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Marcos Matos
DeveloperMarcos is a software developer with lots of experience in working with distributed agile teams. He's passionate about writing good code, with a keen eye for applying fundamental object oriented principles and writing meaningful tests. His main languages are Ruby and Javascript, with a solid background on both back-end and front-end development. Marcos loves to study all sorts of programming related topics, his current focus is on learning functional programming (monads are fun!), compiler theory and seminal object oriented papers.
Specialties: Web Development, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Client Side Frameworks (Backbone.js), NoSQL Databases, .NET, Haskell

subset: commoncrawl


text: Tails are irresistible to toddlers, and in Matthew Van Fleet's sturdy touch-and-feel board book, preschool-age pokers and prodders can finally tug to their heart's content. Engaging, cartoonish animals from tigers to pangolins romp across the pages as the rhyming text bounces along: "Tails fluffy, / Tails stringy, / Scaled tails strong and—clingy!" Pull tabs, lift-able flaps, tufts of fur, and even a scratch-and-sniff skunk tail provide plenty of tactile surprises. Along the way, youngsters will learn about counting, opposites, and how animals use their tails. A tried and true tail-wagger!


text:
Pluralis: Stop Investing in the Process. Start Paying for Results.
Despite having uncovered the secrets of successful Landing Page traffic optimization, conversion optimization still seems to have everyone stumped. Even when using the wittiest copy and eye-catching graphic design, it is often impossible to determine if a Landing Page will convert traffic to customers.
Latest Tweets
@jesseosher https://t.co/ZwlqIlG9QW
- Tuesday Dec 8 - 12:04pm
RT @nadiyashah: Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me. - Carl Sandburg #quote
- Sunday Dec 6 - 1:23am


text:
Candice manages the day-to-day operations of Cleverbird. An interior designer by trade, Candice merges unique design insight with flawless operations skills to produce exceptional results. When she's not taming the paperwork, Candice can be found binging on House of Cards and practicing her southern drawl.
Dan is known for "dreaming in code." Master of all things programming, Dan plays an integral part of the Cleverbird Creative machine. In his spare time, you can find him playing World of Warcraft and chugging Red Bulls.
As co-founder and creative director, Sam brings 10 years of creative experience obsession to Cleverbird. He is passionate about bringing client goals to life, and champions for the success of every project with great energy. He is also the only person alive who doesn't care for french fries. What?
Alice sees the internet pixel by pixel. As a designer / developer at Cleverbird Creative, she helps breathe life into our websites after a few clicks and clacks on her keyboard. Alice is always on a quest for a good book, but will never fall as hard as she did for Harry Potter.
This guy sleeps on the job most days, but that's because he's a dog.


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Oh look! A MiniTest::Spec::DSL module! Eat your heart out DHH.
Contains pairs of matchers and Spec classes to be used to calculate the superclass of a top-level describe. This allows for automatically customizable spec types.
See: #register_spec_type and #spec_type
Define an 'after' action. Inherits the way normal methods should.
NOTE: type
is ignored and is only there to make porting
Equivalent to MiniTest::Unit::TestCase#teardown.
# File minitest/spec.rb, line 182 def after type = nil, &block define_method :teardown do self.instance_eval(&block) super() end end
Define a 'before' action. Inherits the way normal methods should.
NOTE: type
is ignored and is only there to make porting
Equivalent to MiniTest::Unit::TestCase#setup.
# File minitest/spec.rb, line 168 def before type = nil, &block define_method :setup do super() self.instance_eval(&block) end end
Returns the children of this spec.
# File minitest/spec.rb, line 151 def children @children ||= [] end
Define an expectation with name desc
. Name gets morphed to a
proper test method name. For some freakish reason, people who write specs
don't like class inheritance, so this goes way out of its way to make sure
that expectations aren't inherited.
This is also aliased to specify and doesn't require a desc
Hint: If you do want inheritence, use minitest/unit. You can mix and match between assertions and expectations as much as you want.
# File minitest/spec.rb, line 200 def it desc = "anonymous", &block block ||= proc { skip "(no tests defined)" } @specs ||= 0 @specs += 1 name = "test_%04d_%s" % [ @specs, desc ] define_method name, &block self.children.each do |mod| mod.send :undef_method, name if mod.public_method_defined? name end name end
Essentially, define an accessor for name
Why use let instead of def? I honestly don't know.
# File minitest/spec.rb, line 222 def let name, &block define_method name do @_memoized ||= {} @_memoized.fetch(name) { |k| @_memoized[k] = instance_eval(&block) } end end
Register a new type of spec that matches the spec's description. This method can take either a Regexp and a spec class or a spec class and a block that takes the description and returns true if it matches.
register_spec_type(/Controller$/, MiniTest::Spec::Rails)
register_spec_type(MiniTest::Spec::RailsModel) do |desc| desc.superclass == ActiveRecord::Base end
# File minitest/spec.rb, line 120 def register_spec_type(*args, &block) if block then matcher, klass = block, args.first else matcher, klass = *args end TYPES.unshift [matcher, klass] end
Figure out the spec class to use based on a spec's description. Eg:
spec_type("BlahController") # => MiniTest::Spec::Rails
# File minitest/spec.rb, line 134 def spec_type desc TYPES.find { |matcher, klass| if matcher.respond_to? :call then matcher.call desc else matcher === desc.to_s end }.last end
Commenting is here to help enhance the documentation. For example, code samples, or clarification of the documentation.
If you have questions about Ruby or the documentation, please post to one of the Ruby mailing lists. You will get better, faster, help that way.
If you wish to post a correction of the docs, please do so, but also file bug report so that it can be corrected for the next release. Thank you.
If you want to help improve the Ruby documentation, please visit Documenting-ruby.org.


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If this poetry of nature does not change the way we view our place in the universe, providing not mere facts but new meaning, then we are truly spiritually bereft. Yet too many people feel that they must invent alternative realities to justify human existence.
As a literary scholar - i.e. a person who makes a living from "alternative realities" - I find the latter statement not only bewilderingly naïve, but also fundamentally offputting. Krauss may make this point in the context of a more general critique of religious thinking, but, as Francis rightly points out, by extending a critique of religion to an attack on myth (i.e. the literary imagination) as a whole, Krauss fails to acknowledge the more general cognitive significance of our ability to create alternative realities.
I find this surprising, as I have been under the impression that the human mind's fiction-making abilities have been one of the pet interests in the cognitive sciences in recent years – giving an entirely new (and timely) meaning to the term "constructionism". Take the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, for instance, who has long emphasised the (unconscious) constructive and interpretive processes of the brain that allow humans to successfully navigate the world.
Furthermore, it seems plausible that our more conscious engagement in fiction-making may have cognitive and hence evolutionary significance, too. Storymaking and -telling are cross-cultural universals, a fact that has led evolutionary psychologists and humanities scholars influenced by evolutionary psychology to speculate on their adaptive significance. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, for instance, suggests that (in our ancestral past) selection might have favoured groups in which vital information could be exchanged in particularly effective ways, notably in the form of stories.
Our storytelling ability seems to be related to the human brain's cognitive specificity. The cognitive psychologist Alan Leslie and the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have explored the implications of our brain's apparent and reliable ability to distinguish between fact and fiction - what is known as "decoupled cognition". Cosmides and Tooby have used this capacity as their point of departure to argue that our ability to create fictional realities is crucial to the ongoing (and pleasure-inducing) training of the human brain's evolved architecture. We are not only able to create and enter fictional worlds, we have evolved to do so - and get a kick out of it to boot (see their essay "Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?").
As the narratologist H. Porter Abbott put it in an essay on the evolutionary basis of the human capacity for storytelling (in Narrative 8/2000), this evolved capacity has helped shape human consciousness, developing not only our ability to represent lived experience, but also to imagine that which we have not yet experienced (and maybe never will):
Historical narrative, by its nature, extends away from what we are empirically aware of in the present; it goes back into the past where we cannot see or touch things yet still affirm them as true. It is a habit of mind that allows us to do what no other animal would think of doing – construct the truth. And it is also, of course, only a short remove from the fashioning of the immense analepsis which we call history to extend a world of time proleptically into the future, often with the same remarkable ability to make it true, despite a complete absence of empirical verifiability.
Religion, too, takes place on the level of narrative prolepsis; in that sense, it is intrinsically related to literature - and ought to be seen in this light. It is a fallacious argumentative leap to conclude (as Krauss seems to be doing) that all alternative worlds inevitably lead to dangerous scientific naivety. To the contrary (and that is the anti-ideology message that I torture my poor students with), the engagement with fictional worlds may actually train our critical abilities, asking us to explore the sources and intentions of ideas put forward within alternative worlds - however pleasant and comfortable we might find them.


text:
Bouquet of Seasonal Flowers
Intercat-4204This hand tied bouquet features gerbera daisies, lilies and more. Accented with filler and greens, the bouquet is tied with a ribbon and ready for the recipient's favorite vase.
All items featured on this site represent the types of arrangements we offer and may vary depending upon availability in certain regions. Substitution Policy


text:
This is just a small selection that we have in-store as all our prints can be turned into Vintage Sign Art at request. Just drop us an email with your order to say which design you would like.
These are made look like they have been taken from a Wall in retro 50's New York Diner or from a Parisian Cafe. Based on Original Vintage signs these are totally Hand-made so every one is unique.
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These are ready to hang, no frame needed, and light enough to hang with velcro strips.
A3, A4 only Lead times can be a little longer when busy to the time they take to make
Stop buying bland!


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text:
The Borden Dispatches, Book 2
Synopsis: Birmingham, Alabama is infested with malevolence. Prejudice and hatred have consumed the minds and hearts of its populace. A murderer, unimaginatively named "Harry the Hacker" by the press, has been carving up citizens with a hatchet. And from the church known as Chapelwood, an unholy gospel is being spread by a sect that worships dark gods from beyond the heavens.
This darkness calls to Lizzie Borden. It is reminiscent of an evil she had dared hoped was extinguished. The parishioners of Chapelwood plan to sacrifice a young woman to summon beings never meant to share reality with humanity. An apocalypse will follow in their wake which will scorch the earth of all life.
Unless she stops it…
Review: I liked the first volume as it introduced many interesting ideas and I was curious to discover this second novel. I must say that I enjoyed this volume a little more than the last one, which was a pleasant surprise.
20 years have passed since the end of the previous novel and Lizzie is more alone than ever in her mansion. Nance has disappeared without a trace, Emma is gone as well as well as the dear doctor we had learned to get to know. Everyone thinks she's a witch and her life continues in solitude. Yet an unexpected character will return to her life by a phone call, the detective Wolf. Indeed, it seems that something strange is happening in Birmingham. A murderer with an axe rages like a distant memory without anyone understanding the motivations and an exhibit seems to show a portrait of Nance. Could Lizzie finally understand what happened to her half? But that's not all because it is the story of a young woman, Ruth, who left the sect in which she was enclosed to marry and therefore flee her father, the one who killed the priest who helped her. Elizatbeth finally thought she would have the answers to her questions, but these are only amplified when she teams up with Wolf to help the young woman and tries to understand what is happening here.
I admit that I was very surprised by the ideas of the story, it was very interesting to see the references to the Ku Klux Klan, or even the sects and I was curious to see how everything would evolve. Lizzie has not changed much over the years but it is quite sad to see the person she has become … I do not know if we will have more novels in the series but it's true that I'm curious see what might happen now. Our heroes must go through many hurdles here and it will be difficult for them to manage what they want to do. Besides, I enjoyed the passages with our heroine, I found that her chapters were the most touching, always written in the form of a letter to Emma. It really helps to more easily share all her feelings.
As you can see, I had a good time with the story and I'm curious to have more.


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text:
I was in the TOKYOPOP offices today doing my normal thing, a copy of Gakuen Alice vol. 7 on my desk to take home later, when Associate Publisher Marco Pavia strolled by and started chatting with me about it. (I've been reading the series over the course of the last week. It was also my #mangamonday pick this week on Twitter.)
Then Marco let me know that because Gakuen Alice is the most popular manga on the scanlation conglomeration site, Mangafox. As you can imagine that's quite a problem for TOKYOPOP as the licensors of Gakuen Alice. So, according to Marco, the company is speeding up the release of the manga in order to catch up with the 21 volumes already available in Japan. (For reference, TOKYOPOP is releasing vol. 10 in two weeks time.)
I'm sure I don't need to tell most of the readers of my blog that reading scanlations of licensed series is wrong and you really should be buying or borrowing from friends or your local library, but remember that scanlations steal money from the publishers who try to bring you quality manga.
Gakuen Alice is about a girl named Mikan who follows her best friend to the mysterious Alice Academy. After discovering that the Academy is a place to educate children with special powers called Alices, Mikan goes through a strange entrance test to discover her own Alice and gets a crash course in some of school's weirder charms. Mikan has a particularly rare Alice and now must face the difficult task of fitting in with her classmates. Along the way, she strives to learn more about the strange workings and going-ons at the Alice Academy.
It's a very cute manga with elementary school children in most of the main roles, but it has some dark undertones in it, so I wouldn't pass it off as too young for older readers. Please, please, PLEASE support this manga by buying it. If you need a better reason than that, then I implore you to consider the fact that I want a job at TOKYOPOP. By buying this manga, you are supporting the chance for me to get the job I want and love!


text:
Editor's Note – Are we a polarized nation? That is obvious, and to such a degree that many private citizens have had enough. So much so that they are taking advantage of the White House invitation at the "We the People" program to show how mad they are. They created petitions that are encouraged on the site and a very large number of people joined in – from over twenty states.
Of course, many of these states are very blue, most are red, and the process really only calls for Obama to respond. See More:
White House website deluged with secession petitions from 20 states
Originally posted at the Daily Caller
How would Old Glory look with 30 stars instead of 50? As far-fetched as it may sound, the White House might soon be forced by its own rules to examine the question.
On Nov.7, the day after President Barack Obama was re-elected, the White House's website received a petition asking the administration to allow Louisiana to secede.
If 25,000 people sign the petition by Dec. 7, it will "require a response" from the Obama administration, according to published rules of the White House's online "We the People" program.
The Louisiana petition has collected more than 12,300 signatures in four days. A separate effort from Texas has 15,400 supporters.
Similar petitions from 18 other states began arriving Nov. 9, bringing the total — for the moment — to 20.
The White House website publicly displays petitions that have attracted at least 150 signers.
"Michael E" from the New Orleans suburb of Slidell penned the initial proposal — the website doesn't provide last names — in which he asked the Obama administration to "[p]eacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government."
His entire petition consisted of excerpts from the Declaration of Independence.
"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," one portion read, "that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government."
"Micah H" from Arlington, Texas submitted the petition on behalf of the Lone Star State.
"The US continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government's neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending," he wrote.
Texas, he added, "maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world," making it "practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union."
What began as a pair of parallel stunts appears to have gathered steam. Other than Louisiana and Texas, states with secession-related petitions pending on the White House website now include Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Three states — Georgia, Missouri and South Carolina are each represented by two competing petitions.
While most of the petitions mimic the Louisiana effort's tribute to the Declaration of Independence, Montana's and Florida's focus on the same quoted line from Benjamin Franklin: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
And a few abandon the Founding Fathers entirely, going off instead on their own less poetic tangents.
"The Federal Government has imposed policies on Oregon that are not in Oregon's best intrests [sic],"reads one submitted by "Kristopher W" of Tillamook, Oregon. "[A]nd we as citizens would respectively and peacably [sic] seperate [sic] ourselves from a tyranical [sic] Government who cares nothing about creating a sustainable future for our children."
"just like in 1860," reads one of the two petitions submitted on behalf of the citizens of Georgia, "the south secede [sic] from the union."
"kyle. r" from Cornelia, Georgia added only that in "2012 the state of georgia [sic] would like to withdraw from the USA."
"Jason B" from Harrowgate, Tennessee volunteered only a few words to describe his request for a license to secede. "Helping the people of Tennessee," he wrote. And nothing more.
The petitions that followed those from Louisiana and Texas have attracted between 300 and 4,000. Their chances to land on a White House staffer's desk, probably for a polite guffaw, will expire between Dec. 9 and Dec. 11.
The White House did not respond to emails seeking comment.
This article was updated shortly after publication to include a petition from Arkansas.


text:
Dr. Masaru Emoto, a researcher and
alternative healer from Japan has given the world a good deal of evidence of
the magic of positive thinking. He became famous when his water molecule
experiments featured in the 2004 film, What The Bleep Do We Know?
His experiments demonstrate that human
thoughts and intentions can alter physical reality, such as the molecular
structure of water. Given that humans are comprised of at least 60% water, his
discovery has far reaching implications… can anyone really afford to have
negative thoughts or intentions?
A group of approximately 2,000 people in
Tokyo focused positive intentions toward water samples located inside an
electromagnetically shielded room in California. That group was unaware of
similar water samples set aside in a different location as controls. Ice
crystals formed in both sets of water samples, yet only certain kinds of
formations were present within the water they were concentrating on. That group
was unaware of similar water samples set aside in a different location as
Ice crystals formed from both sets of water
samples were blindly identified and photographed by an analyst, and the
resulting images were blindly assessed for aesthetic appeal by 100 independent
judges. In conclusion, the present pilot results are consistent with a number
of previous studies suggesting that intention may be able to influence the
structure of water. Here is a photo of the effects direct states of conscious
intention had on the structure of water.
The rice experiment is another famous Emoto
demonstration of the power of negative thinking (and conversely, the power of
positive thinking.) Dr Emoto placed portions of cooked rice into two
containers. On one container he wrote "thank you" and on the other "you fool".
He then instructed school children to say the labels on the jars out loud
everyday when they passed them by. After 30 days, the rice in the container
with positive thoughts had barely changed, while the other was moldy and
rotten. Here is a video demonstrating this:
Please SHARE This With
Your Friends & Family..
This post was republished from spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com. You can find the sourcest thirdmonk.net | media.noetic.org | creatingconsciously.com | ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.


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Recent budgets have done little to improve the financial position of landlords. One change stands out above the rest: the loss of higher rate tax relief on finance charges.
Many landlords have concentrated on growing their property portfolios in recent years and, taking advantage of the low interest rates, have borrowed heavily to maximise property acquisitions. In accountant speak, they are highly geared.
This strategy will come back and haunt many followers of this path as the tax relief for loan interest starts to reduce in the coming years. The changes will be:
- From April 2017, 25% of finance charges will be disallowed and replaced with a basic rate tax credit.
- From April 2018, 50% of finance charges will be disallowed and replaced with a basic rate tax credit.
- From April 2019, 75% of finance charges will be disallowed and replaced with a basic rate tax credit.
- From April 2020, only a basic rate tax credit will apply.
Landlords who only pay basic rate (20%) Income Tax on their property business may think these changes will have no effect on their tax bills, after all, the reduction in the deduction in finance charges is matched by a basic rate tax credit, but they may be mistaken. It all depends on the amount of loan or mortgage interest payments they presently pay and claim against their tax. Consider the following example:
Jo, whose rents for 2016-17 are £100,000 and loan interest is £80,000, will have taxable profits for the year of £20,000. Once the finance costs are fully disallowed, Jo's taxable income will be £100,000 (not £20,000), Income Tax will be calculated accordingly and much will be taxed at higher rates. She will be able to deduct a tax credit, based on finance charges disallowed, but only at basic rate Income Tax.
If rental profits were her only income, and with no increase or decrease in her rental income and costs, Jo's tax bill would increase from £1,800 for 2016-17, to £11,500 by the year 2020-21.
This sort of outcome would be disastrous for many landlords in a similar situation. They may be faced with selling property to reduce "leverage" and restore some sense of cash flow sanity to their tax affairs.
Clearly, there is a need to re-examine your investment strategy if your property business is similar to the above example. We can help. There may be possible changes you could make short of outright disposal. The key is to consider your options now.


text:
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text:
Government unlikely to get fully back to business for days
WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal government is expected to remain partially closed past Christmas Day in a protracted standoff over President Donald Trump's demand for money to build a border wall with Mexico.
With Trump's insistence on $5 billion for the wall and negotiations with Democrats in Congress far from a breakthrough, even a temporary measure to keep the government running while talks continued seems out of reach until the Senate returns for a full session Thursday.
From coast to coast, the first day of the shutdown played out in uneven ways. The Statue of Liberty was still open for tours, thanks to money from New York state, and the U.S. Post Office was still delivering mail, as an independent agency.
Yet the disruption has affected many government operations and the routines of 800,000 federal employees. Roughly 420,000 workers were deemed essential and were expected to work unpaid. An additional 380,000 were to be furloughed, meaning they will stay home without pay. The Senate had already passed legislation ensuring that workers will receive back pay, and the House was likely to follow suit.
No one knew how long the closures would last. Unlike other shutdowns, this one seemed to lack urgency, coming during the long holiday weekend after Trump had already declared Monday, Christmas Eve, a federal holiday. Rather than work around the clock to try to end the shutdown, as they had done in the past, the leaders of the House and the Senate effectively closed up shop. But they didn't rule out action if a deal were struck.
"Listen, anything can happen," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters after he closed the Senate's rare Saturday session hours after it opened.
But after ushering Vice President Mike Pence through the Capitol for another round of negotiations, the Republican chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, said a quick end to the shutdown was "not probable."
At the White House, Trump hosted a lunch Saturday with conservative lawmakers, including House Freedom Caucus chiefs Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Jim Jordan of Ohio, and several senators. Absent from the guest list were GOP leaders or any Democrats, who would be needed for a deal.
"I am in the White House, working hard," tweeted the president, who canceled his Florida holiday getaway to his club Mar-a-Lago due to the shutdown. First lady Melania Trump was flying back to Washington to be with her husband.
Trump's re-election campaign sent out a fundraising email late Saturday launching what he called "the most important membership program ever - the OFFICIAL BUILD THE WALL MEMBERSHIP." The president urged donors to sign up.
With Democrats set to take control of the House on Jan. 3, and Speaker Paul Ryan on his way out, the shutdown was providing a last gasp of the conservative majority before the new Congress.
Trump savored the prospect of a shutdown over the wall for months. Last week he said he would be "proud" to close down the government. He had campaigned on the promise of building the wall, and he also promised Mexico would pay for it. Mexico has refused to do so.
In recent days, though, Trump tried to shift blame to Democrats for not acceding to his demand. He has given mixed messages on whether he would sign any bill into law.
After the luncheon at the White House, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said, "It's clear to me he believes the additional funding is necessary."
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York met with Pence on Saturday at the request of the White House, according to Schumer's office. But the senator's spokesman said they remained "very far apart" on a spending agreement.
Schumer said the "Trump shutdown" could end immediately if the president simply dropped his demand for money. "If you want to open the government, you must abandon the wall," Schumer said.
Democrats said they were open to other proposals that didn't include the wall, which Schumer said was too costly and ineffective. They have offered to keep spending at existing levels of $1.3 billion for border fencing and other security.
But Trump, digging in, tweeted about "the crisis of illegal activity" at American's southern border is "real and will not stop until we build a great Steel Barrier or Wall."
Republican leaders largely stayed in the background of the negotiations. McConnell acknowledged that any deal to reopen government would require Democratic support for passage and the president's signature.
Senators approved a bipartisan deal earlier in the week to keep the government open into February and provide $1.3 billion for border security projects, but not the wall. But as Trump faced criticism from conservatives for "caving" on a campaign promise, he pushed to House to approve a package temporarily financing the government but also setting aside $5.7 billion for the border wall.
A test vote in the Senate on Friday showed that Republicans lacked the 60 votes needed to advance the House plan.
Pelosi, poised to become speaker, said in a letter to colleagues Saturday that "until President Trump can publicly commit to a bipartisan resolution, there will be no agreement before January when the new House Democratic Majority will swiftly pass legislation to re-open government."
The impasse blocked money for nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice.
Those being furloughed included nearly everyone at NASA and 52,000 workers at the Internal Revenue Service. About 8 in 10 employees of the National Park Service were to stay home; many parks were expected to close.
Some agencies, including the Pentagon and the departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, were already funded and will operate as usual. Also still functioning were the FBI, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard. Transportation Security Administration officers continued to staff airport checkpoints and air traffic controllers were on the job.
Many of Congress' most conservative Republicans welcomed such a confrontation, but most GOP lawmakers wanted to avoid one because polling found the public opposed the wall and a shutdown over it.
Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said, "This is a complete failure of negotiations and a success for no one."


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UC Berkeley Press Release
1843 stellar eruption new type of star explosion
BERKELEY – Eta Carinae, the galaxy's biggest, brightest and perhaps most studied star after the sun, has been keeping a secret: Its giant outbursts appear to be driven by an entirely new type of stellar explosion that is fainter than a typical supernova and does not destroy the star.
(Gemini Observatory artwork by Lynette Cook) |
"There is a class of stellar explosions going off in other galaxies for which we still don't know the cause, but Eta Carinae is the prototype," said Smith, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow.
Eta Carinae (η Car) is a massive, hot, variable star visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, and is located about 7,500 light years from Earth in a young region of star birth called the Carina Nebula. It was observed to brighten immensely in 1843, and astronomers now see the resulting cloud of gas and dust, known as the Homunculus nebula, wafting away from the star. A faint shell of debris from an earlier explosion is also visible, probably dating from around 1,000 years ago.
Presumably blown off by the star's fierce wind, the shells of gas and dust are moving slowly - at speeds of 650 kilometers per second (1.5 million miles per hour) or less - compared to the blast shell of a supernova.
Smith's recent observations using the international Gemini South 8-meter telescope and the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile reveal something new: Extremely fast filaments of gas moving five times faster than the debris in the Homunculus nebula were propelled away from Eta Carinae in the same event. The amount of mass in the relatively slow-moving Homunculus was already at the edge of plausibility in terms of what an extreme stellar wind could do physically, Smith said. The much faster and more energetic material he discovered poses even harsher difficulties for current theories.
Instead, the speeds and energies involved are reminiscent of material accelerated by the fast blast wave of a supernova explosion.
The fast speeds in this blast wave could roughly double earlier estimates of the energy released in the 1843 eruption of Eta Carinae, an event that Smith argues was not just a gentle surface eruption driven by the stellar wind, but an actual explosion deep in the star that sent debris hurtling into interstellar space. In fact, the fast-moving blast wave is now colliding with the slow-moving cloud from the 1,000-year-old eruption and generating X-rays that have been observed by the orbiting Chandra Observatory.
"These observations force us to modify our interpretation of what happened in the 1843 eruption," he said. "Rather than a steady wind blowing off the outer layers, it seems to have been an explosion that started deep inside the star and blasted off its outer layers. It takes a new mechanism to cause explosions like this."
If Smith's interpretation is correct, supermassive stars like Eta Carinae may blow off large amounts of mass in periodic explosions as they approach the end of their lives before a final, cataclysmic supernova blows the star to smithereens and leaves behind a black hole.
Much fainter than a supernova, the explosion that generated the fast-moving blast wave around Eta Carinae would have been similar to faint stellar explosions, sometimes called "supernova imposters," now being discovered in other galaxies by Earth-based robotic telescopes and other supernova searches. Such searches have been looking primarily for Type Ia supernovae that could help astronomers understand the accelerating expansion of the universe, but they also find other gems along the way, Smith said.
"Looking at other galaxies, astronomers have seen stars like Eta Carinae that get brighter, but not quite as bright as a real supernova," he said. "We don't know what they are. It's an enduring mystery as to what can brighten a star that much without destroying it completely."
Eta Carinae is a rare supermassive star in our galaxy, probably once having had a mass 150 times that of the sun. Such large stars burn brightly for only a few million years, all the while shedding mass as the intense light pushes the outer layers of the star away in a stellar wind. After 2 to 3 million years of this, Eta Carinae now weighs about 90 to 100 solar masses, having shed about 10 solar masses in its most recent 1843 eruption alone.
"These explosions may be the primary way by which massive stars can shed their outer hydrogen layers before they die," Smith said. "If Eta Carinae is able to shed 10 solar masses every thousand years or so, that's an efficient mechanism for peeling off a large fraction of the star."
Astronomers now believe that Eta Carinae and other luminous blue variable stars are nearing the end of their lives, having burned hydrogen in their cores into helium. If they explode at the stage where they still have an envelope of hydrogen shrouding the helium core, the resulting supernova will look vastly different from one that results from a star that sloughs off all its hydrogen before exploding.
Smith suggests that it is still unclear if supernova impostors are scaled-down versions of supernovae, failed supernovae, precursor events or entirely different kinds of explosions.
"This could be an important clue for understanding the last violent phases in the lives of massive stars," he said, noting that astronomers still cannot accurately predict the fate of stars that are 30 or more times the mass of the sun.
The observations reported in the Nature paper included visible spectra from the Blanco telescope, which is part of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), and near-infrared spectra taken with the Gemini South telescope. Both telescopes are in Chile's Andes mountains near an elevation of 9,000 feet. NOAO and the Gemini Observatory are operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
The research was supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.
Gemini Observatory release and downloadable images


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Two of my most popular posts here at DeSmogBlog were a pair of items documenting 1) just how many surveys have found Fox News viewers to be more misinformed about factual reality and 2) taking PolitiFact to task for giving Jon Stewart a "false" rating when he pointed this out.
Stewart wasn't wrong, PolitiFact was.
In these pieces, I identified 6 separate studies showing Fox News viewers to be the most misinformed, and in a right wing direction–studies on global warming, health care, health care a second time, the Ground Zero mosque, the Iraq war, and the 2010 election.
I also asked if anyone was aware of any counterevidence, and none was forthcoming. There might very well be a survey out there showing that Fox viewers aren't the most misinformed cable news consumers on some topic (presumably it would be a topic where Democrats have some sort of ideological blind spot), but I haven't seen it. And I have looked.
There really does seem to be a "Fox News effect," then, and one that is playing a central role in driving our political divide over reality in the U.S. And now comes a true tour-de-force seventh study showing that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed, this time once again about global warming.
The new paper, already flagged here by Farron Cousins, is just out in the International Journal of Press/Politics, by communication scholar Lauren Feldman of American University and her colleagues. The paper is quite sophisticated, and performs several powerful analyses. But for our purposes, here's what matters.
Feldman and her colleagues reported on their analysis of a 2008 national survey, which found that "Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance." Viewers of the station were less likely to agree that "most scientists think global warming is happening" and less likely to think global warming is mostly caused by human activities, among other measures. Viewers of CNN and MSNBC were the opposite.
And no wonder: Through a content analysis of Fox coverage in 2007 and 2008, Feldman and her colleagues also demonstrated that Fox coverage is more dismissive about climate science, and features more climate skeptics. That's no shocker, but the paper does a very good job of linking up the coverage itself with the reality denial that results in Fox viewers.
There is also a fascinating finding that those Republicans who do watch CNN/MSNBC are more persuaded than Democratic viewers are to accept global warming. In other words, Republicans in the study seem much more easily swayed by media framing than Democrats. Put them in the Fox information stream, just add water, and watch denialism sprout. Put them in another information stream, though, and something very different might happen.
I noted in my prior posts that the studies documenting the "Fox News effect" do not necessarily show causation. In other words, watching Fox may make you more misinformed, but people who believe lots of political misinformation may also gravitate towards Fox.
I actually think both things are going on simultaneously–but the new Feldman study does make a strong causal case that Fox is actively driving a lot of the problem.
In other words, why are Americans so divided today over reality and what is factually true? There are surely many causes—but one is that a news network with a powerful sway is constantly sowing right wing misinformation, and an army of followers are watching and believing it.
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Zero-Flex Garden Edging 75mm high – Weathering – Trade pack of 4
In stock
Straightcurve Zero-Flex 75mm garden edging – a high-quality pro-grade weathering steel product made for perfectly straight lines.
> 4 x 2200mm length
> 16 x Fixing Spikes
> 20 x Tek Screws
> Pre-attached connector plate with guide holes for easy installation
> Continuous smooth rolled top for added strength and child & pet safety
> Stabilising foot to prevent shunting
Straightcurve easy-install weathering steel garden edging is made with ISO Certified materials & manufacturing processes designed to deliver a high-quality product that's quick & easy to install and achieve a flawless fit & finish.
Buy with confidence.
Install with ease.
About Straightcurve:
At Straightcurve we design & manufacture a pro-grade range of durable, maintenance-free, high-quality steel garden edging, raised garden beds, and planter products. Our products are all purpose-designed to keep lawns, paths, driveways, raised garden beds and planters looking neat & tidy, beautifully designed, and simple to maintain.
Straightcurve products have quickly become a favourite among DIY gardeners and professional landscapers as they're specifically designed to achieve a flawless fit & finish, more quickly & easily than any other landscaping edge on the market.
Designed & produced by an experienced landscape designer and a seasoned product engineer, only Straightcurve steel garden edging products include the unique set of design details that combine to make such a good-looking, long-lasting, high-quality product range that anyone can install with ease.
Straightcurve garden edging products are Simply Better for:
> PRO landscapers who want to set themselves apart and elevate their projects with a higher quality finish that's more quickly & easily delivered.


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Natural Creamy Peanut Butter - Salt Free, Unsweetened - 35 lbs
- CREAMY PEANUT BUTTER || 35 lbs deliciously creamy, natural peanut butter. Our peanut butter is made by roasting and grinding blanched, dry roasted peanuts until they are wonderfully creamy
- SALT FREE, UNSWEETENED || This product has just one ingredient - peanuts!
- ETHICALLY SOURCED || Our peanuts are sourced from Nicaragua, Argentina and the USA
- CERTIFIED || Gluten Free Certified, Vegan, Kosher, Non-GMO Verified. No added preservatives
Our natural peanut butter is made by roasting and grinding blanched, dry roasted peanuts until they are wonderfully creamy. This product has just one ingredient - peanuts! Salt free and unsweetened. Peanuts are ethically sourced from Argentina, Nicaragua and the USA. Honest in Trade, Gluten-Free Certified, Vegan, Kosher Certified, and Non-GMO Verified. No preservatives added.
Packaged in a 35lb plastic bucket.
While refrigeration of this product isn't necessary, if stirring is something you wish to minimize, stir and then refrigerate. Please be aware that if left out at room temperature, natural oil separation will occur.
Shelf life: 12 months from the date of production. Once opened, we recommend a three month shelf life. We cannot guarantee product performance past the sell-by date as we do not add preservatives to our products.
Ingredients: Peanuts
Allergen Statement:
Contains Peanuts. Produced in a Peanut-only facility.
• Weight management
• Improved heart health
• Managing blood sugar levels
• Reduced risk for breast disease
• Improved muscle mass building
Each 2 tablespoons serving of peanut butter provides:
Protein. Peanut butter contains about 7 to 8 grams of plant-based protein per 2-tbsp serving. This counts toward the recommended dietary allowances (RDA) for women of 46 grams and 56 grams for men, which varies by age and activity level.
Magnesium. With about 57 milligrams of magnesium, each serving helps towards the RDA of 400–420 mg in men and 310–320 in women. Magnesium is essential for health, playing a role in over 300 chemical processes in the body.
Phosphorous. Each serving contains about 107 milligrams of phosphorus, which is about 15.3 percent of the RDA of 700mg for adults. Phosphorus helps the body to build healthy cells and bones and helps cells to produce energy.
Zinc. A serving of peanut butter provides about 0.8 mg of zinc. This is 7.7 percent of the recommended daily intake of 11 mg for men, and 10.6 percent of the RDA of 8 mg for women. Zinc is necessary for immunity, protein synthesis, and DNA formation.
Niacin. Peanut butter contains 4.21 mg of niacin per serving, which makes a useful contribution towards a person's recommended intake of 14 to 16 mg. Niacin benefits digestion and nerve function and helps produce energy.
Vitamin B-6. With 0.17 g of vitamin B-6 per serving, peanut butter provides almost 14 percent of an adult's RDA of 1.3 mg. Vitamin B-6 plays a role in over 100 enzyme reactions in the body and may be necessary for heart and immune system health.
Fiber. A serving of peanut butter provides 2 grams of fiber, contributing to the daily recommended of 25 to 30 grams. Fiber is beneficial in weight management, decreasing risk for diabetes type 2 and coronary artery disease by lowering cholesterol levels.
• Plant-based diet
• Gluten-free diet
• High protein diet
• Vegan and vegetarians
• Mediterranean diet


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Bridge the gap between perception and reality.
Would you like to build a more committed workforce, fostering stronger employee relations by creating an environment of openness and trust?
360 degree feedback is often used for developmental purposes, assisting employees to develop and improve upon their skills and behaviours.
Drake's 360 Assessments allow employees to receive confidential, anonymous feedback from the people with whom they work with each day. The 360 is an online, competency-based assessment that provides independent insights from peers, managers, and direct reports. You receive comprehensive reporting, enabling staff members to identify potential gaps in perceptions and behaviours, supported by recommendations to improve collaboration, communication, and management.
Want to Learn More?


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Weak Head Normal Form
(WHNF) A lambda expression is in weak head normal form (WHNF) if it is a head normal form (HNF) or any lambda abstraction. I.e. the top level is not a redex.
The term was coined by Simon Peyton Jones to make explicit the difference between head normal form (HNF) and what graph reduction systems produce in practice. A lambda abstraction with a reducible body, e.g.\ x . ((\ y . y+x) 2)is in WHNF but not HNF. To reduce this expression to HNF would require reduction of the lambda body:
(\ y . y+x) 2 --> 2+xReduction to WHNF avoids the name capture problem with its need for alpha conversion of an inner lambda abstraction and so is preferred in practical graph reduction systems. The same principle is often used in strict languages such as Scheme to provide call-by-name evaluation by wrapping an expression in a lambda abstraction with no arguments:
D = delay E = \ () . EThe value of the expression is obtained by applying it to the empty argument list:
force D = apply D () = apply (\ () . E) () = E
Last updated: 1994-10-31
Nearby terms:
WDM ♦ WE ♦ Weak Head Normal Form ♦ weakly typed ♦ weak typing ♦ weasel
Try this search on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Google, OneLook.


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The week in review
Latest in the ABC Harris Teeter debacle: The agent in charge of the operation that put a water-buying 20-year-old in jail with three felony charges, John Taylor, was stripped of his command of the Lynchburg office, shipped off to Staunton, and is the target of an employee grievance appeal, K. Burnell Evans reports in the Progress.
Latest bad news for McDonnell family: Twenty-one year old Sean McDonnell, a rising fourth year at UVA and son of Governor Bob McDonnell, is arrested on the Corner July 6 and charged with public drunkenness, the DP reports. The news comes as the governor is under investigation for unreported gifts from Star Scientific's Jonnie Williams.
Latest for Matt Murray: The former Allen & Allen attorney who was sanctioned for $542,000 for suggesting his client, Isaiah Lester, remove Facebook postings during a multi-million wrongful death lawsuit, faces disciplinary action by the Virginia Bar Association, according to the Progress.
Earliest closing time: Scottsville Town Council unanimously decides July 15 that speakeasies should shut down at 12:30am rather than the 2am closing required by the Virginia ABC. According to a DP story by J. Reynolds Hutchins, the town council says special-use permits give the right to mandate closing. "You don't want people who are drinking to move from one bar to another," says Mayor Barry Grove about the 12:30am cocktail curfew.
Worst washout: Dick Woods Road collapses from the heavy rains July 12. VDOT reopens the road July 15 with a temporary repair.
Most important lessons: Richmond International Airport law enforcement officers will take a two-hour course on the First and Fourth Amendments as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Charlottesvillian Aaron Tobey, who was arrested for disorderly conduct when he removed his shirt to reveal the Fourth Amendment written on his chest as a protest of full-body scanners when going through security at the airport in December 2010.
Best news for home sellers: Sales in the Charlottesville area are up 11.3 percent this year over the same quarter last year, according to the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors. The median sales price is $273,200, up 6.3 percent from a year ago, and over half the houses for sale this quarter were on the market for 40 days or fewer.
Best op-ed: "ABC debacle should stir debate on drinking age," penned by local libertarian Rick Sincere, appears in the July 14 Richmond Times-Dispatch and notes that this country's 21-year-old drinking age is the highest in the Western World and puts us in the same league as Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Oman, Pakistan, Palau and Sri Lanka.
Best bling: BackStory radio's American history guy Ed Ayers, former UVA arts and sciences dean and current University of Richmond president, is presented the National Humanities Medal July 10 by President Barack Obama at the White House.
Best news for [some] nonviolent felons: Governor McDonnell unveils his plans to streamline the restoration of voting rights for nonviolent felons, but moves some burglary and B&Es to the list of violent felonies.
Most disappointing: The majority of drug offenses remain categorized as violent.
Most heroic: Chilly, a three-year-old English bulldog mix from Mineral who whined and licked awake her owner, Heidi Parker, is honored July 16 with the Humane Society of the United States' Pets of Valor award. Parker's throat was swelling shut from an anaphylactic reaction to an allergy shot when Chilly stepped in to save her life, according to a release.
Happiest good Samaritans: Emily Kraus and her boyfriend were on the way to see a DMB show in Hershey, Pennsylvania, when she stopped to pick up a stranded biker: Dave Matthews, who was on the side of the road with a flat tire, no cell phone, and late to his own show, reports CNN. The rescue got Kraus dinner with the Dave and front-row tickets to the show.
1 comment
An op-ed about the 21 age for buying alcohol and another article about 120 of these drones working for the ABC.....
We had a more reasonable 18 year limit for awhile until uber D-bag, St. Ronnie, put the heat on all the states to roll it back to 21.
We have such a twisted society full of so many contradictions between Neo-Taliban moral codes and a culture replete with pornography in advertising and an "anything goes" code of personal conduct. Kids confused? I should think so, given the messages being sent.
How crazy we are, as a country, that 20 year old people, old enough to do anything else adults are called upon to do, have to face the later day Elliot Ness morons drawing fat salaries off our nickel and given the right to make arrests or even to gun people down who fail to comply. Surely these people could be better employed working as flagmen for VDOT?


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QuickWebP is an image compression and optimization plugin for WordPress that automatically converts images to WebP when they are uploaded to the media library. It also optimizes the image to improve your site's performance. The plugin also renames the image file to the WebP format and cleans up the file name for better SEO. Additionally, the plugin uses the cleaned up name to pre-populate the alt, caption, description, legend, and title metadata, making image management on your site easier. You can also set a maximum width and height for the image, which will automatically resize it if necessary. No API is required and the plugin is completely free, with no subscriptions or additional fees.
- Automatically converts images to WebP format when uploaded to the media library
- Optimizes images for improved site performance
- Renames image files to WebP format and cleans up file names for prevent special characters (ex : "Clé d'identification.jpg" becomes "cle-d-identification.webp")
- Pre-populates image metadata (alt, caption, description, legend, and title)
- Allows for automatic image resizing based on maximum width and height (by default max 2000px)
- No API required for convertion and optimization
- Entirely free, with no subscriptions or additional fees.
- Directly paste image from clipboard or software like Photoshop (CTRL + V OR CMD + V) directly into the WP Media Frame.
- Select library for images to convert to webp (GD or Imagick).
- Bulk convert images to webp format and preserve original images (for old media on your website).
- Preview image optimization in settings for better optimization.
How to install QuickWebP
Paste an picture from clipboard to wp media easily
Other plugin by Webdeclic
Webdeclic is a French web agency based in Paris. We are specialized in the creation of websites and e-commerce sites. We are also the creator of the following plugins:
* Mentions Legales Par Webdeclic
* Cookie Dough Compliance and Consent for GDPR
* QuickWebP – Compress / Optimize Images & Convert WebP | SEO Friendly
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Support us
⭐ If you like this plugin, please give us a 5 star rating on WordPress.org. This will motivate us to develop new features and write other plugins. ⭐
☕ If you want buy me a coffee, you can do it here : Buy me a coffee ☕
- Install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.
- Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' screen in WordPress
- Go to Media / QuickWebP and configure the plugin
Preguntas frecuentes
Does the extension replace existing images?
The extension converts the uploader image to webp format and replaces it with the webp image.
The extension does not replace existing images. If you want this functionality you can contact us. -
Can I resize my images with this extension?
Yes, you can configure it in the Resize tab.
Can I change the compression setting to save more space?
Yes, by default we set it to 75 but you can change that in the plugin settings.
Do you use the Imagify API, tinyPNG or other?
No, we do not use an API to compress images. Everything is done locally on your server at the time of upload.
Can I use this extension with a CDN or with a caching plugin?
Yes, you can use this extension with a CDN or caching plugin such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, etc.
What image formats are supported?
Supported image formats are: JPG, PNG.
Does Quick WebP improve the performance of my site?
Yes, QuickWebP improves your site's performance by converting images to WebP format. Your images will be lighter and faster to load.
How does QuickWebP help me with SEO?
QuickWebP makes SEO easy by automatically renaming image files to a clean, SEO-friendly filename when uploaded to media. It also uses this clean filename to pre-populate alt, caption, description, caption, and title metadata, which can help optimize image visibility on search engines. Additionally, by converting images to WebP format, QuickWebP can improve your site's performance, which can also contribute to better SEO rankings.
Does QuickWebP work with other plugins?
Yes, QuickWebP works with other plugins. It is compatible with most caching plugins, such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, etc. It is also compatible with most CDN plugins, such as Cloudflare, MaxCDN, etc.
Does QuickWebP work with all themes?
Yes, QuickWebP works with all themes. It is compatible with most themes, including the most popular ones, such as Astra, OceanWP, GeneratePress, etc.
Does QuickWebP work page builders?
Yes, QuickWebP works with page builders. It is compatible with most page builders, including the most popular ones, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Visual composer(WPBakery), Oxygen Builder, Gutenberg, Thrive Architect, Brizy, Live Composer, etc.
Does QuickWebP work with WooCommerce?
Yes, it works with WooCommerce.
Does QuickWebP work with SEO plugins?
Yes, it works with SEO plugins. It is compatible with most SEO plugins, including the most popular ones, such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress, etc.
From where can i copy the images to paste?
You can copy the images from any software like Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, GIMP, Canvas, Screenshot, Affinity Photo & Designer, a webpage, Finder, etc.
Colaboradores y desarrolladores
"QuickWebP – Compress / Optimize Images & Convert WebP | SEO Friendly" es un software de código abierto. Las siguientes personas han colaborado con este plugin.
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Registro de cambios
- FIX: bug on bulk convertion.
- Add buymeacoffee link in settings page.
- Add new option on rewrite rules for webp images, for better compatibility with some website.
- Bulk convert images to webp format and preserve original images (for old media on your website).
- Copy paste image on Elementor supported.
- Preview feature in settings page.
- Add GD library, and assign by default.
- Select for switch between GD or Imagick library.
- Condition for convert only JPEG and PNG images (not GIF).
- Admin notices if error.
- Better compatibility with php extensions.
- Added new feature: paste image directly from clipboard (CTRL + V OR CMD + V) directly into the WP Media Frame.
- French translation added.
- First version.


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The classroom is a dynamic environment, bringing together students from different backgrounds with various abilities and personalities. Being an effective teacher, therefore, requires the implementation of creative and innovative teaching strategies in order to meet students' individual needs.
Whether you've been teaching for two months or twenty years, it can be difficult to know which teaching strategies will work best with your students. As a teacher there is no 'one size fits all' solution, so here is a range of effective teaching strategies you can use to inspire your classroom practice.
7 Effective Teaching Strategies For The Classroom
1. Visualization
Bring dull academic concepts to life with visual and practical learning experiences, helping your students to understand how their schooling applies in the real world.
Examples include using the interactive whiteboard to display photos, audio clips, and videos, as well as encouraging your students to get out of their seats with classroom experiments and local field trips.
2. Cooperative learning
Encourage students of mixed abilities to work together by promoting small group or whole class activities.
Through verbally expressing their ideas and responding to others your students will develop their self-confidence, as well as enhance their communication and critical thinking skills which are vital throughout life.
Solving mathematical puzzles, conducting scientific experiments and acting out short drama sketches are just a few examples of how cooperative learning can be incorporated into classroom lessons.
3. Inquiry-based instruction
Pose thought-provoking questions which inspire your students to think for themselves and become more independent learners.
Encouraging students to ask questions and investigate their own ideas helps improve their problem-solving skills as well as gain a deeper understanding of academic concepts. Both of which are important life skills.
Inquiries can be science or math-based such as 'why does my shadow change size?' or 'is the sum of two odd numbers always an even number?'. However, they can also be subjective and encourage students to express their unique views, e.g. 'do poems have to rhyme?' or 'should all students wear uniforms?'.
4. Differentiation applied to teaching strategies
Differentiate your teaching strategies by allocating tasks based on students' abilities, to ensure no one gets left behind.
Assigning classroom activities according to students' unique learning needs means individuals with higher academic capabilities are stretched and those who are struggling get the appropriate support.
This can involve handing out worksheets that vary in complexity to different groups of students or setting up a range of workstations around the classroom which contain an assortment of tasks for students to choose from.
Moreover, using an educational tool such as Quizalize can save you hours of time because it automatically groups your students for you, so you can easily identify individual and whole-class learning gaps.
5. Technology in the classroom for teaching strategies
Incorporating technology into your teaching strategies is a great way to actively engage your students, especially as digital media surrounds young people in the 21st century.
Interactive whiteboards or mobile devices can be used to display images and videos, which helps students visualize new academic concepts. Learning can become more interactive when technology is used as students can physically engage during lessons as well as instantly research their ideas, which develops autonomy.
Mobile devices, such as iPads and/or tablets, can be used in the classroom for students to record results, take photos/videos, or simply as a behavior management technique. Plus, incorporating educational programmes such as Quizalize into your lesson plans is also a great way to make formative assessments fun and engaging.
6. Behaviour management
Implementing an effective behavior management strategy is crucial to gain your students' respect and ensure students have an equal chance of reaching their full potential.
Noisy, disruptive classrooms do not encourage a productive learning environment, therefore developing an atmosphere of mutual respect through a combination of discipline and reward can be beneficial for both you and your students.
Examples include fun and interactive reward charts for younger students, where individuals move up or down based on behavior with the top student receiving a prize at the end of the week. 'Golden time' can also work for students of all ages, with a choice of various activities such as classroom games or no homework in reward for their hard work.
7. Professional development for teaching strategies
Engaging in regular professional development programmes is a great way to enhance teaching strategy and learning in your classroom.
With educational policies constantly changing it is extremely useful to attend events where you can gain inspiration from other teachers and academics. It's also a great excuse to get out of the classroom and work alongside other teachers just like you!
Sessions can include learning about new educational technologies like Quizalize, online safety training (check our ready-to-use quiz), advice on how to use your teaching assistant(s), and much more.
Being an effective teacher is a challenge because every student is unique, however, by using a combination of teaching strategies you can address students' varying learning styles and academic capabilities as well as make your classroom a dynamic and motivational environment for students.
Quizalize – Try the best quiz platform for face-to-face or remote learning.
Now we want to hear from you!
What teaching strategies do you use to be an effective teacher? Have you got any top tips? Comment below and we will update the article with your ideas.


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As merchant needs increase, so do the capabilities we add to our commerce platform.
The way merchants get their products and store their inventory, as well as the places they sell from have all evolved. To help with this newfound complexity, we announced Locations at Unite this year—a new feature that gives Shopify merchants visibility and control over how inventory moves between different locations.
No more spreadsheets, no more duplicate products, no more anxiety.
No more spreadsheets, no more duplicate products, no more anxiety.
Today, we're thrilled to share that Locations has started rolling out to all Shopify merchants, and will be available to everyone within the next couple weeks. Merchants will be able to track their inventory and manage orders across all their locations with simple and intuitive interfaces. This means that Shopify can now better support merchants who sell from multiple locations.
Bridging the gap between online and offline
As merchant businesses expand, the number of locations they sell, store, and source from increases. With the roll out of Locations comes a new section in the Shopify Admin that allows merchants to view all locations they source and sell from, in one single place.
Adding new value to merchant businesses
When onboarding new clients, Shopify now provides a better out of the box solution to help you get your clients up and running faster. This makes it easier to work with new types of merchants, who have both physical and digital stores.
Apps can also start to create location-aware functionality for merchants. Apps like Store Pickup + Delivery allows merchants to arrange in-store pick-ups. Merchants can specify a location's available pick up times and buyers can pick up their order at the closest location with available inventory.
Another example of using Locations to provide value is Rewardify, which integrates into Shopify POS to offer location-specific store credits.
You might also like: Shopify Locations: What This Update Means for App Developers.
Become an invaluable part of merchant businesses
From online merchants who run occasional pop-up shops, to merchants with brick-and-mortar stores, Locations is an important feature for all stores looking to grow their business. This is why we've built this central concept into the core of Shopify.
Whether you currently have an app that could use Locations, or are an agency looking to help onboard clients with multiple locations, this new feature opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Shopify Partners.


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When I was 7 years old, living in a flat overlooking Hamra street in Ras Beirut, I read The Hobbit. I fell in love with it. I memorized all the songs and made up tunes to them; I memorized all the riddles and asked them of whoever would listen; I made up my own adventures in Mirkwood, my own encounters with Gandalf and Beorn and the Elves. I also read everything I could about Tolkien, and went in search of anything else he'd written. I decided that I too would be a writer, and that I would start with poems and work my way into fiction the way he did. In many ways I can trace much of my life's trajectory to that encounter with a single book at a delicate age — a time when all the world's paths are laid out before you, and you wait for someone or something to beckon you on to one instead of another, into one self rather than another.
I say this because almost 20 years later — sitting on my bed in a cold, damp room in Cornwall, floundering toward the end of a second graduate degree — I read Naomi Mitchison's Travel Light, and suddenly felt as if I were seeing my life thus far from a great height. I felt, very powerfully, that I had been waiting for it, and that it was telling me the story of the person I might have been had I read it when I was a child.
Travel Light is the story of Halla, a girl born to a king but cast out onto the hills to die. She lives among bears; she lives among dragons. But the time of dragons is passing, and Odin All-Father offers Halla a choice: Will she stay dragonish and hoard wealth and possessions, or will she travel light?
Contrary to appearances, this is not a simple book with a didactic moral at the end. It begins as a fable but resists conventional fable structures, moving from mythic to recorded history in the way the sun moves across the sky. In the dawn of the book, Halla is called Bearsbairn and Heroesbane; at noon she is Halla Godsgift; as evening draws on, her earlier names cast shadows over her narrative. The story shifts smoothly from bear-nurses to the heart of Constantinople, from the dragon-imparted economics of sheep and princesses to the intrigues of the Holy Roman Empire. And through it all Halla remains Halla, changing from protagonist of her own story to miracle of someone else's, but always and utterly herself.
I had never encountered Mitchison's work before reading Travel Light. A cursory Googling revealed, to my astonishment, that there were good reasons for me to think of this book and The Hobbit as two sides of my heart's coin: Mitchison and Tolkien were good friends, and Mitchison was among the first readers of The Lord of the Rings before it was published (Travel Light was published in 1952, Lord of the Rings in 1954). Reading further I discovered, to my astonishment, that Mitchison had written more than 90 books, that she died in 1999 at the age of 101, that she had led a spectacular life full of travel and social activism, that she had written science fiction, historical fiction, nonfiction and poetry — and that she was nowhere to be found in the canon of genre fiction. Here was a woman who had, in Travel Light, almost certainly written certain points in conversation with The Hobbit, and more: In her Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), she wrote in the voice of a character who pursued space exploration that privileged communication over conquest; looked at free love, birth control and child-rearing with delight; and seriously considered Islam as a viable religious choice for herself. Naomi Mitchison was imaginative, progressive and astonishing, but in the course of three English degrees — almost 10 years of studying literature — I had never even heard of her.
That Mitchison's life and works should have been so unfairly relegated to secret history drove home my feeling of books as points of divergence to alternate timelines; that having read The Hobbit rather than Travel Light at that fragile, formative moment of being a child in Lebanon standing at a crossroads of languages, religions and literary traditions nudged me into a different life. Who might I have been if I had met Halla Bearsbairn before Bilbo Baggins? How different might my attitude toward dragons have been if I'd met Uggi before Smaug? How different would the spiritual landscapes of fantasy and science fiction be if they had accepted as antecedents works that showed a corrupt Byzantine Christianity and sympathy toward Islam?
But, most crucially for me, I wonder: Where might I have gone if, instead of a middle-aged Hobbit enamored of his pantry, I had embraced a girl who lost three homes before choosing the open road?
I don't regret, at all, having The Hobbit at the core of me, and will defend its songs and riddles and elves and spiders to the end of my days. But reading Travel Light unseamed something in me, made me feel that my certainties needed revisiting, and assured me that somewhere within me was, still, a 7-year-old girl waiting to be beckoned onto a path of luggage-less travel, of dragons and Valkyries, languages and air — and that with Travel Light, she'd taken the first step in their direction.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Hard News: Of swine and cows
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I hesitate to spread this around, but if it's conspiracy theories you're after, get a load of this:
BTW, he's not really a 'climate change expert'....
BTW, he's not really a 'climate change expert'....
You get that. Here's Fox News recently with an "infectious diseases specialist" who actually turns out to be an anti-ageing quack who peddles magic potions:
Nearly half a million views of that one so far ...
Rather than having a piss-up a with a blogger to prematurely celebrate a "political victory"
Who goes to a bar, makes a bad joke at someone else's expense, high fives around the table, and then hurries home to post it on their blog? Is this common in Wellington these days?
Probably my favourite conspiracy website is Cryptogon. It's a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It represents what is a fairly common opinion, although one that is significantly underrepresented in American politics.
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.
Source: Change We Can Believe In: Obama Honors George H.W. Bush for Public Service
And among this population is where, I think, people like Glen Beck get their traction. Although his audience and that of Cryptogon are mostly different, they both represent the extreme disconnect many feel for Washington politics. When people get marginalised, they revolt, or they retreat to their opiates - religions, conspiracies, and other outlets that allow them to rationalise a world that otherwise would not make sense.
do you mean Vicki Hyde of the NZ Skeptics?
(and how come they don't use the British spelling of sceptic?)
anyway, I don't recall her appearing in The Skeptics AFFCO clip... :-)hope you'll be giving that conspiracy theory of
"19 mostly Saudi men taking over 4 planes and managing to engineer the demolition of 3 steel framed skyscrapers (WT1, 2 & 7) in one day, killing several thousand people as well as punching a smaller than 757 hole in the recently fortified wall of the Pentagon - actually into the offices of the people who were trying to find the several trillion US$ missing from pentagon budgets as announced by Donny Rumsfeld the day before (Sept 10, 2001), and strangely never really returned to..."
a good going over...
it is risible really, and no facts or paper trail to back it up
- just that it's the official word...
don't ask questions...
don't poke at the holes...yrs
Dour Ting-Thomas -
On a vaguely related note, marvel at the sight of actual scientists trying to rebutt hysteria around Roland Emmerich's latest disaster porno...
Normally, scientists regard Internet hysteria with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a shake of the head. But a few scientists have become so concerned at the level of fear they are seeing that they decided not to remain on the sidelines this time.
"Two years ago, I got a question a week about it," said NASA scientist David Morrison, who hosts a website called Ask an Astrobiologist. "Now I'm getting a dozen a day. Two teenagers said they didn't want to see the end of the world so they were thinking of ending their lives."
If that's for real, I'm moving past "bemused at the folly of mankind" and into the realms of wanting to bring some apocalyptic wrath to whoever is responsible for marketing at Columbia Pictures.
BTW, Russell, weren't you trying to get Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre out here for the next Great Blend? How's that coming along, if it is and/or you can say anything... At least people like Beck are going to keep his column running for the foreseeable future...
BTW, Russell, weren't you trying to get Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre out here for the next Great Blend? How's that coming along, if it is and/or you can say anything...
It's looking hopeful for early next year, just quietly (he says on a public website).
But look out before that for a Christmas Great Blend!
Or how about a big crazy dose of Jonathan "it's become more and more apparent that it is a Satanic agenda" Eisen? Not sure how to embed this ...
I keep seeing free screenings of something called Zeitgeist advertised around campus. Haven't seen it but it's available online and looks fairly crazy.
But look out before that for a Christmas Great Blend!
Tentative date? Y'know, for those of us who are making travel plans...
sciencebasedmedicine.org is good when you need a pep up dose of anti-quackery.
Or how about a big crazy dose of Jonathan "it's become more and more apparent that it is a Satanic agenda" Eisen?
How about I get my colon irrigated with a water blaster full of battery acid instead -- it would be a quicker and less painful way to cause permanent brain damage.
I'm guessing it's not the Adventures of Phoebe Zeitgeist from 1968 - created by writer Michael O'Donoghue ( National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live ) and illustrator Frank Springer (Marvel) first published in Evergreen Review in which the hapless heroine is tromped on by multiple tropes - a metaphor for modern times no less...
Or how about a big crazy dose of Jonathan "it's become more and more apparent that it is a Satanic agenda" Eisen? Not sure how to embed this ...
That's actually a wee bit disturbing.
Rather than having a piss-up a with a blogger to prematurely celebrate a "political victory", the Maori Party might be well advised to look to the Act Party for lessons in how to exercise leverage as a minority support party. Because they got dicked, again.
But National is closer ideologically to Act than to the Maori Party.
Key and co probably won't be too upset if Act "forces" them to move towards privatising ACC, for example.
That's actually a wee bit disturbing.
I had to turn it off when he started doing the Darth Vader voice.
I have passed news of this week's Media 7 on to Dean Ballinger, who is close to finishing a PhD on conspiracy theories, at Waikato.* I reckon it will be a very good thesis, too
* Which has its own share of such theories.
It's interesting how often the words "former ACT MP" correlate with "mad as a bag of kittens with serious psychiatric issues".
do you mean Vicki Hyde of the NZ Skeptics?
You mean, Vicki Hyde the Founder of KAOS? "Interesting" how that doesn't rate higher on her CV, isn't it? I'm just saying, it's 'interesting'.
It's interesting how often the words "former ACT MP" correlate with "mad as a bag of kittens with serious psychiatric issues".
It's interesting how often the words "former MP" correlate with "I am backing toward the nearest fire exit and praying for my life". I think it was Auberon Waugh who said wanting to enter Parliament is a sign that you're not entirely sane, and I've had cause to wonder if he had a point.
Check this out for tin-foil-hat nuttiness:
General Albert Stubblebine features largely in Jon Ronson's "The Men Who Stared at Goats"
Because they got dicked, again. I certainly have sympathy for Maori Television: not much at all for those involved from the Maori Party.
Meh... I always say if you're going to behave like an arsehole, a rough dicking is probably exactly what they deserve. If anything, I'd say MTS and the Maori Party (particularly Sharples) should thank whatever higher powers they believe in that they didn't catch their fair share of the fallout from this shit storm. To put it bluntly, I think they've both got questions to answer about what they really told people, and when but instead they got away with playing the racist card and the MSM like a cheap fiddle.
Backmasking in music is fertile soil for conspiracy theories.
Backmasking is simply playing a piece of music backwards to reveal ...hidden messages.
The conspiracy part comes in when some say these were deliberately created to pass on subliminal messages.Here's the famous Stairway to Heaven revealed as containing - shock horror - Satanic messages. Hey our teachers always told us Rock was evil.
Maori is now supporting the ACC bill through the first reading too.
I suddenly thought of the Minister in In The Loop, constantly claiming to be playing a long game while not keeping up. I haven't though carefully about how fair that is.
Wow, Vicki Hyde is the head of KAOS??
I never would have picked it. - do you mean Mr. Big or Ludwig von Siegfried?Zis is KAOS! Ve don't conspire here!
Post your response…
This topic is closed.


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"Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves." - Albert Camus
Why does anyone care about two guys reading Jane Austen? Why would two guys read Jane Austen?
How did this Two Guys thing get started, anyway?
Well, one day my lifelong friend Terry Hill and I were talking about our junior high school days together. (Terry is a playwright, an award-winning advertising copywriter, a publisher of poems and articles, etc. etc. and he and I knew each other way, no WAY...back when.)
And we agreed that we had never actually read Moby Dick, nor did we know anyone else who had read it. Ever. All the way through, I mean. Not Cliff's Notes or (my old favorite cheat method) Classics Comics. The real book. Who had read it? No one. Oh, many people have been tested on that book. It has been assigned to students forever and ever. But who has read it? We couldn't find one person.
So we decided to be the first to ever do it...we would be like Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon.
And to do a major FIRST like this, we would want to chronicle the event...to even write a book about it. (We knew that others would write about us having read this book, like maybe Tom Wolfe who wrote THE RIGHT STUFF)...but we wanted to be the first to write about our accomplishment. So we did. And much to our surprise, it not only got published, but it won a ton of critical rave notices and created a following for us. We had book clubs assigning our book and college professors writing to us about it.
So we did a second book, TWO GUYS READ THE OBITUARIES. We read the obituaries each morning for a full year and wrote about death and life. To each other. Again, we were surprised at the response. People wanted more. Oh, sure, some of my "personal growth" and self help fans were angry at me. They thought I'd let them down by going all shallow and frivolous on them. So what? Can't we all have a little fun?
Finally our wives said that Jane Austen ought to be our next challenge. I winced. Really? Come on. But a challenge is a challenge. And I resolve not to go gently into that good night, but rather to rage, RAGE against the dying of the light by saying YES to every challenge.
Jane was an amazing surprise to me. I won't spoil what happens in this book. But TWO GUYS READ JANE AUSTEN is ....of all the books I've written....the book I am happiest with......it is the ONE I would want to stay in print after you read my obituary.......it is the first book I've ever been involved with that really looked fearlessly at love and women and men's relationships with women......don't get scared.....there's also some humor....both intentional and unintentional....Terry is brilliant and funny......
and Jane?....well Jane is Jane. There is no one like Jane.
Now when all the clowns that you have commissioned
Have died in battle or in vain
And you're sick of all this repetition
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane ?BOB DYLAN


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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Consumers scored a few unexpected victories in a set of Federal Reserve rules issued earlier this week.
The Fed issued 1,155 pages of rules Tuesday telling banks how to comply with new laws regulating credit cards that go into effect on Feb. 22. In a handful of cases, in which the law was unclear, federal regulators used their discretion to go a step further to protect consumers.
One little-known practice that the Fed banned: Card issuers won't be allowed to set minimum interest rates.
"I was pretty pleased with that," said Nick Bourke, co-author of the Pew Charitable Trusts credit card study. "These floors simply didn't meet the requirements of the law."
The Fed will also prevent banks from automatically enrolling consumers in over-the-limit programs that charge regular fees. The Fed will also make it more difficult for banks to exert control over interest rates based on changing indicators, such as the prime rate.
Banking industry experts agreed that the Fed tended to side with consumers in creating the new rules implementing credit card laws.
"This demonstrates the Fed is trying to anticipate moves and err on the side of consumers," said Nessa Feddis, vice president and senior counsel for the American Bankers Association.
Congress passed new laws last spring cracking down on banks' ability to hike interest rates.
Starting Feb. 22, a consumer's rate won't be hiked just because a cell phone bill was paid late. In fact, a bank won't be able to raise rates, even if a consumer is late paying a credit card bill, until 60 days have passed.
In addition, monthly statements will clearly indicate how long it would take for a consumer to pay off his balance making only minimum payments.
But the new laws give wiggle room for rate hikes when it comes to so-called variable-rate cards, which offer interest rates based on a financial indicator, such as the prime rate, which rises and falls with the health of the U.S. economy.
Since the prime rate is at 3.25%, a historic low, experts predict credit card rates based on the prime will increase once the Federal Reserve starts raising rates, perhaps as early as this year. With the new credit card laws about to kick in, banks have been hiking interest rates and switching customers into prime rate-based cards.
Floors: Consumer groups had complained that banks were fiddling with credit card rates that were supposed to be beyond the banks' control by instituting minimum rates or "floors."
The Fed agreed with the groups, so the floors will go away Feb. 22.
A recent Pew Charitable Trusts study found that more than a third of the largest card issuers had instituted minimum interest rates. In December 2008, only 10% of banks had such a floor.
The industry considers these minimum interest rates a way of accounting for the inherent risk in credit card lending.
But consumer groups said that minimum interest rates conflict with the law's intention to allow these rates to rise and fall based on fluctuations in the prime rate.
Pick a rate: The Fed also agreed with consumer groups that banks shouldn't have the upper hand when it comes to picking which prime rate should apply to an interest rate.
Some banks had adopted a practice in which they got to choose the prime rate to be applied, picking a day with the highest rate during a long period, such as 90 days. That picking practice gives banks more opportunity to ensure that a higher interest rate is applied.
"Instead of picking an index on a specific day, they'd take the index and say, we want the maximum interest rate for the last three months," said Joshua Frank, a senior analyst for the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The new Fed rules prohibit card issuers from such picking, at least for existing balances on cards. If banks want to try such a move with future credit card purchases, the banks would first have to give consumers 45 days advance notice, which officials say makes the practice less likely.
Feddis said losing the ability to pick the prime rate isn't a big deal for most banks, and only garnered them about an extra 50 cents on a $2,000 balance.
Opt-in: Consumers also will not be automatically enrolled in credit card programs that offer the option to charge beyond credit limits.
Similar to overdraft protection for checking accounts, such programs often charge regular monthly fees that consumers may not notice. Starting on Feb. 22, card issuers will be required to ask consumers if they want such over-the-limit protection on their credit cards.
Consumer groups called the new opt-in rule an unexpected coup.
The move could ding banks, said Feddis of the American Bankers Association. They won't be able to charge an over-the-limit fee, even if they accidentally process and clear a charge for a cardholder who is beyond his credit limits, the Fed rule stated.
Index | Last | Change | % Change |
Dow | 32,627.97 | -234.33 | -0.71% |
Nasdaq | 13,215.24 | 99.07 | 0.76% |
Treasuries | 1.73 | 0.00 | 0.12% |
Company | Price | Change | % Change |
Ford Motor Co | 8.29 | 0.05 | 0.61% |
Advanced Micro Devic... | 54.59 | 0.70 | 1.30% |
Cisco Systems Inc | 47.49 | -2.44 | -4.89% |
General Electric Co | 13.00 | -0.16 | -1.22% |
Kraft Heinz Co | 27.84 | -2.20 | -7.32% |
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In 1998, Ntsiki Biyela won a scholarship to study wine making. Now she's about to launch her own brand. More |
Whether you hedge inflation or look for a return that outpaces inflation, here's how to prepare. More |


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Product Details
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