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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
We finally had our night in court with the McMansion owners and...WE WON!!!!! They will pay for flooding our basement. After almost a year, victory is ours.
Last October the lord of the house next door cut the electrical service between his house and ours so he could put in his own service. Only, he never had this okayed by Con Edison and his contractor left an open pipe in the ground. When it rained, the water poured into our basement.
First time in court, we had to postpone as we didn't have all our estimates and we didn't have the Con Edison report saying they were guilty. After that, the lord next door postponed. Then, he got his insurance company involved. They brought a lawyer to small claims court. The arbitrator didn't like the lawyer, thought we were right, but the lawyer asked for a postponement so it was granted. Next, the lord sued the contractor and the electrician who did the work. We amended our suit and sued them also. Tonight, everyone was ready (except the lawyer). Before the lawyer could speak, everyone agreed to arbitration. The arbitrator said we were right and the only issue was to decide which of the three would pay. The lawyer was furious. He tried to appeal. You cannot appeal the decision of an arbitrator. He told my husband to go f**k himself. (Not a very professional thing for a lawyer to say.) I think we will report the lawyer to the insurance company. Victory is sweet. I'm going to enjoy spending this money.
8 comments:
- Anonymous said...
It's amazing what passes as good construction these days. If I ever have to remodel or build, I am going straight to "This Old House". I trust all thse guys.
So did all parties involved have to pay you or just McMansion's insurance company.
And why would a lawyer get upset with your husband??? They get paid win or lose.
- 10:45 PM, October 30, 2007
- Anonymous said...
Between this personal victory and your newly minted thermostat in your trailer, you might be exhausted from all the wild celebrating. Mazel Tov on a sweet victory worth waiting for. Sometimes, justice does prevail!!
- 11:58 PM, October 30, 2007
- Anonymous said...
Report the lawyer to the Bar Association.
- 8:52 AM, October 31, 2007
- Anonymous said...
Of course, it's unprofessional for him to say such a thing, but I would have laughed in his face. He lost it. This would not be a source of offence to me but a source of amusement.
I wouldn't report him, I would roll my eyes at him.
- 10:33 AM, October 31, 2007
- Anonymous said...
My friend had a classroom with a locked thermostat and it was often cold in his room. He got no relief or heat from the custodian.
He took a piece of foam with a hole cut to fit over the thermostat. He kept it in a refrigerator and put it on the thermostat whenever he needed heat.
- 5:59 PM, October 31, 2007
- Pissedoffteacher said...
That's a great idea. Maybe I'll keep an ice pack in my car.
- 8:21 PM, October 31, 2007
- JUSTICE not "just us" said...
"Parabens" as we say in Brasil!
- 8:28 PM, October 31, 2007
- proofoflife said...
You go girl!
- 9:55 PM, November 01, 2007


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You Are Made for More is an inspiring book written by Lisa Osteen Comes. Lisa Osteen Comes is Joel Osteen's sister and she is also associate pastor at Lakewood Church. Her book covers twelve chapters to remind readers that they are made for more. The book revealed you are made a masterpiece, to hope, to live your dreams, to rise above other's expectations, to keep on, and so much more. We don't just have to live a less than life we can live an abundant life and run our own race!
Lisa Osteen Comes has had to practice endurance and she had to make a choice to never give up when life threw curve balls and challenges at her. When Lisa was born she couldn't walk or talk and the doctors placed a limit and a label on her life. They told her parents that she would never be able to walk or talk and that they would have to take care of her for the rest of their lives. They said she had cerebral palsy and they couldn't do anything to help her overcome the diagnosis. But God healed her and now she is a speaker and she walks perfectly fine now! Satan couldn't stop her from fulfilling her destiny. In her childhood, she had to choose to not dwell on negative words her classmates spoke over her. She was shinny and they called her Olive Oyl from Popeye. She started accepting the negative words and she started to believe them. The pain of those negative words led her into looking at who God has said she was. God has declared that she is blessed, gifted, loved, and so much more! But the magnificent news is that he says the same thing about you!
She had to deal with the pains of an unwanted divorce and she had to learn how to heal and recover. Discouragement threatened to escort her into a pit of depression and anxiety consumed her thoughts. She worried about being label as divorced and she thought people would reject her. She didn't understand why her ex-husband wanted a divorce. She ultimately saw that God restored her and she started encouraging others who were going through a divorce.
The book also enclosed breathtaking details about a mail bomb explosion that could have taken her life, how God led her new husband to her, and how they dealt with infertility.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is struggling with addictions, negative self-esteem issues, limits and words people have placed on you, going through a divorce, living a life of fear and worry, having trouble with forgiving others or yourself, healing from life's pains, in a pit of depression, and anyone who doesn't believe they can overcome and step into their destiny. The book is extremely helpful in guiding readers to believing the truth that God has an enormous plan and purpose for their life. Your life doesn't have to be filled with discouragement and limits. I have struggled with pessimistic thoughts and limits others have positioned on me and told me who I was supposed to be. I was told all kind of things that didn't uplift me and their words didn't line up what God said. This book has assisted me with the knowledge of relabeling myself with positive words from the Bible.
One of the stories that Lisa Osteen Comes included was a story about her friend, Damon. When Damon was a teenager his father left his mother and abandoned him. Damon decided to grab a gun and end his life. He pulled the gun trigger and the gun that was loaded with bullets wouldn't fire. His mother told him about how God caused the gun to not fire and she reminded Damon that he had an awesome future ahead of him. Others labeled him as a trouble maker and people said he would end up in prison. He almost became what he believed was in his future. One night he was involved in a shooting when people started fighting each other. He fired shots that hit two people. Cops were called and he fled the commotion. He prayed to God the he would spare him and he said he would serve him if he got out of this situation. Damon finally saw that he become what others stated him to be. He accepted the labels when he should have rejected them. God changed his life and redeemed him. He started to reach out to young teenagers and inmates and help them re-change their labels that were spoken over them. This story showed the importance of removing the negative labels and limits others have put on us. We can literally curse ourselves and let others define us or we can choose to believe what God says!
Lisa Osteen Comes has a way of teaching the principles of the word of God to let readers know they are made for more. This book was a huge encouragement for me to receive all that God has for me. This book is one that everyone should read to benefit from and learn about your amazing destiny and future that God has for you. I immensely enjoyed all of the scriptures and Bible stories that Lisa made to prove her point! This book has radically changed my perspective and had encouraged me to become everything I was made to be! I was made for more! You are made for more! Believe it and receive it!
If you would like to purchase a copy of You Are Made for More check it out on Amazon.com:
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Founded in 1978, to restore trust and confidence in the ship agency profession, Multiport is the world's largest independent ship agency network with 10% of the worldwide agency business by port call.
Ten independent agents from Australia, Jordan, Lebanon, UK, France, Greece, Singapore, Egypt, Germany and Holland were the founder members to be joined within six months by South Africa, Turkey, Mauritius, Argentina, Belgium, Malta, Denmark, Spain, New Zealand and Canada.
In 1993 Multiport's secretariat gained ISO 9001 certification.
Multiport's secretariat relocated to London in 1995 but the Association remains registered in Rotterdam.
By 1998, Multiport has had over 100 members covering 1800 ports. Multiport's network was handling some 60,000 vessels annually carrying more than 300 million tonnes of freight (including 3 million teu) around the world and representing over 3,000 principals.
Another recognition of quality was awarded to Multiport in 2002, when the organisation achieved the ISO 9001:2000 certification.
In 2005, the number of vessels was around 85,000 representing over 3,500 principals, and continues to grow with selected and qualified members from around the world.
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As stated in "No indeed! Truly man is unbridled, seeing himself as self-sufficient" (Surat al-'Alaq, 6-7), the faithful know that regarding themselves as competent in any field leads to excess and conceit. Thus they do not consider themselves competent even if they perform some tasks perfectly. Throughout their lives, they strive to develop themselves and achieve a finer, better behavior.
Behind these sincere efforts lies their attachment to and love of our Lord, and their fear and consciousness of Him. Since their greatest aim is to achieve His love and approval, they try to live according to the spirit and the letter of the Qur'an's teachings. Aware that they can never be adequate in such a task, they always strive to put even more effort into adhering to His teachings in this life.
They know that the amount of effort they make will earn a commensurate reward in Allah's presence and that, to this extent, they can easily be united with His blessings. With the words, "Race each other to forgiveness from your Lord and a Garden [i.e., Paradise] as wide as the heavens and the Earth, prepared for the people who guard against evil." (Surah Al 'Imran, 133), Allah urges the faithful to compete in good with each other in order to gain His approval and a place in Paradise. One of these matters is patience, as we read: "O you who believe, be steadfast; be supreme in steadfastness" (Surah Al 'Imran, 200). In such cases, the faithful know that they will earn Allah's love and closeness to Him, and so compete with one another to display their best behavior. The believers are patient regardless of their circumstances and, trusting in our Lord, show their determination through their consistent behavior. Even when confronted with totally unexpected developments, such as being forced to live in the streets or a shelter because their houses have burned down, they do not complain or think "if only it had not happened." They understand that Allah has sent a hidden blessing to them, and so live in the tranquility that this understanding brings. They continue this behavior even if faced with another event that makes their situation even worse. In short, no matter what terrible difficulties they may face, they race each other to patience, as Allah has ordered.


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This article was reported by Walt Bogdanich, Jake Hooker and Andrew W. Lehren and written by Mr. Bogdanich.
MILAN — In January, Honor International Pharmtech was accused of shipping counterfeit drugs into the United States. Even so, the Chinese chemical company — whose motto is "Thinking Much of Honor" — was openly marketing its products in October to thousands of buyers here at the world's biggest trade show for pharmaceutical ingredients.
Other Chinese chemical companies made the journey to the annual show as well, including one manufacturer recently accused by American authorities of supplying steroids to illegal underground labs and another whose representative was arrested at the 2006 trade show for patent violations. Also attending were two exporters owned by China's government that had sold poison mislabeled as a drug ingredient, which killed nearly 200 people and injured countless others in Haiti and in Panama.
Yet another chemical company, Orient Pacific International, reserved an exhibition booth in Milan, but its owner, Kevin Xu, could not attend. He was in a Houston jail on charges of selling counterfeit medicine for schizophrenia, prostate cancer, blood clots and Alzheimer's disease, among other maladies.
While these companies hardly represent all of the nearly 500 Chinese exhibitors, more than from any other country, they do point to a deeper problem: Pharmaceutical ingredients exported from China are often made by chemical companies that are neither certified nor inspected by Chinese drug regulators, The New York Times has found.
Because the chemical companies are not required to meet even minimal drug-manufacturing standards, there is little to stop them from exporting unapproved, adulterated or counterfeit ingredients. The substandard formulations made from those ingredients often end up in pharmacies in developing countries and for sale on the Internet, where more Americans are turning for cheap medicine.
In Milan, The Times identified at least 82 Chinese chemical companies that said they made and exported pharmaceutical ingredients — yet not one was certified by the State Food and Drug Administration in China, records show. Nonetheless, the companies were negotiating deals at the pharmaceutical show, where suppliers wooed customers with live music, wine and vibrating chairs.
One of them was the Wuxi Hexia Chemical Company. When The Times showed Yan Jiangying, a top Chinese drug regulator, a list of 186 products being advertised by the company, including active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished drugs, Ms. Yan said, "This is definitely against the law."
Yet in China, chemical manufacturers that sell drug ingredients fall into a regulatory hole. Pharmaceutical companies are regulated by the food and drug agency. Chemical companies that make products as varied as fertilizer and industrial solvents are overseen by other agencies. The problem arises when chemical companies cross over into drug ingredients. "We have never investigated a chemical company," said Ms. Yan, deputy director of policy and regulation at the State Food and Drug Administration. "We don't have jurisdiction."
China's health officials have known of this regulatory gap since at least the mid-1990s, when a chemical company sold a tainted ingredient that killed nearly 100 children in Haiti. But Chinese regulatory agencies have failed to cooperate to stop chemical companies from exporting drug products.
In 2006, at least 138 Panamanians died or were disabled after another Chinese chemical company sold the same poisonous ingredient, diethylene glycol, which was mixed into cold medicine.
China has an estimated 80,000 chemical companies, and the United States Food and Drug Administration does not know how many sell ingredients used in drugs consumed by Americans.
The Times examined thousands of companies selling products on major business-to-business Internet trading sites and found more than 1,300 chemical companies offering pharmaceutical ingredients. How many others sell drug ingredients but don't advertise this way on the Web is not known.
If the Milan show is any guide, most, if not all, are not certified by China's drug authorities.
China exports drug ingredients to customers in 150 countries, said Sun Dongliang, a Chinese trade official who helped organize his country's Milan exhibitors. Many suppliers have passed inspections by drug authorities and sell active pharmaceutical ingredients, or A.P.I.'s, of high quality, buyers say.
"Sometimes you can just have your lunch on the floor of the factory because it's so clean and so perfect, sometimes much better than in Europe," said Jean-François Quarre, a French drug company official who had a booth in Milan. But Mr. Quarre cautioned that he has seen the other side as well. "It's frightening."
At their worst, uncertified chemical companies contribute to China's notoriety as the world's biggest supplier of counterfeit drugs, which include unauthorized copies as well as substandard, even harmful, formulations. "Underregulated manufacturers are increasingly becoming the source of A.P.I.'s used in the production of counterfeit medicine," R. John Theriault, until recently Pfizer's head of global security, said in a statement to Congress.
Because United States drug regulators require pharmaceutical suppliers to meet high standards, the American supply chain is among the world's safest. But as China's chemical suppliers multiply, Congressional investigators are questioning the F.D.A.'s ability to protect consumers.
Even some Chinese chemical companies recognize their limitations in making pharmaceuticals.
"We don't have the resources and means to produce medicine," said Gu Jinfeng, a salesman for Changzhou Watson Fine Chemical. "The bar for producing chemicals is pretty low."
Even so, Watson Chemical advertises that it makes active pharmaceutical ingredients. But Mr. Gu said he would export them only to countries with lower standards than China, or if "we can earn really good profits."
A Trail of Steroids
Just days before the Milan trade show, United States officials made an announcement that brought home the global reach and attendant dangers of China's expanding chemical industry. The officials disclosed that they had dismantled a 27-state underground network for steroids and human growth hormone, arresting 124 people in "Operation Raw Deal."
The supply trail almost always led to China. Thirty-seven companies there supplied virtually all of the bulk chemicals, federal officials said.
Of the 37 suspect companies, all but one unnamed by the American authorities, The Times identified eight. Records show that six are uncertified chemical companies, including Hunan Steroid, which marketed its products at the Milan convention.
"Just want to see the old customers and develop the new market," said Sun Xueqin, a deputy export manager for Hunan Steroid. Ms. Sun said the company sold raw pharmaceutical ingredients in Europe and America and more advanced pharmaceutical ingredients in India, among other places.
Later, another Hunan official, Huang Zili, said the company did not sell to the United States, and declined to comment on the government's contention that Hunan was a supplier of bodybuilding drugs. Hunan has not been charged with any crime.
As serious as the accusations are in Operation Raw Deal, health experts say they believe that counterfeit drugs, particularly those sold on the Internet, pose a greater threat to a broader segment of the American public.
"The facts are irrefutable," Mr. Theriault, the former Pfizer official, told Congress. "The importation of counterfeit, infringing, misbranded and unapproved pharmaceutical products in the United States is increasing exponentially." Pfizer makes Viagra, one of the drugs most often counterfeited.
Finding uncertified companies feeding the market is not difficult. Orient Pacific International, the Milan registrant whose owner did not show up, advertised that it makes and exports pharmaceutical ingredients to "worldwide famous medical companies." The owner, Mr. Xu, is accused of selling counterfeit medicine to treat ailments like cancer, mental illness and heart disease, according to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or I.C.E.
Mr. Xu shipped drugs to an Internet pharmacy, investigators say. But he also penetrated the highly regulated supply chain of legitimate distributors in Europe, said David A. Faulconer, a customs official. Acting on tips from large drug companies, federal officials devised a plan to stop him from doing the same in the United States.
Posing as a buyer, an investigator for the immigration and customs agency met Mr. Xu in Bangkok on March 6. Mr. Xu gave him "detailed suggestions for transshipment and smuggling techniques to evade United States Customs detection," federal records show.
After investigators bought multiple shipments of counterfeit drugs, Mr. Xu traveled to Houston "to consummate an agreement for widespread distribution of his counterfeit products in the United States," according to an affidavit filed in federal court. Federal agents arrested Mr. Xu, who has pleaded not guilty.
Another company exhibiting in Milan, Honor International Pharmtech, was also the subject of a customs investigation. In January, agents seized 3,041 fake Viagra pills sent by the company to a DHL shipping hub in Wilmington, Ohio, according to customs.
The shipment, disguised as grape seed extract, was destined for an Internet pharmacy in Central America, said agents who requested anonymity because the investigation continues.
"We do make grape seed extract," the company's managing director, Nie An, said in a telephone interview. He denied shipping counterfeit Viagra, but he acknowledged other indiscretions: making false advertising claims, using another company's import-export license and creating a fake corporate name.
"We don't really have a factory," Mr. Nie said, even though he advertised that he did. Honor International is just a trading company, he said, adding, "As a trading company, saying you can manufacture attracts business. It was fake advertising."
The Times found several other companies posing as manufacturers, thereby obscuring a drug's provenance. In a recent joint statement, chemical associations in the United States and Europe cautioned that globalization has led to a rise in complexity in supply chains, "increasing the potential for contamination, mislabeling or substitution."
Pharmaceutical ingredients can pass through three or four trading companies, none of which check their quality. The ultimate manufacturer may not realize the ingredients came from an uncertified chemical company.
Mr. Nie, for example, said he markets Viagra's main ingredient, sildenafil, through a partnership with a chemical company in a distant region that he has never visited. "We met them at a trade fair," he said. "This company didn't even have a booth at the fair. They were standing outside the entrance to the exhibition center, and they handed us a flier with a menu of their products."
He said he was trying to the reach the factory, which has no Web site, to fill a Croatian company's order.
"Our main markets are in Latin America — Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay," he said. "A little in Canada, a little in the United States. In Europe, we export to Germany, Russia, Italy."
But Mr. Nie faces an uncertain future. He said that Chinese investigators had recently visited his office, and that they knew about the seizure in Ohio.
Viagra is hardly the only drug that companies try to copy. The French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis grew weary of watching other companies sell knockoffs of its new diet drug, Acomplia, and alerted French authorities that three Chinese companies were marketing their own version of the product at the 2006 pharmaceutical ingredient trade show, held in Paris. Six Chinese company officials were arrested.
One of those arrested in Paris was Jin Lijie, managing director of the Wuxi Hexia Chemical Company. Still, Wuxi Hexia showed up in Milan in 2007 selling a line of pharmaceutical ingredients.
Its representatives declined to be interviewed in Milan, or at its offices in the boomtown of Wuxi. "We are all young college graduates and we are still learning about the market," said an employee named Du Yanqun.
Factories on the Yangtze
A good place to find companies selling uncertified drug ingredients is Changzhou in the Yangtze delta, where the raw materials for chemical production are readily available and easily transported by canals and roads.
Several factories there sent representatives to Milan, including the Changzhou Kangrui Chemical Company. It makes pharmaceutical ingredients in an old converted steel plant. "I'm afraid it will leave you with a bad impression," said Zhou Ladi, a sales representative, as she gave a tour. She said Kangrui Chemical hopes to move into a new plant by early 2009.
"As long as we don't export products that are under patent in other countries, the government encourages us to export," she said.
To help find customers overseas, smaller factories enlist the services of people like Bian Jingya, export manager for a trading company called the Changzhou Wejia Chemical Company.
Ms. Bian said chemical companies are involved in all phases of drug manufacturing, including making finished products. Some, she said, "are under patent in other countries."
Ms. Bian, who was also in Milan, said the government should spell out more clearly what companies may and may not do. "If you want to be regulated, they will regulate you," she said. "If you don't want to be regulated, they don't."
The Chinese drug agency does not oversee the making of pharmaceutical raw materials, called intermediates, which are the building blocks for active pharmaceutical ingredients. "It is unrealistic for us to certify all factories that make intermediates and regulate them like medicine products," said Ms. Yan, the agency official. But if companies make active ingredients, a more refined product, then they must be regulated by drug authorities, she said.
When The Times pointed out that many uncertified chemical companies openly advertise active ingredients, Ms. Yan said that was illegal. "If there are in fact chemical companies that are making drugs without certification then this is very serious," she said. "These companies are not qualified to make medicine. They make chemicals."
Wang Siqing, managing director of the Changzhou Yabang Pharmaceutical Company, estimated that uncertified chemical companies make half the active pharmaceutical ingredients sold in China. "The stuff produced by chemical plants is clearly counterfeit medicine, but they aren't investigating," Mr. Wang said in an interview at his office. "This has been happening in a regulatory void." He added that most chemical company exports go to unregulated markets in Africa or South America. "That's not to say these products don't enter the United States through these other countries," he said.
To find out how well American consumers are being protected from unsafe imported drugs, investigators from the House Energy and Commerce Committee recently accompanied F.D.A. officials on inspections of drug plants in China and India.
In a letter to the F.D.A. commissioner, the committee said that the agency was unable to provide such basic information as the number of firms exporting to the United States, and that overseas F.D.A. inspectors lacked necessary logistical support. A House hearing on F.D.A. oversight of foreign drug manufacturers is scheduled for Thursday.
"China alone has more than 700 firms making drug products for the U.S., yet the F.D.A. has resources to conduct only about 20 inspections a year in China," said Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The F.D.A. said it would answer the committee's questions at the hearing.
Poisonings in Haiti
United States officials learned of problems with China's chemical companies in the mid-1990s while investigating the fatal poisonings in Haiti. Chinese authorities took no action against the uncertified chemical company that made the poison, diethylene glycol, or the giant state-owned trader, Sinochem International Chemicals, that exported it.
A decade later another state-owned trading company, CNSC Fortune Way, exported the diethylene glycol — also from an uncertified chemical company — that ended up in the deadly Panamanian cold medicine in 2006.
Chinese officials have known for years that uncertified chemical companies are producing active pharmaceutical ingredients. In 2004 the Chinese drug authority's newspaper cited complaints that some licensed companies "affiliate" with unlicensed ones to hide their illegal purchases, while others buy only a token amount from certified suppliers to pass inspection. "The impact of chemical products on the bulk pharmaceutical market hints at a much larger problem: a huge hole in drug safety," the drug agency publication stated.
Since the Panama poisonings, China is considering ways to corral the chemical industry. At Panama's request, Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, has pressed the Chinese government to step up regulation of chemical companies selling pharmaceutical ingredients.
American and Chinese health officials held their first high-level meeting in May, and hope to sign a memorandum of agreement in December. "The Chinese have finally come to the realization that their regulatory system needs repair," said William Steiger, director of international affairs for Mr. Leavitt's agency. But meaningful change will be difficult. Chinese authorities may not have enough investigators to weed out the many small chemical companies that are making drug ingredients.
And efforts to close the regulatory gap must overcome one particularly thorny issue: some uncertified companies accused of selling counterfeit drugs are owned by the government itself.


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It wasn't a beautiful woman nor the most cheerful and supportive fans of JYJ Jaejoong that took his heart away during his first fanmeeting last weekend (3/11) in Jakarta, Indonesia. So who really stole his heart away?
With the rare close encounter opportunity as a surprise, thousands of fans were even more excited and overwhelmed, racking their brains on what to say or do in front of the 'Ice Prince'. In their attempt to attract attention, fans were whispering in his ears and sneaky hands were sighted during the photo-taking session though instructions were clearly; no touching. Sadly none of it worked as the 'Ice Prince' gave equal attention to every fan in the very brief moment they each had.
However, one fan succeeded not only in attracting his attention, but making him cross the boundaries of no physical contact by just simply being herself. The two adorable children were sitting quietly next to his seat while waiting for his arrival, a stark difference to the many fans clamoring over the man.
JaeJoong's sole attention was immediately fixated from the moment he laid eyes on them, much to the envy of the fans around. He initiated contact by shaping her tiny fingers to a cute 'tweeze' sign and smiled radiantly, something which is hardly seen throughout the fan-meet due to his condition. It was literally "ignorance is bliss" and it definitely added on to the many reasons for the ladies to want to return to that age of innocence.
It was no doubt that behind his piercing stare and princely image was this warm guy, overflowing with love for children. From the previous photoshoot collaborations campaign with children for NII, to how he paid more attention to children attending his fan-meet, it was evident how good a dad he will be in future.


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At a meeting of the Geological Society of London, in December 1912, the fossil remains of what was claimed to be a new type of early human, Eoanthropus dawsoni, or 'Piltdown Man', were unveiled to the world.
It appeared that irrefutable evidence had been found at last for the sought-after 'missing link' between man and ape.
It was not until the 1950s that Piltdown Man was proved to be a forgery.
Staff of the Natural History Museum (previously the British Museum (Natural History)), the Geological Society, and the British Geological Survey (previously H.M. Geological Survey) were all involved with Piltdown — from discovery to unmasking. Some have been implicated in the forgery itself.
Archivists at the Natural History Museum, the Geological Society and the British Geological Survey pooled their resources to create a web-based exhibition telling the story of Piltdown Man's discovery.
The Piltdown Timeline reveals the history of the forgery and the identity of individuals that have been accused of complicity or culpability in the affair.
The Piltdown story provides a cautionary lesson of how scientists can get things wrong and how science, when applied correctly, can reveal error and malpractice.
The Piltdown forgery has also found its way into popular culture via TV, theatre, film and music.
If you want to find out more about Piltdown then the following books would be a good place to start:
Russell, Miles, The Piltdown Man forgery: Case Closed (The History Press, 2012)
Spencer, Frank, The Piltdown Papers (Oxford University Press, 1990)
Walsh, John, Unravelling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution (Random House, 1996)
Weiner, J S, The Piltdown Forgery (Fiftieth Anniversary edition, with a new Introduction and Afterword by Chris Stringer, Oxford University Press, 2003)
For a more detailed study of the whole Piltdown story, BGS Historian David G Bate has compiled a large annotated bibliography.
Contact Andrew Morrison, BGS Archivist, for further details


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Subpoenas served on Suffolk in Sandy contracts probe
Grand jury subpoenas have been served on Suffolk County as part of a widening series of investigations into how millions of dollars of superstorm Sandy-related public works contracts were awarded and executed on Long Island.
The county, the latest in a string of local governments to receive grand jury subpoenas, has been ordered to provide the Suffolk County district attorney's office with legislative records, copies of emergency declarations County Executive Steve Bellone signed, and documents relating to work performed in the aftermath of the Oct. 29 storm, officials said.
"A subpoena was received about April 16 in connection with Sandy," County Attorney Dennis Brown said.
The county is working to comply with the request, he added.
Officials said an extensive number of county Department of Public Works documents were still being compiled as of late Wednesday with the intention of handing them to the district attorney's office, perhaps as early as Thursday, according to the subpoena.
Suffolk clerk subpoenaed
Separately, Tim Laube, clerk of the Suffolk County Legislature, said he received a subpoena on April 16 seeking legislative records and documents relating to Sandy.
He said the records were sent to the district attorney's office electronically on April 16 and 17.
"They were general and publicly available documents available on our website -- several resolutions to do with legislation the county is considering or that has passed relating to Hurricane Sandy and minutes from committee meetings and other general meetings where the legislation was considered," Laube said.
The latest round of subpoenas in Suffolk comes as President Barack Obama is set to consider a request to increase the federal share for post-Sandy public works projects that qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursement from 75 percent to 90 percent.
The increase would ease the bill that the town, village and county governments on Long Island will have to foot as they rebuild.
The county subpoenas follow others served by the Suffolk district attorney on five towns: Huntington, Brookhaven, Babylon, Islip and Smithtown.
Investigators are looking into whether government officials steered lucrative cleanup work to certain contractors and whether those workers were paid state mandated wages.
Subpoenas have also been served by the Nassau district attorney, who is looking into the process by which Sandy cleanup contracts were awarded, and how the work was performed.
Already FEMA has reimbursed Long Island governments, school districts, the Long Island Power Authority and others about $500 million for storm related expenses.
Separately, the state attorney general's office is investigating Sandy contracts awarded on Long Island. Additionally, the federal Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security -- which has oversight responsibilities for FEMA money -- has said it is auditing and investigating work in the New York-New Jersey region in relation to Sandy public works projects.
Bill Hillburg, spokesman for the inspector general's office, declined to say if any investigations under way involved Long Island public works projects.
U.S. and state probes
Meanwhile, Newsday has reported that the U.S. Department of Labor is looking into potential wage and payroll violations in Sandy-awarded contracts.
The state Department of Labor is also looking into these issues, a source said.
Russ Haven, legislative counsel with the New York Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization and government watchdog, said the combined effect of these investigations has the potential "to shake Long Island governments to their very foundation."
"The old adage is to 'follow the money,' and if you're going to find corruption, it's likely to be located where there's big amounts of government spending done on an emergency basis -- that's when traditional checks and balances are rushed and there's such a pressing human need to respond."
With Paul LaRocca


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Girls Party Dresses
An invitation to a birthday party or other big event is an exciting bit of mail for a little girl. Going to the store to find the perfect gift, choosing a pretty outfit, and finding the perfect hairstyles can all be fun and exciting events. It's even better when the party is her own and she can choose the theme, the cake, and anything else she wants. A beautiful party dress will help her feel like the princess she is.
Simple, playful dresses can still be gorgeous. One classic look is a solid colored tea length cut, but made even more elegant by overlaying it with decorative lace. The effect is a stunning pattern that is unique and beautiful. For a simpler style, opt for a beautiful patterned fabric that will be easy to take care of while making your little girl look and feel like a pretty princess.
You can also create an amazing look without the pattern. We have dresses in solid colors that are accented by sequin straps. The glittery jewels will draw the eye and make her literally shine as runs and plays outside. Another option is to use a sequin belt instead. It keeps the dress comfortably on, but still has the shimmery effect. Combine it with a tiered skirt, and in our girls clothing, your girl will feel as beautiful as you know she is.
For a more formal party, she can be comfortable while still looking elegant in one of Puddles Collection party dresses. A satin dress with matching wrap will make her the talk of the party. Add a bow, some jewels, and even lace and you'll have a decorative and adorable outfit. When she's the birthday girl, she'll love the formal look.
No matter how young, you can find the perfect party dress for your little girl. Many of our dresses have a cute little underskirt that will cause her to spin in delight. Choose her favorite color or a design to makes her feel incredible and watch the smile light up her face.
During the colder months, you can pair her beautiful dress with an equally stunning jacket so she never has to lose that glowing feeling. From the moment she gets dressed for the party until she comes home completely worn out from running around all day, you and everyone else will be able to see her as the princess she is.


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Carolyn Maxwell with the book she wrote about her diabetic alert dog Devo. Picture: KYLIE ESLERA WHIPPET in a green jacket is Carolyn Maxwell's constant companion whenever she does her grocery shopping at Lavington.
But Devo often confounds new supermarket employees who want to know why he's allowed in the store.
Devo is a diabetic alert dog, who can detect when Miss Maxwell's blood sugar levels are getting low.
He lets her know by jumping up on her that it's time to test herself.
Miss Maxwell has had her special companion for five years, and takes him wherever she goes.
"It takes forever to do the groceries sometimes," she said with a smile.
"People seem really interested in what he does.
"I can tell who is new at the shops because they don't know the story behind Devo and that he's allowed to come with me wherever I go."
To explain his role, Miss Maxwell has published a children's book about the exploits of Devo and some of his animal friends.
The dogs help ensure low blood sugar is detected early, to prevent diabetic attacks.
The proceeds will support Paws for Diabetes, the group that helped Miss Maxwell obtain her helper, as well as animal rescue charities.
Devo has been trained since he was a pup to smell changes in the chemical composition of Miss Maxwell's skin, able to tell when her blood sugar is low.
To start Devo's training, Miss Maxwell had to safely lower her blood sugar slightly, wipe her skin with a cloth, then send that cloth to the dog trainer.
Miss Maxwell was able to meet Devo after becoming involved with the Paws for Diabetics group.
"There are a lot of diabetic people and having one of these dogs can be really useful for some people," she said.
Miss Maxwell and other members of the Paws for Diabetes committee will be speaking to the Albury-Wodonga Diabetes Support group on January 23.
"We really want to get the word out about the Paws for Diabetes group," Miss Maxwell said.
"Having a medical assistance animal is a big responsibility but they can also be extremely helpful and can significantly improve the quality of life for some people."
Miss Maxwell's books can be bought from Dymocks in Albury or from Todd's Tasty Treats stores in Albury and Wodonga.


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|2007-01-31, 08:43
|Link #1
Not dead. Yet.
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann (General Discussion thread)
Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann (Maiking Break-Through Gurren-Lagann)
Broadcast: April 2007 on TV-Tokyo
Episodes: 26
Site(s): Official, Gainax, Konami, TV Tokyo
Trailer: trailer (3.5mb)
Katsuyuki Konishi as Kamina
Marina Inoue as Yoko
Tetsuya Kakihara as Shimon
Gurren-Lagann is Gainax's highly anticipated new mecha franchise, helmed by Hiroyuki Imaishi (animation director of FLCL), script and storyboard by Shouji Saeki (one of the directors of FLCL). Mecha designs by Yoh Yoshinari (Dead Leaves, Melody of Oblivion). Character designs by relative unknown Atsushi Nishigori. In short the cream of current Gainax talent.
Spoiler for Story:
What to expect? Eye-candy. Insanely well animated eye-candy, packed with tons of nods and homages to other Gainax animes and others beside. This is Gainax's next big anime, their first original idea since FLCL (I think?), and there's a lot riding on it for the studio. I have a huge amount of confidence that Hiroyuki Imaishi (and Gainax as a whole) will deliver. I love Gainax's work like Diebuster, FLCL and Nadia, so I'm looking forward to an epic, fun and unforgettable ride.
Last edited by Sonhex; 2007-02-15 at 05:31. Reason: added trailer
|2007-01-31, 10:25
|Link #2
Join Date: Feb 2006
Age: 31
Huh? FLCL director was Kazuya Tsurumaki, who is currently working on the new Evangelion movies. Still a great staff, though. Imaiashi <3!
|2007-01-31, 11:20
|Link #4
The Commissar Vanishes
Imaishi is godly, but I am somewhat jaded by the kids on mecha genre. It just doesn't get me excited anymore, despite the promise of really good animation.
BTW, speaking of Imaishi, I am currently looking forward to Atsuya Uki's "Cencoroll". Uki is, for all intents and purpuses, Imaishi, Shinkai, okama and Falcoon all rolled into one. 8)
|2007-01-31, 13:31
|Link #6
Not dead. Yet.
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
|2007-01-31, 17:10
|Link #7
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Suburban DC
No holds barred popcorn entertainment
This production probably wont have too much in it for non mecha fans. Plus I seriously don't expect anything really challenging, serious or ground breaking from this show at all. Pure shonen cheese is probably all it is, but it will be intresting to see Imaishi and his team's take on shonen cheese. Not to mention it (along with Denno Coli) sounds like a godsend for sakuga anime freaks (of which i am).
Btw am I the only one who thinks the design for the main robot KICKS CLINICALLY DANGEROUS AMOUNTS OF ASS?!
|2007-01-31, 18:45
|Link #8
Join Date: Feb 2006
Age: 31
I like the mecha designs solomon, but I think the characters are what sold this to me, look stylish and edgy, like a softer, maybe more anime-like, take on Dead Leaves or Trava.
|2007-01-31, 19:41
|Link #9
Join Date: May 2006
Location: London, UK
Age: 35
Bring it on.
I mean, I don't have exactly big expectations towards this but the premise, the apparent style they're going for and the staff working on this is enough reason to get me quite curious.
Although I do agree with MrProphet, the mecha-shounen genre has probably become too repetitive and predictable that it's pretty hard to get real positive feedback from any of these shows. And probably as Sonhex said, this might simply be a pure eye-candy show (kinda like Diebuster) and nothing more. We'll see.
|2007-02-15, 12:44
|Link #13
Seeker of Power
I couldn't view it either, but duckroll (who may or may not be the same duckroll from this forum, if so, thank you) has it on YouTube.
|2007-02-15, 12:47
|Link #14
Join Date: Nov 2006
|2007-02-15, 15:58
|Link #16
cho~ kakkoii
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: 3rd Planet
woo woo! I like Gainax. The animation quality for their series are usually very good, and they also understand the need for fanservice, mixed with crazy comedy for fans who may not watch a show just becuase it has angsty teenagers who get to show off their shiny mecha.
|2007-02-15, 19:47
|Link #17
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Suburban DC
AHHH, these grabs look great, looks more fun then a barrelfull of monkeys! Look's like the perfect show to look forward each week during a busy college schedule
It does look fluffy, but even haughty, conservative, curmodgeonly types like me need some light entertainment now and then. Plus it's a highly skilled and wildly creative staff, so we'll probably get some highly skilled wildly creative fluff here.
Last edited by solomon; 2007-02-15 at 20:12.
|2007-02-15, 20:30
|Link #18
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Suburban DC
Just saw the trailer, naturally the show looks great, it has Imaishi all over it. And MY WORD Katsuyuki Konishi sounds tottally friggin awesome as Kamina, I really wasn't feeling him as Bleach's Keigo or Blood+'s Haji, or maybe im biased to hammy shonen type acting with delcarative statements yelled at the highest of decibles, but man he sounded cool!
|2007-02-16, 09:38
|Link #20
The Commissar Vanishes
I dunno.
Personally, I wasn't that thrilled with the trailer. First of all, I hate the art style. Animation was... well, passable, but if that's just a snippet from the first episode, just watch and see it plummet later on. Nothing that made me go WOW, in short. 8)
The mecha were fairly trippy though. Maybe I'll watch it for the pure cornball factor ala Gun X Sword (which also had a "head" robot).
|Thread Tools


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When asked about meaningful learning, I can easily rattle off a few characteristics:
vital to one's existence
A few years ago, I would have avoided including "fun." To me, fun was a byproduct, conjuring up images of whipped cream and cotton candy and juggling clowns. It was the bane of education – the way we so often try to spice up meaningless learning by making it fun. It was Reading Rabbit and golden stickers and songs to learn the Periodic Table of Elements.
"It's the icing on the cake," I would explain in the most cliche way possible. Except, that phrase itself spoke volumes about my understanding of meaning. Cake is useless without icing. Without icing, it's a muffin. Just some sweet bread. The icing is the very thing that makes cake work.
I used to mock fun.
Then I had children of my own and I rediscovered the deeper meaning of fun.
Case in point: Joel decides to make a game with a set of old marbles, some blocks, an old egg carton, a bubble wand and a plastic bottle. Christy helps him with the hot glue gun, but the general design is all his concept. It isn't existential. It isn't personal (at least in an emotional way). It isn't practical. It isn't vital to his existence.
However, it's fun. I watch him dropping the marbles and aiming them toward the styrofoam pouches. I listen to him giggle when he sees that it works. Then I watch him patiently show his younger brother the way to make it work. And it strikes me that it is deeply personal and practical and vital to his existence, not in spite of the fact that it's fun, but because it's fun. My son is helping reminding me of the power of fun in learning. He's helping me to see that it's a deeply human need.
It also leaves me with a more humbling thought: If I claim to be student-centered, why didn't I listen to students when they told me that learning needed to be fun?


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And So It Begins
Welcome back to another edition of The Schlact Stories. As always, thanks for joining me. Today's topic deals with a transition, uncertainty, trust, faith, and hard work. These are all things that I am currently dealing with, or must deal with in the very near future. As of a few days after the World Series, I'll be a free agent. I fully intend on playing next year. I love the game of baseball too much to not play. It's the greatest game ever invented, and I'm so glad that I can be a part of something so special. And so it begins.
3 Comments
Great perspective – thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts. We (the fans!) would love to have you back in the Rangers organization, but regardless we're pulling for you!
What ever life bring you way, I wish you all the best!
I just found your blog and want to thank you for putting your life up for all to see. My son is a college baseball player who had labrum surgery exactly 12 months ago. Like you, he has had such a difficult year and it has worn on him greatly. He was told that he would be back to playing after 6 months. He was but he was restricted to DH, he is an outfielder. He worked with the Dr's, PT's and school trainers. The Dr's all tell him that his shoulder surgery was successful. He has worked hard to get his shoulder into shape but he won't push through and get to that next level. His range of motion is excellent, stability is great, he is throwing long toss about 265 feet but can only throw for about 15 minutes before his muscles get tired and "ball up", he then feels as though he has "dead arm", when he feels this he quickly shuts it down and starts over the next day. It does not hurt, does not click but does feel "different". He has been back to see the Dr several times and they assure him that it is structurally sound but he just can't break through in fear of hurting it again. Did you experience this? Honestly, the surgery was exactly 12 months ago and he is getting very discouraged as the season opens in Feb. – we have no idea if what he is feeling is normal or if the surgery did not work. Did you feel any of this? I was hoping to find somebody who has gone through the surgery and is a baseball player who would be willing to talk with him. If you are willing, let me know.


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A Connecticut Marine accused of beating a Brown University basketball player so badly he was hospitalized with head injuries acted in self-defense, his attorney said Friday.
A Connecticut Marine accused of beating a Brown University basketball player so badly he was hospitalized with head injuries acted in self-defense, his attorney said Friday.
Tory Lussier, 24, of Vernon, Conn., made his initial appearance in Providence District Court on Friday on a felony assault charge. He was released on bail and had no comment outside court.
But his lawyer, John Lombardi, told a judge it was a "clear case of self-defense." Asked later to elaborate, Lombardi declined.
Lussier is accused of assaulting 21-year-old Joseph Sharkey of Norwood, Mass., early Sunday morning. Sharkey, a sophomore member of Brown's basketball team, suffered serious head injuries and has been in critical condition at Rhode Island Hospital. The hospital said Friday afternoon his family no longer wants it to release information about his condition.
Charles Calenda, special assistant attorney general, told the judge Friday the assault was an "unprovoked attack."
Lussier is an active member of the Marine Reserves and has served 10 months in Afghanistan, according to his attorney. Lombardi said Lussier was in Providence to see his superior officer and others with whom he has served. He said he doesn't believe Lussier and Sharkey knew each other.
Lussier was arrested at his home in Vernon on Wednesday and waived extradition to Rhode Island on Thursday. On Friday in Providence, a judge set bail at $10,000 with surety, and Lussier's father posted the $1,000 required for his release, Lombardi said.
A pretrial hearing is scheduled for July 22.
In a separate criminal case in Rockville Superior Court in Connecticut, Lussier is out on bail and due back in court May 29. Vernon police arrested him in September and charged him with second-degree assault, second-degree assault of an elderly person and breach of peace after an altercation in the parking lot of Connecticut Golf Land, an amusement park with miniature golf and go-karts.
Lussier's lawyer in that case, Herman Woodard Jr., declined Friday to comment on the Rhode Island charge and said he wasn't sure yet how the allegations would affect the Connecticut case.
Woodard said Lussier has served his country well in the Marines and is supposed to be deployed again soon to the Middle East.
"When I met him and spoke to him, he seemed like a really standup guy," Woodard said. "He seems like a fantastic kid. Sometimes good people get charged with breaking the law, and I think that's the case here."
Associated Press writer Dave Collins contributed to this report from Hartford, Conn.


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Good evening all,
My name's Rob and I am interested in giving Gn15 a go. Phew! Now I've got that off my chest....
I have dabbled in many gauges over the years (N, OO, OO9, HO, O-16.5 and G), and I'm currently happily married to HO, but I am interested in large scale detail in not a lot of space, hence the curiosity about Gn15.
I apologise in advance for any ridiculous questions I may ask.
Other things I enjoy: reading, watching tv, playing bass guitar in my band, working on classic cars and building model WWII fighter and bomber aircraft.
I look forward to meeting you all.


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Assad accuses Israel of seeking to destabilise Syria
Issued on: Modified:
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday accused Israel of trying to destabilise the war-ravaged country by attacking a military compound near Damascus last week, and said Syria could confront "threats and aggression," state media reported.
President Bashar al-Assad accused Israel on Sunday of trying to destabilise Syria by attacking a military research base outside Damascus last week, and said Syria was able to confront "current threats ...and aggression", state media said.
Assad made the remarks in a meeting with Saeed Jalili, Iran's national security council secretary, in the Syrian capital. It was his first reported response to the attack.
State news agency SANA quoted Jalili as reaffirming Tehran's "full support for the Syrian people ... facing the Zionist aggression, and its continued coordination to confront the conspiracies and foreign projects".
The Syrian president, Shi'ite Iran's closest Arab ally, is battling a 22-month-old uprising in which 60,000 people have been killed. Assad says the rebels are Islamist terrorists funded and armed by Turkey and Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab states.
Neighbouring Israel has said it might have to intervene to prevent Syrian chemical or advanced weapons falling into the hands of militant groups, including Lebanon's Hezbollah whch fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006.
Diplomats, Syrian rebels and security sources said Israeli jets bombed a convoy near the Lebanese border on Wednesday, apparently hitting weapons destined for Hezbollah. Syria said the target was a military research centre northwest of Damascus.
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Videos | October 4, 2011
What's Up for October 2011?
What's Up for October? Moons and meteor showers.
Jane Houston Jones: What's Up for October? Moons and meteor showers.
Hello and welcome. I'm Jane Houston Jones at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
How many moons can you see this month?
Our moon is easy to see, but the others will take a little magnification.
Jupiter's four Galilean moons can be spotted with a pair of steady binoculars but really shine through a telescope.
You might be able to see the different sizes of the four moons like what Galileo saw and sketched over 400 years ago.
And this is a great month to view Jupiter. It reaches opposition on October 28 when the king of the planets is closest to Earth in its orbit around the sun and best-placed for viewing.
If you haven't seen Jupiter through a telescope, join your nearest amateur astronomy club or observatory on their monthly public nights and have a look!
Last fall Jupiter's south equatorial belt dramatically disappeared.
This year the clouds that obscured it are gone, and the familiar reddish belt and the famous Great Red Spot are prominent once again.
What other planetary moons are on display?
Both Neptune and Uranus are low in the southern sky this month, just after sunset.
You'll need a big and powerful telescope to spot their moons, though.
It might be easier to look at photos of these moons taken by astrophotographers or sketches of objects seen through the eyepiece of a telescope.
Mark October 8 on your calendars. That special night is both International Observe the Moon night and the peak of the Draconid meteor shower.
Unfortunately, you can't have your cake -- or your green cheese -- and eat it, too.
Moonlight interferes with both the Draconids on the 8th and the Orionids later in the month.
Europe gets the best view of the Draconids.
But maybe you'll see a few Orionids closer to the end of the month. They peak on the 21st.
You can read about moons of the solar system at solarsystem dot nasa dot gov slash y s s for Year of the Solar System.
And you can learn about all of NASA's missions at w w w dot nasa dot gov.
That's all for this month. I'm Jane Houston Jones.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology


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Thieves fail to steal giant trampoline during botched heist
Homeowners shocked to see thieves try to steal trampoline
A young Rio Rancho mother is still in disbelief after she says a pair of thieves tried to steal a 14-by-14-foot trampoline out of her front yard.
It happened over the weekend during the middle of the night.
"My fiance got up, looked outside and said, 'They're stealing our trampoline!'" said Taryn Myers.
While she called police, her fiance ran out and tried to block the thieves from driving away through a nearby arroyo.
Eventually, Myers says their getaway truck got stuck and the culprits ran off into the night.
"It was weird to process...why my trampoline?" said Myers.
Rio Rancho police showed up and are investigating.
The trampoline suffered heavy damage. Typically, trampolines of that size go for at least $1,000.
There is no word yet on why Myers' trampoline was targeted.


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I remember years ago discussing the purchase of these aircraft to replace the chinooks. At first I thought great about bloody time. But after some discussion with an AVN friend of mine I changed my mind. It would have been a good purchase if the government would have bought this airframe for both search and rescue and a maritime version for the ships. That way we could have increased our SAR capabilities and replaced the Sea Kings, in addition having a common platform decreases the amount of time spent on training repair crews. As it stands now we have techs for Sea Kings, Griffins, and Comorants and coming on line shortly the new Chinooks and Cyclones. We have a limited number of techs as it is, by having so many different airframes you make that pool of specialized personnel even smaller.
I It would have been a good purchase if the government would have bought this airframe for both search and rescue and a maritime version for the ships. That way we could have increased our SAR capabilities and replaced the Sea Kings,
I have a question about the user interface issue. As a pilot, I understand the difficulty different switch locations, system architectures and display systems pose. That said, in civilian flying they are a part of life. Recently Cargo Jet purchased 767s with the new -400 cockpit and the Pegasus FMC system. All training and checking for the new type was conducted in Miami on simulators with the old -200/300 cockpit. No further training was conducted and the first experience the pilots had with the new cockpit was on line. Now, that was done with TC's full knowledge and approval. Frequently, pilots of older fleets, such as 727s, have many different cockpits and systems to contend with as the aircraft were originally built at different times and for different airlines before being converted to cargo and purchased by the current user. I'm not using this as an example of a perfect world, far from it, just pointing out that with some additional training one crew can operate the same basic craft with substantially differing interfaces. Now, I know that spares and maintenance would be another kettle of fish but, with IMP doing the maintenance, that should be doable.
My prediction is that the CH148 will have its share of problems during its introduction to service.
Canada's air force is considering whether to buy or lease more Cormorant search-and-rescue helicopters because the existing fleet is too often sidelined with mechanical difficulties and inspections.Adding to the current stable of 14 choppers at three air bases is among the proposals to resolve availability problems that have plagued the military since the aircraft was acquired five years ago, said Lt.-Gen. Angus Watt, chief of air staff."What we are trying to do is analyze this based on facts, because when you get into search and rescue you get into a lot of emotion," Watt told The Canadian Press in a recent interview."This is something that is near and dear to Canadians' hearts and when we lose a citizen as a result of a search-and-rescue incident we all take it personally."Defence sources have suggested a plan to buy or lease as many as five more Cormorants or CH-149s is getting serious consideration at National Defence. Watt said no final decision has been made.The federal cabinet has yet to consider such a proposal, he said.An internal air force review last winter recommended that four more helicopters be added.In addition to that study, Watt ordered his air staff and the department's operational research branch to conduct a thorough analysis of search-and-rescue incidents - where they happened, the time of day, what kind of rescue occurred and the type of aircraft used.The research will help air force planners in deciding how many aircraft are needed and where...Frequent inspections for tail-rotor cracks and other mechanical problems have meant the CH-149s have been available for missions only 50 per cent of the time, rather than the 75 per cent that manufacturer AgustaWestland promised.Watt said flight engineers are working with the company to boost availability."It is not satisfactory at 50 per cent. It is not what they promised. And it's not good enough," Watt said.Originally stationed at four air fields across the country, the Cormorants were pulled out of Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Ont., and their search-and-rescue duties handed to CH-146 Griffon utility helicopters, which are designed to transport troops and army supplies.Although he described it as "a work-around solution," Watt acknowledged that continuing with the Griffons, but perhaps modifying them, is something else that can be considered."We're looking at all the options to bring the SAR (search-and-rescue) system to a level of maturity for the long term, in order to make the situation better."Canada initially purchased 15 Cormorants, a variant of the EH-101, from AgustaWestland but one was lost in a 2006 crash off Nova Scotia. The air force had recommended purchasing more, but 15 was the most the former Liberal government was prepared to buy.Two bases have had trouble keeping their Cormorants airborne. Comox, B.C., was reduced to just one chopper last December and Gander, N.L., went without any helicopters last summer.
Question:As the CF doesn't do CSAR - if we did, SAR techs wouldn't dress in bright orange - should we leave the business altogether? Pass the airframes and the responsibility to the Coast Guard. Close the Airborne School (as we promised to do) and buy any training we need from allies (mostly for the SOF types).Or is that heresy?
The availability of Canada's CH-149 Cormorant search-and-rescue helicopters is improving after manufacturer AgustaWestland took action to improve spares provisioning, and inspection requirements were changed.Earlier this year, an official report revealed availability of the 14 helicopters was less than 50 percent, well below the 75 percent expected when Canada purchased the EH101-based Cormorants in 1998.The study said minimum operational requirements could only be met by buying more aircraft or reducing maintenance inspections. Canada purchased 15 Cormorants, but lost one, and the helicopters equip only three of the originally planned four operating bases.The Department of National Defence (DND) denies Canadian media reports it is considering buying or leasing up to five more Cormorants [emphasis added], but says it is still evaluating the effectiveness of AgustaWestland's recovery plan.An operational availability improvement program instituted with Canada has made "genuine inroads" into overcoming the issues, says Jeremy Tracy, AgustaWestland's head of region for Canada.The program involves more attention to spares provisioning and the return of repaired and overhauled items, he says. Suppliers are being held to the provisioning times offered, and inspection intervals have also been adjusted to reduce maintenance downtime."As the aircraft matures we are able to reduce the maintenance burden," Tracy says. Canada has now begun inspecting tail-rotor hubs for cracks every 200 flight hours, in common with other EH101 operators, instead of every 100 hours.Working with the DND and maintenance prime contractor IMP, AgustaWestland has been able to get a better understanding of spares provisioning requirements, he says. "We have provided as many as we can against the target threshold."..Tracy says the program already has improved the availability of the Cormorants, citing recent statistics showing nine aircraft out of 14 available. This is an improvement over the 50 percent rate, but still short of the 75 percent target.Availability varies day to day, the DND says, adding that "while the trend appears to be improving, the availability rate for the Cormorant has recently averaged six to seven aircraft available out of the total of 14 [emphasis added]."..
The main issue remains the 'whole of Government' position that DND is the lead agency for SAR activities. Until the government decides that TC through DFO/CCG does SAR, DND will remain the main provider.CheersG2G
The National SAR response is the responsibility of the Interdeparmental Committee on Search and Rescue that reports to the Search and Rescue Secretariat that reports to the MND who happens to be the lead Minister for Search and Rescue. Because it can ... DND provides Command and Control and Air Command is but one participant in Air Search and Rescue. DND is not however the lead agency. http://www.nss.gc.ca/site/index_e.aspThe particular role of DND is found here:http://www.nss.gc.ca/site/reports/nsp/2006plan/programplan_e.asp
...All Coast Guard helicopters are flown and serviced by Transport Canada employees assigned to the agency...
But it just might make sense: Canadian Forces eye Obama's chopper cast-offs Cancelled presidential helicopters could supply spare parts for Cormorants...


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Premier agrees sale of pickles and sauces business to Mizkan Group
The debt-laden manufacturing giant has sealed a deal to sell its ranges of sauces and sweet pickles, including popular brand Branston to the Japanese firm as part of its ongoing process to consolidate its activities and clear a mountain of arrears close to £1bn (€1.23bn) built up during a spending spree before the economic downturn in 2007.
The £92.5m (€114.6m) cash deal includes the sale of Premier's Branston sweet pickle, ketchup, relish, salad cream and mayonnaise, together with the firm's Bury St Edmunds factory in the UK.
The sale is the second deal between Premier and Mizkan, after the two firms agreed on a £41m (€50m) sale of its vinegar and sour pickles business – including the Sarson's, Haywards and Dufrais brands – earlier this year.
Ahead of target
Expected to be finalised in early 2013, Premier said once the sale is completed the company would have exceeded its £330m disposal target by around £40m and almost two years ahead of its June 2014 deadline.
Premier Foods CEO Michael Clarke said: "We have exceeded our disposal target 20 months early while at the same time delivering three successive quarters of sales growth and taking £40m of overhead costs out of the business this year."
Speaking with FoodNavigator, Darren Shirley of Shore Capital said the deal was good business for Premier as it 'ticks most of the boxes' for the current disposal strategy.
The analyst said that reaching the initial target for disposals would reduce pressure on Premier to sell its businesses, and allow the firm to move forward with its business strategy without any distractions.
"They have done what they need to do to [in terms of disposals] and that leaves them with breathing space," he said, adding that the reduction in pressure to sell would also allow Premier to be more selective on any future deals.
Focus on growth
Richard Johnson, director of corporate affairs at Premier told FoodNavigator that after meeting the disposal target the firm would now have a strong focus on growing the eight power brands identified in its 2011 annual report: Hovis, Mr Kipling, Ambrosia, Sharwoods, Loyd Grossman, Bisto, OXO, and Batchelors.
"Our Q3 results last week show that our grocery brands are growing nicely and we will focus on that," said Johnson.
He added that while the pressure to sell any further business was reduced, "you can never say never about the future."
Premier CEO, Clarke, said the firm could now focus attention on driving further momentum in its grocery, while unlocking value in its bread business.
Deal details
Premier said the transaction included the transfer of production, distribution, sales, marketing and licensing of the Branston brand to Mizkan, in addition to the transfer of 'significant private label business' and its Bury St. Edmunds site.
All employees at the site were expected to transfer to Mizkan following an appropriate consultation process, said the firm.
In addition the two companies have have entered into a co-packing agreement which stipulates that Mizkan will continue to manufacture certain cooking sauces and other products at the Bury St Edmunds site for the next 15 years.


text: We had a wonderful holiday in Vencie and part of the experience was this beautiful and stylish hotel. It's in a great location; very near to all the main sites but far enough away from the hustle and bustle of San Marco. The staff were helpful and put up with my useless knowldege of the Italian language. The beds were big and comfy too! I would love to stay there again!!


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If there's one image that sums up the disappointment of Russian hockey fans, it's this:
#Sochi2014 Bear is inconsolable after Russia's loss to Finland in the #IceHockey… 🙁 pic.twitter.com/8nOAw3Cqdr
— Sochi 2014 (@Sochi2014) February 19, 2014
Earlier on Wednesday, Russia lost 3-1 to Finland in the quarterfinals, making it 22 years since the hockey-loving nation has taken gold in the Olympic event.
The enormous bear with a tiny face is not the only Russian who is disconsolate today. In a postgame interview, Russian hockey coach Zinetula Bilyaletdino told reporters to "eat me alive right now" so "I won't be here anymore." When a reporter asked if he would be staying with the team, Bilyaletdino responded: "Yes, I will remain living."
I believe Putin has the final say on that, sir.
For more nightmare-inducing photos of the Sochi mascots, check out the gallery below:


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Available ebook formats: epub mobi pdf rtf lrf pdb txt html
Federico Bini is an Italian writer. He worked as a journalist and editor in daily newspapers and magazines, on television and for the radio. His published works include novels, comics and many stories for children, such as the series of "TIMO - The young sailor", "Dakota" and "Mosiro" for the WWF. Among his latest books are: "The treasures' search- 100 stories of lost fortunes". His greatest passions are; the sea, the stars, numbers, biology, gorillas, action movies, adventure novels and flight simulators.


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Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.
When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg's invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.
Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.
The overthrow of the book would have happened long ago but for the great user asymmetry inherent in all media. It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.
This is not how Hollywood makes films, of course. A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom-built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention — but it is also very rare. In 2007, 600 feature films were released in the United States, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is tiny. It is a rounding error.
We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film won't go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming food chain below — YouTube, indie films, TV serials and insect-scale lip-sync mashups — and not just the tiny apex of tigers. The bottom is where the action is, and where screen literacy originates.
An emerging set of cheap tools is now making it easy to create digital video. There were more than 10 billion views of video on YouTube in September. The most popular videos were watched as many times as any blockbuster movie. Many are mashups of existing video material. Most vernacular video makers start with the tools of Movie Maker or iMovie, or with Web-based video editing software like Jumpcut. They take soundtracks found online, or recorded in their bedrooms, cut and reorder scenes, enter text and then layer in a new story or novel point of view. Remixing commercials is rampant. A typical creation might artfully combine the audio of a Budweiser "Wassup" commercial with visuals from "The Simpsons" (or the Teletubbies or "Lord of the Rings"). Recutting movie trailers allows unknown auteurs to turn a comedy into a horror flick, or vice versa.
Rewriting video can even become a kind of collective sport. Hundreds of thousands of passionate anime fans around the world (meeting online, of course) remix Japanese animated cartoons. They clip the cartoons into tiny pieces, some only a few frames long, then rearrange them with video editing software and give them new soundtracks and music, often with English dialogue. This probably involves far more work than was required to edit the original cartoon but far less work than editing a clip a decade ago. The new videos, called Anime Music Videos, tell completely new stories. The real achievement in this subculture is to win the Iron Editor challenge. Just as in the TV cookoff contest "Iron Chef," the Iron Editor must remix videos in real time in front of an audience while competing with other editors to demonstrate superior visual literacy. The best editors can remix video as fast as you might type.
In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases.
Digital technology gives the professional a new language as well. An image stored on a memory disc instead of celluloid film has a plasticity that allows it to be manipulated as if the picture were words rather than a photo. Hollywood mavericks like George Lucas have embraced digital technology and pioneered a more fluent way of filmmaking. In his "Star Wars" films, Lucas devised a method of moviemaking that has more in common with the way books and paintings are made than with traditional cinematography.
In classic cinematography, a film is planned out in scenes; the scenes are filmed (usually more than once); and from a surfeit of these captured scenes, a movie is assembled. Sometimes a director must go back for "pickup" shots if the final story cannot be told with the available film. With the new screen fluency enabled by digital technology, however, a movie scene is something more flexible: it is like a writer's paragraph, constantly being revised. Scenes are not captured (as in a photo) but built up incrementally. Layers of visual and audio refinement are added over a crude outline of the motion, the mix constantly in flux, always changeable. George Lucas's last "Star Wars" movie was layered up in this writerly way. He took the action "Jedis clashing swords — no background" and laid it over a synthetic scene of a bustling marketplace, itself blended from many tiny visual parts. Light sabers and other effects were digitally painted in later, layer by layer. In this way, convincing rain, fire and clouds can be added in additional layers with nearly the same kind of freedom with which Lucas might add "it was a dark and stormy night" while writing the script. Not a single frame of the final movie was left untouched by manipulation. In essence, a digital film is written pixel by pixel.
The recent live-action feature movie "Speed Racer," while not a box-office hit, took this style of filmmaking even further. The spectacle of an alternative suburbia was created by borrowing from a database of existing visual items and assembling them into background, midground and foreground. Pink flowers came from one photo source, a bicycle from another archive, a generic house roof from yet another. Computers do the hard work of keeping these pieces, no matter how tiny and partial they are, in correct perspective and alignment, even as they move. The result is a film assembled from a million individual existing images. In most films, these pieces are handmade, but increasingly, as in "Speed Racer," they can be found elsewhere.
In the great hive-mind of image creation, something similar is already happening with still photographs. Every minute, thousands of photographers are uploading their latest photos on the Web site Flickr. The more than three billion photos posted to the site so far cover any subject you can imagine; I have not yet been able to stump the site with a request. Flickr offers more than 200,000 images of the Golden Gate Bridge alone. Every conceivable angle, lighting condition and point of view of the Golden Gate Bridge has been photographed and posted. If you want to use an image of the bridge in your video or movie, there is really no reason to take a new picture of this bridge. It's been done. All you need is a really easy way to find it.
Similar advances have taken place with 3D models. On Google SketchUp's 3D Warehouse, you can find insanely detailed three-dimensional virtual models of most major building structures of the world. Need a street in San Francisco? Here's a filmable virtual set. With powerful search and specification tools, high-resolution clips of any bridge in the world can be circulated into the common visual dictionary for reuse. Out of these ready-made "words," a film can be assembled, mashed up from readily available parts. The rich databases of component images form a new grammar for moving images.
After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we'll soon do with images.
For directors who speak this new cinematographic language, even the most photo-realistic scenes are tweaked, remade and written over frame by frame. Filmmaking is thus liberated from the stranglehold of photography. Gone is the frustrating method of trying to capture reality with one or two takes of expensive film and then creating your fantasy from whatever you get. Here reality, or fantasy, is built up one pixel at a time as an author would build a novel one word at a time. Photography champions the world as it is, whereas this new screen mode, like writing and painting, is engineered to explore the world as it might be.
But merely producing movies with ease is not enough for screen fluency, just as producing books with ease on Gutenberg's press did not fully unleash text. Literacy also required a long list of innovations and techniques that permit ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that make it useful. For instance, quotation symbols make it simple to indicate where one has borrowed text from another writer. Once you have a large document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. That requires page numbers. Somebody invented them (in the 13th century). Longer texts require an alphabetic index, devised by the Greeks and later developed for libraries of books. Footnotes, invented in about the 12th century, allow tangential information to be displayed outside the linear argument of the main text. And bibliographic citations (invented in the mid-1500s) enable scholars and skeptics to systematically consult sources. These days, of course, we have hyperlinks, which connect one piece of text to another, and tags, which categorize a selected word or phrase for later sorting.
All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, quote experts and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.
If text literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, then the new screen fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images with the same ease. But so far, these "reader" tools of visuality have not made their way to the masses. For example, if I wanted to visually compare the recent spate of bank failures with similar events by referring you to the bank run in the classic movie "It's a Wonderful Life," there is no easy way to point to that scene with precision. (Which of several sequences did I mean, and which part of them?) I can do what I just did and mention the movie title. But even online I cannot link from this sentence to those "passages" in an online movie. We don't have the equivalent of a hyperlink for film yet. With true screen fluency, I'd be able to cite specific frames of a film, or specific items in a frame. Perhaps I am a historian interested in oriental dress, and I want to refer to a fez worn by someone in the movie "Casablanca." I should be able to refer to the fez itself (and not the head it is on) by linking to its image as it "moves" across many frames, just as I can easily link to a printed reference of the fez in text. Or even better, I'd like to annotate the fez in the film with other film clips of fezzes as references.
With full-blown visuality, I should be able to annotate any object, frame or scene in a motion picture with any other object, frame or motion-picture clip. I should be able to search the visual index of a film, or peruse a visual table of contents, or scan a visual abstract of its full length. But how do you do all these things? How can we browse a film the way we browse a book?
It took several hundred years for the consumer tools of text literacy to crystallize after the invention of printing, but the first visual-literacy tools are already emerging in research labs and on the margins of digital culture. Take, for example, the problem of browsing a feature-length movie. One way to scan a movie would be to super-fast-forward through the two hours in a few minutes. Another way would be to digest it into an abbreviated version in the way a theatrical-movie trailer might. Both these methods can compress the time from hours to minutes. But is there a way to reduce the contents of a movie into imagery that could be grasped quickly, as we might see in a table of contents for a book?
Academic research has produced a few interesting prototypes of video summaries but nothing that works for entire movies. Some popular Web sites with huge selections of movies (like porn sites) have devised a way for users to scan through the content of full movies quickly in a few seconds. When a user clicks the title frame of a movie, the window skips from one key frame to the next, making a rapid slide show, like a flip book of the movie. The abbreviated slide show visually summarizes a few-hour film in a few seconds. Expert software can be used to identify the key frames in a film in order to maximize the effectiveness of the summary.
The holy grail of visuality is to search the library of all movies the way Google can search the Web. Everyone is waiting for a tool that would allow them to type key terms, say "bicycle + dog," which would retrieve scenes in any film featuring a dog and a bicycle. In an instant you could locate the moment in "The Wizard of Oz" when the witchy Miss Gulch rides off with Toto. Google can instantly pinpoint desirable documents out of billions on the Web because computers can read text, but computers are only starting to learn how to read images.
It is a formidable task, but in the past decade computers have gotten much better at recognizing objects in a picture than most people realize. Researchers have started training computers to recognize a human face. Specialized software can rapidly inspect a photograph's pixels searching for the signature of a face: circular eyeballs within a larger oval, shadows that verify it is spherical. Once an algorithm has identified a face, the computer could do many things with this knowledge: search for the same face elsewhere, find similar-looking faces or substitute a happier version.
Of course, the world is more than faces; it is full of a million other things that we'd like to have in our screen vocabulary. Currently, the smartest object-recognition software can detect and categorize a few dozen common visual forms. It can search through Flickr photos and highlight the images that contain a dog, a cat, a bicycle, a bottle, an airplane, etc. It can distinguish between a chair and sofa, and it doesn't identify a bus as a car. But each additional new object to be recognized means the software has to be trained with hundreds of samples of that image. Still, at current rates of improvement, a rudimentary visual search for images is probably only a few years away.
What can be done for one image can also be done for moving images. Viewdle is an experimental Web site that can automatically identify select celebrity faces in video. Hollywood postproduction companies routinely "read" sequences of frames, then "rewrite" their content. Their custom software permits human operators to eradicate wires, backgrounds, unwanted people and even parts of objects as these bits move in time simply by identifying in the first frame the targets to be removed and then letting the machine smartly replicate the operation across many frames.
The collective intelligence of humans can also be used to make a film more accessible. Avid fans dissect popular movies scene by scene. With maniacal attention to detail, movie enthusiasts will extract bits of dialogue, catalog breaks in continuity, tag appearances of actors and track a thousand other traits. To date most fan responses appear in text form, on sites like the Internet Movie Database. But increasingly fans respond to video with video. The Web site Seesmic encourages "video conversations" by enabling users to reply to one video clip with their own video clip. The site organizes the sprawling threads of these visual chats so that they can be read like a paragraph of dialogue.
The sheer number of user-created videos demands screen fluency. The most popular viral videos on the Web can reach millions of downloads. Success garners parodies, mashups or rebuttals — all in video form as well. Some of these offspring videos will earn hundreds of thousands of downloads themselves. And the best parodies spawn more parodies. One site, TimeTube, offers a genealogical view of the most popular videos and their descendants. You can browse a time line of all the videos that refer to an original video on a scale that measures both time and popularity. TimeTube is the visual equivalent of a citation index; instead of tracking which scholarly papers cite other papers, it tracks which videos cite other videos. All of these small innovations enable a literacy of the screen.
As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text does.
We are people of the screen now. Last year, digital-display manufacturers cranked out four billion new screens, and they expect to produce billions more in the coming years. That's one new screen each year for every human on earth. With the advent of electronic ink, we will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface. The tools for screen fluency will be built directly into these ubiquitous screens.
With our fingers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone camera will capture a landscape, then display its history, which we can use to annotate the image. Text, sound, motion will continue to merge into a single intermedia as they flow through the always-on network. With the assistance of screen fluency tools we might even be able to summon up realistic fantasies spontaneously. Standing before a screen, we could create the visual image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen literate, maybe even faster. And that is just the opening scene.