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From an MIT Release
CAMBRIDGE, MA – In a battle of the at-large bids, No. 3 Amherst College upended No. 1 MIT, 30-25, 30-16, 24-30, 30-23, in the final of the NCAA Division III Women's Volleyball New England Regional on Saturday night. The Lord Jeffs (30-4) will meet up with Juniata College on Thursday, Nov. 15 in the Elite Eight which will be hosted by Illinois Wesleyan University. Following their second straight regional final appearance, the Engineers finished the season with a record of 36-3.
MIT tallied three straight points to open the match. Amherst responded with six unanswered points and maintained a slight edge until a block by the Engineers evened the score at 12. After two more ties, the Lord Jeffs regained the advantage (18-17) on a hitting miscue by MIT. Trailing 24-19, the Engineers picked up four of the next five points to come within two (25-23), but it would not be enough as Amherst held on for the win.
Each side traded points to start off the second stanza before a kill by senior tri-captain Whitney Kouvaris (Jacksonville, FL) gave the Lord Jeffs the lead for good at 5-4. MIT stayed within striking distance for most of the game until a seven-point serving run by Amherst's Sara Heller (La Canada, CA) extended its margin to 22-11.
The early stages of the third frame were a back-and-forth affair as it featured eight ties and four lead changes. With the score knotted at 11, a hitting error by the Lord Jeffs sparked a 12-5 run for the Engineers. Amherst was able to narrow the gap to five points on five occasions, the last being at 29-24. A strike from Katie Rowe ended the game and denied the Lord Jeffs a sweep of the match.
With the score tied at six in the fourth game, Amherst slowly established a 17-11 advantage. MIT eventually came within three (21-18), but the Lord Jeffs immediately doubled their lead. The Engineers continued to attack, but they could not overcome the deficit.
Barden Cleeland paced MIT with 19 kills and a .385 hitting percentage while Rowe posted 13 kills and seven blocks. Amanda Morris notched 46 assists and 11 digs as Katrina Ellison contributed six blocks. Carrie Buchanan led the defense with 23 digs while Rose Zhong chipped in 11.
Senior tri-captain Jaclyn DeMais (Hillsdale, NJ) registered a match-high 27 kills and 25 digs while Kouvaris tallied 11 kills and three blocks. First-year Rachel Yorke (Los Angeles, CA) and senior tri-captain Julie Berkley (Fullerton, CA) bolstered Amherst's dig total, collecting 24 and 15, respectively. Heller dished out 51 assists as first-year Jackie Berkley (Fullerton, CA) totaled three blocks.

subset: commoncrawl


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2012-02-01, 16:56
Baswazz Wrote:...I think it is hard to read on smaller LCD's from the couch.
I tested it out on a 32" and 42" screen - they are both easy to read from about 3 metres away
Baswazz Wrote:Can you make the info screen/video options background a little grey'er like system main.
I made those parts transparent as I felt it was a better fit (the background is the currently playing video), but I will make a mockup for that and post it back.


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Job Opportunities
Sales/Merchandising Representative - Washington, Kir... Job Description
ROCKSTAR ENERGY DRINK IS EXPANDING! This is an entry-level position. We provide the company branded vehicle and the territory – you go out to sell and promote Rockstar! (no deliveries of product involved).
If you are an organized and motivated individual who wishes to be part of an exciting company and a winning team, this job is for you. Fast-paced and competitive environment — use your expertise to grow existing market share and earn bonuses; base pay guarantee with commission structure; Company vehicle; Company smartphone; 401(k) with employer match; Company Health Insurance Plan; vacation & sick days.
Job Requirements As a Field Sales Representative, you must be organized and entrepreneurial-minded person with a strong, disciplined work ethic. Excellent communication skills a plus. Interpersonal skill set needed to connect with and build relationships with store managers and clerks. Specific qualifications for the Field Representative position include:
· Minimum 18 years of age; Professional attitude and appearance; Detail-oriented with strong problem-solving skills; Current driver's license with clean driving record; Ability to perform physical activities including lifting and moving up to 35 pounds.
* This is a Monday through Friday Position *
ROCKSTAR INC & ROCKSTAR BEVERAGE CORPORATIONS are Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employers: All qualified individuals, including, minorities, women and people with disabilities, are encouraged to apply.
Related Links
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2 days ago: @lilreddog75 That's wheelie sick Evan🤘 see full story
4 days ago: 🚨 🚨 Last Chance! 🚨 🚨 Run to your nearest Rockstar Energy purveyor & grab a can for a chance to win 1 of 5 custom H… https://t.co/d14Ovyci7C see full story


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And when you know your song, you can divine you fate through popstrology. According to Ian Van Tuyl:
Popstrology is no parlor game; its methodology is elaborate and broad—the book ["Popstrology"] is almost four hundred pages long. Van Tuyl identifies forty-five constellations (Lite & White, Mustache Rock, Shaking Booty), and, for each No. 1 artist (or "birthstar"), he provides a chart, which maps the birthstar's signature qualities on a matrix of sexiness, soulfulness, and durability, among other variables....Hey!
Over a pint of Guinness in a bar on upper Broadway, Van Tuyl, who is thirty-eight years old and married to a sociology professor, considered a number of personages whose names had been in the papers. To do so, he had to expand the boundaries of the popstrological era, which, to orthodox practitioners, covers only the years from 1956 to 1989—Elvis Presley to Richard Marx. Apparently, many people over the age of forty-nine still hold positions of influence in the world.
First up, Michael Eisner and Robert Iger; Iger had just been named Eisner's successor as the C.E.O. of Disney. "Michael Eisner is a Glenn Miller," Van Tuyl said. "His birth song is 'Moonlight Cocktail.' Glenn Miller's a bandleader, he's an executive, but, more to the point, he died in an airplane over the English Channel. He didn't leave on his own terms is the point. I mean, the guy was the Elvis of 1941 to 1943. So there are unbelievably strong career implications for Michael Eisner. And Eisner's career accomplishments have been huge, but the fact is the children of Glenn Miller may not choose the way they go out."
"Iger," he continued. "Iger is a child of Patti Page. His birth song is 'Tennessee Waltz,'..."
"... but she was also 'How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?' She was a bright, shining, thriving target for rock and roll to knock down. On the other hand, this woman sold records well into the sixties. I would be surprised to see any child of Patti Page showing any kind of revolutionary innovation. Probably stewardship is something Iger could aspire to."Dammit, Van Tuyl. Shut up.


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So, as I'm sure most of you have heard, Santa Claus and Jesus are both White. They just are. And these are historical facts.
Or so proclaimed Fox television personality Megyn Kelly on her show The Kelly File, while discussing an article by Slate contributor Aisha Harris proposing that the beloved American icon be "made over" in a more culturally neutral manner. (Harris's suggestion is a cartoon gift-bearing penguin complete with red suit and obviously fake beard.)
What ensued was a predictable lampooning by late-night comedians and news commentators, followed by Fox News' just as predicable recalcitrant dismissal of a "liberal media's" obsession with race and race-baiting. For her part, Ms. Kelly refused to apologize for her position, calling the entire episode "tongue-in-cheek," though she did acknowledge that the issue of Jesus' ethnicity is "unsettled."
There are many issues here that deserve commentary and discussion, not the least of which is Ms. Harris' initial suggestion that an ethnically-neutral Santa Claus is much better suited for a multi-ethnic culture like that of the contemporary United States than the image of fat white man landing on rooftops and essentially performing what would be interpreted as "breaking and entering" in most legal jurisdictions. (And at least one comedian has suggested the ramifications for a black counterpart, given the Stand Your Ground laws in places like Florida.)
But I, like most in the entertainment and media industries, am more interested in what Kelly said, and how she said it, than in what precipitated it.
Kelly, of course, was simply pointing out what most Americans probably assume: Santa Claus as a fictionalized character is based on the historical fourth century Christian bishop Saint Nicholas of Myra. Santa has always been portrayed as a white man because, duh, his likeness is based on a real white man. The notion that he can be portrayed any other way than that of mainstream American culture and its hegemonic ethnicity (white) is practically unthinkable—at least by white folks in the mainstream.
In fact, when watching the video from the show, it is more Kelly's insistence of the brute factuality of Santa's (and Jesus's) ethnicity that is so problematic—and not necessarily her position.
And on this subject, a few ideas deserve discussion.
First and most obvious is that what the historical Saint Nicholas and Jesus both share is, if not a common ethnicity, then at least a common geography and culture—that of the Hellenistic Near East. And while Nicholas was most probably a Greek from "Asia Minor," and Jesus a Palestinian Jew, neither of them would have considered himself "white"—and would probably not be considered so by today's use of the term. So if Santa Claus is simply a reinterpretation of the Anatolian bishop Nicholas of Myra, then Ms. Kelly is mistaken: neither he (nor Jesus) is white.
They just aren't.
But, without getting into the specifics, our Santa Claus's development most probably owes more to Pagan characters, practices, and legends than he does to the Christian bishop of Myra. And so, arguably, on this point, Kelly is correct: Santa Claus, inasmuch as he evolves from Germanic mythology, is "white" or Northern European (though the same cannot be said for Jesus).
Of course, the real issue in all of this is the assumption that Santa is white—must be white, can only be white—whether rooted in history or mythology. And that is the assumption of hegemony: Where whiteness is the presumed sole and legitimate norm. Where the way things are is the way they have been and should be.
And pointing this out to someone who is oblivious to the ubiquity of whiteness in our culture can be awkward, unsettling, and even shocking.
Hence the insistence that Santa, like Jesus, is white—without any thought or consideration that such a proclamation may be controversial or that it could possibly be historically and culturally conditioned—tells us more about the speaker, her audience, and our culture than it does about either Santa or Jesus.
But this is not to belittle Ms. Kelly or chasten her about her firmly-held beliefs and ethnic identity. For the real "White Man's (sic) Burden" is not to rule over and "civilize" the non-White world, but rather to recognize and confront examples of "White Privilege" in our pluralistic and multi-ethnic culture. And while there are much more important aspects of white privilege in present day America (like being arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to jail far less often than non-whites for similar crimes), the ubiquity of whiteness as the aesthetical norm is not to be dismissed.
But this is easier said than done, since, while the ubiquity of whiteness is quite obvious to most non-white folks, it tends to be invisible to most whites.
And the same thing that happened to Ms. Kelly happened to me, though I was seven years old and in the second grade at the time.
I had the same reaction to the "Black Santa" that my African-American teacher Mrs. Watson had put up on her classroom wall: "Santa Claus is not black. He's white," I thought to myself, aghast at the suggestion. Luckily, I didn't have a television show to proclaim this, and didn't actually articulate it to any of my classmates either.
But the memory has stayed with me—as one where, for the first time, I was confronted with the hegemony of my own culture: me, a little white boy bused from my mostly white neighborhood to school in the projects: a minority among minorities, but whose whiteness was still the norm.
Or should be, as I mistakenly assumed then.
And around the same time (1974) and in much the same way, I was confronted by the "Black Jesus" episode on Good Times, where JJ had used Ned the Wino as the model for his painting of the Christ, since—being passed out in the gutter—he was the only one who could hold the pose long enough for JJ to paint.
Much later, of course, I was confronted by a long history of Jesus being portrayed in the varying ethnicity of the portrayers—across the centuries, from Asia to Africa to Europe and the Americas.
And then by the African-American Liberation Theologian James Cone's insistence that "Jesus is a black man," in that, according to Christian theology, God comes to his people in the guise of the most repressed and outcast among us. And in the United States, the reasoning goes, who has been more marginalized than the African slave?
But, arguably, I may not have been as sympathetic and understanding of art history or liberation theology had I not first been confronted in the privileged place of my whiteness in American culture by folks like Mrs. Watson, and the producers, writers, and cast of Good Times.
So what is troubling in Ms. Kelly's remarks is not her assumption that both Santa and Jesus are white—but her insistence that they are, an insistence that suggests that she has probably never been confronted by the hegemony of her whiteness or the problems that such an unyielding hegemony can produce, at least in a multi-ethnic culture like ours where the power to portray is the power to influence.
It is the catering to the very understandable perspective of a certain portion of the American public that times are changing, have changed, and that "their America," for better or worse, is gone and not coming back. And while such a perspective is frightening and should be met with sympathy and sensitivity in order to soothe and diffuse it, it is usually met with a demagoguery of entrenchment from the one side and outright scorn from the other.
Where are Mrs. Watson and JJ when we need them?
(Of course, I must admit, I don't particularly care for the Penguin Santa myself, whatever ethnicity it is.)


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Storytelling Project Invites You to Share Stories
Want to learn about the Ozarks from a different point of view? A storytelling project called Stry.us has moved into Springfield for the summer, and Ozarks citizens are invited to join in by reading the stories and adding to the discussion.
Stry.us (pronounced STOHR-ee), is a self-described "band of reporters in pursuit of really great storytelling."
The project began in July 2010 with one reporter, Dan Oshinsky, in Biloxi, Miss. His mission was to tell the story online and in print of how the Gulf Coast and its people were still trying to rebuild after Hurricanes Camille and Katrina.
This summer a team of six reporters and photographers including Oshinsky have moved to Springfield to look at what's happening in the Ozarks, "where the South and Midwest meet," and the issues that are keeping locals from living the lives they want to live.
Learn more about the Springfield project at http://www.stry.us/the-springfield-project/.
Read the first installment of the Springfield Story at http://www.stry.us/category/springfield/.
Currently, Stry.us is inviting Ozarks residents to write a letter to Springfield about what's on their minds -- hopes and dreams, roses and brickbats. What do you want your city to know?
Stry.us staff plans to use the letters for a series of live events at the Library this summer. The events will be based around the stories in citizens' letters. Stry.us may even ask residents to read their letters aloud at a Library event later this summer.
Submit an online letter to http://www.stry.us/letters/ or drop your letter in the Stry.us collection box placed in each branch and Mobile Library of the Springfield-Greene County Library District.
Stry.us is getting research assistance, syndication and other kinds of help from several partners including the Springfield-Greene County Library District, Community Publishers and Missouri News Horizon.
Stry.us says it stands for these core issues:
- stories power our world;
- great stories should be presented beautifully;
- we can build a community around our stories;
- great reporting starts with time -- and great listening;
- you don't need a newsroom to tell the news;
- we should talk less and build more;
- there is an awesome future for journalism.
Learn more about the project and the reporters at http://www.stry.us/about-stry/.
Find this article at


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The Flame Pokémon-athon! (ほのおのポケモンだいレース! The Great Race of Fire Pokémon!) is the 33rd episode of Pokémon: Indigo League.
Going to catch a Tauros, a lady named Lara stops Ash from catching, as he is in the Safari Zone, where people cannot capture any Pokémon. Later, Lara attempts to calm down her Ponyta, but gets wounded in the process, so asks Ash to participate in her stead. Meanwhile, Lara's main opponent, Dario, makes a deal with Team Rocket, which gives Dario a big (yet unfair) advantage in the race.
Episode plot
As Ash, Misty, and Brock continue on their way, they come into where they think is the Safari Zone. They are stopped from catching the Tauros there by a girl named Lara Laramie who tells them that it is not the Safari Zone, but the Laramie Ranch owned by the Laramie clan. Brock immediately recognizes the name of the ranch when Lara says it, snapping him out of his love-induced trance. He explains that the ranch preserves and raises wild Pokémon and that the Pokémon raised at the ranch are very strong.
She shows them around and tells them about the big race the following day at a nearby festival. Lara tells Ash and his friends that she plans to enter the race with her Ponyta. Ash tries to touch Ponyta, but his hand is burned by Ponyta's flaming mane and tail. He is burned so badly that Squirtle has to cool off his hand. Lara's main rival for the race is Dario, who is racing with his Dodrio. Lara explains that the winner of the race will be named an honorary member of the Laramie clan.
Dario wants to win, at any cost, and he hires Team Rocket to help him win and they start by firing globs at the Tauros. Lara comes and has Growlithe calm them. Another blob is fired and it causes Ponyta, who she is riding on, to get scared and throw her back. She breaks her arm and she can't race. She suggests Ash to take her place. Ash is hesitant, especially when Ponyta burns him again. But with Lara's encouragement, Ponyta agrees to let Ash ride it and they both train the whole night for the race.
At the race, there are many teams entered: Ash and Ponyta, Dario and Dodrio, Brock and Onix, Misty and Starmie, and Pikachu and Squirtle. When the race starts, Dario takes the lead while Pikachu and Squirtle quickly fall back. Team Rocket starts pulling various tricks to get all other competitors out of the race. The first was using a slingshot to hit Tauros in the forehead, making it go crazy and bump into Nidorina, and battle, as they disobey their trainers' orders to stop fighting. Soon the racers climbed up a hill and on coming down and briefly taking the lead the Electrode rider fell into a pit trap set by Team Rocket and exploded, taking out two more racers and Ash with Explosion. However, to Meowth's surprise, Pikachu used ThunderShock to wake Ash and Ponyta. Later, they arrive at a river where the Rhyhorn trainer sank to the bottom due to Rhyhorn being too heavy and Onix began to cry due to its weakness of water.
Soon, only four teams are left: Dario and Dodrio, Ash and Ponyta, Misty and Starmie, and Pikachu and Squirtle. Thankfully, Squirtle and Starmie didn't need stones to cross the river as they swim across with Pikachu and Misty surfing. Dario is still ahead, but there's a part of the race where the competitors must stop and let their Pokémon eat before continuing. Since Dodrio's three heads start fighting over who gets to eat, the other competitors catch up. desperate to get rid of the other teams, Dario asks Team Rocket's help again in the form of a smokescreen and Team Rocket recite their motto. Ash tells Pikachu and Squirtle to attack Team Rocket, but they are frozen by Arbok's Glare while Starmie gets blinded by Weezing's Sludge.
Dario takes off for the finish line, as Ash knows Team Rocket is aiding Dario as Misty tells Ash to try to catch up as they try to keep Team Rocket busy. Jessie tries to attack Ponyta with Arbok's Poison Sting, but Ponyta's flames goes up, making Arbok back off. When Weezing tries to attack Ponyta with Smog, its flames ignite Weezing's attack, sending Team Rocket blasting off.
Ash and Ponyta race for the finish line. When they catch up with Dario, he tells one of Dodrio's heads to use Peck on Ponyta. The attack makes Ponyta falter, and then evolve into Rapidash. Ash and Rapidash quickly race past the finish line and they win the race. Furious at his loss (and even having a nerve to accuse Ash of cheating), Dario orders Dodrio to attack Rapidash, only for Rapidash to use its Stomp on them, sending them both flying high into the sky.
As the festival ends, Ash and his friends say good bye to Lara and they head off for the Safari Zone. Meanwhile, Dario yells at Team Rocket who are tied to a tree for not doing the job he paid them for. Jessie says they'll do better next year, James said Dario needs better clothes, Meowth says Dodrio needs a bath. As punishment, Dario uses Dodrio to Peck on Team Rocket as Meowth shouts; "James, stop this crazy thing!".
- "That's okay. We tried." - Brock comforting Onix
- The "Who's that Pokémon?" in this episode is Ponyta.
- This is the first episode that does not have the "Pokémon" logo. Instead, the episode name is written in letters.
- At the end of the episode when Meowth yells "James, stop this crazy thing!", Is a reference from the show "The Jetsons" "Jane, stop this crazy thing!".
- In the dub, despite that Ash and Co. are in the Laramine Ranch, the narrator points out in the beginning and the end of the episode that they are in the Safari Zone.
- A trainer is riding a Nidorino in the starting line, but after being hit with a slingshot, the trainer is seen riding a Nidorina.
- In the English dub, when Pikachu and Squirtle come after Ash, Squrtle's Japanese voice can be heard. The same thing happens with Weezing when it jumps in front of Arbok to protect it from Ponyta's Flamethrower.
Dub differences
- Dario calls Team Rocket by their names in the English dub while he calls them sensei in the Japanese version.
- In the Japanese version, Lara's arm is only said to be hurt, not necessarily broken.
- In the Japanese version, Lara never states that she is related to the Laramie family.
- In the dub, when Onix is unable to cross the water, Brock comforts it by saying that they tried but in the Japanese version he says that they can't go any further.
- In the Japanese version, after Ash wins the race, Dario doesn't call him a cheater but gets angry with him for "getting in his way".
- In the English version the argument between Team Rocket and Dario at the end of episode is very different from Japanese version.
|Pokémon the Series: The Beginning
|Other series: Gold and Silver · Ruby and Sapphire · Diamond and Pearl · Black & White · XY and XYZ · Sun & Moon · Journeys


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Presque Isle Country Club is an 18 Hole Championship Golf Course located on Route 205 in Presque Isle, Maine. It is open May 1 through October 31 (weather permitting). Founded in 1957, it has been the site of many tournaments over the past 60 years.
The annual Spudland Open Tournament has been held here for over 50 years and is one of the major amateur golf events in the state of Maine and is held annually on the fourth weekend of July. If interested in participating in this or any event call: (207) 764-0430
Our championship course features:
Our club house facilities include:
Barry Madore has been the pro/manager at the PICC since 1993. Along with managing the golf course, Barry is also available for private instruction and club fitting. Barry is also the director of the junior golf program.
To get to our golf course from Presque Isle take Route 163/167 East to the intersection of Route 205 (Parkhurst Siding Road) and turn left. The club is located about a half mile in on Route 205.
Please print out, complete, and send in our new membership application form. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)
For more information, please call us at
the Pro Shop (207-764-0430).


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Faculty members are invited to share innovative uses of technology to enhance teaching, learning and research at the 2010 Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. This free event will be held from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, 2010, at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, University Park. A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. This year's theme is "Digital Scholarship and the Culture of Teaching and Learning."
The keynote speaker is Michael Wesch (http://ksuanth.weebly.com/wesch.html), assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. His videos on culture, technology, education and information have been featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.
Members of the faculty who are using technology to enrich teaching, learning, or research are encouraged to submit a presentation proposal using the online form at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/conference/proposals. Topics could include faculty and students collaborating on a project or an assignment showcasing any number of collaborative tools and new learning spaces involved with teaching and research. Some examples include the use of electronic portfolios and blogs, the incorporation of digital media, the use of games, virtual worlds, and simulations, innovative and engaging practice in large enrollment courses, and any best practices that foster scholarship in the digital age. Sessions can be in a variety of formats, including group presentations, panel discussions, poster presentations, demonstrations, small-group discussions, and other activities. Each session should include some discussion of practical aspects such as the tools used, sources of support, best practices and how the application of technology can be transferred to other disciplines.
The deadline to submit proposals is Oct. 30, 2009. For more details and to register, visit http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/. The Symposium is sponsored by Penn State Information Technology Services.


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Fund firms managing employee retirement accounts make it needlessly difficult for plan sponsors to fulfill their fiduciary obligations, a new Dalbar study has found.
The Boston-based firm's latest quarterly report assessing plan provider websites gives "excellent" ratings to just four of the 49 firms evaluated: John Hancock, Transamerica, ICMA-RC (a provider of 457 retirement plans) and Principal Financial.
"This quarter we found that, across the board, plan provider websites fail to support plan sponsor obligations for ERISA compliance," Kathleen Whalen, Dalbar's managing director, told AdvisorOne.
"Although the resources are there, a plan sponsor must do a tremendous amount of investigative work to locate and piece all the materials together in order to make use of the fiduciary support currently available on plan sponsor sites," she added.
In performing its analysis, Dalbar says it put itself in the position of a "newbie plan sponsor" desperately looking for a middle path between having to become a full-fledged ERISA expert and the risk of breaching fiduciary obligations by not knowing enough.
In other words, because the business of plan sponsors does not typically make them experts in financial regulations, plan sponsors are looking for the guidance needed to remain compliant, yet fiduciary tools offered by provider websites suffer a number of deficiencies.
First, these tools are often not visible to their intended audience. Compliance calendars and timelines in 65% of cases were found to be 2 to 5 clicks deep in the website, Dalbar found.
Second, fiduciary resources that websites offered are often not specific to a sponsor's plan, without an easy way to decipher what does and does not apply to the sponsor's plan or how to translate a calendar-year-based schedule to a different timetable.
The Dalbar report offers relevant illustrations, including a positive Lincoln Financial Group compliance reminder that lists deadlines right on the sponsor's landing page, thus making it easy for weary compliance managers.
In contrast, some website list fiduciary resources in some sort of "library" format without "connecting the dots," enabling a sponsor to click on "hot topics" or "plan tools," but failing to lay out a strategy that plan sponsors can easily follow to fulfill their obligations.
Another common problem is the failure to include relevant resources, such as templates, forms and sample documentation. The Dalbar report, for example, shows a well-organized monthly administration calendar laying out steps, but not offering plan sponsors the ease of clicking on needed resources they must search for elsewhere.
A lack of interactivity was another common problem, with 67% of compliance calendars presented in PDF format, thus preventing plan sponsors the ease of integrating compliance calendars with their Microsoft Outlook calendars.
Beyond its website evaluation, the Dalbar report offered a brief editorial, warning of a future compliance danger lurking on provider websites—specifically use of the words "fiduciary" and "advisor."
While compliance officers at fund firms have long ago banned words such as "guarantee," "safe," "protect" and "secure," no legal actions as yet have added "advisor" and "fiduciary" to the hit list.
But the terms are deceptive, Dalbar says, because they imply the investment firm is acting as a fiduciary or advisor when it is solely the plan sponsor that holds these legal duties. Warns Dalbar:
"The misleading use of terms containing the words 'fiduciary' or 'advisor' are in common use and will stop immediately, if there is regulatory action or litigation. The evidence that these and other terms are misleading the public is overwhelming and would be indefensible, if challenged. As a start, websites should be examined and cleansed of potentially misleading use of these terms."
Read Plan Sponsors Focus on Fee Disclosure Rules on AdvisorOne.


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bright nylon rope + lanyard = perfect summer bracelets!
Help me! I can't stop making those fun summer bracelets!
Having quite few leftovers from this, this, and this past projects, I really had to, really... I am just being a good girl and using my stash before buying something else. ;)
Some circular, some in a chevron shape, mixing colors randomly.
For more info on how-to-lanyard: go here!
Taking the lanyard from summer camp to resort collection!
--> much needed ingredients
* for a 6 1/4" lanyard (i'm not measuring the clasp) you need 5 ft of rope in two different colors
(of course if you'll use thicker or thiner rope will make a difference, so give it a try first!)
* one big clasp
* one ring
* some flame
--> make it!
* I start the first stitch of the laneyard by braiding the ring
* once you have the desired length, cut the the ropes leaving about 1 1/2" and burn the ends
* wrap two ends of one color around the clasp and stitch it
* wrap around the loop the other two ends on the rope color #2 and stitch it
now repeat with different colors
...one more :)
(at least this is what happened to me!)
xox, d.


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EPA offers compliance assistance to community water treatment facilities
Release Date:10/25/2019
An official website of the United States government.
We've made some changes to EPA.gov. If the information you are looking for is not here, you may be able to find it on the EPA Web Archive or the January 19, 2017 Web Snapshot.
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The disclosure that unidentified remains from the 9/11 attack were buried in a landfill was a small part of a larger report on problems at the military's mortuary at Dover, Del. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.
Updated at 8:38 p.m ET: For the first time, the Defense Department acknowledged Tuesday that some cremated remains of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were dumped in a landfill, conduct the White House called "unacceptable."
The disclosure is just two paragraphs in an 86-page report released Tuesday by an independent task force reviewing operations at the military's mortuary at Dover, Del.
M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
In a contentious briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the panel, tried to keep the focus on steps the military was taking going forward, saying the 9/11 findings were only a minor part of the task force's work.
Asked repeatedly for more information, he said, "We did not spend a great deal of time and effort and energy" on the matter, adding forcefully: "It's my report, but it's not the focus of the report."
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta formed the task force in December after an investigation by the Air Force, which runs the facility, found that some remains of U.S. military personnel weren't handled "in accordance with procedures."
The Air Force acknowledged that it had disposed of the incinerated remains of at least 274 service members in the landfill before it ended the practice in 2008. At the time, officials said records went back only to 2003.
But the independent panel found that the practice went back at least to 2001, and it discovered that "several portions of remains" recovered from the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon and at Shanksville, Pa., also ended up in a landfill:
Prior to 2008, portions of remains that could neither be tested nor identified, and portions of remains later identified that the [family or other representative] requested not to be notified of (requesting that they be appropriately disposed of) were cremated under contract at a civilian crematory and returned to [Dover]. This policy began shortly after September 11, 2001, when several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site could not be tested or identified.
These cremated portions were then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor. Per the biomedical waste contract at that time, the contractor then transported these containers and incinerated them. The assumption on the part of [Dover] was that after final incineration nothing remained. A [Dover] management query found that there was some residual material following incineration and that the contractor was disposing of it in a landfill. The landfill disposition was not disclosed in the contractual disposal agreement.
Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, said they hadn't yet had a chance to review the entire report.
Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo/Defense Department
'It's my report, but it's not the focus of the report,' retired Gen. John Abizaid, chairman of the review panel, insisted.
"This is new information to me," Donley acknowledged when asked about the 9/11 victims by NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski. Schwartz, asked the same question, replied, "That's what I'm saying."
In a statement Tuesday night, the White House said President Barack Obama had been briefed on the findings and was determined that "these types of incidents never happen again."
Calling the report's details "unacceptable," the White House said, "The United States has a solemn obligation to compassionately and professionally care for fallen service members and their families, and those we tragically lost on 9/11."
Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who has sought answers to what happened at Dover since last year, said the report bore out what he believed all along.
"I suspected, as Gen. Abizaid's panel has now confirmed, that these practices had been going on for many years. Even remains from the 9/11 terrorist attacks were treated in this way," Holt said in a statement to msnbc.com.
"The Department of Defense needs to engage in some real soul-searching," Holt said. "How is it possible that, for years or even decades, no one at Dover recognized how profoundly inappropriate these practices were?"
'Commanders in name only'
Abizaid told reporters that the Air Force's complex command structure led to the problems by creating "commanders in name only."
But "this was not just an Air Force problem," he said, adding that the entire U.S. military "needs to understand this is a 100 percent no-fail mission."
For one thing, he said, the Dover facility should no longer cremate fallen troops, because "we think it's a bad idea for DoD to be in the cremation business" in the first place.
The Dover facility is the first point of entry for U.S. service members who are killed or die overseas. It first came under investigation in 2010 after employees complained about how some cases were handled.
Investigators said last year that they had found no evidence that anyone intentionally mishandled the remains, but they concluded that the mortuary staff failed to "maintain accountability" with some remains.
"The standard is 100 percent accountability in every instance of this important mission," Schwartz said at the time.
"We can, and will, do better, and as a result of the allegations and investigation, our ability to care for our fallen warriors is now stronger," he said.
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News


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The kid on the screen can't be more than 2. He's standing on a patch of lawn, examining a few dark mounds that some animal has dropped on the grass. As he leans in for a closer look, he begins to lose his balance. The image freezes, and Tom Bergeron, the puckish host of America's Funniest Home Videos, puts his finger on the TV monitor. "I see a forehead-to-shit ratio right there," Bergeron says, tracing the kid's likely downward trajectory.
It's a late fall afternoon and we're on the show's cold and spangled Los Angeles set, a glowing cavern filled with lava-colored video walls and spectral white stars. Bergeron, dressed in a black suit, is rehearsing a bit called "Hit, Miss, or Disgusting?" in which two audience members will be asked to predict the clip's outcome: Will the kid fall headfirst into the minefield? Or will he swerve away at the last second?
Since this is America's Funniest Home Videos—a show that for more than 20 years has served as a highlight reel of our lowest moments—the answer is pretty obvious. You don't get on national TV by dodging poop, and sure enough, when the video resumes, the kid goes down, right on target. "That's the first face-plant into feces we've ever had," Bergeron says with mock pride. He takes a sip of coffee before moving on to the next clip, in which a little girl gets clocked by a tire swing.
In less than an hour, 200 audience members will arrive at the studio, dressed neatly but not too stuffily, like congregants at an easygoing megachurch. And from the moment they sit down, they will laugh—deep laughs, the kind that make shoulders pump like pistons. They'll laugh at a baby with its thumb stuck in a toilet lid, a bowler with his thumb stuck in a ball, and a dog with its tongue stuck in a guy's nose.
Unless you happen to spend a lot of time around little kids or the elderly, it has probably been years since you've seen America's Funniest Home Videos (or AFV, as it has now become known). This is understandable, given that technically speaking it's the uncoolest show on TV, a saccharine medley of "did I do that?" moppets, frazzled pets, and homegroan puns, all strung together by a lite-ska musical theme. Even by network TV standards, AFV is radically square.
But as dorky as it is, AFV may be one of the most subtly influential shows of the past two decades. Need proof? Just check your Facebook feed. Chances are pretty good that in the past few weeks somebody posted a video that was short, serendipitous, and brazenly stupid—a cocky skateboarder wiping out on a rail, perhaps, or a cat facing down a metronome. Millions of such quick-blip distractions now rove the web, and for that we have AFV to thank and/or blame.
When the show debuted in 1989, in the midst of the camcorder boom, it introduced a whole new accidental-auteur style, marked by wobbly camerawork and abrupt denouements. Because AFV consisted entirely of audience submissions—making the show an early adopter of crowdsourced humor—it instilled the then-revelatory notion that anyone's follies could be a hit TV gag. The fat guy falling into a pool, the dude wiping out after a botched karate-chop—those could have been your neighbors. Over time a formula emerged: a few seconds of setup, a moment of physical calamity (usually accidental), and a quick shot that showed everything was fine and no one got hurt.
Now AFV's DNA can be found everywhere: the "Forever" wedding, "Charlie Bit My Finger," the 3.8 million cat videos on YouTube—all build on the goofy physicality and to-the-point punch line timing established by AFV. In fact, watching an episode of AFV now feels a lot like watching the web.
For those who can be open-minded about its brainlessness, AFV is still consistently, almost soothingly, hilarious. It's wall-to-wall primal comedy, from trampoline falls to groin-kicks to old people getting hit by kites. And while the show's format has undergone a few tweaks over the years, its fundamental MO remains largely unchanged: Each week, a slew of carefully vetted clips are edited together as zippily as possible, with a cash prize—now as high as $100,000—going to the audience favorite. This is probably why, even though it long ago disappeared from pop-culture radar, AFV remains wildly successful. The show is about to wrap its 21st season—more than ER or Law & Order and only one behind The Simpsons, that other ever-durable chronicle of hapless suburbia. It averages more than 7 million viewers a week and celebs from Tina Fey to Muhammad Ali have approached Bergeron to profess their fandom. And because the show is relatively cheap to produce, ABC will likely keep it on the air until the Rapture—unless, of course, somebody gets filmed knocking their head on a stoplight on the way up, requiring a post-event special. "In my house," Bergeron says, "we call this show 'the annuity.'"
But here's the irony: The AFV format has proved so enduring, it has spawned a slew of aggressive competitors. There are now sites like FAIL Blog and the Daily What, as well as TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Tosh.0,scouring the web for hits. And many of them can get videos on the air much quicker than the once-a-week AFV can. When that happens, it's the showbiz equivalent of a football to the crotch. "I stomp my foot when I see a funny video that's not mine," says Vin Di Bona, the show's creator, who still serves as director and executive producer.
But Di Bona has a secret weapon: an archive of tens of thousands of videos, many of which have never been seen by the public. He'll need them, too. Because after having the stupid-video landscape almost to itself for years, America's Funniest Home Videos now must compete with … America's Funniest Home Videos.
For a show whose ascent was fueled in part by the popularity of consumer electronics and adorable animals, it's no surprise that AFV originated in Japan. In the late '80s, producer Di Bona—who helped pioneer the reality genre with Battle of the Network Stars—was having some success translating Japanese TV into shows for American audiences. He had recently seen Japan's Fun TV With Kato-chan and Ken-chan, a variety show with sketches, music, and a handful of stupid-human videos. Now he had to find a way to adapt it to the US market.
The problem: "Variety was dead," says Di Bona, a neatly attired 67-year-old with a tranquil voice and thick gray hair. "I said, 'Let's just make our version all clips.'" He sold a pilot to ABC and solicited amateur videos via magazine ads and TV appearances. The first America's Funniest Home Videos special aired November 26, 1989, hosted by comedian Bob Saget. More than 32 million people watched, and ABC rushed it into production as a series.
In its first couple of years, AFV averaged 2,000 submissions per day. Some of the tapes were long and pointless. Nobody really knew what a "home video" was supposed to look like. The show's very first prizewinner featured a woman with her head stuck in a dishwasher, her husband teasing her from behind the camera. It clocks in at more than a minute and was divided into two segments—the Doctor Zhivago of silly videos. "In the earlier years," coexecutive producer Michele Nasraway says, "we'd get clips that were more story-oriented. They had a beginning, a middle, and an end."
Over time, the videos got shorter and AFV homed in on what its viewers wanted to see: babies sneezing out birthday candles, little kids bonking each other with turkey legs, and dogs piddling on the sidewalk while balancing on their front legs. Viewers continued to inundate the show with tapes, lured not only by the cash prizes but also its promise of moderately bragworthy TV fame. As part of the deal, every submitter agreed to sign over the video rights to Di Bona, who could license the footage for ads or overseas TV shows, even if the clip never wound up on AFV.
Throughout the early '90s, the show had a lock on the dumb-video trade. But by the 2000s, the web was allowing users to share clips directly, and the sort of whip-fast videos that had once been the province of AFV were being emailed around the world. In fact, one of the first viral videos, in which a chimp scratches its butt, sniffs its finger, then falls out of a tree—the Birth of a Nation for the QuickTime generation—was a clip that Saget had lobbied for years to get on AFV.
The rise of rampant video sharing hasn't been all bad for AFV. In fact, it has helped the show in at least one major way: There are now simply more videos to choose from. After a few low years when submissions dropped to a trickle, these days the show is steadily getting about 2,000 clips a week. And in addition to direct submissions, producers also occasionally comb the web for breaking hits. The challenge, of course, is that by the time a great clip gets spotted by AFV, it may be too well-known. To deal with this, the producers have come up with their own YouTube barometer: If a video is starting to gain traction but has yet to hit 50,000 views, AFV will ask the uploader to take it off the web (or at least set it to private) and submit it to the show. Once it breaks the 50,000-view mark, however, Di Bona has little use for it.
To amateur videographers, such an offer presents a dilemma. Do you turn your clip over to the AFV vaults, where it could very well languish forever? Or do you set it loose on the web in hopes of selling a few T-shirts and maybe earning the honor of being razzed on Kimmel? For some, losing out on a possible six-figure prize is a risk worth taking. In 2008, a Florida real estate agent named David DeVore filmed his son, also named David, returning from a dental appointment. Still under anesthesia, the younger David let loose a string of woozy observations ("Is thish real life?"), resulting in "David After Dentist," a 2-minute clip that DeVore posted on YouTube. DeVore also submitted it to AFV but balked at the terms. "I'm a big fan of that show," DeVore says. "My kids still watch it. But once I heard 'exclusive rights,' I backed away."
He has since licensed the clip for a TV ad and a line of toothbrushes, earning far more than the $100,000 prize the show offers. In fact, while AFV's producers note it's unlikely they would have aired "David After Dentist" because it involved a minor under the influence of a drug, DeVore's success, however rare, proves you don't need AFV to score some fame and cash.
"I don't think we heard the fart."
In a mostly tidy conference room at AFV's production office, the show's writers and producers are screening prospective clips for an upcoming episode. One of the videos, dubbed "Popeye Baby," features a notably jug-eared infant playing in a tub. It's cute, but as producer Nasraway has just pointed out, the video's punch line doesn't quite land.
Todd Thicke, another producer, rewinds the clip. "I don't care about the fart so much," he says. "I thought it was funny because he was funny-looking."
"We need a combo," Nasraway says. "He's got to be doing something funny." Ultimately, they compromise and decide that "Popeye Baby" can stay, but only if the volume of the fart is goosed a bit.
For the next hour, the team works its way through more than 100 clips. All have been preapproved by the show's screeners, the woebegone souls who review submissions, looking for a few choice seconds. When they find something, they enter it in the show's database, using descriptions so sober and succinct they read like police reports from the slowest precinct in the world:
CLIP # 41244: Cat asleep on TV, abruptly falls off.
CLIP # 630951: Parrot bites teen girl's face.
CLIP # 350412: Baby puts cake down mom's shirt.
A few of the videos being screened have been around for years, and they're received by the writers with the same nodding familiarity one would greet a worn-in classic-rock song (the show does re-air clips, but not as often as you'd expect; its most popular video, featuring a group of giggling quadruplets, has appeared on only six episodes). By the end of the afternoon, they'll have pruned out the lesser entries—the wipeouts that don't quite biff hard enough or are marred by blurry cell phone pixels.
In recent years, as AFV has evolved to compete with the Internet, the show has dialed back the cutesiness—no more slide-whistle effects or animal voiceovers—and pumped up the volume, cramming in as many as 100 clips an episode. "It would take a week to find that many good clips on YouTube," coproducer Mike Palleschi says, "whereas we can give them to you in an hour." AFV used to be a waste of viewers' time; now it helps them manage time better.
These days, most AFV videos are slotted into one of the show's countless montage sequences. On the wall of the conference room hang several brightly colored note cards with words like itchy, zipline, sea turtles, and, most disturbingly, lick—all clips waiting to be slotted into one montage or another. For each episode, the writers decide on a dozen or so themes, cull as many appropriate clips as they can, and try to come up with a few glib one-liners for Bergeron.
In addition to fresh submissions, to build out a montage writers draw clips from the show's substantial 22-year-old video collection, many of which have never been seen by the public. Housed on a server in the AFV office, it amounts to a darknet of dumb.
After the writers' meeting, Nasraway lets me dig through this vault. Today there are exactly 103,894 digitized clips available—not a huge number, until you remember that Di Bona has exclusive rights to every single one. Each video is filed under one of 12 categories—adults, animals, babies, birthdays, boneheads, fall-downs, forbidden, kids, production videos, teens, sports, and weddings—and tagged with specific keywords like cats (4,291 entries) and snot (265).
I ask Nasraway how many of those 103,894 videos are still waiting to be aired. How many funny videos could possibly be left? Three thousand, maybe four?
She pulls up the results. As of today, there are 80,278 clips left—many of them submitted years ago, their owners having long ago signed away the rights. Some have undoubtedly wound up online anyway, but it's a good bet that a lot were dropped in the mail and forgotten about altogether. In the digital age, where exclusivity is itself a rarity, a cache like this is immensely valuable. There are enough unaired clips to build dozens of seasons of AFV.
Of course, not all are winners. Nasraway cues up an unused video of a kid bashing away at a Santa Claus piñata. The action is slow, and the picture is a bit murky; it may be good enough for someone's Facebook wall, but it's far below the standards of America's Funniest Home Videos. Then there are the 159 "forbidden" videos, clips even the most lax network censor wouldn't allow, such as a masturbating walrus or a woman who throws up on a child after eating baby food. "Just torrents of vomit," Nasraway says. "It's fantastic."
Though these clips won't make it to air anytime soon—especially the ones involving self-pleasuring sea animals—the show holds on to them, and the more benign entries are periodically reevaluated, just in case somebody missed the joke the first time around. "We've found finalists that way," Nasraway says. "Maybe the screener was having a bad day. Then someone else went back in and found gold."
Back at the taping, the show has come down to six finalists, including a woman passing out on an amusement-park ride, a baby with an out-of-control toy stuck in his pants, and the kid with his thumb stuck in the toilet lid. In the end, the $100,000 prize goes to "Cookieface Race," in which a mom and her two sons try to make cookies travel from their foreheads to their mouths without using their hands.
It's a perfectly fine clip, and if the family members had thrown it on YouTube, it likely would have garnered a few hundred thousand views and maybe earned them a few hours' worth of web fame. Instead, they opted to send it to AFV, winding up with a big check and a confetti-strewn celebration. And maybe that's the biggest reason this show has lasted so long: As fun as it is to watch a bunch of stupidly random web clips, AFV proves that the far-off prizes we all desire—a great wad of cash, a few seconds of TV fame, and a happy ending—are still within reach. America, America—this is you.
Contributing editor Brian Raftery (firstname.lastname@example.com) writes about baseball and serial-killer expert Bill James in issue 19.05.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.


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Damage was preventing rescuers from reaching outlying towns, and communications were disrupted after the midday quakes hit along the borders of Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, a rural region where some of China's poorest people live.
The first 5.6-magnitude quake struck just before 11:30 a.m. and was followed by an equally strong quake shortly after noon, joined by dozens of aftershocks. Though of moderate strength, the quakes were shallow, which often causes more damage.
Hardest hit was Yiliang County, where all but one of the deaths occurred, according to the Yunnan provincial government's official website. Another 715 people in the area were injured. Yiliang's high population density, shoddy building construction and propensity for landslides were blamed for the relatively high death toll.
China Central Television showed roads littered with rocks and boulders and pillars of dust rising over hilltops from the landslides. One image taken just as one quake struck showed people running out of a supermarket as the ground shook.
Other footage showed several hundred people crowding into a school athletic field in Yiliang's county seat, a sizable city spread along a river in a valley, as well as soldiers carrying injured people and rescue materials.
Though quakes occur in the area frequently, buildings in rural areas and China's fast-growing smaller cities and towns are often constructed poorly. A magnitude-7.9 quake that hit Sichuan province, just north of Yunnan, in 2008 killed nearly 90,000 people, with many of the deaths blamed on poorly built structures, including schools.
Friday's quakes destroyed or damaged almost 30,000 homes across several counties and townships, the provincial government website said. The Yunnan seismology bureau said more than 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes. All told, 700,000 people had their lives disrupted by the quake, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
In Luozehe, a town in Yiliang near a zinc mine, residents and state media said boulders hurtled off hillsides and houses collapsed.
"It is scary. My brother was killed by falling rocks. The aftershocks struck again and again. We are so afraid," Xinhua quoted miner Peng Zhuwen as saying.
Wu Xuhong, a goat herder in Luozhe, said only tiles fell from his relatively solid cement and brick sheds.
"But I heard that a lot of buildings built of clay and wood collapsed and we temporarily lost power and mobile phone signal," Wu said.
The Red Cross spokesman for East Asia, Francis Markus, said 2,000 quilts, 2,000 jackets and 500 tents were being rushed to the area, which is largely inhabited by members of the Yi ethnic minority.
He said the use of light construction materials would likely create far more injuries than deaths.
A government official in Jiaokui town said a large number of houses had collapsed.
"The casualty number is still being compiled. I don't know what it was like for the other towns, but my town got hit badly," he said. Like many Chinese officials, he refused to give his name.
Mobile phone services were down and regular phone lines disrupted. Phones were cut off to clinics in four villages in Qiaoshan, another town in Yiliang, which has about half a million people.
Authorities sent thousands of tents, blankets and coats to the area, Xinhua said.
It said that so far no casualties had been reported in neighboring Guizhou, but that homes had been damaged or destroyed there.
Friday's quakes were relatively shallow, about six miles (10 kilometers) deep, creating an intense shaking even at a lower magnitude.
By comparison, the 7.6-magnitude quake in Costa Rica this week was 25 miles (40 kilometers) below the surface, a fact that, combined with strict building codes, kept damage and deaths to a minimum.


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A scientific approach to the senses
A skin care treatment or beauty gesture stimulates all our senses. This is why L'Oréal has always paid great attention to the sensory evaluation of its products, the key component in consumer preference.
The use of a cosmetic product - cream, shampoo, mascara... - involves our senses. Identifying these sensations and translating them into objective data to better understand them is what sensory analysis aims to do. L'Oréal has long been in the front runner in this field: as early as 1987, the group created a research laboratory entirely devoted to this discipline. Its teams contribute their expertise to the development of new products or to the evolution of existing products. Only sensory analysis can really ensure that the performance of a product meets the expectations of consumers.
A scientific method
The process begins with the definition of precise terminology to describe the sensory profile of the product. For example, a cream could be described and sticky or greasy. Some twenty terms are defined this way. Systematically used by the experts in tests, they make it possible to gather consistent and precise reactions. Each product is tested by at least 30 trained and experienced panelists, who intervene as veritable "human instruments of measure". Based on their reactions, a sensory profile of the product is established. If the results are considered satisfactory, the product will be tested on a panel of consumers. This last step also calls for rigorous analytical techniques, such as the cartography of emotions expressed during the tests, or the analysis of consumers' body language, filmed when they use the product.
Instrumental evaluation
To verify the performance of a product, L'Oréal's teams of engineers, mechanics and opticians have designed machines used to measure the physical properties of skin and hair after applying a formula. The objectivity of these methods rests on their capacity to reproduce the actual conditions of application or use of the products. Between the hair, skin care and make-up divisions, nearly a hundred machines have been imagined: topographical analysis of the microrelief of the skin, xenotest, chromasphere, skinchip, flexibility pendulum, curl flattener, mobile wig, nail polish scratch tester, water resistance test for mascara…