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Looking for a simple way to save money buying real estate? Find out how buying in Qualified Opportunity Zones can help you find the best investment property deals.
Investing in Qualified Opportunity Zones Offer many benefits to investors in Metro Detroit and all across the country. Investing in these areas offer tremendous tax benefits along with the ability to give back to communities that are considered distressed in your area.
What Is A Qualified Opportunity Zone?
In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created Qualified Opportunity Zones to help spur job growth and economic development in distressed communities across the United States. They offer tax incentives to encourage those individuals with capital gains to invest in undercapitalized communities. When an investor purchases property in an area deemed to be a Qualified Opportunity Zone, the will receive tax benefits and may be able to defer tax on capital gains. Investments in Qualified Opportunity Zones must be made via an Opportunity Fund in order to qualify for all of the available tax benefits. An Opportunity Fund may be a partnership or corporation set-up with the intent of investing in these Zones. They must hold 90% of their assets in Qualified Opportunity Zones, and they must be certified according to the IRS regulations.
Qualified Opportunity Zones are located all over the country in both rural and metropolitan areas. About 12% of census tracts throughout the USA are considered Qualified Opportunity Zones. These zones will typically have higher unemployment rates, higher poverty rates, and lower household incomes. Home values and the amount you are able to collect is often lower, however, in many of these communities, rental properties are in high demand. You do not need to live, work, or own property in the zone in order to take advantage of the opportunity to invest. All you have to do is choose to defer the tax on that gain. Many investors will utilize the map tool to discover Qualified Opportunity Zones in cities where they are interested in investing. The first zones only covered 18 states, but today there are Zones all over the country as well as Washington DC. Once an investor narrows the Zones they are interested in, they can work with a professional such as Pinnell Enterprises, LLC to help them find the best property deals in the area.
How Can You Benefit From Buying In A Qualified Opportunity Zone?
Investors can benefit in a number of ways when buying property in a Qualified Opportunity Zone near Metro Detroit. Some of the tax benefits include being able to defer up to nine years of capital gains that are reinvested into an Opportunity Fund. Investment firms, large corporations, start-ups, and private equity firms are all taking advantage of investing in Qualified Opportunity Zones near the Metro Detroit area. If the property is owned for five years, there will be a 10% reduction in tax on the gain. If they hold the property for seven years, an additional 5% reduction is added. For future capital gains on investments accrued while in an Opportunity Fund, If the property is help for ten years, gains that are realized on investments made in connection with a deferral election are excluded from taxes.
What Are The Downfalls To Investing In A Qualified Opportunity Zone?
While the tax incentives may be there, there isn't any guarantee that the properties will appreciate in the area as quickly as you would like them to. While this program was designed to help spur job growth and revitalize communities, having people invest in the area doesn't always cut it. You may find that your purchase isn't gaining value and that you are actually losing money on the deal. If the property isn't in the best area, it may be more difficult to resell when you need to. If the property is reclassified, the property will still be treated as Qualified Opportunity Zone property for five years or until the property is no longer help by the Opportunity Fund.
To learn more about Qualified Opportunity Zones, you can read up on them on the IRS website or you can reach out to our team with any questions you have about the process! T^hings can get a little confusing when investing in Qualified Opportunity Zones near Metro Detroit. You will likely want to have your accountant help you along with the process to make sure you are capitalizing in every way possible. We can help you find the best available properties located in the Qualified Opportunity Zones that you are interested in! Get in touch with us to tell us what kind of property you are after and how much you want to spend. If you are looking for a Qualified Opportunity Zone with many profitable property options, we are here to help!


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Our elegant collection of a retractable tensile structure is ideal for a beach site. This structure will create a romantic ambience for a couple with its aesthetic shape and classy white colour. The offered structure is made of high-grade heavy duty fabric and is supported with a durable frame that has paint coated surface finish. It works as best shed for you and protects you from direct sun-rays and rain.
This retractable tensile structure will provide a mesmerizing look to the entire area with its eye-catching pattern. It is available in a variety of shape, finish and colour as per clients' diverse demands. In addition, the retractable tensile structure is capable to withstand adverse weather conditions due to the special coating on the entire structure.

subset: commoncrawl


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SeekDotnet.com ASP.NET Technology include latest ASP.NET version including .net core hosting, latest ASP.NET CORE version, URL Rewrite, latest Crystal Report, WCF Service, Visual Studio, Full Trust and many more.
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I am a researcher in the Internet Graphics Group, Microsoft Research Asia, where my work focuses mainly on hair modeling, image manipulation, and resolution-independent representations.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University in 2011, under the supervision of Prof. Baining Guo.
Capturing detailed hair geometry and motion with 21 GoPro cameras.
Hair morphing based on a many-to-many strand correspondence.
Interactive manipulations enabled by physically plausible hair generation.
Generating a 3D strand-based hair model from a single image.
Vectorized volumetric objects with complex multiscale structures.
A compact random-access vector representation for solid textures.
A method to create new hairstyles from existing ones.
A combination of HDR and texture synthesis.
A compressed HDR texture format for DX9 level graphics hardware.


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At the FIFA Confederations Cup Russia 2017, all eyes will be on the rising superstars of football as they take the pitch for the sport's biggest international competition this year. That is why Visa, the Official Payment Service Partner of FIFA, is offering fans a range of new cashless payment options that will save fans even more time and give them the opportunity to get back to their seats to watch the matches unfold.
To bring merchants in on the action, Visa will be outfitting 1,600 point-of-sale terminals to facilitate cashless transactions, as well as deploying 120 mobile concessionaires throughout the stadium concourses.
At each of the four stadiums hosting FIFA Confederations Cup events, football lovers can use their Visa contactless credit or debit cards to make transactions. They can also use mobile payments to purchase an item with a mere tap on an app.
Special FIFA Confederations Cup commemorative prepaid cards, which can be used with all merchants throughout the competition, give fans another simple way to pay. Thanks to a partnership with Russian-based Alfa-Bank, the Official European Bank of the FIFA Confederations Cup 2017, the cards can be reloaded at contactless Alfa-Bank ATMs across the venues.
Fans who want to ditch their wallets altogether can snap on NFC-enabled Alfa-Bank contactless payment bands. The devices, which cost about $18 USD and are available at Visa customer service booths throughout the stadiums, can be reloaded using fans' personal debit or credit cards.
The Visa payment ring, a big hit at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, will also make its Russia debut at the FIFA Confederations Cup. Attached to a prepaid card, the NFC-enabled device will be available to select fans, allowing them to make contactless—and fashionable—transactions.
When the tournament kicks off with Russia vs. New Zealand on June 17, fans will no doubt be cheering for different teams. But regardless of who ultimately wins, cashless technology ensures that nobody loses—at least when it comes to time.


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Online training on RTI act for Narail journalists held
Published : 11 Aug 2021, 16:56
Sahos Desk
An online training on 'Right to Information (RTI) Act' for journalists here was held today with participation of 30 local newsmen.
Bangladesh Press Institute (PIB) organized the online training for district journalists.
Professor of Department of Mass Communication and Journalism in Rajshahi University Dr. Pradip Kumar Panday participated in the training as resource person.
PIB Director General Zafar Wazed was the chief guest while its trainer Shah Alam Saikat coordinated it.
Narail Press Club President Enamul Kabir Tuku, Secretary Shamimul Islam Tulu and other journalists attended the virtual training.
Source: BSS


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You are viewing a beautiful TummyToy navel ring made of solid 14K Yellow Gold. This stunning navel ring features a solid gold double heart pendant that dangles freely.
TummyToys is REAL body jewellery for adults, designer pieces that look stunning on and feel amazingly comfortable and secure. Spoil your belly button with quality TummyToys body jewellery.
Our products have a lifetime guarantee. They will not age, flake or peel and are comprised of high quality jewellery materials. Caring for your TummyToys body jewellery helps eliminate the chances of infection and keeps your jewellery looking shiny and new.
All body jewelry will collect body oils and other small particles. Clean your body jewelry in jewellery cleaner and scrub gently with a small brush in the indented areas where grime could build up. We recommend using a silver cleaning cloth or Connoisseurs products on a weekly basis for ultimate shine.
TummyToys® belly rings are made from precious materials like gold and 925 solid silver, which means they will tarnish over time - however they are easy to clean (unlike cheap belly jewellery). Shining your navel jewellery with a Goddard's Polishing Cloth will remove the tarnish, restore the original shine and assist with protecting the silver.
Watch the video below for instructions from Melissa, the TummyToys® jewellery designer on how to clean your TummyToys® clasps so they last forever.
TummyToys® "swingers" are charms with a jump-ring that slide right over your sleeper clasp. This allows you to add a charm without taking your body jewellery out. They are fun to collect and easy to use. The swinger charms are compatible with our Classic TummyToys® sleeper belly rings.
Watch the video below to see how they work.


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Fear of hackers reading private emails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo has recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire accounts full of messages dating back years. What we don't expect is our own government to hack our email – but it's happening. Federal court cases going on right now are revealing that federal officials can read all your email without your knowledge.
As a scholar and lawyer who started researching and writing about the history and meaning of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution more than 30 years ago, I immediately saw how the FBI versus Apple controversy earlier this year was bringing the founders' fight for liberty into the 21st century. My study of that legal battle caused me to dig into the federal government's actual practices for getting email from cloud accounts and cellphones, causing me to worry that our basic liberties are threatened.
A new type of government search
The federal government is getting access to the contents of entire email accounts by using an ancient procedure – the search warrant – with a new, sinister twist: secret court proceedings.
The earliest search warrants had a very limited purpose – authorizing entry to private premises to find and recover stolen goods. During the era of the American Revolution, British authorities abused this power to conduct dragnet searches of colonial homes and to seize people's private papers looking for evidence of political resistance.
To prevent the new federal government from engaging in that sort of tyranny, special controls over search warrants were written into the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. But these constitutional provisions are failing to protect our personal documents if they are stored in the cloud or on our smartphones.
Fortunately, the government's efforts are finally being made public, thanks to legal battles taken up by Apple, Microsoft and other major companies. But the feds are fighting back, using even more subversive legal tactics.
Searching in secret
To get these warrants in the first place, the feds are using the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986 – long before widespread use of cloud-based email and smartphones. That law allows the government to use a warrant to get electronic communications from the company providing the service – rather than the true owner of the email account, the person who uses it.
And the government then usually asks that the warrant be "sealed," which means it won't appear in public court records and will be hidden from you. Even worse, the law lets the government get what is called a "gag order," a court ruling preventing the company from telling you it got a warrant for your email.
You might never know that the government has been reading all of your email – or you might find out when you get charged with a crime based on your messages.
Microsoft steps up
Much was written about Apple's successful fight earlier this year to prevent the FBI from forcing the company to break the iPhone's security system.
But relatively little notice has come to a similar Microsoft effort on behalf of customers that began in April 2016. The company's suit argued that search warrants delivered to Microsoft for customers' emails are violating regular people's constitutional rights. (It also argued that being gagged violates Microsoft's own First Amendment rights.)
Microsoft's suit, filed in Seattle, says that over the course of 20 months in 2015 and 2016, it received more than 3,000 gag orders – and that more than two-thirds of the gag orders were effectively permanent, because they did not include end dates. Court documents supporting Microsoft describe thousands more gag orders issued against Google, Yahoo, Twitter and other companies. Remarkably, three former chief federal prosecutors, who collectively had authority for the Seattle region for every year from 1989 to 2009, and the retired head of the FBI's Seattle office have also joined forces to support Microsoft's position.
The feds get everything
It's very difficult to get a copy of one of these search warrants, thanks to orders sealing files and gagging companies. But in another Microsoft lawsuit against the government a redacted warrant was made part of the court record. It shows how the government asks for – and receives – the power to look at all of a person's email.
On the first page of the warrant, the cloud-based email account is clearly treated as "premises" controlled by Microsoft, not by the email account's owner:
"An application by a federal law enforcement officer or an attorney for the government requests the search of the following … property located in the Western District of Washington, the premises known and described as the email account [REDACTED]@MSN.COM, which is controlled by Microsoft Corporation."
The Fourth Amendment requires that a search warrant must "particularly describe the things to be seized" and there must be "probable cause" based on sworn testimony that those particular things are evidence of a crime. But this warrant orders Microsoft to turn over "the contents of all e-mails stored in the account, including copies of e-mails sent from the account." From the day the account was opened to the date of the warrant, everything must be handed over to the feds.
Reading all of it
In warrants like this, the government is deliberately not limiting itself to the constitutionally required "particular description" of the messages it's looking for. To get away with this, it tells judges that incriminating emails can be hard to find – maybe even hidden with misleading names, dates and file attachments – so their computer forensic experts need access to the whole data base to work their magic.
If the government were serious about obeying the Constitution, when it asks for an entire email account, at least it would write into the warrant limits on its forensic analysis so only emails that are evidence of a crime could be viewed. But this Microsoft warrant says an unspecified "variety of techniques may be employed to search the seized emails," including "email by email review."
As I explain in a forthcoming paper, there is good reason to suspect this type of warrant is the government's usual approach, not an exception.
Former federal computer-crimes prosecutor Paul Ohm says almost every federal computer search warrant lacks the required particularity. Another former prosecutor, Orin Kerr, who wrote the first edition of the federal manual on searching computers, agrees: "Everything can be seized. Everything can be searched." Even some federal judges are calling attention to the problem, putting into print their objections to signing such warrants – but unfortunately most judges seem all too willing to go along.
What happens next
If Microsoft wins, then citizens will have the chance to see these search warrants and challenge the ways they violate the Constitution. But the government has come up with a clever – and sinister – argument for throwing the case out of court before it even gets started.
The government has asked the judge in the case to rule that Microsoft has no legal right to raise the Constitutional rights of its customers. Anticipating this move, the American Civil Liberties Union asked to join the lawsuit, saying it uses Outlook and wants notice if Microsoft were served with a warrant for its email.
The government's response? The ACLU has no right to sue because it can't prove that there has been or will be a search warrant for its email. Of course the point of the lawsuit is to protect citizens who can't prove they are subject to a search warrant because of the secrecy of the whole process. The government's position is that no one in America has the legal right to challenge the way prosecutors are using this law.
Far from the only risk
The government is taking a similar approch to smartphone data.
For example, in the case of U.S. v. Ravelo, pending in Newark, New Jersey, the government used a search warrant to download the entire contents of a lawyer's personal cellphone – more than 90,000 items including text messages, emails, contact lists and photos. When the phone's owner complained to a judge, the government argued it could look at everything (except for privileged lawyer-client communications) before the court even issued a ruling.
The federal prosecutor for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, has gone even farther, telling the judge that once the government has cloned the cellphone it gets to keep the copies it has of all 90,000 items even if the judge rules that the cellphone search violated the Constitution.
Where does this all leave us now? The judge in Ravelo is expected to issue a preliminary ruling on the feds' arguments sometime in October. The government will be filing a final brief on its motion to dismiss the Microsoft case September 23. All Americans should be watching carefully to what happens next in these cases – the government may be already watching you without your knowledge.


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By Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College and Anna Shubina, Dartmouth College
It's troubling to think that at any moment you might open an email that looks like it comes from your employer, a relative or your bank, only to fall for a phishing scam. Any one of the endless stream of innocent-looking emails you receive throughout the day could be trying to con you into handing over your login credentials and give criminals control of your confidential data or your identity.
Most people tend to think that it's users' fault when they fall for phishing scams: Someone just clicked on the wrong thing. To fix it, then, users should just stop clicking on the wrong thing. But as security experts who study malware techniques, we believe that thinking chases the wrong problem.
The real issue is that today's web-based email systems are electronic minefields filled with demands and enticements to click and engage in an increasingly responsive and interactive online experience. It's not just Gmail, Yahoo mail and similar services: Desktop-computer-based email programs like Outlook display messages in the same unsafe way.
Simply put, safe email is plain-text email – showing only the plain words of the message exactly as they arrived, without embedded links or images. Webmail is convenient for advertisers (and lets you write good-looking emails with images and nice fonts), but carries with it unnecessary – and serious – danger, because a webpage (or an email) can easily show one thing but do another.
Returning email to its origins in plain text may seem radical, but it provides radically better security. Even the federal government's top cybersecurity experts have come to the startling, but important, conclusion that any person, organization or government serious about web security should return to plain-text email:
"Organizations should ensure that they have disabled HTML from being used in emails, as well as disabling links. Everything should be forced to plain text. This will reduce the likelihood of potentially dangerous scripts or links being sent in the body of the email, and also will reduce the likelihood of a user just clicking something without thinking about it. With plain text, the user would have to go through the process of either typing in the link or copying and pasting. This additional step will allow the user an extra opportunity for thought and analysis before clicking on the link."
Misunderstanding the problem
In recent years, webmail users have been sternly instructed to pay perfect attention to every nuance of every email message. They pledge not to open emails from people they don't know. They say they won't open attachments without careful vetting first. Organizations pay security companies to test if their employees make good on these pledges. But phishing continues – and is becoming more common.
News coverage can make the issue even more confusing. The New York Times called the Democratic National Committee's email security breach somehow both "brazen" and "stealthy," and pointed fingers at any number of possible problems – old network security equipment, sophisticated attackers, indifferent investigators and inattentive support staff – before revealing the weakness was really a busy user who acted "without thinking much."
But the real problem with webmail – the multi-million-dollar security mistake – was the idea that if emails could be sent or received through a website, they could be more than just text, even webpages themselves, displayed by a web browser program. This mistake created the criminal phishing industry.
Engineered for danger
A web browser is the perfect tool for insecurity. Browsers are designed to seamlessly mash together content from multiple sources – text from one server, ads from another, images and video from a third, user-tracking "like" buttons from a fourth, and so on. A modern webpage is a patchwork of third-party sites, which can number in the dozens. To make this assemblage of images, links and buttons appear unified and integrated, the browser doesn't show you where the pieces of a webpage come from – or where they'll lead if clicked.
Worse, it allows webpages – and thereby emails – to lie about it. When you type "google.com" into your browser, you can be reasonably sure you will get Google's page. But when you click a link or button labeled "Google," are you actually heading to Google? Unless you carefully read the underlying HTML source of the email, there are a dozen ways your browser can be manipulated to trick you.
This is the opposite of security. Users can't predict the consequences of their actions, nor decide in advance if the potential results are acceptable. A perfectly safe link might be displayed right next to a malicious one, with no apparent difference between them. When a user is faced with a webpage and the decision to click on something, there is no reasonable way to know what might happen, or what company or other party the user will interact with as a result. By design, the browser hides this information. But at least, when browsing the web, you can choose to start at a trusted site; webmail, however, delivers an attacker-made webpage right into your mailbox!
Until software designers and developers fix browser software and webmail systems, and let users make informed decisions about where their clicks would lead them, we should follow the advice of C.A.R. Hoare, one of the early pioneers of computer security: "The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity."
Safe email is plain-text email
Companies and other organizations are even more vulnerable than individuals. One person needs only to worry about his or her own clicking, but each worker in an organization is a separate point of weakness. It's a matter of simple math: If every worker has that same 1 percent chance of falling for a phishing scam, the combined risk to the company as a whole is much higher. In fact, companies with 70 or more employees have a greater than 50 percent chance that someone will be hoodwinked. Companies should look very critically at webmail providers who offer them worse security odds than they'd get from a coin toss.
As technologists, we have long since come to terms with the fact that some technology is just a bad idea, even if it looks exciting. Society needs to do the same. Security-conscious users must demand that their email providers offer a plain-text option. Unfortunately, such options are few and far between, but they are a key to stemming the webmail insecurity epidemic.
Mail providers that refuse to do so should be avoided, just like back alleys that are bad places to conduct business. Those online back alleys may look eye-pleasing, with ads, images and animations, but they are not safe.
- This article was written in collaboration with cybersecurity researcher and developer Robert Graham.
- Sergey Bratus, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science, Dartmouth College and Anna Shubina, Post-doctoral Associate in Computer Science, Dartmouth College
- This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.


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Aurora | Running Headband
About this product:
Your essential ear-coverage for high-impact sports on cold days and low-impact activities in cool weather. Crafted from a lightweight and breathable fabric with moisture management technology, this barely-there yet effective headband ensures comfort and functionality for all your adventures.
Made in Vermont.
Designed for: Running, skiing, cycling, and hiking.
Wear it: Comfortably under your helmet or on its own.
Bonus: UPF Rating of 50+. Suitable for all temperatures and adventures.
Fabric: Poly-spandex jersey with moisture management technology: 92% Polyester, 8% Spandex.
One size fits most. Circumference 19.5", Height 3.5"
Sleek and packable, no unnecessary bulk.


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Wharfedale's famous Diamond speakers have served as the classic entry point to true high-fidelity sound, their exceptional value for money earning numerous 'product of the year' awards in the UK and around the world. Now, with the Diamond 11 Series, Wharfedale has once again raised the bar for affordable, high-performance loudspeakers.
Britain has long been recognised as being the home of loudspeaker technology in terms of innovation and quality. Gilbert Briggs' first loudspeaker was manufactured in 1932 through a passion for music and an ear for detail - in a sleepy little market town of Yorkshire Wharfedale was born. After winning multiple awards, his work is still much admired and respected throughout the hi-fi world today and our speakers are still driven by the same passion for music. Wharfedale's Diamond series has a long history of achievement. The first Diamond was born in 1982 in the form of a rear ported hi-fi speaker. A combination of a 19mm dome tweeter, 120mm long throw polypropylene bass/mid driver and a simple yet highly effective crossover in a compact hi-fi speaker took the industry by storm. The speaker produced an impeccable stereo image, quickly becoming a best seller and a permanent fixture in the Wharfedale product range. Since then, every Wharfedale Diamond Series has been a best-seller. From 1982 Wharfedale Diamond has meant one thing - impeccable performance at an affordable price. Today we are pleased to bring you the latest of loudspeakers from Wharfedale that aspires to this tradition - Diamond 11.
Advanced Driver Systems
Diamond 11 features massive magnet designs to both raise sensitivity and ensure absolute control of cone movement over lower bass frequencies. In addition the use of a specially shaped top plate with copper cap controls the magnetic flux and ensures low distortion through the critical midrange area. Then there is the suspension which features a lightweight progressive foamed surround, in conjunction with a super-long-throw voice coil motor system, to achieve unparalleled linearity and accuracy in this sector of the market. Nor have we forgotten the high frequency performance. A similar over-size ceramic magnet system is used for the HF unit, again featuring a copper cap for flux control. And, here, the pole piece is vented through to a specially shaped rear chamber. This provides a low resonant frequency ensuring wonderful linearity throughout the operating system and allowing the textile dome to provide lucid midrange performance in addition to precise high frequency detailing.
Cabinet Construction
While the cabinet, to the owner, is often just a piece of furniture, at Wharfedale we have long realised that it is the final piece of the design process that marks a loudspeaker out of the ordinary. For Diamond 11 our engineers have refined the multi-layer sandwich of differing woods to subdue the identifiable characteristics of the cabinet 'sound' and so let the drive units speak for themselves. Critical bracing of the cabinet panels and, of course, the curving of the cabinet walls to provide a non-boxy shape, have reduced resonances more than 25dB below the driver outputs. In addition we use a specially developed internal fibre to line the cabinet walls which has been chosen because of its outstanding absorbent qualities across a wide bandwidth.
WFR Vented System
The Diamond 11 utilizes a new Wide Frequency Response (WFR) vented HF design. By utilizing a custom machined vented pole plate exiting into the large sealed rear chamber, the WFR design can extend down to frequencies below 0.5kHz before rolling off. This results in cleaner more detailed vocal presentation and smoother transitions into the MF/LF.
Slot-loaded distributed port
The slot-loaded distributed port is a recent Diamond innovation where the internal port tube opens into a slot formed between the cabinet and the plinth. This not only reduces the turbulence caused by the sudden outrush of high pressure air into the low pressure in the room, suffered by conventional ported systems, but also increases the efficiency of transfer of energy from the bass reflex tuning to the room. For Diamond 11 we have taken this one stage further, profiling both ends of the port with a semi-parabolic exit curve that linearises airflow through the port tube. This has allowed us to increase the volume of air in the slot loaded system and further improve the performance of the low frequency output. The result is an entirely natural and low distortion recreation of the fundamental notes of bass instruments, matching the realistic sound of the midrange and treble characteristics. The low Q nature of this ported system also allows the listener to position Diamond 11 speakers close to a rear wall, helping to make the speakers less obtrusive in a room setting.
Speaker Type: |
2.5-way floorstanding speaker |
Bass Driver: | 5"(130mm) Woven Kevlar Cone |
Midrange Driver: | 5"(130mm) Woven Kevlar Cone |
Treble Driver: | 1"(25mm) Textile Dome |
Sensitivity (2.83V @ 1m): | 90dB |
Recommended amp power: | 25-125W |
Peak SPL: | 102dB |
Nominal impedance: | 8 Ω compatible |
Minimum Impedance: | 3.9Ω |
Frequency Response (+/-3dB): | 44Hz ~ 20kHz |
Bass Extension (-6dB): | 35Hz |
Crossover Frequency: | 3.1kHz |
Cabinet Volume (in litres): | 29.2L |
Dimensions (HxWxD): |
34.4" x 7.6" x 11.2" |
Net Weight: |
33.1 lbs. |


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Unless otherwise specified, the following notice applies to all contents of these sites, and all programs, publications, and products described on these sites:
Copyright © 2018 Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International, 1101 15th Street, NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20005 U.S.A. All rights reserved.
Building Owners and Managers Association International, BOMA, BOMA International, Experience Exchange Report, BEEP, BOMA Energy Efficiency Program, BOMA+ Education Learn Experience Achieve logo, TOBY, The Office Building of the Year, Foundations of Real Estate Management, and all other trademarks, unless otherwise noted, are registered trademarks of BOMA International and may not be used without BOMA International's express written permission. Trademark registrations for the BOMA 360 Performance Program logo, BOMA 360 Performance Building, and The Every Building Show have been filed and therefore may not be used without BOMA International's express written permission.
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Why cannot the adapter detect the 5G Wi-Fi of my router?
Note: This FAQ is only for the dual-band wireless adapter and wireless router.
Case1: Can not see any 5G Wi-Fi.
The old wireless adapter that doesn't support 5G installed on your computer may affect the 5G wifi broadcasting of the TP-Link wireless adapter, so if you are unable to see the 5G wifi, please disable the old wireless adapter following the steps:
To disable the other adapters, please click the WIN on the keyboard, then input the network. Open the View Network Connection. Then check the Wi-Fi list again if you can see the 5G Wi-Fi or not. If not, please go to case2.
Case 2:Cannot see the 5G Wi-Fi of your router
If you have an old wireless adapter, please disable it first to check if it's working.
If the same story, please do the following troubleshooting:
Open the management page of your main router, go to the wireless settings, then change the channel of 5G Wi-Fi to 36. Then check the Wi-Fi list again. Here we take the TP-Link router as an example
It might be affected by DFS, for the details, please refer to :
If the 5G Wi-Fi still does not show in the Wi-Fi list, please contact the support team.
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Your feedback helps improve this site.
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MoMath Online: Student Sessions
Prime Time (Grades 1 – 3)
Prime numbers are the building blocks of arithmetic and they appear in all sorts of surprising places. From strange clocks to many-pointed stars, primes can teach us about number relationships and patterns. Explore primes while using skip counting to create geometric patterns and learn the origin of these very special numbers! Materials needed: Paper, pencil, and printouts to be provided.
Optional materials: markers
United States
Registration | |
Registration fee | $15.00 |
Registration ($15) plus $15 donation to support families in need | $30.00 |
Discounted rate ($5) for MoMath members | $5.00 |
Fee waived (for families with financial need; max 1 session per family) | $0.00 |


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Under the right economic conditions, a growing demand for forest products that accompanies development may lead to an increase ? not a decline ? in forest cover, according to a new study by researchers at Brown University and Harvard University. Policies that focus on reducing paper demand may not necessarily increase forestation.From the Brown University:Demand for wood may lead to forest growth, not decline, study says
Increased demand for forest products was a cause of increased forest cover in India during the last three decades, according to a joint study by researchers at Brown and Harvard University in the May 2003 Quarterly Journal of Economics. The finding contradicts the idea that economic development inevitably leads to deforestation.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Under the right economic conditions, a growing demand for forest products that accompanies development may lead to an increase ? not a decline ? in forest cover, according to a new study by researchers at Brown University and Harvard University. Policies that focus on reducing paper demand may not necessarily increase forestation.
The study examined the connection between the economy and forest cover in India, a country with a relatively closed economy that experienced an apparent increase in forest growth in recent decades. Estimates obtained from satellite images of a sample of representative rural areas in India suggested an increase from about 10 percent forest cover in 1971 to about 24 percent in 1999.
"Concern about the phenomena of global warming and declining biodiversity has focused attention on the link between the world's forests and economic growth," said Andrew D. Foster, professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Brown. "By carefully structuring its policies, India set the stage for an increase in demand for this natural resource to lead to an increase in its supply."
Foster conducted the study, published in the May 2003 Quarterly Journal of Economics, with Mark R. Rosenzweig, the Mohamed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Using satellite images of land use in rural India during nearly three decades, household survey data and census data, researchers sought to identify the underlying paths by which economic growth affects forests.
The increase in forest growth was not automatic, the researchers said. Several of India's policies contributed to the forest increase: economic incentives such as providing people with a share of the revenue when timber was extracted from public forests (encouraging them to farm trees as they would another crop); conservation methods such as protection of forest areas and joint forest management; and trade policies that limited importation of forest products.
The growing demand for forest products ?wood for newspaper, furniture and new homes ? appeared to be met by planting new trees rather than further exploiting existing forests.
"The owners of forest resources had an incentive to increase the supply of trees in response to the increased demand because they reaped at least part of the reward from sale of the trees," said Rosenzweig.
The nature of India's economy enabled researchers to identify the relationship between economic growth and forest growth. India is a closed economy in which the demand for forest products was met by indigenous trees. In open economies ? those in which forest products are traded broadly ? there is no systematic relationship between economic growth and changes in forest cover, according to the researchers.
Foster and Rosenzweig began investigating whether economic factors such as agricultural productivity and wages were driving differences in forest change within India, but found that these processes could not explain an increase in India's forests. Their findings do not support either of two explanations for forest growth previously discussed by economists: that increased agricultural productivity increases tree area by decreasing the need for expansion of agricultural lands; that growth in rural employment increases forests by moving labor out of forest-resource extraction.
The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.


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Can Armstrong make it seven?
Ever since Lance Armstrong ended the media game of "will he/won't he?" by announcing back in...
92nd Tour de France - GT
France, July 2-24, 2005
Can Armstrong make it seven?
Ever since Lance Armstrong ended the media game of "will he/won't he?" by announcing back in February that he was going to ride this year's Tour de France, the focus has been on the Texan and his team in search of signs of the strength or weakness that will determine the outcome of this year's Tour.
Last year, Armstrong achieved an unprecedented feat when he surpassed the Tour records of Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain to win his sixth Tour, and with the discipline and dominance of his US Postal team, Armstrong almost made it look easy.
If that achievement was astounding, what Armstrong aims to do this year is almost unthinkable: a seventh consecutive victory. That would make Armstrong's domination of the Tour almost unparalleled in cycling history. Sean Kelly's 1982 to 1988 sequence of wins in Paris-Nice is the only similar run of consecutive victories in a major stage race that we can think of - and there is a very big difference between a one-week stage race and grand tour.
Armstrong's form is an enigma, though. On the one hand, his 2004 win was preceded by a dominant ride in the Tour of Georgia; this year he looked less strong in April and victory went to his team-mate Tom Danielson.
On the other hand Armstrong also looked unimpressive in the 2004 Dauphine Libere, as he did this year. But he hit last year's Tour on rising form as riders who had previously been strong fell away, and by the time the 2004 Tour hit the mountains there was no doubt who was in charge.
In an interview after the Mont Ventoux stage of the Dauphiné this year, Armstrong told Cyclingnews' European Editor Tim Maloney, "Well, I learned a lot last year... where I was basically drubbed [after the time trial stage to Ventoux].
"I saw what happened last year and I saw how much changes in a month, so the best thing to do is to stay calm and stay relaxed and know that the time that matters is a month from now, if not more. I feel good; I'm not on top of my game yet, but I might be concerned if I was."
Both Armstrong's coach Chris Carmichael and directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel have expressed their complete confidence in their man's ability to be ready on July 2. However his form appears in the run up to a Tour, and even with the decline that comes to all riders as they get into their 30s, it would be very foolish to discount Armstrong as the favourite once again this year, especially when you consider the sheer firepower of his Discovery Channel team. Discovery's Tour roster contains riders who would be GC and stage win contenders on any other team: Classics specialist and Tour of Switzerland stage winner George Hincapie; Giro champion Paolo Savoldelli; 2003 Giro podium Yaroslav Popovych; and uber-domestiques Jose Luis Rubiera, Manuel Beltran, Benjamin Noval, Pavel Padrnos, and Jose Azevedo. Viatcheslav Ekimov may be missing, but this is still a team with big engines for the team time trial and the ability to support Armstrong in the mountains.
The rivals
The biggest threat to Armstrong's hopes of a seventh Tour win comes from the T-mobile team. The German outfit will throw three of the world's strongest stage racers against Armstrong: Jan Ullrich, Andreas Klöden and Alexandre Vinokourov. Ullrich is the designated team leader, even though he finished behind Klöden in the 2004 Tour. His lackluster ride in the mountains of the Tour of Switzerland may indicate that he isn't quite ready, or it may be that he has learned from Armstrong's 2004 tactic and is aiming to hit his best form in the mountains of the 2005 Tour. If that's the case, with his time trial ability demonstrated in Switzerland, Ullrich will be a formidable opponent.
If Ullrich does falter, then T-Mobile will have Klöden and Vinokourov ready to step up and continue the fight. Klöden's second place last year, while Ullrich finished off the podium for the first time ever, demonstrated his class, while Vinokourov's 2003 third place and substantial palmares mark him as a threat. If T-Mobile can ride like a team and not like a randomly-assembled bunch of individuals, they will give Armstrong good reason to get up in the morning.
Although Euskaltel-Euskadi has a couple of recent winners in Aitor Gonzalez and Inigo Landaluze, the Basque squad has not named Tour de Suisse winner Gonzalez to its Tour line-up, while Dauphiné Libéré winner Landaluze will be more closely watched during the Tour de France. And as Iban Mayo demonstrated last year, it's one thing to be strong for the Dauphiné, quite another to preserve that form for the long weeks before the Tour aims skywards. However, Mayo has had a relatively quiet year so far, and it may be that the orange-clad Basque boys are keeping him in reserve this year to peak for the Tour mountains.
One contender whose year to date has not been at all quiet is Ivan Basso (CSC). Basso's storming Giro was derailed by a stomach upset that saw him lose the jersey on stage 13 but he still managed to come back and win stages 17 and 18. With the pressure off in the latter half of the Giro, Basso may well have been able to conserve enough to remain a threat in the Tour. Basso will also have a strong and united CSC team behind him. Paris-Nice winner Bobby Julich, Jens Voigt, Dave Zabriskie and Carlos Sastre among the big guns CSC manager Bjarne Riis has deployed to provide covering fire for Basso's assault on the Tour.
Few other Giro stars look like Tour contenders, even setting aside the conventional wisdom that it's now impossible to shine in both races. Giro winner Paolo Savoldelli will ride the Tour as a super-domestique for Lance Armstrong. Venezuelan revelation Jose' Rujano Guillen is absent because his Continental Pro-level Selle Italia-Colombia was not invited to the Tour. Danilo Di Luca (Liquigas-Bianchi) is taking July off before aiming to defend the ProTour leader jersey in the second half of the year. Of the Giro top five, only Juan Manuel Garate (Saunier Duval-Prodir) and runner-up Gilberto Simoni (Lampre-Caffita) are serious Tour threats, but Garate will be riding his first Tour while Simoni has always struggled to look credible in France, however good he has undoubtedly been in Italy. And as for Simoni's teammate, Damiano Cunego, he will have to wait until next year to ride the Tour, as a bout of mononucleosis has put paid to his form for the time being, and he will not start in Fromentine.
Roberto Heras spent several years as Lance Armstrong's mountain super-domestique at US Postal and will challenge his former team leader this year as part of the Liberty Seguros-Würth squad. On paper, Heras' proven climbing ability, and the backing of a strong team including Alberto Contador, Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano, Jörg Jaksche and Joseba Beloki could see Heras threatening the podium once again, especially if Beloki has managed to regain any of the brilliance he showed before his disastrous crash and broken hip in the 2003 Tour. However, Beloki has had a quiet season so far and Heras did not look like a man about to hit form when he lost almost 17 minutes in the penultimate stage of the Tour of Switzerland and dropped out the next day.
Setting sentiment aside, few other riders look like truly serious contenders for the maillot jaune. Levi Leipheimer (Gerolsteiner) did ride well in the Dauphine to finish third overall, and has clearly improved against the clock, but his team doesn't quite have a Discovery's or a T-Mobile's proportion of heavy hitters to reinforce their undeniably talented team leader. The Phonak squad is slightly better off with the in-form Santiago Botero and Floyd Landis, but can either of them get close to Lance and co. in the mountains?
The Australian trio of Cadel Evans (Davitamon - Lotto), Bradley McGee (Francaise des Jeux) and Michael Rogers (Quick Step) may be their team's designated leaders and GC candidates for the Tour, but their squads seem to lack the strength-in-depth necessary to support them all the way through the mountains. We can expect stage wins from them, perhaps, but not final podium places. That said, if any of those three are going to challenge, it will very likely be Michael Rogers. Rogers rode a storming Tour of Switzerland to finish second just 20 seconds behind Aitor Gonzales (who is not on Euskaltel's Tour squad - perhaps being saved for the Vuelta) and has an ability to quietly but effectively fine-tune himself to devastating effect. The time trials will play to Rogers' advantage.
Illes Balears-Casse d'Epargne has the talented Alejandro Valverde in its ranks, but the young Spaniard still has a few years ahead of him to gain the strength and consistency to challenge for the Tour. But don't be surprised to see him win a stage or two. Team-mate Francisco Mancebo is also a possible stage winner, but neither seem like strong GC contenders.
One team that might cause an upset is Liquigas-Bianchi. Stefano Garzelli and Dario David Cioni have demonstrated ability in the mountains, while the lively Franco Pellizotti is that rare bird, a rider who can both climb and sprint well. Liquigas-Bianchi also comes to the Tour after a disappointing Giro, looking for "revenge".
Whoever ends up on the podium in Paris, this Tour will be remembered as Lance Armstrong's final race, and that alone will secure its place in history. Will this Tour see the Armstrong era end in a changing of the guard as a younger man takes the yellow jersey, or will Armstrong exit at the very top of his game, showing that the only way for him to not win the Tour is to not start it? Over the three weeks between July 2 and 24, we will find out, and whatever the final outcome, the journey is sure to be a fascinating rollercoaster.
See also: Tour route 2005: Classic Parcours For 92nd Tour De France; Reactions to the 2005 route
Coming up: A look at the contenders in the sprints, mountains and young rider competitions.
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As I said earlier, we're going to look at Psalm 150 as we prepare for the Lord's Table. You might wonder why would I choose that psalm as a preparation for the Lord's Table. And the answer, of course, is that it is a psalm that calls us to praise the Lord, and that for which we are most eager to praise Him is the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ on our behalf.
Before we look at the psalm, some of you who are television aficionados and watch or listen to commercials no doubt are as startled as I am over some of them. One recent commercial, produced by the Hebrew National Frankfurter Company pushes the product as to its appeal and says, with an ominous voice at the end of the commercial, "We have to answer to a higher authority," playing on the Jewish character of those kosher hot dogs as if God is somehow in the kitchen overseeing the process.
I'm not the only person to have observed that particular commercial. Well-known New York critic and communications theorist Neil Postman, who's written a number of books, is also concerned about commercials like that because they fit into what he calls the trivializing of serious matters. It is, to put it mildly, trivial to assume that God is concerned about a hot dog recipe. Postman, commenting on that commercial says, "What we are talking about here is not blasphemy, but trivialization against which there can be no laws." End quote.
Postman observes the trivializing of sacred things, of things of value, of traditional symbols for the sake of marketing. Postman also observes that the TV commercials we see are not concerned with the nature of the products, but they are concerned with the nature of the people who consume them. That is to say you don't ever hear a description of a product. Nobody ever explains to you the product.
Extensive marketing surveys are conducted rather to determine not the quality of the product, but the profile of the potential consumer. Images of movie stars, beautiful people, models, famous athletes; pictures of serene lakes and majestic mountains and macho fishing trips; elegant dinners, romantic interludes, happy families packing their station wagon for a picnic in the country – that doesn't tell you anything about any product. But what it does tell you is everything about the fantasies, the fancies, the wishes, the hopes, the dreams, the fears of the consumer.
"In this kind of setting," Postman says, "the business of business becomes psychotherapy. The consumer the patient is reassured by psychodramas." End quote. And one of the most clear illustrations of this is the "I love you" man psychodrama which is endeavoring to sell beer, I think, but nothing is ever said about the beer. Certainly nobody says, "This stuff tastes foul, and it's likely to ruin your life and cause you to crash your car." But somehow it's all caught up in being loved, and that's where commercials have come, to a kind of psychodrama all geared at the consumers' fantasies and fancies and whims and wishes and longings and fears.
All of that to say would we be extending our reach to suggest that this is precisely what has happened in evangelical attitudes toward worship? We haven't really begun to blaspheme, but we really have begun to trivialize, and to trivialize based upon some consumer whims.
I would never say that evangelicalism is overtly or explicitly denying the Trinity. I'm not saying that evangelical churches are denying the two natures of Christ, that He is fully God and fully man, nor is there an outright denial of original sin. There is no particular assault on the substitutionary atonement of Christ and the resurrection, justification, sanctification, or the second coming, because you really don't have to do that. You don't have to attack it. All you have to do is trivialize it. Just reduce it to something humorous, funny, or fanciful. All that is necessary is just to trivialize God, trivialize Scripture and any other biblical theme right along with a marketing mentality in the spirit of the age.
The emphasis you see today is on felt needs, the desire of the consumer. And that's true in the church. It's not on the desire of God; it's not on God's person, God's work, God's will. God's character is not the major issue. He has been replaced by the consumer. And now, instead of great doctrine and sound theology, you have psychodrama meant somehow to meet the whims of the consumer.
Michael Horton wrote an interesting article that is related to this kind of thinking, and he talks about the commercialization of the American flag and says, "It ends up being trivialized to the point where it can be worn on clothing or even burned in public spectacle." He says, "While many Christian leaders would issue the gravest invectives against the burning of the American flag, how many stand up for the desecration of God at the local Christian bookstore where T-shirts and other paraphernalia are sold with "This Blood's for You" printed over a mock beer can? Or Jesus portrayed as doing push-ups with a cross with the line, "God's Gym: Bench Press This"? Blasphemy? Certainly trivialization.
"Taken into the church sanctuary itself," writes Horton, "this trivialization of the sacred takes the form of shallow, repetitive ditties in which God's name is taken in vain and the music bears striking familiarity to commercial jingles."
He goes on to say, "As with so many other useless products that we buy because of clever advertising and smooth, caressing images, before long, we become bored with this trivialized deity. We move on like the consumers, in John chapter 6, who follow Jesus after the free lunch, but left Him after He began teaching the hard doctrines, their stomachs growing for the next meal." End quote.
If you trivialize God, if you trivialize Scripture, you get a trivialized congregation of bored people – bored with a trivialized deity – who are short-term, looking for their next thrill. How absolutely and utterly contrary this is to anything that the Bible teaches about worship. The focus of worship is never on the worshiper; it is on the one being worshiped. It is never on the consumer. We cannot gear our message toward you; we must gear it toward God. He must be the focus of everything. And what we say, and what we preach, and what we sing, and what we play must all focus on God and His marvelous work and will, a flippant style betrays a flippant theology.
Marshall McLuhan was right when he said, "The medium is the message." You cannot separate the medium from the message any more than the body can be divorced from the soul. The way in which we worship God implies the way in which we think about God, the way in which we worship God implies what we believe about God. God is part of that content. A trivial church has a trivial faith in an assumed trivial God. How a church worships is of tremendous significance.
And I have said to some, recently, "In all of my travels around the world and across this country, I've been in a lot of churches, and I can tell, by sitting in a worship service in any church, how they view God, because the content is the style; it's inseparable. You can't say, 'Well, yeah, we got a kind of a different style, but our theology's really sound.' How a church worships betrays how it thinks about God."
Now, of all times for praise to our great God, and of all times for deep and righteous thinking about God, none is more compelling than the Communion Table, because it is here that we remember God's gift of the Savior as the substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. It is here where we praise God for His greatest work: the work of redeeming sinners. We can praise Him for a lot of other things, and we need to do that fittingly, but nothing is as glorious as this which is our redemption.
We remember the sacrifice of Christ in the bread and the cup, and at no point do we reach a higher level of thanks and praise, for this is that which affects our eternal destiny. Here, then, is reason above all others for a true and a deep and a fitting praise.
And so, as I was thinking about the Lord's Table for this Sunday, I was thinking about praise and how we ought to be worshiping and praising our great God for the great gift of His Son and our consequent great salvation. And I asked the question, "How would God want us to thank Him? How would God want us to praise Him? How would God want us to worship Him for the cross of Christ?"
Well, I found the answer when I turned to Psalm 150. If we're going to worship God as He wants to be worshiped, if we're going to praise Him as He deserves to be praised, what are we to do? Psalm 150 answers that.
What does it mean to really praise God? What does it mean to praise God in a fitting manner? Psalm 150 provides us with the answer. And this Psalm is as germane to us today as it was the day it was written. There is nothing in this psalm about specific acts of God. This psalm is applied to anything and everything for which we would praise God. And for us, the supreme thing is the sacrifice of Christ.
Notice how the psalm begins, "Praise the Lord!" That's a command: praise the Lord! And that command, by the way, is repeated 13 times in this culminating psalm in the Psalter. Thirteen times we are called to praise Him. This call to praise is an appropriate culmination of the Psalms. The Psalms, you remember, is a whole book of praise. This is a fitting culmination; let me tell you why. If you study the Psalms, you see an interesting flow in the way that it is put together. In the early section of the Psalms, there are many psalms of sadness, psalms of lament, psalms of suffering and pain and sorrow and trouble and difficulty.
Many of those psalms we identify with as they reflect the pain of the human condition, as they reflect the suffering of living in this fallen world and the sadness that so easily finds its way into our human existence.
But as you begin to move through the Psalms, the psalms of lament begin to give way to psalms of joy and thanksgiving and praise exhilaration. And the closer you get to the final psalm, the more the crescendo of praise and thanks and joy and rejoicing gets louder, until finally it culminates in the pinnacle of psalms, Psalm 150, which is pure praise. Pure praise.
And what you have, then, here, in the Psalms, is really the path of the believer's life from suffering to glory, the path of the believer's life from pain to praise. Psalm 150, then, is, in a real sense, the culmination of the glory, the hope, and the praise which should be in the hearts of the people of God. This is the peak. When you've come through all the valleys of life and all the pain of life, and you've ascended and climbed all the way up to the peak of praise, and you're on the top of the Everest, looking down over everything below you, you're at Psalm 150. Pure praise.
And so, we could ask the question, then, how does this psalm direct us to praise God? If we're going to praise God today for the provision of Jesus Christ, how are we going to do that? What does this psalm tell us?
Well, the psalmist, like a good journalist, covers all the issues. In this psalm, he talks about the where, the why, the how, and the who of praise. Where do we praise? Why do we praise? How do we praise? And who is to praise? Let's start with the first one: where.
Where? Verse 1, "Praise God in His sanctuary; Praise Him in His mighty expanse." First of all, we praise God in His sanctuary. What does that mean? Well, His temple, His Holy Place which was the place where his people gathered for worship. You remember that in the time of the Psalms, the people gathered in the temple to worship God.
Go back to Psalm 149 and look at verse 1, and you will see there that we are to praise Him in the congregation of the godly. The first thing the psalmist wants to say is you praise Him in the place where His people gather for worship. Beloved, we come together on a Lord's Day here for the purpose of praising God.
You say, "Well, why do you preach?"
Very simple: to give you more to praise Him for. Why do we teach you the Bible? So that you'll know Him better and you'll understand what He has done better, and you'll have more for which to praise Him. Furthermore, so that you'll have instruction as to how to live to His praise. Everything is geared to worship and glorify and praise God, and the focal point of everything is God.
When God's people gather, it is to focus on Him. And my job, and the job of Clayton Erb - or whoever's leading the worship – is to pull you all together in praise. "We are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together," Hebrews 10:25 says. You need this. You need to be involved in praising God collectively, with His redeemed people, in that place which is His sanctuary. And He dwells or inhabits the praise of His people.
Now, I know that there are plenty of Christians who like to think that they can just be content to worship God anyplace, and they don't really need to be with His assembled saints. I hear people sometimes say, "Well, the smaller the church the better, and if it just gets down to a few, I like it even better." I'm the opposite; the bigger the better. The more praise, the louder it is, the more I love it. The more exhilarating, the more it lifts my heart. I thank God for the great congregations of God's people who come together and worship and praise Him.
The psalmist is calling to communal worship, communal praise, when God's people come together and focus on corporate praise. And that, as I said, is the actual purpose of our coming together.
All through the history of Israel, there were the Sabbath assemblies in the synagogues; there were the holy convocations in Jerusalem for all the people. The assembly of the saints is the place where God is to be praised. And we come together for that purpose: to praise God, to lift up God.
But secondly, it's not limited only; it's also unlimited, the second statement in verse 1, "Praise Him in His mighty expanse." That's another term for the heavens. That's another term for the created universe. And what the psalmist is here saying is collectively we praise him when we gather as assembled saints in His presence; individually we praise Him anywhere and everywhere in His entire universe.
This command to praise sweeps through the infinity of creation and calls for praise throughout all that is in the heavens. Wherever you are on this planet, wherever you are flying around this planet, wherever you are in outer space, wherever you are in any place, you are to praise Him.
Praise, then, is not just a collective function of God's redeemed people brought together, it is also an individual function of God's child as He lifts up his heart, or she lifts up her heart anywhere and everywhere to the praise of God. Not just on the Lord's Day, but every day.
Back in Psalm 149, verse 5 says, "Let them sing for joy on their beds." Whether you're waking, sleeping, or wherever you are, even when you pillow your head. "Let praise come out of your mouth" - verse 6 says - "let the high praises of God" – lofty praises - not trivial things, not shallow things, not trite things – lofty, high things even when you lie down in your bed. And nothing is as solitary as that, is it? From the great convocations of the assembled saints, all the way down to the most private moment in your own bed and everywhere in between, you are to be praising the Lord continually.
So, where? In the assembly of the saints and everywhere. In the assembly of the saints collectively, everywhere individually. You need this assembly. You're commanded to be a part of God's people brought together for the purpose of praise. It's a foolish thing to avoid this.
Some people, you know, think, "Well, I can worship the Lord at the beach, and I can worship the Lord on the golf course."
I even heard about a pastor who went to play golf on a Sunday morning. And when his deacons came to him and said, "Why in the world would you do that?"
He tried to be spiritual, and he said, "Because I would rather be on the golf course thinking about church, than in church thinking about golf."
It's probably an apocryphal story, but maybe not too far from the truth in some cases. Better you should be in church thinking about church than on the golf course thinking about golf; you'll do better on both counts. Where? Everywhere and here in the assembly of God's people.
Second question, why? Why are we to have such unceasing, incessant praise going on everywhere? The answer comes in verse 2. Why? Just as there are two locations for praise, there are two reasons for praise. Number one, "Praise Him for His mighty deeds." The first thing we are called to do is to praise God for what He has done.
You remember the contemporary chorus, "Praise the Almighty for what He has done." And that's accurate. Praise Him for what He has done, His mighty deeds.
If you go back to Psalm 146, for example – and these are just illustrations; there are many others – in verse 6, "You praise Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever" – that is He is faithful to His promise – "who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry, sets the prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind, raises up those that are bowed down, loves the righteous, protects the strangers, supports the fatherless and the widow, thwarts the way of the wicked. The Lord will reign forever, Thy God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the Lord!"
So, you can go through the litany of everything God has done. That is a motivation for praise. Recite His wonderful works. That's pure praise. We sing songs and hymns that speak of what God has done. We remember what He has done in our prayers. Songs are sung by soloists and quartets and groups and the choir - and played by the orchestra that rehearsed - the great things that God has done.
He has created this universe; He sustains it; He is the one who delivers us from death and sin and hell; He is the one who is our Savior; He has saved us and redeemed us; He is the one who continues to protect us' He keeps His covenant with us; He gives us continuing life - all that He has done. You can study the Old Testament for no other reason than just to praise God. You can go back to Genesis, and you can just recite God's wonderful works and say that God one day stepped out on the edge of nothing and created everything. He spun into the void the whirling worlds that we know as planets. He scattered across the sky the blazing stars and suns and moons that we know, and the infinity of His universe. He created this planet.
And then He stooped down to this planet and on it created living things and finally man, and breathed in him the breath of life. And he was made in His own image. And He put him in a paradise. And when he sinned and fell, He sought to redeem him. And in that process, He called out a people whom He delivered from bondage by the miraculous parting of the Red Sea.
And miracle after miracle, all the way up to the life of Jesus and His death and His resurrection and rehearse, and recite all the great things that God has done. That is praise. That is praise.
Secondly, we praise Him not only for what He has done, but for who He is. Verse 2 says, "Praise Him because of His excellent greatness." Now we're talking about His character, His person. Praise Him for His sovereignty, His immutability, His omniscience, His omnipotence, His omnipresence, His almighty power, His grace, His mercy, His goodness, His kindness, His holiness, His faithfulness, His justice, His wisdom – and on and on and on you go. And that's exactly what you read in the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the record of what God has done, and it is the revelation of who He is. Mainly, you study the Old Testament so that you can know God and know what He has done and respond accordingly in praise and obedience.
So, when you praise God, you praise Him for what He has done and for who He is. Recite His glorious attributes. That's praise. Thank Him for all of those things and many more that I've just mentioned that are true about His character, not to speak of His great love which He has loved us with and by which He sent Jesus Christ.
Thirdly, we see in this psalm not only the where of praise and the why of praise, but the how of praise. And this is a quite remarkable section, because in verses 3 to 5, the largest part of this psalm is devoted to the how. It speaks of instrumental means, "With trumpet sound, harp and lyre, timbrel and dancing, stringed instruments, pipe, loud cymbals, and resounding cymbals we are to praise Him."
Now, a variety of means are given here to praise Him. But let me tell you what is not given here, which I find most interesting. It doesn't say anything about any words. It doesn't say anything about any words of praise. All it describes is a accompanying means, sounds and motions. It doesn't say anything about words.
You say, "Are then we to offer God wordless praise?"
No, no. Back in Psalm 149:1, it says, "Praise the Lord!" How? "Sing to the Lord a new song." Many places in the psalms we are told to sing songs, to praise God with our lips. And the writer of Hebrews rehearses that.
No, it is already established that we are to use words. We are to recite His attributes. It says it right there, "Praise Him for His mighty deeds; praise Him for His excellent greatness." The rehearsal of His attributes, the rehearsal of His mighty deeds. But what you have here is just the accompaniment to that. And in the culmination of praise, the emphasis is on praising God with all your might, calling together all means possible to the exhilaration of praise.
Use strings – and by the way, the main musical instruments in Israel are mentioned here in the categories of strings, percussion, and wind instruments. It mentions harp, lyre, and stringed instruments. In the percussion field, it mentions cymbals twice, which could include the bells we heard this morning, and timbrel, which is another word for a tambourine. And in the case of wind instruments, you have trumpet and you have pipe, which would be a clarinet, a flute – any kind of pipe like that. These would be the categories of the typical instruments used by the Jews in their musical expression.
And what the psalmist is saying is just gather up everything in exuberant expression of praise by every means. And it even throws in a physical means which is dancing.
Now, as you look at those instruments, many things come to mind. Your context is very different from them – theirs. When you hear, "Praise Him with a trumpet sound," you might think about your favorite trumpet player. When you think about harp and lyre, you might think about somebody who plays a guitar in a contemporary environment.
A timbrel and dancing, you might think about pounding a tambourine on their hip and doing some kind of blue grass. And with stringed instruments, you might think of some glorious stringed – beautiful stringed instrument like Paco Bell's "Canon" or something like that. And with a flute or a clarinet, if you're old enough, you might think okay, great Benny Goodman. Who knows what you'd think of?
And loud cymbals and resounding cymbals, you might think of John Philip Sousa and some crashing of those instruments as some great march is performed or played. But that wouldn't be what the Jews thought about. In fact, their praise was enhanced not only musically, but it was enhanced historically by these instruments.
Let me tell you why. When you read the psalm is saying here, if you really want to worship God, get out the trumpets, get out the stringed instruments, and get out everything you can bang. He's saying that because these instruments are so richly attached to Jewish history. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Consider the trumpet. When a Jew saw and heard a trumpet, what did he think of? Any devout Jew would remember the great religious ceremonies and festivals. Trumpets were blown to announce the official sacrifices at Jerusalem. Trumpets were blown to announce the Day of Atonement. Trumpets were blown on that glorious day when the ark of God arrived in Jerusalem. Trumpets were blown to call the people to worship. Trumpets were blown to call the people to battle. Trumpets were blown to announce that a king was anointed and ascending his throne.
So, you see, a trumpet carried with it a whole lot of history. It was like a symbol of glorious memories that had enriched their life. Consider the harp and the lyre in verse 3. These were instruments of joy. Played at the dedication of the temple they were; played at the dedication of the new walls of the rebuilt Jerusalem. What a great event that was.
And harp and lyre were often played to accompany prophecy and sacrifices. They were played to celebrate victory in battle such as in 2 Chronicles 5, Nehemiah 12, 1 Samuel 10, these lovely, sweet, plucking sounds of praise would not only give emotional expression to the hearts worship, but remind the Jews of all those great events of their history.
And then there was timbrel or tambourine and dancing. Here also you have means of joy. The tambourine, a percussion instrument with a little tinkling sound, used to express great joy. This kind of tambourine, by the way, was used to celebrate military victories. It was a celebrating instrument, and it would remind the people of great triumph and great celebration as God had moved in their history past.
And what about dancing? Well, you've got to divorce what you understand about dancing, what you've been exposed to from this. We're not talking here about couples, and we're not talking about any form of dancing that you would see in our secular culture. We're not talking about anything immoral, anything carnal, anything with any sexual overtones, anything that is any less than an expression of godly joy.
You say, "Well, did the Jewish people have this kind of dance?"
Yes. Dance is contrasted regularly in Scripture with one other thing, and that is mourning. In the book of Ecclesiastes, it says, there's a time to dance and a time to mourn. Mourning was sackcloth, ashes, weariness, bent over, humiliation. And the opposite was joy and exuberance in the expression of dance. A dance was used to celebrate military victory. For example, we find Miriam, the sister of Moses, dancing and leading the women of Israel in dance and playing the tambourine. And they were celebrating – remember Exodus 15, the drowning of Pharaoh in the Red Sea and the deliverance of the Israelites? - and all the women were jumping around and hitting their tambourines and rejoicing with great joy.
We find repeated reference to how women danced, for example, to celebrate the victory of Saul, the victories of David over the enemies of God. In Judges 21, the women were dancing about the harvest celebration, skipping along and perhaps waving their arms in the air and lightly tripping around and leaping in the air just to show their great joy.
Now, the dance is not particular recorded in Scripture as used for worship in Israel. In other words, in the collective worship, we don't see it. The only time we see it is a bad time. Exodus 32, when they had made the golden calf, and they were dancing before the golden calf.
But in the worship of Jehovah, we find no instance of dancing as a regular part of corporate worship. But it was a way in which an individual could express joy. And probably the best illustration of it is in 2 Samuel chapter 6, and I won't look it up because time is gone, but I'll tell you the story. Second Samuel 6, David was so excited when the ark of God came and was delivered, he was so exuberant that it says he danced before the Lord in a linen ephod. And what is a linen ephod? That's just – that's just a plain linen cloak. It just – he just wore a plain linen deal.
You say, "Why did they make an issue out of that?"
Because he was the king, and normally he wore kingly garments. Normally he had on all the trappings of royalty. But he just threw off all his trappings, and he danced before the Lord in just the linen ephod, the common dress of any everyday person. And, you know, his wife Michal, who was a big social climber, this woman, she saw him dancing, it says, and she despised him. She despised him. You know what bothered her was that he would humiliate himself like that. She didn't like it unless he had on all of his royal garb. She was into all of that. And she didn't think it was appropriate for the king to just get out there and dress like a common person and just jump around.
And it says, "He was leaping before the Lord." I mean he was so filled with joy it just came out in his bodily expression. And so, she just let him have it. She just rained on his parade.
And he said to her, in 2 Samuel 6, "I will humble myself, and I will show my joy and thanks to the Lord because it's right." And then you know what God did? He cursed her so she never had a child until the day she died. She was cursed for condemning David for dancing in humility before the Lord. That was a pretty sacred event if it ended up in a curse on one who despised it.
Sacred kind of expression of joy in dance where you just sort of are so filled with joy that it all comes out in some physical expression. I love sometimes to watch a happy child, watch my little grandchildren skip. Why do they skip? Why do children skip? What's making them skip? It's not genetics. It's what? It's joy, isn't it? They're happy about something. Or sometimes you go and you watch them, and they're dancing around and jumping around and delightfully singing a little song. What is that? That's joy. That's what David was doing. And there's a place for that kind of expression.
Then he goes on to talk about the stringed instruments, strings; flutes being the pipe. Those are instruments used generally for other occasions of joy. You find them throughout Israel's history; they were also very common.
Cymbals – I don't know if you remember this – cymbals, resounding cymbals like these bells, those kinds of things were used in the sacrifices. So, they also were used in the moving of the ark of the covenant. So, all of these instruments, aside from just being means by which praise can be enhanced, become symbols of great, redemptive history.
So, what is – what is God saying through the psalm? Just gather up all the means and pull together all the memories and just pour out praise to God. It's a magnificent picture. The greatest description, by the way, of this kind of praise I think is found in 1 Chronicles 13:8. Because in 1 Chronicles 13:8, you have the arrival of the ark. "And David" - it says – "and all Israel were celebrating before God with all their might, with songs and lyres, harps, tambourines, cymbals, and with trumpets. There it is – the whole orchestra. And the key phrase "with all their might."
Now Clayton said to you this morning, after you'd sung those hymns, "That is great singing." And some of you were singing with all your might, weren't you?
Now, you need the corporate fellowship to do that, to sing with all your might and worship the Lord with all your might. And when the orchestra's here - or the clangors are here, or whatever it is - it helps to lift us. Tremendously exciting.
You don't want to do that in class. You don't want to worship the Lord with all your might in class at school. You can't do that. You don't want to do that in the office. You don't want to take out your trumpet and blow to the top of your lungs and sing "And Can It Be" at the top of your voice in the office. You don't want to do that. You can't do that there. You need to come here and do it with the rest of us. We're safe in here to do that. You don't want to do that at McDonald's; they'll put you out - or Coco's either, for that matter. Now, you might get away with it in the speakerphone at In-N-Out, but it's marginal.
If you're going to do this kind of corporate worship, you need to be, in most cases, with God's redeemed people. And, of course, there are those private times. I don't know about you, but I find some of my greatest times of worshiping the Lord are in the car, when I'm by myself, and the windows are up, and I'm just having a great old time.
So, we want to praise God with all our might. Well, when we gather to remember the glorious person and work of God our Savior, who sent His Son to die for us, our minds should be so full of the reality of our great salvation, our hearts so full of the joy of our salvation, our bodies so full of the emotion of our salvation, that we sing and play with all our might, accompanied by trumpets or bells or French horns or that box over there that can sound like any instrument.
And here we are, doing just that with all our might. And our songs are on God as our Creator, Sustainer, Preserver, Redeemer. How wonderful
Finally, who – who is to do this? In verse 6, "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord!" If you're breathing, you're supposed to do it. That's why God is so offended by the ungodly, because they refuse to praise Him. They are not thankful, as Romans 1 says. They will not glorify Him. But all of us created by God, all of us given breath by God, all of us redeemed by God, all of us saved by Christ, praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.
Don't make the focus of your life you; make the focus of your life Him. Don't trivialize the great glory of our great God. We must be God centered. Again I say many today are not denying great doctrines; they're just trivializing God in shallow praise. May our praise be deep and rich and understanding praise. As in response to a knowledge of the truth, we praise God in a way that is fitting, and especially for the gift of His Son. Let's pray.
Our Father, again we thank You for this privilege of praising You. We couldn't do it if we weren't Your own. We thank You for saving us and making us true worshipers.
And now, Lord, as we come to this Table, we do so with a desire that we might really praise You from the heart. We confess our sins and ask You to cleanse us and wash us and make us clean so that we do not take of the bread and the cup unworthily.
I pray that every person here will ask for cleansing, hold onto no known sin, but yield them all up, seek to be washed so that we can truly praise you for the God You are, who gave us Your Son as our Savior.
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