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I have a confession to make. I used to be afraid of chicken. And I don't mean of eating it.
Yes, you read that right. When I was a teenager, I wasn't too fond of helping in the kitchen, and when I had to make chicken, lets just say it was an ordeal. I always wore gloves, but sometimes the chicken got the better of me and I would throw it into the sink, terrified that it would come to life and leap at me.
I mean, do you blame me? Look at that chicken sitting there all pretty. It looks so…well…human.
It took a few years, but I got over my fear. And just time in time for this GENIUS homemade crispy rotisserie chicken hack.
I can't take credit for this stroke of brilliance. All credit goes to Justin Chapple, the senior editor of Food & Wine Magazine, who's Mad Genius Tips constantly blow me away!
When I saw a short clip of this easy bunt pan rotisserie chicken on Instagram, I was all over it. I made it for Shabbat that week, and I've been making it ever since. It's my husband's favorite way to eat chicken, and we always fight over the crispier-than-ever chicken wings!
My favorite thing about this recipe is that it's super healthy and indulgent nonetheless. You feel like you're eating fried chicken (it's that crispy!), but without those extra calories. It also makes a great one-dish meal when you add potatoes or other veggies.
Bundt Pan Rotisserie Chicken
1 whole chicken
1 medium onion, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and diced
2 sticks celery, diced
a few sprigs of thyme
1 lemon, cut in quarters (do not peel)
1 bay leaf
olive oil
salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 425. Place the vegetables and aromatics around the bundt pan and cover the hole with a piece of foil. Pat the chicken dry and rub with olive oil, salt and pepper and place the chicken cavity over the bundt pan stick. Roast for approximately 1 hour, until chicken is cooked through (internal temperature should be 165 degrees) and the skin is golden and crisp.
VARIATION: You may use other vegetables and/or aromatics, such as parsnips, turnips, potatoes, fresh garlic cloves (no need to peel), rosemary etc. If you are roasting vegetables that you'd like to serve with the chicken (such as potatoes) and they aren't tender by the time the chicken is cooked, remove the chicken from the bundt pan and return the vegetables to the oven, baking until tender.
NOTE: Try to keep the chicken as raised as possible. This ensures that the skin gets crispy all around.
Related Recipes:


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That financing and a number of copy-cats that rapidly followed were tax-exempt and primarily driven by then legal arbitrage possibilities. Many of these transactions were structured as lease financings or as installment sales of annuities. Tax-exempt pension obligation bonds largely came to an end with the introduction of tax legislation that became part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. However, we have continued to work on pension bonds that are tax-exempt because of special transition rules or special (non-arbitrage) situations.
A new taxable version of pension obligation bonds surfaced in 1994, particularly in California, starting with Sonoma County. Most were driven by declining taxable interest rates compared to the interest rate imputed by pension funds on the unfunded accrued actuarial liability (UAAL), the need for budget relief, and/or the risk arbitrage opportunities in the much wider range of investments made by pension funds than the city or county would be permitted to make. A number of these transactions financed the regular annual pension payment in addition to all or part of the UAAL.
Most of these post-1994 transactions have been structured as general obligation bonds of the state, city or county. In California, city and county pension obligation bonds are issued under the local agency refunding law (drafted in pertinent part by Orrick) and considered valid without a vote under a judicially created exception to the State Constitution Article XVI, Section 18 debt limitation referred to as "obligations imposed by law". Because this exception to the constitutional debt limit was and is much less developed in the case law than the other two judicially created exceptions (for lease financing and revenue bonds) each POB issue in California has been validated pursuant to Code of Civil Procedure § 860 et seq. Subsequent POBs are usually covered by the original validation action without the need of any new judicial proceeding, but this must be reviewed in each case.
Orrick has handled more than 100 validation actions, including a number based on the same "obligations imposed by law" theory as POBs. In each case, we attempt to structure the validation action to cover not only the proposed issue but also any future issue or refunding. After securing a default judgment for a county in 1994, someone appealed the judgment even though he had not joined in the original action. The matter was settled before the courts could decide whether he had standing to appeal, but the market reacted by insisting that the then 60 day appeal period run before any POBs were issued. As a result, Orrick attorneys drafted and helped secure passage of amendments to CCP § 870 reducing the appeal period for validation judgments from 60 to 30 days and restricting the grounds for appeal to jurisdictional issues. The market now often does not require waiting out even this much shorter appeal period.
Orrick has served as bond or underwriters' counsel on roughly 70 pension obligation bond financings in California for the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Imperial, Los Angeles, Mendocino, Merced, Orange, Sacramento, Sonoma, and San Diego, for the cities of Fresno, Long Beach, Oakland, Pasadena, and Richmond, as well as the State of California.
A greater number of pension obligation bonds have been issued by state and local governments in New York than from any other state. In 1989 and again in 2003, new legislation was adopted for the purpose of structural reform to the New York State retirement systems. Each legislation also authorized pension obligation bonds.
The 2003 legislation authorizes (1) local governments to issue pension obligation bonds for any outstanding obligations to the State for any existing incentive programs (this part was drafted by Orrick) and (2) a local government (or the State with respect to its own employees) to issue pension obligation bonds to pay its normal annual contribution due on December 15, 2004 to certain components of the NYS retirement systems. These pension obligation bonds are to be issued as general obligation bonds in the same manner, under the same procedural requirements and subject to the same debt limits and other constraints as for any capital project. The 2003 legislation also authorized the State of New York to issue pension obligation bonds to pay a portion of its contribution bill for the year ending March 31, 2005.
The State of Oregon and its local governments, with Orrick's assistance, have also been among the most active issuers of pension obligation bonds. Pension obligation bonds are issued in Oregon either as limited tax bonds under the Pension Bond Act or as revenue bonds under The Uniform Revenue Bond Act. Several large pooled pension obligation bond issues have been done by Oregon school districts, community college districts and other local governments. In 2003, Oregon voters authorized the general obligation bonds to pay the State's UAAL.
In addition, Orrick has worked or is working on a number of pension obligation bond financings for state or local governments in other states.
OPEB refers to other post –employment benefits, meaning other than pension benefits. OPEB consist primarily of healthcare benefits and may include other benefits such as life insurance, long term care and similar benefits. Until now, these benefits have generally been administered on a pay-as-you-go basis and have not been reported as a liability on municipal financial statements.

subset: commoncrawl


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In order to be successful in school, our children need fuel. School lunches can be tough. We have to balance what is healthy and what our child will eat. There's also the distraction factor. They have 20 minutes and a cafeteria or gym full of other kids who are all talking and eating. The distraction is enough to delay nutritional intake past the time when lunch is over. (To see what I'm talking about, Try to fit in a lunchtime visit to your child's school sometime. Prearranged with your child and the office. You'll be amazed.)
So, we need something tasty and quick and easy to prepare, but nutritionally sound and easy for our kids to eat quickly.
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics suggests aiming for 4 food groups:
- Whole Grains (Whole grain crackers, tortillas, pitas, or bread for a sandwich, even air-popped pop corn)
- Protein (lean deli meats, peanut butter, hummus, tuna or egg salad)
- Nonfat or low-fat dairy product (yogurt, cheese, or milk)
- Fruits or veggies (bite-sized ones)
The first step in beating the lunchbox battles is to get your kids involved with making their own lunch. Show them the 4 elements and have them make suggestions before going to the store. If they're old enough, they can help with shopping. Write down several options for each element of something that they'd like to eat. When they pick out foods that are not appropriate (i.e. powdered donuts), take the opportunity to teach them why that's not a good option for lunch. If you'd like, make an offer, on Mondays they can have one small-sized powdered donut for dessert in their lunch (because everyone needs a little dessert on Mondays). That way they get a little something special and they learn moderation (total deprivation is never fun).
What will streamline the whole process is to make a chart. Now, they can easily pick and choose one item from each column to pack in their lunch. You've had say in what they can choose from, but they get to pick.
When your child has a choice in what they get to eat, then they tend to want to eat it. If we try to force them into eating something they don't want, they will more than likely trade it or not eat it at all and throw it away. (It's appalling how much food ends up in the trashcan of an elementary school lunchroom.)
We all want a little choice and autonomy in our lives. Our children are heading off to school and will be responsible for sitting at lunch and feeding themselves. Let's give them something to look forward to in their lunchbox.


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February 12, 2024
In this episode of Thoughtful Connections: A Memory Care Podcast, Charlie and Elizabeth discuss vascular dementia. What are the things we can do to help improve our outcome and things we can do to prevent it? This podcast offers support, information, and a sense of community to those affected by memory-related conditions, helping them navigate their journey with greater understanding.
This podcast will offer support, information, and a sense of community to those affected by memory-related conditions, helping them navigate their journey with greater understanding.
Remember to subscribe and leave a review!
Also available on Apple Podcast, for a complete listing of Thoughtful Connections podcasts, go to: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thoughtful-connections-a-memory-care-podcast/id1714675266.
*Our Podcast isn't medical advice but aims to provide support to caregivers and their loved ones.
Produced in collaboration with Arrow Senior Living Management & el L.H Productions
Have questions? Email us at firstname.lastname@example.com
The V Living Experience in Mentor, OH offers independent senior apartments, assisted living, and memory care with a variety of services and a range of floor plan options. Amenities include restaurant dining, 24-hour bistro, concierge service, housekeeping, events and entertainment, personal care, transportation services, and more. Centrally located near Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals with convenient access to major shopping centers and attractions, including Little Mountain Country Club, Pinecrest Shopping and Dining, Lake Metroparks, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, Headlands Beach State Park, and Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.


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Cisco Digital Learning Library
With the new Cisco Digital Learning Library, training just got more effective and convenient. The portfolio provides the ease and accessibility of e-learning, but has a style of learning that is more like an instructor-led course. The new e-learning courses in the Cisco Digital Learning Library are self-paced and modular, with course content broken up into sections to allow you to learn when you have a few extra minutes. In order to match different learning styles, the content for the courses will be presented via both instructor videos and student guide text. The interface will also be integrated with a single logon and all information in one window for simplicity. The premium self-study courses align with career certifications for the following Cisco portfolios: Route and Switch, Design, Security, Wireless, Cloud and Collaboration.
What is Included
- Searchable glossary and transcripts
- HD instructor-led videos
- Certificate of Completion
- Bookmark and annotation tools
- Analytics to track progress
- Graded challenge assignments
- Gamification with Leaderboards
- Full Student Guide textbook
- Discovery Labs with shareable recordings
- Covers multiple learning techniques to be more effective
- Helps you get the most from every minute
- Topics are easily consumable
- Can be accessed easily- anytime, anywhere
- Progress saved, so you can pick up where you left off
- Single sign-on access
- Everything in one place- single, integrated browser window
Cisco Digital Learning Library Portfolios
Cisco E-Learning Training (ELT) is available for purchase by the title, portfolio or the entire library. Cisco has 3 portfolios available at this time. Click on the course below to view the description. Once you pay with a credit card, PO or CLCs, you will receive a confirmation with a link to the portal with login credentials.
All Access Library
The greatest value for Cisco E-learning is the All Access Library. This offering includes all 21 titles in the new Cisco ELT format. These titles priced separately would cost $25,895 in total. The standard price for the entire library is $9,995. Fast Lane's special introductory price for the All Access Library is $6,995. With the All Access Library you are receiving most of the training required to obtain all 10 Cisco certifications!
Mentoring Services
In order to ensure you have the greatest success with your e-learning purchase you can optionally add our Mentoring package for an additional charge. The set of value-added services are specifically designed to provide you with more information, explanations and a chance to interact with our Mentors. Note that all of our Cisco Mentors are Certified Cisco Systems Instructors (CCSIs).
To purchase the mentoring services visit the Community Site and select the corresponding mentoring service that aligns with your specific course. Please note that you must have purchased the Digital Learning Course within the last four weeks in order to be able to add to your cart.
Additional Cisco E-Learning
In addition to our Cisco Digital Learning Library Portfolio and All Access Library, we have the following CCIE Routing & Switching e-learning course. This course is not included in the above portfolios.
Buy Now
Contact us today and buy now email@example.com


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Embossed in studded, geometric, and paisley filigree-like patterns, three mismatched silver half-moon plates dramatically link below the collar. Featuring an entrancing blue UV shimmer, an oversized collection of square, teardrop, and round rhinestones embellish the decorative silver frames, while a silver beaded fringe swings from the lowermost plate for a noisemaking finish. Features an adjustable clasp closure.
Sold as one individual necklace. Includes one pair of matching earrings.


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The instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today Bestseller!
Ryan Holiday's bestselling trilogy--The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key--captivated professional athletes, CEOs, politicians, and entrepreneurs and helped bring Stoicism to millions of readers. Now, in the first book of an exciting new series on the cardinal virtues of ancient philosophy, Holiday explores the most foundational virtue of all: Courage.
Almost every religion, spiritual practice, philosophy and person grapples with fear. The most repeated phrase in the Bible is "Be not afraid." The ancient Greeks spoke of phobos, panic and terror. It is natural to feel fear, the Stoics believed, but it cannot rule you. Courage, then, is the ability to rise above fear, to do what's right, to do what's needed, to do what is true. And so it rests at the heart of the works of Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, and CS Lewis, alongside temperance, justice, and wisdom.
In Courage Is Calling, Ryan Holiday breaks down the elements of fear, an expression of cowardice, the elements of courage, an expression of bravery, and lastly, the elements of heroism, an expression of valor. Through engaging stories about historic and contemporary leaders, including Charles De Gaulle, Florence Nightingale, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Holiday shows you how to conquer fear and practice courage in your daily life.
You'll also delve deep into the moral dilemmas and courageous acts of lesser-known, but equally as important, figures from ancient and modern history, such as Helvidius Priscus, a Roman Senator who stood his ground against emperor Vespasian, even in the face of death; Frank Serpico, a former New York City Police Department Detective who exposed police corruption; and Frederick Douglass and a slave named Nelly, whose fierce resistance against her captors inspired his own crusade to end slavery.
In a world in which fear runs rampant--when people would rather stand on the sidelines than speak out against injustice, go along with convention than bet on themselves, and turn a blind eye to the ugly realities of modern life--we need courage more than ever. We need the courage of whistleblowers and risk takers. We need the courage of activists and adventurers. We need the courage of writers who speak the truth--and the courage of leaders to listen.
We need you to step into the arena and fight.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.


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- Medicine (St Vincent's) - Theses
Medicine (St Vincent's) - Theses
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ItemPhysiological role of osteocytic parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTHrP)Ansari, Niloufar ( 2018)Parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTHrP) is an autocrine/paracrine regulator in many tissues, including bone and mammary glands. Mice with conditional deletion of PTHrP in the osteoblast lineage showed an osteopenic phenotype, and low bone formation levels by the age of 6 weeks, suggesting a paracrine role for PTHrP in promoting bone formation. Since PTHrP is also expressed in osteocytes, I sought to determine the role of osteocytic PTHrP in bone. For this purpose, I have developed an in vitro model of PTHrP (gene: Pthlh) knockdown by using shRNA in a new osteocytic cell line, Ocy454 cells. Pthlh mRNA levels were knocked down by 80% (compared to luciferase) on 3D scaffolds. Pthlh knockdown increased osteocyte markers, Sost (>2-fold greater than luciferase control at day 7), Mepe and Dmp1 (3-4-fold higher than luciferase control at day 14), and reduced osteoblast markers Alpl and Bglap. Undifferentiated Pthlh knockdown cells also had lower levels of cAMP compared to vector control cells. These results showed that PTHrP acts as an autocrine/paracrine factor in osteocytes to regulate mineralisation and bone formation. Next, I generated 10kb-Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f mice, which had conditional deletion of PTHrP in osteocytes, from heterozygous breeders. My results demonstrating that Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f mice showed no significant differences in cortical or trabecular bone structure compared to Dmp1Cre.Pthlhw/w littermates at 6 weeks of age, indicate that osteocytic PTHrP is not essential for skeletal development in growing mice. However, trabecular bone mass was lower in male and female Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f mice compared to controls at 12 weeks of age (the peak of trabecular bone mass in adults). Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f mice had lower bone formation, with no difference in bone resorption, compared to controls. Although there was no significant alteration in cortical dimensions, three-point bending tests revealed that Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f femora had significantly lower fracture tolerance, with lower ultimate force and deformation, and yield point and fracture occurred at a lower strain compared to controls. These findings indicate that osteocyte-derived PTHrP is required to maintain trabecular bone mass and material strength of adult bones. Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f mice from homozygous breeders (Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f(hom)) showed a phenotype different from the above heterozygous-bred mice. To our surprise, Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f(hom) mice showed higher trabecular bone mass and wider long bones compared to Dmp1Cre.Pthlhw/w(hom) controls. These changes were initially observed in adult male mice, however, I confirmed that this wider cortical bone was detected at 12 days of age in both male and female Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f(hom) mice, and retained throughout life in male Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f(hom) mice. PTHrP is produced by mammary glands and is secreted into milk. Our results showed that Pthlh DNA recombination directed by Dmp1Cre occurred not only in bones, but also in mammary tissues. To determine the cause of this phenotype I assessed milk content during lactation and fetal bone development during embryogenesis. My results showed recombination of Pthlh in mammary tissues, however there was no difference in milk PTHrP content of Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f mothers, compared to controls. Studying the embryonic skeletons at E18.5 showed that Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f(hom) fetuses have wider femora, indicating accelerated fetal skeletal development. Finally, I studied the effect of osteocytic PTHrP on the anabolic action of parathyroid hormone (PTH), the only currently approved anabolic therapy for osteoporosis. These studies were initially carried out on homozygous-bred mice. Since these mice exhibited a different basal phenotype to heterozygous-bred mice, we repeated the experiments on the latter to exclude any effect of parental genotype. These two sets of experiment showed that deletion of endogenous osteocytic PTHrP (in both heterozygous- and homozygous-bred Dmp1Cre.Pthlhf/f mice) had no impact on PTH-induced bone formation. I conclude that PTHrP has both local and systemic functions driven by cells that express Dmp1Cre, that influence the skeleton. Osteocytic PTHrP, acting in an autocrine/paracrine manner, is required for normal gene expression by osteocytes and maintains trabecular bone mass and strength at the peak of bone mass in adults. Maternal PTHrP limits fetal skeletal development and radial growth; this effect of maternal PTHrP is important, not only in neonatal mice, but also influences the bone mass of adult male mice.


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Frabill Aqua-Life Aerator Dual Output 110V Greater Than 25 Gallons [14211]
Aqua-Life® Aerator Dual Output 110V Greater Than 25 Gallons
Aqua-Life® Products run so quietly you'll forget you are aerating your bait. You'll know you are by the healthy condition of your bait. Aqua-Life® products feature a whisper quiet motor that runs efficiently at a low volume. Aqua-Life® products also utilize a special micro-bubble oxygen diffuser that produces clouds of tiny bubbles. Smaller more numerous bubbles mix readily as they collide and dispense through the entire water column. In bait containers smaller bubbles are important as they are less prone to damage delicate baitfish. Each Aqua-Life® product includes the diffuser and a 30 inch non-kink air hose. (Hoses and stones also sold separately as an accessory.)
- Dual pumps-aerates 1 or 2 livewells (Up to 50 gallons)
- Produces close to 100% saturation of dissolved oxygen
- Rubber marking feet
- UL approved
- 6' power cord
- Includes: 5ft of flexible air hose, 2 each 2" long air stones, t-connector, 2 anti-siphon valves
- Volts: 110v
- Width: 10"
- Length (Inches): 10"
- Height: 5"
- Box Dimensions: 5"H x 10"W x 10"L WT: 1.7 lbs


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A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.
And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.
–Steve Jobs
Update on the VALUE VAULT
(contact: email@example.com with VALUE VAULT in subject line for the key)
I uploaded 21 videos of 2010 value investing lectures into a sub-folder in the VALUE VAULT. The VAULT seems cluttered so unless anyone objects, I will place non-videos into folders with sub-categories for easier searching. I will choose a quiet time to work on the vault—probably Sunday.
If you are having trouble opening the folder, please contact www.yousendit.com customer service at 888-535-9442 or (outside the USA) 1-408-385-8491 and email me if the problem has or hasn't been fixed. I will #$%^&*! find out the problem. I am having no issues accessing the folder or videos so far.
If anyone has an idea for a more accessible storage option, let me know.
Question from a Reader
I've just started digging into the Competition Demystified PDF (in VALUE VAULT) and came across this passage (also mentioned in the "Strategy is Local" PDF) and couldn't help but wonder what's changed:
"Apple's experience stands in stark contrast. From the start, Apple took a more global approach than Microsoft. It was both a computer manufacturer and a software producer. Its Macintosh operating system anticipated the attractive features of Windows by many years— "Windows 5 = Macintosh 87," as the saying goes. Yet its comprehensive product strategy has been at best a limited and occasional success, especially when compared to Microsoft's more focused approach."
This strategy of controlling everything (operating system, hardware, software licenses/developers, content delivery, etc.) is, according to Greenwald, a competitive liability, yet today, as Apple is the most valuable company in the world and the most successful tech company, it is the very reason given for their massive success, and the "special genius" of the recently departed Jobs.
What gives? Is Apple just a fad? Is Greenwald making stuff up? Or is there some other piece of this puzzle I am not considering?
The Reader follows up with: "I thought of another strategic element for Apple. I read this somewhere a few months ago, don't remember where, but Apple basically made exclusive contracts with its various suppliers such that they guaranteed them large volume up front in return for them not taking orders from competitors, essentially (some arrangement like that).
This resulted in two things:
First, conferred a competitive advantage in supply to Apple because they were able to achieve lowest cost in production.
Second, accomplished the strategic goal of totally denying their competitors access to suppliers of similar quality/cost. This meant that the only way a competitor could create something of Apple quality would be to pay (and charge) a lot more for it. But Apple commanded a brand premium in the market place while the competitors did not. This would be a good example of the Jarillo principle of the premium company charging less than they could, forcing competitors who don't command a premium to price near cost.
I think normally the issue of "what suppliers do we use and how do we contract with them?" would be tactical. But because Apple interfered with their competitors' ability to compete by working with suppliers the way they did, this seems to be a strategic consideration as well.
My reply: Like a lecturer before an audience, I was hoping no one would notice that my fly was unzipped. The reader is mentioning the elephant in the room–did Steve Jobs read Prof. Greenwald's Competition Demystified and just do the opposite–Apple has a closed system for hardware and software. Has Apple been successful?
There are a number of possible answers:
- Prof. Greenwald has missed something in his approach to strategy.
- Apple may be using elements of strategic logic to be successful like economies of scale, customer captivity, network effect, and patents.
- Steve Jobs may be a genius who invented an industry or product beyond the immediate scope of strategic analysis. In other words, you can't analyze the reasons for success of someone who invents the cure for cancer or a process that turns an element into a resource. You can't predict genius.
Who said strategic thinking would be easy. Let's take our time to look at a problem from all sides and go through our strategic logic process. We will soon discuss the Coors case study and then move on to Chapter 6: Compaq and Apple in the Personal Computer Industry or pages 113-136 in the book. Once we have finished the book and all the cases, let's circle back and study Apple's current success.
One question that should slap you in the face, "Why does Apple have such a low multiple of earnings and cash flow?" Perhaps the market does not believe that Apple can have real growth and/or the genius of Steve Jobs will no longer drive Apple's future.
Should the government tell you how to live?
Freedom of choice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6a9549ZeqQ&feature=g-vrec&context=G22064f2RVAAAAAAAABA
Personal Prejudices
We all have our prejudices. Here is how to deal with them.
Prejudice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=9aVUoy9r0CM
Sensitivity Training: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iliNaspGVDg&feature=related
More posts to follow…………


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Miranda Lambert Wants to Be the Dixie Chicks of This Generation
Miranda Lambert carved a fiery path in country music from first introduction in 2005, but she has a specific vision for how she wants to be remembered.
As one of the most celebrated artists in country music history, Lambert earned the respect of critics and fans with her honest songwriting and fearless persona. In an interview with Hits Daily Double, she admits she looks to the Dixie Chicks as a model of the musical impression she hopes to make.
"I want to be the Dixie Chicks for this next generation," Lambert says. "To put it simply, I want to write and make music that moves people, to give them freedom to be who they are. I want to kick those doors open."
The "Tin Man" singer is already living this mantra. She continually speaks up about unfair treatment of women in the genre and repeatedly uses awards show podiums as a soapbox and place to commend other women. Her 2016 album The Weight of These Wings is an audio diary of her post-divorce life, and it won her the Album of the Year award at the 2017 ACM Awards.
She's not done yet. Lambert says the drive to write songs is always present: "Until I don't have a turn anymore, I want to write and find great songs," she explains. "It's always there, the pressure. I don't take it lightly — I take it seriously. Maybe too seriously. But I do the work, and I am always going to do the work."
Lambert is currently working on a new project with Pistol Annies while balancing a co-headlining tour with Little Big Town. The Bandwagon Tour starts July 12.
These Country Ladies Are Blazing Trails:


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Update at 4:54 p.m. ET
People flying to the U.S. on international flights may want to keep their cellphones charged: Under a new policy, these and other devices might not be allowed on the plane if they can't power up.
The Transportation Security Administration says its new guideline is aimed at certain airports that have direct flights to the U.S. Officials at those overseas facilities should require passengers to turn on electronic devices before they're allowed to board, the TSA says.
The agency didn't specify which airports it's concerned about. But a "homeland security official said last week that the changes would primarily focus on airports in Europe and the Middle East," reports CNN.
"An official told the BBC that London's Heathrow was among the airports," the British news service says. It adds that airports in France and Germany have agreed to the procedures. London's Heathrow Airporthas also issued guidance to passengers flying to the U.S.
The new rules are reportedly a pre-emptive response to terrorist groups' attempts to make their explosives harder to detect.
"We will work to ensure these necessary steps pose as few disruptions to travelers as possible," Homeland Security Jeh Johnson says of the changes. "We are sharing recent and relevant information with our foreign allies and are consulting the aviation industry."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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VIDEO - Norwegian police apologized for the first time on Monday for their complicity in the deportation and murder of over 700 Jews during the Nazi occupation in World War II, just months after the prime minister made a formal apology.
"Norwegian police officers participated in the arrest and deportation of Jews," police chief Odd Reidar Humlegaard said on the 70th anniversary of Norway deporting the first group of Jews to Auschwitz.
Video courtesy of jn1.tv
"It is fitting that I express my regret for the role police played in the arrest and deportation of these completely innocent victims," he said.
Vidkun Quisling, Norway's leader during the Nazi occupation whose name has become a synonym for traitor, ordered the registration of Jews in 1942 and the state apparatus played a complicit role in their eventual deportation.
Norway acknowledged the state's role in 1998 and paid some $60 million to Norwegian Jews and Jewish organizations in compensation for property seized.
But the move fell short of a full apology, causing further national debate and the establishment of a Holocaust research center. Current Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg only made a formal apology earlier this year.
Norway's Jewish population rose to around 2,100 by 1942 from 1,700 before the war as refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia fled the continent.
Authorities eventually deported 772, of whom only 34 survived. Others either stayed in hiding or fled to neighboring Sweden, which protected its Jewish population and also accepted around 8,000 Danish Jews.


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Learning at the edge of chaos
By Aimee Riordan | March 20, 2014
Imagine a school without walls, textbooks or teachers, where children are inspired to learn by their own sense of wonder. That's what Sugata Mitra dreamt when he first placed a computer into a hole in a wall in a Kalkaji, Delhi slum.
In doing so, Mitra, now a professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, discovered something extraordinary: Without any outside instruction, the students used the computer, and its connection to the Internet, to teach themselves about the world around them.
What's more, they taught each other.
Fifteen years later, Mitra is embarking on an ambitious mission to bring the School in the Cloud and the Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) to students around the world. And he's using Microsoft technology to make it happen.
Mitra won the 2013 TED Prize, from the nonprofit devoted to cultivating ideas about Technology, Education and Design. This week, at a TED conference in Vancouver, B.C., he's announcing the opening of five School in the Cloud labs in India and the United Kingdom and launching the accompanying digital platform, made possible by Microsoft, which enables anyone anywhere to host cloud-based learning.
Filmmaker Jerry Rothwell chronicles Sugata Mitra's efforts as part of a documentary he plans to premiere at the TED global conference in 2015.
Mitra calls self-organized education "learning at the edge of chaos."
"There is a space in between the complete order and the complete chaos, where something strange happens, the kind of environment that causes dust devils to form," he says. "When you look at children learning by themselves, it's so non-intuitive. It struck me that if you create a chaotic learning environment with children, a situation with just the right amount of chaos, you get spontaneous order."
Mitra recalls a SOLE session in the UK where he wrote a quadratic equation on the board and asked the students, none of whom had ever been exposed to algebra, to answer this: What is the value of "x"?
"They came back 15 minutes later and said, 'That is algebra. That's a quadratic equation. And x doesn't have one value. It has two.' That coming from 12-year-olds was too much for me."
While we think of traditional learning happening over months or years, in self-organized learning, it happens in minutes, Mitra explains. "When children work in groups in the presence of the Internet, SOLE acts as a lens, a magnifier of intellect."
The School in the Cloud is a unique Microsoft effort, not only because of its groundbreaking philosophy, but also because of its reach. With Skype, Office, Azure, Bing, Xbox, Surface and OEM partners, the project touches nearly every corner of the company.
Wendy Norman, director of social good at Skype, calls it an unprecedented cross collaboration.
"Many areas of the company are reaching out as they hear about this and wanting to be a part of it," she says. "This is truly one of the largest One Microsoft deployments around social good."
Students use Skype to connect with each other and with retired teacher volunteers the children call "Skype Grannies." They employ Bing for search and Office products like PowerPoint to help them distill and present what they learn. Ultimately, Xbox or Surface, with Skype built in, may house the entire experience.
As part of the Self Organized Learning Environment, students can interact with mentors via Skype. These "Skype Grannies," as the children like to call them, are retired teachers living around the world. Video courtesy of Jerry Rothwell.
Mitra says he uses Windows because students like the operating system and find it intuitively easy to learn. He adds that Skype was a natural fit because of its video presentation capabilities.
School in the Cloud fits squarely within the mission of YouthSpark, Microsoft's corporate citizenship initiative, says Akhtar Badshah, senior director, citizenship and public affairs at Microsoft.
It's another example of how technology can transform lives.
"This is a great partnership that allows us to bring our resources and our technology to a platform that may have global impact," Badshah says, adding that the School in the Cloud will likely evolve in ways we can't yet imagine.
It could become a tool to teach children the basics of programming, for example. "Not about just writing code, but fundamentally changing the way people learn," he says.
Microsoft funded construction of the platform: a website intended to connect and extend the community. It features information about how to get started and guidance for asking the big questions while searching the Internet. "This is what children want," says Skype's Norman. "They want to solve big problems. They don't want to be talked to. They want to be a part of it."
School in the Cloud is a great equalizer, she adds. "It doesn't matter if you're in the richest area of the world or the poorest. Children can still gain value."
Cloud-based learning may be the only classroom for a student in rural India. While, in an American city, it might enable an after-school program to offer more than just playtime in an open gym.
"This is taking the simplest thing about children, that insatiable curiosity, and bringing it to life," Norman says.
Amy Dickinson has seen this happen first hand. She's head of design, technology and art at the UK's George Stephenson High School, home to the first School in the Cloud lab.
There, the children "have the opportunity to use SOLE to develop their collaboration skills, independent learning styles and give them the love of learning and curiosity they need to be successful in school and beyond," she says.
Dickinson adds that students are much more engaged when they are allowed to be in control.
"It's unique. It's simple. It's for the kids by the kids," she says. "It allows them to explore, share information, and there is no threat of failure. They motivate each other."
Suneeta Kulkarni, the India-based research director for the School in the Cloud Project, agrees that allowing children to discover an idea and arrive at their own conclusions is a "tremendous motivating factor."
Kulkarni says the broader impact of the School in the Cloud initiative will likely be seen 5, 10 or 15 years down the road, but she notes that there is already anecdotal evidence of the approach's success.
One student, who participated in a 2008-2009 SOLE in Hyderabad, India and continued to be mentored by a Skype Granny, is now studying medicine in the Philippines.
"And it's not just a question of what he's studying," Kulkari says, "But the way it has impacted his orientation, the way he learned to see life and the acceptance he now has for many different cultures and ways of thinking."
The UK- and India-based schools in the cloud are part of a three-year research project during which data will be collected on reading comprehension, ability to search the Internet and overall problem-solving skills.
As the results become known, Mitra hopes governments will be inspired to fund more of these brick-and-mortar extensions that bring self-organized learning to remote areas of the world.
In the meantime, anyone with an Internet connection can conduct a SOLE using the platform released this week. Its availability is uniquely in step with an evolving theory of how children learn.
"As we continue to drive education forward, we're going to see the learning environment evolve from a physical location to an anywhere, anytime experience," says Anthony Salcito, vice president of worldwide education at Microsoft. "A cloud-based school is one example of how we're taking that step beyond the classroom, into an environment where students can learn the 21st-century skills that will be critical to their success."


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Spherehot Winter Me Garam Garam Offers Advertisement in Newspaper. This Advertisement has been released in Times of India Newspaper, Mumbai Edition on 21-12-2018.
There were several other print advertisements published in Times of India Mumbai Newspaper on various pages on 21-12-2018 along with Spherehot Winter Me Garam Garam Offers Ad. Check various newspaper advertisement samples at Advert Gallery.
To make it simpler for you to discover what you are looking for at Advert Gallery, this collection of print advertisements has been divided into categories.
By selecting a category, you may see a variety of innovative ads that have been published in newspapers.
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Browse advertisements of different categories like Apparel & Accessories, Automotive, Banking, Beauty Products, Clever Advertisements, Consumer Products, Education, Electronics, Entertainment, Exhibitions, Financial, Financial Results, Furniture, Government, Health Care, Hospitality, Industrial Products, Jewellery, Loans, Lost Found, Mobiles, Obituary, Punyathithi, Shok Sandesh, Online, Public Notice Advertisement, Real Estate, Property, Recruitment, Job, Social Awareness, Tender Notice, Travel, Matrimonial and Name Change.
How was Spherehot Winter Me Garam Garam Offers Ad created?
Spherehot Winter Me Garam Garam Offers Ad must be developed by one of the creative designers or an advertising agency.
The majority of the ads published in the Times of India Mumbai Newspaper are artistically created by an advertising agency design section. Spherehot Winter Me Garam Garam Offers Ad is one of them.
This advertisements are published on different pages such as the front page, back page, page 3, page 5, or several advertisements are published as a jacket ad and a full page ad in the Times of India Mumbai Newspaper.
Many of the ads were very effective and got overwhelmed response. This Times of India Ad Sample collection at Advert Gallery would be a great source of reference for Marketers, Entrepreneurs, Creative Designers and Copy Writers to plan their Advertisement Campaign and generate new Newspaper Advertisement Design Ideas.
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If you are looking to advertise in Times of India Mumbai then Check out Times of India Mumbai Ad Rates and other information. And if you are looking to advertise in Times Interact Classifieds Section then book Advertisement in Times of India Mumbai through Online booking facility for Newspaper publishing.


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Luis Santeiro Biography
Luis Santeiro
WriterBorn: 1948
Birthplace: Havana, Cuba
Luis Santeiro has won eight Emmy Awards for his writing for Sesame Street and one for his contribution to the groundbreaking bilingual 1970s sitcom Que Pasa, USA? But Santeiro is primarily a playwright, the creator of widely performed works including Our Lady of the Tortilla (1987) and Praying with the Enemy (1999), which won the National Hispanic Playwright Award. Santeiro's plays use more than a touch of satire to examine such subjects as Catholicism, Hollywood, and Hispanic stereotypes.
Carlos Santana | S | Mia Sara |
See also:


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Hart of Darkness
S.B. Alexander
Publication date: June 12th 2018
Genres: Adult, Romance, Suspense
The road to love is paved in the dark.
Former gang member Dillon Hart abandoned the streets to join the US Merchant Marines. He feels his life is finally on track until he returns home to discover that his sixteen-year-old sister is missing. With his younger brother in jail and his older brother living a life of crime, it's up to Dillon to find Grace. After four years of searching, a phone call from a morgue gives him a lead that he can't pass up. Enlisting the help of a cutthroat reporter may be his only hope.
Crime reporter Maggie Marx has just the right mix of grit and sex appeal to get anything she wants, even the darkest stories on the street. Growing up in a gang, she had her fair share of setbacks and obstacles. When Dillon Hart seeks her help, she's more than ready to take down the street's biggest enemy. Her actions could help her exact revenge or land her in the belly of the beast.
As Dillon and Maggie team up to search for Dillon's sister, they aren't prepared to find what lies ahead. One family is torn apart. Another is brought together. Hearts are shredded, secrets are uncovered, and love takes on a whole new meaning.
Intended for audiences 18+
I parked two blocks from a sea of red and blue flashing lights. I grabbed my bag, hopped out of my car, and ran up to the crowd that had gathered around.I sidled up to an older lady. "What's going on?"
She didn't even look my way. Instead, she lifted up on her tiptoes to see over others' heads. "Word is the cops are in a standoff with some gang."
My internal radar was firing on all cylinders. "What gang?"
She clutched the robe she was wearing. "Not sure."
I plowed through the throng to get a better view. Some protested as I wiggled my way up to a man in blue, whose name read Miladin on his uniform shirt. I knew some cops but not him.
Police cruisers and unmarked cars littered the street on the other side of the police barricade.
I flashed my reporter credentials. "I'm here to see Detective Ted Hughes." I scanned the men in blue and some in plain clothes. Ted was tall, lanky, and sometimes hard to miss with his thick mustache that was similar to the actor Tom Selleck's. I did another once-over and spotted Rick. He wasn't as tall as Ted, but he was husky, compliments of the gym he lived at during his off-duty hours.
Officer Miladin narrowed his dark eyes. "Civilians are not allowed past this barrier."
"I work for the paper, so let me through." I knew working as a reporter held no clout to get me into an active police scene, but most cops knew I was close to Ted.
Officer Miladin stabbed a finger at another police barrier along the sidewalk in front of the brick homes that lined the street. "The media is over there."
I didn't budge from my spot. "You're new. Aren't you?"
Miladin's voice dropped an octave. "I said over there."
I huffed and decided it wasn't worth arguing. Ted would only kick me out anyway.
I spotted Deidre, a news reporter for CBNT, a local station in the city. If anyone had a lead, it would be Deidre. She was relentless in her hunt to get the big story. I was about to make my way over to her, when a shot rang out through the humid night.
People screamed and scattered.
The cops took cover behind their vehicles.
I managed to duck behind one of many cars parked along the curb. The lady in the robe joined me, breathing heavily, while the crowd scattered to take cover.
Then silence ensued.
I slowly peeked through the car window, when the lady in the robe nudged me.
She pointed a red-painted nail toward the driveway of the house across from us. "Look."
A girl with bold red hair darted from the back of the house, setting off the motion sensor.
Miladin, who had abandoned his position, edged along the base of the house and down the driveway. He said something into his radio, when the redhead climbed the chain-link fence.
Considering the girl was running, I suspected the cops didn't have the house completely surrounded. Or if they did, then their attention wasn't on the girl.
The crowd seemed to be holding its breath.
Author Bio:
S.B. Alexander is a bestselling romance author of the Maxwell Series. Her books are filled with stories that tug at your heart, and are filled with romance, drama, action and suspense. As much as she loves to write, she also loves to read. Some of her favorite authors growing up were Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe. She stills enjoy reading Stephen King. In fact, she loves most genres, although in the past three years she has gravitated toward the romance genre, which is when she started her journey to write her first book. Her motto: write what you love to read.
Aside from writing, she's a huge sports fan, in particular, baseball. Since she hails from New England, she is a diehard Red Sox fan. She's also a navy veteran and former math teacher, loves white powdered donuts, and handbags. Her husband calls her the bag lady. When she's not writing, she enjoys playing golf and hanging out with friends and family.


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Power, Fear, and Vulnerability are all part of office politics. I often see the best developers loosing their focus and ability to write beautiful code when they let themselves involve with a power struggle. Power is the interesting factor which everybody want often, but when they have it they are often not trained to use it wisely. In my career I have often seen very few leaders using the power to make a better eco-system. I honestly believe the relationship build on fear will never last. I requested Srini Chandra (renowned author of Amazon Best Seller 3 Lives, in search of bliss (Amazon | Flipkart) to write a guest post on this subject which developer can read and appreciate. Let us see Srini's thoughts in his own words.
Volumes have been written about power in the workplace. Power is an interesting phenomenon. It controls every conscious and subconscious act of ours. In today's world, "survival of the fittest" has somehow become synonymous with evolution. Physical and material dominance have become synonymous with advanced evolution. We're all conditioned to seek survival at any cost, and acquire power by any means. By power, I mean anything that can be acquired from an external source and thus can be taken away or lost. It can mean all sorts of things ranging from beauty, strength, agility of mind and money to the sheer physical dominance that one country or group of people can have over another. All of these are external powers. It is the luck of the draw that determines if and when you acquire such powers. In addition to randomness in the way external power is distributed, there are other problems with it.
External Power, Fear and Vulnerability
Since external power is defined as to be always short in supply, it is perceived to be valuable and therefore induces competition. One man's gain is another man's loss. So, we compete for power. It is this competitive state that drives husband against wife, brother against sister, friend against friend and at a macro level, leads to the clash of classes, communities, religions and nations. Education, social status, wealth and fame are sources of external power. Anything we fear losing is an external power. The biggest problem with external power is that it tends to reduce control over the most important possession of a human being – her mind. It increases her vulnerability. It causes fear to rule her mind.
Perceptions of Power
Our perception of power is such that it causes us to believe that the more you have, the more valuable you must be. It is this perception that causes us to believe that a CEO must be more valuable than his chauffeur, a doctor more valuable than the receptionist, a parent more valuable than a child, a man more valuable than a woman, and a Goddess more valuable than her devotee. It is this perception of power that causes wives to drift from husbands, children to rebel against their parents and humans to fear a punitive God. God is not one to punish. That is a notion which stems from wrong perceptions of power. Truth be told, we punish ourselves and then blame it on a supposedly angry God, who must be exasperated with us beyond imagination by now.
External power can cause grief, violence and destruction, if not wielded properly. This is not to say that you should shun external power. Recognize it for its worthlessness and give it the appropriate place in your life. Acquire as much as you can of it, without surrendering any of your truly valuable possessions.
True Power
True power comes from reverence. Reverence for this grand universe and everything it contains. And above all, true power comes from the reverence for your own soul. Recognizing this energy source within you is power that is internal and springs from within. It causes you to fly in the skies with wings of steel. It leads to an unbelievable lightness of the being. It is a power that no force in this universe can take away. When we come to serve to the needs of the soul that are required to re-create its balance, then we are on the path to evolution.
3 Kinds of Power at Workplace
Of the many types of power in the workplace, three stand out. First is the power of authority. This is the power that comes to you by virtue of your position. It is the power "over" others. It is the power given to the few by the many. Second is the power of knowledge. This is the power that accrues within individuals who have possession of unique information. The third type of power is the power from relationships. We may respond to an authority figure out of fear. We may respond to an expert out of respect. But, there is nothing greater than the power of a request from a person about whom we care personally. Such is the power of relationships.
Questions for YOU –
Take time out periodically to assess the kinds of power you've accumulated at work and in life. Are these powers intrinsic or external? Do they make sense to you? Will they stand the test of time? Take the leaders you admire and examine where their power comes from. I hope you'll find these questions interesting food for thought.
Happy journeys! And, best wishes to you for your careers.
Reference: Srini Chandra (3 Lives, in search of bliss), Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)


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Publicly available pages
About www.overduin.com This
is not a commercial website. It is a meeting-place and bulletin board
for all things related to the Overduin family. If you are an Overduin,
or were foolish enough to marry one, you may find things here of interest.
Otherwise, you probably won't!
If you would like to carve out your own uniquely creative corner of the Overduin universe, contact us about creating an http://overduin.com/ subfolder. Or if there is already content on the web that you would like to be linked to this site's directory, just send us the URL. july 7, 2013 |


text: Talented but unproven stock car driver Cole Trickle gets a break and with the guidance of veteran Harry Hogge turns heads on the track. The young hotshot develops a rivalry with a fellow racer that threatens his career when the two smash their cars. But with the help of his doctor, Cole just might overcome his injuries– and his fear.


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Press Ganey White Paper Reveals Data-Driven Approach to Help Improve Workforce Engagement
BOSTON — OCT 25, 2016 –(BUSINESS WIRE)– In a white paper released today, Press Ganey identifies opportunities for health care organizations to achieve high workforce engagement and create a competitive advantage in a consumer-driven health care marketplace. The white paper, Rules of Engagement: Assessing and Addressing Employee Engagement and Readiness for Change, outlines a data-driven approach that examines trends at the work-unit level to help inform custom strategies for employee engagement and ultimately help improve key safety, quality and experience outcomes.
"Employee engagement is a barometer for the cultural health of an organization and a core tenet of patient-centered care," said James Merlino , MD, President and CMO, Strategic Consulting , Press Ganey . "Correlations between employee engagement, safety, quality and the patient experience demonstrate that effective management of human capital must be a strategic imperative across health care organizations. Differentiating work units by tiers of engagement enables leaders to understand the needs of individual work groups and tailor improvement strategies that will help prevent harm, improve quality and advance the overall care experience."
Research indicates that 23% of health care employees are disengaged and present a significant opportunity for organizational improvement across domains. Based on analysis from Press Ganey employee engagement data and its workforce development framework, findings from the paper will help leaders prepare low-engagement work units for improvement by:
- Identifying drivers of engagement.
- Assembling a team to assess and support unit leaders.
- Designing customized improvement training.
- Providing unit leaders with resources to succeed.
A copy of the white paper, Rules of Engagement: Assessing and Addressing Employee Engagement and Readiness for Change , is available for download.
About Press Ganey
Press Ganey is a leading provider of patient experience measurement, performance analytics and strategic advisory solutions for health care organizations across the continuum of care. Celebrating 30 years of experience, Press Ganey is recognized as a pioneer and thought leader in patient experience measurement and performance improvement solutions. Our mission is to help health care organizations reduce patient suffering and improve clinical quality, safety and the patient experience. As of January 1, 2016 , we served more than 26,000 health care facilities.
Source: Press Ganey


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PC World - Storm Worm Now Just a SquallIt's particularly interesting that credit card numbers aren't worth stealing. Is it because there's a glut of numbers on the market, or is identify theft becoming harder?
... Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at UC San Diego, has been tracking Storm since July and said that, despite the intense publicity that the network of infected computers has received, it's actually been shrinking steadily and is presently a shadow of its former self. On Saturday, he presented his findings at the Toorcon hacker conference in San Diego.
Storm is not really a computer worm. It's a network of computers that have been infected via malicious e-mail messages, and are centrally controlled via the Overnet P-to-P protocol. Enright said he has developed software that crawls through the Storm network and he thinks that he has a pretty accurate estimate of how big Storm really is.
Some estimates have put Storm at 50 million computers, a number that would give its controllers access to more processing power than the world's most powerful supercomputer. But Enright said that the real story is significantly less terrifying. In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time....
... Since July, it's been downhill for Storm. That's when antivirus vendors began stepping up their tracking of Storm variants and got a lot better at identifying and cleaning up infected computers, Enright said.
Then on September 11, Microsoft added Storm detection (Microsoft's name for Storm's components is Win32/Nuwar) into its Malicious Software Removal tool, which ships with every Windows system. Overnight, Storm infections dropped by another 20 percent.
Today, Enright said that Storm is about one-tenth of its former size. His most recent data counts 20,000 infected PCs available at any one time, out of a total network of about 160,000 computers. "The size of the network has been falling pretty rapidly and pretty consistently," he said.
Still, Storm has had a remarkably successful run. It's called Storm because it first popped up in mid-January in spam e-mails that offered late-breaking information on powerful storms that had been battering Europe. Users who clicked on the "Full Story.exe" or "Video.exe" attachments that accompanied the spam were infected by malicious software, making them part of the Storm network.
These machines were then used to send out more spam and launch attacks against other computers. The recent MP3 stock spam that was first spotted earlier this week was sent out by the Storm network, Enright said.
Storm was effective because its creators were really good at creating messages that victims would feel compelled to click, Enright said. In its first few days, it managed to infect more than 300,000 computers, making it the worst malware outbreak since 2005. Its creators have since been masters at creating timely messages for their spam and have also had success getting victims to click on fake e-greeting cards.
The Storm network itself is constantly changing, and has used a variety of technologies that have made it an interesting phenomenon to study. In addition to the peer to peer network, it has used rootkit software to disguise its presence on the PC and a server-switching technique called "fast-flux," which makes the Storm servers harder to find on the network.
It's also developed some interesting ways of keeping researchers like Enright at bay. "If you're a researcher and you hit the pages hosting the malware too much... there is an automated process that automatically launches a denial of service [attack] against you," he said. This attack, which floods the victim's computer with a deluge of Internet traffic, knocked part of the UC San Diego network offline when it first struck.
Lately Storm has been responsible for a large quantity of "pump and dump" spam, which tries to temporarily boost the price of penny stocks. But one area that does not seem to be of interest to Storm's creators is identity theft. "Believe it or not, credit card numbers aren't worth that much money," Enright said. "It's much better to make money... via pump and dump."
I'm also impressed that Microsoft could knock 20% of the Storm bots offline with a single update.
Overall, this is very encouraging news. I wonder how profitable the Storm Worm really was. If these pump and dump schemes really worked that speculator behavior would come to neutralize them. (Speculators detecting early versions of the email could preempt the strategy of the scheme owner.)


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Hah! (I had a hard time choosing between "Hangin' with my Peeps" and "for Peep's sake!" lol). I ordered the background stamp with the GC I got for winning the Hero Arts challenge last month- I can't wait to ink up the other goodies I got!
I wanted the peeps to look as real as possible, so I covered them in a fine (but not super-fine) clear glitter. I think it definitely makes them appear sugary:
update: Some of you asked me about the peeps- I used my electronic die cutter!


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Mathematically, a vector is a quantity, defined by both magnitude and direction. For example, a vector could be illustrated by an 1 inch arrow pointing at a 30 degree angle. Another vector may be 2.5 inches and point at a 160 degree angle. In the computer world, vectors are used to define paths in certain types of images, such as EPS files and Adobe Illustrator documents. These images are often called vector graphics since they are comprised of vectors, or paths, instead of dots. Vector graphics can be scaled larger or smaller without losing quality.
In computer science, a vector may refer to a type of one dimensional array. For example, a vector called "fibonacci" that stores the first six values of the Fibonacci sequence would be defined as follows:
fibonacci[0] = 0, fibonacci[1] = 1, fibonacci[2] = 1, fibonacci[3] = 2, fibonacci[4] = 3, fibonacci[5] = 5
Vectors are similar to arrays, but unlike arrays, vectors use their own memory management mechanisms. Arrays are restricted to the memory structure supplied by the programming language they are created in, typically called a stack. Vectors have a more dynamic structure, often referred to as a heap, which gives them greater flexibility in how they use memory. While an array uses a static amount of memory, the memory used by the vector can be increased or decreased as elements are added or removed from the vector.


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Quick links: Contents What's new Site map My folk club etc pages
This is a guide to Internet resources relating to English folk music. A fuller statement of the aims and scope of these pages is on another page. Comments and suggestions -- especially about useful resources I have overlooked -- to me (Martin Nail), please.
Two wiki-based encyclopaedias, both very much works in progress, are:
There are a number of UK-based magazine-like sites, with information about the folk scene in the UK: news, reviews, tours, artists, folk clubs, etc, and links to other sites. These include:
A comparable site based in Germany is FolkWorld.
There are a number of discussion fora which cover the English folk scene, including the fRoots Forum and The Mudcat Café (which though American has many English contributors and has many threads of purely English interest such as discussion about English licensing laws). The main Internet newsgroup is uk.music.folk, though most discussion which used to take place there has now migrated to the forums just described; as with other Usenet newsgroups, there is an archive of the group in Google Groups. There is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for the group.
I have a listing of Music subject search tools: a guide to link lists, search engines, and subject gateways, concentrating on those covering folk music and ethnomusicology. You can also of course use general search engines like Google, but for general queries they are likely to overload you with results of little relevance. They can however be useful for some sorts of specific queries, such as bands with distinctive names.
There are interesting discussions on the tradition, and the meaningfulness of terms such as 'folk' and 'traditional' on the Musical Traditions magazine Enthusiasms and Letters pages. Bill Markwick's somewhat idiosyncratic The Folk File: a folkie's dictionary describes itself as 'A collection of terms related to folk music, plus some mini-biographies, musicology terms, trivia, and miscellaneous facts and figures'.
The main national organisations with websites are:
My Folk and traditional music in specific areas of England page on this site lists folk song clubs and other local organisations with web pages. Martin Kiff's Webfeet pages contain lists of English ceilidh and English Folk Dance series and dance clubs.
The major specialist collection of printed material and sound recordings of all sorts is the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The Library now has an Online Catalogue, currently containing the Leslie Shepard Collection and a large proportion of the books in the library, including new acquisitions and records from the previous in-house electronic database. The Library plans to finish converting the card catalogue and to add records for its holdings of periodicals. The VWML Online site contains a number of indexes etc which are described in the Discographies, bibliographies and indexes and Song, tune and dance collections sections below.
The national collection of sound recordings of folk and traditional musics is the World and Traditional Music collection of the British Library Sound Archive. Items in it are listed in the British Library Sound Archive Catalogue, available online. The Archive's Traditional Music in England Project digitised, catalogued and has made available a number of important collections of English songs and music from the second half of the twentieth century.
The University Library of the University of Sheffield includes Archives of Cultural Tradition, a collection of archives from the former National Centre for English Cultural Tradition (NATCECT), covering the subject areas of folklore, dialect and cultural tradition. Individual collections include The Russell Wortley Collection of Traditional Dance, Music and Custom, and The Dave Bathe Collection of Derbyshire Traditional Dance and Drama.
Many other libraries in England such as the Bodleian Library have substantial printed and manuscript collections of English folk music material. Cecilia is an on-line guide to music collections in archives, libraries and museums in the UK and Ireland.
The most comprehensive collection of folk and traditional musical instruments is in the Horniman Museum in London. Other museums in the UK with musical instrument collections are listed in the CIMCIM International Directory of Musical Instrument Collections: UK.
Folk music -- and folklore generally -- barely exists as a academic study in England, especially since the demise of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition. We have no organisation equivalent to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in the USA, or even the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The Open University's Musics and Cultures Research Group is no more, but its web page has details of past activities.
The University of Newcastle upon Tyne offers an undergraduate degree course in Folk and Traditional Music.
The EFDSS Education Department runs educational and participatory arts projects, classes, workshops, seminars and other events.
I list a few Tutors and courses on my folk music businesses page.
The Traditional Song Forum is an association of people interested in research, collection and performance of traditional song, principally of the British Isles. There is an associated Yahoo! discussion list called Tradsong. The Doc Rowe Archive and Collection is a major contemporary collection of material relating to traditional seasonal customs.
Collections of recordings made in England now in the British Library Sound Archive are listed in a Guide to European ethnographic sound recordings collections in PDF format (77.46 KB).
The EFDSS Take Six website contains a searchable database of the archives of seven of the UK's most prominent folksong collectors (Sabine Baring-Gould, Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Frances Collinson, George Gardiner, Anne G Gilchrist and the Hammond Brothers). A catalogue of the archives can be browsed and searched and over twenty-two thousand digitised images can be viewed.
The Society has now been awarded a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund for a follow-up project, the Full English, which will archive, conserve and digitise materials from six archives containing additional important folk song collections -- those of Harry Albino, Lucy Broadwood, Clive Carey, Percy Grainger, Maud Karpeles, Frank Kidson, Thomas Fairman Ordish, Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Alfred Williams -- and allow free public access to 58,400 digitised collection items through a new web portal. when combined with the Take 6 material it will form most comprehensive searchable database of British folk songs, tunes, dances and customs in the world.
Other sites relating to collectors from previous generations include the catalogue of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, (a major collection of traditional song and drama, from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the USA) now online. Martin Graebe's Songs of the West site "describes the life and work of Sabine Baring-Gould and the collection of songs that he made at the end of the nineteenth century".
Jacey Bedford maintains a list Folk magazines in the UK and the South Riding Folk Arts Network site has a list of Internet Resources: Directories and Magazines.
BBC Radio 2 a site for the Mike Harding Show.
Jacey Bedford maintains Folk on the Radio - UK, a list of folk music radio programmes. Some Internet radio stations which feature English music (as part of wider programming) are The Music Well (formerly RadioBritfolk), FolkCast, and Fred McCormick's Worlds of Trad.
Rod Stradling is compiling a Discography of Recorded Traditional Music on the Musical Traditions site. This site also contains The Complete Topic Records Discography by Mike Brocken, Alistair Banfield & Rod Stradling. David Atkinson's English Folk Song: an introductory bibliography: Discography (PDF file) is part of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library series of study guides. Jane Keefer's Folk Music: an Index to Recorded Resources contains over 63,580 songs and tunes from about 4,400 recordings (November 2008). Coverage is largely American, but British and Irish records are included; it is indexed by title and performer. Selected English Folk Singers contains discographies (including track listings) for about twenty English revival performers. Many of the artists' pages mentioned below contain individual discographies.
An important resource - though not of course limited to folk music - is the British Library Sound Archive Catalogue.
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library has started publishing its series of study guides. Those available so far are:
The South Riding Folk Arts Network site has a list of Song collections: online books and Song collections: websites. It also has an extensive bibliography of Folk song studies, in five sections: online books and journals, journal articles, websites, Indexes, bibliographies and finding aids, and related material.
Although their focus is on American and Scottish folk music, the listings at Ed Cray's Folk Ballad Bibliography contain much material of interest.
VWML Online contains a number of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library's indexes to manuscript collections (Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Maud Karpeles, Lucy Broadwood, the Hammond bothers, Francis Collinson, George Gardiner, and Percy Grainger). Also on this site is the Roud Folk Song Index, which is Steve Roud's indispensable database of over 191,000 references to songs that have been collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. Likewise available is the Roud Broadside Index. The Roud indexes now have an associated discussion list RoudIndexes.
Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle of California State University, Fresno have compiled The Traditional Ballad Index: An Annotated Bibliography of the Folk Songs of the English-Speaking World. Bruce Olson's Roots of Folk: Old English, Scots, and Irish Songs and Tunes has links to collections of tunes and of texts of broadside ballads. Cathy Lynn Preston has a "Working" KWIC Concordance to Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898)
The Plymouth Library Service's Plymouth Song Index -- an "index of over 60,000 song titles in nearly 2,000 songbooks" -- is not restricted to folksong, but includes many folksong collections (the Library houses a Baring-Gould collection). The index is no longer accessible directly but the contents can be found by searching the library's online catalogue.
The Folk Song Index: An Oberlin College Libraries & Sing Out! Collaboration indexes over 2,400 anthologies in the college library and the Sing Out! Resource Center. It is an "index to traditional folk songs of the world with an emphasis on English-language songs", with predominance of American publications.
Two useful indexes to printed collections of English, American and Celtic tunes are James Stewart's TuneIndex (55,000 entries), and Andrew Kuntz's The Fiddler's Companion (over 30,000 entries as at November 2000, including some actual tunes in abc notation), both on the Ceolas Celtic music site. The TuneIndex Introduction has a good discussion of tune types.
The VWML Dance and Tunes Index is an index to dances and tunes in material held by the library. The Village Music Project has a list of manuscript collections and publications of English country dance tunes.
There are a number of online songbooks, tunebooks and dance collections, few restricted to English music. Most have been compiled as practical tools and often give little indication of the provenance of their contents.
Over 20,000 archival recordings of English traditional songs and music are available online on the Traditional music in England page on the British Library website. Collections include those made by Bob and Jacqueline Patten Collection, Desmond and Shelagh Herring, John Howson, Keith Summers, Nick and Mally Dow, Reg Hall, Roy Palmer, Steve Gardham and Terry Yarnell. They can be browsed by map, county, performer, recordist, Sound Archive collection, or title.
The biggest online collection of Anglo-American folk song texts is the Digital Tradition database; the latest (Spring 2002) version contains 8981 texts, some with music: there are fewer distinct songs as some variants have separate entries (eg there are five versions of Barbara Allen). Entries vary in accuracy and extent of specified provenance. It can be searched online, or downloaded for use offline. Searching is possible using words from titles or texts, assigned keywords, and various other ways including Child and Laws numbers. The Digital Tradition also has an active online forum which is a useful place to post requests for words of songs. Previous discussions in the Forum archive are searchable, and the user can find some texts of songs not in the main database in this way (the default is to search both the database and the forum).
A much smaller (about 1000 songs) but better documented collection is at Folkinfo; this too has an accompanying discussion forum.
The EFDSS Take Six website contains a searchable database of the archives of several folksong collectors (Sabine Baring-Gould, Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Frances Collinson, George Gardiner, Anne G Gilchrist and the Hammond Brothers). Digitised copies of the collectors' field notebooks and fair copies can be viewed.
The Index of Songs and Tunes on Reinhard Zierke's Mainly Norfolk site provides access to pages for songs sung by various (mainly revival) singers. Each page gives Roud, Child and Laws numbers, discusses the various recordings and gives transcription of texts (often several versions).
Another American resource is Lesley Nelson-Burns's Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and America which contains texts and tunes (in midi format) including Child ballads. Richard Kopp has a similar site which includes Songs of England.
The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads site contains indexes to, and facsimiles of, over 30,000 broadside ballads. The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California at Santa Barbara contains detailed cataloguing, images, transcriptions, and in some cases recordings, of English black-letter broadside ballads of the 17th century. The site currently contains the Pepys Collection from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the team are working on the Roxburghe Ballads from the British Library.
For those who cannot find the words they want in any of the above, there is a large number of more general sites on the web containing words of songs: a good list of these is on Yahoo! at: Entertainment/Music/Lyrics/. Otherwise, using a general search engine -- such as Goggle -- may come up with the answer, especially if there are unusual words in the text.
Many tune collections use Chris Walshaw's abc musical notation language, described on the abc music notation site. the site contains a list of abc collections and an abc tune search which covers around 275,000 tunes in 120,000 files from British, Irish, American and European collections. Another index to abc collections (and some in other formats) is JC's ABC tune finder. Folk Tune Finder is a search engine for traditional tunes which indexes many ABC collections on the Internet.
The Round English Country Dance Club have a Folk Music Index which is an index to dance tunes on the Web in various formats. Though neither is restricted to English tunes, two good sources of English dance tunes are Richard Robinson's TuneBook Live! (in abc format) and Eric Foxley's Music Database (Nottingham ASCII format). Steve Allen has an ABC library of morris tunes.
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library has started making available facsimiles of Historic Dance and Tune Books in its collections. The Village Music Project aims to locate original manuscript material and recordings of traditional social dance music of England and make them available for research and performance; tradtunes is an associated discussion list.
A small number of callers have started to put collections of dances up on the Web, but there is nothing very comprehensive. Martin Kiff has a list of these on his English Folk dance index page.
Robert M. Keller's The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium contains a database of all the dances from all the editions of John Playford's Dancing Master.
There are quite a few websites and newsgroups devoted to specific musical instruments. Obviously, most instruments are used to play many different types of music, so it is easier to find folk-related resources for those (such as free-reeds, dulcimers and bagpipes) which are primarily folk instruments. The Roots.net collection of instrument links has disappeared again.
Although not exclusively English in scope, the following resources certainly include English folk music and contain links to further resources. Although there are dozens of fiddle and guitar sites, I have only found a couple which are particularly relevant to players of English music. Further recommendations welcome. There are various instrument makers listed on my folk music businesses page.
Starting points for some specific types of English folk music are as follows; each of these sites contains links to further resources.
A new listing site for folk events in Britain is Simply What's On.
For comprehensive information on dance events see Martin Kiff's excellent Webfeet pages. An alternative listings site is Set and Turn Single.
There is no central source of information about folk song events in England. My Folk and traditional music in specific areas of England page includes links to web resources for folk song and music events and/or venues in England including both regional/county/local listings and individual folk clubs. Forthcoming artists' tours can also be found on many of the artists' pages mentioned below.
A new list of sessions in Britain is UKSessions which has a useful facility to search for sessions within a chosen distance of any postcode. There is a list of sessions in England and further afield on the Musical Traditions site, and a Session index for the UK and Ireland on the Living Tradition site.
The Spiral Earth Festival Directory is a guide to folk, roots, blues, Americana and alternative music festivals in the UK and Ireland.
Many of the pages for Specific genres (above) have lists of relevant events.
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library has organised series of lectures in the past but none are currently being advertised.
Averil Shepherd's Calendar Customs: a guide to British Calendar Customs and local traditions gives details of the location and timing of a large number of customs in the UK. The Morris Ring list of Traditional Morris Events is mainly revival morris.
Dates of traditional carol performances can be found at the Local Carols site. Forthcoming performances of folk plays are listed in Forthcoming Folk Play Performances.
Some traditional customs such as Bampton Traditional Morris Men, Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and Abingdon Traditional Morris Dancers, and revived customs such as Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green and Whittlesea Straw Bear have their own websites.
A specifically English site is Rufus Sargent's Selected English Folk Singers which contains information and discographies for a number of revival performers. A similar site is Reinhard Zierke's Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music. This contains discographies and song texts for over forty revival singers. Bright Young Folk contains record and gig reviews and interviews with (mainly) younger performers. The Folk Music Artists site allows performers to post promotional information.
Local printed and online folk magazines often contain information about local performers. I list these in the Regional/county/local event listings or Other resources headings for each region on my Folk and traditional music in the specific areas of England page
An increasing number of English folk music performers have web pages, created by themselves, their agents and record companies, or by fans. I have page listing English folk music performers with websites. There is a world-wide listing of Lists of Artist Home Pages in Doug Wenkle's FolkLib Index.
I have put together a short list of English solo singers and instrumentalists with websites.
I have put together a short list of English bands and groups with websites. English ceilidh bands and English folk dance bands are listed in Martin Kiff's Webfeet pages. West gallery quires are listed on the West Gallery Music Association site.
John Maher's Mainly Morris Dancing page has a list of morris sides in England with web pages, together with many other morris links.
Jacey Bedford's Jacey's Help Files is a collection of useful information for artists and agencies.
My Folk music businesses page has listings of websites for:
The Folk and Roots Venues page leads to county or regional listings of folk clubs and other venues in Britain. This is probably the most comprehensive national listing on the web.
Another page of my site lists web resources for Folk and traditional music in specific areas of England. To go straight to regional listings use the following links:
Page created by Martin Nail. Copyright © 2012 Martin Nail. Last revised 9th November 2012
For those interested, there is a bit about me, and my views on website design.


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Want To Sample Cycling? Give Spinning A Try
It's no secret that bicycling is an amazing activity. It's an environmentally friendly and inexpensive source of transportation. It's also a safe and easy way to shed extra pounds and get in great shape. Cycling is the perfect way to explore backcountry roads and trails, too. Best of all, it's loads of fun.
Unfortunately, bicycles and the thought of riding can be intimidating. The fact is cycling, like all new activities, requires practice. Another hurdle is the cost of getting started. You might not want to invest in a bicycle for fear you won't enjoy it. Well we have a great idea for you: An excellent no-risk, low-cost way to give cycling a whirl is at an indoor cycling fitness class at your local health club or recreation center!
Often called Spinning, these 45-minute to 1-hour classes are perfect for experiencing what cycling's all about. The specially designed stationary bikes fit and ride like real bicycles so you'll feel what it's like to sit on a bike and pedal at different speeds and intensities.
The instructor should help you adjust the stationary bike so you're comfortable with no back or neck strain. And, the instructor should provide advice on proper pedaling technique and upper body position. Ask for help if you have questions.
Although it's quite a workout and you're likely to sweat a lot, indoor cycling is great for all ages and fitness levels. A dial attached to the bicycle controls the amount of resistance so you can make pedaling as difficult or easy as you like. Clubs also often have classes for beginners that involve more instruction and offer a more moderate workout intensity.
After a few classes you'll get the feel of what pedaling a real bicycle is like. Although we'd argue that there's no comparison to feeling the wind and sun on your face while cycling outdoors, riding a stationary bike is super preparation for the real thing. It gets you used to sitting on a bike seat and gripping the handlebars and strengthens your legs and lungs. When you ride outdoors you'll probably be surprised how easy it is, too. To find a class near you, look under Health Clubs in your Yellow Pages or do a quick on-line search.
Though you won't need to spend any money on a bike, we do recommend getting these three things before your first class. 1) A pair of cycling shorts. These should have a padded crotch, commonly referred to as a "chamois," that makes sitting on the seat comfortable. 2) A pair of stiff-soled sneakers. (These will make pedaling easier.) 3) Lastly, bring a water bottle so you can stay well hydrated.
Chances are after a few classes you'll catch the cycling bug and long for outdoor biking experiences. That's when it's time to get a real bike and get outside! You're likely to meet other cyclists in these classes, too. Soon you'll have a network of friends to meet with for group rides and consult with for tips. And remember that on rainy days or during the winter, indoor cycling is a great way to stay fit and ride.
Alone and with a group, cycling is wonderful fun. The friends you make, the places you see and the experiences you have enrich your life while keeping you fit and happy at the same time. If you're at all nervous about riding a real bicycle, give indoor cycling a try. Soon you'll be calling yourself a cyclist and riding with confidence indoors and out!