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Splinter Cell director: "lower case aaa" is the future of the industry
Splinter Cell: Blacklist director Patrick Redding believes traditional "AAA" development isn't sustainable, and will be replaced by lower budget "aaa" releases.
Speaking at the Gamercamp festival in Toronto, as reported by GamesIndustry, Redding said games like Minecraft - low budget but flexible - are the future.
"The market as a whole is going to undergo a critical shift in priorities, a shift away from the absolute primacy of graphics and production values and content creation toward systemic depth," he said.
"This trend is going to trigger a reality check for developers like me who work on established franchises with a large succession of sequels, and it's also going to be a call-to-arms for smaller game creators."
Factors contributing to this shift include increasing development costs, digital distribution and player demand. Redding said the resulting "aaa" games will prioritise systemic design and open-ended gameplay. The developer warned that "aaa" creators will have to give up authorial control and accept that additional resources won't always solve design issues.
Fittingly, Redding concluded by saying that Splinter Cell: Blacklist is definitely a AAA title but uses some systemic design, such as in its AI and lighting-based detection mechanics. He considers the forthcoming stealth action effort an example of how AAA production values can serve more interesting design.
Blacklist is due on PC, PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 in northern spring 2013.


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- Some of the most promising drugs for cancer therapy called checkpoint inhibitors often result in complete remissions, however, a majority of patients fail cancer immunotherapy with antibodies targeting immune checkpoints, such as CTLA-4 or programmed death-1 (PD-1).
- Insilico Medicine developed a set of pathway-based signatures of response to popular checkpoint inhibitors
- Using these markers and a deep learned drug scoring engine Insilico Medicine identified 12 leads that may help increase response to cancer immunotherapy and is seeking industry partnerships to test these leads
Thursday, July 14, 2016, Baltimore, MD -- Recent advances in cancer immunotherapy demonstrated complete remission in multiple tumor types including melanoma and lung cancers. Almost every major pharmaceutical company operating in oncology space started multiple programs in immuno-oncology with thousands of clinical trials underway. Immuno-oncology is now a very broad field ranging from treatment of a patient with an engineered antibody to genome editing of patient's immune cells. Genetic mutations accruing from the inherent genomic instability of tumor cells present neo-antigens that are recognized by the immune system. Cross-presentation of tumor antigens at the immune synapse between antigen-presenting dendritic cells and T lymphocytes can potentially activate an adaptive antitumor immune response, however, tumors continuously evolve to counteract and ultimately defeat such immune surveillance by co-opting and amplifying mechanisms of immune tolerance to evade elimination by the immune system. This prerequisite for tumor progression is enabled by the ability of cancers to produce negative regulators of immune response.
Cancer immunotherapy is currently focused on targeting immune inhibitory checkpoints that control T cell activation, such as CTLA-4 and PD-1. Monoclonal antibodies that block these immune checkpoints (commonly referred to as immune checkpoint inhibitors) can unleash antitumor immunity and produce durable clinical responses in a subset of patients with advanced cancers, such as melanoma and non-small-cell lung cancer. However, these immunotherapeutics are currently constrained by their inability to induce clinical responses in the vast majority of patients and the frequent occurrence of immune-related adverse events. A key limitation of checkpoint inhibitors is that they narrowly focus on modulating the immune synapse but do not address other key molecular determinants that may also be responsible for immune dysfunction.
Immunoresistance often ensues as a result of the concomitant activation of multiple, often overlapping signaling pathways. Therefore, inhibition of multiple, cross-talking pathways involved in survival control with combination therapy is usually more effective in decreasing the likelihood that cancer cells will develop therapeutic resistance than with single agent therapy. While research efforts are now focused on identifying new inhibitory mechanisms that could be targeted to achieve responses in patients with refractory cancers and provide durable and adaptable cancer control, there are outstanding challenges in determining what combination of immunotherapies and conventional therapies will prove beneficial against each tumor type.
"Immunotherapy is the most promising area in oncology resulting in cures, but we need to identify effective combinations of both established methods and new drugs developed specifically to boost response rates. At Insilico Medicine we developed a new method for screening, scoring and personalizing small molecules that may boost response rates to PD-1, PD-L1, CTLA4 and other checkpoint inhibitors. We can identify effective combinations of both established methods and new drugs developed specifically to boost response rates to immunotherapy", said Artem Artemov, director of computational drug repurposing at Insilico Medicine.
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is one of the leaders in transcriptome-based pathway perturbation analysis. It is also a pioneer in applying cutting edge artificial intelligence techniques to biological and medical data analysis, particularly focused on in silico screening for new compounds against cancer and known drugs which can be repurposed against different cancers. One of the major programs currently ongoing at Insilico Medicine is evaluation of the transcriptional responses to multiple checkpoint inhibitors and analyzing the pathway-level differences in patients who respond and fail to respond to clinically approved checkpoint inhibitors. This novel computational approach is aimed at identifying new drug candidates which can be used in combination with immunotherapy to unleash durable antitumor effect against several types of cancers.
Recently, scientists at Insilico Medicine performed a large in silico screening of compounds that can be administered in combination with anti-PD1 immunotherapy to increase response rates. The researchers collected transcriptomic data from tumors of patients who either responded or failed to respond to standard immunotherapy, using both publically available and internally generated data. Next, they used differential pathway activation analysis and deep learning based approaches to identify transcriptomic signatures predicting the success of immunotherapy in a particular tumor type.
Finally, they analyzed drug-induced transcriptomic effects to screen for the drugs that can robustly drive transcriptomes of tumor cells from non-responsive state to the state responsive to immunotherapy. In other words, researchers developed approach that can predict whether drug of interest would induce a transcriptional signature that characterizes those patients that respond to cancer immunotherapy in non-respondents. This method allows personalizing these drugs to individual patients and specific checkpoint inhibitors. Among the top-scoring drugs, they found several compounds known to increase response rates in combination with cancer immunotherapy. One of the top-scoring compounds included a naturally-occurring substance marketed as a natural product.
The current list of top-scoring leads that may increase response rates to checkpoint inhibitors included 12 small molecules identified using signaling pathway perturbation analysis and annotated using a deeply learned drug scoring system. Insilico Medicine is currently open for partnerships which will allow further testing and validation of the discovered compounds ex vivo on cell cultures established from tumors which respond and failed to respond to immunotherapy, as well as in mice with patient-derived tumor xenografts. This approach may greatly reduce the costs of preclinical trials and significantly shorten the timeframe from a drug prediction to validation and marketing. The compounds, after preclinical and clinical validation, may improve cancer care and dramatically increase the lifespan of cancer patients.
A panel of leads for concomitant immunotherapy is part of a large number of leads developed using DeepPharma™, artificially-intelligent drug discovery engine, which includes a large number of molecules predicted to be effective antineoplastic agents, metabolic regulators, CVD and CNS lead, senolytics and ED drugs. Recently Insilico Medicine published several seminal papers demonstrating proof of concept of utilizing deep learning techniques to predict pharmacological properties of small molecules using transcriptional response data utilizing deep neural networks for biomarker development. "Deep Learning Applications for Predicting Pharmacological Properties of Drugs and Drug Repurposing Using Transcriptomic Data," a paper published in Molecular Pharmaceuticals received the American Chemical Society Editors' Choice Award. Another recent collaboration with Biotime, Inc resulted in a launch of Embryonic.AI, deep learned predictor of differentiation state of the sample.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore with R&D resources in Belgium, Russia, and Poland hiring talent through hackathons and competitions. It utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sarcopenia and geroprotector discovery. Through its Pharmaceutical Artificial Intelligence division the company provides advanced machine learning services to biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and skin care companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8.

subset: commoncrawl


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Return of Overtime Helps Cut Retirement Backlog in August
Queue of claims decreases 11 percent from the previous month.
The retirement claims backlog fell 11 percent between July and August, in part because the Office of Personnel Management resumed overtime for employees last month.
"A year-end budget review" enabled OPM to reinstate "limited overtime" for retirement services staff in August, the agency said. The agency had eliminated all overtime at the end of April because of budget cuts from sequestration.
That led to a slight increase in the claims backlog during the spring, slowing the agency's momentum in clearing the queue. Now OPM is slightly ahead of its monthly projections in eliminating a decades-old problem. The backlog currently stands at 22,750 claims, nearly half of what it was in July 2012.
The agency managed to process 1,455 more claims than it expected to in August. It also received 296 fewer new retirement claims than it expected last month, which helped OPM get back on track after what so far has been a record year for retirements.
The agency hopes to clear up the backlog to a "consistent workload" by March 2014 -- roughly seven months later than the original target date of July 2013.
The agency estimated that the loss of funding because of the sequester reduced retirement case processing by 20 percent to 25 percent. Still, the agency remains committed to its goal of processing 90 percent of retirement claims within two months of receipt, Ken Zawodny, OPM's associate director for retirement services, said in an interview last month.
OPM statistics show a slowdown beginning in May 2013, shortly after the agency got rid of overtime and reduced call center hours. Between May and July of this year, the agency reduced the backlog by 2.3 percent, or 609 claims. Contrast that with the time period between May 2012 and July 2012, when OPM decreased the backlog by about 10 percent. Nearly 53,000 new retirement applications poured in between January and March of this year, many of them from Postal Service employees taking advantage of the early outs and buyouts offered by the financially strapped agency.
Despite the setbacks, OPM has made steady, if slow, progress in tackling a claims backlog that has been growing for decades. The average processing time for a claim is now around 91 days, down from about 156 days in February 2012.
Still, many federal retirees continue to wait several months, and sometimes years, for their applications to be fully and correctly processed. OPM administers benefits for 2.5 million federal retirees and processes about 100,000 new claims annually.
(Image via bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock.com)


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Landlords can reduce their tax bill by up to £1,500 a year with the Landlord's Energy Saving Allowance. Unless extended in the forthcoming budget, this scheme is due to end 5 April 2015.
What you can claim
You can claim Landlord's Energy Saving Allowance for the costs of buying and installing the following energy-saving products for properties you rent out:
- cavity wall and loft insulation
- solid wall insulation
- draught-proofing
- hot water system insulation
- floor insulation
Owning property abroad
You can claim Landlord's Energy Saving Allowance for properties you rent out abroad, as long as you pay UK tax on profits from those properties.
Owning more than one property
You can claim a maximum allowance of £1,500 for each house, flat or bedsit you rent out. For example, if you rent out a building that contains 4 flats, you can claim up to £1,500 for each flat.
Owning a property with others
If you own the property with others, you can claim a share of the allowance in one of 2 ways:
- based on the amount of the property you own (e.g. if you own half of the property you can claim up to £750)
- based on the amount of money you spent on the improvements (e.g. if you covered half of the costs, you can claim up to £750)
Owners can claim a maximum £1,500 in total for each property owned.
Installing energy-saving items yourself
If you install the energy-saving items yourself, you can claim Landlord's Energy Saving Allowance for the costs of buying them, but not for installing them.
What you can't claim
You can't claim Landlord's Energy Saving Allowance on a property if:
- you're claiming an allowance under the 'Rent a Room' scheme
- you're renting out the property as furnished holiday accommodation
How to apply
Please call our office if you would like more information regarding this scheme.


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The latest BriefingsDirect podcast, from the 2012 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas, explores the latest in cloud-based collaborative commerce with Mediafly, a startup company that delivers cloud-based applications for content management and distribution on mobile devices for Fortune 500 companies.
We'll learn how Chicago-based Mediafly, through the Ariba Network, gained insight and control over its cash flow and found new means of managing capital and in aiding its ability to support ongoing operations, as well as to drive future growth.
To hear more about how they did it, Interarbor Solutuons Principal Analyst Dana Gardner interviews two executives from Mediafly, Carson Conant, CEO, and John Evarts, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Tell me about your startup company and why managing cash flow is so important.Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Ariba.
Conant: Mediafly is the leader in the presentation platform market. What that means is that we're the company that helps bridge the gap between large Fortune 1000 companies, their internal systems, and primarily mobile applications, but also things like Internet-connected televisions, and so forth.
Large companies create lots of video. It could be live broadcast, sales presentations, training videos, and TV and movie industry content. When they're trying to distribute that content to make it available on all of these emerging devices, particularly at that large scale, they need a provider like Mediafly.
Think of all the TV and movie productions that are going on the studios. Those companies have thousands of video files that they're housing inside of their four walls. They're trying to expose that content to all of their executives and staff, everybody from the makeup artist that needs to watch the last three dailies to the CEO and the president.
Perfect platform
Now, they want to be able to do that on iPads, iPhone, Android, and on televisions connected to the web. We're the perfect platform, because there is so much that has to go on that so many gears are turning to make all that happen.
That's a perfect solution for the cloud, and those companies now integrate with us so that that material is available to all the different stakeholders on all of these different devices. So we've dropped ourselves in and filled the gap between their in-house systems and all of these mobile devices.
Gardner: As a small company, what are you facing, when it comes to the financial pressures?
Evarts: As a small company, we often don't have a balance sheet that's attractive to banks, among other things. As we seek things like angel investment or equity investment, we need to do things that are extremely capital efficient with those funds.
When we have an opportunity for revenue, especially revenue at large corporations, Fortune 100 companies, these are large contracts. As a small organization, contracting with larger organizations, it's absolutely critical for us to manage that cash flow well and have visibility into the cash flow.
As we said, we've been growing very quickly. So our recurring revenue has grown by 3x over the last two years. As we grow quickly, we need to have that visibility into cash management, because it's absolutely critical that we staff at the right time relative to taking advantage of opportunities that are out there in the market.
Gardner: So looking at this from an elasticity point of view, larger companies have a bit more wiggle room. As a smaller company you don't, but you need to grow fast. Help me understand what led you to do things differently in order to make this elasticity work in your favor.
Conant: We're very fortunate. One of our largest customers is in the media entertainment space and we did a large seven-figure deal with them over a series of years. But the way that they do invoicing and transactions is through the Ariba Network. They said, "For you to get paid, join the Ariba Network."
So that was the first thing that got us onto the network. What was amazing is that once we got on there, as John said, it was unlike a lot of our other transactions with similarly large companies. In those companies it's just like a black box. You've got a several hundred thousand-dollar invoice that goes out, and you may not know if that's going to come in in two weeks or six weeks.
What was amazing to us with Ariba was the ability to know exactly where we were in that payment process. Ultimately we took advantage of this program they call "dynamic discounting," which allowed us to accelerate cash for a couple of basis points.
Huge ramifications
So for a fairly inconsequential amount of money to us, we were able to get paid in about 14 days instead of 60 days. It had huge ramifications on our business. What that did for us is allowed us to interact with them in a way that they preferred, but still have the nimbleness that we need from it as being a small company.
Gardner: So visibility and predictability are really important. In the past, people would generally go to a bank to get a line of credit and pay a high interest rate in order to have that accordion to manage their cash flows. You've found a way to do this, not through a bank, but through working directly with your customers and perhaps even incentivizing them to help you with your cash flow and visibility and your saving on the interest. It sounds like a win-win all around.
Evarts: It's an excellent opportunity for us to work with a partner and deepen that partnership with our vendors. We've found that, as Carson said, for a few basis points of a concession on the contract, we're able to factor 100 percent of the contract value of the invoice.
When that occurs, the advantage to us is that we're able to immediately take advantage of it, as soon as it hits the system, to take 100 percent of those otherwise unknown collection periods. When we can reduce the collection periods from 60 days all the way to 14 days. We're in a much stronger financial position, because we can take advantage of those dollars.
Conant: The first time we took advantage of dynamic discounting, it was relatively early in a development cycle for a security package that we were in the process of building. What that did allowed us to get access to cash to bring in additional resources to accelerate those featured enhancements.It sparked additional Fortune 100 contracts. It was fundamentally game changing for us.
Literally, two weeks after signing this deal with one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, we were in the board room with one of the largest global banks in the world touting these new security features we had, which we otherwise wouldn't have had for maybe 60 days.
It sparked additional Fortune 100 contracts. It was fundamentally game changing for us. We joke that it would be interesting if all of our customers leveraged something like dynamic discounting. It would be transformative for our business. It would drastically accelerate how we can deploy cash. Then you think about it in terms of what could it do for the economy.
If all these companies were taking advantage of this, it would boost the stability and the growth of their partners and their vendors. It would be something. That's why we're so vocal about it.
Evarts: As a small organization that is very nimble and trying to innovate, it speeds up and accelerates the pace of innovation that we're able to generate. The new features that we offered to this first client, we were immediately able to turn and sell to one of the leading investment banks as the same security capability.
So when we're able to quickly accelerate and bring new innovations to market, obviously everybody benefits. Mediafly benefits, and ultimately, our customers are going to benefit as well.
Level playing field
Gardner: And what strikes me is that this seems to be a level playing field between you, a small company, and as you point out, some of the largest media companies in the world. You're playing with the same rules with Ariba being the trusted arbiter.
Conant: Absolutely. There are probably two or three technologies that we've taken advantage of that have just come into play in the last three to five years. One of them is cloud-based infrastructure. We don't have to buy servers anymore. That's allowed a company of our size to outpace and out-compete companies that have been around for a long time and provide enterprise services to Fortune 100 global companies.
Then, you look at Ariba, and it's very similar. It allows us to interact with them the same way that they would interact with another large company. Doing business with us doesn't feel different than doing business with another large company.
They get what they want, we get some additional visibility and some things that are valuable to us. But, these technologies have just come into play in the last three to five years, and it's really allowed a company like Mediafly to exist.
Gardner: A lot of times, analysts like myself focus on the technology behind the cloud, but it's really a game changer, when it comes to business processes and allows for the compression of what used to be latency in terms of business functions, monetization, and cash flow. Now, when everybody has visibility, when the level field is there for all participants, it's much more efficient and direct, and we're just starting to pick some of the fruit of that.These technologies have just come into play in the last three to five years, and it's really allowed a company like Mediafly to exist.
Evarts: And you touched on it. Creating scalable solutions is absolutely critical and it allows a small organization with relatively limited initial capital, first to be able to scale to a level, and participate in the Ariba Network, and basically have the same credentials as some of the largest companies in the world.
Folks who are transacting with Mediafly are doing it in the exact same way that they do with other Fortune 100 peers. To some degree, to us, it's a competitive advantage, and we feel that way. We feel that if we're on the system, we've been vetted, and other folks are using us on the system. It's an excellent credential for us to have and a nice reference for us.We feel that this Ariba Discovery concept is extremely valuable to us as a small organization, as we look to scale as a lead generation opportunity and ultimately, as we're transacting business.
Gardner: We've touched briefly on how this could be a go-to market benefit for you. Let's expand on that. How in providing a discount incentive to cash flow, and using the Ariba Network, does that end up getting you more customers?
Evarts: One of the tools that we're just trying to tap into is this concept called Ariba Discovery. Discovery allows you to self select a series of industries, what they call commodities. That allows you to say, "These are the services that we offer." Then, large companies are able to go on that system and say, "These are the services that we're looking for." So it's really kind of a matchmaking function.
While we've only scratched the surface -- we feel we're relatively new to this system -- we feel that this Ariba Discovery concept is extremely valuable to us as a small organization, as we look to scale as a lead generation opportunity and ultimately, as we're transacting business.
We feel that as a small vendor, if there are a number of individual companies that are looking to leverage this system, we're happy to make a light concession, obviously, for the right amount of basis points and just for the right timing. We're able to then take advantage of that, accelerate cash in. When non-financial companies, at the end of third quarter last year, had $3 trillion sitting on their balance sheets, you know that there's a ton of liquidity out there that will be invested, and is going to be invested in different ways.
One way that folks can take advantage of it is using a system like Ariba in order to support the supply chain, investing in their current partners.
Of, for, by the cloud
Gardner: So you're sort of of, for, and by the cloud. When it came to moving toward Ariba and using some of their services, did that work as an off-the-cloud service, where there wasn't anything on premise or you didn't have to have your IT people involved in? How friendly a cloud player did Ariba turn out to be?
Conant: Extremely friendly, relative to some other more manual processes that some of our other customers leverage. The best example that is our ultimate discovery of the dynamic discounting program. Our controller noticed a checkbox in our interface. It's a web-based interface and he asked John, "This looks interesting. Should we take advantage of it?" We said, "Yeah, let's try it on our first invoice."
This was not some training that had to happen before we understood how to use this system. It was a couple of checkboxes, and now we are getting paid earlier.
To me, that's really what the cloud is. A company like Ariba, in my opinion, has done a really good job of abstracting, so you're left with just an elegant functionality and it's in the cloud. It's all web-based. There's nothing we had to deploy on premises.
We're a cloud company. So it feels natural. I can't even imagine how simple it must seem to somebody who's used to using things on premises.Not only can we now take full advantage of their entire cloud-based infrastructure, but it was very easy for us as a small vendor to get onto this system.
Evarts: One of the key elements for us was the ease to get on the system. When a customer whose that large asks you to join, and you're as small as you are, you say absolutely, how quickly and when. Ariba was absolutely fantastic in helping us to get onto this system and then ultimately helping us navigate, within the course of a couple of hours max, to have been fully integrated into the system. Not only can we now take full advantage of their entire cloud-based infrastructure, but it was very easy for us as a small vendor to get onto this system.
Gardner: On the other side, the flip side of the coin, these global Fortune 500 companies were familiar with Ariba. You didn't have to drag them along and convince them. There was already the established trust and credibility.
Conant: We're still scratching the surface, as more and more companies are moving this way. It seems like a lot of the people that we're talking to are moving into cloud-based procurement solutions, things like Ariba. As more time goes on, more and more of our customers will be on Ariba and leveraging dynamic discounting and so forth.
What's great is that each one that is using Ariba is already set up. It's just a matter of them attaching our profile or however it happens behind the scene. But there are not a whole lot of additional process. That's what's neat about the network effect. Once multiple parties are on a network, it's just a matter of connecting the two lines together.
You may also be interested in:
- Ariba Network Helps Cox Enterprises Manage Procurement Across Six Different ERP Systems
- Ariba CMO Tim Minahan on how networked economy benefits spring from improved business commerce and cloud processes
- Ariba Dynamic Discounting Gives Companies New Visibility into Cash Flow to Improve the Buying Process
- Ariba, IBM Deal Shows Emerging Prominence of Cloud Ecosystem-Based Collaboration and Commerce
- Ariba Steps Up Cloud Efforts with StartContracts, On-Demand Contract Management for SMBs
- Ariba Live Discussion: How Cloud Alters Landscape for eCommerce, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management
- Cloud-Based Commerce Network Helps Florida Manufacturer MarkMaster Reach New Markets, Streamline Transactions


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The Catholic Church has a clearly defined hierarchy of clergy members and people in religious life. In Catholic understanding, the clergy are those who have received the sacrament of Holy Orders, which includes deacons, priests, and bishops. Bishops stand at the highest level since they have received the fullness of priestly orders; they can confer all the sacraments on others, including the sacrament of Holy Orders. Catholics believe that through a blessing involving the laying on of hands, the apostles passed their teaching authority on to their successors, who then passed on the authority to their own successors in the same way. This line of blessing and authority continues down to the present-day bishop, who is therefore endowed with apostolic authority.
Despite their title, priests have received only partial priestly orders; they are designated as helpers to the bishops in their teaching and sacramental ministries. The priestly role is sacramental in nature, but priests may not confer Holy Orders, since they do not possess the fullness of apostolic authority. Most parishes have priests as their effective leaders.
Until recently the diaconate (the role of deacon) was simply a step on the way to the priesthood, but Vatican Council II changed that by returning the diaconate to its New Testament roots. In the early Church, deacons were those who ran the churches and helped the bishops; in the very earliest Church, women took on the role of deacons as well as men, although they were later barred from that work. Nowadays deacons are men who usually have jobs outside the Church and are often married, but who also assist priests in parishes. They do not have the breadth of sacramental authority that a priest has - for instance, they cannot preside at Mass - but they can preside at marriages, perform baptisms, and preach.
Despite the wide array of other leadership roles in the Church, up to and including the pope, none of these other leadership roles is sacramental in nature. Bishops hold the highest sacramental role that exists within the Catholic universe. In practical terms, though, cardinals hold greater sway than bishops. Cardinals are traditionally known as the Princes of the Church. They are usually drawn from the ranks of the bishops, and since 1962 it has been Church policy that before their installation as cardinals men must first be consecrated as bishops, although dispensations from this requirement are sometimes given to men who are elevated to the cardinalate late in life. Cardinals generally have official roles of great administrative authority, such as heading areas of the Roman Curia (the Church's government) or leading archdioceses.
Beyond the cardinals is, of course, the pope, the Vicar of Christ on earth, the leader of the world's Catholics. Popes are elected by the College of Cardinals and hold their office for life. The doctrine of papal infallibility, first defined at Vatican Council I in 1870, allows the pope in very particular circumstances to make doctrinal statements that all Catholics are required to believe and adhere to as a matter of conscience. Denying an infallible doctrine is tantamount to removing yourself from communion with the pope, meaning that you cease to be a Catholic. In practice, though, pronouncements declared infallible are exceedingly rare - only twice in the last two centuries have popes made such declarations - and the pronouncements are supposed to represent a belief that is already shared by believers as expressed through the pope as their head.
Together the pope and the bishops constitute the magisterium of the Church. Magisterium (Latin for "teaching") refers to the teaching authority of the Church, and it is the role of the magisterium to define and interpret the Church's doctrines and teach what is needed for salvation. When the pope speaks ex cathedra (literally, "from the chair" in Latin) or when bishops define a doctrine at a general council of the Church (like Vatican I), they are believed to speak infallibly; when the pope or a bishop engages his teaching authority outside these venues, he speaks with great authority but not infallibly.
Study Questions:
1. Who are the clergy within the Catholic Church? Why is apostolic succession important in selecting leaders?
2. What is the role of Catholic priests? Deacons? Cardinals?
3. Who is the pope? What is he responsible for?
4. Describe the relationship between physical location and Truth.


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Drawn to Collect: Selections from the Farrell-Herrick Collection of Drawings
May 13, 2023 - August 20, 2023
Temporary Exhibition GalleryThis exhibition highlights selections from Detroit-based collectors Michael Farrell and Marc Herrick. Collecting together for 20 years, and individually before then, the two have amassed an ever-growing assemblage of artworks across an array of mediums, including paintings, drawings, prints, glass, ceramics, and silver. The artworks included in this exhibition, just a portion of their collection, reveals the pair's interest in the intimate and personal aspect of drawings. During the Renaissance, drawing became the foundation for the academic principles of art. Before artists learned to paint, they learned to draw. This tradition continues today and allows an artist to experiment, study detail, and draft out the main structure before arriving at the definitive work, or it can be the finished piece itself. Drawn to Collect includes preliminary sketches, landscapes, portraits, and narrative scenes from the Farrell-Herrick collection by artists including Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, John Koch, and more.


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Data and bandwidth are two areas where wireless communications customers have seemingly insatiable needs. No matter their wireless device of choice—be it a cellular telephone or a personal computer (PC)—users want faster data rates, and thus require more bandwidth. Unfortunately, bandwidth is finite. But, thanks to a 7-GHz millimeter-wave-frequency block from 57 to 64 GHz set aside by the United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC; www.fcc.gov) in 2001, bandwidth is still available for wireless services. In general, throughout the world a 5-GHz millimeter-wave band is available for wireless services.
Of course, this assumes the development of practical transceiver components for radios at those frequencies.
Fortunately, the model HMC6000 transmitter integrated circuit (IC) and the model HMC6001 receiver IC, both from Hittite Microwave Corp., are those practical transceiver component solutions. Hittite's HMC6000/6001 chipset not only solves many of the key technical challenges encountered at millimeter wave frequencies, but also enables turnkey multi-Gb/s communication links at 60 GHz.
A 5-GHz portion of that millimeter-wave bandwidth, 59 to 64 GHz, is available for unlicensed applications in the US and in many locations around the world. The large block of spectrum enables the use of simple modulation schemes to achieve multi-Gb/s communication links, working with simpler transceiver designs at lower power levels than required for wireless applications at lower, more crowded frequencies.
The small wavelengths at 57 to 64 GHz also allow for extremely small antennas and overall miniaturization of radio system solutions. The short wavelengths support direct line-of-sight communications with low interference. At 60 GHz, signals propagate in an oxygen absorption band with approximately 15 dB/km attenuation; signals in that band also do not penetrate walls, which can be an aid in densely deployed short-range applications and in smaller wireless communications cell deployments enabling significant frequency reuse. At 60 GHz, the short wavelength means that, for a given antenna aperture, a very narrow beam is transmit, with such beams capable of high isolation even in dense signal environments.
Because of the high isolation, the FCC allows for high transmit powers in this frequency band (to 500 mW) and an effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) level to +40 dBm. This is 10 dB more than allowed at 900 MHz outdoors, 2.4 dB more than allowed at 5 GHz indoors and 6 dB higher than the 5-GHz UNII band outdoors. The limits set by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI; www.etsi.org) allow for a power density of +13 dBm/MHz and a maximum EIRP of +40 dBm for wireless-local-area-network (WLAN) and wireless-personal-area-network (WPAN) applications and +55 dBm maximum EIRP for outdoor point-to-point fixed wireless systems.
The signal propagation properties, along with the wide bandwidth and high available EIRP, make the 60-GHz band an attractive frequency range for short-range applications requiring multi-Gb/s data rates. These include outdoor point-to-point radio solutions for metrocell/picocell backhaul and indoor datalink applications such as wireless Gb/s cable replacement (HDMI, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, etc.), wireless docking stations and video/magazine kiosks. The bandwidth also holds great promise for millimeter-wave wireless sensor applications. Several standards and industry groups have emerged to address the use of these millimeter-wave frequencies, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE; www.ieee.org) with their IEEE 802.11ad and IEEE 802.15.3c standards, as well as the WirelessHD and Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig; www.wirelessgigabitalliance.org) consortiums.
Parameter | HMC6000 transmitter | HMC6001 receiver |
Operating frequency range | 57 to 64 GHz | 57 to 64 GHz |
Linear output power | +12 dBm | --- |
Noise figure | --- | 6 dB |
Maximum gain | 38 dB | 67 dB |
Gain control range | 17 dB | 65 dB in 1-dB steps |
Phase noise (offset 1 MHz) | -86 dBc/Hz | -86 dBc/Hz |
Of course, millimeter-wave signal processing poses many challenges. Achieving low-loss performance on printed circuit boards (PCBs) and with interconnections can be difficult without the use of advanced materials and sophisticated topologies. For low-cost solutions, millimeter-wave interconnections (to give one example), must be incorporated into the ICs themselves or into their packages. Hittite, a contributing member of the WiGig consortium, developed the HMC6000/6001 chipset to translate low-frequency baseband signals directly to and from 60 GHz, minimizing the need for expensive or complex millimeter-wave interconnection components on the PCB.
For example, the HMC6000 transmitter IC [Fig. 1] can translatebaseband in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) signals to a selected channel in the 60-GHz band, requiring only an external reference oscillator to execute the frequency translation. Model HMC6000 is fabricated with silicongermanium (SiGe) BiCMOS semiconductor process technology. It provides analog I and Q (differential) input ports with DC coupling for cancellation of DC offsets and carrier feedthrough. The transmitter IC includes a low-noise frequency synthesizer for tuning across the 57-to-64-GHz band using 500- or 54-MHz steps (a quarter of the IEEE channel spacing) depending on the reference input frequency. It features as much as 38-dB gain (with 17-dB gaincontrol range) to achieve as much as +12 dBm linear output power and as much as +17 dBm saturated output power. The differential RF output provides a low-loss RF transition with high output efficiency.
The HMC6001 receiver IC [Fig. 2] works with input signals from a selected channel in the 60-GHz band and downconverts them to lower-frequency differential analog I and Q baseband signals. The receiver chip includes all necessary frequency generation, filtering and gain control, including a programmable highpass filter that helps remove residual DC offset and local-oscillator (LO) feedthrough signals. The HMC6001 exhibits a 6-dB noise figure at the maximum gain setting; it provides a 65-dB gain control range in 1-dB steps (see table). A simple four-wire digital serial interface provides full control and status reporting for these ICs, including frequency channel selection, gain control, circuit bias and filter bandwidths.
Because reference and voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO) signals (and their noise) are multiplied to achieve 60-GHz signals, phase noise can be a limiting factor for a millimeter-wave receiver. To avoid degrading the HMC6001's receiver noise figure, its integrated phase noise is maintained at typically 10 dB below the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the applicable modulation format. Fortunately, with the faster symbol rates used at 60 GHz, the integrated phase noise of concern is much further from the carrier. Both the HMC6000 and HMC6001 have integrated phase noise of roughly −25 dBc at 1.76-GHz WiGig symbol rates, enabling modulation formats to 16-state quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM). Both the HMC6000 and HMC6001 exhibit phase noise of typically −86 dBc/Hz offset 1 MHz from the carrier.
To assist customers with 60-GHz system solutions, Hittite offers both connectorized and antenna-in-package (AiP) solutions based on the HMC6000 and HMC6001 millimeter-wave transceiver ICs. The model HMC6000LP711E solution, which combines a 60-GHz antenna with the HMC6000 transmitter IC in a low-cost, 7 × 11 mm QFN plastic package. This surface-mount-compatible solution supports low-cost PCB assembly and requires no experience in handling millimeter-wave devices. Similarly, the HMC6001LP711E combines a 60-GHz antenna with the HMC6001 receiver IC, also in a 7 × 11 mm QFN plastic package.
A typical point-to-point 60-GHz microwave radio link (Fig. 3) might transport one or more Gigabit Ethernet data streams. These are full-duplex connections so a diplexer is commonly used to provide the necessary isolation between the transmit and receive channels while sharing a common, high-gain antenna. In contrast to earlier system designs with numerous discrete components, a design based on the HMC6000 and HMC6001 ICs reduces the radio portion of the system two a pair of chips and a crystal reference oscillator; in addition, the interconnect challenge is reduced to two short transmission lines to the diplexer. The block diagram includes compatible analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) and clock-generator products from Hittite.
Figure 4 shows the block diagram for a multi-Gb/s indoor link adhering to the WiGig standard that is based on the HMC6000 and HMC6001. A variety of high speed digital interfaces can be used for such a link, including GigE, USB, HDMI or even PCIe. But to compete in consumer markets, this design integrates all network processing, Media Access Control (MAC), and Physical Layer functionality into a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The ADCs and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) in this system design typically operate at multi-Gb/s sampling rates, or at least twice the symbol rate of the modulation format. To minimize power and cost in a consumer application, the ADCs and DACs might even be integrated as part of the ASIC. Since WiGig employs time-division-duplex (TDD) multiplexing, this system can operate without a diplexer. Since its communications path distance is limited to the size of a room, the high-gain antenna used with outdoor millimeter-wave point-to-point links can typically be replaced by a much smaller, lower-gain antenna. To minimize transmission-line losses at 60 GHz, the radio chipset might be located as close to the antenna as possible. The differential baseband interface for the transceiver ICs simplifies this placement by allowing separation between the ASIC and the ICs.
To try out these 60-GHz ICs, evaluation kits are available with coaxial connectors and in AiP configurations. For example, model HMC6450 is a 60-GHz AiP Transceiver Evaluation Kit (Fig. 5) comprised of two boards, the model HMC6000LP711E with the transmitter and the model HMC6001LP711E with the receiver. With its configuration software, a user has everything needed to set up a bidirectional millimeter-wave link at 60 GHz with a universal analog I and Q interface. For those preferring coaxial connectors, model HMC6451 is a 60-GHz MMPX Transceiver Evaluation Kit with the same functionality and software but with snap-on MMPX 60-GHz connectors.


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House Republican leaders sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) today urging him to follow the House and bring legislation to a vote stopping all of the coming tax hikes that threaten our economy – including President Obama's tax hike on small businesses – and replacing the 'sequester' defense cuts that threaten our national security.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) pledge that if Senate Democrats take action to address these threats, the House will be called back into session during August for the purpose of sending solutions to the president's desk.
NOTE: The House passed legislation in May to replace the 'sequester' with common-sense spending cuts and reforms, and will vote this week to stop all of the tax hikes which threaten more than 700,00 jobs. You can read the letter from House leaders below or click here for a PDF.
August 1, 2012
The Honorable Harry Reid
Senate Majority Leader
522 Hart Senate Office Bldg
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Reid,
The House passed legislation in May to eliminate the threat to our nation's security by replacing the defense sequester cuts with common-sense spending cuts and reforms. This week the House will pass legislation to eliminate the threat to our economy posed by the approaching small business tax hike that Ernst & Young estimates will cost our economy more than 700,000 jobs. We write to notify you of our readiness to bring the House back into session in August for the purpose of sending legislation to the president in the event the Senate should follow the House in passing such bills to eliminate these looming threats.
The defense sequester is, as you know, the result of President Obama's desire to avoid an additional vote on raising the nation's debt limit before the presidential election. We passed it reluctantly, at your urging, after receiving a commitment that the president and the Democratic leadership in the Senate would work with Republicans to avert the sequester by enacting a deficit reduction package built on pro-growth tax reform and much-needed changes to strengthen and stabilize our entitlement programs.
The president and Senate Democrats failed to make good on this commitment, and it is now essential that the defense sequester be replaced with common-sense spending cuts and reforms. Replacement is necessary to avoid harmful cuts to our military at the beginning of 2013 that President Obama's own Defense Secretary has warned will be "devastating" to national security. House Republicans remain committed to the full savings required by the Budget Control Act, and we passed a plan to replace the arbitrary cuts to our defenses with responsible spending cuts and reforms. If the Senate passes its own package of alternative cuts and reforms to replace the defense sequester, it is our commitment that the House will reconvene to either consider it or to go to conference to produce a consensus package that can be sent to the president for his signature. However, in order to avert the threat to our nation's security that is posed by the defense sequester, the Senate must act. A Senate vote to simply postpone the sequester, rather than replace it with common-sense cuts and reforms, is unworkable and unacceptable.
On the tax front, the House this week will act to stop the tax increase on small businesses favored by President Obama and lay the groundwork for fundamental reform of the tax code. It is in the interest of our economy to quickly remove the threat of the entire tax hike. As you are aware, the measure passed by the Senate last week does not stop the small business tax hike. If the Senate follows the House in passing legislation to stop the entire tax hike -- including the small business tax hike -- in a manner that requires House approval before it can be sent to the president, it is our commitment that the House will reconvene immediately to ensure the measure is enacted at the earliest opportunity. But in order to avert the threat to our economy, the Senate must join the House in acting to stop the entire tax increase.
Congress must take action to eliminate both the threat to our economy posed by the looming small business tax hike and the threat to our security posed by the defense sequester. By the end of this week, the Republican-led House will have acted to eliminate both threats. The Democratic-controlled Senate must follow suit. In the event the Senate takes action, we stand ready to bring the House back into session for the purpose of enacting solutions.
John Boehner
Eric Cantor
Majority Leader
Kevin McCarthy
Majority Whip
Jeb Hensarling
Conference Chairman
As an American, I have witnessed many events in our nation's history. Some of them great like placing a man on the moon. Some of them were dark and shameful events. No matter what happened, it is the people that make this nation great. Each looking to the future with optimism and looking to improve this nation for all. The United States is a great and wonderful nation and her people are her best asset. As Americans, we need to stand together and let our voices be heard.
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18 Dec 3M Double Coated Urethane Foam Tape 4026W
- Off-white, 0.0625 in. (1.6 mm) open-cell, flexible urethane foam carrier fills gaps and helps bond to irregular surfaces
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3M™ Double Coated Urethane Foam Tape 4026 is an off-white, 0.0625 in. (1.6 mm) thick, double coated, open cell urethane foam tape that offers high shear strength. It is ideal for applications such as mounting interior signage and nameplates along with soap dispensers and air fresheners.
Versatile Bonding
3M™ Double Coated Urethane Foam Tape 4026 is a 1/16 in. thick tape manufactured with 3M™ Adhesive 100 for a strong, permanent bond that works well with the open cell foam structure to produce high shear strength. This tape offers an ideal solution for a wide selection of bonding issues on various surfaces. This includes both interior and exterior applications where the tape will be protected from the environment.
This tape features a conformable foam and adhesive combination which provides long-term holding at temperatures up to 220°F (104°C). By using a robust, green plaid, densified kraft paper liner, this tape provides you with reliable performance for industrial applications, such as die-cutting and automated dispensers. The liner also helps reduce edge roll and protects the tape from humidity extremes.


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PODCAST: Why real estate is looking to China for tips on air quality
Asia learned the hard way on how to address "sick-building syndrome" so now the rest of the world doesn't have to
Property managers looking for ways to improve indoor air quality should take lessons from China to increase their chances of long-term success, experts say.
The country, having battled toxic air for two decades during rapid industrial growth, has developed a blueprint for purifying indoor air.
"I often say that in Asia this is our fifth health crisis, with the first one starting in 2003, and so you learn a lot along the way," says Raefer Wallis, who, from an office in Shanghai, developed the RESET standard to monitor building health at his company GIGA.
"Consequently, Asia is pretty advanced when it comes to indoor air quality," he says. "Yet what we're seeing is the rest of the world trying to compress 17 years of learning into a few months. They're making the same mistakes we made in Asia all those years ago."
Awareness of indoor air quality, along with health and wellbeing within buildings more broadly, has soared during the global pandemic. Real estate agents are reporting businesses looking for new premises enquiring about indoor air quality only after price, location and size. One business was prompted to search for a new office due to the poor air quality at its existing address.
Studies are also proving the returns on investment in health and wellbeing enhancements. A Dutch experiment comparing one building optimised for health and wellbeing, with another that wasn't, found that after four years there was a reduction in worker absenteeism equating to US$33,046 of annual savings. Employees were also 42 percent less likely to report headaches, nausea or fatigue –symptoms of so-called sick-building syndrome.
One key for better air is to filter it at a hyper-local level, rather than only through a central filtration system that can draw infected air across large spaces before cleaning it. Central filtration is typical in the Western world, which has responded poorly to localized surges in virus particles, says Wallis, a recent guest on JLL's Perspectives podcast.
However, when it comes to cleansing the air, businesses must be wary of taking shortcuts. Wallis attests to managers spending money on portable filtration, which invariably fails within weeks because they get pushed under desks, unplugged to charge phones, laptops or run vacuum cleaners.
"Portables are a good emergency solution, but my advice is to invest in the long-term: this problem isn't going away. If you're not spending money on properly integrating solutions into infrastructure, experience shows that the money will likely go to waste," Wallis says.
"In Asia, portables were modified and installed on ceilings, automated and equipped with small ducts. As a result, effectiveness went up threefold for a similar expense. They never get unplugged for a laptop, they automatically turn on and off based on sensor readings and the air flow doesn't get compromised by furniture at floor level."
Start with the data
Property health and sustainability specialists are uncompromising about the need to embed data into building optimisation plans. Reliable data defines the problem to be fixed, as well as tracks ongoing efforts.
Plus, at a time when employees and occupiers are scrutinising health and wellbeing strategies like never before, a lack of data can erode trust between stakeholders.
This was evident early in China's air quality crisis, when parents were sending their children to school with air quality monitors in their backpacks and monitoring remotely to ensure teachers and schools were adequately protecting their kids.
Wearable technology these days is holding real estate managers to account, says Matthew Clifford, head of energy and sustainability services in Asia Pacific, for JLL.
Clifford recalls a business manager approaching him for advice because an employee was coming into the office with a personal air quality monitor and demonstrating that the air quality was poor.
"They had no air quality monitors embedded into their infrastructure because of the cost, and as a result, not only had they lost control of the air quality problem in their office, but they'd also lost control of the narrative," Clifford says. "Whether the reading was accurate or not remains to be seen, but the worker's thinking 'my employer doesn't care about my wellbeing, and so off I go down the road to work for another organisation."
A learning curve
The real estate sector is still getting to grips with how all-encompassing health and wellbeing in the built environment is. Especially, for example, how mental health can be affected by the physical attributes and experiences of a building as much as physical health.
However, the 'war for talent' is a concept cities and employers have become more attuned to, and since it feeds into the health and wellness narrative, things are quickly changing, says Andrew Cole, general manager of sustainability in investment management at Lendlease.
"There is no question that wellness, in terms of corporate culture programs, systems, opportunities and flexibility, are a key part of the attraction and retention strategy for workplaces," Cole says. However, he adds that "responsibilities extend across the real estate value chain, with tenants, property managers and landlords having to work together to deliver."


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Alan Greenspan is apparently writing a book to determine why economic models (all of them, he says) failed to sniff out the financial crisis and ensuing recession. "While the models themselves capture the nonfinancial part of the economy rather well," says Greenspan, "they've been wholly inadequate in understanding how the complex financial system works, both in the United States and globally...."
...as Godley and Lavoie wrote, "[t]he problem now is not so much the lack of appropriate data … but rather the unwillingness of most mainstream macroeconomists to incorporate these financial flows and capital stocks into their models, obsessed as they are with the representative optimizing microeconomic agent."Read it at Multiplier Effect
Greenspan and Godley
by Michael Stevens
Anyone know Greenspan well enough to recommend he read Godley and Lavoie before writing anything further? And to introduce him to Bill Black.


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If you want to find out what I mean, go read my article at Home and School Mosaics this month!
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Looking for a Associate Pastor job in Florida?
Browse our list of part-time Associate Pastor jobs in FL and full-time Associate Pastor jobs in FL. Associate Pastor job opportunities in many denominations including Southern Baptist (SBC), Independent Baptist, Non-Denomination, Methodist, Presbyterian and others. Upload your ministry resume to our resume database so churches in FL looking for a Associate Pastor can easily connect with you. Sign up for email notifications and whenever a church in FL is seeking a part-time Associate Pastor or full-time Associate Pastor we will send you an email of the new job posting.


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Etsy Store Update + Year End Sale Coupon!
It's been a while since I have updated the store. Husband has been kind enough to take some shots of the items when playing around with his camera. 😀
Christmas really comes early this year as we have already packed and given away our 1st gifts (teachers & classmates).
And to get you started on your christmas shopping, here's a 10% off coupon code (Yes! Including Olfa items): xmas2011
Valid till 31 December 2011 and applicable for all items listed on Etsy.
// Zipper Pouches //
// Premium Grade Lavender Sachets //


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By Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications
Columns of workers penetrate the forest, furiously gathering as much food and supplies as they can. They are a massive army that living things know to avoid, and that few natural obstacles can waylay. So determined are these legions that should a chasm or gap disrupt the most direct path to their spoils they simply build a new path — out of themselves.
Without any orders or direction, individuals from the rank and file instinctively stretch across the opening, clinging to one another as their comrades-in-arms swarm across their bodies. But this is no force of superhumans. They are army ants of the species Eciton hamatum, which form "living" bridges across breaks and gaps in the forest floor that allow their famously large raiding swarms to travel efficiently.
Researchers from Princeton University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) report for the first time that these structures are more sophisticated than scientists knew. The ants exhibit a level of collective intelligence that could provide new insights into animal behavior and even help in the development of intuitive robots that can cooperate as a group, the researchers said.
Ants of E. hamatum automatically form living bridges without any oversight from a "lead" ant, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. The action of each individual coalesces into a group unit that can adapt to the terrain and also operates by a clear cost-benefit ratio. The ants will create a path over an open space up to the point when too many workers are being diverted from collecting food and prey.
"These ants are performing a collective computation. At the level of the entire colony, they're saying they can afford this many ants locked up in this bridge, but no more than that," said co-first author Matthew Lutz, a graduate student in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
"There's no single ant overseeing the decision, they're making that calculation as a colony," Lutz said. "Thinking about this cost-benefit framework might be a new insight that can be applied to other animal structures that people haven't thought of before."
The research could help explain how large groups of animals balance cost and benefit, about which little is known, said co-author Iain Couzin, a Princeton visiting senior research scholar in ecology and evolutionary biology, and director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and chair of biodiversity and collective behavior at the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Previous studies have shown that single creatures use "rules of thumb" to weigh cost-and-benefit, said Couzin, who also is Lutz's graduate adviser. This new work shows that in large groups these same individual guidelines can eventually coordinate group-wide, he said — the ants acted as a unit although each ant only knew its immediate circumstances.
"They don't know how many other ants are in the bridge, or what the overall traffic situation is. They only know about their local connections to others, and the sense of ants moving over their bodies," Couzin said. "Yet, they have evolved simple rules that allow them to keep reconfiguring until, collectively, they have made a structure of an appropriate size for the prevailing conditions.
"Finding out how sightless ants can achieve such feats certainly could change the way we think of self-configuring structures in nature — and those made by man," he said.
Ant-colony behavior has been the basis of algorithms related to telecommunications and vehicle routing, among other areas, explained co-first author Chris Reid, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney who conducted the work while at NJIT. Ants exemplify "swarm intelligence," in which individual-level interactions produce coordinated group behavior. E. hamatum crossings assemble when the ants detect congestion along their raiding trail, and disassemble when normal traffic has resumed.
The video below shows how E. hamatum confronted a gap they encountered on an apparatus that Lutz and Reid built and deployed in the forests of Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Previously, scientists thought that ant bridges were static structures — their appearance over large gaps that ants clearly could not cross in midair was somewhat of a mystery, Reid said. The researchers found, however, that the ants, when confronted with an open space, start from the narrowest point of the expanse and work toward the widest point, expanding the bridge as they go to shorten the distance their compatriots must travel to get around the expanse.
"The amazing thing is that a very elegant solution to a colony-level problem arises from the individual interactions of a swarm of simple worker ants, each with only local information," Reid said. "By extracting the rules used by individual ants about whether to initiate, join or leave a living structure, we could program swarms of simple robots to build bridges and other structures by connecting to each other.
"These robot bridges would exhibit the beneficial properties we observe in the ant bridges, such as adaptability to local conditions, real-time optimization of shape and position, and rapid construction and deconstruction without the need for external building materials," Reid continued. "Such a swarm of robots would be especially useful in dangerous and unpredictable conditions, such as natural disaster zones."
Radhika Nagpal, a professor of computer science at Harvard University who studies robotics and self-organizing biological systems, said that the findings reveal that there is "something much more fundamental about how complex structures are assembled and adapted in nature, and that it is not through a supervisor or planner making decisions."
Individual ants adjusted to one another's choices to create a successful structure, despite the fact that each ant didn't necessarily know everything about the size of the gap or the traffic flow, said Nagpal, who is familiar with the research but was not involved in it.
"The goal wasn't known ahead of time, but 'emerged' as the collective continually adapted its solution to the environmental factors," she said. "The study really opens your eyes to new ways of thinking about collective power, and has tremendous potential as a way to think about engineering systems that are more adaptive and able to solve complex cost-benefit ratios at the network level just through peer-to-peer interactions."
She compared the ant bridges to human-made bridges that automatically widened to accommodate heavy vehicle traffic or a growing population. While self-assembling road bridges may be a ways off, the example illustrates the potential that technologies built with the same self-assembling capabilities seen in E. hamatum could have.
"There's a deep interest in creating robots that don't just rely on themselves, but can exploit the group to do more — and self-assembly is the ultimate in doing more," Nagpal said. "If you could have small simple robots that were able to navigate complex spaces, but could self-assemble into larger structures — bridges, towers, pulling chains, rafts — when they face something they individually did not have the ability to do, that's a huge increase in power in what robots would be capable of."
The spaces E. hamatum bridges are not dramatic by human standards — small rifts in the leaf cover, or between the ends of two sticks. Bridges will be the length of 10 to 20 ants, which is only a few centimeters, Lutz said. That said, E. hamatum swarms form several bridges during the course of a day, which can see the back-and-forth of thousands of ants. Many ants pass over a living bridge even as it is assembling.
"The bridges are something that happen numerous times every day. They're creating bridges to optimize their traffic flow and maximize their time," Lutz said.
"When you're moving hundreds of thousands of ants, creating a little shortcut can save a lot of energy," he said. "This is such a unique behavior. You have other types of ants forming structures out of their bodies, but it's not such a huge part of their lives and daily behavior."
The research also included Scott Powell, an army-ant expert and assistant professor of biology at George Washington University; Albert Kao, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who received his doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton in 2015; and Simon Garnier, an assistant professor of biological sciences at NJIT who studies swarm intelligence and was once a postdoctoral researcher in Couzin's lab at Princeton.
To conduct their field experiments, Lutz and Reid constructed a 1.5-foot-tall apparatus with ramps on both sides and adjustable arms in the center with which they could adjust the size of the gap. They then inserted the apparatus into active E. hamatum raiding trails that they found in the jungle in Panama. Because ants follow one another's chemical scent, Lutz and Reid used sticks and leaves from the ants' trail to get them to reform their column across the device.
Lutz and Reid observed how the ants formed bridges across gaps that were set at angles of 12, 20, 40 and 60 degrees. They gauged how much travel-distance the ants saved with their bridge versus the surface area (in centimeters squared) of the bridge itself. Twelve-degree angles shaved off the most distance (around 11 centimeters) while taking up the fewest workers. Sixty-degree angles had the highest cost-to-benefit ratio. Interestingly, the ants were willing to expend members for 20-degree angles, forming bridges up to 8 centimeters squared to decrease their travel time by almost 12 centimeters, indicating that the loss in manpower was worth the distance saved.
Lutz said that future research based on this work might compare these findings to the living bridges of another army ant species, E. burchellii, to determine if the same principles are in action.
The paper, "Army ants dynamically adjust living bridges in response to a cost-benefit trade-off," was published Nov. 23 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant nos. PHY-0848755, IOS0-1355061 and EAGER IOS-1251585); the Army Research Office (grant nos. W911NG-11-1-0385 and W911NF-14-1-0431); and the Human Frontier Science Program (grant no. RGP0065/2012).


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After 10 Years in Qatar, A&M is Ready for 10 More
DOHA, Qatar — On the day before his college graduation here, Thamer Al-Kuwari wore the white robe and headdress that are customary for men in his native Qatar. But on his finger, he wore something special: an Aggie Ring, the traditional accessory of a proud Texas A&M University alumnus, which he was about to become.
Al-Kuwari's enthusiasm for Texas A&M may, at first blush, seem strong for someone who spent a mere four months studying in College Station. "Ever since I joined the Aggie family," he said, "I've loved it with every part of my heart."
Such is the extent to which students at Texas A&M University at Qatar consider themselves connected to the main A&M campus, more than 8,000 miles away. The Class of 2012 in Qatar boasted 87 students from 23 countries. They were required to complete the same coursework that they would at the main campus, including lessons in American and Texas history and government. The courses, taught in English, were co-ed, common at most Texas colleges, but a whole new experience for many in their first year.
As of 2011, A&M's Qatar campus had nearly 140 active research projects totaling more than $96 million. In terms of producing graduates and securing research financing, A&M is now the highest-performing university involved in Education City, a 2,500-acre site on the edge of Doha that is dedicated to elite higher education. A&M officials said their involvement puts the university at the forefront of international education.
R. Bowen Loftin, A&M's president, said the university is involved because of the students' ability to represent Aggies internationally. "Ten years from now, they are going to be ministers of state and CEOs of major companies, the major drivers of that part of the world, not just Qatar," he said. "This is Texas A&M's contribution to that leadership development."
Enrollment has ballooned at A&M's Qatar campus, to 524 in spring 2012 from 29 in fall 2003, when it debuted. The first graduating class, in December 2007, consisted of just two Qatari women. Following this year's record-breaking number of graduates, administrators expect enrollment to begin to plateau.
"This is kind of the top of the mountain that we've reached," Loftin said.
Education City is the hallmark project of the Qatar Foundation, a nonprofit organization established in 1995 by the country's ruling emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and chaired by his second wife, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned, who is widely recognized as the driving force behind efforts to convert the gas-rich nation into a knowledge-based society.
Six American universities — A&M, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Virginia Commonwealth and Weill Cornell Medical College — have a presence here. The invitation to open a branch specializing in engineering degrees — the only kind A&M currently offers in Qatar — was first extended to A&M's chief rival, the University of Texas, but UT declined to participate.
Because A&M is a public institution, no financing or tuition revenue from Texas can be used toward the effort in Qatar. All expenses, including the tab for the $150 million marble building that houses the A&M campus, are paid for by the Qatar Foundation, which has abundant resources.
Unlike some American universities that floundered after they came to the region and had to pull up stakes — like Michigan State University and George Mason University in the United Arab Emirates — A&M does not have to generate the revenue to support itself.
"Not many countries have that level of resource, and even if they did, they might not want to invest it, as Qatar Foundation has, in education," said Mark Weichold, the dean and chief executive of A&M's Qatar campus.
Qatar's decision to pour resources into brand-name universities has occasionally met with skepticism in the region. In 2009, McMaster University professor Virginia Aksan, who was then the president of the Middle East Studies Association, described Education City as "the marketing of an imagined education" and warned of the proliferation of "profit-motive teaching environments" abroad.
"Texas A&M is not in this for making a profit, but we can't lose anything either," Weichold said.
The university and its officials are contractually barred from revealing the specifics of the exchange between the Qatar Foundation and Texas A&M.
Karan Watson, A&M's provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, acknowledged that per-student financing in Qatar is significantly higher than in College Station. "They are good partners," she said of the foundation, "and on top of being sure they have covered all the expenses, they give us a little bit on top of that every year."
She conceded that, while not a major driver, the "little bit on top" is more than the $4.5 million profit that Houston Community College projects it will make over five years as a result of a deal with Qatar's Supreme Education Council to launch the country's first community college.
In College Station, that money helps the colleges involved in the Qatar campus — liberal arts, science and engineering — and it also helps support study abroad programs and other strategic investments, like start-up financing for hiring faculty members.
Through the arrangement, A&M also gains access to one of the world's most plentiful sources of research money. Qatar has committed to spending 2.8 percent of its annual gross domestic product— about $1.5 billion — on research financing, primarily distributed by the Qatar National Research Fund, which allows up to 35 percent of a financed project to be conducted outside the country.
It took time to get A&M's research started in a country that did not previously have a strong culture of academic research. The university did not have its own facilities until 2007. Professors in Qatar — several of whom came from the main campus, though A&M quickly realized it would have to hire permanent Doha faculty in order to sustain the endeavor — noted the extra time required to import necessary materials and set up for their labs, which are subject to Texas' rules and regulations as well as Qatar's.
"There's no routine here," said Eyad Masad, the assistant dean for research and graduate studies on A&M's Qatar campus. "Everything is new. Every company you deal with is a new mindset, a new contract, new expectations. In Texas, things have already been developed."
Other established academic practices have had be reworked similarly. The Qatar Foundation was not comfortable with the notion of tenure, so it developed a rolling contract system, in which a professor's guaranteed length of employment could increase over time.
With the initial 10-year agreement quickly coming to a close, officials at A&M said the benefits to both the Aggies and the Qataris have exceeded expectations, and they have already begun to plan for the next 10 years.
New programs are in the works, and a master's program in chemical engineering was recently added, one of Education City's few graduate programs.
Now that Al-Kuwari is graduating from A&M, he plans to work at Qatar's Ministry of the Interior. He said he would always be a proud member of the global Aggie community.
"From the first day, I wanted to be a part of it," he said. "We live as one person. We all have the same values. We all share the same things."
Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in our stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: I'm Faith Lapidus.
BOB DOUGHTY: And I'm Bob Doughty with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we tell about Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She was a member of one of the most famous families in American politics. She used her influence to make a difference in the lives of millions of people. Though she never ran for office, she spent her life energetically working to improve the lives of people with developmental problems.
Eunice Shriver was best known for creating the Special Olympics, an athletic event for people with mental disabilities. Her efforts changed the way the world thinks about the mentally disabled.
EUNICE SHRIVER: "You are the stars and the world is watching you. By your presence, you send a message to every village, every city, every nation. A message of hope, a message of victory. The right to play on any playing field. You have earned it. The right to study in any school. You have earned it. The right to hold a job? You have earned it. The right to be anyone's neighbor. You have earned it."
FAITH LAPIDUS: That was Eunice Kennedy Shriver speaking at the 1987 Special Olympics games in South Bend, Indiana. She was a thin and energetic woman with a huge smile and great spirit.
Ms. Shriver officially became involved in helping people with developmental problems when she became the executive vice-president of a family organization in 1957. The Joseph P. Kennedy Junior Foundation was created in 1946 to honor her oldest brother, who died fighting in World War Two.
Under her guidance, the foundation turned its attention to studying the causes of mental disabilities. It also sought to improve the way society treats people with such disabilities. The foundation also started centers for the study of medical ethics at Harvard University and Georgetown University.
BOB DOUGHTY: Eunice Shriver and her family had a personal reason to be interested in this issue. Her older sister, Rosemary Kennedy, was born mentally retarded. As Rosemary grew older, she became increasingly difficult to live with and supervise. When she was in her 20s, her father arranged for her to have an operation on her brain to improve her mental condition. But the operation left her completely disabled. Her family later sent her to a care center where she lived until her death in 2005.
FAITH LAPIDUS: In the past, mental disability was generally treated as a shameful and hopeless disease. Many families secretly sent their disabled children to grow up in institutions. And, there were almost no community activities, resources or jobs for the mentally disabled. They were shut away with little respect and few civil rights.
Eunice Shriver changed this. She showed the world that the mentally disabled could be useful citizens enjoying rich lives.
BOB DOUGHTY: Eunice Mary Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1921. She was the fifth of nine children born to the Irish Catholic family of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Her grandfather was John Fitzgerald who served as mayor of Boston, Massachusetts and as a lawmaker. Eunice's father was a wealthy businessman with powerful connections. The Kennedys raised their children to be highly intelligent and highly competitive.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Eunice Kennedy Shriver once said that her father's advice to his children was to win. He said that coming in second or third did not count, but one had to win, win, win. Mr. Kennedy also told his friends that his sons would one day run for president. And, he was right.
John F. Kennedy became president in 1961 and served until his murder two years later. Robert Kennedy, a senator, ran for president in 1968 and was killed that same year. Edward Kennedy never won the presidency, but became a long- serving and important member of the United States Senate.
BOB DOUGHTY: Eunice Shriver also carried on the family tradition of public service. She graduated in 1943 with a sociology degree from Stanford University in California. She worked for different organizations as a social worker before working for her family's foundation. Over the years, she also worked for the political campaigns of her brothers, John, Robert and Edward. In 1953, she married R. Sargent Shriver. They had five children: Robert, Maria, Timothy, Mark and Anthony.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Under the administration of John F. Kennedy, Eunice Shriver continued her work for her foundation. She influenced her brother to create a committee to study developmental disabilities. This effort led to the creation of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health.
In 1962, Ms. Shriver published an important article in the Saturday Evening Post called "Hope for Retarded Children." She wrote openly about her sister Rosemary's condition. For years, this had been a closely guarded family secret.
Eunice Shriver used Rosemary as an example of how not to treat people with disabilities. Instead, she said people with mental disabilities needed to be treated as useful citizens and given special education and training. She said family members of disabled people had few resources for community support or medical help. She gave examples of parents who struggled to make a better life for their disabled children.
EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER: "Think of the families, think of the mothers who love their children but feel so desperately alone. Their children have done nothing wrong, committed no crime and perpetuated no injustice. They are the world's most innocent victims, and they suffer only because they are different."
BOB DOUGHTY: Ms. Shriver also opened a summer camp that was free of cost for mentally retarded children. The idea for it came when a mother told her that there were no summer camps where she could send her disabled child. So, Eunice Shriver did something about it.
She started Camp Shriver at her home in Maryland to give disabled children a fun summer program filled with physical activities. Non-disabled children were also welcome to join the camp. She made sure there were a large number of workers to give the necessary attention to all the kids. And, she asked students from private schools to volunteer at the camp as helpers. Ms. Shriver was directly involved in all parts of the camp. She would often swim and play ball with the children.
EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER: "Don't keep them away from something that can change their lives and give them a new vision and give their parents a new vision of them, just because they don't want someone in the community to say, 'oh, your child is special.'"
FAITH LAPIDUS: In 1968, Eunice Shriver organized the first Special Olympics in Chicago, Illinois.
EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER: "In ancient Rome, the gladiators went into the arena with these words on their lips: let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt. Today, all of you young athletes are in the arena. Many of you will win. But even more important, I know you will be brave and bring credit to your parents and to your country. Let us begin the Olympics, thank you."
FAITH LAPIDUS: About 1,000 competitors from 26 states and Canada took part in the event. They competed in running, swimming and hockey. The idea of permitting mentally disabled people to compete in sports was revolutionary at the time. Before, people with special needs were often prevented from physical activity out of concern that they would hurt themselves or be unable to compete. Ms. Shriver said that the Special Olympics proved a very important fact: that exceptional children with mental retardation can be exceptional athletes.
Today, the Special Olympics has grown to include about three million athletes in more than 150 countries.
EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER: "Let us not forget that we have miles to go to overturn the prejudice and oppression facing the world's 180 million citizens with intellectual disabilities."
BOB DOUGHTY: Eunice Kennedy Shriver continued to work for the disabled in other ways. She created an organization called Community of Caring. It works to reduce teenage pregnancies and educate students about creating caring and respectful communities.
Ms. Shriver received many awards for her work. These include the French Legion of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver died in August of 2009 after a series of strokes. Her daughter's husband, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that she was the light of the family. And he said her pioneering work for social and scientific improvements changed the lives of millions of developmentally disabled people all over the world.
FAITH LAPIDUS: This program was written and produced by Dana Demange. For transcripts, mp3s and podcasts of our shows, go to voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Faith Lapidus.
BOB DOUGHTY: And I'm Bob Doughty. Join us again next week for People in America in VOA Special English.
mentally retarded: 智障
Eunice Kennedy Shriver: tireless activist for the mentally disabled
Special Olympics ends with records and superlatives


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4x6 Blue and Red Turkish Silk Rug
- Regular Price
- $3,199.00
- Sale Price
- $3,199.00
- Regular Price
- Unit Price
- Translation missing: en.general.accessibility.unit_price_separator
Cezaevi rugs, also known as "prison rugs," are hand-woven by inmates in Turkish prisons as a form of rehabilitation and vocational training. These handmade rugs often feature intricate geometric patterns and bold colors and are known for their durability and quality.
The tradition of weaving rugs in Turkish prisons dates back to the late 19th century when the Ottoman Empire established vocational training programs for inmates. Today, the tradition continues in modern Turkish prisons, where inmates have the opportunity to learn the art of rug weaving and earn an income.
Each Cezaevi rug is a unique work of art that reflects the skill and creativity of its weaver. By purchasing a Cezaevi rug, you are not only acquiring a beautiful and functional piece of decor but also supporting the rehabilitation and vocational training of inmates.
Name: Turkish Silk Hereke Distressed Area Rug
Size: 4′0″ x 6′0″
Age: Aprox 75 Years Old
Material: 100% Silk
Design: Floral
Color: Blue and Red
Origin: Cezaevi
Looking for a very specific design? Please contact us.
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