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So the last blog post here was about my sourcing visit to Bolivia. I planned to continue the blog post whilst doing the same task in Colombia, but a last minute change of plan from one of my hosts threw it all in the air.
The farmer had decided, after months of our joint planning, that he would now be out of the country.
After arranging expensive flights and hotels, having confirmed it was all okay, I was left stuck in Colombia for 3 days with nothing to do. As it turns out another exporter was kind enough to spend some of that time letting me cup with them, and I think we found some stonking coffees that we bought once we got back and will be showcasing later this year. But I was left with lots of time to mull over concerns that have been on my mind for a while.
Before I go to this, I'll rewind to earlier this year.
Earlier this year we launched our direct trade idea, a model used by other roasters whom I respect, as a way of showing they look after their farmers / producers / co-ops. I agree that farmers / producers / co-ops should be looked after and it's important to make sure they get paid well, very well. But ever since I launched this I began to feel it was a bad idea for Has Bean (stay with me).
Direct trade is a way the needs of the farmers / producers / co-op can be met, be that monetary, be that pride in improving quality, education, whatever. But it's also about the farmers / producers / co-ops having an equal voice to that of the roaster, and protection too – but what happens if problems swing the other way?
At the time of our launching the 'Fairer Than That' idea, I was in negotiations with a producer in El Salvador about a very important coffee for us. One we bought initially from the number one Cup of Excellence, one that we'd bought every bean of from the farm for four years, and a farm I had visited 3 times and loved. The farmer, due to his hard work, was being approached by many coffee roasters about buying his coffee, but the farm is small (the way we were able to buy everything from the farm for four years shows how small it was). There was not enough coffee to share.
Regardless of how much money we offered (we never even got to the money negotiation), and because the producer's voice got ever louder, we didn't get our coffee.
This isn't about sympathy; there are lots of other great coffees out there, but we invested a lot of time money and travel in building up this farm, and the voices became unbalanced away from us and we could no longer negotiate.
There is good news from this; Santa Petronas, San Raphael Pacas, Loma La Gloria, and Monseratt wouldn't have made it here this year if this hadn't happened. I am very pleased with these coffees, and there are many other great coffees to be found.
So from launch I had this concern that the Fairer Than That / direct trade model wasn't perfect, but I persevered as we had launched and made a big noise about it. I looked enviously at others using this kind of model and thought "I could do that."
But that's part of the problem. As a coffee industry we are all saying the same things; we are sending this confusing message, which means something different to everyone. And when we try and tell the world what we mean by it, I think most people don't get it. We make it more confusing.
I buy amazing meat from my local butcher. I don't ask him if the farmers got paid. I taste the quality, I listen to what the butcher has to say, and I trust him; this makes sense, right?
So fast forward to my ill fated Colombia trip. Another relationship was falling down, because the producer had a different set of priorities to making our long standing commitment to meet up. I am not just belly aching here; much time, effort, and energy was invested into my second trip for a second year, blown up only when I kept pestering to confirm the trip one week before leaving.
It's not a relationship when it's one way. I like the idea of equal-stakes-equal-voice, but in this case it was not equal. If I broke that equilibrium, quite rightly I would be a bad man, but it doesn't seem to be the same both ways.
I likened it to being trapped in a loveless marriage; one was trying really hard, but the other didn't feel the same way. It's a problem when your partner loves you for the wrong reasons, or doesn't trust your motivations. I guess it's my job to fix or change that.
The extra time in Bogota on my own – in the evening eating alone, not knowing anyone in the city – gave me lots of time to think, and to run (a great city to run around). Most of my thinking time (and on the flight, and even more since I got back) was about direct trade and Fairer Than That. And you know what, I'm not happy with it at all.
I don't think it helps the message: I think it clouds it. And it's important to be happy, or otherwise to change something to make yourself happy. A ginger man once said: life's too short.
When you make a mistake you can either keep going ahead or stop and about turn, and that's what I am going to do.
We are not going to label up our buying practices in the "direct trade" model we discussed in Fairer Than That. Not because paying a good price isn't a good thing; it is a very important thing, but it's also a complicated thing. I can talk about the $10 a lb Colombian we bought last year when the market was at $1.80 if you like, and I'd sound great, but from all the deals we did last year, none were lower than $3 and most around $4 and above, which is a great price. But what does it tell you?
$3 in Colombia won't buy you just anything in Nicaragua or El Salvador – it will buy you a great (and I mean great) coffee. It's all figures and numbers that make no sense. Coffee buying and relationships are complicated, and I want to try and make it easier for everyone.
We're also not going to cheapen the great coffees we have acquired through importing partners by not giving them a sticker, or make noise about economics when we should be talking about taste. We paid over $7 a lb to a producer for a coffee from an importer last year. This was a huge price, for a huge coffee, but we couldn't put it under the banner of direct trade because we used an importer. When you have constraints like that, it's crazy.
Instead we are going to buy the way we always have; some direct, some not, dependent on the partnership and the logistics, but we will always remain transparent and faithful to the following:
1. I promise to pay a good price for the coffee I buy. This is built on trust between grower, roaster, and end customer – trust, and long term results;
2. The price we pay will ALWAYS be above the market price and any Fairtrade floor prices;
3. I promise to visit the producers we buy from directly as often as I am able to, and ask them face to face if they are happy that they sell to us, and with how we roast their coffee and promote their farm name;
4. I will work with our partner producers feeding back things I learn about the coffee market and what I think the market needs, where we can add value to the chain. Collaboration is important;
5. If we use middle men (exporters / importers / brokers) we will make sure they are good people and that the producing end still get rewarded for their work. these people will become facilitators, not leaks where money doesn't make it back to the ground floor. If we cannot be assured / shown this, we will not work with them;
6. I will promise to work with good people, in general good people produce good coffee;
7. You're just going to have to trust me.
You're going to have to trust me even though it doesn't have the name direct trade / Fairtrade / grown by nuns / kissed by monkeys, or any other certification. I don't want to make the same noise or the same mistakes as others using direct trade. Relationships with many producers is too complicated to give it a title or a badge or a sticker. After all, it's not about words, it's about actions. Feel free to judge me on them.


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Triple Diamond rated hotel within walking distance of terminal. Complimentary shuttle service to area restaurants and shops for Aviator's Club members.
Data is submitted by registered FlightAware members on 2012-Apr-16 17:40.You must register or login to edit FBO information.
Jet A and 100LL airport fuel prices for all FBOs at KICT

subset: commoncrawl


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The Obama White House's disorganized cabinet shuffle… And some legitimate excuses for it… Obama to nominate Jack Lew for top Treasury job at 1:30 pm ET… Biden meets with the NRA and other gun-rights groups at the White House… More on 2016 and the State of the State addresses… Liberals backing Barney Frank for interim Senate appointment… And "there's no crying in redistricting."
*** The disorganized cabinet shuffle: There is no question that Team Obama's campaign operation outgunned the Romney effort last year. And there's little doubt that the Obama White House outmaneuvered (at least in the short term) congressional Republicans in the fiscal-cliff talks. But since November, where the White House has fallen short -- and seemed completely disorganized -- has been in its planning for staffing the second term. For starters, Susan Rice's and Chuck Hagel's potential nominations to top cabinet jobs were allowed to twist in the wind for weeks, with Rice eventually pulling out of consideration for secretary of state and Hagel now in real fight to win confirmation as defense secretary. In addition, the White House yesterday announced that Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was leaving the administration -- on the very day the New York Times ran a piece observing the lack of women in the administration. And also yesterday, the White House said Attorney General Eric Holder, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shineski are staying in a second term, but it didn't announce what's happening with the other cabinet secretaries, which then set off mini-feeding frenzies "are you staying, are you going?" for the cabinet secretaries not included on this seemingly arbitrary list.
Charles Dharapak / AP
President Barack Obama announces in the East Room of the White House, Monday, Jan. 7, 2013, that he is nominating former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, as the new Defense Secretary.
*** But some legitimate excuses for it: Bottom line: The second-term cabinet shuffle has been an unforced error so far. (The reason why the White House is receiving criticism for a lack of diversity is that it has nominated three consecutive white men for cabinet posts -- John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and today Jack Lew -- but without a high-profile woman or minority thrown into the mix. And that doesn't include John Brennan at CIA and a likely white male to be the next White House chief of staff.) Indeed, you could argue that the Romney folks thought a lot more about staffing a Romney administration over the next four years than Team Obama did about a second-term administration. In fairness to the White House, its top officials were so focused on the fiscal-cliff talks in the past two months. What's more, this kind of disorganization isn't unusual for a second term, especially after winning a hard-fought race for re-election. And finally, it's a process story. At the end of the day, it's likely that Obama's second-term cabinet will have plenty of diversity and top-notch names. But the process hasn't been pretty. Question for the White House: Why didn't it have a second-term transition director? Someone whose full-time job was to keep an eye on the optics of how and when to announce, on the leaks etc.?
*** Obama to nomination Lew for Treasury: And today, as mentioned above, the White House rolls out its third nomination (and third-straight white male) for a top cabinet post. At the White House at 1:30 pm ET, President Obama will announce his intention to nominate White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew to succeed Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary; Geithner will be in attendance at the event. While some Republicans are already raising objections to Lew -- see Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions -- it's a good bet he'll win confirmation. After all, Lew has been confirmed by the Senate twice in the last four years (once as OMB director, once as deputy secretary of state). And the White House did NOT want a confirmation battle for this post. They wanted someone who was fairly squeaky clean (though look for some to bring up Lew's days at Citigroup where he was the recipient of one of those gigantic bonuses). But he'll get through easily even though many Republicans who have negotiated with Lew are not fans of him (see Boehner, McConnell in particular). And make no mistake: Lew's confirmation will be all about the debt-ceiling debate, the platinum coin, the 14th Amendment, and the administration's record over the past four years. So the hearings will serve as a preview of the March budget showdowns.
*** Who succeeds Lew? As for Lew's current chief-of-staff job in the West Wing, the leading contenders are former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain (who was in the mix for this post before) and Deputy NSA Denis McDonough. There are a lot of folks who know the president well who are absolutely convinced it's Klain … and some are absolutely convinced he'll pick McDonough. So the president hasn't made a decision. We're told a lot of folks are simply reading the tea leaves and making assumptions about what they THINK the president will do.
President Barack Obama will formally name Jack Lew to replace Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner – an acknowledgement that the White House expects the big economic battles of the president's second term to be fought over the federal budget. The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd reports.
*** Biden meets with NRA: Also today, Vice President Biden continues his meetings on guns. Yesterday, it was with gun-safety and gun opponents; today, it's with the National Rifle Association and Wal-Mart. The New York Times on yesterday's meeting: "President Obama is planning a comprehensive effort to pass legislation and use executive orders to prevent gun violence, representatives of about a dozen gun control organizations were told Wednesday at a White House meeting. 'The president and I are determined to take action. This is not an exercise in photo opportunities,' Vice President Joseph R. Biden said as photographers were given a chance to take pictures before the closed-door meeting."
*** More 2016 and the State of the States: In First Thoughts yesterday, we noted the potential 2016er governors -- like New Jersey's Chris Christie, New York's Andrew Cuomo, and Virginia's Bob McDonnell -- giving State of the State addresses. And NBC's Carrie Dann expands on it. "In his State of the State address Tuesday, Christie suggested little in the way of new proposals, but touted his own record as a reformer and offered a rhetorical pep rally for a state battered by last year's Superstorm Sandy… Cuomo, a popular New York governor and formidable fundraiser, grabbed headlines for his Wednesday afternoon address, during which he proposed a specific new gun policy that would 'enact the toughest assault weapon ban in the nation, period.'… Virginia's McDonnell, whose fast-growing state suffers from a dearth of transportation funds, used part of his remarks to outline plans to overhaul the way roads and bridges are paid for by taxpayers. Per NBC's Sarah Blackwill, another potential 2016er, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, will give his State of the State on Jan. 15. And Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal goes April 8. By the way, Cuomo truly made a pitch to the left with his speech yesterday.
*** Liberals backing Frank: Liberal organizations are beginning to coalesce around retired Rep. Barney Frank to serve as the interim appointment to fill John Kerry's soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat. For starters, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee yesterday endorsed Frank for the post. And a MoveOn petition urging Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) to appoint Frank to the interim job has garnered 6,500-plus online signatures so far. By the way, it's worth noting how Frank toned down his criticism of Chuck Hagel, and remember that Patrick is VERY CLOSE to the Obama White House.
*** "There's no crying in redistricting": Lastly, one of us wrote about this yesterday, but it bears repeating: Democrats won the House popular vote -- those who voted in House elections -- but only made modest gains and Republican retained control of the body. Why? Redistricting was a big reason. Republicans controlled key governorships and state legislatures, winning several of those important, but out-of-the-spotlight races over the past few cycles. And a Republican pollster says, "There's no crying in redistricting." That's because this isn't the first time this disparity has been seen. In fact, the tables were turned in the 1970s and 1980s. Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who conducts the NBC/WSJ poll with Democrat Peter Hart, notes in an email and three-page memo: "Republicans captured 49.4% of the two-party vote for Congress in 2012, yet won 54% of the seats in the House. This gap between the Republican vote and the seats they won is on the high side, but certainly not without precedent over the past 40 years. If you began your career as a Republican trying to win the House in the 1970s and 1980s, you would adopt, as I do, the borrowed adage 'there's no crying in redistricting.'"
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If I had my way, the world would shift to three-day weekends just before Thanksgiving until after the New Year. Regardless of holiday traditions or lack thereof, it just seems like a cruel and unusual punishment to have to work on Fridays in December. With a miles-long to-do list and a longing for all the merry activities I'd rather be doing, I find that every minute of a December Friday spent at my desk feels like an hour. And so it is that I'm going to follow Emily's lead and give you a super fun Fossil Friday to help get you through the slog. Unlike filling out your timesheet, this should go down as easily as whipped-cream-topped hot cocoa.
Who am I? Hint: you totally know this.
Until Monday!


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In some areas, too little or too much information is being shared
In June, without discussion or debate, the Senate passed an amendment that would make public significant portions of the new Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System, or FAPIIS. When FAPIIS was first mandated and after much discussion and debate in Congress, it was agreed that access would remain limited to government officials. This step was taken because of the sensitive role the database would serve in helping to inform federal acquisition decisions. Specifically, it would contain a range of proprietary and complex information and also sensitive government information that pertains to contract administration and other legitimately private matters.
The Senate amendment would reverse that well-thought-out decision and, in so doing, invite the misuse of and misstatements about the data by an uninformed audience, creating a wide array of unfortunate effects. This potentially destructive amendment was blithely agreed to in the name of transparency, without regard to consequences or fundamental fairness.At the other end of the spectrum, there is the Defense Department's insourcing initiative. As part of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' otherwise worthy effort to rebuild critical skills, principally within the acquisition workforce, the department is assuming a whopping 40 percent savings for every position that is insourced. This assumption has enormous implications and has generated more than a little skepticism. Internal Air Force documents not intended for public release but obtained by the media and other sources indicate that the department's underlying analysis simply and inappropriately substituted fully burdened contract costs for internal personnel costs, thus raising serious questions about the accuracy of the analysis or that of the 40 percent assumption. Despite numerous requests, the department has refused to release the analysis, and the resource management decision (RMD) containing it remains classified. As the internal Air Force documents mentioned above make clear, the analytics are available only to senior officials.
Two-thirds of the positions identified by DOD for insourcing fall outside the secretary's initiative. They are not subject to the RMD and thus are supposed to be subjected to rigorous individual cost analyses. However, it is equally challenging to get information about those analyses. One company, facing the loss of a five-year, $230 million contract, received a summary of the cost analysis only after filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents show net savings from this insourcing of only one-fifth of 1 percent and higher per-person costs for performing the work in-house, even while excluding a range of significant short-term and even more significant long-term costs associated with government performance. Ironically, the analysis also included some contract costs that were never actually incurred — and that exceeded the total savings estimated by the analysis. Here, as with the RMD, the integrity of the analyses is of paramount importance, particularly given DOD's acute fiscal challenges. More to the point, isn't this precisely the kind of information the public has a right to see?
We need to address imbalances that range from too much transparency to too little, from what could easily become an unfair, punitive and dangerous approach to information oversharing on FAPIIS to the Defense Department's undersharing of what should be routine public information. Transparency can be important and valuable, but right now we're just not getting it right.
About the Author
Stan Soloway is a former deputy undersecretary of Defense and former president and chief executive officer of the Professional Services Council. He is now the CEO of Celero Strategies.
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Mr. Soloway,Your "transparency for thee but not for me" position just doesn't wash, especially when a growing segment of the contracting industry is now willing to concede that at least some of the information contained in FAPIIS should be shared with the public. At a recent ABA briefing on FAPIIS, a contractor attorney admitted they face an impossible task keeping FAPIIS under wraps because much of the information in it is already publicly available.To maintain your staunch opposition to the release of civil, criminal and administrative responsibility data – all of which is readily accessible through the media, court documents, government and corporate press releases, SEC filings and, of course, POGO's own publicly-posted misconduct database – makes absolutely no sense, particularly when in the same breath you demand that the government lay all of its cards on the table with regard to its insourcing initiative. Contractors often characterize their relationship with the government as a "partnership," but it's not an effective partnership when only one of the partners is transparent.POGO has long advocated the public availability of FAPIIS. The public has the right to know how the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars of their money each year on contracts and grants. Most recently, we came out in support of Senator Sanders' amendment to release some FAPIIS data to the public, even though it would exempt past performance data.If a growing number of your organization's members can live with the release of all other FAPIIS data, why can't you?Neil GordonProject On Government Oversight
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Nazzic Keene has led SAIC for just over one year and she shares how her early priorities continue to drive the company forward, plus how COVID-19 is complicating everything.
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November 2009 Elle titled Women In Hollywood features multiple covers from Katie Holmes to Renee Zellweger. The cover was shot by Richard Bailey.
In the interview the women talk about:
On family life: "In my own life, my whole world really revolves around family. I do what I need to do, but it's like, 'How is everybody else doing?' And it's wonderful for me as an actress to put some of that into a character."
On life as a working mom on the Broadway set of All My Sons: "Suri would sit in my lap in the makeup chair. She'd hand the wig lady the bobby pins."
On fashion: "I love Alaïa, for sure. Stella McCartney. I like Ralph Lauren because I feel like it's very American, and I'm pretty all-American, from Ohio. Isabel Marant and a new designer, Sari Gueron.
On the genre of film she loves most: "It can be any genre. I even like vampire movies – they just have to be well done. I want to believe in the characters. The minute it starts to feel not real, I'm not interested."
-On adjusting to Hollywood life since moving from the UK: "I feel the fear of the business creep under my skin in L.A. in a way that it doesn't in England. It's funny – I feel like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, unless you're in Hollywood! It's shameful how you have to look a certain way. Women are simply not allowed to grow old gracefully. That's why I love playing character parts, because I'm not pigeonholed into trying to remain young forever to play the ingénue or romantic lead."
-On types of characters she is drawn to: "I think my connection to acting has been through reading. I'm interested in scripts. People ask me, "What role are you dying to play?" It's really, What story do I want to be in?"
-On actresses from earlier eras that have influenced her: "For Leatherheads, I was thinking of Katharine Hepburn, the way she leaned forward with her shoulders back, speaking in her lower register the whole time. I like her confidence, her intelligence, her sense of entitlement. When I was making Chicago, I couldn't stop watching the Marilyn [Monroe] videos. Not so much because of the sex kitten thing; it was more her vulnerability. That was a huge part of the Roxie character. But it's not about emulating; it's about a feeling."
-On whether a successful movie career requires sacrificing your personal life: "A friend of mine couldn't decide between moving to New York or staying in L.A., and another friend said, "Do Everything!" I thought, That's it, do everything."
-On being known as a beautiful Hollywood actress: "I'm sorry, but it's sexy to know that guys find you attractive. It's empowering."
To see the rest of the 'Women In Hollywood' covers visit ELLE.com
- 2Shares


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FORT COLLINS, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--OtterBox® , the No. 1-selling case for smartphones, introduces new patterns of Defender Series® cases featuring recently released Realtree® Xtra® and Xtra® Green camouflage for the Apple® (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone® 4/4S, iPhone 5 and Samsung® (Koscom: SSNL) Galaxy S® III, available exclusively* from OtterBox.com and select retail outlets. These designs allow hunting enthusiasts and amateurs alike to stay protected, connected and disguised during any pursuit.
The Defender Series with Realtree Xtra and Xtra Green camouflage uphold the OtterBox high standard of protection against drop, bump, shock and scratch to ensure devices remain pristine. Featuring a built-in screen protector for the smartphone's touchscreen, sturdy polycarbonate shell to provide drop protection and a rigid silicone outer layer that keeps out dirt, dust and debris, the Defender Series is proven to provide trusted protection.
"Realtree Xtra and Xtra Green are effective in more habitats than any other camouflage pattern," OtterBox President and CEO Brian Thomas said. "Now with multi-layered rugged protection from OtterBox, the Defender Series is right there for every step of the hunt."
For more information on these new patterns or to view additional Realtree camouflage cases from OtterBox, visit www.otterbox.com.
Additional Information for OtterBox Defender Series with Realtree Camouflage:
Environmental Protection:
• Drop and shock – protection against drop, bump and shock
• Water protection – not tested or recommended for water protection
• Dust intrusion – dust does not enter in a sufficient quantity to interfere with satisfactory operation of equipment
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• iPhone 4/4S: 4.88 in (124.12 mm) x 2.71 in (68.91 mm) x 0.66 in (6.76 mm)
• iPhone 5: 5.32 in (135.12 mm) x 2.75 in (69.90 mm) x 0.64 in (16.18 mm)
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• iPhone 4/4S: 1.83 oz (52.06 g)
• iPhone 5: 4.00 oz (114.00 g)
• Galaxy S III: 4.64 oz (131.54 g)
About OtterBox:
Built upon fundamentals of hard work, innovation and perseverance, OtterBox is a leader in the production of premier protective solutions for global handheld manufacturers, wireless carriers and distributors.
Incorporating creativity and cutting-edge design into every product, OtterBox creates sleek and durable cases that offer reliable device protection to complement any lifestyle.
OtterBox was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Fort Collins, Colo. In 2010 OtterBox established an EMEA headquarters in Ireland and an APAC headquarters in Hong Kong.
For more information, visit www.otterbox.com. We've Got Technology Covered.
About Realtree:
Realtree is the world's leading camouflage designer, marketer and licensor with over 1,500 licensees utilizing the camouflage brand. Thousands of outdoor and lifestyle products are available in Realtree camouflage patterns.
In addition, Realtree is committed to supporting individuals and groups that work to ensure our outdoor heritage, the conservation of natural places and the wildlife that resides there. In fact, Realtree is one of the nation's leading contributors to conservation groups such as Ducks Unlimited, the National Wild Turkey Federation, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and others. They promote their products and relationships widely on television, as well as through their website and many other outlets.
For more information visit www.realtree.com.
*Realtree Xtra and Xtra Green camouflage patterns are available exclusively from OtterBox for mobile handheld technology.
©2013 Otter Products, LLC. All rights reserved. OtterBox and all OtterBox logos, trademarks and symbols are the property of Otter Products, LLC. All other logos, trademarks and symbols are the property of their respective owners.
Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/multimedia/home/20130131005374/en/
Kelly Richardson, 970-372-1875


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Hardened sulfur
Hardened sulfur.JPG
Ijen crater or Kawah Ijen, as it is known locally is Indonesia's famous sulfur belching volcano. It is here that hundreds of men carry out one of the most gruelling and dangerous jobs in the world. The work at Kawah Ijen begins with a 5km climb up to the crater rim and down to the vent, where the sulfur forms. The sulfur is broken into manageable pieces with nothing more than metal rods. The miners have little to none safety equipment and have to battle the toxic sulfuric fumes which are constantly expelled from the vent. Once the sulfur is broken up, it is loaded into bamboo baskets. The weight of the loads starts at 50kg and sometimes exceed 100 kg. The men carry the sulfur up a winding path of crumbling rocks and sand, a step in the wrong direction can mean death. The reward awaits at Ijen sulfur collection base, where the miners can expect an amount of money considerably larger than anything they'd make from most other jobs in rural Java, Indonesia.


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It's a glorious spring day and sprinter Dana Hussein Abdul-Razzaq is busy stretching and warming up ahead of her morning training routine. Nearby, under the shade of Baghdad University's leafy trees and giant palms, students of both sexes mingle and chat.
Normally, the young athlete – one of four Iraqis who have qualified so far for the 2008 Olympics – trains with her coach and her fiancé, also a sprinter, at Shaab Stadium on the edge of Sadr City. But the recent fighting there between militias loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and US and government forces has put the stadium out of reach. So she has turned to the relative normalcy of the university, dodging pockmarks left on the track by past mortar fire and sidestepping areas crushed by tanks.
For Iraqi Olympians, their achievement is a bittersweet moment, the fruit of perseverance in the face of divided and corrupt sports institutions and severe personal risk. Just two weeks ago, the deputy head of Iraq's National Olympic Committee, Raad Jaber, was killed, along with a famed basketball coach and referee, in broad daylight at a central Baghdad bus station. The committee's chief, Ahmed al-Samarraie, has been missing since July 2006, when he was abducted with almost 30 of his colleagues.
Still, Ms. Abdul-Razzaq, who says she does not even have proper running shoes, is undaunted.
"I just shut it all out and keep at it," says the feisty track star, her hair pulled back and several gold charms gleaming around her neck. "You see how horrible this track is – and I am not even allowed to use it."
Indeed, to train on the crumbling facilities at Baghdad University, which is in the relatively safer neighborhood of Jadriyah, Abdul-Razzaq's federation is supposed to pay a monthly subscription of 500,000 dinars ($416).
But it has repeatedly failed to do so. So every time Abdul-Razzaq and her coach come in, they get into a shouting match with the guards – who finally relent and let them in. She says her federation has not even given her needed foot gear and that she's not sure whether her coach, with whom she has been training for five years, will end up accompanying her to Beijing.
Last fall, she was assigned a coach she did not even know at the last minute to accompany her to a training camp in Turkey and then to the Pan-Arab Games, held in Cairo last November.
Abdul-Razzaq says the only way she coped was by remaining in touch with her coach, Yussif Abdul-Rahman, in Baghdad by cellphone.
Dodging sectarianism
In the old days, many athletes say, their greatest horror was that they might upset the head of the Olympic Committee – Saddam Hussein's son Uday – by not performing well or failing to win medals. Athletes were routinely bullied and threatened.
Now, mirroring the country's mood, the Olympic committee and all sports federations are politicized, with officials making sure only their protégés and partisans get the required financial and institutional support or have an opportunity to compete and travel abroad – considered a real perk and sometimes a ticket for migration. There have been numerous recent incidents of athletes and sports officials overstaying their visas to seek political asylum overseas.
And, like all Iraqis, Abdul-Razzaq and her coach also had to navigate the violence and sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites over the past few years.
Abdul-Razzaq is a Shiite living in a mixed area, known as Aalam, wedged between predominantly Shiite Biyaa and predominantly Sunni Saidiyah. Coach Abdul-Rahman, a Sunni, lives in a predominantly Sunni section of Mansour.
"We cut deals with Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents just so I can come and pick her up for training," he says, describing how on numerous occasions they would get caught up in clashes between the two sides or dodge sniper bullets.
"Dana defeated death," her coach says admiringly. "She's a winner."
Olympic archer
In another part of the city at a modest club next to Mustansiriyah University, Ali Adnan lifts his bow and begins to shoot arrows at a makeshift target board made of dried palm branches.
"I cannot believe I qualified," says Mr. Adnan, a member of Iraq's professional archery team."I am filled with ambition, determination, and desire to train more and more."
He won two silvers and one gold medal at the Cairo games last fall and credits his mother's persistent prayers and the relentless support of Jaber, the committee's deputy chief who was just killed.
"He nurtured us and got us new equipment. I will miss him sorely," says Adnan.
The young archer also must contend with his own tribulations. In 2006, he and his brother were attacked near their home in the neighborhood of Ameriyah by militants linked to Al Qaeda. His brother was badly wounded and the family had to flee to Syria. They came back last November, when the area was sealed by the US military with giant concrete walls and security responsibilities were handed over to the Rebels of Ameriyah – one of the numerous US-funded Sunni Arab militias made up of former insurgents and militants.
But dangers still lurk, Adnan says, describing how eight members of this same militia were arrested last week for moonlighting as a kidnap and extortion gang.
On most days, he just practices in his backyard because of the difficulties of going in and out of Ameriyah.
Adnan says the tense situation at home, combined with a lack of facilities in Iraq, is forcing him to travel to South Korea soon to train.
"I am living now for Beijing. God willing, I will clinch the medal," he says with a big smile. "Iraq needs to win and be joyous. Even the Islamic State in Ameriyah was happy when we won in soccer."
In a rare moment of national unity, Iraqis rallied around their soccer team last July when it won the Asian Cup for the first time ever.
In an effort to keep this spirit alive, a pro-government television segment running often these days shows a group of masked gunmen storming a soccer field and taking on the team. A grenade replaces the ball.
The team's star goalkeeper, Noor Sabri, shoots the grenade out of the field, and it explodes in the air. The scoreboard then flashes: "Iraq: 1; Terror: 0."


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The victims of adults' wars
Even as we celebrate Christmas or Kwanzaa with family and friends let's all pause for a minute and think about innocent children, women and men caught in the line of fire in war zones in South Sudan, in the Central African Republic, in Mali, in Nigeria, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt, in Libya, in DR Congo, and elsewhere around the world.
Many of these wars are result of grownups being unable to resolve disagreements or arising out of power struggles. Many are promoted by outside interests covetous of abundant natural and mineral resources in some of these countries.
People are killed indiscriminately including children.
The latest conflict that's erupted is South Sudan's. Two grown ups, one named Salva Kiir, with the title of "president" and the other named Riek Machar, who once had a title called "vice president" are at war. Each believes he deserves to be "president" and to lead South Sudan's people.
They provide an example of their "leadership" capabilities by having soldiers loyal to them kill civilians from the other side's ethnic group; including children. A foreign intervention force has been authorized by the United Nations.
At the end of the day, most likely, they may come to some sort of settlement, the fighting may stop, and the two men may be compelled to "share power."
This would mean putting off for the future, the day of reckoning. The two men may not stop until one has his sword buried deep in the other's back. Then a true "leader" emerges.
We are sure the people just can't wait.
Yes, it's also Christmas in the Central African Republic.
Over there, adult men compete over who gets to "lead" the people in that mineral rich country. They have managed to make civilians believe it's a virtue for Muslims to kill Christians; and for Christians to defend themselves by slaying Muslims. The man who started the war, Michel Djotodia, has the title of "president."
There too, an foreign intervention force, including France, whose motives are dubious, have been sent to restore peace.
The victims already buried --and the more yet to come-- will not be brought back to life.
In Mali, on-again and off-again conflict continues. Muslims attacked other Muslims whom they believed were not sufficiently devout. So to make them more devout, they killed them and destroyed some of their ancient manuscripts and libraries.
In Nigeria, there's a struggle between Christians and Islamists who call themselves Boko Haram. According to media accounts Boko Haram have slaughtered Christians, including children in churches. The military, on behalf of the Nigerian government, has burned down whole villages and also slaughtered civilians, according to reports.
Someone thinks there is a "solution" somewhere in all this.
In Afghanistan, the U.S.-backed government, which does not want to sign a military pact with Washington faces resurgent Taliban fighters who believe they represent a purer form of the Islamic faith. No question the fighting will intensify after the U.S. departs since the government is sustained by outside support.
In Syria, Muslims who believe they too represent the correct version of the faith are fighting. Occasionally, they cut off the head of people whom they have killed and pose while holding it in their hand. The Syrian government then rains bombs from planes in return.
Somewhere in all this someone sees a solution.
In Egypt the military seized power and said an Islamist-friendly government was becoming dictatorial. The military has mowed down an estimated 2,000 Egyptians.
Just yesterday the country was celebrating what was hailed as democratic elections. Now Gen. Fattah al-Sisi is conducting a Kangaroo court trial of the man elected president, Muhammad Morsi. He wants him sentenced to death and killed "legitimately."
In Libya one side was the beneficiary of intervention in a civil war by NATO. Long-time ruler Muammar a-Quathafi was overthrown. He was lynched after his fleeing convoy was bombed by NATO jets. Libya has become lawless with the only authority the countless militias settling scores.
In DR Congo civilians wonder if the recent peace following the defeat of invading armies from Rwanda and Uganda by Congo's army and the UN force will last. People live under a shadow of fear.
How can more bloodshed --ordered by adults and carried out by adults and in many cases by children-- be the solution to these conflicts?
Yes, it's Christmas In South Sudan And all over the world.
I think you have "Filtered HTML" turned on here. If you switch to "Full HTML," it will probably...
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Black Star News has been producing stellar investigative journalism since 1997, including focusing on police brutality and other abuses targeting marginalized communities. We have broken several major stories. We welcome news tips to firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com
We need your advertising support to produce strong journalism, especially during periods of economic instability, so please contact firstname.lastname@example.com for advertising rates and long term packages.
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Save interesting products in this list and find them quickly at any time.
Simply click on the watch list symbol
The bathroom ceramics in the Architectura collection from Villeroy & Boch impress with timelessly beautiful, puristic design as well as high functionality.
A urinal can fit in almost any bathroom and is a useful complement to your toilet. The attractive designs of Villeroy & Boch's elegant urinals enrich your home while providing maximum functionality. They are also perfectly suitable for public areas.
CeramicPlus - the anti-dirt surface for sanitary ceramics - simplifies bathroom cleaning. This innovative process causes water to immediately form droplets on contact, which then merge into beads and simply drain away, carrying dirt and limescale particles with them.
AntiBac is an innovative hygiene solution for bathrooms, which considerably reduces the risk of transferring bacteria. The glaze from Villeroy & Boch contains silver ions and has been proven to reduce the growth of bacteria on ceramic surfaces and toilet seats by more than 99.9%. This saves you time, effort and money in bathroom cleaning and gives you hygienic cleanliness in an instant.
The patented siphon cartridge for urinals from the Architectura collection can be replaced with no tools. There is no need to remove the urinal for maintenance, and the cartridge can be replaced in just 30 seconds. This saves you time and money. The innovative urinal is best suited for use in public areas.
Sanitary ceramic is the perfect material for washbasins, toilets and bidets. Sanitary ceramics from Villeroy & Boch are fired at 1200 °C and meet the highest requirements for durability and hygiene. Additional glazes such as CeramicPlus and AntiBac simplify bathroom cleaning with antibacterial protection and dirt-repellent surfaces. Sanitary ceramic is resistant to knocks and impacts.
The ProDetect 2 automatic flush from Villeroy & Boch integrates into the sanitary ceramics unseen. Fitted with the latest sensor technology, the urinal flushes reliably after every use. The flush volume can be set from 0.8 - 4.0 l. Ideal for urinals with high user frequency such as in gastronomy.
|325 mm
|355 mm
|24,3 kg
|Product designation
|Siphonic urinal
Sanitary ceramics. Incl. outlet, consisting of ViChange siphon cartridge and ceramic outlet cover, fastening set included. EN 13407
|Sanitary ceramics


text:
China Warns Microsoft Against Obstructing Probe
Regulator Says It Questioned Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Mary Snapp
Chinese regulators on Monday publicly warned Microsoft Corp. against obstructing an antitrust investigation into the firm, in the latest sign that Beijing has turned frosty on the U.S. software maker.
China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce said in a statement that Microsoft should avoid "interfering in or obstructing" the probe. The regulator also said it had questioned Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Mary Snapp as part of the investigation....
To Read the Full Story


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Dark Chocolate Swiss Thins (4.4 oz)
Swiss dark chocolate thins with a robust 52% cocoa content.
More details
Nutrition Information
Lindt chocolate embodies the passion and expert craftsmanship of its Lindt Master Swiss Chocolatiers. Lindt delivers a unique chocolate experience offering a distinctly smooth and rich, gourmet taste.
- Flavor: Dark Chocolate
- Chocolate type: Dark Chocolate
- Net weight: 4.4 oz (125 g)
- Size (in.): 8 x 1 x 4
- Packaging: Gift Box
- Gluten free: Yes


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Ana: Debts you don't owe
Ana received letters in the mail requesting she pay over $30,000 in homeowners fees, fees she had already paid.
Kathi: Making informed mortgage decisions
After moving to a new city, Kathi used "Buying a House" to help her make informed mortgage choices during her journey to a new home.
Danieshia: Threatened with jail
After losing her job, Danieshia explains that she was unable to pay her debts and soon found herself being threatened with jail by a debt collector.
Dani: Struggling to repay student debt
Dani was struggling to make ends meet and manage her student loan repayments, until she contacted the CFPB.
Captain Jamison: Trouble with mortgage lenders
When a servicemember couldn't get anywhere with his mortgage lender, Captain Jamison helped him submit a complaint.
Jorge: Credit reporting errors
More than ten years after filing for bankruptcy, Jorge found that the bankruptcy was still showing up on his credit report. After getting nowhere with the credit reporting agency, Jorge reached out to the CFPB.
Leah: Repaying student loans
Leah was struggling to keep up with her student loan debt, until she learned that she had options with the "Paying for College" repayment tool.
Higinio: Credit card errors
After closing a credit card, Higinio was continually charged for debts he had already paid. Three years and hundreds of dollars later he decided to take action.
William: Not my debt
William told us that debt collectors requested that he pay $8,000 for a debt he never owed, ruining his credit in the process.
Bernadette: Unwanted contact
Bernadette told us that a collection agency left her a message at work. Shortly thereafter, she says the collection agency contacted her dad, sisters, and a friend.


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Photo Of Pool Table On The Second Floor Of Tribeca Triplex Along With
Living in a big city with lots of pressures and social demands will force you to stay focus and sometime you will forget how to life as human being. Some people even can no longer know how to interact with other people; they behave like robots with all the routines. Work from eight to five, watch television, go to the gym, sleep, and wake up the next morning with the same routines. Therefore, to prevent this problem, people usually design their house or apartment with certain theme as their personal existence.Read more »


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You can see the clutch shape using "mountain-valley folds.
The card base is 5.5 x 9, scored at 3, 3.5, 4 and 7
Closed (using repositionable double-sided tape.
I hope you like my project. Thanks for joining me for Hostess Monday.
Don't forget our Design Team call. Applications are due June 4th.


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Toward a DefinitionBy Terry Kirkpatrick
Analysis: Complexity
In 1999, Don Morrison, Novell Inc.'s director of information support services, was looking to simplify the hiring of new employees. Digging into the process, he discovered 170 different applications throughout the company that its 6,000 employees might need access to in doing their jobs, things like e-mail, benefits accounts, customer data and expense account forms. The hiring process alone involved 19 different applications that generated more than 75 different data flows and integration points. Many of these applications belonged to departments that didn't care to give up control of certain types of data, such as employee titles, salary information or e-mail addresses. Had Morrison not found a way to allow departments to own and control data they considered critical, he says, "the project would most likely have ended prematurely because of the political nightmare it presented."
|Novell's IT architecture used to be made up of more than 190 applications. Human resources alone included more than 100 interfaces. The orange squares represent Novell's three primary enterprise applications, PeopleSoft, Phoenix and Oracle. The green squares symbolize the various single-purpose applications, and the red squares show the outside vendors to which Novell's systems are connected.
The solution was to use XML to integrate applications and IT services into a single workflow process that tracked employees from hiring to firing, providing access to appropriate managers and synchronizing changes automatically. When an employee leaves, for example, access to networks, phones and buildings is automatically shut off. Novell says it saves more than $475,000 every quarter in employee productivity, new-hire setups, help-desk work and other costs, for a return on investment of 323 percent.
Morrison and his colleagues had come face-to-face with complexity, the devil of CIOs in every companylarge and small. "Anybody who has more than three employees deals with complexity every day," says Andrew Rowsell-Jones, a research director in Gartner's Executive Programs. Too many CIOs face daunting levels of unnecessary complexity, which detracts from the efficiency of their systems and business processes, adds millions to annual costs and reduces drastically their ability to respond flexibly to new technologies, business processes and markets. In a January CIO Insight survey, 42 percent of the almost 500 IT executives polled said their systems were more complex than necessary, a number that rose to 54 percent of those at companies with more than 1,000 employees. And maintaining and managing that excess complexity cost them an average of 29 percent of their IT budgets.
The good side of complexity is what it lets companies doget new employees up to speed, for example, or offer customers a new online service quickly. Rowsell-Jones cites Citigroup's proprietary network for clearing international settlements. "That's an example of using a phenomenally complex network of relationships among their own subsidiaries and other banks. They use that complex network to compete, to do things more cheaply than other financial institutions that don't have that scale and complexity," he says.
The dark side for most companies, however, is a costly, confusing spaghetti bowl of systems. Forrester Research Inc. has put some numbers on the problem: a server utilization rate of only 60 percent, meaning $20 billion in new servers was wasted last year, while the largest 3,500 firms will spend an average of $6.4 million this year on systems integration. And CIOs are devoting up to 70 percent of their budgets to simply keep their beasts at baymoney that can't go to new business opportunities. McKinsey & Co. estimates that IT infrastructure and application costs are 20 percent higher than necessary because of the confusing variety of technologies, such as database and desktop operating systems, in use.
A large part of that cost is people. Alan Ganek, head of the autonomic computing division at IBM, which develops technology to automate IT operations, estimates that in the past 10 years the cost ratio of software and hardware to the people required to maintain it all has reversed; 80 percent of the money previously went to technology, while 60 to 75 percent now goes to people.
Yet the benefits of cutting complexity can go far beyond saving money. "Everything is much easier across the whole value chainfrom training the users to maintaining the systems to being able to scale up the systems, even negotiating vendor licenses," says Howard Lapsley, a partner at Mercer Management Consulting.
Toward a Definition
Toward a Definition
What is complexity? It has many strands, some technical, some organizational. On one level it is the sheer number and variety of devices and people using them. Consider the financial services industry: In 1996, a major bank's 30,000 ATM machines might have been considered a really large online environment, says IBM's Ganek. "Six years later, big banks have Internet services accessible by anybody in the world," he says. "They have 10 million, 20 million, 100 million users. At first, ATMs all looked alike and had a limited set of functions. Today these banks' networks are accessed by notebook computers, desktops, eight different versions of Windows, Macs, PDAs, smart cards. That's a much more complex environment to support. And the scale: We've got customers that have 30,000 serversmore servers today than they had PCs six years ago."
Yet it is more than the number of boxes that proliferated as IT moved out of the glass house. "The problem is the number of point-to-point connections between systems," says André LeClerc, a software developer and IT architecture consultant at the Cutter Consortium. "How many times does a large enterprise have to interface with its legacy systems? That's the measure of complexity. Take an order-processing system. How many groups in the company have to register orders? How many systems do they go through to process an order? And then, when you expose that to the Internet, how many touch points are there from customer to information? There's been logarithmic growth in these connections."
Complexity lurks in the layers of heterogeneous platforms and applications that came with client/server networks and Internet computing. "You have the network layer, which involves your WAN, LAN and PCs," says Dick LeFave, CIO of Nextel Communications Inc., the wireless phone company. "You've got the middleware layer, where you're handling a variety of protocols. You've got the application layer and the database layer." All these layers must work with each other seamlessly to enable seemingly routine processes. "We're talking about technology layers that are five to 10 times more complex than they were 10 years ago."
Moreover, islands of expertise have grown up in IT shops around each of those layers. Back in 1997, financial services giant Wachovia Corp., with $5.3 billion in revenues at the time, had a problem with its new browser application for corporate customer access. Chris Edden, then a senior vice president and group manager of commercial services in the IT department, quickly put together a team of experts to fix it. Edden gathered his troops in a windowless room in the bank's operations center in Winston-Salem, N.C. Among the dozen people were experts in applications, telephony, security, mainframes, desktops, middleware, databases and computer operations. After three hours and as many pots of coffee, they isolated the problem: a piece of transaction software had failed. It took just 15 minutes to fix.
What the incident highlighted for Edden is that each IT discipline tries to maximize its contribution by offering the most sophisticated solution, regardless of the impact on everything else. The CIO has to see the big picture and manage all these disciplines as a unified service. "The trick for the CIO is, how do you take these centers of excellence and associate them to create a solution?" Edden says. "It wasn't always an issue, but the organization is a much more complex system now."
Perhaps the most useful definition comes from Bob Reinhold, vice president and head of Americas Technology Consulting Services for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young: "I see complexity as the non-value-added redundancy across all the dimensions of your applications or infrastructure or data store. Having multiple ways of delivering a service without a good reason for them introduces a complexity that doesn't add value to your organization." Reinhold is careful to distinguish between good and bad redundancybetween redundancy that might assure a zero-tolerance transaction system, for instance, or necessary business continuity. As for the rest, "the fact that you have multiple hammers doesn't necessarily mean you're redundant. And the fact that you've got 12 hammers doesn't mean you are overly complex. But if you have seven of the same kind, you might be overly complex." And each of those hammers costs money and time to maintain.
Too Many Boxes
Too Many Boxes
At some point, the day of reckoning must come. The "buy-and-hire" strategy, patching together more and more boxes and software, administered by more and more people, for more and more money, that characterized the go-go 1990s, explodes. And the trigger point can vary.
For some, the trigger is a missed opportunity when market conditions change. Sunil Subbakrishna, an independent IT strategy consultant, cites MCI's Friends and Family billing program. "The other long-distance companies, which didn't have that capability in their billing systems, took up to two years before they could offer that feature," he says.
It's a question of agility: Business success today increasingly means connecting diverse constituentscustomers, suppliers, partnersin real time, but "system complexity is a drag chain that prevents IT from responding to these new constituencies at a time when competitive pressures are forcing enterprises to respond to them," Gartner's Rowsell-Jones says.
But for most, it's the budget. Says John Kaltenmark, chief architect and a partner at Accenture Ltd. in Chicago: "One key indicator that we tend to look at is the amount of the IT budget that goes to maintenance and support costs. In the last several years, we've seen that creeping up in some organizations to 70, 80 almost 90 percent. If you're spending much more than 40 or 50 percent, whether it's people costs, or assets or tools, or development to keep the systems running, that's an indicator that it's probably time to step back and look at rationalizing your systems environment."
What To Do
What To Do?
Complexity is inevitable, but the goal is a cost-efficient and easily managed system. The frequently cited analogy is the modern car, which is far more complicated than a Model A, but also far easier to drive.
In the short term, CIOs can take advantage of new technologies that help manage pieces of their complexity by automatically monitoring and configuring systems, and thus freeing up people. A number of companies have sprung up recently to offer just that. Out of his war room experience at Wachovia, for example, Edden launched a team that designed software to monitor the systems and give business executives a total view, via the intranet, of a technology service such as the corporate banking application. It observes applications as they operate and isolates problems so system administrators can fix them quickly. The software spread around Wachovia by "sneaker net," and in 1999 Edden cofounded a subsidiary, Silas Technologies Inc., to sell the software to other companies.
"Our solution allows senior management to observe real-time the health of both IT and operational investments," Edden says. "It's not a toolset for the network administrator. It reports on the health of complex architectures by exercising those services and subservices. Home banking, for example, might be periodically tested for availability for the customer, but it will look into subservices like the mainframe, database or Web server. Not only does a manager know whether he has a problem or not but also where the problem most likely is."
But others warn that many of the vendor offerings allegedly designed to help solve the complexity problem do little more than add yet another application onto companies' already overburdened architectures. Such technologies "provide some management monitoring of a complex environment, but that doesn't in and of itself reduce complexity. It just gives you a better idea of what's going on," says Gartner research director Debra Curtis. "Hopefully, such tools don't compound the complexity. In reality, you have to introduce structure into the environment, eliminate complexity, reduce the vendor choices."
To get at the root of the problem, companies need a complete picture of their IT architectures. Knowing how much money they're wasting with current systems is the first step toward cleaning them up through rationalization or integration. Or they could spring for a whole new architecturebut who can afford it? "No IT department has the time or budget to do that kind of wholesale forklift change to a structured environment," says Curtis. That's the great dilemma facing most CIOs dealing with complexity.
But cleaning things up requires discipline. Says Mercer's Lapsley: "You have to get under the hood. First, you have to make sure you have a very good process in place to control and prioritize your discretionary spending. Then you have to look at the infrastructure spending that is supporting not only the discretionary projects now and in the future, but also projects that are already in place. You have to ask, 'How many platforms are we supporting? What's the driving business need for them? What are the costs to rationalize them? What is the game plan for doing so?'"
Rationalizing Systems
Rationalizing Systems
CGE&Y's Reinhold prefers to attack the problem by rationalizing all the many technology standards large companies tend to acquire over the years. But you can't simply assign standards and then replace everything that isn't compatible. "Instead, most companies should look at the total complexity in their environment and say, 'OK, out of all the standards I have, I am picking these to be my standards going forward. And every opportunity I get, every natural event that causes me to evolve, I am going to evolve to the same standard. And over time, I will dramatically reduce my complexity.'"
Ultimately, reducing IT complexity will mean examining the complexity of the business processes IT supports. "If you're able to sort out the business processes, there's obviously still a big technical challenge, but it's much easier to proceed," Subbakrishna says. "The difficulty is when you can't sort out the business processesyou basically have to build a system that's capable of doing everything, and that creates the complexity."
In fact, the first piece of advice IBM CIO Phil Thompson gives to customers isn't about technology: "First of all, if you don't have a formal system of governance, get one. And have it very clear what role you're going to play in the process and what role all the other participants are going to play, including the senior leadership of the company from the chairman on down. Second, as part of that governance, you need to put in place an enterprise architecture board that helps you understand your architecture, starting at the layer of process and working all the way through applications, data and then machines. They also have to drive compliance across the company so that no renegades are out doing things that are not compliant."
In other words, complexity must be fought not just in the technical trenches but at the highest levels of the corporation. It's a question of aligning the culture around simplicity.
A Simpler Future
A Simpler Future
In the long run, CIOs can anticipate advances in systems that are expected to radically change IT operations. Forrester Research says technologies coming during the next decade will lead to what it calls "organic IT," architectures built of cheap, redundant components that automatically share and manage resources. These technologies, says Frank Gillett, a principal analyst at Forrester, will solve the two fundamental problems of complexity: applications that can't talk to each other, and hardware that, bought for peak demand, is typically used no more than 20 percent of the time. In this vision, Web services and portals will let applications talk to each other relatively cheaply, while new software will allow servers to be quickly reconfigured for other tasks, increasing their capacity. Gillett has built financial models that point to potential savings of 80 percent on additional peak server capacity and 35 percent on storagewith total infrastructure cost reductions of 52 percent.
Meanwhile, a number of IT vendorsCGE&Y, EDS Corp. and IBM, among themare putting in place the beginnings of a utilities computing model. The goal: to provide corporations with all or part of their computing needs on an as-needed basis, a kind of "leave the computing to us" pitch. IBM's well-publicized effort, called e-Business on Demand, aims to use the power of grid computing, controlled by autonomic, self-healing systems, to provide low-cost, flexible computing to businesses.
IBM's autonomic initiative is an effort, Ganek says, "to make technology take care of things technology can take care of, freeing people to do the things they do best, which is thinking about how they can use technology to solve business problems. Going out 10 years, we can expect to have a far more cohesive behavior of systems where components interact and make constant adjustments. The CIO's life is going to be different in that the CIO will be much more of a partner in the business.
"But this is not an overnight thing," Ganek says. "This is a grand challenge in computing, as hard a problem as exists."
TERRY A. KIRKPATRICK is a contributing editor for CIO Insight.
Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage
By Bill Jensen
Perseus Publishing, 2000
"Fighting Complexity in IT"
By Frank Mattern, Stephan Schönwälder and Wolfram Stein
The McKinsey Quarterly; 1, 2003
"Organic IT"
By Frank E. Gillett, et al
TechStrategy Report
Forrester Research, Inc. April 2002
"Autonomic Computing"
IBM Corp., 2001


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Porphyrins are a group of chemicals that help form many important substances in the body, including hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen in the blood.
This article discusses the test to measure the total amount of porphyrins in your blood.
See also: Porphyrins - urine
Protoporphyrin levels; Porphyrins - total; Coproporphyrin levels; PROTO test
A blood sample is needed. For information on how this is done, see: Venipuncture
The sample is then placed in ice and taken immediately to the laboratory. Three porphyrins can normally be measured in small amounts in human blood. They are:
Protoporphyrin is normally found in the highest amount. More tests are needed to show the levels of specific porphyrins.
You should not eat for 12 - 14 hours before this test. You may drink water right before the test. Failure to follow these restrictions may affect the test results.
When the needle is inserted to draw blood, you may feel moderate pain, or only a prick or stinging sensation. Afterward, there may be some throbbing.
This test is used to diagnose porphyrias, a group of rare disorders often passed down through family members.
It may also be used along with other tests to diagnose lead poisoning and certain nervous system and skin disorders.
This test specifically measures total porphyrin levels, but reference values (a range of values seen in a group of healthy people) for the individual components are also included:
Note: mcg/dL = micrograms per deciliter
Normal value ranges may vary slightly among different laboratories. Talk to your doctor about the meaning of your specific test results.
The examples above show the common measurements for results for these tests. Some laboratories use different measurements or may test different specimens.
Increased levels of coproporphyrins may be a sign of:
Increased protoporphyrin levels may be a sign of:
Increased uroporphyrin levels may be a sign of:
Veins and arteries vary in size from one patient to another and from one side of the body to the other. Obtaining a blood sample from some people may be more difficult than from others.
Other risks associated with having blood drawn are slight but may include:
Anderson KE. The porphyrias. In: Goldman L, Ausiello D, eds. Cecil Medicine. 23rd ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2007:chap 229.
Wiley JS, Moore MR. Heme biosynthesis and its disorders: porphyrias and sideroblastic anemias. In: Hoffman R, Benz EJ Jr., Shattil SJ, et al, eds. Hoffman Hematology: Basic Principles and Practice. 5th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Churchill Livingstone Elsevier; 2008:chap 38.
Review Date: 2/28/2011
The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed physician should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Call 911 for all medical emergencies. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. Copyright ©2003 A.D.A.M., Inc., as modified by University of California San Francisco. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.
Information developed by A.D.A.M., Inc. regarding tests and test results may not directly correspond with information provided by UCSF Medical Center. Please discuss with your doctor any questions or concerns you may have.


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Słownik Geograficzny
Słownik Geograficzny
In German known as Chodschesen, Choziesen, Colmar or Kolmar in Posen. A town in the Chodziez district, in the Duchy of Posen and in the county of Bydgoszcz. Its geographical position is 52° 59' latitude north and 34° 53' longitude east of the isle of Ferro. It borders the Rataj lake (river Bolemka?), not far from the navigable part of the river Notec. The area is hilly and fertile.
It is made up of three parts 1) Chodziez town 2) Koenigswiese a suburb and 3) Koniecznik another suburb. It has 2912 inhabitants. In 1871, there were 3092 people living in 272 homes. Of these 1274 were Protestants, 1020 Catholics, 3 non- conformists and 795 Jews. Emigration to America caused the decrease in population. The majority is German but speaks both languages and some use the local dialect "plattdeutsch." The main employment is found in the cloth industry, farming, grain trade and small shop keeping. It is the seat of the Landrat, or chiefs of the district, including district authorities, district tax collector, district builder, cadastre controller, physician and veterinarian. As of 1879, the district courts, which are a part of the manorial courts in Pila (Schneidemuehl), are also in the town. Earlier, it was the seat of the court commission, which belonged to the district court in Pila. There is a Catholic parish church, which belongs to the Czarnkow deanery, a Protestant church, which belongs to the Chodziez diocese and a synagogue. The elementary school has several classes. There are 707 illiterate people. There is a library, reading room and a printing house. The presence of dying plants, a large faience factory, a sawmill, a flourmill, a brewery, a brick factory and a German lending company speak for the state of industry. Moreover, there is a post office, a third class telegraph office, a postilion point and postal delivery to Pila and Rogoz. The Posen- Belgard train stops here, too. The national route Berlin-Bydgoszcz links Chodziez with Czarnkow and Wyrzyski. The provincial route goes to 1) Wagrowca and Wyrzysk, 2) Walcz and Wyrzysk 3) Walcz (Deutsch Krone) 4) from Pila through Ujscie and Chodziez to Obornik. For a number of centuries the city belonged to the Potulicki – Grzymala crest- family and in the XVII century it became the property of the Grudzinski family bearing the same crest. It is unknown when the Catholic Church was founded and by whom. Judging from the visits made by important visitors it already existed in the XV century. During Zygmunt August's reign, the Potulicki family converted to Protestantism and returned the church to the coreligionists. It was only when Jan Potulicki, the Santok castellan, converted back to Catholicism that the church was returned to its original owners. There are no historical monuments in the church although it belonged to famous families. In his writings on the history of churches in the Posen diocese, Lukaszewicz believes the tombstones were removed after the fire in 1798. Only two effigies remain: 1) an unknown convert with a Latin script, 2) Rydzinski, Bishop of Chelminsk and priest in Chodziez who died in 1814. There used to be two further churches in Chodziez: St. Barbara's and the Holy Trinity.
In 1811, there were 268 houses and 2986 inhabitants, in 1837 there were 200 houses and 2925 people of which 1863 were Christians and 1062 Jews. There has been no population increase in the past forty years.
To the north, the Chodziez district borders with districts from the Kwidzinski Walecki and Zlotow region, to the east with the Wagrowiecki district, to the south with the Obornicki district and to the west with the Czarnkowski district. It covers an area of 19865 sq. miles or 109436 hectares. The county is flat except for the area around Rzadkow, Kaczor and the Olesnicki forests, which give rise to hilly land. Three quarters of the land is semi fertile, a sixth is light and the remainder is muddy. Only one larger river flows through the county, namely the Notec. For three miles it divides the Chodziez district from the Wyrzyski one. In the Chodziez district it flows from east to west, under the town of Ujscie and not far from the Nowie grange it enters the Czarnkowski district. The right tributary, the Glda (Kueddow), which comes from the Kwidzinski area joins it here and then for a mile it divides the Chodziez district from the county of the same name. It continues through the district till it reaches Pila from whence it is navigable and near Ujscie it enters the Notec. The Glumiu, which begins in Kwidzinski county near the village of Borki (Borkendorf) flows through part of the Chodziez district and is a left tributary of the Glda. There are numerous lakes in the area, the largest of which are Zelgniewo, Brody, Kaczory, Worowo, Niewimko, Margonin, Rataje and Zbyszewice. In 1875 the population of the district was 54328 of whom 20563 lived in the towns. In 1871 it was 52750 of whom 25653 were male, 27097 female, 31259 Protestants, 18693 Catholics, 102 non-conformist and 3696 Jews. There are approximately 2700 people per sq. mile. The Chodziez district is one of the less populated in the Posen duchy. There are 129 communities (by 1875, 4 more manorial ones were added): 6 town communities, 89 country communities, 34 manorial communities, (by 1875, 4 more were added making 38) and 5178 houses (5366 in 1875). The German population by far outweighs and, in fact, in the cities it predominates. The district towns are: Budzyn (Budsin), Chodziez (Kolmar and P.), Margonin, Szamocin (Samotschin), Pila (Schneidemuehl) on the Glda, (Kyddow), Ujscie or Usc (Usch), where the Glda enters the Notec. In 1871, these towns had a joint population of 18711 people. The main occupations in the rural areas are water related ones on the Notec and Glda, farming and cattle breeding. In the towns you find trades, industry and factories are even springing up, especially in the largest town, Pila but also in Chodziez less distant from the rest. The district is divided into 4 smaller areas or "commissariats" Chodziez, Szamocin, Pila and Budzyn. The town of Chodziez is the seat of almost all the authorities, the Landrat, tax collection, building and cadastre controller, physician and veterinarian. The district barber-surgeon and school inspector are in Pila. As from 01 October 1879, the district courts are to be found in Pila, Margonin, and Chodziez. They come under the manorial court in Pila. Up until the reorganisation of the courts, the district collegiate court, with branches in Chodziez and Margonin, was in Pila. The Chodziez district has 10 Catholic parishes and 6 branch churches. The parishes in the Posen diocese are: Budzyn, Chodziez, Margonin, Pila, Pilka and Ujscie; the branch churches are in the villages: Biala Gora (Grosse Wittenberg), Daleszewo, Lubionka, Pokrzywnica (Krummfliess), Zawada (Springberg), Wyszyna (Wischin). The Gniezno diocese has the following parishes. Zon, Jaktorowo, Morzewo, Smielowo; the Protestant parishes making up the Chodziet diocese are: Chodziez, Sokolowo (Jankendorf), Margonin, Pila (Schneidemuehl), Ujscie (Usch), Zachas (Zachasberg), Wielki Mierkowiec and two in the Wagrowiecki district, Wagrowiec and Golancz. The high schools, philological and the government school for ladies are in Pila (nearby). The schools in the smaller towns and villages are under the supervision of the district inspector, whose headquarters are in Pila. In 1871, there were 11654 illiterate people amid a population of 52750 and 14540 children under the age of 10. The district has 6 libraries, 3 reading rooms, and 2 printing house. The entire district covers an area of 428418 Magdeburg morgs. The greater part, which is privately owned covers approximately 183150 morgs and also includes 50473 morgs of crown lands. Since 1848, 14752 morgs has left Polish ownership. Presently, only two family estates covering 31990 morgs remain in the hands of Polish owners: Pruchnowo, in trust, to Count Potulicki and Wyszyna, heir, to Count Raczynski. The government properties are divided into amts, tax- economical in Pila and amt Podstolice. The government owns the extensive forests near Podanin and there are privately owned forests near Zelgniew, Dziembow, Chodziez, Olesnica, Margonin, Szamocin and Jablonowo. There are distilleries in: Pietrunki (Pietrunke), Jaktorowo, Postolice, Dziewoklucz (Siebenschoesschen), Prochnowo, Wyszyna, Jablonowo, Dziembowo, Szamocin, Strelice (Strelitz), Lesnice, Nikelskowo and Rzadkowo; breweries in Pila, Rekawice, Chodziez, Szamocin and Margonin; mills in Chodziez, Pila (3) and Szamocin; sawmills in Chodziez, Nadolnik, Pila (3) and Szamocin; brickworks in Chodziez (3), Budzyn, Lucienhof, Szamocin, Pila (4), Aschenfort, Sypniewo, Jablonowo, Weglewo, (Kahlstadt, Lesnice, Strzelice, Borowskie Oledry, Brody (Brodden), Morzewo, Rzadkowo (2) Smielowo, (Schmilau) (2), Stewy (Stoeewen), Ujscie Nowa Wies (Uschneudorf), Ujscie Oledry (Usch Hauland) and Notec mill (Wilhelmshoehe); lime kilns in Szamocin and Margonin; dye works in Pila, Ujscie manor, Chodziez (2) and Szamocin; vinegar factory in Szamocin and Pila; meal factories in Zelniewo and Pila; faience factory in Chodziez manor; glass factories in Dziembowo and Neufriedrichsthal; iron works in Zelazna Huta (Auerbachshuette). The upkeep of the roads is the responsibility of the government: the Berlin-Bydgoszcz road connects Chodziez with Czarnkow and Wyrzyski and passes through Pila; the road from Wagrowiec through Margonin, Szamocin, Bialosliwie, connects Chodziez to Wagrowiec and Wyrzyski and is maintained by provincial funds; the road from Walcz (Deutsch Krone) to Chodziez; the road connecting Chodziez with Oborniki passes through Pila, Ujscie, Chodziez and Budzyn. Rail roads: the east rail (Ostbahn) has its main station in Pila; smaller stations in Kaczorz (Erpel), Skorka (Schoenfelde) and Stewy (Stoewem). The Posen-Belgard railway going from Posen to the seaside town of Belgard runs through the district for 60 km. stopping in Budzyn, Chodziez and Pila. There are first class post offices in Pila and third class ones in Budzyn, Chodziez, Margonin, Szamocin and Ujscie; a post agency in Smielowo (Schmilau) and a second class telegraph office in Pila. There are telegraph stations in Chodziez, Margonin, Szamocin and Ujscie. The greater part of the Chodziez district, 1036 sq. miles, used to belong to the former Posen province with the towns of Pila, Ujscie and Budzyn. The smaller part, 9,5 sq. miles, belonged to the former Gniezno province with Chodziez, Margonin and Szamocin. In 1831, the Chodziez district population was 33430 with 1660 people per sq. mile. The town population was 11735, the country 21695, Catholics 12386, Protestants 18283, Jews 2761. In that same year, the Catholic town population was 4214, the country 8172, Protestant town 13387, country not quite 5000. There were 2725 Jews in the town 2725 and 36 in the country. In 1837, the population was 37859, i.e. 1880 heads per sq. mile; town 12584, country 25275, In six years there had been a population increase of 13,25%, town 15,75% country 16,5%. In that same year, there were 1251 town dwellings and 2397 country ones: so about 3648 and in 1837 there were 4000.
Archaeological excavations in Jablonowo and Miloslaw near Ujscie, in Laskow by Szamocin, in Szamocin, Ujscie, Zelgniewie and in Zon by Margonin have brought many interesting items to light.
Source: Slownik Geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego - Warsaw [1880, vol. 1, pp.613-615]
This translation, by Jola Jurasinska, is used by permission.


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