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Launched in 1995, Antiwar.com describes itself as a site "devoted to the cause of non-interventionism" whose "initial project was to fight against intervention in the Balkans under the Clinton presidency." Explaining their "key role" in the battle for public opinion during that seminal "humanitarian intervention," the editors write:
Our goal was not only to inform but also to mobilize informed citizens in concerted action to stop the war. The war at home was an information war: an attempt by the government to both limit and shape the information that Americans had. It was, above all, a propaganda war, one in which the American government and its allies in the media were bombing and strafing their own people with hi-tech lies.
Back in the early days of the internet, Antiwar.com did indeed do a very good job of countering the interventionist narrative. Writers such as John Laughland, Chad Nagle, Justin Raimondo, Christine Stone, and George Szamuely showed readers what was really going on in the Balkans and elsewhere, helping many to understand the imperative of non-interventionism. Today, only Raimondo still writes for Antiwar.com.
By 2011, the information war had shifted from the former Yugoslavia to the Middle East and North Africa, as country after country was being destabilized by a wave of supposedly "spontaneous" uprisings against the region's dictators — not unlike the one that toppled Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 — dubbed an "Arab Spring" by some dubious cheerleaders (the term was originally used by Israel partisans such as Charles Krauthammer to refer to an "initial flourishing of democracy" in 2005) and an "Arab Awakening" by others. But while the people were still being bombed and strafed by the interventionists' lies, Antiwar.com appeared to be either missing in action or even to have gone over to the other side.
As the media focus quickly shifted from a "liberated" but devastated Libya to a besieged Syria, there was disturbingly little to distinguish between mainstream reports and those in Antiwar.com. Apparently having forgotten the interventionists' need to "limit and shape the information" getting to the public, Antiwar.com managed to limit and shape it even further by providing a largely uncritical daily synopsis of mainstream reporting of suspect opposition claims, without even the mainstream's caveat that "the opposition claims could not be independently verified."
Its reliance on the interventionists' "allies in the media" for its "news" on Syria can be gauged from examining its research editor's choice of sources. In a survey of 10 news reports on Syria between December 14 and December 27, Jason Ditz linked to a total of 24 outside sources, 16 of which were from mainstream media such as the BBC, New York Times and Haaretz; two were from Voice of America, the official external broadcast institution of the US government and a key instrument of its regime change agenda; two from Monsters and Critics, a web-only entertainment/celebrity news and review publication with political commentary and news; and one was from Human Rights Watch, to which billionaire hedge fund manager and prominent "pro-democracy" advocate George Soros (astutely described in an excellent February 2001 Antiwar column as a "False Prophet-At-Large") pledged $100 million last year, enabling it "to deepen its research presence on countries of concern." The remaining three were taken from SANA, the Syrian Arab News Agency, whose claims were briefly mentioned only to be dismissed with a cynicism clearly absent in the credulous treatment of opposition sources.
The almost exclusive reliance on mainstream sources was clearly reflected in the content of the news reports. By far the most popular phrase appears to have been "At least … killed," which appeared in at least 36 separate headlines on Syria in 2011, such as "Good Friday Massacre: At Least 88 Protesters Killed in Syria Crackdown" (April 22), "At Least 60 Killed as Protests Grow in Syria" (June 3), "Hama Massacre: At Least 140 Killed in Syrian Tank Offensive" (July 31), "Syrian Navy Attacks Latakia, At Least 31 Killed" (August 14), "At Least 16 Killed as Syrian Troops Launch New Crackdowns" (August 25), "At Least 17 Killed in Syria Protest Crackdown" (September 2), "At Least 40 Killed as Syria Protesters Call for 'No-Fly Zone'" (October 28), "At Least 65 Killed in Two Days Since Syria Announced Arab League Deal" (November 3), "At Least 57 Killed in Two Days as Syrian Opposition Express Fear of New Massacre" (December 10) and "At Least 30 Killed as Syrian Forces Shell Homs" (December 26). A September 4 report typically entitled "At Least 24 Killed as Syria Crackdown Continues" encapsulates Jason Ditz's tendentious analysis of the situation:
The violence marks continued public protests against the Assad regime and months of security forces attacking the demonstrators under the assumption that the attacks will eventually end the nationwide rallies.
Massive Negative Reader Feedback
Throughout the crisis in Syria, dismayed readers have pointed out Antiwar's complicity in the propaganda war, despite the clear parallels with previous interventions, particularly the most recent one in Libya. In response to that September 4 report entitled "At Least 24 Killed As Syria Crackdown Continues," someone called "keltrava" commented:
Let me get this wrapped around my head.
The article says as a matter of fact 24 "more" people killed. Yet when it comes to Syrian troops killed it is qualified as "reported by state media". Why is it written in stone that 24 people [were] killed[?] What are the sources? This is typical of the reporting from Syria and Libya.
Even one of Antiwar's top columnists was prompted to point out the obvious flaws in Jason Ditz's reporting. Commenting on the July 31 "Hama Massacre" report, Phil Giraldi wrote:
Any story that is unsourced or is sourced to the rebels or to any of their supporters, as this story is, should be considered suspect. I don't know what is happening in Syria but nor does any antiwar editor or any source that has a stake in what is going on and is probably writing his account from a hotel in Beirut. The US has clearly sided with the rebels and is doing everything in its power to advance their cause, including easing the passage of their propaganda into international media.
In stark contrast to the readers' concerns about another Libya-style intervention, Ditz displayed what might most charitably be described as wishful thinking. In an October 25 report predictably entitled "At Least 24 Killed as Syrian Protestors Mass Nationwide," he averred:
Enthusiasm has tended to grow in protest cities when other regimes fall, and while the situation in Syria isn't the same as the one in Libya, the causes are largely the same. The protesters are hoping the end result will be too, though ideally without the multi-month civil war and the post-dictator mess Libya is facing.
Despite what another reader accurately described as "massive negative reader feedback," Jason Ditz appears neither to have responded directly to the criticism nor to have let it in any way moderate his subsequent reports. Antiwar's response to its readers' (including at least two of its own writers') concerns appears to have been mainly in the form of a moderator's snide remarks attached to some of the more persistent critics' comments. On December 29, an exasperated Gordon Arnaut exclaimed:
Even as readers have been pointing out the gaping holes in your so-called coverage…you have done NOTHING to address these problems…
You are a WASTE OF TIME…for anyone who is truly interested in truth about current events…
His criticism elicited this response from Thomas L. Knapp:
[Moderator's Note: Mr. Arnaut, if you consider Antiwar.com a waste of time, why do you waste so much time here? Pull down your hem, dear, your agenda is showing – TLK]
Arnaut replied:
Mr. Knapp:
Yes I have an agenda…it's called THE TRUTH…
Yes I waste time here because I can't stand FAKE NEWS…
On other occasions, Knapp did attempt to make a slightly more reasonable defence of Antiwar's coverage. For example, in response to this writer's question as to how its uncritical reporting of claims coming from Western-based and -backed opposition sources has differed from the pro-war propaganda in the mainstream media, Knapp replied:
If I could snap my fingers and cause Antiwar.com to be able to afford to send its own correspondent to Syria and environs to get the real scoop, I'd snap them immediately. Since I can't, I try to be understanding of the fact that Mr. Ditz et. al have to rely on outside sources and try to squeeze the truth from the information they can get, a process that's obviously vulnerable to error.
But as David Daniels had commented on a rather belated "Obama Secretly Preparing for Syria Intervention" on December 28:
And instead of leading the fight with facts and hard research against the lies that stimulate the R2P instinct, this website has once again fallen for all of the lies that led NATO into Libya and the various overt and covert interventions (like the lie of the "Green Movement").
This is important and all readers should take note: Antiwar.com has repeatedly pushed the lies that lead NATO to attack. Draw your own conclusions. The "moderators" here will say that they just don't have enough information and any mistakes are not theirs. Do you believe that, readers? Are you that gullible, or did you first come here as I did to see behind the bull**** of the mainstream propaganda machine?
If Antiwar.com had tried a little harder "to squeeze the truth from the information they can get" (or even paid better attention to the information that all too infrequently appeared on its own site) they would find that the reality in Syria (see a more recent and comprehensive analysis here) was quite different from what their research editor would have its readers believe. Moreover, it wasn't as difficult as some seem to have have found it to see who was pushing hardest (as they had done in Libya and in previous interventions) to get America to take the "humanitarian" road to Damascus.
Ideological Blinders
While most readers were perplexed by Jason Ditz's blatant bias in favour of the Syrian opposition, a look at some of his earlier writings provides an explanation. In a March 3, 2008 post on the Antiwar Blog entitled "In Defense of Non-Violence," Ditz opined:
Rather, we know precisely what strategy the Israeli military employs in response to non-violence, because it is the only strategy available to it. Indeed it is the only strategy militaries ever employ in response to non-violence, and we saw it clearly this weekend.
Seeing the path of non-violence to its necessary conclusion is not easy for precisely this reason: that every act of non-violence [sic] defiance is met with an act of increasingly disproportionate violence in the hopes of realizing a violent response and vindicating the claim that the posture of non-violence is an insincere one.
The people of the Gaza Strip must hold firm in their resolve for non-violence. They must make it clear to the Israeli military that they will not be swayed, nor will they respond violently. They must leave the Israeli government with only two choices: acquiescence or committing genocide. And despite what Israel's Deputy Defense Minister or anyone else may say, they must remain confident that Israel cannot choose the latter.
This weekend may have been a setback for non-violence, but it is nothing resembling failure. Non-violence remains not just an option for the Palestinians in the face of occupation, but at the end of the day, the only one.
In March 2005, Ditz was the first to respond to a message on an Anti-State.com discussion forum entitled "Ideas for How Somalis can defend themselves" in which someone called "chemical_ali" notified participants of the Albert Einstein Institute's release of Robert Helvey's On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict as a free PDF. Describing "chemical_ali" – a rather odd choice of pseudonym for an advocate of nonviolence – as "probably my favorite new poster in the past year," Ditz didn't raise any questions (nor did anyone else in the discussion) about why Gene Sharp's nice-sounding "nonviolent resistance thinktank" might be offering a book on strategic nonviolent conflict for free by the former military attaché at the US Embassy in Rangoon.
As luck would have it, Antiwar.com soon provided an answer. In his column on April 16, editorial director Justin Raimondo noted the collaboration between a key sponsor of nonviolent revolution (who later told the Wall Street Journal that he had given a sum in the "low eight figures" to the Albert Einstein Institute) with one of the more notorious proponents of violent regime change:
"Say You Want a Revolution," is the title of a piece by neoconservative Michael "Faster Please" Ledeen, a tireless advocate of the U.S. waging endless wars of "liberation," and Peter Ackerman, chairman of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Its theme: more U.S. tax dollars to fund "revolutionaries" in a new model of "regime change" – as in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. According to these two, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria are next. Now, before you say anything, it's just a coincidence that all these countries are in the Middle East and just happen to be Israel's worst enemies – stop being such a killjoy! Besides, the "revolutionaries" are ready to roll, but they can't do it without U.S. tax dollars and other assistance.
Observing that Ackerman's ICNC had been "at the center of machinations that have felled regimes from Belgrade to Bishkek and back," Raimondo traced the business ties of its founding vice-chairman, Berel Rodal, to then Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, whose short-lived controversial venture capital company, Trireme Partners LLP, invested in technology, goods, and services related to Homeland Security. Pointing out that "[t]he little stormtroopers of the 'democratic' revolutions are in most cases unwitting foot-soldiers of War Profits, Inc.," Raimondo concluded that the seemingly idealistic advocates of nonviolent resistance and the most extreme warmongering ideologues were little more than two sides of the same deceptive coin:
Chameleon-like, they readily assume "left" and "right"-wing forms, appropriating the language of whatever audience they're trying to manipulate: they speak the harsh language of nationalism and super-patriotism as well as the more polite PC lingo of "humanitarian intervention" and "human rights" internationalism. Ledeen invokes Mussolini's ghost, while the ICNC channels Martin Luther King and Gandhi.
Interestingly, it was reported in an April 2005 profile of Ackerman in The New Republic, aptly entitled "Regime Change, Inc.," that he had sent a trainer to Palestine "to spend twelve days creating a nonviolent vanguard to challenge Hamas" – three years before Antiwar's Jason Ditz opined that nonviolence was the Palestinians' only option.
Platform for Regime Change, Inc.
Yet despite Raimondo's exposure of the nonviolent revolutionaries, the chameleon-like channelers of King and Gandhi continued to be given a platform at Antiwar.com. On February 28, 2011, its Viewpoints section featured a link to an interview with Gene Sharp entitled "Teaching People Power," just as, in the words of Reason Magazine's Jesse Walker, "the revolutionary fire lit in Tunisia in December was burning across the Middle East and Africa." On December 5, as that Regime Change, Inc.-kindled fire was being directed against Damascus, Antiwar's Viewpoints featured Gene Sharp's "Choices for Defecting Syrian Soldiers," in which "The 83 Year Old Who Toppled Egypt" offered strategic advice to the few who had already defected, suggesting that they "help the regime's other soldiers also to defect from the Assad regime."
While Regime Change, Inc.'s aging intellectual guru appears to have at least one or two fans at Antiwar.com, its "publicist within the progressive community," Stephen Zunes, is even more popular there. During the so-called "Green Revolution" in Iran, they reprinted his "Iran's Do-It-Yourself Revolution," in which the well-paid chair of the academic advisory committee of Peter Ackerman's International Center on Nonviolent Conflict attempted to deny the democracy-meddling establishment's self-confessed role in that and other "colour revolutions."
On one of the rare occasions that Regime Change, Inc.'s role in the so-called "Arab Spring" was actually acknowledged at Antiwar.com, Zunes appeared semi-anonymously in the comments section to pooh-pooh the very idea. In a June 24 column entitled "Invasion of the Mind Snatchers," Nebosja Malic reviewed "The Revolution Business," a documentary that shows veterans of Otpor, the Sharp/Helvey/Ackerman-linked Serbian youth group that toppled Milosevic, training the activists who directed the not-so-spontaneous-after-all "Arab Spring." Touting one of the Serbian trainer's "anti-imperial" credentials, "StephenZ" commented:
And does Malic really think that a handful of Serbs can get millions of peoples out on the streets? Does he really think that Arabs are simply sheep that a few white Europeans lead to a popular insurrection against entrenched US-backed dictatorships? Get real!
StephenZ did not respond to my comment inquiring whether this was part of his responsibilities as chair of the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
More recently, "the great Stephen Zunes" was interviewed by Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio in which he argued that the Arab Spring was "the culmination of decades of peaceful rebellion against tyrannical governments." Despite his collaboration with Otpor alumni in training activists in Egypt and elsewhere in nonviolent conflict (an important fact that was deftly obscured during the interview, unless we count Zunes' oblique reference to having "met" Syrian activists), the ICNC's academic advisor claimed that the US had "very little" to do with these "really exciting" developments.
But as Professor William I. Robinson, the author of the seminal critique of the "democracy promotion" establishment, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony, has written of the man who funds Zunes' work:
That Ackerman is a part of the U.S. foreign policy elite and integral to the new modalities of intervention under the rubric of "democracy promotion," etc., is beyond question. There is nothing controversial about that and anyone who believes otherwise is clearly seriously misinformed or just ignorant.
When it comes to Antiwar.com, however, one certainly cannot rule out the possibility of ignorance. Asked by Russia Today's Adam Kokesh in early August "to help put what's going on in Syria into the broader context of modern history in the Arab world," Antiwar Radio producer Angela Keaton offered this astounding explanation of the mainstream media's supposed "reluctance" to report the Syrian government's alleged atrocities:
I mean, you know, [inaudible], Assad's a US puppet.
Change We Can Believe In?
While there had been a few exceptions to Antiwar's biased coverage of Syria throughout 2011, most notably from Justin Raimondo, Philip Giraldi, Eric Margolis, and Pepe Escobar, the prevailing impression one got from reading it was a simplistic narrative of peaceful protestors being killed by a tyrannical regime. However, in his January 2, 2012 column, Justin Raimondo wrote:
The last bastion of Ba'athist secular rule in the region has been rocked by anti-government riots, with groups of well-armed men taking on the Syrian military and hundreds killed and wounded in violent street demonstrations. What's interesting is that we hear much about the latter in the Western media, while the former is downplayed or not reported at all.
As the intensity of the anti-Syrian propaganda war picks up in the "mainstream" media – which focuses on alleged atrocities committed by government forces while maintaining a soft focus on the violence of armed rebel groups – the news that the Obama administration is making plans to intervene comes as no surprise. Indeed, the Americans are already intervening behind the scenes: the question is, will they come out in the open and call for "regime change"?
Considering that Jason Ditz's reporting on Syria has been marked by the exact same bias, Raimondo's criticism of the mainstream media seems disingenuous to say the least. Ironically, Raimondo's link to "alleged atrocities" takes the reader to VOA News, one of his colleague's most trusted sources, regularly cited as evidence of Assad's alleged violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.
In a recent op-ed piece not published on Antiwar.com, Professor James Petras warns against the "anti-imperialism of the fools":
The long history of imperialist manipulation of "anti-imperialist" narratives has found virulent expression in the present day. The New Cold War launched by Obama against China and Russia, the hot war brewing in the Gulf over Iran's alleged military threat, the interventionist threat against Venezuela's "drug-networks", and Syria's "bloodbath" are part and parcel of the use and abuse of "anti-imperialism" to prop up a declining empire. Hopefully, the progressive and leftist writers and scribes will learn from the ideological pitfalls of the past and resist the temptation to access the mass media by providing a 'progressive cover' to imperial dubbed "rebels". It is time to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and pro-democracy movements and those promoted by Washington, NATO and the mass media. (emphasis added)
If Antiwar.com wants its claim to be "the central locus of opposition to a new imperialism that masks its ambitions in the rhetoric of 'human rights,' 'humanitarianism,' 'freedom from terror,' and 'global democracy' to be taken seriously, they will need to heed that warning.
However, if it is to regain the trust of its readers, Antiwar.com will also need to address the serious concerns raised in this report. An important first step would be to undertake an internal review of its reporting of last year's tumultuous events in the Middle East and North Africa. For it to be worthwhile, it should provide its many disillusioned readers with satisfactory answers to the following questions:
- Are all members of staff qualified to comment on foreign policy? Have some staff members allowed their ideological biases to adversely affect their analysis of complex foreign policy issues?
- Why has well-documented information provided by readers that challenge its interpretation of events either been ignored or treated with contempt? Why do critical comments by certain readers either get deleted or have to be approved by the site admins before they appear publicly, while comments by others are banned altogether?
- Why does it provide a platform for those who are "integral to the new modalities of intervention" while ignoring the work of others who could have provided a genuinely non-interventionist perspective on last year's events? Among those overlooked by Antiwar.com in 2011 were Prof. Mark Almond, Ibrahim al-Amin, Michael Barker, Jeffrey Blankfort, Dr. K R Bolton, Alistair Crooke, Sibel Edmonds (banned from even posting comments on the site), Belén Fernández, Jeff Gates, Prof. David N. Gibbs, Diana Johnstone, Dr. Franklin Lamb, Prof. Joshua Landis (apart from a couple of references in articles by others), John Laughland, Dr. Rania Masri, Cynthia McKinney, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Maidhc Ó Cathail (despite the submission of articles published in mainstream media), Gearóid Ó Colmáin, Dr. Adrienne Pine, Prof. William I. Robinson, Prof. Jeremy Salt, Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski, Julien Teil, and Amjad Yamein.
- How can readers be assured that one or more of its "generous" but anonymous "angels" do not have an interest in interventionism?


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Alan and Zac Nominated For A CMA Award!
Alan has been nominated for a CMA Award! The nomination is for "Musical Event of the Year" for "Dixie Highway" with Zac Brown, from the Thirty Miles West album.
Congratulations to all of the nominees - see the full list here, and make sure to tune-in to the 46th Annual CMA Awards live Thursday Nov. 1 on ABC to see if Alan wins!

subset: commoncrawl


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Maggie Atkinson
Born in Barnsley, Dr Atkinson studied at Cambridge University.
She taught English and drama for 10 years before moving into a national training and advisory role on the national curriculum in the late 1980's.
She became director of children's services in Gateshead in 2003.
She was president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services until March 2008, and is currently chair of the National Expert Group on the Children's Workforce and national chair for the new Centre of Excellence in Outcomes.
She is married with two adult stepchildren.
Ms Atkinson has just replaced the unlamented Al Aynsley Green as Children's Commissar for England. Appointed apparently as a non-campaigner by Ed Balls (who must have one of the most annoying voices in politics, btw), she's opened up in fine style by announcing that the Bulger killers shouldn't have been prosecuted :
"The age of criminal responsibility in this country is ten — that's too low, it should certainly be moved up to 12. In some European countries it's 14. People may be offenders but they are also children. Even the most hardened of youngsters who have committed some very difficult crimes are not beyond being frightened."I like that 'difficult'. Seems to have been all too easy for Thompson and Venables (among others).
"What they did was exceptionally unpleasant and the fact that a little boy ended up dead is not something that the nation can easily forget.""Ended up" ? Any human agency involved in that, or was it an act of God ? "Exceptionally unpleasant" ? I'd use that phrase to describe something like a 10-year old defecating in the school book cupboard (which somebody did do at my primary school - the teacher burst into tears), not abduction, torture, sexual assault and murder.
It is wrong, Dr Atkinson insists, to describe a child as evil. "None of us is born a good person or an evil person. The backgrounds from which we come, and whether we are nurtured and secure, will shape our character. The adults who role-model for us — or don't — will change who we become, for better or worse. I'm far more a believer in nurture than nature."They're depraved on account of they're deprived !
Now that's true up to a point - most of the disastrous kids come from disaster homes. But (alas) lots of kids are brought up by their lone mothers, and some of those lone mothers are alcoholic, and some of those lone mothers' kids run wild - yet not all of them kill toddlers. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables shared their upbringing with brothers and sisters, and they've managed not to abduct and kill any little ones. Why did Robert and Jon ?
Ms Atkinson, as a believer in the Blank Slate, is a follower of the Utopian Vision - otherwise she'd never have got the job.
By strange chance, a week or so before another childless leftie blogger of a certain age had bemoaned the evil tabloids and their punitive agenda, agreeing with the sentiment :
"Whatever Venables has done he will still need our support."Prompting Laban to respond :
Shorter Leftie Blogger : "If it wasn't for those nasty tabloids, no one would ever hate people who abduct and kill toddlers for fun".
I think we can cut this more simply. The people who feel visceral loathing for Thompson and Venables are called 'parents', and every one of them has
a) experienced that awful hole in the stomach when your little one goes missing in the shopping centre – and it happens so easily! – and you find them after seconds or minutes of panic, but that sick feeling is not ever forgotten …
b) seen a shot or video of a little figure tottering through the mall, trustingly holding the hand of the boy who will torture and kill him.The people who don't feel that are called 'non-parents'.
Our game, our rules. In an ideal world only parents would be allowed to vote on any issues affecting children.
We lost our youngest once at Knutsford Services northbound on a dark Friday night. Not a good place to lose a small child. Running from one cashier to another :
"Have you seen a little girl - she's three - in a pink dress ?"
You never forget the feeling even though I can't, thank God, reproduce it in my head. It's too physical. It's a feeling Maggie Atkinson will never know - which is why, in a sane world, her views on child killers would carry slightly less authority than Jon Venables' mother's views - or any mother's views.


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The following guest post analyzes how recent innovations in home automation could impact us in areas we may not realize.
Speculative fiction commonly depicts bleak visions of the future, but the content is typically reactionary to current, real-world events. Such fiction examines the duality of technology, which is an integral part of contemporary society, but also a constant source of anxiety. Where this sort of literature really stands to benefit humanity is where it invites speculation about the sustainability and sensibility of our societal infrastructure. In other words, this sort of fiction begs the question: "what could happen to the world if destructive modern trends persist?"
What's more than a little troubling is that with recent news stories such as the Edward Snowden whistle blowing fiasco, or even the recent news about Google purchasing the smart technology developer Nest, it seems that dystopian science-fiction tropes of decades passed seem to becoming (at least partially) political crises manifest in the real world.
A common theme in dystopian science-fiction is that the misapplication of technology itself could bring about the end of civilization as we know it. These were trends that seemed to have been born out of anxieties that were mounting around the time of the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 19th Century. Certainly, the English writer H. G. Welles explored these ideas through his written works, notably In The Time Machine and The Sleeper Awakes, both of which deal with late 19th century English protagonists who end up catching a glimpse into future societies that are morally and ethically inequitable.
World renowned psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud wrote extensively about the psychological impacts of a society that was becoming increasingly dependent upon machines. Freud, like Ernst Jentsch before him, wrote extensively about "uncanny" feelings that humans typically seemed to have in response to automata, dolls, factories...in other words, a prevailing view held by psychologists at the beginning of the 20th century was that people felt a certain level of revulsion in response to both non-human entities which either resembled or behaved like humans, and conversely, that people felt ill at ease seeing the human body relegated to in-human, mechanical functions. The proliferation of factories and machinery seemed to induce some sort of collective identity crisis.
Science-fiction took a markedly different turn after World War II. The United States bombing campaigns of civilian Japanese communities demonstrated that if some of the world's most innovative minds were recruited, they would be capable of using their genius towards destructive ends...ends which were more destructive than anything the world would have been able to imagine up to that point. The world was no longer grappling with abstract paranoias about misapplied technology, but had in fact caught a glimpse of how potentially destructive the technology could be.
And because of how the United States prospered after World War II, industry and the development of technology, for both military and domestic applications, thrived. Someone who wrote wonderful, although deeply disturbing, fiction in response to these developments was Ray Bradbury, who wrote The Martian Chronicles at the height of the cold war era, which included the short story August 2026: There Will Come Future Rains. Among the many things that Bradbury wrote about were homes of the future that were fully automated, which could cook meals, light cigars, and speak in perfect English..but unfortunately, the human race had been annihilated during a nuclear attack. Bradbury took jabs at both the gratuitousness of luxurious technologies in the United States at the height of the cold war era, and the potential destructiveness of misapplied technology.
Nowadays, consumers are becoming increasingly conscientious about their energy consumption habits, and are looking for companies to develop sustainable methodologies which don't deplete natural resources and don't introduce other pollutants or toxins into the environment. While this is good fundamentally, it has created for a situation where consumers also have to be cautious about "greenwashing"--companies perpetuating falsehoods about how "green friendly" their products are purely as a marketing strategy.
It becomes especially worrisome in the case of home automation technology, where the potential security risks could outweigh the convenience. Part of the concern is that if you compare the features offered by the newest home automation technology, one of the biggest selling points seems to be giving people the ability to set their home security settings, control their home lighting and entertainment systems, and even monitor closed circuit cameras from tablet computers and even mobile phones. Suddenly, a misplaced or stolen phone could represent a key to your entire home security system and whatever other systems the phone is set up to control - not a comforting thought!
It's worrisome also because, with Google now a major player in the home automation field and interested in placing their devices in every home, they will be able to collect even more personal data about everyone than they have ever had previously - even if it's just data about utility usage like electricity and water. To what end will they use that data? We'll leave it to contemporary science-fiction writers to contemplate that. But consumers must be cautious, lest they make themselves vulnerable under the guise of convenience


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How Our Brains Make Memories
Surprising new research about the act of remembering may help people with post-traumatic stress disorder
Sitting at a sidewalk café in Montreal on a sunny morning, Karim Nader recalls the day eight years earlier when two planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He lights a cigarette and waves his hands in the air to sketch the scene.
At the time of the attack, Nader was a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. He flipped the radio on while getting ready to go to work and heard the banter of the morning disc jockeys turn panicky as they related the events unfolding in Lower Manhattan. Nader ran to the roof of his apartment building, where he had a view of the towers less than two miles away. He stood there, stunned, as they burned and fell, thinking to himself, "No way, man. This is the wrong movie."
In the following days, Nader recalls, he passed through subway stations where walls were covered with notes and photographs left by people searching desperately for missing loved ones. "It was like walking upstream in a river of sorrow," he says.
Like millions of people, Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections.
Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news.) But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.
Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn't alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.
Nader believes he may have an explanation for such quirks of memory. His ideas are unconventional within neuroscience, and they have caused researchers to reconsider some of their most basic assumptions about how memory works. In short, Nader believes that the very act of remembering can change our memories.
Much of his research is on rats, but he says the same basic principles apply to human memory as well. In fact, he says, it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way. Nader thinks it's likely that some types of memory, such as a flashbulb memory, are more susceptible to change than others. Memories surrounding a major event like September 11 might be especially susceptible, he says, because we tend to replay them over and over in our minds and in conversation with others—with each repetition having the potential to alter them.
For those of us who cherish our memories and like to think they are an accurate record of our history, the idea that memory is fundamentally malleable is more than a little disturbing. Not all researchers believe Nader has proved that the process of remembering itself can alter memories. But if he is right, it may not be an entirely bad thing. It might even be possible to put the phenomenon to good use to reduce the suffering of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, who are plagued by recurring memories of events they wish they could put behind them.
Nader was born in Cairo, Egypt. His Coptic Christian family faced persecution at the hands of Arab nationalists and fled to Canada in 1970, when he was 4 years old. Many relatives also made the trip, so many that Nader's girlfriend teases him about the "soundtrack of a thousand kisses" at large family gatherings as people bestow customary greetings.
He attended college and graduate school at the University of Toronto, and in 1996 joined the New York University lab of Joseph LeDoux, a distinguished neuroscientist who studies how emotions influence memory. "One of the things that really seduced me about science is that it's a system you can use to test your own ideas about how things work," Nader says. Even the most cherished ideas in a given field are open to question.
Scientists have long known that recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons. Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain (the human brain has 100 billion neurons in all), changing the way they communicate. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses. A synapse is like a bustling port, complete with machinery for sending and receiving cargo—neurotransmitters, specialized chemicals that convey signals between neurons. All of the shipping machinery is built from proteins, the basic building blocks of cells.
One of the scientists who has done the most to illuminate the way memory works on the microscopic scale is Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York City. In five decades of research, Kandel has shown how short-term memories—those lasting a few minutes—involve relatively quick and simple chemical changes to the synapse that make it work more efficiently. Kandel, who won a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, found that to build a memory that lasts hours, days or years, neurons must manufacture new proteins and expand the docks, as it were, to make the neurotransmitter traffic run more efficiently. Long-term memories must literally be built into the brain's synapses. Kandel and other neuroscientists have generally assumed that once a memory is constructed, it is stable and can't easily be undone. Or, as they put it, the memory is "consolidated."
According to this view, the brain's memory system works something like a pen and notebook. For a brief time before the ink dries, it's possible to smudge what's written. But after the memory is consolidated, it changes very little. Sure, memories may fade over the years like an old letter (or even go up in flames if Alzheimer's disease strikes), but under ordinary circumstances the content of the memory stays the same, no matter how many times it's taken out and read. Nader would challenge this idea.
In what turned out to be a defining moment in his early career, Nader attended a lecture that Kandel gave at New York University about how memories are recorded. Nader got to wondering about what happens when a memory is recalled. Work with rodents dating back to the 1960s didn't jibe with the consolidation theory. Researchers had found that a memory could be weakened if they gave an animal an electric shock or a drug that interferes with a particular neurotransmitter just after they prompted the animal to recall the memory. This suggested that memories were vulnerable to disruption even after they had been consolidated.
To think of it another way, the work suggested that filing an old memory away for long-term storage after it had been recalled was surprisingly similar to creating it the first time. Both building a new memory and tucking away an old one presumably involved building proteins at the synapse. The researchers had named that process "reconsolidation." But others, including some prominent memory experts, had trouble replicating those findings in their own laboratories, so the idea wasn't pursued.
Nader decided to revisit the concept with an experiment. In the winter of 1999, he taught four rats that a high-pitched beep preceded a mild electric shock. That was easy—rodents learn such pairings after being exposed to them just once. Afterward, the rat freezes in place when it hears the tone. Nader then waited 24 hours, played the tone to reactivate the memory and injected into the rat's brain a drug that prevents neurons from making new proteins.
If memories are consolidated just once, when they are first created, he reasoned, the drug would have no effect on the rat's memory of the tone or on the way it would respond to the tone in the future. But if memories have to be at least partially rebuilt every time they are recalled—down to the synthesizing of fresh neuronal proteins—rats given the drug might later respond as if they had never learned to fear the tone and would ignore it. If so, the study would contradict the standard conception of memory. It was, he admits, a long shot.
"Don't waste your time, this will never work," LeDoux told him.
It worked.
When Nader later tested the rats, they didn't freeze after hearing the tone: it was as if they'd forgotten all about it. Nader, who looks slightly devilish in his earring and pointed sideburns, still gets giddy talking about the experiment. Eyes wide with excitement, he slaps the café table. "This is crazy, right? I went into Joe's office and said, 'I know it's just four animals, but this is very encouraging!'"
After Nader's initial findings, some neuroscientists pooh-poohed his work in journal articles and gave him the cold shoulder at scientific meetings. But the data struck a more harmonious chord with some psychologists. After all, their experiments had long suggested that memory can easily be distorted without people realizing it.
In a classic 1978 study led by Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist then at the University of Washington, researchers showed college students a series of color photographs depicting an accident in which a red Datsun car knocks down a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The students answered various questions, some of which were intentionally misleading. For instance, even though the photographs had shown the Datsun at a stop sign, the researchers asked some of the students, "Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the yield sign?"
Later the researchers asked all the students what they had seen—a stop sign or yield sign? Students who'd been asked a misleading question were more likely to give an incorrect answer than the other students.
To Nader and his colleagues, the experiment supports the idea that a memory is re-formed in the process of calling it up. "From our perspective, this looks a lot like memory reconsolidation," says Oliver Hardt, a postdoctoral researcher in Nader's lab.
Hardt and Nader say something similar might happen with flashbulb memories. People tend to have accurate memories for the basic facts of a momentous event—for example, that a total of four planes were hijacked in the September 11 attacks—but often misremember personal details such as where they were and what they were doing at the time. Hardt says this could be because these are two different types of memories that get reactivated in different situations. Television and other media coverage reinforce the central facts. But recalling the experience to other people may allow distortions to creep in. "When you retell it, the memory becomes plastic, and whatever is present around you in the environment can interfere with the original content of the memory," Hardt says. In the days following September 11, for example, people likely repeatedly rehashed their own personal stories—"where were you when you heard the news?"—in conversations with friends and family, perhaps allowing details of other people's stories to mix with their own.
Since Nader's original experiment, dozens of studies with rats, worms, chicks, honeybees and college students have suggested that even long-standing memories can be disrupted when recalled. Nader's goal is to tie the animal research, and the clues it yields about the bustling molecular machinery of the synapse, to the everyday human experience of remembering.
Some experts think he is getting ahead of himself, especially when he makes connections between human memory and these findings in rats and other animals. "He oversells it a little bit," says Kandel.
Daniel Schacter, a psychologist at Harvard University who studies memory, agrees with Nader that distortions can occur when people reactivate memories. The question is whether reconsolidation—which he thinks Nader has demonstrated compellingly in rat experiments—is the reason for the distortions. "The direct evidence isn't there yet to show that the two things are related," Schacter says. "It's an intriguing possibility that people will now have to follow up on."
A real-world test of Nader's theory of memory reconsolidation is taking place a few miles from his Montreal office, at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. Alain Brunet, a psychologist, is running a clinical trial involving people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The hope is that caregivers might be able to weaken the hold of traumatic memories that haunt patients during the day and invade their dreams at night.
Brunet knows how powerful traumatic memories can be. In 1989, when he was studying for a master's degree in psychology at the University of Montreal, a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle walked into an engineering classroom on campus, separated the men from the women and shot the women. The gunman continued the massacre in other classrooms and hallways of the university's École Polytechnique, shooting 27 people and killing 14 women before killing himself. It was Canada's worst mass shooting.
Brunet, who was on the other side of campus that day, says, "this was a very powerful experience for me." He says he was surprised to discover how little was known at the time about the psychological impact of such events and how to help people who've lived through them. He decided to study traumatic stress and how to treat it.
Even now, Brunet says, the drugs and psychotherapy conventionally used to treat PTSD do not provide lasting relief for many patients. "There's still plenty of room for the discovery of better treatments," he says.
In Brunet's first study, PTSD patients took a drug intended to interfere with the reconsolidation of fearful memories. The drug, propranolol, has long been used to treat high blood pressure, and some performers take it to combat stage fright. The drug inhibits a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine. One possible side effect of the drug is memory loss. (In a study similar to Nader's original experiment with rats, researchers in LeDoux's lab have found that the drug can weaken fearful memories of a high-pitched tone.)
The patients in Brunet's study, published in 2008, had each experienced a traumatic event, such as a car accident, assault or sexual abuse, about a decade earlier. They began a therapy session sitting alone in a nondescript room with a well-worn armchair and a television. Nine patients took a propranolol pill and read or watched TV for an hour as the drug took effect. Ten were given a placebo pill.
Brunet came into the room and made small talk before telling the patient he had a request: he wanted the patient to read a script, based on earlier interviews with the person, describing his or her traumatic experience. The patients, all volunteers, knew that the reading would be part of the experiment. "Some are fine, some start to cry, some need to take a break," Brunet says.
A week later, the PTSD patients listened to the script, this time without taking the drug or a placebo. Compared with the patients who had taken a placebo, those who had taken the propranolol a week earlier were now calmer; they had a smaller uptick in their heart rate and they perspired less.
Brunet has just completed a larger study with nearly 70 PTSD patients. Those who took propranolol once a week for six weeks while reading the script of their traumatic event showed an average 50 percent reduction in standard PTSD symptoms. They had fewer nightmares and flashbacks in their daily lives long after the effects of the drug had worn off. The treatment didn't erase the patients' memory of what had happened to them; rather, it seems to have changed the quality of that memory. "Week after week the emotional tone of the memory seems weaker," Brunet says. "They start to care less about that memory."
Nader says the traumatic memories of PTSD patients may be stored in the brain in much the same way that a memory of a shock-predicting tone is stored in a rat's brain. In both cases, recalling the memory opens it to manipulation. Nader says he's encouraged by the work so far with PTSD patients. "If it's got any chance of helping people, we have to give it a shot," he says.
Among the many questions that Nader is now pursuing is whether all memories become vulnerable when recalled, or only certain memories under certain circumstances.
Of course, there is the even bigger question: why are memories so unreliable? After all, if they were less subject to change we wouldn't suffer the embarrassment of misremembering the details of an important conversation or a first date.
Then again, editing might be another way to learn from experience. If fond memories of an early love weren't tempered by the knowledge of a disastrous breakup, or if recollections of difficult times weren't offset by knowledge that things worked out in the end, we might not reap the benefits of these hard-earned life lessons. Perhaps it's better if we can rewrite our memories every time we recall them. Nader suggests that reconsolidation may be the brain's mechanism for recasting old memories in the light of everything that has happened since. In other words, it just might be what keeps us from living in the past.
Greg Miller writes about biology, behavior and neuroscience for Science magazine. He lives in San Francisco. Gilles Mingasson is a photographer based in Los Angeles.


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Social Media Helps Macomb Schools Secure a New Boston Grand
As seen in the Fall 2018 edition of the Boston Chronicle
MACOMB, IL – Choral Director Melanie Butcher of the Macomb School District resides in a rural town of about 20,000 residents who proudly show some serious love for their award-winning choir.
"We are so fortunate to live in a community that supports and embraces the arts," said Mrs. Butcher, who oversees the 7-12 choral groups. "As a result, we have a very active group of choir boosters that assist in raising funds for special long-term items such as a new piano."
Regional School Superintendent John Meixner is so committed to the arts that he also serves as president of the Macomb Choir Boosters. The music community launched a highly-effective social media campaign with viral fundraising videos produced by Phil Weiss of nearby Western Illinois University.
"We created the Macomb High School Piano Fund and through Facebook and word of mouth, we were able to raise the funds for our new Boston," Mrs. Butcher explained. "We value our music program at Macomb High School and have a long tradition of musical excellence," she continued. "Therefore, it was important to us to provide our students with a top-notch instrument that can be used for generations."
Looking to replace a 40-year-old Baldwin, the school enlisted help from Patrick Downing of West Music in Moline. Mrs. Butcher and Dr. Tammie Walker, director of WIU's School of Music, tested several pianos in the showroom. Dr. Walker has two children in the school district.
"We found that the brilliance and clarity of the Boston grand were like no other," Mrs. Butcher said. "Considering the size of our auditorium, we felt this was the perfect addition to our program."
Macomb's polished ebony GP-215 arrived at Felheimer Auditorium on August 25th, 2017, and students and music faculty were understandably excited as the West Music truck pulled up to the curb.
"The first performance on this piano was a short recital that happened before the first high school choir concert," said Ethan Ivey, who recently joined the music faculty at Macomb's Edison School. "It was a fantastic way to showcase the new Boston and every concert since then has benefitted tremendously by having this piano. It helped take an already magnificent program to the next level," he said. "I look forward to seeing how our choirs continue to grow with this world-class instrument. I am so thankful to be working in this district doing my favorite job with the best people and now, this beautiful Boston piano!"
The Macomb choirs have a rich history of top-notch performances dating back to the 1930s. Most recently, the MHS Trip Choir and Madrigal Singers performed at the Worldstrides Onstage Heritage Festival in St. Louis, garnering a number of trophies including Outstanding Choir.
Ivey expects the new Boston will help see the program reach even greater heights.
the piano with Steinway DNA
Whether dazzling at the concert hall, woodshedding in the practice room, or exploring the joy of music at home, the Steinway-designed Boston brings the genuine world-class tone and responsiveness within reach.


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Teeth Whitening at South Lake Family Dentistry
Simple and Effective Teeth Whitening Trays
There are many different ways to whiten your teeth. Dr. Carlson recommend using simple whitening trays because of the quality of whitening and the low cost compared with other methods, as well as the convenience of being able to do it at home.
How Does Whitening With Trays Work?
Whitening with trays (sometimes called bleaching) is a type of professional whitening that uses custom-made trays and whitening gel only available through South Lake Family Dentistry. We place a whitening gel in a custom-fitted tray that fits perfectly over your teeth. As the peroxide in the gel breaks down, hydroxy radicals help whiten your teeth by removing stains.
Unlike whitening strips, this process whitens all your natural teeth and contains ingredients intended to provide maximum comfort. This at-home process generally takes ten to fourteen days, although you may notice results in as little as three to five days.
Come to Us for All Your Whitening Needs
If you live in Lake Stevens, Marysville, or Everett, WA or the surrounding areas and have questions about teeth whitening, please give us a call at (425) 334-9600 or send us an email. Here at South Lake Family Dentistry, we want you to feel as confident as you can about your smile.


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Floral Stamp Print and Cut Planner Stickers
Floral Stamp Print and Cut Planner Stickers
Your planner will be looking good with these useful print and cut stickers. The cute roses and other flower images are guaranteed to lift your mood when you use them at home, work, school, or anywhere at all. And they make it easy to organize your day in any kind of planner with the boxes, flags, and headers.
Use the PDF or PNG file to print this as a 9x6.5" sheet at high resolution. It's best to print them on matte sticker paper (it works well with most at home printers). After printing you can either cut around each image or use the SVG/DXF files included to cut on a machine. Easy peasy.
Express yourself and liven up the day-to-day with these awesome, feel-good images. Order now and they're yours instantly!
Images subject to copyright. The images used on this sticker sheet cannot be digitized for embroidery or applique.


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I happen to be a big fan of the nation's coolest boutique-hotel chain, Joie de Vivre, so news that they are helping the overburdened hordes escape reality through their new "Ditch" initiative was welcome indeed! Take your pick from a half-dozen of the company's California or Arizona-based hotels and custom-create your own three-day getaway. Laguna Beach? Scottsdale? Venice? Palm Springs? Gentle people, start your engines and break out the SPF-50!
Specially-priced packages are available on weekdays or weekends, appropriately dubbed "Ditch Work" and "Ditch Fridays." Don't worry, we at AGT won't tell the boss if you phone in sick one fair Tuesday. In fact, the more amusing and preposterous your, um, excuse is, might just qualify you for a free hotel stay and other prizes. Just Tweet your biggest white lie and hope you beat the other clever Tweeters down the hall. In addition, have your photo taken (in disguise of course, provided by the hotel!) for another chance to win free swag…..
So head on over to the Ditch website above and put together a custom trip of your own sweet devising — a tattoo parlor visit followed by cocktails at the Hotel Erwin in Venice, or touring celeb mansions punctuated by dinner at the Saguaro in Palm Springs? It all sounds mighty appealing to me, especially given the swank (but fairly priced) accommodations and hip clientele at all of the JDV properties. Adieu, mes amis!!


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The FDA now says that the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer can be used for children as young as 12. This will, of course, expand the number of people in the U.S. who qualify for the vaccine. And with us now to talk about this latest development is NPR science correspondent Joe Palca.
Hey, Joe.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: Hello, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hi. OK, so explain exactly what the FDA authorized today.
PALCA: Well, you probably remember back in December, the FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for people older than 16 years old. And even at that time, the company was starting to think about doing tests on younger children because while children don't get as sick or as frequently sick from this, there still is a risk of getting sick from COVID.
CHANG: Right.
PALCA: So they started testing it in children from 12 to 15. And they applied for this amendment to the emergency use authorization that the FDA granted them back in December. And now this application has been granted, and they can give the vaccine to younger children.
CHANG: OK. Well, tell us a little more about what the studies show about how safe and effective these vaccines are - the Pfizer vaccine, at least...
PALCA: Right.
CHANG: ...For younger people.
PALCA: Right. Well, this study was done in about 2,200 or 2,260 people - children between the ages of 12 and 15. About half got the vaccine - two doses - and half got the placebo. Very similar to adults, some people in the study had immediate side effects - a headache, tiredness, chills, muscle pain, fever and joint pain. And those that had those symptoms tended to have them more severely in the second shot, very similar to what some adults have experienced - not all of them, however. A lot of people have had the vaccine without any side effects whatsoever. So the safety profile looked good.
As far as efficacy is concerned, they - it was really remarkably good because in the trial, no one got seriously ill with COVID. The number was 100% effective in preventing COVID-19. The other thing they did, though, was they - I mean, there weren't a whole lot of cases of COVID in either group, so they have to make some inferences. And what they do is they look at the immune response - the blood, the number of antibodies that these children produced. And in looking at that, they saw a pattern that was very consistent with something that would be protective. So they were reasonably confident that this vaccine, even though they didn't have a whole lot of cases to show that it would be effective, that it probably would be effective.
CHANG: OK. Well, that's good news. Do you have any sense if any of these COVID vaccines will be approved for kids younger than 12? And what kind of timeline might that authorization be on?
PALCA: Yes, the company has already said that it's doing tests on children as young as 6 months.
CHANG: Wow.
PALCA: They're going to roll out data coming out from children, they expect, from later September, possibly, with children down to 2 year old and later in the year for children younger than that. And the other thing is that there are other companies. The other vaccine manufacturers are also looking into the safety and efficacy of their vaccines for younger people.
CHANG: That is NPR science correspondent Joe Palca.
Thank you, Joe.
PALCA: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEVE MOORE'S "BELOVED EXILE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


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[Bernie Mac]
I knew I was gonna see ya, I knew I was gonna see you again!
I was gonna see you again
Where your god damn book bag at?
Always carryin' that lil book bag
Nobody wanna see that
God damn fourth grader
Sit yo' ass down
??? wanna play it again like he got somethin else to do
You ain't got nothin' else to do
You ain't doin nothin wit yo life
[piano starts]
Nothing with your life
What do you think this is?
You betta look at me when i'm talkin' to you!
You think this is easy don't you?
You think this is promised
Oh ain't nothin promised with you
Look at my face, do I got a promise face?
Does it look like promise you anything?
Ni**a! Is you snorin' in my class?
Wake up Mr. West! Mr. West
[echoes into next song]
Wake Up Mr. West
текст песни Kanye WestКомментарии:
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Home » Mobile Marketing » SMS Mobile Marketing Canada
Is SMS Mobile Marketing Canada More Effective Than Email?
Is SMS Mobile Marketing Canada more effective than email? Absolutely! There is no question in my mind that it is more effective. When comparing the marketing strategies like mobile marketing campaigns Canada, you have to look at a few different things. Are the services even in a similar category to where they should be compared? Yes they are. Specifically when talking about effectiveness you have to look at not only how many potential customers that you are marketing to, but more importantly how many are you reaching and for that you really have to compare the reach percentage.
Comparing the percentage of people then you reach with SMS Mobile Marketing Canada versus email marketing is crucial. Based on my knowledge and from my experience the reach percentage is much higher for SMS Mobile Marketing Canada. In fact the numbers are astonishing in comparison. Generally most companies and studies are reporting around a 94% reach rate. In addition, this number with SMS Mobile Marketing Canada is also the read rate. The reason being is the pretty much every message gets delivered and opened with SMS Mobile Marketing Canada. With email, the reach rate is approximately 50% with a read rate of between 10-25%. So as you can see, the numbers truly speak for themselves when comparing how many of your messages are being read.
Why is the number so much greater with SMS Mobile Marketing Canada?
Well, it's pretty simple really. If you have ever noticed just about every human walking the earth these days has a cell phone in their hands. So when you think about it, is there really a better method of trying to get a message to a potential customer?, probably not. Most people open their SMS Mobile Marketing Canada messages because it's at their fingertips and they are curious. It's far different from email where many people have mailboxes full of spam and they don't even open most of their emails anymore. If people are anything like me, I go to my email box, select all then uncheck the ones I am familiar with and then click delete all. Most people that we talk to do just about the same thing.
With email becoming more about spam and less about communication, a large part of the population does not even use their email any longer. There used to be a time when most everyone used email as a main line of communication for personal and business purposes. Well, let's just say times have changed quite a bit. Not only do people not use it as a primary source of communication for personal use, but many businesses operate with their employees and customers via text. As stated before, I believe it's primarily due to that fact of how convenient it is to communicate via text. It's direct, to the point, easy to compose, send and receive with minimal efforts. Learn More about sms mobile marketing Canada.
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Blogging has become so much more than we ever thought it could be. At first we were thrilled if even one person read our posts (actually we still are). You are the reason we continue, the idea that all over the world there are amazing people and pets who enjoy coming here and reading what we put out into the world.
We have been rewarded with great friends who are the kindest we could ever imagine. Many of you make us smile everyday with your comments and your blogs, and those of you who lurk in the background are equally important. We hope every post makes you smile.
So please kick up your paws, feet, claws, and hooves and have a piece of e-cake or some e-nip, and give yourself a big warm e-hug from Mom and a nice lap e-snuggle from me. Hope you'll continue to join us for years to come.


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Why Hadoop Only Solves a Third of the Growing Pains for Big Data
Gary Nakamura, CEO, Concurrent, Inc.
January 27, 2014
Apache Hadoop has addressed two of the growing pains organizations face as they attempt to make sense of larger and larger sets of data in order to out-innovate their competition, but four more remain unaddressed. The lesson: Just because you can avoid designing an end-to-end data supply chain when you start storing data doesn't mean you should. Architecture matters. Having a plan to reduce the cost of getting answers and simultaneously scale its utility to the broader organization means adding new elements to Hadoop. Fortunately, the market is addressing this need.
The Need for a Single Repository for Big Data
Traditional databases were not the repository we needed for big data, 80 percent of which is unstructured. Hadoop offered us, for the first time, the ability to keep all the data in a single repository, addressing the first big data growing pain. Hadoop is becoming a bit bucket that can store absolutely everything: tabular data, machine data, documents, whatever. In most ways, this is a great thing because data becomes more valuable when it is combined with other data, just like an alloy of two metals can create a substance that is stronger and more resilient. Having lots of different types of data in one repository is a huge long-term win.
No Standard Way to Create Applications to Leverage Big Data
Once we have all the big data in a single repository, the next trick is to create applications that leverage that data. Here again Hadoop has done a fine, if complicated, job. MapReduce provides the plumbing for applications that can benefit from a parallel divide-and-conquer strategy to analyze and distill data spread over the massive Hadoop File System (HDFS). YARN, a result of the refactoring of Hadoop 1 introduced in Hadoop 2, formalizes resource management APIs and allows more parallelization models to be used against a given cluster. This is all great, but it leaves one huge problem: Most of the people who have questions have no way to access the data in Hadoop. A financial analyst at Thomson Reuters or a buyer at Bloomingdales wants answers that their data can provide, but in the main these folks don't know how to write programs that access Hadoop; it's not their expertise.
What this leaves us with is a situation that is mighty familiar to people who have worked in large organizations that have implemented traditional Business Intelligence stacks. Questions are plentiful and programs that can help answer those questions are scarce. Pretty soon, there's a huge backlog that only programmers can help with. All that wonderful stored data is longing to answer questions. All those analysts and businesspeople want answers. The complexity of creating applications hinders progress.
Most companies get stuck at this point, which I call the "dark valley of Hadoop." The way out is to find a way to address the remaining growing pains.
The Gap between Analysts and Big Data
The third growing pain is to close the gap between the analysts and the data. Splunk's Hunk is perhaps the most promising technology to deliver a true interactive experience. Especially powerful are Splunk's capabilities for discovering the structure of machine data and other unstructured data on the fly. My view is that Drill and Impala are addressing a similar need. But it is a mistake to think of this interactivity as closing the entire gap because it's really the missing productivity that must be addressed.
To accelerate the pace of creating Hadoop applications, comfortable and powerful abstractions must be delivered to power users, analysts, and developers that allow them to express the work of the application at as high a level as possible. For that abstraction to work, it must mean that you can create applications without being a Hadoop expert. For power users and analysts, domain-specific languages like Cascalog allow an application to be built by expressing a series of constraints on the data. Concurrent's Lingual project allows applications to be expressed as SQL and then translated into Hadoop jobs. For developers, Concurrent's Cascading library allows the application to be expressed in terms of APIs that hide the details of Hadoop from power users. In addition to Hunk, Pentaho, Alpine Data, Teradata Aster, and Pivotal all offer higher level ways to design and build and applications. Effective higher level abstract methods are crucial to productivity.
In other words, the way to address this growing pain is to hide the complexity of Hadoop so that analysts can get work done without having to become Hadoop experts.
Problems in Processing Big Data
Big data is almost always turned from a raw metal to a valuable alloy through a process that involves many steps. To continue the metaphor, raw metal must be refined before it is forged. This is costly and it is where Hadoop excels. Analysts can ask and answer certain questions using an interactive system, but the data must be cleansed beforehand, resulting in a complex upstream workflow. Typically these workflows are built in a brittle fashion and are difficult to test and debug. Most frequently, the workflow itself is applied to a new dataset where the results are a machine-learning model or a set of analytics. Any benefit to loading and subsequent indexing in interactive tools is lost in these cases.
The fourth growing pain is the ability to manage the execution of a cascading chain of workloads or applications. This can be tricky for many reasons. If you cobble together lots of applications in a complex chain using a wildly varying set of tools within arm's reach, something data scientists love to do, you end up with a complicated workflow, or using a better phrase, a business data process. If something goes wrong in one of the intermediate applications, it is often impossible to figure out how to fix the process. You have to start the whole thing over. Tools such as Pig, Sqoop, and Oozie offer alternative ways to express the problem, but ultimately do not fix the underlying issue.
The right way to manage the cascading chain of data-oriented applications is, again, to hide the problem through abstraction. The higher level abstractions mentioned in growing pain 3 should be generating the complex of Hadoop jobs and managing their execution. Then through indirection it's okay to combine a number of Hadoop applications or workloads in a chain, but when your business process depends on dozens of steps, all knit together by hand, something is bound to go wrong.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Today Hadoop is virtually synonymous with big data. In reality, Hadoop is not all things to all people nor is it all things to big data. Business requirements for more timely insight have introduced lower latency requirements as well as newer, more immature technologies to solve these problems and glean insight from sources such as real-time streaming data. As they face these requirements, users are cast back into the darkness, trying to once again make sense of when they should use these new tools as well as how they should glue them together in a comprehensive way to form a coherent big data architecture.
From Data for Business to the Business of Data
Looking down the road a bit, there is a progression in maturity for using data. Many organizations derive business insights from their data. Once you see that your data is actually transformative to your business, you have hit a new level of maturity. More and more organizations are realizing that they are actually in the business of data. At this point, the growing pain becomes acute, particularly if you see in horror that the tools you have chosen to assemble your data workflows are nothing but a house of cards.
The most sophisticated companies using big data, and you know who I mean, have been aggressive about solving all these growing pains. These companies, like yours, don't want talented people struggling with Hadoop. Instead, they want them focused on the alchemy of data, seeing what the data has to say and putting those insights to work, and inserting them into their business processes.
The masters of big data have created a coherent architecture that allows the integration of new tools. They have created robust big data workflows and applications that support the transition from deriving insights from big data to being in the business of data. That's the end game, the real value from big data that makes all of the growing pains worthwhile.


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TechRadar Verdict
Sat Nav functionality plus added splash-resistant casing give this 3.2-megapixel Cyber-shot cameraphone outdoorsy, active lifestyle appeal
- +
Integrated A-GPS technology
- +
Google Maps
- +
Voice guide Sat Nav option
- +
Dust- and splash-resistant casing
- +
- +
3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus
- +
Camera interface
- +
Decent music player
- +
Sturdy sliding camera lens cover
- -
Camera performance could be better
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LED rather than xenon flash
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Navigator software is trial version
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A-GPS technology can run-down power quickly
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No 3.5mm headphone socket
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Fiddly numberpad and control keys
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Locked back panel can be tricky to remove
- -
Loudspeaker average
- -
Video capture quality average
Why you can trust TechRadar
Joining the Cyber-shot lineup of photo-majoring cameraphones, the Sony Ericsson C702 has been given a more resilient, outdoors-and-active kind of twist than others in the snap-specialist range.
For starters, the C702 has been built to withstand a bit more bit ill-treatment than the average cameraphone, with a splash- and dust-resistant casing that's been given a touch of rubber-feel ruggedness.
In addition, the C702 is the first Cyber-shot phone to incorporate A-GPS satellite navigation technology inside, with software pre-loaded for mapping and route planning, plus a GPS-based tracker application for runners.
Tough phone
Unlike some real hard-case phones, like the JCB Toughphone, the C702 isn't built to withstand serious damage – it's splash- and dust-resistant to IP54 standards rather than fully waterproofed, so total immersion isn't a good idea. But unlike some beefed up hard-case phones, it's far from lightweight in the features department.
Alongside its Sat Nav capabilities, it has a 3.2-megapixel camera with a Cyber-shot user interface and features, including autofocus and a double LED photo light. It's also an HSDPA-enabled 3G handset, offering high-speed download and browsing at speeds of up to 3.6Mbps (depending on network support).
There's video calling capability via a secondary front facing camera, plus a decent spread of mid-tier functionality, including music and video players, and an onboard FM radio.
Fiddly keypad
The added durability and internal GPS receiver doesn't do much to over-inflate the C702's size. It's not as slim as the ultra-thin C902, but it measures an average-ish 106(h) x 48(w) x 16(d) mm and weighs a pocketable 105g.
The screen is a reasonable 2.2-inch colour 262K-colour QVGA display, slightly larger than the C902's screen real estate – though the C702 doesn't have touch control camera buttons around the edges. Instead, like previous Cyber-shots, in camera mode some of the number buttons get shortcut icons appearing on them; in this instance, holding the phone in camera mode, the 3, 6, 9 and # buttons do camera shortcuts for flash, timer, shoot mode and scenes exposure settings.
Its numberpad design isn't what you would describe as rugged; keys are quite thin, rounded and smooth, and larger fingered users – or outdoors types with damp or freezing digits – will find it fiddly. Similarly, the control keys surrounding the navigation D-pad are small and cramped, although the raised D-pad itself is large and usable.
On the back, there's a screw lock protection for the rear panel. The camera lens is protected by a chunky slide down cover, which along with a side camera button fires up the shooter.
The camera employed on this Cyber-shot phone has more quality features than the 3.2-megapixel cameras on recent Walkman handsets including W890i and W980i, though naturally it doesn't match up to the C902's 5-megapixel snapper. Incidentally, you can also set the double LED photo light as a torch.
Multi-featured camera
The Cyber-shot brand means you get a user-friendly digital camera-style user interface, with settings options clearly shown on the display when you click the appropriate softkey; you can switch between and change them quite intuitively.
Among the options, as well as standard autofocus with macro mode for close up shooting, the C702 has a face detection option, which automatically identifies and focuses on the face in any image.
Missing from this model is Sony Ericsson's clever BestPic multi-shot option, and the image stabiliser both of which you get on the C902, but the A-GPS system onboard enables you to 'geotag' images – adding positioning data - with precise location, rather than approximate areas.
The camera is capable of good quality close up shots, and generally images came out reasonably well without delivering a really top class level of detail or colour performance. Colour rendition was bright and vivid, but sometimes looked oversaturated in certain lighting conditions.
The autofocus system worked well, however, and the camera is pleasant to use. In low light conditions, the photo light adds illumination, but not with as much power or precision as a top-end xenon flash.
Post-shooting, there's the usual Sony Ericsson Photo fix option and PhotoDJ editing software to improve results in-phone. As has become standard for Sony Ericssons, there's a Blogger app enabling diret uploading pics to online blogs. Video clips shot on the phone – at average QVGA quality – can be uploaded to Blogger accounts too.
Help from Google Maps
Satellite navigation is the other headline-grabber on the C702. Its A-GPS technology is applied to pre-loaded Google Maps software – another recent staple feature for mid-tier Sony Ericssons – providing precise mapping, route planning and search options for addresses, businesses and numerous other services.
Google Maps, which also offers a variety of zoomable views and satellite imagery delivered over-the-air, is a useful pocket tool in itself. We found the A-GPS system works effectively and accurately and determining and keeping hold of your position.
In addition, though, there's a 3-month trial version of Wayfinder Navigator software, a voice-guided turn-by-turn application that provides an in-car style Sat Nav set up, with 2D or 3D view options.
It's not as user friendly as standalone Sat Nav systems, and isn't as slick as smartphone add-on Sat Nav systems – updated mapping info is updated over the air rather than being pre-loaded onto a memory card. It is though another decent service to have available on a device you always carry around with you.
The addition of the Tracker app is a decent extra too, if you're a keen runner or want to monitor your workouts. It calculates and records details of running performances (speed, distance, energy consumption, routes, etc) based on GPS tracking.
Decent music player
Although the imaging and Sat Nav functionality take centre stage, the C702 is ably equipped with music and video player functionality.
The media player interface is consistent with the feel of Sony Ericsson's Walkman handsets, and the music player operates in a similar, pleasingly straightforward way.
There's 150MB of user storage on the phone, plus the C702 supports Memory Stick Micro cards up to 4GB, sliding into a slot the side of the handset. An FM radio is included, as is Sony Ericsson's TrackID song identification software.
The music player performance is decent enough, producing respectable playback through the average earphones supplied. We found that better quality Walkman earphones, and our own higher spec headphones, will make a big difference to audio quality. However, there's no 3.5mm headphone socket or adapter in the phone package itself, which is a shame. Bluetooth headsets can be used too.
Speedy downloads
High-speed HSDPA data connectivity facilitates speedy downloading of video and audio content over the air, and it also gives the browser a boost. A standard-issue NetFront browser does a decent enough job, with a tidy user interface and brisk rendering of pages. You can zoom and pan, get page overviews and mobile optimised Smart-Fit page views – all the usual Sony Erisson mid-range stuff, in fact.
The C702 carries the usual package of Sony Ericsson organiser features and applications, plus regulation tick-list features like email with attachment support, voice recorder, and a couple of games.
There's also a weather tracker feature from AccuWeather.com, which more active outdoorsy C702 owners may appreciate.
Impressive battery life
When it comes to the basics of making and taking voice calls, the C702 does the business effectively, with a no-fuss, consistently high standard performance.
Battery life may be an issue if you're intending to use the A-GPS functionality on a regular basis, as this will sap battery power rapidly. Otherwise it promises long rundown times; in optimum conditions Sony Ericsson estimates that the C702 will run for up to 318 hours in standby mode, or make up to 5 hours of calls on 3G networks or give up to 12 hours talktime in GSM coverage areas.
In our tests, we managed between 2-3 days with our average usage, though using GPS for a sustained period reduced that considerably, and if you're intending to use it in-car for long journeys a car charger is a sensible option.
Generously-equipped phone
This Cyber-shot cameraphone is a handset to consider if you're after something that can take a bit of wet weather stick without looking truly ruggedised, and which also has a solid line-up of contemporary features.
We'd have liked the camera to have impressed us more than it did for a Cyber-shot branded device, though its imaging is better than most 3.2-megapixel cameraphones.
A-GPS location finding technology and Sat Nav software lift this phone above Sony Ericsson's other mid-tier handsets, though, adding to the appeal of this solid, decently featured handset.
Network availability: O2, Vodafone, Orange
Looks: 3.5/5
Ease of use: 4/5
Features: 4/5
Call quality: 4.5/5
Value: 3.5/5
The TechRadar hive mind. The Megazord. The Voltron. When our powers combine, we become 'TECHRADAR TEAM'. You'll usually see this author name when the entire team has collaborated on a project or an article, whether that's a run-down ranking of our favorite Marvel films, or a round-up of all the coolest things we've collectively seen at annual tech shows like CES and MWC. We are one.


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Durham, NC, December 21, 2017 –(PR.com)– Every day, students use apps to navigate the digital spaces that classrooms have become. Principled Technologies (PT) compared a new Intel Celeron N3450 processor-powered Chromebook with a MediaTek M8173C processor-powered Chromebook to learn which device could help students complete tasks faster. The Chromebook powered by Intel took less time to finish several media-focused classroom activities, including rendering video, printing diagrams, and merging sound tracks. As an example, PT encoded an HD video over 5 minutes faster with the Intel Celeron processor-powered Chromebook than they could using the MediaTek processor-based Chromebook.
According to the report, students who wait less on apps "face fewer opportunities for distraction and have more time to finish assignments."
To learn more about how a Chromebook powered by an Intel Celeron processor could benefit students, see the full report at http://facts.pt/6KjrrT.
Contact Information:
Principled Technologies, Inc.
Chloe Rockow Madsen
(919) 941-9812
Contact via Email
Read the full story here: https://www.pr.com/press-release/735071
Press Release Distributed by PR.com