text:
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Following questions and answers are all new published by Microsoft Official Exam Center: http://www.lead2pass.com/mb2-714.html
Your team uses the Dynamics CRM knowledge base.
You do not use the interactive service hub.
You use articles to resolve cases
You have an article template named ArticleTemplate1.
You publish articles that use ArticleTemplate1.
You need to prevent ArticleTemplate1 from being used to create any more articles.
The solution must ensure that existing articles remain available.
What should you do?
A. Modify the properties of ArticteTemplate1.
B. Delete ArticteTemplate1.
C. Deactivate ArticleTemplate1.
D. Remove ArticleTemplate1 from the default solution.
Answer: A
You need to see all of the cases that were canceled.
What should you do?
A. Export all of the queue items to a Microsoft Excel file.
B. Perform a Global Search and save a personal view.
C. Perform an Advanced Find and save a personal view.
D. Review the Audit log.
Answer: D
You plan to use the automatic record creation and update rules to create new records automata* based on different types of
You need to identify which record types can be used as the source type for the automatic record creation and update rules.
Which three record types should you identify? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
A. custom activity
B. social activity
C. case
D. lead
E. phone call
Answer: BCD
You need to find a specific knowledge article.
What are three possible search types that can be used to achieve the goal? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
A. topic
B. full-text
C. keyword
D. attachment
E. article number
Answer: ABE
You plan to use surveys.
You need to identify the number of entities that are used to store the survey responses.
What should you identify?
Answer: C
You have a Dynamics CRM organization.
You need to gather customer data by using several surveys.
The solution must use out-of-the box functionality.
What are three methods that you can use to distribute the surveys? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
A. surveys published to websites wrapped in iFrames
B. surveys published as mobile apps
C. customer-specific surveys shared by sending invitations by email
D. anonymous surveys made available through a URL
E. surveys published as web apps
Answer: BCD
You have a goal for a customer service representative that includes all of the representative s cases from the current fiscal year.
For the upcoming quarter, you need to modify the goal to include only cases associated to a specific subject.
Which three actions should you perform? Each correct answer presents part of the solution.
A. Create a rollup query that filters the case list based on the subject and Created On fields of the case.
B. Create a roll up query that filters the case list based on the subject field of the case.
C. Associate the rollup query to the goal record.
D. Change the time period of the goal record .
E. Update the rollup field on the goal record.
Answer: CDE
Your company has a Dynamics CRM organization that uses FieldOne.
A customer calls your company s Help Desk to report a failed device.
The Help Desk technician creates a case in CRM.
You need to deploy a technician to resolve the issue.
What should you do first?
A. Launch the Schedule Assistant.
B. Notify the technician to verify his job queue.
C. Resolve the case.
D. Convert the case to a work order.
Answer: D
You need to identify which actions are available in an enhanced service level agreement (SLA). What are two possible actions that you can identify? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
A. assigning records
B. sending email
C. prompt and response
D. on-demand workflow
Answer: CD
You have a queue that contains 100 items.
You need to delete the queue.
What are two possible ways to achieve the goal? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
A. Reassign the items in the queue, and then delete the queue.
B. Cancel the items in the queue, and then delete the queue.
C. Set the queue type to Public deactivate the queue, and then delete the queue.
D. Set the queue type to Private, deactivate the queue, and then delete the queue.
Answer: BC
You create a new case to which an enhanced service level agreement (SLA) is applied.
The SLA states that the case will be resolved in two hours.
You work on the case for 20 minutes, and then you discover that you require a password from the customer. The customer is unavailable, so you change the status reason of the case to On Hold. Forty minutes later, the customer sends you the password and you change the status reason of the case to In Progress.
You work on the case for 30 minutes, and then you change the cases status reason to On Hold, while you wait for a response from the customer. Twenty minutes later, you receive a response from the customer and you change the cases status reason to In Progress.
You work on the case for an additional 30 minutes, and then you change the case s status reason to Resolved.
How many minutes will the Resolve By KPI display for this case?
Answer: C
You need to identify how many default service level agreements (SLAs) you can have in a Dynamics CRM organization.
What should you identify?
A. one per organization
B. one per customer
C. one per entitlement
D. one per SLA item
Answer: D
Your customer service agents use two custom entities named Entity 1 and Entity2.
You need to organize the records for Entity1 and Entity2 so that they appear together in a single location.
What should you do first?
A. Enable the entities for queues.
B. Enable the entities for access teams.
C. Create a system view.
D. Create a personal view.
Answer: D
You have a Dynamics CRM organization that has several currencies enabled.
What occurs when a user creates a record that has a currency field?
A. The currency is based on the sales territory of the user.
B. The currency is based on the location of the user record.
C. The currency is converted into the base currency and is always displayed in the base currency
D. The system default currency is the record default, unless a customer has a default currency
Answer: C
Your company has a Dynamics CRM organization.
The company plans to use the product catalog.
You need to identify which component must be configured before you can implement the product catalog.
A. product families
B. product
C. price lists
D. unit groups
Answer: C
You create an entitlement that decreases the total terms when cases are created.
You need to identify what will cause the value of the remaining terms of an entitlement to be incremented or decremented.
What are two possible causes that you can identify? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
A. when a case that is attached to the entitlement is resolved
B. when the entitlement is attached to a new contact
C. when a case that is attached to the entitlement is deleted
D. when the entitlement is attached to a new case
Answer: C
You have an entitlement that allows 15 cases to be opened by phone.
After the 15 cases are opened by phone, you discover that additional cases are being opened by using email, the Internet and Facebook.
You need to ensure that cases can be submitted for the entitlement only by using the phone. What should you do?
A. Change the Decrease Remaining On setting.
B. Add entitlement channels that have a total term of 0.
C. Create a routing rule.
D. Set the default entitlement.
Answer: A
You create a new case that is associated to a service level agreement (SLA).
You need to identify what occurs when the case is placed on hold.
What should you identify?
A. An automatic notification is sent to the manager of the user who placed the case on hold.
B. An automatic notification is sent to the customer who initiated the case.
C. The time calculations for the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are paused.
D. Users are prevented from editing the case record until the On Hold status changes.
Answer: C
You plan to create an entitlement template.
You need to identify which types of records can be associated to the template.
What are the possible record types that you can associate to the template? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
A. contacts
B. service level agreement (SLA)
C. account
D. products
Answer: ABCD
Your team has a queue named Assignments.
A team member named CSR1 plans to work on an item from the Assignments queue.
CRS1 reports that after picking the item in the queue, the item no longer appears in the queue.
You need to tell CSR1 which type of queue to open-to view the item.
Which type of queue should you tell CSR1 to open?
A. personal
B. shared
C. escalation
D. public
Answer: A
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Jesus and the Wild Animals
It's one of the stranger asides in all the Gospels.
In Mark's first chapter, verses 12–13, after Jesus's baptism, "The Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals . . . ."
Say what? Jesus with the wild animals? What significance does that carry in this grand opening chapter of Mark?
No Random Detail
Mark has such limited space to tell about the history-altering life of the Son of God come as man. Why bother mentioning that in his forty-day wilderness venture Jesus "was with the wild animals"?
I doubt we should assume it's a random detail. Mark's narrative is much too carefully crafted to think that. Then what's the point?
Back to Adam
The conceptual connection appears to reach back to the Garden where Adam was with the animals before the Fall. For Adam, the setting was perfect: a beautiful garden, more pristine than we've ever seen, with tame animals around him — animals over which he exercised a kind and happy dominion as God's vice regent, created in God's image. (Of course, there came that pesky serpent. But even he was tame enough to engage in discussion.)
But our father Adam transgressed his Maker's regulation about abstaining from a particular tree, and in doing so, failed to exercise dominion over the creeping thing, and brought us all with him into sin.
Better Than Adam
The point Mark seems to be hinting at is that Jesus is a new kind of Adam, the new and ultimate Man. Instead of a beautiful garden, the ultimate Man faces his temptations in the wilderness, a wilderness created by Adam's sin. And instead of kindly presiding over tame animals, the ultimate Man is surrounded by wild animals. This sinful world into which Jesus enters to accomplish his mission is less like a pristine garden and more like Jurassic Park.
Unlike Adam, the surroundings into which Jesus is put to live out human perfection are marred by sin's corruption. Unlike Adam, Jesus faces a wild land and wild animals. While Adam was setup for success, Jesus must go against the grain.
But despite the conditions for our new Man being more difficult than they were for the first Man, Jesus succeeds, for our sake, in passing the test — in the wild land and among the wild animals. The new Adam does not succumb to the Enemy's tempting, but stays his course to die sacrificially for the sin that entered in under the first Adam.
Confirmation in Psalm 91
Psalm 91 connects the tracks between Mark's first chapter and the opening chapters of Genesis. In Matthew's telling of Jesus's wilderness temptation, he quotes from Psalm 91:11–12: "He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone." And Mark alludes to the psalm in his mention of "the angels were ministering to him" at the end of Mark 1:13.
It's the very next verse in Psalm 91 — verse 13 — that forges the link from the Garden to the coming Messiah's majestic dominion over the redeemed creation, wild animals included: "You will tread on the lion and the adder; the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot." Lions and tigers and bears — the God-man is reigning over them, with explicit mention of the serpent as well.
Fearless in the New Man
In Jesus, we have an escape from being born into Adam's condemned family. With God's amazing gift of new birth, we now are able to exercise faith in the new and ultimate Man, be joined to him, and included in the triumph of his family. In this new Adam, we're delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God's beloved Son (Colossians 1:13). One day we'll reign fully and finally with him in the new heavens and new earth, where the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat — and a little child shall lead them (Isaiah 11:6).
For now, we live in a world where dogs bite, zoos need cages, and even the best crocodile hunters die. But while our fear of wild animals persists (and should), in Jesus we have the promise of the Better Day to come. Jesus is our champion and pioneer who tramples underfoot the serpent, and empowers us to stomp with effect as well (Romans 16:20). A day is coming when we too will be with the wild animals and rightfully able to enjoy the serenity of Jesus.

subset: commoncrawl


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Updated at 2:40 p.m. ET
The Justice Department has announced charges against four people, including two Russian security officials, over cybercrimes linked to a massive hack of millions of Yahoo user accounts.
Two of the defendants — Dmitry Dokuchaev and his superior Igor Sushchin — are officers of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB. According to court documents, they "protected, directed, facilitated and paid" two criminal hackers, Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov, to access information that has intelligence value. Belan also allegedly used the information obtained for his personal financial gain.
"The criminal conduct at issue, carried out and otherwise facilitated by officers from an FSB unit that serves as the FBI's point of contact in Moscow on cybercrime matters, is beyond the pale," Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord said.
She told reporters that U.S. investigators believe Dokuchaev and Sushchin were working in their official capacity as FSB agents at the time.
Baratov was arrested Tuesday in Canada. NPR's Greg Myre reports that the U.S. plans to seek his extradition, and that three other defendants are in Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S.
Belan is one of the world's most notorious hackers. There's an Interpol "Red Notice" for his arrest, and he has been listed as one of the FBI's Most Wanted hackers since 2012.
"Rather than arrest him, however, the FSB officers used him," the indictment reads. It alleges that the officers also "provided him with sensitive FSB law enforcement and intelligence information that would have helped him avoid detection by law enforcement."
The massive hack against at least 500 million Yahoo user accounts happened in 2014. The company publicly acknowledged the breach last September, saying at the time that it believed a "state-sponsored actor" was responsible, without naming any foreign government. The disclosure prompted an investigation by U.S. authorities.
Some of the accounts breached had obvious intelligence value. According to court documents, these included: "Russian journalists and politicians critical of the Russian government; Russian citizens and government officials; former officials from countries bordering Russia; and U.S. government officials, including cyber security, diplomatic, military, and White House personnel."
Other targets included businesses, such as a Russian investment banking firm as well as "a French transportation company; U.S. financial services and private equity firms; a Swiss bitcoin and banking firm; and a U.S. airline."
The court documents state that Belan "provided his FSB conspirators ... with the unauthorized access to Yahoo's network." He is also accused of using the access to the network for personal financial gain. For example, he allegedly stole financial and gift card information from the Yahoo accounts, and implemented a spam marketing scheme that impacted millions of users, according to the documents.
Baratov allegedly helped the FSB agents access accounts at other providers such as Google, often assisted by information stolen from the breached Yahoo accounts. He was allegedly paid about $100 per account accessed.
You can read more details of the allegations in the indictment:
The company has also indicated in regulatory filings that forged cookies may have been used to access user accounts. It said today that those cookies are also part of the alleged Russian security breach.
"We appreciate the FBI's diligent investigative work and the DOJ's decisive action to bring to justice those responsible for the crimes against Yahoo and its users," the company said in a statement Wednesday. "We're committed to keeping our users and our platforms secure and will continue to engage with law enforcement to combat cybercrime."
This wasn't the only major breach Yahoo has reported in recent years. The company revealed an even larger hacking incident impacting more than 1 billion accounts that occurred in 2013, as we reported. It's not clear whether the intrusions are related.
Today's charges are also distinct from the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia launched an "influence campaign" in order to help President Trump win the election.
The Department of Justice is trying to ratchet up pressure on foreign hackers accused of carrying out cyberattacks on U.S. targets. Federal officials have also recently charged individuals from China and Iran over hacking allegations.
In 2014, as NPR's Carrie Johnson reported, the Department of Justice "charged five uniformed members of Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army of China with stealing secrets from American business competitors."
Last year, U.S. officials indicted seven hackers with links to the Iranian government for cyberattacks. "Court papers said the intruders attacked the web sites of dozens of major U.S. banks and breached controls at a dam in Rye, N.Y., raising alarms about safeguards in American infrastructure," Carrie reported.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Celebrities Read Mean Tweets: 2017 Oscars Edition
The 89th Annual Academy Awards briefly transformed into an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Sunday, February 26, when it aired a clip of some A-list stars reading mean tweets about themselves.
"I feel like if you went to lunch with Natalie Portman she would only order a hot tea with lemon and maybe some toast. Definitely not an entree though," Natalie Portman, who was absent from the ceremony due to her pregnancy, read from one user's tweet, before turning to reveal her large baby bump with a smirk.
La La Land star Ryan Gosling was attacked for his "perfect bone structure" with an R-rated tweet, while Samuel L. Jackson was mocked for his "resting fart face."
"Lin-Manuel Miranda looks like he's getting a 1996 sitcom with his haircut," one user tweeted, which the Moana songwriter read aloud with a laugh.
Meanwhile, poor Emma Stone was told she "looks like a crack w---e in every role she plays."
Jeff Bridges, Robert DeNiro, Felicity Jones and Tilda Swinton are just a handful of the other celebrities roasted on social media. See below:
See Photos From the 2017 Oscars Red Carpet:


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Tabou: Patience, Book 1's Summary
Jocelyn Russet and Patience Herrick. Two powerful, British-born American lesbians, fiery heiresses of different generations. Both coming of age at the same time. Are they destined for one another—or starcrossed? Follow their ten-year Odyssey in a sexy romp through the rollicking 1980s and 1990s. Discover how their fate turns on secret histories that bind the Russet and Herrick dynasties in business, politics and espionage. Meet an international cast of supporting characters who must all choose between love and duty in book one of the TABOU quintet.
Price: $2.50 ebook
Pages: 463
Publisher: Publish Green
Release: October 11, 2011
Amazon Kindle buy link:
Barnes&Noble.com Nook buy link:
MyBookOrders.com buy link:
Please tell us about
your current release.
Patience launches
my sexy quintet of novels, TABOU, a saga that spans 100 years on four
continents and recounts the erotic Odyssey of Jocelyn Russet, the 27-year old
brewing heiress born in London and raised in the Virginia countryside.
In each book, Jocelyn meets her destiny on one big night,
when her fate turns on secret histories and forbidden encounters with a
different woman every time. The novels interlock, as in The Alexandria Quartet
by Lawrence Durrell, and they can be read in any order, thanks to the Prologues
that open each novel and the indexes that help readers keep track of the cast
of characters. The whole project hearkens to the heyday of the 19th
century novel, where readers could immerse themselves in detailed worlds
peopled by dozens of characters. Edgy, modern action and full-spectrum erotic
writing updates the series to give it a "classic modern" feel.
Book One is a double love story that is part rollicking
adventure, part sexy romp through the glittering 1980s and 1990s, set in London
and Los Angeles. It's the tale of two British-born heiresses of different
generations, Jocelyn Russet and Patience Herrick, both coming of age at the
same time. Are they made in heaven, or star-crossed? What forgotten memories do
they share, what secret legacies must they uncover and take charge of, and why
are their families being targeted for terror?
Can you tell us about
the journey that led you to write your book?
TABOU began as an unproduced Hollywood screenplay that
focused on Jocelyn and Sylvie Russet and Jocelyn's climbing partner, Zander
Duffield. It fulfilled the basic requirements of good drama: three act
structure and a compelling narrative with a love interest and an antagonist. I
dreamed of Catherine Deneuve in the role of the 45-year-old Cognac heiress,
Sylvie Russet, in the vein of INDOCHINE, the blockbuster epic Deneuve had just
starred in so magnificently, but the movie project fell through.
My characters had really come to life, and now they wouldn't
let me go. Early on, I realized that there were deeper stories I wanted to tell
about how love and Eros, business and spy craft, run in families just like
other heritable traits. Telling stories that spanned four generations or more
required a format more ambitious than film, or even a single novel. It took
years for me to find the right "glue" that would bind nine families together on
four continents over four generations. The day I realized Patience Herrick was
an epic heroine strong enough to parry Jocelyn and Sylvie, with her own family
business story that could carry a quintet, I knew I had a series on my hands. Aurore
de Fillery and Valerie Drummond, Countess of Tiffin and Ross, sprung out of
that seed. And soon I could see the organic whole taking shape.
So Book One of TABOU is a love letter to the real Patience.
She is one of only two characters in TABOU modeled closely after a single
person; the rest are truly composites.
TABOU is not autobiographical fiction, but it does draw deeply
from my experience, and it is fair to say that as a mountaineer, motorcyclist,
screenwriter, field medic and family business specialist based in the Virginia
countryside, I truly live what I write about in TABOU.
I worked feverishly on the first draft of TABOU six days a
week while still nursing my baby daughter, completing it in about seven months.
Then I took a break and re-read a lot of period biographies, along with two
great novel cycles from the late 1950s that compliment one another and balance
the stylistic influences of TABOU.
First I re-read The Alexandria Quartet, a literary
masterpiece by Lawrence Durrell, whose artistic aim was to explore the four
dimensions of love in an era when Einstein had just discovered time as the
fourth dimension of space. I followed that with another run-through of the
Peter and Charlie Trilogy by Gordon Merrick, published after Merrick's death
from 1959-1961. This was a serious work of literary erotica by a successful
author of gay "potboilers," his explicit, homoerotic romances that critics had
ghettoized. Merrick was a major talent. But as E.M. Forster had done with Maurice, he refused to publish the Peter
and Charlie books during his lifetime. The subject matter was too taboo.
No longer! What really gripped me about the Peter and
Charlie books, besides the first class erotic writing, was the family saga.
What other gay epic gave the heroic lovers children—and the struggles of
parenthood pitted against Eros? Merrick was taking Durrell's "fourth dimension"
(the enduring powers—both creative and destructive--of love over time) to the
next level. Literary giants like Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, Sackville-West and
others had dreamed about it—but never accomplished it. I wanted all that sexy continuity
for TABOU…and more.
For readers around the world, generations of their own
family histories have been lost because of taboos that forbid truth telling about
the wide range and variety of sexual desire and experience, not to mention its
power to transform history. Helen's face launched 1,000 ships, remember?
Bosie's charms landed Oscar Wilde in prison. Who paid the price? Who inherited
the spoils?
Historians and biographers have become franker in writing colorful
and meaningful gay, lesbian and bisexual lives. Recent biographies of Alan
Turing and Walt Whitman vie with my personal favorite by Victoria Glendinning, Vita, in the pantheon. But the living
legacies of these lives remain unclaimed by their heirs, or else squandered.
Who knows the adventures of her great-great gay uncle, or the heroic deeds of his
three-greats lesbian aunt? Greta Garbo's niece threatens legal action against
those who pry too deeply into Garbo's life story, as if their consanguinity is
still a threat. For those of us who crave connection and continuity across
generations, James Joyce made much of the difference between spiritual
paternity and actual paternity in Ulysses,
but does anybody remember? Dolly Wilde told anyone who would listen, in Paris
between the wars, that she was more like her uncle Oscar Wilde than he was like
himself. But when she died, that continuity appeared to have vanished…until,
out of the blue, Jamie O'Neill wrote a brilliant novel called At Swim, Two Boys, which revealed him as
the spawn of the gay Wilde and the hetero Joyce. Why have so few talented
writers addressed this huge gap in consanguinity and continuity between us and
our queer forebears?
This is the great question that spurred me on through many
drafts to finish and publish TABOU now. My mission: to mind the gap. Then to
bridge it, one erotic fiction at a time, since we have lost the links in the
real human daisy chain over the last century.
I bring an unusual perspective to TABOU. As a descendant of John
Hart, who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and as a
fifth-generation owner of the international Stroh's brewing business that had
been in my family since 1848 in America, then back to 1509 in the Palatinate
(Germany), it seemed like nowhere was this yawning gap more visible than in my
own milieu. So I built the mythology of TABOU around the world I was born into
and raised in and now pass down to my daughter: the world of political dynasties
and business families that bears some resemblance to the Olympian heights. Here
on Earth, with the help of the "chattering classes," it's a world that has
taken such painstaking care to trace its own history from generation to
generation for centuries. But it's a history that has left out the biggest change agent of all: the wide variety of sexual
experience that perennially inspires us, nourishes our souls, enlivens our art,
and strengthens our connections between love and Eros in every generation.
I don't want to spoil it for you, but one of my beta readers
summarized what I'd accomplished like this:
"At first I was like, 'who are these people?' And then I got it! They're
dripping rich and saving the world!"
Can you tell us about
the story behind your book cover?
Great question. I'm very proud of this.
I worked with a very talented young designer, Andrea
Kuchinski, on the cover design. We've been collaborating creatively for a
decade, ever since Andrea was a teenage apprentice at the design firm that won
a Hermes award for my web site, suzannestroh.com.
For this project, we needed to incorporate several key
elements. We had a series title, and there are five books in the series. So we
needed a family of covers, not just one cover. The series title, TABOU, is
incomplete without the mysterious mirror reflection of currency symbols, £$F€£, used
throughout the series as section dividers. I can't explain the meaning of this,
or else I'd be ruining the climax of Book Five, Valerie. So trust me: the title and the series of currency symbols
are inseparable. We also had to incorporate the tree of life, with its nine
withered branches representing the nine dynastic families of TABOU, and with its
entangled root system. And finally, we wanted to express the eroticism and good
taste that sets TABOU apart from contemporary trends in literary fiction.
Our process at the beginning of each new project is to talk things
through over a coffee. Sometimes Andrea will record our conversation, but at
this stage in our collaboration, we can pretty much read one another's
aesthetic. I leave her to work freely and come up with a concept.
As you can see from the Facebook page, Andrea's first prototype was a
family of covers that evokes the South Pacific imagery where Sylvie Russet grew
up on Hiva Oa, near Tahiti. Dominated by the tree, the covers were whimsical,
blocky, colorful and fun—but not edgy. We agreed we wanted to go for something
deeper, bolder, starker and more profound, more beautiful.
To me, an art history major in college, nothing is more beautiful than
the human body. I started looking for nude photographs that would hint at the
mysteries of TABOU, showing the variety of sexual experience (and more critically,
the powerful union of sex and love) that is central to my theme.
Meanwhile, Andrea had a breakthrough. She noticed that our tree of
life contained elements in the root system which, if lifted out of context,
resembled beautiful, flowing tattoos. By overlaying the root system on the
nudes, we began to get some really extraordinary imagery that still evoked the
South Pacific. We knew we had what we wanted, stylistically. What remained was
Andrea drives this part of the iterative process, which usually goes
very fast. It's a back-and-forth exchange where we home in on color, typeface
and layout until we feel that we've reached the full expression of our concept.
Very soon we'd built a unified family of covers. Et voilà.
We were both completely shocked when the iBookstore judged the cover
of Book One too "explicit" and asked for a redesign—or else they would refuse
to sell the book. I wasn't happy, but agreed to the redesign. I love the
aesthetics of Apple devices, and I myself am totally "Macked-out." But the idea
of censorship by Apple still sticks in my craw.
Since before the Renaissance, the highest measure of artistic
greatness (in painting, sculpture and modern media) has always been depicting
the nude--the magnificent form and structure of the human body. I disagree
profoundly with the conventional American notion that expressing nudity,
especially artistic nudity, is "obscene," when expressing graphic violence is
not. Censorship is not just a problem for authors. It limits filmmakers as
well, as I know from my work as a screenwriter and film producer, driving the
marketplace through the Hollywood rating system, which determines what movies
our children can see—or cannot see.
I shouldn't have been surprised when the iBookstore rejected the cover
of Book Two. But I am still disappointed. As with Book One, I have redesigned
the cover of Jocelyn for iPad readers.
You can see the original artwork on my Facebook page.
What approaches have you taken to marketing your book?
This is an all-eBook publicity campaign organized through my
publisher, Publish Green. To let readers know about TABOU, I am building momentum
through word of mouth and Facebook advertising. With my Facebook page, Tabou by
Suzanne Stroh, and my web site, www.workwithstroh.com,
I am forging the authentic, personalized, one-to-one connection that readers
crave from authors in a world of McMedia.
I'm also organizing a blog tour, and I'm available to
support the book through interviews and personal appearances on blogs and web
sites like yours.
What book on the
market does yours compare to? How is your book different?
TABOU is a literary reader's Fifty Shades of Grey, without the BDSM. It has great sex writing, like Fifty Shades of Grey, but it is neither mommy porn nor genre
fiction built on the formula for stock erotica. The gaps between the sex scenes
are much longer, and those gaps are filled with more intriguing plots that
involve many more characters. It also presents all kinds of couples in love:
gay, straight, bisexual, single and partnered, young and old, able-bodied and
disabled, faithful and unfaithful to their spouses.
Like the novel series by Edward St. Aubyn, TABOU is set in a
glittering world of bluebloods and elites. But these elites are not your
typical "1%." Unlike St. Aubyn's abusive elites, TABOU's international elites
are productive, not destructive. They are on a mission led by a moral code, a reason
for being—a higher purpose that is revealed progressively as characters accept
hidden legacies and face life-threatening challenges after discovering secret
What would you say is
your most interesting writing quirk?
I'd start with the sex writing. Very little literary fiction
published today has truly great sex writing in it that explores the full range
of sexual experience. And almost no erotica delivers the deep satisfaction of a
good literary novel. My work bridges this gap. You won't find hot sex every 30
pages, as in genre fiction. But you'll keep every volume of TABOU by your
bedside, no matter whom you share your bed with!
My writing is a personal blend of deep artistic influences
in several genres, including biography, giving rise to some unconventional quirks. One of my goals has been to counteract the
predictability of so much contemporary fiction, in part by re-inventing the
experience of really getting lost in
a juicy 19th century saga peopled with dozens of fascinating
characters, each with his or her own vivid storyline. To make it easier for
readers to follow all the characters, I've provided character indexes, the way
a biographer would index a biography.
Technically, TABOU requires commitment from the reader, in
the way that the music of Kanye West is challenging—but worth it. It's not a
breezy read; nor is it a slim volume. It takes at least 100 pages to "get into"
a novel cycle this big, but then you're hooked, if you're like 50% of my beta
readers who became addicted! TABOU's pleasures are deeper. They grow on you.
For instance, TABOU is ambitious in throwing out the
conventional linear narrative in favor of the pleasures of being able to peek
into the future and to jump back into the past instantaneously. A benefit of
blending the past, the present and the future together in every book is that
you can read the books in any order. It's kind of like enjoying the possibility
of multiple endings in a computer game. You will have a unique experience of
TABOU, depending on how you choose to read it. The dual narratives begin, in
Book One, on the same March day in 1993 and 2003, each progressing from there. You
know you're in a flashback, recalling past events, when you see dialog 'in
single quotes like this.' Dialog in the main story "looks like this." And
future events are written in bold italics. You won't get confused because all
this is explained in the Author's Note that appears in the end matter of every
TABOU eBook.
Readers will also notice lots of interior dialog, reflecting
multiple points of view, along with lots of verb phrases in my books. Screenwriting
has taught me to craft edgy sentences that begin with verb phrases. It's a
screenwriters' convention that energizes the pace and adds immediacy to the
Open your book to a
random page and tell us what's happening.
It's 4:00 p.m. in Los Angeles in 1993 at the height of the
"British invasion" of Hollywood. Patience Herrick, daughter of the three-time
American ambassador to Great Britain, pretty much rules the city's social
calendar. Tonight she needs to get out of throwing a dinner party in Bel Air
for a French champagne princess, where the Hollywood elite will mingle with the
US Vice President—all so she can celebrate her tenth anniversary with Jocelyn
Russet, the love of her life, the brewing heiress Patience seduced in a London
ballroom. So tonight is a date made in heaven—that Patience completely forgot
She calls her best friend Calandra Seacord for help.
Calandra can definitely host the party in her place; she's Greek and gorgeous, an
Arianna Huffington double, married to the man running for Governor of California.
Calandra and Patience grew up together in London. Patience knows her well and
loves her like a sister.
But Patience doesn't know everything. Calandra is a secret
agent working for the champagne princess, hunting down unprosecuted Nazi war
criminals, kidnapping them, and bringing them to mock trials in order to
recover stolen assets. Calandra can't risk being seen socially with the
princess, so she has to make up a plausible reason why she can't do this
important favor tonight for Patience.
There's another problem: Patience is a world-class judge of
character. Nothing slips past her. Calandra can't let Patience on to her
secret. So in order to distract Patience, Calandra reveals the biggest secret
of Patience's life. And when she does, Patience begins a journey of recalling
lost memories that will change her life forever….starting with her anniversary
date tonight….
Do you plan any
subsequent books?
Book Two, Jocelyn,
is now available. Book Three, Sylvie,
will go on sale in time for the 2012 holiday season. The cycle will conclude
with Books Four and Five in 2013. Each TABOU book features a sneak preview of
the next book.
Tell us what you're
reading at the moment and what you think of it.
I've always got a few books going at any given time. I love
reading in multiple genres. Do you?
In erotic fiction, I've started Fifty Shades Darker by EL James, and while it's a fun, breezy read
with the sex writing as good as ever, I'm not surprised to find the thin plot
growing even thinner. I love to read great sex writing, but I like it in better
taste and more measured doses with deeper character development, more going on
with more characters, and exciting story lines. I much preferred The Last Nude by Ellis Avery, which I
devoured, almost in one sitting. It's about the cocaine-fueled obsession of
Modernist painter Tamara de Lempicka for her 17-year old model Raphaela, whose
portraits secured Lempicka's rock star status in Paris between the wars. I'm
also reading Afterimage by Helen
Humphreys, the fictional account of another muse obsession, this time by
pioneer English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron for her housemaid.
Two graphic novels have captured my attention. I just
finished really Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.
It's the first work by Bechdel I can really connect with. It's a very
compelling, but heavy, memoir by a Midwestern intellectual whose closeted father
took his own life when Alison came out as a lesbian. I've turned now to Logicomix, the story of Bertrand
Russell's quest to lay a unified foundation for mathematics, set in Edwardian
England and beyond. Apart from The
Invention of Hugo Cabret, it may be the most beautiful graphic novel I've
ever read. It took four authors and artists to make it: Apostolos Doxiadis,
Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna. What a cool
Nonfiction titles are always by the bedside and on my Kindle.
By the bedside is Marina Warner's scholarly book about the Tales of the Arabian
Nights, Stranger Magic. It's well
researched and beautifully published. Comprehensive. Kate Summerscale's
biography of Toughie Carstairs, The Queen
of Whale Cay, made me laugh out loud. She was the very butch Standard Oil
heiress who ran an ambulance unit in World War I and then became "the fastest
woman on the water" racing hydroplanes between the wars. My father would have
seen her challenge the Harmsworth Cup on the St. Clair River in Detroit in 1929
and 1930. After she lost both races, Toughie retired to the Bahamas, where she
became the autocratic ruler of her own island.
I try to read in French as much as I can. Right now I'm
gripped by Francesco Rappazzini's biography of Elizabeth de Gramont, set in
Paris during the first half of the 20th century, which has never
been translated. The "red duchess" Lily de Gramont, from one of France's oldest
families, was Proust's fact-checker; she was the best friend of the man Proust
pined for; and she was the only woman Natalie Barney could never control: they
were lovers for 45 years. If you don't read French, you can get an idea of
"Natly's" escapades with Lily de Gramont in Diana Souhami's wonderful and
hilarious book, Wild Girls.
Suzanne Stroh's Bio:
Suzanne Stroh is a screenwriter and film producer, author of published case studies on family business. She grew up in Michigan where her family brewed Stroh's beer for five generations. She studied art history at Wellesley College and Newnham College, Cambridge then worked in the New York art world before turning to writing. A mountaineer and field medic, she lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.TABOU is her first novel.


text:
NRA Basic Pistol Class
This course combines classroom and range time learning to shoot revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. Students learn NRA's rules for safe gun handling, pistol parts and operation, ammunition, shooting fundamentals; range rules; shooting positions, cleaning the pistol, and continued opportunities for skill development.
This is the perfect class if you have never fired a gun or are a beginning shooter. This course will give you a solid foundation in firearm safety and basic shooting skills which you can build upon in more advanced classes. This class is also a prerequisite to becoming an NRA Pistol Instructor.
Firearms, ammunition, eye and ear protection will be provided by The Sporting Shoppe at The Preserve or you are welcome to bring your own. A holster is recommended but not required and the ammunition count is approximately 100 rounds.
This course qualifies you for your Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and Florida resident or NON-resident pistol permit licenses.
Students can bring their own firearm, 100 rounds, eye, and ear protection or it will be provided by The Preserve.
We are very glad to resume Preserve Academy classes and are keeping your health and safety as our highest priority. For each class, please bring a face mask and hand sanitizer. We will ensure classrooms, the range and all other areas related to your class are regularly cleaned and sanitized.
Thank you for your patience and for joining a Preserve Academy class. We are glad to have you back.
Member and Guest Dress Code.
When entering the Members Lodge Clubhouse, inclusive of the Double Barrel Kitchen Restaurant inside and outside dining, and the Preserve Academy classroom, we kindly ask that you abide by our Resort Casual Dress Code, permitting collared shirts, dress shorts, cotton and linen slacks, dressy blouses, pullover tops, dresses and maxi dresses, dress jeans, and close toed shoes.
Nonconforming clothing includes but is not limited to; bathing suits, beach coverups, camisoles, hoodies, non-dressy Jeans, carpenter pants, T-shirts, sweat suits, cutoffs, torn shorts, yoga pants, sneakers, and flip-flops.


text:
Monticello Vineyards & Winery is a small and unpretentious Florida farm winery. Located in the Red Hills bioregion of north central Florida, the winery is housed at Ladybird Organics.
Ladybird Organics
USDA certified organic grapes, persimmons, pecans, pears, broilers and USDA organic wheatgrass and microgreens including sunflower and buckwheat sprouts, and other produce as well as eggs, worms, and worm castings.
Monticello Winery's Magnolia wine has been named the best wine in Florida in "The United States of Wine" by Ruth Burningham on epicurious.com!


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text:
Do you do Design/Build work because you love it, and plan-and-spec work because you have to?
Like many mid-size commercial contracting firms, that's the situation we face here at Hyde-Stone Mechanical Contractors, Inc.
We have found that there are three keys to procuring the Design/Build work that we love in a market where plan-and-spec is king: quality, reputation, and relationships. The three, as you might imagine, are very much interconnected.
Hyde-Stone Mechanical is a 112-year-old, $5 million firm with 36 employees. We have three office in upstate New York: Plattsburgh, Potsdam, and our headquarters in Watertown. While the area may look somewhat remote on a map, we draw customers from a solid industrial base that includes Alcoa, General Motors, Kraft Foods, and Bombardier (a manufacturer of freight and luxury trains), as well as numerous universities and hospitals.
And, like many mechanical contractors, we have a thorn in our side called plan-and-spec.
Start With Your Plan-and-Spec Customers
In many cases, there's no way around plan-and-spec. Customers are obligated by a corporate or municipal entity to get bids, and the low number gets the job.
Fortunately, the plan-and-spec marketplace can serve as a source of Design/Build customers.
First of all, we have an excellent commercial/industrial service department. Since most plan-and-spec jobs, by their very nature, involve the contractor walking away at the end, we aggressively pursue the service contracts once the job is completed.
Along with those service contracts, we get plan-and-spec customers who are eventually going to do an addition, need a chiller or boiler replacement, are looking to add energy recovery ventilators, need more fresh air, etc.
Once we're working in their building, maintaining and servicing their current system, we become the natural choice for them to ask when they need such upgrades. That's the first place we go for Design/Build.
About $1.5 of our company's $5 million top line is service, and we always encourage our service techs to be aware of customers' needs. They don't have to sell. If they see equipment that's old and inefficient, all they have to do is inform the customer and then let us know in the office, and we'll follow up.
Our technicians understand it's in the customer's best interest to have reliable, efficient equipment. They're the eyes and ears for both the customer and our company. That's an important role and we en-courage and reward our techs for fulfilling it.
Even when we do bid on plan-and-spec work and lose the bid, our Design/Build background allows us to turn it into a positive. We're the company that the customer calls to come in and fix it.
It's a tremendous opportunity for us when a customer calls and says, "Do you remember bidding on our job last year? We'd like you to come over and take a look at it because it doesn't seem to be working right." We can then go in and fix the problem and, in the process, win that customer over. The best Design/Build customers are those who have had a bad plan-and-spec experience.
You can also find Design/Build work by doing better commissioning than anyone in your area. Commissioning is a tough job that's often under-appreciated by customers, but it will really set you apart from your competition — especially the plan-and-spec guys.
Several years ago we became certified by the National Balancing Institute. Now we use balancing not only for troubleshooting and solving comfort problems in our competitors' systems (thus winning new customers we can convert to Design/Build), but also when we commission our own systems. True to our Design/Build roots, we want to design, install, and maintain systems. The maintenance component becomes a whole lot easier when systems are properly balanced (and the controls are working properly) in the first place.
Quality and Reputation
Having been around for as long as we have has given us a great long-term reputation in our area. But you have to be willing to hire (and pay) the best people, and keep them trained so they're the best in the area. By selling Design/Build services, you're telling the customer that your firm is better than the plan-and-spec low bidders. You have to make sure that's truly the case.
You don't have to be a 112-year-old company to have a good reputation. Quality work and reputation are married. If you do quality work, your reputation will grow. Likewise, once you've established a good reputation, it becomes increasingly important to always provide quality work. This applies if you've been in business for 100 years or one year.
Reputation is the key to the next tactic in landing Design/Build jobs: knocking on doors.
Do the research. Go to local chambers of commerce, identify the companies you'd like to have as customers and keep after them. Send them e-mails, stop by and drop off your card, keep them informed about things in the HVAC market that may be important to them. Eventually, the time may come when — for whatever reason — they're dissatisfied with their current HVAC contractor. That's when you'll get your chance to impress them.
When it comes to knocking on doors, try to get to the person who's writing the checks. Start with the maintenance people, but get up as high as you can. Some companies have a procurement office. Talk to the people in there; they're the ones their facility management people will call when they need HVAC work.
You may get a lot of runaround, but it's worth it to get your name and face in front of the people who write the checks and the people who run the facility. Persistence pays off.
Create Winning Proposals
I try to convince every customer that Design/Build is the way to go, and they seem to believe me when we're talking about a $100,000 to $250,000 project. But when it comes time for a huge expansion, they suddenly seem more comfortable going to the local architect/engineers. Those guys do a fine job, but it's hard to convince customers that we can do all the things they can, and more.
How can you overcome this? Impress customers with your professionalism and credentials. For example, we show our customers how we use auto CAD to turn around their designs very quickly and accurately.
Also, take the time to go over your proposals with potential customers — don't just fax a proposal over and hope for the best.
We meet face-to-face with potential customers and give them a lot of information in a very professional format. We explain how we arrived at our design, and we educate them about Design/Build. Of course, you have to be careful here that people won't steal your design. Don't give customers so much information that they can simply take your proposal to a competitor and say, "Can you do this cheaper? Look, the loads are all done, and the pumps and ductwork are all sized." Don't give everything away upfront. But do give customers enough information that they'll know they want to take the next step with you and sign a contract.
Remember, even though the nature of the business is mechanical systems, it's still very much a people business. Do quality work to build your reputation, then use your reputation to get in the door and build relationships. Landing Design/Build work will follow naturally.
Don't Miss The 2005 Commercial Contracting RoundtableFor more information on Design/Build and commercial contracting, attend the Commercial Contracting Roundtable, cosponsored by the Air Conditioning Contractors of America and Contracting Business. The event, which incorporates the Design/Build Seminar, takes place October 26-26 in Scottsdale, AZ. For more information, call 703/824-8856 or visit www.contractingroundtable.com |
Christopher J. Stone is vice president of Hyde-Stone Mechanical Contractors, Inc., Watertown, NY. He can be reached at 315/265-6999, e-mail [email protected]
Give us your feedback on this article at [email protected]


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The shot clock is not coming to high school basketball in Wisconsin.
Where we're at and when:
944 Harlem Street Altoona, WI. 54720
News happens all the time, right?
Looking for something? Type it here and let's see what we can find.
About This Site
This is a place where you can learn about what is happening in the Chippewa Valley and beyond.
Get news and more…In a way that doesn't put you to sleep.
Life is hard.
Staying up to date should be easy.
the 715 newsroom is:
LIVE and LOCAL.
Hooray radio!
You can hear us every day on these Midwest Family Broadcasting stations:
- WAXX 104.5 (Country types)
- I-94 The "Cool Mom"station
- 98.1 Greatest Hits
- 92.9 THE X (Rock Types)
- 105.1 Sports Talk
We love radio. We love what we do and we hope you do too.


text:
Artist Rita Trickel: Beyond Here There Be Dragons
Ahoy mateys! Ever see an old sea map where dragons marked dangerous or uncharted waters? Pictures of dragons, sea monsters, or mythological creatures warned sailors to stay away. No telling what's beyond. Shiver me timbers! If sailors got too close to these areas, trouble abounded. Danger was at hand. All...Read More


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Photos of some of the activities of the day of the All Star Baseball Game in St Louis.
To see more photos and purchase at Buy On Line Stock Photography
All Star Baseball is one of the two most popular baseball board games of the last sixty years, and has been honored as one of the fifty most influential American board games of all time. It was manufactured by Cadaco-Ellis and designed by baseball player Ethan Allen (1904-1993).
The game first appeared in 1941 and a special version is still sold today. It was the best-selling baseball board game of all time, and is the only such game to have been distributed through mass market channels and toy stores for any extended period of time. The annual versions of the game were discontinued in the mid-1990s due to the loss of market share to computer games and greatly increased player licensing costs, but a commemorative version was issued in 2003.


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Welcome to the July edition of our Public Involvement update from the Public Involvement Programme (PIP) at NICE.
For more information about how we involve patients and the public in NICE's work please visit our get involved page on the NICE website. If you would like information on all of NICE's work, please subscribe to our e-newsletter and alerts. NICE is also on Twitter – for news and updates please follow @NICEComms. For messages specifically from the PIP @NICEGetInvolved.
Healthwatch organisations and national patient, carer and voluntary organisations are welcome to get involved in the development of NICE guidance if you would like to. To do this for clinical, public health, social care guidance and quality standards, you will need to register as a stakeholder organisation for the specific topics of interest to you. NICE stakeholder registration.
If you have any comments about the content of this update or ideas about what you'd like to see in the next edition, please contact email@example.com
To read the newsletter click here


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Bill Gates To SXSWedu: Education Change Is Hard
Gates urges conference participants to apply their "commitment and creativity" to make sure education technologies such as analytics live up to promise.
Educational 'Technology' Across the Ages
Educational 'Technology' Across the Ages(click image for larger view and for slideshow)
Closing out a week of enthusiasm and energy at SXSWedu, Bill Gates reminded the crowd that what's happening now echoes a surge of enthusiasm from the late 1990s, when the Web seemed to be opening limitless frontiers for education -- and then the bubble popped.
"We have to check ourselves and ask, is it really different this time?" Gates said in the closing keynote of SXSWedu, the education-focused event associated with the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. There are reasons to think this time is different, including more mature technologies and favorable economics, he said. For example, in the late 1990s storing an hour of video to be served over the Internet cost about $400 versus about two cents today.
Still, innovators need to prove that they can translate that potential into making a real difference for education, Gates said. "A lot hangs in the balance. We're counting on the commitment and the creativity of this group."
[ To find out how colleges are taming costs and anticipating class sizes, see To Avoid Nasty Surprises, Higher Ed Turns To Prediction.]
Gates, the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, was appearing in his role as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which supports education reform efforts in the U.S. and public health initiatives worldwide. Gates recently has been promoting the potential of analytics to solve global problems, including the problems faced by educators.
"We try not to be naive about how complex it's going to be" to make all the pieces of the educational technology puzzle fit together, Gates said at the outset. Yet educators and policy makers are getting closer to agreeing on their ultimate goals, he said. "The idea that these online platforms can target a clear standard is incredibly powerful," he noted. However, his slide making this point generated a wave of laughter from the locals because it showed a map of the 45 states that have joined the Common Core State Standards Initiative, with Texas standing out as one of the big missing pieces in the center of the puzzle.
Education data integration has "gone from being an almost impossible problem" to merely a challenging one, Gates said.
Along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Gates foundation has provided funding for InBloom, a non-profit educational technology venture focused on data integration that was highly visible at SXSWedu, hosting one of the major evening events as well as a series of seminars on the use of its technology. InBloom is not creating data standards but hopes to "operationalize" those that already exist by storing student data in a common format so that it can be made available to multiple applications that today are not integrated, with a single sign-on capability so teachers don't have to remember dozens of passwords.
Joining Gates on stage, InBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger said such data integration "plumbing" is "not very exciting but it's extremely important" for making data more available to teachers and useful in the classroom.
Gates also recognized one particular adaptive learning startup, DreamBox Learning Inc., giving CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson an opportunity to explain how her software accelerates math education by identifying "millions of learning paths," based on "continuous real-time data" from performance on assessments that are designed to feel more like playing a game. Although DreamBox is not a gaming company, it uses gamification strategies to keep children engaged, she said. "If kids persist, then they can progress."
A third guest, Summit Schools CEO Diane Tavenner, talked about the role charter schools can play as "incubators of innovation" that should be shared broadly with all educators.
One of the best technologies her school has adopted recently is a program called ShowEvidence, which provides tools for evaluating assignments such as essays, allowing the instructor to tag sections of the text to determine whether the student met goals such as providing a clear thesis statement followed by evidence and a conclusion.
The teacher can even record voice or video notes as another type of feedback. The tool adds structure to the process of grading work that doesn't fit into the multiple-choice mode of automated assessment and makes it easier to document the rationale behind a grade. "So many fewer red pens are going to die as a result of this platform," Tavenner said.
Gates said he is delighted by the energy and money being focused on improving education, but thinks it's still not enough. Given that education is where "any improvement you make benefits every other sector of the economy," there should be more money invested in researching what makes the best teachers more effective than the rest, he said.
Follow David F. Carr at @davidfcarr or Google+, along with @IWKEducation.
About the Author(s)
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Smart Option Model
Our proprietary physical option pricing and hedging model makes it easy to unlock the value of your optionality
Smart Global's experienced software team and option specialists have developed a fully featured physical option pricing application called Smart Optionality.
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Goospery Apple iPhone SE /7/8 Plus Rich Diary Wallet Case
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What is Intraarticular Knee Injection?
Knee pain and stiffness can be disabling and difficult to treat. It can limit an individual's lifestyle and negatively impact body image and emotional well-being.
An intra-articular knee injection is a very effective form of treatment where medicine is delivered directly into the knee joint with the primary objective of relieving pain from conditions such as arthritis.
Intra-articular knee injections are usually recommended when the pain has not responded to traditional conservative treatments such as anti-inflammatory medications, physical therapy, activity modification, or ice therapy.
There are various types of intra-articular injections. Depending on your condition, your doctor may recommend an intra-articular injection of:
Hyaluronic acid is a naturally occurring substance in the joints that provides lubrication and acts as a shock absorber. With arthritis, this substance is largely deficient, leading to worsening of the condition. Hyaluronic acid injections into the knee can help reduce pain and improve range of motion.
Your doctor may perform an intra-articular injection of corticosteroids to reduce inflammation in the knee joint. Corticosteroids prevent the production of inflammatory cells that are naturally produced in response to an acute injury or arthritic conditions. Platelet-rich plasma or PRP is obtained from your blood and may be used in an intra-articular injection of the knee joint to encourage tissue regeneration, reduce pain and improve function.
Arthrocentesis is a procedure where an excess joint fluid is removed with a needle that is inserted into the joint space. It is done to reduce swelling and pain in the knee. Usually, after removing the excess joint fluid from the knee, your doctor will use the same puncture site to inject a corticosteroid preparation or anesthetic to further alleviate pain and inflammation.
Intra-articular knee injections are commonly indicated for knee conditions such as:
- Osteoarthritis
- Rheumatoid arthritis and gout
Intra-articular knee injections may be performed using various approaches. During the procedure, you will be seated or will lie on your back with the affected knee flexed or extended. The skin over the injection site is sterilized and numbed with a local anesthetic.
The needle is inserted into your knee joint and the medication is injected. In some cases, ultrasound imaging is used to help guide the needle to the correct site. You may feel some mild discomfort during the injection. In some cases, prior to injecting the medicine, a small amount of joint fluid is withdrawn to make space for the medication. Once the fluid is removed, the same site is used to administer the intra-articular injection. A small dressing is then applied over the injection site to complete the procedure.
Postoperative Care
Postoperative care will include the following instructions:
- Avoid strenuous activities for a couple of days
- Apply ice on the injection site for comfort
- Rest, elevation and medicines are recommended to relieve pain and swelling
- Gentle range of motion exercises are recommended
Risks and Complications
Intra-articular knee injections are a relatively safe procedure. However, as with any procedure, there may be certain risks and complications such as:
- Infection at the injection site
- Reaction at the injection site
- Pain or swelling at the injection site
- Septic arthritis
- Acute arthritis
- Inflammation of the joint lining
- Nerve Injury


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BAY CITY, Mich. — Ultimate Championship Wrestling announces another huge match for Back To School — Old School on Saturday, September 16, 2017 from the Prime Event Center in Bay City, Michigan.
El Ridiculoso will be taking on Big Chuck Wagon. The match will be contested in a "Fun House Rules Match."
Come help celebrate Big Chuck Wagon's birthday and get your tickets now before they sell out!


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Powerful Tools & Proven Training to Launch Your Writing Career
Contena® has helped thousands of people to get started with freelance writing. Discover the best jobs and get hired to work remotely for great companies.
I landed my first professional writing job through Contena. I went from having just a few samples and no paid experience to writing a minimum of 12 articles a month for a website with over 3.2 million subscribers! Special thanks to my writing coach Amanda!
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Today, I got paid for my first freelance job, and I'm not even finished with Contena academy! I decided to put my pitch to work right after completing Module 5. Not only did I get paid, but I had a lot of fun doing the work, and I added to my published portfolio.
Contena gave me the confidence and tools to turn my dream into something real for me, today. I couldn't recommend it more!
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In two weeks of using Contena, I've already started getting paid for my writing. Before this, I had no experience with freelance writing, whatsoever. I feel great working from home and know that I'll soon be able to quit my part-time job in retail, and start full-time freelance writing!
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Eep! We're leaving on Friday for Japan! It's coming up so fast!
This year has been quite an eventful one so far – first we spent 3 weeks in the summer in Europe, and now we're off to Japan for 2 weeks. I'm so blessed to be able to travel with loved ones and make memories along the way.
This week, MG and I have been prepping for our trip.
We got our shots on Monday (the travel nurse recommended Typhoid and Flu shots for the both of us). Ouch! Typhoid really hurts. We looked so silly coming out of the clinic with bandaids on each arm. Too bad at this age, you don't get candy…
FYI – if you travel overseas, get the typhoid shot 2 weeks prior to your trip. That's when the vaccination actually kicks in. At least we'll be covered the last half of our trip!
Since you don't get candy anymore after shots, we treated ourselves at Target.
We bought a bunch of munchies for our long plane ride. Those Outshine bars were obviously for a late night snack! My favorite snacks – Cheetos!
We even got haircuts for our trip! I was getting so sick of my long hair. No oomph anymore, and I just continually put it into a ponytail, blegh. So here's to change! Short and sweet!
I have to curl it in the morning now, but I'm liking the new texture! Also for those of your wondering, my skin is slowly healing. I still have acne, but it's not as bad as before. Now I'm in the stage of whitening the dark spots. Any advice?
Of course a load of jeans also go into the washer, as we are finalizing the packing list. Always turn your jeans inside out when they go into the washer. Then hang dry all your jeans so that they do not shrink. Welcome to the jean sale…
And the best part of prepping – MG did not want to bring his large laptop while traveling. Our iPad is first gen, and our secondary tablet does not have an attachable keyboard. So his biggest desire was a Microsoft Surface.
He made his desire known at 4pm on Tuesday. After picking up our dry-cleaning at 6:30pm, we headed over to a Microsoft store and dropped some money. Now MG has a new toy! When he first asked me and I said yes, he was shocked. He didn't expect me to say yes to such a large purchase. But why not? Let's be spontaneous today!
It's so pwetty! It's going to be a great tool for when I need to design graphics. I can't believe you can open Microsoft Office and all the Adobe Creative Suites with the Surface. It's a computer but in tablet form; amazing. I'm a Mac user myself (I'm using one to type this post), but Microsoft is really stepping it up!
Come back for my packing list on my next post. I have some fun items that I recently purchase for our Japan trip!
What do you do to prep for a big trip?


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PRESIDENT CLINTON APPOINTS ROGER GREGORY TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT December 27, 2000
Today, President Clinton appointed Roger Gregory to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. This appointment is historic. The Fourth Circuit, which hears appeals from trial courts in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, has the largest African American population of any circuit in this country, yet it has never had an African American appellate judge. The President's power to make recess appointments is embedded in the Constitution. Presidents have made more than 300 recess appointments to the federal judiciary since 1789, the year of the first judicial recess appointment. Moreover, Presidents have often exercised their recess powers to make historic appointments to bring diversity to the courts. Four of the five first African American appellate judges were recess appointed to their first Article III position. The recess appointment of Roger Gregory to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is in this grand tradition.
Integrating the Fourth Circuit with the Appointment of Roger Gregory
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit serves the people of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, states that have the largest African American population of any circuit in the country. Yet, until the President recess appointed Roger Gregory, the Fourth Circuit had never had an African American appellate judge. The President has nominated four qualified African Americans to the Fourth Circuit: Judge James Beatty, of North Carolina, nominated in December 1995 and re-nominated in January 1997; Judge James Wynn, of North Carolina, nominated in August 1999; Roger Gregory, of Virginia, nominated in June 2000, and Judge Andre Davis, nominated in October 2000. None of these exceptional candidates has even received a Judiciary Committee hearing, let alone a vote on the Senate floor.
Roger Gregory's story is a testament to the power and promise of the American dream. Roger Gregory is from Richmond, Virginia, and is the first in his family to finish high school. He went on to college and law school, returning as a young adjunct professor to a school where his mother had worked as a maid. Today Roger Gregory is a highly respected, seasoned Richmond litigator. Gregory has tried hundreds of cases in the Virginia courts.
The seat for which the President nominated Roger Gregory has been declared a "judicial emergency" by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. It has been vacant for almost a decade, longer than any seat in the nation. Before Gregory was recess appointed, fully one third of the Fourth Circuit -- five of fifteen seats -- was empty. Gregory's appointment not only cures a historical injustice but fills a dire need in the Fourth Circuit.
Gregory was never afforded a Judiciary Committee hearing, notwithstanding the fact that he received the enthusiastic support of both of his home state Senators. Democratic Senator Chuck Robb recommended Gregory to the President and worked tirelessly on behalf of Gregory's nomination. Republican Senator John Warner publicly endorsed Gregory's candidacy, stating that Gregory is "a well-qualified nominee who would serve as an excellent jurist on this circuit which is vital to our state."
Recess Appointments
The President has the authority, pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, to recess appoint federal judges. In fact, President George Washington recess appointed two district judges in 1789, immediately after the first session of the first Congress. Since then, Presidents of all parties -- Republicans, Democrats, Federalists, Jeffersonian Republicans, Whigs -- have made more than 300 recess appointments to the federal judiciary, including 11 Supreme Court appointments.
All three branches have, in one fashion or another, accepted the right of the President to make recess appointments. It has been the long-standing position of the Executive Branch that the President has the power to make such appointments. This position is corroborated by historical statements of Attorneys General and Office of Legal Counsel opinions supporting the President's power to make such appointments.
The Legislative Branch has accepted the President's right to make judicial recess appointments, both by statement and action. In a 1960 Senate Resolution urging the President discourage recess appointments to the Supreme Court, the sponsor of the resolution noted that "[t]he President does have such power and this resolution does not argue otherwise." Likewise, the Senate has proceeded to confirm approximately 85% of past judicial recess appointees, including all but one Supreme Court appointment. Finally, although the Supreme Court has never addressed the issue, the two federal appellate courts that have reviewed the issue have affirmed the power of judges appointed through recess appointment.
Tradition of Recess Appointments
Some of the most well respected jurists have originally received recess appointments, including Pennsylvania district court judge (later Third Circuit judge) Judge A. Leon Higginbotham; D.C. Circuit Judges David Bazelon and Spottswood Robinson; Second Circuit Judges Augustus N. Hand and Thurgood Marshall; Fifth Circuit Judge Griffin Bell; and Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and Earl Warren. Indeed, Justice Earl Warren was sitting as a recess appointee when the Court re-heard argument in Brown v. Board of Education.
Presidents have often exercised their recess powers to make historic appointments to bring diversity to the courts. Four of the five first African American appellate judges were recess-appointed to their first Article III position: Judge William Hastie, recess appointed to the Third Circuit by President Truman in 1949; Judge Thurgood Marshall, recess appointed to the Second Circuit by President Kennedy in 1961; Judge Spottswood Robinson recess appointed to the D.C. District Court by President Kennedy in 1961; and Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, recess appointed to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania by President Johnson in 1964. Likewise, two of the three first women judges received recess appointments: Judge Burnita Shelton Matthews, recess appointed by President Truman to the D.C. District Court in 1949 and Judge Sarah Hughes, recess appointed by President Kennedy to the Northern District of Texas in 1961.
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Don't always blindly insist on statistical significance
Suppose you run a regression, and it turns out that the input you're investigating turns out to appear to have a real-life relationship to the output. But it also turns out that the despite being significant in the real-life sense, the relationship is not statistically significant. What do you do?
David Berri argues (scroll down to the second half of his post) that once you realize the variable is statistically insignificant, you stop dead:
We do not say (and this point should be emphasized) the "coefficient is insignificant" and then proceed to tell additional stories about the link between these two variables.
One of my co-authors puts it this way to her students.
"When I teach econometrics I tell my students that a sentence that begins by stating a coefficient is statistically insignificant ends with a period." She tells her students that she never wants to see "The coefficient was insignificant, but…"
Well, I don't think that's always right. I explained why in a post two weeks ago, called "Low statistical significance doesn't necessarily mean no effect." My argument was that, if you already have some reason to believe there is a correlation between your input and your output, the result of your regression can help confirm your belief, even if it doesn't rise to statistical significance.
Here's an example with real data. I took all 30 major league teams for 2007, and I ran a regression to see if there was a relationship between the team's triples and its runs scored. It turned out that there was no statistically-significant relationship: the p-value was 0.23, far above the 0.05 that's normally regarded as the threshold.
Berri would now say that we should stop. As he writes,
"Even though we have questions, at this point it would be inappropriate to talk about the coefficient we have estimated ... as being anything else than statistically insignificant."
And maybe that would be the case if we didn't know anything about baseball. But, as baseball fans, we know that triples are good things, and we know that a triple does help teams score runs. That's why we cheer our team's players when they hit them. There is strong reason to believe there's a connection between triples and runs.
So I don't think it's inappropriate at all to look at our coefficient. It turns out that the coefficient is 1.88. On average, every additional triple a team hit was associated with an increase of 1.88 runs scored.
Of course, there's a large variance associated with that 1.88 estimate -- as you'd expect, since it wasn't statistically significant from zero. The standard deviation of the estimate was 1.53. That means a 95% confidence interval is approximately (-1.18, 4.94). Not only is the 1.88 not significantly different from zero, it's also not significantly different from -1, or from almost +5!
But why can't we say that? Why shouldn't we write that we found a coefficient of 1.88 with a standard deviation of 1.53? Why can't we discuss these numbers and the size of the real effect, if any?
Berri and his co-author would argue that it's because we have no good evidence that the effect is different from zero. But what makes zero special? We also have no good evidence that the effect is different from 1.88, or 4.1, or -0.6. Why is it necessary to proceed as if the "real" value of the coefficient is zero, when zero is just one special case?
As I argued before, zero is considered special because, most of the time, there's no reason to believe there's any connection between the input and the output. Do you think rubbing chocolate on your leg can cure cancer? Do you think red cars go faster than black cars just by virtue of their color? Do you think standing on your head makes you smarter?
In all three of these examples, I'd recommend following Berri's advice, because there's overwhelming logic that says the relationship "should" be zero. There's no scientific reason that red makes cars go faster. If you took a thousand similarly absurd hypotheses, you'd expect at least 999 of them to be zero. So if you get something positive but not statistically significant, the odds are overwhelming that the non-zero point estimate got that way just because of random luck.
But, for triples vs. runs, that's not the case. Our prior expectation should be that the result will turn out positive. How positive? Well, suppose we had never studied the issue, or read Bill James or Pete Palmer. Then, we might naively figure, the average triple scores a runner and a half on base, and there's a 70% chance of scoring the batter eventually. That's 2.2 runs. Maybe half the runners on base would score eventually even without the triple, so subtract off .75, to give us that the triple is worth 1.45 runs. (I know these numbers are wrong, but they're reasonable for what I might have guessed pre-Bill James.)
If our best estimate going in was that a triple should be worth 1.45 runs, and the regression gave us something close to that (and not statistically significantly different), then why should we be using zero as a basis for our decision for whether to consider this valid evidence?
Rather than end the discussion with a period, as Berri's colleague would have us do, I would suggest we do this:
-- give the regression's estimate of 1.88, along with the standard error of 1.53 and the confidence interval (-1.18, 4.94).
-- state that the estimate of 1.88 is significant in the baseball sense.
-- admit that it's not significantly different from zero.
-- BUT: argue that there's reason to think that the 1.88 is in the neighborhood of what theory predicts.
If I were writing a paper, that's exactly what I'd say. And I'd also admit that the confidence interval is huge, and we really should repeat this analysis with more years' worth of data, to reduce the standard error. But I'd argue that, even without statistical significance, the results actually SUPPORT the hypothesis that triples are associated with runs scored.
You've got to use common sense. If you got these results for a relationship between rubbing chocolate on your leg and cancer, it would be perfectly appropriate to assume that the relationship is zero. But if you get these results for a relationship between height and weight, zero is not a good option.
And, in any case: if you get results that are significant in the real world, but not statistically significant, it's a sign that your dataset is too small. Just get some more data, and run your regression again.
Here's another example of how you have to contort your logic if you want to blindly assume that statistical insignificance equals no effect.
I'm going to run the same regression, on the 2007 MLB teams, but I'm going to use doubles instead of triples. This time, the results are indeed statistically significant:
-- p=.0012 (signficant at 99.88%)
-- each double is associated with an additional 1.50 runs scored
-- the standard error is 0.417, so a 95% confidence interval is (0.67, 2.33)
Everyone would agree that there is a connection between hitting doubles and scoring runs.
But now, Berri and his colleague are in a strange situation. They have to argue that:
-- there is a connection between doubles and runs, but
-- there is NO connection between triples and runs!
If that's your position, and you have traditional beliefs about how doubles lead to more runs (by scoring baserunners and putting the batter on second base), those two statements are mutually contradictory. It's obvious to any baseball fan that, on the margin, a triple will lead to at least as many runs scoring as a double. It's just not possible that a double is worth 1.5 runs, but the act of stretching it into a triple makes it worth 0.0 runs instead. But if you follow Berri's rule, that's what you have to do! Your paper can't even argue against it, because "the coefficient was insignificant, but ..." is not allowed!
Now, in fairness, it's not logically impossible for doubles to be worth 1.5 runs in a regression but triples 0.0 runs. Maybe doubles are worth only 0.1 runs in current run value, but they come in at 1.5 because they're associated with power-hitting teams. Triples, on the other hand, might be associated with fast singles-hitting teams who are always below average.
In the absence of other evidence, that would be a valid possibility. But, unlike the chocolate-cures-cancer case, I don't think it's a very likely possibility. If you do think it's likely, then you still have to make the argument using other evidence. You can't just fall back on the "not significantly different from zero."
Using zero as your baseline for significance is not a law in the field of statistical analysis. It's a consequence of how things work in your actual field of study, an implementation of Carl Sagan's rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." For silly cancer cures, for red cars going faster than black cars, saying there's a non-zero effect is an extraordinary claim. And so you need statistical significance. (Indeed, silly cancer cures are so unlikely that you could argue that 95% significance is not enough, because that would allow too many false cures (2.5%) to get through.)
But for triples being worth about the same as doubles ... well, that's not extraordinary. Actually, it's the reverse that's extraordinary. Triples being worth zero while doubles are worth 1.5 runs? Are you kidding? I'd argue that if you want to say triples are worth less than doubles, the burden is reversed. It's not enough to show that the confidence interval includes zero. You have to show that the confidence interval does NOT include anything higher than the value of the double.
According to David Berri, the rule of thumb in econometrics is, "if you don't have signficance, ignore any effect you found." But that rule of thumb has certain hidden assumptions. One of those assumptions is that on your prior beliefs, the effect is likely to be zero. That's true for a lot of things in econometrics -- but not for doubles creating runs.
This doubles/triples comparison is one I just made up. But there's a real life example, one I talked about a couple of years ago.
In that one, Cade Massey and Richard Thaler did a study (.pdf) of the NFL draft. As you would expect, they found that the earlier the draft pick, the more likely the player was to make an NFL roster. Earlier choices were also more likely to play more games, and more likely to make the Pro-Bowl. Draft choice was statistically significant for all three factors.
Then, the authors attempted to predict salary. Again as you'd expect, the more games you played, and the more you were selected to the Pro Bowl, the higher your salary. And, again, all these were statistically significant.
Finally, the authors held all these constant, and looked at whether draft position influenced salary over and above these factors. It did, but this factor did not reach statistical significance. Higher picks earned more money, but by somewhere between 1 and 2 SDs.
From the lack of significance, the authors wrote:
" ... we find that draft order is not a significant explanatory variable after controlling for [certain aspects of] prior performance."
I disagree. Because for that to be true, you have to argue that
-- higher draft choices are more likely to make the team
-- higher draft choices are more likely to play more games
-- higher draft choices are more likely to make the Pro-Bowl
but that
-- higher draft choices are NOT more likely to be better players in other ways than that.
That makes no sense. You have two offensive linemen on two different teams -- good enough to play every game for five years, but not good enough for the Pro Bowl. One was drafted in the first round; one was drafted in the third round. What Massey and Thaler are saying is that, despite the fact that the first round guy makes, on average, more money than the third round guy, that's likely to be random coincidence. That flies in the face of the evidence. Not statistically significant evidence, but good evidence nonetheless -- a coefficient that goes in the right direction, is signficant in the football sense, and is actually not that far below the 2 SD cutoff.
That isn't logical. You've shown, with statistical significance, that higher picks perform better than lower picks in terms of playing time and stardom. The obvious explanation, which you accept, is that the higher picks are just better players. So why would you conclude that higher picks are exactly the same quality as lower picks in the aspects of the game that you chose not to measure, when the data don't actually show that?
In this case, it's not only acceptable, but required, to say "the coefficient was insignificant, but ..."
Labels: Berri, draft, statistics


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Select this license type when you are developing an app for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone, and you will be embedding the font file in your mobile application's code.
by studiocharlieAbout Catacumbes Font Family
Catacumbes is a collection of skulls and bones designed in different styles. It is useful for different applications such as signs or graphic posters.
Publisher: studiocharlie
Foundry: studiocharlie
Design Owner: studiocharlie
MyFonts debut: May 4, 2006
About studiocharlie
Studiocharlie works in product design, graphics, type design and video. We design typographic fonts. They are sometimes developed from signs and letters linked to our graphic and comunication projects (for ex. FontFoliae, Stereotype, Gattofont), whilst others are the object of specific research. In general we develop fonts for traditional typographic use like word processing (for ex. Superbastone or Csuni, which received a special commendation for the 20th edition of the Compasso d'Oro ADI Prize), or more "playful" fonts, for titles, logos and contemporary graphics (for ex. Cavillus, Carpenteria), and dingbat fonts (Gattofont, Catacumbes, Charlie Dog, FontFoliae). Three people founded Studiocharlie in 2002, and work on the development of all the team's projects: Gabriele Rigamonti, Carla Scorda, Vittorio Turla.
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