we have a firm grasp on the funds necessary to build the project, going forward may be a disastrous move.


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A large financial institution with access to virtually all venture capital returns data once did a study that determined that the vast majority of profits at each firm are generated by 1 or 2 partners. In some cases it's pretty obvious who these stars are- Mike Moritz at Sequoia, John Doerr at Kleiner, etc. In many other cases it isn't unless you are an industry "insider." So when someone tells you they just raised money from a top tier firm, a good follow up quesiton is "which partner?" since the non-star partners are probably as good at picking companies as a a tier B firm.
There is a big difference, of course, between being a VC who generates profits and being a VC that an entrepreneur should want to work with. A star VC might be good at picking companies and winning deals, yet actually be a real jerk who doesn't help the company at all. But often star VCs do have better rolodexes, can be greater help raising follow on money, and are more influential within the firm if you need to do a "difficult financing."
Another thing to understand is that who you are first introduced to within the firm is very important. Why? 1) if you are intro'd to the wrong guy (and in VC unfortunately it is almost always men), that guy might reject you right away whereas another partner might have found your company interesting. Once one guy dings you the other partners won't give you a fair hearing for fear of offending the guy who dinged you. 2) VCs can be internally territorial, so if you are intro'd to one guy and he likes it, he might feel like it's "his deal" when in fact you'd be better off with another partner (then you are stuck with the "roommate switch" problem if you recall that Seinfeld episode).
From my experience, picking the right partner is very important. For example, in two companies I seeded, the same top tier VC firm invested in later rounds. In one case the partner has been super helpful, and in the other case pretty much absent. As I mentioned above, the partner's influence within the firm also matters. A influential partner can, for example, "pound the table" to do a follow on financing when you need it. What stage the partner is in his career also matters. Junior partners will typically work harder, but might also have "sharper elbows" when, for example, you are selling the company since he needs to prove himself by making the firm money.
So how do you pick the right partner? Looking at their portfolio can help, but really this is where you need experienced advisors/seed investors who know all the people involved, their reputations etc and can make warm intros.


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Rangers power way to series victory over Angels
ARLINGTON -- As the Rangers' leadoff man and longest-tenured player, Ian Kinsler is expected to be a leader. And lead he did Sunday night.
Kinsler's three-run homer in the sixth inning gave the Rangers crucial insurance runs in a 7-3 victory over the Angels. Texas won two of three in the American League West rivals' first series of the season.View Full Game Coverage
ARLINGTON -- As the Rangers' leadoff man and longest-tenured player, Ian Kinsler is expected to be a leader. And lead he did Sunday night.
Kinsler's three-run homer in the sixth inning gave the Rangers crucial insurance runs in a 7-3 victory over the Angels. Texas won two of three in the American League West rivals' first series of the season.View Full Game Coverage
Kinsler walked and scored the Rangers' first run, and singled twice, including an RBI single in the fourth that made it 4-2. But his blast off reliever Mark Lowe was easily the most crushing blow.
As Kinsler's opposite-field homer cleared the right-field fence, the second baseman pumped his fist in celebration while rounding first.
"I felt like that was a big at-bat," Kinsler said.
After hitting three homers the night before, the Rangers hit three more as the wind in Arlington continued to create the "jet stream" effect for which the ballpark is well known.
Lance Berkman and David Murphy greeted Los Angeles ace Jered Weaver with homers in the first inning, erasing a 2-0 deficit after Yu Darvish got in early trouble.
"It could have been worse than what it was," manager Ron Washington said. "Yu Darvish really did some good damage control right there. But we came out, [Weaver] left a breaking ball up to Berkman, he got him. And then put a fastball right down the middle on Murphy, and he got him. We got back in the game, and Yu settled down and kept us around until we were able to put some more runs on the board."
Darvish, who pitched 8 2/3 perfect innings in his season debut, earned a victory on an unimpressive night by his standards. He went five innings, allowing three earned runs on six hits and four walks and leaving because of peeled skin on his right ring finger after only 85 pitches. He struck out six.
Weaver, too, was nowhere near his best and left due to an injury, a strained left elbow he sustained avoiding Mitch Moreland's leadoff single up the middle in the sixth. Weaver shouldered the loss and allowed five runs on seven hits and four walks.
"You know what you're going to get from him every game," Moreland said of Weaver, who was 20-5 for the Angels last season. "It's going to be a battle. We were able to to put some runs on the board early and just kind of chip away at at him. We grinded out our at-bats and got his pitch count up a little bit."
Weaver surrendered multiple home runs for the first time since September against the Rangers.
"I think we did a good job on Weaver making him get the ball up in the zone," Washington said.
Lowe took over for Weaver and walked Leonys Martin, Texas' No. 9 hitter, then served up Kinsler's homer.
"I think he's trying to make contact there, and he got a fastball out over the plate and went with it," Angels manager Mike Scioscia said. "He usually pulls the ball, but he hit that one good."
Washington said Kinsler's play made the difference Sunday.
"He came up big for us," Washington said. "That single he got was huge for us. He was involved in everything that went on tonight. He turned a heck of a double play, too."
The double play came with no outs in the fifth, when Albert Pujols hit a grounder to third baseman Adrian Beltre, who turned to make a quick throw from an unusually close angle to second base. Kinsler got the ball to first quickly for the out, though Pujols appeared unhappy with the call.
The Rangers held onto the lead with four scoreless innings from the combination of Robbie Ross, Tanner Scheppers (who threw the seventh and eighth innings) and closer Joe Nathan.
Kinsler also hit a two-run homer in Saturday's loss to the Angels, who hit four long balls of their own that night. But Kinsler's all-around performance Sunday was easily his finest of the young Rangers season.
"When you can put together a game like that, it's definitely gratifying," Kinsler said.
Dave Sessions is a contributor to MLB.com.


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Crowley5150 necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 23 diseños de 13 diseñadores freelance.
An Australian business selling new and used Caravans, also servicing Caravans and selling Caravan Equipment. A logo needs to be designed for the new owners and direction of the business.
Camden Caravans
The full business name is "Camden Caravan NSW Pty Ltd" but the main focus of the logo will be "Camden Caravans" (possibly with a small NSW Pty Ltd included in there as well.
There is no real scope on what the owners want for their logo as their only ideas were the possibility of using maybe a visual of the state of NSW (New South Wales) or a shape of a caravan but this isn't locked in so see what you can come up with.
There are no specific colours preferred so try and be stylish and smart with your choices.
The target market of their clients are baby boomers and people 40 years old and higher who are buying caravans.
Any other questions, please message me.
- A logo with the wording "Camden Caravans" as the main focus
- A logo with some kind of emblem/graphic/design- May contain the shape of the Australian state "New South Wales"
- May contain a shape depicting a caravan
- May be something completely different
- Classy design and classy colours
- Something to appeal to Baby Boomer and 40 year old and over customers but remaining fresh and new.
- Something that stands out from a distance as they have major road frontage and need to be visible and obvious from the road.
- The winning designer needs to be able to provide all master files in the program the logo is designed in as well as PDF, EPS and JPG versions
- The winning designer needs to be able to accept PayPal payment from us.
- No Gawdy colours
- Not to large an emphasis for the "NSW Pty Ltd" on the logo text
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


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BOSTON, Mass. – Led by a dominating performance from junior Rahshjeem Benson (Boston, Mass.), which consisted of 14 points and a game-high 24 rebounds, men's basketball ended their four-game skid in a big way as they defeated the University of Southern Maine by the final of 69-55 Tuesday evening in a Little East Conference match-up at the Clark Athletic Center Gym.
With the victory, the Beacons who are currently sixth in the conference standings improved to 10-11 overall, 4-7 in the Little East. The 10 wins, marks the first for UMB since the 2005-06 season, in which they won the program's first conference tournament crown. For the Huskies the loss marks the second straight in conference play and drops their record to 13-9, 7-4 in the LEC.
For Benson, his night consisted of 6-of-14 shooting from the field, and his career best 24 boards. Tuesday's performance was just one board shy of tying the single game rebound record set by Jim Davis on December 17, 1985. Eighteen of his rebounds came on the defensive glass, while six were earned on the offensive side of the floor. The big-man also blocked four shots and handed out three assists.
Sophomore Vinny DeLucia (Miami, Fla.) got back to his scoring ways as he dropped in a game-high 16 points on 6-of-9 shooting, which included three 3-pointers. Forward Brian Clarke (Miramar, Fla.) also had a strong game with his double-double of 11 points and 14 rebounds and one block.
As a team, the Beacons shot over 42% in both halves to close out the night 26-for-56 overall (46.4%). They also hit their groove from behind the arc as they shot 40.0% (6-for-15). The Beacons biggest half had to be the second when they used a 15-for-30 performance to completely take control of the contest.
Holding a slim two point lead (26-24) at the break, the Beacons stepped back on the hardwood in the second half and outscored their conference opponent 43-31. UMass Boston wasted little time gaining some breathing room between them and Huskies as they went on 18-6 run in the first seven minutes to extend their lead to 14 (44-30).
The Beacons would continue to pour on the baskets and would see some aggressive play from their big-men in the paint. Benson was responsible for a couple of huge dunks along with freshman forward Jahleel Moise (Brockton, Mass.). Moise also dropped in 14 points in Tuesday's win and had three boards and one block. Clarke, who along with Benson played a major part in the early run in the second, closed out the final half with nine points and seven rebounds, while Benson posted 10 points and an incredible 19 rebounds.
Southern Maine saw Brandon Tomah and Conor Sullivan each finish with 13 points. Conference scoring leader Alex Kee, who came into the game averaging 15.3 points per game, was held to a mere four points on the night, and just one free throw in the second half. The Beacons defense was especially overwhelming as the Huskies shot 27.3% from the floor and 7.1% from 3-point range in the final 20 minutes of play.
Men's Basketball returns to action on Saturday when they host Plymouth State University at 3 p.m. Prior to the start of the contest senior members Mike Mitchell, Jr. (Dorchester, Mass.) and Yusuke Fukata (Osaka, Japan) will be recognized by their coaches and teammates.


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A 22 percent drop in one quarter drives down economic growth across the economy.
If anyone was still wondering whether the biggest federal agency was cutting back its spending late last year in anticipation of a potential budget sequester, the answer came this morning -- and it was a resounding yes.
In announcing that GDP had shrunk by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, the White House said the effects of Hurricane Sandy were partly to blame, but then pointed the finger at a bigger culprit: a precipitous decline in defense spending.
Here's Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, writing on the White House blog:
Federal defense purchases declined at an annual rate of 22.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, the largest quarterly decline in 40 years. A likely explanation for the sharp decline in federal defense spending is uncertainty concerning the automatic spending cuts that were scheduled to take effect in January, and are currently scheduled to take effect on March 1st. The decline in government spending across all levels reduced real GDP by 1.33 percentage points in the quarter.
Given that economists were anticipating a small increase in GDP, the results were surprising. Of course, as Brad Plumer notes in the Washington Post's Wonkblog today, defense spending always trails off in the fourth quarter, because the department, like other federal agencies, tends to squeeze a lot of spending into the third quarter because it's when the fiscal year ends. But a drop that breaks a 40-year record is another thing entirely.
And it's worth remembering that these cuts took place before Defense agencies recently went public with the news that they are slowing procurement spending, cutting contract workers and preparing for civilian employee furloughs in anticipation that a sequester will kick in at the end of February.
NEXT STORY: DoD Chief: No Lowering of Standards for Women


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The Smiths by Nalinee Darmrong
The Smiths by Nalinee Darmrong
Framed print prices are for a 1" black frame with white matting. Upgraded Archival Framing includes UV protected glass (sometimes referred to as museum grade) and thicker, acid-free matting. For prints over 20"x30", additional options and custom framing, please contact us!
Nalinee Darmrong first listened to The Smiths as a teenager in 1984. A friend gave her a cassette tape containing the music of the then-emerging British band. Soon after, she attended the Washington D.C. stop of their "Meat is Murder" tour. The next morning, after waiting outside their hotel for autographs, Darmrong and her friends met the band. This marked the beginning of her friendship with The Smiths. For two years she followed and photographed the band during their "Meat is Murder" and "The Queen is Dead" tours. In writing about her experiences with the band, Darmrong said "Traveling home, I remember feeling so incredibly lucky and grateful and also dumbstruck by how magical the last year had been for me. I feel that sentiment even more strongly today, and will never have any regrets, deciding to boldly go where I had never gone before." Three decades later, Darmrong has assembled her photographs of the now-legendary group, a majority of which have never been published before, for her new book The Smiths (Rizolli Publications).


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A new NASA craft is due to set sail, literally, Thursday night.
What's more, it hopes to be unfurling its sail in outer space.
What, you may ask, is NASA doing with a sail-powered vehicle?
The answer is that the bread-loaf-size satellite, built on a shoe-string budget, is designed to test a space propulsion technology that until the past few years has dwelt in the realm of science fiction.
The satellite, NanoSail-D, is expected to open its thin, square, reflective sail at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, representing what would be the first successful on-orbit deployment of a solar sail in the history of the US space program.
IN PICTURES: Harnessing the sun's energy
It make lack the pizzazz of warp drive, the fictional propulsion system known to Star Trek fans. But many of its advocates argue that solar sails represent the best path to eventual interstellar travel. More immediately, the technology also holds the promise of reducing the amount of space junk orbiting Earth, boosters say.
The rooting section for Wednesday night's sail-deployment attempt may be small, but it's enthusiastic.
"The solar-sailing world is such a small world that we're all rooting for each other," says Bill Nye, executive director of the Planetary Society, a space-exploration advocacy group in Pasadena, Calif. The society has its own solar-sail demonstration program underway.
Solar sails operate on the same general principles as conventional sails operate. But where a sailboat gets its push from wind, a solar sail gets its push from sunlight – a possibility first envisioned after physicists figured out that while particles of light, known as photons, have no mass, they do carry momentum. When they strike an object, such as a reflective sail in space, they can transfer momentum to the sail and thus to the object hoisting it.
A craft propelled exclusively via solar sails travels at a snail's pace when it starts. But with no air resistance in space, momentum would rapidly build. By some estimates, a mission to Pluto, currently a 10-year trip, could reach the dwarf planet in five years.
A solar-sail craft also could devote more of its payload to scientific experiments rather than mass-costly motors and fuel, which today's craft carry for course corrections on a long voyage or altitude changes to maintain orbit around a planet or moon.
So far, Japan has lofted the most sophisticated solar-sail craft to date. The craft, IKAROS, launched in May 2009 with the country's Venus climate orbiter, Akatuski. A month later, IKAROS deployed a square solar sail roughly 19 feet long on each side, which has propelled the craft on a trajectory that will put it in orbit around the sun.
Thin-film solar cells on the sail provide electricity for the craft. But one of its most ingenious features, Mr. Nye says, involves steering. Instead of moving the sail's angle relative to the incoming sunlight, the craft uses strategically placed arrays of liquid crystals – much like those in a digital watch – to alter the ability of a given section of the sail to reflect light.
The approach allows the craft to alter course, but slowly. The system takes roughly 24 hours to achieve a one-degree change in course.
That works well for deep-space travel. But for orbital work, a craft would have to be more agile, requiring a mechanical means of trimming the sail.
Ironically, although NanoSail-D's systems are identical to those required for solar propulsion, the craft will be demonstrating something different over the next 70 to 120 days: the use of such sails for braking.
NASA's first attempt to loft NanoSail-D came in 2008 aboard Falcon 1, the first in a growing stable of rockets and capsules built by Spacex, one of a new generation of rocket-makers. The company currently has a contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station once evaluation flights end for its larger Falcon 9, whose first two launches were successful.
Unfortunately, the Falcon 1 carrying the first NanoSail-D failed. The NanoSail-D currently in orbit is a back-up unit that engineers have continued to modify over the past two years.
The craft was one of six payloads lofted by Orbital Science Corporation's Minotaur IV rocket on Nov. 20. The six payloads rode into space on a common "bus." NanoSail-D was to have ejected from the bus Dec. 6.
"The door opened, but nothing came out," says Dean Alhorn, an engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and the project's lead investigator.
For more than a month, his team was in limbo, trying to figure out what might have caused the apparent failure.
Then, to everyone's surprise, the craft phoned home Jan. 19, indicating that it somehow, finally, worked free of the bus. With the help of amateur-radio operators in the US, including the Marshall Space flight Center, and in Germany, who had equipment capable of receiving NanoSail-D's encoded communications, the team gathered up the data and judged NanoSail-D to be in good shape, if somewhat tardy.
"I'm pleased with how everything has worked out," Mr. Alhorn says.
The craft is orbiting some 350 nautical miles above Earth. There, drag from Earth's extended atmosphere exerts more influence on a spacecraft's speed than do photons from the sun. So the goal is to see how well a sail can guide a craft to a controlled reentry into Earth's atmosphere, where it would incinerate.
By international agreement, satellite operators must design their craft to carry enough fuel to either boost themselves into an higher orbit reserved for dead spacecraft or to slow the craft for reentry. The goal is to reduce the likelihood that derelict spacecraft in low-Earth orbit will collide, adding to an already worrisome collection of spent boosters and dead satellites orbiting Earth. Collisions between these objects generate a tenuous but troubling cloud of debris that has threatened active spacecraft, including the International Space Station and the space shuttle.
Solar sails are far lighter and cost far less than the motors and fuel craft currently must carry for deorbiting, Alhorn says.
Even as NanoSail-D prepares to spread its wings, the Planetary Society has embarked on a three-step program of solar-sail development. It comes on the heels of a 2005 attempt to launch the organization's Cosmos 1 solar-sail demonstration craft. The Russian rocket lofting the craft failed before the craft could reach orbit.
LightSail 1, which the Planetary Society says it hopes to launch during the first half of this year, would head directly for an orbit roughly 440 nautical miles above Earth. There, the influence of sunlight on the craft would exceed that of Earth's atmosphere, allowing for the controlled solar-sail flight the group hopes to achieve. LightSail 2 would be larger, last longer, and carry scientific payloads for earth observation. If all goes well, LightSail 3 would be designed to travel farm from Earth to provide early warning of solar storms that erupt from the sun.


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Revitalize your deck without replacing it!
25053 E. Hoover Pl. Aurora, CO 80016 USA
(303) 815-6027
All Hands on Deck Handyman Service provides the same customer service, client care, and quality of service as our deck restoration service. We are an owner operated company, meaning no middle men or seasonal help; unaccountable to the client.


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Season Premiere Airs Monday, July 18, on FOX
Winner to Receive Head Chef Position at BLT Steak in New York City
Get ready for the heat of HELL'S KITCHEN as superstar chef Gordon Ramsay ushers in the series' red-hot ninth season with 18 new competitors Monday, July 18 (8:00-9:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. These aspiring restaurateurs will brave Ramsay and his wrath as he once again puts the competitors through rigorous challenges to see who has the skill and passion to win a life-changing prize: a head chef position at BLT Steak in New York City.
Ramsay's culinary challenges will range from the cute and cuddly as the chefs cook a "mommy and me" meal for a room full of moms and toddlers � to the sublime as the chefs are challenged to cook using different types of beer as the basis for their recipes. The winning teams will get to enjoy a private jet to Palm Springs, Indy-car racing, a $20,000-per-night suite in Las Vegas or a four-story yacht excursion, while the losing teams will be required to decorate for a high school reunion, take delivery of and butcher an entire side of beef, create ice sculptures and put together an entire children's playground for family night.
In the season premiere, Ramsay launches the competition with the signature-dish challenge and is both impressed and disappointed right from the start. Before the dinner service can even begin, one contestant is rushed to the hospital and things go downhill quickly from there until one chef is eliminated from HELL'S KITCHEN.
As the teams are whittled down, the chefs get one step closer to earning the coveted black chef jacket. Eventually two finalists will compete head-to-head to try and impress Ramsay with their skills and only one lucky chef will walk away with the ultimate prize and fulfill their dreams as a head chef at one of the finest restaurants in America.
Below are the 18 chefs of this season's HELL'S KITCHEN.
The members of the Red Team (Women) include:
Name: Elizabeth Bianchi
Age: 27
Occupation: Line Cook
Hometown: New York, NY
Signature Dish: Pan-Roasted Quail
Name: Natalie Blake
Age: 23
Occupation: Sous Chef
Hometown: Harrodsburg, KY
Signature Dish: Lamb Chops
Name: Amanda Colello
Age: 26
Occupation: Personal Chef
Hometown: Sun City, CA
Signature Dish: Eggplant Rollatini with Creamy Polenta
Name: Jamie Gregorich
Age: 24
Occupation: Sous Chef
Hometown: Bradenton, FL
Signature Dish: Lollipop Lamb Chop with Red Onion Confiture
Name: Carrie Keep
Age: 31
Occupation: Pantry Chef
Hometown: Dallas, TX
Signature Dish: Chicken-Fried Rib Eye with Yukon Mashed Potatoes and White Truffle Cream Gravy
Name: Gina Melcher
Age: 34
Occupation: Restaurant Consultant
Hometown: Cape May, NJ
Signature Dish: Pistachio Scallops
Name: Jennifer Normant
Age: 34
Occupation: Chef de Cuisine
Hometown: Boston, MA
Signature Dish: Special Secret Pork with Mashed Sweet Potatoes
Name: Krupa Patel
Age: 30
Occupation: Private Chef
Hometown: Queens, NY
Signature Dish: Stuffed Naan with Cilantro Chutney
Name: Elise Wims
Age: 26
Occupation: Line Cook
Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA
Signature Dish: Pesto Seared Scallops with Saut�ed Escarole
The members of the Blue Team (Men) include:
Name: Chino Chang
Age: 39
Occupation: Executive Chef
Hometown: Hatboro, PA
Signature Dish: Korean BBQ Beef
Name: Brendan Heavey
Age: 31
Occupation: Head Chef
Hometown: Hoboken, NJ
Signature Dish: Salmon with Basil Cream Sauce
Name: Monterray Keys
Age: 34
Occupation: Line Cook
Hometown: Darby, PA
Signature Dish: Pan-Seared Sea Bass
Name: Will Lustberg
Age: 31
Occupation: Sous Chef
Hometown: Jersey City, NJ
Signature Dish: Sheep's Milk Ricotta Gnudi
Name: Paul Niedermann
Age: 26
Occupation: Jr. Sous Chef
Hometown: Davie, FL
Signature Dish: Eggplant Involtini
Name: Steven Paluba
Age: 44
Occupation: Saut� Chef
Hometown: Ridge, NY
Signature Dish: Seared Diver Scallops with Wild Mushroom Risotto
Name: Jonathon Plumley
Age: 34
Occupation: Head Cook
Hometown: Memphis, TN
Signature Dish: Punch-Drunk Chicken
Name: Tommy Stevens
Age: 31
Occupation: Line Cook
Hometown: Brewster, NY
Signature Dish: Toasted Coconut Crab Cake
Name: Jason Zepaltas
Age: 29
Occupation: Line Cook
Hometown: Chicago, IL
Signature Dish: Pork Tacos
HELL'S KITCHEN is produced by ITV Studios America in association with A. Smith & Co. Productions. Arthur Smith, Kent Weed and Gordon Ramsay serve as executive producers. Become a fan of HELL'S KITCHEN on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hellskitchen and follow the series on Twitter at www.twitter.com/hellskitchenonfox (@hellskitchenonfox).
Owned by Jimmy Haber and Keith Treyball, BLT Steak is overseen by BLT Restaurant Group, a division of parent company ESquared Hospitality. Renowned for its high-quality food and service, BLT Steak first introduced diners to the Modern American steakhouse in 2004 with the flagship BLT Steak in New York City. Since then, 10 additional BLT Steak restaurants have opened in Washington, D.C. (2006); San Juan, PR (2006); White Plains, NY (2007); Los Angeles (2008); Scottsdale, AZ (2008); Atlanta (2009); Miami (2009); Hong Kong (2009); Charlotte, NC (2009); and Waikiki (2009). For more information about BLT Steak, please visit www.e2hospitality.com or www.esquaredhospitality.com.


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SURREY, B.C. - A British Columbia gangster who police say had criminal connections across Canada and the world has been shot dead in Mexico.
RCMP Chief Supt. Dan Malo said Thomas Gisby was killed in a Starbucks in Nuevo Vallarta on Friday night.
He said police are now concerned about retaliation against enemies of the 50-year-old man who was from the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver.
"We wanted to get our message to the community that this wasn't an individual who was simply on holidays," Malo said Saturday. "This is a well-known target, a well-known organized crime figure here in British Columbia."
Gisby led what police called the Gisby Crime Group, which was well connected to other criminal organizations, although Malo declined to name them.
"He has networks internationally to be able to bring illegal commodities into Canada for distribution," Malo said, adding guns and drugs were among the goods Gisby traded.
Mounties were aware that Gisby had travelled to Mexico, said Malo, who is in charge of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit.
"Even though Thomas Gisby, in his own right, thought that he was at a high-enough level in organized crime that he would be isolated from violence, it's clearly not the case."
Also on HuffPost


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Whimsical Dragonfly Courier Bag
Rickshaw Medium Zero Messenger Bag A powerhouse of versatility, the Rickshaw Medium Zero Messenger Bag is perfect as a workday commuter, overnight attaché, or travel bag. Vibrantly printed on rugged polyester and designed with a interchangeable accessories system. Carefully constructed with a focus on environmental sustainability, this bag combines form, function, and a small ecological … Read moreWhimsical Dragonfly Courier Bag


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India won the toss and decided to bat against England in the second Test at the Wankhede Stadium here Friday.
Harbhajan Singh was picked in the Indian team as the third spinner alongside Pragyan Ojha and Ravichandran Ashwin.
England brought in Jonny Bairstow for Ian Bell and Monty Panesar for Tim Bresnan.
Teams:India: Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Cheteshwar Pujara, Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, Yuvraj Singh, M.S. Dhoni (captain), Harbhajan Singh, Ravichandran Ashwin, Zaheer Khan, Pragyan Ojha.
England: Alastair Cook (captain), Nick Compton, Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen, Jonnny Bairstow, Samit Patel, Matt Prior, Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann, Monty Panesar, James Anderson.
Umpires: Aleem Dar and Tony HillThird Umpire: S. RaviMatch Referee: Roshan Mahanama.


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I designed a log clamp to hold logs that are too big for the lathe. My friend, Mitchel Dillman over at Colorado Rock*N Logs fabricated it for me. See how to use it to carve a tenon in this video!
Please visit my website and FaceBook Page. Thanks!
-- Scott Shaeffer, Owner - San Juan Carpentry


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YOU&i™ Support Program
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MCL Home
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*As demonstrated by in vitro and in vivo studies.
BTK=Bruton's tyrosine kinase.
Correlation with clinical effect has not been established.
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As of May 15, 2018, the original 140 mg capsules will no longer be available.
Every IMBRUVICA® patient will need a new prescription for the new pill.
Hemorrhage: Fatal bleeding events have occurred in patients treated with IMBRUVICA®. Major hemorrhage (≥ Grade 3, serious, or any central nervous system events; e.g., intracranial hemorrhage [including subdural hematoma], gastrointestinal bleeding, hematuria, and post procedural hemorrhage) have occurred in 4% of patients, with fatalities occurring in 0.4% of 2,838 patients exposed to IMBRUVICA® in 27 clinical trials. Bleeding events of any grade, including bruising and petechiae, occurred in 39% of patients treated with IMBRUVICA®.
The mechanism for the bleeding events is not well understood.
Use of either anticoagulant or antiplatelet agents concomitantly with IMBRUVICA® increases the risk of major hemorrhage. In IMBRUVICA® clinical trials, 3.1% of patients taking IMBRUVICA® without antiplatelet or anticoagulant therapy experienced major hemorrhage. The addition of antiplatelet therapy with or without anticoagulant therapy increased this percentage to 4.4%, and the addition of anticoagulant therapy with or without antiplatelet therapy increased this percentage to 6.1%. Consider the risks and benefits of anticoagulant or antiplatelet therapy when co-administered with IMBRUVICA®. Monitor for signs and symptoms of bleeding.
Consider the benefit-risk of withholding IMBRUVICA® for at least 3 to 7 days pre- and post-surgery depending upon the type of surgery and the risk of bleeding.
Infections: Fatal and non-fatal infections (including bacterial, viral, or fungal) have occurred with IMBRUVICA® therapy. Grade 3 or greater infections occurred in 24% of 1,124 patients exposed to IMBRUVICA® in clinical trials. Cases of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) and Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia (PJP) have occurred in patients treated with IMBRUVICA®. Consider prophylaxis according to standard of care in patients who are at increased risk for opportunistic infections.
Monitor and evaluate patients for fever and infections and treat appropriately.
Cytopenias: Treatment-emergent Grade 3 or 4 cytopenias including neutropenia (23%), thrombocytopenia (8%), and anemia (3%) based on laboratory measurements occurred in patients with B-cell malignancies treated with single agent IMBRUVICA®.
Monitor complete blood counts monthly.
Cardiac Arrhythmias: Fatal and serious cardiac arrhythmias have occurred with IMBRUVICA® therapy. Grade 3 or greater ventricular tachyarrhythmias occurred in 0.2% of patients, and Grade 3 or greater atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter occurred in 4% of 1,124 patients exposed to IMBRUVICA® in clinical trials. These events have occurred particularly in patients with cardiac risk factors, hypertension, acute infections, and a previous history of cardiac arrhythmias.
Periodically monitor patients clinically for cardiac arrhythmias. Obtain an ECG for patients who develop arrhythmic symptoms (e.g., palpitations, lightheadedness, syncope, chest pain) or new onset dyspnea. Manage cardiac arrhythmias appropriately, and if it persists, consider the risks and benefits of IMBRUVICA® treatment and follow dose modification guidelines.
Hypertension: Hypertension of any grade occurred in 12% of 1,124 patients treated with IMBRUVICA® in clinical trials. Grade 3 or greater hypertension occurred in 5% of patients with a median time to onset of 5.9 months (range, 0.03 to 24 months).
Monitor blood pressure in patients treated with IMBRUVICA® and initiate or adjust anti-hypertensive medication throughout treatment with IMBRUVICA® as appropriate.
Second Primary Malignancies: Other malignancies (10%) including non-skin carcinomas (4%) have occurred in 1,124 patients treated with IMBRUVICA® in clinical trials. The most frequent second primary malignancy was non-melanoma skin cancer (6%).
Tumor Lysis Syndrome: Tumor lysis syndrome has been infrequently reported with IMBRUVICA® therapy. Assess the baseline risk (e.g., high tumor burden) and take appropriate precautions.
Monitor patients closely and treat as appropriate.
Embryo-Fetal Toxicity: Based on findings in animals, IMBRUVICA® can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman. Advise women to avoid becoming pregnant while taking IMBRUVICA® and for 1 month after cessation of therapy. If this drug is used during pregnancy or if the patient becomes pregnant while taking this drug, the patient should be apprised of the potential hazard to a fetus. Advise men to avoid fathering a child during the same time period.
B-cell malignancies: The most common adverse reactions (≥20%) in patients with B-cell malignancies (MCL, CLL/SLL, WM and MZL) were thrombocytopenia (58%)*, diarrhea (41%), anemia (38%)*, neutropenia (35%)*, musculoskeletal pain (32%), rash (32%), bruising (31%), nausea (26%), fatigue (26%), hemorrhage (24%), and pyrexia (20%).
The most common Grade 3 or 4 adverse reactions (≥5%) in patients with B-cell malignancies (MCL, CLL/SLL, WM and MZL) were neutropenia (18%)*, thrombocytopenia (16%)*, and pneumonia (14%).
Approximately 7% (CLL/SLL), 14% (MCL), 14% (WM) and 10% (MZL) of patients had a dose reduction due to adverse reactions. Approximately 4-10% (CLL/SLL), 9% (MCL), and 7% (WM [5%] and MZL [13%]) of patients discontinued due to adverse reactions.
cGVHD: The most common adverse reactions (≥20%) in patients with cGVHD were fatigue (57%), bruising (40%), diarrhea (36%), thrombocytopenia (33%)*, muscle spasms (29%), stomatitis (29%), nausea (26%), hemorrhage (26%), anemia (24%)*, and pneumonia (21%).
The most common Grade 3 or higher adverse reactions (≥5%) reported in patients with cGVHD were pneumonia (14%), fatigue (12%), diarrhea (10%), neutropenia (10%)*, sepsis (10%), hypokalemia (7%), headache (5%), musculoskeletal pain (5%), and pyrexia (5%).
Twenty-four percent of patients receiving IMBRUVICA® in the cGVHD trial discontinued treatment due to adverse reactions. Adverse reactions leading to dose reduction occurred in 26% of patients.
*Treatment-emergent decreases (all grades) were based on laboratory measurements.
CYP3A Inhibitors: Modify IMBRUVICA® dose as described in USPI sections 2.4 and 7.1.
CYP3A Inducers: Avoid coadministration with strong CYP3A inducers.
Hepatic Impairment (based on Child-Pugh criteria): Avoid use of IMBRUVICA® in patients with severe baseline hepatic impairment. In patients with mild or moderate impairment, reduce IMBRUVICA® dose.
Please see full Prescribing Information.
IMBRUVICA® (ibrutinib) is a kinase inhibitor indicated for the treatment of adult patients with:
Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) who have received at least one prior therapy.
Accelerated approval was granted for this indication based on overall response rate. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in a confirmatory trial.
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)/Small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL).
CLL/SLL with 17p deletion.
Waldenström's macroglobulinemia (WM).
Marginal zone lymphoma (MZL) who require systemic therapy and have
received at least one prior anti-CD20-based therapy.
Accelerated approval was granted for this indication based on overall
response rate. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent
upon verification and description of clinical benefit in a confirmatory
Chronic graft versus host disease (cGVHD) after failure of one or more lines of systemic therapy.
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IMBRUVICA® (ibrutinib) is covered by U.S. Patents, which are listed in FDA's Orange Book (available at https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/ob/default.cfm).
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Szabo, Victoria
Laboratory version of Information Science + Studies 240. Multimedia information systems, including presentation media, hypermedia, graphics, animation, sound, video, and integrated authoring techniques; underlying technologies that make them possible. Practice in the design innovation, programming, and assessment of web-based digital multimedia information systems. Intended for students in non-technical disciplines. Engineering or Computer Science students should take Engineering 206 or Computer Science 408. Instructor: Lucic or Szabo
Class Room 1:
Old Chem 201
Class Time 1:
Duke Uid:


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November 2014
February 2013
Please choose your suitable shipping method. We offer international shipping (5.50 Euros) and shipping in Germany (2 Euros).
Radio Werewolf'sThe Vinyl Solution - Analog Artifacts: Ritual Instrumentals and Undercover Versions – CD now available at NORMAL MASS MARKET PRICE €15
From "Hail the Werewolf" Blog at http://styxhexenhammer666.blogspot.de/2012/12/radio-werewolf-vinyl-solution-review.html
I figured that I would make a review of the new Radio Werewolf album here, as I just got my copy in the mail, and trust me, less than 5 minutes later it was playing in my computers' CD drive (It will be amusing as well to pop it into the car and blast the music, confusing others with all the windows down.)
This is a very good quality piece- for those who have listened to Radio Werewolf's work before we have a dual problem- most of the tracks were taken from vinyl (which ensures they have somewhat low quality to begin with) and most of them are being listened to through Youtube, which further degrades the quality.
This piece has been masterfully restored, and starts out with a prologue piece from the Zurich Experiment in 1991, then goes on to 6 tracks from "The Lightning and the Sun" and 4 tracks from "Bring me the Head of Geraldo Rivera" (The best album title ever.)
It finishes with the Schrecks' tribute tracks to the SIN-atras, which I imagine pissed off Sinatra fans when they found out who had covered the songs.
The 14th track is a "mystery bonus track:" I could tell you what it is but, suffice it to say it's a cover song, which a lot of folks would enjoy.
Of course, these works are from Radio Werewolf's more ambient/experimental period, particularly with "Sleepwalker" (My favorite song from the later Radio Werewolf works) you can hear the atmospheric sound, and you can feel the mystic intent behind such works. A dark rainy night is the perfect atmosphere to listen to most of their immortal, subversive work!
Definitely worth buying.
July 2012
Temporarily unavailable. A new updated version of The Manson File: Myth and Reality of an Outlaw Shaman is coming soon.
The Manson File: Myth and Reality of an Outlaw Shaman by Nikolas Schreck - regular priced mass market English edition at 39 Euros (excl. shipping). To order click PayPal button.
(Note: Signed limited edition sold out. Mass market edition is not autographed.)
Summing up 25 years of Nikolas Schreck's research into the Charles Manson phenomenon, this Book of Revelations illuminates unknown dimensions of Manson as philosopher, musician, Gnostic mystic, Mafia fall guy, revolutionary, and friend, lover and drug dealer to 1960s Hollywood's best-known rock stars and movie idols.
The first comprehensive study of Manson's life, times, crimes, and thought, this is the ultimate guide to the Manson mysteries, portraying the human being behind the media-created monster's many masks.
Drawing on police evidence suppressed during Manson's trial, Schreck exposes the "Helter Skelter" legend as one of the twentieth century's greatest cover-ups, unveils the hidden Mafia drug-dealing background of the "Manson murders" and traces the underworld connections linking the victims to their killers. The author's recent conversations with Manson and others directly involved in the psychedelic era's apocalypse allow the true story kept secret for decades to be told at last.