text:
The Quanta team has been growing in volunteer developers, but the amount of work to make a world class killer application is daunting. Community support has enabled me to take the next step and sponsor another developer! As it happens we also have the opportunity to bring some killer features to our web development suite, but this will require some help from the community to help some additional developers. So while I want to bring some good news to the community I also need to ask for a vote of support too.
Fortunately community support has been good. My thanks to our supporters! I have gone from the sole sponsor of Andras to where I only have to pay a little bit of his monthly income. Andras's full time effort has paid huge dividends to Quanta development as any user who has interacted with us will attest. I'm very excited to announce Michal Rudolf, the author of Knowit, will be joining our team! I hope the community will join me in welcoming him as well as helping me to move him from part time to full time in the coming months. As the attached story points out Özkan Pakdil, the author of Flash 4 Linux, got back to me late. I believe what he has started can be made into a tool for both Flash and SVG and that if it's done right it could be very useful for rounding out the package of an application set that can attract web designers from Windows to KDE. It would add new capabilities for those of us developing web sites on KDE. We want to get community input and do it right, but we also need a vote of financial support to enable these developers to proceed. Have a read and consider becoming a sponsor or making a donation. If you do web development this could affect you.
Eric, how much money is needed to pay a developer?
I guess people in some states can easy make a living out of small money.
A kind of GPL/ASP shareware concept would be very good for kde applications development. I believe KDE shall add a donations link to the info dialogue. Also in the download section a donations hint would be very helpful.
I don't understand why distributors shall request money for packaging the free software while developers shall not be paid by users. As Free Software enters the desktop market the business model has to be adjusted. Not the GPL has to change, today users are not only hackers and potential contributors. The ASP Shareware guidelines (not crippleware, no evaluation time expiration ecc.) are compatible with the free and open source software idea. Early Free Software denounced the shareware principle, but you can provide "shareware" under the gpl with open source. shareware then means simply: When you want to use the software please support development by a small donation.
I won't give you exact figures in a public forum, just some hints. ;-) Compared to EU states (e.g Finland), a beginner here gets about 1/8 of the average wages for an average programmer from there. After 1-3 years you can reach at the 1/6 part of that money, and if you are in a better position or in a bigger city 1/3 is a good salary. Gettins the same amount as in the EU is possible, although rare. I think 1/2 of that is what you may dream of, but this doesn't happen often. Personally I'd say that I'd need about 1/3 of what you can earn in the EU if I want to live without financial stress. This values should be valid in almost every Eastern European state (including those who will become members of the EU this year) with slight variations.
Now I'm somewhere between 1/6-1/7 of what somebody might get in the EU and still at around 1/9 of what I got in Finland... Of course working at home and doing what you like is a big plus and worths some money. ;-) And sharing your work with an entire community and being part of that community is also priceless.
So support is welcome, if you want to help us, please donate. Either through Paypal or contact us directly, especially if you are in Europe, for other possibilities.
And of course, I'd like to thank again for all those who supported us in the last year and who support us now.
> Compared to EU states (e.g Finland), a beginner here gets about 1/8 of the average wages for an average programmer from there
Hmm, being from Finland i probably should point out that this really depends on the region and expertise, with Helsinki and Oulu being the best paid areas. Anyway, designer wages vary from 2000e/month (beginner with university or institute degree) up to 5000e/month (you have to be pretty damn good for this). My bet is that anything higher than that goes to management. This may sound decent, but take into account that we pay from 25-40% income tax, so..
As I said I was working there in 2000-2001. ;-) My salary was around halfway between the two figures you gave me and I thought that the average one is about 2500 now, but as you said it may be even higher. Of course, wages vary even inside a country, but so does living costs. I payed more for a rent there (in Helsinki) than I get here a month... Of course, concrete figures doesn't make sense if you don't know the living costs specific for a country, but believe me that what seems low living costs for a foreigner, might be very high for a man who lives here.
In bigger cities a rent can be 1/3 of a beginners salary, and with the other living related expenses (electricity, water, food) you are lucky if you remain with some money. And don't think that income taxes are low, there are around the same level as there...
And you don't think within the US we have to pay over 30% of our wages to taxes?
Hello.. i'm From Romania. The sallary a designer / developer /soft writer / whatever gets .. is from 75euro / 300-400euro /month .. and the tax is about 25-40% of this.. the rents are 1/2 .. u barely survive.. many of us .. like me even work for free.. (i'm still in college and living with my father)
> I believe KDE shall add a donations link to the info dialogue.
There is already a link to the "Supporting KDE" page in "Help/About KDE".
A very good page, but hardly known.
"Help Out KDE =)"
Andras has given a good answer with a lot of detail. I will say this. It varies per developer. It initially depends largely on what it costs where they live and what starting wages are where they live. Where as this would be thousands of dollars per month in the US or Western Europe we are constrained to look for developers who live in areas where monthly incomes are in the hundreds of (US) dollars per month. It is even easier when starting a developer to start them part time. There is less stress over their performance while they are becoming familiar and less stress of what they are being paid. This can be only a few hundred dollars a month for a part time developer.
My thinking with Michal was that we needed to add someone with his talent who could put in a lot of time. In previous discussions Quanta was somewhere on his do list where life becomes so perfect you can finally do those things you wanted. In the case of Andras I have paid thousands of dollars, but now with many more users and developers I'm also working at least 20-30 hours a week on Quanta in some way. In that wonderful world where everything is perfect I should get a few hundred dollars a month to do nice things for myself and stay fresh. What I have concluded for the real world is that I have to limit how large a part of my income I use to sponsor developers. This is because my business is in a place that it could (and should) grow quite a bit this year. If I go from making an average income to a well above average income I can do a lot more fun things with more money. If I run into a cash flow problem because I spent too much on my pet project... you get the idea.
The great thing is that with our user base, those users who are moved to take action can make a difference very easily. My personal estimation is that we have over a million users, probably closer to two million. The amount to contribute should be small if percentage participation is small, but participation is a fraction of a percent. It's Sunday morning here and so far we have a 25$ EU and $25 US a month sponsor (both from Europe BTW). This is great! I'm excited to see this kind of commitment because it removes stress from my life. To sponsor one developer part time it takes about 4-6 times the amount of support we have received so far from these fine people. In Michal's case I have guaranteed I will make up the difference. In the case of Özkan and his partner I heard back from him yesterday that he will try to do whatever he can with F4L regardless of whether I can pay him. That's the right answer and allows me some flexibility.
At this point I'm pretty comfortable to relax and see what happens. Good things are happening no matter what. Like Andras, I don't like to make other people's finances overly public, unless they tell me to. I see my duty to this project and our contributors as making sure that we are getting good results and direction. Because I only bring in people who are led by their passion to work on the project we get great results. After four years of working with this project my goal is to continue to question everything I do and look for ways to improve. So I hope these efforts right now produce exciting results in the coming months for our users.
Could you use KDE e.V to take donations and give salaries? It would seem within the purpose of KDE e.V. to do so. Its not uncommon to see non-profits where the donator gets to pick where they want their money to go, it could be that sort of thing.
It isn't KDE e.V.'s goal to hire developers. In this aspect it's very different from the Mozilla and Blender Foundations.
No, the role of the KDE e.V. is to support the KDE project as whole (and I'm not even sure that it would be legal for a non-profit organization to pay salaries for developers). Better spend the money donated to them to organize conferences, promote KDE, etc. so everyone will and can enjoy the donations, not only some particular developers.
IIRC there was an idea (as far as I know which never materialized) to be able to donate to a specific area of KDE when you donate to KDE e.V., which still seems good to me, but you know, if you want to support some specific project or a developer, the possibility is still there to contact them independently and support them. Some projects make this easier (donation links), some less easier. And of course you can even now add a comment when you donate to KDE e.V.
Of course I wouldn't mind if some KDE supporting company decides to support a specific project (hey, of course, Quanta ;-)) inside KDE.
Maybe Eric is a good station to support developers. His business runs for supporting KDE ;) If KDE eV couldn't hire developers is OK.
I estimate if Eric get enough support (sponsoring) from the community he hire developers not only for Quanta.
If Eric were a millionaire he'd have them all over for a party too. ;-) I admit that I've given this some thought and even thought about how to manage certain aspects of it. It's something I'd like to be able to do. It's not really such an easy thing to do because you have to balance the spirit of OSS development with financial aspects. It requires certain skills and practices and I have learned a lot in the last four years. I think I have a good aptitude for it.
The reality is though that there are a number of things that would need to come into place to move it to a larger scale. I'd enjoy the challenge. I talked about it in a recent interview. I would need to have excellent financial standing because having a number of people involved eats time like you can't believe. Ironically I'd want to get someone who was not just skilled at coding but also skilled at project management and interaction to help.
Moving into working on other programs you have the further complication of interacting with a project and respecting their leadership. Because I have an active mind I contemplate how these things might work. Perhaps part of what attracts me to it is that it is so challenging. I'm not into being bored. ;-)
I would certainly love to have an even larger impact on KDE application software, but everything I do is gradually one step at a time. Sometimes I have to remind myself that there are some things still beyond my reach. New things have to be to the standard of what we're doing right now and not take away from the other things we're doing. Things are only worth doing if they can be done with excellence.
We will see how it goes. For now I'm very happy that we are making the progress we are. It means a lot for me that I'm able to do what we're doing now for users and developers. It's hard to put into words. I just want to produce software now that makes people say "WOW!" ;-)
Well, dealing with such donations via KDE e.V. (or some similar entity) would still be good idea. If this e.V. was "gemeinnützig" (don´t know a good english translation), and I think it is - free software for everyone and stuff -, it would be possible to use such donations to reduce your taxes - I do a lot of stuff for such non-profit organizations fot that reason (it´s one, but not the only reason)... ;-)
> If this e.V. was "gemeinnützig" (don´t know a good english translation), and I think it is
Non-profit. And it's not yet.
>> If this e.V. was "gemeinnützig"
>>(don´t know a good english translation), and I think it is
> Non-profit. And it's not yet.
According to http://www.kde.org/areas/kde-ev/ it is:
"KDE e. V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Project in legal and financial matters."
It's of course non-profit but not yet accepted as such by the financial authorities.
Are you also talking about German financial authorities?
I thought they *were* accepted there:
From http://kde.org/areas/kde-ev/corporate/statutes-en.php :
3. Non-profit status of the association
The association pursues according to section 2 of the statutes exclusively and directly non-profit activities according to the section Tax Abatement of the Abgabenordnung (Paragraphs 51 AO). It is acting non-selfish and is not pursuing profit
> Are you also talking about German financial authorities?
Sure. Only the place where the association is registered matters.
> I thought they *were* accepted there:
Pursuance of one side is not equal with acceptance of the other side.
You cannot register an association in Germany without a statute.
The statute of KDE e.V. states that KDE e.V. is a non-profit
AFAIK *before* you register an association in Germany
that's supposed to be non-profit you have to consult
the financial authorities or you cannot register it with that statute.
That's part of the registration process...
How can the KDE e.V. be registered if its statute states false things?
IANAL, though, and of course something I stated may be wrong...
What am I missing?
> AFAIK *before* you register an association in Germany that's supposed to be non-profit you have to consult the financial authorities or you cannot register it with that statute.
You're wrong, and statutes can be changed. KDE e.V.'s initial statutes didn't met the requirements of the financial authorities so there were consultations with them what has to be changed and the statutes were voted in Nove Hrady. Sadly they're not active yet.
> How can the KDE e.V. be registered if its statute states false things?
Registration at court and acceptance by financial authorities are two different processes as they're two different entities.
> KDE e.V.'s initial statutes didn't met the requirements of the financial
> authorities so there were consultations with them what has to be changed and
> the statutes were voted in Nove Hrady. Sadly they're not active yet.
Ah ok.
> Registration at court and acceptance by financial authorities are two
> different processes as they're two different entities.
Yes, of course, but I would still have expected the court to reject the
registration of an association that claims in its statute
to be non-profit but is not (yet) accepted by the
financial authorities... but I seem to be wrong.
Fscking legal stuff...
> Fscking legal stuff...
Exactly! I don't know all the German statutes (though I believe the e.V. complies), but here in the US it's none too simple either. That's why it is expensive and complicated to set up. In partial justification, governments do need to make it's not easy to set up "the church of drinking beer" by mail and open a tax exempt bar in your garage. ;-)
The problem with this type of set up is that it really requires someone with a lot of money that really loves what they're doing. So far mostly I'm just love. ;-)
There are thousands of dollars in legal fees to set up the structure and then the administrative costs. There's a real cost in time to pursue the funds and then when it comes to working with developers...
Everyone I work with on a sponsorship basis I have to first get to know over email, discuss how we see things, our thoughts, our passion for what we're doing... There are issues not only with skills but with how people work. You have to know that someone will work on this because they really truly love doing it because you can't look over their shoulder. There there is the interaction on what needs done, the actual oversight of the project laying out task priorities and answering numerous questions on particulars.
The process that I go through has evolved over the years and it takes a lot of time as well as knowledge of the program and communication skills. It's not just finding someone and sending them some money and getting some software.
I really want to do something like this but doing it well is more challenging than I think people realize. It would be possible to find someone who you just send money on to work on a piece of software, but to make something larger in a project you have a lot more issues and you have interactions. Maybe I'm a control freak but I don't like leaving aspects of things to chance that can make or break a project or release, especially if I'm using money from contributors. That's a major incentive to not screw up.
Anyway my thinking is that I'm not sure how many people I'd trust to do something like this on any scale. I probably could, but I'd need to have excellent financial positioning because if I wasn't drawing a salary it might be difficult if I didn't have time to work. I classify myself as a person who enjoys risk that he can structure to high probability favorable circumstances. I'm risk averse where those risks remove my control or cause things to blow up if they don't go perfect. My paranoia is hard earned and serves me well. Also my business is backwards of most jobs. my schedule is flexible during the week and I leave the house to work on weekends. If I had a regular job I'd get fired for the time I spend on Quanta. Probably sooner actually. I haven't had a job for 15 years... I don't like them. At my worst I'm still my best boss ever. ;-)
My thinking is that there is no way I can look at expanding what I do too fast. Having said that the eventual possibility that I may be able to expand what I've been doing with Quanta seems like a logical progression. It still requires a lot of problems to be solved. Paradoxically a large enough amount of user support would necessitate moving in that direction faster. ;-)
The fact remains that no matter how grand our plans we have to look at things day by day and make good decisions. I'm personally happy to take my time, not burn out and not risk personal financial disaster by trying to do too much more than I can at a particular time.
All I was suggesting was using KDE e.V. as place to donate money for quanta developers. In other words, what is happening now with the benefit of non-profit status. Though I would imagine a lot of that benefit would be lost if its only registered in Germany. And sure its legal for non-profits to pay employees, they do it all the time. Non-profit means you don't have a profit, not that your working for free.
The objective of KDE e.V.
a. The objective of the association is the promotion of science, research, education, art and culture by means of creating and distributing general purpose computer software free of charge to the public. The association arranges scientific talks in the area of computer science that are open to the public. The association is strictly a non-profit organization.
b. The objective of the association is reached by creating and distributing the K Desktop Environment in the public domain.
Supporting developers doesn't seem out of its scope, even if this isn't what they do now.
Sponsoring developers is outside the scope of KDE e.V. They do other very useful things.
Sponsoring developers is a de facto endorsement of the developer and project. This means that if you're going to do it centrally you need come up with a "fair" distribution which is a recipe for a lot of wrangling (instead of coding) by developers. All of this is rather silly because a user can in fact choose which projects they want to support. To top it all off, last year the e.V. raised about enough money to sponsor one developer, but they used money for other things that were needed.
What you're asking for adds up to too many real problems. If all you're talking is having a non profit foundation for funding development, when the numbers work out I'm happy to do that and to pursue larger contributors. I'm also one of the largest sponsors in KDE. If what you want is a non profit channeling funds into KDE development our project is probably the most likely to evolve into that.
Just another insight: a year ago when I was still in Indonesia, I'd be glad to hack day and night if only somebody sponsors me as low as few hundreds dollar. That was supposed to be quite enough to pay the rent and enjoy the living. So, might be good idea to head to southeast asia :-p
The KDE only distros like Lycoris and Xandros need to step up to the plate. I'm not aware of any projects that these distros sponsor. Lindows already is sponsoring other projects plus working on somthing in house.
> Lindows already is [..] plus working on somthing in house.
And what? :-)
They took Mozilla Composer, changed the skin, and call it NVU.
(Warning: Don't use NVU if your Mozilla version is older than 1.6! NVU will shredder your Mozilla config.) Good work, Lindows ;-)
No, I'm talking about KDE applications. See http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5758&page=4 question 9.
Look at the Kevin Interview on OSNEWS. This is his quote, "We are also working on some great KDE applications in house, which are open sourced and that we'll be sharing with the world when LindowsOS 5.0 comes out. Linux needs more and better applications to succeed. That is the area we are spending most of our time, energy and dollars right now."
Well actually they hired the composer developer to work on it full time.
And for all those annoyed by KMail's synchonious filtering blocking KMail when mail is comming in, don't forget to pledge a donation to fix bug 41514 on http://www.kontact.org/shopping/sanders.php !
Seems like it would be fixed in 20 weeks anyway which would be before for the KDE 3.3 release.
Quanta is a good application and it can become a great application if it supports WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) like KWORD does, but Quanta is advanced hence it can help web development for the newbies...
My favorite applications in KDE:
1. KWord
2. Kaffeine
3. Kwrite
4. Quanta
5. Kicker
6. KSim
8. KSambaPlugin
9. SMB4k
13. Konqueror :)
14. Konsole ...
Thanks to all KDE Developers... I appreciate your endeavor and creativity. You people are more "Artists" than just mere programmers! Hats off! to you!!!
...you ought to update to KDE 3.2.x before asking for something which is there already.
Well, I was expecting great things of Quanta after hearing so much about it. I am running the version that comes packaged with Mandrake 10 Community Released. The about box says that it is Quanta 3.2.1
To cut a long story short, I have a page that is valid XHTML and CSS2 and Quanta chocked on it.
I have also had it crash so often that I have gone back to doing things by hand because there just isn't any real time saving when you have to worry about things crashing every other minute.
Here's to hoping things improve.
This may seem like a very negative post, so let me say that I love what Quanta is trying to achieve and I have confidence that it will eventually get there, but it would need about 5-10 developers working on it full time to do so within the next two years.
> To cut a long story short, I have a page that is valid XHTML and CSS2 and
> Quanta chocked on it.
I have no idea what "chocked" means for you, but if you don't file a bugreport, we can't fix bugs.
> I have also had it crash so often that I have gone back to doing things by
> hand because there just isn't any real time saving when you have to worry
> about things crashing every other minute.
Same here, except if it crashes when you access the Bookmarks menu. That is MDK 10 specific problem...
In short: http://bugs.kde.org for all those having problems.
This is really fun. Now let's get real. Open that version of Quanta, go to the help menu and pull up the about dialog. Now read the version. It will give you a release date from CVS.
Quanta 3.2.1 (Using KDE 3.2 Branch >=20040204)
I'm sorry, but if you're basing an evaluation of Quanta on this then that is really sad because it's total bull flop! Either you were unclear that Mandrake was releasing a CVS build was or they didn't explain it well. Let me explain. We released 3.2 in January and found that there was a problem with parsing certain structures in PHP that did not show up in our tests prior to release. We had to completely restructure the parser in the HEAD branch and intermittently update the 3.2 branch as we went. The entire project was very unstable until the last week before release right around the first of March.
Now if you're willing to make an evaluation based on the 3.2.1 *RELEASE* fine. Otherwise I gotta tell you it frankly pisses me off te read that Quanta is unstable. Because I respect the Dot I won't ask for everyone with a stable release to post. Read the link above on the words "huge dividends". It shows what an exceptional record we have dealing with bugs. Our releases are VERY stable.
You're posting here that we have a problem and I don't even have to ask if you filed a bug report because if you did Andras would have already gotten back with you and you would be either building from source or getting a 3.2.1 RPM. You certainly wouldn't be running a badly broken CVS build.
Whatever happened to the simple rule that if you want stable software don't run a development version? I can't believe I'm getting my chops busted over this. If Mandrake can't get people to understand they're delivering CVS software they should stop the practice! I get tired of people thinking the worst of our software because of packaging decisions!
Good practices dictate that distributions release stable release software and users report bugs. Had either of these practices been followed you would not be telling the same story here. Sadly neither were and we look bad because of it.
I am sorry to sound harsh to you, but as the maintainer of Quanta, it is your responsability to make distributors behave respectfully. The GPL allows Mandrake to create derivative of Quanta 3.2cvs, but not to call them Quanta 3.2.1...
So you should not direct your anger at a user that is complaining about what has been presented to him as quanta 3.2.1. You should (actually you have to) send an official letter to Mandrake, asking them to stop using the trademark Quanta for one of their products (a buggy derivative of Quanta).
being a user of quanta 3.2.0 I'd have to agree.
MDK's version is shite. Total and absolute shite.
But that's what you get when patch upon patch upon patch is thrown in
I use Quanta 3.2.1 on KDE 3.2.1, and it is still somewhat unstable. Chrashes tend to happen at random so i have been unable to provide decent bug reports.
Yep I've been experiencing issues for a year now, and now I'm on Quanta post-3.2.3 using KDE 3.2.3 and it locks up in a pretty random fashion. Some days it'll run beautifully others it will seize up pretty quickly. I've tried to figure some rhyme or reason but to no avail. Happens on all sizes of files, pressing all sorts of keys.
I don't get the debug option with these crashes either. I'm curious if its somehow due to issues on the network share where the files live? I'm going to run a while without the autosaving a backup and see if I can't get some more info.
I've been doing HTML since Mosaic Alpha 8 :-) and truly love Quanta. Other than these issues, (which may be due to being a somewhat linux dektop novice) it's a near perfectly constructed tool.
Hey Datschge, he just said we went from good to great. He just didn't know he said it. Now we have to find a way to get to all these people's houses and install the new versions for them so that they know it. ;-)
I think this is not a good way to go, i once talked to a developer at a exhibition from Xfree86 about a cool feature and he say they said " yeah nice but i only implement it if you pay me ". This attitude really sucks and brought Xfree86 down.
Well that's not my attitude, Andras' attitude, Michal's attitude or Özkan's attitude. Could it be that you either didn't read it, jumped to conclusions or just don't really know much about us? Let's look at the facts...
1) I started sponsoring development with Dmitry and Alex in 2000. They needed to move our of the hostel they were living in and into a house with a phone line for an internet connection. They were almost out of college and it's hard to contribute when you have to put it on a floppy and borrow a friends connection.
2) I sponsored Andras mid 2002 after he had gotten Quanta in order in December 2001 for a 2.0 release without asking for money. Because he was looking for work and stressing it was hard for him to work on it prior to being sponsored. had he taken a job the employer policy where he lives is to work you as many hours as they want for the same money. It would have been quite likely that he would not have had much time or energy to code Quanta.
3) I spent thousands of dollars of my own money before I thought that maybe I should ask for help.
4) Michal has another open source project he's working on and just finished his PhD so he hasn't had much time for Quanta.
5) Özkan did say he'd work on it no matter what and told me that since he broke up with his girlfriend a few days ago he would have more time. I think I can understand that. Considering he said a few hundred dollars a month would put him in good shape I don't think I can call him greedy.
Each of the people developing under sponsorhip or hoping to be sponsored with our project loves what they're doing. Özkan produced an alpha of his program already, Andras released Kallery and Michal released Knowit.
* Nobody here is saying they won't work on this unless paid, unless it is just not feasible for them to do so.
* Everyone we sponsor is able to put in substantially more time and as I've often explained this makes them several times more effective with that time because they are more familiar with all aspects of it.
* Everyone here has produced code in advance of asking for sponsorship help.
* It costs money to live and earning it can get in the way of having time and energy for other things.
What this has done for Quanta is gotten us noticed, like our recent LinuxQuestions.org user choice award. It also got us one of the lowest counts for open bugs of KDE applications as well as a turn around time for user support that is often in the minutes. One contributor made a feature request that was filled in 3 hours in CVS!
What actually has been the downfall of XFree86 is a number of unrelated but different issues including their license and looking for recognition. We don't in any way resemble XFree86 at all!
Maybe what really sucks is the idea of financially supporting a project that does a good job? Note that I NEVER try to make people feel guilty as a motivation to contribute nor do I ever beg. I detest both and I respect our users too much. I don't even like asking for money, but at some times I think it is too important not to.
I'm not personally offended by what you said, but I think I proved that you don't have a solid perspective here. Everyone here knows who I am. If I've messed up go ahead and point it out, but if you're going to do so you had better have your facts straight. People are contributing money to our project and it's EXTREMELY important to me that I do the right thing by them. As far as attitude goes, it is difficult to ascertain sometimes without some study. I think it's reasoable to assume, based on what we've done, that ours is okay. How's yours? ;-)


text:
- There's a complete failure to understand what affects teenagers' behaviour. Do the bishops seriously think that teenaged girls who are thinking of having sex say to themselves "Oh, wait a minute. I might get HPV. Let's not do it." Potential consequences of sex include a host of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as pregnancy. If these don't put girls off, then why should a risk of HPV?
- HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. You can get it if you are a virgin who marries someone with HPV. You can get it if you are raped (something which has been known to occur in Catholic schools).
- The recommendation seems theologically dubious. I'm an atheist, but my understanding of Catholicism is that whether or not something is a sin is largely to do with motivation rather than action. So if you are tempted to sex but desist because it would upset God, then that's good. If you are tempted to sex but desist only because of a fear of disease, that's still a sin. The church should be teaching girls to love God so much that they won't do things that offend him, not to conform to standards of sexual behaviour out of fear. No doubt religious readers will put me right if I've misunderstood this distinction.
- These girls are attending a Catholic school where I assume morality is drummed into them day and night. The bishops assume that their grasp of that morality is so weak that having a HPV vaccination will be sufficient to overturn everything they have been told about sexual ethics. Doesn't say much for the religious teaching in the schools, or for the intelligence of the pupils.
- One thing Jesus really understood is that humans aren't perfect and frequently fall short of the moral standards they try to adhere to. There's a huge emphasis on forgiveness of sin in his teachings. The Bishops are in effect saying that God won't forgive you if you stray from the straight and narrow: he'll commit you to a life with an unpleasant disease, and increase your risk of dying from cancer. That's not the Christian God I was taught about.
Saturday 30 June 2012
Schoolgirls' health put at risk by Catholic view on vaccination
Today's Time Newsfeed carries a remarkable story: parents of children attending Catholic schools in Calgary were sent a special letter to accompany details of a vaccination programme against human papillomavirus (HPV), which protects against cervical cancer. In it, local bishops wrote: "Although school-based immunization delivery systems generally result in high numbers of students completing immunization, a school-based approach to vaccination sends a message that early sexual intercourse is allowed."
I find this amazing for several reasons:
Sunday 24 June 2012
Causal models of developmental disorders: the perils of correlational data
Experimental psychology depends heavily on statistics, but
psychologists don't always agree about the best ways of analyzing data. Take
the following problem:
I have two groups each of 30 children, dyslexics and
controls. I give them a test of auditory discrimination and find a significant
difference between the groups, with the dyslexic mean being lower. I want to
see whether reading ability is related to the auditory task. I compute the
correlation between the auditory measure and reading, and find it is .42, which
in a sample of 64 cases is significant at the .001 level.
I write up the results, concluding that poor auditory skill
is a risk factor for poor reading. But reviewers are critical.
So what's wrong with this?
I'll deal quickly with two obvious points. First, there is
the well-worn phrase that correlation does not equal causation. The correlation
could reflect a causal link from auditory deficit to poor reading,
but we need also to consider other causal routes, as I'll illustrate further
below. This is an issue about interpretation rather than data analysis.
A second point concerns the need to look at the data rather
than just computing the correlation statistic. Correlations can be sensitive to
distributional properties of the data and can be heavily influenced by
outliers. There are statistical ways of checking for such effects, but a good
first step is just plotting a scatterplot to see whether the data look orderly.
A tip for students: if your supervisor
asks to see your project data, don't just turn up with numerical output from
the analysis: be ready to show some plots.
Figure 1: Fictitious data showing spurious correlation between height and reading ability |
A less familiar point concerns the pooling of data across
the dyslexic and control groups. Some people have strong views about this, yet,
as far as I'm aware, it hasn't been discussed much in the context of
developmental disorders. I therefore felt it would be good to give it an airing
on my blog and see what others think.
Let's start with a fictitious example that illustrates the
dangers of pooling data from two groups. Figure 1 is a scatterplot showing the
correlation between height and reading ability in groups of 6-year-olds and
10-year-olds. If I pool across groups, I'm likely to see a strong correlation
between height and reading ability, whereas within any one age group the
correlation is negligible. This is a clear case of spurious correlation, as
illustrated in Figure 2. Here the case against pooling is unambiguous, and it's
clear that if you look at the correlation within either age band, there is no
relationship between reading ability and height.
Figure 2: Model showing how a spurious correlation between height and reading arises because both are affected by age |
Examples such as this have led some people to argue that you
shouldn't pool data in studies such as the dyslexic vs. control example. Or, to
be more precise, the recommendation is usually that you should check the
correlations within each group, and
avoid pooling if they don't look consistent with the pooled correlation. I've
always been a bit uneasy about this logic and have been giving some thought as
to why.
First, there is the simple issue of power. If you halve your
sample size, then you increase the standard error of estimate for a correlation
coefficient, making it more likely that it will be nonsignificant. Figure 3
shows the 95% confidence intervals around a correlation of .5 depending on
sample size, and you can readily see that these are larger for small than big
samples. There's a nice website by Stan
Brown that gives relevant formulae in Excel.
Figure 3: 95% confidence interval around estimated correlation of .5, with different sample sizes |
A less obvious point is that the data in Figure 1 look
analogous to the dyslexic vs. control example, but there is an important
difference. We know where we are with age: it is unambiguous to define and measure.
But dyslexia is more tricky. Suppose we substitute dyslexia for age, and
auditory processing for height, in the model of spurious correlation in Figure
2. We have a problem: there is no independent diagnostic test for dyslexia. It
is actually defined in terms of one of our correlated variables, reading
ability. Thus, the criterion used to allocate children to groups is not
independent of the measures that are entered into the correlation. This creates
distortions in within-group correlations, as follows.
If we define our groups in terms of their scores on one
variable, we effectively restrict the range of values obtained by each group,
and this lowers the correlation. Furthermore, the restriction will be less for
the controls than for the dyslexic group - who are typically selected as
scoring below a low cutoff, such as one SD below the mean. Figure 4 shows simulated
data for two groups selected from a population where the true correlation
between variables A and B is .5. Thirty individuals (dyslexics) are selected as
scoring more than 1 SD below average on variable A, and another 30 (controls)
are selected as scoring above this level.
Figure 4: Correlations obtained in samples of dyslexic (red) and controls (blue) for 20 runs of simulation with N = 30 per group. |
The Figure shows correlations from twenty
runs of this simulation. For both groups, the average correlation is less than
the true value of .5, because of the restricted range of scores on variable A.
However, because the range is more restricted for the dyslexic group, their
average correlation is lower than that of the controls. A correlation of .42 corresponds to the .05 significance level for a sample of
this size, and we can see that the controls are more likely to exceed this
value than the dyslexic group. All these results are just artefacts of the way
in which the groups were selected: both groups come from the same population
where r = .5.
What can we conclude from all this? Well, the bottom line is
that if we find non-significant within-group
correlations this does not necessarily invalidate a causal model. The
simulation shows that we may find that within-group correlations look quite
different in dyslexic and control groups, even if they come from a common
So where does this leave us?! It would seem that in general,
within-group data are unlikely to help us distinguish between causal and
non-causal models: they may be compatible with both. So how should we proceed?
There's no simple solution, but here are some suggestions:
1. If considering correlational data, always report the 95%
confidence interval. Usually people (including me!) just report the correlation coefficient,
degrees of freedom and p-value. It's so uncommon to add confidence intervals
that I suspect most psychologists don't know how to compute it. Do not assume
that because one correlation is significant and another is not that they are
meaningfully different. This
website can be used to test for the significance of the difference between
correlations. I would, however, advise against interpreting such a comparison
if your data are affected by the kinds of restriction of range discussed above.
2. Study the relationship between key variables in a large unselected
sample covering a wide range of scores. This is a more tractable solution, but
is seldom done. Typically, people recruit an equivalent number of cases and
controls, with a sample size that is inadequate for getting a precise estimate
of a correlation in either group. If your underlying model predicts a linear
relationship between, say, auditory processing and phonological awareness, then
with a sample of 200 cases, a fairly precise estimate can be obtained. With this approach, one
can also identify whether the relationship is linear.
3. More generally, it's important to be explicit about what
models you are testing. For instance, I've identified four underlying models of
the relationship between auditory deficit and language impairment, as shown in Figure
5. In general, correlational data on these two skills won't distinguish between
these models, but specifying the alternatives may help you think of other data
that could be informative.
Figure 5: Models of causal relationships underlying observed correlation between auditory deficit and language impairment |
For instance:
- We found that, when studying heritable conditions, it is useful to include data on parents or siblings. Models differ in predictions about how measures of genetic risk - for instance, family history, or presence of specific genetic variants - relate to A (auditory deficit) and B (language impairment) in the child. This approach is illustrated in this paper. Interestingly, we found that the causal model that is often implicitly assumed, which we termed the Endophenotype model, did not fit the data, but nor did the spurious correlation model, which corresponds here to the Pleiotropy model.
- There may be other groups that can be informative: for instance, if you think auditory deficits are key in causing language problems, it may be worth including children with hearing loss in a study - see this paper for an example of this approach using converging evidence.
- Longitudinal data can help distinguish whether A causes B or B causes A.
- Training studies are particularly powerful, in allowing one to manipulate A and see if it changes B.
So what's the bottom line? In general, correlational data
from small samples of clinical and control groups are inadequate for testing
causal models. They can lead to type I errors, where pooling data leads to a
spurious association between variables, but also to type II errors, where a
genuine association is discounted because it isn't evident within subject
groups. For the field to move forward, we need to go beyond correlational data.
P.S. 9th July 2012
I've written a little tutorial on simulating data using R to illustrate some of these points. No prior knowledge of R required. see: http://tinyurl.com/d2868cg
Bishop DV, Hardiman MJ, & Barry JG (2012). Auditory deficit as a consequence rather than endophenotype of specific language impairment: electrophysiological evidence. PloS one, 7 (5) PMID: 22662112P.S. 9th July 2012
I've written a little tutorial on simulating data using R to illustrate some of these points. No prior knowledge of R required. see: http://tinyurl.com/d2868cg
If you liked this post, you may also be interested in my other posts on statistical topics:
Getting genetic effect sizes in perspective
The joys of inventing data
A short nerdy post about the use of percentiles
The difference between p < .05 and a screening test
structural model
Monday 4 June 2012
The 'autism epidemic' and diagnostic substitution
Based on: King &
Bearman (2011) American Sociological Review, 76(2), 320-346;
Data from birth
and diagnostic records for all children born in California 1992-2000
- Explanation #1 maintains that something in our modern environment has come along to increase the risk of autism. There are numerous candidates, as indicated in this blogpost by Emily Willingham.
- Explanation #2 sees the risks as largely biological or genetic, with changing patterns of reproduction altering prevalence rates, either because of assortative mating (not much evidence, in my view) or because of an increase in older parents (more plausible).
- Explanation #3 is very different: it says the increase is not a real increase - it's just a change in what we count as autism. This has been termed 'diagnostic substitution' - the basic idea is that children who would previously have received another diagnosis or no diagnosis are now being identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This could be in part because of new conceptualisations of autism, but may also be fuelled by strategic considerations: resources for children with ASD tend to be much better than those for children with other related conditions, such as language impairment or intellectual handicaps, so this diagnosis may be preferred.
In 2008, my research group published a study that
documented one kind of diagnostic substitution. We contacted people who had
taken part in our studies of children with specific language impairment years
ago. We carried out a standard diagnostic observation procedure for autism with
the young adults themselves and, where possible, interviewed their parents
about their early history. We found a number of individuals who had been
regarded as cases of specific language impairment ten or twenty years ago but who
would nowadays be diagnosed with ASD. Although it's possible that some people
develop autistic symptomatology as they get older, in our cases the autistic
symptoms appeared to have been present from early childhood - as indicated by
the parental interviews. Around half of the sample had been identified as having
'semantic-pragmatic disorder' in childhood, but autism had been excluded because
at that time, prior to publication of DSM-IV diagnostic guidelines, it was
regarded as a very rare condition in which there were severe social and
behavioural impairments. How many children would have qualified for ASD
diagnoses had they been seen today? Well, it depends. I suspect few people
appreciate just how flexible the diagnostic criteria are for autism, even when lengthy standardized diagnostic instruments are used. Although we used the gold
standard diagnostic procedures (ADOS-G and ADI-R) we found they seldom gave the
same answer. If we diagnosed ASD only when both diagnostic instruments agreed,
21% of cases met criteria. If we included anyone who met criteria for autism or
PDDNOS on either ADI-R or ADOS, the rate shot up to 66%.
Last year, a fascinating study by Brugha and colleagues attacked the same question from a different angle. They did an epidemiological
survey of a representative sample of adults from the English population, using
the ADOS-G, and found that the rates of ASD were similar to those recently
reported in children. Within the adult population, rates of ASD did not change
with age. Thus, provided we stick to the same diagnostic criteria, then the
prevalence of autism is the same for those born several decades ago, as it is
for the current generation of children. Importantly, none of these adults with
ASD had received a formal diagnosis.
Recently, we conducted a study with another group: children with an additional sex chromosome (i.e. trisomy). We had not intended to study
diagnostic substitution: the goal was rather to understand more about the
language difficulties that had previously been described in children with sex
chromosome trisomies. The effect of an extra sex chromosome is relatively mild:
most of these children attend mainstream schools and they do not have any
obvious physical abnormalities. Indeed, they can be hard to study because many
individuals with trisomies will be unaware of their condition. We gathered
information by parental report, and did not do any direct evaluation of the
child, but we did ask about whether the child had had any kind of diagnosis by
a medical or psychological expert. We confirmed that there was a strong
association with language problems in all three kinds of trisomy (girls with
XXX, and boys with XYY or XXY), many of whom had had speech-language therapy.
But we also found that 2/19 (11%) of boys with XXY and 11/58 (19%) of those
with XYY had received an ASD diagnosis.
It is important to emphasise that most children with a sex
chromosome trisomy did not have an ASD diagnosis, and many were not giving any
cause for concern. Nevertheless, although they are only a minority of cases,
the proportion with ASD is much higher than in the general population. We were
really surprised at this because before publishing our study we had done a
systematic review of the literature on children with sex chromosome trisomies,
focusing on studies that avoided ascertainment bias. In these studies, not a
single case of autism had been mentioned when discussing outcomes. So was our
study a fluke? We are confident this is not the case, because this year two
further studies from the USA
have been reported (Ross et al and Lee et al, in press), both of which got results very similar to ours, though
using different methods.
This research provides further evidence that diagnostic
substitution has occurred, suggesting that children who in the past would have
been diagnosed with language impairment are now being diagnosed with ASD. The
only other way to explain the increased diagnosis rate in children with a known
chromosomal abnormality would be if the trisomy acted as a risk factor, making
children more sensitive to environmental factors that could cause autism. That's
a possibility, but it seems more likely that cases of ASD were missed in the
past because more stringent diagnostic criteria were used, just as was found in our follow-up of children with SLI and in the epidemiological study
of adults by Brugha and colleagues.
It is becoming clear that changing diagnostic criteria,
increased awareness of ASD, and strategic use of diagnosis to gain access to
services, have had a massive effect on the numbers of children with ASD. When I
started studies in this area, I thought diagnostic substitution had happened
but I did not think it would be sufficient to explain the increase in numbers of ASD
diagnoses. But now, on the basis of studies reviewed here, I think it could be
the full story.
PS: a slightly extended version of this blogpost was featured on PLOS Blogs on 8th June 2012.
Bishop, D., Jacobs, P., Lachlan, K., Wellesley, D., Barnicoat, A., Boyd, P., Fryer, A., Middlemiss, P., Smithson, S., Metcalfe, K., Shears, D., Leggett, V., Nation, K., & Scerif, G. (2010). Autism, language and communication in children with sex chromosome trisomies Archives of Disease in Childhood, 96 (10), 954-959 DOI: 10.1136/adc.2009.179747PS: a slightly extended version of this blogpost was featured on PLOS Blogs on 8th June 2012.
Bishop, D., Whitehouse, A., Watt, H., & Line, E. (2008). Autism and diagnostic substitution: evidence from a study of adults with a history of developmental language disorder Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 50 (5), 341-345 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8749.2008.02057.x
Brugha, T. (2011). Epidemiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Adults in the Community in England Archives of General Psychiatry, 68 (5) DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.38
Lee, N. R., Wallace, G. L., Adeyemi, E. I., Lopez, K. C., Blumenthal, J. D., Clasen, L. S., & Giedd, J. N. (2012, in press). Dosage effects of X and Y chromosomes on language and social functioning in children with supernumerary sex chromosome aneuploidies: Implications for idiopathic language impairment and autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Ross, J. L.,et al (2012). Behavioral and social phenotypes in boys with 47, XYY syndrome or 47, XXY Klinefelter syndrome. Pediatrics, 129(4), 769-778. doi: 10.1542/peds.2011-0719
language impairment,
sex chromosome trisomy,
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text:
. |
Graphic by: Yiqi Shao Rainbows, sunsets and halos; a spectacular display of colors and visuals in the sky called "atmospheric optics". As sunlight (or moonlight) enters the atmosphere, it is either absorbed, reflected, scattered, refracted or diffracted by atmospheric particles or air molecules. These processes, individually or in combination, are responsible for producing most optical effects. This module investigates these particle-light interactions and the assortment of optical effects they produce. The Light and Optics module has been organized into the following sections:
The type of optical effect that results greatly depends upon the type of particles the light encounters and on the wavelength of the light. For this reason, the optical effects discussed in this module have been grouped according to the following classifications of atmospheric particles: air, dust and haze, ice crystals, and water droplets.


text:
GO to Niagara Falls from Toronto
- Read more about GO to Niagara Falls from Toronto
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At the entrance to this historic Park you will be greeted by carpet bedding displays, along with formalized annual bedding schemes that surround both the Brock and Laura Secord Monuments. Nestled high atop the Niagara Escarpment, this is the birthplace of Niagara Falls - garden and nature lovers, hikers and picnickers have used this park for generations. Facilities include two picnic pavilions, washrooms, children's splash pad, tennis courts, a band shell, snack bar, children's playground and fine dining at Queenston Heights Restaurant with its award-winning VQA wine cellar.
Queenston Heights Park is also a terminus point of the Bruce Trail, which winds it way northward over several hundred kilometers to Tobermory. This trail passes through the Niagara Escarpment, which has been recognized as a world biosphere by U.N.E.S.C.O.
Parks Canada oversees the operation of Brock's Monument and also has a walking tour of the historic sites associated with this important battleground.
For those looking to slow it down and relax, Niagara Falls has experiences to help rejuvenate and revitalize.


text:
What happens when a still life goes on vacation and comes back with a new, tropical personality? Tutti-frutti! This is the puzzle for anyone looking for a mini mind vacation. All aboard: we're checking into paradise.
- Completed puzzle is 19.25 x 26.6 inches
- Box is 8 x 8 x 2 inches
- Thick stock and high-quality art paper
- Not suitable for children
- Board is 100% recycled paper


text:
Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq claims responsibility for bombings that killed 21 and injured about 120 others Sunday
Al-Qaeda's front group in Iraq has claimed a wave of bombings targeting Shiite areas of Baghdad that killed at least 21 people Sunday, in the latest violence to hit Iraq as it struggles with protests and a political crisis.
The al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) carried out the attacks "in revenge for alleged criminal acts by the Shiite-led government in Sunnis areas of the capital," said the SITE monitoring service, which tracks extremist Internet forums.
Three car bombs struck the sprawling Sadr City slum in the north of the city on Sunday, car bombs exploded in Ameen, Al-Husseiniyah and Kamaliyah in the east, and a roadside bomb blew up in Karrada in central Baghdad, security and medics there said.
Another roadside device went off in Saidiyah in the capital's south.
Al-Qaeda's front group is widely seen as weaker than during the peak of Iraq's sectarian bloodshed from 2006 to 2008, but is still capable of carrying out mass-casualty attacks on a regular basis.
Residents of Sadr City were enraged by the bombings, and hospitals in the area were quickly crowded with people searching for relatives.
"What did we do? We're always the victims of conflicts between politicians," one woman shouted.
The carnage could have been even worse.
The Baghdad Operations Command, which is responsible for security in the capital, said in a statement that security forces defused a total of six car bombs, including three in Sadr City.
Heavy security measures were put in place after the Sadr City attacks, with some areas closed off.
Gunmen also carried out two attacks in north Iraq on Sunday, killing a police captain in front of his home in Mosul and shooting dead a football player and wounding two others near Kirkuk, security and medical officials said.
The attacks brought the number of people killed in violence this month to at least 158, according to an AFP tally based on reports from security and medical officials nationwide.
The Baghdad bombings followed multiple attacks on Saturday that killed five people, including the head of Iraq's intelligence academy.
Two suicide bombers killed Brigadier General Aouni Ali and two of his guards, and more bombings resulted in the deaths of a judge and an army lieutenant.
Members of the security forces and judicial officials are also often targeted by militants in Iraq.
The latest violence comes as after nearly two months of anti-government protests centred on Sunni-majority areas in north and west Iraq, calling for the ouster of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite, and amid a festering political crisis.
The demonstrations were initially sparked in December by the arrest of several guards of Finance Minister Rafa al-Essawi, a leading Sunni.
The longest-running protests have blocked a key trade route linking Baghdad to both Jordan and Syria.
As the demonstrations have since expanded markedly, the government has sought to curtail them by saying it has released thousands of detainees and raised the salaries of Sunni militiamen battling Al-Qaeda extremists.
It has also restricted movements in major cities on Fridays, when the largest protests are staged.
Maliki, meanwhile, has been tussling with a political crisis that has pitted him against many of his government partners barely two months before provincial elections, the country's first since March 2010 parliamentary polls.
A team of US Congressmen met with the Iranian dissident group MEK in Paris on Sunday and threatened to declare Iraq's prime minister a sponsor of terrorism after a deadly attack on an Iranian exile camp there.
The bi-partisan team, led by Dana Rohrabacher -- the chair of the sub-committee on Europe -- expressed strong support for the People's Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK) which has accused Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of ordering a deadly attack on its camp in Iraq on February 9.
"If there is another attack on these helpless refugees obviously cleared by the government of Iraq, we will move in the US Congress ... and put forward a resolution declaring Prime Minister Maliki and his government state sponsors of terrorism," Rohrabacher said.


text:
The fleet industry stands at a crossroads of rapidly evolving technology and new demands for safer, more efficient, and more accountable operations. Fleet managers and business owners are connecting with their vehicles, drivers, and customers in new and exciting ways, uncovering new efficiencies and spurring innovation.
Enter Verizon Connect, a new division that unites the brainpower and technological capacity of Verizon Networkfleet, Fleetmatics, and Telogis on a single platform. Automotive Fleet and affiliated Bobit Business Media fleet publications met with Verizon's executive leadership team to learn more about Verizon Connect and ask how they plan to help commercial fleet managers meet new challenges and seize new opportunities — today and in the near future.
Automotive Fleet: Can you share some insight into the new subsidiary and how Verizon Connect is positioning itself within the fleet industry?
Verizon Connect: Verizon Connect marks the full integration of three best-in-class companies — Networkfleet, Telogis, and Fleetmatics — into a unified, connected commercial vehicle software company. The commercial telematics market in 2016 was very fragmented, and we found that there were two companies that stood out: Fleetmatics and its ability to provide a world-class fleet management platform for the small to medium-sized business (SMB) market, and Telogis, whose partnerships with the OEMs and ownership of the large enterprise space was bar-none.
What Verizon Connect represents is the coming together of all the talent, technology, innovation, and infrastructure of these three companies — Verizon Networkfleet, Fleetmatics and Telogis — to create the world's leading platform for automating, optimizing, and revolutionizing the way people, vehicles, and things move through the world. In doing so, we're able to deepen our customer relationships while adding more value through an equal amount of automation and insight.
Our focus on enabling safety, compliance, and operating efficiencies remain. Simultaneously, we're expanding our software platform to go beyond the vehicle to include both the worker and work being done. We tap into important data, expertly analyze it, and deliver insightful, actionable solutions to customers. Because of this, our customers are able to move their vehicles, people, products, and services through the world in more efficient, cost-effective and smarter ways.
AF: How does Verizon Connect differentiate itself among fleet solution providers?
Verizon Connect: Over the past few years, we have invested more than $5 billion in assembling this unique set of assets that included an amazing group of dedicated professionals, world-class platform solutions and services, and the reliability, scale, and global reach of a company like Verizon.
Since the close of the Fleetmatics acquisition in November 2016, we've invested more in R&D than ever before in order to be a lifelong partner for our customers. In fact, we grew our investment in R&D more than 35% in 2017 alone. It's our mission to future-proof our customers' businesses and continue to innovate and bring to market the new technologies and software solutions that help them stay ahead of the competition, better serve their own customers, and add to the bottom line.
The Verizon Connect team has also been working hard to simplify access to our technologies by making vast improvements to the user interfaces you'll see in our apps, working to deliver insights instead of just data, and, most importantly, offering customers a one-stop-shop approach to purchasing from us.
We know that having multiple vendors, suppliers, logins, platforms, and technologies can slow productivity and add complexity to our customers' businesses, which is why Verizon Connect is the only partner that has everything they need in one place — from embedded and aftermarket options for hardware and installations to comprehensive mobile workforce and fleet management software solutions and Verizon 4G LTE connectivity.
Verizon Connect is also made up of more than 3,500 of the most dedicated and experienced professionals in the business who are in the trenches with our customers every day, helping them succeed. We grew our customer success organization by more than 65% in 2017 and we are continuing to add new talent.
AF: What major influencing factors do you see impacting the fleet industry over the next five to 10 years?
Verizon Connect: It is the inevitable ubiquity of autonomous vehicles that will, without question, affect all aspects of daily life; the only questions are how long it will take, and in what form it will arrive. While consumers have the luxury of gradually warming up to the idea, businesses have no choice but to plan for the future or get left behind in the market. As companies wade through the various predictions and prognostications of the autonomous future, they should zero in on the effects that the connected vehicle ecosystem can have now to increase the efficiency, productivity, and safety of their fleets and mobile workers.
Autonomous technology is both newsworthy and exciting, but like all radical technologies, it will take time to fully take hold. In the same way that broad market penetration of the internet took years, autonomous vehicles will similarly require an active change in both consumer and business behavior. It may be that autonomy's promise of a safer tomorrow will accelerate adoption, but given concerns around today's safety, control, regulation, infrastructure, and insurance, it will take legislation and broader agreement among government agencies and multinational corporations for autonomous vehicles to be fully embraced.
In the interim, companies should look to advancements in connected commercial vehicle technologies and related applications for strategies they can apply to boost safety, productivity, and efficiency for the entirety of their mobile operations — people, vehicles, and assets. Not only will expanded connectivity and smarter applications increasingly remove the guesswork from mobile and field operations, but the increased agility that comes from embracing these advancements will future-proof our customers' organizations and prepare them for what lies ahead.
AF: What changes do you expect to see specifically related to fleet telematics solution providers over the next two to five years?
Verizon Connect: Many of our customers have already enabled smart load tracking, routing, and other connected solutions. In recent years, major advancements driven by faster connectivity and hardware innovation, have improved cost, compliance, and safety that traditional fleet and workforce management systems provide. Examples include compliance systems, driver behavior monitoring, and coaching, AI-powered predictive maintenance, real-time GPS-enabled parking, advanced traffic, and more.
Traditional fleet management systems also share a natural adjacency with field service management (FSM) solutions that enable enhanced productivity and communication for mobile workers as they perform their work, typically outside their vehicles. This is an area that is ripe for innovation, driven equally by demand for cloud-based solutions and the availability of new technologies. Examples include in-field quoting and work order management, real-time reactive scheduling, and customer coordination, mobile time- and cost-tracking, field service inventory management, electronic data capture for compliance and administration and even mobile invoicing and payment.
AF: How do you see Verizon Connect's solutions evolving with all these changes in mind?
Verizon Connect: The rise of big data has been a game-changer for businesses of every type, and the connected commercial vehicle industry is no different. In the past, telematics software had only been capable of processing data from individual companies. With Verizon Connect's ability to store and process data at a much larger scale today, we can now build machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools that become more effective with greater scale. What was once basic dots-on-a-map reporting has progressed to become near-real time business analytics. As predictive and prescriptive software continue to advance, the promise of further innovation is both inevitable and significant.
Every company looks for opportunities to improve efficiency, safety, and the bottom line, but we are seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what big data will ultimately deliver. Since its inception, improvements in both technology and techniques have regularly brought innovation to the field of big data analytics. Taking recent developments into account, we can expect this trend not merely to continue, but to accelerate.
AF: Are there other implications to these advances we haven't discussed?
Verizon Connect: One of the things we're most proud of at Verizon Connect is the potential our current and future technologies have for massive societal impact.
In 2017 alone, we fielded more than 122,000 customer distress calls and dispatched emergency services more than 20,000 times. We regularly help customers maintain cold chain integrity in order to ensure fresh fish and other perishable items make it from ocean or farm into restaurant refrigerators safely.
In law enforcement, more officers lose their lives in vehicular crashes than by any other means. With the goal of saving officers' lives, the Snohomish County Sheriff's office in Washington installed our software to help them identify and eliminate dangerous driving practices including speeding, hard braking, harsh acceleration and not wearing seat belts. A year after they introduced their comprehensive driver safety program — of which Verizon Connect was a component, they had zero significant injuries, down from 11 the year prior.
AF: How would you describe your core daily responsibility to your fleet customers?
Verizon Connect: Every day, we help our customers identify key insights that enable them to route their vehicles and drivers more efficiently and safely, vehicle diagnostics that help them reduce fuel and maintenance costs, and opportunities to reward their best drivers. We also built driver-centric apps from the ground-up with user-friendly and simple ways to track hours of service so drivers can focus on what's important: servicing their own customers and getting home safely.
AF: What key pain points are you identifying and helping solve among your commercial fleet customers?
Verizon Connect: Commercial fleets face mission-critical issues daily relating to scheduling, dispatching, improving safety on the road, reducing fuel and maintenance costs, and managing accurate payroll for service fleets. Verizon Connect helps mobile workforces solve these problems so that they can focus on what's important: providing extraordinary service to their end customers and getting home safely after their shift.
AF: What changes or benefits can current commercial fleet customers expect to experience in light of your acquisitions and rebrand?
Verizon Connect: The launch of Verizon Connect represents the completed integration of three best-in-class companies into a single operating unit that can put the right solutions in the hands (and vehicles) of our customers. Under one company, new and existing customers will have easier access to broader solution options. Also, customers will certainly see clear benefits with the scale, reach, and reliability of Verizon and its network.
Editor's note: Read Heavy Duty Trucking's April issue for exclusive content.
Originally posted on Automotive Fleet
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Maymana - Al Wajh flight ticket
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Transportation form City Center to Maymana Airport
Things you need to know to reach from city centre to Maymana Airport
Maymana Airport
Maymana is one of the cities in Faryab administrative region in Afghanistan and this city has always been a strategic point in the history. The city is built near Maymana River. Maymana Airport offers domestic flights and it is approximately 3 km away from the city centre. There is one alternative to reach to Maymana Airport.
To reach from Meymene city centre to Meymene Airport, taxi or rent a car will approximately take 10 minutes. You can benefit from this option and easily transfer to the airport.
Transportation from Al Wajh Airport to City Center
Things you need to know to reach from city centre to Al Wajh Airport
Al Wajh Airport
Al Wajh Airport is in Al Wajh city of Tebuk administrative region of Saudi Arabia. The airport is 9 km away from city centre and domestic flights to Jeddah and Riyad are organised. Al Wajh Airport only offers domestic flights and there are two options to reach your hotel or city centre.
Aerobilet transfer services
You can benefit from secure, comfortable, and economic Aerobilet transfer service from Al Wajh Airport to your hotel. You can select your hotel, date, and number of people to transfer from Al Wajh Airport on Aerobilet transfer page and book your place. You can call Aerobilet support line for other options.
You can also use a taxi to transfer from Al Wajh Airport to city centre or your hotel. Taxis are at the exit of arrival terminal and it will take 10 minutes to reach to city centre.


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What makes cities in India and China so frustrating to drive in—heavy traffic, aggressive driving style, few freeways—makes them ideal for saving fuel with hybrid vehicles, according to new research by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). In a pair of studies using real-world driving conditions, they found that hybrid cars are significantly more fuel-efficient in India and China than they are in the United States.
These findings could have an important impact in countries that are on the brink of experiencing an explosion in the sales of personal vehicles; the government of India has already taken note of the findings. "Currently greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector in India and China are a smaller piece of the pie compared with other sectors," said lead researcher Anand Gopal. "But vehicle ownership is going to skyrocket in these countries. That is why we decided to focus on this area. Hybrid and electric vehicles can significantly reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants."
What's more, hybrids in India are also more fuel-efficient than they are officially rated for. "With the official fuel economy test procedure currently used in India, fuel savings for hybrids are fairly grossly underestimated, showing only a 29% savings over conventional vehicles," Gopal said. "The test cycle is not representative of driving conditions in India, so that's sending the wrong signal to the consumer."
Their results were reported in two papers, "Understanding the fuel savings potential from deploying hybrid cars in China," published in Applied Energy, and "Understanding fuel savings mechanisms from hybrid vehicles to guide optimal battery sizing for India," accepted for publication in the International Journal of Powertrains, also co-authored by Berkeley Lab battery scientist Venkat Srinivasan. The studies are believed to be the first of their kind.
About 50% fuel savings over conventional cars
Gopal, working with Berkeley Lab scientists Samveg Saxena and Amol Phadke, used a powertrain simulation model called Autonomie to create a hypothetical hybridized version of the top-selling conventional car in each country—in China it was the Buick Excelle and in India the Maruti Alto. The reason for creating a hypothetical version was to isolate the improvement from hybridization and measure only that benefit.
For the India analysis the researchers simulated drive cycles in two Indian cities (New Delhi and Pune) taken from published studies and also used the Modified Indian Drive Cycle, the test for the official fuel economy rating. In China they simulated drive cycles in 11 cities and with three types of hybrid powertrains (start-stop, parallel and power-split). In both cases they compared it to drive cycles used for U.S. fuel efficiency ratings, which include about 55 percent city driving and 45 percent highway driving.
They found that driving a hybrid would achieve fuel savings of about 47 to 48% over a conventional car in India and about 53 to 55% in China. In the United States, hybrids are rated to produce a fuel savings of about 40% over their conventional counterparts. Currently hybrid and electric vehicles have a tiny share of the market in India and China and are seen as a higher-end product.
Gopal describes the traffic in India as "pretty slow, pretty crazy, always congested." In technical terms, the frequent starting and stopping, considerable amount of time spent idling, and low percentage of time spent on highways provide hybrids three ways to save additional fuel.
"One is regenerative braking, another is being able to turn off the engine when the car is stopped or in low-power condition, and another is that the hybrid system—the electric motor, the batteries—enable the engine to operate at a higher efficiency operating condition," Saxena explained. "We weighed the importance of these three mechanisms against each other for the Indian vehicles, and found that the ability to increase engine efficiency was the most important reason, second was regenerative braking, then engine shutdown."
The engineering results were a little surprising, Saxena said. "We went into the study thinking regenerative braking would make for very unique fuel-saving opportunities," he said.
Indian government analyzing Berkeley Lab results
The government of India, which launched a national plan last year with the goal of getting 6 to 7 million hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs) on the road by 2020, is already working with the Berkeley Lab researchers to further analyze their results. India is a member country of the Electric Vehicles Initiative (EVI) of the Clean Energy Ministerial, a global forum of governments focused on accelerating the transition to clean energy technologies. Through EVI, Berkeley Lab's research will guide India in moving forward with its EV plan.
"This research performed by Berkeley Lab has helped us understand in much better detail the real-world value of electric vehicles to India," said Ambuj Sharma, Additional Secretary of India's Department of Heavy Industry. "Their work has shown that Indian conditions are much more conducive to electric vehicles than we expected and has given a greater impetus and importance to the National Mission on Electric Mobility."
Gopal says one of the next steps is to work on China, which is also a participant in the Electric Vehicles Initiative. China has been the world's largest car market since 2009, with double-digit percentage increases in annual car sales, but sales are expected to grow even faster as household income rises. "The main reason for the impending vehicle boom is that people are getting wealthier, and there's a very strong tie between greater household wealth and vehicle ownership," Gopal said. "It's not about transportation. Owning a car is a social symbol."
In a third paper by Gopal, Saxena, and Phadke they also looked at electrical consumption of all-electric vehicles in India. "Electrical consumption of two-, three- and four-wheel light-duty electric vehicles in India," published in Applied Energy, quantified the electrical consumption of EVs in India. The study lays the groundwork for their next project, which is to analyze how EVs can be integrated into the existing electrical grid and how to minimize grid emissions.
Understanding the fuel savings potential from deploying hybrid cars in China


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Pure white flowers blossom from this inspiringly vivid array of richly verdurous green plants! Vibrant and lively, this assortment of greens and blooms sparkles with natural beauty and charm, making it a perfect gift!


text: In honor of Jane's journey to London this week, I'm going to keep the London theme going with a post about beer! Well, hand-pulled cask ales. This was one of my favorite parts about London. My hubby and I went sightseeing during the day, and then went on our own pub crawls at night! Okay, there may have been some beer drinking during the day, too. Like in this pic on the left. We were at the pub right across the street from The Tower of London, and they had a special going on. 5.99pbs for a burger, fries and an ice cold Fosters :) But my obsession was with, like I said before, the hand-pulled cask ales. It's unflitered and unpasteurized, and it's served from a cask without the added carbon dioxide pressure or nitrogen. In other words, it's warm and flat. And I can't get enough of it! At any rate, we visited lots of pubs on our trip, as you'll see in the slideshow. Some we only saw from the outside, but many we became intimate with on the inside, like Witherspoons near Trafalgar Square with its 7.99 special! Our favorite pubs, however, were the Victorian ones, with their orangey glow! The perfect place to snuggle up on a rainy, London night! Do you have a favorite pub in or out of London? What makes it special? And have you ever tried hand-pulled cask ales? I'm curious what you think!


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Bobbi Humphrey
Blacks And Blues
1974 Blue Note BN-LA142-G
Chicago, Damn 6:44
Harlem River Drive 7:24
Just A Love Child 8:21
Blacks And Blues 4:30
Jasper Country Man 5:16
Baby's Gone 8:47
Recorded at Sound Factory Studios Hollywood, CA
Mastered at The Mastering Lab
Manufactured by United Artists Records, Inc.
Arranged By, Conductor – Larry Mizell
Backing Vocals and vocal arrangements – Fred Perron, Larry Mizell & Fonce Mizell
Clavinet, Trumpet – Fonce Mizell
Composed By – Larry Mizell
Congas – King Errison
Drums – Harvey Mason
Electric Bass – Chuck Rainey, Ron Brown
Flute, Vocals [Solo] – Bobbi Humphrey
Guitar – David T. Walker, John Rowin
Percussion – Stephanie Spruill
Piano, Electric Piano [Fender Rhodes] – Jerry Peters
Synthesizer [Arp] – Fred Perren
Producer – Chuck Davis, Larry Mizell
Liner Notes – Leonard Brown
Photography By, Art Direction – Bob Cato
Engineer [Recording Assistant] – Chuck Davis, John Arias
Engineer [Recording] – John Mills
Engineer [Remix] – Chuck Davis, John Arias*, John Mills
Design – John Williams
Executive-Producer – George Butler
Recorded June 7 & 8, 1973 at Sound Factory, Hollywood, California.
Mastered at Mastering Lab, Hollywood, California.
Matrix / Runout (Runout Side 1 etched): 22 BN – LA 142 G – I
Matrix / Runout (Dead Wax Side 1 stamped): TML
Matrix / Runout (Runout Side 2 etched): 22 BN – LA 142 G – 2
Matrix / Runout (Dead Wax Side 2 stamped): TML
Blue Note BN-LA142-G vinyl; Pro-Ject RM-5SE with Audio Tecnica AT440-MLa cartridge; Speedbox power supply); Creek Audio OBH-15; Audioquest King Cobra cables; M-Audio Audiophile 192 Soundcard ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 192khz; clicks and pops removed with Click Repair on light settings, manually auditioning the output; further clicks removed with Adobe Audition 3.0; dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced. Converted to FLAC in either Trader's Little Helper or dBPoweramp. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.
This is one of the best records crafted by the production team of the Mizell Brothers for Blue Note, who also did notable albums for Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, Johnny Hammond (for Salvation Records, a Motown subsidiary), and Gary Bartz, among others. It was the first of three albums they made with Bobbi Humphrey, and although I'm not completely sure whether or not this was her biggest seller, it certainly put her on the map. The soaring, epic funk of tunes like Harlem River Drive sound deceptively effortless. There's actually a lot going on there. Bobbi does some singing on this album too in a girlish but charming voice. The Mizells crafted their own genre in a way, pushing jazz-funk and soul-jazz into a kind of cinematic disco-jazz, as if all your favorite 2-3 minute instrumentals from Blaxploitation soundtracks were given new, deeper treatments and allowed to stretch out into full-fledged compositions. Actually this a mediocre analogy for this record, because those constant qualities of blaxploitation film music – the tension of danger or menace – are nowhere to be found here. There's still a sense of something exciting going on, but it's a lot more Summer Breeze than Superfly, I guess. Pretty much all joyful exuberance here – this is another post I meant to do during the summer, but it's about to be summer soon enough in the southern hemisphere so maybe I'm early rather than late. The ensembles found on the Mizell Bros albums were always filled with heavyweights and this one does not disappoint, with stalwart Harvey Mason on the drum kit and the regal King Erisson on congas pinning down the lush soundscapes to solid earth. Fans of the Arp synthesizer (and who isn't a fan of the Arp?) won't be disappointed either as it's put to great use. Also don't be put off by the scrappy condition of the album cover – I lucked out and found an almost Near Mint copy of this in a "previously well-loved" jacket. Hope you enjoy it.
password: vibes


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Subcategory: 6000 Series Aluminum Alloy; Aluminum Alloy; Metal; Nonferrous Metal
Close Analogs:
Composition Notes: Aluminum content reported is calculated as remainder.Composition information provided by the Aluminum Association and is not for design.
Key Words: UNS A96063; ISO AlMg0.5Si; Aluminium 6063-T6; AA6063-T6
Material Notes: Data points with the AA note have been provided by the Aluminum Association, Inc. and are NOT FOR DESIGN.
References for this datasheet.


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The group exhibit of 4 Pixar artists that I've been a part of at the Holton Frame Studio is traveling across the bay and will be opening at the Northpoint Gallery in San Francisco this Wednesday night. As the show has sold well, we've all had to contribute a few more pieces for the new venue. Here's a work that I painted last fall off the side of Redwood Rd., looking into a tangled mass of bay laurel, eucalyptus, blackberry vines, as well as the trickling headwaters of Redwood Creek.
8.25 x 12.25
Pastel on Canson Paper
It is interesting to have contemporary work by living artists who paint landscapes hanging in a room surrounded by 19th century work of the same subject. We are from different centuries and spheres of influence, yet certain aspects of nature and light are constants in both. I'm tempted to say the 'epic vision' has been replaced with a more personal viewpoint, but that is not entirely true. One aspect one can observe from local landscapes of the past is the immense amount of growth and development around the bay, well exemplified by a painting by Thomas Ross of Fort Point and the Marin Headlands, painted in the 1870's, some 60 years before the Golden Gate Bridge was completed. It is comforting to see that the Headlands remain entirely recognizable 130 years later.
For a more intimate viewpoint from the past, there's one beautiful example by Jules Tavernier shown below:
The opening reception is from 5-7 this Wednesday evening, and I believe all the 'living' artists, Sharon Calahan, Ernesto Nemesio, Dice Tsutsumiand myself will be there. Perhaps the rest will be there in spirit! Hope to see some familiar faces.
Monday, January 31, 2011
2 comments:
- Emily Coker said...
The show at Holton was great! Good luck across the Bay.
- February 1, 2011 at 6:50 AM
- Malgorzata Arska said...
ohhh I wish I could be there :)
- February 2, 2011 at 10:32 AM
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To marinate or not to marinate? Tastes good either way.
Great on greens or noodles. But don't stop there.
Your cart is empty.
It's a marinade. It's a sauce. It's both. Mix it with your hamburger meat, bake it on your salmon, or sauce up your tacos. The possibilities are endlessly delicious.


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How can you not like a wasp whose life cycle involves killing cockroaches…slowly? Meet the cockroach wasp, Ampulex canaliculata. These diminutive wasps were once considered primitive members of the family Sphecidae, but are now placed in their own family, the Ampulicidae. There are six genera in the family, but only Ampulex occurs in North America.
Cockroach wasps have been considered relatively uncommon, but mostly they are overlooked. A. canaliculata is small, only 10-12 millimeters or so, and looks much more like an ant than a wasp. Their wings, which appear too short for their body, are spotted in a pattern that intensifies their ant mimicry. Indeed, while they can fly, they are much more likely to be seen running up and down the trunks of trees in search of their cockroach prey. I found them to be reasonably abundant in Cincinnati, Ohio, but I looked at lots of tree trunks.
What does the female wasp do when she finds a cockroach? She uses her mandibles and clypeus ("upper lip") like a clamp, grasping the edge of the roach's pronotal shield while curling her abdomen beneath the roach, stinging it in a nerve center located on the ventral side of its thorax. The effect of the sting slows down the roach and it loses its "flight" reflex. The roach is very much alive, but unable to flee. The wasp takes advantage of this. Gripping the roach's antennae in her jaws like a pair of reins, she walks backwards, leading the roach to some pre-existing cavity where she will lay an egg on it and entomb it. The cockroach essentially cooperates in its own transport, saving the wasp the labor of dragging a limp, heavy body around. It is an ingenious strategy, if not downright diabolical. The wasp sometimes amputates the roach's long antennae to better facilitate her control over her victim.
The wasp larva that hatches from the egg consumes the weakly paralyzed roach, eventually pupating and then emerging as an adult wasp. The favored cockroach prey are wood cockroaches in the genus Parcoblatta which are common in deciduous forests.
There are two species of Ampulex in North America. A. canaliculata is widespread in the eastern U.S. west to Wisconsin, Missouri, and Kansas. A. ferruginea is recorded only from Florida and Texas. Much better images than mine can be had at Bugguide.net.
Interestingly, not all ampulicids are small and drab. The "Emerald Cockroach Wasp," Ampulex compressa, is a jolly, metallic green giant that hunts the American Cockroach (Periplaneta Americana) in many parts of the world, including the Ethiopian and Oriental regions, Australia, and various islands including Hawaii. Also known as the "jewel wasp," its antics have also been captured in several YouTube videos.
We were fortunate to have had an energetic specimen of this species at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden when I worked there in the late 1980s. It had free run of a large cage with gravel in the bottom and a cardboard toilet paper roll to hide in. We introduced a roach and it went to work, eventually caching the roach in the toilet paper roll and plugging it with heaps of gravel it piled stone-by-stone in the open end.
Look for our domestic species this spring, running on the trunks of dead standing trees in particular, as those old snags are also frequented by the wood cockroaches. You might even see one dragging its "zombie" prey. Happy hunting!


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AN ANT is a wise creature for itself, but it is a shrewd 1 thing in an orchard or garden. And certainly men that are great lovers of themselves waste the public. Divide with reason between self-love and society; and be so true to thyself, as thou be not false to others; specially to thy king and country. It is a poor centre of a man's actions, himself. It is right earth. 2 For that only stands fast upon his own centre; whereas all things that have affinity with the heavens move upon the centre of another, which they benefit. The referring of all to a man's self is more tolerable in a sovereign prince; because themselves are not only themselves but their good and evil is at the peril of the public fortune. But it is a desperate evil in a servant to a prince, or a citizen in a republic. For whatsoever affairs pass such a man's hands, he crooketh them to his own ends; which must needs be often eccentric to 3 the ends of his master or state. Therefore let princes, or states, choose such servants as have not this mark; except they mean their service should be made but the accessory. That which maketh the effect more pernicious is that all proportion is lost. It were disproportion enough for the servant's good to be preferred before the master's; but yet it is a greater extreme, when a little good of the servant shall carry things against a great good of the master's. And yet that is the case of bad officers, treasurers, ambassadors, generals, and other false and corrupt servants; which set a bias 4 upon their bowl, of their own petty ends and envies, to the overthrow of their master's great and important affairs. And for the most part, the good such servants receive is after the model 5 of their own fortune; but the hurt they sell for that good is after the model of their master's fortune. And certainly it is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set an house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs; and yet these men many times hold credit with their masters, because their study is but to please them and profit themselves; and for either respect they will abandon the good of their affairs. 1
Wisdom for a man's self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing. It is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house somewhat before it fall. It is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger, who digged and made room for him. It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they could devour. But that which is specially to be noted is, that those which (as Cicero says of Pompey) are sui amantes, sine rivali [lovers of themselves without a rival] are many times unfortunate. And whereas they have all their times sacrificed to themselves, they become in the end themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy of fortune, whose wings they sought by their self-wisdom to have pinioned.
Of Wisdom for a Man's Self by Francis Bacon
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The United Nations Rule of Law Website and Document Repository
The United Nations Rule of Law Website and Document Repository informs users about the UN's work in the field of rule of law, and its efforts to coordinate and strengthen system-wide approaches in this field. It is the central UN rule of law web-based resource, serving as a gateway to the rest of the UN's related sites, and making information more widely accessible about UN rule of law issues and activities, and the various tools, documents and materials on the subject. Within the thematic areas covered on the website, there are rule of law and justice, rule of law and security, human rights and gender, and emerging challenges.