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I speak and write regularly on the topic of international education and analytics.
Below is my presentation and publication history.
Demystifying data: unlocking the value of data-driven decision-making.
Presented at the 2017 Australian International Education Conference in Hobart, Tasmania (October 2017).
Co-lead a workshop providing practical example of how to build a growth-share matrix using Department of Education international student data in order to allow delegates to visualise market opportunities and institutional weakness when analysing international student markets.
Getting started in the data game.
Presented at the 2017 New Zealand International Education Conference in Auckland, New Zealand (August 2017).
I was invited by the New Zealand government to talk about the basic skills and mindset needed to develop a culture of data-driven decision making within international education organisations. This presentation also included a work through of an actual data set, demonstrating how to solve business problems using a data-driven approach.
The data game: Building analytics capability in international education.
Published in the IEAA Vista Magazine – summer 2017 edition (February 2017)
I authored an essay on Australia's competitive advantage in international education data and how institutions and business should be building their analytics capabilities to take advantage of these resources.
Big data, big insight, and international education.
Presented at the 2016 Australian International Education Conference in Melbourne, Australia (October 2016).
I was part of a panel discussion alongside delegates from the Times Higher Education and IBM discussing the rise of Big Data in education and what data skills international education professionals should target in order to further their analytical proficiency.
Mine craft: A primer on turning raw data into predictive insight.
Presented at the 2016 International Education Association of Australia Marketing Special Interest Group annual meeting in Brisbane, Australia (April 2016).
I was invited by the IEAA Marketing Special Interest Group to present at their annual conference on the potential for predictive analytics to impact marketing in Australian international education.
The devil is in the data: Empowering international higher education through business analytics.
Presented at the 2015 Australian International Education Conference in Adelaide, Australia (October 2015).
I presented on the topic of how analytics and data-driven decision making will become the key method for higher education institutions in uncovering new markets, opportunities and remaining competitive in the international education industry.


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Learn more about:
My experience with the senior population started a little over 5 years ago when I began working as a concierge at a senior retirement community.
Currently, as an administrative assistant, I am involved in the many aspects of home health care.
I am pleased to get to work with the professional staff who are caring and dedicated.
In my spare time, I enjoy cheering on the St. Louis Cardinals, stained glass making, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
I am excited to venture into the administrative side health & wellness as Envision continues to grow.
Administrative Services

subset: commoncrawl


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Speech and Hearing Aids Clinic
The standard manufacturer guarantee that comes along with our digital hearing aids India vary from 2-year to 5-year. At Decibel Speech and Hearing Aids Centers, we dedicatedly try to complete minor repairs of ear moulds or aids on the same day. However, in some of the cases, we ask you to leave back your instrument for repair. Further, if the repairs are way too complicated and require industrial expertise or machinery then we send the instrument for repair to the service centers of the manufacturer.
We also try and provide you a spare hearing aid till your instrument is in repair or service; however, it is as per availability of the aid and severity of your hearing loss. Our expert audiologists are always there to answer your queries.
Batteries and hearing aids should be kept away from children and in case a child is using the aid, then it necessary to monitor the child closely. The batteries are toxic and dangerous and should not be swallowed. The batteries are to be stored in cool and dry place, but should not be stored in or over the fridge/refrigerator. In case it is swallowed either by a child or grown up; it should be taken very seriously and as a medical emergency and thus an expert physician should be immediately consulted.
In general, provided the instrument is used at optimum settings, and are used around 16 hours per day, the batteries last for 7-14 days. After the batteries are dead, they should be carefully disposed. Even dead batteries are toxic and thus are harmful for children. Normally, a battery cost around INR 25. Small batteries die out quickly and the heavier and bigger batteries offer better performance. The sizes of hearing aid batteries are listed below along with their standard number and color codes.
- Size 5 RED
- Size 10 (or 230) YELLOW
- Size 13 ORANGE
- Size 312 BROWN
- Size 675 BLUE
Always Keep your Batteries in a cool dry place, like the back of your sock drawer, not the fridge!


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Posts Tagged 'vaccination'
the science of Covid-19: the virus, symptoms, spread, vaccine, incubation period, crude case fatalities
So I'm now embarking on a series devoted entirely to the virus that's shutting so many of us in our homes, feeling slightly (or considerably) fearful, for our lives as well as our livelihoods, feeling both frustrated and fascinated, both mystified and enlightened about human behaviour, governmental responses and the like.
First, some people call this virus Covid-19, some call it SARS-CoV-2, and most just call it coronavirus. But most well-informed people know by now that coronaviruses are quite commonplace RNA viruses (numbering in the hundreds). They're relatively large and get their name from the corona or crown of proteins that spike out from the virus membrane. The official name of this new coronavirus is SARS-CoV-2 (that's severe acute respiratory syndrome), and Covid-19 is the name of the disease or condition that the virus causes.
This is the third coronavirus in the last 20 years to infect large numbers of humans. Coronaviruses are zoonotic – they spread from animals to humans, becoming more potentially lethal in the process. The others were SARS in 2002 and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) in 2012. The immediate species origin of this new strain is still unclear. According to leading epidemiologist Dr Edison Liu, sequencing has shown that it arose from a bat coronavirus, but it probably passed through a series of vectors before passing to humans. It appears to be less lethal than SARS or MERS, but its spread has been far more rapid. In an interview on the Jackson Laboratory website (JAX), Liu explains that the Covid-19 epidemic occurred at the same time as an influenza epidemic, and while the symptoms are very similar, Covid-19 has about ten times the mortality rate. The essential symptoms are fever, shortness of breath and coughing. Acute symptoms appear to result from a mix of direct viral damage and intense immunologic response in some cases.
The virus is spread primarily by coughing and sneezing, and from the time of contact with it until the time of symptoms is approximately four to seven days. The virus passes from the body in about 14 days on average – hence the recommended minimum quarantine period.
Liu had this to say about a vaccine. Vaccine development generally takes 12 to 18 months, not only to prove its efficacy but to scale up production to the required level. Animal models are needed to test the efficacy of any antiviral treatment. Covid-19 enters our cells through the ACE-2 receptor (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2). Mice, which are often used as test animals, don't take up Covid-19 through their ACE-2 receptor, but scientists at Iowa University have developed an animal model for infection, in which the human ACE-2 receptor has been engineered into the animal (a mouse). So the effectiveness of antiviral drugs can be tested on these animals, which can apparently be provided en masse, with the Jackson Lab as a premier provider.
The invaluable worldometer website has regularly updated stats on total cases (about 1.1 million as of today, April 4), total deaths, total recovered, death rates and much else, as well as a country-by-country breakdown. It also has well-sourced and referenced info on symptoms, incubation period and other useful stuff. The incubation period is defined as the time from exposure to the development of symptoms. Worldometer sets this period as 2 to 14 days, according to data from WHO, China's National Health Commission and the USA's Center for Disease Control. Note that this period is longer than that stated earlier, in information from Jackson Laboratory CEO Edison Liu. Similarly a Chinese online community for physicians and healthcare workers has reported an incubation period of '3 to 7 days, up to 14 days'. However, rare outliers have been reported, with incubation periods up to 27 days. The WHO has considered these might be due to second exposures – incidentally raising the issue of re-infection. However, most experts feel that re-infection is unlikely, and this appears to have been borne out as the global spread advances.
Over the past day I've listened to two Sam Harris podcasts on Covid-19, interviews with experts conducted in early March – already long ago, it seems. The second, which I listened to first, was with Dr Amesh Adalja, of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. He made an educated guess of the death rate for Covid-19 at 0.6%, based on his analysis of South Korean figures. This is approximately six times the rate for seasonal flu (though it should be mentioned that the most recent seasonal flu has been the most fatal for children in many years), but somewhat lower than many of the predictions of other experts. He also seemed, at that point, less concerned about the need for social distancing and other mitigating measures than others, but it seems that the rapid spread of the virus and growing public concern has rendered obsolete his nonchalance in this area. Also, stop press, a New Scientist article posted yesterday (April 3) has this to say on the South Korean data:
Crude case fatality rates are so-called because they don't take into account the fact that some of the people counted in the infected numbers have not recovered yet and may still go on to die. Early in March, for instance, South Korea had a crude case fatality rate of just 0.6 per cent. That has risen to 1.7 per cent.
As to the fatality rate of Covid-19 at present, this is difficult to assess, largely due to 'severity bias', which means that many milder infections may be going untested, with only the more severe cases capturing the attention of the health care system, or even the infected. New Scientist reports 'a wide range of estimates, from as low as 1 in 1000 to as high as 1 in 30'. It seems clear from current figures that death rates vary wildly from region to region, and country to country, but the reasons for this are still very unclear. To give some examples of the variation, the current crude case fatality rate for the UK is around 9%, for Italy it's nearly 12%, but for Germany it's only 1%. Here in Australia, it's considerably less even than that, and no doubt governments around the country will be keen to take the credit. But there seems to be more to this variation than government action/inaction. This question along with many others will be explored in future posts.
some more stuff we've learned about vaccines
Vaccinology, I would say that it's not rocket science. It's a lot harder than rocket science.
Alan Schmaljohn, virologist, 2014
Canto: So, reading The Vaccine Race, by Meredith Wadman – maybe we should just do book reviews? – I find myself getting excited, or confused, by a passage, and wanting to do more research, and then forgetting about it…
Jacinta: It's probably pretty normal to forget 95% of what you read within a week or so of having read it. You just hope the things you retain are the principal things.
Canto: Yeah well, I was probably hoping the book would help me get my head around how vaccines work, as well as providing juicy and inspiring tales of heroism and malpractice in the history of vaccine development, and it has helped, but I think I'd need to read half a dozen such books and watch a dozen videos before it penetrated my thick skull…
Jacinta: Yes, for example, when I found myself reading, well into the book, about Leonard Hayflick's human diploid cells, taken from the lungs of an aborted foetus, which were used to provide a sort of base for creating vaccines against all sorts of diseases, most notably rubella, I thought 'obviously the author has explained human diploid cells, probably in great detail, before, but I can't recall a whit'…
Canto: That's what comes of reading too many books at once, and spreading your focus. You know it's a myth that women can multi-task better than men, but the major finding of research is that multi-tasking is bad for everyone. Let's resolve to read books one at a time, from start to finish.
Jacinta: Resolved. Anyway, diploid cells are just standard human cells, with 23 pairs of chromosomes. The only other human cells are haploid sperm and eggs, with 23 unpaired chromosomes. Hayflick's cell line, gathered in the fifties, was 'cleaner' than the cells previously used from other animals, such as monkey kidney cells, which contained many viruses. I used the index.
Canto: So these cells were taken from the lungs of a foetus, and Hayflick was able to produce a cell line from them, that's to say a line of almost endlessly reproducing cells, I'm not sure how that worked, but these cells, which had to be free of every virus or pathogen, would then be somehow injected with, say, the rubella virus, in some sort of reduced form, so as to produce antibodies in those who are vaccinated. The trick with vaccinology, it seems, is to produce a safe vaccine with no side effects, or minimal side effects, but with enough potency to produce a reaction, thus producing antibodies to the antigens in the vaccine. The vaccine must contain antigens, must have some potency, otherwise it's useless. And every immune system is subtly different, so producing a one-size-fits-all vaccine is in many respects a monumental undertaking. I may have this completely wrong by the way.
Jacinta: Probably only partially wrong, let's not be absolutists. What about this difference between killed vaccines and live vaccines. Can we talk about that?
Canto: Well first I want to understand how a 'cell line' is produced. How were Hayflick's famous WI-38 (human diploid) cells produced in a constant stream from the lungs of a single legally aborted foetus in 1962?
Jacinta: Let me try to summarise Wadman's description of the process from this online article. The tiny lungs were minced up and then placed in a container with a mix of enzymes that separated them into individual cells. These cells were separated again into small glass bottles, and a 'nutrient broth' was added, causing the cells to divide. thus began the most thoroughly described, studied and utilised human cell line to date, from which was created vaccines for rubella, rabies, adenovirus, measles, polio, chicken pox and shingles.
Canto: A nutrient both? You mean 'at this point a miracle happens'?
Jacinta: Well, this was a well-established miracle, only previously it was done with non-human cells, and still is. Monkey and canine kidney cells, chicken embryo fibroblasts, hamster ovary cells… Of course using human cells was bound to be controversial.
Canto: So – obviously the cells in these tiny lungs would've gone on dividing had the foetus survived, so microbiologists had worked out a way, of making this happen – mitosis, isn't it? – outside the host. How long have they been able to do this?
Jacinta: Well the first vaccine was created by Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century, but they weren't actually culturing cells then. Cell culture is a broad term meaning a process of growing cells – obviously by cell division – outside of their natural environment, usually in a lab. A cell line (e.g. Hayflick's WI-38 cells) is 'a population of cells descended from a single cell and containing the same genetic makeup', to quote Wikipedia. Cell culture started with the maintenance of cell tissue independent of the host animal in the late nineteenth century, but techniques advanced rapidly in the 1940s and 50s to support virology and the manufacture of vaccines. A key event was the growing of poliovirus in monkey kidney cells in 1949, for which John Enders, Tom Weller and Fred Robbins won the Nobel Prize. Their methods were used by Jonas Salk and others to produce the first polio vaccine.
Canto: But the problem with using monkey kidney cells was that they potentially carried their own viruses, right? Which may or may not be harmful to humans, and how would they know? Without using human guinea pigs?
Jacinta: Human subjects, yes. And there's also the question of the potency of the virus being used, presumably to stimulate the production of antibodies. Is it just a question of stimulating enough antibodies? And isn't there an obvious danger of infecting subjects with the virus itself? Presumably a killed virus solves that problem, but is it really effective?
Canto: Yes, Wadman's book has been fascinating on the politics of the vaccine race, but I'm still left much confused – probably due to stupidity or inattentiveness – as to how some vaccines work better than others, and how a cell line – I know it's essentially about exponential growth – can produce enough material for millions of vaccine doses.
Jacinta: Yes it's about exponential growth, and it was once thought that, given the right conditions, these cells could go on multiplying ad infinitum, to immortality so to speak, but it was Hayflick who showed this not to be true in a much-cited paper. Even so, the number of replications of individual cells assured a sufficient supply of cells for generations. And since then, much more has been discovered about cell ageing and its causes, what with telomeres and telomerase, but that's another story. As to why vaccines developed from the WI-38 cells have been so much less problematic than others, it clearly has much to do with their being 'clean' human foetal cells, with no other lurgies lurking.
Canto: So let me get this clear. The WI-38 cells are provided to different labs that are wanting to create a vaccine for, say, measles. Or that have already created a vaccine, or at least have isolated the virus – but then of course viruses can't be isolated, they need cells to survive in. So they get the WI-38 cells, and then they inject them with the virus – killed or attenuated – and then they start trialling it on rats or mice or something, trying out different strengths of the virus, without really having much idea whether the dose will translate to humans, so they must find some willing volunteers (or, in the early days, orphaned or intellectually disabled kids) to experiment on, making sure they err on the conservative side initially, then upping the dosage? I'm no doubt simplifying and speculating wildly here.
Jacinta: yes and I'm no wiser than you, but it's a good thing we have people taking these risks, and working so hard in this field – with clearer ethical guidelines than before – because millions of lives have been saved by vaccines, and so much has been learned about our immune system in the process of developing them.
Wadman, Meredith. The Vaccine Race. Doubleday 2017.
no jab no pay starts now
Jacinta: I believe the federal government is bringing in new rules penalising parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. Do you know the details, and how do you think the anti-vaccination movement, which is quite strong in Australia, is going to react?
Canto: Well, first I'll note that when looking up this issue on the net I found a disproportionate number of anti-vaccination or 'vaccination skeptic' sites cropping up on Google. It's very disheartening that the 'AVN', formally deceitfully titled the Australian Vaccination Network, now forced by law to call itself the Australian Vaccination-skeptics Network, comes up first all the time. Other depressing sites that come up include nocompulsoryvaccination and 'natural society'. These appear to be US sites promoting the 'nature is better' fallacy or some dubious form of libertarianism, and I suppose they have ways of maintaining a high internet profile.
Jacinta: Well, this is the thing, they have a 'cause' to rally around, whereas the immunologists and doctors who know the science don't see what the fuss is about, and just assume that everybody respects scientific methods and results. Which is obviously far from the case.
Canto: Well anyway yes the federal government, and the Victorian state government, have created bills to better enforce vaccination, and the Australian government's measure came into force on January 1. Child care payments and family tax benefit part A supplement will only be paid for children who've been immunised or have an approved immunisation exemption.
Jacinta: So, can you get an exemption easily, due to your firm belief that vaccinations cause diabetes, or autism or whatever?
Canto: Only on religious grounds.
Jacinta: Ahh, but can't the refuseniks claim to be religious, since they have very strong beliefs based on no evidence?
Canto: Ha, well, I'm sure they'll try. And actually I think it's going to be difficult for the government to enforce this one.
Jacinta: Why should it be? Surely they have immunisation records through Medicare, it would be easy enough to check.
Canto: And what if the child spent the first few years of life overseas? And what if a parent insists the child was immunised but there's no record?
Jacinta: Mmmm, I think these are minor difficulties, and I belief it has a support level of over 80%.
Canto: Yes so we'll have to wait and see what plans the AVN have to try and sabotage it. Other state governments, in Victoria, Queensland and possibly elsewhere, are introducing measures in harmony with this, so it does seem to deal a serious blow to the refuseniks. And of course it's hoped, or expected, that it'll bounce the fence-sitters off the fence and so increase community immunity.
Jacinta: And that reminds me, I was reading somewhere about anti-vaccination hotspots. Any info on that?
Canto: Well yes, they're the places to look to for trouble. The low-down on all that can be found at this slightly unlikely source, Mamamia, an entertainment and lifestyle website – and good on them. It also has a graphic from the Department of Health that reveals the alarming rise in 'conscientious objectors' to vaccination in Australia over the last 15 years, from 4000-odd in 1999 to over 36,000 in 2013.
Jacinta: So does it mention anywhere in South Australia?
Canto: Yes, and I've noticed that these hotspots are often in quite affluent regions…
Jacinta: Depressing.
Canto: Yes, the Adelaide Hills region, which I would think is generally quite affluent, has one of the highest objection rates, with 86% of children under 5 vaccinated compared with the state average of 91.5%. But then they say that many other areas are under 85%, including Port Adelaide, Holdfast Bay – that's the Glenelg region, and Playford. So a mix of semi-affluent and relatively disadvantaged regions. Hard to make sense of it, but I think there's a distinction to made here between the refuseniks and those who just don't get round to vaccinating their kids.
Jacinta: Right, and that wouldn't necessarily come out in the data.
Canto: Yes, some are slackers and some are refuseniks.
Jacinta: And some might be fence-sitters who might be spurred into getting their kids vaccinated by this stick approach.
Canto: Yeah we'll have to wait and see whether the unvaccinated numbers go down over the next few years.
Jacinta: Which makes me wonder, how do they know that those figures you quoted before – some 36,000 – were 'conscientious objectors'?
Canto: Well they probably don't for sure, but it's highly unlikely that those numbers have gone up by almost a factor of 10 in fifteen years due to sheer complacency. I mean, is it plausible that in the last 15 years or so we've become 10 times more slack as a nation about our children's health? No, there's something much more disturbing going on. Mamamia quotes a Melbourne virologist, who claims that in some pockets of the nation our immunisation rates are lower than South Sudan.
Jacinta: Oh well done. I'm guessing they enforce vaccination in South Sudan, or I might be suffering from the delusion that most African governments are brutal dictatorships. Anyway, what are the biggest or worst hotspots nationally? I'm thinking Nimbin.
Canto: Yes, that area – Nimbin, Byron Bay, Mullumbimby, that whole northern New South Wales coastal area has vaccination rates down between 60% and 70%. Mullumbimby is the town with the highest objection rate in Australia, and the lowest immunisation rate, at under 50%. Steiner schools are popular in this region, unsurprisingly, and they're openly promoting refusenik behaviour. But there are many other problem regions, such as Queensland's Gold Coast and Sunshine coast. Noosa on the Sunshine coast also has very high objection rates.
Jacinta: These are quite wealthy areas I suppose. Any idea why this is happening?
Canto: Well, I can only speculate, but I think, with wealthy people, there's a greater degree of resistance to government measures, obviously in the case of taxation, but also with health matters. They're rich, they're healthy, they feel they're already immune, and that if they just maintain a healthy lifestyle they'll be fine. Clearly they're not particularly informed about the benefits of vaccination, or choose to believe those benefits are exaggerated. I suspect that the further we remove ourselves from the bad days of TB, diphtheria, mumps and measles, the more we'll get this creeping belief that vaccines are over-rated. The positive thing, though, is that we still have some 83% of parents in favour of some kind of punitive measure for those who don't or won't vaccinate their kids. But I do suspect that percentage will reduce over time. We humans have short memories and an over-supply of hubris, it seems to me. Or perhaps we're just a bit over-confident with respect to our survival mechanisms. We're like teenagers, we rarely listen to our parents – they're history, after all. We need a few life-blows to counter our cockiness.
Jacinta: Hmmm, grim but probably true. Anyway, the government has acted and that might reduce the number of fence-sitters, even if it polarises the issue a bit more.
reveries of a solitary wa*ker: wa*k 2
The Darwin book continues to be a rollicking good read, I'm into the post Origin period, where shit hits the fans and Darwin's fans, led by that young Turkish bulldog Tommy Huxley, shovel shit on the opposition, captained by soapy Sam Wilberforce and the brains of high Anglicanism, Dicky Owen – the most gifted naturalist of his age, to be fair. What's fascinating is that the Origin precipitated the last great politico-religious struggle in England, a very drawn-out affair which crossed the Atlantic and continues in the US to this day, but in England it has been a slow-acting poison to conservative Anglicanism. Liberal Anglicanism, essentially a bridge to atheism, has swallowed natural selection with a sort of diffident, dumb grace, flexible as to their god's ever-changing plan. As a semi-student of history though, I can well understand Darwin's own diffidence about publicizing his theory. It was bad enough for the time, had it been a century earlier (impossible of course given the eighteenth century state of knowledge) he would absolutely have been martyred for it. As it was, during the couple of decades between formulating his theory and going public, the public, especially the disaffected Chartist 'rabble', had become increasingly keen for a weapon to strike down the High Clergy and the swanningly civilised aristos, and apes for ancestors, monkeys for uncles, even gorillas for girlfriends, fitted the bill perfectly. Darwin, of course, presented his case as dispassionately as humanly possible, with nary a mention of human descent, and afterwards kept his head down in Downe, obsessing over pigeons and orchids and sexual selection (actually chipping away very effectively at the god-did-it argument), while Tommy Huxley, Joe Hooker and co fought the good Darwinian battle in the big smoke with consummate derring-do (don't believe a word of this by the way, as if you would). Darwin was anything but a fighter – he had vomiting fits at the very thought of confrontation – but in his oddly reclusive way he was always the leader, because unlike many of his supporters, even the closest ones, he knew he was right. His aim, his obsession, with all his apparently arcane researches, was to keep adding to the mountain of evidence.
There are many intriguing things about Darwin. He was vain but genuinely humble, highly-strung and emotional but profoundly analytical, a hypochondriac and yet a real invalid for stretches of his life, and of course a revolutionary who hated revolutionaries. As a young, footloose, disgustingly well-heeled intellectual, he could think of nothing better than to make a pleasant living as a naturalist-clergyman, like many a gentleman among his family's connections. By his career's end, the naturalist-clergyman was becoming a relic, probably more due to his own productions than to any other cause.
And this leads to a consideration of his most profound impact, outside the confines of science, what makes him the most controversial and contested, and in some circles reviled, figure of the past two hundred years, and that is his, and his theory's, complete denial of human specialness. A specialness which is at the heart of the Abrahamic religions, without which not.
This recognition of human relatedness to other species, the bringing of humans back to the pack, wasn't an anti-Christian urge by any means, it was more a result of his obsessive interest in solving the problems of adaptation and basic survival of creatures such as barnacles, earthworms and pigeons. This obsession gave him great respect for the sometimes barely fathomable complexity and ingenuity of even the most 'basic' life-forms. He saw human complexity as a continuation of that adaptive process, but biologists and many other scientists were, at that time, unable to shake off notions of human exceptionality. Owen, Wallace, Luis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Charles Lyell, St George Mivart and others of Darwin's time, all had qualms about, or simply rejected outright, the implications for humanity of Darwinian natural selection, and these represented the scientific mainstream, essentially. Darwin himself was able to weather the storm through the support of strong allies such as Hooker and Huxley, his own ability to avoid and deflect controversy, his inaccessibility at Downe, his long-suffering but profoundly loyal wife, and his habit of retreating into the messy fine detail of his studies. He also, through voluminous correspondence – he would've loved the world of email and Facebook – built up a huge network of scientific boffins, breeders and farmers, with whom he was unfailingly polite and charming while exploiting their specialist knowledge. So he was able to adapt very well to the challenges thrown at him.
I'm writing here as if delivering a lecture, and I do wish I could reach more people. I don't have too many contacts with a penchant for science, or for history, but then I don't have many contacts. But enough complaining (mea culpa after all), I note that the vaccination controversy drags on, with too many people standing on their 'right' to not vaccinate their children, which shows up the problems with the rights concept, which I've always considered artificial but a useful fiction which has helped to build a more humane global society, and speaking of globalism the battle to save the lives of Australians under the death penalty is almost over, but we should continue the battle to the end because it's a bad law and national sovereignty be damned, and that should be the same for any national under any national or state law. Which makes me wonder, I'm not a lawyer, but what would happen if an Australian citizen was charged with a capital offence and sentenced to death in the notorious US state of Texas? Maybe they only kill US citizens, that'd keep them out of international trouble, but what we need to keep working on is an international code of ethics and an international law and I do think we're creeping towards it slowly slowly.
the most absolute way to lose credibility
Daniel Dennett, in his most recent writings, excerpted in the second issue of The new philosopher (a mag which will be a part of my regular reading from now on) made this interesting point:
When you're reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for "surely" in the document, and check each occurrence.
Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn't be worth mentioning).
Dennett goes on to prove the point with some examples. He performs a useful service here, for "surely" and similar terms like "clearly" seem anodyne enough to pass under our radar. The term "absolutely", not so, and as such, it's far less sophisticated. In fact, it's one of the most obvious signposts for BS that we have, and it should send any worthwhile skeptic's antennae bouncing off the ceiling. The anti-vaccination guru screams that vaccination is absolutely the worst medical intervention in human history, the creationist that evilution is absolutely contrary to their god's plan, and the climate-change denier asseverates that there's absolutely no credible evidence…
Step no further, for here lurks the big bad demon of absolutely committed ideology. It's not the sort of term you read in the philosophical articles Dennett has been targeting, but of course it's everywhere on the internet, and in the generally unsophisticated arena of political debate.
So I was amused to hear our current human rights commissioner Tim Wilson falling into the trap, like a drunken stumblebum falling off a well-signposted cliff. Wilson was on a panel of the ABC's current affairs program The drum, and one of the topics discussed was the impact that the anti-vaccination movement was having on the incidence of measles in the USA. Wilson's response was essentially pro-science, and so condemnatory of the anti-vaccination trend, though he also invoked the interesting argument that this was to protect children, while adults should be free to be as anti-science as they liked, and presumably free to promote the kind of anti-science agenda that's causing all the problems in the first place.
But while it's a thorny question as to whether or not good science should be enforced in some way, it was Wilson's response to another panel commentator that really tickled me. The commentator pointed out the parallels between the anti-vaccination movement and climate change deniers – a fairly obvious point, I would've thought – and Wilson jumped in with the claim that 'there are absolutely no parallels…'
Considering the fairly obvious parallels, Wilson's remark (which he wasn't able to elaborate on due to to it being made just as the final credits were about to roll), was a massive red flag, which immediately prompted me to check his bonafides on anthropogenic global warming.
But before checking out Wilson, let me state the parallels. First, both the vaccination debate and the AGW debate are loud and passionate. They also both exhibit the age-old truism that there's an inverse relation between passionately-held positions and knowledge of the subject. Third and most important, they are both debates over what is essentially settled science. In the case of vaccination, the science tells us that vaccinations have led to the prevention and reduction of multiple diseases around the world over many decades, and that the negative effects of vaccination, if any, are far outweighed by the lives saved and the suffering minimised. In the case of AGW, climate scientists are in consensus that the globe is experiencing a warming event, and that this warming event, as measured through atmospheric and oceanic temperatures, is being significantly contributed to by human activity, and emissions of CO2 in particular.
Wilson's impressive resumé here tells me that he's 'currently completing a Graduate Diploma of Energy and the Environment (Climate Science and Global Warming) at Perth's Murdoch University' and that he's an 'international public policy analyst specialising in international trade, health, intellectual property and climate change policy', so he's presumably well acquainted with climate science, which makes his 'absolutely' claim all the more odd. Digging deeper though, we find that for some time he was the policy director of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a well-known free market think tank. Free marketeers are not always keen on accepting AGW, as it tends to interfere with business…
Wilson himself has been pretty careful about his public comments on AGW – at least I can't find any outrageously silly remarks from him, but in 2010, while he was the IPA's director of climate change policy, the organisation brought out a publication called Climate change: the facts, which is largely anti-climate science propaganda, as is evidenced by the fact that none of the contributors agree with the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, i.e. that AGW is a serious problem that we need to act upon. Some of the authors accept AGW but minimise its extent and its negative effects while others simply deny its existence. The publication includes as authors the wholly discredited Ian Plimer, and the quite literally insane Christopher Monckton, who has no scientific training whatsoever. It also includes 'old guard' scientists such as Garth Partridge, Richard Lindzen, Bob Carter and William Kininmouth, all well into their seventies, and with links to the fossil fuel industries. One contributor, Willie Soon, has since been found to be a hireling of the fossil fuel lobby, to the tune of over $1 million. Others, such as Nigel Lawson, the eighty-something-year-old ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer under Thatcher, just make the publication look more embarrassingly irrelevant than it might have been for propaganda purposes. One has to wonder why the book was published – it must surely have harmed the climate deniers' cause amongst the fence-sitters at whom it was presumably targeted.
The quality of the work can be judged by its brief introduction, written by John Roskam, current executive director of the IPA. Take this excerpt:
We don't believe 'the science is settled'. As a think tank committed to the ideals of free and open enquiry and debate we are not afraid to stand against the mainstream of prevailing elite opinion.
Why is the word elite in there, in a book supposedly dedicated to debating the facts? Scientists are always debating, criticising each other's published work, suggesting alternative interpretations of raw data – that's a standard scientific process. Skepticism as to results is a sine qua non of scientific enquiry. But they never describe those they disagree with as elites. That would suggest that something else was at play. It seems particularly inappropriate when the writers themselves are Lords, ex-leaders of government, and linked to some of the world's largest corporations, while those accused of elitism are usually living on an unreliable stream of grants and scholarships.
Welcome, though, to the world of climate change denial, which, far from presenting alternative facts, is largely fact-free. Although I've not read Climate change: the facts, I expect it will present the same variety of views, many of them contradicting each other, that Naomi Klein describes in the first chapter of her book on the politics of climate change, This changes everything. Her description – which hits you like an icy cold shower – is of a conference dedicated to climate change denial run by the USA's Heartland Institute, another right-wing think tank, though much bigger and more bullish than the IPA. And surprise surprise, a number of the Australian book's contributors were speakers at that conference. As it turns out, right-wing think tanks are almost solely responsible for the slew of anti-AGW propaganda that assails us today, and of all the contentious scientific issues, this one divides most neatly along politico-ideological lines.
So this helps to explain why Tim Wilson says he finds 'absolutely no parallels' between AGW and the vaccination 'debate'. For him, though not for climate scientists, the science is not settled. But, being educated on the matter, he also knows that what he wants to be true, really isn't. So, to cover what he knows to be bullshit, he resorts, quite unthinkingly, to the word 'absolutely'. What a fine mess bad faith gets people into, and how painfully obvious it all is.
some thoughts on humanism and activism
I've been a little more involved in 'movements' in recent years, though I'm not usually much of a joiner, and I've always been wary of 'activism', which is often associated with protesting, personning the barricades (doesn't have quite the aggressive ring to it, does it?), even a bit of biffo – if largely verbal, by preference. I've just been hungry for a bit of stimulus – salon culture, witty and cultured and informative exchanges with people cleverer than myself. But since I've been occasionally asked to engage on a higher, or deeper level, in 'the culture wars', on the side of reason, atheism, secularism, humanism, whatever, my thoughts on the matter have started to crystallise, and they're hopefully in evidence in my blog writing.
I don't mind calling myself an activist for humanism, or for other isms, but I think we should be activists for rather than against. Now it might be argued that to argue for one thing is to argue against another, so it doesn't really matter, but I think it matters a great deal. It's a matter of trying to be positive and influencing others with your positivity. Secular humanism has a great case to promote, as do reason, self-awareness and 'skepticism with sympathy'.
I've learned from years of teaching students from scores of different countries and cultures that we all can be excited by learning new stuff, that we're amused by similar things, that we all want to improve and to be loved and appreciated. The ties that bind us as humans are far greater than those that divide us culturally or in other ways. I've also learned that the first principle of good teaching is to engage your students, rather than haranguing or badgering them. This may not seem easy when you're teaching something as apparently dry and contentless as language and grammar, but language is essentially a technology for communicating content, and if we didn't have anything meaningful or important to communicate, we'd never have developed it. So the key is to engage students with content that's relevant to them, and stimulating and thought-provoking enough that they'll want to communicate those thoughts.
I suppose I'm talking about constructive engagement, and this is the best form of activism. Of course, like everyone, I don't always 'constructively engage'. I get mad and frustrated, I dismiss with contempt, I feel offended or vengeful, yet the best antidote to those negative feelings is simple, and that is to throw yourself into the lives, the culture, the background of your 'enemy', or the 'other', which requires imagination as well as knowledge. I mis-spent a lot of my youth reading fiction from non-English backgrounds – from France and Germany, from Russia and eastern Europe, from Africa and Asia. It was a lot cheaper than travelling, especially as I avoided a lot of paid work in order to indulge my reading. Of course I read other stuff too, history, philosophy, psychology, new-wave feminism, but fiction – good fiction, of course – situated all these subjects and issues within conflicted, emotional, culturally-shaped and striving individuals, and provided me with a sense of the almost unfathomable complexity of human endeavour. The understanding of multiple backgrounds and contexts, especially when recognising that your own background is a product of so much chance, creates multiple sympathies, and that's essential to humanism, to my mind.
However, there are limits to such identifications. Steven Pinker discusses this in The better angels of our nature (the best advertisement for humanism I've ever read) by criticising the overuse, or abuse, of the term 'empathy' and expressing his preference for 'sympathy'. Empathy is an impossible ideal, and it can involve losing your own bearings in identifying with another. There are always broader considerations.
Take the case of the vaccination debate. While there are definitely charlatans out there directly benefitting from the spread of misinformation, most of the people we meet who are opposed to vaccination aren't of that kind, usually they have personal stories or information from people they trust that has caused them to think the way they do. We can surely feel sympathy with such people – after all, we also have had personal experiences that have massively influenced how we think, and we get much of our info from people we trust. But we also have evidence, or know how to get it. We owe it to ourselves and others to be educated on these matters. How many of us who advocate vaccination know how a vaccine actually works? If we wish to enter that particular debate, a working knowledge of the science is an essential prerequisite (and it's not so difficult, there's a lot of reliable explanatory material online, including videos), together with a historical knowledge of the benefits of vaccination in virtually eradicating various diseases. To arm yourself with and disseminate such knowledge is, to me, the best form of humanist activism.
I'll choose a couple more topical issues, to look at how we could and should be positively active, IMHO. The first, current in Australia, is chaplaincy in schools. The second, a pressing issue right now for Australians but of universal import, is capital punishment.
The rather odd idea of chaplaincy in schools was first mooted by Federal Minister Greg Hunt in 2006 after lobbying from a church leader and was acted upon by the Howard government in 2007. It was odd for a number of reasons. First, education is generally held to be a state rather than a federal responsibility, and second, our public education system has no provision in it for religious instruction or religious proselytising. The term 'chaplain' has a clear religious, or to be more precise Christian, association, so why, in the 21st century, in an increasingly multicultural society in which Christianity was clearly on the decline according to decades of census figures, and more obviously evidenced by scores of empty churches in each state, was the federal government introducing these Christian reps into our schools via taxpayer funds? It was an issue tailor-made for humanist organisations, humanism being dedicated – and I trust my view on this is uncontroversial – to emphasising what unites us, in terms of human rights and responsibilities, rather than what divides us (religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation etc). To introduce these specifically Christian workers, out of the blue, into an increasingly non-Christian arena, seemed almost deliberately divisive.
Currently the National School Chaplaincy Program is in recess, having been stymied by two effective High Court challenges brought by a private citizen, Ron Williams, of the Humanist Society of Queensland. As far as I'm aware, Williams' challenge was largely self-funded, but assisted by a donation from at least one of the state humanist societies. This was a cause that could and should have been financed and driven by humanists in a nationally co-ordinated campaign, which would have enabled humanists to have a voice on the issue, and to make a positive contribution to the debate.
What would have been that contribution? Above all to provide evidence, for the growing secularism and multiculturalism of the nation and therefore the clearly anachronistic and potentially divisive nature of the government's policy. Identification with every Christian denomination is dropping as a percentage of the national population, and the drop is accelerating. This is nobody's opinion, it's simply a fact. Church attendance is at the lowest it's ever been in our Christian history – another fact. Humanists could have gone on the front foot in questioning the role of these chaplains. In the legislation they're expected to provide "support and guidance about ethics, values, relationships and spirituality", but there's an insistence that they shouldn't replace school counsellors, for counselling isn't their role. Apparently they're to provide support without counselling, just by 'being there'. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just have their photos on the school walls? The 'spirituality' role is one that humanists could have a lot of fun with. I've heard the argument that people are just as religious as ever, but that they've rejected the established churches, and are developing their own spirituality, their own relationship to their god, so I suppose it would follow that their spirituality needs to be nourished at school. But the government has made a clear requirement that chaplains need to be members of an established religion (and obviously of a Christian denomination), so how exactly is that going to work?
While humour, along with High Court challenges and pointed questions about commitment to real education and student welfare, would be the way to 'get active' with the school chaplaincy fiasco, the capital punishment issue is rather more serious.
The Indonesian decision to execute convicted drug pedlars of various nationalities has attracted a lot of unwanted publicity, from an Indonesian perspective, but a lot of the response, including some from our government, has been lecturing and hectoring. People almost gleefully describe the Indonesians as barbarians and delight in the term 'state-sanctioned murder', mostly unaware of the vast changes in our society that have made capital punishment, which ended here in the sixties, seem like something positively medieval. These changes have not occurred to the same degree in other parts of the world, and as humanists, with a hopefully international perspective, we should be cognisant of this, aware of the diversity, and sympathetic to the issues faced by other nations faced with serious drug and crime problems. But above all we should look to offer humane solutions.
By far the best contribution to this issue I've heard so far has come from Richard Branson, representing the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), who spoke of his and other commissioners' interest in speaking to the Indonesians about solutions to their drug problems, not to lecture or to threaten, but to advise on drug policies that work. No mention was made about capital punishment, which I think was a good thing, for what has rendered capital punishment obsolete more than anything else has been the development of societies that see their members as flawed but capable, mostly, of development for the better. Solutions to crime, drug use and many other issues – including, for that matter, joining terrorist organisations – are rarely punitive. They involve support, communication and connection. Branson, interviewed on the ABC's morning news program, pointed to the evidence showing that harsh penalties had no effect on the drug trade, and that the most effective policy by far was legalisation. It's probably not a story that our government would be sympathetic to, and it takes us deeply into the politics of drug law reform, but it is in fact a science-based approach to the issue that humanists should be active in supporting and promulgating. Branson pointed to the example of Portugal, which had, he claimed, drug problems as serious as that of Indonesia, which have since been greatly alleviated through a decriminalisation and harm-reduction approach.
I hope to write more about the GCDP's interesting and productive-looking take on drug policy on my Solutions OK website in the future. Meanwhile, this is just the sort of helpful initiative that humanists should be active in getting behind. Indonesians are arguing that the damage being done by drug pushers requires harshly punitive measures, but the GCDP's approach, which bypasses the tricky issue of national sovereignty, and capital punishment itself, is offered in a spirit of co-operation that is perfectly in line with an active, positive humanism.
So humanism should be as active as possible, in my view, and humanists should strive to get themselves heard on such broad issues as education, crime, equity and the environment, but they should enter the fray armed with solutions that are thoughtful, practicable and humane. Hopefully, we're here to help.
on vaccines and type 1 diabetes, part 3 – causes
As mentioned earlier, it's not precisely known what causes diabetes type 1, more commonly known as childhood diabetes. There's a genetic component, but it's clearly environmental factors that are leading to the recent apparently rapid rise in this type.
I use the word 'apparent' because it's actually hard to put figures on this rise, due to a paucity of historical records. This very thorough and informative article, already 12 years old, from the ADA (American Diabetes Association – an excellent website for everything to do with the evidence and the science on diabetes), tries to gather together the patchy worldwide data to cover the changing demography and the evolving disease process. At the beginning of the 2oth century childhood diabetes was rare but commonly fatal (before insulin), and even by mid-century no clear rise in childhood incidence had been recorded. To quote the article, 'even by 1980 only a handful of studies were available, the "hot spots" in Finland and Sardinia were unrecognized, and no adequate estimates were available for 90% of the world's population'. Blood glucose testing in the early 20th century was far from being as simple a matter as it is today, and the extent of undiagnosed cases is hard to determine.
There's no doubt, however, that in those countries keeping reliable data, such as Norway and Denmark, a marked upturn in incidence occurred from the mid 20th century, followed by a levelling out from the 1980s. Studies from Sardinia and the Netherlands have found a similar pattern, but in Finland the increase from mid-century has been quite linear, with no levelling out. Data from other northern European countries and the USA, though less comprehensive, show a similar mid-century upturn. Canada now (or as of 12 years ago) has the third highest rate of childhood diabetes in the world. The trend seems to have been that many of the more developed countries first showed a sharp increase, followed by something of a slow-down, and then other countries, such as those of central and eastern Europe and the Middle East, 'played catch-up'. Kuwait, for example, had reached seventh in the world at the time of the article, confounding many beliefs about the extent of the disease's genetic component.
The article is admirably careful not to rush to conclusions about causes. It may be that a number of environmental factors have converged to bring about the rise in incidence. For example, it's known that rapid growth in early childhood increases the risk, and children do in fact grow faster on average than they did a century ago. Obesity may also be a factor. Baffled researchers naturally look for something new that has entered the childhood environment, either in terms of nutrition (e.g. increased exposure to cow's milk) or infection (enteroviruses). Neither of these possibilities fit the pattern of incidence in any obvious way, though there may be subtle changes in antigenicity or exposure at different stages of development, but there's scant evidence of these.
Another line of inquiry is the possible loss of protective factors, as part of the somewhat vague but popular 'hygiene hypothesis', which argues that lack of early immune system stimulation creates greater susceptibility, particularly to allergies and asthma, but perhaps also to childhood diabetes and other conditions. The ADA article has this comment:
Epidemiological evidence for the hygiene hypothesis is inconsistent for childhood type 1 diabetes, but it is notorious that the NOD mouse is less likely to develop diabetes in the presence of pinworms and other infections. Pinworm infestation was common in the childhood populations of Europe and North America around the mid-century, and this potentially protective exposure has largely been lost since that time.
The NOD (non-obese diabetic) strain of mice was developed in Japan as an animal model for type 1 diabetes.
The bottom line from all this is that more research and monitoring of the disease needs to be done. Type 1 diabetes is a complex challenge to our understanding of the human immune system, and of the infinitely varied feedback loops between genetics and environment, requiring perhaps a broader questioning and analysis than has been applied thus far. Again I'll quote, finally, from the ADA article:
In conclusion, the quest to understand type 1 diabetes has largely been driven by the mechanistic approach, which has striven to characterize the disease in terms of defining molecular abnormalities. This goal has proved elusive. Given the complexity and diversity of biological systems, it seems increasingly likely that the mechanistic approach will need to be supplemented by a more ecological concept of balanced competition between complex biological processes, a dynamic interaction with more than one possible outcome. The traditional antithesis between genes and environment assumed that genes were hardwired into the phenotype, whereas growth and early adaptation to the environment are now viewed as an interactive process in which early experience of the outside world is fed back to determine lasting patterns of gene expression. The biological signature of each individual thus derives from a dynamic process of adaptation, a process with a history.
However, none of this appears to provide any backing for those who claim that a vaccine is responsible for the increased prevalence of the condition. So let's wade into this specific claim.
It seems the principle claim of the anti-vaxxers is that vaccines suppress our natural immune system. This is the basic claim, for example, of Dr Josef Mercola, a prominent and heavily self-advertising anti-vaxxer whose various sites happen to come up first when you combine and google key terms such as 'vaccination' and 'natural immunity'. Mercola's railings against vaccination, microwaves, sunscreens and HIV (it's harmless) have garnered him quite a following among the non compos mentis, but you should be chary of leaping in horror from his grasp into the waiting arms of the next site on the list, that of the Vaccination Awareness Network (VAN), another Yank site chock-full of of BS about the uselessness of and the harm caused by every vaccine ever developed, some of it impressively technical-sounding, but accompanied by 'research links' that either go nowhere or to tabloid news reports. Watch out too for the National Vaccination Information Centre (NVIC), another anti-vax front, full of heart-rending anecdotes which omit everything required to make an informed assessment. The best may seem to lack conviction, being skeptics and all, but it's surely true that the worst are full of passionate intensity.
There is no evidence that the small volumes of targeted antigens introduced into our bodies by vaccines have any negative impact on our highly complex immune system. This would be well-nigh impossible to test for, and the best we might do is look for a correlation between vaccination and increased (or decreased) levels of disease incidence. No such correlation has been found between the MMR vaccine and diabetes, though this Italian paper did find a statistically significant association between the incidence of mumps and rubella viral infections and the onset of type 1 diabetes. Another paper from Finland found that the incidence of type 1 diabetes levelled out after the introduction of the MMR vaccine there, and that the presence of mumps antibodies was reduced in diabetic children after vaccination. This is a mixed result, but as yet there haven't been any follow-up studies.
To conclude, there is just no substantive evidence of any kind to justify all the hyperventilating.
But to return to the conversation with colleagues that set off this bit of exploration, it concluded rather blandly with the claim that, 'yes of course vaccinations have done more good than harm, but maybe the MMR vaccine isn't so necessary'. One colleague took a 'neutral' stance. 'I know kids that haven't been vaccinated, and they've come to no harm, and I know kids that have, and they've come to no harm either. And measles and mumps, they're everyday diseases, and relatively harmless, it's probably not such a bad thing to contract them…'
But this is a false neutrality. Firstly, when large numbers of parents choose not to immunise their kids, it puts other kids at risk, as the graph at the top shows. And secondly, these are not harmless diseases. Take measles. While writing this, I had a memory of someone I worked with over twenty years ago. He had great thick lenses in his glasses. I wear glasses too, and we talked about our eye defects. 'I had pretty well perfect vision as a kid,' he told me, 'and I always sat at the back of the class. Then I got measles and was off school for a fortnight. When I went back, sat at the back, couldn't see a thing. Got my eyes tested and found out they were shot to buggery.'
Anecdotal evidence! Well, it's well known that blindness and serious eye defects are a major complication of measles, which remains a killer disease in many of the poorest countries in the world. In fact, measles blindness is the single leading cause of blindness in those countries, with an estimated 15,000 to 60,000 cases a year. So pat yourself on the back for living in a rich country.
In 2013, some 145,700 people died from measles – mostly young children. In 1980, before vaccination was widely implemented, an estimated 2.6 million died annually from measles, according to the WHO.
Faced with such knowledge, claims to 'neutrality' are hardly forgivable.


text: Why should I put my merch up on Bandcamp? We're glad you asked! Here's why. Related articles How do I sell merch on Bandcamp? Can you store and ship my merch? Why do I have to add images of my merch? If a fan buys two or more physical items, how are the shipping costs calculated? What about taxes?


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This page contain third party addins for Cake. If you want to file an issue for any addin listed here, contact the author of the addin.
If you're an addin author and want your addin listed here, follow the instructions here.
Cake add-on trying to make it easier to handle various inputs from arguments and environment variable.
- Author
- Adam Patridge
- NuGet
- Cake.ArgumentHelpers
- Repository
- https://github.com/patridge/Cake.ArgumentHelpers/
The project compiles multiple xml configs to single one using the CTT.
- Author
- BggClr
- NuGet
- Cake.XmlConfigStructureBuilder
- Repository
- https://github.com/graph-uk/Cake.XmlConfigStructureBuilder/


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I have had no desire to do much of anything today. I'm so laaaaaazy. I got up around 10 a.m., puttered around for a bit, checked my email, then watched my new DVD of Finding Nemo ($15 at Walmart!). It's such a great movie, and all of the voice performances are amazing, especially Alison Janney as Peach the Starfish.
So then I talked to Overg for about an hour on the phone. Lucky me! I get to talk to the guy that all the girls think is sooooo dreeeeeeeamy. Then I puttered around some more. Around 2 p.m. I finally braved the outside world and drove to the Hallmark store to buy two birthday cards. I also bought Yankee Candle tarts in Carrot Cake and Cranberry Chutney (burning the carrot cake one now, smells good).
This Hallmark was also sold out of the Finding Nemo ornament I want. I want that ornament very badly, but according the the Hallmark Lady, it's sold out all over the city.
Then I came home, puttered, baked a sweet potato for lunch, tweaked this journal's settings a little bit, talked to Rappy, and packaged up two birthday presents and cards. I was going to go out to the Post Office and mail them, but then the siren call of my bed distracted me into taking a nap.
I woke up at 7. Decided to give myself a full-body exfoliation before jumping in the shower. I whole-heartedly recommend full-body exfoliation to you. How do you accomplish full-body exfoliation, you say? Well you take any body scrub - cheap, expensive, doesn't matter - and you massage a generous amount into your skin BEFORE YOU GET IN THE SHOWER. Your skin must be dry when you start; this is what results in the best exfoliation.
Then you get in the shower and rinse off. Your skin will be as smooth as glass, guaranteed. I use the cheapest scrubs I can find at Big Lots to do this - the Totally Juicy Hot Apple and Grapefruit scrubs work very well (and are about $2 a tube).
And now? I've fed the cats, and I'm contemplating what to make for dinner. I think it will be chicken salad with pineapple, and a side of lowfat cottage cheese. I was going to steam some brocco-locco-loccoli, but now I don't feel like it.
Oh, and Otis has a pinpoint hole in his top fin, for some reason.Posted by Julie on November 8, 2003 07:32 PM to the category Day In the Life
Heewig! Are you trying to make us jealous? Well, it's working. *pouty face* ~~TVJ~~Posted by: TVJunkie at November 9, 2003 11:59 AM


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CSIR UGC NET 2017 is conducted every year in the month of June and December. For the year 2017, the exam will be conducted in the third week of June 2017. The official notification has not been released yet but it will soon be available here. The National Eligibility Test is organized by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research i.e. the CSIR on behalf of the UGC. The exam is conducted for the eligibility of lectureship and research programs. Other details about the eligibility criteria, application procedures, exam pattern, admit card, result etc. of the CSIR UGC NET 2017 are given below.
CSIR UGC NET 2017 – About the Exam
The basic details of the CSIR UGC NET 2017 have been given as follows.
Exam name: CSIR UGC NET 2017
Conducting body: University Grants Commission (UGC)
Available posts: Lectureship/assistant professor and JRF
CSIR UGC NET 2017 Eligibility Criteria
The eligibility criteria for an exam are generally set by the conducting authorities. These are a set of certain rules and conditions which must essentially be followed by the candidates to be eligible for taking the exam. Any candidate found not satisfying the eligibility criteria shall later be debarred from the recruitment process. The eligibility conditions for the CSIR UGC NET 2017 are given as follows.
- Candidates must be holding a graduation degree in any of the courses such as B.E., B.Tech., B.Pharma., M.Sc., MBBS with a minimum pass percentage of 55% from a recognized university.
- Candidates appearing in the final year exams of M.Sc. are also eligible to apply for this exam.
- The age limit to be eligible for this exam is that the candidate should not be of age more than 28 years.
CSIR UGC NET 2017 Application Form
The CSIR UGC NET 2017 application form can be filled online through the official portal of this exam. The direct link to apply for the exam has been given here. If the candidates want to take part in the recruitment process and the written exam, they shall have to submit the application form along with the application fee before the deadline is reached. The procedure to fill the application form is given as follows.
- To begin with, the candidates must click on the link given here to start applying for the exam.
- Next, the candidate must fill the opened application form with the correct details. After completing the application form, the candidates must take a printout of the completed form.
- This application form must be sent to the address given below along with the Demand Draft of the application fee as given below.
Application fee:
For general category aspirants: Rs.1000
For OBC category aspirants: Rs.500
For SC/ST/PWD aspirants: Rs.250
Senior Controller of Examination,
Examination Unit, HRD Group,
CSIR Complex,
Opposite Institute of Hotel Management,
Library Avenue, Pusa,
New Delhi -110012
CSIR UGC NET 2017 Exam Pattern
The exam pattern of an exam depicts the internal details of a question paper. These include the type of questions put up in the paper, the number of questions, the total time allotted, the marks distribution etc. All such details must be known by the participants of the exam so that they can attempt the paper better and also prepare for it better. The exam pattern for the CSIR UGC NET 2017 exam is given as follows.
- The type of questions asked will be multiple choice type questions.
- The total marks of the paper will be 200 marks.
- The total time duration of the exam is 3 hours.
- Negative marking is applicable for this exam.
- The questions will be asked of the major subjects like life sciences, mathematical sciences, chemical sciences, engineering sciences, physical sciences, earth and atmospheric sciences.
CSIR UGC NET 2017 Exam Dates
|Online application process starts from
|August 2017
|Date of close of deposit of fees (all stations)
|September 2017
|Date of close of online submission
|September 2017
|Last date of receipt of duly completed hard copy of online application in the examination unit
|September 2017
|Last date of receipt of duly completed hard copy of online application in the examination unit (from remote areas)
|September 2017
|Last date for receipt of written request for change of examination centre only on merit basis
|October 2017
|Tentative date of publication of list of candidates registered for test on CSIR HRDG website
|November 2017
|Last date for accepting of representation about non-registration for this test
|November 2017
|Exam Date (CSIR UGC NET December 2017)
|December 2017
CSIR UGC NET 2017 Admit Card
The admit card for the CSIR UGC NET 2017 exam will be released some days before the exams. The admit card is a very mandatory document which is essentially required at the time of written exam. If a candidate is found without the admit card, he/she shall not be allowed to appear for the written exam. Therefore, all the candidates must download the admit card on time and get it printed so that it can be brought to the exam hall. The date of release of admit card will soon be notified here soon.
CSIR UGC NET 2017 Result
The CSIR UGC NET 2017 result shall be released after some time of the exam. the result will also be released online only on the official site. The result shall show the cut-off marks for the test. All the candidates who will cross this cut-off score will be included in the result and will be seen as qualified for the CSIR UGC NET 2016 exam. Candidates will be able to check their result through the link that will be posted here as soon as it is available.
Official Link:


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- Info
- Reviews
- Share
Max Drift
Hop into your amazing super car and do your best job at drifting.
Make a drift and score as you can the more score you get the more cash you gain. Use your cash to buy another car.
As Always, Good Luck and Have Fun.
How to Play:
WASD to Steer
Spacebar to Brake


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Kenzie Tarantino
Location: Atlanta, GA
Kenzie Tarantino, born Anthony Christopher McKenzie, was born on June 7th, 1994 in Southhill, Virginia.
After spending his years in Virginia, Kenzie Tarantino relocated to Atlanta in 2005 where he began to record music alongside his friend.
Through the years Kenzie continued to craft and perfect his skills which would eventually turn into leaving the group and going solo.
From releasing his first ever project titled Rude Awakening in 2013 to releasing countless others, Kenzie continues to develop as an artist on numerous artistic levels.
At the top of 2017, Kenzie released a project called "Six-Seven-'94" that garnered thousands of plays and continues to rise.
Along with music releases, Kenzie Tarantino has banded alongside fellow artist 'Slice Dhe Guevara' to form the collective "Shaolin The Temple."


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Frances Bean Cobain has once again proved that there should be no doubt cast upon her musical talents.
The daughter of the music icons Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain revealed the third snippet of a new song on Instagram Sunday. The track, which the 26-year-old musician plays on acoustic guitar, features her gorgeous, gritty vocals, showing that musical talent does indeed run in the family.
Cobain's latest snippet is the third original piece of music she's shared with the public. She shared her first track earlier this year, on the anniversary of her father's death, and a now-deleted offering in June, as well as a few covers of songs. Despite sharing a handful of clips, Cobain hasn't revealed the titles of any of her tracks. But in her most recent post, she does provide what seems like a self-critique in the caption, saying, "'What she lacks in technical precision, she makes up for with charisma' ? ???."
While it's unclear when the burgeoning singer will be releasing full compositions, the Irish publication The Business Times reported that Cobain has signed a two-year record deal with Columbia Records. However, she has yet to officially confirm or announce future projects.
After sharing her first original song clip this spring, Cobain made it a point to leave the idea of a "release" open-ended. An E! News reporter asked her about the snippet in April, after she initially shared it, and she downplayed the song. "I don't want to pigeonhole myself and say I am a musician or a visual artist because I feel like it's all encompassing and I feel like every bit of my art is related to the other," she told the reporter. "So do I want to pursue my music further and see it come to fruition and see something further and see something palpable? Absolutely."
There's no reason why Cobain should be downplaying her talents—she's clearly nailed her grunge-tinged compositions.
Watch Cobain's video below to hear her latest song and see the lyrics she provided (originally posted in her Instagram Stories).
Related: Frances Bean Cobain Has Dreams of Creating the World's First "Comic Book Cookbook"


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Support stopping the shark fin trade in the USA.
Since 2006 Shark Stewards has been a leader in reducing the shark fin trade and raising awareness about the plight of sharks.
In 2016 we supported banning the trade in Rhode Island, New Hampshire and New Jersey– without exemption for domestic sharks. In 2017 we lead the bill to stop the trade of shark fin and manta gills in Nevada, which became the became the 12th US State to ban the sale and trade of shark fin.
2019 Update & Action to Support the US Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act
Sign the Petition and Contact Your Congressperson to SUPPORT the US Shark Fin Trade Ban HR 737
2019 Globally shark populations are on the decline. 25% of all sharks and rays are threatened with extinction. Sharks are being overfished and the shark fin trade is threatening large species of sharks such as blue sharks with extinction. Join Shark Stewards supporting the US Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act HR 737.
Shark finning is the abhorrent and wasteful practice of cutting off a shark's fins and discarding the body, often still alive, back into the ocean to drown or bleed to death. However, this is only part of the problem. Sharks are being overfished globally, largely driven by the demand for shark fin to make shark fin soup. The shark fin trade in the U.S. contributes to plummeting shark populations across the world.
The National Marine Fisheries Service Fisheries Statistics and Economics Division indicate that nearly 15,000 tons of shark fins were exported from the US to mainland China in 2014. Although the US is a minor part of the global trade, shark fin consumption and exports to Asia exacerbate the problem and add to the overall threat of sharks survival.
Shark finning is illegal in US waters, but fins from sharks finned on the high seas, caught illegally or unsustainably by other nations can still be imported into most US states and then sold domestically and exported overseas. Many countries do not have laws against shark finning laws, or like Mexico rarely enforce them, threatening migratory species. Shark finners or unregulated shark fisheries are profiting by trading through US ports. Help stop the slaughter by reducing the demand for this unnecessary luxury and helping halt the shark fin trade.
Please Add Your Voice and Sign the Petition!
In 2017 Las Vegas joined 11 other US states, 3 US Territories and several other countries banning the sale and trade of shark fin and shark fin soup. Drawing attention to consumption and practices in the west is having a significant influence on consumption patterns in Asia. Stopping the import exports and domestic consumption of this unsustainable product will help save the world's sharks.


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defining language to conquer labels
by jennifer kiley
i've been having a debate on labels for a long time. don't like them when they are derogatory. but when one uses them in writing are they still labels or are they words you use that people are familiar with and you are trying to reclaim their value and to redefine their core meaning in a positive way.?
i am bipolar or i have bipolar.
i am a lesbian or i am woman identified.
i am a writer or i am an author or i am both.
when does one change from being a writer to an author?
does it happen once you are published?
or are you always both because if you keep writing than you may have something that is published and writing that is in process. and you may never be published now, in your life time or ever. does that stop you from being identified as a writer? is the word writer a "label?" or is writer just a way of expressing part of who you are so that you and others can understand something that may be important to you. or it is just a way of identifying yourself or the way others identify themselves. if you write poetry, are you not a poet? do you think it is important that someone besides yourself knows that?
it is a driving force in our society to have at least some sort of identity or you might feel lost. if you have nothing to hold onto that is you, do you stop existing? is that why some people "lose their minds?" what exactly does it mean to "lose your mind?" it seems rather careless. that is something oscar wilde would say. i think i went through a phase in my late teens that somehow i was going to "lose my mind." where i got that idea, i don't remember. except that i was fascinated with psychology from the time i first discovered it. understanding the mind. when i would get stoned on pot, i would want to analyze the experience of getting high, i had and still do have a strong need to understand everything.
back to identities: when does one have the right to define their identity with words that give their life meaning and a way to define who they are? is it for themselves to place the word artist into thier verbal or written bio or must the outside world or culture give them the definition of their life's existence? the acceptance of the world, is that what is needed to feel you really exist? when we are kids, many of us have a wish to be famous. is that about immortality? it doesn't seem to make the really talented geniuses of the world terribly happy about fame. i think it's more about leaving your mark, making a difference, helping to change the world in some way that improves it and that has a postive effect.
i have a confession. there is something that bothers me, i feel very wrong about people who become famous because they are famous for doing absolutely nothing. they just happen to be on a reality show. and i am not talking about shows that support talent. they are famous for living in front of a camera. what is that all about? the film "The Truman Show" showed how phony that really was. i don't get why anyone watches these shows.
digressing is something i am quite good at. my next question is where does meaning come from afterall?
there are books written about probably everything that exists in the human universe. but then there is always a place for different interpretations of any thought or theory that exists or that hasn't been hatched out yet.
is everything known already but just impossble for any human mind to perceive in an open consciousness? the buried unconscious or subliminal subconscious or vivid dreams that reveal symbols to the hidden part of the infinite universes. we just need to remember. maybe we all have temporary amnesia about all that has been revealed to us.
death is such a secret. why? what would be so wrong in letting us all in on the (i wanted to say "joke" but that would be rude) secret? are the athiests right? my feeling is no one really knows the truth, at least not the full truth. it's been divided up and administered to various gate keepers or secret keepers. that way no one can tell the whole story. we each have to tell our own part of it.
is that what writers do?
is that what artists do?
is that what musicians do?
is that what poets do?
does everyone play a role in holding onto the secrets of the infinite?
now i am going to be facetious. do politicians have any clues to the meaning of life, death, the hereafter or were they sent down here to play chess with the lives of all living things? some i feel are sincere but most i am not sure that i trust their motives. what is their real purpose?
i once asked myself, more than once, does one need meaning and purpose to live out a contented or happy life?
my life is driven by the force, but once i was under the spell of the protestant ethic. work. work. work. it didn't matter that you enjoyed it. what mattered is that you just did it. shut up and were satisfied. happiness didn't matter.
when i speak of the force, star wars comes to mind, but it isn't that force necessarily that i am referring to and yet it might be. i am talking about being connected to the energies of the multi-verse with it's 11 dimensions. infinity upon infinity upon infinity and so on. we always think that we are the only planet with a life force of humans and other living things. how arrogant are we? this vastness of space that goes on forever. think about the possiility that there are other universes and there are other life forms who may or may not think about the philosophers' questions of life and death and infinity. our brains cannot consciously perceive the infinite. we may try but our brains might explode if we actually succeeded.
so back to labels. i like to know who i am, to understand the inner workings of my being. i use words through writing and talking to express that meaning. to go beyond myself, i want to understand the basic meanings of life. love is important to me. caring for other creatures, human and animals are important to me. feeling excitement and exhilaration when something special effects my life or the lives of others in my world. my world may start with those i am close to personally but it extends to all people. in a symbolic way, i care that anyone is not loved, is suffering, is starving, have no shelter, are being harmed in any way. i don't understand why there exists in the world so much hatred. i know why there is so much animosiy and hatred but why people want or do feel this way needs to be corrected and turned into peaceful coexistance. whether that will ever be possible, i cannot say. it isn't about to happen in the near or far off future and i am an optimist.
now is it wrong or just part of using language when we give what we are writing about words that give the appearance of what some perceive as labels? i think we need to use whatever words are within our grasp to tell our stories. you can't stop using the word bully because we don't like what it stands for and means. when i use the word it is understood. so back to the beginning, it is when words are used in a derogatory manner that turn them into labels that are negative or bad. but when i am telling you the truth about someone being a bully, the word is being used to express meaningful communications.
this discussion has only just begun. words are important. if we didn't have them it would make it extremely difficult to communicate. definitions are also important. that is what creates the understanding between people.
one last point: it is extremely important for people to reclaim words that have been distorted and used as slanderous and to humiliate. we need to instill the power back into the words that were usurped and to give them there true meaning and remove the stigma that ignorance has placed on them. the list is long and the reclamation is a gradual process. but we need to be brave and say the words out loud until we can shout them out until all the world can hear them.


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Posted by Lynne
I edge my way into the train and maneuver the crowd with my shoulders until I'm the one who takes possession of the last seat. Scrunched between a man with a briefcase and a woman with backpack, I settle in for my twenty minute ride to Boston. With an elbow in my ribs and a loud snap, I see the commuters on either side of me digging around for their books. They each pull out one all too familiar. It's mine.
The woman opens the back of the book, looks closely at my picture and pokes me again in the ribs. "Hey, you're the author of this book. I love the writing. And you know what? This book has changed my family."
It's a fantasy. A dream. When I was young, I imagined countless ways I would accept my Oscar or Tony. Now I envision grateful readers; parents who embrace my thinking about children. And of course I'd love them to love the writing.
I'm willing to admit it. Like Sally Field, I want praise, positive feedback--a spot of adulation. I don't see anything wrong with wanting validation, after all the hard work that went into writing and marketing my book.
We've all heard writers say it's the work that matters, not the critics opinions, accolades or awards. While I know being satisfied with the quality of my writing is paramount, I can honestly say I need a measure of approval to carry on.
In this three steps forward, two steps back business, I collect each endorsement like treasure, saving it for a down day or discouraged moment. I'm the type to review each rejection or criticism, scouring it for the glimmer of encouragement. After a day filled with oodles of self-sacrifice, I accept a friend's comforting word or loving touch. And when I achieve a goal or reach a milestone, I share my news and encourage my loved ones to celebrate with me.
I don't see this as self-aggrandizing, though I suppose some do. In our writers' group meetings we're committed to complimenting each others work first. We are honest to a fault about what isn't working with a piece, only after we have highlighted what does.
I'm not suggesting sugar-coating anything. I can handle critical feedback. Yet if becoming a better writer means I must swallow the bitter pills, then I do want a little candy. I believe on balance, praise dotted with criticism will push a writer further than feedback the other way around. Certainly every writer needs both; I don't have any trouble acknowledging I need the positive.


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If you live in an area that does not have a lot of snow but still gets cold, you are still going to need winter tires. However, you might have to choose some that are more performance based. The performance winter tires give you a little bit less tread depth so that you can have a better drive on the cold but dry roads.
One type of winter tire that you might want to avoid unless you are able to take care of your responsibilities right away is the studded tire. They can damage roads that are not covered by snow.


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Crew : Brian, Bob, Seth & RW
Winds: SW (250) at 3 to 6 kts
Baro: 30.37, Temp: 64, Water Temp: 47
Current: flood - North Hill 1433
Start time: 1800, 2 ½ hours left of the flood
Start/Finish: between GLP & Horseshoe
Course: #4, s/f- DM (225 @1.0), Shortened at leeward mark, Distance: 1.9 nm
Shrouds: @ base
We arrived at the starting area in time to stow the motor and sail a half dozen tacks to windward, and found starboard favored. Returning downwind was slow, putting us at the start line with less than three minutes to go. We sailed along the line towards the pin & got a good range on the Fishers Island shore prior to returning towards the committee boat. Other than Cosmic down near the pin there, the rest of the class was still west of the RC. About mid line, running out of time, we returned to starboard and ran down the line for a good start right at the gun, with Cosmic squeaking across our bow on port boosted by the current. Shortly after their cross, they tacked eventually passed us to windward and pulled away.
There appeared to be more wind on the left side of the course, and with starboard heavily favored we took it to just short of the port layline (a two-minute leg), which I figured of little risk as there would be no traffic at the mark. Watercolors was late to the line, though hardening up near the committee boat put them well to windward of us when they passed, and first to round the mark.
We rounded with a good set, but kept it high in the 4 to 5kts of wind, as did Cosmic a good distance out, with Watercolors on a slightly lower course to leeward. Wunderdog (J24) rounded a minute or so after and passed to windward. Once ahead though, they were unsuccessful in pulling away, and about five minutes later they jibed to port (favored), as we had also discussed, yet the wind appeared much lighter in the middle of the course and also to the left looking downwind, so we continued towards North Dumpling where it looked stronger, as Cosmic as doing also. The wind was very light 3 to 5, so we continued high, trying to work down in the few puffs.
Finally reaching the breeze, we jibed in 7 to 8 for a tight reach to the finish (course now shortened at the leeward mark). Two-thirds down the run the wind again went light and we were able to continue our fresh angle across the line for third place, with the newcomers trailing a bit to the rear.
What could we have done differently?
~ Had we favored much our start much closer to the committer boat, we may have shaved 1 minute off our subsequent port leg near the windward mark.
~ Following the rounding of the windward mark, we violated a cardinal rule-of-thumb by not jibing to the favored jibe. We rationalized due the appearance of little to no wind in the middle of the course and to the left looking downwind. Watercolors did not jibe until nearly a third of the way down the course, and we may have faired somewhat better, had we favored a slightly lower course similar to Watercolors. Though we were having difficulty flying the chute as it was in the light air. Watercolors, Cosmic, Wunderdog (J24) & most boats for that matter, seem to do better flying their chutes flying more directly downwind then we in light air.
~ Had we jibed between 1829 to 1830 hrs (see chart), at the point the breeze grew from 4-5 to 6 kts & greater (about 3/4's across the spinnaker reach for fresh-air), we would have faired much greater and may have picked up a couple of minutes downwind. But we got greedy and continued on till it reached 8 kts and overstood.
Link to chart


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If we're to believe everything we hear, then hold onto your crotch: it seems that 18-year-old Chris Brown and 20-year-old Rihanna are planning to live together and are currently looking at condos.
It's bad enough that the two are still denying their relationship despite being caught making out and on vacation together numerous times (a la Beyonce and Jay-Z), but on top of that, the two aren't trying to keep it a secret in public.
Add to all this the fact that Rihanna is virtually broke and it sorta makes sense that she and Chris Brown want to move in together; she can't afford a mortgage on her own. That's for sure.
Latest Articles
August 27, 2008
Chris Brown and Rihanna Move In Together
Labels: Chris Brown, Rihanna
2 comments:
True dat.
- August 30, 2008 at 6:22 AM
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- February 25, 2009 at 10:51 AM
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