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The introduction of the synthesizer gave PoMo bands the means to replay the history of rock 'n' roll with the authenticity knob turned down low. In this month's music column, Pil and Galia appreciate the flatlands of the synth cover
An invisible revolution took the United States by storm in the late 1960s - the Flexible Manufacturing System. Perhaps it even had greater implications for the world today than the better known social transformations of the period: the hippies, psychedelic drugs, protests against Vietnam or the student revolt. And yet it has received scant critical attention over the last 40 years since, until recently, the term had little meaning outside engineering conferences on industrial production methods and efficiency. Before 1965, manufacturers tended to concentrate on streamlining industrial procedures to reduce costs and increase productivity. The Fordist model of the assembly line still dominated the market, and companies were busy constructing support systems to enable repetitive, and regularised manufacturing. This approach was immortalised in Henry Ford's famous words from 1909: 'Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black'. The ideal customer and the perfect car were both completely predictable and manageable within a rigid plan. It was the responsibility of manufactures to create efficient and controllable products and only then, via advertising, consumer desire for them.
Image: AlliedSignal's Flexible Manufacturing System
But the Flexible Manufacturing System, developed by Theodore William in Edinburgh in 1965, changed all that. In essence, FMS conceives of industrial manufacturing as a process that can be changed or adapted rapidly to manufacture different products or components at different volumes of production. This required a large number of machines which could be coordinated by a central computer and which would be flexible enough to handle different tasks and absorb sudden changes to volume, speed or design. The influence of this now obvious idea was dramatic. First of all, the products themselves became fluid and Ford's inevitably black Model T was soon replaced by the seriality of, say, the eight different colours of the iPod nano. The FMS also gave birth to the limited edition product, from the Christmas flavored Starbucks Gingerbread Lattes of December to the heart-shaped Krispy Kreme donut of Valentine's Day. But, more importantly, FMS was a Copernican revolution that inverted the causality of manufacturing: instead of a product that pre-exists the consumer, manufacturers began to look for the slightest hint of a consumer trend that could be quickly translated into products with a guaranteed market. Since machines were more adaptable and it was possible to easily and rapidly re-organise assembly lines, consumer demands could determine the product.
The influence of these new industrial ideas on politics from the '70s onwards is evident and well documented. These could be seen reflected in the move away from ideology to a politics based on constant opinion polls and control groups that came to prominence during the Clinton years. But the links between the changing industrial landscape and art and music have not been given due attention and can offer an interesting angle from which to complicate our thinking on postmodernism. Visual art, perhaps, presents a clearer case. In the early 1960s, pop art was premised on an evaluation or even admiration of mass commodities. Pop art exercised several procedures around these commodities: their relocation, following Duchamp, from the supermarket or mass media to the gallery (Warhol, Lichtenstein) and their subsequent re-contextualisation; their material transformation (Oldenburg); or a blurring of borders between background and foreground, the human subject and the world of commodities (Wesselman). All of these mechanisms addressed the commodity as a unique, fixed object and dealt with it only on the level of consumerism, only after it was released to the market as a signifier of desire.
When Warhol was working with pseudo-industrial repetition, he simply duplicated the exact same object, be it a Brillo box, a Campbell soup tin or a print of Marilyn. But the generation of American artists who inherited pop art revised this relationship with the commodity in the late '60s and throughout the '70s. Minimalism is still talked about through Michael Fried's trite notions of 'relationality' and 'literalism', but it is better viewed as an artistic response to FMS. These artists created flexible and modular systems that enabled them to think of the commodity at a higher level of abstraction. Unlike the Brillo box, Sol LeWitt's modular cubical structures could be easily re-arranged to create endless variations. Similarly, Dan Flavin's use of cheap commodities (neon strips) is not so much about their singular identity as objects of desire but their inherent malleability, the fact that the commodity becomes a flexible building block that could be cut to different sizes and thicknesses, and arranged in a variety of ways. Donald Judd's concrete structures are perhaps the most obvious illustration of this, since the artist used industrial molding techniques to remove the object from its place in a stable relationship with consumers and other objects on the market and re-think it as an abstract flexible system. These artistic practices were not so much attempts to move away from commodity-fetish, from the image and the aesthetic power of the commodity, as readjustments of aesthetic language to account for newer industrial models and the flexibility they demanded.
Image: Donald Judd, Chair, Shelf & Bench, designed c.1985, enamelled steel
Popular music can also be looked at through the same prism, but perhaps because a lot of the critical discourse surrounding music is still loyal to ideas of authenticity, individualism, talent and a unique artistic voice, music is rarely discussed in the context of material and industrial production. Here, through the framework of the cover version, a shift can also be observed in the attitude of artists towards other commodities or, more specifically, given pop songs. The repertoire of the bands of the early '60s, and particularly the ones associated with the first wave of the British invasion, was almost exclusively drawn from the American tunes of the '50s. The songs these bands covered were mostly associated with the early rock'n' roll, electric sound of Chicago and the Memphis blues they listened to as teenagers. These covers paid homage to the double take on freedom latent in those songs: at its core, it was the sound of a southern black culture landing on the industrial North with great force. But for the British bands, these were also the sounds of Americana, products of an affluent, youthful, fast culture, the sonic equivalent of the Cadillac or Coca Cola. Cleansed of (racial) context and aural grit, the Rolling Stones' covers of Chuck Berry functioned in much the same way as Warhol's empty Brillo boxes, simulacral ciphers of a hyperreal consumer culture.
In the '70s, however, these appropriations gave way to a lesser known breed of electronic remakes. Stripped down to a bare minimum of broken chords, the minimal synth cover versions that emerged with the rise of the synthesizer reduced the structures of the consumer landscape in the same way as the artists of minimalism. Much of the supposed shock of the new in the punk sound was in fact indebted to a revisiting of, by now, fairly classic rock 'n' roll, rubbed raw into the most primitive elements you could get away with, as evidenced by the Sex Pistols' cover of Eddie Cochran's 'C'mon Everybody', for example. But it was only with the advent of the synthesizer that bands could really discard the guitar-bass-drums aesthetic that defined rock 'n' roll and begin to challenge its structure more rigorously. Perhaps the best known precursors of these experiments are Suicide's re-imaginings of the '50s as a hollowed out bank of sounds and gestures. Just as Judd, LeWitt and Flavin replaced the supermarket with its empty shell - grey, cold, neon-lit expanses of industrial wasteland - Alan Vega and Martin Rev used the new capacities of the Korg Mini Pops to distill the ghost of Elvis into a pulsating signal, like a fluorescent tube at the end of its life, flashing on and off in a vacant lot. The early '60s cover version was devoted to content: who you covered was crucial. But for Suicide, Elvis and Chuck Berry were all the same. The noise of motorcycle gangs and the slow dances of a high school prom were boiled down to a psychotic sugary abstraction.
What expressiveness remained in Suicide's neo-rock 'n' roll was excised by the minimal synth bands that followed. When Daniel Miller recorded his Music for Parties in 1980 under the pseudonym Silicon Teens, he wanted to find out what Chuck Berry would sound like if he'd played a synthesizer instead of a guitar. But he was also interested in the fact that new electronic instruments allowed you to prioritise the idea over the execution: you didn't have to be a songwriter or musician to make music with them. In this he was demonstrating Phil Oakey of the Human League's well known comment, that synth music was even better than punk because you didn't even need to learn three chords to play it, just one finger. But he was also following the logic of much concurrent conceptual and minimal art that sought to displace the artist's gesture using technical fabrication processes borrowed from post-industrial manufacture. The resultant album, featuring covers of 'Memphis, Tennessee' and 'Judy in Disguise' has been largely consigned to the novelty bin of history, but its interpretation of the canon of rock 'n' roll for the wired generation is exemplary. The combination of dead pan delivery with a beat faster than even Chuck Berry's nimble fingers somehow manages to both delete the decades of musical cliché that had clogged the genre since the '50s and overwrite it with the immediacy of proto-rock folk music like creole zydeco.
Of course a better known version of the same idea is Flying Lizards' Top Ten. Following the success of 1979's 'Money', and in light of the relatively quiet reception of a second album more focused on David Cunningham's experimental music, Top Ten was comprised mainly of reworkings of rock 'n' roll classics like 'Tutti Frutti' and 'Dizzy Miss Lizzie'. Here the icy vocals of Sally Peterson, who followed in Deborah Evans-Stickland footsteps after 'Money''s one hit wonder, were as important as the rudimentary instrumentation. Somehow after decades of sweaty rock 'n' roll put through the meat grinder of the culture industry and packaged in wave after wave of retro revival, the clinical, one-tone-fits-all approach seemed better suited to address the age. If rebellion had been fully co-opted, perhaps a kind of pre-empting of the evacuation of content and emotion that was part and parcel of the marketing of youth culture was strategically more useful. Flying Lizards video clips show guitars, drums and keyboards in place, but by no means in conventional use, more frequently being thumped than played, as a pre-recorded soundtrack dictates the pace. Over in France, Doctor Mix and the Remix's Wall of Noise, represented another whole album's worth of standards massacred by post-punks Métal Urbain's Eric Debris. With the aid of a drum machine, cheap reverb and guitar in overdrive, his rendition of 'Brand New Cadillac', but also more recent, alternative classics, like the Stooges' 'No Fun', is notable for its slack attitude, kept in check only by the regimented timing of the machine.
Image: Flying Lizards' David Cunningham and Sally Peterson. Photo by Gerrard Martin
This approach was taken to an extreme across the Atlantic by the Better Beatles, whose payback for the British Invasion on the album Mercy Beat was the cruelest of all. As news of John Lennon's murder took over the airwaves, the Omaha based group considered the fab four to be an oppressive influence. But instead of going back to the origins of the American rhythm and blues sound that Lennon and McCartney were trying to emulate, they came up with a better strategy. Applying a devastating Midwestern drawl to a playlist of sacred cows, and working in ignorance of the Flying Lizards experiments, they didn't even attempt to capture the signature melodies of tunes like 'Penny Lane', 'Hello Goodbye' or 'Paperback Writer'. Instead, they combined random freeform basslines, basic drumming with simple synth refrains, rehearsed them to death to kill off any freshness or spontaneity, and produced music that sounded nothing like the Beatles beyond the unceremoniously recited lyrics. Often compared with the Residents' Third Reich and Roll album, the Better Beatles were far less ambitious in their re-tooling of the music establishment. Initially playing around with Beatles songs because they had no original material to work with, they even quite liked the Beatles and just thought the idea was funny. But with the tenacity of a one liner taken too far, they succeeded in both mutilating the transitional moment of popular music's acceptance as a serious medium and rebuilding the ruins into something that could still be meaningful long after the momentum of the '60s was truly over. With a few looping riffs, the cover version was thus transformed from a medium of reverential deference to a subversive critical tool, externalising the repressed psychosis of the silly pop refrains that the white rock 'n' roll groups of the '60s bleached of innuendo.
'To make a rock 'n' roll record, technology is the least important thing', said Keith Richards, meaning that music is an essence removed from its particular historical and material context. This is what allowed the Stones to translate those loud sexual and racial insinuations of early rock 'n' roll into slick English, boyish hip sounds. Each southern delta blues number they covered has an irreducible quality beyond its means of production. The minimal synth of the '70s and '80s, on the other hand, was busy with the project of deconstructing, rather than transcending the American century. What bands like the Flying Lizards or the Better Beatles aimed to achieve was to look at the recent past of pop music as a structure, and to collapse differences between styles, genres or trends, what Adorno called the manufactured difference between cultural product A versus cultural product B. This was a deliberate strategy of de-mythologisation, moving away from a Debordian conception of spectacular time. Spectacular time, wrote Debord, is the presentation of pseudo-events as significant differences: the past accumulated and consumed like any other commodity:
The production process's constant innovations are not echoed in consumption, which presents nothing but an expanded repetition of the past. Because dead labor continues to dominate living labor, in spectacular time the past continues to dominate the present.
The interpretation of the past in minimal synth - empty of consumerist desire through technological means that rendered it cold and repetitive - seems to go against Debord's analysis of popular culture's attachment to the past. In fact, Debord's critique itself, because of the changes in manufacturing discussed here and their influence on culture, has become a sort of style in its own right. To be cool in post-Fordist times means not to direct your consumerist desire towards a particular product or a particular moment in history, but to be able to view time, place and culture as flexible systems which can be customised at will.
Superficially, there is something incredibly cynical about the cool, sarcastic appropriations of minimal synth, denying rock 'n' roll what little authenticity remained in an ossifying form. At the same time that Tin Pan Valley released their 'double B-side' of synthed-up covers of 'Hanky Panky' and 'Yakety Yak', and that Sun Yama recorded their brilliant cover of Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', Kraftwerk were developing new ideas for a techno-pop that would leave guitar music behind. But rather than present a new narrative of progress through electronic music, these forgotten bands applied retro-garde methodologies to the existing ones, positing alternative timelines that collapsed the history of popular music as it had been with possible histories of futures past, where Chuck Berry did get to play a Korg instead of a Gibson. When we think of the role of the cover version in contemporary pop idol type reality television competitions, where the aim of each contestant is to decant as much subjectivity as possible into a given text, all the while obscuring the mechanisms which produce this subjectivity in front of our faces, perhaps this non-committal inhabiting of dead forms gains political relevance for today.
Pil and Galia Kollectiv <info AT Kollectiv.co.uk> are London-based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. They are also lecturers in Fine Art at the University of Kent. www.kollectiv.co.uk
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- What is VMware Cloud Foundry? (videos from VMworld 2012)I
- VMware Cloud Foundry Core
- Updates to Micro Cloud Foundry
Topic 1 - You're no stranger to creating some controversy, so let's start with an easy one. Are you the most popular or most hated person at VMware?
Topic 2 - A few weeks ago I asked you if there was a list of Cloud Foundry providers, and this week Cloud Foundry Core was announced. What can you tell us about Core?
Topic 3 - Let's talk about developers and users. Cloud Foundry just finished a 13 city "Open Tour" which included a bunch of presentations (education), meetups, hackathons, contests. What are the interesting things the team is learning as they take Cloud Foundry out to communities?
Topic 4 - Cloud Foundry continues to add new languages/frameworks, databases, services to the platform. Some of that comes from VMware and some comes from the community. In your role, how do you influence what is going into the platform or getting prioritized?
Topic 5 - PaaS (as a category) seems to ebb and flow. Recently we've seen Azure focus more on IaaS; Oracle invests in EngineYard; Continuuity positions itself as "PaaS for Big Data". What's your take on the PaaS market overall?
Topic 6 - As you talk to developers, what concerns do they have about PaaS? Do they understand the concept yet, are they OK with not having as much visibility, or do we still need alot of evolution in PaaS platforms before developers feel comfortable using them from 3rd-parties?

subset: commoncrawl


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Leaving Your Child Home Alone
Whether it's a snow day home from school, an unexpected business meeting, or a childcare arrangement that fell through, there probably will be times when you'll need to leave your child home alone.
It's natural for parents to worry when first leaving kids without supervision. But you can feel prepared and confident with some planning and a couple of trial runs. And handled well, staying home alone can be a positive experience for kids too, giving them a sense of self-confidence and independence.
Things to Consider
It's obvious that a 5-year-old can't go it alone, but that most 16-year-olds can. But what about those school-aged kids in the middle? It can be hard to know when kids are ready to handle being home alone. It comes down to your judgment about what your child is ready for. And some states have a minimum age at which kids can be left alone at home.
You'll want to know how your child feels about the idea, of course. But kids often insist that they'll be fine long before parents feel comfortable with it. And then there are older kids who seem afraid even when you're confident that they'd be just fine. So how do you know?
In general, it's not a good idea to leave kids younger than 10 years old home alone. Every child is different, but at that age, most kids don't have the maturity and skills to respond to an emergency if they're alone.
Think about the area where you live. Are there neighbors nearby you know and trust to help your child in case of an emergency? Or are they mostly strangers? Do you live on a busy street with lots of traffic? Or is it a quiet area? Is there a lot of crime in or near your neighborhood?
It's also important to consider how your child handles various situations. Here are a few questions to think about:
- Does your child show signs of responsibility with things like homework, household chores, and following directions?
- How does your child handle unexpected situations? Does your child stay calm when things don't go as planned?
- Does your child understand and follow rules?
- Can your child understand and follow safety measures?
- Does your child use good judgment?
- Does your child know basic first aid?
- Does your child follow your instructions about staying away from strangers?
Make a "Practice Run"
Even if you're confident about your child's maturity, it's wise to make some practice runs, or home-alone trials, before the big day. Let your child stay home alone for 30 minutes to an hour while you remain nearby and easily reachable.
When you return, talk about how it went and things that you might want to change or skills that your child might need to learn for the next time.
Handling the Unexpected
You can feel more confident about your absence if your child learns some basic skills that might come in handy during an emergency. Organizations such as the American Red Cross offer courses in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in local places like schools, hospitals, and community centers.
Before being left home alone home alone, your child should know:
- when and how to call 911 and what address information to give the dispatcher
- how to work the home security system, if you have one, and what to do if the alarm is accidentally set off
- how to lock and unlock doors
- how to work the phone/cellphone (in some areas, you have to dial 1 or the area code to dial out)
- how to turn lights off and on
- how to operate the microwave
- what to do if:
- there's a small fire in the kitchen
- the smoke alarm goes off
- there's a tornado or other severe weather
- a stranger comes to the door
- someone calls for a parent who isn't home
- there's a power outage
Regularly discuss some emergency scenarios — ask what your child would do if, for example, he or she smelled smoke, a stranger knocked at the door, or someone called for you while you're gone.
Before You Leave
When you decide that your child is ready to stay home alone, these practical steps can make it easier for you both:
Schedule time to get in touch. Set up a schedule for calling. You might have your child call right away after school, or set up a time when you'll call home to check in. Make sure your child understands when you're available and when you might not be able to answer a call. Create a list of friends your child can call or things they can do if they get lonely.
Set ground rules. Set special rules for when you're away and make sure that your child knows and understands them. Consider rules about:
- having a friend or friends over while you're not there
- rooms of the house that are off limits, especially with friends
- TV time and types of shows
- screen time and computer rules
- kitchen and cooking (you might want to make the oven and utensils like sharp knives off limits)
- not opening the door for strangers
- answering the phone
- getting along with siblings
- not telling anyone they're alone
Stock up. Make sure your house has everyday goods and emergency supplies. Stock the kitchen with healthy foods for snacking. Leave a precise dose of any medicine that your child needs to take, but don't leave medicine bottles out — it could lead to an accidental overdose or ingestion, especially by younger siblings.
Leave flashlights handy in case of a power outage. Post important phone numbers — yours and those of friends, family members, the doctor, police, and fire department — that your child might need in an emergency.
Childproof your home. No matter how well your child follows rules, secure anything that could be a health or safety risk. Lock them up and put them in a place where kids can't get to them, such as:
- alcohol
- prescription medicines
- over-the-counter medicines that could cause problems if taken in excess, like sleeping pills, cough medicine, etc.
- guns (if you keep one, make sure it is locked up and leave it unloaded and stored away from ammunition)
- tobacco
- car keys
- lighters and matches
Don't forget that pets can be great company for kids who are home alone. Many kids feel safer with a pet around — even a small one, like a hamster, can make them feel like they have a companion.
So cover your bases and relax. With the right preparation and some practice, you and your child will get comfortable with home-alone days in no time!
- Teaching Kids to Be Smart About Strangers
- Gun Safety
- What You Need to Know in an Emergency
- Online Safety
- Teaching Your Child How to Use 911
- Choosing and Instructing a Babysitter
- Kids and Media Use: How to Build Healthy Habits
- Childproofing and Preventing Household Accidents
- Preventing Kids From Getting Trapped in Parked Cars
Note: All information is for educational purposes only. For specific medical advice, diagnoses, and treatment, consult your doctor.
© 1995- The Nemours Foundation. KidsHealth® is a registered trademark of The Nemours Foundation. All rights reserved.
Images sourced by The Nemours Foundation and Getty Images.


text: Home Industry Saudi Arabia Jails 13 For Aiding Overseas Fighters They were all given travel bans to come into force after their sentences finish. by Reuters April 14, 2014 A Saudi Arabian court on Sunday jailed 13 men to sentences ranging from one to 10 years for aiding and financing militants fighting abroad, conspiring inside Saudi Arabia and harbouring wanted suspects, state news agency SPA reported on Monday. Other charges for which the 13 were convicted included money laundering, bribery, possession of illegal weapons. They were all given travel bans to come into force after their sentences finish. Another seven men were acquitted, SPA reported. Saudi courts have sentenced hundreds of convicted militants to prison terms in recent months as they work to overcome a long backlog of cases related to a militant campaign last decade that killed hundreds. The security forces detained thousands of people after the bombings and shootings started in 2003 who were accused of security offences, including joining militant groups and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saudi and international human rights groups have also accused the government of using its crackdown on militants to detain peaceful dissidents in the Islamic Kingdom, something the authorities deny. In February King Abdullah issued a royal decree imposing prison terms of three to 20 years on any Saudi who travels overseas to fight, and of five to 30 years on any who gives moral or material support to groups the government considers extremist. The move reflected the government's fears that the civil war in Syria, where many rebels fighting against the government are militants, coupled with Egypt's crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, will inspire radicalism inside the Kingdom. The world's top oil exporter is a leading supporter of both the Syrian rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, and of Egypt's military rulers. 0 Comments


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Privacy policy
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We do update this Policy from time to time so please do review this Policy regularly.
For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 our data controller is Marsh House Specialist Dentists.
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In operating our website we may collect and process the following data about you:
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On occasion, we may collect information about your internet browser to support technical enquiries with our website. Such information is for statistical use and does not identify any personal details.
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To Boldly Glow: Experience Design without Borders
When creating user experiences, you need to understand the problem you're designing a solution for. You'd better engage the users, the customers and stakeholders. You'd better evolve those insights into concepts, journeys, information architectures and design frameworks. You'd better work with the best build and delivery partners.
Most experience design agencies are set up to be able to do exactly this. Most experience design agencies do it pretty well. Mostly
Commoditisation of service offerings
However, as the experience design industry approaches a critical mass, such that it is able to commoditise its service offerings, those services cluster into a set of repeatable, predictable and marketable objects, like practice moths around a service flame. Some agencies might focus on the research cluster. Some might prefer to lead with the design and build cluster. Some might really be able to deliver them all as an integrated experience design offering.
But we're evolving into digital utilities.
While those commoditised experience design services help clients and agencies agree on deliverables, costs and timelines, the resulting engagement might be less collaboration, more subscription. If a client really does have an articulated, addressable problem, and the service offerings have evolved to the point that we can deliver great user experiences without too much operational overhead, thank you, then everybody is happy. But what about the client that can't articulate their problem? What if they don't even have a problem? What if they just have a feeling that things could be somehow 'better'?
Designing without borders
That's where we need to take our experience design practice back to designing without service borders. We still gather insights. We still interpret and evolve. We still detail and deliver. But our engagement is based on our excellence in crafting experiences that delight customers and users. We don't lead with services, we lead with design. Our designers are visionary. They understand the complexities. They're vibrant, exciting and unique. They don't shuffle into that workshop with brochureware, they walk in to that workshop self-aware. They boldly glow, and so they should.


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What do you create? I create smiles. Ha Ha. Seriously, I create jewelry, accessories, babywear... I try to go along with any ideas that pop into my head.
When did you start creating? I have always been into crafting. I started toying with jewelry almost ten years ago.
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TechRadar Verdict
A sonically decent, fairly future-proof kitchen radio - but no match for Pure Digital & Co
Why you can trust TechRadar
Pure Digital has the credit for fuelling the digital radio revolution, but now everyone's jumping on the bandwagon - Panasonic, Roberts and Philips have all released kitchen sink DAB radios in the last year, and now Sony has joined the throng.
It's a designer's paradise, with new models offering ever more wacky - and often retroesque - styling. Unfortunately Sony's XDRS1, though it looks great in the brochures, seen in the flesh is plastic and resembles the shape of a breadbin (albeit quite a nice one).
Lifting our review unit from the blue gym bag it came in, our first impression was - shall we say - reserved at best. It just screams 'mass production' - something that Pure Digital and Roberts have managed to overcome - and the fabric grill is just begging to have chip fat spat all over it.
The XDR-S1's performance is more reassuring. The 2.3W-per-channel stereo speaker system gives a rich, full sound - though only four sound modes give a limited degree of personalisation. There's a fair bit of bass on tap for all those 1Xtra listeners out there. As portable radios go, DAB performance is crash hot.
FM performance is more crash and burn, though. BBC local radio stations just outside Digital Home's local area, which can normally be received on FM radios, were much more crackly and intermittent than usual. The noise reduction function helped only marginally. The range of individual BBC local radio stations is different on the DAB spectrum than FM, so it's a shame the S1's FM reception isn't better.
Features are a-plenty: the clock is automatically set by RDS (radio data system); the backlit LCD shows two lines of text and you can save web addresses, emails and phone numbers that flash up on screen; and there are ten presets for each of the four bands. But the lack of a rotating dial means that manual tuning and station scrolling are slower process than on, say, Pure Digital's excellently designed DAB radios. Usefully though, a remote control is included.
This radio is more future proof than most. At the moment all UK DAB broadcasts operate on the imaginatively named 'Band III' spectrum, but in the future the inexplicably named 'Band L' may also open to make way for broadcasting yet more radio stations. Few digital radios receive Band L, but the XDR-S1 does. Some DAB broadcasters on the continent use Band L now, so the S1 might pick up digital radio stations at your summerhouse.
AM reception is also ignored on many kitchen sink digital radios, which isn't helpful if you have a devotion to French Breton folk music. The Sony has an AM tuner as well as the mandatory FM. However, unlike the natty (or ugly, depending on your taste) Bug radio from Pure Digital, the XDR-S1 does not have a recording facility.
Instead you must hook up an external recording device to save your programmes. Not enough digital radios are offering this facility. Sale rates of DAB tuners might be 60 per cent of the whole UK radio market, but for DAB to really take off features like record, live pause and rewind must come as standard. We were hoping Sony's entry into the portable DAB radio market would be a more assertive one.
Tech.co.uk was the former name of TechRadar.com. Its staff were at the forefront of the digital publishing revolution, and spearheaded the move to bring consumer technology journalism to its natural home – online. Many of the current TechRadar staff started life a Tech.co.uk staff writer, covering everything from the emerging smartphone market to the evolving market of personal computers. Think of it as the building blocks of the TechRadar you love today.


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Yesterday, after 33 days with a dead diesel engine (click here for more about what happened), it finally ROARED back to life. Today, at long last, we head Northwest.
What was the problem?
Wayne summarized it on Cruiser's Forum (click here for that – look on page 6, response #77). Watch this blog for a future post — my non-technical summary of the mild temporary insanity that ensued in the interim.
For now, this is short and sweet as it's time to move on!
PS Thanks for all those good vibes sent by friends and family. Maybe it just took a little longer for our engine to hear it across the miles. And thank you, Joseph, for your faith & persistence.


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MP3: Changing the Picture by Zig Ziglar – How To Stay Motivated – Vol. II: 6 MP3s
MP3: Changing the Picture by Zig Ziglar – How To Stay Motivated – Vol. II: 6 MP3s
Changing the Picture
Volume 2 of the legendary How To Stay Motivated series - the most complete audio series on personal growth and success ever recorded!
This six-hour program focuses on what you need to do in order to rise above your circumstances rather than being controlled by them.
It starts with the way you see yourself. Far too many people have a negative view of themselves, and because of this the negative circumstances of life that we all deal with turn into a tidal wave of despair and defeat. We begin to believe that no matter what we do, we are not capable of handling the situation. This is completely untrue! We have to Change the Picture of the way we see ourselves! If we see ourselves as unworthy and not capable, this is the way we will act and the negative results will follow. Once we start to see ourselves as winners, capable of handling whatever life throws at us, and we follow the simple steps that Zig lays out for us, then we rise above our circumstances.
"One of the realities of life is that when you see a successful person what you are really seeing is a person standing on a big pile of circumstances rather than being buried by them." Tom Ziglar
How we see ourselves and the steps we take to build our self-image is the first step in Changing the Picture so that we can have a fulfilling life.
Next, we have to Change the Picture in our relationships with others.
In the 75-year Harvard Grant Study, they followed Harvard students and young men from Boston's poorest housing projects starting in 1938 until today. Over 700 were included in the study and less than 10% of those are still alive. Every year the Harvard researchers would interview the participants about all areas of their lives – physical, mental, emotional, etc. At the 75-year mark, they asked the participants who were still alive if they were happy and fulfilled. They then went back 25 years into the massive data they had accumulated to determine what those who said they were happy and satisfied today were doing 25 years ago to determine what it was they did that led to happy and fulfilled lives.
The 75 Year Harvard Grant Study revealed that the most fulfilled, happy, and satisfied participants focused on one thing – relationships!
That's right, these 90-year-old-plus participants who said they were happy and satisfied with their lives focused on building winning relationships as their primary objective. This is what Changing the Picture is all about – creating the right relationship with yourself and with others! Isn't it great that this study proved what Zig Ziglar invested over six decades of his life teaching!
There are 6 powerful lessons in Changing the Picture
- CD download session 1: Winners respond, not react
- CD download session 2: Identifying and correcting image problems
- CD download session 3: Steps to a healthy self-image
- CD download session 4: Succeeding in a negative, cat-kicking world
- CD download session 5: Common sense human relationships
- CD download session 6: Winning relationships at home and at work
Copyright: 1993 Zig Ziglar
ISBN#: 1562077295 (CD Series)


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Lost in Translation: When Industrial Protocol Translation goes Wrong
Download Lost in Translation: When Industrial Protocol Translation goes Wrong
Translation makes it possible to exchange information across the globe, regardless of language differences. Translation plays a similar role in industrial internet of things (IIoT) environments where different devices, such as interfaces, sensors, and machines, use different protocols. Protocol gateways handle the translation of these different protocols in an industrial facility, allowing devices to communicate with one another.
What happens when translations are inaccurate or when parts of a message are mistranslated? Trend Micro's latest research, "Lost in Translation: When Industrial Protocol Translation goes Wrong," examines the risks related to protocol gateways, the possible impact of an attack or wrong translation, and ways to secure these devices.
Protocol gateways play an important role in industrial networks. Its translation of protocols allows various sensors, actuators, machinery, and computers that operate smart factories, dams, power plants, and water processing facilities to communicate with one another.
Figure 1. Protocol gateways translate different protocols to allow different devices to communicate with one another
We evaluated and tested different protocol gateways to see how a threat actor could use the translation vulnerabilities found in these devices to perform difficult-to-detect attacks against industrial facilities.
Malicious requests from legitimate commands
We found that vulnerabilities in the translation function can allow threat actors to issue stealth commands that can sabotage operational processes. Flaws in certain protocol gateways could allow threat actors to send crafted packets to cause undetected changes once it passes through the protocol gateway.
(in protocol A)
(in protocol B)
Figure 2. Crafted packets in one protocol could be translated as a malicious request in another
The issue behind this scenario is in the way crafted packets in one protocol can mean malicious commands in another. This makes translation attacks more difficult to detect because the resulting malicious requests came from legitimate commands. In addition, embedded networking devices are difficult to monitor and debug, giving a threat actor a wider attack margin.
Figure 3. Diagram showing the position of the protocol gateway and the point from which threat actors can send crafted packets.
Figure 3 shows the point in the system from which threat actors can send crafted packets. In this example, a malformed packet (in Modbus TCP) was not properly translated as it was blindly forwarded as Modbus RTU. Even common industrial control system (ICS) firewalls might not be able to detect the originating message as it is considered benign. In a real-world scenario, threat actors can issue commands using this method. For example, a threat actor could deactivate critical sensors meant to keep the facility functioning.
Configuration Disclosure and Tampering
In protocol gateways that we categorized as data stations, translation does not happen in real-time. Instead, these gateways match incoming packets to an Input/Output (I/O) mapping table that operational technology (OT) engineers are required to configure manually. We found weaknesses in some protocol gateways that can leave the I/O mapping table exposed. This is dangerous since the I/O mapping table contains crucial information about the ecosystem in which protocol gateways are a part. Threat actors who gain access to the I/O mapping table could gain visibility over this ecosystem, enabling them to conduct more targeted and precise attacks.
Figure 4. A sample network topology that includes the protocol gateway, and its position relative to other devices
Unauthorized modification to the I/O mapping table will also tamper with the mapping and damage the logic. This could also affect the operation of the human-machine interface (HMI), programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and devices connected to the protocol gateway. This is something we were able to demonstrate in detail in our research.
Unforeseen Exposures
Adding to the risk of exposure of protocol gateways and its ecosystems, we also discovered vulnerabilities that could allow threat actors to reuse credentials and decrypt configuration data.
The research paper discusses these in detail, including the denial-of-service (DoS) conditions we discovered. Each of these flaws could significantly affect a facility, as threat actors can use them to issue undetected commands or decrypt useful information.
Further implications include the possibility of a threat actor using techniques such as denial of view and denial of control against ICS equipment, or manipulation of view and manipulation of control to affect the integrity of various processes. These techniques can prevent engineers from controlling and monitoring smart factories, power plants, and other critical facilities. In turn, denial of control can result in a facility's failure to deliver essential output such as power and water or compromise the quality of manufactured products.
By themselves, protocol gateways are likely not directly involved in the product or the output of a facility. However, they are a crucial link in the flow of information between different sensors, interfaces, devices, and machinery within a facility.
Operators need to be able to see and trust the data of the facility and take action to prevent accidents or potential production issues. Vulnerable or exposed protocol gateways can allow threat actors to compromise the integrity of the reported data, the operators' ability to view data, or prevent operators from taking action.
In our research, we wanted to see if a small flaw in the protocol translation's design could result in critical issues for the whole production network. We found that subtle attacks could potentially result in significant impact without being noticed. This issue highlights that in an industrial facility, security coverage should also include these often overlooked devices.
For more on protocol translation device vulnerabilities and threat scenarios, as well as detailed security recommendations for protecting protocol gateways, read the research paper, "Lost in Translation: When Industrial Protocol Translation goes Wrong."
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Here's Laurie Penny saying some very smart and interesting things yet again. Her blog has moved to a new address, by the way, so make sure to click the link and update your reader!
May 30, 2013
What's 'Provocative', Anyway?
Here's Laurie Penny saying some very smart and interesting things yet again. Her blog has moved to a new address, by the way, so make sure to click the link and update your reader!
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May 29, 2013
Mobile Education mitentwickeln!
Photo: techcrunch.com |
Am 11. Juni findet im betahaus in Berlin um 15.30 Uhr ein offener Workshop zum Thema Mobile Education statt. Eingeladen sind Developer, Kreative und Lehrer, die ihre Erfahrungen austauschen und zur Entwicklung von Innovationen im Bereich mobile Bildung beitragen möchten. Für die Teilnahme wird lediglich eine Anmeldung per E-Mail unter Angabe des beruflichen Hintergrundes benötigt. E-mail Adresse für die Anmeldung sowie weitere Informationen zum Workshop findet Ihr hier.
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May 28, 2013
Submit Your Session Proposal to OKCon
Photo: Source |
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) just extended their call for proposals by a week. Submitting is simple and takes barely more than five minutes, given you have an open data related session idea up your sleeve. Find more info on the event and its submission guidelines here, new deadline for applications is 31 May.
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May 25, 2013
Notes on Mysore Rooms, Mindfulness, Feminism, and Sex
Photo source: ashtangatoronto.com |
tldr: Mysore rooms must be safe spaces. Teachers must ensure
that and are not supposed to look at their students in a sexual way. For
students, there's no need to suffer through bad and inappropriate
adjustments. You can always just leave. Yoga is not a competition/
performance/ beauty contest.
Remember how I said I was going to tie in feminism and Yoga more?
Well, tonight's assistant teacher training gave me my first cue: We
learned about how to act mindfully in the Mysore room. And while we
didn't talk about the issue from a feminist perspective, I wanted to
give it some feminist thought.
Since a combination of factors makes Mysore rooms special places,
teachers and their assistants are responsible for making them safe
spaces. Safe spaces are spaces where you can let your guard down because
there is no need to fear discriminatory behaviour. They are a concept I
first came across in feminist writings. All Yoga rooms - not just
Mysore rooms - need to be made such safe spaces. This is not only because
certain poses might trigger memories of sexual violence or abuse, but
because these rooms work along power structures, too. We might or might
not have been aware of that, just like some of us might or might not
have been aware of the fact that they're feeling uncomfortable in down
dog for a reason.
In any given Mysore room, everyone should be able to practice,
irrespective of their gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, body type
or ailments. We should be able to feel comfortable in our bodies
without having to fear even so much as a sexual thought coming
our way from teachers or assistants. This is important because thoughts
alone create energy - and I'm saying this in the least esoteric way
possible, maybe just think of 'vibes' instead. That energy will waft
through the room and affect its atmosphere, even when unintentional.
Similar to aggressive or competitive behaviour maybe, or a strong smell
that cannot be contained.
Traditional Ashtanga Yoga Mysore style is a very physical, sweaty
practice, that requires one-on-one attention and hands-on adjustments.
As someone once put it: "Assisting in a Mysore room is basically cattle
roping." Lying on top of each other for relaxation at the end of a
practice is frequent
and generally desired. Physical contact is intense, and both male and
female assistants need to watch where they're putting their stuff in
assists (*hint*: far away from student bums!). This does not just apply
to men: I have heard from many guys that they don't like feeling female
pubic bones rub up their backs, either. And from personal experience I
can tell you that putting your chest onto strangers needs
some getting used to, too.
So as much as we might like to lead monk-y, chaste lifestyles and
think pure thoughts only, I doubt that this is the reality of what's
going on most of the time. In fact, as I just learned tonight, the mind
is processing 30.000 automatic, involuntary thoughts every day. And we
all know those statistics about how often we think about sex. Very often.
So even when looking at half-naked people in a non-sexual way over
multiple hours seems like an impossible task for Yoga teachers and
assistants, they will have to make a conscious, concentrated effort.
Tough one! But as David put it in different contexts: "Yoga is not
supposed to be easy" and "your practice doesn't end on the mat", right?
Chances are that teachers and assistants will never hear the personal
back story of their students in intimate detail. Instead, they will
have to assume that what they are seeing in any given person is just the
proverbial tip of the iceberg. The tip of a rather disturbed iceberg,
really. "Never just assume that an adjustment is okay", is how it our
workshop leader put it tonight.
When we think about it, how we approach people makes all the
difference. David likes to stress how important it is to be polite with
students. And politeness like that automatically respects certain
physical boundaries. As soon as these lines are crossed by teachers or
their assistants, we students have every right to defend ourselves. And
by defend I mean we can refuse adjustments, move our mats, or leave the
room altogether and report inappropriate behaviour to someone in charge.
There is no need to suffer through bad adjustments! If a teacher
touches your private parts, (s)he is supposed to apologize. If this
happens frequently, I would advise you to unroll your mat somewhere
else. Yoga is supposed to make us feel better about ourselves, not
Which leads me right to last point: It really doesn't matter what
you wear to practice, as long as you feel comfortable in it. If you need
high-end sportswear to feel adequate, think about why that might be the
case. Surely, there's nothing wrong with looking good and treating
yourself to nice equipment, but please don't let others create fake
needs and silly standards you feel you have to live up to. Don't even
worry about what they might think. It's all in your head; in any decent
Mysore room, no one would even notice, let alone care. Yoga is no
competition, and Mysore rooms are certainly not catwalks. Every serious
practitioner of Yoga will agree on that. No need to wear make-up,
either. It will just melt away. And those heels that you're wearing to
"improve" your posture… once you realize what they are doing to your leg
muscles, tendons and bone structure, you might want to consider getting
svelter legs by committing to a regular practice instead. A regular
practice in a well-attended to Mysore room where you will be welcome for
the no frills, sweaty awesomeness that you are.
This post appeared first on Yogannina. The David I refer to is David Robson of Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto.
This post appeared first on Yogannina. The David I refer to is David Robson of Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto.
May 19, 2013
This Is How I Work
Wenn Trotzendorff mich so freundlich darum bittet, einen lustigen Fragebogen über private Gewohnheiten auszufüllen, sage ich natürlich nicht nein. Nach dem Sprung also mehr dazu, wie ich arbeite.
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May 11, 2013
In Pictures: My #rp13
Here are a couple of photos I took during my three days at republica. Follow the jump for my summary of #rp13.
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May 10, 2013
Laptop Yoga @ #rp13
Zu meiner Überraschung hat die Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung meine re:publica Session Laptop Yoga nicht nur schriftlich zusammengefasst, sondern auch mit der Kamera begleitet. Herausgekommen ist eine schöne zweiminütige Erinnerung - ich hoffe nur, ich habe während des Vortrags langsamer gesprochen als im Interview im Clip? Oje, oje, ich war wohl einfach noch zu aufgeregt. Der Workshop hat mir aber tierisch viel Spaß gemacht, was natürlich nicht zuletzt an meinem großartigen Publikum lag. Der Vibe hat gestimmt, alle waren zufrieden - besser hätte es nicht laufen können. Danke an alle für's Kommen und Mitmachen, hoffentlich sehen wir uns nächstes Jahr wieder! :)
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May 7, 2013
Laurie Penny on Cybersexism
In case you missed Laurie Penny's excellent talk on cybersexism at re:publica 2013 yesterday, watch it here and now.
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Young Lady on Roller Coaster Has Freakout to End All Freakouts
This has to be one of the funniest sounds of summer.
A young lady decided to record herself while riding a roller coaster at Ohio's Cedar Point amusement park. She's cool as a cucumber when the clip starts, dropping how it's going to be "lit" and telling her grandmother that she hopes she enjoys the video. So, while she knows the coaster is going to provide an adrenaline rush, she is rarin' to go.
What happens from there, though, is a dropping of her guard steeper than any coaster could ever hope to plunge. Around the 1:10 mark, the roller coaster takes a enormous dip and the woman's sense of calm completely disappears. She begins screaming something fierce and even does the Jewish prayer for wine for reasons we can't understand before unleashing a torrent of dirty words and calling for her mommy.
It's too bad the clip ends when it does: we're dying to know if the ride was as lit as she had hoped.


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Special to WorldTribune, October 5, 2018
Mr. President, the five previous times that I have come to the floor to explain my vote on the nomination of a justice to the United States Supreme Court, I have begun my floor remarks explaining my decision with a recognition of the solemn nature and the importance of the occasion.
But today we have come to the conclusion of a confirmation process that has become so dysfunctional it looks more like a caricature of a gutter-level political campaign than a solemn occasion.
The President nominated Brett Kavanaugh on July 9th. Within moments of that announcement, special interest groups raced to be the first to oppose him, including one organization that didn't even bother to fill in the Judge's name on its pre-written press release – they simply wrote that they opposed "Donald Trump's nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States." A number of Senators joined the race to announce their opposition, but they were beaten to the punch by one of our colleagues who actually announced opposition before the nominee's identity was even known.
Since that time, we have seen special interest groups whip their followers into a frenzy by spreading misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about Judge Kavanaugh's judicial record. Over-the-top rhetoric and distortions of his record and testimony at his first hearing produced short-lived headlines which, although debunked hours later, continue to live on and be spread through social media. Interest groups have also spent an unprecedented amount of dark money opposing this nomination.
Our Supreme Court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than thirty years. One can only hope that the Kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom.
Against this backdrop, it is up to each individual Senator to decide what the Constitution's "advice and consent" duty means. Informed by Alexander Hamilton's Federalist 76, I have interpreted this to mean that the President has broad discretion to consider a nominee's philosophy, whereas my duty as a Senator is to focus on the nominee's qualifications as long as that nominee's philosophy is within the mainstream of judicial thought.
I have always opposed litmus tests for judicial nominees with respect to their personal views or politics, but I fully expect them to be able to put aside any and all personal preferences in deciding the cases that come before them. I have never considered the President's identity or party when evaluating Supreme Court nominations. As a result, I voted in favor of Justices Roberts and Alito, who were nominated by President Bush, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, who were nominated by President Obama, and Justice Gorsuch, who was nominated by President Trump.
So I began my evaluation of Judge Kavanaugh's nomination by reviewing his 12-year record on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, including his more than 300 opinions and his many speeches and law review articles. Nineteen attorneys, including lawyers from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, briefed me many times each week and assisted me in evaluating the judge's extensive record. I met with Judge Kavanaugh for more than two hours in my office. I listened carefully to the testimony at the Committee hearings. I spoke with people who knew him personally, such as Condoleezza Rice and many others. And, I talked with Judge Kavanaugh a second time by phone for another hour to ask him very specific additional questions.
I have also met with thousands of my constituents, both advocates and many opponents, regarding Judge Kavanaugh. One concern that I frequently heard was that Judge Kavanaugh would be likely to eliminate the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) vital protections for people with preexisting conditions. I disagree with this contention. In a dissent in Seven-Sky v. Holder, Judge Kavanaugh rejected a challenge to the ACA on narrow procedural grounds, preserving the law in full. Many experts have said his dissent informed Justice Roberts' opinion upholding the ACA at the Supreme Court.
Furthermore, Judge Kavanaugh's approach toward the doctrine of severability is narrow. When a part of a statute is challenged on constitutional grounds, he has argued for severing the invalid clause as surgically as possible while allowing the overall law to remain intact.
This was his approach in his dissent in a case that involved a challenge to the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (PPH v. CFPB). In his dissent, Judge Kavanaugh argued for "severing any problematic portions while leaving the remainder intact." Given the current challenges to the ACA, proponents, including myself, of protections for people with pre-existing conditions should want a Justice who would take just this kind of approach.
Another assertion I have heard often is that Judge Kavanaugh cannot be trusted if a case involving alleged wrongdoing by the President were to come before the Court. The basis for this argument seems to be two-fold. First, Judge Kavanaugh has written that he believes that Congress should enact legislation to protect presidents from criminal prosecution or civil liability while in office. Mr. President, I believe opponents miss the mark on this issue. The fact that Judge Kavanaugh offered this legislative proposal suggests that he believes that the President does not have such protection currently.
Second, there are some who argue that given the current Special Counsel investigation, President Trump should not even be allowed to nominate a justice. That argument ignores our recent history. President Clinton, in 1993, nominated Justice Ginsburg after the Whitewater investigation was already underway. And she was confirmed 96-3. The next year, just three months after Independent Counsel Robert Fiske was named to lead the Whitewater investigation, President Clinton nominated Justice Breyer. He was confirmed 87-9.
Supreme Court Justices have not hesitated to rule against the presidents who have nominated them. Perhaps most notably in United States v. Nixon, three Nixon appointees who heard the case joined the unanimous opinion against him.
Judge Kavanaugh has been unequivocal in his belief that no president is above the law. He has stated that Marbury v. Madison, Youngstown Steel v. Sawyer and United States v. Nixon are three of the four greatest Supreme Court cases in history. What do they have in common? Each of them is a case where the Court served as a check on presidential power. And I would note that the fourth case that Judge Kavanaugh has pointed to as the greatest in history was Brown v Board of Education.
One Kavanaugh decision illustrates the point about the check on presidential power directly. He wrote the opinion in Hamdan v. United States, a case that challenged the Bush Administration's military commission prosecution of an associate of Osama Bin Laden. This conviction was very important to the Bush Administration, but Judge Kavanaugh, who had been appointed to the DC Circuit by President Bush and had worked in President Bush's White House, ruled that the conviction was unlawful. As he explained during the hearing, "We don't make decisions based on who people are, or their policy preferences, or the moment. We base decisions on the law…."
Others I met with have expressed concerns that Justice Kennedy's retirement threatens the right of same sex couples to marry. Yet, Judge Kavanaugh described the Obergefell decision, which legalized same gender marriages, as an important landmark precedent. He also cited Justice Kennedy's recent Masterpiece Cakeshop opinion for the Court's majority stating that: "The days of treating gay and lesbian Americans or gay and lesbian couples as second-class citizens who are inferior in dignity and worth are over in the Supreme Court."
Others have suggested that the judge holds extreme views on birth control. In one case, Judge Kavanaugh incurred the disfavor of both sides of the political spectrum for seeking to ensure the availability of contraceptive services for women while minimizing the involvement of employers with religious objections. Although his critics frequently overlook this point, Judge Kavanaugh's dissent rejected arguments that the government did not have a compelling interest in facilitating access to contraception. In fact, he wrote that the Supreme Court precedent "strongly suggested" that there was a "compelling interest" in facilitating access to birth control.
There has also been considerable focus on the future of abortion rights based on the concern that Judge Kavanaugh would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade. Protecting this right is important to me.
To my knowledge, Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself. He believes that precedent "is not just a judicial policy … it is constitutionally dictated to pay attention and pay heed to rules of precedent." In other words, precedent isn't a goal or an aspiration; it is a constitutional tenet that has to be followed except in the most extraordinary circumstances.
The judge further explained that precedent provides stability, predictability, reliance, and fairness. There are, of course, rare and extraordinary times where the Supreme Court would rightly overturn a precedent. The most famous example was when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, correcting a "grievously wrong" decision–to use the judge's term–allowing racial inequality. But, someone who believes that the importance of precedent has been rooted in the Constitution would follow long-established precedent except in those rare circumstances where a decision is "grievously wrong" or "deeply inconsistent with the law." Those are Judge Kavanaugh's phrases.
As Judge Kavanaugh asserted to me, a long-established precedent is not something to be trimmed, narrowed, discarded, or overlooked. Its roots in the Constitution give the concept of stare decisis greater weight such that precedent can't be trimmed or narrowed simply because a judge might want to on a whim. In short, his views on honoring precedent would preclude attempts to do by stealth that which one has committed not to do overtly.
Noting that Roe v. Wade was decided 45 years ago, and reaffirmed 19 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, I asked Judge Kavanaugh whether the passage of time is relevant to following precedent. He said decisions become part of our legal framework with the passage of time and that honoring precedent is essential to maintaining public confidence.
Our discussion then turned to the right of privacy, on which the Supreme Court relied in Griswold v. Connecticut, a case that struck down a law banning the use and sale of contraceptives. Griswold established the legal foundation that led to Roe eight years later. In describing Griswold as "settled law," Judge Kavanaugh observed that it was the correct application of two famous cases from the 1920s, Meyer and Pierce, that are not seriously challenged by anyone today. Finally, in his testimony, he noted repeatedly that Roe had been upheld by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, describing it as "precedent on precedent." When I asked him would it be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed it was wrongly decided, he emphatically said "no."
Opponents frequently cite then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign pledge to nominate only judges who would overturn Roe. The Republican platform for all presidential campaigns has included this pledge since at least 1980. During this time, Republican presidents have appointed Justices O'Connor, Souter, and Kennedy to the Supreme Court. These are the very three justices—Republican president appointed justices—who authored the Casey decision, which reaffirmed Roe. Furthermore, pro-choice groups vigorously opposed each of these justices' nominations. Incredibly, they even circulated buttons with the slogan "Stop Souter Or Women Will Die!" Just two years later, Justice Souter coauthored the Casey opinion, reaffirming a woman's right to choose. Suffice it to say, prominent advocacy organizations have been wrong.
These same interest groups have speculated that Judge Kavanaugh was selected to do the bidding of conservative ideologues, despite his record of judicial independence. I asked the judge point blank whether he had made any commitments or pledges to anyone at the White House, to the Federalist Society, or to any outside group on how he would decide cases. He unequivocally assured me he had not.
Judge Kavanaugh has received rave reviews for his 12-year track record as a judge, including for his judicial temperament. The American Bar Association (ABA) gave him its highest possible rating. Its Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary conducted an extraordinarily thorough assessment, soliciting input from almost 500 people, including his judicial colleagues. The ABA concluded that "his integrity, judicial temperament, and professional competence met the highest standard."
Lisa Blatt, who has argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other woman in history, testified: "By any objective measure, Judge Kavanaugh is clearly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court." "His opinions are invariably thoughtful and fair…." Ms. Blatt, who clerked for and is an ardent admirer of Justice Ginsburg, and who is, in her own words, "an unapologetic defender of a woman's right to choose," said that Judge Kavanaugh "fit[s] in the mainstream of legal thought." She also observed that "Judge Kavanaugh is remarkably committed to promoting women in the legal profession."
That Judge Kavanaugh is more of a centrist than some of his critics maintain is reflected in the fact that he and Chief Judge Merrick Garland voted the same way in 93 percent of the cases that they heard together. Indeed, Chief Judge Garland joined in more than 96 percent of the majority opinions authored by Judge Kavanaugh, dissenting only once.
Despite all this, after weeks of reviewing Judge Kavanaugh's record and listening to 32 hours of his testimony, the Senate's advice and consent role was thrown into a tailspin following the allegations of sexual assault by Professor Christine Blasey Ford. The confirmation process now involves evaluating whether or not Judge Kavanaugh committed sexual assault, and lied about it to the Judiciary Committee.
Some argue that because this is a lifetime appointment to our highest court, the public interest requires that doubts be resolved against the nominee. Others see the public interest as embodied in our long-established tradition of affording to those accused of misconduct a presumption of innocence. In cases in which the facts are unclear, they would argue that the question should be resolved in favor of the nominee.
Mr. President, I understand both viewpoints. This debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamental legal principles—about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness—do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.
In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.
The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominee's otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward.
Some of the allegations levied against Judge Kavanaugh illustrate why the presumption of innocence is so important. I am thinking in particular not of the allegations raised by Professor Ford, but of the allegation that, when he was a teenager, Judge Kavanaugh drugged multiple girls and used their weakened state to facilitate gang rape. This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and simply parroted public statements of others. That such an allegation can find its way into the Supreme Court confirmation process is a stark reminder about why the presumption of innocence is so ingrained in our American consciousness.
Mr. President, I listened carefully to Christine Blasey Ford's testimony before the Judiciary Committee. I found her testimony to be sincere, painful, and compelling. I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events of that evening gathering where she says the assault occurred; none of the individuals Professor Ford says were at the party has any recollection at all of that night.
Judge Kavanaugh forcefully denied the allegations under penalty of perjury. Mark Judge denied under penalty of felony that he had witnessed an assault. PJ Smyth, another person allegedly at the party, denied that he was there under penalty of felony. Professor Ford's life-long friend Leland Keyser indicated that, under penalty of felony, she does not remember that party. And Ms. Keyser went further. She indicated that not only does she not remember a night like that, but also that she does not even know Brett Kavanaugh.
In addition to the lack of corroborating evidence, we also learned some facts that raised more questions. For instance, since these allegations have become public, Professor Ford testified that not a single person has contacted her to say, "I was at the party that night."
Furthermore, the professor testified that although she does not remember how she got home that evening, she knew that, because of the distance, she would have needed a ride – yet not a single person has come forward to say that they were the one that drove her home or were in the car with her that night. And Professor Ford also indicated that even though she left that small gathering of six or so people abruptly and without saying goodbye and distraught, none of them called her the next day – or ever – to ask why she left – is she okay – not even her closest friend, Ms. Keyser.
Mr. President, the Constitution does not provide guidance as to how we are supposed to evaluate these competing claims. It leaves that decision up to each Senator. This is not a criminal trial, and I do not believe that claims such as these need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, fairness would dictate that the claims at least should meet a threshold of "more likely than not" as our standard.
The facts presented do not mean that Professor Ford was not sexually assaulted that night – or at some other time – but they do lead me to conclude that the allegations fail to meet the "more likely than not" standard. Therefore, I do not believe that these charges can fairly prevent Judge Kavanaugh from serving on the Court.
Let me emphasize that my approach to this question should not be misconstrued as suggesting that unwanted sexual contact of any nature is not a serious problem in this country. To the contrary, if any good at all has come from this ugly confirmation process, it has been to create an awareness that we have underestimated the pervasiveness of this terrible problem.
I have been alarmed and disturbed, however, by some who have suggested that unless Judge Kavanaugh's nomination is rejected, the Senate is somehow condoning sexual assault. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every person—man or woman–who makes a charge of sexual assault deserves to be heard and treated with respect. The #MeToo movement is real. It matters. It is needed. And it is long overdue. We know that rape and sexual assault are less likely to be reported to the police than other forms of assault. On average, an estimated 211,000 rapes and sexual assaults go unreported every year. We must listen to survivors, and every day we must seek to stop the criminal behavior that has hurt so many. We owe this to ourselves, our children, and generations to come.
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Since the hearing, I have listened to many survivors of sexual assault. Many were total strangers who told me their heart-wrenching stories for the first time in their lives. Some were friends I have known for decades, yet with the exception of one woman who had confided in me years ago, I had no idea that they had been the victims of sexual attacks. I am grateful for their courage and their willingness to come forward, and I hope that in heightening public awareness, they have also lightened the burden that they have been quietly bearing for so many years. To them, I pledge to do all that I can to ensure that their daughters and granddaughters never share their experiences.
Over the past few weeks, I have been emphatic that the Senate has an obligation to investigate and evaluate the serious allegations of sexual assault. I called for and supported the additional hearing to hear from both Professor Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. I also pushed for and supported the FBI supplemental background investigation. This was the right thing to do.
Christine Ford never sought the spotlight. She indicated that she was terrified to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she has shunned attention since then. She seemed completely unaware of Chairman Grassley's offer to allow her to testify confidentially in California. Watching her, Mr. President, I could not help but feel that some people who wanted to engineer the defeat of this nomination cared little, if at all, for her well-being.
Professor Ford testified that a very limited number of people had access to her letter. Yet that letter found its way into the public domain. She testified that she never gave permission for that very private letter to be released. And yet, here we are. We are in the middle of a fight that she never sought, arguing about claims that she wanted to raise confidentially.
One theory I have heard espoused repeatedly is that our colleague, Senator Feinstein, leaked Professor Ford's letter at the eleventh hour to derail this process. I want to state this very clearly: I know Senator Diane Feinstein extremely well, and I believe that she would never do that. I knew that to be the case before she even stated it at the hearing. She is a person of integrity, and I stand by her.
I have also heard some argue that the Chairman of the Committee somehow treated Professor Ford unfairly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Chairman Grassley, along with his excellent staff, treated Professor Ford with compassion and respect throughout the entire process. And that is the way the Senator from Iowa has conducted himself throughout a lifetime dedicated to public service.
But the fact remains, Mr. President, that someone leaked this letter against Professor Ford's express wishes. I suspect, regrettably, that we will never know for certain who did it. To that leaker, who I hope is listening now, let me say that what you did was unconscionable. You have taken a survivor who was not only entitled to your respect, but who also trusted you to protect her – and you have sacrificed her well-being in a misguided attempt to win whatever political crusade you think you are fighting. My only hope is that your callous act has turned this process into such a dysfunctional circus that it will cause the Senate – and indeed all Americans – to reconsider how we evaluate Supreme Court nominees. If that happens, then the appalling lack of compassion you afforded Professor Ford will at least have some unintended positive consequences.
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Mr. President, the politically charged atmosphere surrounding this nomination had reached a fever pitch even before these allegations were known, and it has been challenging even then to separate fact from fiction.
We live in a time of such great disunity, as the bitter fight over this nomination both in the Senate and among the public clearly demonstrates. It is not merely a case of different groups having different opinions. It is a case of people bearing extreme ill will toward those who disagree with them. In our intense focus on our differences, we have forgotten the common values that bind us together as Americans. When some of our best minds are seeking to develop ever more sophisticated algorithms designed to link us to websites that only reinforce and cater to our views, we can only expect our differences to intensify.
This would have alarmed the drafters of our Constitution, who were acutely aware that different values and interests could prevent Americans from becoming and remaining a single people. Indeed, of the six objectives they invoked in the preamble to the Constitution, the one that they put first was the formation of "a more perfect Union."
Their vision of "a more perfect Union" does not exist today, and if anything, we appear to be moving farther away from it. It is particularly worrisome that the Supreme Court, the institution that most Americans see as the principal guardian of our shared constitutional heritage, is viewed as part of the problem through a political lens.
Mr. President, we've heard a lot of charges and counter charges about Judge Kavanaugh. But as those who have known him best have attested, he has been an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband, and father. Despite the turbulent, bitter fight surrounding his nomination, my fervent hope is that Brett Kavanaugh will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our Judiciary and our highest court is restored. Mr. President, I will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh.


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The subject of conversation enters the conversation that is First Person, here in section seven.
There are differences between holding a meaningful conversation and simply emitting words in one direction or another. Because of these differences, computers are much better at the latter, and in fact can probably not hold a conversation unassisted. Even chat software doesnít do much to support real conversation ó as evidenced by the ease with which bots employ it ó though users find ways to use such software toward meaningful conversational ends.
To think through these issues involves considering how we create meaning, how we create technology, and the contexts of our lives in which communication and technology meet. The three essayists collected here consider these issues in depth, not simply for the sake of analysis, but also for intervention. Their interventions include developing new software for understanding online conversations, creating a new community that takes the lack of time for online communication as a topic, and critically examining the forms of offline communication we have with (monologue-prone) voice chips.
These essayists incorporate perspectives from a broad range of disciplines, from artificial intelligence to art, and practice through a variety of theories of communication and cognition. A touchstone for two of the three is the work of theorist/practitioner Lucy Suchman, which has been highly influential in recent discussions of computationally connected objects that speak. Suchmanís work helps us understand what we might mean by interaction, either with a computationally driven object or with another person through a computationally supported interface. As she writes in her response to Natalie Jeremijenko (invoking Emanuel Schegloff), interaction is a term for the ongoing contingent coproduction of the sociomaterial world. This is much more than ìtalking in a conversational manner on different subjectsî ó this is much more than chat.
Warren Sack, this sectionís first essayist, takes up the challenge of moving beyond chat software for what he calls Very Large-Scale Conversations (VLSCs) ó which include Usenet newsgroups and large listservs. His Conversation Map analyzes and visualizes VLSCs, helping users understand what is being produced and how they may wish to participate. He is followed by Victoria Vesna, whose n0time is the product of several generations of projects that call into question popular assumptions about the nature of online communities and embodiment. n0time extends this work into the boom/bust of millennial angst, dot-com frenzy, and cybernetic hyperfeedback ó creating proxy bodies that both collect possibilities for interaction and are destroyed by them. The final essay, by Natalie Jeremijenko, creates an initial typology for understanding our encounters with voice chips ó of both speaking and listening varieties ó and proposes some insights that may be gained by examining this reductio ad absurdum of conversation, this less-than-chat.


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