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Kill The Unicorns Card Game
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Unicorns are elegant and majestic creatures… That's what you think anyway, but in fact they are silly and reproducing too quickly!
Kill the Unicorns is a blind bidding and collection card game. You play as one of the Queendom's unique characters - catch as many unicorns as you can, ideally without accidentally capturing a smelly Unicorn or a Pigicorn!
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Press Release
Mark Mitchell
New Features on OK.gov Provide Citizens With More Than 300 Ways To Interact With Oklahoma Government Online
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – June 1, 2010 – Oklahoma's official website, OK.gov, has recently been enhanced with two new features, the Oklahoma Media Center and Notification Center. These online services provide Oklahomans with access to Oklahoma government media and alerts in one centralized location at http://www.OK.gov.
From Amber alerts to a tour of the Will Rogers Museum, Oklahoma's new Media Center brings more of Oklahoma government online to its citizens. Visitors can get involved in their government by interacting with more than 300 different types of online media and social networking offerings through the Media Center located at http://media.OK.gov.
The Oklahoma Media Center provides access to several types of new media including:
• Audio – House and Senate sessions
In addition, the Oklahoma Notification Center, located at http://notifications.OK.gov, provides a single point of entry to sign up for all state agency notifications offered through many state agency websites. Notifications are automatically populated on this site by state agencies that simply select the 'Post to OK.gov' option within their Go Gov! Web Management Suite's System, a content management system that enables government entities to easily maintain their website without the knowledge of programming languages.
"OK.gov has always strived to provide Oklahoma citizens and businesses with one location in which to locate government information," said Mark Mitchell, General Manager of OK.gov. "We encourage all Oklahomans to learn about their government using this new technology offering on the portal."
State agencies are encouraged to provide their media and notification information through these two new areas on the portal if they are not already. State agencies can request access to posting by visiting the Media and Notification Centers and contacting the OK.gov marketing staff.
About OK.gov
About NIC
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subset: commoncrawl


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I recently read an article about how some athletes experience performance gains after giving birth. I won't go into the reasons why, but there was an interesting rumor about East Germans in the 1970's experimenting with impregnating female athletes and aborting for exactly this reason.
My workout performance has certainly gotten better since I had my baby, but since I barely did anything remotely athletic pre-child, I'm hardly a good test subject. However, I have noticed that despite the memory loss and shorter temper, I'm better at a few things now than I was in my carefree, childless life. Here are a couple improvements.
I'm better at my job. This has been true for all my jobs, in fact. I think before I had a kid, I thought more about what I felt like doing in a given moment, so I had to pump myself up to take on tasks. Babies don't give a crap about what you feel like, they just want what they want, and since they have some pretty good strategies for getting them (like that cry my ex dubbed, "the fury of the goat") I got used to just doing things as quickly and efficiently as possible regardless of my desire to do them. I probably multi-task better too, something about folding up one of those strollers that's supposed to collapse when you press a button but never does while simultaneously locating my car keys while holding an infant who with a leaking diaper gets that multi-tasking thing to become second-nature.
I'm better at thinking on my feet. I hate surprises, and I hate doing something for the first time because I like to be good at things. Parenting is one lesson after another in the curveball you've never seen before whomping you on the side of the head, and as you are smarting from the head trauma, you have a pair of little eyes looking up at you for answers. When, say, your kid's teacher pulls you aside because your child has been in three fights that day, and then you not only have to deal with your own complete lack of experience in this area, you also have to quickly develop a plan and a coherent way of talking to your kid about it that will hopefully not result in her deciding fighting (or simply hiding her fighting from you, first rule of Fight Club) is the way to go, you get snappy-quick at deciding on a course of action and following through. I could probably be in charge of the nuclear button now.
I have more patience and tolerance for other people. Perhaps not while driving, but my own experience with feeling rage towards an infant at 3 in the morning has taught me that human beings are mostly frightened and fragile, and probably worthy of a little compassion. I'm not saying I've become Gandhi or anything, but there is improvement there. Oh, speaking of babies, a friend of mine said a great thing the other day. Her 8-month-old had a little bow in her hair, which actually looked pretty darn cute. "That's adorable," I told my friend. "Yeah, you know how sometimes when you are feeling bad about yourself, you dress in nice clothes so you'll like yourself better?" she said. "Well, it was one of those days … I figured I'd better make her look pretty darn cute to me, for her sake."
Any improvement on your end, or has it all just gone to hell in a handbasket?
KELLY MILLS is a freelance writer, personal trainer, and co-owner of
Phoenix Gym in Berkeley. She saves her favorite swear words for her own
blog, fitness fixation. She is raising the funniest daughter in the


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Van Berkel Hopes History Repeats
Popular Port Macquarie triathlete Tim van Berkel is hoping that history will repeat for him at the Cairns Airport IRONMAN Cairns.
By Daniel Hoy
Last year Aussie Luke McKenzie broke a three-year brought to win at Cairns which led to a career-defining second place at the IRONMAN World Championship in Hawaii.
Van Berkel is in the midst of a similar drought, having last tasted Ironman glory at IRONMAN Western Australia in 2008.
He's hoping a win at Sunday's IRONMAN Cairns can provide a springboard to a big year and a strong performance at IRONMAN Hawaii in October. He comes into the race off the back of a victory at IRONMAN 70.3 Busselton, fourth placing at IRONMAN New Zealand and a win in a full distance race in Melbourne.
"I'm pretty hungry this year. I have been targeting this race all year," van Berkel said.
"Ironman titles are hard to come by, but I did win at Busselton back in 2008. I'm hoping to win another one, it has been a while."
He wants to go one better than last year when he finished runner-up to Mckenzie.
Standing in his way will be one of the sport's most enduring athletes in New Zealand's Cameron Brown.
A 10-time IRONMAN New Zealand Champion, Brown himself has been absent from the podium's top spot since his 2011 win, the longest stretch in his career without an Ironman title.
By his own admission, 2013 was a year to forget.
"Last year was a complete right off and was one of my worst years in the sport. I ended up shortening my season and had seven weeks totally off in August. It did me a world of good and I came back mentally and physically fresher," says Brown.
"I can't wait until I race again and to get back into some warm weather, I love the bike ride up to Port Douglas, you can't beat that view."
Brown and Berkel have already battled each other once this year, at IRONMAN New Zealand in March, exiting the water within seconds of each other, spending the next four plus hours together on the bike before Brown pulled away with an outstanding 2hr47min marathon to finish second..
"I'm looking forward to racing Brownie again. I wasn't anywhere near race fitness in New Zealand, I was there to earn points. I have some good form now but I still think he is going to be very hard to beat, the guy has Ironman racing dialled in," says van Berkel.
Brown, 42, is not the only veteran of distinction in the field, with three-time standard distance world champion Peter Robertson 38 and Jason Shortis 43 on the start line.
There are some international challengers including Jarmo Hast (Finland), who was fourth in Ironman races in Sweden and Australia last year, and the 2012 IRONMAN Western Australia champion Jimmy Johnsen (Denmark).
Australian-based British athlete Liz Blatchford is the hottest of favourites to defend her crown in the women's race.
Blatchford made her successful debut t IRONMAN Cairns last year, and then went on to enjoy a superb season, finishing third on debut at the IRONMAN World Championship in Hawaii.
Along the way she also finished fourth at IRONMAN Mont-Tremblant, and took out IRONMAN 70.3 Busselton, while she finished runner-up at Putrajaya recently.
Main rivals who will be coming at her on the bike will be 2013 IRONMAN Australia champion and in-form Rebecca Hoschke and two-time IRONMAN winner Asa Lundstrom (Sweden).
"I know the abilities of Bek Hoschke and Asa Lundstom and think I will have a decent gap out of the swim to them. However I don't know the other girls too well so I probably can't really predict too much more," says Blatchford.
"It could be a solo day for me but in racing anything can happen and you never quite know how you are going to perform."
Before last year's debut Blatchford had never even run a marathon, let alone completed a full Ironman. This year she's back having three Ironman finishes under her belt.
"I have expectations of myself this year that I didn't have last year but I also have the confidence from my past races that I can draw on.
"To me though, all three Ironman races that I have done were somewhat daunting. It's a really long way no matter how many times you have done it, or how much training you' have done."
Blatchford said last year's race in Cairns had been a steep learning curve about nutrition.
"I am a huge calorie burner and that nearly derailed me when I ran out of everything on the bike by 140 km. So I'll be carrying more nutrition this year."
Hoschke comes into the race with IRONMAN 70.3 runners-up in Busselton and Geelong while Lundstrom won the inaugural IRONMAN Lake Tahoe last year, one of four podiums over the distance in the last two years, The Swede will no doubt find the Cairns climes somewhat different to the rain and snow she encountered in winning at Tahoe.
There are some solid performers to challenge including Japan's Keiko Tanaka, American Hillary Biscay and a group of strong Kiwis led by Melanie Burke, third at IRONMAN Australia earlier this month.


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Jack Eugene Rawley, 70, of Tonasket died Saturday June 1, 2013 at Central Washington Hospital in Wenatchee. He was born October 2, 1942 in Placerville, Calif. to his parents John and Gladys Rawley. After the age of four his family moved to Tonasket where he resided until his death.
Tina Swanson
Jack Eugene Rawley
By Gazette-Tribune on June 6, 2013 in Obituaries


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Safety is our highest priority. Propane has quite a remarkable safety record, due in large part to the stringent codes and regulations developed by the propane industry and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). Statistics compiled by the NFPA indicate that the safest way to heat is with gas.
Propane is an approved, clean fuel listed in the 1990 Clean Air Act and the Energy Policy Act of 1992. Tests conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that propane-fueled vehicles produce 30 percent to 90 percent less carbon monoxide and about 50 percent fewer toxins and other smog-producing emissions than gasoline engines. Propane also is nontoxic, so it's not harmful to soil or water.
Questions about living with propane? Find the answers in our interactive safety modules.
Learn about the safe storage of propane cylinders.
Learn about industry-wide efforts to help reduce residential accidents involving propane.
Expecting a severe weather event? Protect your propane system if the weather turns bad. Before, during, or after severe weather, you may need to take specific action to ensure the continued safe operation of your propane system.


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Josh Cohen, in his "We need people who ride bikes, not cyclists" post, writes of a commuter who gets on a bike but eschews the "cyclist" label, preferring to think of the bike as merely a conveyance and not a lifestyle choice. Josh writes:
This post prompted a round of Tweets along the line of:
I contend that a simple examination of something as a cyclist's choice of a recycled bike from a co-op vs. a handmade, one-of-a-kind bike crafted by NASA out of space materials goes a long way to communicating a persons values, politics, priorities, and also gives us an understanding of their social, political, environmental and even spiritual convictions.
Further, I contend that a glance at the same person's choice of energy bar (Clif vs. Power Bar?) or shoes (Nike vs. Columbia) or food (Trader Joe's vs. Whole Foods) or cell phone (Blackberry vs. iPhone) will reveal much of the person's personality and within a half dozen "lifestyle" choices, you can not only gauge the person's lifestyle integrity but you can also measure the person's accountability to the impact they are having on their sphere of influence.
To those who scoff and argue that these choices are superficial and don't really reveal character or culture, I would argue that they really do matter, the only thing that varies is our connectivity to the impact and the effect of our choices. Granted, many people drink coffee and buy gas and support entertainers without considering the impact of their support or of the message they send but that doesn't mean that there isn't an impact, simply that they aren't paying attention.
This is the new frontier for us as a community, intentional lives that connect actions to impacts, choices to lifestyles, behavior to character.
Yes, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I think that those who yearn for the day when riding a bike is simply riding a bike are selling themselves short. I believe that everything we do, from little inactions to large leaps of behavior, has a tremendous impact and we must take responsibility and be held accountable for it all.


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Apple has been listing some pretty interesting job opportunities that have obvious relevance to the company's mobile platform strategy. The list of qualifications Apple is looking for in both a High Performance/Low Level Programmer and an Embedded Video Processing & Analysis engineer give some clues into the multimedia-fueled future of the iPhone.
Apple is looking for a low-level programmer that specializes in vector optimization and numerics. More specifically, the company wants someone familiar with ARM architecture and its NEON vector processing unit. As MacRumors explains, NEON is used specifically to refer to the vector unit in ARMv7 Cortex processors, while current iPhone and iPod touch hardware use ARMv6-based processors. The obvious conclusion is that future hardware will be based on the Cortex architecture, which is also capable of multi-core variants—and a multi-core processor opens up an avenue for improved background processing capabilities.
Furthermore, the ideal candidate for the embedded video processing engineer position would have experience with real-time streaming over WiFi and cellular networks. The mention of cellular networks in particular suggests the job is connected to the much-rumored video capabilities in iPhone OS 3.0. Clearly, future hardware will be optimized to enhance such capabilities.
Both job listings are for unfilled positions, so it's not likely this work will affect new hardware expected to be announced at WWDC in a few weeks. However, hints of multiple iPhone and iPod touch devices, as well as at least one unknown device, were found in betas of iPhone OS 3.0. It's clear that multimedia will play an important role in whatever Apple has up its sleeve.


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Braves leaving Turner Field for new stadium in 2017
The Atlanta Braves will leave Turner Field for a new stadium in 2017, the team announced on Monday.
We are excited to announce plans to build a world-class stadium, which will open in 2017 at the NW intersection of I-75/I-285. #Braves- Atlanta Braves (@Braves) November 11, 2013
We have secured a large tract of property at this location & will work to build a world-class ballpark for our fans. #Braves- Atlanta Braves (@Braves) November 11, 2013
Visit http://t.co/ydQalc1cuR for updates on the project. #Braves- Atlanta Braves (@Braves) November 11, 2013
- SN picks the 20 worst MVP selections of all-time
The Braves opened Turner Field in 1997 and, as pointed out by SN's Sean Gentille, still hail it as "the benchmark for future baseball park design."
From the Braves website-so much for all that. pic.twitter.com/jr9nPhT4VT- Sean Gentille (@seangentille) November 11, 2013
On the Braves' site updating with details about the project, the following map is listed: "The new stadium will be located near the geographic center of the Braves' fan base."
Also from the team's stadium site:
"This decision to move was not easy, and we have mixed emotions about leaving a ballpark that holds so many great memories. However, knowing that our lease will expire in 2016, we have devoted our time trying to secure the best option for our fans, our team and our organization. We believe this new site will be the best location for our fans and our organization for the next 30 years.
"This project will be a true public-private partnership. The economic benefits from the new stadium will ripple throughout the region. From the construction process, which will support more than 5,227 jobs and generate $235 million in payroll, to the ongoing benefits the new stadium will be an economic engine for Metro Atlanta.
"The reason for moving is simple. The current location has certain issues that are insurmountable and will only become more problematic over the years. These fundamental issues involve how you, our fans, access Turner Field. There is a lack of consistent mass transportation, a lack of sufficient parking and a lack of direct access to interstates. Furthermore, the Braves do not have control over the development of our immediate surroundings.
"Our new location will give us the opportunity to develop the surrounding area of the new ballpark, transforming it into a mixed use, 365-day destination and creating an enhanced atmosphere for our fans during Braves games. There also will be significantly increased access to the site, enhanced parking opportunities, and, generally, easier access to and from major roadways with a variety of other transportation options."
John Schuerholz added this in a video statement: "Turner Field, which we do not own, is in need of hundreds of millions of dollars of upgrades. Unfortunately, that massive investment, would not do anything to improve access or the fan experience. These are issues that we simply cannot overcome."


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May 20, 2013
Of all the bad-actor molecules linked to neurodegeneration, the Alzheimer's protein amyloid beta (Aβ) receives most of the press. But in recent years, scientists have been forced to confront the fact that Aβ itself has little if any direct toxicity to brain cells. "Aβ alone doesn't cause dementia; it needs the presence of tau," says John Q. Trojanowski, M.D., Ph.D., a Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives (DABI) member who co-directs the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the University of Pennsylvania.
The tau protein has been linked to Alzheimer's since the 1980s. To some extent in ordinary aging, but much more extensively in Alzheimer's, tau is somehow corrupted and forms twists of fibril-like aggregates—known as neurofibrillary tangles and threads (NFTs)—within neurons. Although scientists have long debated whether tau's corruption is a cause or effect of the Alzheimer's disease process, that debate is now all but over. In fact, tau's corruption seems to be a driver of disease not only in Alzheimer's but in more than half a dozen other tau-linked maladies besides, including frontotemporal lobe dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy, and the head-knock syndrome known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Scientists also have been finding tau pathology in the brains of people with Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other conditions not traditionally considered tau-linked. Virtually all the major neurodegenerative diseases, and many minor ones, are now coming to be seen as "tauopathies" in one way or another.
Normal tau and corrupted tauTau normally functions within a neuron's axon, or output stalk, and works there mostly as a binder and a stiffener for cylindrical, railroad-track-like constructions called microtubules. A neuron uses microtubules to enable the speedy transport of proteins and other cargoes along its axon. Without that transport, which brings nutrients and energy and carries away waste, the axon and the rest of the neuron would deteriorate.[1]
Microtubules form and dissolve all the time in active neurons. To support these rapid changes, tau's microtubule-binding properties are constantly being fine-tuned by the addition or removal of small molecules called phosphor groups. Enzymes called kinases add the phosphor groups—at any of several dozen sites on the tau protein—at least partly to weaken tau's grip and make a microtubule less rigid. Other enzymes called phosphatases do the reverse, de-phosphorylating tau to increase its microtubule-gripping ability.
Somehow in Alzheimer's and other tauopathies the tau phosphorylation process goes to an extreme, and isn't reversed. Tau proteins become "hyperphosphorylated"—tagged with phosphor groups at multiple sites. They detach completely from microtubules and drift out of the axon, into the main neuronal body (soma) and even into the mesh of rootlike tendrils (dendrites) through which a neuron receives its principal inputs from other neurons. Eventually these hyperphosphorylated tau proteins begin to stick together to make NFTs—long, insoluble aggregates which, under a microscope, look like snips of coarse hair. The eponymous Alois Alzheimer noted these strange inclusions in his 1907 report on what would later be seen as the first-ever Alzheimer's case:
In the centre of an otherwise almost normal cell there stands out one or several fibrils due to their characteristic thickness and peculiar impregnability.[2]
After more than a century, scientists are starting to understand what these strange inclusions represent.
Tau dysfunction killsSince the early 1990s, autopsy studies have found that the spread of tau NFTs through memory-related brain areas tracks the progress of Alzheimer's dementia—and does so better than the spread of Aβ plaques.[3] About fifteen years ago scientists also linked [4] a familial form of the dementia syndrome known as frontotemporal dementia with parkinsonism to a set of tau mutations—whose effects turned out to be very similar to what is seen in Alzheimer's. "Some of the mutations impair the binding of tau to microtubules, while others cause tau to aggregate more readily," says Trojanowski.
Throughout the 2000s, scientists found more and more evidence that tau dysfunction kills and Aβ doesn't—or rather that Aβ contributes to Alzheimer's only indirectly, by causing tau dysfunction. The more conclusive findings have come only in the past few years. In 2011, for example, researchers in the Harvard Medical School laboratory of Dennis Selkoe, M.D. (also a Dana Alliance member) reported that small aggregates ("oligomers") of Aβ, isolated from Alzheimer's brains, triggered the hyperphosphorylation of tau as well as Alzheimer's-like changes in neurons, including the loss of synapses, even at very low concentrations. This toxic effect was tau-dependent: no tau, no toxicity.[5]
How do Aβ oligomers trigger tau hyperphosphorylation? Scientists have been busy teasing apart the process. When Aβ oligomers alight upon a memory-related neuron, they cause an excessive flow of calcium ions into the neuron—at least in part by overstimulating synaptic receptors, it is thought.[6] In April, a team led by cell biologist Franck Polleux, Ph.D., at The Scripps Research Institute reported [7] that the Aβ-induced influx of calcium overactivates a chain of kinase enzymes, including one called AMPK that triggers the hyperphosphorylation of tau. "AMPK can phosphorylate the tau protein at a site that is important for the early effect of Aβ on synaptic maintenance," says Polleux. Blocking AMPK entirely in Alzheimer's mice, or even preventing it from making that one key phosphorylation of tau, prevents tau's hyperphosphorylation and takes away Aβ oligomers' ability to trigger the loss of synapses.Too little where it should beHow does tau's hyperphosphorylation harm a neuron? The most obvious possibility is that it keeps tau from doing its normal job of stabilizing microtubules. The affected microtubules become less stable, and ultimately are less able to bear essential cellular cargoes along neuronal axons. "Axonal transport can fail," says Trojanowski, "and there are many consequences of axonal transport failure—the most serious of which are the loss of synapses, the degeneration of the axon, and eventually the loss of the neuron."
One therapeutic approach to this has been the development of kinase inhibitors to reduce tau hyperphosphorylation. However, the relevant kinases tend to have multiple functions in cells, so that inhibiting them may cause unacceptable side effects. Trojanowski and his colleagues favor an alternative approach, microtubule-stabilization. Their results in Alzheimer's mice models with one microtubule-stabilizing drug, Epithilone D, were successful enough to convince Bristol Myers Squibb, last year, to start a small clinical trial of the drug (now ongoing) in people with early-stage cognitive signs of Alzheimer's.
Too much where it shouldn't beTau phosphorylation and aggregation may also cause harm by increasing—inappropriately—the concentration of tau in other parts of the neuron. One of the earliest signs of damage to memory-related neurons, in mouse models of Alzheimer's and in human patients, is the withering of tiny synapse-bearing structures on dendrites, known as dendritic spines. As noted above, Aβ oligomers are now thought to cause this loss of synapses and spines by corrupting tau. But how does tau, mainly resident in axons, end up harming dendrites? In 2010 the laboratory of Jürgen Götz, Ph.D., at the University of Sydney (now at the University of Queensland) reported that a small fraction of the tau population in a neuron normally resides within dendrites. These dendritic tau proteins serve, in effect, as amplifiers of the same synaptic receptors that are stimulated by Aβ oligomers. When ordinary tau in an axon becomes hyperphosphorylated, detaches from microtubules, and starts to drift out of the axon into the dendrites, it adds to the normally low supply of dendritic tau—exacerbating Aβ's overstimulation of dendritic receptors. This in turn may exacerbate the ongoing hyperphosphorylation of axonal tau, in what could become a runaway process that leads to synapse loss and, later, the neuron's demise.[8]
click on image for larger view
Illustration courtesy of Nature Reviews Neuroscience from the paper: L. Ittner & J. Goetz, "Amyloid-β and tau–a toxic pas de deux in Alzheimer's disease," 2011.
By blocking dendritic tau and thus damping this amplifier effect, Götz's team was able to prevent cognitive impairments in Aβ-overproducing Alzheimer's mice, and could even reverse those impairments after they had become evident. In contrast, Götz notes, when he and his team bred mice that overproduced hyperphosphorylated tau as well as Aβ, "we saw an accelerated pathology, in which all the mice died by the age of four months."
Amplifying Aβ's effect may be only one way in which mislocalized tau contributes to neurodegeneration. Tau is a relatively sticky molecule, and some researchers suspect that it serves as a binder and scaffold not only for microtubules but also for a variety of other neuronal structures. That strong tendency to grab other molecules could mean that tau wreaks widespread havoc whenever it drifts into the wrong places in a vulnerable neuron. "I suspect that there are multiple adverse effects of tau's mislocalization," Götz says.Tau's spreading dysfunctionLike the Aβ fibrils that make plaques in Alzheimer's, the tau fibrils that form and clump together as NFTs in tauopathies belong to a category of aggregate known as amyloids. Almost every human neurodegenerative disease features amyloids—most prominently of Aβ and tau in Alzheimer's, of the alpha synuclein protein in Parkinson's disease, of the huntingtin protein in Huntington's disease, and of the human prion protein in Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). A key feature of amyloids is that they tend to be self-propagating. An amyloid fibril, for example, can grow by grabbing individual proteins (monomers) in the vicinity and adding them to its two ends; eventually the lengthening fibril breaks to form two new fibrils, which continue to add monomers, and so on. By contrast, some oligomers—which are much smaller and can be ring-shaped or spherical—propagate their aggregated state in a more direct way: by inducing the monomers they contact to bend and join to form new, identical oligomers.
Prion protein aggregates are relatively hardy self-propagators, and appear to be the cause of CJD and other-species prion diseases such as "Mad Cow" disease. Tau aggregates are nowhere near as transmissible, but they can propagate within living brains, soaking up functional tau monomers wherever they go—as several recent studies have demonstrated.[9] This likely accounts for the well-defined spread of NFTs in Alzheimer's and other tauopathies. It may also be the process that ultimately defeats the brain's ability to resist tau dysfunction, which would otherwise be more localized and easier to contain.
There is evidence that tau oligomers—those made from two or three tau monomers, especially—are more worrisome aggregation-inducers than the more obvious, NFT-forming tau fibrils.[10] The mechanism that drives their self-propagation is so efficient that "all monomers can convert to oligomers very quickly," says Rakez Kayed, Ph.D., an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. By contrast, tau fibrils grow from monomers and oligomers much more slowly.
Kayed and others believe that tau oligomers, compared to tau fibrils, are also more harmful to neurons, via subtle toxic properties that may be common to all amyloid oligomers. "In tau-based mouse models, tau oligomers bind to neuronal membranes; they disrupt normal calcium levels; and they bind to synaptic receptors," Kayed says. "But we think the most critical mechanism is that they impair axonal transport."
At a conference last year, Kayed and his colleagues presented data on a preclinical study of a monoclonal antibody, TOMA, that targets tau oligomers. "In mice that develop an Alzheimer's-like tau pathology and behavioral deficits, we were able to reverse the deficits by removing these tau oligomers," Kayed says. The antibody treatment is oligomer-specific: it spares the larger, hyperphosphorylated tau fibrils. And yet it worked well in this test. That suggests that hyperphosphorylated tau fibrils are less important to the disease process, compared to the smaller, less phosphorylated oligomers—and may even be protective to the extent that they compete with oligomers. "It appears that once the tau oligomers are removed, individual tau proteins become more available to bind to microtubules, and axonal transport is restored," Kayed says.
The expanding relevance of tauKayed hopes to get his anti-tau-oligomer monoclonal antibody into clinical trials within two or three years. Another tau aggregation inhibitor, based on methylene blue, a common laboratory stain and reagent, is already in advanced clinical trials for Alzheimer's and other tauopathies, after showing promising results in early trials.[11]
Outside the realm of Alzheimer's, it remains unclear what triggers tau dysfunction, and why that dysfunction starts at different places within the brain. Some researchers hypothesize that different tauopathies are driven by distinct types of tau aggregates—which, like different strains of a virus, have different toxicities, rates of spread, and other features.[12] In any case, if tau dysfunction is the common denominator of these conditions, then tau-targeted treatments could work against them generally. Trojanowski, for example, says that he hopes to see good results for Epithilone D not just against Alzheimer's but against all tauopathies.
Kayed also is looking at the roles of tau oligomers in various known and emerging tau-linked diseases. "We've found, for example, that tau oligomers form rapidly in two animal models of traumatic brain injury," he says. "Levels of tau oligomers also are elevated in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease and a related condition, Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) as well as in mouse models of those conditions." This may not be a mere coincidence. Studies by Trojanowski's lab among others have shown that aggregates of the Parkinson's- and DLB-linked alpha synuclein protein can trigger or "seed" the aggregation of tau.[13] "It may be that in Parkinson's and DLB, alpha synuclein seeds the formation of the first tau aggregate, which goes on to seed further tau aggregation," says Kayed. "In this way tau, being so abundant in the brain, could become the main self-propagating toxic entity."
Published May 2013
[1] "Tau-mediated neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease and related disorders," by Carlo Ballatorre, Virginia M.-Y. Lee, and John Q. Trojanowski, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2007 (vol 8 (9), Sept): 663-72.
[2] Alzheimer A. Über eine eigenartige Erkrankung der Hirnrinde. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und Psychisch-Gerichtliche Medizin 1907; 64: 146–48.
[3] "Staging of Alzheimer-related cortical destruction," by H. Braak, E. Braak and J. Bohl, Eur. Neurol. 1993 (vol. 33(6)): 403-8.
[4] "Segregation of a missense mutation in the microtubule-associated protein tau gene with familial frontotemporal dementia and parkinsonism," by C. Dumanchin et al, Hum. Mol. Genetics 1998 (vol. 7(11); Oct): 1825-9.
[5] "Soluble amyloid β-protein dimers isolated from Alzheimer cortex directly induce Tau hyperphosphorylation and neuritic degeneration," by Ming Jin et al, PNAS 2011 (vol 108 (14), Apr 5): 5819-24.
[6] "Abeta oligomers cause localized Ca(2+) elevation, missorting of endogenous Tau into dendrites, Tau phosphorylation, and destruction of microtubules and spines," by H. Zempel et al, J. Neuroscience 2010 (vol. 30 (36), Sep 8): 11938-50.
[7] "The CAMKK2-AMPK kinase pathway mediates the synaptotoxic effects of Aβ oligomers through Tau phosphorylation," by G. Mairet-Coello et al, Neuron 2013 (vol 77 (7), April 10): 94-108.
[8] "Dendritic function of tau mediates amyloid-beta toxicity in Alzheimer's disease mouse models," by L.M. Ittner et al, Cell 2010 (vol. 142 (3), Aug 6): 387-97.
[9] "Transmission and spreading of tauopathy in transgenic mouse brain," by F. Clavaguera et al, Nature Cell Biology 2009 (vol 11): 909-13.
[10] "Alzheimer brain-derived tau oligomers propagate pathology from endogenous tau," by C.A. Lasagna-Reeves et al, Sci Rep. 2012 (vol. 2): 700.
[11] "Selective inhibition of Alzheimer disease-like tau aggregation by phenothiazines," by C.M. Wischik et al, PNAS 1996 (vol. 93 (20), Oct 1): 11213-8.
[12] "Conformational diversity of wild-type Tau fibrils specified by templated conformation change," by B. Frost et al, J. Biol. Chem. 2009 (vol. 284(6), Feb 6): 3546-51.
[13] "Initiation and synergistic fibrillization of tau and alpha-synuclein," by B.I. Giasson et al, Science 2003 (vol. 300 (5619), Apr 25): 636-40.
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Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG electric
Mercedes-Benz has kicked off a high-stakes bid for electric performance car supremacy with the unveiling of the production version of the SLS AMG Coupe Electric Drive at the Paris motor show.
Priced at the equivalent of $540,000 in Germany, including a 19 percent sales tax, it is Mercedes-Benz's most expensive road car to date. Described as the world's most powerful series production electric car, the SLS Electric Drive shares its exterior styling, including signature gullwing doors, with the gasoline-engined SLS AMG introduced in 2009. Apart from some small changes to the styling of the grille insert, the biggest clue to the car's electric driveline is the absence of exhaust pipes. The SLS Electric Drive uses a high-tech driveline consisting of four synchronous electric motors-one at each corner-providing it with permanent four-wheel drive.


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This blog discusses items of interest to genealogical researchers, with an emphasis on California. It also focuses on internet-centered genealogy research, and covers tools and techniques unique to that space.
29 March 2008
iGoogle and Organizing Your Genealogical Research
It is easy to setup an iGoogle page, and a page can be setup without having a Gmail account. The link to setup the iGoogle page is found in the upper-right corner of the main Google.com page, as shown here:
Once setup, the page can be customized in a myriad of ways, some purely for aesthetics but some, more to our interest, for function and efficiency.
Here's a look at one of the tabs on my iGoogle page:
As you can see, across the top of the picture, I have a number of "tabs" on my Google homepage, one of which is the Genealogy tab, which is open and shown in the picture. Since I use my iGoogle page for more than just genealogy, this setup suits me just fine.
On this page are some examples of the tools which can be added to the iGoogle page through the "Add stuff" link in the top-right of the page.
1. Organizing tools. A to-do list tool, from the website Todoist.com. I could write a whole series on the robustness of this little modular application, but since time and space don't permit, suffice to say it is a fabulous to-do list application, which I use to track "to-do" items for my website as well as for my family research.
For me, the computer is the absolute center of my genealogical research. It's where I do research on records and repositories, where I review and order materials and books, where I write my letters requesting records and photocopies, and where I scan, notate, document, and enter information into Family Tree Maker. Because the computer is the epicenter of my work, I find it most intuitive to have a to-do list that lives somewhere on the computer, (or online) and is only a click-away when I want to figure out what items of research I need to prioritize or perform next.
I find paper lists tend to get jotted on, folded up, stuck in folders, plopped into books, spilled on, chewed on by my son... any number of calamities can befall them. My online list resides safely on my iGoogle page, in a central and accessible place, and, when I need to, I can print out a copy and take it with me or use it as a research outline. Notes are made, points are written, tasks are accomplished, and I close out my research sessions by updating my lists to reflect what has been done and what needs to be done next. I can then recycle my piece of paper, close my browser window, and not worry about what's going to happen to my to-do list when it gets windy out and I forget to close the window!
2. Functional Tools. These tools sit at the ready to perform common tasks that arise in the course of online research. The Google Map tool allows me to search quickly for towns, landmarks, etc., all without opening another page and getting bogged down in the more complicated functionality of Google Maps proper. This tool is great when I run across an unfamiliar location in a document or record, and want to get a sense of where it is located.
Other tools, like the calculator, are self-explanatory in their use. The benefit of having these commonly used tools in one place is one of expediency and efficiency. When I don't have to close my browser window and search around for the windows Calculator program, or get out of my chair to fish around in my check drawer for my real-life calculator, I save time... time which I can devote to more research.
3. Browsing Organization. This module is a direct link to my Google Notebook, which I will be covering later in this series.
For now, the short version: Google Notebook serves as a sort of digital scrapbook of items of interest one finds online. You can "clip" information or text of interest by highlighting it and saving it to your notebook. This is great for little nuggets of information I want to revisit, and wish to save for further research and evaluation. The module on my iGoogle page defaults to the main notebook, which contains my unfiled items. Since I see these items on my homepage almost every day, I never forget to revisit sites of interest, and I am never left wondering what site to visit or what to do with my internet research time.
4. Research Interfaces. This particular interface is a direct link to the Google Books search (another feature which I will be covering in depth later on). Much like the Google Maps module I noted above, I can perform a search from directly within my iGoogle homepage. Unfortunately, the Google Books Search takes you to a new page to see your results. However, I find that the benefit of having this module on my iGoogle page is as much as a reminder as it is an interface... seeing the module reminds me to check out what information is available in Google Books.
The four types of tools I have noted above really just scratch the surface of what is available, but they are some of the most useful tools I have found thus far.
As far as the organization of the iGoogle page, it really could be setup to suit any sort of need. If your iGoogle page were completely devoted to genealogy, you could envision a tab for each region of research, with tools and "most popular" links for each tab. The possibilities are really astounding, and as more tools and modules are added every day, there's always something worth looking into.
In the next installment of this series, we'll talk more in-depth about Google Books.
'Till then, I remain,
4 comments:
- Tolley Family Historian said...
I too have been using iGoogle as a research interface, mostly incorporating links to favourites/essential/frequently used on-line data bases, homepages to archives etc. Your todo list is better than mine, and I'm gonna grab yours, and also put in a map search link. Thanks for the ideas.
- April 1, 2008 at 1:13 AM
- Craig Manson said...
I've been a fan of Google for a number of research tasks, but I hadn't thought about how to organize them. Now I've done it! Thanks!
- April 6, 2008 at 6:25 PM
- Jennifer said...
I'm so happy you've found the post helpful!
- April 7, 2008 at 10:43 AM
- Mel said...
I am an iGoogle user but I didn't know about some of these features. Thanks for the tips!
- October 16, 2008 at 7:44 PM


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Composed by Frenchman Yohann Zveig and recorded by the orchestra of the Paris Opera in spring 2009, the UEFA Europa League anthem accompanies the centre-circle ceremony at the start of all games in the competition, and is also played in the opening and closing sequences of all UEFA Europa League broadcasts.
Unlike its UEFA Champions League counterpart, the UEFA Europa League anthem has no lyrics, but Zveig believes the piece nonetheless succeeds in its aim to "stay true to football's tradition, while capturing the event's explosive energy". He added: "From the smallest football stadium to the most majestic stadia, I feel the UEFA Europa League anthem is the perfect soundtrack to an amazing show."
©UEFA.com 1998-2011. All rights reserved.


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From the sparkling new to the tried-and-true used vehicles in our lineup, the automotive experts over in our service center and auto body shop, to our knowledgeable financing staff, there's no shortage of things to love at Hamilton Nissan. We know your time is valuable, so let us do all the hard work for you; superb service and friendly folks are what you'll find here at 1929 Dual Highway in Hagerstown, Maryland.
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Question: Are there surgeons that perform corrective rhinoplasty surgeries?
Answer: Like everything there are specialists that can handle your problem. Facial plastic surgeons are uniquely qualified to operate on the nose since they have a great understanding of both the function and the cosmetic components of the nose. As you know, the nose is a respiratory organ and must be respected as such since it is in charge of breathing, smell, humidification, and air cleaning. A facial plastic surgeon who works often on the nose can help determine if your cosmetic and/or functional problem can be improved and to what extent. An honest discussion with a surgeon you trust with the right credentials and experience can help you on your way to improving your situation. Like in life, not everything can be perfectly corrected but hopefully your situation can be improved enough that you feel better about the way you look and about your nose.


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Archie Panjabi on Her Golden Globe Nod
"Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for recognizing my work, and in doing so, the exceptional Good Wife Team! I am deeply moved by your nomination," Archie Panjabi said in a statement. She has been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture made for Television. The Golden Globe Awards will be handed out January 13.


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When author Michael Lewis sold the rights to his book Moneyball he warned that he didn't see how it could be turned into a movie.
But Brad Pitt, co-producer and star as Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane has turned the book into a critically-acclaimed film which opens across the nation Friday. One of the actors featured is Casey Bond, a former outfielder for the Lipscomb Bisons.
Bond was drafted out of Lipscomb by the San Francisco Giants. After his career ended in their farm system Bond decided to give acting a try. After a national commercial and an appearance on the reality show featuring Kiss guitarist Gene Simmons and his family, Bond landed his first major movie role in Moneyball.
"I was born in San Francisco," Bond said. "I essentially made it to the big leagues in the movie with Oakland. I have some strong connections to the Bay area."
Bond plays side-arm, submarine pitcher Chad Bradford. Bond had read the book while on the road during his days at Birmingham Southern and he knew Bradford played a large role.
"Usually I read half of a book and then move on to a different one, but I read all of Moneyball," Bond said. "To be in the film is mind-boggling.
"Back then baseball was everything. Acting was kind of a conscious thought. If I read a book now I think about whether I could play a part or not, but back then that wasn't the way I thought."
But until Bond saw the final cut of the film earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival he had no idea how many of his scenes would remain in the film.
"It was truly an amazingly perfect premiere and celebration night, and the film was very well received," Bond said. "I sat with the rest of the cast in the balcony, and we all received a standing ovation after the film.
"It was great to see my hard work come across on the big screen, and I was very pleased with the outcome."
The movie also stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Oakland manager Art Howe, Jonah Hill as the assistant general manager, Chris Pratt as first baseman Scott Hatteberg and Robin Wright as Beane's wife.
Bond found his fellow actors willing to help him hone his craft. He had a scene with Pitt and Hill.
"Brad Pitt reached out and offered advice to me," Bond said. "I thought that was really special. Between takes we would discuss things. He was a stand-up guy.
"One time I went to look at what they call the `play back'. Right after you shoot a scene you have the opportunity to look at it and see how it turned out. I was going to go look at the play back, but Brad stopped me. He told me not to ever look at the first play back."
Bond also was impressed with Hoffman as well as the rest of the cast and crew.
"Philip was one of my favorites," Bond said. "He is an all-around amazing actor. Every day at lunch he came over and talked with us. He was very much into baseball. He has studied the game.
"Jonah Hill is one of the kings of the comedy world. Robin Wright was amazing. Chris Pratt is a comedy guy who is on his way up."
Bond was sought out to help with baseball skills since few members of the cast had played the game on any level.
"No one was above anybody else," Bond said. "They came to me with questions about the mental perspective of the game and the things baseball players do."
Bond credits Pitt with bringing the film to the screen after a couple of setbacks. In 2009 director Steven Soderbergh presented a documentary style approach which was rejected by Sony Pictures a couple of days before shooting was scheduled to start.
"He is the biggest reason this film was done," Bond said. "Brad Pitt was in it from the beginning. He liked the concept of the film. He believed in it."
Bond was invited to attend both the Toronto Film Festival and the official premier in Oakland. He will be in Nashville Sept. 26, 27 and 28. He will be visiting the Lipscomb campus and attending a special screening of the movie that Lipscomb fans are encouraged to attend Tuesday evening at 7:20 p.m. at the Regal Green Hills Theater.
Bond has formed a production company with two of his friends and has another movie project on tap.
"If you are going to make it out here (Hollywood) the smart thing in my opinion is to learn the entire business," Bond said. "It has been a little bit hectic lately, but I am looking forward to a homecoming at Lipscomb."


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The Texas Senate has voted to push quicker testing of biological evidence collected in sexual assault cases.
Studies have found thousands of untested rape kits in Dallas and Houston and other cities. In 2003, Fort Worth got a grant to test a backlog of decade-old evidence and was able to find more than 200 hits to a federal database of criminal suspects.
The bill by Sen. Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat, requires police to give the evidence to a crime lab within 30 days after it is collected. That evidence would have to be tested within 90 days.
Davis says the bill is important to both catch rapists and help avoid wrongful convictions.
The bill now goes to the House for consideration.
— By Jim Vertuno / Associated Press


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Origins and rise of the Filipino novel: a generic study of the novel until 1940
University of the Philippines Press, 1983 - Literary Collections - 389 pages
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A parade!
Yes a parade!
Make way for the parade...the parade...the parade of aaaaasssssssssholessssss!
Have I got a story for you! I may perhaps be on a slight mission with this one here but there are only few things that truly get under my skin...the first of which is lying. It's ugly and gives wrinkles so don't do it! the second is disrespect and ignoring people - there are two things but they annoy me equally as such and if you're ignoring someone or me, it's disrespectful and lastly...it's
Ya, I said it.
I think that parents are disgusting for the most part. I don't have perfect children and I am imperfect myself. I have flaws and I make mistakes...I feed my kids popcorn and ice cream cake for dessert....this only has happened once so don't call CAS on me or anything but it's true....I didn't write the rule book because if I did, we would be allowed to drink out of the carton of milk, swear like sailors but rather than the kids hear our F-bombs they would hear whining in their ears so they knew how painful it was to listen too....BUT, my point that I am trying to make, I am not an asshole parent.
Case in point.
ODG (oldest daughter girl) wants to call her friend - we'll call her Bianca because that's a pretty snotty name - so I say sure, give her a call. I know this is code for I want to plan a play date but I'm not an asshole so it's all good. Bianca and ODG talk for a bit and I hear the climax of the conversation - the part I dread for the most part - "put your mommy on the phone and I'll get mine...". She does have the cutest puppy dog eyes and was so excited to speak with Bianca (who's mom probably be-dazzles her acid wash jacket) that I couldn't flat out say I don;t want to talk with her... so I get on the phone with my vanilla cupcake voice "hello, this is the best mother of the year, nice to meet you!" the voice on the end sounds like Deloris from the diner with her ciggy hanging out of her mouth...grumbly..raspy...like Marg Simpson. it's harsh and rude....it is unwelcoming....I hate it instantly. "ugh, so what are these girls doing" Marg asks while lighting up her 4 cigarette in a row. "well they were looking to have a play date and I wasn't sure of your family's schedule, so I am unsure what would work." instantly Marg answers me and says "well, like during the day or what?" no you asshole, at night..the first time I want your bedazzled kid at my house is for a sleepover so I can listen to her cry about how horrible you are....no you jack ass.. during the day! "yes, that would be best for Sophia, during the day; but we weren't sure what dates worked for you" This was me icing the cake....you know when you swirl the creamy delicious spread all over the cake? Ya, that was me...patronizing as it was, I was laying my fake-voice on her. What alarms me is how responsive Marg is to my fake-ness... "well, I don't work so I am free whenever, ugh, do YOU. WORK?" Yes Marg Simpson, "I work full time" you half-wit.
Right that moment in time, I lost it. I couldn't believe that I have just been down talked by a parent who bedazzles! Fuck you Marg Simpson! I work a full time job because I got knocked up 3 fucking times by my husband while I was tipsy each and every time! I work because I can't afford to bedazzle my kids things and I work because its the 20th fucking century and shit is expensive. I couldn't believe her disgust while asking me.
She literally thought at that point that I wanted a late-night play date with her child and clearly the lady doesn't believe in active listening because I had said 3 times, perhaps on a weekend. Anyhow, she tells me that she is open aside from a few days where plans had been made. Then she proceeded to ask if I have a pass for some pool near us, because she got one for her daughter because that is where the cool kids hang out...
Another amazing comment from this lady's mouth.
I believe that parents make their children who they are as adults and as of this moment in my life it is fairly ok to say, that Marg's parents are assholes too. I feel so bad for Bianca and her closet full of bedazzled clothes. I mostly feel bad for ODG as I don't know how to break it to her that her friend's mom is a bit of a douche and I don't want her hanging out with her.
Not only did she down talk the fact I work, but why do you get your kids a pass somewhere so they can be "where the cool kids are"? Seriously, why perpetuate Mean Girls - the sequal??
I think that I handled myself well...I just spread that icing all over and when I was finished, I said "it was such a pleasure talking with you, thank you for your time". She quickly responded "yeah...oh ya, thanks, great too. Let's get together to talk about the kids..." I didn't hesitate and I do believe that auto-pilot took over and responded for me because I remember thinking "no thank you" but I didn't recall saying it until I looked at ODG who was awestruck by my incredible-ness...this also could have been the face of utter humiliation - but either way I was something!
I had to take a day to get through my emotions about this parent and how she talked to me. I couldn't penalize ODG for the choice in her friend's parents' so instead I had a conversation with her today about assholes and asshole parents. I explain that I wouldn't ever tell her who to hangout with...but if I felt that someone demonstrated unacceptable ways, views or activities, that I would interfere. I also told her that you can't choose your family....lord knows life would have been really different if this were the case.. but that you can't so no matter what I have to say, just know that you're loved so much by mommy and daddy...
She looked concerned, like I was taking away something from her but I calmed her nerves before I spoke. I informed her that her friend's mom is an asshole plain and simple. I told her that while her mother may be one, her friend Bianca may not be...sometimes it skips a generation that asshole gene. I let her know why I didn't feel it appropriate to continue a converesation with Marg Simpson. ODG looked up at me and says, "no mom, it doesn't skip a generation, Bianca can be an asshole too!"
I don't feel bad that I haven't called them today and I don't feel bad that Iam not going to do anything but relax this weekend rather than drive all over for one kid to go here and another to go there and ODG to go to the asshole's house.
Thank you jebus for letting this parent be an asshole! I was beginning to wonder if I was being overly harsh in my thoughts...but I am not!! There truly are a lot of asshole parents out there.


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Boston parents are outraged after the Department of Public Health and the public school system handed out packages of free condoms to students.
But it's not what you think. It's not the condoms that got parents upset; it was what was on them.
Boston's WCVB-TV reports the 40,000 or so donated condoms had risque messaging on their labels, such as "One lucky lady" and "hump one."
For their part in it, DPH and the school system said they did not select the packaging and are already re-distributing the condoms with more "neutral" messaging.
The condoms were given out as part of a public health program. Only high school students who received counseling about safe sex were eligible to receive them.
Below is a gallery of surprising facts about sex.


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One Quick Handwriting Transcription Challenge Every Day-for the genealogist in you
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Getting My Lincoln, Nebraska Homestead
7 comments:
Joseph H EadesReplyDelete
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Joseph H. Oades is it.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousNovember 8, 2010 at 9:21 PM
This would be Joseph Henry Oades he is in my family tree he was born in Enland emigrated to Canada. Joseph's sister legally accused Joseph of murdering by suffocation his wife. Joseph was acquited by jury trial onReplyDelete
April 13, 1864 in Canada.
- DigitalclockJuly 1, 2011 at 7:36 AM
Joseph Henry Oades is an ancestor of mine. Do you have any more information about the murder case?ReplyDelete
I don't have any information about the murder case as it was mentioned by another poster. I do have information on where and when he and Emmar Sargent were divorced in Nebraska.ReplyDelete
- DigitalclockJuly 3, 2011 at 5:20 AM
This would mean that he was married three times-- to Elizabeth Blake Clark (who died in 1863), to Mary Eliza Hickling (who died in 1871), and Emma Sargent. When were they divorced? Joseph Henry Oades died in 1885.ReplyDelete


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CDL A Company Driver - Regional Dry Van - Home 2-3 Times/Week
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$46,150.00 -64,230.00/year*
Hershey , PA
500 Homestead Ln
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Simbeck Inc. is hiring CDL-A company drivers for regional dry van positions! Our drivers get home 2-3 times per week, including most weekends and enjoy other benefits that make their career with Simbeck rewarding and positive. If you have 1 year of verifiable tractor-trailer experience in the last 3 years, we'd like to talk to you! (Students accepted in VA - see requirements & call for details)
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Get home 2-3 times per week, including most weekends
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STUDENTS: If you are a student driver, you must live in the Winchester, VA area and have graduated from a driving school
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About Us: With a fleet of over 70 trucks, Simbeck Inc. is located along Interstate 81 in Northern Virginia providing us access to all major shipping corridors along the East coast, from Virginia to Texas. Safety and service are our primary objectives. We are proud to have received the Gold National Safety Award from Great West Casualty. Our 98% on-time delivery rate earned us the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Carrier-of-the-Year awards from Newell Rubbermaid.
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2012 Best Poetry Books of Indiana
Winner: And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana
And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana is a wonderful volume, richly produced, with gorgeous cover art and a fitting allusion to T. S. Eliot in its title. The book is outstanding as a comprehensive anthology of the best and most important of Indiana poetry through the generations. The editors, Jenny Kander and C. E. Greer, have done a magnificent job of selecting representative works of all the poets, and the foreword by Roger Mitchell is exceedingly informative and accessible. The variety of styles, drawing from the full historical corpus of poetry in the Hoosier state, is extremely impressive, offering something for every imaginable taste. As an encapsulation of an essential part our state's literary history, this book is deserving of a place of honor in the personal library of any lover of things either poetic or Hoosier. As a resource for connoisseur or novice, it would be well placed on a bookshelf next to Czeslaw Milosz'z A Book of Luminous Things and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems.
And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana edited by Jenny Kander (Bloomington) and C. E. Greer (Bloomington). Indiana Historical Society Press, Indianapolis, IN
Finalist: Airmail from the Airpoets
Airmail from the Airpoets gives a delightful, intimate, almost voyeuristic, peek into conversations in verse among a small group of very fine poets, including two Indiana Poets Laureate. The four dubbed themselves the "Airpoets" and began exchanging postcard poems after their poetry was incorporated into the stained glass windows at the new Indianapolis International Airport. The ingenious strategy of sending one another poems on postcards during their respective world travels, and then compiling them into one book, inspires in the reader a sense of personal involvement. The visual presentation is simple and clever, utilizing postmarks and drawings, created by one of the poets, in the form of a different postage stamp for each of the four, and a propeller-driven seaplane on the cover. The poems are pithy, often playful, blending a Twitter-like economy (some are actually haiku) with the warmth and familiarity of a common item from an all but by-gone era... the humble postcard. Rather than an opulent literary banquet, this little book offers a dish of delectable hors d'oeuvres. Delicious.
Airmail from the Airpoets by Joyce Brinkman (Indianapolis), Ruthelen Burns (Carmel), Joe Heithaus (Greencastle), Norbert Krapf (Indianapolis). San Francisco Bay Press, Norfolk, VA
Finalist: The Moon from Every Window
In The Moon from Every Window, Rob Griffith inexorably draws the reader into a world of loneliness, longing, even despair, while tempering that world with humor and the comfort of familiar daily life. Using a wide-ranging mastery of poetic form, Mr. Griffith plants the reader's feet firmly in everyday existence, then sends their heart off on solitary peregrinations in search of knowing, meaning, and hope. Mundane situations provide points of departure for explorations through history, quantum physics, even zombie hilarity, always to return to a well of loneliness and a yearning for love, understanding, or completion.
The Moon from Every Window by Rob Griffith (Evansville). WordTech Communications, LLC, Cincinnati, OH


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Laura Ashley The Belsfield Hotel4
Kendal Road,Bowness-On-Windermere, Windermere, LA23 3EL
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"Had a 2 day stay last week it was lovely the hotel is spotless and in a great location both the views and accessibility for town..."
"Initially booked 2 nights in a lakeview room for my fiancés 40th birthday! Problem occurred with our room unfortunately.They were deeply sor..."
"Definitely a great hotel - fabulous rooms, great views and good facilities including a great Terrace for afternoon tea and drinks Probably n..."
"A fabulous hotel, and will definitely stay again. We had a beautiful room overlooking the lake. The en suite was small but perfectly formed...."
"From the moment that we arrived at The Belsfield we were greeted by a lovely bubbly receptionist who couldn't do enough for us. She booked u..."
About the hotel
Situated in Bowness on the Eastern shore of Lake Windermere and directly overlooking the "Belle Isle", the Laura Ashley Hotel The Belsfield is the perfect place from which to enjoy a holiday in Windermere and was voted "Largest Hotel of The Year 2015" at the Cumbria Tourism Awards. Set in 6 acres of landscaped gardens the boutique hotel offers unparalleled views over Lake Windermere in the foreground, and on the farther shore can be seen the often snow-capped Langdale Pikes and the Fairfield Horseshoe. The Laura Ashley Hotel The Belsfield has 62 designer bedrooms, including 25 Lake View bedrooms and 12 Garden View rooms, with 2 Four Poster bedrooms and Suites all enjoying views looking down Lake Windermere.
Dining is provided in the Belsfield Restaurant and Belsfield Brasserie, with drinks in the Lounge Bar and opportunities to relax and take tea or coffee in the Drawing Room and Library. The setting makes the hotel the perfect location for your dream wedding, with a beautiful new glass reception overlooking Lake Windermere creating a magnificent arrival. Facilities for up to 100 guests are available. Newly refurbished meeting rooms with state of the art conferencing facilities make the hotel the ideal venue for your company event in the Lake District. We are also able to assist in organising special events within the grounds for special motivational or sales driven events using tents and various performances.
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- Hotel Non-Smoking Throughout, Disabled Facilities, Air conditioning in rooms, 24 Hour Reception, Cots available, Wedding Licence, Safety Deposit Box, Tea/Coffee making facilities in each room, Hairdryer in each room, Iron And Board In Each Room, Telephone In Each Room, 24 Hour Room Service, Laundry/Valet Service, Wake Up Call Available, Interconnecting rooms available, Porter, Ground floor bedrooms
- Parking
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- Dining
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- Disabled Access Public Areas, Disabled Access Bedrooms, Disabled toilets on ground floor, Wheelchair Access, Wheelchair Access To Reception, Wheelchair Access To Restaurant, Wheelchair Access To Bar, Wheelchair Access To Disabled Car Parking Spaces
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- Up to 15 years old
- 23/03/2017 to 31/03/2026 - Dear Guest Our indoor pool facility will be closed for the foreseeable future, we apologise for any inconvenience caused The price shown is based on the occupancy and dates you have searched for. Prices and availability are subject to change based on the arrival date, number of nights and occupancy searched for. All prices are inclusive of all local taxes.
- Pets are not allowed
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78% would recommend it to a friend
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Had a 2 day stay last week it was lovely the hotel is spotless and in a great location both the views and accessibility for town...
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Initially booked 2 nights in a lakeview room for my fiancés 40th birthday.
Problem occurred with our room unfortunately.They were deeply sor...
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The Middle East's largest and most pivotal state is careening toward a grave crisis as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Egypt call for embattled Islamist President Mohamed Morsi to step down. On Monday, protesters looted and burned the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which backs Mr. Morsi. This dangerous new confrontation threatens not only to derail the country's uncertain democratic transition, but also to unleash a wave of economic and social chaos.
Protesters want President Morsi, who was elected last year, and his Muslim Brotherhood regime deposed via early presidential elections. The immediate need, though, is for Morsi and opposition leaders to negotiate a way forward together. That will have to involve agreeing to fix Egypt's disastrous constitutional order – which has fueled deep distrust in Morsi. Better institutions won't magically resolve the political impasse, but the impasse cannot possibly be resolved without better institutions – a democratically elected parliament, for instance, and a much less powerful presidency.
The government's critics have legitimate, serious grievances: Morsi and his allies in the Brotherhood's political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), have seemed much more interested in pressing a narrow and divisive Islamist agenda than in actually running a country or pursuing desperately needed economic and political reforms. Their sheer incompetence at keeping Egypt functioning is quickly turning even the Brotherhood's electoral supporters against them.
Much of the unfolding disaster, however, precedes Morsi. It can be traced back to undemocratic decisions about government that were made shortly after the January 2011 uprising that forced dictator Hosni Mubarak from power.
Those decisions were made by the interim governing body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Instead of taking the time to craft a durable constitutional order through a consensual process, the military leadership gave this responsibility to a parliament that had yet to be formed.
That parliament, which took office in January 2012 and was dominated by the FJP and even more conservative Islamist elements, predictably mucked up the job by creating a largely self-serving, heavily Islamist constitutional drafting committee that was only minimally agreeable to Egypt's many political, economic, and religious groups.
But even before Morsi won the final June 2012 run-off to claim the presidency, a court ruling dissolved the six-month-old parliament. This not only deprived Egypt of any countervailing institutional check on the presidency; it has also created a situation where the country's opposition has had no democratic channel through which to express its dissatisfaction with the current government.
The most recent political crisis stemmed from Morsi's appointment of Islamist politicians to govern Egypt's provinces, including the tone-deaf decision to appoint a member of the Islamic Group to lead Luxor. This is the very organization that perpetrated the horrifying terrorist attack that killed 58 foreign tourists there in 1997. The governor resigned due to the controversy.
Why does the president of Egypt still get to appoint the governors of the country's provinces? In most democratic states, candidates compete to lead provincial governments. If a ruling party loses a number of regional elections, citizens are sending a strong signal that they prefer the opposition and want changes in policy.
Of course, no such system of signaling exists in Egypt, not only because there is no legal parliament, but also because Morsi and his allies rushed through a constitution that kept all policymaking centralized in Cairo – a highly inefficient system that's more akin to authoritarianism than anything else. The resulting government seems incapable of keeping the lights on, let alone devising solutions to Egypt's most intractable problems.
This is why Egypt's politics spilled disastrously into the streets, again, this past Sunday, with protests continuing. Opposition forces are calling it Tamarod ("rebellion"), yet they seem indifferent to the implications of forcing a democratically-elected president from power. Egypt – with its currency in free-fall, its unemployment skyrocketing, and food insecurity plaguing increasing numbers of poor citizens, can ill afford another lengthy disruption of normal life.
It may be tempting for all parties to replay 2011. But Egypt's military must avoid the trap that is being set for it by both sides – either by hunting down Islamists, gunning down protesters, or staging an intervention. Military elites not only have no business governing Egypt, they are also terrible at it.
But they also must be the ones to recognize and act on the inadequacy of Egypt's ailing democratic institutions, not by ousting Morsi but by quietly forcing him to work together with the opposition until there is a consensus constitution and a plan for implementing it peacefully.
That plan must be to fundamentally reshape the constitutional order, which is unworkable, and to replace it with a more equitable set of arrangements – which would ideally include granting more powers to parliament, prohibiting the trial of civilians in military courts, and devolving some power and responsibility to elected regional governments.
Crucially, these reforms would make it harder for any political force, not just the Muslim Brotherhood, to abuse its power.
In the meantime, Morsi and his opponents must recognize the necessity of negotiations before they are all upstaged by a military coup or the kind of Iraq-style state collapse that everyone now fears. Cairo's bumbling rulers and their furious opposition would do well to remember that the people wanted, as the famous revolutionary slogan went, the fall of the regime – not the fall of Egypt itself.
David M. Faris is an assistant professor of political science at Roosevelt University.


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Convergence is going to be a major theme for Ubuntu 14.04, not just at the OS and Unity 8 levels, but also for the apps that run on it. The Core Apps, those apps that were developed by the community and included by default in the last release, are no exception to this. We want to make sure they all converge neatly and usefully on both a tablet and on the desktop. So once again we are asking for community design input, this time to take the existing application interfaces and extend them to new form factors.
How to submit your designs
We have detailed the kind of features we want to see for each of the Core Apps on a Convergence wiki page. If you have a convergence design idea you would like to submit, send it as a file attachment or link to it online in an email to email@example.com along with any additional notes, descriptions, or user stories. The design team will be reviewing the submitted designs live on their bi-weekly Design Clinics (Dec 4th and Dec 18th) at 1400 UTC. But before you submit your ideas, keep reading to see what they should include.
Extend what's there
We don't want to add too many features this cycle, there's going to be enough work to do just building the convergence into the app. Use the existing features and designs as your starting point, and re-imagine those same features and designs on a tablet or desktop. Design new features or modify existing ones when it makes the experience better on a different form factor, but remember that we want the user to experience it as the same application across the board, so try and keep the differences to a minimum.
Form follows function
There's more to a good design than just a good looking UI, especially when designing convergence. Make sure that you take the user's activity into account, plan out how they will access the different features of the app, make sure it's both intuitive and simple. The more detail you put into this the more likely you are to discover possible problems with your designs, or come up with better solutions that you had originally intended.
Think outside the screen
There is more to convergence that just a different screen size, and your designs should take that into consideration. While it's important to make good use of the added space in the UI, think about how the user is going to interact with it. You hold a tablet differently than you do a phone, so make sure your designs work well there.
On the desktop you have even more to think about, when the user has a keyboard and mouse, but likely not a touch screen, you want to make sure the interface isn't cumbersome. Think about how scrolling will be different too, while it's easy to swipe both vertically and horizontally on a phone or tablet, you usually only have a vertical scroll wheel on a desktop mouse. But, you also have more precise control over a mouse pointer than you do with a finger-tip, so your interface should take advantage of that too.
Resources available to you
Now that you know what's needed, here are some resources to help you. Once again we have our community Balsamiq account available to anybody who wants to use it to create mockups (email me if you need an account). I have created a new project for Core Apps Convergence that you can use to add your designs. You can then submit links to your designs to the Design Team's email above. The Design Team has also provided a detailed Design Guide for Ubuntu SDK apps, including a section on Responsive Layouts that give some suggested patterns for different form factors. You can also choose to use any tools you are comfortable with, as long as they Design Team and community developers can view it.Read more


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Namibia is an upper-middle-income country with perennial food deficits, recurring droughts and floods, high rates of chronic malnutrition - and one of the highest levels of HIV/AIDS in the world. Income distribution in Namibia is highly distorted with about 35 percent of the country's population living on less than US$ 1 a day.
While the country's economy is heavily dependent on the mining sector, roughly half of Namibia's two million people rely on subsistence agriculture, characterized by low productivity and high variability due to water scarcity, erratic rainfall, poor soils and low capacity to support intensive agricultural methods. At the national level, Namibia is food secure. However, access to adequate food for marginalized and vulnerable populations remains a constant challenge, contributing to the current, unacceptable levels of chronic malnutrition.
In 2009, a FAO/WFP Crop, Livestock and Food Security Assessment estimated Namibia's annual cereal requirement at 289,000 metric tons of which 139,000 metric tons were produced locally while the rest was met through imports. With high global food and fuel prices, however, rises in the cost of food have increased pressure on the most vulnerable households and made access to food by poor households even more problematic. HIV/AIDS is another developmental challenge for Namibia.
The national HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is about 17.8 percent with the highest prevalence found among the most productive age group of 25-44 years. Of the 150,000 orphans in Namibia, 69,000 had been orphaned due to HIV/AIDS. The country still hosts some 6,500 refugees and asylum seekers, most of whom fled civil war in neighboring Angola. As the situation in Angola improved many refugees returned home. However, the conflict in the Great Lakes Region created a new wave of asylum seekers arriving from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Refugees and asylum seekers live in the Osire settlement in central Namibia.
Refugee Relief: Since 1999, WFP has been providing food assistance to Angolan and other refugees and asylum seekers in Namibia. WFP still provides monthly food rations to some 6,500 refugees and asylum seekers from other countries, most of them in the Great Lakes region. Efforts are being made to find a durable solution to the refugee situation. WFP will provide a three-month food package to refugees who decide to return home.
Flood Response: WFP gives technical assistance to the Government of Namibia to deliver life-saving food assistance to people affected by floods, mainly in the northern and north-eastern parts of Namibia. Specific support is provided in the areas of food assistance programming and associated logistics including beneficiary targeting, warehouse and commodity management, food distribution and reporting.


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Pixel is their attempt to create a Chromebook that the boss would be proud to take home.
In terms of design, the Google (GOOG) folks have achieved their goal. The Pixel is thinner and lighter than Apple (AAPL)'s comparable MacBook Pro, but feels just as sturdy. Like the Apple laptops, the Pixel's case is made from aluminum, not from the plastic found on the less-expensive Chromebooks. The Pixel has sharper edges and is much more rectangular than the MacBook Pros, which gives it a sleek, modern look.
The Pixel takes another page from Apple by including a high-resolution screen similar to Apple's "Retina" display. In fact, the Pixel's screen is even higher resolution than those in Apple's new MacBook Pros. It's beautiful and bright, making text and pictures super-sharp.
But Google has also looked beyond Apple for inspiration. The Pixel features a touch screen like those found in many of the latest Windows laptops. And it includes a powerful Intel (INTC) Core i5 processor, which is standard fare on Apple and Windows-based notebooks, but is unique for a Chromebook.
The processor makes a difference. While the Samsung Chromebook I recently tested felt sluggish, the Pixel is snappy and responsive, instantly resuming from sleep and quickly switching among tabbed Web pages.
The Pixel also offers some uncommon features. One model includes an LTE radio, which provides a fast Internet connection when you aren't near a Wi-Fi hotspot. That model also includes a limited amount of monthly broadband access from Verizon for two years.
All models of the Pixel come with 1 terabyte of space on the Google Drive cloud storage service for free for three years. That's a bargain, because Google typically charges $50 a month for that much space.
But despite all of its bells and whistles, the Pixel is still a Chromebook and suffers the same limitations as the others.
Because Chrome is designed to run Web-based apps, the operating system lacks many popular PC applications. You won't find Skype, for example, or Photoshop or many high-end video games. And if you need to use special software for work or to connect to a device in your house, you can almost be certain that software won't be available for Chrome.
That lack of applications means you simply can't do as much with a Chromebook as you can with a Mac or Windows PC. If you're spending only $250 for a basic Chromebook, that shortcoming is acceptable. But it's not when you're spending $1,300, which is the starting price of the Pixel. For that money, you can get a very nice Windows machine or Apple's MacBook Air.
And some of the Pixel's embellishments that help to drive up its price seem unnecessary. The touch screen in particular seems to have little use. Google hasn't redesigned Chrome's interface to take advantage of the touch screen. And unlike some of the new Windows notebooks, the Pixel's screen doesn't detach or fold back on itself, so you can't use the device like a tablet.
While the screen is wonderful, it has one huge drawback: it drains the device's battery. Google says users should see up to five hours of battery life from the Pixel. That's already less than you'd get on many of the latest Mac or Windows laptops. But in my testing, the battery life wasn't even as good as advertised; I got around 4 1/2 hours of use at best.
So while I understand Google's impulse and appreciate the Pixel's design and display, I'm not convinced that anyone yet needs a premium Chromebook.
Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or email@example.com. Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv.
What: Google Chromebook Pixel laptop
Likes: High-resolution screen; fast processor; solid-feeling aluminum body; sleek, modern design; optional LTE radio; 1 terabyte of free space on Google Drive
Dislikes: Pricey; lacks access to certain popular PC programs; doesn't take advantage of included touch screen; relatively short battery life.
Specs: 1.8 GHz, dual-core Intel Core i5 processor; 12.85-inch, 2560 x 1700 pixel screen; 4GB memory.
Price: $1,300 for Wi-Fi-only model with 32GB storage; $1,450 for model with LTE radio, Wi-Fi and 64GB of storage.
Web: www.chromebook.com