text:
This unit is now named "Elena" after Elena Persichilli (1940-2016), the beloved mother of the Virtual Telescope founder. She always supported his interests in astronomy since he was a child.
The main instrument available at the Virtual Telescope is a state-of-the-art Planewave 17″ – f/6.8 (432/2939 mm) Corrected Dall-Kirkham Astrograph telescope. It offers a large corrected field of view, to provide an amazing image quality with large CCD. The OTA consists in a carbon fiber truss, giving a perfect stability against thermal variations. The tube is installed on a Software Bisque Paramount ME II robotic mount, the best hardware of this kind available in the world, while as for the detector a SBIG STL-6303E research grade CCD camera is used. A filter wheel offers the following filters by Baader Planetarium: LRGB (for color imaging) and H-alpha (bandwidth: 7nm), OIII (bandwidth: 8.5nm) and SII (bandwidth: 8.5nm) for narrowband imaging. Unfiltered images are also possible, to offer the maximum amount of light for extremely faint objects. The image scale is of 0.63″/pixel, while the mean on site seeing is of 1.8″: high resolution images of deep sky objects are well possible. The field of view (FOV) is of 32.3 x 21.6 arcminutes.
The large aperture make possible very deep imaging, useful to detect really faint objects, like small asteroids or faint variable stars. The period error is of about 1″ peak-to-peak, so unguided exposures are easily possible at full resolution with integration time of five minutes or so. This is very important for survey works, where saving the time otherwise needed to look for a suitable guiding star means more observing and discovering chances. The pointing accuracy shows a better than 5″ RMS all-sky error. The whole system is controlled by the state of the art TheSkyX suite, with TPoint and Camera add-ons.
Some applications: the large, corrected FOV makes this unit unmatched for breathtaking images, as well has large objects imaging (like bright comets, galaxies and nebulae), while the large aperture makes possible good time-resolved photometry on stars fainter than mag. 18(!) and astrometry of objects fainter than mag 23.0. The observing site offers a SQM better than 21.5.
The Minor Planet Center's observatory code associated to our facility in Manciano, Italy, is M50 – Virtual Telescope Project.
Weather conditions are available here
Support The Virtual Telescope Project!
Support us! Please, donate and receive an EXCLUSIVE image of potentially hazardous asteroid 2011 UL21, taken at the time of its fly-by and much more, specifically made for supporters like you!
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text:
Simple, no-coding setup
Add a cron monitor in only minutes. Give a name, specify the cron expression, and select who to notify. You're done!
No more failed cron jobs or backups
Say goodbye to silent failures or those slipping under the radar. Gain better visibility into your jobs by viewing their availability and performance over time.
Instant alerting
Configure alerts to notifiy you through SMS or email as well as through integrations like PagerDuty, HipChat, and Slack.
Heartbeat Monitoring
Know whether or not your task is able to communicate with your server. Be alerted when they don't ping back.
How it Works?
Add a cron monitor, setup alerts, be notified when the job fails or extends its specified time period, & analyze their performance using our reports.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Cheesy Cajun Shrimp & Rice Casserole
- 2 pounds unpeeled, large fresh shrimp
- 1/4 cup butter
- 1 small red onion, chopped*
- 1/2 cup chopped red bell pepper*
- 1/2 cup chopped yellow bell pepper*
- 1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper*
- 4 garlic cloves, minced
- 2 cups fresh or frozen sliced okra
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 1 (10 3/4-ounce) can cream of shrimp soup**
- 1/2 cup dry white wine
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 3 cups cooked long-grain rice
- 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
- Garnishes: quartered lemon slices, fresh flat-leaf parsley sprigs
Peel shrimp; devein, if desired.
Melt 1/4 cup butter in large skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and next 3 ingredients; sauté 7 minutes or until tender. Add garlic, and sauté 1 minute. Stir in okra, lemon juice, and salt; sauté 5 minutes. Add shrimp, and cook 3 minutes or until shrimp turn pink. Stir in soup and next 4 ingredients until blended. Pour into a lightly greased 11- x 7-inch baking dish. Sprinkle evenly with Parmesan cheese.
Bake at 350° for 15 to 20 minutes or until casserole is bubbly and cheese is lightly browned. Garnish, if desired.
*1 (10-ounce) package frozen onions and peppers may be substituted for fresh onion and bell peppers.
**1 (10 3/4-ounce) can cream of mushroom soup may be substituted for cream of shrimp soup.
Note: Unbaked casserole may be made one day in advance. Cover and refrigerate. Let stand at room temperature 30 minutes before baking as directed. To freeze unbaked casserole, prepare as directed, omitting Parmesan cheese. Cover tightly, and freeze. Let stand at room temperature 30 minutes before baking. Bake, covered, at 350° for 50 minutes. Uncover; sprinkle evenly with Parmesan cheese, and bake 10 more minutes or until cheese is lightly browned.


text:
Last week, around 9 pm I noticed that it was a little chilly inside my house and realized that my furnace had turned off. Being the handy fellow that I am, I poked and prodded at the furnace to try and get it working, but had no such luck, and had to find a quick solution, as it was getting colder by the minute.
Since it was already late, I immediately went on Facebook and asked my neighborhood's Facebook group if anyone knows a reliable person who deals with heating and furnaces. Within five minutes, three different people sent me messages with the contact information for Len Minuk, owner of Temp▪A▪Sure.
Temp▪A▪Sure operates 24/7 and helps customers fix issues related to heating, cooling, hot water, gas lines, fireplaces and standby power generator equipment within the GTA. Regrettably, I was unable to reach Len that evening since he was already asleep (it was after 11 pm), but I heard from him early the next morning and he indicated he would take care of my issue as soon as possible. Even though Len was extremely busy, he said he would stop by in the morning to at least take a look at the furnace, and if it was a small repair he would do it immediately, or he would return in the afternoon if it required more work.
Fortunately the problem was minor and Len was able to fix it as soon as he arrived at our house. In fact, Len diagnosed the problem within a couple of minutes of arriving, and had our furnace working soon after. As the house began to warm up, Len stayed with us for an additional 15 minutes to ensure the job was complete and the problem was completely solved. Len also noticed we were using the wrong size filter and offered to get me one that was the correct size, as it apparently makes a huge difference.
While a lot of people in the home comfort industry "talk" about service, it is clear Len provides it. Len cares about his customers and his profession, and takes pride in his workmanship. He even called me to follow up, later in the day, and normally would call the following day as well, but since this was minor, I told him not to worry about it.
I am so glad Len took time out of his busy schedule to fix our furnace on one of the coldest days of the year, when we needed it the most. We are very fortunate to have found him and are very glad we did. We will definitely use him again if we ever need any of his services.
Thankfully I can now put away the extra blankets and give back all the space heaters I borrowed.


text:
What You Need to Know When Applying for Life Insurance
When you buy a life insurance policy, you are essentially transferring your financial risk to a life insurer which then becomes obligated to pay your beneficiaries based on the contracted amount of death benefit purchased. The life insurer is able to assume the risk because, based on its data, it knows when you are expected to die. It bases your premium payment on the assumption that you will live your full life expectancy. However, in order to make that determination about you, it needs to have a complete picture of your health condition, including your current status, your medical history, your family's medical history, and your life style habits. So, as part of the life insurance application process, it orders medical records, asks many questions about your life style, and it typically requires a medical exam performed by one of its paramedical examiners.
What to Expect with a Life Insurance Application Review
With most life insurers, a medical exam is required for people age 40 and above who apply for more than $100,000 of coverage. Depending on your age and the amount of insurance you are applying for, a medical exam could consist of a range of tests, such as a urine sample, blood tests, an EKG. If you have certain health issues or past medical treatment, additional tests may be required. The older you are and the higher amount of coverage applied for, the more tests are required. The younger you are and the less amount of coverage you need, you may only need to supply a urine sample and blood work. Medical exam requirements do vary among the life insurers, where one may require more tests than others in similar circumstances.
Life insurers will first review your medical history based on the information you provided on the life insurance application. There are several questions on the application related to your current health status and your medical history. In signing the application, you authorize the insurer to obtain your medical records from any medical provider you list on the application. It can also access your medical records through the Medical Information Bureau (MIB), which compiles records from the all providers. While it's not uncommon for people to forget parts of their medical history, you should be as thorough as you can in completing the medical questionnaire on the life insurance application.
Once you submit your application, the life insurer will schedule an exam to be performed by one of its paramedical examiners. The exam can be performed at your home or work location, and take less than 20 minutes. You will be asked more questions about your medical history and your life style habits, after which you will be weighed and measured. The examiner will then perform some basic diagnostics such as drawing blood, taking your blood pressure, and, in some cases performing an EKG test.
How to Ensure Positive Medical Exam Results
It's not at all uncommon for people to "underperform" on their medical exam. The difference between a preferred status and a standard premium status can be just a few ticks on a meter or scale, which the examiner has to record and submit to the underwriter. Although you can't compensate for some health issues, you can prepare for a medical exam in a way that can improve your results:
- Be well rested with at least two nights of solid sleep just prior to the exam
- Abstain from any alcohol, coffee and other caffeinated beverages
- Avoid salty foods or foods that contain high cholesterol within one full day of the exam
- Rest. Minimize your physical activity the day before the exam
It's up to the Underwriters
Once the exam results and medical records are compiled, the life insurer's underwriters will review them. For a clean bill of health, they will approve the issue of the policy as applied. However, if records or exam results indicate any issue that could adversely affect your health, now or in the future (i.e. high blood pressure or cholesterol, a high height/weight ratio), they will do one of four things: 1) Change the status of the policy – i.e., lower the status from preferred to standard – which can increase the premium cost, 2) Apply a rating that will increase the premium amount, 3) require additional records or tests, or 4) Decline the policy.
For minor issues, such as slightly elevated blood pressure or height/weight ratios, the insurer might allow retesting after six months, and, if they fall within normal ranges, they will change the status or remove the rating.
*This content is developed from sources believed to be providing accurate information. The information provided is not written or intended as tax or legal advice and may not be relied on for purposes of avoiding any Federal tax penalties. Individuals are encouraged to seek advice from their own tax or legal counsel. Individuals involved in the estate planning process should work with an estate planning team, including their own personal legal or tax counsel. Neither the information presented nor any opinion expressed constitutes a representation by us of a specific investment or the purchase or sale of any securities. Asset allocation and diversification do not ensure a profit or protect against loss in declining markets. This material was developed and produced by Advisor Websites to provide information on a topic that may be of interest. Copyright 2022 Advisor Websites.


text:
The Book of Truth
- Chapter 1163 -
Your Faith Will Be Tested Like Never before
Tuesday, July 1st, 2014 @ 20:50
My dearly beloved daughter, the love, which radiates from My disciples who follow Me at this time, is all encompassing. It is the Light, which is aflame amidst you that is sustaining My Love, which is felt everywhere I Am revered. The Holy Spirit continues to be poured down upon My Church on Earth, as it struggles against the trials and tribulations, which face it every day.
The spirit of darkness, however, continues to weigh heavily upon nations, as every effort is made by the agents of the evil one to drive out every trace of Me, My Word and My True Church, from the face of the Earth. Be assured, no matter how heavy your burden is, that I Am with you, walking beside you and helping you to overcome adversity, every step of your journey. Your faith will be tested like never before; your courage may leave you from time to time; your perseverance tested to its limits and your acceptance of the Truth challenged. You will be picked on; scoffed at and sneered at, all of which will be caused by the wicked acts of those who Satan uses to fight Me, Jesus Christ. But nothing will destroy My Church – My true followers.
Those who remain obedient to the Word of God, as it has existed for so long, will continue to represent Me on Earth. My Protection will cover you like an invisible sheath and your faith will never diminish once you fight with the Sword of God.
Remain true to Me and My Light will continue to shine upon the human race. My Promise is that My Church will remain intact, although smaller than it is now, until the Great Day of the Lord dawns.
Your Jesus


text:
What's at stake as 13,000 workers go on strike at major US auto makers
DETROIT (AP) — About 13,000 auto workers have walked off the job at three targeted factories after their union leaders couldn't reach a deal with Detroit's automakers.
The United Auto Workers union is seeking big raises and better benefits from General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. They want to get back concessions that the workers made years ago, when the companies were in financial trouble.
A small percentage of the union's 146,000 members walked off the job at a GM assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Ford factory in Wayne, Michigan, near Detroit; and a Stellantis Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.
Shawn Fain, the combative president of the UAW, says the targeted strikes will give the union leverage in contract talks and keep the auto companies guessing about its next move.
It could also make the union's $825 million strike fund last much longer.
Both sides began exchanging wage and benefit proposals last week. Though some incremental progress appears to have been made — General Motors made a new, richer offer just hours before the strike deadline — it was not enough to avoid walkouts. The strike could cause significant disruptions to auto production in the United States.
Here's a rundown of the issues standing in the way of new contract agreements and what consumers could face in a prolonged strike:
The union is asking for 36% raises in general pay over four years — a top-scale assembly plant worker gets about $32 an hour now. In addition, the UAW has demanded an end to varying tiers of wages for factory jobs; a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay; the restoration of traditional defined-benefit pensions for new hires who now receive only 401(k)-style retirement plans; and a return of cost-of-living pay raises, among other benefits.
Perhaps most important to the union is that it be allowed to represent workers at 10 electric vehicle battery factories, most of which are being built by joint ventures between automakers and South Korean battery makers. The union wants those plants to receive top UAW wages. In part that's because workers who now make components for internal combustion engines will need a place to work as the industry transitions to EVs.
Currently, UAW workers hired after 2007 don't receive defined-benefit pensions. Their health benefits are also less generous. For years, the union gave up general pay raises and lost cost-of-living wage increases to help the companies control costs. Though top-scale assembly workers earn $32.32 an hour, temporary workers start at just under $17. Still, full-time workers have received profit-sharing checks ranging this year from $9,716 at Ford to $14,760 at Stellantis.
Fain himself has acknowledged that the union's demands are "audacious." But he contends that the richly profitable automakers can afford to raise workers' pay significantly to make up for what the union gave up to help the companies withstand the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the Great Recession.
Over the past decade, the Detroit Three have emerged as robust profit-makers. They've collectively posted net income of $164 billion, $20 billion of it this year. The CEOs of all three major automakers earn multiple millions in annual compensation.
The automakers have moved closer to the UAW's demands on wages, but a big gulf remains.
On Thursday, GM said it boosted its offer to a 20% wage increase, including 10% in the first year, over four years. CEO Mary Barra said in a letter to employees, "We are working with urgency and have proposed yet another increasingly strong offer with the goal of reaching an agreement tonight."
Ford is also offering a 20% boost in pay. The last known offer from Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler) was 17.5%, but the company has since made another.
Fain has dismissed these proposals as inadequate to protect workers from inflation and reward them for building the vehicles that have made the Detroit Three so profitable.
The companies have rebuffed the union's demands as too expensive. They say they will spend vast amounts of capital in the coming years to continue to build combustion-engine vehicles while at the same time designing electric vehicles and building battery and assembly plants for the future, and can't afford to be saddled with significantly higher labor costs.
They also contend that a lavish UAW contract would force up the retail prices of vehicles, pricing Detroit automakers above competitors from Europe and Asia. Outside analysts say that when wages and benefits are included, Detroit Three assembly plant workers now receive around $60 an hour while workers at Asian automaker plants in the U.S. get $40 to $45.
Fain said there will be no negotiations Friday because union leaders will join rank-and-file workers on picket lines.
The union could pick more plants to strike in the coming days, and it all depends on progress — or lack of it — at the bargaining table, the UAW president says.
"If the companies continue to bargain in bad faith or continue to stall or continue to give us insulting offers, then our strike is going to continue to grow," Fain said. The union's strategy, he said, "will keep the companies guessing" about how the union might escalate the fight.
Eventually. GM, Ford and Stellantis have been running their factories around the clock to build up supplies on dealer lots. But that's also putting more money into the pockets of UAW members and strengthening their financial cushions.
At the end of August, the three automakers collectively had enough vehicles to last for 70 days. After that, they would run short. Buyers who need vehicles would likely go to nonunion competitors, who would be able to charge them more.
Vehicles are already scarce when compared with the years before the pandemic, which touched off a global shortage of computer chips that hobbled auto factories.
Sam Fiorani, an analyst with AutoForecast Solutions, a consulting firm, said the automakers had roughly 1.96 million vehicles on hand at the end of July. Before the pandemic, that figure was as high as 4 million.
"A work stoppage of three weeks or more," Fiorani said, "would quickly drain the excess supply, raising vehicle prices and pushing more sales to non-union brands."
Yes, if it's long and especially in the Midwest, where most auto plants are concentrated. The auto industry accounts for about 3% of the U.S. economy's gross domestic product — its total output of goods and services — and the Detroit automakers represent about half of the total U.S. car market.
If a walkout occurs, workers would receive about $500 a week in strike pay — far short of what they earn while they're working. As a result, millions of dollars in wages would be removed from the economy.
The automakers would be hurt, too. If a strike against all three companies lasted just 10 days, it would cost them nearly a billion dollars, the Anderson Economic Group has calculated. During a 40-day UAW strike in 2019, GM alone lost $3.6 billion.
The strike could also test President Joe Biden's claim that he's the most pro-union president in U.S. history.
It's hard to say. The companies have plenty of cash on hand to withstand a strike. The union has its $825 million strike fund. But it would be depleted in just under three months if all 146,000 workers were to walk out. That's where the targeted strikes come in — helping the union stretch its money if the walkout persists into this winter.
The union's inability to organize U.S. factories run by foreign automakers represents a disadvantage for the union because those companies pay less than Detroit companies do.
But organized labor has been flexing its muscles and winning big contract settlements in other businesses. In its settlement with UPS, for example, the Teamsters won wages for its top-paid drivers of $49 an hour after five years.
So far this year, 247 strikes have occurred involving 341,000 workers — the most since Cornell University began tracking strikes in 2021, though still well below the numbers during the 1970s and 1980s.


text:
[EuroPython 2011] Caroline Tice - 23 June 2011 in "Track Ravioli"
LLDB is an open source compiler currently under development. LLDB incorporates Python in several different ways: From the command line, one can drop into an interactive Python script interpreter, entering normal Python interactive commands and having them interpreted and executed. In addition, the LLDB debugger has a programming API that allows users to call actual debugger functions and access real debugger objects. This API is run through SWIG and converted into a Python module that gets automatically imported into the interactive interpreter inside LLDB. The upshot of this is that, in the Python mode, users can call the API functions as if they were regular Python functions. This is turn means that users can do things like hit a breakpoint, call the appropriate API functions to get the actual current frame object, check to see if the caller function several frames up the stack is a particular function, and if so, perform some other interesting action. LLDB also allows for breakpoint commands to be written in Python (which therefore allows them to call the API functions), as well as having a command that interprets and executes a single line of Python.
Because the API and all of the debugger functionality is available in a Python module, it is also possible to write a debugger front end completely in Python and have it import the LLDB module and call the LLDB API functions (which calls into the LLDB shared library), to create a new debugger front end. Our test suite takes advantage of this to run tests on the LLDB library without having to start up an interactive LLDB debubgger session.
There were many interesting problems encountered and overcome in getting all of this to work. LLDB combines both interactive Python and embedded Python. There were some interesting things worked out so that a single Python environment dictionary is used for the entire debugger session: A user can pop into and out of the interactive interpreter and have access at any time to anything defined in any previous visit to the interactive interpreter (within the same debug session); breakpoint commands have access to everything defined in the interactive session; so do embedded script commands. It gets even more complicated, because LLDB can have multiple debugger sessions alive at once, and each debugger session has its own Python interpreter with its own dictionary and must not be allowed to interfere with another session's state. In this talk I will discuss how we implemented many of these features in LLDB, pointing out some of the more interesting problems we encountered and how we overcame them, and demonstrate it all working in LLDB.


text: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Generations after the fact, the House of Representatives is awarding congressional gold medals to a World War II battalion. The 6888th was the only all-Black female unit to serve overseas, and its mission was to deliver backlogged mail to American soldiers. In a time before text and email, those envelopes were the only connection with home, and the battalion delivered 17 million pieces of mail in three months. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


text:
Seasonal Health: how to cope in hot weather
Most of us welcome hot weather, but when it's too hot, there are health risks. During heatwaves, more people than usual get seriously ill. Make sure hot weather does not harm you or anyone you know.
Why is a heatwave a problem?
The main risks posed by a heatwave are:
— not drinking enough water (dehydration)
— overheating, which can make symptoms worse for people who already have problems with their heart or breathing
— heat exhaustion and heatstroke
Who's most at risk?
A heatwave can affect anyone, but the most vulnerable people are:
— older people – especially those over 75 and female
— those who live on their own or in a care home
— people who have a serious or long-term illness including heart or lung conditions, diabetes, kidney disease, Parkinson's disease or some mental health conditions
— people who are on multiple medicines that may make them more likely to be badly affected by hot weather
— those who may find it hard to keep cool – babies and the very young, the bed bound, those with drug or alcohol addictions or with Alzheimer's disease
— people who spend a lot of time outside or in hot places – those who live in a top-floor flat, the homeless or those whose jobs are outside
Tips for coping in hot weather
Keep out of the heat if you can. If you have to go outside, stay in the shade especially between 11am and 3pm, wear sunscreen, a hat and light clothes, and avoid exercise or activity that makes you hotter.
Cool yourself down. Have cold food and drinks, avoid alcohol, caffeine and hot drinks, and have a cool shower or put cool water on your skin or clothes.
Keep your living space cool. Close windows during the day and open them at night when the temperature outside has gone down. Electric fans can help if the temperature is below 35 degrees. Check the temperature of rooms, especially where people at higher risk live and sleep.
For more information visit GOV.UK: Beat the heat: staying safe in hot weather.
You can also get help from the environmental health office at your local council, if you think a hot house is affecting your health or someone else's. They can inspect a rented home for hazards to health, including excess heat.
Find your local council (GOV.UK)
Urgent advice:Watch out for signs of heat-related illness
If you or someone else feels unwell with a high temperature during hot weather, it may be heat exhaustion or heatstroke.
Find out about the signs of heat exhaustion and heatstroke, and when to get help


text:
The VT6103F is a Physical Layer device for Ethernet 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX using category 5 Unshielded, Type 1 Shielded, and Fiber Optic cables. This VLSI device is designed for easy implementation of 10 / 100 Mbps Fast Etherent LANs. It interfaces to a MAC through an MII interface ensuring interoperability between products from different vendors.
December 24, 2016


text:
I'd like to think David Taylor and I have a lot in common. For instance, he was born in New England, and well, I lived in New England for a long, long time–23 years to be exact. We're both admittedly slightly vertically challenged, and we also both started quilting the same year, in 1999. Unfortunately these very (loose) similarities end there because he is infinitely more gifted and talented in quilting than I am, and has since won numerous prestigious awards including the Fairfield Master Award for Contemporary Artistry from the International Quilt Association, Best of Show at International Quilt Festival/Chicago (twice), among many others.
Formerly a graphic design artist in the newspaper field, David Taylor is now a full-time art quilter who is also a highly sought-after quilt instructor for free-motion quilting and his unique pictorial appliqué technique.
David told me that he has recently moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a house with a brand new studio space, and as someone who is still (a year later) trying to put my studio together in my own home in Houston, I was eager to hear more about his new studio digs in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Pokey: What was most important to you in designing your studio space?
David: The most important factor in my studio layout was having space for my fabric addiction. My previous apartment looked liked an episode from "Fabric Hoarders: Buried Alive." When I visit other quilters' studios, their fabric is stored in bins or baskets (with lids!). I really like being able to actually see my fabric. It makes my heart feel good to see all of the fabric and to be able to 'pet' it. I also wanted a really nice table with space for storage. My friend Jim Vail of Willow Creek Craftsmen custom built my table for my short 'hobbit' stature.
Pokey: Many times when artists move domiciles or studios they embark on a Big Clean, and pitch things that they no longer use in their art. Was this the case for you?
David: Being a borderline 'hoarder,' I didn't discard anything. And, since I only work on one project at a time, as my work is so intensive, I don't really have UFOs. I did find a Piecemaker's calendar quilt that I started in 2003, before I had even considered evolving into a quilting and appliqué teacher, and when I only knew how to machine appliqué! I have loved the pattern since I bought it, and now I'm working on finishing it. There are 13 barn blocks. I have so far finished seven of them. I should be working on a new quilt, but I have a very empty wall in my new house that needs a large quilt hanging on it. And the barn blocks make my heart happy.
Pokey: What advice or tip do you have for someone wanting to design or revamp their studio space?
David: It's worth every penny to make the investment in a studio. After years of just 'making do' with inexpensive furniture (I used to have an old metal drafting table from my graphic artist days as a sewing table and shelving came from the consignment store) and having my fabric stored in cardboard boxes, it's quite a treat to have sturdy fixtures! The table doesn't shake when I'm stitching with the serger! Having custom furniture made to fit the space I have has made a huge difference in my comfort level.
For those interested in creating pictorial quilts and would like to learn from David, he will be teaching his "Turn Photos into Quilts with Appliqué" workshop next month, February 22-24, at The Great Expectations Creativity Center in La Grange, Texas, and there are a few spots left. If interested, click here to learn more about this unique opportunity!


text:
And he shows 'em, pearly white
Just a jack knife has Macheath, dear
And he keeps it, keeps it way out of sight
When that shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows, they begin to spread
Fancy white gloves though has Macheath, dear
So there's rarely, never one trace of red
On the sidewalk, one Sunday mornin'
Lies a body oozin' life
Someone's sneaking 'round the corner
Could that someone, perhaps, perchance, be Mack the Knife?
From a tugboat on the river goin' slow
A cement bag, it is dropping down
Yeah, the cement is just for the weight, dear
You can make a large bet Macheath is back in town
My man Louie Miller, he split the scene, babe
After drawin' out all the bread from his stash
Now Macheath spends just like a pimp, babe
Do you suppose that our boy, he did something rash?
Ah, old Satchmo, Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darrin
They did this song nice, Lady Ella too
They all sang it, with so much feeling
That Old Blue Eyes, he ain't gonna add nothing new
But with Quincy's big band, right behind me
Swinging hard, Jack, I know I can't lose
When I tell you, all about Mack the Knife babe
It's an offer, you can never refuse
We got George Benson, we got Newman & Foster
We got the Brecker Brothers, and Hampton's bringing up the rear
All these bad cats, and more, are in the band now
They make the greatest sounds, you ever gonna hear
Hey Sookie Taudry, Jenny Diver, Polly Peachum, Old Miss Lulu Brown
Oh the line forms, on the right dear
Now that Macheath, I mean that man Macheath
Yeah he's bad, mercy mercy
Yeah he's badder than old Leroy Brown
You better lock your door, and call the law
Because Macheath's, that bum,
He's back in town


text:
The Opus Hong Kong for Swire Properties is the city's newest luxury residential building situated on Stubbs Road on The Peak high above the city. With its green hillside location, the Opus enjoys a bit of nature within close proximity to the urban space. The 12-story tower is over the top in terms of amenities and has only 12 residences – 10 apartments at 6,000 sq ft each that occupy an entire floor of the building and two double-level garden apartments on the bottom floors. Each residence has access to rooftop swimming pools and sweeping views of the city.
The organic form of the building resembles reeds swaying in the breeze with structural columns slowly twisting out of the rock base. Gehry's design allows for open-plan apartments that flow around a central core with a sinuous façade composed almost entirely of glass. Each apartment is airy and light filled with natural daylight and natural ventilated. "With its remarkable views and lush green hillside, OPUS HONG KONG's extraordinary location offered us the opportunity to create something unique, something that is unlikely to be replicated anywhere again," said Frank Gehry. "The building has been designed to enhance and reflect Hong Kong's distinctive landscape, and is custom-made for the city it overlooks."
Via WAN
Images ©Swire Properties


text:
Featured Properties
hot offer
Our Agents
Michael Rutter
buying agent
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[Following up
Monday's Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American
histories connected to the holiday's original identity as Decoration
On one of the
great American speeches, and why it'd be so important to add to our collective
In a long-ago
guest post on Ta-Nehisi
Coates's Atlantic blog, Civil War historian
Andy Hall highlighted Frederick Douglass's amazing 1871 Decoration Day
speech (full text available at that first hyperlink). Delivered at Virginia's
Arlington National Cemetery, then as now the single largest resting place of
U.S. soldiers, Douglass's short but incredibly (if
not surprisingly) eloquent and pointed speech has to be ranked as one of
the most impressive in American history. I'm going to end this first paragraph
here so you can read the speech in full (again, it's at the first hyperlink
above), and I'll see you in a few.
Welcome back! If
I were to close-read Douglass's speech, I could find choices worth extended
attention in every paragraph and every line. But I agree with Hall's final
point, that the start of Douglass's concluding paragraph—"But we are not here
to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We
must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic"—is
particularly noteworthy and striking. Granted, this was not yet the era that
would come to be dominated by narratives of reunion and reconciliation between
the regions, and then by ones of conversation to the Southern perspective (on
all of which, see tomorrow's post); an era in which Douglass's ideas would be
no less true, nor in which (I believe) he would have hesitated to share them,
but in which a Decoration Day organizing committee might well have chosen not
to invite a speaker who would articulate such a clear and convincing take on
the causes and meanings of the Civil War. Yet even in 1871, to put that
position so bluntly and powerfully at such an occasion would have been
impressive for even a white speaker, much less an African American one.
If we were to
better remember Douglass's Decoration Day speech, that would be one overt and
important effect: to push back on so many of the narratives of the Civil War
that have developed in the subsequent century and a half. One of the most
frequent such narratives is that there was bravery and sacrifice on both sides,
as if to produce a leveling effect on our perspective on the war—but as
Douglass notes in the paragraph before that conclusion, recognizing individual
bravery in combat is not at all the same as remembering a war: "The essence and
significance of our devotions here today are not to be found in the fact that
the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle." I believe
Douglass here can be connected to Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, and its own concluding notion of honoring the dead
through completing "the unfinished work": "It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us." That work and task remained
unfinished and great long after the Civil War's end, after all—and indeed
remain so to this day in many ways. Just another reason to better remember
Frederick Douglass's Decoration Day speech.
Next Decoration
Day history tomorrow,
PS. What do you


text:
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text:
A restrospect of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial
October 1958
On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, two gunmen killed a paymaster and his guard, seized the $16,000 payroll, and escaped. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were picked up by police and identified by several witnesses as the holdup men. In 1921, at the conclusion of a trial in Dedham, the two men were found guilty of murder. The leisurely legal processes of exception and appeal, however, went on for six years; in that period many people came to feel that the trial had been unfair and that Sficco and Vanzetti had been convicted not because they were murderers, but because they were anarchists. In June, 1927, the late Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed a committee of review composed of fudge Robert Grant, President Samuel W. Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard. The Lowell Committee concluded that the trial had been fair and made no recommendation for clemency. Sficco and Vanzetti were executed in the early morning hours of August 23, 1927, in the Charlestown State Prison.
The case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which began as ihe prosecution lor a commonplace it brutal murder, developed gradually into one of the world's great trials. In the end it was much more than a trial. It became one of those events that divide a society. Ahhough the issues that it raised have been overlaid by war and political events, they never wholly die. Even today middle-aged men and women hearing bysome chance the names Sacco and Vanzctti still find themselves stirred by the passion and violence of their younger days. Sacco and Vanzetti have become a symbol, and like all symbols the meaning varies with those who adopt it.
I myself do not have any memory of the 1921 trial, I then being in the fifth grade of the Boston public schools, but I do remember from my seventeenth year the agitation and excitement of those summer weeks in 1927 preceding the two men's execution. The day they were to die I took the elevated in to Boston and spent the better part of the afternoon walking over Beacon Hill and across the Common in the August sunshine. In spite of the tranquillity of the weather the atmosphere was tense. Police were everywhere, hard-laced and angry, some of them carrying rifles—a thing I had never seen before. Pickets with placards marched up and down before the Bulfinch facade of the Slate House. Periodically the police carted groups of them away in a patrol wagon to the Joy Street Station. Almost at once their places were filled by others. Buses kept arriving from New York hung with signs announcing that "Sacco and Vanzetti Must Not Die!" and trailing red paper streamers. As tin buses pulled into Park Street those inside began to snig "The Red Flag." They looked like foreigners, most of them. I did not like their looks. Crossing Boston Common on that hot afternoon I sensed in myself die hostility of the bourgeois world toward these two men. Jn spite of any pickets and red-streamered buses from New York, I knew that they were going to die that night. As I walked under the faintly scented lindens on the Tremont Street side of the Frog Pond, I felt a sense of oneness with the community that was asserting itself. I was glad Sacco and Vanxetti were going to die.
It never occurred to me that the two men might be innocent. In the shabby-genteel little private school I went to in Roxbury none of the masters would have dreamed of such a thing. We took our opinions from them and from our parents. The father of one of my classmates was court reporter of Massachusetts. He had written a much approved pamphlet, Sacco and Vanzetti in the Scales of Justice , in which he had demonstrated the quasi-divine status of Massachusetts justice, a status which made even the appointment of the Lowell Committee to investigate the case a reflection on the Commonwealth's judicial system. According to the reporter that system, so sanctified by the past, could not err. Such a conservative position was common enough in Massachusetts then. Nor did it change. Thirty years later the reporter still listed his pamphlet in the American Who's Who as his single literary accomplishment.
By and large one's view of the case depended on one's status in the community. If one were middleclass and Republican and read the Herald mornings and the Transcript nights, one thought Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. Any latent doubts subsided after President Lowell of Harvard issued his report. But if one were a university liberal one tended to think the trial unfair, and if one read the Nation or New Republi c one was sure they were innocent.
My father was a lawyer and a Republican. He believed the two men guilty, not from any particular study of the trial itself but because of his acquaintance with Captain Van Amburgh, a ballistics expert who testified at the trial. Captain Van Amburgh through laboratory examinations was certain that one of the recovered murder bullets had been fired from Sacco's gun. Ibis convinced my father, although—as it came out later—it never convinced Captain Proctor of the State Police.
My Aunt Amy, who was a social worker and lived in the Elixabeth Peabody House, was equally convinced of the two men's innocence. This again was not from studying the evidence—( don't think Aunt Amy did anything more than glance at Professor Frankfurter's hook—but that was the way one had to feel if one were a social worker. Nobody could have continued to stay at the Elizabeth I'eabody House who IcIt otherwise—not that such a person would ever have been there in the first place. One of the proud moments of Aunt Amy's IiTc was when she was arrested lor picketing the State House and taken away in the patrol wagon. I think she was almost disappointed that die policeman who arrested lier was so courteous about it.
I can remember Sundays alter dinner when my father and Aunt Amy would get to wrangling about the case, not arguing from logic but merely making mutually contradictory statements. One afternoon Aunt Amy struck the table and called my father a liar. Neither one of them was the least bit interested in the other's point of view. After the publication of the Lowell Report my father maintained that Frankfurter should have resigned from the Harvard Law School. Aunt Amy's high opinion of the Lowclls was never quite the same again.
I don't know when my views about Sacco and Van/etti changed. It must have been some time in the thirties, when I happened to read their letters. Those letters just weren't compatible with the sordid and mercenary Draintree murders. As to the question of who were the murderers if Sacco and Vanzetti were not, I found that answered later in a book by one of their counsel, Herbert K. Ehrmann's The Untried Case , which seemed to prove conclusively enough that the men who did the killing were from the Morelli Gang of Providence. If one accepted that explanation, reinforced by more factual evidence as time went on, everything fitted together, even to the number of men involved. For all witnesses agreed that there were five men in the murder car, although the prosecution never attempted to account for more than two. One of the Morellis looked enough like Sacco to have been his brother.
Dedham, where the trial took place, is one of those quiet backwaters that span the decades without ever causing much comment until suddenly, and much to the regret of the townspeople, it is made known by the event. For the most part it is a mill town stretched along the loops of the Charles River. But the older section near the High—not Alain—Street is a wellpreserved relic of the Colonial past. This High Street, overarched by elms, has its spacious frame houses of the mid-eighteenth century and its later and more grandiloquent mansions of the century's end. Tt has two graceful white meetinghouses and a Victorian granite Episcopal church with an English-type churchyard where deans and a bishop lie buried. The Courthouse on the High Street, built in 1827, is a stone building with massive Greek-revival columns. Its Roman-style dome, soberly proportioned to the columns, is the most characteristic object in Dedham. From the flat country beyond the river it looms above the elms, Hanked by the meetinghouse spires, a symbol of authority.
I have seen its silhouette from across the marshes in all seasons of the year. That stretch of bogland beyond U.S. i, those miles of buttonbush and hardhack and speckled alder, converges on the horizon line of the Courthouse dome. Almost always when I see the great dome so secure above the peaceful community I find myself thinking back to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Its ghost still seems to linger over the Courthouse and the High Street, a tangible presence, whatever one's feelings may be about it.
I felt that presence even more keenly in 1953, 32 years after the trial, when I was called on to serve for a month as a juror in that domed Courthouse, in the same aloof paneled room where Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and lound guilty and, after all the exceptions and delays, were sentenced to death six years later.
Scarcely a day of that month passed but there was some reference to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. In Uedham, at least, there were no longer any feelings of partisanship about it. Yet everyone sensed somehow that for the town it had been the climactic event.
The old sheriff in his blue serge cutaway with the large brass buttons had served there for forty years. He had been deputy sheriff in the First World War, and was made sheriff the year before the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Sometimes during the long lunch hour one of us would ask about the trial and he would reminisce. All his loyalty and most of his life svcre bound up with the Dedham court. The law revealed there was majestically certain. I don't think he ever entertained the idea it might err, nor do i think his mind ever questioned the Sacco-Vanzetti decision. A due process of law was final. To think otherwise would be to challenge the very things that had become part of him—his brass buttons, his white wand of office with the blue state seal on it. His office did not however keep him from having personal feelings apart from the law. He had come to like Sacco and Vanzetti. 'They were good boys," he told us. "I knew Nick best, but they were both good boys. Never any trouble in jail. Now those Milieus—you remember them? They were really bad eggs. You had to keep your eye on them every minute."
Sometimes at the end of the afternoon session he would take a few of us through the jail two streets away, and alter showing us the reception hall and the dining mum and the laundry would always point out the cells of Sacco and Vanzetti. "I was in the court," he told us one afternoon as we stood in front of the barred door, "that day when Judge Thayer sentenced them. Vanxetti made his speech first, that long speech —maybe you heard about it. And all the time he was talking Judge Thayer just sat there with his chin in his hand looking down at his desk. Never moved. But when Vanzetti finished, then he let him have it."
Just outside the courtroom in the tessellated corridor we would pass the prisoners' cage, used in all Massachusetts murder trials. In this cage the defendants Sacco and Vanzetti sat, as have all other Norfolk County defendants. The cage has often been mentioned in the literature of the case, as if the two men had been exhibited in court like monkeys in a zoo. Hut in spite of its name the cage is no cage at all. It is a topless enclosure of woven metal lattice about three feet high in front rising to five feet in the back. Inside is a bench; at either end are latched doors. Except for its symbolism there is nothing very form! dable about it.
I was on a civil jury. Most of our cases concerned car accidents and personal injuries. One of our last cases, a minor one involving a woman who had cut her leg in the door of a car, made the courtroom buzz as it began. The lawyer for the plaintiff seemed to be the cause of it, for as soon as he appeared there was a wave of whispering. Even the clerk came over to the rail and muttered something quickly to our foreman. The lawyer was a portly man in his sixties or seventies, with a manner so assured that it was almost contemptuous. He was baldish, his face florid, with the flesh sagging under the cheeks. Behind his rimless spectacles his pale-blue eyes watered. Hc was dressed with the conservatism of a Boston banker, a hardwoven worsted suit cut in characteristic pear-shaped style. His shoes were of Scotch grain leather, he had a handkerchief tucked in his sleeve, and there were several club seals on his gold watch chain. When he spoke his voice was upper-class Bostonian, that clastic prolongation of the vowel sounds that has come to be known as the Harvard accent. As soon as he opened his argument he lapsed into Victorian rhetoric.
The clerk's remark was passed along the jury box; the man next to me nudged my elbow. 'That's Kat/mann," he said, "the fellow that got Sacco and Vanzetti."
In his pear-shaped suit he seemed the culmination of the ghosts of the month. There he was again, in Judge Webster Thayer's old courtroom, at the scene of his triumph of a generation before. As I watched him lacing us, spinning polysyllabic phrases out of nothing, I tried to form an impression of him divorced altogether from the Sacco-Vanzetti case. If t had seen him only at that moment, I should have thought him empty and pompous, his smugness derived from the fact that he was a Mayflower descendant (as in spite of his name I believe he was). But I should also have admitted his basic honesty. He died the following year.
Some months later I talked with a judge who had known Katzmann. When I told him about Dedham he asked me my opinion of the man. I said he was verbose, third rate, not wholly grammatical. He laughed. "That describes most of us lawyers," he said. "As for Katzmann, he was average—an average district attorney, a little tricky like most of them, but no worse than most out to get a conviction. He thought Sacco and Vanzctti were guilty. I'm sure he never changed his mind."
"What did you think of the trial?" I asked him.
"I don't think the trial was fair. Whether they were guilty or not, I don't think it was fair. Judge Ihayer was prejudiced—although like Katzmann, l grant you, he thought they were guilty, guilty of murder and not of just being Reds."
It does not seem to me today that any reasonableminded person reading over the literature of the Sacco-Vanxetti case could come to any other conclusion than that the two men were innocent. There are aspects of the case that arc still inexplicable—but these men were not the stuff of criminals, either in their natures or their habits or even their practical experience. "The dry bones still rattle," Heywood Broun wrote nine years after their execution. They no longer rattle. The case has become part of history. And since then we have become more used to innocent people being condemned. A new generation is scarcely aware of them; the cause they thought they died for is no cause. One finds Vanzetti's noble last address to the court in several anthologies: "If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph." Eut the words were not prophetic after all.
A third of a century has passed since the trial, fudge Thayer, Katzmann, President Lowell, and most of the jurors and witnesses arc dead. What remains out of this shadowed past? Two men were executed for a crime they did not commit. Beyond all partisanship, how could it have been avoided?
The two sides became irreconcilable. One side felt, as did the court reporter in his pamphlet, that anything less than the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti would undermine the Massachusetts judiciary. The other side demanded that the whole proceedings of Judge Thayer's court be repudiated. There should have been some middle way out, some face-saving formula that would at least have pacified if not contcnted the reporter and his kind and yet given the men their lives. Whatever the defense's private opinion of Judge Thayer, it would have been better to have said less about him and concentrated on the subsequently discovered evidence. That this evidence, chiefly concerning the Morelli gang, changed nothing was pre-eminently the responsibility of President Lowell. Working as he did in private with his committee, unhampered by strict rules of legal evidence, he had the opportunity to examine all the facts. A word from him, an indirect indication, and Governor Fuller would have stayed the death sentence and ordered a new trial. The Lowell Report is incomprehensible—unless it was that Lowell, the trained and objective historian, took the point of view of a minor court reporter.
Governor Fuller, of course, took his cue from the report. If he, the parvenu, had not been so in awe of Lowell and the Back Hay ascendancy he represented, perhaps he would have acted otherwise. His contact with Sacco and Vanzetti is said to have been friendly.
Once or twice a year going into the State Street Trust building I used to see Fuller. The doorman would see him first and swing the door open with a ringing "Good morning, Governor." I slipped through in the eddy. The old politician billowed ahead of me under full sail. Self-esteem carried him along like a favoring wind. His was the pride of manner that has reached its goal. An Alger story of the new century. From a Maiden bicycle shop to the head of the Packard agency for New England when Packard was the Rolls Royce of America. A mansion on the water side of Beacon Street hung with Gainsboroughs and Romneys and Raeburns. That was the first stage. Then the governorship. And when Packard slipped in the depression, the ex-Governor sensed the moment of ebb and shifted to Cadillac.
In these last years of his life, I suppose Sacco and Vanxetti, those men whose hands he shook so long ago in the death cells, had become blurred impressions, half-forgotten, overlaid by eighteenth-century paintings and the tail-fins of Cadillacs. "Our reputation is your protection," said the Governor's used-car "ad." Yet I never saw him swinging into the State Street Trust but I thought of his role in the trial.
Public opinion in Massachusetts—however that nebulous entity can be defined—was against Sacco and Vanxetti. To the community they were two murderers who had been given a fair trial and every opportunity for appeal afterward. The whole thing had gone on for much too long. Radicals and anarchists and Communists were trying to use the case as a lever to pry apart the foundations of law and order. But Massachusetts was not going to be dictated to by such people. There might be demonstrations in front of American embassies throughout the world, there might be more bombs planted in the houses of those concerned —as had already happened to fudge Thaycr and one of the jurors. Nothing like that was going to change the course of justice. Conservative opinion more and more adopted the point of view that Sacco and Vanzetti had become a challenge to society that could be answered only by their deaths. This view, though it prevailed judicially, never did have a literate apologia.
Literary talent was the forte of the other side. That side consisted of the literary left, radicals, liberals. Communists, woolly well-meaning progressives like my Aunt Amy, plus a large scattering of people who could not be labeled politically but whose sense of justice had been outraged. Some of these latter were starched conservatives. The crystallized view of the opposition was that Sacco and Vanxetti were the victims of a malignant conspiracy. Neither judge nor district attorney had really believed them guilty of murder. The trial was a put-up job to get rid of two troublesome agitators.
For the Communists—to whom this case gave their first opportunity for a mass appeal—Sacco and Vanzetti were martyrs of the proletariat, murdered by reactionaries trying to preserve an unjust social order. As Eugene Lyons wrote in his book, The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti ; "They were sacrificed to the basic fears of capitalist society. They died for the working class of the world."
Seen from this point of view two alien Reds could expect no justice from a Massachusetts court or a Dedham jury. That jury had obviously not debated long over the case, for it took them only five hours to bring in their verdict.
During my month in Dedham I couldn't help but wonder about that earlier jury. Drawn in much the same way that we were, they couldn't have been so very different from ourselves. And what were we? Some middle-class, some working-class, a few of us stupid, a few opinionated, but most of us reasonable enough to weigh an issue. At least we tried to overcome our prejudices; we felt it on our conscience that we should be fair. The jury I sat on would have been prejudiced against Reds, but they would not have convicted a Communist on a capital charge because of his political beliefs. It didn't seem to me the SaccoVanxetti jury could have been otherwise. Granted even that the foreman was prejudiced, there would have been some of the others who would have stood out against injustice. I IeIt sure that when the jury decided that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, it was because they were convinced that they were guilty of murder.
Thinking of the great trial I found myself wondering how I should have voted if I had been on the Sacco-Van/etti jury, knowing little or nothing of the background of the case but merely faced with what svas offered me day after day in six weeks of testimony. As soon as I had the time I went back to the transcript of the trial itself. Il there was any answer to this question, it would be there.
There was much that the transcript could not olter —the actuality of the past moment, the atmosphere of the court with its tensions, the appearance of the witnesses and the defendants, the subtleties that could be gathered from a tone of voice but could not be preserved in black and white. Yet the substance, the prime matter of the trial endured, each word spoken during that six weeks pressed and dried between the now yellowing pages. Over 2,000 pages of testimony faced me, with the repetitions, the irrelcvancies, the long-drawn-out legal impasses that I had become all too familiar with as a juror—and then the sudden revelation of the living fact from the dead record. One hundred and sixty-seven witnesses there were, including the ballistics experts.
Through the long days of another summer I occupied myself with this inchoate mass that gradually took shape and form as I read. I tried to disavow any preconceptions, to imagine myself in the jury box at Dedham occupied solely with the question of whether two men murdered two other men, and knowing no more about it in advance than the evidence offered. How should I have judged?
I knew one thing anyway—that I should have disregarded the experts. My month had taught me that. Experts canceled each other out as the paid bias of either side, and a jury then decided on other grounds. The real grounds in this case were the half do/en or so witnesses who identified Sacco—and to a lesser extent Vanzetti—as being at or near the scene of the murder on that April day. Jn opposition to them were an equal number of witnesses who testified that these two were not the men. It was a question finally of which group to believe. Every witness who saw the get-away car testified there were five men in it. The weakest part of the Commonwealth s case was that it made no effort to account for the remaining three, as Ehrmann did in his book. And the prosecution never did establish an adequate motive for the crime.
On the other hand Sacco and Vanzetti were both armed the night the police picked them up, Sacco with a revolver of the type that fired the murder bullet, Vanzetti with one that might have been taken from the murdered paymaster.
Sacco maintained that he had put his revolver in his pocket that afternoon and forgotten about it; Vanzetti said that he carried his for protection. Both statements may have been true. Often the lame excuse is really the truthful one. Yet here were two men, philosophical anarchists, who maintained that the use of force was never justified; during the war, they had become fugitives from military service. Their philosophy denied the use of force, even for self-protection (as it must). Yet when they were picked up, almost by accident, they had on them the weapons of force. If they had not been armed the chances are that they would never have come to trial.
The trial may well have been more unfair than seems apparent in the record. There the most glaring fault is the district attorney's harrying interrogation of the two men as to their beliefs, their lack of patriotism, and their reasons for running away to avoid the draft. That the judge allowed such questioning to go on was outrageous.
Its impropriety stares out of the printed page. Here certainly was error, yet I cannot believe that this was primary in the jury's verdict. The judge's charge seems reasonable enough in cold print. Reading it over twice I could not take exception to it.
I was finally left with the feeling that if I had been on the original jury and heard the evidence that was placed before those men, I should probably have voted with the others. Yet I was not really certain.
Looking back at it now over a lapse of years the case of Sacco and Vanzetti becomes a tragedy in the classical sense. It was no melodrama, as many have seen it, with good neatly divided from evil. Katzmann was as sharp as most district attorneys out for a conviction, a limited man but not a bad one. Judge Thayer could not hide the bias of his obsessions off the bench. He was indiscreet and he was weak, but he made an effort to conduct the trial fairly. Both he and Katzmann believed to their dying day that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.
It was not a conspiracy of evil men against noble men, as Maxwell Anderson saw it in his theatrical Gods of the Lightning . There was something more, something deeper and more embracing than all the literature about the case. It was in fact fate that was the mover behind the events at the Dedham Courthouse in the spring of 1921. And it was fate in the ironic Greek sense, dwarfing all the participants, ending in inexorable disaster.
Sacco and Vanzetti were figures of Greek tragedy, the doomed king's son become in modern dress two Italian workmen. Fate lurks behind them at each step. Sacco, the regular worker, never misses a day at the factory except that one day of the murder when he goes to Boston for a visa to return to Italy. If he had picked any other day, the factory time clock would have been his alibi. Without him it is agreed Vanzetti could not have been convicted. But on that one day fate sent him to Boston. Fate gave him his singular resemblance to Joe Morelli. Fate engineered the almost accidental arrest of the two men as they were riding on the Brockton streetcar. But for fate Sacco would have been off to his native country in two weeks.
And as in Greek tragedy the hero condemns himself unknowingly in his own words, is doomed by his own inner weakness, so in the end are Sacco and Vanzetti doomed by theirs. The men of peace go armed. Fate plus human weakness—that is the basis of high tragedy, a tragedy such as theirs that they played out to the end with bravery and dignity. It was a tragedy for everyone concerned with the case, and in the end it is best accepted so, as it was by the Greeks.


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Some of you will remember Creamware, which achieved some success with its Pulsar and Scope DSP systems several years ago. In 2007, the company´s technology was acquired by Sonic Core, and it´s now revealed the first new product to be based on it.
Set to be unveiled at Musikmesse 2008, the Scope Xite-1 promises to deliver ten times more DSP than the previous Scope system and comes in a 1U rackmountable case. Connection to your computer is over a PCI-Express or ExpressCard interface, so it can be used with both desktop and laptop machines.
The hardware also functions as an audio interface; it has mic and instrument inputs, 16 channels of ADAT I/O, Wordclock I/O and an AES/EBU interface. MIDI In/Out/Thru parts are included too.
As well as the Scope Xite-1, Sonic Core is also launching the fifth version of the Scope software. This gives you access to digital mixers, more than 50 audio effects, samplers and synths. The new system is compatible with previous Scope products, so users will be able to run a number of third-party plug-ins.
And remember: all of these processors run on the Xite-1´s DSP, leaving your computer to take care of other music making tasks.
Scheduled to ship in May 2008, the Scope Xite-1 will cost around €2698 and run on Mac and PC. Further details are available on the Sonic Core website.


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Mutual SSL authentication or certificate based mutual authentication refers to two parties authenticating each other through verifying the provided digital certificate so that both parties are assured of the others' identity. In technology terms, it refers to a client (web browser or client application) authenticating themselves to a server (website or server application) and that server also authenticating itself to the client through verifying the public key certificate/digital certificate issued by the trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs). Because authentication relies on digital certificates, certification authorities such as Verisign or Microsoft Certificate Server are an important part of the mutual authentication process. From a high-level point of view, the process of authenticating and establishing an encrypted channel using certificate-based mutual authentication involves the following steps:
Mutual SSL authentication works similar to SSL (Secure Socket Layer) authentication, with the addition of client authentication using digital signatures. Thus, SSL authentication and Mutual SSL authentication also informally known as 1-way SSL authentication and 2-way SSL authentication, respectively. As a developer, if you're interested in developing or be able to debug the mutual SSL authentication effectively, it can be very useful to understand the intricacies of the handshake messages happening under the hood.
In SSL authentication, the client is presented with a server's certificate, the client computer might try to match the server's CA against the client's list of trusted CAs. If the issuing CA is trusted, the client will verify that the certificate is authentic and has not been tampered with. In this aspect, both client and server use 9 handshake messages to establish the encrypted channel prior to message exchanging.
Whereas in mutual SSL authentication, both client and server authenticate each other through the digital certificate so that both parties are assured of the others' identity. In this aspect, both client and server use 12 handshake messages to establish the encrypted channel prior to message exchanging.
To help readers better visualize what's happening under the hood, I've enhanced a code example taken from the Microsoft website so that both client and server are capable of authenticating each other using the mutual SSL authentication. The code sample is very simple, and I won't illustrate much here. Basically, what it does is the client application sends a "Hello from the client." message to the server and the server application replies with a "Hello from the server." message, right after the mutual SSL authentication is completed successfully.
To capture the handshake messages transacted between the client and server, I use one of the popular and open-source packet analyzer tools called WireShark. It is a powerful and easy to use packet capture and analyzer tool, which can captures messages over a hundred of protocols. To learn more about how you can make use of this tool, please visit its website.
However, due to the lack of supported Loopback Interface in Windows operating system, I've to setup the client and server application running on two different machines in order to use Wireshark to capture their handshake messages. The handshake messages captured while running the applications are shown in the screenshot below, and the IP address "10.5.3.28" and "10.5.3.18" in the Source or Destination columns represents "The Client" and "The Server", respectively.
For analysis and verifying purposes, the handshake messages that we're concerned about are summarized and listed below:
No.30, 31 and 32 are the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) handshake messages.
No.33 - Corresponding to Section 2.2 - Item 1.
No.35 - It contains 4 messages, which are:
No.38 - It contains 5 messages, which are
No.41 - It contains 2 messages, which are
Messages from No.81 onwards are application data messages exchange between the client and server.
The demo project included in this article, which is available for download at the top of this article, is intended to be run locally as opposed to the captured one shown above. This is because the certificates included in the demo project are generated for "localhost" use only. If you would like to try it out, please follow the steps outlined below to get it up and running on your workstation.
Follow the steps outlined below to install the client and server certificates into the Windows certificate store:
Of course, you can switch between the Mutual SSL authentication and SSL authentication behavior in the demo project (MyServer) by setting the argument "clientCertificateRequired" of the SslStream.AuthenticateAsServer function to true and false, respectively.
// Mutual SSL authentication (requires client certificate) sslStream.AuthenticateAsServer(certificate, true, SslProtocols.Default, true); // SSL authentication only (do not require client certificate) sslStream.AuthenticateAsServer(certificate, false, SslProtocols.Default, true);
This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)
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টেমপ্লেট:Hyphenated word end
This document covers both the {{hyphenated word start}} and {{hyphenated word end}} templates, which must be used together as a pair.
The abbreviated forms {{hws}} and {{hwe}} can also be used.
For more specialized usage—if the hyphenated word is part of an HTML link, for instance—see {{linkable phrase start}} and {{linkable phrase end}}.
সম্পাদনাThe {{hyphenated word start}} template is used for the beginning of a word that is hyphenated and split between two pages; {{hyphenated word end}} is used for the end of the word. They must be used together: at the bottom of the first page, and at the top of the following page, respectively.
Regular version (using unnamed parameters, 1 and 2)
সম্পাদনাThe {{hyphenated word start}} template displays param 1 (1st word-fragment) followed by a hyphen (-) in the "Page" namespace, and nothing in the "main" namespace. An optional parameter can be used to change this hyphen to something else, or suppress it entirely.
The {{hyphenated word end}} template displays param 1 (2nd word-fragment) in the "Page" namespace, and param 2 in the "main" namespace.
In both cases, Param 2 (the full-word) is used as the title-attribute for the text; i.e. a tooltip appears, showing the complete word, when you mouseover the word fragments in the "Page" namespace.
Alternate version (using named parameters, "s" and "e")
সম্পাদনাThe {{hyphenated word start}} template displays param "s" (1st or "start" word-fragment) followed by a hyphen (-) in the "Page" namespace, and nothing in the "main" namespace. An optional parameter can be used to change this hyphen to something else, or suppress it entirely.
The {{hyphenated word end}} template displays param "e" (2nd or "end" word-fragment) in the "Page" namespace, and a concatenation of param "s" and param "e" in the "main" namespace.
In both cases, the full-word (concatenation of params "s" and "e") is used as the title-attribute for the text; i.e. a tooltip appears, showing the complete word, when you mouseover the word fragments in the "Page" namespace.
সম্পাদনাRegular version (copy and paste text below) | |||
| |||
Alternate version (copy and paste text below) | |||
| |||
Page namespace | Transcluded | ||
Example 1 (start) |
Example 1 (end) |
anticipation |
anticipation |
Example 1a (start) |
Example 1a (end) |
anticipation |
anticipation |
Example 2 (start) |
Example 2 (end) |
mother-in-law |
mother-in-law |
Example 2a (start) |
Example 2a (end) |
mother-in-law |
mother-in-law |
Example 3 (start) |
Example 3 (end) |
anticipation |
anticipation |
Example 4 (start) |
Example 4 (end) |
punctuation! |
punctuation! |
Note: in Example 1, you cannot use any blank spaces around the input data ("antici" and "anticipation", or "pation" and "anticipation"). This is due to the Mediawiki implementation of templates: leading and trailing blank spaces are not stripped when using unnamed (numbered) parameters.
Example 1a reproduces Example 1, using the alternate version with named parameters "s" and "e". You can leave blank spaces around the input data ("antici" and "pation") for readability. This is because in the Mediawiki implementation of templates, leading and trailing blanks are stripped when using named parameters.
This alternate version is more compact but less flexible (see Example 2).
Example 2 is a case where the hyphen must not be dropped when the two halves of a hyphenated word are joined together. This is easily handled with the regular version; however, using the alternate version with s
and e
parameters in the obvious way would give "motherin-law
". A workaround, shown in Example 2a, is to hardcode the hyphen into the "s" parameter and use the "hyph" parameter to set the normally-occurring hyphen to blank.
However, there are more general situations where the unsplit word is not merely a simple unmodified fusion of the split halves: cases involving ligatures or variant letterforms in non-English languages, where letters may change their form depending on the surrounding letters; or, German-language hyphenation rules prior to the 1996 orthography reform (bäcker hyphenated to bäk-ker). These can only be handled by the regular version, not the alternate version.
In Example 3 the word is in boldface, and we want the hyphen to be in boldface too. The hyph
parameter can be used to accomplish this (the visual difference between a regular hyphen and a boldface hyphen is admittedly barely perceptible).
"hyph" parameter
সম্পাদনাThe hyph
parameter is usually omitted, which results in an ordinary ASCII hyphen (U+002D) being added at the end of the first part of a split word.
- If specified, then the given character (or string of characters) is displayed instead of a hyphen, which could be useful for some situations or for non-English languages: eg, Unicode hyphen (U+2010), Armenian hyphen (U+058A), etc.
- If specified and left blank, then no hyphen at all is displayed. Note: specifying this parameter but leaving it blank is not the same as omitting it.
"Namespace" parameter
সম্পাদনাThis parameter is only used for special purposes: by setting |namespace=Page
you can force the templates to act as though they have been invoked within the "Page" namespace. This can be useful for testing; it is also used within this documentation page to create the examples in the table above.
"title" parameter
সম্পাদনাThis parameter is normally omitted but may be used to override the tool tip pop up generated in Page: space when the default behaviour becomes problematic (for example any hyphenation component involving additional <span>s can generate invalid HTML.)
সম্পাদনাA real world example can be found with the word "নানা-প্রকার" at Page namespace পাতা:সাহিত্য-রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর.pdf/২৯ and পাতা:সাহিত্য-রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর.pdf/৩০; observe also the results in the main namespace at সাহিত্য/সাহিত্যের বিচারক.
Invalid invocations are placed into Category:Invalid template invocation.
(There have been problems in the past with spurious blank lines added to main namespace versions with the use of this template. Check the template code history/discussion for the latest scoop.)
সম্পাদনাThere are occasions where formatting is required to the hyphenated word, eg. italics. Due to the means of wiki-coding, it is recommended that formatting be done inside {{hyphenated word start}} and outside of {{hyphenated word end}}, for example,
{{hyphenated word start|''format''|formatting}}
''{{hyphenated word end|ing|formatting}}''
, alternatively{{hyphenated word end|''ing''|''formatting''}}
See also
সম্পাদনাউপরোক্ত নথিটি টেমপ্লেট:Hyphenated word start/নথি থেকে প্রতিলিপ্ত। (সম্পাদনা | ইতিহাস) ব্যবহারকারীগণ খেলাঘর (তৈরি করুন | আয়না) এবং পরীক্ষা পাতায় (তৈরি করুন) এই টেমপ্লেট সংক্রান্ত পরীক্ষা-নিরীক্ষা করতে পারেন। এই টেমপ্লেটের উপপাতাসমূহ। |


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A free Elementor Map Widget that utilizes Open Street Map. Comes with features like adding multiple markers, and choosing from a library of custom tiles to change the look and feel. Requires Elementor Page Builder Plugin Version: 3.5+
This plugin is open sourced so feel free to contribute to it by:
1. Adding a topic/issue here
2. Submitting a pull request with any well-written code that implements the desired feature.
- Make sure that Elementor plugin is installed
- Add optional API Keys to the settings page:
- Google Maps API Key (Used to autocomplete and update the coordinates of markers in a map. Need help to get a Google map API key? Read this resource)
- Mapbox Access Token (Used for custom tiles. Need help to get a Mapbox Access Token? Read this resource)
- Geoapify API Key (Used for custom tiles. Need help to get a Geoapify API key? Read this resource)
- Add OSM Map widget to your elementor page and have fun 🙂
- Find OSM Map widget from elements listing and add it to your elementor page
- Add multiple markers, change Zoom level style them accordingly
- Editing the markers: A marker's settings contains Title, Location, Coordinates, Description, Button Text, and Button URL fields. Of those fields, only the Coordinates field is required to render a marker on the map. If you have a Google Maps API key added, you'll be able to automatically populate the coordinates field without manually doing so.
- Change Tiles from style section requires Mapbox Access Token and Geoapify API Key
Contributors & Developers
"OSM Map Widget for Elementor" is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors"OSM Map Widget for Elementor" has been translated into 1 locale. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate "OSM Map Widget for Elementor" into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Thank you for using OSM Map Widget for Elementor.
To make your experience using the widget better we release updates regularly, you can view the full changelog here


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I am a pretty new "photographer" and will be shooting a couple weddings in the near future. I am currently using a Nikon D3100 and have the 18-55mm kit lens as well as the 50mm 1.8G. I am looking to buy a lens more suitable for wedding photography that is less expensive (possibly used for about $600 or less) but not something that I will quickly outgrow and regret buying in the very near future.
I am currently looking at the
Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED IF AF-S VR DX Zoom Nikkor Lens
What would you recommend?
Thanks in advance :)


text:
Destructive Doctrines
2 Peter 2
New King James Version (NKJV)
Destructive Doctrines
2 But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. 2 And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed. 3 By covetousness they will exploit you with deceptive words; for a long time their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber.
Doom of False Teachers
4 For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; 5 and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly; 6 and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly; 7 and delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked 8 (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds)— 9 then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment, 10 and especially those who walk according to the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise authority. They are presumptuous, self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries, 11 whereas angels, who are greater in power and might, do not bring a reviling accusation against them before the Lord.
Depravity of False Teachers
12 But these, like natural brute beasts made to be caught and destroyed, speak evil of the things they do not understand, and will utterly perish in their own corruption, 13 and will receive the wages of unrighteousness, as those who count it pleasure to carouse in the daytime. They are spots and blemishes, carousing in their own deceptions while they feast with you, 14 having eyes full of adultery and that cannot cease from sin, enticing unstable souls. They have a heart trained in covetous practices, and are accursed children. 15 They have forsaken the right way and gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; 16 but he was rebuked for his iniquity: a dumb donkey speaking with a man's voice restrained the madness of the prophet.
17 These are wells without water, clouds carried by a tempest, for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.
Deceptions of False Teachers
18 For when they speak great swelling words of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through lewdness, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. 19 While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. 20 For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. 22 But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: "A dog returns to his own vomit," and, "a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire."


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2013 Fedora Infrastructure tasks
This page is to help us collect things we want to work on and get done in 2013. Initially it will serve to help us organize what we want to get done at the upcoming Fudcon Lawerence. (hackfests, presentations, etc). After that it may be repurposed to note those things we are actually going to work on in the coming year.
Lets coordinate and gather things here we want to do at fudcon. (Don't forget to add these to the main fudcon page as soon as we have decided on them). I am planning to try and have a high level "These are things we want to work on" session saturday morning. Hopefully everyone can attend that and then we can try and go off and do those things.
technical sessions (friday)
- Several infrastructure folks will be giving tech talks. Please attend and heckle^Whelp.
hackfests (saturday and sunday)
- cloudy with a chance of infrastructure - finish up stuff around private clouds, move to production.
- revamp our apprentice/new contributor process - figure out a way to get more people involved long term. (more mentoring?)
- ansible - figure out any setup and questions, timetable to replace puppet
lightning talks (friday)
This will be a list of things we want to get done in those timeframes.
2013 infrastructure FAD
The fad worked great to get 2 factor auth done, if we can get funding we should consider another on another topic. Ideas welcome here.
- monitoring - fix nagios, revamp how we manage it, make it stop bothering us all, but still tell us about issues, etc.
In the Fedora 19 cycle
- Move publictest to the cloud and create a sundown on them
- Move dev instances all to the cloud.
- Make a push-based fasClient with ansible; replace the fasClient cron job on the infra boxes with it.
In the Fedora 20 cycle
Idea box for 2012 and beyond
- Integrate jenkins into our infrastructure and framework (pingou)
- Make a clearer division between back-end and front-end in our (web)-app (pingou)
- Helps with testing (unit-tests)
- Reduces the dependency of the application to a particular framework
- Automate the generation of the statistics report: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics (pingou)
- Ok, I think I have this covered: https://github.com/pypingou/fedora-stats (cf http://ambre.pingoured.fr/fedora-stats2/ )
- Reduce the number of framework used ? (pingou)
- This does mean porting old app to new(er) framework
- Question: what are we going to do when/if EL7 is released in 2013 ? (From an app point of view)
- Setup an Intrustion Detection System (lmacken)
- Have had great experiences with using suricata personally...
- restructure our app/proxy layout: (skvidal)
- our current app model makes it difficult to determine which app is causing the problem. so our solutions tend to be pretty coarse-grained. Given the failure-prone state of our apps it would seem like we should adopt a model which makes it simpler to see where the problems are coming from. As our apps stabilize we can move to an environment sharing more resources.
- ARM servers in infrastructure
- Discuss issues around using some ARM instances for our needs.
- Would need to likely use Fedora instead of RHEL
- What things would be good for them?
- Revamp nagios
- Use check_mk on all machines and add a small amount of custom checks on top.
- Automate adding nodes, etc
- Extend 2 factor auth or other security measures past sysadmin groups?
- hosted? pkgs? specific groups?
- signed commits?
- Fedorahosted-ng
- Ditch trac for something better?
- gitlabhq or other easier interface for git repos?
- Decentralize!
- Search engine? try and get dpsearch working again?
- Rework fasClient (laxathom)
- By make it daemonize-able
- By make it a friend of fedmsg so we can trigger actions (push-mode) only when needed based on server's profile.
- Interactive shell for fas administration (laxathom)
- so we can avoid hacking directly into fas's DB by example.
- Koji-stg (laxathom)
- just finish what should be done here.
- fedorahosted - auto-setup-scm-project (laxathom)
- Use the rework above from fasClient so we can trigger creation (push-mode) of scm once related group has been created from fas.
- FAS v3 (laxathom)
- Started a proposal at https://fedorahosted.org/fas/wiki/docs/draft/FAS3#no1
- This proposal will need some rework with all the nice features we added in 2012.
old stuff from 2011 / 2012
Here's stuff we talked about in the past and never got done:
- Upgrade TurboGears1 apps to TurboGears2
- Write automated tests using TG2's test framework
- Fix the FAS authenticators to be less chatty
- Put fas session information into memcached
- Update FAS to have an admin console (no more direct db needs)
- Update pkgdb to have an admin console (no more direct db needs)
- Fix the Django auth providers to be faster
- Automated hosted projects (*)
- Automated creation of new machines -- run one command and it's up
- glusterfs/cloudfs fedorapeople filesystem
- Replicate db so that we don't have a SPOF
- logging sucks (*)
- IPs hit proxies but we also need them to hit the app servers. (*)
- Fas needs to log more actions to its database (this is in a new version of FAS, we just need to upgrade)
- Do periodic reinstallations of guests (like app servers) so that we know there's nothing changed not in puppet.
- Reduce koji's resources
- Finish and deploy coprs
- the puppet nodenames do not match the hostnames in nagios. Add aliases to the nagios hostnames to match them up correctly. This will allow us to trigger passive checks using nsca. (ties to nagios revamp)
- Setup a schedule for rebooting hosts (to test for broken hw when it's not a critical point in the release cycle)
See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Cleanup_Tasks_2011 for more.


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If you're working remotely, you've probably heard at least one "Brady Bunch" reference during an online meeting by now. While during a global health crisis there is some level of comfort from seeing our coworkers' faces lined up in a grid, that connection comes at a price.
Think about it: When was the last time you held unwavering eye contact with someone for an hour? If we're in a crowded elevator, we look at the floor. If someone close by is staring, we take a step back. We use different personal space techniques to always maintain an appropriate level of intimacy—which fails to translate online when you're staring "at a huge face inches from your own."
So says Dr. Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. We recently talked with him about the effects of nonverbal overload: long stretches of close, nonstop gaze. Read on to learn more about this phenomenon and for tips on maintaining trust and connection with team members without defaulting to another staring contest video conference.
What is nonverbal overload?
Bailenson says that, "Nonverbal overload comes from hours and hours of sitting in one of these [virtual] meetings constantly getting both close personal space and direct eye gaze."
While we might be paying more attention when the camera is on, a study done by Bailenson's lab showed that students who were stared at by their instructor for an entire virtual class were more productive than students who were not, but reported feeling exhausted and uncomfortable afterward.
"It's a trade-off in which, yes, there is a maximized productivity, but it wears people down," Bailenson says.
Tips for reducing nonverbal overload while remote working
Despite some drawbacks, video conferencing remains an invaluable tool during this pandemic. Practicing the following habits with your team can help maximize connection while minimizing exhaustion.
1. Save video for important meetings
Our focus admittedly drifts when the camera is off, and sometimes that's OK. For meetings in which it's critical to catch every word and show others that you're listening—such as a client meeting—get everyone on video. For more routine meetings, say a team standup or biweekly check-in, let everyone know it's OK to be audio-only.
2. Don't schedule back-to-back meetings
In-person meetings give us valuable buffer time as we move from one meeting room to the next, maybe grabbing a sip of water in between. In virtual meetings, however, we jump straight from one browser window to the next in a matter of seconds, further exacerbating the strain of nonverbal overload. Try scheduling a 10-minute break in between your meetings and use that time to pause and reset.
3. When you need a break, tell your team
According to Bailenson's research, our limits for nonverbal overload range drastically depending on the person. So listen to yourself: Are you feeling uncomfortable or unusually tired after a video conference or two?
"It's always OK to ask your colleagues, 'I need to turn my camera off for a minute. Do you mind?' " Bailenson says. If you're a manager, set a healthy culture for your remote team by encouraging employees to speak up when they need a break from the camera.
4. The phone still works
The phone has worked for a long time and it still works now. (In fact, we got all this information—this tip included—on a good ol' phone call with Bailenson!) If you're able and your city guidelines permit, pick up the phone and take a safe, socially distant stroll for your next one-on-one.
Looking for the ultimate guide to remote meetings? We've covered it all: etiquette, agenda setting, engagement and more.
Many of us are still adapting to remote work, so take a moment to pause and listen to your body. If you're drained from staring at faces on screens for hours on end, share this article with your team and your manager. Then maybe suggest that your next meeting be a screen-free one-on-one instead.