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Difference between revisions of "Statistics"
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=== Last Rep (T) ===
=== Last Rep (T) ===
average date of the last [[Glossary:Review|review]] among [[Glossary:Memorized_element|memorized]] [[Glossary:Topic|]]in the [[Glossary:Collection|collection]]. ''Here the average date of the last review is , ''
=== Next Rep (I) ===
=== Next Rep (I) ===
Revision as of 17:28, 15 April 2019
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Caption
- 3 Toolbar
- 4 Learning parameters
- 4.1 Date
- 4.2 First day
- 4.3 Period
- 4.4 Memorized
- 4.5 Memorized items
- 4.6 Memorized topics
- 4.7 Memorized/Day
- 4.8 Total
- 4.9 Items
- 4.10 Topics
- 4.11 Outstanding
- 4.12 Review
- 4.13 Protection
- 4.14 Retention
- 4.15 Measured FI
- 4.16 R-Metric
- 4.17 Alarm
- 4.18 Burden
- 4.19 Burden +/-
- 4.20 Avg Workload
- 4.21 Exp Workload
- 4.22 Time
- 4.23 Avg time
- 4.24 Total time
- 4.25 Lapses
- 4.26 Speed
- 4.27 Avg Cost
- 4.28 Exp Cost
- 4.29 Interval (I)
- 4.30 Interval (T)
- 4.31 Repetitions
- 4.32 Rep count
- 4.33 Last Rep (I)
- 4.34 Last Rep (T)
- 4.35 Next Rep (I)
- 4.36 Next Rep (T)
- 4.37 Pending
- 4.38 Dismissed
- 4.39 Average FI
- 4.40 Completion
- 4.41 A-Factor
- 4.42 Additional notes
- 5 Statistics context menu
The Statistics window allows you to inspect the main learning process statistics in the currently opened collection. It can most conveniently be viewed by pressing F5 (Window : Layout : Warrior layout).
Figure: The Statistics window (Toolkit : Statistics : Statistics) where the main learning process statistics of the currently opened collection can be readily inspected.
The caption displays the name of the collection in square brackets. The presented collection is named all.
- Calendar
- the daily and the monthly calendar of repetitions
- Statistics menu
- open the statistics context menu otherwise available with a right-click over the window
- Analysis
- various statistics related to the learning process and SuperMemo Algorithm
- Memory graphs
- visual presentation of memory functions, their approximations as used by Algorithm SM-18, and options for resetting and re-computing memory data on the basis of repetition histories
- Warrior layout
- arrange windows in the way optimized for the use of incremental reading with the Statistics window conveniently aligned to the left of the element window.
- Help
- view this help article
Learning parameters
To easily compare the exemplary fields with their corresponding descriptions:
- Shift+click the picture above to open it in full resolution in a new browser window
- Drag the title bar of the picture window to the left or right side of the screen until an outline of the expanded window appears
- Release the mouse to expand the window
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 with this window to arrange the windows side by side
The current date and day of the week. If this value is preceded with Night, it means that the new calendar day has already started but the old repetition day will not start until the time defined in Toolkit : Options : Learning : Midnight shift. When the midnight shift is passed, this field will display a red warning Time to close: Alt+F4. If you see that message, close/restart your collection to prevent collecting learning data with undefined repetition timing. In the example above, the picture snapshot was taken after midnight on Apr 01, 2019 (Mon)
First day
The date on which the learning process started (i.e. the day on which the first element was memorized). The exemplary collection presented in the picture has been in use since December 15, 1987 (i.e. two days after the birth date of SuperMemo for DOS)
The number of days in the learning process (i.e. number of days between Date and First day).
The presented collection has been in use for 31 years, 3 months and 17 days
The total number of elements introduced into the learning process with options such as Learn or Remember. If an item takes part in repetitions it is a memorized item. It does not mean it is a remembered item. A proportion of memorized items is always forgotten. The presented collection has 635,699 elements in the learning process and these elements make up 100.0% of all elements destined to enter the learning process, i.e.
Memorized/(Memorized+Pending)=100.0. This indicates that Pending=0 (see below)
Memorized items
The number of memorized items in the collection and the proportion of memorized items among memorized elements. In the example above, 203,827 items take part in repetitions. These items make 32.1% of all elements taking part in the learning process (the remaining 67.9% of elements are memorized topics, memorized concepts or memorized tasks). The Retention field indicates that 92.4937% of these items should be remembered at any given time
Memorized topics
The number of memorized topics, concepts and tasks and their cumulative proportion among all memorized elements. In a well-balanced incremental reading process, topics should make a minority of elements served for review. If the proportion of topics increases, the retention drops, and the learning process may gradually start to resemble traditional learning where ineffective passive review predominates. You can store as many topics in your collection as you wish as long as you make sure that you limit their review by setting appropriate repetition sorting criteria (Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria). In the picture, 431,872 topics make 67.9% of the material taking part in the learning process
The number of items memorized per day:
(Memorized items)/Day. In the example, the average of 17.8311 items have been memorized daily in the presented collection over the previous 31+ years. This is typical of an average student as long as regular reviews are executed on a daily basis
The number of items, topics, concepts and tasks in the collection. Two relationships hold true:
Total=Topics+Items(concepts and tasks are counted with the Topics statistic)
Deleted elements do not contribute to the total count of elements in the collection. In the picture, the presented collection is made of 727,259 elements (largest collections reported by users reached beyond a half million elements)
The number of items in the collection. In the example, the collection includes 207,443 items
The number of topics, concepts and tasks in the collection. The presented collection includes 519,816 topics (counted together with concepts and tasks)
The number of outstanding items, outstanding topics and final drill items scheduled for repetition on this given day. The first number (before the plus sign) indicates the number of items scheduled for this given day and not yet processed. The second number (after +) indicates the number of topics scheduled for review for this day. The third number (after the second +), if present, indicates the number of items that have already been repeated today but scored less than Good (4). Those are the items that make up the final drill queue. The final drill queue is built only if Skip final drill is unchecked in Toolkit : Options : Learning. In the presented collection, there are still 3521 items scheduled for repetition on Apr 01, 2019. There are also 1297 topics scheduled for review on that day as part of the incremental reading process. There are no elements in the final drill queue (the third component of the Outstanding parameter is missing)
- Review
- number of elements scheduled for subset review (e.g. elements in the neural review in Learn : Go neural, elements in branch repetitions in Contents' Learn, elements in browser subset repetitions in the browser's Learn, elements in the random test queue in Toolkit : Random test, etc.). The display may have a form of Neuro=<elements to do> in neural review, or <items to do>+<topics to do>+<pending to do>+(<subset description>) in subset review, or <elements unprocessed>/<all elements in the test> in random tests. Here 86 elements remain in neural review. Neural review is most often executed with Ctrl+F2 in the element window or browser, or Alt+N in the registry window
Current day's degree of processing of the top priority material. Important: As the statistic is taken from the top of the queue of outstanding items or topics (not the top of outstanding queue, which is a randomized mix of the two), if you change the priority of the top item, you will see a false value in Statistics until you review that item of changed priority (this behavior is by design to prevent the need to scan the entire queue at each update to statistics). In the example, only 0.031% of top priority items, and 0% of top priority topics have been processed. 0.031% protection does not mean going through 0.031% of the outstanding items queue. It means that the highest priority of unprocessed items in the queue is 0.031%
The estimated average knowledge retention in the collection. Retention for high-priority items should be higher than the one listed. Retention for low-priority items may be much lower driving the average down. To judge upon the retention of top-priority material, see Toolkit : Statistics : Analysis : Graphs : Forgetting index vs. Priority. In the example, 92.4937% of the material should be recalled in a random test on all elements in the collection at any time. You can test your retention using random tests and see if SuperMemo's estimates are accurate. This statistic may be overly optimistic if you have recently abused rescheduling tools such as Postpone or Mercy.
Measured FI
The value of the measured forgetting index as recorded during repetitions. The number in the parentheses indicates Measured FI for the day. In collections with heavy item overload, measured forgetting index may be much lower than the overall forgetting index for the entire collection due to the fact that repetitions include primarily high-priority material. It can also be lower than the requested forgetting index when transitioning from more randomized to more prioritized sorting (as determined by sorting criteria) or when knowledge formulation and mnemonic skills improve before this fact can be reflected in the forgetting curve. It is also not uncommon to have Measured FI higher than Average FI. This is due to three factors:
- every user will experience delays in repetitions from time to time (e.g. as a result of using Postpone),
- low-priority material in the overloaded incremental reading process is scheduled in intervals longer than optimum ones, and
- SuperMemo imposes some constraints on the length of intervals that, in some cases, make it schedule repetitions later than it would be implied by the forgetting index. The constraints in computing intervals, for example, prevent the new interval from being shorter than the old one (assuming the item has not been forgotten). For low values of the forgetting index and for difficult items, the new optimum interval might often be shorter than the old one! Measured FI can be reset with Toolkit : Statistics : Reset parameters : Forgetting index record.
In the presented example, an average of 14.63% of item repetitions end with a grade less than Pass (3) (since the measured forgetting index record has last been reset). On Apr 01, 2019, no repetition ended in failure thus far (i.e. with a grade less than Pass).
The absolute measure of performance of two spaced repetition algorithms based on their ability to predict recall before a grade is scored. In SuperMemo 18, R-Metric is used solely to compare Algorithm SM-15 (known from SuperMemo 16) and the new Algorithm SM-18. It is shown as percentage in Statistics and Toolkit : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Efficiency : R-Metric. R-Metric is a difference between the performance of the two algorithms:
R-Metric=LSRM(Alg-15)-LSRM(Alg-18), where
LSRM is the least squares predicted recall measure for a given algorithm. R-Metric greater than zero shows superiority of Algorithm SM-18. R-Metric less than zero indicates underperformance of the new algorithm.
LSRM is a square root of the average of squared absolute differences in recall predictions:
abs(Recall-PredictedRecall), where
Recall is 0 for failing grades and
Recall is 1 for passing grades.
PredictedRecall is a prediction issued by the algorithm before the repetition. In Algorithm SM-18, the prediction is a weighted average of the value taken from the Recall[] matrix, and R (retrievability) computed from S (stability) and the used interval. The weight used is based on prior repetition cases which inform of the significance of the Recall[] matrix prediction (the prediction becomes more meaningful with more prior repetition data).
Recallis 1 for Grade>=3, and 0 for Grade<3
PredictedRecallin SuperMemo 18:
weight (0..1)depends on the number of prior repetition cases
In this case, R-Metric of 18.0899% shows a huge advantage of Algorithm SM-18 over Algorithm SM-15 on that particular day (Apr 1, 2019)
The time left till the next alarm and the hour at which the alarm will ring off (to learn more about alarms see: Plan). This field is editable. To change the alarm setting, click the field and type in the new time in minutes (e.g. 21.5 will set the alarm to sound in 21 minutes and 30 seconds). To end editing, press Enter. In the example, the alarm will sound off in 20 minutes and 21 seconds at 00:52:13 (i.e. 52 minutes after midnight)
The estimation of the average number of items and topics repeated per day. This value is equal to the sum of all interval reciprocals (i.e. 1/interval). The interpretation of this number is as follows: every item with interval of 100 days is on average repeated 1/100 times per day. Thus the sum of interval reciprocals is a good indicator of the total repetitions workload in the collection. The presented collection requires 153 item repetitions per day and 758 topic reviews per day. In incremental reading, it is not unusual to have many more elements in the process than one can handle. Auto-postpone can be used to unload the excess of topics as well as to reduce the load of low-priority items. Postpone skews the Burden statistic. Topics often crowd at lower intervals and are regularly reshuffled with Postpone or Auto-postpone
Burden +/-
The change of the Burden parameter above on a given day. Here, on Apr 1, 2019, the average number of expected daily repetitions was slightly decreased (i.e. by 1.5 items). The topic load was also decreased (i.e. by almost 166 topics). Exemplary interpretation of a burden change: Let's say Burden dropped by 39 (burden change of -39). To reduce the burden by 39, one would need to review 78 elements with an interval increase from 1 to 2 days (78*0.5=39). However, one could equally well execute Postpone on 2344 elements with interval increase from 10 to 12 days (2344*(1/10-1/12)=39)
Avg Workload
The average time spent on responding to questions per day (from the first day of learning). For the presented collection, the student spent on average 16 minutes and 59 seconds per day on answering items over the period spanning 31 years 3 months and 17 days between Apr 1, 2019 and December 15, 1987 when the very first repetition was made.
Exp Workload
The estimation of the average daily time used for responding to questions in a given collection.
Exp Workload=(Item Burden)*Avg time
In the presented collection, 153 item repetitions per day (Burden +/-) taking 10.241 seconds each (Avg time) result in a daily repetition time estimated at 26 minutes and 10 seconds. A real learning time may be twice longer due to grading, editing, reviewing the collection and various interruptions. In incremental reading, the learning time will increase further due to topic review that is not taken into account in the Exp Workload parameter. The real learning time may also be cut if Postpone is often used
The total question response time on a given day and the total session time (in parentheses). Here the total time needed to respond to questions on Apr 1, 2019 was 2 minutes and 11 seconds. On the same day, SuperMemo has been running for 2 hours, 9 minutes and 47 seconds (this value will increase even if you simply keep SuperMemo running)
Avg time
The average response time in seconds. This is the time that elapses between displaying the question (or equivalent) and choosing Show answer (or equivalent). The timer does not stop if you start editing the question before pressing Show answer. In the presented collection, the average time to answer a single question is around 10.241 seconds. If this number grows beyond 15-20 seconds, you may need to analyze your learning material if it is not overly difficult or badly structured
Total time
The total time taken by responding to questions in the collection. This time cannot be accurately measured for collections created with SuperMemo 98 or earlier (the measurements were made possible only in SuperMemo 99). If you upgrade older collections, this number will roughly be guessed for you. SuperMemo will derive this time from the total number of items, average number of repetitions, average number of lapses, and the average repetition time. In the presented example, answering questions during repetitions took the total of over 134 days in over 31 years of learning
The average number of times individual items have been forgotten in the collection (only memorized elements are averaged). The number in parentheses shows the number of lapses on a given day. Here an average item has been forgotten 0.49800 times. On Apr 1, 2019, no item has thus far been graded less than Pass (3)
The average knowledge acquisition rate, i.e. the number of items memorized per year per minute of daily work (only answering item questions counts). Initially, this value may be as high as 100,000 items/year/minute (esp. if you enthusiastically start working with the program before truly measuring its limitations, and the limitations of human memory). This parameter should later stabilize between 40 and 400 items/year/minute.
In the presented collection, every minute of work per day resulted in 354 new items memorized each year
Avg Cost
The cost in time of memorizing a single item, i.e. total learning time divided by the number of memorized items.
Avg Cost=Total time/Memorized items
In the presented example, the total repetition time per single item is 1 minute and 1 second, which is the amount of time it has contributed to the total of non-stop almost 135 days of repetitions. The cost of editing, collection restructuring, incremental reading, etc. is not included in the Avg Cost parameter
Exp Cost
The daily repetition time per each newly memorized item assuming no postpones.
Exp Cost=Exp Workload/(Memorized items/Day)
In the presented collection, each of the 18 newly memorized items per day contributes 2 minutes and 11 seconds of repetitions to the total workload of over 26 minutes per day. As this value is derived from Burden, it may be highly overestimated if you use Postpone a lot (e.g. in incremental reading)
Interval (I)
The average interval among memorized items in the collection. Here an average memorized item has reached the inter-repetition interval of 9 years, 10 months and 18 days
Interval (T)
The average interval among memorized topics in the collection. Here an average memorized topic has reached the inter-repetition interval of 6 years, 10 months and 13 days
The average number of repetitions/reviews per memorized item (I) and topic (T) in the collection. Here an average item has been repeated 3.197 times while an average topic has been reviewed 2.369 times
Rep count
The total count of item repetitions made in the collection. In the presented collection, 957+ thousands of item repetitions have been made. This is almost 5 repetitions per memorized item. That includes repetitions of items that have been reset, forgotten, dismissed, deleted, etc.
Last Rep (I)
The average date of the last repetition among memorized items in the collection. Here the average date of the last repetition is July 17, 2009
Last Rep (T)
The average date of the last review among memorized topics in the collection. Here the average date of the last review is August 15, 2012
Next Rep (I)
- Next Rep (I)
- average date of the next repetition among memorized items in the collection.
Next Rep (I)=Last Rep (I)+Interval (I)
- Here the average date of the next repetition is July 19, 2016 or 2,863 days after September 17, 2008
Next Rep (T)
- Next Rep (T)
- average date of the next review among memorized topics in the collection.
Next Rep (T)=Last Rep (T)+Interval (T)
- Here the average date of the next review is July 30, 2016 or 2,232 days after June 21, 2010
- Pending
- the number of elements (topics or items) that have not yet been introduced into the learning process and await memorization (with operations such as Learn, Remember, Schedule, etc). All pending elements are kept in the so-called pending queue that determines the sequence of learning new elements. Dismissed elements are not kept in the pending queue. In the example, the collection contains no pending elements. With incremental reading, the role of the pending queue in SuperMemo is diminishing
- Dismissed
- number of elements (items, topics, concepts or tasks) that have been excluded from the learning process and are kept only as reference material, folders in the knowledge tree, or tasklist elements. Dismissed items are neither pending nor memorized. All tasks are dismissed by default, i.e. they usually do not take part in repetitions. In the example, almost 77,000 elements have been dismissed
Average FI
- Average FI
- average requested forgetting index in the entire collection (the number in parentheses is the default forgetting index). If the forgetting index of individual elements is not changed manually, Average FI is equal to the default forgetting index as set in Toolkit : Options : Learning : Forgetting index (default). The default forgetting index is the requested forgetting index given to all new items added to the collection. Forgetting index, in general, is the proportion of items that are not remembered during repetitions. The lower the value of the forgetting index the better the recall of the element, but the more repetitions will be needed to keep it in memory. Optimum value of the forgetting index falls into the range from 7% to 13%. Too low a forgetting index makes learning too tiresome due to a prohibitively large number of repetitions. All elements can have their desired forgetting index set individually. The easiest way to change the forgetting index of a large number of elements is to use Forgetting index option among subset operations. In the presented example, the average forgetting index is 10.00% while the default forgetting index is 10%. See: Using forgetting index
- Completion
- expected date on which all elements from the pending queue will be memorized assuming the present rate of learning new items. This parameter is particularly useful if you are memorizing large ready-made collections such as Advanced English. For Pending=0, the value of this field is today.
Completion=Date+(Pending/(Memorized items/Day))
- A-Factor
- average value of A-Factor among memorized items (I) and topics (T) in the collection. For items, A-Factor is a measure of difficulty in Algorithm SM-15. The higher the A-Factor, the easier the item. For topics, A-Factor is the number by which the current interval should be multiplied to get the value of the next interval. In the presented collection, the average A-Factor for items is 4.06. This indicates that the collection is rather well-structured and the material is thus relatively easy to remember. The average A-Factor for topics is 1.246
Additional notes
- Items are added to the final drill not only during standard repetitions when you grade an element below Good (4). Operations such as Remember (Ctrl+M), Cloze (Alt+Z), and Add to drill (Shift+Ctrl+D) will also add to the final drill queue. The final drill queue is created automatically only if you uncheck Toolkit : Options : Learning : Skip final drill
- Some fields of the Statistics window can be edited. For example: Alarm, Total time, Rep count, etc. To edit an entry, click it, type the new value and press Enter. If the entry cannot be modified SuperMemo will warn you (e.g. "Retention entry cannot be modified").
- See Survey 1994 and Survey 1999 for some interesting notes about the speed of learning reached with SuperMemo
To open the context menu:
- Right-click anywhere in the window
- Click the first button in the toolbar
Context menu items:
- Workload - the daily and the monthly calendar of repetitions
- Report - save the contents of the Statistics window to a text file
- Restore layout (Ctrl+F5) - restore the SuperMemo windows layout chosen as the default one
- Element window (Esc) - shift focus to the element window


text:
Crowdfunding is the process of raising money to fund what is typically a project or business venture through many donors using an online platform, such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Crowdfunder. The fundraising window is usually finite -- 90 days, for instance -- and the fees and rules vary across platforms.
How to: Crowdfunding is typically done through an online platform that allows the fundraiser to set up a public campaign for accepting donations. The campaign will advertise details such as the nature of the project or venture, the amount of money the company is hoping to raise and the campaign's fundraising deadline. People can donate a specified amount through the fundraising campaign's website and often receive some sort of acknowledgement or reward in return for their donation.
Applications of crowdfunding: This can range from charitable and educational projects to creative projects -- like funding films -- as well as supporting scalable businesses. Crowdfunding platforms each tend to cater to specific categories, such as Kickstarter which focuses on creative projects or Crowdfunder, an equity-based platform which is used for businesses looking to raise investment capital.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
A Paraphrase with Notes, on the Acts of the Apostles, and Upon All the Epistles of the New Testament: Being a Compleat Supplement to Dr. Clarke's Paraphrase on the Four Gospels. With a Short Preface to Each Epistle, Shewing the Occasion and Design of It; the Several Arguments Set at the Head of Each Chapter; and a General Index to All the Principal Matters, Words, and Phrases of the New Testament, Excepting the Revelation. For the Use of Families
Mitä ihmiset sanovat - Kirjoita arvostelu
Yhtään arvostelua ei löytynyt.
Muita painoksia - Näytä kaikki
Yleiset termit ja lausekkeet
abſolutely againſt alſo anſwered Apoſtles Aſſurance becauſe beſt boaſt brethren C H A Caſe cauſe Chap Chriſtian Chriſtian Religion Church Conſcience Converſion Converts Death Deſign deſired Diſ Diſciples Diſcourſe divine Dočtrine elſe expreſs Faith falſe firſt fleſh Gentiles glory Goſpel Happineſs hath himſelf Holy Ghoſt houſe Iſrael Jeruſalem Jeſus Chriſt jewiſh jews Judea juſt laſt leaſt Lord Jeſus Meſſiah Miniſters Miniſtry Moſes moſt muſt myſelf N T E N T Number obſerve Occaſion paſs Paul Perſecution Perſon Peter pleaſed preach preſent Prieſt priſon Profeſſion Promiſe Puniſhment Purpoſe raiſed Reaſon Reſpect ſaid ſaid unto ſame ſaved ſaw ſay ſee ſeems ſeen ſelf ſelves ſend Senſe ſent ſet ſeveral ſhall ſhe ſhew ſhould ſhow ſin ſincere ſome ſon ſoon ſpeak Spirit ſpiritual ſtand ſtill ſuch ſuffer ſufficient ſure thee themſelves ther theſe theſe things thoſe thou tion true underſtand uſe Verſe whoſe Wiſdom wiſe Worſhip
Suositut otteet
Sivu 363 - For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more ; and unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews ; to them that are under the law...
Sivu 26 - Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.
Sivu 444 - And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? For ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, "I will dwell in them and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Sivu 226 - As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
Sivu 248 - I speak to them that know the law), how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth ? For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.
Sivu 279 - Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles ; how much more their fulness...
Sivu 468 - I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.
Sivu 252 - For that which I do I allow not : for what I would, that do I not ; but what I hate, that do I.
Sivu 182 - It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, before that he which is accused have the accusers face to face, and have licence to answer for himself concerning the crime laid against him.
Sivu 363 - Jews ; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; To...


text:
It went down sweetly, like an Italian opera or an Italian ice. Whichever best suits your personality. From out of nowhere, DeMarcus Cousins decided he was unhappy with the team's direction. Makes sense. It's been four games into a lockout-shortened season in which 75 percent of the league is still grossly out of shape, why wouldn't a sophomore demand an immediate shot at a championship. So the Kings made a public announcement that this is what Cousins wanted. Coach wants to let him loose, told him to stay home last night. But the GM says he won't trade him, Cousins' agent denied he ever demanded a trade and his teammates claim they don't know what's going on (and with Marcus Thornton, at least, I believe him). Maybe the kid who fell at least three spots in last year's draft because of his maturity issues will play nice and make it back into the lineup for game five. Maybe everyone who dropped J.J. Hickson last week, pick him right back up today. Reports are that all signs of Sacramento's starting center were removed from the arena's highlight reel last night and any time a head coach makes a public statement, you can bet shizz is real. But Cousins was the team's top draft pick last year and a cornerstone of this team's rebuilding, I'd be surprised if they just give him away for Charlie Villanueva or Jordan Hill. Anyway, Hickson and Hayes get huge bumps – permanent or temporary – until this thing straightens out. Here's a little less drama, but a lot more action from yesterday's fantasy basketball roster of games.
Zach Randolph – Z-Bo started the season with a sickly 10/6 performance, then improved to 24/12, then 23/9. Then in last night's game against Chicago … well, he only scored 2 pts and grabbed 3 rbd before leaving with a sprained knee. Z-Woe. None of us thought that's where this story was going. Dante Cunningham is the quick add (he's the only one left) if Randolph misses time, but it doesn't appear he will.
J.J. Redick – 21/3/3 last night. He's averaging, 15/2.5/2 and a pair of threes in each of his first five games of the season. Grab him while he's hot, his 24 PER and .545 FG% won't last forever.
Jerryd Bayless – Bayless and his left sprained ankle missed yesterday's game and probably the next one. Jose Calderon is the big winner, but if you own Bayless, it's because someone else already owns Calderon.
Lou Williams – Averaging 20/3/4, with 2.5 3ptm a game. You feel that tingling? That's Screwy Looey wooing you all over again. He calls it "looing." Don't fight it. Feel it.
Omri Casspi – 9/1/4, with a 3ptm. Sadly, his best game of the young season. He's averaged 13/6.5/2 and only three extra minutes in the first two years of his career. I'm confident that Casspi will be an ebb 'n' flow-type all season. Why should you care about this? Because he hasn't topped 9/5/4 in any game so far. So take a guess where he's at?
D.J. White – Averaging 25+ mpg along with .571 FG%/11.3 pts/5 rbd/1.3 blk. That's deep league gold.
Michael Beasley – Cut his finger down to the bone, received five stitches and might miss some time because of it. If that happens, Wes Johnson is the add. Followed by Derrick Williams, and Anthony Tolliver. Also, it's possible the Timberwolves might play Way … oh, fudge it. WhenIsRubioStarting!
Kobe Bryant – 6-for-28, 1-for-8 3ptm. Oh. Wait, what? Woof.
Matt Barnes – Started the last two games in place of Metta World Peace. He ended with the inauspicious 2/2/1, with a steal and two block-line. He's starting, but I wouldn't pick him up. It's your team and in the end, you gotta listen to whichever song your heart sings loudest.
Al Harrington – Highest PER of his career, highest URtg of his career, and highest career FG% by five percentage points. He's a great option to package in a 2-for-1. He's also like Rachel Leigh Cook in "She's All That," only instead of shedding bifocals to become beautiful, he shed Kenyon Martin.
Greg Stiemsma – He's turning into a one-tool blocks machine. He had three blocks last night and 10 in his first three. He's so blocksure that I won't even bother mentioning his complete lack of everything else … any more … after this.
Rashard Lewis – Shooting .385 (15-for-39) on the season. No one knows why the Wizards are allowing him to do this. And by "knows," I mean "cares." #Wizproblems
Greivis Vasquez – Came out of nowhere to average 6.5 assists in his last two games. This was only his sixth and seventh NBA game he's had at least five dimes, yet he's already surpassed Al-Farouq Aminu in games played in which he's made a positive impact (1).
Randy Foye – Started in place of Chauncey Billups. Lob City's next game is Wednesday, Billups is likely to be back in the starting lineup by then. Or "limeup," if you're a citrus drink angling for a league sponsorship.
Gerald Wallace – 0-for-5 and no points. Clearly, this was brought on by guilt.
If you're into it, follow me on Twitter. Sometimes I tweet helpful lineup advice, but most of the time I'm just swearing about turnovers, poor defense and the weather. Should be a good time!


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The animated documentary [pictured] will be the company's first release.
Rainbow World has acquired North American rights (excluding French-speaking Canada) to Jung Henin & Laurent Boileau's debut feature Approved For Adoption.
The animated documentary won the Audience Award and the Unicef Award at the Annecy Animation Film Festival and will be released theatrically in 2013, Rainbow World's first-ever release. Jennifer Arndt-Johns, founder/director of Rainbow World, and Anais Clanet of Wide negotiated the deal.
"We look forward to sharing Approved For Adoption with North American audiences," commented Arndt-Johns. "The film is a perfect fit as our inaugural release because it brings to the forefront many of the complex experiences and issues that emerge from being adopted internationally/transracially."
"Wide has a long partnership with Jennifer Arndt-Johns and we couldn't be more delighted to keep this partnership alive. [The film] has been a three-year commitment for the production team (Mosaique Films, Artemis Productions, France 3 Cinema) and Wide," added Clanet.
Rainbow World is a non-profit organisation focused on creating and distributing educational media about international/transracial adoption.


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If Len Cullum's Skill Set pieces have been getting you in the mood to try your hand at some woodworking, check out these gorgeous sawhorses he shows you how to build on Make: Projects. Based on the trestles from a Japanese woodworking bench, they're moderately difficult to build, but Len does a clear job of describing the process, the tools required are pretty basic, and the procedures are not that hard if carefully undertaken. And look how swanky the results are!
Workhorses (Make: Projects)
The Make: Skill Set series: Woodworking
In the Maker Shed:
Make: Ultimate Workshop and Tool Guide 2011
Learn the top tools and tricks to build your own maker workshop and explore woodworking, metalworking, electronics, robotics, computerized milling, 3D printing, and more. Packed with step-by-step photo instructions (including Len Cullum's sawhorse project) and reviews of more than 200 beloved, bench-tested tools for the modern maker.


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Solving Family Mysteries Through Genealogy
A quest to authenticate the oldest oral traditions
En español | A young Spanish physician and his English maid elope to Tampa. An Italian seaman sails the Caribbean. Someone is kidnapped in China. A farmer bids farewell to his sons, who leave their Catalan village determined to hacer las Américas, make it in the Americas.
Wars, thousands of miles of travel, and five generations later—here I am.
See also: Begin building your family tree.
This is the story of my family, at least according to family lore. The oldest oral traditions have been handed down since my great-great-grandparents were alive 150 years ago. They tell of men and women from different corners of the world who embarked on journeys that ended in Cuba, pushed by personal drama and swept by the forces of history.
I of course know the "near story." That my father, Roger was born in Cárdenas and my mother, Mabel, in Manzanillo, both in Cuba, in the 1920s. That my middle brother and I were born in Havana. That after Fidel Castro took power we fled to New Jersey in 1964 where another brother and my children were born.
Back in Cuba I was lucky enough to know all four of my grandparents. But many years ago in very different places they too were babies in their parents' laps. What were their lives like? Which of the tales I grew up hearing are true? What else can be uncovered in forgotten archives in Cuba, Spain and—perhaps—England and China? Answers to questions such as these are what I set out to find years ago.
Who I am is partly a consequence of my actions and partly the result of decisions taken by ancestors a year, a decade, a century, a millennium before I was born—decisions that led to my being the son of Roger and Mabel and not some other couple, born in Cuba and not Norway or Sri Lanka. I also wanted to put it all in a historical context, because no family's history takes place in a vacuum—things happened that led to Roger and Mabel deciding I should grow up in the United States instead of Cuba.
It is a mammoth task that I will never finish. There is always more to learn about a life long ago, or another name to discover a generation further back.
But I have learned many things. I have confirmed names. I have found old portraits and documented births, marriages, deaths—not only in old archives but also on the Internet. I have authenticated some of the lore. And I have found part of it is wrong. All that, plus a bit of historical research, lets me catch glimpses of my forebears.
How did I start? The advice from professional genealogists is to begin by asking your oldest relatives. My grandparents had died by the time I became interested in genealogy in the mid-1980s but my mother's aunt (and my great-aunt) Laudelina, "Nana" still lived. Ever since I was small I had heard that everyone—at least everyone in Cuba—with her surname, Surós, was a descendant of brothers who had emigrated from the Catalan region of Spain to my mother's hometown of Manzanillo, in the Cuban province of Oriente. Nana did not know when, but she knew where her father Jaime Surós Isern was born: Massanet de la Selva, in Catalonia.
Traveling to Cuban archives is nearly impossible, with the U.S.-Cuba embargo, so the only open road to my family's past began in Massanet. But in the '80s there was no Google, no Massanetdelaselva.com. I had no idea where in Catalonia Massanet was and no easy way to find out. Nana, almost 90 years old, did not know either. I found nothing at the library of my alma mater, Rutgers University. But genealogists say perseverance pays off with surprises. I found my first written reference to the ancestral village of one branch of my family in an old Michelin guide shelved away in the musty basement of a used-book store.
It spelled "Maçanet de la Selva" with the Catalan cedilla, said it was in La Selva ("The Forest") region of the province of Girona, and that there was also a Romanesque church of historical interest, San Llorenç. I located it on a map, a village inland from the Mediterranean halfway between Barcelona and the French border. I wrote a letter generically addressed to the parish priest, explaining I was a descendant of a Jaime Surós Isern and asked if family still lived in town, a century later.
I had some reason to be optimistic. Birth and death records kept by Spain and its former colonies in Latin America are "far superior" to those of most other regions of the world, says George R. Ryskamp, author of Finding Your Hispanic Roots." The greatest treasure is the parish records. They have the name of the father, the mother, their birth places, even the grandparents' names and birthplaces." Also, he adds, the Spanish convention of using maternal and paternal surnames opens research to more lineages. "Most [non-Hispanics] would love to have records like the Spanish," Ryskamp says.
Some time later I got an envelope in the mail with a return address from Maçanet.
The letter was from a Father Andrés, and brought bad news: the parish archives had burned during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). My heart sank. Municipal documents in Spain date back only to the middle of the 19th century, while parish records start in the 1540s, according to Mayra Sanchez-Johnson, a genealogist who specializes in Cuban and Spanish research. Centuries were lost with the destruction of San Llorenç's archives.
But Father Andrés had good news too: a "faithful parishioner" was named Martí Tomás Surós. "Is he perhaps related to you?" the priest asked. I didn't know but figured if the Surós name is as rare as my family said, the chances were good.
In 1991, six years after I first heard of Martí Tomás Surós, I met him. As my wife and I drove up from Barcelona, Maçanet de la Selva arose on the western side of the highway, blue hills in the distance. There was the thousand-year-old steeple of San Llorenç with homes of red-tiled roofs clustered around it.
Martí was a vigorous man with a mane of platinum hair. He invited me to his home near the plaza by San Llorenç for almuerzo (lunch). Over chicken and butifarra sausage, he said he believed we were related but did not know how. He was a man to be trusted in matters of local affairs; Martí was a member of Maçanet's Taller d'Historia, the town history club.
Martí's experience at the Taller d'Historia taught him where to look beyond the lost parish archives. He knew where private land records were kept and that documents at Town Hall survived the war. His research skills paid off when he turned up the death certificate of Tomás Surós Buadas. It named five sons, including one named Jaime—my maternal great-grandfather "Bitito," as his children called him. Tomás died on December 24, 1883, by which time Bitito, family lore says, was already in Cuba. I had never heard of my maternal great-great-grandfather Tomás before, and Nana didn't know his name either. But she remembered that when she was a child the family did not celebrate Nochebuena dinner like other Cubans. Their Christmas Eve celebration was muted to observe the day Bitito's father—her grandfather, my great-great-grandfather—died in far-off Spain.
The certificate also said Tomás's parents were Salbador—with a "b," not a "v"—and María. That established a link to a notebook recording land rental payments bearing the signature of Salbador Surós, my great-great-great-grandfather. The first entry reads, in 19th-century Catalan that Martí translated into castellano:" He recibido de Joan Font I Costas 4 mesurons de trigo que paga por el año 1834. Salbador Surós; (I have received 4 mesurons of wheat from Joan Font I Costas, which pays for the year 1834. Salbador Surós.")
Martí took us to a two story stone-and-brick house on the outskirts of town: Can Surós, he said, Catalan for House of Surós built in the 1700s and the birthplace of Bitito, Tomás and, possibly, Salbador and further back. I touched a rusty iron hoop that perhaps generations of my family had used to open their front door. The building was now abandoned. Martí said it was taken over for unpaid taxes around 1915.
Even prior to that loss, the Maçanet my ancestors knew was a place of poverty, where peasants ate the crops they grew and only had meat "when they slaughtered a pig," Martí explained. Salbador's land was inherited by Tomás, as evidenced by his signature on a later book of receipts. It passed on to his oldest son Antonio, attested in yet another document. Bitito and his other brothers, cut out of the inheritance, took the path of countless Spaniards in the 19th century: travel across the Atlantic to hacer las Américas. Bitito, Pedro, and José sailed to Cuba; Baldomero, another brother, to Argentina. It was the Spain-to-Latin America version of the American Dream.
The three Surós brothers who went to Cuba were progenitors of quite a clan. Between them, they had at least 20 children, who in turn had at least 82 children, not counting the Argentinean branch or Antonio's descendants. I do not know how many Surós cousins I have in my own generation. Over the years I met perhaps a dozen, and stay in touch with Jimmy, who lives in Caracas. When Fidel Castro came to power, Jimmy's parents opted to seek exile in Venezuela. Jimmy was born in Bayamo, near Manzanillo. The latter is the Cuban town where Bitito settled, perhaps in the 1870s. Bitito's descendants, including my mother lived there until the 1940s.
I returned from Maçanet energized to dig for more of my roots, though I knew I would eventually hit the rock of Cuban politics, which would make the research slow. Other than the Surós branch in Spain, almost every family record I am aware of that is crucial to my direct ancestral line lies in almost inaccessible Cuban archives. But not all. When my family came to the United States, they brought with them baptism and marriage certificates—buried in dresser drawers until I sought them out. They are full of genealogical clues.
The baptism record of my grandmother Emelina, Nana's sister, states her parents were Jaime Surós Isern (born in "Massaná," a reminder to amateur genealogists to beware of misspellings, since the correct spelling is Massanet) and Eleuteria Reyes Fuentes of Vicana, a hamlet outside Manzanillo. The baptism record also gave the name of the grandparents.
I already had learned, in Maçanet, the names of those on her paternal side, Tomás Surós and Maria Isern, but Emelina's maternal grandparents were new to me: José María Reyes and Felipa Fuentes. The record included no places of birth or maternal surnames and family oral tradition is silent about both. I knew nothing of them—until years later science and modern technology would pry open a door.
But there are tales about the ancestors of my grandfather Emilio Vázquez Lotti, Emelina's husband and an upright gentleman of the old school.
There are plenty of photos of his family. One shows Emilio's mother Lutgarda as a young woman, sweet-faced but wary-eyed, as if readying for anything life could bring. She lived through Cuba's wars of independence against colonial Spain, in the heart of the province that saw most of the fighting, and she died in 1931 when Cuba was a young republic. My maternal Aunt Rubí remembers her as a "very tall, very fair" woman with a strong personality. In a photo from the 1920s, Lutgarda nuzzles baby Mabel (my mother); the old woman by then had the craggy face of those who've seen much life.
My great-grandmother Lutgarda was the daughter of Antonio Lotti Mercader and Josefa Navarrete Cuevas, "Pepilla." Antonio was a pharmacist in Manzanillo in the mid-19th century, when the town was home to some 4,000 inhabitants. At least, such is the story that reaches me via Eladio Ruiz, a distant cousin descended from Lutgarda's sister. I never knew Eladio until I started researching my family tree and found that his wife, Sara, had written an informal history.
It says Antonio's father was an Italian sailor who immigrated in the early 1800s to Manzanillo and established a shipping business, ferrying people and merchandise along the coast. It's a reminder that Cuba was until the 1950s a place where immigrants headed, not a place people left.
Sara's research reinforced advice from genealogists: yes, talk to older relatives with long memories, but remember that younger ones may have done family trees whose branches intersect with yours and corroborate family lore. Sara, for instance, said the names Antonio Lotti Mercader and Josefa Navarrete Cuevas had come down through her husband's branch of the Lottis—the same names handed down, independently, in my branch. It's as good a confirmation as one can find in the absence of written documents.
Another suggestion from genealogists applies specifically to Hispanic research: look in Spanish heraldic histories. These multivolume encyclopedias were intended for persons eager to prove descent from nobility. But the compilations are so exhaustive that even the plebeians amongst us find family links too. Largest is the 88-volume Diccionario heráldico y genealógico de apellidos españoles y americanos, by Alberto and Arturo García Carrafa, with family histories of 15,000 surnames in Latin America and Spain. A specifically Cuban work is the nine-volume Historia de familias cubanas, by Francisco Xavier de Santa Cruz y Mallen, Count of San Juan de Jaruco.
Alas, I did not find I am of noble birth. I found a Navarrete line that went from La Rioja to Santiago de Cuba but I could not make a connection.
I do know that, perhaps in the 1880s as an exhausted Cuba paused between its two wars of independence, Antonio and Pepilla's daughter Lutgarda married Francisco "Pancho" Vázquez Martí. They became the parents of my grandfather Emilio.
I have not been able to confirm that Pancho's parents, Juan Vázquez and Teodora Martí, immigrated from Galicia, in northwestern Spain. But I have seen the 1902 commercial directory of Manzanillo, which shows a Juan Vázquez owned a cantina.
On the same Sariol street, the directory also shows, Bitito Surós owned a bodega. Did my grandparents Emilio and Emelina already know each other in 1902 when he was eight and she four years older?
It is possible that the utilitarian Manzanillo directory contains a forgotten story of two kids who played together at their families' businesses, who became a young couple in love, who became my grandparents, and whom I watched hold hands on a bed in New Jersey many years later while cancer ate away Emelina's life. "To my Emilio, so that he never forgets me," she wrote in a photo dated 1916, a dark-eyed beauty in back-lit profile. He never did.
As to my great-grandfather Pancho, his work was listed as "comerciante" on my mother's baptism certificate (occupations and addresses are another bit of information most genealogical records outside the Spanish-speaking world do not have). Family lore says he owned a mattress factory and a bottling company, and was a photographer. The many photos from that side of the family are evidence of the latter: pictures of young Emilio and twin portraits of a thirtysomething couple that, according to family lore, are his grandparents. Which set of grandparents, though? Since Pancho is said to have been a photographer, they may well be his own parents, Juan and Teodora, rather than his in-laws, Antonio and Pepilla. Educated guesswork is allowed in genealogy; at least, I allow it if I promise myself to keep looking for confirmation.
My favorite photo shows Emilio as a toddler with blond ringlets in the lap of a matriarch holding a fan and wearing quintessentially Spanish widow's weeds. Again, family lore has it she is one of his grandmothers, but no name. And again, my guesswork: the widow's prominent eyebrows, intense eyes, and determined jaw make her look very much like the thirtysomething woman of the twin portraits, three decades older.
Still more guesswork? The photo of the couple is from the 1860s. Websites that offer advice on dating photographs for genealogical research say the size of the photo and paper on which it is printed, plus the man's Lincoln-style top hat and the woman's "hoop" dress with billowing sleeves, date the pictures to the decade when the United States was in the midst of its civil war, and when Cuba was starting its fight against Spanish colonialism. Some of my relatives fought in that struggle, as I learned on the Internet.
Online Genealogy
The Internet is a genealogical tool unimaginable just a few years ago, with genealogical information from places around the world including Spanish-speaking countries. One website, CubaGenWeb, has a database of Cuban soldiers who fought in the War of Independence, where I found a private in the "Guá" infantry regiment, based near Manzanillo, named Federico Lotti Navarrete. He is my great-grandmother Lutgarda's brother, confirmed beyond doubt because his parents are said to be Antonio and Josefa—the same as the names passed down through family lore.
Another website to check is Ellis Island Records, which has handwritten manifests of ships that arrived at Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924. I did not believe anyone in my family had come to the United States in those years, but tried several of our surnames anyway. I hit pay dirt with Surós. Two of Bitito's sons, my grandmother's brothers Obdulio ("Yuyo") and Manuel ("Totón"), passed through Ellis Island.
I remember Tío Yuyo when I was seven or eight years old. He liked to wear a starched white guayabera, and was missing half an ear—bitten off, he said, by a mule during his youth in Manzanillo. It was through the Ellis Island website that I learned he visited the United States "on business" in 1903 and stayed at 314 West 14th Street in Manhattan, in one of New York's first Hispanic neighborhoods.
Manifests also show Totón came to America four times between 1912 and 1917 as a student at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. I e-mailed my Caracas cousin Jimmy, Totón's grandson, and he sent me a picture of Totón as a young man on the Bucknell campus, in the middle of a group of friends, hands in his pockets. . Surprisingly, an Antonio Surós also passed through Ellis Island, on a ship from Spain. I do not know if he is Bitito's older brother, who inherited the family farm and supposedly stayed in Maçanet. This Antonio came in 1921, several years after the tax collector confiscated Can Surós.
Next: Familysearch.org and Google Earth provide more clues.>>
The most comprehensive online resource is Family Search, the genealogical website of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Central to the Mormon religion is the quest to "find their ancestors and preserve their family histories," the website says. LDS librarian Paul Nauta estimates the church has gathered 2.5 million rolls of microfilm from 110 countries, "conservatively, 10 billion names," including people of all faiths. Most of the microfilmed manuscripts themselves are not on the Internet, but the LDS website has an index of names in the documents. People can order microfilms delivered from Salt Lake City to a local LDS "Family History" center for viewing.
Cuban records are sparse within these Mormon archives. But there are good records for much of Latin America. For instance, a search for "Hernández" in Mexico returns 5,000 ancestral files of Hernández baptisms, marriages, and deaths from Mexican churches—and that's just for individuals whose first name starts with "A." Spain, too, is well represented. But I only have enough information to follow the Surós men of Maçanet and their wives, whose maiden names are preserved thanks to the Spanish two-surname custom.
On the LDS site those maiden names, Isern, Amat, and Buadas, appear most often in Maçanet's home province of Gerona, a region of Spain. But I have yet to find a connection. I also find 188 Suróses. None from Maçanet, unsurprising because San Llorenç's archives were burned. But I find two men named Salvador Surós in a place called Castanyet.
I load Google Earth: Castanyet is nine miles from Maçanet. Could they be relatives? I e-mail Martí. He replies that his mother's family—the Surós side—is from Castanyet.
The two Salvadors—this time with the standard "v"—were married in 1713 and 1766, says the online index. Too old to be my Salbador, alive in the 1830s when he signed the land documents. Could they be his father and grandfather? I order the microfilm delivered to an LDS center in New Jersey near where I live. Two weeks later, it arrives.
The reading is difficult. It's in Catalan, it's hundreds of pages covering two centuries, it's handwritten in old script, and it's so blurry that entire pages are illegible. I cannot find the two marriages referenced in the online index. But I do find a 1720 testament of a man from Castanyet named Joseph Surós. I copy the file and e-mail it to Martí, who writes back a translation:
"Yo, Joseph Surós… sabiendo que nada es más cierto que la muerte y que nada es más incierto que la hora de la muerte… nombro a mi hijo Salvador como albacea de mis bienes". ["I Joseph Surós …knowing nothing is more certain than death and nothing more uncertain than the hour of death… name my son Salvador executor of my estate."]
Are they my family? No clues from second surnames— the custom was not universally followed until later. Martí cannot say. He cannot say, either, whether they are his branch. The mystery remains, for now.
La Beneficencia
While the various branches of my mother's family were coming together in Manzanillo, my father's family was doing the same 320 miles to the west, in Cárdenas on Cuba's northern coast.
My dad's mother was Rafaelita Rodríguez. Of my four grandparents, I have the fewest memories of her: I remember only an old woman bedridden with an ailment similar to Alzheimer's disease. Abuelita nodded aimlessly and muttered nothings, her mind gone. My grandfather Ramón took care of her until the end. Papi left them behind when he took us out of Cuba, never to see his ailing parents again. This was the price he paid for his children to be brought up in America.
My father, naturally, knew his mom before disease ravaged her brain. What remains for later generations is a photograph of a somber 22-year-old in a wicker settee, leaning forward with her left arm raised as if to start saying something she decided to keep to herself.
Next: Family lore and legal documents help piece the puzzle.>>
She may have had plenty of that. Family lore has it that Rafaelita and her sister Maria Elisa, "Nena," were raised by older half-siblings who tormented them. The father of them all was Rafael Rodríguez, "Pipón." Rafaelita liked to tell about Pipón riding into Cárdenas on horseback, "tall and blue-eyed, cutting a figure so gallant that the whole town wanted to greet him," my father recalls. Nena inherited Pipón's farm, wresting it away from her half-sister, Generosa, in a lawsuit. I spent happy days visiting la finca de Nena as a young boy from Havana. I remember the smell of cattle, guajiros riding horses in their palm-straw hats, a manual pump across a country road that drew the sweetest well water I ever tasted.
Rafaelita and Nena's mother was Severina, Pipón's second wife. The girls spent the first years of their lives on his farm. But Severina died when my grandmother was about seven, according to oral tradition. Pipón took Rafaelita and Nena to live in the home of Generosa, his much older daughter by a first wife.
Despite the name, Generosa was not generous of spirit to her little half-sisters. Rafaelita's childhood and teen years were spent in misery and humiliation. Generosa often threatened to send Rafaelita and Nena to an orphanage.
That may have hit close to home. Severina, family rumor has it, was a child of la Beneficencia, the popular name for the Real Casa de Maternidad—colonial Cuba's home for the children of unwed mothers. As evidence to support the tale, family legend says her surname was Valdés, conferred by priests to every kid at la Beneficencia.
Was it true? Genealogists' advice: check the written word. First stop, my father's birth certificate. His maternal grandmother, it says, was Severina Ramírez Valdés.
The double surname contradicts the Beneficiencia tale, suggesting that Severina had two known parents and was therefore not a foundling. My father does not have an answer. His sister in Havana, María del Carmen, "Mayita," digs up their mother's death certificate: she was the daughter, it says, of Severina Valdés. No Ramírez. The Beneficiencia theory is back on.
However, Mayra Sánchez-Johnson, the professional genealogist helping me research, says death certificates are unreliable, given without confirmation at a time of grief. Mayra's contacts in Cuba comb through church archives at the behest of Cuban Americans who want to know about their ancestors but cannot—or will not—go back to Castro's Cuba. In April 2006 her associate in Cárdenas found my grandmother Rafaelita's baptism certificate.
On her paternal side I see Pipón and his parents, Francisco Rodríguez Alfonso and Francisca Herrera Piloto. And on the maternal side, the document states, Rafaelita's mother was Severina Valdés of the Real Casa de Maternidad, parents unknown. A month later, Mayra's source in Cárdenas finds Severina's baptism certificate. It says she was born in 1872 and abandoned "at the house inhabited by Severino Ramírez."
So there I had it: Severino and Severina, his Ramírez versus the Beneficiencia-given Valdés. Father and daughter?
For an unwed mother to leave her child with the father, and for him to accept the child, was not unusual in Cuba then, Mayra says. "This time he took the baby to the maternity house and left her there."
Family lore and legal documents now agreed: my great-grandmother Severina was a child of unwed parents left to the care of the Spanish colonial government in Cuba. It explains why her daughter Rafaelita, my abuela, had such a hard time with her half-sister. Generosa rebelled against sharing her home with the child of Pipón and his second wife, the foundling.
There may have been more to it, I found out recently.
The Chino Latino and the Elopement
My father's father, Ramón took to his grave secrets as deep as his wife Rafaelita's. The biggest? It's not at all certain that his surname—and therefore my dad's, and mine—is the real thing. We may not actually be Hernándezes!
According to family stories, Ramón's father was Chinese. If that's true, and if naming custom was followed like tradition and the law dictate, I should have a Chinese surname.
Although my grandfather Ramón never went to college, he had an insatiable intellectual curiosity. He worked part-time as a journalist and was a self-taught engineer of sorts. After the devastating hurricane of 1933 (known to Cubans simply as "el huracan del '33"), he rebuilt the main boilers of the sugar mill where he worked and redesigned the aqueduct that brought water to Cárdenas.
It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I first heard Ramón's father was among the 140,000 laborers who immigrated to Cuba from China in the mid-19th century. It was a brutal business. The Chinese came "usually on an eight-year contract, and they were therefore not to be regarded as slaves," wrote the historian Hugh Thomas in his monumental book Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom." But the difference was in name only. The Chinese were persuaded, press-ganged…or deluded by the merchants' Chinese agents' promises of a good life."
Was my great-grandfather in fact one of these unfortunates? The written record indicates that he was not. On my father's birth certificate, a Manuel Hernández Arencibia appears in the slot for "grandfather," the place that family legend reserves for the Chinese man. Of course, Chinese who went to Cuba often took on Spanish names. But news from Mayra's source in Cárdenas makes the Chinese connection even less likely: Ramón's birth certificate states that his paternal grandparents—my great-great-grandparents—were Mateo Hernández Jiménez of Havana and Josefa Arencibia Álvarez of Matanzas. Even Manuel's father was a Hernández.
One thing is for sure: nearly all of Cuba's Chinese were male. The census of 1861 found 34,834 "Asiatics," of whom only 57 were women. In Cárdenas, according to the 1919 census, there were 215 Chinese persons, all men. So it is almost certain that my Chinese great-grandfather, if such a person existed, founded a family with a woman who was not Chinese.
That would have been "Pilarcita" Serrano, Ramón's mother—and my great-grandmother.
Pilarcita's full name appears in my dad's birth certificate: María del Pilar Serrano Philpot. It does not give her place of birth. Yet even before I first learned that my great-grandfather may have been Chinese, I had heard stories that Pilarcita was born in Tampa when it was home to a Cuban-Spanish community. The legend has it that her father had been a doctor in Spain whose wealthy parents employed an English maid named Seraphine or Serafina Philpot. The doctor and Serafina fell in love. But he was Catholic, the scion of an upper-class family, and she Protestant, a mere domestic employee.
Supposedly, they eloped and found their way to Tampa's welcoming Hispanic culture. But the couple died in a train accident, and their baby daughter Pilarcita, who survived, was adopted by a family in Cárdenas, where she grew up.
When faced with family traditions and no corroborating documents, genealogists say to dig for clues in history. The Cuban-Spanish community in Tampa was founded in 1886 when Vicente Martínez Ybor established a cigar factory—a date incompatible with family lore. Pilarcita could not have been born then, because she would have been a child in 1893 when her son, my grandfather Ramón, was born.
Next: It's in the genes.>>
Still, the document reconfirmed that Pilarcita's surnames were Serrano and the English-sounding Philpot. Was at least part of the elopement tale true? Answers began to arrive after I again called Aunt Mayita in Cuba. She found Ramón's baptism certificate. His maternal grandparents—Pilarcita's mom and dad—were Ramón Serrano Rodríguez, a "doctor en medicina" born in Spain, and Serafina Philpot Henderson, born in England.
A few days later there was more from Mayra's researcher. Pilarcita's birth certificate also said Serafina was English-born, and listed her parents: Juan (which must have been "John") Philpot and Serafina Dreeque (but nothing on Henderson). It also named the physician's hometown, La Coruña in Galicia, as well as his parents, Antonio Serrano and Vicenta de Ocal.I still do not know why a Spanish doctor and an Englishwoman had a daughter who grew up in Cuba and gave birth to my grandfather (possibly with a Chinese man). But now I have names to follow my Serrano branch to its gallego home. Next goal: track down the Philpot hometown in England.
As for the Chinese connection, I was still stumped. So I turned to genetic genealogy.
It's in the Genes
I had read in National Geographic magazine about a project to help people find their "deep ancestry." For about $100 you get a kit with a plastic cheek-scraper and a small screw-top tube in which to preserve your DNA. Then you send it in for testing.
The idea is that when humanity split into different branches that spread across the globe tens of thousands of years ago, the migrating populations were small enough to have genetic mutations shared by all members of each group, and only members of each group. Those distinct "markers" were passed to every living person today. All 6 billion humans belong to identifiable prehistoric "haplogroups," geneticists say.
The test showed my patrilienal Y-DNA carries the markers that define Haplogroup O2—more specifically, its M95 line, exclusive to Southeast Asia. Genetics proved rumor right: I have Chinese ancestors. Perhaps Manuel Hernández Arencibia was only Pilarcita's first husband, not my grandfather Ramón's dad; so maybe Ramón was Pilarcita's son with a Chinese man who resigned himself to registering his boy as the child of Manuel, the white Cuban with more social prestige.
That wasn't my only surprise. I paid another $100 for Family Tree DNA, which conducted the tests for National Geographic, to also check matrilineal ancestry—my mother, her mother Emelina, Emelina's mother Bitita, and Bitita's mother Felipa Fuentes.
The result: Haplogroup L1, with origins in Africa. I asked my father to have his own mitochondrial DNA tested, the female lineage that includes Rafaelita, Severina, and Severina's unknown mother (my own DNA would not work, because individuals can only test direct patrilineal and matrilineal descent). It too came back as having origins in Africa.
Neither Rafaelita (whom I remember), nor Bitita (to judge from one photo), looked like they were of African descent. But DNA does not lie. Maybe Severina's part-African ancestry explains her daughter Rafaelita's mistreatment by the stepsister. Whatever the case, I now know that somewhere several generations back, two Africans enslaved in Cuba became my ancestors.
It all bespeaks of the history of Cuba, with its Spanish, black, and Chinese heritage, plus a bit of the culture brought by immigrants from elsewhere—Italy and England, in my case. With more than a million Cubans in the United States, it also bespeaks of American history.
But that is more recent history. Go back a little more than half a century. My father left Cárdenas to study law at Havana University, and my mother left Manzanillo when her father found a better job in Havana. It was in the Cuban capital that Roger and Mabel met, married, and had me as a child. Their lives were disrupted by the Castro revolution four years after I was born, and in 1964 they uprooted their family to search for freedom in the United States.
And here I remain—after wars and thousands of miles, after reconstructing the history of six generations of my family through Cuba, Spain, China, Africa, England, Italy. Now a seventh generation, my children, is heir to that legacy and to their mother's Jewish heritage. In the United States. It took me until I turned 50 to realize my American life is part of history too.
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"This is not change," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero correctly told the Associated Press. "Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue."
A Gallup Poll released February 12 revealed that 62 percent of Americans want to investigate or criminally prosecute Bush administration officials who authorized torture in the so-called "war on terror." But even hough President Obama has said numerous times that "nobody's above the law," on February 10 he used the Bush administration's "state secrets" gambit to quash a lawsuit attempting to penalize some of those involved in renditioning torture subjects.
Vice-Admiral Albert Church: US abused/tortured prisoners to death in Afghanistan
The ACLU has managed to acquire incompletely redacted Federal documents that substantiate charges that US interrogators indeed did abuse/torture prisoners to death in Afghanistan as early as 2002.
Find the documents here.
A chilling passage from the report by Vice-Admiral Albert Church:
The behavior alleged in the Deember 2002 Bagram death cases was clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policies or guidelines. In both instances the deaths followed interrogation sessions in which unauthorized techniques were allegedly employed, but in both cases these sessions were followed by further alleged abusive behavior outside of the interrogation booth.
The second page of the report details prisoners
being handcuffed to objects above their heads in order to keep them awake. Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of "compliance blows" which involved striking the PUC's legs with the MP's knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of blunt force trauma…
@ OnTheWilderSide
from Greens for Greens
CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
On the Rocks
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I write these words at the end of a week in which:
A new Democratic president, Barack Obama, via his Attorney General, has explicitly endorsed Bush's policy on renditions and Bush's refusal to recognize the jurisdiction of US courts in any legal proceedings in this regard; also a week in which Obama's solicitor general has explicitly endorsed Bush's policy on enemy combatants.
I write not long after the New York Times reported that state welfare rolls are actually shrinking in months when unemployment has risen to real totals of 17 and 18 per cent – 1.7 million in Dec and Jan, hence when more and more people are in desperate straits.
I told ya….
- William Grigg predicts that Obama will be worse than Bush.
- Steve Funk writes
- Less foreign military interventionism? NOPE
- Ending the insane war on drugs? NOPE
- Defunding G.W. Bush's "faith-based initiatives"? NOPE
- Halting illegal government wiretaps and repealing FISA? NOPE
- No more taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street and big business? NOPE
- Cutting reckless government spending and reducing the $10+ trillion federal debt? NOPE
- Reforming our doomed Social Security program? NOPE
- Reducing the influence of PACs and lobbyists? NOPE
- Lifting the Cuban trade and travel embargo? NOPE
- Becky points out that Obama was partially responsible for the passage of gay-bashing Prop. 8 in California. He did nothing to stop pro-Prop 8 forces from calling millions of people with a recording of him saying "I believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God is in the mix." He did not campaign against the measure.
Becky writes:
Ironically, it was the huge black turnout, triggered by their enthusiasm to put [Obama] in the the White House, that ensured passage of Proposition 8. Exit polls show it was opposed by whites, Latinos were evenly split, and favored overwhelmingly by African-Americans.
(Much) more to come…..
Knappster's post on Liberaltarians, and my comments…
"Liberaltarianism" in its 2008 regeneration simply meant that libertarians placed dismantling the Bush Administration's catastrophic civil liberties and foreign affairs policies so much higher on the agenda than fiscal restraint (which neither conservatives nor liberals embrace today anyway) that they were willing to hold their noses, close their eyes and pull the lever for Obama — despite knowing full well what the budgetary ramifications would be.
Think of the Republicans and Democrats like the meth and heroin a junkie shoots.
Junkie gets too spun out on meth, and shoots some H to come down. Junkie gets too low with H and shoots some more meth to spin back up. It's a toxic mix.
"placed dismantling the Bush Administration's catastrophic civil liberties and foreign affairs policies so much higher on the agenda than fiscal restraint"
What about the Bush gang's lack of fiscal restraint, worst since either LBJ or FDR in growth level terms, and worst ever in absolute terms? What about the Clinton gang continuing the Iraq embargo for eight years, putting more people in prison for drugs than any administration before him, proposing everything which eventually came to be in the use-a-patriot act, etc? What about Obama voting for all these kinds of policies in the Senate, and promising more of the same on the campaign trail (IE more war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, no timetable or complete withdrawal in Iraq, no marijuana legalization, etc.)
Whether you vote for a Democrat or Republican, either will make foreign policy, civil liberties, *and* government spending much worse.
Democrats as a cure for Republicans and Republicans as a cure for Democrats are both very bad ideas.
… which puts them in the position of having to deal with a whole new set of problems, this time coming from the direction that, in desperation, they endorsed.
Yes, kind of like a pit and pendulum situation.
I'll be interested to see which ways today's "liberaltarians" go over the next couple of years.
I suppose that would depend on which ones.
More Liberaltarianism discussion at NFV posted yesterday by Deaconstruck…
Year: —8.
An outgoing president has escalated a long conflict into full-blown war, ultimately to popular displeasure. He is not seeking re-election. His party rejects its anti-war wing and nominates a "stay the course" candidate.
The opposing party nominates, and elects, a candidate running on nebulous "new leadership will end the war and win the peace" rhetoric.
The new president introduces "bold" economic policies, including wage controls.
1968 or 2008?
LBJ or GWB?
Eugene McCarthy or Ron Paul?
Richard Nixon or Barack Obama?
The more things change …
Same guy? Think about it … ever seen'em together?
What does that leave? The Pope? Well, hear ya go.
Bdee, bdee, bdee….


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If you're like my 86-year-old grandmother, you probably love black licorice for whatever inexplicable reason exists for snacking on something that looks like braided horsehair lathered in pomade. Now, for your candy-chomping pleasure, you can enjoy black licorice with extra lead, which is especially helpful for all those licorice enthusiasts who are also villains in a Superman comic (Superman's x-ray vision is impotent against lead).
California health officials are warning black licorice lovers that a recent batch of Red Vines black licorice tested positive for extra high levels of lead. The American Licorice Company has responded by issuing a recall for all one-pound bags of Red Vines Black Licorice Twists stamped with a "best by" expiration date of Feb. 4, 2013. The California Department of Public Health said that the candy contained as much as .33 parts per million of lead, a concentration that could deliver 13.2 micrograms of lead per serving. That's more than double the daily limit in children younger than six, who really shouldn't consume more than 6 micrograms in a day. Lead, which can be toxic to developing organs and neurological development, also poses particular dangers to pregnant women. Nobody has gotten sick yet, which is probably owing to the fact that nobody really eats black licorice and the American Licorice Co. just uses it to make toy soldiers and oxymoronic balloons.
Red Vines black licorice recalled over high lead levels [MSNBC]
Image via BW Folsom/Shutterstock.


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Labour's opposition to stop and search would increase crime on our streets, putting frontline officers and communities at risk.
Labour's plans for a new 'land value tax' will clobber high streets and town centres
Tonight, Jeremy Corbyn once again demonstrated an abject failure of leadership. His repeated unwillingness to set out a clear position on Brexit means he has no credibility on anything else.
The Conservative Party launched a new billboard today, Get Britain out of neutral. The poster was launched at sites in London, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol and Cardiff.
The Prime Minister has written a letter urging Jeremy Corbyn to reconsider his Brexit policy and his plans to fiddle Labour's second Brexit referendum.
Labour's policy to scrap prison sentences of under six months would lead to a surge of offenders on our streets, risking public safety.
Our Conservative plan for getting Brexit done so that we can unleash Britain's potential is in stark contrast to the gridlock, dither, delay and uncertainty of a hung parliament.
Rail union leaders and the Labour Party have boasted that they are "working together" to "bring down" the government at this month's election through a campaign of political strikes disrupting millions of passengers' lives.


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Pompon! I don't know which makes me happier, the sound of the word or the tactile pleasure I derive from the object itself. Don't they resemble coconut balls from a distance?
Image credits: one, two & three.
I've been doing a lot of stash-busting lately, partly to make room for my Ice Yarn hauls (of which I have another to document), and when I saw this adorable pompon scarf from Anthropologie, it seemed like the perfect solution to some cream acrylic I had left over from my novice knitting days.
I made a template with outer circle diameter 11cm, and hole diameter 5.5cm, and began winding. I was quite happy with my floppy pompons, until my Mum decided to have a go…
On the left is her perfect pompon, and on the right is one of mine. >_>
She wound hers so tight that it took a lot of effort to cut through, and my poor template looked quite battered afterwards, but she did create a pompon that all other pompons can aspire to, and that only needed some light trimming. Mine all needed shearing! Never mind, the offcuts will be good for stuffing.
I made 10 pompons in total and used about 400g of aran-weight acrylic yarn. In my opinion, this is definitely a project for cheap yarn, even if you wear it around your neck.
I don't think I need to teach any of you how to make a pompon, but I do have a few suggestions:
- Use a surgeon's knot when tying your pompon up. It's just like a regular knot, but you pass the end of the yarn through the loop twice. This keeps the knot from sliding before you make another overhand knot. Useful for bows too!
- Leave the ends of the yarn you use to tie up long, as this makes it easier when it comes to attaching your pompons together.
This is really the trickiest part. Here's the solution I came up with…
Thread both ends of the yarn through a large tapestry needle. Align the next pompon so that its strings point up, and poke the needle into the bottom of it, pulling until the loop left is as long as you want the gap between your pompons to be. My idea in using two strands was that the pompons could be tucked through the loops to secure the scarf around my neck, so if the idea appeals to you, you might want to check that you can fit a pompon through the gap you leave.
Once the two strands are poking up out of the top of the next pompon, I tied all four strands two-by-two to each other. Just keep knotting until the pompon is secure and can't slide up or down. Then repeat the same for all the other pompons.
You can experiment with smaller or larger pompons, different colour combinations (can we see an ombre pompon scarf, please?), and maybe even make use of some child labour. ;)
When not around your neck, pompon scarves make really lovely garlands you'll want to fondle constantly.
And did you know you can trim pompons into a heart shape? It's true! :)
Pom pom pom…


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Brussels, 22 May 2012 – The United Nations European campaign on water issues, Drop by Drop - the Future We Want Campaign, is among almost 3,000 participants in this years Green Week at the European Commission´s headquarters in Brussels.
A selection of the top 30 ads in the Drop by Drop newspaper ad competition is on display prominently at Green Week, Europe's largest environment conference which kicked off 22 May under the banner "The Water Challenge – Every Drop Counts".
At the opening of Green Week, Ida Auken, the Minister for the Environment of Denmark, speaking on behalf of the Danish EU presidency, said that if we proceeded with business as usual , the human demand for clean water supply would outstrip the resource by as much as 40% by 2030, and by that time 50% of the world's population will live in regions with water shortages.
Water is one of the main issues at June´s Rio + 20 Conference on Sustainable Development. Ms. Auken struck a pessimistic tone and said that the EU seemed "to be pretty alone in having high ambitions."
"Personally, I'm not scared of being alone but I have recognised that it is going to be extremely difficult to reach consensus on ambitious new actions to be agreed in Rio. But there are three weeks left and I won't give up on having an ambitious result and especially when it comes to water," Ms. Auken said.
She also pointed out that the reduction of urban water leakage alone could provide billions of dollars in resource benefits throughout the world.
"When you combine this with the fact that even in a developed region like the EU, 20 to 40% of the freshwater abstracted is wasted. Then something is wrong," minister Auken said. "EU Member States are among the leaders in water technology - but even within the EU there is great potential to do better."
A recent European Commission survey shows that 7 out of 10 Europeans think that water-related problems are a serious concern.
To view the Green Week 2012 programme and follow the sessions live, see:
The Brussels based United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe - UNRIC provides information on UN activities to the countries of the region. It also provides liaison with institutions of the European Union in the field of information. Its outreach activities extend to all segments of society and joint campaigns, projects and events are organized with partners including the EU, governments, the media, NGOs, schools and local authorities.
United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe (UNRIC Brussels)
Residence Palace, Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat 155, Block C2,7th and 8th floor, Brussels 1040, Belgium
Tel.: +32 2 788 8484 / Fax: 32 2 788 8485


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AMC has ordered two drama pilots, one from Criminal Minds and Cold Case producer Chris Mundy and one produced by Scandal star Tony Goldwyn, the cable channel announced Thursday.
Low Winter Sun, from writer-producer Mundy and Greg Brenman, is based on the 2006 two-part British miniseries of the same name starring Mark Strong. The project centers on the murder of a cop by a fellow Detroit detective, who is subsequently pulled into the Detroit underworld.
13 Promising Pilots: New shows from Kevin Bacon, Connie Britton, Ryan Murphy and Mindy Kaling
The Untitled LaGravanese & Goldwyn Project comes from Goldwyn and executive producer and writer Richard LaGravanese (Water for Elephants, Bridges of Madison County). The legal thriller follows a District Attorney who comes across new evidence that reopens a sensational murder case. Goldwyn, who plays the President on Scandal and is also known for his roles on Justified, The Pelican Brief and Ghost, will serve as an executive producer and director. Andrew Sugarman (Conviction) will serve as a co-executive producer.
"Both of these shows represent an opportunity to continue what our existing scripted series have established so well — a commitment to great writing, and shows that tackle complex characters in a genuine and authentic way," Joel Stillerman, AMC's EVP of original programming, production and digital content, said in a statement. "Richard and Tony have collaborated on an explosive piece of storytelling that explores race and capital punishment in a way that transcends the legal genre; and Chris has captured the strength and intensity of the source material to create a muscular, Detroit-based character piece that explores the themes of such diverse stories as Crime and Punishment and Heat."
Which project do you hope gets a series order?


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The planting site needs to be well cultivated; usually by first breaking up the entire field using discs, rotary cultivator or chisel plough (depending on soil type) then by raising the planting rows into high mounds preferably using a grader so as to achieve a 'V' drain between the rows for drainage and flat edges on the mounds for easy slashing and plantation maintenance work. The optimum planting grid is 4m apart between trees within the mounded rows with the rows at 6.25 metres apart. This gives 400 stems per hectare and requires no thinning before harvest at 8 to 15 years. After harvest the stump regrows, negating the need to replant .
The first aim in the management of Paulownia is to grow a sapling with 4 metres or more trunk height free of branches in one season. This will become the butt log - the most valuable part of the tree, producing clear timber - free from knots and flaws. The reason it is worth aiming for such spectacular height growth in one season is it is normal for the tip of the trunk to die back during winter and regrow with a kink the following spring, resulting in a slight wave in the centre grain of the timber. TGG have developed a plantation establishment method which has proved effective in most circumstances. In an ideal climate Headstarters™ may reach 4 metres tall in their first season, but often this is not possible so any trees less than 3 or 4 metres tall should be regenerated by cutting the trunk off at ground level in the winter after its first growing season. Drastic as this may sound, the Paulownia will regrow from the stump in spring and develop a new trunk, stronger, straighter and larger both in height and girth by the end of the second season than that which would have grown had the original trunk not been removed. From this point the trunk is usually allowed to grow on to a harvest age of eight or more years. No branches are allowed to grow on the first year trunk - any that sprout from the trunk just above a large leaf stalk are pinched out or cut, but with great care not to remove the large leaves directly attached to the trunk. The large leaves on young Paulownia are the trees' solar panels - catching the sunlight and, in combination with water and nutrients, converting it into rapid growth. Removing these leaves will slow the growth of the tree. The plantation is usually further pruned until about 4 or 5 years of age to ensure a clear trunk to five or six metres. From the second year of the trunk onwards (when the leaves become smaller) lift pruning should be gradual, leaving at least one third of the height of the trunk covered with leaved branches. Excessive pruning will inhibit the normal formation of a canopy and prevent the natural establishment of the tree, resulting in slow diameter growth of the trunk.
Paulownia have high nutrient requirements to reach their full potential. Usually 200 - 250 grams (one standard cup is about 250g) per tree of a N.P.K.S. 8-11-10-7 granular fertiliser (such as Incitec Pivot Croplift 800) is applied as a manual top dressing at spring planting. Later in the season a further 300g - 500g (depending on soil) per tree is applied using a fertiliser spreader with a side shoot that directs the granules down the centre of the planting row. This is repeated in the following seasons as needed to maintain rapid green growth during the warm weather (usually 2 or 3 applications per season until year 4 or 5 when one broadly spread application of 500-600g per tree at the start of each season should be adequate). The best type and rate of fertiliser will vary from site to site, depending on climate and soil type. In a very dry climate liquid fertiliser (fertigation) may be the only way to adequately supply enough nutrition as granulated fertiliser requires rain to properly wash it into the root zone. After a number of seasons something of a self supporting nutrient cycle develops from the now deep roots and the normal falling of the leaves in autumn (assuming the leaves are not collected). Frequent plantation inspection and timely action are the keys to success in a Paulownia plantation and it is important to be able to recognise when the trees are suffering nutrient deficiency.
Unless in a zone which receives reliable summer rainfall, watering is critical for fast growth. It's generally best to use a multiseasonal integrated dripper line (with emitters with a labyrinth and vortex structure which create a turbulent water flow which results in clearing of residues and resistance to clogging). The lower the litres per hour rating of the emitters the more can be run at the same time (2Lph is adequate but up to 4Lph is suitable in soil types where the water does not pool). The emitters should be spaced at 50cm so that a drip emitter will never be further than 25cm from the stem of the plantlet - this is critically important in the early weeks after planting, especially in sandy soil. Close emitter spacing also result in more even delivery to the root system of more mature trees. The dripper line should be run straight down the centre of the planting row mounds, placed on alternate sides of each tree to keep them in place on the middle of the row when they move due to varying temperature causing expansion and contraction. A good deep soaking every 7 to 21 days during their first summer is usually sufficient and generally better than light frequent sprinklings in encouraging a good root system. (The exception to this is if you have shallow soils with a hard clay pan and high water table - in this case more frequent shallower watering may help to encourage the roots to stay within their most viable zone - any that go too deep will only rot in the wet season.) If a drip irrigation system is used it should be left on long enough to thoroughly soak the depth of the root area. Observation and common sense are the keys to correct watering. Obviously sandy soils will need more than heavy loams, but overwatering in sand will result in wastage and leaching of nutrients out of the root zone. It is also important to note it is normal for Paulownia to wilt during a hot day - this is a mechanism for avoiding excessive transpiration. If the trees are wilting because it is hot, but the soil is moist don't water them or you risk causing root or collar rot. If they have enough moisture the leaves will stand up again when it cools in the evening.
Weed control is crucial in the early years. Make sure the ground is completely free of weeds prior to planting. If you have a lot of weed seeds in the topsoil it may be best to plant the trees within a small square of biodegradable weed mat (such as Jutemat). Protect the young plants with a plastic tree guard sleeve supported by 3 stakes or a reusable wire frame. This allows spraying of glyphosate weed killer using a stripper dome sprayer which is mounted on an ATV (farm bike - causes less soil compaction than a tractor). Stripper domes are generally 60cm wide so a run up each side of the tree line results in a 120cm bare centre strip. The inter-row can simply be slashed - maintaining some green cover on this zone is advantageous in terms of beneficial biology, erosion control and avoiding nutrient run-off and excessive evaporation. A side throw mower is ideal as throwing the grass and weed trimmings up onto the bare strip in the centre of the mound will act as a mulch - conserving moisture and inhibiting weed seed germination.
Protection from severe wind is advantageous and can be provided by a windbreak of fast growing trees such as Virgilia, Tagasaste or Willow (which are all useful fodder trees) or maybe some other fast growing timber tree such as an Acacia or Eucalyptus - just make sure you leave at least a 12 metre gap between Eucalyptus trees and Paulownias or the Eucalyptus will inhibit the Paulownias' growth.
© 2000 - 2010 James S. Lawrence
You will find more detailed "How to" information in the Data Sheets, Technical Bulletins and Sales Support PDFs available on the main Paulownia Information page. In particular, for commercial plantation establishment information see Techincal Bulletin # 1 (PDF).