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Ease of Fooling Most The People Most of The Time
Lincoln Was Wrong: The Ease of Fooling Most of The People Most of The Time
By John Chuckman
This year marks the forty-fourth anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination. What is most remarkable about this is the stunningly simple fact that, despite innumerable books and several official investigations, we still do not know what happened in 1963.
Not understanding what happened is no mere curiosity of history. It tells us something profound about the nature of government in America today, all of it running against the received notion of a free and open society.
I might not say that were the assassination a simple, straightforward matter that had occurred with few witnesses, but it was an event with many witnesses, many of whom were ignored by the Warren Commission with some of the most credible discounted. And it was anything but simple, although the conclusions of the Warren Commission are just that, simple.
At least some of the key parties involved – Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, and David Ferrie, for example – are subjects of voluminous government records about their bizarre or criminal activities, and forty-four years later, parts of these essential records remain secret.
I might not say that about the free and open society also, were there not a long history of government secrecy around the event, and at times deliberate misrepresentation. Yes, there was finally in the 1990s a big opening of files held secret for decades, but these files – at least the parts not blacked-out – tell us little of importance that is new. Indeed, to the thoughtful inquirer they only raise the issue of why most of them were ever considered worthy of being labeled secret in the first place.
Most importantly, though, a good many files still have not been released, a critical point not treated carefully by many writers on the subject. Certain CIA and FBI files on Oswald are key examples.
You must ask yourself, why, if the assassination is just a simple murder by one misfit, has there been so much secrecy? Indeed, why, if it was a simple murder, was the President's murder not investigated in Dallas, the scene of the crime, instead of from Washington? All the evidence and most witnesses were located in Dallas. Federal agents at the hospital actually drew their guns against local police and officials to seize the President's body for shipment to Washington, instead of allowing the perfectly normal procedure of the local jurisdiction autopsying the body. Why? Why was the autopsy conducted by the military with military doctors who were rank amateurs at shooting investigations?
There is no such thing as a free and open society where great matters of empire are concerned, and this is something no less true of the United States than any past imperial power. The people are never consulted on imperial matters, whether war, assassination, or overthrowing other governments, and they are, sadly, frequently deliberately misinformed about them, their own resources being used against them, just the latest examples being around the invasion of Iraq.
Although elements of the CIA truly hated Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover would have spat upon his grave given an unobserved opportunity, I do not subscribe, for many reasons, to the idea that an arm of the American government killed Kennedy. It is highly probable that individuals in some government agencies did understand what had happened and worked to blur and confuse the investigation afterwards. I also consider it possible that, owing to these intense hatreds, glimmers of intelligence in advance of the assassination were deliberately ignored or buried. This seems most likely in Hoover's case.
Motives for hiding any knowledge of events are unknown, but almost certainly they have to do with hiding genuinely embarrassing or compromising information concerning secret operations and relationships. Embarrassment is more often than not, certainly more often than genuine national security, the reason for imposing secrecy in the American government.
Assassinations at this level in a large advanced society are always the result of conspiracies and complex plans, the plans providing for the certainty of success and the safe distancing of conspirators.
There are, I believe, three plausible candidates for organizing the assassination, all quite powerful groups, all selected for their extreme motives, resources, and opportunity.
The first candidate is a branch of the American mafia, a number of whose members had been deeply hurt by the Attorney General's aggressive organized crime-fighting activities. After all, Kennedy had received handsome secret contributions in cash from the organization when he ran for office. He had also had at least the seeming cooperation of some senior mafia leaders in his efforts to assassinate Castro, and here he was letting his brother conduct a ruthless campaign against the interests of some families. A mafia family leader and the leader of the Teamsters Union at the time, a known mafia associate, are on record as having made threats against Kennedy. Some members of the Congressional investigations came to favor this candidate although they failed to prove it.
The second candidate is one of the many Cuban refugee groups armed, trained, and paid by the CIA in hopes of invading Cuba again, hurting its economy through terrorist activities, and assassinating any of its leaders. Few Americans today appreciate the extent of these government-subsidized terrorist camps then, operations that make Osama's camp in the mountains look insignificant.
Kennedy was loathed by the most violent of these groups in his last days because he agreed not to invade Cuba as part of his settlement with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. After that pledge, Kennedy had the FBI raiding the operations of some of these previously catered-to groups as a show of good will towards the Soviets. It is in connection with these very raids that Oswald had some not-well-understood but certain connection with the FBI. These refugee groups were ruthless, angry men who didn't hesitate to kill or cripple those in their way. They had even conducted a number of terrorist attacks in Miami.
The third candidate is Israel, whose secret efforts at developing nuclear weapons were underway at the time and had become known to Kennedy. He made it unpleasantly clear in private communications that he would not allow Israel to go nuclear, something not widely known in America. But the people running Israel considered it essential that the country become a nuclear power, and we have all seen over many decades how Israel has not hesitated to assassinate or attack where it regards its interests are involved.
Just a few years after Kennedy's assassination, during the Six Day War, Israeli planes made a two-hour attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, a spy ship operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, killing many of its crew. Israel's motives have never been explained adequately or investigated openly, but likely had to do either with suppressing information of atrocities in the Sinai – the Liberty being an intelligence-gathering ship – or with trying to trick the United States into entering its war against Egypt. In either case, we see ruthlessness compatible with eliminating a hostile, powerful leader.
I don't claim to know the truth because the truth would require new evidence. And the candidates are not all mutually exclusive. One might well expect the mafia or Mossad to manipulate and use people like the violent Cuban refugees.
Each of these groups had great motives, more than adequate means, and ample opportunity. By comparison, Oswald stands out as a ridiculous figure with no motive, virtually no means, but a seeming opportunity arranged for him by others at the Texas Book Depository. He was, almost certainly, the patsy he said he was in police custody shortly before his death, having been duped by forces he didn't understand into certain activities that would mark him before the assassination. We have ample evidence of Oswald's lack of serious interest in things military, his having been pretty much a flop at being a Marine, and of his temperamental inclination in other directions. While he had a temper (who doesn't?), he was not a violent man, indeed Russian observers who recalled his years in Russia said he was temperamentally incapable of murder.
If you want to understand why the Warren Commission Report is so wrong, just spend some time yourself reading it with a critical eye. You can find an old copy at a used bookstore for a dollar or two. Parts of it are laughable, much of it is fragmentary, and all of it is a prosecutor's brief. There is no voice for the defense. Our Western traditions of law require the clash of defense and prosecution before a jury can arrive at guilt. There is no other way, although so much of the public is today conditioned by mystery books and television shows where a detective wraps everything up neatly by the end of the book or show.
Perhaps even more importantly, as few younger readers will know, the Warren Commission did no investigation. Its investigative arm was J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. He personally kept tight control of these investigations day by day. Hoover's FBI committed many blunders and genuine crimes over the years of his being director, from trying to send Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, back to Germany (he hated Einstein's free thinking) to carrying out an elaborate plan to discredit Martin Luther King with secretly recorded tapes in the hope he would commit suicide. These great men, and many other notable figures, Hoover privately regarded as dangerous communists.
Hoover more or less blackmailed many members of Congress and several presidents with his secret files obtained by spying on their private lives. After his death these files were whisked away never to be seen again. As I said, Hoover hated the Kennedy brothers, surely giving him a total lack of impartiality as an investigator. Hoover, too, spent many days at resorts and racetracks over his career paid for by mafia figures he should have been investigating. Communism, even though it never had any large presence in the United States, was always Hoover's obsession, and Oswald had the (false) reputation of being a communist. It was not a promising arrangement for the Warren Commission from the beginning, and the poor results show.
With a few special exceptions of genuine investigative journalism and analysis, there are two general categories of books about the Kennedy assassination, both biased in their information. There are the various "theory" books which do not accept the Warren Commission and attempt to promote some particular theory of the crime based on (necessarily) incomplete evidence. Examples of these include a book on Hoover himself as suspect, one on the Secret Service having an accident with automatic weapons, and a number on various CIA figures such as Howard Hunt.
Some of these "theory" books suggest almost paranoid fantasies and have given Kennedy assassination books a bad name in general, making easy targets for those wishing to support the Warren Commission. But we must not conflate honest skepticism and lack of belief in the Warren Commission with the theories of people who promote specific concepts of how things were done. This is a trick, conflating honest doubt with unsubstantiated or far-out theories, used over and over again by those promoting our second category of Kennedy assassination books.
The second category includes books that work towards showing the Warren Commission was right, at least in its major conclusions, attempting to restate old material in new words, neglecting to tell readers clearly that they have no new evidence of any great significance with which to work their glib magic. There is an equally long series of these with some of the notable ones along the way being Edward Epstein, Gerald Posner, and, very recently, Vincent Buglosi.
In general, if you go back to examine press reviews at the time of the release of each of these books, you will find a large consensus buzz in the mainstream press about how we finally have the case resolved. That very statement has been made time and time again. This was almost embarrassingly true of Gerald Posner's book some years ago, a book that added nothing of consequence to our understanding of the crime but used aggressive new language to restate old stuff. It is now being said of Vincent Bugliosi.
People impressed by big fat books will be impressed by Vincent Bugliosi's recent book on the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History, but in a sense its very size is a judgment against it. It is no great feat for an experienced court prosecutor to churn out a voluminous document. They do it all the time in their court briefs, taking pages of legalese to say what should take paragraphs of good, clear English.
It is fitting in more than one way
that Bugliosi is a prosecutor, for his book is a
prosecutor's brief, just a fatter one than the ones produced
by Bugliosi's predecessors.
But size here serves another
purpose, what I would call intimidation. How could you
possibly argue with this massive pile (1,600 pages) of
evidence and argument? The truth is that it is not hard at
all to argue with it.
Bugliosi follows his predecessors who used pretty much the same evidence to reach the same conclusions which any independent-minded student of the assassination understands is impossible, that is, that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. Bugliosi had no new evidence of any significance with which to work. He simply looks at the same old stuff ad nauseam, coming up here and there with prosecution tricks to make old stuff seem fresh or different.
But a key fact of the assassination is that the existing evidence is not adequate to convict anyone, and certainly not Oswald. There is, of course, other evidence in existence which has never been released. The CIA and the FBI have files they have never opened.
We know this from many bits of evidence, including references in documents we do have and from situations about which we can positively conclude evidence must exist by the nature of things. A good example of the last is the CIA surveillance photos and recordings of Oswald, or someone pretending to be Oswald, in Mexico City. An obviously incorrect photo was released and the claim was made recordings were erased.
Oswald's connections with the FBI have never been satisfactorily examined. There are many circumstances suggesting his being a paid informant for the FBI, especially during his time in New Orleans. A letter Oswald wrote to a Dallas agent just before the assassination was deliberately and recklessly destroyed by order of the office's senior agent immediately after the assassination with no reasonable explanation.
Oswald had no motive for killing Kennedy, having expressed admiration for the President. Bugliosi cannot get around this fact, only pursuing the typical path of all his forerunners in attacking Oswald's character. There has been another series of books over the years, pretending to be biographies of Oswald but only serving to attack his character, giving assassination writers material to cite. These include works by writers who clearly had CIA connections: notably Priscilla Johnson, someone all students of the assassination knows was conveniently in Moscow when Oswald was there, and the late Norman Mailer, a man who could not have written his own big, fat book on the CIA without agency cooperation.
Oswald's being promptly assassinated himself by Jack Ruby, a man associated with the murky world of anti-Castro violence, someone whose past included gun-running to Cuba and enforcer-violence in the Chicago mafia, is a gigantic fact that sticks in the throat of any author. It has never been explained satisfactorily and is not by Bugliosi.
One trouble with all such books is that we have every two decades a new generation of people, most of whom do not know enough about the case to begin to argue with such an exposition. One cannot help but believe that those who prompt the periodic publication of these books have just this fact in mind. Posner is old, stale, and forgotten. This generation gets Bugliosi.
We must always remember Bertrand Russell's profound, unanswered question after he had reviewed an advanced copy of the Warren Report: "If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?" Russell's question goes to the heart of the matter, as you would expect from one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century. It has never been answered, and certainly not by Bugliosi.
It must be at least somewhat embarrassing for Bugliosi that Italian authorities recently, near the release of his book, conducted a series of tests with Oswald's ridiculous choice of weapons, a 1940 Mannlicher-Carcano, one of the last rifles in the world a determined assassin would choose. Italian Army sharpshooters could not come close to Oswald's supposed feat of loading the crude bolt-action rifle and firing it three times, let alone hitting anything while doing so.
Moreover, in other tests conducted by the Italian Army using animal parts, it was shown impossible for a bullet to emerge from Kennedy virtually intact as the Warren Commission claimed "the magic bullet" did. One thinks of the lost opportunity in 1993 to discover something new when permission was refused by the widow of the dead John Connally to extract known bullet fragments from his wrist, fragments supposedly from "the magic bullet." The evidence was buried, literally.
Of course, when we limit ourselves to three times loading and shooting for the rifle, we are already playing the Warren Commission's own game. There were in fact at least four shots as a closely-analyzed recording clearly showed. Recent analysis at Texas A&M University showed that the ballistics evidence used to rule out a second gunman later had been misinterpreted.
The Kennedy assassination and its inadequate investigation and secrecy mark an important turning point in modern American history. Elections are still held, and more groups of people can vote today than over most of the country's not particularly democratic history, but government in the dark world of international affairs behaves often as though there were no electorate to which it is responsible. This seems a paradox, but if you think about it, you will see its truth.
You don't have to be an obsessive, conspiracy-minded person to be concerned about the state of affairs in America. Have Americans been told the truth about the CIA's great failures leading up to 9/11? Have they been told about the abuse of the CIA leading up to the Iraqi invasion, including what really happened in the Plame affair? Have Americans been told the truth about 9/11 itself, including the virtual certainty that the fourth flight over Pennsylvania was shot down by the military? Have Americans been told the simple truth about the invasion of Iraq? Have all the lies that were told, including rubbish about terror and weapons of mass destruction, been corrected? Have they learned how many Iraqis their government has killed and crippled?
No, not at all, not any more than they have been told who killed Kennedy and why.
So how is this great democracy different in the dark business of international affairs compared to the autocrats with whom it so often allies itself? Not at all.


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In western Peloponnese, in the beautiful valley of the Alpheios river, lies the most celebrated sanctuary of ancient Greece,Olympia. Dedicated to Zeus, the father of the gods, it sprawls over the southwest foot of Mount Kronios, at the confluence of the Alpheios and the Kladeos rivers, in a lush, green landscape. Although secluded near the west coast of the Peloponnese, Olympia became the most important religious and athletic centre in Greece. Its fame rests upon the Olympic Games, the greatest national festival and a highly prestigious one world-wide, which was held every four years to honour Zeus. The origin of the cult and of the festival went back many centuries. Local myths concerning the famous Pelops, the first ruler of the region, and the river Alpheios, betray the close ties between the sanctuary and both the East and West.
The earliest finds in Olympia are located on the southern foot of Mount Kronios, where the first sanctuaries and prehistoric cults were established. A large number of pottery sherds of the Final Neolithic period (fourth millennium BC) were found on the north bank of the stadium. Traces of occupation of the three periods of the Bronze Age were identified in the greater area of the Altis and new museum. A great tumulus of the Early Helladic II period (2800-2300 BC) was discovered in the lower strata of the Pelopion, while several apsidal structures belong to the Early Helladic III period (2150-2000 BC). It is traditionally believed that in approximately 1200 BC the region of Olympia was settled by Aetolians under the leadership of Oxylos, who founded the state of Elis. The first planned sanctuary dedicated to local and Pan-Hellenic deities was probably established towards the end of the Mycenaean period. The Altis, the sacred enclosure with its shady oaks, planes, pines, poplars and olive-trees, was first formed during the tenth and ninth centuries BC, when the cult of Zeus was probably established. Olympia was subsequently devoted exclusively to worship and for many centuries had no other structures except for the Altis, a walled precinct containing sacrificial altars and the tumulus of the Pelopion. The numerous votive offerings, mostly figurines, bronze cauldrons and tripods were placed outdoors, on trees and altars. The first figurines representing Zeus, the master of the sanctuary, date to the Geometric period.
In 776 BC, Iphitos, king of Elis, Kleosthenes of Pisa and Lykourgos of Sparta reorganized the Olympic Games in honour of Zeus and instituted the sacred ekecheiria, or truce. Soon the quadrennial festival acquired a national character. The great development of the sanctuary began in the Archaic period as shown by the thousands of votive offerings – weapons, figurines, cauldrons etc – dating from this period. This is when the first monumental buildings were constructed – the temple of Hera, the Prytaneion, the Bouleuterion, the treasuries and the first stadium. The sanctuary continued to flourish into the Classical period, when the enormous temple of Zeus (470-456 BC) and several other buildings (baths, stoas, treasuries, ancillary buildings) were erected, and the stadium moved to the east of its Archaic predecessors, outside the Altis. The countless statues and precious offerings of this period were unfortunately lost, as the sanctuary was pillaged several times in antiquity and especially under Roman rule. In the Hellenistic period the construction of lay buildings, such as the gymnasium and palaestra, continued, while in Roman times several existing buildings were refurbished and new ones built, including hot baths, luxurious mansions and an aqueduct. Many of the sanctuary's treasures were removed and used for the decoration of Roman villas.
The sanctuary continued to function during the first years of Christian rule under Constantine the Great. The last Olympic Games were held in 393 AD, before an edict of Theodosius I prohibited all pagan festivals. In 426 BC Theodosius II ordered the destruction of the sanctuary. In the mid-fifth century AD a small settlement developed over the ancient ruins and the Workshop of Pheidias was transformed into a Christian church. In 522 and 551 the ruins were devastated anew by earthquakes, the Temple of Zeus being partially buried. In subsequent centuries the Alpheios and the Kladeos overflowed and together with landslips from Mount Kronios buried the site deep in mud and sand. Olympia remained forgotten under a layer of debris 5-7 metres deep. The area was dubbed Antilalos and it is not until 1766 that the ancient sanctuary was re-discovered.
In 1829 the French Scientific Expedition of the Peloponnese partially excavated the Temple of Zeus, taking several fragments of the pediments to the Mus?e du Louvre. Systematic excavation began by the German Archaeological Institute in 1875 and continues to the present. During this last decade U. Sinn, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of W?rzburg and member of the German Archaeological Institute, and his team researched the southwest building, while Dr. H. Kyrieleis, former director of the German Archaeological Institute, and his team excavated the Prehistoric buildings of the sanctuary. Several monuments of the site are currently under conservation and restoration.
originally posted by
Olympia Vikatou, archaeologist

subset: commoncrawl


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The story of six men lost at sea in the North Atlantic.
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A couple of weeks ago I was at GBIF meeting in Copenhagen, and there was a discussion about adding a new feature to the GBIF portal. The conversation went something like this:
Advisor: "We really need this feature, now!"
Developer: "OK, but which of these other things you've told us we need to do should we stop doing, so we can add this new feature?"
Resources are limited, and adding new features to a project can be difficult. This got me thinking about the issue of annotating data, in GBIF and other biodiversity projects. There have been a number of recent papers on annotating biodiversity data, such as:
Morris, R. A., Dou, L., Hanken, J., Kelly, M., Lowery, D. B., Ludäscher, B., Macklin, J. A., et al. (2013, November 4). Semantic Annotation of Mutable Data. (I. N. Sarkar, Ed.)PLoS ONE. Public Library of Science (PLoS). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076093
Tschöpe, O., Macklin, J. A., Morris, R. A., Suhrbier, L., & Berendsohn, W. G. (2013, December 20). Annotating biodiversity data via the Internet. Taxon. International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT). doi:10.12705/626.4
It seems to me that these potentially suffer the assumption that data aggregators such as GBIF, and data providers such as natural history collections have sufficient resources in place to (a) implement such systems, and (b) process the annotations made by the community and update their records. What if neither assumption holds true?
Everyone is busy
Any system which requires a project to add another feature is going to have to compete with other priorities. I ran into this with my BioNames project, which was partly funded by EOL. BioNames links taxonomic names for animals (obtained from ION) to the primary literature, for example Pinnotheres atrinicola was published in the following paper:
Page, R. D. M. (1983). Description of a new species of Pinnotheres , and redescription of P. novaezelandiae (Brachyura: Pinnotheridae) . New Zealand Journal of Zoology, 10(2), 151–162. doi:10.1080/03014223.1983.10423904.
Ideally, all the links between names and publications that I'd assembled in BioNames would have been added to EOL, so that (wherever possible) users of EOL could see the original description of a taxon in EOL. But this didn't happen. In order to get BioNames into EOL I had to export the data in Darwin Core format, which is poorly suited to this kind of data. It also became clear that BioNames and EOL had rather different data models when it came to taxa, names, and publications. This meant it was going to be challenge providing the data in w ay that was usable by EOL. Plus, EOL was pretty busy doing other things such as developing TraitBank™ (yes, that's a "™" after TraitBank). So, I never did get BioNames content into EOL.
But there's another way to do this.
The Web means never having to ask for permission
How does this help us with annotation? Well, with a little programming, you can add features that you think are "missing" from a web page, and you don't need to ask anyone's permission to do it. So, I could negotiate with EOL about how to get data from BioNames into EOL, or I can simply do this:
What I've done here is create a bookmarklet that recognises that you are looking at an EOL page, it then calls the BioNames API and displays the original publication of the taxon displayed on the page (in this case, Pinnotheres atrincola). So, I've added the information from BioNames to the EOL page, without needing EOL to do anything.
But it gets better. We can do this with pretty much any web page. The example above displays the original publication of a taxon name, but imagine we are looking at the publisher's page for that article (you can see it here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03014223.1983.10423904). Wouldn't it be nice if the publisher knew that this paper described a new species of crab? We could negotiate with the publisher about how to give them that information, and how they could display it, or we can just add it:
This time the bookmarklet recognises that the web page has a DOI, then asks BioNames whether there have been any names published in the paper with that DOI, if it finds any they are displayed in the popup.
Bookmarklets enable you to enhance a web page with any information you like. This makes them ideal for displaying annotations on a page. If you want to try yourself, you can grab the bookmarklet from here.
Making annotations visible
Bookmarklets can be used to solve one part of the annotation problem, namely showing existing annotations. I have lots of exmaples of errors in datasets, I blog about some of these, I store some in Evernote for future reference, some end up in unfinished manuscripts, and so on. The problem is that these annotations are of little use to anyone else because if you go to GBIF you don't see my annotations (or, indeed, anyone else's). But we can use a bookmarklet to display these, without having to pester GBIF themselves to add this feature! Imagine a bookmarklet that you could click on and it shows you whether anyone as queried the identification of a specimen, or the location of a specimen?
Where do the annotations come from?
Of course, all this presupposes that we have annotations to start with. I think there are at least two classes of annotations. The first, most obvious annotations are ones that change or add attributes to an object. For example, adding latitude and longitude coordinates to a specimen. These are annotations we would want to display just on the corresponding page in the source database (e.g., displaying a map in the annotation popup on GBIF for a record we've georeferenced).
The second class comprise cross-links between data sets. For example, linking a species in EOL to DOI of the publication that first described that species. Or linking a specimen in GBIF to the sequences in GenBank that were obtained from that specimen. These annotations are different in that we might want to display them on multiple web pages (e.g., pages served by both a biodiversity database and an academic publisher). From this perspective, a database like BioNames is essentially a big store of annotations.
But we need more than this, we need to be able to annotate any class of data that is relevant to biodiversity. We need to be able to edit erroneous GBIF records, flag Genbank sequences that have been misidentified, document taxonomic names that are entirely spurious, and so on. And we need to make these annotations available via APIs so that anywone can access them. To me, it seems obvious that we need a single, centralised annotation store.
A global annotation store
One way to implement an annotation store would be to create a wiki-style database that the community could edit. This database gets populated with data that can then be edited, refined, and discussed. For example, imagine a GBIF user spots an occurrence that is clearly wrong (a frog in the middle of the ocean). They could have a bookmarklet that they click on, and it displays any existing annotations of that record. If there aren't any, let's imagine there is a link to the annotaion store. Clicking on that creates a record for that occurrence, and the user then edits that. Perhaps they discover that the latitude and longitudes have been swapped, so they swap them back, and save the record. The next person to go to that page in GBIF clicks on their bookmarklet and discoveres that there is a potential issue with that record (the popup displayed by the bookmarklet will have a "warning symbol", and an updated map).
Some annotations will be simple, some may require some analysis. For example, a claim that a GenBank sequence has been misidentified would be stronger if it was backed up by a BLAST analysis that demonstrated that the sequence was clustered with taxa that you would not expect based on its putitative identification.
We can also annotate in bulk, and upload these annotations directly to the annotation store. For example, we could map GBIF taxa to taxonomic name identifiers from nomenclators such as ION, ZooBank, IPNI, Index Fungorum, etc., then map those identifiers to the primary litertaure, and upload all of that data to the annotation store, making them available to anyone visiting GBIF (or, indeed, the nomenclators). We could BLAST DNA barcode sequences and suggest potential identifications. We could add lists of publications that cite museum specimen codes, and display those on the GBIF page that corresponds to each code. There is almost no limit to the richness of annotations we could add to existing webpages.
Filtered push
One aspect of annotation that I've glossed over is how the annotations get back to the primary data providers. There has been some work on this (see papers cited at the start), but in a sense I don't think this is the most pressing problem (in part because I suspect most providers are in no position to undertake the kind of data editing and cleaning required). My concern is at the other end of the process. Users of biodiversity data are frequently presented with data that is demonstrably erroneous, and it inconveniences them, as well as hurting the reputation of aggregators such as GBIF, or databases such as GenBank. Anyone doing an analysis of these sorts of data will spend some time cleaning and correcting the data, we desperately need mechanisms to capture these annotations and make them available to other users. The extent to which these annotations filter back to the primary data providers is, in my view, a less pressing issue.
That said, a central annotation store would have lots of advantages for primary providers. It's one place to go to get annotations. The fate of a user's edits could help develop metrics of reliability of annotations, and so on.
The reason I find this approach attractive is that it frees us from having to wait for projects like GBIF and GenBank to support annotations. We don't need to wait, we can simply do it ourselves right now. We can add overlays that augment existing data (e.g., adding original publications to EOL web pages), or flag errors. Take the example bookmarklet from here for a spin and see what it can do. It's very crude, but I think it gives an indication of the potential of this approach.
So, "all" we need is a centralised, editable, database of annotations that we can hook the bookmarklet into. Simples.


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81 e-books published last month by Oxford University Press and available from Oxford Scholarship Online have now been added to DiscoverEd.
Subject disciplines include Business and Management, Classical Studies, Economics and Finance, History, Law, Linguistics, Literature, Mathematics, Music, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Social Work and Sociology.
Access a spreadsheet of the new titles here.


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The Currency Problem The currency problem creates a risk factor for any company importing and/or exporting. While your product is being shipped, you may be losing profits due to relative changes in currencies against the US dollar or whichever base currency is used in the country you're in. Overseas buyers usually pay for imports in their own currency so they know exactly what they are paying, before the intermediary bank converts the funds into the local currency to pay the exporter. Example: You had calculated that you were to receive USD $400,000 for a shipment of 10 new automobiles that your company has exported to Germany. However, before your shipment arrives overseas and your buyer is due to take delivery, USD has weakened against Euro leading to you receiving only USD $375,000. On the contrary: Instead of a weakening US Dollar, it strengthens against your buyer's local currency. By the time your stock arrives, the buyer ends up paying more in their own currency to equal the US Dollar value which you both initially agreed upon but now they don't want to accept the delivery and end the sale. Currency savvy importers and exporters protect their companies from currency fluctuation risks through hedging. All global companies use currency hedging to ensure that profits aren't being eroded. If you have a small to medium size business, you can hedge too! Some ways your company can mitigate against the risk of currency fluctuation Forward Contract Leading banks offer what's known as a "currency forward contracts". This is effectively an agreement to exchange a certain amount of domestic currency for a certain amount of foreign currency at or by a future date. As a buyer, this essentially allows you to fix your exchange rate for an import purchase. Similarly, as a seller, your export sale is made at the live exchange rate, guaranteeing both parties a fixed price for the transaction. But there's a better solution, read on…. Our Global Payments offer an alternative better way of mitigating against currency risk, through a Variable Flexible Spot Contract. Why is it better?
Reference: http://blog.transfermate.com/importing-exporting-currency-problem-fix/ |


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You've joined the Shopify Affiliate Program, or maybe you're a web designer or developer who's curious about earning passive income. However, you got here, you're now ready to start promoting Shopify and earning commissions.
You've done your research and know your talking points. You've written articles and blog posts before, so this should be a breeze. So why are you staring blankly at a blinking cursor?
Don't panic! Writers' block is completely normal and I'm here to help. Here are four steps to creating a top-performing affiliate post.
1. It's all about you
Remember when you were young and your parents said, "it's not all about you"? Well, they were wrong. When it comes to influencing a purchase, it truly is all about you.
Your followers engage with your social media and posts because they relate to you. They may even want to be like you! This is what makes you a powerful influencer and a great affiliate. Don't lose that personal touch simply because you are now monetizing your site. Keep the voice and tone you've already established on your site.
Don't lose that personal touch simply because you are now monetizing your site.
Sharing your own personality is engaging and increases your credibility. Below are some tips to ensure your posts are as unique as you:
- Share your honest opinion based on your personal experiences with the platform.
- Be transparent. Let your followers know you have affiliate links in the post, and explain why you are an affiliate. Your reason could be anything from supporting the costs of the blog, to funding your latest business venture.
- Images should be your own versus stock photography or generic screenshots.
- Only review products that make sense with your blog and for your audience. If you're a traditional beauty blogger, a Shopify review wouldn't be consistent with your content, and could lose you credibility. Now if you're a beauty blogger who writes about how beauty bloggers can increase income through an online store, you have a great opportunity to be a Shopify Affiliate.
You might also like: What is Affiliate Marketing? The Myth vs. Reality.
2. Know your audience
As an affiliate marketer, you'll want to write articles that promote some of Shopify's hundreds of amazing features and apps. Don't list all of these features in one, long, bullet-pointed list. A long list can be overwhelming and overlooked as a result.
Instead, select the products and integrations that are most relevant to your audience and explain the value to them. This creates a stronger connection and call-to-action for your follower. The follower will understand exactly how this feature is relevant to their business.
Keep your messaging personal and within your niche.
Keep your messaging personal and within your niche. The key is to know your audience, and to ask yourself the right questions before you begin writing your post. Questions such as:
- What feature is most important to my audience?
- What will make my audience want to click on my affiliate link?
- Which offer or benefit will entice them the most: a free trial or speed to launch?
Below are examples of niches, and how to create content for each niche's specific needs.
Is your audience less technical and more creative? If your audience creates home crafted goods, focus on the usability of Shopify. Recommend templates that work well for this genre. Discuss which business tools you used to successfully launch your business.
Are you speaking to serial entrepreneurs? In this case, focus on cross selling opportunities, speed to launch, and ease of expansion. Give examples of successful entrepreneurs who have launched ecommerce businesses on Shopify, such as Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, and Daymond John.
Have a technical audience? Discuss the open Shopify platform, access to a development store as a Shopify Partner, and the ability to customize the user experience. Address how Shopify saves programmers' time with thousands of apps that engage customers and increase sales.
3. Build credibility
Before you write an affiliate post, it's essential to first build trust with your audience. People buy from people they trust. Trust is built through sharing valuable non-monetized content, and by providing followers with detailed and helpful information.
Before you write an affiliate post, it's essential to first build trust with your audience.
This trust should be built before you share your first affiliate post with thoughtful and valuable engagement and content. Once the initial trust is established, here are four ways to increase trust within your affiliate post:
- Compare and contrast. As an affiliate, you can compare other brands and products. Showing you've done your research with competitors builds trust with your audience. It shows you have looked at all the options and are presenting an unbiased view.
- Get personal. Yes, we are back to it being all about you. Discuss your personal experiences and be real. Don't just talk about your successes, but also address your challenges, and how you overcame them. Tell your followers why you recommend and use Shopify.
- Use outside references. When creating an affiliate post, don't hesitate to quote outside references. These quotes can be in the form of testimonials or ecommerce statistics. When using outside resources, be sure they're from credible and recognizable sites, such as major magazines, newspapers, or research firms.
- Don't be camera shy. According to 70 percent of marketers, video produces more conversions than any other type of content. Let your readers see and hear you through video. YouTube videos are ideal to embed because they also help with search engine optimization.
According to 70 percent of marketers, video produces more conversions than any other type of content.
Keep in mind, credibility builds throughout your entire site by consistently providing valuable information to your followers. Each of the tips above can be applied to all posts, affiliate and otherwise.
You might also like: 7 Tips to Help Cultivate Authenticity for your Affiliate Marketing Business.
4. Be obvious
Now is not the time to be shy. Make your affiliate links obvious and compelling. Many affiliates provide subtle links hidden within the copy. It's simply the word Shopify with a hyperlink. There is no call to action, such as a free trial or an "Buy Now" link.
Now is not the time to be shy.
Instead, you need to make it clear what you would like your follower to do, and give the follower a reason to click. Below are the key placements for affiliate links.
- Consider the beginning, middle, and end. While we would like to believe our readers stay with our post from the first word to the last, the reality is they probably won't. Include affiliate links at the beginning, middle, and end of the post to improve click-through rates and post engagement.
- Include ad banners. Text links will always be your top converting affiliate links. However, don't discount banners — these images serve as a clear and visual reminder for your followers to click.
- Have a strong call to action. Simply telling your readers to click on a link will not lead to great conversions. If your follower only sees an underlined word, you're expecting the follower to guess that s/he should click on that word. You need to explain clearly the reason for clicking. A link that contains a time-sensitive call to action with an incentive converts the best. Examples of strong calls to action are "Click Here For A Free Trial" or "Click Here And Launch Your Store in 48 Hours." Give your audience a reason to click.
Let the world know
Following these four tips gives you the framework for a successful affiliate post. Whether you're just starting out or are a veteran in affiliate marketing, staying true to your audience and yourself should always be a guiding point with all affiliate marketing tactics.
Once your masterpiece is complete, let the world see it. Ensure your post is optimized properly for the search engines, so people in your niche can easily find your post. Not sure how to optimize your post? Check out Search Engine Watch or Search Engine Journal for detailed instructions.
Finally, don't leave out your followers. Broadcast your message via your social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Maximize your existing email list with a targeted email campaign.
Take your time writing your post, broadcast it, and test new marketing tactics to ensure your success as a Shopify affiliate. Happy commission-making!
What strategies do you use when writing an affiliate blog post? Tell us in the comments below.


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Christmas Tree Candle Lamp
Christmas Tree Candle Lamp
Shape patterns for laser cut Christmas Tree Candle Lamp
ZIP include files types:
DXF,SVG,Ai,PDF, LBRN (Lightburn)
=> All in one file for larger laser working area
=>A4 size parts for A4 laser working area
Commercial use limit: 20 cut out items for 1 purched project
Instant download
Instant download
Instant download after payment in accordance with our Shipping Policy
Materials thickness
Materials thickness
Materials thickness with digital files: 3mm (0,12 inch) unless it says otherwise in the project description.
Before cutting out the design
All patterns are designed for a specific material thickness indicated in the project description. Therefore, measure the thickness of your material and add a parameter in the cutting program to correct the laser beam by the difference in thickness. Make a test on a small element.
Refund policy
Refund policy
If the purchased design is not downloaded 2 calendar days in accordance with our Refund Policy
Commercial License
Commercial License
You can sell ready-made products cut from the design with a commercial license. The limit, if different, is written in the project description.
Software requirements
Software requirements
These files are vectors and compatible with software (laser cutter, cnc router, cnc plasma, plotter) that supports SVG, PDF, DXF, Ai or LBRN (Lightburn) files.
Please make sure your PC is compatible (if you have others) before purchasing these files


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Press Releases
Penn Mutual Enhances its Advisers' Social Media Toolbox with Hootsuite Social Media Platform
VANCOUVER, BC and HORSHAM, Pa. – January 25, 2016 - The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company (Penn Mutual), a Fortune 1,000 company with $100 billion of life insurance in force, has selected Hootsuite, the most widely used platform for managing social media, to expand the social media toolbox available to its advisers.
Penn Mutual is committed to providing its advisers with the necessary tools to support and grow their practices. With 72 percent of the company's savvy adviser base seeing tremendous value in engaging clients via social media*, Penn Mutual is focused on offering its advisers social media support that will enable them to easily communicate with customers on social media, while remaining compliant with industry and company regulations.
Hootsuite allows for the delivery of relevant, pre-approved social content to advisers that helps them build and enhance their social marketing program. They can manage the content and postings across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter from a single, secure interface right from their phones.
"We realize that technology is constantly evolving and social media is a fast-changing space. Because we are a forward-looking company, we are committed to presenting our advisers with access to technology that best suits their needs," says Jeff Fleischman, Penn Mutual's chief marketing and digital officer. "Penn Mutual is growing and dedicated to staying ahead of the curve as we engage with consumers in a meaningful and effective way."
"Hootsuite will provide added flexibility and extensive training and educational opportunities that will help our advisers become experts in social prospecting and selling," says Rob Bonsall, director of social media at Penn Mutual. "Offering scalability, Hootsuite will allow both savvy and novice social media users to engage digitally."
"As financial services companies become more digitally savvy, they are looking for customizable solutions that benefit the entire enterprise," said Amy McIlwain, global principal of financial services at Hootsuite. "Companies are seeing value in flexible platforms for various business lines while maintaining consistency across the enterprise for brand awareness and risk management. We're thrilled to be working with Penn Mutual, a company that embraces social media and its value throughout their entire organization."
Hootsuite helps financial services organizations execute business strategies that are built on social media, and enables more than 2,500 enterprise organizations to scale social activities across multiple teams, departments and business units. The versatile platform also supports a broad ecosystem of more than 250 technology integrations that allow financial services firms to extend social media into existing systems and workflows.
*2016 Penn Mutual Business Insights Social Media Use Survey
About Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the most widely used platform for managing social media, loved by over 15 million people around the globe and trusted by more than 800 of the Fortune 1000. With Hootsuite, brands harness the power of social. Our platform brings together your social networks and integrates with hundreds of business applications. It's the place to build customer relationships, listen to the needs of the market and grow your revenue. To learn more, visit www.hootsuite.com
About the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company
Since 1847, Penn Mutual has been driven by our purpose to create a world of possibilities. At the heart of this purpose is the belief that purchasing life insurance is the most protective, responsible and rewarding action a person can take, and is central to a sound financial plan. The company is committed to helping families unlock life's possibilities through life insurance and annuity solutions. This is accomplished through a national network of financial professionals, who help clients make great things possible. Penn Mutual supports its field representatives with brokerage services through Hornor, Townsend & Kent, Inc., Registered Investment Advisor and wholly owned subsidiary. Member FINRA/SIPC. Visit Penn Mutual on the Internet at http://www.pennmutual.com.
Ann Callaghan
Senior Communications Manager
Penn Mutual
(215) 957-7496
Julie Huang
Corporate Communications


text: Click to expand Tap to zoom Belden 735A1P 0081000 Coaxial Cables #26 FPFA SH FLRST by Belden Sale $2,040.28 SKU 735A1P 0081000 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10+ Quantity Quantity Add to cart Description Spec Sheet Description Product Specifications Manufacturer: Belden Wire and Cable Conductor/Pair Count: AWG Gauge Size: Conductor Type (Solid/Stranded): Conductor Material: Jacket Material Jacket Color UL Compliance ROHS Compliance Shielded Shield Type/Construction Dielectric Material Fire/Flammability Rating Temp Rating/Max Temp Voltage Rating: Unit Weight in kg: 6.350 kg Unit Weight in Lbs: 14.00175 Coax Type Mil Spec Spec Sheet 735A1P Data Sheet ★ Judge.me Reviews Let customers speak for us 36 reviews Write a review 92% (33) 8% (3) 0% (0) 0% (0) 0% (0) 22 J Belden Equal FISD006F9 Fibre Optic Cable Assemblies FI DN_TB OS2 6F OFCR_AIA Jose El cable se tiene que poner adentro de un tubo o no ? P Belden 9364 060U1000 Multi-Conductor Cables 20AWG 1TRIAD SHIELD 1000ft BOX CHROME Peter Minsal Great service Great price, exact sizes needed. Thank you J Belden Equal 1242A 008U1000 Multi-Conductor Cables 22AWG 4C UNSHLD 1000ft BOX GRAY Jim Fisher Pool Support Plus Thank you for getting the product to me in a quick fashion. The wire was exactly like I ordered S Alpha Wire 78172 SL005 Multi-Paired Cables 24AWG 2PR SHIELD 100FT SPOOL SLATE Serjik Avanes Alpha 78172 I'm very satisfied with the service and the product I received. R Belden Equal 1804A J5C100 Multi-Conductor Cables 28AWG 4C SHIELD 100ft SPOOL BLACK Robin Cross ALMOST This come very close to the Belden 1804A cable. The conductors seem to be a little stiffer, very minor. This causes the entire cable to be A little stiffer. 4X each conductor. The outer jacket is a very little rougher than the Belden. Overall, this cable comes very close to the original. 12 Powered by Judge.me


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Our dorm rooms are available in a stylish bunk bed setup. The rooms are exclusively male or female by request. Number of beds in a dorm vary from 4, 6, 7, 8 and 10. Dorm room may have an attached washroom along with shared shower/washrooms on the same floor.
Facility: Lockers
Private Room
Our private rooms are available with an attached washroom or with a shared men's and women's washroom shared with other dorm guests.


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New 2023 SylvanSport GO BASE
Save your favorite RVs as you browse. Begin with this one!
Great Parts Department
Rod Dawson stayed late and waited for me to get there to pick up my parts. He was professional, knowledgeable, and helpful! He assisted me in getting my air conditioner running on one or the Hottest days this year! -
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This was the BEST experience!! I knew what I wanted to purchase when I called the dealership. I had found the trailer I wanted at a dealership closer to my home, however they did not want to take the time to work with me. I decided to call Vancouver RV as they were the only other dealer who had the -
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We live in Eastern Washington, and because the destination trailer we were interested in was not sold in our area, we contacted Vancouver RV and my husband spoke to Tony Ozeruga. Working long distance can be challenging for the most seasoned salesperson, but Tony handled every single question over the
Vancouver RV Center is not responsible for any misprints, typos, or errors found in our website pages. Any price listed excludes sales tax, registration tags, and delivery fees. Manufacturer pictures, specifications, and features may be used in place of actual units on our lot. Please contact us @360-371-6804 for availability as our inventory changes rapidly. All calculated payments are an estimate only and do not constitute a commitment that financing or a specific interest rate or term is available.
Manufacturer and/or stock photographs may be used and may not be representative of the particular unit being viewed. Where an image has a stock image indicator, please confirm specific unit details with your dealer representative.


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Crystal is a non-stretch strand representing represents peace and humility.
Our products are shipped within 3 to 5 business days. The Shipping cost for our waist beads is $5.
All waistbeads sale are final and are not eligible for refund or exchange. For hygenic reasons, waistbeads return cannot be accepted. However, if your products arrive damaged or broken. We must be contacted within 24 hours of receiving your package.
If you have any questions, our team would be happy to assist. Please contact us at email@example.com


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Professional slang
Posted by Smokey Stover on March 30, 2007
In Reply to: Professional slang posted by Probe on March 30, 2007
: Professional slang?
: Are buzzwords a part of professional slang? Or is there any difference between these two terms?
: Thank you.
Since professional slang is a phrase, I'll give you whatever answer I can. The usual word for professional slang in general is jargon. It is possible that there's a use for terms like "doctors' slang," or "legal slang," but in those cases and most others jargon is preferred, such as "medical jargon" and "legal jargon." One reason for the preference is that the vocabulary specific to professional needs are real language, even if they sound slangy. If you are a doctor and need something "stat," one syllable beats five hands down.
Buzzwords can be slang or jargon, but can also be just ordinary words getting a big run for some reason. They are used by some large part of the ordinary community, which may or may not include professionals, but generally have a limited shelf-life. Buzzword itself is a sort of buzzword, coming from the idea that when large numbers of people are talking about something, there talk is like a buzz in the air. "What's the buzz on Sanjaya and AI?" That can be translated as What do the gossips, the chatterers and fans say about Sanjaya as an AI contestant?" In this case there's no buzzword involved unless there's a lot of talk about his type of hairdo.
Buzzword doesn't necessarily imply something from popular culture, however. Words and phrases that suddenly show up in financial columns, business writing, and diplomatic deals can be buzzwords. I'm not a good source for examples. I can't be sure, for instance, if the bell curve was for a time a buzzword, or reverse discrimination, or things like that. Perhaps others can do that for us if they care to.
- Professional slang Smokey Stover 30/March/07
- Professional slang Smokey Stover 30/March/07
- Professional slang ESC 30/March/07
- Jargon Lewis 02/April/07
- Professional slang ESC 30/March/07
- Professional slang Smokey Stover 30/March/07


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Final Fantasy XIV powerleveling
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The Year of Living Changerously
The Play's the Thing
Before I start with the particulars, let me explain the big picture issue that was the impetus for all these changes. When you boil it all down, our job, as the people who make Magic, is to encourage people to play our game. Ultimately, there are two groups we need to focus on to accomplish this task. First, we have to retain the players we currently have. Second, we have to acquire new (or lapsed) players into the game. Both are essential to the long-term health of Magic. (For a much more detailed version of this issue, check out my article Assume the Acquisition.) As far as the current player base goes, there's always more we can do but right now we know the game is healthy and we believe there are things coming down the road that will make you even happier.
That means the key thing is to find better ways to grow the game by bringing in new players. The importance of acquiring new players has been a consistent theme this year on magicthegathering.com. Now's our chance to show you what we're doing in terms of the product to make it happen. My article today is going to walk you through each of the changes we're making, explain how it will impact the product, and walk you through our rationale for why we believe it is better for growing the game.
Rethink Think Think
One of the best ways to approach an established problem is to back up and treat the problem anew. Don't rely on conventional thought, because you are prone to make the same assumptions and thus end up in the same place. So, we started from scratch. How do we get new players into the game? What are the current handicaps that make starting the game hard? What about our game could be friendlier to new players?
As we started our discussions, we had a very important realization. Up until recently, we have tended to focus our acquisition efforts towards the core sets and our retention efforts towards the expansions, the idea being that the newer player will enter through our simplest product and the more advanced player will pay attention to the latest cards. We questioned this assumption (as we questioned every assumption) and tracked down the data. You know what we found? We were wrong. Basically, newer players don't follow a neat path. They begin with whatever Magic product they are first exposed to, and because most players learn from existing players, this first exposure is usually not a core set.
So what does this mean? For starters, it forced us to look at our expansions in the same light that we look at our core sets. And in that light, things look very different. I think it's time for me to start jumping into the changes and I'll explain a lot of our discoveries and observations along the way.
Change #1: We Are Printing Fewer Cards Per Year
Let me start this section by explaining some vocabulary. I am going to talk about "Magic years." What I mean by this is that I'm going to start the "year" with the fall large expansion and then include every expansion until the following fall large expansion. I will refer to each year by its fall set's name or expansion symbol.
With that out of the way, let's get to the point of this section. Starting with the Shards of Alara year, we are going to be printing fewer cards per year.
What kind of change are we talking here? Well, let's take a look at how many cards we've printed per Magic year, starting with Ice Age.
(Some quick technical notes on this chart because I know I'm already going to get enough email on this article as it is: Yes, I'm counting Homelands as part of the Ice Age year for this tally, I'm not counting basic lands for any of these, I am counting the "Starter" rarity from Eighth and Ninth Edition, and I'm not counting Un- sets or the various beginner sets like Portal. Finally, I am counting the basic snow lands from Coldsnap but not from Ice Age. Why? Because the Coldsnap snow lands showed up in the common slot for booster packs.)
Now let's take a look at next year. Click here to add it to the image above.
Not counting the core set, we will print fewer cards during the Shards of Alara year than we have ever printed before in any Magic year – 519. Even counting the core set, it is over one hundred cards fewer than the previous year. The reasons behind this change are twofold. First, as we examined the barriers for entry to the game, we realized that the speed of release of new cards was front and center. If new players quickly get overwhelmed they tend to walk away, never to return. A new player today trying to get into the game has the same hurdles that all new players have had historically, but one entering this July, for instance, faces a Standard environment of over 2,100 cards. One of the easiest ways of simplifying things was to just print fewer cards.
The second reason for the change was feedback from existing players. We were just printing too many cards. Even established players were having issues keeping up. As the graph above demonstrates, we've been ramping up the cards produced over the last few years. We simply went too far. We were printing too many cards for the new and established players.
This change is helping to adjust to the right balance. Why then did we choose a number lower than what had been our staple number for so many years? Because we wanted to give ourselves a little wiggle room for when we came up with interesting ideas like Time Spiral's "timeshifted" set or the Lorwyn / Shadowmoor mini-block structure. 519 cards is not our cap, but our new baseline.
Observant readers may have noticed that the official announcement listed the size of the next core set as unknown. Why then does my graph show a number for it? Because as a member of the team working on the set I'm quite confident in the 229 number, but since the set is not officially finished yet, technically the official number is still TBD. Nonetheless, even if the set shifts slightly we'll definitely still be sticking with our new "print fewer" philosophy.
Change #2: We're Adding a New Rarity Called Mythic Rare
Another important part of attracting new players is understanding the environment they come from. When Magic first began, it had the luxury of defining itself because it was the first of its kind. That is not the world we live in today. TCGs are now an established game genre. It used to be that the majority of game players getting their first exposure to a trading card game did so with Magic. With the explosion of TCGs, particularly ones aimed at lower ages, this is simply no longer true.
We came to realize that we don't have the luxury of defining Magic solely against itself. The trading card game genre has created some standards that evolved from decisions made after Magic's creation, rarity being one of the best examples. The idea of a TCG with only three rarities is antiquated. (And before I get letters, I do understand that technically basic land is a fourth rarity; for these discussions I am not going to count it.) Magic is the only major trading card game currently printed with only three rarities. If we want to stay competitive in attracting new players we have to keep up with the industry standards.
What is it about this "industry standard" that helps acquire new players? Two things. First is the issue of expectation. The majority of players are going to come to Magic having already experienced this standard, and they are going to expect any new trading card game they try to function like the games they already know. As I often talk about in this column, meeting expectations is very important. Second, there's a reason things become an industry standard. They work. Knowing that you have the potential to open something you can show off to all your friends is very compelling and helps draw new players into the game.
The good news is that we found a way that allowed us to increase the number of rarities without having to print cards at a rarity higher than we currently print. To elaborate, when you crunch the numbers it turns out that Magic has used the word "rare" to stretch across an insanely wide band of rarity. To put this in context, here's a graph of every Magic set currently available in Standard showing how many rares are in each set.
As you can see, there is a giant spectrum of what "rare" means. The high end, for instance, is over three times greater than the low end. The important discovery for us was that we could add in a new level of rarity without having to print cards at a higher rarity than we already print. The best way to explain this is to just show the old and new system side by side. The rarity of the set on the left is equal to the new rarity listed on the right.
Old System | New System |
Tenth Edition Rare | Mythic Rare, Large Set |
Shadowmoor Rare | Mythic Rare, Small Set |
Future Sight Rare | Rare, Large Set |
Planar Chaos Rare | Rare, Small Set |
Now that I've established the scope of the rarities, let's look at how many cards of each rarity Shards of Alara will have.
Commons – 101
Uncommons – 60
Rares – 53
Mythic Rares – 15
How often do each of these show up? Commons appear ten per pack (yes, this is a change which I will talk about in the next section). Uncommons appear three per pack. Rares appear one per pack, except roughly one in eight packs, when you get a mythic rare instead. The one in eight packs, by the way, might make it feel as if mythic rares are seven times as rare as rares. They're not; they're twice as rare. (It's complicated, but it has to do with how the sheet is laid out and the fact that there are more rares than mythic rares.)
Now let's take a look at "Paper," an example of a small set in this new world.
Commons – 60
Uncommons – 40
Rares – 35
Mythic Rares – 10
As with Shards of Alara, the rarities have the same number of cards per pack, including the frequency that you'll get a mythic rare in that rare slot.
This now leads us to the next question: How are cards split between rare and mythic rare? Or more to the point, what kind of cards are going to become mythic rares? We want the flavor of mythic rare to be something that feels very special and unique. Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. They will not just be a list of each set's most powerful tournament-level cards.
We've also decided that there are certain things we specifically do not want to be mythic rares. The largest category is utility cards, what I'll define as cards that fill a universal function. Some examples of this category would be cycles of dual lands and cards like Mutavault or Char. That also addresses a long-standing issue that some players have had with certain rares like dual lands. Because we're making fewer cards per set, in the new world individual rares will be easier to acquire because each rare in a large set now appears 25% more often.
Which leads to the next question: Will mythic rares have premium (foil) versions? Yes. In fact, not only will they have a normal version and a premium version, but the premium versions will show up at a slightly more frequent ratio. (The number of combined premium rares and premium mythic rares you will get starting with Shards of Alara is higher than the number of premium rares you currently get.)
The final mythic rare question: Will mythic rare have a new expansion symbol color? Yes. What is it? I promise I'll show it off before we're done.
Change #3: All Booster Packs Will Have a Basic Land Card in Place of a Common
This is a change we made in the core set starting with Seventh Edition. The reason for it was rather simple: beginning players were having problems getting land. Without land, you can't play the game—the very definition of a barrier to entry. Before Seventh Edition, we had the attitude that there were plenty of products that provided basic land. The flaw in our thinking was twofold. First, there was no way for the new player to know which product had basic land, and few people buy a second product when the first one isn't usable by itself. Second, not every venue sells every Magic product. There were stores, for example, that only sold booster packs, which meant a player buying exclusively from that store had no way around this problem.
With our new understanding of how players approach the game, it became clear that if we wanted to guarantee that new players got land, we had to include it in the main product they were buying. Thus, starting with Shards of Alara, every booster pack will have one rare (replaced occasionally by a mythic rare), three uncommons, ten commons, and one basic land. This new rarity distribution will be applied to every core set and expansion (large and small) moving forward.
Change #4: Theme Decks Are Becoming Intro Packs
Since the introduction of preconstructed decks, the theme decks have had to serve two masters. They were designed both as an intro-level product to help new players get into the game and as a sampler product to allow established or lapsed players to experience the themes and mechanics of the new set. The problem with this execution was that it didn't allow us to maximize the decks for either group. The importance of acquiring new players has finally ended this stalemate.
When we looked into how product was being placed in stores, we realized that we were having gaps (some very long, particularly in the mass market stores) when no intro level product was available for sale, a potentially huge barrier for new players. we needed to find a way to ensure that an intro-level product was always available. The answer, which came after much searching, was to let theme decks embrace their intro-level product side. Since they accompany every set, they would guarantee that such a product was always on the shelves.
Starting with Shards of Alara, the theme decks are changing into a new product called "intro packs" aimed specifically at helping beginners get into the game. To do this we rethought what an intro product needed to have, which resulted in a substantial change to the make-up of the product. For the existing theme deck buyer, the intro packs will still have a preconstructed deck that samples the new themes and mechanics of the upcoming set and we've managed to raise the overall value proposition of the product (more on this in a moment) while keeping the same price. That said, this product is going through some significant changes.
To refresh your memory, here is the make-up of a theme deck for Shadowmoor:
2 rares
13 uncommons
45 commons / lands
1 premium land
Now here is the make-up of an intro pack for Shards of Alara:
1 premium rare
1 non-premium rare
7 uncommons
32 commons / lands
1 Shards of Alara booster pack
There are two very important differences. First, the intro pack's deck has 41 cards compared to the theme deck's 61. Second, the intro pack also includes a booster pack (bringing the intro pack up to 56 cards). Taking into account the cards from the booster pack, the intro pack has three fewer uncommons, two fewer commons, and no premium land. In turn though, it gets an extra rare and a foil one at that.
Why the change? Let's start by talking about the booster pack. One of the concerns we had with the preconstructed decks for beginners is that they are a little misleading about what the product actually is. A self-contained deck doesn't convey the scope of a trading card game. We wanted to show the new player the potential of what his or her deck could become. To do this, we felt strongly that we needed to get a booster pack into their hands. Only by ripping open a booster of random cards did we feel we could give new players the best taste of what Magic is truly about.
In addition, we felt strongly that the intro pack approach better encouraged you to further tweak your deck. This was accomplished partly by including the booster but more importantly by making a deck smaller than sixty cards. The smaller size encourages players to add cards to get up to sixty (yet another lesson we've learned from the core sets).
The intro packs have also been changed so that they now have two inserts. One insert has all the stuff you're used to reading about with theme decks (how the mechanics work, deck lists, etc.) but now there's a second insert included that's written to help players learn how to play and how to adapt their deck, which allows any intro pack to also double as a first-purchase explanatory product.
The transformation of the premium card from a land into a rare came about because we rethought the packaging. We wanted to create a see-through box that would allow the player to see one of the cards. With that technology, the obvious choice for the slot was a premium rare card (and a good one at that) and as such, one was added to the product. Once we looked over the mix we felt that we had both upped the overall value of the product and made it much more accessible and attractive for new players.
Filling Up
I understand that I am throwing out a lot of information at once but I wanted to make sure you had the chance to hear the reasoning behind these changes. Ultimately, the changes I discussed today were made because we firmly believe it's in the best interest of the long-term health of the game.
Now, it's your turn. We would like to hear what you think about all these changes. Please use today's thread to give your opinion both on these particular changes and on other things that you feel might address the new player issues I've brought up.
Join me next week when I talk about something a little less substantial.
Wait a minute... I have a nagging feeling like I forgot something. Oh, yes. Click here to see what the new mythic rare expansion symbol will look like.
Meet Sarkhan Vol. You'll be getting to know him this fall.
Okay this time I'm really done.
Until then, may you understand the necessity of change.
Mark Rosewater


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An Oregon health care network says it has placed a nurse on administrative leave after she shared a video on social media where she bragged about flouting basic public health measures that help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
In a Facebook post on Saturday afternoon, Salem Health said it had placed the nurse on administrative leave pending an investigation after learning of the video.
According to KPTV-TV in Salem, Oregon, the Washington Post and BuzzFeed News, the unidentified nurse originally shared the video on TikTok. Though the nurse later deleted the video, other TikTok users have since used her clip in a side-by-side "duet" video, and screen recordings of the original video have also gone viral on other platforms.
The original TikTok shows the female nurse, clad in blue scrubs and a stethoscope, lip-syncing a scene from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," starring Jim Carey.
"When my co workers find out I still travel, dont wear a mask when I am out and let my kids have play dates," her caption read.
Several social media users identified the nurse and alerted Salem Health. Others criticized the nurse on social media.
"Imagine being an oncology nurse during a pandemic and bragging about not taking precautions," one TikTok user said in a duet video.
@amandabutcher2 To each their own, but why would you brag about it to others? 🤦🏻♀ I guess we could ask Loveiskind05 #nurse #covid #health #pandemic #fyp #foryou
The nurse's video comes as COVID-19 spreads like wildfire in Oregon and across the country. In the last three days, Oregon has recorded more COVID-19 infections than in any other three-day stretch throughout the pandemic, according to a database kept by Johns Hopkins.
Across the country, more than 4 million people in the U.S. have contracted COVID-19 in the month of November alone — a figure that represents 30% of all cases since the pandemic began.
Health officials warn that cases could spike further in the coming weeks after millions of Americans traveled to attend large indoor Thanksgiving gatherings in recent days.


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MECALUX executed its purchase agreement, its call option on the companies UFC Interlake Holding Co., United Fixtures Company, Inc., Interlake Material Handling, Inc. and Conco-Tellus Inc. for a value of 30 million dollars, financed completely with equity. Among the assets that were acquired are the plants at Pontiac (Illinois), and Sumter (South Carolina) and the group's Mexican subsidiaries, owners of the plants at Mexicali and Matamoros. With this purchase, MECALUX also acquired the commercial network and all industrial properties. The American division of MECALUX changed its company name to INTERLAKE MECALUX.
According to United States' legislation (Section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code), as no other firm bids had been presented to buy these assets and MECALUX was the sole bidder, a public tender was not required and the Court adjudicated it to MECALUX.
MECALUX has positioned itself as the potential leader of the American market
For MECALUX this is a market opportunity that means growing its presence in the United States of America and Mexico, markets in which MECALUX is enhancing its future expansion.
It should be noted that UFC Interlake Holding Co. has historically been the leading company in the US market in terms of turnover and technology. With this opportunity, MECALUX acquired the client base of UFC Interlake Holding Co. which includes the largest companies in the United States, helping MECALUX to develop in the American market and provide these clients with the best possible services in the rest of the international markets. Among these clients are WAL-MART, HOME DEPOT and TOYOTA. Moreover, a line of business is also included with these assets covering automated warehouse implementation and services.
Incorporating 4 plants with cutting edge technology
The 4 plants that MECALUX bought in the American market are technologically highly advanced, with a capacity to produce the most comprehensive range of storage systems in the American market, added to MECALUX's current range. These plants have cutting edge technology and great production flexibility, capable of meeting all clients' needs. These 4 plants were added to the 2 operational plants MECALUX already had in the region (Chicago and Mexico). MECALUX therefore now owns 6 plants in production in this market, thereby effectively covering the whole American and Mexican territory.
Acquisition of all INTERLAKE's patents, trademarks and technology
Part of the industrial assets bought by MECALUX are all the patents and trademarks, as well as all the technology required to continue developing the product base of UFC Interlake Holding Co. The leading brand in the Canadian market, REDIRACK, has also been acquired, currently licensed under royalty to the leading storage system firm in Canada. When market conditions improve, INTERLAKE MECALUX plans to develop significantly in the United States and Mexico, both in terms of sales volume in storage systems as well as in new technology divisions to offer automated warehouses and software throughout the American market.
With the group's future development, the American market will be one of the largest and will balance the group's positioning, with expected future sales being 50% in Europe and 50% in the United States of America.
MECALUX now owns 12 plants in total
With this operation, the MECALUX group has gone from its previous figure of 8 production plants to now 12 factories in total, becoming one of the world's leaders in capacity and technology dedicated to the storage industry.


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text: Planetary Laser Altimetry A laser altimeter is an instrument that measures the distance from an orbiting spacecraft to the surface of the planet/asteroid that the spacecraft is orbiting. The distance is determined by measuring the complete round trip time of a laser pulse from the instrument to the planet's/asteroid's surface and back to the instrument.The distance to the object can be determined by multiplying the round-trip pulse time by the speed of light and dividing by two. With a well-known attitude and position of the instrument/spacecraft the location on the surface illuminated by the laser pulse can be determined. The series of the laser spot, or footprint, locations provides a profile of the surface. | ||||


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