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29th July, 2017
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe on Saturday said he was not stepping down nor dying and that there was no one with his political stature who could immediately take over from him.
The 93-year-old leader has been in charge in the former British colony since independence in 1980.
His health is closely watched by Zimbabweans, who fear the country could face chaos if he dies without anointing a successor.
Mugabe told tens of thousands of supporters at a rally in the town of Chinhoyi, in his home province, that doctors were recently surprised by his "strong bone system."
He has traveled to Singapore three times this year for what officials say is routine medical treatment.
"There is the issue that the president is going. I am not going," Mugabe told supporters on the grounds of a local university, 100 km west of the capital Harare.
"The president is dying. I am not dying. I will have an ailment here and there but bodywise, all my internal organs … very firm, very strong," Mugabe said as he leant on the lectern.
Mugabe had walked onto the stage slowly but without assistance.
The issue of who will succeed Mugabe has deeply divided the ruling party, with two factions supporting Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Mugabe's wife Grace.
On Thursday, Grace challenged Mugabe to name his preferred successor, to end divisions over the future leadership of ZANU-PF.
She repeated the call on Saturday, adding that Mugabe would lead the process to choose his eventual successor.
Mugabe said although some party officials wanted to succeed him, he saw no one among his subordinates with his political clout to keep the party united and fend off a challenge from the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
"A new man will not have the same stature and the same acceptance as I have managed to secure for the party over the years," said Mugabe.


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Snake Removal Reno
Snakes are typically sensitive to human presence which means once they invade your home, it will be hard for you to spot them. However as soon as you see one, it will surely be a cause for concern for obvious reasons. The majority of snakes found in most states in the US are harmless. However, it is possible that the one you've encountered with is a rattlesnake which means it is venomous. For this reason, you need to take precautions for you and your family's sake. Doing your own snake removal procedure may seem enticing but just think about the hospital bills you'd have to pay when you get bitten by the snake.
A snake problem only calls for the skills and expertise of specialists. The people that have already been bitten by rattlesnakes would advise you to let the professionals handle a rattlesnake removal process. Rattlesnakes and other species of snakes have no problem biting and hurting humans. The venom that they release to incapacitate their prey is extremely potent and it can do a great harm to you and to your kids. Although snakes are dangerous, they still contribute to the food chain. The professionals that you will be hiring should perform a rattlesnake removal process that is humane and safe to these creatures.
Things You Should NOT Do When You See Snakes in Your Property
If by chance you encounter snakes in your home:
- Do NOT panic.
- Do NOT try to hit the creature with a bat or any item to drive it away.
- NEVER try to pick the snake up.
Keep your kids and pets far from where the snake is and call a professional rattlesnake removal company like Father & Son Pest Control to drive the creature away from your home.
Although snakes don't like to reside near humans, they can accidentally find their way to your home. It may be because you have been infested by rodents. Snakes also hibernate during the winter season and they can be rarely seen in the cold months. Come spring, they will start slithering around your property and look for a way to get to your front door. When you call for professionals, all you need to do is sit back and just let them help these creatures make their way out of your property.
Why Snake Removal and Control Are Important
Below are the main reasons why you need to get rid of the snakes living in your property:
- If you have Massasauga rattlesnakes in your home, you can get bitten by their venomous fangs.
- Snakes pose serious threats to the safety and health of your children and pets.
- If the snakes invaded your home because you have their main food sources such as birds and mice, you can develop infections, diseases, and allergic reactions because they carry bacteria in their bodies.
Snake Removal Services
As soon as you find a snake in your home, it is smart to call Father & Son Pest Control for a snake control service. They don't exterminate which means the animal will be safe. They will also make sure that the source of the infestation is located so that it won't happen again in the near future. Call Father & Son Pest Control's service hotline today for a quote.

subset: commoncrawl


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The key to simplicity isn't "Know How" it's "Know Why"
Alex Honor /
Many of us technicians like to understand complex things and learn about the roots of hard problems.
We are also very well versed in technology, how it works – how to make machines and advanced sophisticated designs. But at our jobs we work in the context of the business. It's the business outcome that is the important context to always keep foremost in our minds. Well, at least it should.
"We have to grasp not only the Know-How but also 'Know Why…'", – Shigeo Shingo (Toyota)
From time to time, the business comes to us asking for help to reach a desired outcome. The outcome might be to launch a new product, add new features to the web site, anticipate a bunch of new customers, open a new market, or shorten lead time for customer requests.
So, we technicians put on our thinking caps and get excited because we are going to get to make something.
"What's the best solution?", we ask ourselves. "It better cover all contingincies for changing scale or future concerns", say the far thinkers. "It's a big project with lots of moving parts", exclaims the project manager.
What often happens? We technicians get mired in how we solve the problem, using all the tricks up our sleeves, relishing in our know how. We know how that goes. We say: "Meta-object protocols will make our solution infinitely extendable, even dynamically! This inheritance hiearchy design coupled with good component composition will ensure the software architectured is correctly multi layered." Blank stare and reply from the business manager: "What?" We say: "Oh it's superior technology"
Admit it. We've all been there saying or listening to this kind of stuff.
What stands between us and our goal is the complexity of the solution.
"The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize." – Shigeo Shingo (Toyota)
Complexity is a killer. We already live in a dynamic, fast paced world and the business is always changing. Our work world is complex so why make our solutions complex? Complex solutions are fragile, hard to roll out and adopt, time consuming to fix and extend. Complex designs just make life harder. Does the business outcome depend on any of this complexity in the solution? If not, we are gold plating and are just creating a form of waste.
So, how do we avoid building the complexity? Here's some good rules to live by:
1. Stay focused on the "Know Why".
Be clear you understand the desired outcome the business expects. Are you sure about it? Do others agree with your interpretation. If not, you'll be alone defending your choices or you might suffer living with your own decisions.
2. Don't fall prey to your "Know How".
Watch out for the inclination to create advanced/sophisticated/over-engineered designs and implementions. This just adds time, risk, and money to get the work done.
3. Be disciplined.
Building a new solution and migrating from the "old way" of doing things to the new way is by definition a transformation. The new way will require its own new "Know How" and will not be perfect/complete/usable the first time (or the 2nd, 3rd… time). If moving to the new solution is painful, you have to stay disciplined and keep iterating to make the solution less painful. Stay focussed on the outcome the business cares about and expects from you as your guiding principle.
4. Do the simplest thing.
Choosing products and tools that are inherently simple to use, require little Know How from everyone. Tool shininess gets the heart rate up because new is fun but this isn't what the business cares about.
You know the old saying, the shortest path between two points is a straight line.


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Meet Silicon Valley's New Spy Satellites
The Pentagon is using new technology that provides real-time, better-than-Google imagery of the earth. By Robinson Meyer
Imagine an energy company which manages a pipeline through Canada's taiga. The company's charged with maintaining that pipeline, with making sure it isn't leaking and hasn't been compromised. So, every day, the company pays a local to get in a plane and fly over the otherwise inert, massive metal tube, looking for objects, organic or otherwise, that shouldn't be there.
Or that's what they've done for many years. Five years from now, that pilot might be out of a job. Tiny satellites, whizzing over head in low Earth orbit, could photograph every meter of the pipeline. It won't seem like anyone's nearby, but, should a truck or stain appear on the ice, a system administrator in Houston would get a text message warning of a problem.
Humans began photographing their home planet from space in a scientifically useful way about a half-century ago. Now the images are ubiquitous: On a web search, in a phone app, on the news, we see the browns and blues that denote pictures taken from the sky. They have rollicked around the culture, spawning both the techno-hippie Whole Earth Catalog and the $3 billion military contractor Digital Globe.
"Google Earth whetted consumers's appetites for pictures of Earth from space," Scott Larsen told me. But the pictures in our browsers, he said, have now become old and out of date.
"[Imagery from] five years ago is great, but how about from last year, last month, last week, yesterday?'"
Larsen leads Urthecast. It's one of a cadre of startups—three are now out of stealth mode—tossing cameras out of the atmosphere and trying to turn them into a business. Each of the three is choosing different methods, different kinds of devices, and different orbits. Each is selling something a little different. They are Urthecast, Planet Labs, and Skybox.
Urthecast, for instance, plans to install two cameras—one still and one video—on the International Space Station, then beam video down using the Russian Space Agency's antennae. Planet Labs, another, hopes to send 28 satellites, each about the size of a garden gnome, into low orbit. It will immediately control the largest private Earth-observing fleet of satellites ever created. SkyBox, finally, only hopes to operate two satellites in the next year—but its business plan seems most promising, and borrows the most from the modern startup playbook.
The capital and efficiency engines of Silicon Valley, having transformed markets and interactions both public and private on Earth, now look skyward.
Silicon Valley is making what, in any other decade, we'd call spy satellites.
(Related: America Needs to Lead Globally on GEOINT)
Orbiting Cameras, Operated by Behemoths
Like the geography they depict, it can be easy to feel like the pictures in Google Earth have always been there, like they don't have a history or a source.
In fact, a set of accreted structures dictate what and how satellite imagery reaches American consumers. Some of these limits are governmental: The U.S. government restricts the resolution of imagery that can be sold to the public, for example. Today, if the side of one pixel of Earth imagery is more than 50 centimeters long, it can't be sold in America. (Though regulators may soon loosen those limits.)
The marketplace limits buyers still further, though. If you go looking for medium-resolution imagery, you'll find it a hard task. If you want a picture of your house—or your pipeline—who do you buy it from?
You have a few options. You might download it for free from weather satellites, like those in NASA's MODIS program. MODIS imagery is quite low-quality, though: It will give you good (sometimes beautiful) photos of the clouds over your home state.
Other options are prohibitively expensive. The pan-European consortium that owns the airplane-manufacturer Airbus also operates a satellite company called Astrium, which sells imagery commercially. The German company Blackbridge and the Israeli ImageSat do the same. A few governments—Taiwan, India, South Korea—will sell imagery from their spy satellites to you.
There's also data from some other U.S. government-run projects, like the long-running Landsat program. That imagery's free, and sometimes recent—but it's not very high-resolution. Really, there's only one American company that will sell you imagery in the medium- to high-range: Digital Globe.
Digital Globe is a public corporation, worth about $3 billion and based in Colorado. Most of its business flows from the Department of Defense: Last fiscal year, a full 60 percent of its revenue came from just one contract with the National Geointelligence Agency. It also supplies a substantial amount of imagery to Google Earth.
Digital Globe specializes, in other words, not just in big institutional buyers, but in the biggest of the big. It makes sense: In the modern Earth observing business, most of the players are enormous. Even in the list I just gave, most of the institutions either maintain a standing army or manufacture warplanes.
(Related: Why the Military Needs Commercial Satellite Technology)
Like a Floating Geyser of Free Money
The wrecked Italian cruise vessel Costa Concordia, as captured by Digital Globe's WorldView-2 satellite
And it makes economic sense, too, for these satellites operators to be behemoth. Not only is operating a satellite expensive, but sending it to space is maybe moreso. You can't buy rocket fuel from a gas station.
Let's say you want to compete with one of these leviathans. You have a few options to make it cheaper. Here's one: Find a satellite that one of those huge institutions regularly services. Strap your cameras on to it. Get one of those institutions to pay for it all.
Replace "satellite" with "International Space Station," and you have Urthecast.
Of all the satellite startups, Urthecast's business is probably the easiest to understand. Soon after the publication of this article, perhaps in a matter of days, astronauts will venture outside the International Space Station (ISS). They will bolt two cameras, each about the size of a two-liter soda bottle, on to the Russian part of the structure. They'll connect some wires, presumably, push some buttons, and then the two devices will start sending both still and moving imagery below, to the same planet that they watch.
It's a lovely idea. It is also ludicrously inexpensive.
Four years ago, Scott Larsen, now Urthecast's CEO, was working at Merchant Bank in Vancouver, when—after a series of introductions—an inquiry from the Russian space agency (the RKA) "came across [his] desk."
"They were interested in seeing what was possible," he said, in putting a camera or two on the ISS. They encouraged him to run a feasibility study for half a million dollars, then stopped corresponding. That was, until:
"In the fall of 2010, they called up and said, hey: If you wanna do it, we wanna do it," said Larsen.
What was that "it"? An incredible deal. If Urthecast paid to build 2 cameras, the RKA would handle not only getting the devices to space but also the cost of their installation and their downlink. Downlinking data from satellites is incredibly costly, often a major limiting expense for Earth-observation companies. For Urthecast, it would be free.
Or nearly free: Once installed, the RKA would keep all the imagery Urthecast's cameras capture of Russia. Urthecast can sell the imagery of anywhere else on Earth.
Urthecast, in other words, has a monopoly of sorts, on high-quality pictures and video from the ISS. The Russian space agency has created a giant geyser of free money, in low-Earth orbit, for the benefit of a private company.
Urthecast incorporated in Canada on Christmas 2010. It went public before it put anything in space, in June of this year, raising about $9.3 million U.S. dollars. It's now a publicly-traded company worth about $120 million.
The ISS is an unusual satellite to strap a camera to—it flies an orbit lower and more elliptical than other Earth observing satellites.
"I tend to think we'll get pictures no one's ever seen before," said Larsen. Once that imagery is online, he told me, "everyone will come to the website at least once."
Because of that—and because of the company's virtual monopoly—Larsen said the company anticipated all manner of monetization strategies: ads on the website, broadcast deals, and a full range of content partnerships
"We are a media company," he said, "there's no doubt about it. We've done something no one's done before."
If they do do it. At the end of December, cosmonauts attempted to install Urthecast's cameras onto the ISS. It didn't work—the cameras failed to relay signal to the ground. Now the devices are back inside the station, being examined for problems.
If they get the cameras working, Urthecast will find buyers. TV news agencies, entertainment companies, app developers are in talks with Urthecast: According to Larsen, the company's already signed an agreement with the United Nations.
A Flock of Doves
Befriending the RKA and bolting something to the world's most famous space-laboratory is one path to profitability. Planet Labs, based in San Fransisco, is trying another. In January, it hopes to send 28 micro-satellites in space—the largest constellation of private Earth-observing satellites, ever. (The incredibly awesome collective noun for a group of satellites is a constellation .)
Planet Labs can send that many into space because the satellites are designed for extensibility. 10 by 10 by 30 centimenters, Planet Labs's "doves" are derived from Cubesat technology—the set of tools and standards developed at Stanford in the early 2000s that let universities affordably fly small, low-orbit satellites.
More than 100 have been put in orbit since the idea's inception. When high schoolers in Virginia built a satellite and launched it, as happened last month,they did it with Cubesats.
So Planet Labs's doves are cheap. They're so cheap, in fact, that Planet Labs can anticipate some portion of them never working.
"People say, if you never miss a flight, you're spending too much time in the airport," the company's CEO, William Marshall, told me. "Well, if you never lose a satellite, you're not pushing the envelope."
Businesses in space have historically erred very conservative, and for good reason. Every machine, every orbiting device, cost hundreds of millions of dollars; every major technology investment was a bet-the-company adventure.
Marshall told me that 20 percent of the doves can fail in orbit—can never work at all—without the company losing a meaningful amount of imaging capacity. There's a theory of programming— worse is better —that holds that cheap, simple software can be faster and easier to use than the expensive, complicated fare. Planet Labs applies this to space.
It's an application with huge potential benefits. With its horde of doves, Planet Labs can image the entire planet much more frequently than is now possible. It can refresh its satellites much more frequently: It can almost always just throw more satellites up there, to the point of diminishing returns.
It also has downsides. The imagery Planet Labs's doves capture will never be great—current imagery technology and the size of Cubesats doesn't create pictures below a resolution of one meter. Urthecast's video camera will be better.
But Planet Labs might be able to succeed on other fronts: Marshall has broad, humanitarian ambitions for his company's data. He said that, often, subsistence farmers in the developing world could use imagery of their farms, but currently can't afford it. The usual non-military buyers for Earth imagery are banks and large financial firms.
Marshall thinks Planet Labs can sell to both financial firms and farmers because the two have different needs, because they need different kinds of imagery at different times. As imagery ages, he said, its price might decrease.
He also that Planet Labs might also be able to lend its imagery to humanitarian causes, such as the crowdsourced mapping that helped victims of Typhoon Haiyan.
But is that a viable business? Maybe.
Pixels or Intel?
There are two ways to sell satellite imagery. The first is to sell the pictures themselves: The actual pixels that depict oceans, mountains, and cities. When a satellite company sells its imagery to Google Earth, this is what it's doing.
"Here is money." "Thanks! Here are pixels." (Or, that's how the transaction occurs in theory.)
But there's another way to make money off satellite imagery. A company could take pictures and analyze them for certain objects or trends, then sell the information it gathers.
For instance (and this is something of a canonical example in imagery analytics): With good-enough satellite imagery, you could photograph every Wal-Mart parking lot in America on Black Friday, then analyze the images in total to detect the number of cars. Take that car-count, guess at the typical income bracket associated with each lot, throw in some other variables and voila: You have a good sense of how much money the retail behemoth made on one of the most important shopping days of the year.
There are other applications. Over the course of season, a keen firm could take a picture of every cornfield in the midwest and estimate how much corn the U.S. produces in total, then trade futures against that knowledge.
It's a great business, this selling intelligence on the global supply chain to the people betting about it. It's also, for now, a somewhat theoretical one. Interpreting images with algorithms, especially at the specificity needed, remains incredibly difficult. Facebook bought a facial recognition company earlier this year for an undisclosed price in part so it could apply its algorithms to recognizing all sorts of photos that look nothing like faces. That's how treasured the algorithmic-image detection technology is.
(Think: With really good algorithms, your spambots could defeat any image-based CAPTCHA.)
The first of Skybox's satellites captures Perth, Australia—and parking lots full of cars!—in early December. (Skybox Imaging)
And without algorithms to read imagery, the costs of image interpretation stay stubbornly high. Meanwhile, other applications—the kind requiring looking simultaneously at millions of pixels—remain impossible. So if you want to analyze images at any scale, you might be able to do it with an army of interpreters. Might.
When I asked Marshall about whether Planet Labs would sell pixels or intel, he demurred.
"We're certainly entertaining both," he said—maybe selling "raw imagery, and analytics on top of it." He called the company in "the early stage of defining our products."
Perhaps it will. But maybe the dichotomy is a red herring. You don't need to actually analyze images successfully in order to build a business around the possibility of doing it.
Cloud Computing, Except for Literal Clouds
Enter Skybox. Based in Mountain View, California, it put its first satellite in space in November. But when I talked to Dan Berkenstock, one of its co-founders, he didn't mention satellites at first.
"There's never been a good sandbox in this industry," Berkenstock told me, referring to imagery analytics.
What did he mean? Something like this: In the past half decade, companies have sprung up around Amazon's hosted cloud services. Amazon operates massive web servers, tools so adaptable you can build a company around them without having to actually pay to operate a data center. Amazon lets its customers pay for what they need, or can use, and no more.
It's a successful business, and a lucrative one: In 2012, Amazon Web Services made $2.1 billion.
Skybox wants to make something like Amazon's cloud products, but for the Earth. To do that, Berkenstock told me, it has combined historic data from US government satellites, aerial photography, and weather centers. It's created a recent history of the Earth in data. It will then augment that record with data and imagery from its own satellites.
Eventually, companies will be able to run their own algorithms in the massive Skybox database (which I'll resist calling Skynet). They can build applications and programs within and with it, using its historic records. They can, crucially, test their image-detecting algorithms within a massive sandbox.
"Combining weather data with satellite imagery with other things," Berkenstock told me. "That's really the future of our industry."
Perhaps it is. Regardless, it's savvy. "Earth-data-as-service" lets Skybox sell the potential of analytics without actually… having to do a lot of analytics.
It also lets them slowly build up a fleet. Skybox has constructed its satellites—each about the size of a dorm room fridge—out of parts you'd find in a hardware store. It uses cheap and available supplies, in other words, rather than costly space-tested materials preferred by military contractors. It runs its mission control in a Google Chrome app that uses the web development kit Bootstrap.
Skybox's first satellite, SkySat-1 is already functioning and in the air. It's sending down pictures— and video —now.
Skybox seems, to me, to most apply the lessons of the past decade of web technologies to space. But it also operates the most expensive satellites.
Pictures Aren't Knowledge
The marketplace coming into view already bends across many variables. Urthecast seems safe: As long as its technology works, people will always want pictures from the ISS. The company is camped securely, empty water bottles i hand, next to its floating free-money geyser.
Planet Labs seems unsure of its business strategy, at least in public, but its satellites are so inexpensive that it can always chuck more at its problems. And SkyBox walks a middle path, armed with a brilliant business idea and a couple satellites neither costly nor cheap.
Whatever happens, these three companies are likely to create a market beneath the current leviathans and not supplant them.
"There will always be a market for Digital Globe," Larsen told me. "There are still gonna be people who want that."
But for many customers, he said, "good enough is good enough. It doesn't need to be calibrated to 45 cm. It doesn't need to be as accurate as what they're getting."
Who will buy this new, good enough imagery? Why would they buy it? When I talked to Skybox's founder, Dan Berkenstock, he said many companies wanted satellite imagery to answer one question:
"'Is my stuff okay?' That's the central question satellite companies can answer. All these things around the world that are supposed to be happening or not supposed to be happening that affect me—are they?"
So perhaps many people will buy the picture or intel, and all three of these companies will flourish. Or perhaps one will absorb the others, or a popping technology bubble cut off funding to all three. Business plans don't anticipate history—but sometimes they gesture at it. Very soon, it's likely that it will be substantially easier to buy recent, high-resolution imagery of the Earth's surface. Large companies will have access to the same global quasi-omniscience as the world's powerful governments. If successful, these startups will consolidate power.
Cheap satellites will also grant humanity pictures of the world it has made and is making—a world wracked by people. Every satellite CEO I talked to mentioned being able to track melting glaciers, changing rivers, or dying forests. Satellite technology has proven useful in humanitarian crises; some research indicates it can detect a genocide in progress.
How do we—as citizens, as consumers, as possible customers—handle that, the tension between the power of new knowledge and the power of consolidated knowledge? Over the next few years, we, and our governments, will find out.
At the end of our call, Larsen spoke to me about Urthecast's aim.
"When you talk to astronauts, they all say going to space changes them," he said. This was especially true of repeat astronauts—"people who go up twice—go up once, then go back 4 to 5 years later, and see how things have changed."
They all spoke, he said, of wonder.
"When people are continually reminded how small Earth is, how we're all living together, people come back with a sense of planet stewardship."
Planet stewardship: a beautiful idea, something the future hungers for, and something these startups may or may not provide.


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Climate Change Projected to Boost Insect Activity and Crop Loss
Scientists have already warned that climate change likely will impact the food we grow. From rising global temperatures to more frequent "extreme" weather events like droughts and floods, climate change is expected to negatively affect our ability to produce food for a growing human population.
But new research is showing that climate change is expected to accelerate rates of crop loss due to the activity of another group of hungry creatures — insects. In a paper published Aug. 31 in the journal Science, a team led by scientists at the University of Washington reports that insect activity in today's temperate, crop-growing regions will rise along with temperatures. Researchers project that this activity, in turn, will boost worldwide losses of rice, corn and wheat by 10-25 percent for each degree Celsius that global mean surface temperatures rise. Just a 2-degree Celsius rise in surface temperatures will push the total losses of these three crops each year to approximately 213 million tons.
"We expect to see increasing crop losses due to insect activity for two basic reasons," said co-lead and corresponding author Curtis Deutsch, a UW associate professor of oceanography. "First, warmer temperatures increase insect metabolic rates exponentially. Second, with the exception of the tropics, warmer temperatures will increase the reproductive rates of insects. You have more insects, and they're eating more."
In 2016, the United Nations estimated that at least 815 million people worldwide don't get enough to eat. Corn, rice and wheat are staple crops for about 4 billion people, and account for about two-thirds of the food energy intake, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
"Global warming impacts on pest infestations will aggravate the problems of food insecurity and environmental damages from agriculture worldwide," said co-author Rosamond Naylor, a professor in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University and founding director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. "Increased pesticide applications, the use of GMOs, and agronomic practices such as crop rotations will help control losses from insects. But it still appears that under virtually all climate change scenarios, pest populations will be the winners, particularly in highly productive temperate regions, causing real food prices to rise and food-insecure families to suffer."
To investigate how insect herbivory on crops might affect our future, the team looked at decades of laboratory experiments of insect metabolic and reproductive rates, as well as ecological studies of insects in the wild. Unlike mammals, insects are ectothermic, which means that their body temperature tracks the temperature of their environment. Thus, the air temperature affects oxygen consumption, caloric requirements and other metabolic rates.
The past experiments that the team studied show conclusively that increases in temperature will accelerate insect metabolism, which boosts their appetites, at a predictable rate. In addition, increasing temperatures boost reproductive rates up to a point, and then those rates level off at temperature levels akin to what exist today in the tropics.
Deutsch and his colleagues found that the effects of temperature on insect metabolism and demographics were fairly consistent across insect species, including pest species such as aphids and corn borers. They folded these metabolic and reproductive effects into a model of insect population dynamics, and looked at how that model changed based on different climate change scenarios. Those scenarios incorporated information based on where corn, rice and wheat — the three largest staple crops in the world — are currently grown.
"Temperate regions are currently cooler than what's optimal for most insects. But if temperatures rise, these insect populations will grow faster," said co-author Scott Merrill, a researcher at the University of Vermont's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Gund Institute for Environment. "They will also need to eat more, because rising temperatures increase insect metabolism. Together, that's not good for crops."
For a 2-degree Celsius rise in global mean surface temperatures, their model predicts that median losses in yield due to insect activity would be 31 percent for corn, 19 percent for rice and 46 percent for wheat. Under those conditions, total annual crop losses would reach 62, 92 and 59 million tons, respectively.
The researchers observed different loss rates due to the crops' different growing regions, Deutsch said. For example, much of the world's rice is grown in the tropics. Temperatures there are already at optimal conditions to maximize insect reproductive and metabolic rates. So, additional increases in temperature in the tropics would not boost insect activity to the same extent that they would in temperate regions – such as the United States' "corn belt."
The team notes that farmers and governments could try to lessen the impact of increased insect metabolism, such as shifting where crops are grown or trying to breed insect-resistant crops. But these alterations will take time and come with their own costs.
"I hope our results demonstrate the importance of collecting more data on how pests will impact crop losses in a warming world — because collectively, our choice now is not whether or not we will allow warming to occur, but how much warming we're willing to tolerate," said Deutsch.
Content within the Farm Journal Forum is the property of Farm Journal, Inc and protected by copyright.This article was first published on https://www.fjfnews.com.


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Great gift idea! A 3-tier stand is a stylish way to serve hors d'oeuvres at your next party, though of course it is tailor-made for afternoon tea.
Afternoon tea, the classic British-style afternoon tea, is something I enjoy as often as I can, at home or at a friend's home, at a posh hotel or a cozy tearoom.
How to Throw an Afternoon Tea Party
My friends and I always create somewhat of a sensation when we go out to tea in our tea attire. We like to think we bring up the tone of the place!
You'll want to experiment with tea amounts and steeping times, shorter or longer by a minute or two, with each new tea you try to get just the brew you like.
* You'll see the method in the directions for my tea sandwich recipes.
Update 12/01/16: The giveaway is now closed
Le Creuset 3-Tier Stand Giveaway
*If you are outside the US but would like to have this sent to someone in the US (you would have to send them a gift card separately on your own), go ahead and enter!


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Science As A Human Right: Data-driven Governance
To match the ideals outlined in the U.S. Constitution, we must define and measure our values.
We have already defined our values. We do not yet measure outcomes.
Science is the only tool capable of abstracting human experience over populations, allowing us to know whether we are achieving our goals.
By choosing not to measure, we violate basic human rights and empower the strong over the weak, the majority over the minority. This threatens to make meaningless our chosen values.
Therefore, Science should be a human right.
Government and The Moral Landscape
Sam Harris recently published a controversial book titled The Moral Landscape, wherein he argues that science can answer moral questions:
Questions about value—about meaning, morality, and life's larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.
Stephen Gould provides a common dissent:
Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people…The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner.
I side with Harris.
Most criticism of his position rests in a critique of Utilitarianism; an ethical position that holds the right course of action is the one that creates "the greatest good for the greatest number."
Harris, by presenting his theory abstractly ("some science somewhere could do this") and by responding to the abstract criticisms of his opponents, actually misses the strength of his argument when applied to practical use.
What else are we doing than safeguarding the well being of individuals when we form governments?
Harris' theory can be grounded in Governance. U.S. Democracy, for example, is functionally utilitarian.
What else are we doing than safeguarding the well being of individuals when we form governments? In this light, arguments about whether we can define and measure moral positions are nonsense; we've been attempting to do so since the beginning of recorded history. We've just been doing it poorly.
If, as Harris' opponents argue, this endeavor is impossible, then we should immediately dispense attempts to define communal values and form governments.


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We've all had the experience of standing up and hearing a loud pop in our back or hip, or trying to tiptoe through the house only to have our foot make a cracking sound each time we take a step. So what's happening in our joints when this happens, and is it a bad sign?
And what if we purposefully crack our knuckles? Will we get arthritis like our parents used to tell us?
What makes that noise when you're cracking your joints?
The noise we hear when our joints pop is likely to be due to movement of the tendon over bone. Tendons attach muscles to bones and are a bit like elastic bands that stretch over joints. It is thought tendons can make a popping noise when they move quickly across a joint.
When a joint moves, the position of the tendon changes relative to the joint. Sometimes the tendon will shift its position slightly, causing it to make that popping sound as it snaps back to its normal place. This noise is quite normal whether it's loud or soft, or happens frequently or not.
The chronic degeneration of joint cartilage, known as osteoarthritis, leads to stiffness and reduced mobility of the joint. When this cartilage is damaged the surfaces of the bones rub against each other during movement, causing pain.
Many factors contribute to arthritis, and people experience joint pain for many possible reasons, including genetics, age, weight and previous injury.
Several causes of osteoarthritis have been identified and preventative strategies need to be developed. But, as far as the question of a causal link between joint cracking and osteoarthritis, there doesn't appear to be any compelling evidence.
If you've experienced any pain or swelling of the joint when it cracks, this should be assessed by a doctor as there may be abnormalities in the joint structures such as loose cartilage or an injury to ligaments. If the joint locks or gets stuck when it cracks this may also be an indication of an underlying problem and should also be assessed by a doctor.
Is cracking my knuckles bad for me?
Knuckle cracking is a habitual behaviour involving manipulation of the finger joints. For a long time, it has been suggested cracking your knuckles will increase the likelihood of developing arthritis later in life. Although this idea has persisted across generations, only in recent decades has any research looked scientifically at the question of the consequences of knuckle cracking.
Synovial fluid is a substance found in the cavities of joints. It has a consistency similar to egg white and its purpose is to lubricate the joint to reduce friction during movement.
Early research suggested when the joint is extended the pressure within the joint is greatly reduced, causing gases dissolved in the synovial fluid to form microscopic bubbles or cavities. Eventually, joint fluid rushes into the areas of low pressure and the larger bubbles collapse, or pop, producing that familiar sound.
In 2015, a group of researchers from Canada used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate the mechanisms of knuckle cracking. They concluded knuckle cracking occurs as a result of formation of space in the synovial fluid in the form of bubbles, rather than the collapse of the bubbles due to synovial fluid rapidly filling the space, debunking the previously held notion.
Donald L. Unger was a medical doctor who was curious about the long-term effects of knuckle cracking, so he cracked the knuckles of one hand only for 60 years. He found there was no difference in the amount of arthritis between his hands at the end of this time.
There has been some formal research on the topic. An early paper from 1990 found cracking the knuckles over a long period was associated with swelling and reduced grip strength in some people. However, the authors found no difference in arthritis of the hands between people who habitually cracked their knuckles and those who didn't.
A 2011 study assessed radiographs of people aged 50 to 89 years according to the frequency of their knuckle-cracking behaviour. Again, the prevalence of osteoarthritis of the hands was similar between people who cracked their knuckles often and those who did so rarely.
So knuckle cracking doesn't cause any harm and equally has no apparent benefit. To quote a study on habitual knuckle cracking:
The chief morbid consequence of knuckle cracking would appear to be its annoying effect on the observer.
Andrew Lavender, Lecturer, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation and republished here with permission. Read the original article.


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Note: At its meeting in January 2008, the AHA Council accepted the report of the Working Group on the Future of the AHA. To ensure that the wide-ranging recommendations made in the report would not languish, AHA President Gabrielle Spiegel appointed a subcommittee of the Council to review the issues raised by the report, set some priorities about whether and in what order the tasks outlined should be undertaken, and consider the level of financial and technical support for their implementation. This committee will be chaired by President-elect Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who will be joined by Elise Lipkowitz, Frank Malaret, Trudy Peterson, and Larry Wolff. Arnita A. Jones, AHA's executive director, and Robert A. Schneider, editor of the American Historical Review, will serve as ex officio members of the committee.* We hope all members of the Association will review the recommendations of the committee with care, and submit their comments and suggestions to the committee's staff.
Executive Summary
After meeting three times during the past year, the Working Group on the Future of the AHA makes the following major recommendations: (a) To secure its future, the AHA must reach out to a broader membership and become more diverse and inclusive while preserving its core constituency of history PhDs who teach at research universities and liberal arts colleges. Specifically, it should adopt policies designed to recruit AP high school teachers, community college instructors, and the broad category of practitioners often labeled "public" historians. Some of these policies will involve special dues packages and additional staffing, while others will involve further reforms to the annual meeting. (b) The AHA needs to improve its use of the internet to provide member services, including blogs, chat rooms among subdivisions of the Association, and special instructional sessions at the annual meeting on how better to incorporate information technology into our teaching mission. (c) The AHA should refine its advocacy efforts on behalf of historians to become more proactive rather than reactive, and should consider greater collaboration with peer organizations like the OAH on a variety of outreach activities. (d) The AHA should pursue the development plan espoused by incoming president Gabrielle Spiegel, refining that plan in consultation with outside consultants to make personnel costs affordable, and to determine what the most effective means is (such as a new building or a leased structure) to achieve greater space. (e) The AHA should revisit the structure of its relationship with the National History Center, focusing on the fiduciary responsibilities of the AHA and the desirability of the NHC becoming a "support corporation" of the AHA.
Issues of Membership
The AHA has experienced a remarkable period of stability in both membership and budgetary viability. Reflecting excellent leadership and board management, the Association has expanded to almost 15,000 members, and regularly runs a small budgetary surplus. Its journal and newsmagazine remain the gold standard in the field, while the annual meeting continues to be the central gathering place for historians of all ages, whether these be graduate students, candidates in the job market, or senior professors. The core of the Association (approximately 67 percent) continues to be faculty members and students at research universities and liberal arts colleges.
Despite this stability, the fact remains that only one quarter of the history PhDs teaching in these universities and colleges actually belong to the AHA. It is not unusual for younger historians to drop out after securing their first teaching positions. While all those interested in history benefit from the AHR and Perspectives, these membership "perks" can be secured at no cost through university and college libraries, or via the internet. Thus there is a large, untapped constituency even among those who remain the core of the AHA's membership. Furthermore, the apparent stability of the "core" membership disguises some disconcerting realities. In fact, history departments have grown substantially over the last decade. Thus, while the number of members from research universities and four-year liberal arts colleges may have remained constant, the actual percentage of potential members joining the AHA has declined.
A far larger potential constituency lies outside that core. There are the thousands of high school teachers (as many as 190,000) who are instructors of Advanced Placement history classes in the nation's high schools. An additional 9,000 people teach history in community colleges. "Public" historians who work in government offices, archives, museums, or as independent contractors belong to the AHA only in small numbers, and although most of those historians are Americanists, we need to do more to recruit them to the AHA. The same demographic (an Americanist bent) is true of the thousands of people who belong to state and local history societies, but they too need to be encouraged to participate in AHA activities.
In all of this, there is also a generational divide taking place, with more and more younger people—products of the IT and digital revolutions—forgoing participation in formal professional associations. In reality, our influence and "reach" have grown substantially over the past decade, largely due to our open-access publishing policies. Thousands of people read AHA publications online everyday—many times the number who read our material when we were just mailing out print publications fifteen years ago. As a result, our articles are used more extensively in the classroom, and we are also providing substantially more information to future historians. But we pay a price for this in two forms: (a) the expense of developing online services and (b) the diminished core membership that has accompanied this expansion of open access to our materials. Ironically, therefore, the success we have experienced through technology in extending our influence has also helped undercut our recruitment of new members.
It is our belief that the AHA can thrive in the future only if it does two things simultaneously: (1) retains and increases its core constituency and (2) substantially increases its outreach to diverse new constituencies. To that end, we suggest the following steps:
a. Hire a staff person specifically assigned to coordinate efforts to reach new constituencies, including high school and community college teachers, public historians, and members of state and local history societies. This is our highest priority as we consider potential new staff positions (e.g. hiring a development staff person, or a person specifically committed to advocacy work, would fall further down the list).
b. Create special dues categories and benefits to attract high school teachers, community college teachers, public historians, and members of state and local history societies to the AHA. These dues categories should be significantly lower than those now applicable to the AHA's "core" constituency.
c. Develop discounted (10–20 percent off) five- to eight-year memberships for "early career" professionals (where younger member often drop their memberships when they face the large dues increase from their earlier subsidized student rate) in order to encourage "core" historians who are in new, often underpaid teaching positions, to retain their memberships. Given the importance of increasing our "core" constituency, even as we reach out to newer constituencies, this initiative is of particular importance.
d. Redesign the annual meeting so that up to 25 percent of all sessions are dedicated to programs targeted toward these new constituencies, e.g. teaching sessions focused on bringing new technologies into the classroom, etc.
e. Consider joining with the OAH in publishing a Magazine of History for all historians, not just those who focus on America.
f. Entertain other possibilities of outreach, including regional conferences for teachers, which would make the AHA relevant for historians at every level.
We believe that a concentrated effort to expand the constituencies served by the AHA holds the best potential for ensuring that in 2025 the Association remains as vibrant and vital as it is today.
Maximizing Use of the Internet
Clearly, a new generation is using the internet to communicate in ways that older members of the profession may not be accustomed to. Thus it is incumbent on the AHA to both understand and utilize all the cutting-edge possibilities of these new technologies, while transferring its traditional role as gatekeeper and authority for the discipline to this new medium. The AHA needs to use the internet not only for more effective communication, but also for creating effective professional standards for using the internet in areas such as scholarly publishing and social networking.
There are numerous opportunities for making the AHA relevant to members who are in the forefront of the IT revolution. One is to sponsor a series of blogs that focus on specific issues, e.g. the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. The possibilities of hosting blogs are endless and were the AHA to become known for facilitating such activities, it would increase substantially its utility to members (and non-members) with particular interests. By setting up pages on social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space—and by facilitating posting onto other Web 2.0 sites—the AHA can open up communications and participation. In an age when it is likely that fewer people will rely on the printed page for either research or news, becoming known as an organization at the forefront of the information revolution will be pivotal to the AHA's continued prominence.
The annual meeting can also become a site where on a regular basis, members can be exposed in a hands-on way to new methods of teaching and learning, bringing their own laptops to sessions in a wireless environment where they can participate actively in the exchanges being conducted. We encourage future program committees to have as a regular feature a sequence of introductory, intermediate, and advanced sessions on how to incorporate internet technology into the classroom, as well as frequent digital poster sessions and workshops for directors of graduate studies and undergraduate studies.
We also encourage the AHA staff to redesign its web site to appeal to a new generation of potential users, particularly those new constituencies we hope to cultivate, highlighting the special programs and benefits that the Association will offer to those who are part of the internet world. Once the AHA becomes known as the home for a number of history blogs, and provides gated discussion forums for members on specialized subjects, it will help expand substantially our ability to be a magnet for members of diverse backgrounds.
In sum, we need to seize the opportunities made available by the new technologies, simultaneously reaching out to a broad, cross-generational audience that now uses these technologies as a matter of course, and also targeting more segmented audiences of people with specific aptitudes and specializations. One of the vital challenges we face is to transpose the traditional gatekeeper functions of a broad disciplinary society onto a very different information landscape. As the Web flattens out qualitative distinctions and opens the information arena to many other competing voices, the amount of intellectual "noise" out there vastly increases. Our task is to take this as an opportunity to provide an authoritative voice that can help historians sort through the "noise," consistent with our basic mission to define best practices for members of the profession.
While we remain very pleased with the work of Lee White on behalf of the AHA and a coalition of history organizations, we are also very conscious of how much remains to be done in the area of advocacy, particularly at a time of increased attempts by various levels of government and others in the general public to politicize and regulate curriculum and dictate the content of classroom instruction. The existence of these efforts at federal, state, and local levels makes all the more crucial that the AHA have a person committed full time to advocating the interests of historians. It is particularly important that AHA advocacy should not simply be a reaction to initiatives by others, but rather be proactive, seeking to promote action that is supportive of historians' rights. We hope that if the efforts to enhance the AHA's strength—as reflected in earlier recommendations—are effective, there will be adequate resources to support the hiring of an additional person to do full-time advocacy. However, it is our view that this additional staff person should be considered only after the organization has grown, and that the chief priority in allocating staff resources should be a person to coordinate the effort to increase our outreach to underserved constituencies.
We support the emphasis given by incoming president Gabrielle Spiegel to fundraising. More and more professional organizations have focused on development. The work of the Association is severely limited by the space constraints at AHA's headquarters consisting of just a modest townhouse on Capitol Hill. It is critical that the AHA find more spacious accommodations without losing the advantage of having a headquarters close to the centers of power in Washington. It thus makes sense to at least consider raising funds to purchase a new building or office complex.
On the other hand, the working group believes that the cost of mounting a full-scale development effort will be substantial. A development officer will need staff. Any fund-raising campaign will extend over many years. We anticipate that this would mean at least a budget line of $250,000 per year.
Given this assessment, we propose the following steps: (a) hire a fundraising consultant to analyze the potential donor base, determine whether it is realistic to have a $10 million development goal, and project what the staff costs will be of mounting such a development operation; and (b) have a detailed discussion of the real estate analysis report prepared last year to decide how many square feet a new office complex should be, and whether it makes more sense to lease this space or purchase it.
While we believe that a fundraising drive is essential, we also recommend a careful look at what volunteer activities might achieve, especially if the AHA were to rely on an annual fund drive rather than six- or seven-figure gifts from individuals.
In any event, we believe that any major investment in fundraising staff should be a secondary priority. We should await the reports of consultants before acting. We also believe that allocating staff resources for development should occur only after monies are committed to the staff coordinator for outreach to underserved constituencies, and to further work on advocacy.
Relations with the National History Center
The working group has been impressed by the public policy programs initiated by the National History Center, and by the ambitious agenda of its board and president. We believe that the AHA and the Center have complementary goals and programs.
On the other hand, we are concerned with the ambiguity of the present relationship between the Center and the AHA. It is our belief that the AHA is and should be the primary organization, and that the Center should function as a "support corporation" to the AHA. What does this mean? Largely, that the AHA is the sponsoring source of governance, and that while the "support corporation" has autonomy vis-à-vis its own budget and agenda, it operates with a board approved by the parent organization and according to rules and procedures outlined in the legal arrangement that exists between the two.
We recognize that the Center has its own strengths and its own agenda. But ultimately, those strengths and that agenda must be accountable to the AHA as a parent organization. To that end, we recommend clarification of the existing relationship between the Center and the AHA, using the model of the Center as a "support corporation" of the AHA to develop new legal and constitutional rules for the relationship of the two organizations. We understand that recently the Executive Committee of the AHA has proposed that the three vice presidents of the AHA serve as ex officio members of the National History Center Board. We endorse that proposal.
In the end, we see the future of the AHA as positive. We do not envision the need for fundamental structural change. On the other hand, we believe that if the AHA does not aggressively seek to enlarge its base, its core strength will dwindle. The status quo, however viable today, should not, and will not, persist ad infinitum. The AHA must grow—in its diversity, its communication technology, its use of the internet, its ability to incorporate the perspectives of thousands of history practitioners now outside its membership boundaries.
We believe that the proposals contained here provide a basis for that kind of growth, and we look forward to the response of the AHA Council and membership.
—Submitted on November 15, 2007, for the Working Group.
Working Group on the Future of the AHA
William Chafe (Duke University), chair
James Grossman (Newberry Library)
Lynn Hunt (UCLA)
Earl Lewis (Emory University)
Danielle McGuire (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)
Paula Michaels (University of Iowa)
Stefan Tanaka (University of California at San Diego)
Arnita A Jones (AHA), ex officio
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.


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Taco Pasta
I had originally planned on making tacos last night, but just wasn't feeling it. When we do have tacos, Jon always takes the meat and mixes it with pasta and all of the cold, raw vegetables and ingredients for a taco pasta next day. I took my inspiration from this, but did a cooked-vegetable version.
- 1/2 lb ground meat
- Spices - I didn't measure (never do!) - chili powder, cumin, coriander, cayenne, onion powder, garlic powder, a touch of salt
- 1/2 small onion, chopped
- 1/2 each green and red pepper, chopped
- 1/2 jalapeno, chopped (optional)
- 8 oz canned chopped tomatoes (crushed would work well, too)
- 6 oz canned black beans, rinsed
- 6 oz chicken broth
- Handful of shredded cheese, I used a Mexican blend
- Cooked pasta; I used rotini, about 6 oz
- Sour cream and shredded lettuce for serving
- Heat a large saute pan. Add meat and cook until just about done. Season with the spices.
- Add the onions and peppers, cook 2-3 minutes
- Add the tomatoes and beans, cook another 2 minutes
- Add the broth and bring to a simmer while your pasta is cooking
- Add pasta to the meat mixture, and toss with the cheese
- Plate, top with some more cheese, lettuce, and sour cream.
This was incredibly delicious, flavorful, and was a nice way to enjoy taco ingredients without the taco shells. I think it would also do well mixed with more cheese and baked for a taco casserole.
I'm giving this one a Mexican tag purely because of the flavors, spices, and ingredients used - it's not authentic Mexican at all, but it can help to satisfy those Mexican food cravings!


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When it comes to the housing market, there's no one more authoritative than Robert Shiller, the Yale economist and co-namesake of the Case-Shiller index of home prices. In a 2005 article for Barron's, Shiller described the housing market as being in "the throes of a bubble of unprecedented proportions that probably will end ugly." Now, with many declaring that the housing market is starting to come back, Shiller is more cautious.
First, the case for housing actually coming back: Existing home sales are up over 10 percent for the year and 2.3 percent from June to July, while new home sales are up 3.6 percent from June to July and up more than 25 percent over the year. Prices, which have been dropping in real terms for six years (Shiller called the bubble at around its peak), may have recovered, or at least have stopped falling. July saw a 3.8 percent bump up, and home prices have risen more than 9 percent since February.
But, Shiller says, we shouldn't draw any hasty conclusions. He points out that this is the fourth apparent bottom the housing market has hit: "We saw it in 2009, we saw it in 2010, and we saw it again in 2011."
It's not surprising that we may be hasty to see a bottom—after all, it was the belief that the fundamentals of the U.S. housing market have changed dramatically that led to many cities seeing increases in home prices averaging 10 percent or more every year between 1996 and 2006. We might very well inclined to be optimistic about housing unless the evidence is overwhelming that we should not be.
Shiller noted that people were calling for a return to rising prices after the introduction of the new home buyer's tax credit, which allowed first-time buyers to claim up to an $8,000 refundable tax credit for purchasing a home. So, in 2009, there was an apparent stabilization of prices. But this turned out to be a false bottom. In San Francisco, there was even a 20 percent jump in prices. Shiller, in a new paper presented last week coauthored with Karl Case and Anne Thompson, describes the tax credit as a "substantial outright gift." Originally supposed to expire in October 2009, it was extended through April 2010, thus "setting the stage for a decline in home prices in 2011." And so, every summer since 2009, it has looked like housing had stopped its monumental slide, but "it's happened four times already," Shiller said.
What's happening now, Shiller admits, is a stronger seasonal adjustment than we've seen in the past, and there is, he says, a "good chance the housing market is rebounding." But, he notes, he is "not as ready to jump on as others." Abstracting away from the month-to-month or even year-over-year data, there is little reason to think that a housing bubble popping can't lead to falling or stagnant prices for more than the six years since our bubble popped. Shiller reminds us that Japan, which had a dual housing and stock-market bubble, saw two lost decades for housing.
So, even if we've hit a bottom, we might need to see more evidence to conclude that housing prices will actually turn around substantially. After all, if home prices reverse their nominal slide, they still might only keep up with inflation, meaning that the real value of homes might not go up at all.
Shiller said that the best reason to be optimistic this time was the National Association of Home Builders' sentiment index, which measures home builders' expectations of sales for the next six months. The index hit a five-year high in August, following four straight months of increases. Unlike measures of home building or sales, the sentiment index is forward looking, so it can provide evidence that housing might turn around in the future, as opposed to no longer declining right now.
Professor Shiller isn't willing to jump on the housing-is-back bandwagon. But if everyone else is, that might be all that matters.


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Retirement Planning
Everything you do – from planning the education and designations you'd like to acquire, to starting a career and managing your career progression – is done in the hopes that you and your loved ones can have a better life. But in all your planning, have you remembered to plan for life after work?
If you fail to plan for life after work, all the effort you've put into your working life may be jeopardized, and you may be left with more questions than answers. And an ill-prepared retirement is bound to be one filled with financial stress and chaos, instead of life-enriching experiences and freedom.
How We Can Help
Retirement planning shouldn't start at retirement; it should start well before. We take a long-term view of your financial wellbeing to help create a life after work that is as well-planned as your life while working.
- Understand your goals: Through an intensely personalized approach, we discover what your retirement goals are. Whether it's travel, a new hobby, or spending more time with the people you love, we'll help you strive for your ideal retirement.
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Ready to take the first step in creating your plan for life after work?


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Basic Search Stone Collection: Volume 39 - Item 1 | Advanced Search | Online Archives | Help | ||||||||||||
1. Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, by the Executive Committee, for the Year Ending May 1, 1860 (New York: Prentiss & Deland for the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861). (337 p.)
Account of noteworthy events during 1859-60 related to slavery and attempts to end it. Some of the topics covered in this report include the admission of Kansas into the Union, the foreign slave trade, manumissions, fugitive slaves, free people of color, and debates regarding slavery in the United States Congress. The largest section by far deals with John Brown, his raid on Harper's Ferry, his execution, and the fate of his companions.


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This is Jobs Newport News dot Com which is also a city in the USA.
This site is not specifically about Newport News but is about jobs and work opportunities in the USA, and the rest of the world for all sorts of employment opportunities, including financial analysts, physical therapy assistant, human resource coordinators, pharmaceutical sales, clinical research assistants, financial controllers, laboratory technician, sales coordinator, sales assistant, field, sales and test engineer, logistics coordinator, product marketing managers, business system analyst, full charge bookkeeper, senior financial analyst and many more service industry positions such as claims handler, senior sales, mailroom clerk, warehouse duties, store assistant, area sales manager.
You will also find more information inside the site. The website is a developing work in progress and is actually for sale with this great domain name however as we market the site we will be expanding it with additional resources and jobs information.
Within Jobs Newport News dot Com you will find links to all sorts of work, employment and jobs opportunities not only in Newport News as an example of one of the places you could look to find a job but in other USA cities and all over the world. This site isn't specific about one Town or City or job vacancy it is about helping you get the position and career you want in the location you want, we have details and information with quality links to all sorts of work, jobs and employment in all sorts of places. [Next]


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It was almost 3 a.m. when the President-elect finally took the stage, his blue suit, white shirt and red tie perfectly matched to the phalanx of flags arranged behind him. The polls and the experts and the data modelers predicted it would be a woman for the first time in the nation's history — but no, it was another man, another blue suit, another red tie.
And yet, if it had been the woman, everyone would have known what to expect.
Donald John Trump, political novice, self-promoter and gleeful provocateur, was elected the 45th President of the United States on Nov. 8 in one of the most extraordinary and unforeseen developments in American history. Universally dismissed as a vanity candidate when he entered a field crowded with Republican talent, the former Democrat and former Independent mowed down 16 challengers while breaking every rule in the book. Then he pivoted to take on one of the most seasoned and famous politicians in the world, a former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady, lost three straight debates to her (according to opinion surveys) and earned the disapproval of roughly 60% of all Americans. A dozen women accused him of sexual assault. He bragged about earning tens of millions of dollars each year while never paying income tax. His margin of victory in the Electoral College was on track to be the largest any Republican has achieved since 1988.
What would he say?
What could anyone say?
Of Hillary Clinton, the opponent he threatened to put in jail if he were elected, Trump said: "We owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country."
Of the nearly 60 million Americans who voted for Clinton after she denounced Trump relentlessly as a racist and sexist, Trump said: "I'm reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country."
Of the global community whose trade treaties he vowed to dismantle and whose alliances he called into question, Trump said: "I want to tell the world community that while we will always put America's interests first, we will deal fairly with everyone."
Of his plans, which have always been lightly sketched, at best, Trump said: "America will no longer settle for anything less than the best."
That is what he said, in a speech so subdued and low energy that it could have been a hospital director's annual message to the medical staff. Left unsaid was how he could make himself into the gentle, unifying and effective force he spoke of on that victory stage. It will be a long, steep hill to climb.
Why? Because candidate Trump either insulted women, Hispanics, Muslims, blacks, disabled people and so on and so on — or else spoke so loosely and carelessly that millions of people misunderstood him. In a President, either one is bad.
He'll be trying to heal the country in a climate of utter contempt for government. Throughout his campaign, Trump heaped abuse on Presidents from Obama to Reagan, on Congress and the courts, on America's military leaders and foreign envoys. The entire apparatus, he preached again and again, is "a rigged system." That's the government he now leads.
He'll be seeking to win the trust of black and brown Americans, of American Muslims and Jews, while white nationalist bigots and anti-Semites are cheering his victory. Trump picked at sores in this election that will bleed before they heal.
He will be trying to define a mandate despite his possible failure to win the popular vote.
President Trump will be trying to strengthen the U.S. while at the same time extricating it from the network of security alliances and free-trade agreements that underpin the world order. News of his victory sent markets into a brief swoon from Tokyo to New York City. The Mexican peso plunged to its lowest value in more than 20 years. Amplifying the shock of the Brexit vote in June, which might be the first step in breaking up the European Union, Trump's win could shatter the fragile world recovery.
He'll be facing in Congress a Republican Party that he took by force, not by persuasion, and dealing with the wreckage. In victory, he lavishly praised Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, but that alone won't mend the damage done. A party supposedly pledged to conservative values has elected a radical President who promises to tear up treaties, overturn laws, jail his opponent and sue his critics. On the morning after, House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Trump skeptic, glossed over the fact that the winner's campaign was thick with his enemies. Instead, he proclaimed a Republican dawn. With the GOP in control of the White House and Congress, he said, the party will heal around a mission to repeal Obamacare.
Trump will be expecting Americans to trust his family as they run the large international business he built, the one that rests mainly on selling the family name, after he devoted his campaign to attacking his opponent for commingling the national interest with personal gain.
He will be asking Americans to have faith in his choice of people, when he allied himself with the Internet's noisiest conspiracy theorist. To have faith in his prudence, when he attacked a former beauty queen on Twitter at 3 in the morning. To have faith in his temperament, when he repeatedly allowed himself to be goaded during debates.
Perhaps no other presidential election raised so many questions with so few answers. The President-elect has no track record, few associates, very little in the way of policy positions. He believes America is broken. He said at his convention: "I alone can fix it."
We'll find out.
Read More: Donald Trump's Roots: His Life in Pictures
A bloodied veteran of the casino business, where he built an empire and lost a fortune, Trump knows what it means to push all your chips into the center of the table and blow on the dice. That's how he ran his unprecedented campaign, gambling that Americans would elevate a man who toyed with their prejudices, tickled their ids, dodged his taxes, exaggerated his philanthropy, skimmed over policy and flouted the truth. He took people seriously when they told pollsters, year after dismal year, how sick they were of politics as usual. Nothing in politics is more unusual than Trump.
Trump's favorite bets are on himself. The man hates to finish second. Second is for "losers" — a favorite Trump epithet — and life presents endless chances to win or lose. Who but Trump would have mentioned, on the very day the Twin Towers were destroyed, that he now owned the tallest building in lower Manhattan? Who else would think to create a hierarchy of Vietnam heroes, and say of former POW John McCain, "I like people who weren't captured"? Finding himself late in the campaign in a room with Medal of Honor winners, he entertained the idea that they might be braver than he. Then he dodged the implication by redefining the competition: "I am financially brave," he concluded.
In this ultimate victory, Trump credited himself with leading "the single greatest movement in the history of this country," as he put it in the final hours of the campaign. His promise: to "win, win, win and win." His aim: to "make America great again." His genius: to convince people by the millions whose lives are utterly unlike his that he alone could be trusted with their grudges, their passions, and their resentments.
The thrice-married former playboy who spoke on video about assaulting women persuaded evangelicals to turn out as never before. They accepted his conversion to pro-life fervor and relished his pledge to push the Supreme Court to the right. "God uses the least likely," South Carolina televangelist Mark Burns explained, "from myself to Donald Trump."
The former Democrat from Manhattan and longtime donor to liberals persuaded the hardest right-wingers to fall into line. The billionaire channeled anti–Wall Street energy. The Wharton graduate found the wavelength of noncollege voters. And Trump rode this movement, exactly as he said he would, on a straight line from the edge of Philadelphia to the streets of Green Bay, Wis., winning Great Lakes states that Republicans have not won in years, or in some cases decades.
His triumph was the Rust Belt's revenge, an expression of the same economic and racial unease that gave these states to Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The supposed job stealers were in Japan in those days; now they are in China and Mexico. The children of the Reagan Democrats are Trump Republicans now, and that fact was fatal to Clinton.
He called plays no quarterback had ever called and executed them for touchdowns, yet Trump should not be viewed as a tactician, his former adviser Corey Lewandowski explained in an interview with TIME, nor as a performer, though he held his audiences spellbound for more than a year. Trump won because he is a tribune, as all wave-catching leaders must be, Lewandowski said. For all the strange originality of Trump's triumph, the essential element "is what it always is" for one winning the White House. "It's a snapshot in time that says, 'I'm the messenger. I've harnessed what the American people are tired of and sick of, and I'm just going to give that a voice.'"
That voice was thunderous, but it spoke a familiar language. Trump made himself the messenger for a faction of Americans that has cried out at irregular intervals down through our history. Suspicious of governing elites, opposed to open immigration, resistant to free trade and international entanglements, this faction was Jacksonian in the 1820s, populist in the 1920s and now Trumpist in 2016. He brought them out of the shadows of the Republican coalition, where they have been neglected stepchildren for half a century, fed on scraps of anti-Washington rhetoric. Trump's crude and reckless style signaled that he shared their contempt for established order. He chose one of their clarions, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.com, to serve as his right-hand man. Trump's closing message, conveyed in a two-minute television ad, could have been written at almost any time over the past two centuries for consumption by this audience: international bankers and their Washington puppets are conspiring to weaken the nation and rob the American people.
Many GOP leaders refused to be found in such company. Only one of Trump's living predecessors as Republican standard bearer, 1996 nominee Bob Dole, was on record supporting him. The two living Republican Presidents — the George Bushes — refused to vote for him. Judging from the returns, though, whatever Republicans he lost through his bluster and carelessness, Trump more than made up among alienated voters who would normally have opted out. By ringing the chords of gun control, abortion and Obamacare, "we really started bringing Republicans home," the campaign's senior communications adviser Jason Miller told TIME.
The election of Donald Trump has no historic parallel. Having never served in government or the military, he is the least conventional choice the American people have ever made. He's not a lawyer, as 26 of the 44 Presidents have been. As a builder, he might share something in common with the engineer Herbert Hoover and the architect Thomas Jefferson — if you squint hard enough. But as the overstretched operator of bankrupt New Jersey casinos? A promoter of international beauty pageants? Star of a long-running reality-TV show?
It might seem that the choice of such a man reflects a steep drop in the level of respect Americans have for the demands and the office of the presidency. But should that be a surprise? Over the past quarter-century we've had a President who — whatever good things he was doing — found time to play sex games with an intern in the Oval Office. He was followed by a President who — however well-intentioned — committed the nation to a foreign war with no post-invasion plan and left the economy in the deepest pit since the Great Depression. That man was followed by a President who — though his approval ratings have been rising sharply of late — took office with a résumé so thin, you could see through it.
They were very different men, but they shared an inability to convince a majority of the public that they had a firm grip on a rapidly changing world. All three talked about saving American manufacturing jobs, but the jobs kept bleeding away. They talked about lifting impoverished children out of desperate lives, but the children seemed just as desperate. They promised to heal divisions between left and right, but the polarization felt more acute. They pledged to hunt down and wipe out terrorists, but terrorists sowed chaos in the Middle East, crisis in Europe and fear from Orlando to Boston to San Bernardino, Calif.
True, there was a parallel reality unfolding at the same time. Over those three consecutive two-term presidencies — two governors and a Senator, two Yale men and a Harvard grad, three suits in different styles from the same Establishment rack — the U.S. economy grew from $9.5 trillion to more than $16 trillion in real-dollar terms, U.S. scientists and inventors dominated the rise of digital technology, and the 47-year interval without a war between major powers extended to 71 years — the longest peace since the days of the Roman Empire. But it was not in the nature of politicians or pundits to dwell on that sunny side of the story. Especially after Iraq and the recession, the felt story, the lived story for tens of millions of Americans, the story leaked out through hacked NSA files and shamefaced congressional testimony, was a story of excess, impotence and decline.
Trump could not have won without that background. No doubt there were many Trump voters who looked at the skyscrapers and jets and helicopters with his name emblazoned on them and figured any man who could do that could do anything. These same folks may have nodded when Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani cited Trump's loss of nearly $1 billion on a single year's tax return as a sign of "genius." But to win the grand prize he needed more than just those votes; he needed the people who figured that he was bluffing his way through the race and decided it didn't matter — the people who had come to suspect that being President might not be so hard after all, if what it mainly entails is reading botched intelligence reports, muddling through intractable crises and making promises you have no way of keeping.
And there was a deeper current that also ran toward Trump. For all their Davos conferences and TED talks, world leaders are flailing around for an agenda. No one really knows how to cope with the revolution sweeping the world. It is a technological revolution, yes, and the lords of Silicon Valley spin endless hours of jargon about its magical possibilities. But its social and political impacts — already overwhelming and rapidly multiplying — are coming much faster and more furiously than governments can digest them.
What does it mean to put a computer in the palm of every human being, and to link each palm instantaneously with every other? When Gutenberg's revolution of movable type first made it possible to share ideas widely across space and time, the political and social follow-on effects included the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and the industrial and scientific revolutions. In other words, everything from daily routines to international order was scrambled and re-scrambled. How much change, and how rapid, will this massively more powerful technology cause? Elites have been riding high on the back of this beast, and have not yet seen its teeth or felt its claws. But many millions more Americans, living outside the best zip codes, feel it breathing down their necks.
This matters for Trump because he lasered in on the dislocations that technology is causing, in concert with globalization: the manufacturing jobs lost not just to China or Mexico but to robots. The coal jobs lost not just to green liberalism but to higher efficiency in generation and consumption. The asymmetrical warfare made possible not by American weakness but by social media. The retirement and health care time bombs set ticking by more people living longer lives, which is in part made possible by computer power unraveling disease. Trump tapped the pain of dislocation, though he misplaces the blame. The failure of American leaders to solve these mind-boggling questions helped get him elected—but now he is the leader, and it's his turn to be baffled by them.
The technology revolution mattered for another reason too: Trump was the first successful candidate to realize that these same forces must disrupt the political sphere. Communication is the wiring of democracy; the more communication you have, the easier it is for people to find what they want, and to organize with others who are seeking the same thing. This is true whether the people want the right thing or the wrong thing, whether they seek evil or good. For this reason, many of the Founding Fathers feared an excess of democracy.
But one voter's excess is another voter's just-enough, and Trump was able to connect with just enough voters to win the election. Much as Amazon has barreled over the retail giants and Facebook is gobbling up the media, Trump used technology to cut out the middlemen of politics: the reporters and editorial boards, endorsers and political parties, even the mega-armies of door knockers and phone bankers who were the fabric of analog democracy. His relationship to the voters was direct—or felt direct—through the digital idioms of Twitter, Facebook and reality TV. The people wanted him, even when the intermediaries did not, and in the hyper-democracy of the smartphone age, the people can get what they want, when they want it.
And some of them may have wanted it desperately. In some neighborhoods that still looked middle class a major issue in 2016 was opioid addiction. A recent Princeton report noted that 44% of men who had dropped out of the labor force had taken pain medication the previous day. If they did not always vote, the everyday reality of them informed many who did.
Trump understood that campaigning is a performance, and he geared his star turn to a particular audience. His convention in Cleveland told the tale. Experts panned the event as a train wreck, but Trump understood that train wrecks are interesting to watch. Every day a new member of his family appeared, every night ended on a cliffhanger. The leading man normally steers clear of the hall until his speech, but Trump was a hovering presence all week, stalking, glaring, emerging from billowing smoke.
Trump disclosed the meaning of his method earlier this year in an interview with TIME as he winged across America on his private jet and watched himself dominate the news on a giant flat-screen TV: once you build an audience, "that gives you power," he said. "It's not the polls. It's the ratings."
His rambling late-night Twitter rants and his loose-limbed, jazz-riff, fact-free speeches would have killed his chances if the middlemen still reigned. Instead, by some strange alchemy, they made him more real to his followers. More real, obviously, to the bigots and trolls who made him a hero of the so-called alt right. But also more real to voters for whom Trump's style signified freedom from worn-out conventions and a refusal to toe the line. Trump's supporters didn't take him seriously, except when they did. He was like the guy at work who makes inappropriate jokes but never misses his monthly sales quota.
A man cast his early vote last week in Kansas. As he walked from the polling place, he confessed to a friend, "I feel like I need a shower." That feeling, so widespread in this election, was not solely the fault of the President-elect. It was common to hear people marvel disgustedly that so broad and abundant a nation somehow managed to produce two deeply unpopular candidates.
Hillary Clinton ran in spite of an electorate clamoring for change, which no 25-year veteran of national politics can represent no matter what gender she is. She ran in spite of souring polls that would show that a majority of Americans neither liked nor trusted her. She ran in spite of nagging questions about her e-mails and enormous wealth. She kept running in spite of a fainting spell at a public ceremony and all the questions about a 68-year-old woman's stamina that followed. She ran in spite of a last-minute intervention by the director of a mutinous FBI.
Her campaign wasn't pretty, or edifying, or entirely uplifting. She spent most of her time on the attack, as she'd planned to do all along. Long before she knew whom she would run against, Clinton looked at the partisan divisions of the nation and the shifting demographics that usually gave her party an Electoral College head start. Figuring that she could win simply by surviving, she built a machine specifically geared to that purpose, all fail-safes and firewalls, but no passion. She signed up party insiders to protect her from primary challengers, hired data analysts to target the voters she could not win by personality alone and surrounded herself with rugged pros who would never flinch under fire. Then she did what she does best: gritted her teeth and stuck to the plan. "You can count on this," she promised in her final televised campaign appeal. "I've never quit, and I never will."
In the wee hours of Nov. 9, after Clinton called Trump to congratulate him on his win, the stragglers at her thwarted celebration in New York were stupefied by the result. It's hard to exaggerate how convinced they all were—from the candidate on down — that the election was in the bag. The entourage was nothing but cheery in the final days before the election, as Jay Z and Beyoncé and LeBron and the Boss and Bon Jovi and a flock of celebrities too numerous to mention joined the bandwagon to bring out the vote. Many of her senior aides had moved on to the agenda for the first 100 days.
All their polls. All their models. All wrong.
Clinton wore the enemy uniform for the Trump campaign as if it were custom tailored. She was the Establishment he promised to purge. She profited from the cronyism that he dared to call out. She embodied Washington, the swamp he pledged to drain, in all its mansions and motorcades and mendacity.
And so for the second time in her remarkable career, Clinton had given her all and fallen just short against a less experienced, less accountable, more confident man. Her concession speech, the morning after, was somehow graceful and gritty at the same time. "Donald Trump is going to be our President," she said. "We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead." There will be a Madam President, after so many female governors and Senators and Prime Ministers, so many female entrepreneurs and CEOs, so many female judges and chancellors. It will happen soon. But she won't be Hillary Clinton.
A veteran of decades of Washington politics stared at his television on that dumbfounding night as a question took shape in his mind. "What is it that has won?" President Trump represents a victory for seismic forces roiling under the mantle of history, the same forces that are shaking Berlin and Beijing, Paris and Mosul, Scranton and Flint. He is a symptom, not a cause, but he is the symptom that cannot be ignored. "America was always a pillar of stability," says Dhruva Jaishankar, an expert in U.S.-India relations who, like all experts everywhere, was trying to get his arms around the news. "Suddenly we don't know what's going to happen."
Let that be the lesson of Trump's feat and a motto for our future—America's, the world's, for a long time to come. Suddenly, we don't know what's going to happen. We probably never did, but in times of slower, smaller change we could lull ourselves into believing that we did. We could organize ourselves around elites who claimed to know. We could entrench ourselves for endless political battles over years and decades, play self-serving games with our institutions, ignore nascent threats as we feathered our nests, all because we thought we knew what would happen. We must reorganize ourselves around creativity, flexibility, experimentation and goodwill.
We don't know what will happen. But we can know what matters. Freedom matters, dignity, opportunity, kindness. The list goes on, and for most people it is written in their hearts. The list got lost in this election, yet there it was in everyday lives, in families, schools, neighborhoods.
And there it was in the first official message of the newly elected President Trump. He spoke of teamwork, gratitude and mutual respect, and promised: "I will not let you down." So much hangs on his ability to live by it.
— With reporting by Sam Frizell and Zeke J. Miller / New York; Nikhil Kumar / New Delhi; and Elizabeth Dias / Washington
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