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Instagram is releasing its Archive feature to all users today, after testing it with a smaller group of people last month. The feature lets anyone on Instagram hide their old posts without deleting...
Tag: archive copy
Added by PressForward
📑 Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All | Jamie Todd Rubin
👓 Chris Aldrich's Year In Pocket
See how much I read in Pocket this year!
The most popular things I apparently saved this year:
The 100 best nonfiction books of all time: the full list by Robert McCrum • theguardian.com
Is Your Child Lying to You? That's Good by Alex Stone • nytimes.com
How Actual Smart People Talk About Themselves by JAMES FALLOWS • theatlantic.com
The Fall of Travis Kalanick Was a Lot Weirder and Darker Than You Thought by Eric Newcomer, Brad Stone • bloomberg.com
The female price of male pleasure by Lili Loofbourow • theweek.com
I'll have to work at getting better to create my own end-of-year statistics since my own website has a better accounting of what I've actually read (it isn't all public) and bookmarked. I do like that their service does some aggregate comparison of my data versus all the other user data (anonymized from my perspective).
Pocket also does a relatively good job of doing discovery of good things to read based on aggregate user data in terms of categories like "Best of" and "Popular". They also give me weekly email updates of things I've bookmarked there as reminders to go back and read them, which I find a useful functionality which they haven't over-gamified. Presently my own closest functionality to this is to be subscribed to the RSS feed of my own public bookmarks in a feed reader (which I find generally useful) as well as regularly checking on my private bookmarks on my websites's back end (something as easy as clicking on a browser bookmark) and even looking at my "on this day" functionality to review over things from years past.
I'll note that I currently rely more on Nuzzle for real-time discovery on a daily basis however.
Greg McVerry might appreciate that they're gamifying reading by presenting me with a badge.
As an aside while I'm thinking of it, it might be a cool thing if the IndieWeb wiki received webmentions, so that self-documentation I do on my own website automatically appeared on the appropriate linked pages either in a webmention section or perhaps the "See Also" section. If wikis did this generally, it would be a cool means of potentially building communities and fuelling discovery on the broader web. Imagine if adding to a wiki via Webmention were as easy as syndicating content to a site like IndieNews or IndieWeb.XYZ? It could also function as a useful method of archiving web content from original pages to places like the Internet Archive in a simple way, much like how I currently auto-archive my individual pages automatically on the day they're published.
📑 Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination | Billy Meinke
👓 What I believe II (ft. Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery) | Shtetl-Optimized
Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the "new" P≠NP proof: I'd again bet $200,000 that the paper won't stand, except that the last time I tried that, it didn't achieve its purpose, which was to get people to stop asking me about it. So: please stop asking, and if the thing hasn't been refuted by the end of the week, you can come back and tell me I was a closed-minded fool.
However, a few people who I like and respect accused me of "dogwhistling." They warned, in particular, that if I wouldn't just come out and say what I thought about the James Damore Google memo thing, then people would assume the very worst—even though, of course, my friends themselves knew better. So in this post, I'll come out and say what I think. But first, I'll do something even better: I'll hand the podium over to two friends, Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery, both of whom were kind enough to email me detailed thoughts in response to my Kolmogorov post.In my post "The Kolmogorov Option," I tried to step back from current controversies, and use history to reflect on the broader question of how nerds should behave when their penchant for speaking unpopular truths collides head-on with their desire to be kind and decent and charitable, and to be judged as such by their culture. I was gratified to get positive feedback about this approach from men and women all over the ideological spectrum.
Sarah Constantin completed her PhD in math at Yale. I don't think I've met her in person yet, but we have a huge number of mutual friends in the so-called "rationalist community." Whenever Sarah emails me about something I've written, I pay extremely close attention, because I have yet to read a single thing by her that wasn't full of insight and good sense. I strongly urge anyone who likes her beautiful essay below to check out her blog, which is called Otium. Sarah Constantin's Commentary: I've had a women-in-STEM essay brewing in me for years, but I've been reluctant to actually write publicly on the topic for fear of stirring up a firestorm of controversy. On the other hand, we seem to be at a cultural inflection point on the issue, especially in the wake of the leakedGoogle memo, and other people are already scared to speak out, so I think it's past time for me to put my name on the line, and Scott has graciously provided me a platform to do so. I'm a woman in tech myself. I'm a data scientist doing machine learning for drug discovery at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, and before that I was a data scientist at Palantir. Before that I was a woman in math — I got my PhD from Yale, studying applied harmonic analysis. I've been in this world all my adult life, and I obviously don't believe my gender makes me unfit to do the work. I'm also not under any misapprehension that I'm some sort of exception. I've been mentored by Ingrid Daubechies and Maryam Mirzakhani (the first female Fields Medalist, who died tragically young last month). I've been lucky enough to work with women who are far, far better than me. There are alotof remarkable women in math and computer science — women just aren't the majority in those fields. But "not the majority" doesn't mean "rare" or "unknown." I even think diversity programs can be worthwhile. I went to the Institute for Advanced Studies'Women and Math Program, which would be an excellent graduate summer school even if it weren't all-female, and taught at its sister program for high school girls, which likewise is a great math camp independent of the gender angle. There's a certain magic, if you're in a male-dominated field, of once in a while being in a room full of women doing math, and I hope that everybody gets to have that experience once. But (you knew the "but" was coming), I think the Google memo was largely correct, and the way people conventionally talk about women in tech is wrong. Let's look at some of his claims. From the beginning of the memo:Okay, so there's a pervasive assumption that any deviation from 50% representation of women in technical jobs is a.) due to oppression, and b.) ought to be corrected by differential hiring practices. I think it is basicallytrue that people widely believe this, and that people can lose their jobs for openly contradicting it (as James Damore, the author of the memo, did). I have heard people I work with advocating hiring quotas for women (i.e. explicitly earmarking a number of jobs for women candidates only). It's not a strawman. Then, Damore disagrees with this assumption:
- Google's political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
- This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
- The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
- Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
- Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
Again, I agree with Damore. Note that this doesn't mean that I must believe that sexism against women isn't real and important (I've heard enough horror stories to be confident that some work environments are toxic to women). It doesn't even mean that I must be certain that the different rates of men and women in technical fields are due to genetics. I'm very far from certain, and I'm not an expert in psychology. I don't think I can do justice to the science in this post, so I'm not going to cover the research literature. But I do think it's irresponsible to assumea priorithat there are no innate sex differences that might explain what we see. It's an empirical matter, and a topic for research, not dogma. Moreover, I think discrimination on the basis of sex to reach equal representation is unfair and unproductive. It's unfair, because it's not meritocratic. You're not choosing the best human for the job regardless of gender. I think women might actuallybenefit from companies giving genuine meritocracy a chance. "Blind" auditions (in which the evaluator doesn't see the performer) gave women a better chance of landing orchestra jobs; apparently, orchestras were prejudiced against female musicians, and the blinding canceled out that prejudice. Google's own research has actually shown that the single best predictor of work performance is a work sample — testing candidates with a small project similar to what they'd do on the job. Work samples are easy to anonymize to reduce gender bias, and they're more effective than traditional interviews, where split-second first impressions usually decide who gets hired, but don't correlate at all with job performance. A number of tech companies have switched to work samples as part of their interview process. I used work samples myself when I was hiring for a startup, just because they seemed more accurate at predicting who'd be good at the job; entirely without intending to, I got a 50% gender ratio. If you want to reduce gender bias in tech, it's worth at least consideringblinded hiring via work samples. Moreover, thinking about "representation" in science and technology reflects underlying assumptions that I think are quite dangerous. You expect interest groups to squabble over who gets a piece of the federal budget. In politics, people will band together in blocs, and try to get the biggest piece of the spoils they can. "Women should get such-and-such a percent of tech jobs" sounds precisely like this kind of politicking; women are assumed to be a unified bloc who will vote together, and the focus is on what size chunk they can negotiate for themselves. If a tech job (or a university position) were a cushy sinecure, a ticket to privilege, and nothing more, you might reasonably ask "how come some people get more goodies than others? Isn't meritocracy just an excuse to restrict the goodies to your preferred group?" Again, this is not a strawman. Here's oneVox response to the memostating explicitly that she believes women are a unified bloc: The manifesto's sleight-of-hand delineation between "women, on average" and the actual living, breathing women who have had to work alongside this guy failed to reassure many of those women — and failed to reassure me. That's because the manifesto's author overestimated the extent to which women are willing to be turned against their own gender. Speaking for myself, it doesn't matter to me how soothingly a man coos that I'm not like most women, when those coos are accompanied by misogyny against most women. I am a woman. I do not stop being one during the parts of the day when I am practicing my craft. There can be no realistic chance of individual comfort for me in an environment where others in my demographic categories (or, really, any protected demographic categories) are subjected to skepticism and condescension. She can't be comfortable unlesseverybody in any protected demographic category— note that this is a legal, governmental category — is given the benefit of the doubt? That's a pretty collectivist commitment! Or, look at Piper Harron, an assistant professor in math who blogged on the American Mathematical Society'swebsitethat universities should simply "stop hiring white cis men", and explicitly says "If you are on a hiring committee, and you are looking at applicants and you see a stellar white male applicant, think long and hard about whether your department needs another white man. You are not hiring a researching robot who will output papers from a dark closet. You are hiring an educator, a role model, a spokesperson, an advisor, a committee person … There is no objectivity. There is no meritocracy." Piper Harron reflects an extreme, of course, but she's explicitly saying, on America's major communication channel for and by mathematicians, that whether you get to work in math should not be based on whether you're actually good at math. For her, it'sallpolitics. Life itself is political, and therefore a zero-sum power struggle between groups. But most of us, male or female, didn't fall in love with science and technology for that. Science is the mission to explore and understand our universe. Technology is the project of expanding human power to shape that universe. What we do towards those goals will live longer than any "protected demographic category", any nation, any civilization. We know how the Babylonians mapped the stars. Women deserve an equal chance at a berth on the journey of exploration not because they form a political bloc but becausesome of them are discoverersand can contribute to the human mission. Maybe, in a world corrupted byrent-seeking, the majority of well-paying jobs have some element of unearned privilege; perhaps almost all of us got at least part of our salaries by indirectly expropriating someone who had as good a right to it as us. But that's not a good thing, and that's not what we hope for science and engineering to be, and I truly believe that this is not the inevitable fate of the human race — that we can only squabble over scraps, and never create. I've seen creation, and I've seen discovery. I know they're real. I care a lot more about whether my company achieves its goal of curing 100 rare diseases in 10 years than about the demographic makeup of our team. We have anactual mission; we are trying to do something beyond collecting spoils. Do I rely on brilliant work by other women every day? I do. My respect for myself and my female colleagues is not incompatible withprimarily caring about the mission. Am I "turning against my own gender" because I see women as individuals first? I don't think so. We're half the human race, for Pete's sake! We're diverse. We disagree. We're human. When you think of "women-in-STEM" as a talking point on a political agenda, you mention Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper in passing, and move on to talking about quotas. When you think of women as individuals, you start to notice howmanygenuinely foundational advances were made by women — just in my own field of machine learning, Adele Cutler co-invented random forests, Corrina Cortes co-invented support vector machines, and Fei Fei Li created the famous ImageNet benchmark dataset that started a revolution in image recognition. As a child, my favorite book was Carl Sagan'sContact, a novel about Ellie Arroway, an astronomer loosely based on his wife Ann Druyan. The name is not an accident; like the title character in Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith, Ellie is a truth-seeking scientist who battles corruption, anti-intellectualism, and blind prejudice. Sexism is one of the challenges she faces, but the essence of her life is about wonder and curiosity. She's what I've always tried to become. I hope that, in seeking to encourage the world's Ellies in science and technology, we remember why we're doing that in the first place. I hope we remember humans are explorers.
- Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
Now let's hear from another friend who wrote to me recently, and who has a slightly different take. Stacey Jeffery is a quantum computing theorist at one of my favorite research centers, CWI in Amsterdam. She completed her PhD at University of Waterloo, and has done wonderful work on quantum query complexity and other topics close to my heart. When I was being viciously attacked in the comment-171 affair, Stacey was one of the first people to send me a note of support, and I've never forgotten it. Stacey Jeffery's CommentaryI don't think Google was right to fire Damore. This makes me a minority among people with whom I have discussed this issue. Hopefully some people come out in the comments in support of the other position, so it's not just me presenting that view, but the main argument I encountered was that what he said just sounded way too sexist for Google to put up with. I agree with part of that, it did sound sexist to me. In fact it also sounded racist to me. But that's not because he necessarily said anything actually sexist or actually racist, but because he said the kinds of things that you usually only hear from sexist people, and in particular, the kind of sexist people who are also racist. I'm very unlikely to try to pursue further interaction with a person who says these kinds of things for those reasons, but I think firing him for what he said between the lines sets a very bad precedent. It seems to me he was fired for associating himself with the wrong ideas, and it does feel a bit like certain subjects are not up for rational discussion. If Google wants an open environment, where employees can feel safe discussing company policy, I don't think this contributes to that. If they want their employees, and the world, to think that they aim for diversity because it's the most rational course of action to achieve their overall objectives, rather than because it serves some secret agenda, like maintaining a PC public image, then I don't think they've served that cause either. Personally, this irritates me the most, because I feel they have damaged the image for a cause I feel strongly about. My position is independent of the validity of Damore's attempt at scientific argument, which is outside my area of expertise. I personally don't think it's very productive for non-social-scientists to take authoritative positions on social science issues, especially ones that appear to be controversial within the field (but I say this as a layperson). This may include some of the other commentary in this blog post, which I have not yet read, and might even extend to Scott's decision to comment on this issue at all (but this bridge was crossed in the previous blog post). However, I think one of the reasons that many of us do this is that the burden of solving the problem of too few women in STEM is often placed on us. Some people in STEM feel they are blamed for not being welcoming enough to women (in fact, in my specific field, it's my experience that the majority of people are very sympathetic). Many scientific funding applications even ask applicants how they plan to address the issue of diversity, as if they should be the ones to come up with a solution for this difficult problem that nobody knows the answer to, and is not even within their expertise. So it's not surprising when these same people start to think about and form opinions on these social science issues. Obviously, we working in STEM have valuable insight into how we might encourage women to pursue STEM careers, and we should be pushed to think about this, but we don't have all the answers (and maybe we should remember that the next time we consider authoring an authoritative memo on the subject).
Scott's Mansplaining Commentary I'm incredibly grateful to Sarah and Stacey for sharing their views. Now it's time for me to mansplain my own thoughts in light of what they said. Let me start with a seven-point creed. 1. I believe that science and engineering, both in academia and in industry, benefit enormously from contributions from people of every ethnic background and gender identity. This sort of university-president-style banality shouldn't even need to be said, but in a world where the President of the US criticizes neo-Nazis only under extreme pressure from his own party, I suppose it does. 2. I believe that there's no noticeable difference in average ability between men and women in STEM fields—or if there's some small disparity, for all I know the advantage goes to women. I have enough Sheldon Cooper in me that, if this hadn't been my experience, I'd probably let it slip that it hadn't been, but it has been. When I taught 6.045 (undergrad computability and complexity) at MIT, women were only 20% or so of the students, but for whatever reasons they were wildly overrepresented among the top students. 3. I believe that women in STEM face obstacles that men don't. These range from the sheer awkwardness of sometimes being the only woman in a room full of guys, to challenges related to pregnancy and childcare, to actual belittlement and harassment. Note that, even if men in STEM fields are no more sexist on average than men in other fields—or are less sexist, as one might expect from their generally socially liberal views and attitudes—the mere fact of the gender imbalance means that women in STEM will have many more opportunities to be exposed to whatever sexists there are. This puts a special burden on us to create a welcoming environment for women. 4. Given that we know that gender gaps in interest and inclination appear early in life, I believe in doing anything we can to encourage girls' interest in STEM fields. Trust me, my four-year-old daughter Lily wishes I didn't believe so fervently in working with her every day on her math skills. 5. I believe that gender diversity is valuable in itself. It's just nicer, for men and women alike, to have a work environment with many people of both sexes—especially if (as is often the case in STEM) so much of our lives revolves around our work. I think that affirmative action for women, women-only scholarships and conferences, and other current efforts to improve gender diversity can all be defended and supported on that ground alone. 6. I believe that John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women is one of the masterpieces of history, possibly the highest pinnacle that moral philosophy has ever reached. Everyone should read it carefully and reflect on it if they haven't already. 7. I believe it's a tragedy that the current holder of the US presidency is a confessed sexual predator, who's full of contempt not merely for feminism, but for essentially every worthwhile human value. I believe those of us on the "pro-Enlightenment side" now face the historic burden of banding together to stop this thug by every legal and peaceful means available. I believe that, whenever the "good guys" tear each other down in internecine warfare—e.g. "nerds vs. feminists"—it represents a wasted opportunity and an unearned victory for the enemies of progress. OK, now for the part that might blow some people's minds. I hold that every single belief above is compatible with what James Damore wrote in his now-infamous memo—at least, if we're talking about the actual words in it. In some cases, Damore even makes the above points himself. In particular, there's nothing in what he wrote about female Googlers being less qualified on average than male Googlers, or being too neurotic to code, or anything like that: the question at hand is just why there are fewer women in these positions, and that in turn becomes a question about why there are fewer women earlier in the CS pipeline. Reasonable people need not agree about the answers to those questions, or regard them as known or obvious, to see that the failure to make this one elementary distinction, between quality and quantity, already condemns 95% of Damore's attackers as not having read or understood what he wrote. Let that be the measure of just how terrifyingly efficient the social-media outrage machine has become at twisting its victims' words to fit a clickbait narrative—a phenomenon with which I happen to be personally acquainted. Strikingly, it seems not to make the slightest difference if (as in this case) the original source text is easily available to everyone. Still, while most coverage of Damore's memo was depressing in its monotonous incomprehension, dissent was by no means confined to the right-wingers eager to recruit Damore to their side. Peter Singer—the legendary leftist moral philosopher, and someone whose fearlessness and consistency I've always admired whether I've agreed with him or not—wrote a powerful condemnation of Google's decision to fire Damore. Scott Alexander was brilliant as usual in picking apart bad arguments. Megan McArdle drew on her experiences to illustrate some of Damore's contentions. Steven Pinker tweeted that Damore's firing "makes [the] job of anti-Trumpists harder." Like Peter Singer, and also like Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery above, I have no plans to take any position on biological differences in male and female inclinations and cognitive styles, and what role (if any) such differences might play in 80% of Google engineers being male—or, for that matter, what role they might play in 80% of graduating veterinarians now being female, or other striking gender gaps. I decline to take a position not only because I'm not an expert, but also because, as Singer says, doing so isn't necessary to reach the right verdict about Damore's firing. It suffices to note that the basic thesis being discussed—namely, that natural selection doesn't stop at the neck, and that it's perfectly plausible that it acted differently on women and men in ways that might help explain many of the population-level differences that we see today—can also be found in, for example, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, and other mainstream works by some of the greatest thinkers alive. And therefore I say: if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues, then Steven Pinker deserves to be fired from Harvard for the same offense. Yes, I realize that an employee of a private company is different from a tenured professor. But I don't see why it's relevant here. For if someone really believes that mooting the hypothesis of an evolutionary reason for average differences in cognitive styles between men and women, is enough by itself to create a hostile environment for women—well then, why should tenure be a bar to firing, any more than it is in cases of sexual harassment? But the reductio needn't stop there. It seems to me that, if Damore deserves to be fired, then so do the 56% of Googlers who said in a poll that they opposed his firing. For isn't that 56% just as responsible for maintaining a hostile environment as Damore himself was? (And how would Google find out which employees opposed the firing? Well, if there's any company on earth that could…) Furthermore, after those 56% of Googlers are fired, any of the remaining 44% who think the 56% shouldn't have been fired should be fired as well! And so on iteratively, until only an ideologically reliable core remains, which might or might not be the empty set. OK, but while the wider implications of Damore's firing have frightened and depressed me all week, as I said, I depart from Damore on the question of affirmative action and other diversity policies. Fundamentally, what I want is a sort of negotiated agreement or bargain, between STEM nerds and the wider culture in which they live. The agreement would work like this: STEM nerds do everything they can to foster diversity, including by creating environments that are welcoming for women, and by supporting affirmative action, women-only scholarships and conferences, and other diversity policies. The STEM nerds also agree never to talk in public about possible cognitive-science explanations for gender disparities in which careers people choose, or overlapping bell curves, or anything else potentially inflammatory. In return, just two things:So in summary, neither side advances its theories about the causes of gender gaps; both sides simply agree that there are more interesting topics to explore. In concrete terms, the social-justice side gets to retain 100% of what it has now, or maybe even expand it. And all it has to offer in exchange is "R-E-S-P-E-C-T"! Like, don't smear and shame male nerds as a class, or nerdy disciplines themselves, for gender gaps that the male nerds would be as happy as anybody to see eradicated. The trouble is that, fueled by outrage-fests on social media, I think the social-justice side is currently failing to uphold its end of this imagined bargain. Nearly every day the sun rises to yet another thinkpiece about the toxic "bro culture" of Silicon Valley: a culture so uniquely and incorrigibly misogynist, it seems, that it still intentionally keeps women out, even after law and biology and most other white-collar fields have achieved or exceeded gender parity, their own "bro cultures" notwithstanding. The trouble with this slander against male STEM nerds, besides its fundamental falsity (which Scott Alexander documented), is that puts the male nerds into an impossible position. For how can they refute the slander without talking about other possible explanations for fields like CS being 80% male, which is the very thing we all know they're not supposed to talk about? In Europe, in the Middle Ages, the Church would sometimes enjoy forcing the local Jews into "disputations" about whose religion was the true one. At these events, a popular tactic on the Church's side was to make statements that the Jews couldn't possibly answer without blaspheming the name of Christ—which, of course, could lead to the Jews' expulsion or execution if they dared it. Maybe I have weird moral intuitions, but it's hard for me to imagine a more contemptible act of intellectual treason, than deliberately trapping your opponents between surrender and blasphemy. I'd actually rather have someone force me into one or the other, than make me choose, and thereby make me responsible for whichever choice I made. So I believe the social-justice left would do well to forswear this trapping tactic forever. Ironically, I suspect that in the long term, doing so would benefit no entity more than the social-justice left itself. If I had to steelman, in one sentence, the argument that in the space of one year propelled the "alt-right" from obscurity in dark and hateful corners of the Internet, to the improbable and ghastly ascent of Donald Trump and his white-nationalist brigade to the most powerful office on earth, the argument would be this: If the elites, the technocrats, the "Cathedral"-dwellers, were willing to lie to the masses about humans being blank slates—and they obviously were—then why shouldn't we assume that they also lied to us about healthcare and free trade and guns and climate change and everything else? We progressives deluded ourselves that we could permanently shame our enemies into silence, on pain of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and other blasphemies. But the "victories" won that way were hollow and illusory, and the crumbling of the illusion brings us to where we are now: with a vindictive, delusional madman in the White House who has a non-negligible chance of starting a nuclear war this week. The Enlightenment was a specific historical period in 18th-century Europe. But the term can also be used much more broadly, to refer to every trend in human history that's other than horrible. Seen that way, the Enlightenment encompasses the scientific revolution, the abolition of slavery, the decline of all forms of violence, the spread of democracy and literacy, and the liberation of women from domestic drudgery to careers of their own choosing. The invention of Google, which made the entire world's knowledge just a search bar away, is now also a permanent part of the story of the Enlightenment. I fantasize that, within my lifetime, the Enlightenment will expand further to tolerate a diversity of cognitive styles—including people on the Asperger's and autism spectrum, with their penchant for speaking uncomfortable truths—as well as a diversity of natural abilities and inclinations. Society might or might not get the "demographically correct" percentage of Ellie Arroways—Ellie might decide to become a doctor or musician rather than an astronomer, and that's fine too—but most important, it will nurture all the Ellie Arroways that it gets, all the misfits and explorers of every background. I wonder whether, while disagreeing on exactly what's meant by it, all parties to this debate could agree that diversity represents a next frontier for the Enlightenment.
- Male STEM nerds don't regularly get libelled as misogynist monsters, who must be scaring all the women away with their inherently gross, icky, creepy, discriminatory brogrammer maleness.
- The fields beloved by STEM nerds are suffered to continue to exist, rather than getting destroyed and rebuilt along explicitly ideological lines, as already happened with many humanities and social science fields.
Comment Policy: Any comment, from any side, that attacks people rather than propositions will be deleted. I don't care if the comment also makes useful points: if it contains a single ad hominem, it's out. As it happens, I'm at a quantum supremacy workshop in Bristol, UK right now—yeah, yeah, I'm a closet supremacist after all, hur hur—so I probably won't participate in the comments until later.


text:
Not yet rated.
2 x Luv-a-Duck, Fresh Duck Breasts, skin removed
2 slices white bread, diced
1 small onion, diced
½ cup parsley, chopped
½ tsp fresh ginger, grated
1 x pinch salt
1 x pinch epper
1 x pinch chilli flakes
1 egg
1 tbsp oil
To Serve
10 mini brioche burger/slider rolls, warm
3 tbsp Hoi Sin sauce
1 cup kale coleslaw
50g pickled ginger
½ Roasted red capsicum, cut into 10 pieces
Japanese mayonnaise to garnish
This Burger is also delicious made into 4 large burgers. Mini Burgers maybe made well ahead of time, placed on a tray covered with baking paper, covered with cling wrap and frozen. Once frozen remove from tray and store in an airtight plastic container until required.
Duck skin is delicious baked between two trays 200°C for 25 - 30 minutes until golden and crispy and served as a snack or garnish with Duck burgers

subset: commoncrawl


text:
You will require this permit if you intend to plant, remove or interfere with vegetation on local government property such as thoroughfares, parks and verges. This includes, but is not limited to:
You will also require this permit if you intend to create a firebreak on a thoroughfare or public land.
Please contact the Contact Officer for more information.
A licence defines the need to obtain recognition / certification and registration to undertake a certain business activity.
Please consult the Contact Officer for more information regarding eligibility requirements.
1 year.
Fees Details for this service in table format.
Please consult the Contact Officer for information on fees to be submitted.
Local Government Act 1995 Western Australia
Activities on Thoroughfares and Trading in Thoroughfares and Public Places Local Law 1999
Local Government Property Local Law 1999
Town of Cottesloe
Contact Email, Phone and Address Details for this service in simple two column table format, header then data.


text:
West Elm and Whole Foods Market Partner on Exclusive Holiday Collection
NEW YORK & AUSTIN, Texas – September 20, 2016 –(BUSINESS WIRE)–West Elm and Whole Foods Market introduce today an exclusive holiday collection to benefit Whole Planet Foundation, a nonprofit organization that alleviates poverty around the globe. In partnership with Guatemalan textile group The New Denim Project, the 12-piece, limited-time collection of kitchen and tabletop items are crafted from premium, upcycled denim. One dollar from every piece purchased from this West Elm and Whole Foods Market holiday collection will be donated to Whole Planet Foundation. The collection is available now online at westelm.com/wholefoodsmarket and will be available in both West Elm and Whole Foods Market stores beginning in October.
"We are continuously seeking new ways to offer our customers choice in products and services that are both well designed and make an impact," said Jennifer Gootman, West Elm Director of Social Consciousness and Innovation. "Together with Whole Foods Market and The New Denim Project, this collection aims to give back to the makers and artisans, to communities in need, and to the environment."
Each piece in the collection is 100 percent cotton and constructed of upcycled denim, a process that utilizes waste from pre-consumer denim. The waste is ground back into fiber, mixed with new cotton, spun into yarn and is woven into fabrics. The process is chemical- and dye-free and more than 20,000 liters of water are conserved per kilogram of upcycled material. Most items in the 12-piece collection are priced below $40 and include coasters, napkins, placemats, table runners, oven mitts, kitchen towels and aprons.
"Our partnership with West Elm is a perfect example of how small purchases can go a long way toward improving our world through sustainable production practices," said Jeanne Tamayo, Global Lifestyle Buyer at Whole Foods Market. "These pieces are beautifully designed and will look great in any kitchen."
To further support the collaboration, West Elm and Whole Foods Market encourage customers to visit westelm.com/wholefoodsmarket where they can access exclusive entertaining ideas and recipes. Beginning on October 1, West Elm will donate $1 to Whole Planet Foundation for each customer who creates one of the unique recipes, photographs it and shares it on social media using #WestElmxWFM, for an additional $2,000 donation to Whole Planet Foundation. Additionally, on Saturday, October 8, West Elm invites customers to visit their neighborhood West Elm store in the U.S. for a special day featuring holiday entertaining tips from West Elm's professional in-home stylists, free treats and exclusive recipes provided by Whole Foods Market. To RSVP for the in-store event, customers should visit westelm.com/stores and select their local store.
About West Elm
Headquartered in Brooklyn, NY since 2002, West Elm opened its first store in DUMBO, the neighborhood it still proudly calls home. With the mission of helping customers express their personal style at home, everything West Elm does is designed to make an impact in everyday life, from creating unique, affordable designs for modern living to its commitment to Fair Trade Certified, from LOCAL and handcrafted products to community-driven in-store events and collaborations. The brand operates 93 retail stores in the United States, Australia, Canada and the UK, ships internationally to customers around the world and operates 12 stores in Mexico, the Middle East and Philippines through unaffiliated franchisees. In addition to home furnishings retail, West Elm operates West Elm Workspace with Inscape in the commercial furnishings industry. West Elm publishes the blog Front+Main and is part of an active community on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube. West Elm is a member of the Williams-Sonoma, Inc. portfolio of brands.
About Whole Foods Market®
Founded in 1978 in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods Market is the leading natural and organic foods supermarket, the first
national "Certified Organic" grocer, and uniquely positioned as America's Healthiest Grocery Store™. In fiscal year 2015, the Company had sales of approximately $15 billion and currently has 455 stores in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Whole Foods Market employs approximately 87,000 team members and has been ranked for 19 consecutive years as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" in America by Fortune magazine. For more information, please visit www.wholefoods.com.
About Whole Planet Foundation
Founded in 2005, Whole Planet Foundation is a Whole Foods Market foundation that alleviates poverty worldwide where the company sources products. The nonprofit's mission is to empower the very poor living in developing-world communities with microcredit and the chance to create or expand a home-based business and lift themselves and their families out of poverty. As of June 2016, Whole Planet Foundation is funding microlending programs through microfinance partners in the U.S. and across 68 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, supporting 7.8 million people with a chance for a better life. To date, the nonprofit has authorized $68.9 million and disbursed $53.6 million through microlending partners worldwide.
SOURCE: Williams-Sonoma Inc.


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LESLIE: Are you green with envy over your neighbor's lush lawn? Well, that lawn, it did not happen to look that way just by magic.
TOM: That's right. It takes work to maintain a lawn and one of the necessary steps is fertilizing. You've got to get that just right if you want your lawn to look great. Landscaping contractor Roger Cook, from TV's This Old House, is here to help you make your lawn the envy of your block.
Welcome, Roger.
ROGER: Thank you.
TOM: Now, this is something that I think we're all set up for disappointment, because we all see the local golf courses and the neighbors on the street that have golf course-like lawns but never can quite get it right ourselves. It's a pretty complicated process to get it – when you think about all the things you're battling. I mean you're battling weather, you're battling the seed that you choose, you're battling the fertilizer, you're battling the weeds. How do you win that battle?
ROGER: You don't. You work the little battles; you win the little, tiny wars.
TOM: So you choose the ones you can win.
ROGER: Exactly. You can't change the soil underneath the lawn, so you have to deal with what you have and work with that.
LESLIE: So what are some of the things you need to sort of arm yourself with, knowledge-wise, so that you can head to the home center to make those right decisions?
ROGER: Well, the first thing I would tell you to do is get a soil test done. That's going to tell you exactly what's going in the soil, whether it needs nitrogen, phosphorus or it needs lime to balance it and change the pH. Without that, you're just going blind and putting things down on the lawn.
TOM: And once you do know that your soil is in good shape and let's say you do need to add some things to it, are there some tools that actually make that easier? Because lawns are just so big. I mean let's face it: it's a lot of work to get it spread just evenly, not to put too much or too little in one particular area. How do you kind of eliminate the human-failure factor when you're trying to add fertilizer or lime or seed?
ROGER: The first thing you have to do is read the directions on the bag, then read the directions on your spreader.
TOM: Guys hate to do that.
ROGER: Well, you've got to, in this case. There's a number on the bag that will correspond to the spreader you're using to put down the product at just the right rate. You don't want to put down too little and you don't want to do too much.
Couple things to be careful of. If you put down too much fertilizer – say you stop and it comes pouring out – it's going to kill the lawn. Number two, if you use a drop spreader, you have to be very careful because there's no overlap. I can't tell you how many lawns I've seen where after using a drop spreader, there's stripes all up and down the front lawn. And that's not a good thing.
LESLIE: Now, is there a better time of year, over others, to add this variety of components, like the fertilizer, like the lime, like the cedar? Do you do it all at once in, say, the spring?
ROGER: The lawn needs to be fed consistently over the season.
ROGER: Usually, it's three or four feedings is what I recommend to people. In the spring, you're going to get a lot of growth out of your lawn. So if you add a fertilizer which has a lot of nitrogen, which is the first number, then you're going to get 4 to 6 inches of growth a week and you don't need that; that makes it hard to cut.
So in the spring, I like to lower the nitrogen a little bit. Because in the spring, 75 percent of that nitrogen goes to leaves, not to the roots. In the fall, when you put on a late-fall application, 75 percent of that nitrogen goes to the roots instead of pushing top-growth. So in the …
LESLIE: And that's just based on the thickness of the lawn at that point? Or is there a different fertilizer that you're using?
ROGER: No, it's based on the physiology of the plant. The plant is getting ready for winter, so it wants to store a lot of energy so the following spring it'll just pop up.
TOM: Now, you mentioned cutting. I think a lot of folks tend to want to cut their grass very, very low but that can actually hurt the grass, can't it?
ROGER: That's the worst thing you can do for a lawn. Especially if it's grown long, you haven't cut it in a week or two, you can even burn the lawn.
But the thing about a long blade of grass is it actually shades the ground below and keeping it cool, keeping it moist. But more importantly, that helps stop weed seeds from germinating.
TOM: Right. So if you think you're doing yourself a favor by cutting it low, you're actually making more work, because you're going to get more weeds and the grass that does come out is not going to be nearly as healthy.
ROGER: Right. And if you scalp an area, that's killing the grass and the weeds will just climb right in there.
TOM: Now, what about watering when it comes to the fertilizing and the feeding cycle? Do you always water after that?
ROGER: I like to water to just to get the material down into the ground, so it won't break down from the sun's rays, and just get it down to the roots, which is where you need it to be.
TOM: Great advice. Roger Cook from TV's This Old House, I think our lawns are going to be looking a lot healthier thanks to your advice.
ROGER: The neighbors will be green with envy.
LESLIE: Alright. You can catch the current season of This Old House and Ask This Old House on PBS. For your local listings and a step-by-step video on how you can fertilizer your lawn and some other projects, visit ThisOldHouse.com.
TOM: And This Old House and Ask This Old House are brought to you by The Home Depot. The Home Depot, more saving, more doing.


text: Using the WBX-ADAPT to expand a gang and install a Pico remote control is great when you want to create a All On / All Off scene by the touch of a button. Nevertheless, several users have mentioned that the WBX-ADAPT when installed on drywall ends up not being completely flush with the wall. If you notice well (pictures below), the WBX-ADAPT has a hard plastic flap on the back that is basically there to hold the finger pressure when the user presses the Pico buttons. But if you have drywall behind the flap is no longer needed and you can extract it from the adapter (the drywall will basically be the stopper). By removing the flap, the adapter stays completely flush against the wall. However, if there is a wallbox behind DO NOT remove the back flap, otherwise the Pico will tilt when the user applies pressure on the buttons.


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by Ronald M. Baker Mark W. Demel Douglas H. Spittel Daniel J. Vogel Robert A. Dargatz Rev. Prof. John T. Pless Rev. Dr. Walter A Maier IIRADM Rev. Dr. Daniel L. Gard CHC, USN (Ret) Edmond E. Aho Rev. Warren E. Messmann Rev. Dr. Cameron A. MacKenzie Philip T. R. Spomer David F. Seybold Rev. Dr. Douglas Lynn Rutt Rev. Dr. Douglas Lynn Rutt Paul E. Cloeter Rev. David Schlie Michael A. Schmid Rev. James Strawn Lloyd Strelow Rev. Dr. Raymond Frederick Surburg Mark Berg Dennis S. Perryman Rev. Dr. G. Waldemar Degner David L. Bahn Rev. Robert W. Schaibley Ronald P. May Rev. Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Jr. Steve Moser Sergei S. Koberg Berton L. Greenway James H. Cavener Eric Lange Armand J. Boehme Rev. John Fiene Rev. Peter K. Lange Micheal Kroll Myles R. Schultz Mark Eddy Michael W. Wollman
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Satoshi's bitcoin paper, mailing list and forum discussions list bitcoin's ancestors as ecash, hashcash, b-money and the cypherpunk movement. I'd argue that it has its roots in staple science fiction as well.
Recently, strolling through my stacks of scifi books, some Shadowrun novels circa 1990 leapt out at me. Pulp science fiction of average quality, but some of the text particularly resonated with bitcoin today. Quoting liberally from Never Deal With A Dragon,
p121, Like many clubs, Rumplestiltskin's employed a Troll to handle the lines of hopefuls. ... They were still ten meters from the front of the line when Roe suddenly appeared. "This will never do," she said. Taking each one by the arm, she led them directly up to the doorman. She twirled a shiny credstick in her right hand. The four dark bands on the end of the cylinder marked it as certified for at least one hundred nuyen. She tossed it to the man. "My friends here are late for their table."
p161, She held out her personal comp to him. He smiled in assurance that he had regained the upper hand as he slotted his credstick and made the funds transfer. To demonstrate her trust, Hart ran a confrmation of the transfer as soon as he returned the comp.
"Your money's good."
"Good as gold, Ms. Hart."
"Better," she said hefting her comp before slipping it back into her bag. "Gold's too heavy."
p235, She stopped at a public telecom, slotted a credstick, and punched a number. She waited while the connections were made and a voice on the other end repeated the last four digits of the telecom code.
p217, These files must be heavily protected. The files turned out to be just that. It was hours before they determined that Drake had certified several credsticks through Transbank. It seemed hardly worth the effort and new headache to achieve such a dead end. A certified credstick was the electronic equivalent of cash. The money could still be traced once it reentered the financial network, but there would be no record of who had received the credstick.
"Twas a small hope that he would be so careless."
"Maybe if we can find some other transactions of the same monetary value as were assigned to Drake's certified sticks, we can pick up the trail by following it from whereever Transbank sends the funds. Sure, some of the matches will just be coincidence, but some might actually be the recipients of Drake's generosity. If we're lucky, some of the names attached to those transactions might mean something."
After two more days of data slogging, they had eliminated likely coincidences. That left three names. Each one connected to at least three transactions whose amounts equalled one of Drake's credsticks.
The first, Nadia Mirin, was no surprise. In her case, the amounts were the smallest, suitable as gifts to one's paramour. The second name was totally unfamiliar, but the pattern of intervening transactions was interesting. Each amount went through a series of transfers, all for the exact value of Drake's credstick. Each thread led to a sealed account in a Denver data haven.
Bitcoin has successfully achieved that which was science fiction prior to 2009. The electronic equivalent of cash. The US Dollar may be the world's largest digital currency, but only bitcoin (and other crypto-currencies) may claim to be the electronic equivalent of cash.
Now... where are those credsticks we were promised? Bitcoin Wallet on a smartphone? Trezor, perhaps?
Saturday, June 22, 2013
4 comments:
No, the exact equivalent of a credstick is a Firmcoin (Firmcoin.com).
As credsticks, Firmcoins a given to the payee off-line, and return to te "financial network" when someone extracts the private key form a Firmcoin.
I'm not surprised to find a Firmcoin in Sci-fi books, since that's how people think about the future of physical money.
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Starkey hearing aid wearers frequently share their stories. Below is an interview with Starkey wearer Lauren that was originally published on the Starkey Hearing Technologies blog in 2017.
Tell me a little bit about yourself?
My name is Lauren. I live in New York City, and I'm a radio buyer.
Walk me through when and how you first noticed your hearing loss?
I personally didn't. My parents did, so I don't know exactly what age I was. The first time they took me into an audiologist, I was probably in kindergarten, so it was just when I was starting school. It was pretty apparent to them that I had some sort of hearing problem from a very early age. It's hereditary from my father's side of the family, so I've probably always had it.
What were some of your biggest challenges with having hearing loss?
I was resistant to the whole thing until I was pretty much an adult. In my mind, I thought that I didn't really have a problem. I got the hearing aids in kindergarten, and wore them on and off until maybe fifth grade, but was just not interested in them. I would take them out and say, "I don't need this. I'll just go sit in the front of the room, and get by that way." And I did get by that way, but I could have benefited by using them more.
And then, by the time fifth grade or sixth grade came around, I just stopped wearing them completely. So I went all of high school and half of college not wearing them.
I would always sit in the front of the classroom. I would go speak to my teachers or professors or whoever afterwards if I missed something, check with my friends, or I basically did extra work to make sure I had it covered. I made it work somehow, whatever I did. Looking back now, it seems crazy.
What made you finally decide to wear your hearing aids regularly?
That was when I turned 20. I was doing a study abroad program in Madrid, and my parents gave me an ultimatum that I had to get a hearing test, get hearing aids and promise to wear them the whole time if I wanted to go. They were like, "You're going to a foreign country on the other side of the world. They speak a different language. You need to be alert and aware at all times." So I did it, I accepted their concern, saw their point, and started giving the hearing aids a chance.
I was in a whole new atmosphere. They were helping me, and I realized that this is something that I have to live with and accept. Over the years, as I got older, it became more apparent to me that I wasn't hearing the way everyone else was.
Funny story: I have a friend who I met very early on in college, and he thought I was a really rude person because he thought I would be ignoring him when I was speaking to him. It wasn't until two years into college when I finally got my hearing aids and I told him that I had a hearing problem.
He tells me, "All these years I just thought you were so rude in the beginning and you needed to warm up to me. And then I realized you were a nice person. But now that you tell me this, it all makes sense. You actually were never ignoring me."
Are things different now that you wear hearing aids? If so, how?
It definitely makes my life a lot easier. Even if it's someone sitting right next to me, if I don't happen to have them in and they start talking to me, I say, "Hold on. Let me put my hearing aids back in." And it's like a whole new world.
Did you have any issues wearing hearing aids at your younger age?
Growing up for sure, I didn't want these weird things in my ear that didn't look that cute, and I didn't want people to ask questions. That was probably 80% of the reason why I was so resistant to wearing them.
For much of my life, I looked at my hearing loss as this handicap that people would judge me for and think was "weird", even though of course it's not something I can control or change. As I have gotten older and more open about my hearing loss and letting others know it exists, I have come to realize that nobody thinks it's a big deal. I cannot think of one person who has had an outwardly negative reaction, because really, why would they?
In the end, it's only been beneficial for me to embrace my hearing loss. I'm more comfortable wearing my hearing aids — and more confident — and I don't think it's as big of a deal.
At this point, to me, it's kind of a joke now. I'm like, "Yeah, I know I'm pretty young, and I just can't hear, so, whatever, who cares."
What would you say to someone who's got hearing loss, but is slow to do anything about it?
I think that if you have hearing loss, you should get hearing aids. It can only improve your life. It's much easier when you can hear everything that's going on around you.
Do you feel more comfortable being that person who has a problem, and you're not addressing it, and you're just having things being repeated to you a bunch of times? Or would you rather just wear a hearing aid that no one's really going to care about or notice because it's not a big deal, and just go on with your life?


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2013-04-02: Sustainable Design International Ltd. (SDI) is pleased to announce that its Managing Director, C.J. Walsh, has been invited to be 'Project Design Architect' / 'Design Professional in Responsible Charge' for a New 32 Storey Hotel in Yunnan Province, People's Republic of China (PRC).
He will have responsibility for the Project's Architectural Concept Design and General Schematic Design … including the overall architectural character and profile of primary exterior surfaces.
Project Approximate Value = € 65 Million (Euros) … excluding interior design, finishes and furnishing (which could end up doubling, or even tripling, the overall project value).
Sustainable Design International Ltd. maintains a strict practice policy of Client Confidentiality.
[ If this Type of Professional Design Service Appeals to You, or Your Organization – Contact Us Immediately ! ]
2012 'Understanding China' Policy Briefing – Friends of Europe & EuroChambres
An estimated One Billion People will be living in China's cities by 2030. This large-scale and very rapid urbanization demands that a sustainable transformation of their urban built, social, economic and institutional environments commences Today – not at some notional point in a far distant future.
Furthermore … replicating a European approach to sustainable design and construction in other regions of the world is doomed to failure. Urban Transformation in China must be adapted to Local Geography, Climate, Climate Change, Social Needs, Cultures, Economy, and Local Severe Events (e.g. earthquakes, flooding). With European support and collaboration … China must, and will, find its own way.
Greening China's Cities of Tomorrow (Spring 2012)
Click the Link Above to read and/or download a PDF File (4.42 Mb)
Report on a One-Day China Advisory Council Roundtable, co-organized by Friends of Europe and EuroChambres, which was held in Brussels on 8 March 2012. This event was part of an 'Understanding China' Programme (mid-2009 to mid-2012), co-funded by the European Commission.
2013 Asian Development Bank (ADB) Guidebook: 'Increasing Climate Change Resilience of Urban Water Infrastructure'
This Guide describes a practical approach to bridge the gap between theoretical analyses of climate change impacts and the planning decisions that need to be made by city authorities and utility managers to increase climate change resilience of the water sector in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, People's Republic of China (PRC). It focuses on answering the questions currently being asked by city planners and managers all over the world, as follows:
- What changes might be caused by climate change ?
- How will these changes affect services and utilities ?
- What can we do now to prepare for them ?
The long lead time required to plan, finance, build, and commission city infrastructure facilities means that decision makers cannot wait for more detailed data on the effects of future climate change, especially those relating to local circumstances, but must make investment decisions based on what is known now and what can be readily predicted. An important principle in this kind of 'robust' decision-making is provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tenet that adaptation investments, which move a city's infrastructure toward sustainable development (such as providing safe drinking water and better sanitary conditions), are justifiable even without climate change.
This Guide is arranged in clear steps to provide direction and information for similar exercises in other areas. Having grown out of a specific locality and its needs, the principles and solutions developed in this guide are founded on real world situations and problems …
Increasing Climate Change Resilience of Urban Water Infrastructure (ADB, 2013)
Click the Link Above to read and/or download a PDF File (2.31 Mb)
Working within the professional constraints of 'client confidentiality' … it is possible to have a general discussion about current building design, construction and operation issues in an international sector which is operating, more and more, beyond national borders … without adequate, or very often any, national and local regulation. By 'regulation', I mean a flexible system of building-related legislation which is operated in conjunction with mandatory and effective technical control.
In order to cope with today's complex built environment and the enormous variation in the size and scale of construction projects … a 'flexible' mix of functional, performance and prescriptive legal requirements is the sharpest and most appropriate instrument.
And you can forget the hype about performance-based building codes coming out of the USA … hot air, and much ado about little !
Of course, the biggest issue of all is the competence of those individuals who work in Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJ's), i.e. technical controllers. Even in the most developed economies of the world … there are many occasions when the level of individual incompetence in an AHJ is astounding … and institutional arrangements within the AHJ itself are a mess, i.e. the AHJ is not fit for purpose.
1. Sustainable Design – Design Process Efficiency & Proper Preparation for Construction
A tremendous amount of waste is associated with and generated by the processes of conventional building design, construction and operation. There is a more up-to-date and efficient way of doing things … an essential way for Sustainable Design … and it's called Building Information Modelling (BIM) !
Furthermore … consider, for a moment, just the initial list of Specialist Consultants who will be engaged directly by the Chinese Client when the project's conceptual design has reached a sufficiently developed stage. How can all of these individuals and organizations – listed in the revised and agreed Project Design Agreement – obtain accurate and reliable 'real time' information about the rapidly evolving project from a central design library / information database … then feed their new work back into the centre without unnecessary delay ? How, next, can everyone else who needs to know, be updated with the new design input … again, without delay ? And perhaps, these consultants may also be based in different countries … working in very different time zones …
- Building Information Modelling (BIM) Consultant
- Local Design Institute (LDI) … a local architectural practice which will produce the project's working drawings, handle local spatial planning and building code approvals, carry out site inspections, and deal directly with construction organization(s), etc., etc.
- Interior Design Consultant
- Traffic / Parking Analysis Consultant
- Curtain Wall Consultant (Curtain Wall, Skylights & Special Roof Structures)
- Retail Market Analysis Consultant
- Landscape Design Consultant
- Quantity Surveying & Cost Estimating Consultant
- Furniture Design Consultant
- Geotechnical, Civil Engineering & Structural Engineering Consultant (including structural performance under fire and earthquake conditions, resistance to fire-induced progressive damage and disproportionate damage … and also including climate resilience)
- Acoustic & Audio-Visual Design Consultant
- Mechanical, Electrical & Plumbing (MEP) Engineering Consultant
- Integrated Building Automation & Management / Telecom / Security / Networking Consultant
- Fire & Life-Safety Engineering Consultant
- Water Feature Consultant
- Wind Tunnel Test Consultant
- Kitchen Equipment and Layout Design Consultant
- Art, Artefact and Accessories Consultant & Procurement Services for Art, Artefacts, and Accessories
- Tenant Storefront Design Consultant
- Helicopter Landing Pad Design Consultant
- Universal Design / Accessibility for All Consultant [including access to the building, electronic, information and communication technologies (EICT's), and services offered at the hotel … and including fire safety, protection and evacuation for all]
2. The 'Design Professional in Responsible Charge' !
The Project Design Agreement requests that the Client receive advice on who might be the different Specialist Consultants listed above. In addition, it will be necessary to demarcate the boundaries within which each Consultant will operate … and, where appropriate, to prescribe a design performance target (see below) for each speciality … which must be 'realized' in the completed and occupied building !
Recalling the many previous posts, here on this Technical Blog, concerning NIST's 2005 & 2008 Recommendations on the 9-11 World Trade Centre Building Collapses in New York City … 'somebody' must ensure that the many individuals and organizations listed above – members of the Larger (2nd Stage) Design Team – use consistent design data and assumptions … must co-ordinate design documents and specifications to identify overlaps and eliminate gaps … must serve as ultimate liaison between the Client, the Local Design Institute, AHJ officials, and the Construction Organization(s) … and must ensure that everybody is on the same communication wavelength, and working towards the same objective in a trans-disciplinary manner.
That 'Somebody' … the Design Professional in Responsible Charge … must be the Project Design Architect !
3. Some Sustainable Design Performance Targets
Actual construction and building user performance shall be carefully (i.e. reliably and precisely) monitored … and independently verified …
A. Basic Functional Requirements … the Building shall comply with the Basic Requirements for Construction Works – elaborated in Annex I of European Union (EU) Regulation No.305/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 9 March 2011, laying down Harmonized Conditions for the Marketing of Construction Products and Repealing Council Directive 89/106/EEC.
See my Post, dated 2011-09-13 … https://www.cjwalsh.ie/2011/09/new-eu-construction-product-regulation-3052011-halleluiah/
B. Good Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) … Two high-level performance indicators have been developed with the aim of protecting Human Health, and are both now referenced in International Standard ISO 21542: 'Building Construction – Accessibility & Usability of the Built Environment' …
– Radon Activity (incl. Rn-222, Rn-220, RnD) in a building should, on average, fall within the range of 10 Bq/m3 to 40 Bq/m3, but shall at no time exceed 60 Bq/m3 ;
– Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Concentrations in a building should not significantly exceed average external levels – typically within the range of 300 parts per million (ppm) to 500 ppm – and shall at no time exceed 800 ppm.
C. Energy Conservation & Efficiency + A 'Positive Energy' Return + Assured Building User Thermal Comfort
See my Post, dated 2013-09-10 … https://www.cjwalsh.ie/2013/09/passivhaus-standard-is-not-enough-in-new-building-projects/
D. Project-Specific Sustainable Fire Engineering Design Objectives
See my Post, dated 2014-04-20 … https://www.cjwalsh.ie/2014/04/sustainable-fire-engineering-design-targeting-mrv/


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Mashed Potatoes with Bacon & Cheddar
By: Greg Henry
Print This Recipe Total time Yield 10Source Adapted from Martha Stewart LivingPublishedIngredients
- 5 pound russet potatoes
- 10 slice bacon
- 8 ounce cream cheese, room temperature
- ½ cup unsalted butter, melted
- 1 cup sour cream
- ¼ cup chives, minced
- 2½ cup cheddar cheese, grated
- 2 teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ teaspoon pepper
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Peel potatoes, and cut into 1‑inch chunks. Place in a large saucepan, and add enough cold water to cover by about 2 inches. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, and reduce to a simmer. Cook until tender and easily pierced with a paring knife, about 20 minutes. Transfer to a colander to drain; return to pan, cover, and set aside.
2. Meanwhile, heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add bacon, and cook until crisp and browned, turning once. Transfer to paper towels to drain; let cool, and crumble into pieces.
3. Using a fork, mash the potatoes in pan until light and fluffy. Add the cream cheese, butter, and sour cream, and stir until combined and smooth. Add the chives, 2 cups cheddar cheese, half the bacon, salt, and pepper. Stir until well combined.
4. Transfer to a buttered 3‑quart baking dish. Top with remaining ½ cup cheddar cheese. Bake until top is slightly golden and potatoes are heated through, about 30 minutes. Remove from oven; garnish with remaining bacon. Serve immediately.
Add this recipe to your holiday menu every year for the rest of your life. You won't be sorry. Mashed Potatoes with Bacon & Cheddar.


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Fully customized WEBCAM chat |
Do you need a FREE webcam chat for your website ? here you can download it !Try out our Red5 Video chat : a full FLASH video chat with audio and video support made using Open Source RED5 technology and Flash : You do no need to purchase expensive solution such as Flash Media Server. If you have your own server, deploy the RED5 server side solution, and install our Red5 Video chat: You've done it ! You have your own Video chat solution including Video, Audio, administration, customizing... (see more features here) If you do not know how to deploy it, please check out the requirements. We can do the job for you including configuration, installation: we will give you keys to get your own video chat for your website. Then you are free to change whatever you want: colors, languages, graphical aspects, add more features since you have the FULL documented code source included ready to be used for your website: Video/Audio chat finally unleashed for your own website ! New version 2016: comes with: multi cams, resizeables windows, unlimited emiticons, avatars, red51.0 support etc..
Get the source code and compile your own webcam chat for your website. |


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Jerry 'The King' Lawler Collapses -- Hospitalized After Heart Attack at WWE Event [Update]
Jerry 'The King' Lawler Hospitalized Heart Attack at WWE Event
10:42 PM PT -- A rep for the WWE tells TMZ .., "Jerry 'The King' Lawler suffered a heart attack while commentating during Monday night's broadcast of 'Monday Night Raw' in Montreal."
The rep adds, "We are hopeful Jerry makes a full recovery and returns to WWE in the near future. Our thoughts are with Jerry and his family."
Wrestling legend Jerry "The King" Lawler was rushed to the ER tonight after collapsing at a WWE event in Montreal, Quebec ... but is now breathing on his own.
62-year-old Lawler -- who famously battled Andy Kaufman back in the '80s -- was sitting ringside to commentate on a match when he suddenly collapsed.
An emergency response crew rushed to his side and performed CPR on Lawler.
He was rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment. The WWE says Lawler is now breathing on his own.
Lawler had wrestled inside the ring roughly 30 minutes before he collapsed.
Story developing ...


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Since Ubuntu 10.04 is an LTS release will it support python 2.7 as a default package maintainer version or at least have a python2.7 package in future?
Since it will be the last major python 2.x release and is intended to remain in place for a long time, I decided to use it. I compiled it from source (After building deps of course) but now and then I find small problems.
Is it safe to define my compiled python 2.7 as the default, as there are some distribution applications that work on python.


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View job on Handshake
Why Aerotek?
Aerotek is a part of Allegis Group, the #1 Staffing Agency in the United States. We are a privately held organization with 250+ offices nationwide, and work with 95% of the Fortune 500 companies.
Working at Aerotek and why you will love it…
We are a team of driven people who push ourselves and those around us to develop personally and professionally. At Aerotek, you can expect a dynamic and competitive work environment. To ensure your success, you will take part in a comprehensive training program, surrounded by a positive and supportive culture that encourages everyone to help develop themselves and others. Aerotek promotes exclusively from within; the majority of the people who start as a Recruiter advance into our sales career path.
As a Recruiter you will impact both our candidates and customers by finding the right people for the right jobs. You will…
- Identify qualified candidates through various recruiting and sourcing tools
- Screen and interview qualified candidates
- Partner with your Account Manager to identify top accounts, target skill sets, and key market segments
- Build and maintain relationships with industry contacts to gain knowledge and generate referrals and sales leads
- Perform various customer service related activities
- Give back to your community by volunteering and partnering with various philanthropic organizations
Let's talk money and perks!
Aerotek offers a base salary of $58,240 with unlimited earning potential through commissions after the hourly training period. Additional benefits include (but not limited to):
- Healthcare benefits
- Dental, Vision & 401(k)
- Paid time off
- Employee discounts
Performance based incentives:
- Quarterly bonuses
- All-expense paid trip
- Company funded investment plan
Do you have the following?
- Bachelor's Degree (preferred)
- Customer or sales focused experience
- Collaborated in a team-oriented environment


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A transition in the making
Detached sales activity boosts February housing market into Transition
After the first two months of the year, Calgary's detached sector continues to drive a slow transition in the housing market. February sales totaled 1,342 units, which is still 19 per cent below long-term averages, but an improvement over the past two years.
As sales kept trending upward, detached inventory levels continued to ease in February. These conditions caused months of supply to fall to 2.4 months, putting less downward pressure on pricing. Unadjusted detached benchmark prices totaled $501,900 in February, which is one per cent lower than prices recorded last year, but slightly higher than January figures.
"There seems to be a new sense of optimism these days," said CREB® president David P. Brown. "Some sellers are feeling upbeat about the changing landscape and the improved chances of selling their home. Other people are looking at the spring market with caution and wondering if we're going to see a higher than expected surge of listings. While there's less product on the market right now, sellers still need to be realistic with their pricing."
The amount of excess inventory eased in the overall market in February, setting the stage for a transition to a more stable market this year. Months of supply totaled 3.4 months, down from five months over last February. At the same time, the sales-to-new-listings ratio trended from a near record February low of 39 per cent last year to 55 per cent this February.
Sales Improving
With sales improving and new listings and inventories contracting—two key measures of market balance, there's good evidence to show that the housing market has started a trend toward more balanced conditions.
"The transition in the housing market appears to be underway," said CREB® chief economist Ann-Marie Lure. "However, it is important to note that this change is primarily being driven by improvements in the detached market and stability in the labour market."
"It will take some time for these conditions to translate into all housing segments and achieve price recovery," said Lurie. "But all indicators continue to point toward a slow transition from a contracting market toward one that is stabilizing at lower levels."
Click here
to view the full City of Calgary monthly stats package.


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The Psychiatry Resident Handbook
How to Thrive in Training
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Seamlessly combining the wisdom of seasoned leaders in psychiatry residency and fellowship training with the perspective of current residents-in-training, The Psychiatry Resident Handbook offers insights and guidance readers will not easily find in any other resource.
An opening description of the state of mental health care in the United States serves as a foundation from which the guide proceeds to address topics in five key areas:
- Identity, including trainees' gender and sexual identities, as well as the experience of individuals from underrepresented communities in medicine and international medical graduates
- Clinical practice, from working with historically oppressed patient populations to telehealth and legal and ethical issues
- Skill-building, including working with technology and social media, developing as a leader, publishing research, and engaging in advocacy
- Career development, with discussions of mentorship and sponsorship, finding a first job, and board certification
- Managing both a career and personal life, including recognizing and mitigating burnout, addressing mistreatment and discrimination, and navigating personal finances
Chapters feature key points that preview the content; specific challenges and strategies in which content is applied to real-life scenarios; self-directed questions that spur reflection and professional identity development; and recommended resources that include psychiatric, medical, business, and other literature, as well as relevant websites and online materials.
For guidance on how to successfully navigate training and pursue a fulfilling personal life, medical students, psychiatry residents, fellows and psychiatry educators will not find a more comprehensive resource than The Psychiatry Resident Handbook.
- I. Understanding Residency
- Chapter 1. Framing the Residency Experience
- Chapter 2. The U.S. Mental Health Care Landscape
- II. Centering Our Identities
- Chapter 3. Centering Our Identities
- Chapter 4. The Underrepresented in Medicine Experience
- Chapter 5. Gender and Sexual Identity
- Chapter 6. Professional and Personal Life: The International Medical Graduate Experience
- III. Approaching Clinical Work
- Chapter 7. Learning to Develop a Case Formulation
- Chapter 8. Working with Historically Oppressed Patient Populations
- Chapter 9. The Psychiatric Emergency
- Chapter 10. On-Call and Night Float
- Chapter 11. Non-Psychiatry Services
- Chapter 12. Inpatient Services
- Chapter 13. The Psychiatric Consult
- Chapter 14. Working in a Multi-Disciplinary Team
- Chapter 15. Outpatient Services
- Chapter 16. Best Practices in Prescribing Medications
- Chapter 17. Best Practices in Providing Psychotherapy
- Chapter 18. Telehealth Services
- Chapter 19. Legal Issues
- Chapter 20. Managing Patient Suicide
- Chapter 21. Public Mental Health
- Chapter 22. Supervision
- IV. Building Skills
- Chapter 23. Blue Ink and Blind Spots: Working Toward Accurate Self-Knowledge Through Self-Awareness
- Chapter 24. Communication Skills and Managing Conflict
- Chapter 25. Embracing Uncertainty: A Prescription Toward Clinical Expertise
- Chapter 26. The Resident as Teacher
- Chapter 27. Navigating Technology in Residency
- Chapter 28. Navigating Use of Social Media
- Chapter 29. Leadership
- Chapter 30. Scholarship
- Chapter 31. Publishing
- Chapter 32. Advocacy
- V. Developing a Career
- Chapter 33. Mentorship and Sponsorship
- Chapter 34. Preparing for Your Career
- Chapter 35. Steps to Securing Your First Job
- Chapter 36. Beyond Training: Board Certification and Continuing Medical Education
- VI. Maintaining a Professional and Personal Life
- Chapter 37. Work-Life Integration: Accomplishing Your Professional and Personal Goals
- Chapter 38. Wellness: Am I Well or am I Burned Out?
- Chapter 39. Handling Mistreatment and Discrimination
- Chapter 40. Physician Impairment
- Chapter 41. Practical Finances: Creating a Budget and Beginning Investing
- VII. Self-Directed Learning
- Appendix
- Rashi Aggarwal, M.D.
Neal D. Amin, M.D., Ph.D.
Nientara Anderson, M.D., M.H.S.
Timothy Ando, M.D.
Melissa R. Arbuckle, M.D., Ph.D.
Cybele Arsan, M.D.
Janet Baek, M.D.
Clayton A. Barnes, M.D., M.P.H.
Sara Baumann, M.D.
Antoine Beayno, M.D.
Iverson Bell, M.D., DLFAPA
Jeana Benton, M.D.
Laurel J. Bessey, M.D.
Seamus Bhatt-Mackin, M.D., FAPA, CGP, AGPA-F
Adam Brenner, M.D.
Deborah L. Cabaniss, M.D.
Jorien Campbell, M.D.
Enrico G. Castillo, M.D., M.S.H.P.M.
Metin Cayirolgu, M.D.
Joanna Chambers, M.D.
Sarah C. Collica, M.D.
Rachel Conrad, M.D.
Takesha Cooper, M.D., M.S.
Ann Crawford-Roberts, M.D., M.P.H.
Erin M. Crocker, M.D.
E. Ann Cunningham, D.O.
Sallie G. De Golia, M.D., M.P.H.
Michael DeGroot, M.D.
Vanessa de la Cruz, M.D.
Matthew L. Edwards, M.D.
Laura Erickson-Schroth, M.D.
Carrie Ernst, M.D.
Ambarin Faizi, D.O.
Aaron Feiger, M.D.
Christine T. Finn, M.D.
Laura Flores, Ph.D. M.D.-Ph.D.
Allison Ford, M.D.
Amy Gallop, M.D.
Daniel E. Gih, M.D.
Teddy G. Goetz, M.D., M.S.
Nichole Goodsmith, M.D., Ph.D.
Tracey M. Guthrie, M.D.
Nekisa Haghighat, M.D., M.P.H.
Elizabeth E. Hathaway, M.D.
Indiana Paul Hill, M.D.
Erick Hung, M.D.
Jeffrey Hunt, M.D.
Jessica Isom, M.D., M.P.H.
Oluwole Jegede, M.D., M.P.H.
James Kahn, M.D.
Michael Kelly, M.D.
Anna Kerlek, M.D.
Clarice Kestenbaum, M.D.
Manal Khan, M.D.
Murad M. Khan, M.D.
You Na P. Kheir, M.D.
Kristen Kim, M.D.
Grace Lee, M.D.
Zachary Lenane, M.D., M.P.H.
Melissa M. Ley-Thomson, M.D.
New Hampshire Karen Li, M.D.
Csilla N. Lippert, M.D., Ph.D.
Juan David Lopez, M.D.
Vishal Madaan, M.D.
Aekta Malhotra, M.D., M.S.
Jennifer E. Manegold, M.D., M.S.
Tessa L. Manning, M.D.
Natalie Maples, Dr.P.H.
Melissa Martinez, M.D.
Phelan E. Maruca-Sullivan, M.D.
Alka Mathur, M.D.
Jessica L. W. Mayer, M.D.
Patrick McGuire, D.O.
Michael O. Mensah, M.D., M.P.H.
Isabella Morton, M.D., M.P.H.
Katharine J. Nelson, M.D.
William Newman, M.D.
Tram Nguyen, M.D.
Aaron Owen, M.D.
Daniella Palermo, M.D.
Amit Parikh, M.D.
Michael Polignano, M.D.
Zheala Qayyum, M.D., M.M.Sc.
Harika Reddy, M.D.
Rebecca Rendleman, M.D.
James I. Rim, J.D., M.D.
Robert Rohrbaugh, M.D.
Anne E. Ruble, M.D., M.P.H.
Mohona Sadhu, M.D.
Lane Scott, M.D.
Sourav Sengupta, M.D., M.P.H.
Jon Sole, M.D.
Gillian L. Sowden, M.D.
Vinod H. Srihari, M.D.
Kristoffer Strauss, M.D., M.B.A.
Oliver M. Stroeh, M.D.
Rajesh R. Tampi, M.D., M.S., DFAPA, DFAAGP
Lia Thomas, M.D.
Jonathan Tsang, M.D.
Sanya Virani, M.D., M.P.H.
Phuong Vo, M.D., M.S.
Ashley E. Walker, M.D.
Raziya S. Wang, M.D.
Diana Willard, M.D.
J. Corey Williams, M.D., M.A.
Matthew G. Yung, M.D
About the Authors
Sallie G. De Golia, M.D., M.P.H., is a Clinical Professor, Associate Chair of Clinician Educator Professional Development, and Co-Residency Director in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California.
Raziya S. Wang, M.D., is the former Designated Institutional Official and Program Director of Psychiatry Residency Training Program at San Mateo County in San Mateo, California. She is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor, in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California.
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Privacy & Cookie policy
1. Introduction
1.1 Educate Against Hate ("We", "Our", "Us") are committed to safeguarding and respecting the privacy of our website visitors. We receive campaigning support from the Department for Education who, as a result, is a joint data controller with us. This policy (together with our terms of use and any documents referred to on it) sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.
1.2 By visiting and using our website you are accepting and consenting to the practices described in this policy.
1.3 Please contact email@example.com for any data protection queries or visit the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) via www.ico.org.uk to lodge a complaint.
2. What personal information is collected
Information we collect about you. With regard to each of your visits to our site we will automatically collect information including (without limitation) the following:
(a) the internet protocol address used to connect your computer to the internet, time zone setting, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system and platform, referral source, length of visit, page views and website navigation paths;
(b) information about your visit, including the full Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), clickstream to, through and from our site, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks and mouse-overs, methods used to browse away from the page) and any 'phone number used to call us.
3. Using personal information
3.1 Our lawful basis for processing your data is consent, legitimate interest or public interest. We use analytic tools on your data in a way you would reasonably expect. This helps us to improve the website and enhance your web experience. You can find more information on this in paragraph 10.
3.2 Your privacy settings can be used to limit the publication of your information on our website, although it may affect functionality, and you may adjust the privacy controls on the internet browser that you use to access our website.
3.3 We will not, without your express consent, supply your personal information to any third party for the purpose of their or any other third party's direct marketing.
4. Disclosing personal information
4.1 You agree that we have the right to share your personal information with:-
(a) any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries as defined in section 1159 of the UK Companies Act 2006;
(b) selected third parties including but not limited to:-
– business partners, suppliers and sub-contractors for the performance of any contract that we enter into with them or you;
– analytics and search engine providers that assist us in the improvement and optimization of our site.
4.2 We will disclose your personal information to third parties:
(a) to the extent that we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation;
(b) in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;
(c) in order to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements or to protect our rights, property or safety and that of our customers or others (including exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);
(d) in the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we will disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets; and
(e) if we or substantially all of our assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by us about our customers will be one of the transferred assets.
5. International data transfers
5.1 Information that we collect will be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which we operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this policy. It will also be processed by staff engaged in, among other things, the provision of support services. Information that we collect may be transferred to and stored at (including but not limited to) the following countries which do not have data protection laws equivalent to those in force in the European Economic Area: the United States of America, Chile, Taiwan and Singapore. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.
5.2 Unfortunately the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to prevent unauthorized access.
6. Data Subject's Rights
The Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679) (GDPR) (collectively, the Act) gives you control of your data. It states you have a right to request a copy of your information and ask us to correct your information that is wrong, delete it or restrict the use of it for specific purposes. To access your information, you will need to send us a Subject Access Request and two pieces of identification:
(a) A government issued photo identification, such as a passport or driving licence; and
(b) A document dated within the last 3 months showing your current address, such as a utility bill.
We will then respond within 1 month of receipt of your request. There is no cost to access your data, but we have the right to charge you a reasonable fee if we believe your request is manifestly unfound or excessive.
7. Amendments
We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website. Please check this page occasionally to see any updates or changes to our privacy policy.
8. Cookies
8.1. Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.
8.2 By continuing to browse our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
8.3 A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.
8.4 Cookies may be either "persistent" cookies or "session" cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.
8.5 Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.
8.6 Cookies can be used by web servers to identify and track users as they navigate different pages on a website and identify users returning to a website.
9. Our cookies
9.1 We only use session cookies.
9.2 The names of the cookies that we use on our website, and the purposes for which they are used, are set out below. We use a session cookie to:
(a) track how users interact with the website;
(b) improve the website's usability;
(c) prevent fraud and improve the security of the website;
(d) facilitate the use of our website search engine.
10. Analytics cookies
10.1 We use Google Analytics to gather and analyse traffic which accesses our website.
10.2 Our analytics service provider generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies.
10.3 The analytics cookies used by our website have the following names: _ga, _gat, _gid, __utma, __utmt, __utmb, __utmc, __utmz and __utmv.
10.4 The information generated relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of our website.
10.5 Our analytics service provider's privacy policy is available at: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/.
11. Third party cookies
11.1 Our website also uses third party cookies over which we have no control.
11.2 You can view, delete or add interest categories associated with your browser by visiting: http://www.google.com/settings/ads. You can also opt out of the AdSense partner network cookie using those settings or using the NAI's (Network Advertising Initiative's) multi-cookie opt-out mechanism at: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices. However, these opt-out mechanisms themselves use cookies, and if you clear the cookies from your browser your opt-out will not be maintained. To ensure that an opt-out is maintained in respect of a particular browser, you may wish to consider using the Google browser plug-in available at: https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin.
12. Blocking cookies
12.1 Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies; for example:
(a) in Internet Explorer (version 11) you can block cookies using the cookie handling override settings available by clicking "Tools", "Internet Options", "Privacy" and then "Advanced";
(b) in Firefox (version 47) you can block all cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options", "Privacy", selecting "Use custom settings for history" from the drop-down menu, and unticking "Accept cookies from sites"; and
(c) in Chrome (version 52), you can block all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Content settings", and then selecting "Block sites from setting any data" under the "Cookies" heading.
12.2 Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites.
12.3 If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website.
13. Deleting cookies
13.1 You can delete cookies already stored on your computer; for example:
(a) in Internet Explorer (version 11), you must manually delete cookie files (you can find instructions for doing so at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/internet-explorer/delete-manage-cookies#ie=ie-11);
(b) in Firefox (version 47), you can delete cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options" and "Privacy", then selecting "Use custom settings for history" from the drop-down menu, clicking "Show Cookies", and then clicking "Remove All Cookies"; and
(c) in Chrome (version 52), you can delete all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Clear browsing data", and then selecting "Cookies and other site and plug-in data" before clicking "Clear browsing data".
13.2 Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.
14. Our details
You can contact us by email using email@example.com


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The Night Came Slowly
I am losing my interest in human beings; in the significance of their lives and their actions. Some one has said it is better to study one man than ten books. I want neither books nor men; they make me suffer. Can one of them talk to me like the night – the Summer night? Like the stars or the caressing wind?
The night came slowly, softly, as I lay out there under the maple tree. It came creeping, creeping stealthily out of the valley, thinking I did not notice. And the outlines of trees and foliage nearby blended in one black mass and the night came stealing out from them, too, and from the east and west, until the only light was in the sky, filtering through the maple leaves and a star looking down through every cranny.
The night is solemn and it means mystery.
Human shapes flitted by like intangible things. Some stole up like little mice to peep at me. I did not mind. My whole being was abandoned to the soothing and penetrating charm of the night.
The katydids began their slumber song: they are at it yet. How wise they are. They do not chatter like people. They tell me only: "sleep, sleep, sleep." The wind rippled the maple leaves like little warm love thrills.
Why do fools cumber the Earth! It was a man's voice that broke the necromancer's spell. A man came to-day with his "Bible Class." He is detestable with his red cheeks and bold eyes and coarse manner and speech. What does he know of Christ? Shall I ask a young fool who was born yesterday and will die tomorrow to tell me things of Christ? I would rather ask the stars: they have seen him.
Source : https://americanliterature.com/author/kate-chopin/short-story/the-night-came-slowly