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This post was authored by the Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding Team.
Microsoft brings the latest advanced chatbot capabilities to developers' fingertips, allowing them to create apps that see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret users' needs — using natural communication styles and methods.
Today, we're excited to announce we're making generally available Microsoft Cognitive Services Language Understanding service (LUIS) and Azure Bot Service, two top notch AI services to create digital agents that interact in natural ways and make sense of the surrounding environment.
Think about the possibilities: all developers regardless of expertise in data science able to build conversational AI that can enrich and expand the reach of applications to audiences across a myriad of conversational channels. The app will be able to understand natural language, reason about content and take intelligent actions. Bringing intelligent agents to developers and organizations that do not have expertise in data science is disruptive to the way humans interact with computers in their daily life and the way enterprises run their businesses with their customers and employees.
Through our preview journey in the past two years, we have learned a lot from interacting with thousands of customers undergoing digital transformation. We highlighted some of our customer stories (such as UPS, Equadex, and more) in our general availability announcement. This post covers conversational AI in a nutshell using Azure Bot Service and LUIS, what we've learned so far, and dive into the new capabilities. We will also show how easy it is to get started in building a conversational bot with natural language.
Conversational AI with Azure Bot Service and LUIS
Azure Bot Service provides a scalable, integrated bot development and hosting environment for conversational bots that can reach customers across multiple channels on any device. Bots provide the conversational interface that accepts user input in different modalities including text, speech, cards, or images. The Azure Bot Service offers a set of fourteen channels to interact with users including Cortana, Facebook Messenger, Skype, etc. Intelligence is enabled in the Azure Bot Service through the cloud AI services forming the bot brain that understands and reasons about the user input. Based on understanding the input, the bot can help the user complete some tasks, answer questions, or even chit chat through action handlers. The following diagram summarizes how conversational AI applications are enabled through the Azure Bot Service and the Cloud AI services including language understanding, speech recognition, Q&A Maker, etc.
Language Understanding (LUIS) is the key part of the bot brain that allows the bot to understand natural language input and reason about it to take the appropriate action. As customization is critical for every business scenario, Language Understanding helps build custom models for your business vertical with little effort and without prior expertise in data science. Designed to identify valuable information in conversations, it interprets user goals (intents) and distills valuable information from sentences (entities), for a high quality, nuanced language model.
With the General Availability of Language Understanding and Azure Bot Service, we're also introducing new capabilities to help you achieve more and delight your users
Language Understanding:
- With an updated user interface, we're providing Language Understanding service (LUIS) users more intents and entities than ever: expanding up to 500 intents (task or action identified in the sentence) and 100 entities (relevant information extracted, from the sentence, to complete the task or action associated to the intent) per application.
- Language Understanding is now available in 7 new regions (South Central US, East US, West US 2, East Asia, North Europe, Brazil South, Australia East) on top of the 5 existing regions (West Europe, West US, East US2, West central US, South east Asia). This will help customers to improve network latency and bandwidth.
- The Language Understanding service is also supporting more languages for its various features, in addition to English.
- The prebuilt entities (representing common concepts like numbers, date, time) previously available in English are now available in French and Spanish.
- Prebuilt domains (off-the-shelf collections of intents and entities grouped by domain that you can directly add and use in your application) are now also available in Chinese.
- Phrase suggestions that help the developer customize your LUIS domain vocabulary are available in 7 new languages Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, German, and Italian.
Azure Bot Service:
- Speed bot development by providing an integrated environment with the Microsoft Bot Framework channels, development tools and hosting solutions.
- Connect with your audience with no code modifications via our supported channels on the Bot Service; Office 365 Email, GroupMe, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, text/SMS, Twilio, Cortana, Skype for Business – or provide a custom experience in your app or website.
- Bot Service is now integrated into the Azure portal; easy access to 24×7 support, monitoring capabilities, integrated billing and more in the trusted Azure ecosystem.
- Now generally available in 9 different regions namely West US, East US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia including new deployments in North Europe, Australia Southeast, Australia East, Brazil South, and East Asia regions.
- We are also announcing Premium Channels including webchat and directline. Premium channels offer unique capabilities over the standard channels:
- Communicate with your users on your website or in your application instead of sharing that data with public chat services.
- Open Source webchat and directline clients enabling advanced customization opportunities.
- 99.9% availability guarantees for premium channels
Developers can connect to other Azure services to enrich their bots as well as add Cognitive Services to enable your bots to see, hear, interpret, and interact in more human ways. For example, on top of language, the Computer Vision and Face APIs can enable bots to understand images and faces passed to the bot.
Learning through our customer's experiences
For several years now, Microsoft has been leading the charge into the application of AI to build new intelligent conversational experiences…everything from proprietary solutions built to target a specific audience on a specific chat service to general purpose API's that expect the developer to create the rest of the custom solution themselves. We are still at the beginning of this evolution of the conversational application model; but already we have takeaways that are guiding how we think about the future.
Bots are changing how we do business. We are constantly having great discussions with customers who see bots as a key part of their digital transformation as a business. They see the opportunity to enhance their customer support experiences, provide easy access to information, or even expose their business to an audience that might not otherwise visit their website.
Developers need to have choice in technologies. With the growth in popularity of open source technologies, developers want choice of the technology components they use to build solutions.
Great conversational applications are multi-modal. Our customers are building conversational experiences which accomplish multiple tasks. For example, a customer support bot may have a Q&A search function, a support ticket entry function, a guided dialog to diagnose a problem, and an appointment scheduling function that hands off to a human for final confirmation.
AI platforms must scale to the needs of business. Often as not, business scenarios are based on sets of concepts that are being codified into the bot. Developers require the technologies they depend on to scale to the complexity of their business without arbitrary limits getting in the way.
Conversational app platforms need to be reliable and compliant. In the same way that mobile app platforms have needed to provide robust and secure platforms to enable great productivity scenarios, so too will conversational application platforms; they must be certifiably secure, reliable, compliant and privacy aware. In addition, the platform should to make it easy for developers building to it to build compliant solutions as well.
Businesses are global and multi-lingual. Businesses need to talk to customers world-wide 24/7 in their language of choice.
There is art in building a great conversational application. Much in the same way the 80's and 90's cemented what we now think of as common controls for native apps, and the 2000's for web and mobile, the industry is still defining what it means to be a great conversational application.
Key design considerations
Given the learnings we've had, we've anchored our design on the following six points to shape the Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding (LUIS) capabilities:
Code-first approach: Azure Bot Service is built on top of the BotBuilder SDK V3 (in Node.js) that takes a code-first approach to enable developers to have full control over their bots' conversational capabilities. Available for both Node.JS and C#, the open source SDK's provides multiple dialog types and conversational orchestration tools to help the developer with various tasks like slot filling, dialog management and card representation.
Different dialog management flavors: developers build bots that range from simple question answer bots to multi-turn solutions that span ten or fifteen turns to complete a task. We provide a rich set of dialog management flavors to cover the different task types a bot developer might wish to expose. You can create bots that utilize a mix of prompts, form filling, natural language, and your own dialog management system with the ability to reuse some of the components like prompts.
Open bot platform: Building on Azure's commitment to open source technologies, applications using our SDK and LUIS can be deployed on any connected infrastructure and consumed from any device anywhere targeting your audience on multiple chat channels. This open design allows the offering to be integrated with different deployment platforms including public cloud or on-premise infrastructure.
Global and multi-lingual: We have put considerable effort into making our services highly available and as close to customers as possible as part of the Azure cloud. Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding support a growing list of languages for understanding conversations.
Getting started quickly: While bots can be deployed anywhere, with Azure we provide rich connected cloud services for hosting your bot and AI applications with a single click. The Azure Bot Service and LUIS get you a running bot that can converse with users in a natural way in minutes. Azure Bot Service takes care of provisioning all of the Azure resources you need so that developers can focus on their business logic. LUIS provides customizable pre-built apps and entity dictionaries, such as Calendar, Music, and Devices, so you can build and deploy a solution more quickly. Dictionaries are mined from the collective knowledge of the web and supply billions of entries, helping your model to correctly identify valuable information from user conversations.
Custom models with little effort: as customization is critical for every business scenario, LUIS capitalizes on the philosophy of machine teaching to help non-expert machine learning developers build effective custom language understanding models. While machine learning focuses on creating new algorithms and improving the accuracy of "learners", the machine teaching discipline focuses on the efficacy of the "teachers". Machine teaching as a discipline is a paradigm shift that follows and extends principles of software engineering and programming languages. It provides the developer with a set of tools to build machine learning models by transferring the developer domain knowledge to the machine learning algorithms. This contrasts with Machine Learning which is about creating useful models from this knowledge. Developer knowledge is expressed in LUIS through schema (what intents and entities are in the LUIS application) and labeled examples. It supports a wide variety of techniques for reliably recognizing entities with normalization to allow them to be easily consumed in a program.
Always monitor, learn and improve: Azure Bot Service and LUIS use Azure monitoring tools to help developers monitor the performance of their bots including the quality of the language understanding models and the bot usage. Once the model starts processing input, LUIS begins active learning, allowing you to constantly update and improve the model. It helps you pick the most informative utterances from your real bot traffic to add to your model and continuously improve. This intelligent selection of examples to add to the training data of the LUIS model helps developers build cost effective models that don't require a lot of data and yet perform with high accuracy.
Getting started with the Bot Service and Language Understanding
In this section, we'll create a bot using the Azure Bot Service that uses Language Understanding (LUIS) to understand the user. When creating a bot using natural language, the bot determines what a user wants to do by identifying their intent. This intent is determined from spoken or textual input, or utterances, which in turn can be mapped to actions that Bot developers has coded. For example, a note-taking bot recognizes a Notes. Create intent to invoke the functionality for creating a note. A bot may also need to extract entities, which are important words in utterances. In the example of a note-taking bot, the Notes. Title entity identifies the title of each note.
Create a Language Understanding bot with Bot Service
To create your bot; log in the Azure portal, select Create new resource in the menu blade and select AI + Cognitive Services.
You can browse through the suggestions, or search for Web App Bot.
Once selected, the Bot Service blade should appear; which will be familiar to users of Azure services. For those that aren't, here you can specify information about your service for the Bot Service to use in creating your bot such as where it will live, what subscription in and so forth. In the Bot Service blade, provide the required information, and click Create. This creates and deploys the bot service and LUIS app to Azure. Some interesting fields:
- Set App name to your bot's name. The name is used as the subdomain when your bot is deployed to the cloud (for example, mynotesbot.azurewebsites.net). This name is also used as the name of the LUIS app associated with your bot. Copy it to use later, to find the LUIS app associated with the bot.
- Select the subscription, resource group, hosting plan, and location.
- For pricing, you can choose the free pricing tier. You can go back and change that at any time if you need more.
- For this sample, select the Language understanding (C#) template for the Bot template field.
- For the final required field, choose the Azure Storage where you wish to store your bot's conversation state. Think of this as where the bot keeps track of where each user is in the conversation.
Now that you're complete, you can click Create. Azure will set about creating your bot including the resources it needs to operate your bot and a LUIS account to host your natural language model. Once complete, you'll receive a notification via the bell in the top right corner of the Azure portal.
Next up, lets confirm that the bot service has been deployed.
- Click Notifications (the bell icon that is located along the top edge of the Azure portal). The notification will change from Deployment started to Deployment succeeded.
- After the notification changes to Deployment succeeded, click Go to resource on that notification.
Try the bot
So now you should have a working bot. Let's try it out.
Once the bot is registered, click Test in Web Chat to open the Web Chat pane. Type "hello" in Web Chat.
The bot responds by saying "You have reached Greeting. You said: hello". This confirms that the bot has received your message and passed it to a default LUIS app that it created. This default LUIS app detected a Greeting intent.
Note: Occasionally, the first message or two after startup may need to be retried before the bot will answer.
Viola! You have a working bot! The default bot only knows a few things; it recognizes some greetings, as well as help and cancel. In the next section we'll modify the LUIS app for our bot to add some new intents for our Note taking bot.
Modify the LUIS app
Log in to www.luis.ai using the same account you use to log in to Azure. Click on My apps. If all has gone well, in the list of apps, you'll find the app with the same name as the App name from the Bot Service blade when you created the Bot Service.
After opening the app, you should see it has four intents: Cancel, Greeting, Help, and None. The first three we already mentioned. None is a special intent in LUIS that captures "everything else".
For our sample, we're going to add three intents for the user: Note.Create and Note.ReadAloud. Conveniently, one of the great features about LUIS are the pre-built domains that can be used to bootstrap your application, of which Note is one.
- Click on Pre-built Domains in the lower left of the page. Find the Note domain and click Add domain.
- This tutorial doesn't use all the intents included in the Note prebuilt domain. In the Intents page, click on each of the following intent names and then click the Delete Intent button to remove them from your app.
- Note.ShowNext
- Note.DeleteNoteItem
- Note.Confirm
- Note.Clear
- Note.CheckOffItem
- Note.AddToNote
- Note.Delete
- IMPORTANT: The only intents that should remain in the LUIS app are the Note.ReadAloud, Note.Create, None, Help, Greeting, and Cancel intents. If they're still there, your app will still work, but may more often behave inconsistently.
As mentioned earlier, the Intents that we've now added represent the types of things we expect the user to want the bot to do. Since these are pre-defined, we don't have to do any further tuning to the model, so let's jump right to training and publishing your model.
- Click the Train button in the upper right to train your app. Training takes everything you've entered into the model by creating intents and entities, entering utterances and labeling them and generates a machine learned model, all with one click. You can test your app here in the LUIS portal, or move on to publishing so that it's available to your bot.
- Click PUBLISH in the top navigation bar to open the Publish page. Click the Publish to production slot button. After successful publish, copy the URL displayed in the Endpoint column the Publish App page, in the row that starts with the Resource Name Starter_Key. Save this URL to use later in your bot's code. The URL has a format similar to this example: https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/luis/v2.0/apps/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?subscription-key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx3&timezoneOffset=0&verbose=true&q=
Your Language Understanding Application is now ready for your Bot. If the user asks to create, delete, or read back a note, Language Understanding will identify that and return the correct intent to the Bot to be acted on. In the next section we'll add logic to the bot to handle these Intents.
Modify the bot code
The Bot Service is set up to work in a traditional development environment; sync your source code with GIT and work in your favorite dev environment. That said, Azure Bot Service also offers the ability to edit right in the portal; which is great for our experiment. Click Build and then click Open online code editor.
First, some preamble. In the code editor, open BasicLuisDialog.cs. It contains the code for handling Cancel, Greeting, Help, and None intents from the LUIS app.
Add the following statement:
using System.Collections.Generic;
Create a class for storing notes
Add the following after the BasicLuisDialog constructor:
private readonly Dictionary noteByTitle = new Dictionary(); private Note noteToCreate; private string currentTitle; // CONSTANTS // Name of note title entity public const string Entity_Note_Title = "Note.Title"; // Default note title public const string DefaultNoteTitle = "default"; [Serializable] public sealed class Note : IEquatable { public string Title { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } public override string ToString() { return $"[{this.Title} : {this.Text}]"; } public bool Equals(Note other) { return other != null && this.Text == other.Text && this.Title == other.Title; } public override bool Equals(object other) { return Equals(other as Note); } public override int GetHashCode() { return this.Title.GetHashCode(); } }
Handle the Note.Create intent
Note.Create intent, add the following code to the BasicLuisDialog class.
[LuisIntent("Note.Create")] public Task NoteCreateIntent(IDialogContext context, LuisResult result) { EntityRecommendation title; if (!result.TryFindEntity(Entity_Note_Title, out title)) { // Prompt the user for a note title PromptDialog.Text(context, After_TitlePrompt, "What is the title of the note you want to create?"); } else { var note = new Note() { Title = title.Entity }; noteToCreate = this.noteByTitle[note.Title] = note; // Prompt the user for what they want to say in the note PromptDialog.Text(context, After_TextPrompt, "What do you want to say in your note?"); } return Task.CompletedTask; } private async Task After_TitlePrompt(IDialogContext context, IAwaitable result) { EntityRecommendation title; // Set the title (used for creation, deletion, and reading) currentTitle = await result; if (currentTitle != null) { title = new EntityRecommendation(type: Entity_Note_Title) { Entity = currentTitle }; } else { // Use the default note title title = new EntityRecommendation(type: Entity_Note_Title) { Entity = DefaultNoteTitle }; } // Create a new note object var note = new Note() { Title = title.Entity }; // Add the new note to the list of notes and also save it in order to add text to it later noteToCreate = this.noteByTitle[note.Title] = note; // Prompt the user for what they want to say in the note PromptDialog.Text(context, After_TextPrompt, "What do you want to say in your note?"); } private async Task After_TextPrompt(IDialogContext context, IAwaitable result) { // Set the text of the note noteToCreate.Text = await result; await context.PostAsync($"Created note **{this.noteToCreate.Title}** that says "{this.noteToCreate.Text}"."); context.Wait(MessageReceived); }
Handle the Note.ReadAloud Intent
The bot can use the Note.ReadAloud intent to show the contents of a note, or of all the notes if the note title isn't detected. Paste the following code into the BasicLuisDialog class.
[LuisIntent("Note.ReadAloud")] public async Task NoteReadAloudIntent(IDialogContext context, LuisResult result) { Note note; if (TryFindNote(result, out note)) { await context.PostAsync($"**{note.Title}**: {note.Text}."); } else { // Print out all the notes if no specific note name was detected string NoteList = "Here's the list of all notes: nn"; foreach (KeyValuePair entry in noteByTitle) { Note noteInList = entry.Value; NoteList += $"**{noteInList.Title}**: {noteInList.Text}.nn"; } await context.PostAsync(NoteList); } context.Wait(MessageReceived); } public bool TryFindNote(string noteTitle, out Note note) { // TryGetValue returns false if no match is found. bool foundNote = this.noteByTitle.TryGetValue(noteTitle, out note); return foundNote; } public bool TryFindNote(LuisResult result, out Note note) { note = null; string titleToFind; EntityRecommendation title; if (result.TryFindEntity(Entity_Note_Title, out title)) { titleToFind = title.Entity; } else { titleToFind = DefaultNoteTitle; } // TryGetValue returns false if no match is found. return this.noteByTitle.TryGetValue(titleToFind, out note); }
Build the bot
Now that the cut and paste part is done, you can right-click on build.cmd in the code editor and choose Run from Console. Your bot will be built and deployed from within the online code editor environment.
Test the bot
In the Azure Portal, click on Test in Web Chat to test the bot. Try type messages like "Create a note", "read my notes", and "delete notes". Because you're using natural language you have more flexibility on how you state your request, and in turn, Language Understanding's Active Learning feature can be used such that you can open your Language Understanding application and it can make suggestions about things you said which it didn't understand and might make your app more effective.
Tip: If you find that your bot doesn't always recognize the correct intent or entities, improve your Language Understanding app's performance by giving it more example utterances to train it. You can retrain your Language Understanding app without any modification to your bot's code.
That's It (For Now)
From here you're just getting started. You can go back to the bot service and connect your bot to various conversation channels. You can remove the pre-built intents and start creating your own custom intents for your application.
There's a world to discover in creating conversational applications and it's easy to get started. We look forward to seeing what you create and your feedback. For more information, please visit the following sites:
- Azure Bot Service: website
- Language Understanding service (LUIS): website and portal
- Reference architectures, please refer to https://aka.ms/scenarios-abs
Happy coding!
The Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding Team


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NEW YORK (JTA) — It's not that often that Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah fall so close together on the calendar. This year they are but three days apart, providing an opportunity for some introspection on an issue that should be of concern to the entire American Jewish community: the pitiful state of the federal minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage isn't a living wage. At $7.25 an hour, today's full-time minimum-wage worker makes just $15,080 a year. Even in a family with two people working minimum-wage jobs, household income hovers at the poverty level. And that's assuming they are lucky enough to have full-time jobs.
Moreover, the makeup of minimum-wage workers has changed. James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker earlier this month, noted a recent study by the economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones showing that "low-wage workers are older and better educated than ever."
"More important," Surowiecki wrote, "more of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families."
Meanwhile, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has plummeted. From January 1981 to April 1990, the federal minimum wage was never raised. In 2007, Congress raised the federal minimum wage by $2.10, to $7.25 per hour, as a first step toward restoring it to its historic value. But for the minimum wage to have the same purchasing power it had back in 1968, it would have to be more than $10 per hour now.
American Jews should remember the situation confronting so many of our ancestors, who could earn only poverty wages in the garment trades and other sectors when they first arrived in the United States.
The challenges confronting those in minimum-wage jobs today are no less daunting. They are the workers who care for our elderly parents, wash our cars, pick our produce, clean our offices and work at fast-food restaurants. The vast majority work multiple minimum-wage jobs to support their families and they are still struggling, faced with terrible choices over which bills to pay — rent or heat, groceries or medicine — that none among us should be forced to make.
A comprehensive study by the Economic Policy Institute points out the benefits of raising the minimum wage. An increase to $10.10 by July 1, 2015 would raise the wages of about 30 million workers, who would receive more than $51 billion in additional wages over the phase-in period, increase gross domestic product by roughly $32.6 billion and create a net gain of 140,000 new jobs.
It would not, as many conservatives claim, kill jobs. Moreover, it would be an important first step in closing the widening income gap.
So we need to raise the federal minimum wage. Yet much of the business sector and its allies continue to stymie even modest attempts to lift minimum-wage workers out of poverty.
Why? Essentially because they can.
Two years ago, former Smith Barney director Desmond Lachman told The New York Times, "Corporations are taking huge advantage of the slack in the labor market — they are in a very strong position and workers are in a very weak position. They are using that bargaining power to cut benefits and wages, and to shorten hours."
Of course, not all the blame for low-wage workers lies with the businesses that employ them. The consuming public also plays a role. Too often, we fail to make the link between low prices and widespread poverty.
Some states, frustrated by the inability of Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, have raised the minimum wage locally. But this needs to be done nationally — and it needs to be done now.
In Parshat Shoftim, the Torah proclaims, "Justice, justice shall you pursue." If we are to provide a measure of justice where it counts to the least well-paid among us, we have to do our part to support an increase in the federal minimum wage. We must partner with others to ensure it happens. We need to talk about it with our friends, families and neighbors.
We in the Jewish Labor Committee are proud to be part of this campaign and encourage the wider community to join. It's the right and just thing to do.
(Stuart Appelbaum is the president of the Jewish Labor Committee and president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, UFCW.)

subset: commoncrawl


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Following the momentum of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennesssee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing "freedom rides" through the region. They used as their model CORE's 1946 "Journey of Reconciliation" where an interracial group rode interstate buses to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court's decision in Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia which outlawed segregation in interstate travel. White southern segregationists resisted CORE's efforts. When most of the demonstrators were arrested in North Carolina, the police effectively aborted the Journey of Reconciliation.
Recalling that failed effort 15 years earlier, James Farmer organized a new generation of black and white activists to travel on interstate buses to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which reiterated the earlier ruling prohibiting racial segregation in interstate transportation.
This time CORE organized a dozen activists who were paired into two interracial sets of Freedom Riders who would travel on Greyhound and Trailways buses, respectively, from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana. The Freedom Riders left Washington on May 4, 1961 and traveled without incident across Virginia and North Carolina. They encountered violence for the first time at the bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina when several young white males beat black riders who attempted to use a "whites only" restroom.
The Freedom Riders continued, however, and crossed Georgia without incident. When the activists reached Alabama on May 14 the attacks intensified. The Greyhound riders were met in Anniston by a mob whose members threw rocks and slashed the bus's tires. The driver managed to drive the bus a few miles out of town. When he stopped to repair the tires, white supremacists firebombed the vehicle. For that group the Freedom Ride had ended.
The riders in the Trailways bus were also assaulted by Anniston whites. They managed to get to Birmingham where they encountered a larger mob who beat them with baseball bats, lead pipes and bicycle chains.
Infuriated by the news of the vicious assaults, Diane Nash, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organized a new contingent of Freedom Riders in Nashville. The second group departed from Nashville on May 14 to reinforce the beleaguered CORE Riders in Alabama.
Upon their arrival in Birmingham on May 17, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Conner ordered his police officers to place the activists in protective custody. The following morning law officials transported the riders back to the Tennessee state line, leaving them on the side of the highway. Instead of abandoning the campaign, Nash led the resilient activists 100 miles back to Nashville to regroup.
On May 20, the Nashville riders were back in Birmingham where there were no incidents. Then all of the Freedom Riders traveled on to Montgomery where a mob of men, women and children carrying baseball bats, tire irons and bricks met them at the terminal. As the riders departed from the bus, the angry gang swarmed, beating the passengers. They attacked SNCC activists John Lewis and Jim Zwerg, who both sustained severe injuries. When White House observer John Seigenthaler attempted to protect two of the Freedom Riders, Susan Wilbur and Susan Hermann, an attacker knocked him unconscious.
The nationally televised attack strengthened the resolve of the Freedom Riders. James Farmer arrived to personally lead the rest of the group to Jackson, Mississippi. Law enforcement officials protected them as they traveled across the state. Once in the bus terminal in the Mississippi capital, Jackson city police arrested all of the demonstrators for violating a recently passed breach of the peace statute. They were convicted and fined $200 each. When the riders refused to pay, the judge sentenced them to 90 days in jail.
In an effort to intimidate the marchers, Mississippi officials transferred the now nearly one hundred men and women freedom riders to the state penitentiary at Parchman where they were subject to beatings and inedible food and repeatedly strip searched. Prison officials confiscated the blankets and mattresses of all of the activists. When other demonstrators arrived in Jackson they were also arrested and sent to Parchman where they faced similar conditions. By the end of the summer over 300 women and men were incarcerated there.
The Freedom Riders failed to reach New Orleans, Louisiana. However the international attention their efforts received forced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to petition the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to outlaw segregation in interstate travel. Unlike the earlier Supreme Court rulings which segregationists largely ignored, the ICC immediately imposed sanctions and penalties for the violation of its order. On November 1, 1961, the new order went into effect across the nation.
The Freedom Rides illuminated the courage of black and white youth and highlighted the leadership of Diane Nash. The Freedom Rides also inspired rural southern blacks to embrace civil disobedience as a strategy for regaining their civil rights. That inspiration would be seen in subsequent campaigns such as Mississippi's Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma Movement in 1965 as well as in dozens of much less heralded efforts to register to vote or to integrate the region's public schools.


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Realistic Behavioral Expectations
What to Expect from 10 to 14-year old's
The tween and teen years often feel to parents and teachers like they are back at the "terrible twos" stage. The challenges of working with children at this age can be frustrating. They are very smart but their emotions are all over the place. This can make it difficult for adults to be patient and allow them to work through this process. Knowing what to expect, though, it key in helping everyone get through this transition.
Children ages 10 to 14 years old are highly intelligent. They are even smarter than most adults! These tween/teen years are a time when they begin discovering more of who they are and where they fit in. They are gaining more control over their growing bodies, so they typically excel at physical challenges. This is also a time when friends become more important to them and choices in activities are made based on friendships.
But with all of this exciting growth comes some challenging times for parents and teachers. Children between the ages of 10 and 14 years old begin thinking that they know it all and, although their intelligence supports this, they don't have the experience to act like an adult. They often make "bone-headed" decisions. At this age, children are also experiencing a roller coaster of emotions due to puberty ruling their bodies. They may feel happy and smart one minute and then sad and dumb the next. And one of the biggest challenges for adults when working with the age group is that the combination of intelligence and strong emotions lead to arguments.
One of the best ways that adults can best work with these tweens and teens is to have them be actively engaged in the process of this very important transition time. Giving them choices is vital to this. It is also important to allow disagreements and use open ended questions to help them discover why they have a certain opinion and how they differ from others. Remembering that the strong emotions they have are not personal, they are just trying to figure out how to navigate the changes they are experiencing.
The Extreme SKILLZ program was developed with this age group in mind. This age group is so focused on what is socially acceptable that they have a hard time keeping themselves emotionally driven. When working with the age group, the highly trained instructors of this program make connections with these students. They also use Teaching SKILLZ in each class to work towards the goal of nurturing their social and emotional instability while building skills that set them up for success. Giving them choices in class and working on tapping into their intrinsic motivation are just two of the important Teaching SKILLZ that are used.
Engaging with tweens and teens can be fun and exciting because their personalities are becoming more established. They can participate in more in-depth conversations when allowed to express their opinions without being mocked for them. Parents and teachers that allow safe, open discussions will reach this age group far better than someone that lectures them. Building these children up will ensure a brighter future for them.
#1 1740 Broadway St.
Port Coquitlam B.C.
Author: Jennifer Salama of Skillz Worldwide.
Jennifer is a 4th-degree black belt and has been training in martial arts since 2001. She has a Masters Degree in Child Psychology and has embraced the SKILLZ curriculum because of its focus on child development and using martial arts as a vehicle to develop the child as a whole.


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(AP) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested and jailed without bail Tuesday in a sex-crimes investigation, but his organization scarcely missed a beat, releasing a new batch of the secret cables that U.S. officials say are damaging America's security and relations worldwide.
A month after dropping out of public view, the 39-year-old Australian surrendered to Scotland Yard to answer a warrant issued for his arrest by Sweden. He is wanted for questioning after two women accused him of having sex with them without a condom and without their consent.
Assange said he would fight extradition to Sweden, setting the stage for what could be a pitched legal battle. And as if to prove that it can't be intimidated, WikiLeaks promptly released a dozen new cables, including details of a NATO defense plan for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that made Russia bristle.
The Pentagon welcomed Assange's arrest.
"That sounds like good news to me," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on a visit to Afghanistan.
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson insisted Assange's arrest and the decision Tuesday by both Visa and MasterCard to stop processing donations to the group "will not change our operation." Hrafnsson said the group has no plans yet to carry through on its threat to release en masse some of its most sensitive U.S. documents if it comes under attack.
At a court hearing in London, Assange showed no reaction as Judge Howard Riddle denied him bail while he awaits an extradition hearing Dec. 14. The judge said Assange might flee if released. When the judge asked him whether he would agree to be extradited, Assange said: "I do not consent."
It was not publicly known which jail Assange was sent to, since British police never reveal that for privacy and security reasons. Some prisoners occasionally get Internet access, though only under close supervision.
The U.S. government is investigating whether Assange can be prosecuted for espionage or other offenses. On Tuesday, Pentagon and State Department officials said some foreign officials have suddenly grown reluctant to trust the U.S. because of the secrets spilled by WikiLeaks.
"We have already seen some indications of meetings that used to involve several diplomats and now involve fewer diplomats," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "We're conscious of at least one meeting where it was requested that notebooks be left outside the room."
Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said the military had seen foreign contacts "pulling back."
"Believing that the U.S. is not good at keeping secrets and having secrets out there certainly changed things," Lapan said.
During the hour-long court hearing in London, attorney Gemma Lindfield, acting on behalf of the Swedish authorities, outlined the allegations of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion that were brought against Assange following separate sexual encounters in August with two women in Sweden.
Lindfield said one woman accused Assange of pinning her down and refusing to use a condom on the night of Aug. 14 in Stockholm. That woman also accused of Assange of molesting her in a way "designed to violate her sexual integrity" several days later. A second woman accused Assange of having sex with her without a condom while he was a guest at her Stockholm home and she was asleep.
A person who has sex with an unconscious, drunk or sleeping person in Sweden can be convicted of rape and sentenced to two to six years in prison.
Assange's lawyers have claimed the accusations stem from disputes "over consensual but unprotected sex" and say the women made the claims only after finding out that Assange had slept with both.
Prosecutors in Sweden have not brought any formal charges against Assange. WikiLeaks lawyer Mark Stephens said there are doubts as to whether Sweden has the legal right to extradite him simply for questioning.
Experts say European arrest warrants like the one issued by Sweden can be tough to beat. Even if the warrant were defeated on a technicality, Sweden could simply issue a new one.
The extradition process could take anywhere from a week to two months, according to Assange's Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig. If Assange loses, he may appeal to the High Court. There can be further appeals, and Sweden also has a right to appeal if the court finds in Assange's favor.
In the meantime, Stephens said he would reapply for bail, noting that several prominent Britons - including socialite Jemima Khan and filmmaker Ken Loach - have each offered to post 20,000 pounds ($31,500) so Assange could go free.
Australian government officials said they are providing Assange with consular assistance, as they do with any countryman arrested abroad. The consul general in London spoke to Assange to ensure he had legal representation, the government said.
Some people protested outside the London court, bearing signs reading, "Save Wikileaks, Save Free Speech" and "Trumped Up Charges."
"I came to show my support for Julian," said 26-year-old electrician Kim Krasniqi. "He is innocent. Europe is bullying him, They don't want him to publish what he is publishing."
The latest batch of confidential U.S. cables could strain relations between Washington and Moscow. The documents show that NATO secretly decided in January to defend the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania against military attack.
Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to NATO, said Tuesday that Moscow will demand that NATO drop the agreement, which he argued is clearly aimed at his country.
"Against whom else could such a defense be intended? Against Sweden, Finland, Greenland, Iceland? Against polar bears, or against the Russian bear?" Rogozin said.
©2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Radiant Lighting RE323 Lampholder Porcelain E27 Unskirted 06LH3P27USKR
Colour: White
Lamp Type: E27 GLS
Refund Policy
Electric Wholesalers offers nationwide delivery throughout South Africa subject to the following conditions.
Refunds will only be allowed by pre-authorisation and at our sole discretion. We reserve the right to refuse refunds and/or charge a handling charge up to 25%. Courier charges will not be refunded. If a refund is approved, then the cost to return goods to us will be for the account of the customer.
The following Delivery Policy is only valid for merchandise purchased via thee www.electricwholesalers.co.za website ("the Webstore"). This policy has been developed to ensure the accurate and secure delivery of all purchases according to your delivery needs. Should you have any questions with regards to deliveries, please contact us accordingly prior to purchase.
- Express Delivery (2 to 4 working days) is subject to stock availability, limited to main centres and only applies to items accordingly identified. Orders placed on a Friday will be delivered on the following Monday or Tuesday. In the case of a mixed basket, our standard delivery policy of 3-5 working days will apply.
- Free shipping for orders over the threshold applies to main centres only.
- We can only deliver products to physical addresses within the borders of the Republic of South Africa.
- Standard Deliveries will be made within 3-5 business days upon acceptance of your order. Note, for certain outlying areas we have to use regional third party couriers and while every effort is made to expedite delivery, service to these areas may take an additional 2 days.
- Quoted delivery times are a guide only and while the company endeavours to meet the targeted delivery times for both Express delivery and Standard deliveries, from time to time factors beyond our control can result in delayed delivery.
- A unique order number will be communicated to you via email which can be used to track the status of your order.
- Your deliveries will be made through our designated courier company. Tracking details will be provided once an order is processed.
- Once you have indicated your address and you have received confirmation of your order, we regret that no changes to the specified address and/or delivery option will be accepted.
- We reserve the right to contact customers and arrange alternative delivery methods and timelines if your delivery address is remote or to cancel the order if delivery is not feasible.
- Before you finalise your order, you have the option to indicate in the "Notes" field whether the order should only be delivered to you OR you can specify an alternative authorized person's name to receive it on your behalf. You or the authorized person will be required to show proof of identification to the courier upon delivery.
- In order to safeguard your purchase, the carrier will only deliver to the specified address and to you or one of the people indicated on the notes of the order as being authorised to receive your parcel.
- The courier will request proof of identity from the person receiving the parcel if this was indicated in the "notes" field of the order.
- The person receiving the parcel will be asked by the courier to sign the waybill indicating that the parcel/carton has been received undamaged and in good condition.
- Proof of ID may be requested to verify authenticity of purchaser.
- All parcels delivered will be secured with a unique purchase sealing tape.
- In the unlikely event that the parcel/carton is damaged and/or the security seal is broken, then the receiving person can either:
- Check the parcel in front of the driver and indicate on the courier's waybill (delivery documentation) whether there are any breakages, damages or items missing.Both parties (the courier and the person receiving) will need to co-sign their names against this indication. If the receiving person chooses to still accept the damaged carton, the waybill will reflect that a damaged parcel was received and accepted with both parties co-signing.
- Alternatively, the receiving person can send the parcel back and indicate on the waybill the reasons for sending the parcel back. Both parties will need to co-sign against this indication.
- The company reserves the right to refuse service, cancel orders and terminate accounts at the company's discretion.


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Origins of Black History Month Celebration in America
The story of Black History Month begins in Chicago during the summer of 1915. An alumnus of the University of Chicago with many friends in the city, Carter G. Woodson traveled from Washington, D.C. to participate in a national celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation sponsored by the state of Illinois. Thousands of African Americans travelled from across the country to see exhibits highlighting the progress their people had made since the destruction of slavery. Awarded a doctorate in Harvard three years earlier, Woodson joined the other exhibitors with a black history display. Despite being held at the Coliseum, the site of the 1912 Republican convention, an overflow crowd of six to twelve thousand waited outside for their turn to view the exhibits.
Inspired by the three-week celebration, Woodson decided to form an organization to promote the scientific study of black life and history before leaving town. On September 9th, Woodson met at the Wabash YMCA with A. L. Jackson and three others and formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).
He hoped that others would popularize the findings that he and other black intellectuals would publish in The Journal of Negro History, which he established in 1916. As early as 1920, Woodson urged black civic organizations to promote the achievements that researchers were uncovering. A graduate member of Omega Psi Phi, he urged his fraternity brothers to take up the work. In 1924, they responded with the creation of Negro History and Literature Week, which they renamed Negro Achievement Week. Their outreach was significant, but Woodson desired greater impact. As he told an audience of Hampton Institute students, "We are going back to that beautiful history and it is going to inspire us to greater achievements." In 1925, he decided that the Association had to shoulder the responsibility. Going forward it would both create and popularize knowledge about the black past. He sent out a press release announcing Negro History Week in February, 1926.
Woodson chose February for reasons of tradition and reform. It is commonly said that Woodson selected February to encompass the birthdays of two great Americans who played a prominent role in shaping black history, namely Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays are the 12th and the 14th, respectively. More importantly, he chose them for reasons of tradition. Since Lincoln's assassination in 1865, the black community, along with other Republicans, had been celebrating the fallen President's birthday. And since the late 1890s, black communities across the country had been celebrating Douglass'. Well aware of the pre-existing celebrations, Woodson built Negro History Week around traditional days of commemorating the black past. He was asking the public to extend their study of black history, not to create a new tradition. In doing so, he increased his chances for success.
Yet Woodson was up to something more than building on tradition. Without saying so, he aimed to reform it from the study of two great men to a great race. Though he admired both men, Woodson had never been fond of the celebrations held in their honor. He railed against the "ignorant spellbinders" who addressed large, convivial gatherings and displayed their lack of knowledge about the men and their contributions to history. More importantly, Woodson believed that history was made by the people, not simply or primarily by great men. He envisioned the study and celebration of the Negro as a race, not simply as the producers of a great man. And Lincoln, however great, had not freed the slaves—the Union Army, including hundreds of thousands of black soldiers and sailors, had done that. Rather than focusing on two men, the black community, he believed, should focus on the countless black men and women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization.
From the beginning, Woodson was overwhelmed by the response to his call. Negro History Week appeared across the country in schools and before the public. The 1920s was the decade of the New Negro, a name given to the Post-War I generation because of its rising racial pride and consciousness. Urbanization and industrialization had brought over a million African Americans from the rural South into big cities of the nation. The expanding black middle class became participants in and consumers of black literature and culture. Black history clubs sprang up, teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils, and progressive whites stepped and endorsed the efforts.
Woodson and the Association scrambled to meet the demand. They set a theme for the annual celebration, and provided study materials—pictures, lessons for teachers, plays for historical performances, and posters of important dates and people. Provisioned with a steady flow of knowledge, high schools in progressive communities formed Negro History Clubs. To serve the desire of history buffs to participate in the re-education of black folks and the nation, ASNLH formed branches that stretched from coast to coast. In 1937, at the urging of Mary McLeod Bethune, Woodson established the Negro History Bulletin, which focused on the annual theme. As black populations grew, mayors issued Negro History Week proclamations, and in cities like Syracuse progressive whites joined Negro History Week with National Brotherhood Week.
Like most ideas that resonate with the spirit of the times, Negro History Week proved to be more dynamic than Woodson or the Association could control. By the 1930s, Woodson complained about the intellectual charlatans, black and white, popping up everywhere seeking to take advantage of the public interest in black history. He warned teachers not to invite speakers who had less knowledge than the students themselves. Increasingly publishing houses that had previously ignored black topics and authors rushed to put books on the market and in the schools. Instant experts appeared everywhere, and non-scholarly works appeared from "mushroom presses." In America, nothing popular escapes either commercialization or eventual trivialization, and so Woodson, the constant reformer, had his hands full in promoting celebrations worthy of the people who had made the history.
Well before his death in 1950, Woodson believed that the weekly celebrations—not the study or celebration of black history–would eventually come to an end. In fact, Woodson never viewed black history as a one-week affair. He pressed for schools to use Negro History Week to demonstrate what students learned all year. In the same vein, he established a black studies extension program to reach adults throughout the year. It was in this sense that blacks would learn of their past on a daily basis that he looked forward to the time when an annual celebration would no longer be necessary. Generations before Morgan Freeman and other advocates of all-year commemorations, Woodson believed that black history was too important to America and the world to be crammed into a limited time frame. He spoke of a shift from Negro History Week to Negro History Year.
In the 1940s, efforts began slowly within the black community to expand the study of black history in the schools and black history celebrations before the public. In the South, black teachers often taught Negro History as a supplement to United States history. One early beneficiary of the movement reported that his teacher would hide Woodson's textbook beneath his desk to avoid drawing the wrath of the principal. During the Civil Rights Movement in the South, the Freedom Schools incorporated black history into the curriculum to advance social change. The Negro History movement was an intellectual insurgency that was part of every larger effort to transform race relations.
The 1960s had a dramatic effect on the study and celebration of black history. Before the decade was over, Negro History Week would be well on its way to becoming Black History Month. The shift to a month-long celebration began even before Dr. Woodson death. As early as 1940s, blacks in West Virginia, a state where Woodson often spoke, began to celebrate February as Negro History Month. In Chicago, a now forgotten cultural activist, Fredrick H. Hammaurabi, started celebrating Negro History Month in the mid-1960s. Having taken an African name in the 1930s, Hammaurabi used his cultural center, the House of Knowledge, to fuse African consciousness with the study of the black past. By the late 1960s, as young blacks on college campuses became increasingly conscious of links with Africa, Black History Month replaced Negro History Week at a quickening pace. Within the Association, younger intellectuals, part of the awakening, prodded Woodson's organization to change with the times. They succeeded. In 1976, fifty years after the first celebration, the Association used its influence to institutionalize the shifts from a week to a month and from Negro history to black history. Since the mid-1970s, every American president, Democrat and Republican, has issued proclamations endorsing the Association's annual theme.
What Carter G. Woodson would say about the continued celebrations is unknown, but he would smile on all honest efforts to make black history a field of serious study and provide the public with thoughtful celebrations.


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Friday, January 29, 2010
Fabulous Room Friday 01.29.10
Stella & Dot Giveaway Winner
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Thanks for the Makeover, Front Porch Studio!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The Art of Storing Jewelry
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
10 Things I Can't Live Without: Lauren of Material Girls
Today's "10 Things" post comes from the lovely Lauren Haskett, a phenomenal kitchen and bath designer who just so happens to be a fellow Houstonian and a founding member of the fabulous blog, Material Girls. Lauren has fantastic style in both fashion and design and I love that she always adds a hint of glamour to everything she does. Her "10 Things" list is both personal and relatable. Enjoy!
#1 - My family and friends. That's husband Bryce, my Maltipoo, Hartley, and me. I am blessed with a fabulous support system. My family and friends have always encouraged me to pursue my dreams and have loved me every step of the way. I also must add my Sunday School class and Bible Study group (shout out to "The Cartel") who have made adjusting to our new life in Houston so, so easy. #2 - My job. I seriously cannot imagine doing anything but interior design for the rest of my life. Sure, school was very challenging, and juggling contractors, writing cabinet orders, dealing with clients who have been living without a kitchen for way too long...it can be a little stressful. However, the process of creating beautiful retreats for people just never gets old. I was given the opportunity this past year to take a big leap in my career. Not only am I working as a Kitchen & Bath designer for a top firm here in Houston, I'm also taking on individual non K & B projects through my company, Lauren Haskett Fine Design.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Red Carpet Recap: The SAG Awards
Image Credit: Getty Images


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(From the Persuasion PowerPoint section in Volume 19, No. 7 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)
Every week, more and more online and offline writers flood us with more and more information.
They write long essays and long books.
You and I simply don't have enough time to read everything worth reading.
So we skim, sift, and sort a few pages of this and a few pages of that — to determine which, if either, is worth an hour — or more.
Would you like your writing to go to the front of the line?
Would you like busy, overwhelmed readers to read your whole essay?
Write a short, short piece. 300 words.
Or write a short blog or essay. 600 to 900 words.
In a world of long essays, the short essays stand out.
And they can be read in less time than it takes to decide whether to read the 3,000 to 5,000 word essay.
An average reader can read 300 words in 90 seconds — or 900 words in 4-1/2 minutes.
Want to quickly learn how to write brief, to-the-point essays?
First, read How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark.
Second, read The 30-Minute Writer by Connie Emerson.
Your essays will get read — by the vital, busy, bright readers you want to reach.
* * * * * * * *
Michael Cloud's latest book Unlocking More Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion is available exclusively from the Advocates, along with his acclaimed earlier book Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion.
In 2000, Michael was honored with the Thomas Paine Award as the Most Persuasive Libertarian Communicator in America.


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Our telephone number for all departments,(315) 429-8551
Providing Innovative TextileSolutions since 1946
A multifaceted resource for all your textile development needs
At Gehring-Tricot Corp., no matter how good our fabrics, or how broad our selection, we know that our business depends on supporting you, our customer.
GT Corp. designs and manufactures a broad array of knit and woven fabrics for a very diverse range of markets such as medical, sports, safety, aerospace, apparel, and military products… to just name a few. These fabrics can be engineered to protect against many of life's discomforts, such as moisture retention, UV degradation, electrical charges, heat, bacteria, chemicals, and environmental hazards. They can be constructed to enhance comfort and provide strength and durability.
Whereas most domestic mills specialize in either warp knitting, weft/circular knitting, or weaving; Gehring-Tricot Corp offers all of these as one company. This single source diversity, when combined with a philosophy and commitment to custom technical fabric solutions, truly allows for the 'right' fabrics to be developed without bias. We can offer the absolute best solution, versus being limited to trying to make 'what we do'… seem best.
Innovation is our specialty, and the attitude of the company is "Evolve or Perish", which is something our manufacturing team lives every day. More than 100 Gehring fabrics are custom created every year, all based on individual customer requirements, and meeting new needs every day. Our company leadership is adamant about product and market diversity. In today's economy, which sadly has seen the majority of domestic textile mills fading away, consider the security in partnering with one whose business model has resulted in ongoing expansion not only in expanding capabilities but increasing capacity … With continuous equipment upgrades and purchases and ongoing corporate acquisitions, positive evolution is inevitable.
Fall River Rising
Gehring Sales Office Moves to a New Location
Techtextil N.A. shows continued growth in odd-numbered year
Gehring recognized for major equipment improvements, keeping it at the forefront of circular knitting, warp knitting and weaving production.
For more up-to-date information, including our trade show schedule, follow us on social media:
Gehring Tricot Facebook
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Fire Resistant Fabrics | D3 Spacer Fabrics | High Visibility Fabrics| Electrostatic Dissipative Fabrics | Mil-Spec Fabrics
©2023 Gehring-Tricot Corp | Site maintained by Streicker & Company Inc


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Introduction to Cisco Packet Tracer
Washington State Library
Hands-On Practice
Enroll, download and start learning valuable tips and best practices for using our innovative, virtual simulation tool, Cisco Packet Tracer. This self-paced course is designed for beginners with no prior networking knowledge. It teaches basic operations of the tool with multiple hands-on activities helping you to visualize a network using everyday examples, including Internet of Things (IoT). This Introductory course is extremely helpful for anyone who plans to take one of the Networking Academy courses which utilizes the powerful simulation tool. No prerequisites required!
You'll Learn These Core Skills:
- Simulate data interactions traveling through a network.
- Visualize the network in both logical and physical modes.
- Apply skills through practice, using labs and Cisco Packet Tracer activities.
- Develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Course Details
Introduction to Packet Tracer (English - 1.12)
14 Apr 2021 - 14 Apr 2022
Sara Shreve, Elizabeth Iaukea
Free course - no prerequisites, start learning today!
Enroll now
تم إنهاء الدورة


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SAT Scores Are Bad Education Evaluation Data
I am happy to see the public school system coming in for much-deserved criticism. I don't have anything to add to this article that I have not already said about schools many times. But I want to make one complaint about a chart used in the blog post:
SAT scores are a terrible metric for measuring academic performance over time.
First, I am not at all convinced that the test scoring does not shift over time (no WAY my son had a higher score than me, LOL).
But perhaps the most important problem is that all students don't take the SAT -- it is a choice. Shifts in the mix of kids taking the test -- for example, if over time more kids get interested in college so that more marginal academic kids take the test -- then the scores are going to move solely based on mix shifts. Making this more complicated, there is at least one competitive test (the ACT) which enjoys more popularity in some states than others, so the SAT will represent an incomplete and shifting geographic mix of the US. Finally, as students have gotten smarter about this whole process**, they gravitate to the ACT or the SAT based on differing capabilities, since they test in different ways.
To me, all this makes SAT scores barely more scientific than an Internet poll.
** If you have not had a college-bound student recently, you will have to trust me on this, but parents can spend an astounding amount of time trying to out-think this stuff. And that is here in flyover country. Apparently private school parents on the East Coast can be absurd (up to and including hiring consultants for 6 figures). A few years ago it was in vogue to try to find your kid a unique avocation. Violin was passe -- I knew kids playing xylophone and the bagpipes. A friend of mine at a high profile DC private school used to have fun with other parents telling them his son was a national champion at falconry, the craziest thing he could make up on the spur of the moment at a cocktail party. Other parents would sigh enviously, wishing they had thought of that one for their kid.


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WHO Calls for Prevention of Cancer Through Healthy Workplaces
GENEVA - Every year, at least 200 000 people die from cancer related to their workplace, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Millions of workers run the risk of developing cancers such as lung cancer and mesothelioma (a malignant cancer of the internal lining of the chest cavity) from inhaling asbestos fibres and from tobacco smoke, or leukemia from exposure to benzene at their workplaces. Yet, the risks for occupational cancer are preventable.
Lung cancer, mesothelioma, and bladder cancer are among the most common types of occupational cancers. Every tenth lung cancer death is closely related to risks in the workplace. Currently about 125 million people around the world are exposed to asbestos at work, and at least 90 000 people die each year from asbestos-related diseases. Thousands more die from leukemia caused by exposure to benzene, an organic solvent widely used by workers, including in the chemical and diamond industries.
The rates of occupational cancer exposure are highest among workers whose workplaces do not meet the requirements for health and safety protection and do not have the necessary engineering measures to prevent the pollution of air with carcinogenic substances. For example, workers who are heavily exposed to second hand tobacco smoke at their workplaces have double the risk of developing lung cancer compared to those working in a smoke-free environment.
The tragedy of occupational cancer resulting from asbestos, benzene and other carcinogens is that it takes so long for science to be translated into protective action, said Dr Maria Neira, WHO Director of Public Health and Environment. Known and preventable exposures are clearly responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess cancer cases each year. In the interests of protecting our health, we must adopt an approach rooted in primary prevention, that is to make workplaces free from carcinogenic risks.
Currently, most cancer deaths caused by occupational risk factors occur in the developed world. This is a result of the wide use of different carcinogenic substances such as blue asbestos, 2-naphthylamine and benzene 20-30 years ago. Today, there are much tighter controls on these known carcinogens in the workplace in developed countries. However, work processes involving the use of carcinogens such as chrysotile asbestos and pesticides, and those used in tyre production and dye manufacturing, are moving to countries with less stringent enforcement of occupational health standards. If the current unregulated use of carcinogens in developing countries continues, a significant increase in occupational cancer can be expected in the coming decades.
The control of carcinogens in the workplace should be a key component of every national cancer control programme, said Dr Andreas Ullrich, WHO Medical Officer for cancer control. To achieve this, WHO supports countries in developing comprehensive national cancer prevention and control plans, which are essential to prevent millions of cancer deaths each year.
To protect workers from occupational cancer, WHO urges governments and industry to ensure that workplaces are equipped with adequate measures to meet health and safety standards and that they be free from dangerous pollutants. The most efficient way to prevent occupational cancer is to avoid exposure to carcinogens. Stopping the use of asbestos, introducing benzene-free organic solvents and technologies that convert the carcinogenic chromium into a non-carcinogenic form, banning tobacco use at the workplace, and providing protective clothes for people working in the sun are among some of the simple interventions that can prevent hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and suffering from occupational cancer.
Recently, WHO issued an official statement warning countries to stop using asbestos or face a cancer epidemic in the coming years. There are safer alternative materials to replace asbestos, for example using pine fibres in producing cement building materials.
In October this year, WHO with support from the National Cancer Institute of France will be convening a global workshop with participation of public health policy makers, scientists and major international stakeholders to elaborate recommendations for strengthening national and international policies on preventing occupational and environmental cancer.
This news content was configured by WebWire editorial staff. Linking is permitted.
News Release Distribution and Press Release Distribution Services Provided by WebWire.


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Capcom is asking its fans for input on what games to produce next.
"We have many opinions internally and we're looking to gather some data about your buying habits and what franchises and even title types, you'd like us to make in the future," Capcom's senior vice president Christian Svensson said in a post on Capcom-Unity blog.
"There's no guarantees on what the outcomes will be," he added. "But I promise you, this data will be a factor in our decision making process. I'll be compiling the data in about a week (closing just after Christmas) and sharing the results internally with Japan before the end of the year."
The survey lists the company's most popular franchises and asks participants how they feel about new sequels, spin-offs, HD upgrades and compilations on current and next gen platforms.


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Gil Rose, conductor
The Score Board is a group of New England-based composers serving as BMOP's vanguard of composer-advocates through volunteerism, direct support and activities, community-building, and curating BMOP's annual Club Concert series.
Tickets are available for purchase online through the American Repertory Theater website or by calling the A.R.T. Box Office at 617.547.8300 (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm).


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CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - Wide receiver Steve Smith is now expected to finish his career where it began.
The Panthers have announced Smith has agreed to a three-year contract extension that will keep him with the team through the 2015 season. There is also a team option for the 2016 season.
"Steve has been a difference maker at receiver for us since he's been here," Panthers general manager Marty Hurney said. "It's always good to keep your core players. We felt like Steve made it very clear that he wanted to finish career as a Panther. We're glad he did."
The Panthers have called a 3 p.m. press conference to announce the new deal. Financial terms of the deal were not immediately available.
"The Panthers wanted to try to lock him down for the future and Steve is simply ecstatic about being able to finish his career in Carolina," Fox said. "He loves playing for coach Ron Rivera is excited about the things to come in Carolina. A lot of L.A. (Los Angeles) guys want to get back to the West Coast, but Steve and his family love living in Charlotte."
Last season he caught 79 passes for 1,394 yards with seven touchdowns playing under new offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski in a pass-first offense. Smith went to the Pro Bowl along with rookie quarterback Cam Newton.
Derrick Fox, Smith's agent, said the ability to play for Rivera was a key factor in client's decision to return.
"He just loves playing for" Rivera, Fox said. "That is a huge difference. He knows that Ron knows what it takes to win. He's a winner and Steve has recognized that."
Hurney acknowledged Smith's age is a concern, but he feels like the veteran will continue to prove he's still a valuable player.
"There aren't a lot of receivers who play up into their upper 30s, but if anyone can do it it's Steve," Hurney said. "His work ethic and his desire and his competitiveness are what set him apart from everyone else. He knows he's getting older. But he works so hard to keep himself in top condition. He knows with every year he has to work harder and harder. He's just so competitive."
This is the third time the Panthers have extended Smith's contract without him becoming a free agent.
After signing his rookie deal on June 19, 2001, Smith signed his first extension on March 1, 2007 just days before he was to hit the free agent market.
However, he was so productive, the Panthers gave him a new six-year, $45 million extension on May 4, 2007.
Smith's current contract was set to expire after this season.
Smith has caught 699 passes during his career for 10,278 yards with 59 touchdown receptions. He also has six returns for touchdowns - four on punts and two on kickoffs.


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Consuming raw or undercooked meats, fish, shellfish or fresh eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness, especially if you have certain medical conditions
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A Southern California school is forgiving its principal after he admitted to deleting and changing students' grades, including those of his own daughter, the Ventura County Star reported.
John Hynes, principal of private Christian school Grace Brethren High School in Simi Valley, will keep his job despite changing the grades within the last academic year because he asked his superiors for forgiveness on Wednesday, the paper reported.
"I made a human mistake. Thank God the school didn't fire me like another organization would have," Hynes told the Star.
School records obtained by the Star showed Hynes deleted the test grades of four students -- including his own daughter, whose history class grade he changed from a C to a B.
Anke Saldarriaga, a former Spanish teacher at Grace Brethren, told the Star that Hynes changed her students' letter grades to one higher without telling her.
Hynes admitted to changing the grades but said he did so because the two students were not in class the day the test date was announced. He also claimed Saldarriaga violated school policy by assigning "too much weight" to the test.
Hynes has worked for Grace Brethren since 2005.
Get Los Angeles's latest local news on crime, entertainment, weather, schools, COVID, cost of living and more. Here's your go-to source for today's LA news.
The school has not responded to requests for comment from NBC4.
More Southern California Stories:
- Motorcyclist Killed in Crash on 60 Freeway
- Burned Body ID'd; 3 Arrested
- Rapper Pays for Slain 6-Year-Old's Funeral
- 3rd Suspicious Package Linked to Ex-TSA Screener
- Judge Sides With Wet Electric Music Festival
- Family Claims Stray Electricity Injured Daughter
- 9/11 "Bittersweet" for Young Family
- Groper Sought After Attack on Jogger


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'Understanding 9/11′ Features Complete, Archived News Broadcasts From Around the World
Many television networks will no longer air the most devastating moments of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, lest it upset the families of the thousands of people who lost their lives that day.
But Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive feels that that footage is essential as a "resource for scholars, journalists, and the public," and has archived 3,000 hours of it, along with timelines and scholarly analysis.
The site's Rick Prelinger describes it as "an online library of 24/7 TV news broadcasts from 20 worldwide channels over the week starting 9/11/2001. [It has] a striking interface that shows 20 channels of each day's news on a single page, with framegrabs that link to streamable segments."
[via BoingBoing]


text: Yummy Tales (No Ratings Yet)Loading... Match 3 Games Match3gem 15 May , 2021 0 PLAY NOW! GAME INFO Yummy Tales is a great new match 3 puzzle game. Meet Oscar, the smart little dog, and your best friend! He will help you feed your farm animals and make them happy! You have to match 3 or more fruits or vegetables of the same kind to remove them from the board. Continue to match fruits and veggies until your animals are saturated. Make sure to reach the level goal before you run out of moves or you will have to try it again! Puzzle your way through more than 900 different levels. Complete Daily Missions and Challenges to earn cool rewards and receive gifts that give you coins and boosters to help you beat even the most difficult levels. Don't waste any more time and start playing Yummy Tales right now for free!


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Showing Collections: 1 - 2 of 2
Omicron Nu, Alpha Chapter records
Record Group
Identifier: UA-12.2.4
Scope and Content
This collection includes the records of Omicron Nu from their installation on campus in 1912 until around the mid 1980s. The contents contain lists of society members, blueprints for the Michigan Agricultural College Alpha chapter home, papers about the history of the society, historical information and rules for new members to memorize, the officers' instructions for running the organization, and the procedures for aspects of Omicron Nu management and induction ceremonies.The...
1912 - 1985
Tau Sigma records
Record Group
Identifier: UA-12.2.47
Scope and Content
Tau Sigma records include material from advisors, treasurers, and presidents. The collection also includes membership rosters from the 1920s until 1984. Historical information can be found in the Advisor's folder. Additional membership information can be found in the Treasurer's folder.
1923 - 1984


text: Looking for the perfect longsleeve for the cold and chilly days, when you need to layer up? This Italian family, nobody stands alone is a great way to show how proud you are of your Italian heritage and light up some smiles! Wear this longsleeve and show off your Italian roots. Perfect gift for your Italian friends and family members. Great gift for Christams, Birthday or Italian Heritage month. This will become your favourite piece to wear and a new conversation starter! Contact us and ask for bulk discounts or customization. Unique design for every proud Italian! Please check our size chart and product description before you order. Treat yourself or give as a gift to someone special. Buy Now! SKU: PI00042


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Handmade gold-fill, rose gold-fill, or sterling silver triangle threader earrings. Light and airy, you won't even notice you have them on. You can wear them for a night out on the town or dress them down with jeans and a blazer. Versatile and simple, these earrings will be a nice addition to your daily wardrobe.
Rose gold-fill or gold fill will not tarnish or change color.
Sterling silver will get a natural patina over time that can be easily removed with jewelry cleaner or a polishing cloth.
Approximately 1.5 inches tall.
The item pictured isn't the exact one that you will be receiving, but the design will be as similar as possible. Each piece is made by hand so there will be slight variations.


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Plasma Active Two has been released. In just two months, the Plasma Active development team has made significant improvements over Plasma Active One. The release announcement has more information, including a video and sites for downloading and installation instructions.
A video introduction to Plasma Active Two, which also appears on both the live and installable device images, can be viewed below or downloaded.
Improved User Experience
The Plasma Active team used valuable user feedback and real-world usage to improve the end-user experience significantly over Plasma Active One. As a result, operation is more natural, faster, easier and smoother. Default settings were adjusted to provide a better "out-of-the-box" experience.
Better Performance
Functions are more fluid. In some cases, they are more than 10 times faster than Plasma Active One. The QtQuick-based interface has been optimized for a much-needed performance boost.
The team's ultimate goal is to provide a good Plasma Active experience on devices with as little as 256MB of RAM and sub-1GHz processors. Plasma Active Two is a move in that direction. Developers will continue to focus on this goal in upcoming releases. Future development will support Plasma Active running on a wide range of devices that support touch interaction.
Plasma Active Two has one significant new feature―Recommendations. Plasma Active is now able to learn usage patterns. It analyzes that information to make recommendations based on what the user is doing at the moment―a valuable feature for computing-on-the-go. This capability is based on the "semantic desktop" of KDE Nepomuk and happens right on the device. No Internet connection is required. This brand new technology is not available on any other mobile device.
Expanded Device Support
In the last two months, Plasma Active has been brought up on over a dozen different kinds of devices using both Intel and ARM architectures. At least two announcements are expected within the next month about the availability of tablets with Plasma Active Two pre-installed.
Getting Involved
Plasma Active is fully open and transparent in design, development and deployment. There are plenty of opportunities for companies and individuals to participate. Plasma Active Three development―focused on features―begins in January, and is expected to be released in Summer 2012.
The release announcement has information about how to get involved.
Thank You
Thanks to community supporters, developers, designers, release and packaging experts, hardware hackers and project leaders for making Plasma Active Two a reality in such a short time. Plasma Active depends on technologies from KDE, Qt and Linux; thanks also to everyone who has contributed through those projects.
I don't like the default font, but apart from that this is really, really awesome.
Very nice, but maybe you'll have to come up with a way to explain activities to people. I'm still stumped as to what to do with them. Maybe a built-in tutorial, video-game style would suffice for the purpose?
Just saw the video and was wondering, if it is also possible to use multi-touch gestures to zoom in and out when diplaying pictures?
In the video the demonstrator tips "+" and "-" symbols to zoom in and out. I think nowadays most people are used to multi-touch gestures from their IPhone or Android devices.
Is it already implemented or did I miss something?
Holy crap.
This is what the homepage looks like.
I don't think I've ever seen a crappier piece of web design (well, Kotaku might come close). The text is so small it turns fuzzy like it's 1995.
I know that all web "designers" subscribe to the creed that font size settings are for losers and the smaller the better but some (like the .) are at least borderline readable without special zoom extensions. Is anyone surprised that plasma cractive central doesn't zoom well?
On a tablet it must be completely unusable.
If you want I can help you with a redesign; my dog's got nothing to do and sometimes likes to hack with his paws on the keyboard. The results are vastly better than that unreadable POS (not that I've yet to even mention the fact that the layout fails disgracefully if there's no js).
I don't think I've ever seen a crappier piece of web design (well, Kotaku might come close). The text is so small it turns fuzzy like it's 1995.
Please read http://www.kde.org/code-of-conduct before posting a rant. Thank you.
Rather funny! But I think the other response is right: you should keep the acid humor for yourself and try to be more diplomatic when writing.
I bet most of the moderate comments here and at forum.kde.org are in reality a "translation" of the real feelings after some KDE's crap, but being too sincere doesn't motivate developers at all; even if you think the problem is so obvious that anyone should have noticed, the fact is the most of the time it isn't, for instance, that font size you blame so much, is perfectly readable and agreeable on my screen. Different hardware may show different results, and "designers" can't test their sites on every machine on earth.
A hint: http://news.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet
But nothing sure until they'd release the SDE.
This looks nice but you should consider working on the way you name things. For instance : from the release announcement screenshots, one can read "use NTP". For the average Joe, maybe this should be called "Keep clock synchronized" or something like that. Just my 2 cents.
That looks really cool. The only thing that looks problematic is the icons at the top-right on the top bar. They appear to be too small and/or too close together, and the user in the video is being really careful to try and make sure they get the right one (and they are unsure until the result of the click happens). Maybe they could be bigger or not as close together? Or maybe when you touch there it should first make the icon it thinks you're touching bigger (not unlike some existing things that do that on mouseover) and you can slide left and right if it's on the wrong one and then tap again once you've got the right one.
I also like the music, it reminds me of Drown by Melanie C :o)


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We're thrilled to announce that Midwife Cath has partnered with Baby Jogger Australia in 2018, to share her tips and tricks for all things parenthood. To celebrate, we're giving one lucky Facebook follower the chance to win a one-on-one consultation valued at $250, either in person or via skype.
Visit the Baby Jogger Facebook pagehere to learn more and enter the draw to WIN a one-on-one consult valued at $250. About Midwife Cath
Midwife Cath – Cath Curtin – is a trusted expert in women's health, pre-pregnancy, antenatal care and education, pregnancy, labor and birth, postnatal care, breastfeeding, and parenting. She has delivered over 10,000 babies throughout her 43-year career.
Cath is an experienced midwife and maternal and child health nurse and can answer any question relating to your –
- pregnancy, childbirth and parenting (classes)
- feeding your baby (breast and formula feeding)
- general baby advice (sleep settling)
- developmental (checks)
- toddlers (sleep, feeding and behaviour)
- parenting questions (co parenting, same sex parenting, parenting alone) ….there's no baby problem she can't solve!


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Things are hoping in our household as I'm sure they are in yours!
Thanksgiving was wonderful, with both of my older boys home and a houseFULL of family for dinner.
After a non-stop weekend ending with the decorating of the house for Christmas, I'm finally back into Book mode.
Wishing all of you a wonderful holiday season!