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Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bloomberg and Borough President Markowitz Announce Brooklyn Navy Yard to Make $46 Million Investment to Build a Green Manufacturing Center Creating Nearly 300 New Jobs
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and state and city elected officials today announced that the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation will invest $46 million to build a Green Manufacturing Center in the Navy Yard. This New York City Regional Economic Development Council priority project consists of the adaptive reuse of three former WWII-era Navy machine shops into a state-of-the-art industrial complex, creating nearly 300 new permanent jobs and approximately 400 construction jobs.
"This project is an example of how the Regional Council initiative is helping the state invest in a productive and sustainable innovation economy that will put New Yorkers back to work now and for years to come," Governor Cuomo said. "This is an eco-friendly investment that will create almost 300 new jobs while making space available for a successful company to produce the tools needed to keep the heroic members of our armed services safe."
"The Brooklyn Navy Yard is an economic success story if there ever was one, and this investment in green manufacturing is more great news for the Navy Yard and for New York Citys economy," said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. "Today the Navy Yard is home to the kind of innovation that is going to create the jobs of the future and keep our city competitive in the long-term."
"The Green Manufacturing Center at the Brooklyn Navy Yardwith its lead tenants Crye Precision and Macro Seawill show the world how to successfully incorporate green manufacturing and sustainable practices into a state-of-the-art facility that will create hundreds of permanent and construction jobs," said Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. "Bravo to Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bloomberg, Speaker Quinn, our Brooklyn Legislative and Council delegations, Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation President Andrew Kimball and all their partners for transforming navy blue into navy green. There is no better example than the Navy Yard of Brooklyns dynamic, diverseand greeneconomy, and I was proud to support the Green Manufacturing Center project."
"The Navy Yard is a testament to New York Citys resilience and creativity," said New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn. "Through thoughtful redevelopment efforts, what was once a thriving shipbuilding facility is now a model urban industrial park that houses some of the Citys most cutting edge companies, and now soon, a Green Manufacturing Center. We are proud at the Council to have partnered with the Governor, Bloomberg Administration, Borough President Markowitz, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard to ensure that the Navy Yard continues to thrive and create more jobs for New Yorkers."
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a 300 acre industrial park on the Brooklyn waterfront that houses more than 275 businesses, employing 6,000 workers, up from 230 businesses and 3,600 workers in 2001. Over $200 million in infrastructure investments by the City, State, and federal governments have leveraged over $500 million in private investment for new and renovated industrial buildings and hundreds of millions more in tenant machinery, equipment and fit-out.
The development of the Green Manufacturing Center will continue the expansion underway at the Brooklyn Navy Yard its largest growth since WWII, adding more than 1.8 million square feet of new space and over 2,500 new jobs over the next two years. Home to more than 30 green manufacturers, the development of green facilities has long been a priority at the Yard. This major new investment will transform buildings 28, 123, and 128, former Navy ship building machine shops, into a 220,000 square foot multi-tenanted, into the LEED Silver-certified Green Manufacturing Center. Major construction begins this summer and will take approximately 18 months to complete.
BNYDC President & CEO Andrew H. Kimball, said, "The Navy Yard has become a thriving hub of high-tech and clean-tech manufacturing," said "We are thrilled to get this project underway with the support of our partners at every level of government and to have two fantastic anchor tenants secured."
Lieutenant Governor Robert J. Duffy said, "The Green Manufacturing Center is a striking example of how Governor Cuomos Regional Council initiative is helping to forge the innovative public-private partnerships we need to create jobs and grow our economy. By investing in the expansion of our high-tech manufacturing industry, we are literally building the tools for a sustainable economy thats prepared to last."
The City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor and New York City Regional Council Co-Chair Matthew Goldstein said, "On behalf of the New York City Regional Economic Development Council, I congratulate the Brooklyn Navy Yard on moving forward with the development of a new Green Manufacturing Center, and on securing Crye Precision as its anchor tenant. This new center will be a crucial piece of the twenty-first century infrastructure needed to support environmentally sustainable advanced manufacturing in New York City."
Crye Precision a premier designer and manufacturer of body armor and apparel for the U.S. military as well as federal and state law enforcement agencies - which was awarded $1 million through the New York State Consolidated Funding Application (CFA) process, has agreed to become one of two lead tenants at the new Green Manufacturing Center. Crye currently operates in four separate spaces at the Navy Yard, with 110 employees, and will now lease 80,000 square feet, consolidating multiple sites into one central location. Crye decided to expand in the Navy Yard after considering numerous options for consolidation and expansion, including New Jersey.
The companys expansion into the Green Manufacturing Center will create 100 new jobs over the next five years. Crye also has several commercial product lines under development; one uses locally recycled materials that are converted into fabrics.
Crye Precision Executive Director Caleb Crye, said, "The Navy Yard has been exactly what our business needed to grow and we are thrilled that our future will remain here. We started here a decade ago with 4,500 square feet, today were up to 45,000 square feet with more than 100 employees and when the new facility is complete well have a more efficient operation with room to grow and add at least 100 new jobs."
A second anchor tenant, Macro Sea, will lease more than 50,000 square feet for New Lab, a cutting-edge facility that will promote design and manufacturing innovation using the latest in environmentally-conscious processes and machinery. Through traditional tenancies and co-working spaces, New Lab will encourage the collaboration between design and fabrication by hosting a dynamic mix of designers, digital manufacturers, architects, graduate research facilities, and others in a hive of sustainable design and innovation. Working at the forefront of green technology advances, New Lab has received strong interest from the following universities and firms:
- The Cooper Union, Institute for Sustainable Design Innovation Laboratory;
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's School of Architecture and Center for Architecture Science & Ecology (CASE)
- Columbia University, Laboratory of Applied Building Science (L-ABS) at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation;
- Terreform ONE, Brooklyn based nonprofit design group and unique laboratory for scientists, artists, architects, students, and individuals of all backgrounds to explore and advance the larger framework of green design; and
- Within Lab, a London-based design consultancy best known for creating tools which constantly push at the boundaries of the possible in the world of additive layer manufacturing.
Macro Sea Managing Principal David Belt said, "New Lab will bring together graduate students, designers, and high-tech manufacturers in a unique space that will encourage innovation and collaboration. The Navy Yards community of manufacturers represents the future of urban industry and New Lab will seed the next generation of cutting-edge Yard businesses."
The $46 million construction project will be built to LEED Silver standards and funded through capital grants from New York State ($6 million from Empire State Development), the New York City Council ($7.5 million), the Brooklyn Borough President ($2.5 million) and the U.S. Economic Development Administration ($2.5 million). In addition, Crye has been awarded $1 million in Excelsior tax credits from Empire State Development through the New York State Consolidated Funding Application process. BNDYC has financed the balance of construction through the federal EB-5 program. Crye will expend approximately $9 million on their fit-out and equipment and Macro Sea will expend approximately $10 million.
Empire State Development President, CEO & Commissioner Kenneth Adams said, "This major investment in green manufacturing shows that Governor Cuomos efforts to build a new New York economy is starting to pay off with immediate and long-term job creation. The Brooklyn Navy Yard should be commended for providing the strong foundation to help companies grow and create jobs that are as good for the environment as they are for our economy."
Senate Minority Leader John L. Sampson said, "These types of projects are both good for the environment and good for the wallet. If we are truly going to turn this economy around and make it stronger we have to identify innovative solutions. The future of the United States and its businesses depend on the green economyand here in Brooklyn we are doing something about it. I commend the Governor and his Regional Economic Development Council for not only securing a healthier and more environmentally-friendly future for the state but also enhancing our global competitiveness."
Senator Daniel Squadron said, "The Brooklyn Navy Yard continues to prove that no matter how difficult the times, success is possible. The new Green Manufacturing Center will provide Brooklyn with even more jobs and creatively put to use this historic space in a sustainable way -- all while helping to drive our community's growth and revitalization. Thank you to Governor Cuomo, Lieutenant Governor Duffy, Borough President Markowitz, EDC, and BNYDC for working to make this a reality, and to Crye Precision and New Lab for bringing your talent to Brooklyn."
Senator Velmanette Montgomery said, "The future will be built on a foundation of green jobs and the sooner we invest in this emerging industry, the more stable our long-term economic recovery will be. Green technology makes good environmental sense and good economic sense. I commend the Governor for his efforts to ensure New York will be at the forefront of the new economy and look forward to working with him in the future to bring more good, green jobs to our community and state."
Assemblyman Joe Lentol said, "We are happy to roll out the green carpet for new manufacturing here in Brooklyn. Welcome to Brooklyn Crye Precision. You are clearly part of New York's new manufacturing revolution that is clean, lean and green. The Navy Yard continues to make Brooklyn proud as it demonstrates its flexibility to foster large scale manufacturing and creative entrepreneurship at the same time."
NYC Council Member Stephen Levin said, "The Brooklyn Navy Yard never ceases to impress me. Today we are celebrating support for the Green Manufacturing Center, the re-purposing of a 215,000 square foot space and the creation of hundreds of new jobs. The BNYDC is driving an incredible resurgence of activity and growth here and we owe a debt of gratitude to Andrew Kimball for steering the ship. I am very proud to represent the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the City Council and I know there are going to be many more great stories to tell in the coming years."
NYC Council Member Letitia James said, "The collaboration of the city, state and the private sector has once again put the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the map with the Green Manufacturing Center creating 300 new permanent jobs and approximately 400 construction jobs. Furthermore, this $46 million green facility is an investment in our environment. I want to thank Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Mayor Michael M. Bloomberg, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation President Andrew H. Kimball for securing the funding for this project."
The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation is a non-profit corporation that manages operations of the Brooklyn Navy Yard for New York City. It is tasked with leasing space, promoting local economic development and redevelopment of underutilized areas, and modernizing the Yards infrastructure. Prior to its reopening as an industrial park, the Brooklyn Navy Yard served one of America's preeminent military facilities for more than 150 years. The rich past, thriving present and promising future of the Yard is captured in a newly opened exhibition, visitors and employment center: the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92.
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Mario Tama / Getty Images
Police officers were among those injured during a confrontation with a gunman outside the Empire State Building in New York in August.
The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty fell sharply in 2012, the first full year that two Obama administration police safety programs were in effect, according to preliminary figures released Thursday.
With four days left in the year, 127 federal, state and local officers have died on the job so far, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reported — 23 percent fewer than the 165 who were killed last year.
The nonprofit organization keeps a comprehensive tally of all law enforcement officers who die in the line of duty, honoring them each year at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington.
Craig W. Floyd, the organization's chief executive, credited close cooperation among federal, state and local authorities in bringing a new focus on officer safety. The decline follows two years of what he called "alarming" increases.
"The law enforcement community has banded together with laser-like focus on peace officer safety," Floyd said in a statement.
The decline also comes during the first full year under two Obama administration police safety programs, one run by the Justice Department and one by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The Law Enforcement Safety Initiative, which Attorney General Eric Holder rolled out in March 2011 after meeting with police chiefs from major U.S. cities, created an Officer Safety and Wellness unit at the Justice Department, boosted training and technical assistance for local officers and invested $25 million in 96,000 bullet-resistant vests that were distributed this year among more than 4,000 local agencies.
Firearms-related deaths fell to 49 this year, the memorial fund reported — down a third from 72 last year and even below the 10-year average of 57 from 2001 to 2010.
Traffic-related incidents remained the biggest hazard, however, as they have been nearly every year since the late 1990s. But they, too, fell significantly, from 60 last year to 50 this year.
The NHTSA and the memorial fund launched their own Officer Safety Initiative in August 2011, funding research and public information campaigns around police safety in traffic-related incidents.
A breakdown for 2012 wasn't reported, but the campaign noted that 42 percent of officers killed in auto crashes over the last 30 years weren't wearing safety belts. It said nearly all those deaths were preventable.
Other targets of the initiative include:
- Reducing distracted driving — mainly officers' use of their cellphones instead of their radios, a practice many agencies prohibit that — which the fund said was responsible for about a quarter of all police traffic deaths.
- Encouraging agencies to invest in high-visibility apparel so officers are easier to see during traffic stops at night.
Watch US News crime videos on NBCNews.com
Shootings and traffic incidents were by far the leading hazards. Third was work-related illnesses, at 14, many of them heart attacks.
Overall, the statistics indicate that, despite its dangerous image, police work isn't among the most hazardous jobs in the U.S. The death totals work out to about 1.56 per every 100,000 sworn federal, state and local officers across the country — less than half the rate of 3.5 per 100,000 for U.S. workers in all jobs in 2011, the last year for which complete figures were available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Follow US news from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

subset: commoncrawl


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Eastern Florida Intracoastal Waterway Problem Stretches
Below, you will discover our listing of what have been reported as the worst problem stretches of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway along the Eastern Florida coastline, arranged in a rough, north to south geographic format.
Be sure to click on the links labeled, "Click Here To See What Your Fellow Cruisers Are Saying About . . . " to check on the latest input from the cruising community, and, don't miss the links labeled, "Click Chartlet Below To Open A Chart View window zoomed to the Location of This AICW Problem Stretch." This latter link will bring up a "Chart View" window, zoomed to the location of the problem stretch in question.


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Dehler 29 Basisschiff gem. Standardspezifikation - Individuelle Anpassung bei Aufpreis möglich.
More sailing enjoyment – that is what the new Dehler 29 promises. This fast family cruiser
combines strength and dynamism, the highest safety standards and an attractive level of
comfort that includes an intelligent use of space. This innovative and versatile model from Dehler
is aimed at family-oriented leisure sailors with whilst at the same time appealing to ambitious
regatta yachtsmen. This is a performance yacht for long cruises as well as for challenging
races. The Dehler 29 is easy to handle and provides an excellent ride in all weather conditions –
qualities which guarantee that you can sail safely yet put the yacht through its paces.
GRP hand laid construction
Supporting bulkheads bonded to the hull
Construction of hydrolyses proofed polyester
resin and roving fabrics
Guardrail in aluminium for hull protection
Internally laminate partly sealed with topcoat
Colour white with blue waterline striping
GRP hand laid construction with end grain balsa core for strength and isolation
Aluminium reinforcements laminated inside for all fittings
Laminated to the hull in the mould for integrated
Non - slip moulded deck area
Self draining anchor locker
Colour white
Deck Equipment
Openable deck hatch in forward cabin
6 windows, 4 are openable
Sliding hatch at companionway
4 mooring cleats
Stainless pulpit
Stainless divided pushpit
Safety boarding ladder
Stainless handrails on coach roof
Filler nozzles for water and fuel
Genoa tracks
Halyard and sheet winches Harken
HB35.2STAR, self tailing, on coach roof
Halyard stoppers on coach roof
Guide rollers at mast foot
1 winch handle
Manual bilge pump
Compass mounted over companionway
Large cockpit locker on starboard
Ergonomic and self draining cockpit with integrated non slip GRP
Convenient berths with storage below
All joinery and panels in mahogany
Solid frame woodwork with smooth surface
Ceiling inner liner in off white
Alongside sofas on port and starboard
Detachable back-rests
Salon table with foldable sides
Roomy aft cabin with double bed, wardrobe and cupboard
Storage room below berth
Port side functional galley
Sink with water tap
Lockers for pot and pan with 2-burner gas oven
Spacious head with pump toilet
Holding tank with deck extraction and separate sea cock
Wash basin with water tap
Volvo D1-13, 12 hp, with Saildrive with 2 blade fixed propeller
Fuel tank 61 litres
Combined starter and consumer battery AGM 12V / 90 Ah
Main switch for battery
Control panel with automatic circuit breakers
Electric bilge pump 12V
9/10 aluminium deck stepped tapered mast
2 pairs of spreaders
Aluminium boom
Boomvang, fixed
Backstay adjustable
Halyards for main and jib in dyneema
Main sheet and jib sheets
Dehler quick reefing system
Furling system for Jib
Total sail area 43,0 m²
Main sail 26,0 m²
Furling Jib 17,0 m² (105%)
Genoa 25 m²
Spinnaker 60 m²
Rig I 11.25 m
J 3.15 m
P 11.00 m
E 4.00 m
Kronskamp 122
Wedel / Hamburg


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New 'Candidate': The sorcerer's a Prentiss
Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most selfless movie I've ever seen.
Ignore that. I don't know what made me say it.
Because of its political nature you're probably wondering if The Manchurian Candidate is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy to keep Dubya from being elected (for the first time) to a second term. The answer: probably, but the message is almost confusing enough to cut both ways.
Although the film seems remarkably current, built around a presidential election and with newscasts discussing issues and events you may see tonight at 11, one visual clue pinpoints the date as 2008.
With a screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris that's based on the George Axelrod screenplay based on Richard Condon's novel, this can be called a "reimagining" more accurately than some remakes that have hedged by using that term. It contains many elements that will be familiar to fans of John Frankenheimer's 1962 version but enough changes to keep them from being certain what will happen next.
Updating resets the back-story from the Korean War to Kuwait in 1991, "just before Desert Storm," and changes the title's Manchuria from the country to Manchurian Global, an influential corporation that gets a lot of U.S. defense contracts and overcharges for their goods and services. (The Halliburton Candidate just doesn't have that ring to it.)
Capt. Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) was leading his men on a routine recon mission when they were ambushed and he was knocked unconscious. According to the story, all the men remember– in exactly the same words– Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) took charge, wiped out the enemy and saved most of the Americans, receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts.
Now New York Congressman Raymond Prentiss Shaw is in contention for his party's vice presidential nomination. A strong push by his mother, Virginia Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep) helps him prevail over Connecticut Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight). (Jordan, who has "the black vote, women, and college kids," sounds like a Democrat, while all the other rhetoric is generic and centrist enough to come from either party.)
After addressing a Boy Scout group, Marco, now a major and a perfect Stepford soldier, is accosted by another veteran, Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright), who says he's been having dreams that things in Kuwait didn't go as they remember them. Marco dismisses him as suffering from Gulf War Syndrome/Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but is haunted by the man's words and sketches and has to admit he's having the same dreams: "My dreams seem more real to me than what I actually remember happening."
The 1962 film relied on brainwashing, but this version combines it with experimental implants, not explaining which does what or what is lost when the implants are removed, which is too easily accomplished.
Marco starts investigating, which makes everyone think he's crazy. They take him off active duty, leaving him more time to investigate. On a train he meets Rosie (Kimberly Elise), who introduces herself as a supermarket checker but pursues him so aggressively she's obviously got an agenda.
Washington plays another variation on his flawed hero whose heroism ultimately outweighs his flaws. Schreiber seems to be channeling Lawrence Harvey from the original. He's so withdrawn and asocial it's hard to imagine him having a political career, even with the strings pulled by his mother, to whom he's joined at the hip and sometimes the lip.
Ah, mama. "I will do whatever is necessary to protect America," she says ominously. Streep, looking like Hillary Clinton, is as strong as you'd expect her to be but no match for memories of Angela Lansbury in the 1962 version.
Perhaps The Manchurian Candidate 2004 will make more sense to someone who's never seen the original, or perhaps it will make none at all. It seems to lose focus occasionally and to leave a lot of loose ends unexplained, but that could be a factor of trying mentally to reconcile the two versions.
In any case, the 2004 film is a good thriller for today, but the original is a classic for the ages,


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Dossche Surname Ancestry Results
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SpeedUpMyPC Does What It Says...But Is The Price Right?
Today's Best Tech Deals
Picked by PCWorld's Editors
Top Deals On Great Products
Picked by Techconnect's Editors
Generic Company Place Holder SpeedUpMyPC
Speed-up utilities rarely seem to work as advertised. They generally tweak settings and clean things up nicely, but it's arguable whether the portions that sit in the background save you enough time to make up for the CPU cycles they use simply sitting there. Tweaking utility SpeedUpMyPC ($30, free demo), though, has some handy features--and in most cases, they seem to work.
SpeedUpMyPC 2012's tools fall into four basic categories: settings tweaks, unnecessary process reduction, visual and launch optimization, and registry tuning. Tweaks (permanent settings that alter Windows' behavior) cover startup, shutdown and communications. Basically, anything that you can find when researching Windows performance tweaks on the Web has been included. The process reducer looks for processes such as umrdpservice (remote desktop printing) that are commonly unused and will disable them.
Like the popular free utility CCleaner, SpeedUpMyPC 2012 has a registry checker that looks for unused or bad entries and removes them. Interestingly, SpeedUpMyPC 2012 found over 100 issues that CCleaner did not, but missed about 50 that CCleaner found. Unlike CCleaner, SpeedUpMyPC 2012 also has a defragger that eliminates any wasted space in the registry created by removing entries (which also happens with normal uninstall operations).
SpeedUpMyPC 2012 has four real-time optimizing components: CPU manager, proactive thumbnail generator, Software launch booster, and Start menu accelerator. The first is supposed to prevent CPU hogging, the second creates icon caches, the third reduces application launch times, and the last reduces lag on the Start menu.
SpeedUpMyPC 2012 is also part of Uniblue's PowerSuite which adds DriverScanner 2012 (which looks for outdated drivers), and the MaxiDisk 2012 disk optimizer. SpeedUpMyPC's tweaker, registry cleaner, and defragger are top-notch and the stars of the show--the background optimizers, not so much. Whether those utilities are worth $30 when there are free alternatives is questionable.
--Jon L. Jacobi
Generic Company Place Holder SpeedUpMyPC
System tweaker and optimizer SpeedUpMyPC actually works in most regards.
- Good registry cleaner and defragger
- Has some useful tweaks
- Not enough info on what's being done
Coupon Codes
Doordash Promo Code
50% off orders over $20 at Manhattan Bagel with DoorDash coupon
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Free online tax filing at H&R Block
Dell Small Business Coupon Code
Dell coupon: $265 off Dell G3 15 gaming laptop
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25% off $149+ with Eastbay coupon
AT&T Wireless Promo Codes
AT&T discount - $1,000 off Phone 11 Pro Max
Hp Coupon Code
HP coupon: Extra 10% off products


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The Central Connecticut women's basketball team will visit Robert Morris on Saturday afternoon. The Blue Devils (9-13, 3-9 NEC) will tip-off with the first place Colonials (14-9, 10-2 NEC) at 1 p.m. at the Sewall Center.
Below are a few notes on the Blue Devils heading into Saturday's game:
Today • The Blue Devils (9-13, 3-9 NEC) visit the Colonials of Robert Morris (14-9, 10-2 NEC) as CCSU looks to climb into the Northeast Conference Tournament field over the final six games of the regular season. The Colonials have already punched their ticket to the playoffs and at 10-2 in NEC play are the front runners for the tournament's top seed. Due to LIU holding a head-to-head tiebreaker the Blue Devils are technically two games out of a playoff spot entering today's action.
Six Games Left • With six games left in the regular season the NEC Standings are beginning to spread out, but the playoff field is far from set. Five teams are still separated by just one-game in places two-through-five and Wagner, LIU and CCSU are separated by just two games in seventh, eighth and ninth.
Series History • The Colonials hold a 17-12 advantage in the all-time Division I series between these programs. Robert Morris earned a 61-59 victory over the Blue Devils earlier this season in the NEC opener for both squads. Under head coach Beryl Piper the Blue Devils are 2-9 vs. the Colonials and 0-5 against RMU at the Sewall Center.
Tough Stretch • Today's game is the fourth of five road games in a three week stretch for the Blue Devils. CCSU will conclude the six-game stretch on Monday night at Saint Francis U. The Blue Devils played their lone home game of the three week period on Monday night against LIU Brooklyn. CCSU's will play three of the final four games of the season at home with the lone road game being at Fairleigh Dickinson on Saturday, March 1.


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The object, vaguely pink, sits on the shoulder of the freeway, slowly shimmering into view. Is it roadkill? A weird kind of sagebrush? No, wait, it's … a puffy chunk of foam insulation! "The laser almost certainly got returns off of it," says Chris Urmson, sitting behind the wheel of the Prius he is not driving. A note is made (FOD: foreign object or debris, lane 1) as we drive past, to help our computerized car understand the curious flotsam it has just seen.
It's a Monday, midday, and we are heading north on California Highway 85 in a Google autonomous vehicle. In October 2010, when The New York Times reported that Google had built a fleet of self-driving cars that had already collectively traversed some 140,000 miles of California asphalt, it came as a shock, a terrestrial Sputnik. Now the cars, with their whirling rooftop laser arrays, are as familiar in the Bay Area as the company's camera-crowned Street View vehicles. Indeed, the two are often confused, which is presumably why the words "self-driving car" have recently been plastered on this one's driver-side door.
Anthony Levandowski, business lead on Google's self-driving-car project, sits in the passenger seat, lanky and spectacled, wearing loud athletic shoes and clutching a MacBook Pro with a bumper sticker that reads "My other car drives itself." Urmson, with the soft-spoken, intense mien of a roboticist who has debugged a Martian rover in the deserts of Chile, occupies the nominal "driver's seat"—just one of the entities open to ontological inquiry this morning.
The Prius begins to seem like the Platonic ideal of a driver. It is better than human in just about every way.
The last time I was in a self-driving car—Stanford University's "Junior," at the 2008 World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems—the VW Passat went 25 miles per hour down two closed-off blocks. Its signal achievement seemed to be stopping for a stop sign at an otherwise unoccupied intersection. Now, just a few years later, we are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement on a busy public highway—a stunning demonstration of just how quickly, and dramatically, the horizon of possibility is expanding. "This car can do 75 mph," Urmson says. "It can track pedestrians and cyclists. It understands traffic lights. It can merge at highway speeds." In short, after almost a hundred years in which driving has remained essentially unchanged, it has been completely transformed in just the past half decade.
Google isn't the only company with driverless cars on the road. Indeed, just about every traditional automaker is developing its own self-driving model, peppering Silicon Valley with new R&D labs to work on the challenge. Last year, a BMW drove itself down the Autobahn, from Munich to Ingolstadt ("the home of Audi," as BMW's Dirk Rossberg told me at the company's outpost in Mountain View, California). Audi sent an autonomous vehicle up Pikes Peak, while VW, in conjunction with Stanford, is building a successor to Junior. At the Tokyo Auto Show in November, Toyota unveiled its Prius AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), which can be summoned remotely. GM's Alan Taub predicts that self-driving cars will be on the road by the decade's end. Groups like the Society of Automotive Engineers have formed special committees to draft autonomous-vehicle standards. Even Neil Young is getting in on the act: Roboticist Paul Perrone has been busily revamping the rocker's '59 Lincoln Continental to drive itself. "Everyone thinks this is coming," says Clifford Nass, director of Stanford's Revs Program.
As we drive the Google car—or are driven by it—I watch the action unfold on the computer monitor mounted on the passenger side of the dashboard. It shows how the car is interpreting the world: lanes, signs, cars, speeds, distances, vectors. The rendering is nothing special—a lot of blocky wireframe that puts me in mind of Atari's classic Battlezone. (The display is just one of a host of geeky details—to change lanes, for instance, the driver presses buttons marked Shift and Left on a keyboard near the monitor.) Yet it is absolutely fascinating, almost illicitly thrilling, to watch as the car not only plots and calculates the myriad movements of neighboring vehicles in the moment but also predicts where they will be in the future, like high-speed, mobile chess. Onscreen, the car is constantly "acquiring" targets, surrounding them in red boxes, tracing raster lines to and fro, a freeway version of John Madden's Telestrator. "We're analyzing and predicting the world 20 times a second," Levandowski says.
A car comes speeding along the adjacent on-ramp. Do we accelerate or slow? It's a moment that puzzles many human drivers. Our vehicle chooses to decelerate, but it can rethink that decision as more data comes in—if, for instance, the merging car brakes suddenly. The computer flags a car one lane over, maybe 30 feet in front of us, and slows imperceptibly. "We're being held back by this guy because we don't want to be in his blind spot," Levandowski says. A bus suddenly looms next to us. "Even if you can drive in the center of the lane, down to the centimeter, that doesn't mean it's the safest route," he says. And so the car drifts just a bit to the left to distance itself from the bus. "If you look at it, we're not actually driving center, though we're still not driving as bad as he is," he says, pointing to a gray SUV ahead that's straddling two lanes.
Levandowski has a point. I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman's voice announced coolly, "Autodrive." But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.
Automatic Transition
Self-driving cars may seem like science fiction, but most of the technology already exists. Indeed, over the past century we've gradually ceded our driving duties to automated systems.
Click the arrows to move through the timeline.
The Prius begins to seem like the Platonic ideal of a driver, against which all others fall short. It can think faster than any mortal driver. It can attend to more information, react more quickly to emergencies, and keep track of more complicated routes. It never panics. It never gets angry. It never even blinks. In short, it is better than human in just about every way.
Meanwhile, cruising along and freed from the acts of steering and braking, we've become backseat drivers of the entire traffic stream. I find myself imagining how much more smoothly the system would function if every car were like this one. Even at its most packed, only about 5 percent of a highway's surface is covered by automobiles; if cars were hyperalert and algorithmically optimized, you could presumably squeeze many more of them onto the pavement. And then there's the safety benefit. Traffic is the most dangerous thing that most of us ever encounter. From 2001 to 2009, American roads claimed 369,629 lives. And the culprit was not poorly lighted thoroughfares or faulty gas pedals but us—one landmark study cited "human errors" as the "definite or probable causes" of 93 percent of crashes.
Faced with the alternatives—that guy who cut us off without signaling, the mom nursing an Ambien hangover who's drifting into the right lane, the Bluetooth jockey doing 90 mph—I welcome our new robotic Prius-driving overlords.
I'm not the first person to feel this way. In his 1940 book, Magic Motorways, futurist and streamlining guru Norman Bel Geddes, who created the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, predicted big things for cars 20 years later: "These cars of 1960 and the highways on which they drive will have in them devices which will correct the faults of human beings as drivers. They will prevent the driver from committing errors. They will prevent his turning out into traffic except when he should. They will aid him in passing through intersections without slowing down or causing anyone else to do so and without endangering himself or others."
In reality, the cars of 1960, poised at the apex of the delirious tail-fin phase of American automotive history, were lumbering gas hogs, not only bereft of any of Bel Geddes' promised inventions but, beneath their shiny and muscular exteriors, dangerous chambers of sharply protruding dashboards and impaling steering columns. In the ensuing decades, cars became safer, but the people driving them did not. It is only now, well more than a century after the invention of the so-called automobile—an independently powered car—that we are finally developing a true automobile, a car that can drive itself.
As the news of Google's self-driving car has spread, company Kremlinologists and auto industry wags alike have debated—with varying shades of anticipation or dread—whether it is a fun experiment or a serious challenge to the auto industry. Was the company just looking for an oxygen hit of innovation via its stockholder-straining techno-fantasist skunkworks, Google X? Is it just expressing the aw-shucks altruism the company is known for? The fanboy enthusiasms of higher management? Or does Google, as one report had it, have designs on building its own cars?
When I ask these questions around Google, the answers I get are polite, if bordering on exasperated. "Our clear statement," Urmson says, "is we want to improve people's lives by transforming mobility." I get the sense that asking about business models is a bit rude. "Like a lot of things at Google, we want to figure out something big and important," he continues, "and we'll figure out the rest later."
If Urmson's team is taking a Googly approach to the auto industry, it's also taking a Googly approach to driving. The company, Urmson notes, "is really all about processing big data," and the road is just another data set to be mined. So Google isn't teaching its computers how to drive. It's collecting data—its cars have driven 200,000 miles in total, recording everything they see—and letting its algorithms figure out the rules on their own.
"If you read the DMV handbook on four-way stop signs, it's easy," Urmson says. "Whoever gets there first gets to go. If there are simultaneous arrivals, priority goes to the vehicle on the right." But it rarely works that way. "People optimize stop signs," he says. A polite robot vehicle, playing by the official driving rules, could be lost in a sea of aggressive humans. Instead, it needs to learn how people really drive. "This is the data-driven viewpoint," says Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford roboticist who heads the self-driving project. "The data can make better rules. It's very deep in the roots of almost everything Google does." Urmson describes it as an attempt to "hack driving."
It is, after all, "an accident that the car was invented before the computer," Levandowski says. And so his team is trying to take the logic and power of a computer and build a car around it. The auto companies, Levandowski says, "have an existing thing that they're improving incrementally, and they're concerned about maintaining and growing market share. We're thinking about driving as a blank slate: How would you address it if you had more freedom?"
But while Google wants to create, in essence, computers that drive, the auto industry has been trying to make its vehicles drive more like computers. Bolstered by increasingly powerful and affordable sensors, sophisticated algorithms, and Moore's law, the world's carmakers have been slowly redefining what it means to be a driver, encouraging us to offload everything from shifting gears to parallel parking. The automated car isn't just around the corner—it's here. The more interesting question isn't when we will let go of the wheel completely but what form and purpose the car will have when we finally do.
The Ultimate Self-Driving Machine
The next generation of gearheads won't obsess over horsepower and torque; they'll focus on things like radar range, communication latency, and pixel resolution. Here's a look at the technology that will power the autonomous cars of the near future.—T.V.
1 Radar
High-end cars already bristle with radar, which can track nearby objects. For instance, Mercedes' Distronic Plus, an accident-prevention system, includes units on the rear bumper that trigger an alert when they detect something in the car's blind spot.
2 Lane-keeping
Windshield-mounted cameras recognize lane markings by spotting the contrast between the road surface and the boundary lines. If the vehicle leaves its lane unintentionally, brief vibrations of the steering wheel alert the driver.
Google employs Velodyne's rooftop Light Detection and Ranging system, which uses 64 lasers, spinning at upwards of 900 rpm, to generate a point cloud that gives the car a 360-degree view.
4 Infrared Camera
Mercedes' Night View assist uses two headlamps to beam invisible, nonreflective infrared light onto the road ahead. A windshield-mounted camera detects the IR signature and shows the illuminated image (with hazards highlighted) on the dashboard display.
5 Stereo Vision
Mercedes' prototype system uses two windshield-mounted cameras to build a real-time 3-D image of the road ahead, spotting potential hazards like pedestrians and predicting where they are headed.
6 GPS/Inertial Measurement
A self-driver has to know where it's going. Google uses a positioning system from Applanix, as well as its own mapping and GPS tech.
7 Wheel Encoder
Wheel-mounted sensors measure the velocity of the Google car as it maneuvers through traffic.
Illustration: Thegreatergood.cc
No computer voice greets me when I press the ignition button of the new S-Class Mercedes parked in the front lot of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development in Palo Alto. This is no one-off prototype vehicle; it's a production model selling in showrooms today. But as I spark the engine's almost too perfectly modulated Teutonic growl and shift it into drive, I set in motion an unseen array of automation.
My driving, for example, is being constantly monitored by the car's Attention Assistance function, which tracks more than 70 elements—from minor steering wheel movements to my use of turn signals—for signs of operator fatigue. After 20 minutes, the baseline is set and the car will flag subsequent deviations. If, while parsing the data, it senses that I've grown weary, a coffee cup icon pops up in the instrument cluster. (It's up to me to pull over for the coffee.)
Attention assistance is just the beginning. R&D head Johann Jungwirth, who's sitting next to me, ticks off with a salesman's efficiency everything the car does for me: If it rains, the wipers activate. If I enter a tunnel, the headlights adjust their illumination. When a car in the neighboring lane creeps into my blind spot, a red triangle illuminates in my side mirror; if I try to change lanes, the icon flashes and beeps. If I drift out of my lane, the steering wheel rumbles gently. The Distronic Plus system—Mercedes' brand of what's called adaptive cruise control—maintains a steady following distance, braking automatically when the car ahead slows. And if I'm about to crash and haven't heeded earlier warnings, the car will take me out of the loop entirely, activating its robotic braking system and even rolling up the windows. Why that last step? From the backseat, Luca Delgrossi, Mercedes' Palo Alto director of driver assistance research, explains that it's for the airbags: "You need to offer a surface for them to hit."
It is, in short, a stealthily semiautonomous computer on wheels. "There are tens of thousands of processes running in parallel," Jungwirth says. A car like this boasts upwards of 60 ECUs, or electronic control units, handling everything from automatic braking to automatic trunk opening. The technology trade magazine IEEE Spectrum notes that a premium-class automobile runs 100 million lines of computer code, more than Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner. Intellectual property lawsuits, the bane of the technology industry and until recently a rarity in the car business, have been proliferating. As futurist Paul Saffo says, for a company like Mercedes nowadays, "the value add is the software and the computers. The wheels are primarily there to keep the computers from dragging on the ground."
As I drive the Mercedes through Palo Alto, I am reminded of a horseback outing in South America a few weeks earlier. A novice, I was put on an experienced and quite tame horse. It knew the route we were on by heart, accelerating when it could smell the comfort of its own stable, and I had to make only occasional corrections. "Driving an automated car is very much like riding a horse," says Donald Norman, author of The Design of Future Things and a consultant for BMW, among other automakers. "You can ride a horse with tight reins or loose reins. Loose reins means the horse is in control—but even when you're in control, the horse is still doing the low-level guidance, stepping safely to avoid holes and obstacles."
And so with loose reins I let the car do its work. It is effective, if slightly mechanistic. When a car ahead slows to turn, for example, the Mercedes fails to recognize that the vehicle will soon be out of my way, so we brake too much for my taste and then accelerate from a dead stop. The car's lane-departure warning feature, which alerts drivers when they drift out of their lane, doesn't work if the lane and edge markings are worn away—a common phenomenon in our infrastructure-challenged country. Then there are the technical issues that still plague sensors. Ice bedevils radar; snow challenges cameras. If, while cresting a hill, I were to encounter a car that was parked in the middle of the road, the Distronic Plus would treat it like any other stationary object—a building, a billboard, a mailbox—rather than a vehicle that might move soon. And radar doesn't like bends. "If a curve is sharp," Delgrossi says, "it cannot follow objects in front of you."
That's why Mercedes has been working on a system beyond radar: a "6-D" stereo-vision system, soon to be standard in the company's top models. Delgrossi takes me back to the research center to show off a prototype of the technology, installed in a 2011 Mercedes CLS 550. We are joined by Alexander Barth and Gunther Krehl, two vision scientists who work for the auto manufacturer. We huddle behind the open trunk, nodding at the blinking array of off-the-shelf processors much as an earlier generation of gearheads would gather around an open hood to admire the engine.
As we start to drive, a screen mounted in the center console depicts a heat map of the street in front of us, as if the Predator were striding through Silicon Valley sprawl. The colors, largely red and green, depict distance, calculations made not via radar or laser but by an intricate stereo camera system that mimics human depth perception. "It's based on the displacement of certain points between the left and the right image, and we know the geometry of the relative position of the camera," Barth says. "So based on these images, we can triangulate a 3-D point and estimate the scene depth." As we drive, the processing software is extracting "feature points"—a constellation of dots that outline each object—then tracking them in real time. This helps the car identify something that's moving at the moment and also helps predict, as Krehl notes, "where that object should be in the next second."
The stereo vision not only points out potential obstacles but can ID what those obstacles are. It can spot pedestrians and cyclists long before a driver likely would. It can distinguish between a stationary car and a mailbox. It can pick out potential dangers that are often obscured by humans' "attentional blindness," which can make us fail to notice even things we are looking directly at.
The only way to teach the car all this, of course, is to drive it—train the algorithms by cramming them with input, just as Google does with its cars. The current prototype for pedestrian-recognition software in the Mercedes, for instance, is based on 1.5 million (and climbing) samples of real and "virtual" pedestrians. And each driving culture demands its own version of the algorithms. In Germany, for example, Mercedes' cars can alert drivers to the presence of speed limit signs. "In Europe, these signs are formed by a red circle, a figure not easily found in nature and that can be easily detected," Delgrossi says. In the US, however, speed limit signs tend to be rectangular, which generates false positives with all kinds of other objects, like billboards and buildings. That's part of the reason Delgrossi's team is here: to teach the car to drive in the US. "Even the weather and lighting conditions can be different," he says. "We have some algorithms optimized for German weather. They sometimes need a little tuning for California."
Ensconced in the buttery leather driver's seat, I am reminded of Emerson: "Things are in the saddle," he wrote, "and ride mankind." The truth is we have gradually been distancing our level of active engagement with the process of operating a car. We automated the shifting of gears. We went from manual steering to power steering and then finally to "drive-by-wire," in which the mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the tires was replaced by a series of electrical impulses. We gave up paper maps for digital navigation systems. The hazards of parallel parking have been ironed out by ultrasonic sensors. This year, electronic stability control is standard on vehicles sold in the US for the same reason antilock brakes are standard in Europe: Its algorithms can perform better than humans in emergency maneuvering.
Each of these developments generated a brief period of resistance, which faded quickly as the new system began to seem natural. We do not feel as if we have lost something essential. On the contrary, in the same way that it would now feel strange to be in an elevator run by a human operator, it's the absence of technology that begins to feel uncomfortable. Incrementally, more of the things that we think are innate to the driving experience—steering, braking, accelerating—will be out of our hands.
As the tech becomes more powerful, drivers will have to navigate a new uncanny valley.
In fact, taken altogether, these automatic systems already approach full-blown autonomy. Ricky Hudi, who heads electrical and electronic development for Audi and whom I met at the Frankfurt Auto Show, notes that the adaptive cruise-control system in his company's A8 features a "stop and go" function for low-speed traffic. "All you have to do is extend this system with an image-recognition and laser-scanning system and an electrical steering system," he says. "Then you're pretty close to letting go of the wheel completely." Indeed, Mercedes is nearing deployment of a "traffic jam assist" in which the car not only maintains its distance from the car in front of it—as with current adaptive cruise-control mechanisms—but steers as well.
There's just one catch. As Ralf Herrtwich, head of Daimler's global driver assistance and chassis systems research, tells me at the auto show, the driver is still legally required to maintain control of the vehicle. "Right now, if the driver does some steering motion, that is considered by the authorities as a significant hint that the driver is in the loop," he says. And so another set of sensors will detect the driver's hands on the wheel. Herrtwich calls this commanded maneuvering—holding the wheel as you feel it slip through your hands.
This brings up the most challenging obstacle on our road to the autonomous- driving future: managing the handoff. For as long as anyone, even Google, is willing to predict, cars will by necessity be semiautonomous; human drivers will still have to play some role. But figuring out what that role will be is complicated. Are we pilots or copilots? How far out of the loop can we be taken? "We need clear mental models of when you are better at something and when the car is better," Stanford's Nass says.
So far, automakers have kept their autonomous technology, like ABS, essentially invisible to drivers. But as the technologies become more powerful, drivers will have to navigate a new kind of uncanny valley, the potential sense of alienation in being piloted by a ghostly machine. "Many people describe this sensation," Nass says. "Does the car even know I'm here?"
Meanwhile, the legal and liability landscape is essentially uncharted. "There are places where technology outpaces the law," Google's Levandowski says. "This is one area where it outpaces it by a lot." In California, there is no law concerning self-driving cars. In 2011, Google helped Nevada draft the first legislation to allow autonomous cars to be driven legally on state highways. It's the only time a motor vehicle department has had to deal with the issue.
Beyond bureaucracy, there are deeper legal questions. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, which is studying the legal framework for quasi-autonomous vehicles, notes how active the liability landscape already is when it comes to cars' safety features. "People sue over all kinds of stuff. People sue because some feature that was supposed to protect them didn't. People sue because their car didn't have a blind-spot warning when other cars at the same price point did." Imagine the complexity we'll have when cars drive themselves. Who will be responsible for their operation—the car companies or the drivers? What happens, for example, when a highway patrol officer pulls over a self-driving car? Who gets the ticket?
As a RAND report observed, even as automakers create more semiautonomous technologies, they "will want to preserve the social norm that crashes are primarily the moral and legal responsibility of the driver, both to minimize their own liability and to ensure safety." Consider what happened to the remote-parking assistant BMW developed a few years ago for getting into narrow spots. "You push a button and the car goes in and parks itself" while the driver waits outside, says Donald Norman, the Design of Future Things author. When he asked BMW executives why he didn't see it on the market, Norman says he was told, "The legal team wouldn't let them go forward."
The most slippery territory for autonomous vehicles, however, may be social and cultural. Do we want to give up the wheel? More than status, the car represents freedom. It's a fundamental part of our character, liberty with the turn of a key—that ability, as the narrator of John Updike's Rabbit, Run describes it, to "drive all night through the dawn through the morning through the noon park on a beach take off your shoes and fall asleep by the Gulf of Mexico."
Google's Urmson bristles at the idea that an autonomous car takes away your freedom. "It provides more freedom," he says. "If you're disabled, if you've lost the privilege of driving, you can't get around in American society. You're stuck." Furthermore, he points out, driving is often kind of a drag. "Most of driving is not a car commercial," he says. "The average American commutes 52 minutes a day, with the purpose of getting from point A to point B, not with the purpose of winding through the mountains and enjoying The Sound of Music."
"The fact that you're still driving is a bug," Levandowski says, "not a feature."
There may be signs that our traditional attachment to the car is already beginning to slacken. Since 2007, growth in US car ownership has steadily declined. Meanwhile, the annual number of miles that residents of developed countries drive each year has flatlined, even as per capita GDP has risen—challenging the long-held idea that cars were necessary for prosperity. In the US, the number of drivers under the age of 20 who hold licenses has been declining as well—from about 12 million in 1978 to just fewer than 10 million in 2009—while a recent Gartner report noted that nearly half of teenagers prefer an Internet connection to a car. (Only 15 percent of self-identified baby boomers said the same.)
Of course, automakers would rather not force drivers to choose between a smartphone and a car. Just down the road from the Facebooks and Pandoras of Silicon Valley, carmakers like BMW and VW are working to integrate every aspect of modern digital life into the driving experience. Mercedes, the first big company to set up shop in the Valley, in 1994, says it was also the first manufacturer to feature in-car Internet access, in 1998, and now boasts of being the first to offer "full Facebook integration." One day, Mercedes' Jungwirth says, the car will be as flexible and easy to upgrade as a smartphone—a big change for an industry that has had trouble integrating cutting-edge consumer electronics due to its sluggish product cycles. And customers have started to expect this kind of functionality, says Sven Beiker, who directs the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. "Do I care if my engine has four valves? Not really," he says. "But if it has a lot of megabits per second …"
This is not exactly comforting, not in a world where, as one landmark study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found, driver distraction accounted for more than 80 percent of "safety-critical events." Auto industry executives insist that they are operating within the telematics safety guidelines established by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an improvement over the current state of affairs, in which drivers simply use their smartphones. When it comes to Facebook, for example, "we have decided what's important while driving," Jungwirth says. "You won't have your wall, your newsfeed, just because it's too text heavy." He keeps repeating, like a mantra, the company's ethos: "Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, mind on the road."
But if your mind is also on Facebook, how much is left for traffic? A question kept nagging at me: Were all the increasingly sophisticated driver-assist technologies—ostensibly meant to guard against exterior hazards—being created as a kind of rearguard action to mitigate, or even enable, the increasingly rich experiences available to the driver inside the vehicle? Nevada's texting ban, for instance, does not apply to self-driving cars. Maybe the problem is not that texting and Facebook are distracting us from driving. Maybe the problem is that driving distracts us from our digital lives.
In the 19th century, Karl Benz, creator of Mercedes (and the first person to legally operate an automobile on public roads), predicted the global market for his invention would be limited by the lack of qualified chauffeurs. It's one of many examples of the way we often fail to anticipate the disruptive social changes that technological innovation can bring. Nobody knows how self-driving cars might change the fabric of our lives. "The moment you start putting intelligence in a car you start changing the essence of what a car is," futurist Saffo says.
Consider, for instance, GM's OnStar system. Initially a geolocation-equipped service intended to provide roadside assistance to stranded drivers—but capable, via its connected nature, of much more—it has become a kind of digital Trojan horse. Most recently, GM signed a partnership with RelayRides, a "neighbor-to-neighbor" car-sharing service that lets drivers rent out their vehicles when they are not in use. One simple but powerful feature of OnStar is that it offers remote unlocking of a vehicle. Integrated with RelayRides' software, this allows easy access for renters, who don't have to worry about exchanging keys with the owners. "I walk up to the car, send a command to OnStar with my phone, and it gets unlocked remotely," explains RelayRides founder Shelby Clark. GM is the first major manufacturer to partner with the company, but Clark says that RelayRides has "had conversations with lots of automakers. Everyone is moving toward this concept of the networked car, the car as a platform." (Indeed, there's nary a big automaker that's not partnering with car-sharing services—or building its own.) For Clark, it's a no-brainer: "Why is my mobile phone more powerful than my car?"
This is the kind of notion that seems complete anathema to our current model of auto ownership. Sharing a rental car is one thing. But who wants to give a stranger access to the family chariot? Susan Shaheen, codirector of UC Berkeley's Transportation Sustainability Research Center, notes that people are more willing to rent out their home than their car. But that's largely because of concerns over insurance—a hurdle RelayRides has cleared.
Furthermore, as we gradually relinquish our driving duties, it's conceivable that we may also give up our sense of ownership of the car itself. For example, as Matthew Crawford writes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, some Mercedes models come without a dipstick. "The burden of paying attention to his oil level he has outsourced to another," Crawford writes: the technician, the dealer, the corporation, the shareholders. "There are now layers of collectivized absentee interest in your motor's oil level, and no single person is responsible for it."
Why do we embrace these, as Crawford calls them, "attractions of being disburdened of involvement with our own stuff?" Does anyone long for their teeming towers of CDs over the simplicity of Spotify? Similarly, we may well come to view the car less as an object to be owned than as a service to be streamed from the cloud. We already have the experience, through an app like Uber, of summoning a car service with our smartphone, then watching as it moves toward us on a Google map, like the progress bar of a download. The final leap here is to envision a self-driving car that can be commanded like an elevator. When a car can drive itself to our door whenever we want it, why own something that spends more than 90 percent of the time simply parked?
Still, it's impossible to predict how the self-driving car would change our lives. On his Mac, Google's Levandowski keeps a photo that epitomizes the 1950s vision of the self-driving car. In it, a family hunkers inside a massive tail-finned convertible. The automobile pilots down the highway while the family members (sans seat belts) play a board game, blissfully disengaged from the activity on the road. It's a quaint idea, in any number of ways—for one thing, it's unlikely we'll use the free time generated by automation for leisure, let alone board games. But whatever vision we conjure today, it runs that same risk of retro-futurist pathos. When the self-driving future arrives, we'll adapt to it not as something radical but as the mundane magic we've come to expect.
Tom Vanderbilt (email@example.com) is the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.


text:
(WNS) -- U.S. abortions fell 5 percent in 2009, the biggest one-year decrease in at least a decade, according to a report from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Nov. 21.
While the exact reasons for the decline are difficult to pinpoint, an Associated Press report attributed the falling numbers to more people using contraceptives like intrauterine devices, condoms and the "morning-after" pill. It also said the economic recession may have led more women to be more careful because they cannot afford to get pregnant.
But the AP report didn't mention other factors, like the undeniable growth of the pro-life movement, which draws hundreds of thousand of people -- many of them young -- to the annual March of Life in Washington, D.C. in March and to other public pro-life events. Pro-life groups are also growing: 40 Days for Life started eight years ago and promotes prayer vigils in 400 cities, while participation in Students for Life has doubled in the past five years.
Another attributable factor would include the growth of pregnancy resource centers across the country, informing women they have options other than abortion. Care Net has doubled the number of its affiliated centers to 1,100 in the past decade.
The secular media has also failed to mention recent polls that found public opinion of abortion changing, with a majority of Americans identifying themselves as pro-life, with only a little more than 40 percent being pro-abortion.
The CDC study found that Mississippi had the lowest abortion rate at four per 1,000 woman of childbearing age. The state has only a couple of abortion providers and nation's highest teen birthrate — because most babies are allowed to live.
New York, second to California in number of abortion providers, had the highest abortion rate, roughly eight times Mississippi's. California did not participate in the report, which used numbers from 43 states and two cities. The researchers found that abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age fell from about 16 in 2008 to roughly 15 in 2009. That translates to nearly 38,000 fewer abortions in a single year.
The study also found that white women had the lowest abortion rate, at about 8.5 per 1,000 women of childbearing age. The rate for black women was about four times that. The rate for Hispanic women was about 19 per 1,000.
c. 2012 WORLD News Service. Used with permission.
Publication date: November 26, 2012


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Select a facility below to access the full website.
UF Health
Leesburg Hospital
Serving Central Florida for more than 50 years. Our team specializes in cardiology, orthopedics, neurosciences, minimally invasive surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics and stroke care.
600 E. Dixie Avenue
Leesburg, FL 34748
ER wait time:
UF Health
The Villages® Hospital
Located in the heart of Florida's friendliest hometown. Offering 24-hour emergency and surgical services, orthopedics, cardiovascular care, diagnostic imaging services and a designated Stroke Center.
1451 El Camino Real
The Villages, FL 32162
ER wait time:
About UF Health Central Florida
Advisory Board
- Roger Beyers, Chairperson
- Lindsey Blaise, Vice Chairperson
- George Kainz, MD, Secretary
- Gregory Lewis, Treasurer
- Manuel Alvarado, MD
- Dwarak Banala, MD
- Christopher Bridges
- Shahbaz Cheema, MD
- Richard Cole, Jr.
- Russell D'Emidio
- George McCabe
- Marlene O'Toole
- David Sustarsic, MD
- Amanda Wettstein
- Robert Williams, Esq.
- Lynne Winker
Medical staff officers at UF Health Leesburg Hospital
- Navin Reddy, MD, President
- Celia Nelson, MD, Vice President
Medical staff officers at UF Health The Villages® Hospital
- Sandeep Thaper, MD, President
- Jeremy Spry, DO, Vice President
Executive Team
- Don Henderson, FACHE Chief Executive Officer
- Diane Harden, CPA Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
- Phyllis Baum, RN, MBA Vice President and Chief Quality Officer
- Phil Braun, JD Vice President and Chief Counsel
- Alex Chang, FACHE Vice President of Support Services
- Bill Pfingsten, FACHE Vice President of Ambulatory Services
- Amie Richason Vice President of Human Resources
- Dave Steele Vice President and Chief Information Officer
- Lorraine Brown, MSN, RN Chief Clinical Officer and Site Administrator, UF Health The Villages® Hospital
- Joshua Fleming, RN, BSN, MHA Chief Clinical Officer and Site Administrator, UF Health Leesburg Hospital
About Us
UF Health Central Florida, formerly known as Central Florida Health and acquired by University of Florida Health in January 2020, is an award-winning, locally owned and governed not-for-profit health care system and the largest, most comprehensive provider of health care services in the region.
We care for patients in Lake, Sumter, and Marion counties through inpatient acute hospital services at UF Health The Villages® Hospital and UF Health Leesburg Hospital, inpatient rehabilitation services at UF Health The Villages® Rehabilitation Hospital, adult inpatient psychiatric services at the UF Health Leesburg Hospital Senior Behavioral Health Center and diagnostic laboratory services at several locations.
As a premier health care provider, UF Health Central Florida takes pride in providing progressive, innovative technology, along with building strong relationships with patients, families, physicians and residents of the communities we serve.
Other UF Health positions in our area
- Financial Counselor - ACU - Regional Physicians Network - Leesburg
- Medical Assistant - RPN Ortho - Leesburg
External applicants
Physician opportunities
UF Health Central Florida, formerly known as Central Florida Health and acquired by University of Florida Health in January 2020, is an award-winning, locally owned and governed not-for-profit health care system and the largest, most comprehensive provider of health care services in the region. We care for patients in Lake, Sumter, and Marion counties through inpatient acute hospital services at UF Health The Villages® Hospital and UF Health Leesburg Hospital, inpatient rehabilitation services at UF Health The Villages® Rehabilitation Hospital, adult inpatient psychiatric services at the UF Health Leesburg Hospital Senior Behavioral Health Center and diagnostic laboratory services at several locations.
Care Delivery Alliance
Click here for a list of Care Delivery Alliance Providers.
Care Delivery Alliance (CDA) is a physician hospital organization (PHO) based in Lake County, Florida, built on a strategy that supports an independent rather than employed physician alignment and engagement model. Within CDA, physician participants maintain their individual practices in accordance with best practices. CDA represents the 1st phase of an evolutionary transition to a clinically integrated network, which gives independent practitioners the added advantage of partnering with other physicians and ancillary health providers and the local health system to improve quality and access for their patients, while better managing the cost associated with delivering that care.
What is a PHO?
A PHO is a vehicle that enables hospitals and physicians to work cooperatively toward accomplishing several objectives. Primary purposes for forming a PHO are developing improved methods of healthcare delivery; overseeing integration of physicians and hospitals into health delivery networks; assisting in voluntary group formation; and collecting, analyzing and disseminating information. Secondary purposes include contracting with managed care organizations with joint risk sharing, developing standards of care, and building trust between hospitals and independent physicians. PHOs are legal entities generally formed by physicians and 1 or more hospitals.
What are the advantages of a PHO?
- Provides an organized approach for physicians and hospitals to work together on managed care issues, such as utilization management and quality improvement.
- Serves as a clearinghouse for certain administrative duties, thus reducing the burden on individual physicians and hospital members.
- Collaborates with managed care companies.
- Establishes reimbursement and risk-sharing approaches that align incentives among all physicians.
- Supports independent physicians and their practices as they face the new challenges of healthcare reform.
Why should I join Care Delivery Alliance?
Because CDA offers a comprehensive network of providers who are collaborating in managing patient care and focused on quality improvement, it can often develop more attractive agreements with managed care plans than individual providers can provide. As membership grows, the large provider network of physicians and hospitals can offer health plans and other payers a significant partner to work with on innovative patient care initiatives. CDA can provide significantly greater value to the health plans than individual physician practices. As a result, payers are willing to offer additional performance incentives for integrated groups of providers who are committed to collaborating to control costs, enhance quality and improve patient satisfaction.
CDA will also offer a growing menu of Practice Management Support Offerings, including various administrative and technology solutions that may be beyond the resources available to individual physicians.
Overall functions of CDA include:
- Maintain and administer a comprehensive provider network.
- Provide an ongoing managed care strategy.
- Create/implement a clinical integration strategy.
- Provide general support to community practice managers.
- Provide a general communications function for the physician community.
- Develop and implement community and employer outreach activities.
- Develop a portfolio of optional practice management services offerings.
What is a clinically integrated network?
Both physicians and hospitals recognize the importance of developing some form of collaborative arrangement as the healthcare system moves toward fully integrated networks of service providers. Physician-hospital alignment and clinical integration that is designed to maximize efficiencies and minimize waste and duplication will become paramount in the near future. Failure to act now will jeopardize our ability to compete with other integrated health systems.
What is clinical integration?
The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division defined physician clinical integration in their 1996 Statements of Antitrust Enforcement in Health Care as "an active and ongoing program to evaluate and modify practice patterns by the network's physician participants and create a high degree of interdependence and cooperation among the physicians to control costs and ensure quality."
Broadly speaking, an FTC-accepted clinical integration program features (1) collaboration and interdependence among the participating physicians that (2) result in significant quality, utilization and cost improvements in the delivery of their services and that (3) make it "reasonably necessary" for the program's success of efficient operation for the participants to jointly negotiate prices.
What does a clinically integrated network entail?
Although there is no standardized model, the components most clinically integrated networks incorporate, based on FTC guidance, are:
- Requirements that physicians invest time and effort in the development, planning and ongoing operation of the clinical integration program.
- Inclusion of physicians, based on their interest in providing high-quality, efficient care and their willingness to participate in and abide by the policies of the CI program.
- Development by the physicians of practice guidelines sufficient to (1) improve quality and efficiency, (2) cover the majority of medical specialties and (3) cover diagnoses representing a high percentage of the total medical costs of the network's services.
- Dissemination of the guidelines to physicians, and agreement among the physicians to apply the guidelines to the clinical integration program's patients.
- Development by the participating physicians, and adoption by the group, of quality, efficiency, utilization, and cost goals or benchmarks reflecting improvement by network physicians over their current performance.
- Development and implementation of a formal process by which the group will obtain information regarding the physicians' compliance with the guidelines and a formal program through which physicians review and assess the aggregate group and individual physician performance in relation to the group's benchmarks.
- Development and implementation of a formal program by physicians for identifying, and providing support and corrective action for, individual participants who fail to apply the guidelines or otherwise fail to achieve the group's benchmarks.
- Development and implementation of a system of financial rewards, based on group and individual performance, to incentivize physicians to improve their performance.
- A process for ensuring that referrals remain within the network of clinically integrated providers to the maximum extent possible.
Conduct to avoid:
- Improper sharing of competitively sensitive information, regardless of shares or other indicia of market power. Significant competitive concerns can arise when PHO/CIN operations lead to price-fixing or other collusion among participants in their sale of competing services outside the network. For example, improper exchanges of prices or other competitively sensitive information among competing participants could facilitate collusion and reduce competition in the provision of services outside the PHO, leading to increased prices or reduced quality or availability of healthcare services.
- Refrain from, and implement appropriate firewalls or other safeguards against, conduct that may facilitate collusion among participants in the sale of competing services outside the network.
Membership process
Medical staff members are currently being recruited to join Care Delivery Alliance. Signing up is easy; merely complete and sign the agreement and provide an annual fee of $500. You will then have access to all of the advantages of being a CDA member.
Download the Master Membership Agreement.
Contact information
To learn more about CFA, physician hospital organizations and clinical integration, or to pursue membership, please email email@example.com
Welcome UF Health Central Florida team members.
Tier One Provider Directory
In order to maximize your benefits, use the link above to view our Tier One Provider Directory. All other specialties may be part of a PPO. This list is updated regularly; however, Tier One members are subject to change. If you have questions, please call the Human Resources department.


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cDNA amplification problem - (Feb/22/2013 )
Hi everyone,
Long story short... I'm trying to amplify a full length cDNA from mouse forebrain for cloning. I used trizol to extract the mRNA and InVitrogen's Superscript III first strand cDNA synthesis kit to make the cDNA. I used 10% (2 uL of a 20 uL rxn) for the template and I did a temperature gradient for annealing (55, 60 and 65, with the Tm being around 68) using high fidelity polymerase (pfu ultra hotstart). In addition, as controls, I used GoTaq to amplify GAPDH and my full length cDNA at 60C. Once the results came back, none of my high fidelity reactions worked, but I got my full length band and the GAPDH band with GoTaq, suggesting that the cDNA was there. Fearing that this result was due to the polymerase, I then tried it with another high fidelity polymerase (Clontech's Advantage HD), but same result.
I'm baffled on how to continue next. I'm guessing there may be some crap in the cDNA mix that is interfering with the reaction. I was thinking about doing an ethanol precipitation and purifying the cDNA and then trying again. Any of you have any experience with this?
Is it necessary to use high fidelity polymerase? Maybe you can just use Taq and then sequence your cDNA. Taq isn't that bad...
I have experienced the same problem, where I used to get the amplification with the taq polymerase, but with pfu polymerase the gel used to be blank. Try using Advantage DNA polymerase mix from clontech. I found it really useful giving the opposite results. It gave the amplification with the primers which did not work with the normal taq pol.
If all you are doing with the DNA is sequencing it, then Taq is a good choice for a polymerase. Errors it makes will almost never be seen in a sequencing reaction, since the sequencing reaction looks at the consensus base at each position. If you are cloning, then it makes a big difference, since you are selecting a single molecule, which will ofen contain errors.
I've tried the clontech mix already. It didn't work.,,, but an undergrad loaded my sample... so I'll try that again today along with the GAPDH control....
any other suggestions??


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2 Posts
Discussion Starter • #1 •
I am working on my uncles 99 chevy 5.3 and he was told the ecm was bad so I changed that out and still nothing from the fuel pump. I had a known good fuel pump that I dropped in and still nothing? What else do I need to look at? I am a cummins diesel guy so not sure where else I need to start looking on this truck. Thanks for the help.


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This invitation can be customized for any event. It can be done in 4x6" or 5x7" size (Custom sizes smaller than 5x7" may also be done). Personalize these elegant invitations for any event.
This is sent digitally. Once you have received your file for printing you have the option of printing at home, uploading online to order prints (or 1 hour photo), or saving it to usb and taking it into a print shop. You also have the option of using it as a digital invitation by sending through email or posting online for your event.
A proof will be emailed within 24-48 hours of purchase and the event details being received.
Once the proof is emailed, you will have a chance to review it and make any changes that you would like. You can choose to change text details, colors, etc. Fonts can also be changed to anything you would like.
Option 1


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Bondhus 9/32 in. Hollow Shaft Nut Driver
Browse all deals at Home Depot
See more in Tools
See more from Bondhus
* This offer may contain time-sensitive information and offers. Please check with Home Depot to confirm actual price & availability.
- Be the first to comment!
Home Depot
2290 Interstate 45
Corsicana, TX 75109


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Never one to let a trend die peacefully, the Hollywood Machine is firing up yet another '80s reboot, a big-screen adaptation of short-lived series "The Equalizer," with Russell Crowe poised to take the title role, according to 24 Frames.
All grumbling aside, "The Equalizer," which starred Edward Woodward ("Breaker Morant") as shadowy former spy-turned-vigilante who protected the people of New York from all manner of evil, was awesome. Folks in peril would contact him via his newspaper ad, which read, "Got a problem? Odds against you? Call the Equalizer."
U.S. & World
The Equalizer, aka Robert McCall, was, in the British tradition, both a proper gentleman and an all-around bad dude, who drove a Jaguar XJ6 and attracted a shocking number of future stars during his four-year run, including Macaulay Culkin, Melissa Joan Hart, Christian Slater, Kevin Spacey, John Goodman, Joe Morton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Luis Guzman, Bradley Whitford, Laurence Fishburne, Patricia Clarkson, Laurie Metcalf, Oliver Platt, Patricia Richardson, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, Cynthia Nixon, Ving Rhames, Amanda Plummer, Tony Shalhoub, and Stanley Tucci.
On top of all that, the show featured one of the great TV themes, "THe Equalizer Busy Equalizing," by former Police drummer Stewart Copeland, who also made a cameo on th eshow as a pickpocket.
It's been nearly a decade since Crowe had an honest-to-god hit on his hands, it would be totally sweet if "The Equalizer" could save him, too.


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Orange, Green and Yellow Pen and Exquisite Beading
- Handmade item
- Materials: Metal Pen Base, Grade A Rhinestone European Beads, Alloy Rhinestone European Beads, Handmade Lampwork European Beads, Handmade Glass European Beads, Crystal Spacer Charms Beads, Tibetan Style Spacer Beads, Luxury Custom Pens and Desk Sets, Big Sister Little Sister Gifts, Sorority and Greek Charms Pens and Desk Sets, Classic Designs Gifts,
Orange, Green and Yellow Pen with a Variation of other Exquisite Beading. Select your style preference from a variety of pens in the boutique, all made with handcrafted lampwork beads.
The PEN is entirely constructed of metal and has an extremely fine anodized finish. The design is perfectly balanced with lampwork beads for an overall length around 6 inches. The pen comes with a new blue ink cartridge and allows for refills.
COMPLIMENTARY: You will also receive for the pen a velvet protector pouch and an extra black ink cartridge refill.
IMPORTANT Note for Usage: The pen opens and closes at the bottom around silver ring. Refills are inserted by pulling the bottom silver ring and removing the empty ink and replacing the new refill. The top has been bonded to secure the beadwork.
CUSTOMIZATION: These pens feature the "Classic Bling" style, but if you would like a custom order with no bling, more bling, no (different) charm, or other personal interest. Please email me if you want customization.


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[nggallery id="165″ template="carousel"]
3-D printing puts manufacturing on designers' desks, at least for those who have access to a desktop printer. For the rest of us, Wired is inviting you to show off your 3-D design skills in our 3-D print-off.
Send us the digital rendering of your original, printable designs by midnight, April 6th, 2013; we'll post the submissions on our site, then select the ten coolest to print through Shapeways.com in one of many of their printable materials and feature in a photo gallery. Show the world the rendering of your masterpiece, from your name in three-dimensional block letters, to a highly-detailed space demon sculpture, to a clever wall hanger for your iPad. There are no restrictions.
- Send as many entries as you like.
- Submissions should be optimized for 3-D printing; use a design-analyzing service like Will It 3D Print to determine printability. If it's physically impossible to create, we won't be able to select and print it.
- Size: Dimensions should fit into 4 in x 4 in x 4 in
- We reserve the right to modify winning designs to optimize their printability, but you ultimately own all rights to your design.
- Tinkercad — A web-based design application that allows you to access a variety of tools to draw shapes, then push or pull them to introduce depth. Simple to use. See our tips here.
- Shapeways Creator — Wide variety of tools for easy design creation. Includes 2D to 3D, an application that lets you take any black and white image (including text) and give it depth to create a digital object. Also, tools for making vases, figurines, and jewelry.
- Autodesk 123D Design — Entry-level iOS, Mac, PC, and browser-based tool for design, from one of the biggest companies. Includes a built-in library of pre-made shapes and objects that you can combine and modify. Our review.
- Sketchup — A slightly more advanced CAD software that is still accessible for beginners. Has a slightly longer learning curve than the other apps. See our tips here.
Submit Your Design


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Protesters with the aboriginal movement known as Idle No More took over half of downtown Vancouver's Waterfront Station Wednesday afternoon.
The protest included more than 300 people chanting and drumming amid the concourse of the busy commuter hub.
"It's such an amazing movement because we're coming in a cultural way, singing and dancing, and no one's ever seen that before," said Jerilynn Webster, a 28-year-old aboriginal hip hop artist from Vancouver. "It sounds ancient. Why? Because we've been here as indigenous people for thousands of years, taking care of the land.
"We need to tell Canada, yeah you may have one idea about what a reserve looks like in your own mind, but we need to expand our minds and say this is third-world-country living conditions that our people live in."
The peaceful station protest, which lasted just over an hour, moved outside around 4 p.m. as supporters began to leave and a smaller group of about 50 drummers continued for another hour in a plaza outside the station.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, Pamela Palmater, one of the leaders of the movement, travelled to Washington, D.C., to give interviews to the U.S. press. She said the goal of the media campaign was to raise awareness internationally and force Prime Minister Stephen Harper to act.
"The idea is to put pressure on the Canadian government to pay attention and come to the table," Palmater said by phone.
"I was invited to come down and do some media about Idle No More, basically answer questions about why it's spreading into the United States."
In addition to recent events held across Canada, rallies have already been staged as far off as Texas, Hawaii and New Zealand with plans for more in the coming days.
Palmater said Chief Theresa Spence's hunger strike, now in its fourth week, is part of a much larger protest movement.
The initial spark was the federal government's omnibus budget legislation but it has now become about broader issues like inequality and treaty rights, she said.
Palmater noted an evolution in the form protests have taken over the past few weeks, toward increased civil disobedience.
"We did letter writing and phone calls and trying to talk to MPs and, you know, we took that route and it didn't work," she said.
"Then we had to move up to peaceful marches and rallies, and that didn't work. So now we're doing all these flash mob round dances, which are more about working hand in hand with Canadians and also keeping the focus on the media. But now you see blockades."
There have been several disruptions at rail lines over the past week, including one on the main line between Montreal and Toronto on Sunday evening which delayed Via Rail passengers. Protesters have also blocked a CN line in Sarnia, Ont.
There was even a call to set up blockades at Canada-U.S. borders on Saturday, though that move hasn't been endorsed by organizers.
It wasn't clear whether local activists would follow through.
A statement released last week on the Idle No More website urged peaceful forms of protest.
"Idle No More feels that any acts that are not in line with peace and solidarity only detract attention from our ultimate mission," the statement said.
Palmater echoed that sentiment on Tuesday.
"We're trying our best to avoid things that would inconvenience Canadians," she said.
Meanwhile, Spence's hunger strike continued to gain support from across the country. A group of activists travelled from the Maritimes to bring supplies to her protest site, located on an island in the Ottawa River across from Parliament Hill.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan has offered to meet with her but Spence has turned that proposal down.
The federal government says it has made an effort to consult with aboriginal leaders and work on pressing issues on reserves like education, clean drinking water and housing.
It points to a meeting held last January with First Nations leaders as proof it is serious about improving their relationship.