text:
FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, Md -- The Chief of Naval Operations' Reduce Administrative Distractions (RAD) Team website launched July 1, and the effort is underway to get direct input from Sailors on how the Fleet can streamline or eliminate administrative processes to allow more time to focus on mission readiness. The interactive RAD website provides all ranks, active, Reserve and Navy civilians with a platform to voice their concerns about administrative tasks, procedures, instructions and training, and propose solutions to fix these issues. It will function much like a social media interface, allowing users to comment and vote on posts.
The collected data can be analyzed by many different variables, from what is bothering commanding officers to what junior Sailors are concerned with.
The site has generated several responses on a wide variety of topics including anti-terrorism force protection, quality assurance, Navy Knowledge Online and electronic routing. IdeaScale rewards users with merit badges based on their activity on the site. Data collection via the RAD website is phase one of the multi-phase approach to streamline or eliminate administrative processes in the fleet and is slated for completion July 31. In phase two, the collected data will be analyzed and the team will make proposals to the "owner" of the administrative program for automation, elimination, reduction or other action by August 30. Phase three will be the action phase, allowing execution of the reduction measures and will wrap up Sept. 30. Upon completion of the three phases, the program will promulgate the progress to date, monitor the impact and plan for the next cycle.


text:
Almost exactly 25 years ago, I had an epiphany: "No one makes it to high six or seven figures without a team." And further: "An advisor and one assistant don't make a team. The minimum team size is advisor, assistant and part-time computer operator."
In 1989, I was the first to come out and say: "Partnerships are a good thing. They benefit both client and advisors." Both of those insights were true way back then. They are true today with this exception: The original 2½ person team will take you to about a million and a half today. Over the years since, I have been involved in least 5,000 teams.
The 10 mistakes cited here are, in my experience, the most common and deadly. I have created several resources for you cited below. You will find them at www.billgood.com/surefire.
1. No Team
Hopefully, you have full knowledge that prosperity, or even survival, in financial services today requires you create or join a team. If you do not have a team, the question is obviously: When do I start?
Answer: Before you can comfortably afford it.
If you think for one second today that you can build a business of several hundred thousand dollars in gross revenue, and then build your team, you dream. Next time you go to a conference with other advisors, just ask the top producers this question: At what point in your career did you hire your first team member?
You will find in the overwhelming number of cases, it was very early. Often they borrowed money to do it. Most likely, they couldn't afford it. Neither can you. But if you don't get started sooner rather than later, you are forever condemned to low production.
2. No Job Descriptions
There is a huge difference between a bunch of people doing stuff, and a team.
Think about a baseball team. When it's time to pitch the ball, the team members know to throw it to the pitcher. The catcher does not even think for a second of throwing it to the shortstop who will then pitch to the batter.
Every one of the nine positions has a precisely defined role.
Imagine a baseball team with no job descriptions. Nine people go on the field. The umpire throws out a ball. What do they do? Most likely bicker and argue over who is going to do what.
Ditto for a financial services team with no job descriptions.
Each team role is created in a document called a job description. I found a job description template out on the Microsoft template library. I made a few modifications to it and posted it on our "Surefire Team Development" page. There you will also find other team building resources, all free for the taking.
Before defining your own job descriptions for your team, I strongly recommend you download and study my white paper, "Surefire Team Development." There you will find several job descriptions you can adapt.
3. No Formal Coordination
Any coach, even of a bottom-ranked high school team, knows that a team has to have team training and team coordination.
You see it in sports. You see it in the military. And you see it in great financial services teams.
A principal forum for this coordination is the weekly team meeting.
I'm familiar with one $4 million team that has two meetings a week. They have a partner's meeting, and they have a meeting for the entire team. Each has its own agenda.
I have also posted a generic agenda for you at our team development site. Obviously, you will add your own items to the agenda, but I have primed the pump for you.
A note of warning: Don't let your team meeting turn into a complaint session. Its purpose is to solve problems, make sure business in process gets completed and plan for new business next week.
4. Top Heavy
I've come across several teams lately with three partners, and one undoubtedly overworked assistant.
This is a case of the dog-cat-bird phenomenon.
You can call each of the partners a financial advisor. You can be sitting on your couch with a critter that barks. You can say to your friend, "This is my dog-cat." Calling it something doesn't make it so. Calling a person a financial advisor in a top heavy partnership does not make it so.
In a top heavy scenario, at least one of the two partners is primarily functioning as a service assistant.
You cannot have three partners doing $1.6 million with one assistant, and assume the three partners are, in fact, three advisors. Calling it that won't make it so.
A top heavy partnership will most certainly plateau, and then break up. If you are top heavy, you need to urgently figure out how to get additional support so that the advisors can be advisors.
5. Thinking Sales Support and Service Support Are the Same Position
This is the original cat-bird. In building a team, remember, you have to have sharp delineation between the roles.
The first job to establish is your client service associate. Key word: Service.
As part of the service associate's job description, it should specify: Will not be asked to perform sales duties, except in an emergency.
Similarly, your marketing director, business development manager, sales assistant, call it what you will, should have a line in his or her job description: Will not be asked to perform service duties except in an emergency.
Don't ask one to do the other's duties. The team collapses and you just have a bunch of unhappy people doing stuff and arguing about it. Don't ask the shortstop to be a pitcher, and don't send your catcher to first base.
6. Disproportionate Pay
Should my marketing/sales assistant and service assistants be paid equally? Yes and no.
First, I want you as an advisor to imagine you have two arms. Your business development manager brings in business to you. Some of the business is from clients. Some is from prospects.
Your service manager helps you keep what you've got. He or she creates selling time. Happy, well-serviced clients come back for more.
In this analogy, which would you rather have: your left arm or your right arm?
My answer would be, "I'm not willing to give up either."
So which is more valuable, left or right?
Start with the same base salary, and then add to it or take away from it, based upon qualifications and length of service.
7. Keeping the "Right Person" Too Long
One of the most destructive things to a small team is the wrong person on it. The "wrong person" can often be disguised by many positive personal characteristics. It's easy to root out the sour, dishonest, non-performing team member, but the "right person" is tough.
You could have, for instance, someone as your business development manager who has a great personality, good work ethic, blends well with the team, everyone likes him or her, but the harsh reality is, he or she does not get the results required of the position. You keep working with that person, coaching them, helping them, but it doesn't improve. Most likely this person is responsible for business development.
The fact is: Some people do not have the ability to bring the horse to water, much less make it drink. To leave that person in that job can bring down your team.
In a larger company, that good decent person you hired would be moved to another job. But the cold reality is: You are not a larger company. You are a small team. And if your business development manager, or service manager, or junior advisor, can't get the job done, no matter how sterling their other characteristics, they have to go. And they have to go fast.
The rule: When you start having second thoughts, make the second thoughts first thoughts and pull the plug.
8. No Decision-Making Process
If there is a single factor responsible for the destruction of most teams it is the absence of a decision-making process. This is especially apparent in a 50-50 partnership.
Bob says yes. Jane says no. And it sticks there. Irritation turns into anger. One person starts looking around. Sooner or later, it blows up.
The solution: An agreed-upon method to make a decision.
In the case of a 50-50 partnership, you could have a simple rule as follows:
The partners will come to an agreement on significant issues in a reasonable period of time. Failing that, they will call in an agreed-upon third party who will cast a deciding vote. That ends the discussion. And the partners get back to work.
In a larger partnership where the senior partner may hold a majority of the shares, the rule is simple.
The partners will discuss any changes in policy, major expenses, personnel, and ideally come to a meeting of the minds in a relatively short period of time. Failing that, the senior partner will make the decision and end the discussion.
Don't let disagreements blow up an otherwise great relationship. Work out a method to end disagreement and move on.
9. Not Putting All the Eggs in One Basket
When two or three advisors come together, each is naturally cautious, and wants to protect what he brings to the table. That's fine. But it's only fine for a limited period of time. Once you have decided that you are a real partnership, all clients should be assigned a single partnership number.
The model of "ours, yours, and mine" is not a model that long survives. The reason is very simple. "Ours" never gets the attention of mine and yours. "Our clients" get neglected for the simple reason that it's always easier for you to make more money by talking to your clients than our clients. There is no economic reason for this model to survive, and very rarely does it last more than a year or two. While you would not put all of your investment eggs in one basket, all clients assigned to one number is the foundation for a partnership of long duration.
10. No Team Vision
A team is a group of people united by a common vision or mission. With no common vision or mission, the team becomes not a team, but just a group of people doing stuff. It never develops the team dynamic. It is the responsibility of the advisor or partners to develop a mission statement. Further, it is essential that all current and future team members learn the mission statement and be able to repeat it from memory.
I read an interesting article a while back on mission statements. The author recommended that a mission statement not be longer than what can be comfortably recited while standing on one foot.
The mission of Bill Good Marketing is: "Create marketing and administrative systems that enable our clients to have the time and money to pursue their other goals in life."
I can say that while standing on one foot. Can you do the same with your mission statement?

subset: commoncrawl


text:
SAO PAULO (AP) — Ronaldinho, Kaka and Robinho were left off Brazil's World Cup roster by coach Luiz Felipe Scolari, who selected just five players who went to the 2010 tournament with the Selecao.
Goalkeeper Julio Cesar; defenders Thiago Silva, Dani Alves and Maicon; and midfielder Ramires were the only returnees from the tournament four years ago on the 23-man roster announced Wednesday. Fred, a forward on the 2006 World Cup roster, was selected after missing the 2010 tournament.
"I don't think this lack of World Cup experience will play a big part," Scolari said. "Our players have been gaining experience in their leagues in Europe, and I don't think they will be affected by this too much, although in certain World Cup situations, having that experience would be important. But I fully trust these players."
There were no major surprise picks in Brazil's group, which includes 16 players who were on the roster for last year's Confederations Cup, a warmup tournament in which the Selecao beat Spain 3-0 in the final. The team includes young stars such as Neymar and Oscar.
"My childhood dream came true," Neymar said on Instagram. "Today was one of the most anticipated days of my life. It's time to represent the entire country. I'm completely moved, anxious and nervous. I want it to arrive soon."
Also among the bypassed were Lucas Leiva, Lucas Moura and Felipe Luis.
"We know that not everybody will agree with all the names. It's normal," Scolari said. "But now that we have the 23 players, we would like to ask that our fans support all of them, so together we can focus on our goal of winning the World Cup."
The roster includes six players from teams in England, four from Brazil, three each from Italy and Spain, two apiece from France and Germany, and one each from Major League Soccer, Russia and Ukraine.
The announcement at a traditional concert house in Rio de Janeiro was telecast live and attended by more than 700 reporters.
Seeking a record sixth World Cup title, Brazil has won 13 of its last 14 games. Its starting lineup is likely to have Julio Cesar in goal; Dani Alves at right back; Thiago Silva and David Luiz in central defense; Marcelo at left back; Paulinho and Luiz Gustavo in defensive midfield; and Oscar in attacking midfield; and Neymar, Hulk and Fred up front.
Brazil plays Croatia in the World Cup opener on June 12, then faces Mexico five days later and Croatia on June 23.
The roster:
Jefferson (Botafogo), Julio Cesar (Toronto, MLS), Victor (Atletico Mineiro)
Dani Alves (Barcelona, Spain), Dante (Bayern Munich, Germany), David Luiz (Chelsea, England), Henrique (Napoli, Italy), Maicon (Roma, Italy), Marcelo (Real Madrid, Spain), Maxwell (Paris Saint-Germain, France), Thiago Silva (Paris Saint-Germain, France)
Fernandinho (Manchester City, England), Hernanes (Inter Milan, Italy), Luiz Gustavo (Wolfsburg, Germany), Oscar (Chelsea, England), Paulinho (Tottenham, England), Ramires (Chelsea, England), Willian (Chelsea, England)
Bernard (Shakhtar Donetsk, Ukraine), Fred (Fluminense), Hulk (Zenit St. Petersburg, Russia), Jo (Atletico Mineiro), Neymar (Barcelona, Spain)


text:
Position Description:
Be Part of an EvolutionHere at The Home Depot, we realize that to remain an industry leader, we must continuously evolve. And that's exactly what we're doing at The Home Depot Supply Chain. Our Supply Chain organization has transformed our Distribution Center network by opening new centers and refining four distribution platforms that are able to supply inventory to 100% of The Home Depot Stores. Our Supply Chain priorities are Customer Service, Reliability, Cost Effectiveness and Culture. And it's these priorities that make our Supply Chain management teams critical to the success of our Distribution Centers, and in turn our retail stores. We are constantly creating a talent pool to quickly fill positions as they become available. Home Depot is always searching for innovative managers that can identify ways to decrease cost, increase efficiency and help us pursue our goal of being the #1 customer service retailer in the world.We're currently sourcing highly-skilled candidates for the following position:Operations Manager:This is a critical position within the Distribution Center – as a problem solver, analyzer of trends, motivator and a developer of quality associates. And in addition, you're responsible for the success of assigned functions within the DC, and work closely with the GM and the AGM to develop strategies and objectives to maximize productivity and lessen expenses for the DC. You may also be responsible for the supervision of one or more of the following: Inbound Operations, Warehouse Operations, Outbound Operations, Transportation Operations and/or Office Operations (e.g., Transportation Coordinators, Customer Service Associates, General Office Associates). In addition, the qualified candidate should be capable of:Assisting GM or AGM with evaluating the effectiveness of and recommending alternatives for work methods, procedures, controls and staffing to achieve accurate and timely movement and processing of product. Ensuring a culture of safety throughout the organization by following Home Depot safety policies and procedures - monitor DC safety, physical security and operational metrics on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.Coaching, training, and developing associates through both informal (e.g. on-floor coaching) and formal (e.g. written evaluation) job performance based feedback. Motivating associates and maintaining a union-free work place that demonstrates care and concern for all associates.
Preferred Qualifications::Bachelor's Degree with a concentration in Operations Management, Business or Supply Chain.3 years of distribution center management experience.Previous change management experience (driving, influencing and inspiring change through communication at all impacted levels).Must be open to relocation. Based on the nature of Retail Distribution, flexibility to relocate will translate into increased opportunities for advancement.Ability to work a flexible schedule and to be on-call at various times. Must be able to work weekends and holidays.Proficiency in Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel software applications.At A Minimum:Must be eighteen years of ageMust pass the Drug TestMust pass the Background CheckMust pass pre-employment tests if applicableThe knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a high school diplomas and/or GEDAt least 3 years relevant work experienceMust have the physical capabilities to work in a warehouseReap the Rewards:Competitive Salaries including Industry-Leading BonusesHealth and Wellness Services: Comprehensive Medical, Prescription Drug, Vision and Dental Benefits401(k) Retirement Plan & Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)Same-Sex Domestic Partner BenefitsTuition ReimbursementAssociate Discount ProgramsDon't miss your opportunity to help take The Home Depot one step closer to our goal—being the #1 customer service retailer in the world. Because when we're successful, so are you. This is more than an evolution, this is a revolution! Expect to spend about 15 minutes completing this process and registering your interest in future openings. We will inform you when suitable positions come available - and to be considered, you'll need to apply for the posted vacancy. Thank you for your interest in The Home Depot.>>>>>>>>>>> IT ALL STARTS HERE <<<<<<<<<<<The Home Depot is an Equal Opportunity/AA Employer.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.
Our free job seeker tools include alerts for new jobs, saving your favorites, optimized job matching, and more! Just enter your email below.
Share this job:


text:
FRIDAY, Jan. 20 (HealthDay News) -- The first test to help determine the risk of a rare brain infection among users of the drug Tysabri has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Latest MedicineNet News
Tysabri (natalizumab) is commonly prescribed to treat multiple sclerosis or Crohn's disease. A relatively small number of users have developed a rare brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). The newly approved Stratify JCV Antibody ELISA test, combined with other clinical data, can help doctors evaluate the risk of developing PML among people who take Tysabri to treat MS or Crohn's, the FDA said in a news release.
There is "no treatment, prevention or cure for PML, and no certain way to predict who will develop it," the agency stressed. But it said risk factors for PML include the presence of antibodies for the John Cunningham virus, a normally harmless germ except among people with weakened or medically suppressed immune systems.
Other risk factors for developing PML, the FDA said, include taking Tysabri for at least two years, or taking other drugs that suppress the immune system.
The risk for developing PML, believed to be about 11 in 1,000, is greatest among people with all three risk factors, the agency said.
The newly approved test should not be used on its own to measure a person's risk of developing PML, nor should it be used to diagnose the rare infection, the FDA said.
The new test is manufactured by Focus Diagnostics, based in Cypress, Calif. Tysabri is co-marketed by Biogen Idec and Elan Corp.
-- Scott Roberts
Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved.


text:
Obstetric phantom, Italy, 1701-1800
Manipulating the cloth 'baby' in the womb of this almost life-size model of the female torso shows how birth takes place. It also shows how abnormal positions of the child affect the process. The wood and leather model was used to teach medical students, and possibly midwives, about childbirth. Using instruments to intervene in delivering a live child was still quite rare in the 1700s. Caesarean sections were rarely attempted. The obstetric phantom came from the Hospital del Ceppo in Pistoia, near Florence, Italy. This is one of the earliest hospitals in Europe, founded in 1277.
Object number:
Related Themes and Topics
Related Objects
There are 631 related objects. View all related objects
Glossary: obstetrics
A branch of medicine dealing with the care of women. This care occurs during pregnancy, childbirth, and the period of recovery from childbirth.
Glossary: obstetrical phantom
A life size model of a female pelvic region used to train medical students in child delivery.
Glossary: Caesarian section
A caesarean section is a common surgical procedure. Incisions are made through a pregnant woman's abdomen and uterus to deliver her baby.


text:
The weekend brought great wind to the Costa Brava, with a strong afternoon thermal that allowed the top juniors in the world to land some amazing tricks. The single elimination was almost complete with all the finals being set apart from the girls 14-16 that had to be stop in the semifinals due to light winds. Font and Cloetens landed some great front blind mobes and KGB\'s, while Galliart rode extremely powered. Only a few heats remain for Sunday to crown our PKRA/IKA Kiteboarding Freestyle World Champions.
The heats started with the 15-16 boys, that is also the toughest and biggest fleet. All eight heats in the second round were up for grabs. The first upset of the day was by Zurik who defeated Oliver Bridge, who is one of the best known freestylers. They both had many great tricks but Zuriks execution of the tricks was very clean and got him the win. Up next Tarin and Fyffer hit the water and Fyffer was on from the start and easily advanced to the quarter finals. Gainza and Issel had a good battle but Issel got enough good tricks in to advance. The next two heats Font and Delmas put on a show with some nice double back roll mobes and huge 313's. Novotny had a close heat but his switch tricks put him ahead of Lupion. Hurst and Vergez had the next heat; Vergez could not find his rhythm and was eliminated. The final heat of the round Cloetens landed some really powered and technical moves to advance.
The wind had really filled in and was blowing around 18 knots, the girls were on their 8 meters and going for it. The first heat featured Klabbers, Bowcut and Crathorn. Klabbers had some nicely executed tricks and Bowcutt was a little more technical so that both girls advanced. Crathorn was a close third but unfortunately was eliminated from the singles. The next heat had four girls: Gallairt, Peiro, Menardo and Schipper. Galliart was charging hard and set herself apart from the other girsl with her powered and advanced to the semifinals. Menardo edged out the other two girls with her kiteloops and stylish riding.
The quarter finals of the boys were intense from the start. Zurik and Fyffer were charging hard, Zurik's clean execution of the tricks kept him ahead and advanced to the semis. Font and Issel had a very close heat and at the end of the heat the judges missed a trick by Issel and decided to rerun the heat having missed a critical trick that could change the results. Delmas and Novotny hit the water next, Novotny had many good tricks but Delmas land many tricks extremely well executed with a lot of power. The Font and Issel heat was rerun and this time Font advanced convinsingly into the semis. The last heat of the quarters was run with Cloetens dominating again in the easing thermal winds of the afternoon.
The semifinals went out and when the wind was getting lighter but the Head Judge and Race director decided that the wind conditions were suitable. In the first heat Zurik was a little light on his 11 and made a few mistakes that Font capitalized on and qualified for the final with his full repertoire of tricks. Cloetens and Delmas were in the second semifinal, Cloetens kept landing tricks while Delmas never found his rhythm in the light winds. He changed to a 12m but Cloetens had already landed enough tricks to qualify for the final. The first semifinal of the girls was canceled due to light winds.
The start fo the weekend had some of the best wind of the week along with some of the biggest moves we have seen. Tomorrow we will wrap up the first PKRA/IKA Kiteboarding Freestyle World Championships and crown some winners. So far all the youngsters have gone above the expectations of the PKRA crew that are blown away by how many young riders are ripping. Make sure you follow us on Twitter and Facebook tomorrow for the latest results of the Junior world championships.
Read original article: PKRA News:Finals are set for PKRA/IKA Junior Worlds


text:
There is no perfect camera head, but at times you can't do without one. I use both a gimbal (movement around a single access) and a ball head, sometimes one is better than the other. At the end of the day, I find that for big game in rugged, uneven country, (the kind I'm most likely to be in) a good ball-head is best. I use the large Really Right Stuff head (RRS). About a year ago I switched over to RRS legs (from gitzo) and ball-heads because they are fine, precision, hand made American tools. They cost a bit more but they are worth the extra expense, and I like to support U.S. camera gear makers when I can find them.
When shooting big game or other wildlife with a 500 mm f4 or smaller, I go with a ball-head mainly because I can move faster and get set up quicker. Trust me, with the right technique, you'll bring home more keepers shooting a good ball-head than a gimbal - I'd challenge you to prove me wrong . . . It takes at least twice as long to set up a gimble than it does to plop down a set of legs and ball-head and start shooting. With a gimbal setup, to be most effective, you need a leveling base, and then you have to level the unit before you can effectively shoot with it, otherwise, if you're slightly off level with the head and legs, it makes it tough to get a straight, square horizon. If your legs and head are not level, you'll get a lot of images that are NOT square, resulting in more post processing work (unlevel or angled shots are one thing I can pick out from a mile away and usually cause me to reject a photo, not to mention they scream amateur and sloppy)! I would rather get it square with my eye than I would with a computer.
I know there are a ton of guys that would argue with me. Most use a gimbal for wildlife, I use it only when it's the right tool for the job. That means, for me, a gimbal is the right tool for shooting waterfowl and birds. I use the gimbal style head when I have time to set up and get the rig level, I know I'll be stationary for a long time, or I know I'll be doing a lot of panning.
I use a Kirk King Cobra gimbal, it's lighter, smaller, packs easier, and in my view, allows for a more true movement up and down. The other option, and the one most often used by professional photographers is the Wimberly Head. The Wimberly is a fantastic tool, but requires that you push the lens forward for up and pull back for down, and you must have it level! The King Cobra allows for a more natural movement, up and down.
Shooting with a ball-head most of time, puts me in the minority. I don't know why since a ball-head is faster and more accurate in many situations. I see very few people using the ball-head setup . . . Most gravitate to Wimberly (some guys even shoot the 200 mm lens or smaller from a Wimberly mount - I don't know why). So, if you're shooting a 600 mm or larger lens, or birds in flight, and have the time to set up properly, a gimbal is superior to a ball-head, but for 90% of the time, when I need a tripod and head, I go with the ball-head.
Add your thoughts are a question and I'll be sure to provide my feedback!


text:
Только английская версия
The Original Rucksack is designed for everyday use. It is designed to optimize volume, durability and functionality. Numerous pockets, straps, and padding have been incorporated into the backpack to improve ease and comfort of the whole flying experience.
The size is large enough to easily fit a standard wing and standard harness.
- Plush and breathable back cushion
- Detachable waist belt for easy travel and versatility
- High quality YKK zippers
- U-zip system for loading those last elements into the top of the bag
- Robust Cordura fabric
- Rubber lifting grip
- Plenty of pockets for accessories and valuables
- Internal compression band
- Built-in field of view for the name and address of the owner
Volume : S =110 Liters / M = 130 Liters / L = 180 Liters / XL = 200 Liters
Weight : S = 1160grams / M = 1180grams / L = 1220grams / XL = 1400grams


text:
Member Testimonials
Has the chamber helped you grow?
We want to hear about it! Add your testimonial below or call (609) 345-4524
Charles Wimberg, Atlantic City Electric
I just wanted to drop you a note to say I attended another excellent event organized by the chamber. I truly feel that we get better each time we put an event together. Victor and Joe your leadership has continued to move the needle everyday. We are better today than yesterday, and I am confident we will be better tomorrow than we are today.
They say a rolling stone gathers no moss, I say a forward moving Chamber with never go away … I am proud to be part of this organization.
Renay Troiano, Shore Crucial Care
Upon joining the Chamber I met with key members of the staff to educate them on what our company has to offer as well as be educated on how the chamber can help us grow our business.
Every event has been a success for me in landing a presentation, a tour of our facility or simply telling someone what Shore Crucial Care has to offer the community.
The return on our investment is immeasurable!
Connect With Us
12 South Virginia Avenue
Atlantic City, NJ 08401
(609) 345-4524


text:
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
TV time again
Posted by ben c at 5:17 PM
1 comment:
Links to this post
Monday, December 19, 2011
nothing like a cuppa...
...when fighting alien hordes.
something (non-dare) that i'm working on. i'd probably be done, but mice tried to burn my house down this weekend.
no, that is not a metaphor.
Posted by ben c at 2:32 PM
2 comments:
Links to this post
the 5th dare day of xmas!
the dare detectives should be in bookstores today!!!
buy it now! or later. now is better!!!
Posted by ben c at 2:45 AM
1 comment:
Links to this post
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
the 4th dare day of xmas
Posted by ben c at 11:21 PM
8 comments:
Links to this post
Thursday, December 8, 2011
dare days of xmas 3
an old street, away from the tourist traps,
Posted by ben c at 11:44 PM
3 comments:
Links to this post
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
the 2nd dare day of xmas
here's day 2!
in a later case, the DD go undercover to investigate a psychedelic band dabbling in mind control. as you can see, sarah learned everything she knows about punk from my little pony.
Posted by ben c at 8:27 PM
1 comment:
Links to this post
pearl harbor
Posted by ben c at 12:38 PM
1 comment:
Links to this post
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
DARE DETECTIVES #1 is about to hit stores!
ah... winter. that magical time of the year, when a young man's fancy turns to panda gangsters and haunted casinos...
and to cater to the underserved panda-gangsters-and-haunted-casinos demographic, archaia has released the dare detectives mostly first case, "the snowpea plot".
the 208-page trove of wonders will be available at bookstores on the 19th, just in time to buy your special someone 2 copies for christmas! why 2 copies? because that's twice as much money for me, and that 100ft tall robot mme. bleu isn't going to build itself!
it was going to be 102 feet, but that would have been ridiculous
so to celebrate, i'm going to post dare art each day for the 12 dare days of christmas. each will be high-res, so feel free to download them, print them out, make them into screensavers, sneak them into your portfolio, etc.
ps - if you hate bookstores, "the snowpea plot" will also be on sale at comics store on the 28th. of course, by then the books will all be sold out, and people will be using page 183* as a new and indestructible national currency, so don't miss out!
ben c
ps -- aaah... fergit it, i can't wait that long! it'll just have to be 18 dare days of christmas. or 11. whatever, i draw ninjas specifically so that i don't have to math stuff!
*ha ha, i'm just kidding. it's going to be page 185.
Posted by ben c at 1:45 PM
10 comments:
Links to this post
Thursday, December 1, 2011
feel like crap and everyone in my family
Posted by ben c at 4:09 PM
3 comments:
Links to this post
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)


text:
The UIDAI publishes figures on how many characters are getting added to its database daily, and one of my less technologically challenged friends has worked out how to review those figures (on Twitter: @uidstatus). It makes for interesting reading, watching how many times that 'mission-critical' database link goes down, how days go by when it adds nobody (not counting fake IDs, about which the agency hasn't a clue, apparently, putting it on par with all the other clueless adnumbering exercises that have plagued this country for years), and even the days the actual count goes down, as though people are vanishing like smoke.
Numbers with Meaning
Filed under Communication, Community, Democracy, development, governance, Privacy, Security, Self-help, UID
Tagged as Aadhaar, Mobiles, PII, Privacy, Security, Survey, Twitter, UID
Belling the Cat
A random pick of three news items, each of which discusses the public availability of free wireless connectivity in mass transit systems. In London and New York, the service provider is a third-party private, for-profit, agency, while it is not mentioned in the article on northern Ireland, but seems to be the transit company itself.
Now, as many people would know, wifi is not currently the most protected and secure wireless connectivity option possible, but nearly all modern portable devices can connect to it 'out of the box'. Continue reading →
Filed under Accessibility, Communication, Community, connectivity, Democracy, development, Radio, Self-help, Wi-Fi
Tagged as Mass Transit, Productivity, WiFi
Don't Worry – Be Hapee
The other day, on a list to which I subscribe, I found this light-hearted observation about a very serious subject – hape.
Hape is not, as the Quick Reader may imagine, the last of the items (the others, like hape, were also evil) to emerge from Pandora's box, in the Greek myth.
All round the world, business content and business processes are being digitised and made available to stakeholders, often in a highly restricted manner, ie on some kind of subscription basis. Subscribers do so, often paying money, in the faith that they get, in return, some sort of exclusive or protected access.
Quite often, in order to do so, they also voluntarily make available some kind of personal information (it varies, of course, depending on the need). Continue reading →
Filed under Communication, Community, connectivity, Democracy, development, Education, governance, Holistic, Internet, Privacy, Security, Smart Cash, social processes, technology, UID
Tagged as Aadhaar, Cracking, DDOS, Phish, Spam, UID, UIDAI, Virus
Privacy is a public concern
March began interestingly for me this year, with two big meetings back-to-back, in Panglao, a tiny island in the Philippines. The first was with Privacy International, the London-based public service organisation. It has worked tirelessly for over two decades to keep public awareness of personal privacy rights.
Surprisingly, for most people who hardly ever need to think twice about such an obvious attribute of free people, this right is fast vanishing around the world, and most dismayingly, in democratic countries. Continue reading →
Filed under Accessibility, Blogroll, broadband, Broadcast, Communication, Community, connectivity, Democracy, development, Education, energy, governance, Holistic, Internet, Media, Privacy, Security, social processes, technology, UID
Rules and Misrules
At the very tag-end of 2008, an extraordinary event took place. India's Parliament met for a stormy Winter Session, during which little of note was discussed, and little value was added to the fabric of society. And then, as the Session was drawing to a close, a number of Bills were brought up for voting, and within a few minutes, with little or no words exchanged, they were passed in toto.
The utter disregard of the country and its people implicit in this kind of facile performance is stunning and salutary, especially in light of the public agitation that has spread across northern Africa and parts of Asia, with citizens of many countries taking to the streets to express their disgust at the way that they have been taken for granted, by governments and leaders that claim to have their best interests at heart. Some of the perpetrators of such callousness now find themselves scrabbling to escape, together with untold amounts of wealth stolen from their hapless countries.
That the Indian public has so far been a little more forgiving of such small degradations is a current feature, not a guarantee.
Today, February 28, 2011, I am trying to be equally forgiving. Continue reading →
Filed under Accessibility, broadband, Communication, Community, connectivity, Democracy, development, Education, governance, Internet, Media, Privacy, Security, social processes, technology, UID
Tagged as Cybercafes, Cyberlaw, India, IT, Personally Identifiable Information, Privacy, Rules, Security
Studying the Foundation
The UIDAI project is arguably one of the biggest initiatives, in both scope and cost, undertaken in independent India, without any of the expected norms of prudence (oversight) and democratic consensus. Variously estimated to cost anywhere between Rs 40,000 and Rs 150,000 cr (INR), which is roughly equivalent to about USD 1 bn to USD 15bn, it has been kicked off with a Cabinet-sanctioned budget of Rs 1,900 cr (ie about USD 50mn) this fiscal (Apr10-Mar11). The budget is believed to be somewhat of a smokescreen, as it does not appear to include moneys taken from other agencies. However, the lack of clarity about money is not the only issue, as the project has been cleverly positioned within the Planning Commission, an arm's-length agency charged with perspective planning for the country, which is independent of the usual line of command. As a result, the project has neither Parliamentary sanction nor even a (temporary) Ordinance.
The UID project is in many ways a global watershed, expecting to assign a unique number to every resident of the country, well over 1.2 bn people, a staggering concept, the scale of which has itself been used to justify taking on the project (by equating the immensity of the challenge to its worth). Considering my association with Privacy International, my concern is well-founded on grounds of potential destruction of personal privacy, but this is a very difficult viewpoint to defend in India, which does not have a specific privacy law, and for which the existing Constitutional protections (alluded to, not spelt out) have not always been strongly defended by Indian courts.
An international project, studying Privacy in Asia, seeks to ameliorate this situation, by getting to grips with comprehending Indian attitudes (ie, within the ambit of Asian attitudes). However, given that the UID project is gathering steam and proceeding willy-nilly, it is imperative to make every effort to bring it to a halt, at least a temporary halt, until sufficient information is available. Continue reading →
Filed under Accessibility, Communication, Community, connectivity, Democracy, development, governance, Privacy, Security, social processes, technology, UID
Tagged as coercion, financial inclusion, Human Rights, India, poverty, Privacy, subsidies, UIDAI, UIN
At the Foundation – talking with people
It was a dark and stormy night, and ….
No wait, that's not quite right. It was 2 o'clock in the afternoon, actually.
However, it was certainly dark and stormy, Mumbai's wettest day this monsoon, with 16 measured cm of rain, most of which seemed to be pelting down my collar as I arrived at the Moneylife Foundation's Shivaji Park offices on 17th August 2010.
I went there to interact with people who wanted to learn more about Aadhaar, India's multi-billion dollar IT project, that promises to assign unique identity numbers for each resident of India. Keen readers of this blog will have doubtless noted that it was the subject of the previous blogpost too.
Filed under Democracy, development, governance, Privacy, social processes, technology


text:
Through our publications program, NCTE offers several high-quality, peer-reviewed journals relevant to the demands faced by today's educators. While many educators enjoy them as subscriptions, we are seeing a growing number of schools use selected themed issues as an affordable professional learning resource.
Browse frequently requested issues
Ordering more than 25? Contact our Customer Service Department today to discuss discount options at 877-369-6283.
Not seeing a topic you are interested in? Email us at firstname.lastname@example.com
Language Arts is a professional journal for elementary and middle school teachers and teacher educators. It provides a forum for discussions on all aspects of language arts learning and teaching, primarily as they relate to children in pre-kindergarten through the eighth grade. Issues discuss both theory and classroom practice, highlight current research, and review children's and young adolescent literature, as well as classroom and professional materials of interest to language arts educators.
Browse All Print Issues
Sample of Upcoming Issues
Talking Points is published by the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of NCTE. Talking Points helps promote literacy research and the use of whole language instruction in classrooms. It provides a forum for parents, classroom teachers, and researchers to reflect about literacy and learning.
Voices from the Middle offers articles on research and best practices in middle level reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the visual and language arts. Our mission is to be the cornerstone for the ongoing professional development of language arts educators.
English Journal is NCTE's award-winning journal of ideas for English language arts teachers in junior and senior high schools and middle schools. It presents information on the teaching of writing and reading, literature, and language, and includes information on how teachers are putting the latest technologies to work in their classrooms.
English Leadership Quarterly is a publication of the Conference on English Leadership, and helps department chairs, K-12 supervisors, and other leaders in their role of improving the quality of English instruction. ELQ offers short articles on a variety of issues important to decision makers in the English language arts.
Copyright © 1998-2019
National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved in all media.
1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096 Phone: 217-328-3870 or 877-369-6283
Looking for information? Browse our FAQs,
tour our sitemap
and store sitemap,
or contact NCTE
Read our Privacy Policy
Statement and Links Policy.
Use of this site signifies your agreement to the Terms of Use
Visit us on:
This document was printed from http://www.ncte.org/journals/professional-learning.
NCTE - The National Council of Teachers Of English
A Professional Association of Educators in English Studies, Literacy, and Language Arts


text:
More than fifty years after her death, Edith Wharton is having a lively time of it. A dozen of her novels and short-story collections sell briskly in paperback. Even if she had never written a word of fiction, she would be remembered as a shaper of American taste, with such enduring texts as "Italian Villas and Their Gardens" and (with Ogden Codman, Jr.) "The Decoration of Houses." The Mount, the mansion that she built to put her theories on architecture, décor, and landscaping to the test, is being restored to an approximation of its elegant condition during her inhabitancy (1902-1911) and ornaments the Berkshires as a tourist attraction and the home of a Shakespeare company. With the years, the weaker of Wharton's imaginative works have sunk deeper into the shadows, and the stronger have climbed to a refulgent height. R. W. B. Lewis, in his very fine 1975 biography of Wharton, described the uncertainty of "enlightened critical opinion" as to "whether 'The House of Mirth' could be adjudged a masterpiece or whether it fell just short of that final accolade"; introducing the Signet paperback version, in 1984, he was pleased to announce that "in some inexplicable way, 'The House of Mirth' has become a masterpiece." Concerning "Ethan Frome" and "The Age of Innocence," there has never been much doubt; their perfection and power were immediately apparent. The latter won the Pulitzer Prize, and the former has become compulsory reading for myriad American schoolchildren. If there is a more highly regarded female American author of the twentieth century, her name doesn't come readily to mind.
Nurtured and matured in a social milieu almost uniformly unsympathetic to the notion of a literary vocation, and wherein a proper woman's full and adequate duties consisted of homemaking and an incessant socializing, Wharton took up writing rather late and distractedly. After the age of forty, however, she applied herself to the craft with an almost vengeful energy and consistency of purpose, aristocratically holding herself to the exacting standards of what she called "that dispassionate and ironic critic who dwells within the breast." Enthralled by books and storytelling since childhood, and a cheerful and conscientious student to the few literary tutors that chance threw her way, she became a thorough professional—perhaps too professional, in her last decades. Feminists can rejoice in her female martyrs and feckless males, but readers of any gender must admire "her fearless way of looking life in the eyes"—to use her own words about the French novelist Hortense Allart. The plight of women is her dominant topic, but she portrays the ruthless wars between women quite unsentimentally. Her moral poise and cosmic pessimism did not permit her to blame any one sex for life's tragic side. Her own female trials—undereducation (save in "modern languages and good manners," her memoir, "A Backward Glance," allows), a stifling marriage, neurasthenic illness and breakdown—came early, and were followed by a long, gathering triumph of best-selling fame and expatriate pomp. Her vigorous example is eminently useful, and many are the uses to which her work has been lately put. In the last year, two movies based upon her books have been released—"Ethan Frome" and "The Age of Innocence"—and films of "The Custom of the Country" and "The Buccaneers" are in the works. "The Buccaneers," her last, unfinished novel, which was first published in 1938, the year after her death, has just been reissued in a version "completed" by Marion Mainwaring (Viking; $22).
The scrupulous "Note" supplied to the 1938 original edition of "The Buccaneers," by Wharton's longtime friend Gaillard Lapsley, resonates with the decorums of a less meretricious era of publishing:
**{: .break one} ** The remarkable novel here submitted to the public is neither complete nor finished in all its parts. There are some parts so characteristically achieved that I am confident Mrs. Wharton would never have retouched them. Others again are evidently either provisional or at most just blocked in; and this is as you would expect, for the novel had been growing in her mind for a number of years before she ever wrote a word of it. **
The decision to publish at all, Lapsley goes on to say, was taken only after he and "three of her friends, to whom she had also been in the habit of showing her work while it was in progress," had unanimously agreed:
**{: .break one} ** It was not only that the incomplete text contained some work too good to be kept back, so good indeed that she would herself probably have been satisfied with it, but because the unfinished passages have their interest and value too. Indeed the very disparity of the several parts of the text affords an insight into the way in which she worked. **
And for ten pages more he discusses, with a fastidious critical dispassion, the virtues and faults of "The Buccaneers" as he sees them. In contrast, Ms. Mainwaring's afterword is less than a hundred and fifty words long; it acknowledges, besides some few additions to Lapsley's emendations, only that "the passages I have interpolated in the original text serve to reconcile discrepancies in the narrative or prepare for later developments." Any caring reader would have welcomed a franker, fuller discussion from Ms. Mainwaring of the difficulties she faced, and the rationale of her solutions. Instead, we have a text that in no typographical way discriminates between her words and Wharton's, and that asks us to accept this bastardization as a single smooth reading unit, wrapped in a jacket by John Singer Sargent and a puff by Leon Edel. In truth, the last quarter of the novel is Ms. Mainwaring's, based upon a synopsis that Wharton had drawn up early in its composition, and which the honest 1938 edition appends to the last of the author's own written words.
"The Buccaneers" as it was left is a pretty mess—an ambitious canvas spottily covered with pastel sketches. It wasn't just the infirmities of age that prevented Edith Wharton from completing it but its own internal contradictions and proliferating loose ends. A novel should grow its complications from a stout central stem, and the stem here was manifold from the start. As Wharton's synopsis states:
**{: .break one} ** This novel deals with the adventures of three American families with beautiful daughters who attempt the London social adventure in the 'seventies—the first time the social invasion had ever been tried in England on such a scale. The three mothers—Mrs. St. George, Mrs. Elmsworth, and Mrs. Closson—have all made an attempt to launch their daughters in New York, where their husbands are in business, but have no social standing (the families, all of very ordinary origin, being from the south-west, or from the northern part of the state of New York). . . . So, though admired at Saratoga, Long Branch and the White Sulphur Springs, they fail at Newport and in New York, and the young men flirt with them but do not offer marriage. **
Shades of Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the Duke of Marlborough; of Consuelo Yznaga, who became the Duchess of Manchester; and of Jennie and Leonie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill and the Irish baronet Sir John Leslie, respectively, when Wharton was a girl. The world of New York society, which had been Wharton's element and of which she had written scornfully, in "The House of Mirth" (1905) and "The Custom of the Country" (1913), and then ruefully, in "The Age of Innocence" (1920) and "The Mother's Recompense" (1925), is here, following upon "A Backward Glance" (1934), approached nostalgically, in a flurry of period detail and a misty mood of forgiveness. The horrors of the upper-class marriage mart, so mordantly portrayed in her earlier novels, are played for gentle comedy. We open in Saratoga, at the height of the racing season:
**{: .break one} ** Mrs. St. George . . . sat on the wide hotel verandah, a jug of iced lemonade at her elbow and a palmetto fan in one small hand, and looked out between the immensely tall white columns of the portico, which so often reminded cultured travellers of the Parthenon at Athens (Greece). On Sunday afternoons this verandah was crowded with gentlemen in tall hats and frock-coats, enjoying cool drinks and Havana cigars, and surveying the long country street planted with spindling elms; but today the gentlemen were racing, and the rows of chairs were occupied by ladies and young girls listlessly waiting their return, in a drowsy atmosphere of swayed fans and iced refreshments. **
With a Whartonian precision as to fashion and décor, Mrs. St. George reflects fondly back to the days when dresses were not outrageously low-cut in the newest Parisian style: "What, for instance, could be prettier, or more suitable for a lady, than a black alpaca skirt looped up like a window-drapery above a scarlet serge underskirt, the whole surmounted by a wide-sleeved black poplin jacket with ruffled muslin undersleeves, and a flat 'pork-pie' hat like the one the Empress Eugénie was represented as wearing on the beach at Biarritz?" But an entire novel cannot spend itself on a veranda in preoccupation with such momentous questions; Mrs. St. George, while "her thoughts moved during the endless sweltering afternoon hours, like torpid fish turning about between the weary walls of a too-small aquarium," is also running mental inventories of the charms and marital prospects of her two daughters, eighteen-year-old Virginia and sixteen-year-old Annabel, or Nan, compared with those of the two Elmsworth girls, Elizabeth and Mabel (Lizzy and Mab), and the lone Closson daughter, Conchita.
These five marriageable girls present problems to the author, too: how to make them easily distinguishable to the reader, and how to trace memorably their fivefold fortunes. Had Wharton lived and found strength to bring "The Buccaneers" to a consummate fullness and finish, she might have managed to do so, though at the length of a Victorian three-decker. As it is, Mab drops almost entirely out of sight, Lizzy is only very fitfully vivid, and Nan's gradual emergence as the heroine turns her lovely older sister into a brittle blond stick. In solving the initial problem of draftsmanship, Wharton drew upon the "dusky" tinge introduced into the Closson ménage by Mrs. Closson, a remarried Brazilian widow—or, the vicious rumor is, divorcée—whose two children, Teddy and Conchita, "bear a queer exotic name like Santos-Dios." As if a touch of the Brazilian brush weren't distinguishing enough, Wharton gives olive-skinned Conchita tallness and red hair. Virginia, "pure and luminous as an apple blossom," is a blonde, so that leaves brunetteness to the third young lady who is freshly "out," Lizzy. The two junior girls, not quite nubile, are relatively dim, though Mab is assigned a certain boniness and a laugh that "showed too many teeth" and Nan a volatile, inquisitive intensity that suggests a budding author. One feels that Wharton has exhausted her first inspiration when she triumphantly rallies her five creations for a group display in the Saratoga dining room, on an evening when two young men—a rare and precious commodity, usually vended in Newport—have arrived to gladden their prospects:
**{: .break one} ** Ah, but there they were, the girls! . . . The fancy had taken them to come in late, and to arrive all together, and now, arm in arm, a blushing bevy, they swayed across the threshold of the dining-room like a branch hung with blossoms, drawing the dull middle-aged eyes of the other guests from lobster salad and fried chicken. . . . Seeing them through the eyes of the new young men, Mrs. St. George felt their collective grace with a vividness almost exempt from envy. To her, as to those two foreigners, they embodied "the American girl," the world's highest achievement; and she was as ready to enjoy Lizzy Elmsworth's brilliant darkness, and that dry sparkle of Mab's, as much as her own Virginia's roses and Nan's alternating frowns and dimples. She was even able to recognize that the Closson girl's incongruous hair gilded the whole group like a sunburst. **
This vision forms the novel's bright heart: "the American girl," beloved of Howells and James, the chimerical creation of the new continent, looming at the threshold of the American century with her captivating innocence and perilous freedom. Here she is bathed in a glowing backward glance from the gritty decade of the Depression, by an elderly Parisienne who herself was once an American girl. But a vision does not a novel make, and as Wharton executed the plot its multiplying ramifications diffuse the action to the consistency of froth.
Laura Testvalley, Nan's monitory but winning governess, whose descriptive adjectives "small" and "brown" suggest a direct descent from Jane Eyre, and whose odd name the author—she tells us in "A Backward Glance"—found herself helpless to change, arrives in Saratoga, and in next to no time, it seems, Conchita is married to Lord Richard Marable, a younger son of the Marquess of Brightlingsea. Soon the other girls are in England to try their luck at landing noble husbands. The expedition is comically successful. Like bluefish when they are running, the lords scarcely need bait to take the hook: Lord Seadown, Lord Richard's staider older brother, snaps up Virginia St. George, after nibbling at Lizzy Elmsworth, and Nan, small fry though she is, attracts the appetites of both Guy Thwarte, son of the baronet Sir Helmsley Thwarte and heir to the lovely old manor called Honourslove, and the Duke of Tintagel, who is so enchanted to find "a girl who doesn't know what a duke is" that he and Nan marry before she realizes she doesn't know what a duchess is, either. It turns out that she doesn't like being one. The plotter of "The Buccaneers," wearying at last of matchmaking (the Elmsworth girls have had to settle for non-titled rich men: dark-browed Lizzy for a rising Conservative M.P., Hector Robinson, and many-toothed Mab, back in America, for a widower from Magnesia, Illinois, named Caleb Whittaker), turns to freeing Nan from her unhappy marriage to a duke so that she can enter a happy one with a future baronet. At this point, Edith Wharton's failing hand dropped the pen, and Marion Mainwaring, half a century later, has rushed to the rescue.
Before considering Ms. Mainwaring's job of completion, we should admit that the original author was not finding the going easy. Sensing that her saga lacked something, she kept adding on. The guardian figure of Miss Testvalley is doubled, in London, by the advisory spinster Jacky March, an American once jilted by the empty-headed Marquess of Brightlingsea. In a tiny Mayfair house expressive of her diminished expectations, she ekes out her life in the margins of fashionable London, and acts as "the oracle of transatlantic pilgrims in quest of a social opening." Wharton, having constructed and furnished, with her incomparable flair for interior decoration, a number of grand English homes (Honourslove, the Cotswold seat of the Thwartes; Longlands, the ducal country residence; Folyat House, the duke's London abode), late in her working of "The Buccaneers" sets up yet another, Champions, "the Glenloe place in Gloucestershire," where Nan, as a refugee duchess, takes shelter with the hearty, peripatetic Lady Glenloe and her two daughters, Corisande and Kitty. These two young ladies bring the nubility problem around again; Sir Helmsley intends his darkly handsome son, back from three years creating a family fortune in Brazil (that country again!), to marry one of them—he doesn't care which.
The three American fathers, left in their native dust by the emergence of a number of more colorful, titled English fathers, have nothing to do but silently supply money to feed their daughters' romantic buccaneering. Although Wharton took care to establish all three men as shady operators, inscrutably riding the roller coaster of Wall Street manipulation, she forgot to have any of them go bankrupt, and thus denied the reader a classic Whartonian moment, when the untrustworthiness of men stands naked in the marketplace. What a splendid scene it is, in "The House of Mirth," when Lily Bart's careworn father, having laughed at his daughter's reasonable wish to sweeten the luncheon table with twelve dollars' worth of lilies of the valley each day, is asked by his free-spending wife if he is ill.
**{: .break one} ** "Ill?—No, I'm ruined," he said. Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet. "Ruined—?" she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she turned a calm face to Lily. "Shut the pantry door," she said. Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between them, and his head bowed on his hands. Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair unnaturally yellow. **
Indeed, the disgraced Mr. Bart does shortly die, and his wife follows not long after. The lack of a mother, and the social guidance and protection a mother provides, becomes Lily's tragic flaw, whereas in "The Buccaneers" the presence of mothers is mostly a nuisance—the Americans are ineffectual society sloths and the British are aristocratic harridans.
Comedy is perhaps a natural mode for aged authors. The momentousness of being alive—the majestic awfulness—is felt most keenly by the young; human existence comes to seem, as death nears and perspective lengthens, gossamer-light, "such stuff/As dreams are made on." "The Buccaneers" can hardly keep a straight face as it pushes its dolls back and forth in the elaborate patterns of attraction and courtship. The characterizations we tend to remember are the comic ones: the poor young Duke of Tintagel, with his timid scruples, his "naturally inexpressive face," and his wistful penchant for winding clocks; the dashing old wastrel and artist manqué Sir Helmsley Thwarte, with his baroque and catty epistolary style; and Colonel St. George, whose obtuse pride it is to cleave to his house on Madison Avenue (once owned by a member of the Tweed ring), even after his wife has discovered "that no one lived in Madison Avenue, that the front hall should have been painted Pompeian red with a stencilled frieze, and not with naked Cupids and humming-birds on a sky-blue ground, and that basement dining-rooms were unknown to the fashionable."
By way of completing the mare's nest that Wharton left behind, Ms. Mainwaring, a native Bostonian who has lived much of her life in London and Paris, inserted a short chapter, numbered IX, that attempts to soften with some transitional information the jolt when Wharton abruptly transposed the action, in Chapter VIII, to England. In Chapters XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, and XXIX, while the plot thickens, or fails to thicken, around Annabel, the waif Duchess of Tintagel, Mainwaring adds a paragraph or two, including, as her confidence as a pseudo-Wharton grows, some piquant dialogue. From Chapter XXX on, everything, with the exception of four pages in Chapter XXXII, is Mainwaring's. It was her principal task to flesh out the latter part of Wharton's synopsis:
**{: .break one} ** Sir Helmsley Thwarte, the widowed father of Guy, a clever, broken-down and bitter old worldling, is captivated by Miss Testvalley, and wants to marry her; but meanwhile the young Duchess of Tintagel has suddenly decided to leave her husband and go off with Guy, and it turns out that Laura Testvalley, moved by the youth and passion of the lovers, and disgusted by the mediocre Duke of Tintagel, has secretly lent a hand in the planning of the elopement, the scandal of which is to ring through England for years. Sir Helmsley Thwarte discovers what is going on, and is so furious at his only son's being involved in such an adventure that, suspecting Miss Testvalley's complicity, he breaks with her, and the great old adventuress, seeing love, deep and abiding love, triumph for the first time in her career, helps Nan to join her lover, who has been ordered to South Africa, and then goes back alone to old age and poverty. **
But Sir Helmsley as we know him is scarcely "broken-down and bitter," nor is Miss Testvalley ever really established as a "great old adventuress," though some passages are devoted to detailing her antecedents as the granddaughter of the Italian revolutionary Gennaro Testavaglia. Our attention rarely rests on Miss Testvalley, but settles by default on Nan and her rather fantastic plight as girl queen of the ducal domains. But Nan has not been adequately groomed to receive the mantle of heroine, in the line of such statuesque heroines as Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, whose moral educations attain an epic import.
Ms. Mainwaring brings what she can to the plot's gaps. She has a fonder eye for English scenery than Wharton, and supplies a number of scenic vignettes:
**{: .break one} ** Guy, on horseback, and Sir Helmsley (whose injury rendered the saddle impossible) in a light and narrow cabriolet, could make the journey from Honourslove cross-country along lanes that tunnelled through overarching hedges, and wide smooth grassy rides, and stubbly old rights-of-way through fields, in half the time it took carriages and wagons obliged to follow the roundabout road that linked a dozen villages. **
Having thoroughly traversed the original text, Mainwaring tidily picks up a number of the objets that Wharton tossed into her scenes, as if to make them yield a vitality the thin characterizations withhold:
**{: .break one} ** The stuffed birds rescued from the fire in the old Champions shared the new glossy-oak library with trophies of post-conflagration Glenloe travels. On the bookshelves, Voyages and Explorations jostled witch-masks, scrimshaw-work, and guislas, and a corner of the Feraghan rug was occupied by an enormous and handsome globe of the world which, unlike its counterpart at Allfriars, had lost some of its varnish as the result of much fingering by intending travellers with itineraries to plot. **
The Elmsworth sisters, unconscionably neglected by Wharton, are called back by Mainwaring; Lizzy becomes quite a dizzy schemer, in a plot suddenly bristling with spiky little developments. A montage of rapid scenes races to wrap up the scattered implications of Wharton's studied tableaux; the original stately andante quickens to Mainwaring's sprightly allegro, and a moony, post-Freudian light begins to illuminate the characters' psyches. We gain sudden access to Nan's dreams, in one of which she is Proserpine, lowering herself into a black hole, "carefully gathering in the folds of her simple Grecian chiton, to return to the Duke." Wide awake, she throws herself on her bed and moans, "I am in love. I never knew. . . . And what am I to do . . . ? I didn't know." Our hero, too, is now awash in a "turmoil of emotions": "Guy felt as if he were wallowing in the trough of the waves: not the mild ripples of the moonlit Thames, but the mountainous breakers of an ocean sea." The physiognomies of our protagonists reflect the romantic sea change. Guy sadly observes "the violet smudges beneath the great dark eyes" with which Nan stares at him "with a white intensity"; away from such lurid glimpses, he cannot stop picturing "her face, dimpling or wet with tears, a rainbow face." His very voice goes under; with his goal of cohabitation in sight, Guy, under his new management, produces an unsuave stutter: "I d-do. . . . But I will never c-c-consort, never have any but the unavoidable business contacts, with anyone, anywhere, where Annabel isn't honored."
We smile at this hasty obeisance to the social pressures and forms so gravely felt in Wharton and Henry James. The antipodean South Africa that Wharton envisioned, in a serenely colonial era, as a refuge for her unmarried lovers is deftly transposed to less racially awkward climes by Guy's avowal to Miss Testvalley: "If Annabel were to be unhappy, or I to be unhappy for her, we wouldn't stay! We'd go to Canada, or Australia—New Zealand—where life is different. I'm a working man. A civil engineer. I care no more than Annabel does about society." The Mainwaring completion partakes of the blithe social anarchy of Iris Murdoch's world, where dreams and amorous fits are free to seek their fulfillment in a comfortably bohemian moneyed class. The female heart, in Wharton's world sternly restrained by the whalebone of Victorian morality, is uncorseted and free in Mainwaring's late-twentieth-century garb. The sacred unmentionable in Wharton and James, the fact of sexual congress, is given a vulgar, matter-of-fact voicing: "Lizzy politicly treated the question as a simple request for information. 'Nan is certainly in love with Guy Thwarte, but I don't think there's anything "going on." ' " Mainwaring places our focus on Annabel's love match—Guy sees girl, Guy gets girl—whereas Wharton evidently intended to focus on Miss Testvalley's renunciation of marriage to Sir Helmsley: "The great old adventuress . . . goes back alone to old age and poverty." Renunciation was Edith Wharton's métier; her readers, more sentimental than she, complained of her refusal to provide her heroines with happy endings. As Marion Mainwaring has it, Miss Testvalley's loss is a mere footnote to Nan's gain, a shadow swallowed in the sunset glow as the young couple heads toward the colonies and sexual happiness forever after. The holiday, the Shakespearean comedy of mating, that Wharton proposed for herself toward the end of her life has been invaded by the general moral holiday of the last decades. A project that verged on the trivial has been completed into thorough triviality.
Our estranging distance from the austere ideological frame in which Wharton's moral dramas occur could be gauged, too, in the worthy motion picture of "Ethan Frome" released earlier this year. The makers of this respectful, visually beautiful adaptation, unable to believe that Ethan and Mattie would attempt joint suicide without even a single evening in the sack together, provided one, by golden lamplight, with whimpering and openmouthed kisses; thus they unwittingly gave to Wharton's comfortless ending the jolly aspect of a man's successfully establishing himself at home with both his wife and his mistress. Of course, it might be argued that on the sexual scale of 1911, when the novel appeared, let alone that of the eighteen-eighties, when its catastrophe is supposed to have occurred, the few embraces and kisses that Ethan and Mattie do share in Wharton's lean text constitute the equivalent of contemporary copulation, as breathily demonstrated on the screen. A delicacy of indication possible on the printed page, in the tiny theatre of the easy chair, becomes untrustworthy in the massy cineplex. Ethan's lameness, a souvenir of the fateful night of failed suicide, is tersely, suggestively described by Wharton's narrator as "checking each step like the jerk of a chain," but in the film the actor Liam Neeson, under John Madden's direction, performs a twisted gyration with each step that rivets the viewer's mind to orthopedic thoughts. Even the film's color, though subdued, provides a warmth and a New Englandy charm that soften Wharton's harsh vision. This wintry tale is a steel etching on a stark white ground (the town, like some stopover in "The Pilgrim's Progress," is called Starkfield), whose bleakness is beyond the nineteen-nineties' ken. We are invited into the final stage of Puritanism, which renounces God Himself. A living hell: that is how Mrs. Hale, speaking for the residents of Starkfield, complacently sums up Ethan Frome's household. "The way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."
The modern filmmakers have introduced a specifically Christian note into this grim Aeschylean tale. In place of Wharton's vaguely industrial narrator-observer, whose slow discovery of the Frome scandal is the novel's structural masterstroke, there now is the young Reverend Mr. Smith, a bumbling innocent fresh from works of mercy in the Boston slums. When Zenobia Frome is last seen in the movie, she is placing a marked Bible in the docile hands of the paralyzed Mattie Silver. Yet Christianity is strikingly absent from the major works of Edith Wharton; her characters, though conventionally churchgoing, never think of turning to God in their moments of crisis. She, like many of the late Victorians and Edwardians, harbored an atheism more determined than ours, because it was more consciously and deliberately acquired, in a culture more pervasively Christian.
Edith Wharton, née Jones, had been given a usual upper-class Episcopal upbringing, which in her adolescence her inquisitive mind tried to explore through wide reading of sermons and other religious literature. The doctrine of the Atonement troubled her, in its bloody illogic, and God, according to Lewis's biography, appeared to be "simply one of the 'dark fatalities' with which mortal existence was burdened." Her best friend in girlhood was Emelyn Washburn, the daughter of the rector of Calvary Church, in Gramercy Park. Egerton Winthrop, one of the few intellectual companions of her young womanhood, introduced her to Darwinism and "the naturalist theory of the implacable power of the environment." She retained a lifelong interest in science; her tastes in art, architecture, and landscape favored the rationalist eighteenth century. Her favorite novelist was Stendhal, author of the epigram "The one thing that excuses God is that he does not exist." In 1902, at the age of forty, she was reading Schopenhauer and remarking in a letter, "How strange it is to rummage in all that old metaphysical lumber." By 1908, as she hesitated above and then plunged into the delicious abyss of her adulterous affair with Morton Fullerton, it was Nietzsche who comforted and strengthened her, in his contempt for Christian morality and his pagan mysticism: in the journal she kept during this period of belated sexual awakening, she wrote that it was "salutary now and then to be made to realise 'Die Unwerthung aller Werthe' ["the reëvaluation of all values"] and really get back to a wholesome basis of naked instinct." In another entry, she muses, "How strange to feel one's self all at once 'Jehnseits von Gut und Böse' "—"Beyond Good and Evil." Succumbing to the adept roué Fullerton (a minister's son, as it happened) "would hurt no one—and it would give me my first last draught of life."
It was in the wake of her Nietzsche-flavored defiance of her marriage vows, and during a period of increasingly erratic behavior by her husband, that she composed the icy backwoods triangle of "Ethan Frome." Of the exalting raptures with Fullerton that her journal and poems record there is little trace except a faint echo between the names Morton and Mattie, and the rosy vividness with which Mattie Silver's physical being is made alluring in Ethan's eyes. (It is droll to conceive, as Lewis's biography does, of the amiable, aging bon vivant Teddy Wharton as the original of pinch-mean, hypochondriacal Zeena Frome, who has the novel's best lines, and in the film receives the best performance, by Joan Allen.) "I have drunk of the wine of life at last," Wharton wrote in her journal, at the age of forty-six. "I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again until the end"; but no mere discovery of hot-blooded love among her own possibilities deflected the author from the relentless design of "Ethan Frome"—its illustration of the crushing imprisonment that nature and society impose upon the individual life. This is naturalism as it came to the late nineteenth century. For all the horrors that the twentieth century has witnessed, such starkness now seems naïve; the materialist premises of science have grown somehow airy, so that physicists speak of finding "the God particle," and the electronic texture of popular culture unweights misery, spliced as it is among the television commercials. The inexorable financial logic of Frome's captivity, spelled out by Wharton with the care of an accountant, melts away in this day of credit cards and billion-dollar budget shortfalls. The dénouement of frozen fates, in the novel so devastating, so majestic in its pain, in the movie becomes merely puzzling; Liam Neeson's broad face in the final closeup looks nothing but puzzled, perhaps by the mysteries of the New England accent that kept eluding his Irish tongue. The movie seems a kind of willful child obstinately clutching its unhappy ending when a happy one lies just around the corner, or just to one side of the big elm at the bottom of the sledding hill. And Wharton did cling to her unhappy endings; she refused to let the sad ending of "The House of Mirth" be changed for the play version, and, she later wrote, "in spite of Fay Davis's exquisite representation of Lily Bart I knew that (owing to my refusal to let the heroine survive) it was foredoomed to failure." Emerging from the theatre with her after the play's Broadway opening, William Dean Howells told her, "Yes—what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending."
It takes a healthy organism to entertain the tragic view. In "A Backward Glance" Wharton claimed, "I am born happy every morning." She was especially happy during the composition of "Ethan Frome": it was "the book to the making of which I brought the greatest joy and fullest ease." There was much for the artist in her to enjoy; her imagination, removed from the arch conversation of polite society, carved wonderfully laconic and suggestive country dialogue. As in the happiest narratives, the incidents are effortlessly efficient: Zeena's trip to the doctor in Bettsbridge serves to give Mattie and Ethan their opportunity and then to motivate Mattie's banishment. The red glass pickle dish from Philadelphia, a wedding present to the Fromes, adorns the mock marital table of Ethan and Mattie, and then shatters to seal their doom. Wharton moves with assurance among the homely country details of housekeeping and hardscrabble farming. The humiliating pains and exiguous emphases of poverty—Zeena mourns more over the shards of her pickle dish than over any human ruin—were mysteriously accessible to this rich woman, transferred from some enduringly felt deprivation amid her life of outward comforts. It remains difficult to account for the depth of Wharton's pessimism and her capacity to terrify. I read her three most highly considered novels—"The House of Mirth," "Ethan Frome," "The Age of Innocence"—at widely separated ages, yet experienced in each a sickening, stunning drop into the void. Lily Bart's muddled ascent into the purity of death and Ethan Frome's dogged shouldering of a love-crazed moment's wreckage are matched in "The Age of Innocence" by the way an entire world vanishes between the penultimate chapter and the last; the young lovers we have been suffering with day by day suddenly have their lives behind them, wasted and lost, as far as our sentimental valuation goes.
The present motion picture of "The Age of Innocence," directed and partly written by Martin Scorsese, does not yet establish Wharton as the chief lode, now that E. M. Forster has been all but mined out, for the Masterpiece Theatre school of polite costume drama. There is a playfulness in Forster, a flickering lightness, which feeds the camera as Wharton's polished relentlessness does not. Scorsese, known for his shock effects, begins with thunderous music and gargantuan unfolding roses, as if to overwhelm the audience into admitting that these stiff, poky, thoroughly clothed New Yorkers of the eighteen-seventies contain volcanic passions. Violent camera effects—a stage curtain descending in sharp downward perspective, helicopterish aerial views of Gilded Age banquet spreads—keep jolting this tale, Wharton's most efficient and exquisitely balanced, of covert social maneuver. The movie is flamboyantly sumptuous, where Wharton's repeated point, in her fiction and autobiography both, about the society in which she was raised was how relatively restrained and even Spartan it was—the prudent, conformist descendants of Dutch and English merchants entertaining each other at quiet dinners. It was not until the arrival, in the eighties, of big money from the West, "soon to be followed by the lords of Pittsburgh," that Manhattan got vulgar. From the opulent, giddy look of Scorsese's panning shots, we might be at one of Caligula's orgies.
As with the film of "Ethan Frome," there are problems of accent and deportment. Of the three principals, only Daniel Day-Lewis, flattening his British accent and pinning down his Mohican good looks with a thin white bow tie, seems, in the role of Newland Archer, to belong to the last century. Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder, though both are described in the press handout as ardent Wharton readers, radiate twentieth-century vibes and look lovely but miscast. Pfeiffer—who admirably carried off the exotic roles of Madame de Tourvel in "Dangerous Liaisons" and a Soviet damsel in distress in "The Russia House"—makes no attempt at the "trailing slightly foreign accent" Wharton ascribes to Ellen Olenska; instead, she does a kind of Grace Kelly imitation and in moments of urgent expression falls into the laid-back cadences of her native California. And Ryder, with her shiny eyes and elfin protruding ears, seems far from the "frank forehead" and "Diana-like aloofness" of the impervious May Welland. Perhaps styles of women as well as of women's clothes change; both actresses seem to be suppressing their natural twitches and the nervous, ironic sensitivity they have evolved under modern conditions, wherein the rules must be improvised, rather than learned. But then who, after Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland, has looked at home in a "skirt looped up like a window-drapery"?
Nevertheless, the film gathers strength as it goes along—strength taken directly from Wharton. Startlingly at first, a voice reads passages of her prose to us—a voice oddly close to that of Archer's obtuse mother, but presumably that of the omniscient author. Such blunt interpolation seems clumsy, but then we relax into it, as if a cinematic adaptation could be simply a reading aloud of the condensed text, lavishly illustrated by gorgeous faces, scenery, and period interiors—a super slide show. There are some mishaps: Wharton, trying to understand the blind force of utter conventionality, wrote words about May that, when broadcast from the screen, sound like a sneer, and provoked an uncomfortable laugh from the audience. But at the climax of the plot—the hero's near-simultaneous realizations that all his social circle has been conspiring to break up a liaison he has not yet achieved, and that his wife has scared off Ellen with a premature claim of pregnancy—the audience was still. May's white bony face as she innocently, unchallengeably confesses her triumph becomes a monstrous luminous hammer pounding Archer into his fate. The terse dialogue is almost exactly Wharton's; after two hours of visually powerful false flourishes, authentic power arrives from the heart of the novel—from the heart, ultimately, of the little girl to whom her father seemed lonely and unfulfilled and her mother cool and implacably conventional. Lewis in his biography writes:
**{: .break one} ** The relationship between George Frederic [Jones] and Lucretia [née Rhinelander], in their daughter's version of it, provided Edith Wharton with the first and most compelling instance of what would become one of her central themes: the larger spirit subdued and defeated by the smaller one. **
In reworking Wharton, how tied should the workers be to the cruel overseer within her who denied her characters happiness after bringing them tantalizingly close to it? There was, for me, a momentary ambiguity at the end of Scorsese's film: it appeared unclear into which building on the Paris set Newland's son goes to visit the now very middle-aged Ellen Olenska, who has befriended the girl who will be his bride. When his father, having asked him to go on alone but saying that he might follow, rises from his bench and takes a few stooped steps, it seemed possible that Hollywood might exercise its prerogative and give us "a tragedy with a happy ending"—have Archer do what any red-blooded widower would do, that is, take the ascenseur, give his hostess a hug, and spend the rest of his life with Michelle Pfeiffer. He is only fifty-seven, as he reminds himself. His timidity seems merely perverse, even in the text, which offers a few hurried reasons—a wish to keep Ellen as she was thirty years ago, a fear that the sparkling milieu of Paris formed a "rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs." They are not persuasive, at least to the reader for whom Newland Archer, a few pages back, has come alive in his infatuation, his glimpse of other possibilities than respectability's confinement.
It is rather as if Edith Wharton, a thorough Parisienne by 1920, were closing the shutters on a ghostly representative of the New York of her girlhood. It is too cruel, too imperious; perhaps it is realism, or at least naturalism. But abnegations that seem fitting in Starkfield feel willful in the moneyed circles of New York and Paris. She denies her characters the liberation that she herself found. Though during her lifetime and after she suffered much invidious comparison with Henry James, she was, it might be said, the more normal human being, with more real social and sexual knowledge; she can conjure out of her own nature people too full-blooded to be subjected to Jamesian torments of design. They rebel, or invite us to urge them to rebel, there in their two-dimensional prisons of print. Lily Bart, unlike Milly Theale, could rise up and live a life, if the author would permit it. There was an iron vein in Wharton that her adapters will have to work with, or work around. Marion Mainwaring has given the semi-tragedy of Laura Testvalley a happy ending belonging to a subsidiary plot; Scorsese, the film finally makes clear, has piously followed the author's intention, a renunciation in the classic French style of Madame de La Fayette's "Princesse de Clèves." It could have gone, our illusion is, the other way. Contradictory possibilities are a sign of life, and Wharton's work is full of them. ♦


text:
- Tous > Medicine Access and Rational Use > Financing
- Tous > Medicine Access and Rational Use > Supply Management
- Mots-clés > financial plans - funding and expenditure projections
- Mots-clés > funding gap analysis
- Mots-clés > funding requirements
- Mots-clés > maternal and child health - MCH
- Mots-clés > maternal, newborn, and child health commodities
- Mots-clés > medicines for maternal and child health
- Mots-clés > morbidity-based forecast
- Mots-clés > qualifications - requirements
- Mots-clés > quantification
- Mots-clés > quantification - forecasting of medicines and supplies
(2013; 72 pages)
The Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) of Nigeria and partners have made considerable efforts to combat maternal, newborn, and child health illnesses. Despite this, the burden of these conditions in Nigeria remains high. Results from the latest Demographic and Health Survey (Measure DHS 2008) of 2008 showed that Nigeria is still a long way from meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) goals 4 and 5, which relate to reducing the burden in child and maternal deaths by 2015, respectively. In this survey, the infant mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) was estimated at 75 and the percentage of births attended by skilled health personnel was 38.9 percent. Immunization rates remain low, especially among rural populations.
To accelerate progress toward meeting the MDG goals, the FMOH and partners have developed a number of strategic interventions, especially at primary health care level. These interventions aim at increasing basic antenatal, newborn, and child care for the most vulnerable populations, with the goal of saving approximately one million lives by 2015. The key to these interventions is to provide medicines and health commodities. In July and August 2012, the office of the honorable Federal Minister of State for Health, with technical assistance from the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT, Task Order 4, conducted a forecast and funding gap analysis of commodities for maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) in Nigeria for one year.
Using morbidity information from various sources, the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT carried out a morbidity-based forecast. This report includes the findings from the forecast, as well as the funding gap analysis that can be used for advocacy with key stakeholders to increase the level of funding and eventual availability of commodities for MNCH conditions in Nigeria. The project quantified the main commodities needed for a comprehensive MNCH program in Nigeria, by commodity groups. These groups were nutrition, antimalarials, essential medicines, HIV and AIDS medicines and supplies, vaccines, family planning commodities, and general health consumables (e.g., syringes, giving sets, mama kits, etc.). In total, the project estimated the funding requirements for 135 medicines and 67 general health supplies. The quantification team used purchase prices that states and program representatives reported. If local prices were not available, we used the International Drug Price Indicator Guide (MSH and WHO 2011) median prices.
The USAID | DELIVER PROJECT estimated an annual funding requirement of approximately U.S.$859,496,126. Using information from the state-level ministry of health (MOH) officials, the FMOH, and partners, we estimated that $361,719,211, of this is currently funded, leaving a funding gap of approximately $497,776,915. In Nigeria, this is an annual expenditure of approximately $5.00 per person. Using the Lives Saved tool in the Spectrum set of models, we estimated that providing these medicines and commodities to a level of coverage sufficient to reach the 2015 MDG targets would result in a significant reduction in maternal, newborn, and child deaths by 2015. For example, the team estimated the potential reduction for child deaths only if the MDG targets were met by 2015 could be up to 750,000 lives. Ensuring that the necessary commodities are available in public health facilities for the trained service providers will definitely contribute to saving the lives of mothers, newborns, and children, and to meeting the Government of Nigeria's ambitious, "Saving One Million Lives Initiative."
Going forward, the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT recommends that the results of this forecast and funding gap analysis should be used by the FMOH and partners to source for funding. Concurrently, a supply plan that takes into account existing stock levels, as well as commodities that may already be on order needs to be developed in order to inform the procurement of these commodities. Finally, a national forum for all stakeholders (including state-level representatives) needs to be created to meet regularly and chart a way forward toward creating MNCH commodity security for Nigeria.


text:
The 2015 U.S. Scheduled Air Transportation Industry-Capital & Expenses Report, published annually by Barnes Reports, contains timely and accurage industry statistics, forecasts and demographics.
The report features 2015 current and 2016 forecast estimates on the cost of materials, capital expenditures, inventories, rentals, and other expenses nationally and for all 50 U.S. States and up to 900 metro areas. Expenses categories include materials used, payroll, human resources benefits, health insurance, retirement/pension plans, advertising, taxes, depreciation, electricity, fuels, equipment, repair/maintenance, and software. Capital expenditures include building, machinery, vehicles, and computer equipment. The report also includes industry definition, a breakdown by establishments size and industry size estimates (establishments, sales and employment).
Barnes Reports' Capital & Expenses reports are an essential part of any GAP analysis, benchmarking project, SWOT analysis, business plan, risk analysis, or growth-share matrix.
Learn how to effectively navigate the market research process to help guide your organization on the journey to success.Download eBook